The Collector of Dying Breaths

by M. J. Rose

  The music, jazz from the ’30s, wafted through the room, and she rode the waves of the melancholy moodiness. Robbie didn’t like jazz as much as she did. He loved opera, which she didn’t like at all. She couldn’t stand knowing there were words being sung that she didn’t understand. She wanted to know what every one of them meant.

  Understanding what was going on around her mattered to Jac. She didn’t like the unexplained or unexplored. It was what made some of the issues in her life that much more complicated—like what had happened between her and Griffin. They’d begun a dance that had ended unexpectedly and for reasons that still confused her.

  They’d met when she was a senior in high school. She’d smelled his scent before she saw him. A scent that reached out, pulled her in and promised stories. Its ingredients included lemon, honey and musk. Rich florals and animalic accords that blended together to create a particular fragrance that for her would always be associated with Griffin. With their time together. With wonder. With falling in love. With a cessation of loneliness. And then with anger and grief.

  Long after they’d broken up, she still scanned tables at flea markets and auctions on eBay, buying up even half-empty bottles. In the recesses of the armoire in her bedroom, she had a cache of eight bottles of his signature scent. But even in sealed packaging, even in the dark, cologne evaporated. Like moments in life.

  They’d seen each other all through college and graduate school. Then, just when they finally had the chance to live together, he left her. He’d said it was because he couldn’t bear that she would always be disappointed in him . . . that he wasn’t as smart or talented as she believed him to be and he’d never live up to her expectations.

  He’d left when they were just past the budding stage of their love. His abrupt departure never gave it a chance to fully bloom and then decay—if that’s what was going to happen—of its own accord.

  She’d survived, even though at times she was certain she wouldn’t. Even though one night she’d sat in the bathtub, staring at a razor blade and thinking about what would happen if she just . . .

  Although she couldn’t forget him, and never let another man in the way she’d let Griffin in, she’d built up a solid satisfying life for herself. Until eighteen months ago when Griffin had come back in the midst of the worst crisis she’d ever faced and was there to help her save Robbie in Paris. And then—just like that—he was gone, and she was alone again.

  But she’d still had her brother.

  Jac picked up the phone and dialed a number in New York City. Malachai Samuels answered on the second ring, saying hello in his mellifluous voice. She pictured her mentor and friend in his office, surrounded by his antique card collections, books and objets d’art.

  “Am I catching you between sessions?” she asked, knowing that Malachai saw patients during the afternoons.

  “My next appointment isn’t for another half hour. How are you?” he asked in a concerned voice, and she felt cosseted. They could argue and had, but Malachai knew her better than anyone—even Robbie in many ways.

  They spoke of his work and hers, and she told him about her business decision to bring her extended family into the House of L’Etoile and how it was working out.

  “That all sounds wonderful, but it’s not why you called. Are you having a hard time in France on your own? Do you think you might be happier here in New York again?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes. But then the idea of leaving seems much worse.”

  “That’s because you feel more connected to Robbie’s memories there. It’s where you spent your time with him. You were never here with him.”

  She took a sip of the wine and listened to him offer advice in a smooth voice.

  “Jac, take your time. It’s important to be where you feel closest to Robbie right now. And his soul is there, in Paris, in that house, in the workshop.”

  “You mean that as a metaphor?”

  “What? That his soul is in the house?”

  “Yes.”

  “No . . . I mean it literally . . . I believe that often when someone leaves so suddenly his or her soul remains for a while to ease the passage from grief to acceptance for those left behind.”

  “That’s all?”

  Malachai laughed. “Well, it’s a fairly large concept, but yes. Why?”

  “Because . . . he didn’t tell you about . . . Did he tell you what he was working on before he died?”

  “I hadn’t spoken to him for a few months, so no.”

  That made sense. Robbie only knew the reincarnationist through Jac, and while the two men shared a very deep and abiding belief in past-life theory, they were not close the way Jac and Malachai were.

  “What is this about, Jac?”

  She took a breath and dove into the beginning of the story. “You do know a woman named Melinoe Cypros, don’t you?”

  Malachai remained silent. Ever enigmatic. Revealing so little. But Jac thought she’d heard an intake of breath on the other end of the phone.

  “She said she knew you.”

  “You met her?” he asked.

  “Yes. Because of Robbie. He’d been working for her right up to the time he died. She told me that she met Robbie through you. Is that true?”

  In all the years Jac had known Malachai, and she had known him since she was fourteen, he had never revealed very much about his personal life. Oh, certainly there were anecdotes about childhood, or his years studying psychology at Oxford, or conversations about his likes and dislikes. She knew he was closest to his aunt, Beryl Talmage, who ran the Phoenix Foundation with him. And Jac understood that Malachai’s father was still alive at ninety-two and living in England and that they were estranged. But she didn’t know if he’d ever been married. If he lived with anyone. If there was someone, he was very discreet about her, for he never brought her to dinners or mentioned her. Malachai had been alone in his country home when she’d visited there eight months ago.

  At the same time Malachai never seemed like the kind of man who was celibate. He was too much of a sensualist for that. So Jac had always assumed there were women here and there but that ultimately Malachai had chosen to live alone.

  She’d gotten the sense from Melinoe that she and Malachai had been close. Perhaps even lovers. Was that true? She certainly seemed like someone he might be interested in. Both collectors, both eccentric. Both elegant and sophisticated. Both fascinated with the shadows and secrets that hid just beyond our reach.

  “Yes, it’s true. I knew Melinoe. Why, Jac?”

  And so Jac told him about the dying breaths project Robbie had been working on, that he’d intimated he thought she should complete.

  “That collection was supposed to be mine,” Malachai said in a low voice.

  Jac was startled by the vehemence and anger in the seven words.

  “What do you mean, yours?”

  Malachai sighed, as if he was loathe to talk about it.

  “She was interested in reincarnation and came to New York to talk to me.”

  “When was this?”

  “Five and a half years ago.”

  Very specific, Jac thought. “And?”

  There was silence on the other end. Jac wondered if Malachai was remembering or just not certain he wanted to continue.

  “She was a highly knowledgeable amateur. As you know, since you’ve met her, she’s immensely wealthy. She began to contribute large sums to fund our archaeological projects and research. In fact she was invited to serve on the foundation’s board of directors . . . Melinoe was very much committed to aiding us to find memory tools that might enable people to access their past lives . . .” He trailed off.

  Jac took another long sip of her wine while she waited for Malachai to resume. She pictured him at his desk, picking up one of his exquisite objets d’art, as he often did, and contemplating it. He had a col
lection of jeweled creatures arranged at the base of the Daffodil Tiffany lamp that sat to his left. His favorite was a jadeite frog with ruby eyes. She’d held it once, and it was cool to the touch and soothing.

  “And you were close?” Jac asked, nudging him toward a revelation.

  He ignored her question but continued speaking.

  “About three years ago, I found out about a collection of very curious objects coming up for auction at Sotheby’s. According to the legends engraved on their silver coverings—the parts that could actually be deciphered—they were the property of Catherine de Medici’s perfumer and were his collection of last breaths—including the breaths of the queen’s husband, son and other members of her family. They had been found in a château in Barbizon. The first time in modern history that anything had ever surfaced that went back to the alchemical breath experiments that were done in the Renaissance.”

  Jac knew from the edge in his voice he was becoming more distressed as the story progressed.

  “I told Melinoe about them. When we flew to England together to see the collection and examine it, we were both fascinated. Obsessed if you will. Drunk on the possibilities that there were still breaths in the bottles and instructions on the silver coverings. And that if we could decipher them, there might be a way to . . . I went to the auction. I was bidding on behalf of the foundation to acquire the collection. The foundation’s money is not my own. The board of directors—which included Melinoe—had voted on a very generous sum to enable me to buy the breaths. Well above the estimate of $60,000. We all thought that was enough. No one even knew if the breaths were still in the bottles. So what were we even buying? What was the collection really worth? What’s a dream worth? It was all legend . . . all myth.”

  “Well, you don’t have to tell me how seductive a myth is. What was the estimate?”

  “The estimate was $35,000 to $50,000 because of the workmanship of the silver cases that covered each bottle and the connection to Catherine de Medici. No one took the legend very seriously.”

  “But it had been authenticated? It must have been for Sotheby’s to be handling it.”

  “Yes, the glass and the silver had been dated to 1550 to 1575. It was authentic all right. Just authentic what?”

  “So how much did they go for?”

  Malachai didn’t give her a simple answer. But then she shouldn’t have expected one. Simplicity and Malachai didn’t go together.

  “I went to the auction alone. Melinoe had other business and told me she was certain I’d get the collection—that no one would want it as much as we did. There were quite a few people bidding at first. After all, the pieces were associated with a queen of France. I hadn’t planned on entering the bidding till it got close to my limit—I didn’t want to drive up my own price. But once it reached $30,000, it was just me and a private bidder on the telephone.”

  Jac had been to quite a few auctions and could picture the scene, with the auctioneer at the podium and a grouping of auction house employees fielding bids on the phones to the right. Telephone bidders were always a dramatic and mysterious part of an auction.

  “What happened?”

  “The bidding landed at $60,000. It was with a bidder on the phone. I should have stopped, but I was too far gone by that point. I had convinced myself we would discover something of great importance from the collection. I had to have it. So I decided to add some of my own money to the foundation’s sum. The bidder and I were now locked in a game of one-upmanship. I went to $65,000. The telephone bidder went to $70,000. And so it continued until we had reached $250,000. I was going to have to liquidate part of my retirement fund. But I didn’t care anymore. I had to have the silver bells and the bottles for the promises they held. And the fact that someone else wanted them as much as I did only made me more convinced that they would reveal something astounding.”

  “How far did you go?” Jac was fascinated seeing this side of him.

  “I bid $300,000, and then the person on the phone bid $1.85 million. A very significant amount.”

  “Wow. That’s a crazy jump. But why was it significant?”

  “It was $25,000 more than my portfolio plus the foundation’s $60,000. Exactly and to the penny out of my reach. And not by five or ten thousand dollars that I might have been able to raise but by enough that I really had to stop.”

  “I see.”

  Malachai was silent on the other end.

  Jac finished the story for him. “She knew how much you were worth because you were lovers. She was the other bidder, wasn’t she? It was Melinoe who bought the collection out from under you.”

  Chapter 13

  Jac had never heard Malachai sound vulnerable before, but talking about Melinoe seemed to unnerve him. He was at the same time wounded and angry. And even wistful. Was he still mourning the loss of the collection—or the woman who stole it from him?

  “She is without heart. Without honor. Utterly selfish. Why are you asking me about her?”

  “She told me it was through you that she had heard about Robbie.”

  “Yes, but it would have been back a while. I haven’t talked to Melinoe or seen her since the night after the auction.”

  “Did you accuse her of what you suspected? That she had been the bidder on the phone?”

  “Yes, of course. That night, at dinner. And she laughed at me. She has a very curious laugh. It’s very childlike. There are aspects of her that have never quite grown up. As if part of her had been frozen at the time of her father’s death. Do you know about that?”

  Jac knew only the broad strokes of the story. So Malachai told her.

  “Melinoe’s father had a butterfly house and spent hours there taking care of the plants, cataloging the butterflies. She said he always played music in there. Mostly opera, which he loved, especially the Italian grand dramas. When she came home from school, she would always go directly there, and they would spend an hour together. No matter who he was married to, and he had married four times, that hour after school was time she and her father spent alone.

  “When she went in that day, Verdi’s Il Trovatore was playing. This tragic opera was one of her father’s favorites. She walked through the heavy green foliage toward the back, where he had a grouping of chairs and a workbench and where she often found him repotting a plant or making notes.

  “He was sitting in a chair, his head down. Sleeping, she thought. And then she noticed there were odd designs on his face and hands. And on his khaki pants. And on the floor around him. A small red pattern made up of tiny red dots. No, not red dots. They were butterfly feet. The butterflies had gotten into something red, and everywhere they’d landed they’d left a stamp. As she watched, a monarch approached her father and landed on his chest, then flew a few feet, landed on a leaf, then flew off, leaving the mark.

  “Melinoe looked back at her father. He had been wearing a navy T-shirt so she hadn’t seen the stain at first, but now she did. She also saw that there was a slash on his neck, a gaping wound still bleeding. She ran to him. Shook him. Shouted at him over the music. Touched his face. In her growing panic she never remembered those next minutes with him, but she said it took her a long time to realize or accept that he was dead. And then she noticed that behind her father, partially obscured by a group of potted palms and other foliage, there were two more bloody bodies: her stepmother, Lynda, and Serge. Melinoe tried to rouse them too but couldn’t. By then she was covered in her father’s blood, and when she ran toward the greenhouse exit to get help, she added her own bloody prints to those of the butterflies. Her hands and face—from where she tried to wipe away her tears—were stained too. When she ran into the house—incoherent with panic—the housekeeper thought she had been hurt. For a few minutes, she’d tried to tend to her until she understood what Melinoe was saying.

  “It was a murder-suicide. Serge’s mother, who had severe emotional issu
es, came to believe her new husband of eight months, Melinoe’s father, was trying to seduce Serge. In a rage she attacked Cypros with a knife. Serge tried to intervene and was hurt. When Lynda saw her son bleeding out, she assumed she’d killed him and then killed herself.

  “There were many who cheered Cypros’s death because he’d been ruthless and uncaring in business. He often bought up companies and stripped them of their employees as he merged them into larger entities. If economies required people lose their jobs—so be it, he always said. Cypros presented a cold exterior. But to Melinoe, he’d been warm and loving. Trying to be twice the parent since she’d lost her mother at such a young age. Her ‘Poppa,’ she used to call him.”

  Malachai had paused, then continued. “Serge’s wound would have been fatal had Melinoe not saved his life by finding him when she did. And so at sixteen she and Serge, who was a year older, became orphans and formed a deep and complicated bond.

  “I could tell from the way Melinoe told me the story, from how she talked about her life pre-accident and post, that she integrated her father’s personality into her own. I think what attracted me to her at first was her coldness. She seemed so impervious. It was a challenge to the therapist in me. I’d never met anyone as calculating and capable of control. All traits I shared with her, I’m afraid, but she had perfected them. I was in awe of her power over her feelings. Frightened too, I think, to look at her and see myself. I have often thought since then that my need to seduce her, to find some tenderness in her, was a search to find it in myself.”

  In all the years Jac had known him, Malachai had never revealed himself to her like this. And Jac wondered why he was doing it now.

  “You were in love with her,” she said.

  “I was.”

  Jac thought that she had never heard two words spoken with so much sadness before. Malachai didn’t usually elicit empathy from her—he did now.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered into the phone as if she were offering condolences upon hearing that someone had died.