by Jimmy Fox
Cue the haunting Bernard Herrmann soundtrack.
In the distance, on a slope, he saw what looked like a large, beautiful seventeenth-century French chateau. As he got closer, he realized that the distance was not as great as he had at first thought. The building had been constructed on a miniature scale, with perfect illusionary proportions.
He parked amid potted orange and lemon trees, and abundant topiary, and walked toward the front door in the heavy green silence of the rose-fragrant air.
Inside, he found himself in a high-ceilinged room of improbable spaciousness; above him, a balustraded gallery on the two sides and back of the building suggested a second story, and possibly more. There were flamboyant materials and elaborate architectural features that might be tricks of painting, might be real. It was impossible to guess the actual dimensions or composition of the whole structure, so much was artifice.
Amazed, Nick turned in a circle where he stood: dozens of paintings hung from the walls and freestanding display flats; bronze, marble, wooden, and stone sculpture competed for space in the peculiar maze.
He made his way around the room. His shoes squeaked on the polished floor of black, white, brown, and gray marble set in an intricate repeating geometric design. Outside, doves cooed sedately. He supposed that the collection of art was worth a fortune; but this strange museum he’d entered as if by a magic door sent a shiver down his spine.
The art was exclusively twentieth century; not the pleasant visual discourses of the Impressionists viewing the human comedy, or the severe calm of Constructivism, or the sardonic kitsch of American Pop Art, but the violent nightmares of a contemptible civilization that had lost its center, from the time of World War I and after, when artists no longer believed in old verities slaughtered in muddy trenches. Nick thought of Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” of a world circling self-destructively out of control like a falcon ignoring its master.
A profusion of French doors let in bleached light from outside. The building might have been a conservatory once; but now, the lighthearted spirit of the architecture nourished only this poisonous depression. If these artworks gave any clue of Natalie Armiger’s state of mind, this wasn’t going to be a pleasant meeting.
A narrow flight of stairs led to the gallery. Nick went up, still not sure he was in the right place. He had a sudden memory of the conclusion of 2001: A Space Odyssey, when astronaut Bowman finds himself in weird, otherworldly, inexplicable captivity.
Upstairs, Nick saw lighted glass cases, like transparent coffins, standing against the three walls of the gallery, which was otherwise illuminated only by high, small oeil-de-boeuf windows. The cases contained many books, documents, and scrolls.
He walked up to one case, and his breath caught. The writing on the centuries-old documents was old Provençal, and Hebrew. That much he could tell. These records belonged in the great museums of the world.
“I was beginning to doubt your reputation as a masterful genealogical investigator, but I see your instincts have led you correctly once again.”
Armiger was standing at double doors that gave access to a room behind her. She wore a less severe outfit than the one Nick remembered from their meeting in his office. A white silk caftan with paisley designs and a chiffon scarf for accent around her neck replaced the intimidating high-fashion uniform of their first meeting.
“Allow me to be your tour guide,” she said.
He listened as she led him by each glass case, describing the genealogical riches inside.
In impassioned detail she told him about the medieval Jewish burial-society books; the royal permission for Jewish merchants to conduct business with Christians; guild complaints about Jewish competition; synagogue records; petitions, judgments, and proclamations; lists of deaths and property destruction from pogroms; documents relating to the final 1394 expulsion of Jews from France. In other display cases, Nick saw more nearly contemporary German, Polish, and Yiddish writing, possibly mid-nineteenth century.
He was viewing not a genealogical flea market, a haphazard jumble of items, he realized, but a magnificent collection built upon a monomaniacal mission.
Nick had come across such artifacts of Europe’s Jewish semi-autonomous communities only in reference books. He knew, though, that each artifact here was a marvelous, priceless source of genealogical information, the disappearance of which was surely the cause of many thousands of impossible gaps for those seeking to learn about their families’ past. Armiger had separated children from parents, generations from generations, as surely as had the grenade thrown by some local malcontent into Maurice and Erna Balazar’s apartment in 1958.
Nick had reached a case holding documents of the kahalim, or ruling community elders, of seventeenth-century Poland-Lithuania.
“You get some kind of sick pleasure having this stuff here, under your control, don’t you?” he asked, repulsed and fascinating simultaneously. “These represent the wanderings of your ancestors over several hundred years. And it’s all yours, all neatly labeled. Those lives, those pasts…”
“Please, join me.” She gestured toward the room from which she had emerged. “We have much to discuss.”
“Did you ‘discuss’ things with Max Corban before you had him killed?”
“I envy him, in a way.” She turned and walked through the double doors.
Wondering how to read her non-admission of guilt, Nick followed her into an octagonal room. The only light here, too, came from small round windows high in the walls. At the far end was a rococo writing desk, with one simple but perfect 18th-century armchair behind it, another in front. The desktop was bare, except for a picture in a splendid old silver frame, and a tiny gold pillbox, exquisitely embellished with a scene too small for Nick to make out from his distance. They sat down.
“This is where I do my thinking,” she said, scanning the room, seeming to see through the walls to the beautiful grounds beyond. “Nothing to distract. No conference calls, no faxes, no computers, no servants. When my husband was alive, after he became too feeble to leave the house for his adolescent games–golf and horse racing, primarily–this is where I sought refuge. Where I reclaimed my health after my severe heart attack, three years ago.”
“That photo almost does justice to your daughter.”
Zola, in the radiant bloom of young womanhood, sheathed in layers of taffeta and lace, curtsied on the white-gloved hand of a tuxedoed man whose face was out of the frame.
“My favorite,” said Natalie Armiger. “It was her debut.”
“I understand why you like it out here: it’s a perfect microcosm of your life. Secrecy, absolute power, beauty masking…let’s just say, something not so beautiful.”
“Always searching for significance, aren’t you, Nick? I admire that–to a certain degree. The building and the artwork were lucky finds, a package deal. Many years ago, I learned of a Hungarian family in financial difficulty; they were agreeable to my purchase of their collection, and they threw in this lovely children’s playhouse from their Lugano lake estate. I had it shipped from Switzerland and reassembled, piece by piece.
“I have donated many of the Renaissance works and the Impressionists to institutions around the world–too much simplistic piety and naive optimism.” Her wide mouth fractured in distaste. “But I am particularly fond of those works that you saw downstairs. They speak to me in a special way. As for this lovely property, it once belonged to an African order of Catholic sisters. My Natchitoches ancestors would be shocked, I’m sure, if they knew their most successful descendant spends much of her time in the precincts of a convent for black nuns?”
“There’s a lot about you that would shock your family–below ground and above. Where did all the genealogical material come from? You can’t just buy that stuff at your local bookstore.”
“One of the secrets of my success, Nick, is that I make use of experts on the scene. When searching for values in small-capitalization companies in foreign markets, for instance, I find s
omeone local whose talents and word I trust, and turn the affair over to him or her. It has been the same with my genealogical acquisitions. There are many like you who correctly value quality of life over philosophical niceties.”
She gave him a gloating smile that telegraphed the message: I’ve got you pegged, little man. You can be bought.
“That was Corban’s problem, right? He didn’t follow your rules.”
“He had the choice,” she replied. “As long as it was just a question of money, I could deal with him. He chose to dwell on…certain other themes.”
“Such as your daughter’s real parentage?”
She hesitated a moment, obviously caught off guard, weighing her next words carefully.
“Knowing your adversary’s weakness can sometimes be your own undoing,” she said. “You may awaken the dragon that will burn and devour you. Attack calls for counterattack. You have just brought our little game to a new level.” She studied him.
How much do I know? That’s the big question, isn’t it, Natalie?
“Very well, then,” she resumed. “Yes, Max knew about the tragedy of Zola’s parents, as you do, also, it would seem. A tragedy I relive daily. I was very young and immature when it happened. Something of an anti-Semite myself, I suppose, which was very much in vogue in polite society. My own parents had just died, leaving me sole guardian of the family’s wealth and social position. You see, I was a Fulke-Bruine.”
Nick heard the pride as she uttered her maiden name; he now recalled that it was chiseled over the portals of several buildings on the campus of Freret University. She was a Balazar, too, he wanted to remind her. But she had selected her own myth of ancestry. He’d seen it many times. Genealogy, for all its hard facts and systematic rules, is finally a subjective study, a handy tool to create a past that fills some present need. The difference in her case was that she was taking away the choice of others who would follow her.
She went on to say that her Balazar cousins continued to write to her over the next decade or so. She never responded. But when she learned of their murders, and of Zola’s survival, something new and wonderful was born in her soul that could not form in her womb.
Listening to her, Nick could feel some of the transforming power of the sudden compassion for the orphaned child. He wondered: was this the only time she’d ever allowed love to disrupt her life?
“In some way,” she said, “Max obtained a great deal of information that I had been assured would be kept confidential forever. Can you blame me for trusting those international organizations, which seemed better than the rest of humanity at the time? In those days, adopted children rarely went looking for their birth parents. Personally, I think it is a regrettable practice today. But that is beside the point.
“The amnesia of a few key officials at state and federal agencies was easy to purchase. Some records merely vanished; others, like a birth certificate, came into being. My husband and I faked a short pregnancy and a premature birth for my daughter. Our friends were completely taken in. Therefore, I had never concerned myself with the question until Max began his threats. Soon, I found that there was nothing I could propose to satisfy him. Only bringing back the dead would have done that.”
Nick said, “You need me to ensure no one can make the jump to the line that leads to Zola’s real parents. This had nothing to do with any fear of anti-Jewish hatred, did it? You knew it was a hot-button issue for me. You reeled me in with that bait.”
“The revelation of–how shall I put it–my interesting family background, could have been put to rest eventually. The Jewish question, shall we say? The public has a very short memory. And, of course, I don’t need to tell you that if one goes back far enough, everyone is related. Back to our ancient mother, Lucy, or beyond, to a bubbling primitive pool of amino acids.”
“A subversive thought, Mrs. Armiger.”
“Perhaps. Surely you understand. Zola would never forgive me–what I did, or didn’t do, about her real parents when I had the chance to make a difference. I know her so well, Nick. Oh, she would pretend nothing had changed, but she would freeze me out of her life. Forever.” Armiger swallowed a few times before continuing, as if her throat were dry. “She believes such moral issues are black and white; she can be quite ruthless, in her doctrinaire way.”
“With Corban dead, you think the story of the adoption will submerge once again.”
“I will see that it does, whatever the cost, your relationship with my daughter notwithstanding.”
Nick got the creepy feeling that Armiger had a camera in Zola’s bedroom, that she knew every whispered intimacy her daughter and he had shared.
“What are your intentions toward my daughter?” she asked. He knew this was a little more serious than a first-date interview with the parents.
“I have no intentions. My love life is not a strategic exercise, a leveraged buyout. I don’t plan these things for profit and loss. And I don’t have to answer to you.”
“I think you intend your relationship with Zola to shield you. That would be a mistake. I will do anything to protect my daughter, Nick. Anything to keep from her knowledge that might damage her.”
“Damage you, you mean, Mrs. Armiger? You can’t tell the difference between love for her and love of yourself.”
“You’re being a fool, Nick. Like Max.”
“‘Motley’s the only wear,’ when people like you feel justified in committing any crime.”
“Who are you to judge me?!” She stood up. The scraping of her chair on the floor was like a scream of fury. “Another’s failure is so gratifying, isn’t it?! But what would you have done, in my position? How easy to judge from a distance, to be an armchair moralist! You have never decided the future of anyone but yourself, and that not very often, or very well!”
She struggled to bring her voice back to a normal level; pale, she sat down again.
Then she took a small pill from the gold box and placed it under her tongue. Gradually, her pinched demeanor relaxed a little more. There was a slight sheen of sweat on her face.
Ah, so there is a weak spot in her dragon’s armor. She’s not well. She’s weakening. But beware the fire.
“Emotionalism is not the answer,” she said, after a minute or two. “This is getting us nowhere. The head must rule the heart in these situations…. The reference you just made was to a Shakespeare play, wasn’t it? As You Like It, I believe. Are you surprised that I should know that? You specialists think you have a monopoly on learning.”
Kubrick and Clarke’s science-fiction epic came back to him, oddly, now. He thought of the murderously paranoid supercomputer HAL slowly being deactivated by Bowman.
“A useful metaphor for our discussion, that play of Shakespeare’s,” she was saying, trying to regain her equanimity. “Bad things happen to good people, liars and cheats win sometimes, even capture the White House, pain and sorrow often reign supreme before order is restored. Some must die so that others may live.
“I have an empire, Nick. Thousands of human beings whose livelihoods, whose lives, depend on me. Decisions of such magnitude are foreign to your experience. I don’t think you understand. This is more than merely evaluating student papers, deciding on increments of grades, lifting rocks to find some titillating genealogical centipede. I must occasionally play God.”
“Even a deity can have a bad-hair day, right? Like when you betrayed her parents?”
“I made a judgment that they would be better off in Europe, and that my family and my company would be better off, as well. Yes, I knew that I was in all probability their only relative left alive. No, I could not foresee what would happen to them. But I have altered my plan to compensate. Is there no room in your world-view for divine improvisation? Zola is living a life she could never have imagined, full of accomplishment, excitement, and joy. I made that possible, and only I can continue to make that possible.”
Her forehead uncreased and her hairline moved back ever so slightly, conjuring the i
mage of a cat’s ears flattening and pupils dilating autonomically before a fight. When she spoke again, her voice was a razor of decisiveness: “You are the only variable remaining, Nick. Where is the information I hired you to find? There is a glass case out there waiting for it.”
“I haven’t finished my research yet. You wouldn’t want me to do a sloppy job?”
“Your time is running out, as is my patience. It would be a pity if you were to suffer a freak accident. Max Corbin is beyond harm now. You are not. Goodbye, Nick.”
He drove to his office, more convinced than ever that it was up to him to make Armiger pay, one way or another, for her hubris. Max Corban and Ivanhoe Balzar would have expected no less.
“Find out where a guy named Shelvin Balzar is,” Nick said to Hawty, who was busy on her computer in the outer room she had transformed into an office for herself. “Shelvin and I need to talk.” He explained to Hawty where she was likely to find him.
All of the furniture in this outer room Hawty had directed Nick to push against the walls, allowing her an unencumbered central area in which to navigate.
“Where have you been?” she asked. “We’re just going to have to get you a beeper, that’s all there is to it. You can’t keep running from the twentieth century like this, especially since it’s almost over. No, even better than that, let me order you one of these new personal digital wireless assistants–”
“No microchip the size of my fingernail is going to order me around. Anyway, what’s so urgent?”
“Well, I need to ask you where I’m supposed to look for Indian records.”
“Try the Federal Records Center in Fort Worth,” Nick said, “or the Oklahoma Historical Society, if you’re interested in the Five Civilized Tribes. Are you working on the family groups for that guy from Ohio?”
She nodded. He instructed her to check the National Archives for Eastern Cherokee records, and just for the hell of it, the Carlisle Indian School files and the Eastern Cherokees vs. United States court records; and the card indexes for estate files at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Then, she ought to look at the transitional rolls between 1880-1890, and, of course, the Dawes Rolls.
