"Not yet!" she cried. She let the peignoir fall and moved upon him with a relentless nakedness. As he braced to meet her, he thought, is the woman a bottomless pit? Then remembering her long months of desolate abstinence, he tightened in remorse and met her hunger with a surging violence of his own.
When he finally slipped from the kitchen door of the bakery, it was a little past noon. He was weary and exhausted, his body a mass of protesting flesh, his blood numbed by the fury of the rivets he had pounded. He hurried to the grocery across the alley.
"Is he upstairs?" he asked Akragas.
"Who?" the grocer sneered.
"Don't jest with me, cockroach!" Matsoukas cried. "Is my friend upstairs? Has he been here at all?"
The grocer blinked in fear and shook his head.
Matsoukas hurried through the streets to the Minoan Music Store. An edge of apprehension sliced at his flesh and he cursed the delay in Anthoula's bed.
The small bell above the door tinkled as he entered the Minoan and he swept under the archways and around the shelves to confront Falconis sitting at his desk. Matsoukas spoke against the tight fear growing in his body.
"Where is Cicero?" he asked.
Falconis was paler than usual and he looked at Matsoukas without answering.
"Man, where is Cicero!" Matsoukas cried.
Falconis watched him for a trembling moment more. His tongue came out to lick his dry lips.
"Last night while dealing," he said and he shivered, "He had a stroke."
Matsoukas heard the words and for a whirling instant they caused a roaring in his ears. He felt them echo and reecho through the span of his body cutting to the core of his being.
"We called the Mercy Hospital right away," Falconis said. "They sent an ambulance for him."
Matsoukas turned and, with the fear burst like a wound in his flesh, he ran toward the door.
"It wasn't my fault, Matsoukas," Falconis called plaintively after him. "I was always decent to ..."
The slamming door cut off his words. Matsoukas stood for a frenzied moment undecided how to get to the hospital most quickly. A car was approaching and he leaped into its path and waved it down with a great swinging of his arms. The brakes squealed and the startled driver gaped at him through the windshield. Matsoukas ran around and entered the other door.
"Emergency," Matsoukas said. "Mercy Hospital a mile from here. Left at the next light."
The man looked at him a moment longer and then something in the frozen set of Matsoukas' cheeks and head started him driving.
The receptionist in the hospital lobby leafed through a file of cards, extracted one and studied it.
"We have notified his sisters," she said. "Are you a relative."
"A friend," Matsoukas said.
He carried the card to the elevator. A nurse at the fourth-floor desk took his card and motioned him to follow her. They moved down the corridor and he caught vagrant glimpses of occupied beds, still bodies, watchful and grieving faces. The nurse paused before a room at the end of the corridor and Matsoukas heard the wild rushing sound of wind.
He entered the room with dread and traced the wind from a small weird tent covering the upper part of Cicero's body, a hose running to a cylinder beside the bed. Below the perimeter of the tent Cicero's legs lay stiff and straight beneath the spread, seeming the slim thighs and calves of a child, the toes a wide distance from the bottom of the bed.
Matsoukas bent slightly to peer into the tent. He saw his friend's face luminated through the glass, the cheeks green and rippled as though they lay just beneath the scummed surface of a stagnant pool, the mouth gleaming like a shell, the moist hair plastered in tendrils of weed across his temples.
"Cicero, it is me," Matsoukas whispered. He saw the spasms of blood and phlegm bubbling in the hollows of Cicero's throat. And he sensed a stirring under the flesh and bone, the eyelids quivering in a massive effort to open.
"It is Matsoukas!" he cried softly. He reached down and caught the dealer's hand that lay just outside the tent. He felt a rawness to the flesh, a suspension between warmth and cold, a hard tautness to the wrist. He pressed the fingers in the enfolding shelter of his palm. And he was possessed by a frenzy to tear off the tent and embrace his friend.
"Cicero!" he pleaded. "Cicero!"
A harsh new sound made him tense. A strange knocking that he heard clearly. It was a sound that he remembered suddenly from his childhood, he had thought it a bough striking against the house on the night his grandmother died. He had heard it while he lay in bed and it struck terror into his body. Now he heard the sound again and understood what it meant. He saw that darkness hung on the borders of the room, pressing in upon them with unwinding plumes of shadow. The light declined. All forms and shapes absorbed the relentless dark. And a wretched resignation burned his flesh.
For a long time he sat beside the bed holding Cicero's hand. Once the nurse entered silently and adjusted the knob on the tank and looked in through the glass. He rose a number of times and peered into the tent. His friend's face was more remote each time, blurred and fading, settling deeper into the water. In the end all that remained was a frail shell beneath a fathom of dark water, a tiny ripple left by the final mocking and tender quiver from his lips.
After a while, he could not be sure how long, he was conscious of a difference in the timbre of the wind, the disordered hiss of air rushing into a vacuum. He felt the long lean fingers grown cold and strangely still in his palm. He raised them to his lips and kissed them gently for the last time.
He walked to the tank and turned off the air. A total silence covered the room. He walked from there down the corridor to the small coned enclosure of light where the nurse sat. "He is dead," he told her. He pushed open the door marked with the red-lamped exit and started down the stairs.
Outside the evening had come, the pavements almost deserted in the hour of supper. He walked along the street, past a row of stores just closing, and entered the mouth of an alley.
He leaned against the brick of a wall and looked up at the curve of the sky. He felt the distant stars draw into the blurred circle of his grief. A lament curled in his ears, an ancient dirge, a wail carried over the centuries through dreams, by the wind through the peaks of trees, and by chilled stirrings in the blood.
He began walking deeper into the blackness of the alley. He started to moan softly, his flesh bunching and heaving in great cold shudders. Yet in his terrible anguish he could not understand whether he grieved for his friend or for his son.
CHAPTER TEN
Matsoukas sitting at his desk staring at the partially packed crate containing his possessions. Each morning when he entered his office he carefully wrapped in tissue and brown paper one more picture or statue or framed testimonial letter and placed them in the crate between cushions of crumpled newspaper.
Since the death of Cicero two weeks before he had added only about a dozen items to the crate. He would examine each article intently, wavering between what to take and what to leave behind. But in this way, the open crate before him, he remained suspended for the journey.
An occasional client entered for some advice and assistance. Matsoukas listened to the tales of woe and earnestly sought to aid them. But for the first time in years his attention drifted relentlessly away. He wondered how his bets were faring and he chafed with impatience for the client to leave so he might hurry downstairs and use the phone in the hallway to call Falconis.
"Listen, Matsoukas," Falconis told him fretfully, "this is the third call about this race. You know post time is not for another five minutes yet. I have never known you to be this unbalanced with impatience."
He had six times in the past two weeks altered his airline reservations. Having come so close to the journey he could not bear to be without seats on each flight that left for Greece. As his tickets were cancelled when he did not pick them up before the flight, he made another reservation.
He had attempted to obtain some special disp
ensation from the airlines, visiting their offices, sweeping whoever he was allowed to see with eloquent arguments why he should be charged only a single fare. He promised to hold Stavros tightly in his arms and not let him intrude by even an inch upon the seat beside them. All his passion was useless against the impersonal ritual of their response.
"Hello, Falconis!" he cried into the phone. "What did Araby do in the second?"
He listened to the answer and sighed. He rapidly consulted the scratch sheet he held in his hand.
"Give me five to win on Saragosa in the third..." He heard the uneasy whine of Falconis cut into his words. "I will pay you, man!" he cried. "Have I not always paid in the end? These bets are important to me now!" Falconis succumbed with a doleful grunt. "All right, old sport," Matsoukas pressed his advantage, "and then parlay Saragosa with Valhalla in the fourth at Tropical for five more." He hung up quickly to avoid hearing Falconis squawk.
Once again at his desk he studied the pad containing the names of those he approached for a loan. One by one he had to scratch them off.
"I am sorry, Matsoukas," Fatsas told him sadly. "Forty years I have been playing cards. I do not have a dime and slim prospect of ever getting any more than a small stake to join another game."
"Can't help you, Matsoukas," Charilaos said glumly. "My guitar is in hock and without my guitar I cannot work to earn the money to redeem it."
"My wife is having a baby."
"I am getting a divorce."
"I am broke."
"You must be mad," Falconis told him. "You owe me almost six hundred dollars. Now you want me to lend you six hundred dollars more for you to leave the country so that I may never see either amount again."
"Listen, old sport," Matsoukas spoke earnestly. "I will find some work in Greece. I will send you every last dollar with any interest payment you wish. I need this money now."
Once or twice it seemed to him that Falconis wavered. But the bookie's fear of being thought weak made him freeze at an act so patently absurd.
Matsoukas remained in his office late at night concocting bold schemes to raise the cash for the fare. There were wild real estate projects, and an efficiency plan for restaurants in which a squad of chefs were rushed by limousine and driver to various restaurant kitchens. In this way a half-dozen places could be serviced with a sharing of the salaries. These ideas expired like seeds denied sun and water.
Of all his plans and designs, none excited him and nourished his hopes more than the master project he labeled, "Heavenly Burials." This project was born one night when walking the streets restlessly he paused before a cinema showing a film about a cemetery called "Whispering Glades." He stared for a long while at the sidewalk trailer photos of crematorium urns and flowered plots and a great glistening rocket. He hurried home and all the remainder of that night he worked out the details for the plan, possessed by exultation. At dawn he called the Archdiocese in an effort to obtain an audience with the Bishop. He called unsuccessfully several more times that day and the following day as well. All he was able to achieve was an appointment on the morning of the third day with a young Deacon on the Bishop's staff, a pale-faced and bespectacled youth only six months out of the seminary with a small sparse beard that was a pallid copy of the Bishop's thick and handsome tuft. The Deacon met Matsoukas at a bench in a corridor of the Archdiocese.
"Please sit down, Mr. Matsoukas," he spoke in a thin nervous voice. "This is a frantic morning. His Eminence is receiving many visitors of international importance and I am needed. But he has empowered me to listen carefully to your plan and relay the information to him for whatever further disposition might be required."
"I would have honestly preferred to have explained directly to his Eminence," Matsoukas said. "A plan of this magnitude requires contact at the highest possible level. If I had carried it to the Episcopalians I am positive I would have been granted audience with at least an Archbishop. But I could only consider offering it to our own beloved church."
The Deacon shifted his black-cassocked figure restlessly on the bench and cleared his throat. He stared somberly at Matsoukas through his heavy-lensed glasses. "We appreciate your loyalty and devotion," he said smoothly. "I will make sure that his Eminence hears of it should he wish to offer you his benevolent blessing."
"Which I will accept gratefully," Matsoukas said. He drew a deep breath and looked carefully up and down the long corridor. "This project must be shrouded in the utmost secrecy," he said in a low voice. "If word of it leaked out, the Catholics might get a massive jump on us. It would be a catastrophe.''
The Deacon leaned forward slightly. A flush of excitement speared his pale cheeks. "Go on," he said. "Please go on."
"Right!" Matsoukas said. "Now this is how we begin. We announce from the pulpit of every Greek Orthodox church in the diocese that an organization under the auspices of the Bishop himself will undertake funeral and special interment for a sum of five hundred dollars. This is one third the cost of the average funeral and we will handle every detail. From the moment a beloved member of the family dies we take charge. When we have signed a thousand agreements we will have a half-million dollars." He paused to let the size of the amount impress the Deacon. "Of course this amount may vary slightly since I am considering a twenty percent ecclesiastical discount for priests and their families..." And he added quickly, "... for Deacons too."
The Deacon blinked. "That seems fair," he said slowly. He looked slightly perplexed.
"Now," Matsoukas said, "as we receive the corpses of the first thousand who die, we cremate them ..."
"Mr. Matsoukas!" the Deacon said in a shocked voice. "Are you acquainted with the position of our church on cremation? We are unalterably opposed ..."
"Permit me to finish, your Deaconship," Matsoukas said brusquely. "This plan is so brilliant it may require that certain church codes be relaxed. Please listen carefully. At the same time that we are cremating the thousand corpses, we obtain a small surplus rocket from the United States Government. We enclose the ashes of the thousand heavenly pioneers into a special urn in the rocket and..." he paused with tremors of excitement singeing his tongue ... "we launch the rocket with the ashes into space to become a satellite, whirling forever around the earth in God's pasture for a truly celestial interment!"
The Deacon staggered on the bench as if he had been kicked. He stared at Matsoukas in shock and tried to speak but only managed a weak squeak.
"Stuns you, doesn't it?" Matsoukas cried. "Takes your breath away! I knew you would be affected this way! But there is more to come. We launch this rocket in a mass blast-off ceremony at dawn from Soldier's Field or Yankee Stadium! Can you imagine the sight? The grandstand packed with tens of thousands of relatives and close friends of the deceased, watching them actually begin their final journey not into the damp and worm-riddled earth but to the stars! The Archbishop will be there, of course, and all the Bishops clad in their bright vestments and a choir of a thousand voices, one for each deceased, will thunder out a majestic chorus of hosanna, hosanna, hosanna!"
"My God!" the Deacon found his voice. "O my God!"
"Magnificent, isn't it?" Matsoukas cried gleefully. "The Presbyterians and Baptists will be green with envy and the Pope will burn a cluster of red hats! Instantly they will strive to imitate us but to no avail! The Orthodox Church will gain the envy and applause of the entire world! We will gain millions of new converts! Do you understand the significance? We will be the first faith into space!"
The Deacon struggled to rise and his legs would not sustain him. When he finally got to his feet he leaned weakly against the wall for support. He stared down at Matsoukas with his face as white as gravestone.
"My God!" he gasped again. "O my God!"
"God will be delighted, of course," Matsoukas said briskly, "but let us begin with the Bishop? Do you think I might see him now?"
The Deacon quivered and his thin crimson tongue came out to lick helplessly at his lips. Then he reached down and caught
the hem of his cassock. He raised it to his knees and crouching slightly he started walking down the corridor with short quick steps.
"What is wrong?" Matsoukas rose and cried after him. "Just a minute, your Deaconship! You have not heard about the memorial service once a year! Wait!"
The Deacon looked back and then turned forward and hoisted his cassock higher and broke into a disjointed run. Holding the black cloth bunched at his thighs, he fled through the door at the end of the corridor.
When Matsoukas grew restless and uneasy he went to spend several hours with Anthoula. Whether it was day or night they bounced on her rocking bed. He was grateful for her long shrill shrieks of passion which smothered his distress and, for a little while, provided his agitation a rampant release. She never seemed to get enough of him and yet he always left her bed feeling he had stayed too long. His body ached and throbbed and he felt like a blacksmith engaged in an endless battle to shoe a wild and unbroken mare.
On other afternoons when a strange melancholy possessed him, he escaped from the frenzied milling crowd in the Minoan, and avoided Anthoula. He boarded a bus and rode to the end of the line, to the cemetery where Cicero had been buried. He walked beneath the metal arch of the gate along a gravel road. When he turned off the road he moved across a small hill, carefully wending his way between the monuments and markers. He came to Cicero's grave, the earth dark and loose and still unsettled. He squatted down beside the grave.
"How are you today, old sport?" he asked. He picked up a handful of earth, held it tightly in his palm for a moment and then let it slip through his fingers. "The boys at Falconis miss you," he said. "Fatsas plays even worse than his usual terrible game and Babalaros is even more impatient. Old Kampana senses you are absent and sniffs the air with disdain when another dealer calls the cards." He fell silent under a sudden tug of despair. "And I miss you too," he said.
A soft wind rippled the branches of the nearby trees and carried the whirling scents of spring to his nostrils. He was much more conscious here than he had been in the city that spring had erupted into bloom. The buds were longer and greener on the branches of the trees, and the birds were everywhere, speckled robins and gray starlings and brownish redwings.
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