by Ted Bell
Listen to me. Alex Hawke, she’d said one day when he’d come home all scratched and bloody, having brought home a foundling cat, a boy carrying a cat home by the tail is learning something he can learn no other way.
He was ten or eleven years old when he finally read the book for himself. The story of Huck Finn filled in a lot of the holes created when his mother’s own life story ended so abruptly. His father was English and so was he, but he’d had an American mother and the book had helped the boy feel a connection to his mother, to see her America, feel it the way she did, even though it was a story from a time long ago. He was thinking about his mother now, Hawke realized, because thinking about anyone else was unbearable. His idea was to try and find the house where she’d grown up, find her childhood room on the top floor, and look out her window at the river.
See what she’d seen with his own eyes.
The real estate agent in Baton Rouge had told him the house was still standing. The Louisiana Historical Society protected it, although some developer was trying very hard to change that. According to the agent, the house, called Twelvetrees, was Italianate style, completed in 1859 by a Mr. John Randolph of Virginia. It was now owned by a family named Longstreet, but had stood unused and unoccupied for decades.
Alex had been driving for some time before he saw the flashing blue lights coming up fast in his rearview mirror and realized he was going well over a hundred and ten miles an hour. Fast, but well below escape velocity. You can’t outrun this one anyway, Alex, not this time, he told himself. Not ever. He slowed down and pulled off the side of the road, waiting for the police to pull up behind him, run his plate through the computer, approach him with their hands on their hip holsters, ask him what the hell the big hurry was, Mister.
The blue lights went screaming by him, siren wailing. The vehicle with the flashers wasn’t a police car, it was an EMS van and it raced past him and disappeared around a bend in the road. Five minutes later he saw the ambulances and the fire engine and the fiery accident itself up on the side of the levee. He knew instantly it was bad and averted his eyes, kept them on the road ahead, sped up again. He punched some buttons on the radio, looking for Louis Armstrong.
He finally caught Satchmo singing “Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?” It helped a little bit. Laissez les bon temps rouler. That’s what his mother had always said, her favorite expression. Let the good times roll. Bloody hell. You couldn’t cry anymore so you had to laugh. After half an hour or so, he saw a Louisiana Historical Site sign. ‘Twelvetrees Plantation.’ He turned into the drive. Satchmo was singing “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South.”
He could see the house standing at the end of the long allee of oak trees. The oaks formed a solid canopy above him, turning the entire drive into a green tunnel. The sun was low enough in the west now, hovering just above the levee, to flood the entire length of the drive with rusty light. As he got closer, he began to sense the enormity of the old house.
He parked the car under a big oak and got out. His shirt was drenched with sweat and clung to his back. The heat and humidity were part of the place. The mosquitoes and the music, the bugs and the blues. And the moss, he thought, taking a fistful from a low branch and turning the matted greyish-green filaments in his hand. Tentacles of moss dripped from all the branches of all the oaks around him. It was pretty, but there was something decadent about it as well, something that sent a graveyard chill up his spine.
Spanish moss, Hawke said to himself, suddenly remembering the name. He walked out from under the low-hanging branches and looked up at what was left of the house where his mother had been born. He was glad he’d come. It occurred to him that he’d needed to do this for a long, long time.
Make a connection.
It was a stunningly handsome work of architecture. Four graceful stories rising up above the trees, each one with a veranda, massive Corinthian columns now shrouded in the heavy green vines which had almost overtaken the entire house. He climbed the steps leading to the front entrance and paused when he reached the top. He saw the doors were missing, and twisting vines had worked their way through the open portal and into the interior of the house.
There were some faded beer cans and old newspapers littering the steps and the sagging floorboards of the front portico. It was irrational, he knew—he wasn’t the proprietor after all—but all this refuse made him not just sad, but angry. The trash and debris were just a natural accumulation, the commonplace detritus of years of human neglect. Still, it felt to Alex Hawke like a sacrilege, a desecration. He brushed away veils of drooping cobwebs and ducked into the musty coolness of the reception hall.
The staircase. That was the thing which helped him get beyond all the ugliness at his feet. It soared upwards to the very top of the house in two gently curving sets of stairs which intersected to form landings at every floor, then bowed out once again and ascended higher only to join once more. It was perhaps the most beautiful thing Hawke had ever seen. At once delicate and strong, it was the work of an artist commissioned by someone, this John Randolph apparently, who clearly wanted to make the most functional fixture in the house also the most beautiful.
The stairway reminded him of something, Alex thought, mounting the stairs and climbing upwards. Something in nature. What was it? Damn it, he couldn’t remember anything lately.
Alex reached the top floor, paused on the top step, and pulled the old postcard out of his jacket pocket. On the faded front was a Mississippi steamboat, white billows of steam floating from her big black stacks, coming round a wide bend in the river. On the other side was a little note from his mother. He’d read the thing a thousand times, but now, standing in her house, he found himself reading it aloud. Not whispering either. He pronounced each word in a loud, clear tone, as if he were addressing an invisible audience gathered below.
“My darling Alexander,” he began. “Mummy and Daddy have finally reached New Orleans and what fun we are having! Last night, Daddy took me to hear a famous trumpet player down in the French Quarter named Satchmo. Isn’t that a funny name? He toots like an angel, though, and I adored him! This morning we drove up the River Road looking for Mummy’s old house. I was amazed to see it still standing! It looks dreadful to be sure, falling down, but I took your father up to the very top floor and showed him my room when I was your age. It’s a very silly little room, but you would love it. It has a big round window that opens and you can sit and watch the river go by all day if you want to! Rivers go on forever just like my love for you. I miss you, my darling, and Daddy and I send you all our love and oodles of kisses, Mummy.”
The sound of his voice was still reverberating throughout the empty house as Alex returned the postcard to his pocket. He walked to the banister, which seemed solid enough, gripped it and leaned over, looking down through the intertwining stairs to the ground floor hall far below.
“Hello,” he cried, listening for the echo. “Anybody here? I’m home!”
He turned and walked along the hall until he came to the center door. It was slightly ajar and he pushed it open, surprised by the flood of sunlight still streaming in. It was coming through a large round opening in the opposite wall. The opening was in an alcove formed by the pitch of a gable. Going to it, he saw the window itself was long gone and all that remained was the empty hole. Shielding his eyes from the glare of the setting sun, he went to it and rested both hands in the curvature of the sill.
Her room was filled with light every evening. This is where she would have had her bed. She would have read her books here, listening to the sonata of a songbird, the sweet scent of magnolia floating up from the gardens. During the day, she could watch the boats out on the river, looking up from her book whenever she heard one hooting, coming around the wide bend. At night, pulling her covers up, she would lay her head down on the pillow and see the broad avenue of trees which led all the way out to the stars over the river and sometimes to the moon.
There was a rickety old straight-b
acked chair tilted against one wall, and Alex pulled it over to the window. He sat there, seeing the world through her eyes, until the sun had finally set behind the levee and all the stars he could see from his mother’s window had been born.
Finally, he stood up and turned to go. He was walking across the dusty floorboards when it came to him. What the lovely spiral staircases of Twelvetrees had reminded him of. That thing in nature they had so closely resembled.
“It’s DNA,” Alex said softly to himself and then he pulled his mother’s door shut behind him.
Chapter Four
Venice
FRANCESCA STOOD ALONE, DRINKING CHAMPAGNE AND LOOKING out at the hazy lights along the Grand Canal. A slightly swampy evening breeze off the water carried a fog and blew the blonde curls back from her forehead. She allowed herself a smile, standing there at the railing of the terrace balcony of the suite at the Gritti Palace. The last of the Italian detectives and American diplomatic security agents had all come and gone. Each group had visited the suite at least three times during the week following the bizarre death of the new American ambassador to Italy. They had, they claimed, all they wanted from her. A lie.
She’d allowed herself the smile at this lie because no man on earth had ever had all he wanted from her.
The three Italian detectives had left the hotel, each one clutching her glossy autographed eight by ten. The two handsome American agents from the State Department had, after their third visit, departed the Gritti with only one burning memory: three exquisite inches of pale white thigh and pink garter above the tops of her sheer black stockings visible as she rose from the deep cushioned chair to say good-bye.
One of them, Agent Sandy Davidson, had, she felt, a certain boyish charm.
“Sfumato!” she had exclaimed on his last visit, tears welling in those enormous brown eyes. “Sì! Up in smoke! Poof! That’s what they tell me has happened to him, Sandy! Horrible, no? Ma Donna!”
The American DSS agent in charge thanked the world-famous movie star profusely for her time and apologized for asking so many delicate questions at such a horrendous time. He was sure they would soon catch the terrorist group behind the gruesome murder of Simon Clarkson Stanfield. Any threats? he asked, putting on his raincoat. There had been, she said, certain threats, si, as recently as the preceding week. Her lover had said he was tired of always looking over his shoulder. An American expression, no? What she didn’t tell them, what they certainly had not needed to know, was precisely why her lover had actually been looking over his shoulder that warm summer night one week earlier.
Two minutes after Stanfield had left her alone in the bed that night, Francesca had poured herself a glass of Pol Roger and walked naked out onto the very balcony where she now stood.
Her little silver bird had flown. The red bag hanging from her bare shoulder was much lighter now, without the slender missile. She drew a deep breath and composed herself. A few quiet moments to reflect before she opened the red leather bag again.
Certo, she’d made only one real mistake. She’d stupidly snapped at Luciano out on the dock when he tried to help her with her bag. Surely the target had been watching, seen that behavioral misstep. She couldn’t fly to Venezia; she’d had to take the train because of the contents of the bag. The long ride was tiresome and boring, what with all the begging for autographs. No excuse. She’d lost it down there on the dock, momentarily, and surely the target had seen her step out of character.
She was only lucky he hadn’t asked to see what was in her bag that was so important, no? Stupido! Only the stupid could allow themselves the luxury of luck!
She removed two items from the red leather bag. A Sony Watchman television with a tiny dish antenna affixed. And a very sophisticated satellite telephone to which she had attached a scrambling device of her own design.
First, she switched on the palm-sized television and adjusted the antenna. The image broadcast from the nose-mounted camera of the tiny missile was riveting.
The target was twenty feet ahead, bobbing and weaving and continually looking back over his shoulder. His face, so handsome in repose, was a mask of raw fear. He was just leaving the Alla Napoleonica and entering the central Piazza. Not taking her eyes off the screen she speed-dialed a number on the scrambled satphone. Snay bin Wazir, otherwise known as the Pasha, picked up on the second ring.
“Pasha?”
“My little Rose,” the soft male voice said in classical Arabic, but with a distinct English lilt to it.
“Sì, Pasha.”
The Pasha had long ago decided to call all of the female hashishiyyun in his seraglio of death his ‘petites fleurs de mal’. His little flowers of evil. Each of his small army of seductive assassins was entitled to her own flower name and, since Francesca had some seniority, she’d quickly chosen her favorite, Rose.
The best name was long taken, chosen years ago by one who was the envy of them all, a great beauty descended from one of France’s oldest aristocratic families. She was the very first assassin recruited to do the Pasha’s bidding when his movements were restricted by the Emir. A recluse now, she lived in splendor in a large house on the Ile de la Cité. No one save the Pasha ever saw or spoke to her. She was known only as Aubergine. And called only by her chosen name, Deadly Nightshade.
“Are you watching this, my Pasha?” Francesca asked in English.
“Wallah,” the Pasha said. “Incredible. Dr. Soong’s remarkable silver arrow flies straight and true.”
“Is it not all we hoped for?”
“The Emir is sure to be pleased, little flower. I am certain when he sees this he will—Wait! What is he going to do?”
“Dive into the canal, I would guess? That’s what I would do. Look! He’s—”
“Jara!” Pasha said, “Shit!”
Ever since he’d left England and returned to the high mountains of his native land, the Pasha sprinkled his English with Arabic and his Arabic with English.
“Don’t blink or you’ll miss the good part, Pasha.”
“Astounding! How does it—poise—in mid-air?”
“This is why I am so in love with this new weapon, Pasha. The thrusters, they angle in every direction. Dr. Soong, he explain to me it is like a, what, English Hurrier jet? Yes. Same principle, just smaller.”
“They call it the Harrier, little Rose.”
“Yes, but ‘Hurrier’ it is more funny, no?”
“And, it goes under the water?”
“Of course, Pasha!”
“Yes! Yes! It’s going under the water…it’s…”
The video transmission abruptly ended in a silent blast of static.
“Allah akbar!” the Pasha shouted. “You shall be richly rewarded in the Emir’s Temple of Paradise, little Rose.”
“Allah akbar,” Francesca replied after the Pasha had disconnected the call. The marvelous weapon had worked flawlessly. This Dr. Soong, whom she had met at an arms bazaar in Kurdistan, deserved his reputation as a true genius with weapons. Biological, chemical, or nuclear. He’d first made his name with poison gases, so, although the doctor’s name was I.V. Soong, he was commonly known amongst the cognoscenti as Poison Ivy.
The Venetian moon slipped from behind a cloud and bathed the terrace in pale blue light.
“One down,” Francesca whispered to herself, smiling.
The Pasha, born Snay bin Wazir, fifth son of Machmud, replaced the solid gold receiver and took another bite of his chocolate chip cookie. Famous Amos. The recipe anyway. Couldn’t buy them anymore, so bin Wazir’s pastry chefs made them by the dozens. He hit the intercom button and told the projectionist to take down the screening room lights. To witness the death of the American in real time had been most satisfying. Almost as satisfying as the cookies.
“Roll it again!” the Pasha commanded.
Snay bin Wazir clapped his hands twice. It was a signal to the two concubines beneath his vast embroidered silk robes to return to their ministrations. “Death in Venice!” he’d roar
each time the dramatic scene ended, “Run it again!” He’d recorded it for the Emir’s collection of such tapes and made the projectionist play the tape over and over.
Finally, he had his surfeit of the thing. “Out! Out!” the Pasha said, and the two naked courtesans emerged, giggling and tinkling with bangles and rings, running for the exit. Snay bin Wazir clapped four more times, a sign to his four personal bodyguards that he was ready to move.
Although the screening room had plenty of plush velvet seats, over a hundred, the Pasha wasn’t sitting in any of them. He traveled about his palace in an elaborately carved eighteenth century Italian sedan chair. Sad, but true. He had grown to such a magnitude he preferred the chair to his own two feet. As his weight now hovered around four hundred pounds, the palace doctors were concerned about his sixty-year-old heart. He kept telling them this was not a problem.
He had no fucking heart.
His four principal guards appeared, grunted and squatted, each grabbing one of the four posts of the sedan chair and lifting it easily. Lifting the Pasha and his gilded chair was no effort at all, because Snay bin Wazir had chosen as his closest, most personal guards, perhaps the four greatest Japanese sumo wrestlers of the last century.
Ichi, Kato, Toshio, Hiro.
Snay bin Wazir, the notorious sultan of Africa, now known throughout the Emirate as the Pasha, had traveled to Japan to make his selection. He watched and studied the sumo world for months, attending bouts in Tokyo and Honshu, Yokohama and Kyoto, before making his decision. Four men were ultimately kidnapped. Captured, drugged, and smuggled out of Japan aboard the Pasha’s private 747, they were brought up into the high mountains by camel caravan. The sumos had been installed in Snay bin Wazir’s palatial fortress four years earlier. If there was small chance of escape then, there was none at all now.
The furor all this caused in Japan was immense. But no one knew where the rikishi were, and, over time, the country’s economic woes eclipsed the story.