Night Secrets

by Thomas H. Cook

  The Puri Dai’s eyes closed slowly and remained closed until Frank spoke again.

  “This is what he saw,” Frank said. He hesitated, hoping that she would take up the narrative. “He saw you,” he began again after a moment. “No one else. Just you.”

  She opened her eyes and turned her head toward him, her face strangely mobile, as if lights were passing over it.

  “Just you,” Frank repeated, this time with a slight edge to his voice, as if he knew it all now, and was merely waiting for her confirmation. “With the razor,” he added, then hesitated again. “Standing over the old woman,” he said finally. “With the razor in your hand.”

  Her eyes studied him closely for a moment, then a kind of visible relief swept into her face. “That is all,” she said. “That is all he could have seen.”

  “Yes, that’s all,” Frank admitted. “But there are a few details that still interest me.”

  The relief disappeared from her face.

  “Why was the door open?” Frank asked.

  There was no answer.

  “It was open because you wanted Ortiz to come in,” Frank said. “You wanted him to see you.”

  Silence.

  “But what he saw, there’s a problem with it.”

  The Puri Dai’s eyes filled with an intense concentration, but she did not speak.

  Frank lifted his arm high above his head, the fist clenched. “Your hand was in the air like this,” he said. “That’s a stabbing motion.” He brought his hand down in a rapid slice. “Like that.” He looked at her closely. “But she wasn’t killed like that. She wasn’t stabbed at all. Her throat was cut.”

  The Puri Dai said nothing.

  “And it was cut from behind,” Frank added. “The killer had to have been standing directly behind her, and she was probably on her knees.”

  Her eyes began to glisten, as if she were seeing it.

  “She was on her knees,” Frank repeated, “and she was facing that little room.”

  Her hands began to tremble slightly.

  “That little room that someone was kept locked up in,” Frank added.

  Her fingers began to scratch mercilessly at her thighs.

  “And the killer took the woman by the hair, and pulled it back,” Frank said in a hard, relentless voice. “And he brought the blade across her throat.”

  Suddenly, the Puri Dai’s face grew stony. “Go now,” she said. “I do not want you.”

  “You were standing with your feet on either side of her head,” Frank continued relentlessly. “You couldn’t have killed her in that position.”

  “Go,” she repeated, with a sudden, unexpected tenderness, almost pleadingly.

  “And the groceries,” Frank said, as if he had not heard her. “Peanut butter. Bread. Fruit. Do you know what they all have in common?”

  The Puri Dai did not answer.

  “They don’t need to be put in a refrigerator,” Frank said. “You’d also bought a quart of milk, but suddenly you didn’t take it. You couldn’t take it, because you weren’t going to have a refrigerator, were you?”

  “Go,” the Puri Dai said softly. “You do not know what you are doing.”

  Frank looked at her very pointedly. “And then, there’s this,” he said. He reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out the little car game he’d bought on the way to the center and tossed it onto the sofa where she’d been sitting.

  The Puri Dai’s eyes flashed toward it, then back up at Frank, where they fixed on his desperately.

  “You were going to run away,” Frank said determinedly. “But not alone. You were going to take someone else with you.” He looked at her intently. “A child.”

  One of her hands drew in around the blue note, crushing it completely.

  “You were going to take the person who was kept locked up in that little room, where the latch is high and loose, so that only a child couldn’t get out if it were locked.”

  The Puri Dai pressed her hands flat against her legs.

  “Is it your child?” Frank asked.

  She didn’t answer, but Frank could tell that it was. “Where were you going to take her?”

  Silence.

  “Is it a boy or a girl?”

  Silence.

  “How old?”

  The Puri Dai stared at him angrily, but didn’t answer.

  “Where is it now?”

  Suddenly, something seemed to break in her. “Safe,” she said.

  “Safe? From what?”

  “She is safe now.”

  Frank took a small step toward her. “She? A little girl?”

  The Puri Dai turned away from him.

  “Safe now?” Frank asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Silence.

  “Why is she safe now?”

  The Puri Dai didn’t answer.

  Frank moved closer to her. “Tell me.”

  She was shivering slightly, but beneath those small movements, Frank could see a will of iron.

  “How old is she?” he demanded.

  Silence.

  “Why is she safe now?” Frank demanded. “From what?”

  Her eyes drifted over to him. “She is safe,” she told him. “Let her be safe.”

  “Why is she safe now?”

  There was no answer.

  “Why is she safe now?” Frank repeated loudly.

  The Puri Dai hesitated for a moment, then began. “Because,” she said, then stopped. “Because …”

  Frank was very near her now, his face nearly touching hers. “Why?” he whispered with a sudden, shuddering desperation. “Why is she safe?”

  “Because the errate—the blood—has been fouled,” the Puri Dai told him in a quick, passionate whisper. “Because her blood—the pure blood of our line—has been made impure.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Her blood,” the woman said coldly. “In her veins.”

  “Impure? How is it impure?”

  She stared at him mercilessly.

  Frank took her by the shoulders. “Where is she?” he demanded. He could feel his allegiance to the Puri Dai suddenly and miraculously shifting to someone else, a little girl he had never seen, but whom he imagined now as she must have sat in the little chair, facing outward in inexpressible terror as the old woman sank to her knees, stretched out her arms as her head was pulled back and stared at her in unspeakable horror as the razor was drawn across her throat.

  “Tell me where she is,” he demanded hotly. “Where is your daughter?”

  “Safe,” the Puri Dai replied coldly. “The only one who ever has been.”

  For a moment he started to ask another question, but the look in her eyes had hardened to an absolute solidity, and he realized that there would be no more answers, that she had told him the last of what she would ever tell.

  It was nearly three in the morning when Frank finally stumbled wearily into Toby’s after-hours place. He could still see the eyes of the Puri Dai, utterly firm, as if the mind behind them had turned to cold blue steel.

  Farouk was already seated at his table in the back of the room. He’d already ordered Frank his usual, a Jameson’s, straight up, and he slid it over to him easily as he sat down. “The night is warm,” he said.

  Frank nodded, then took a drink. He could feel his own eyes burning slightly in the smoky air, as if growing softer and more pliant as the Puri Dai’s turned to stone.

  Farouk watched him closely. “You do not look well, Frank. Perhaps it is time you slept on something besides that sofa in your office.”

  Frank shrugged. “It’s just me,” he said. “I don’t need anything else.”

  “A man does not always know what he needs,” Farouk told him firmly.

  Frank nodded, then drew in a deep breath. The Puri Dai was still in his mind, just as she had lingered in it insistently during all the long silent walk he’d taken by the river after leaving her. But now she was no longer alone in the place she occu
pied. Now there were two of them with him, so that when he saw the Puri Dai in his mind, there was also a child standing beside her, a little girl with long dark hair, like her mother’s, and the same black eyes.

  Farouk took a long pull on his drink, his eyes staring over the rim of the glass.

  Frank watched him drink. It wasn’t his usual, either scotch or Turkish coffee. It was a clear liquid that seemed to move down the glass slowly, like a thick syrup.

  “Raki,” Farouk said. “Would you like one?”

  Frank shook his head.

  “The smell in the Gypsy’s house,” Farouk said. “It brought back many things.” He placed the glass on the table. “It is odd, what the mind displaces.” He smiled. “The only thing more odd is what may return to occupy its forgotten place.”

  Frank suddenly looked at him pointedly. “You found something, didn’t you?”

  Farouk nodded. “It may be of assistance.”

  “What?”

  “Three words,” Farouk said. “Though not in your language.”

  “What words?”

  “La Femme Gatée.”

  “You told me what they mean.”

  “‘The ungovernable woman,’” Farouk said. “‘She who is master of herself.’”

  “Yes.”

  “This brought something back.”

  “A memory?”

  “More a sense of things, my friend,” Farouk said. “Of lost connections.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Farouk leaned back slightly and took another sip of raki. “The Gitano believe that sudden ideas do not come from inside us, but from the duende, the wandering ghost.” He smiled. “It enters through the soles of our feet, and shoots up into our minds, and that is when we feel something which we could not have guessed before.”

  Frank nodded, already laboring to follow Farouk’s slowly unraveling connections.

  “The duende is the source of all sudden, passionate inspiration,” Farouk told him. “It is she who gives the Gitano the power to tell fortunes, to know what others cannot know.” He smiled again, but this time with a distant, eerie seriousness. “She is, herself, a femme gatée, and only music lures her.”

  Frank instantly thought of all the odd instruments which hung from the wall of the Gypsy house. His lips parted silently.

  Farouk seemed to know what he was thinking. “The gusla” he said. “And the tiple. These are the traditional instruments of the Gitano. They are used to summon her, and when I remembered these instruments, and saw the words ‘La Femme Gatée,’ that is when, as they say, the duende entered me.”

  Frank leaned forward slightly, his hand squeezing tightly around his glass. “And told you what? Something about the woman?”

  “About them,” Farouk said, as if gently correcting him. “About the three women.”

  “The three of them?”

  “Yes,” Farouk said. “It made me think of another three women my mother used to speak of.”

  “Who were they?” Frank asked.

  “They are known as the Seaborne Marys,” Farouk said quietly.

  “The Seaborne Marys,” Frank repeated, almost to himself.

  “They come from a tale my mother told me of a strange Gitano sect,” Farouk went on. “As you know, my father was a Moslem, but my mother, she was from the Christian world.” He smiled. “But a different Christian world, a Gypsy Christian world, and so, like everything with the Gitano, this world was like no other. It had its own sense of things.” He inserted a cigarette into his ivory holder and lit it. “The Gitano take what they want, and add what they want. This they do in their food and drink. This they do in their songs. And this also they do in their religion.”

  “Religion?” Frank asked unbelievingly. “They believe that there were three Marys?”

  Farouk nodded. “Known to them sometimes as the Three Marias, and other times as the Seaborne Marys.”

  Frank continued to stare at him incredulously.

  “Let me explain,” Farouk said. “For the Gitano, there were three Marias, three Marys, besides she who was Christ’s mother, the Holy Virgin. These three Marias were all beloved of Christ. Two of them, Maria Salome and Maria Jacobe, these were the sisters and helpmaids of the Holy Virgin.”

  Frank looked at him penetratingly. “Those were the names of the women on Tenth Avenue.”

  Farouk smiled. “Yes, they were.”

  “So the Puri Dai …”

  “Is the Third Maria,” Farouk said. He took another sip of raki, then continued. “According to this small sect of the Gitano, which my mother sometimes spoke of, the Three Marias did not remain in the holy land with the Virgin. After the Crucifixion, they fled by sea from the fires of Palestine.”

  “All three of them,” Frank said quietly, trying to keep it all straight in his mind.

  “All three,” Farouk said. He listed them again. “Maria Jacobe and Maria Salome, the two sisters of Christ’s mother. And with them, the Third Maria.”

  “The Third Maria,” Frank said. “Who was she?”

  Farouk smiled knowingly, and in an instant, Frank knew who the Third Maria was. “Magdalene,” he said softly, “Mary Magdalene.”

  “Maria Magdalene,” Farouk said solemnly. “The whore whom Christ adored.”

  “Yes,” Frank said. He remembered all the sermons his father had preached about her, loudly and incessantly preached, as if he too had from time to time fallen beneath her enigmatic spell.

  “Maria Magdalena,” Farouk repeated, “whom Christ saved, and who followed him as one of his disciples.”

  Frank nodded.

  “And it was she who first discovered the Resurrection,” Farouk added, “found that the stone had been rolled away from Christ’s tomb.”

  “Yes.”

  “To most of the Gitano, Magdalena was beloved of Christ just as his mother was. Just as were the other two Marias.”

  “Most of the Gitano?” Frank said quizzically. “But not all?”

  Farouk nodded slowly. “No, not all,” he said. “There is a small sect, very old, which carries forth another idea.”

  “Which is?”

  Farouk’s eyes darkened solemnly. “That the Third Maria was a woman whom God not only loved,” he said slowly, “but in His fleshly shape … desired.”

  Frank’s eyes widened. “Desired,” he repeated.

  “It is she of all women whom Christ loved as a man is said to love a woman,” Farouk said.

  “With his body,” Frank said.

  “By flesh and blood,” Farouk said. Then his words became more measured as he went on, as if they were leading him into a treacherous land. “And it was also the Third Maria, according to this one small sect within the Gitano faith, who lived to bear Christ’s only earthly child.”

  Frank sat back slightly. “Christ’s child?” he asked unbelievingly.

  “So that such holy blood would not be lost to man,” Farouk said, as if by way of practical explanation.

  For a moment, Frank felt as if the duende had entered him as well. “The errate,” he said.

  Farouk nodded. “Holiest of blood. She who has it must live a secret, blameless life. She must be kept apart from the world of the gorgio, so that her blood can be handed down from one generation to the next, mother to …”

  “Daughter,” Frank whispered, his mind whirling wildly, moving from the small game the Puri Dai had bought for her, to the open door where she must have sat, her small eyes filled with horror, as the old woman slowly dropped to her knees before her.

  “The blood flows through the generations,” Frank said, “passed, as you say, from mother to daughter.” His voice grew low, somber, tragic. “And at the age of ten the child is bound over to the Gypsy Father. She is bathed in raki and adorned for him, so that she is fit for his pleasure, and for the passage of the errate.”

  Frank’s lips parted silently. “You mean, for him to …”

  “Yes,” Farouk said.

  Frank’s eyes fled to the bar for a m
oment, then snapped back to Farouk. “She was trying to save her daughter,” he said. “She was going to run away with her, but it was too late.”

  Farouk nodded.

  “Someone killed the other woman,” Frank went on, “and took the little girl.”

  “For her holy blood, yes.”

  “And the only way she could save her was to confess to murder?”

  “To poison the blood, that is true,” Farouk said. “To make it useless for all time. To do it publicly, as they say, to enter the world of the gorgio.”

  Frank stood up instantly. “I’ve got to go talk to the Puri Dai,” he said worriedly.

  “Why?”

  “Because now I know why she’s been trying to get me off the case,” he told him. “I’ve been trying to prove her innocence. To build a case for not accepting her confession.”

  Farouk nodded.

  “Which would mean that her daughter’s blood …”

  “Would still be pure in the eyes of the Gypsy Christ,” Farouk said. He stood up. “I will go with you,” he said.

  They hailed a cab and went directly to the Women’s Center. It was almost four in the morning, and the front desk was empty. The small lounge to the right was also vacant, except for a single figure who sat, curled up at one end of the sofa, her arms wrapped around her knees. She was smoking a cigarette while she peered out the window, and she didn’t bother to look around when Frank walked up to her.

  “I need to see one of the women here,” Frank said.

  “Go ahead,” the woman answered dully.

  “She’s on the sixth floor,” Frank said. “You know where the desk clerk is?”

  The woman shrugged. “She pees a lot,” she said. “She’s probably in the john.”

  “Would you mind getting her for me?”

  The woman suddenly whirled around to him, her body seemed to grow red around the edges. “Go get her your fucking self,” she screeched. “I’m not your fucking maid!”

  Frank stepped back slightly, nearly bumping into Farouk. For an instant, he started to reply, then felt Farouk’s hand drawing him away. “No need, my friend,” he said softly. “No need.”

  Together they walked to the desk. The desk clerk returned almost immediately. It was Ruth, and she smiled cheerfully as she came down the corridor.

  “You’re back?” she asked.