Private Demons

by Robert Masello

  He knew, before even opening the folder of personal messages and correspondence, that he would find at least one call from Hallie. But there had to be at least fifty other invitations and solicitations for charity events and such to wade through first. He'd have to tell Simone to wield a more ruthless hand in future and toss out all but the most important. There were cards, press releases, fund-raising letters from every major museum, political organization, and disease he could think of, and plenty of others from people and places he couldn't even identify. The Advocacy for the Disabled, the Foundation for Clinical Studies (of what? he wondered), the Pan-Asian Cultural Conference, the Swinburne Society, the Wetlands Conservation Committee. There was a note from Gregory Harbison at the Asia Museum of New York thanking him again for the donation of his world-class collection and advising him that, as a result, attendance at the museum had already seen a rise of thirty-one percent. Lucien was pleased to hear it. And there, toward the bottom—Simone had put everything into the folder by date—was a slip to inform him that Hallie Patton had called the day before to say she was back from Milan. “Please call” was also checked off on the slip.

  But he hadn't called her yet. And he felt guilty for not having done so. But he was wrestling again with the question that had tormented him for so much of his life. Knowing the terrible pact he had made, and the peril in which his soul resided, should he ever allow himself to become close to another human being? How deeply could he dare to entangle someone else in his own deadly web? Especially someone that he loved? Already, he had drawn Hallie into mortal danger at least twice—once on the plane to Thailand, and again on the docks of Bangkok. Unless, and until, he could free himself of the awful curse that hung over him, he would be endangering the very life of anyone foolish enough to love him.

  And yet every part of him wanted her, desperately.

  He threw some papers into his Moroccan leather attaché case, and left the office. He said good night to Simone, busily putting his schedule together for the next day, and went downstairs to the car.

  On the drive uptown, Hun listened avidly to a medley of Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings. Lucien had learned, over the years, to identify some of the most prominent country singers.

  At home, he gave Hun's wife, Sokhim, instructions for his dinner, then headed straight to the rear of the townhouse. He was carrying under his arm a brightly wrapped box, with several small holes punched in the top and sides. Removing his silver key ring, he opened the narrow door set between the two torchères, then went down the steps to the wine cellar. There he entered the combination on the metal door at the bottom, and passed into his dressing closet. It had been much longer than he liked since he'd last been here; the peace and privacy of his subterranean chamber acted as a kind of restorative for him, in mind and body both. Just taking off his business suit and putting on the saffron robe made him feel as if he were leaving, to some degree, this earthly plane and approaching a higher and more distant one.

  On bare feet, his hair undone so that it fell loosely to his shoulders, he padded to the far end of the pool room, spread his mat, and sat down. He put the package down at his side.

  This, as much as anything now, was like coming home to him. The rough-hewn rock of the walls, the sandstone carvings, the soothing green light that shimmered off the water of the pool—this secret grotto was at once his sanctuary and a powerful sensory reminder of his life in Cambodia. The air had that same heat and humidity, the light that same pale, verdant cast; the mythological figures, cut into the huge reliefs, brought back to him the mighty temples and monuments of his youth. For Lucien, it was perhaps the one place on earth that ineffably brought together the two separate strains, the two monstrously different epochs, of his life.

  His breathing became deeper, and slower. His legs were folded into the lotus position, his palms upturned in his lap. He listened, with great satisfaction, to the resounding silence of the room. He gazed, with eyes unfocused on anything before them, into the reflective waters of the pool.

  How long he remained that way, he could not have said.

  When he heard the voice, it was almost as if it were speaking from inside his head, rather than out of it. It was low, and soft, but unconcealably eager.

  “You're back again,” it said. “I couldn't wait any longer. Can you see me?”

  Even as she asked, her face took on shape and definition at the edge of the pool. Her long blond hair clung wetly to the sides of her head, and draped her narrow shoulders. Her eyes were the blue of the palest sapphires unearthed from the clay in Cambodia.

  “Yes, Mandy, I can see you.”

  Her bare arms were propped on the side of the pool now, just a couple of feet to his left. She was smiling.

  “I'm so glad you're back. I was worried about you.”

  How strange, Lucien thought, to have a ghost concerned for his welfare.

  “Did you go where you said you were going—Bangkok, London, those places?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Damn,” she said, but not with anger, “I wish I could have done things like that. I wish I'd made a little better use of my time.” She flipped the ends of her wet hair back over her shoulders. Her eyes flicked, a little self-consciously, to the package at his side. “What's that?” she asked with studied nonchalance.

  Lucien pushed it toward her. “Why don't you see?” he said.

  “It's for me?”

  “I promised I'd get you a present, didn't I?”

  “You did! But I didn't think you would. I didn't think you'd remember.”

  “Go on—open it.”

  But at this she looked troubled, and drew back.

  “No, that's all right,” she said. “You open it for me.”

  What was she afraid of? he wondered. Or was it that she couldn't do something so physical anymore, that her existence in this world was too insubstantial for her to perform even such a simple task? He wanted to ask her, but he was afraid that doing so would only hurt and embarrass her even more.

  He held the package in front of her, and pulled the ribbon loose. Then he tore a flap in the bright green paper and ripped it all away.

  It was a finely meshed metal cage, and huddled in it were two little puffs of color.

  Mandy came halfway out of the pool to get a closer look.

  “What are they?” she said, in amazement.

  “They're a pair of rare and exotic creatures, stalked and trapped in the tropical forests of Southeast Asia, and then purchased from a vendor in the Floating Market of Bangkok,” he intoned.

  She was pressing her face almost against the bars.

  “They're parakeets,” he said, and she laughed out loud with delight.

  “They're beautiful! Can we set them free? I don't want to keep them locked in a cage. I want to see them fly!”

  Lucien flipped open the little gate at the front of the cage, but the parakeets clung tenaciously to their perch. Shaking the cage didn't help either. Finally, he had to reach inside, his hand being pecked all the while, and scoop the birds out.

  He remembered, quite suddenly, freeing his mother's parrot from its cage, in their deserted home.

  In a blur of green and gold, the parakeets shot off into the room, circling the pool, dipping toward the water, then fluttering back toward the ceiling, looking for a place to land. Mandy's head turned to follow them, and she laughed again when one, and then the other, found perches atop two of the sandstone reliefs. “You don't mind them parking there, do you?” she asked, already taking the protective tone of a mother whose kids had just been up to some mischief.

  “No, I don't mind. Those reliefs have probably seen worse over the past four hundred years.”

  “Oh, Lucien,” Mandy said, still watching the birds with enchanted eyes, “I just love them. I just love there being life down here. They're beautiful.”

  So he'd guessed right after all. He'd wondered what he could bring her that would give her real joy . . . and he'd had to make sure that w
hatever he did buy her, Hallie never found out about it. He'd have had a hard time explaining that the gift was not for some seeret rival, but only for a sad young ghost that he knew and had befriended.

  Mandy turned back to Lucien, and it wasn't clear to him if her eyes were tinged with tears or simply pool water. “Thank you,” she said.

  “You're very welcome.”

  “I really have been worried about you, you know.” For a moment, she seemed to fade away, before coming back into focus. “It's not as easy for me to tap into stuff when you're not right here. But I can still get some things, even when you're not.”

  “Things such as?” he asked.

  She shook her head, and looked troubled. “Things that don't make much sense to me, but keep coming right back anyway. Like that image of the nun, the one who taught me algebra. I don't know why I see her when I'm trying to make some connection to you.”

  Lucien remembered well the image that he too had received the last time he and Mandy had communed. The nun, whose hood he had longed to pull back, whose face he had felt some growing need to uncover.

  “What else do you see?”

  “Weird things . . . scary things. Like a man who's been horribly mutilated . . . with only one eye left and dead-white hair.”

  Kevin Molloy.

  “And another man, Asian, with a gun; he's got on some kind of uniform.”

  Yang, the Thai official who'd shot at him on the dock?

  “Can I show you someone else,” Lucien said, “and ask you if you've seen him?”

  “Sure,” she replied. “Go ahead.”

  He never knew exactly how this worked, but he did know that Mandy had access to his mind, that she could project there images that she wanted him to see, or enter and view images that he wanted to display to her. It was as if his head were just a blank screen to her, on which she could toss up what she wanted, or observe what he was imagining. In a way, it made him feel as naked as she was.

  Now he closed his eyes, and summoned up a picture of Lord Sykes as he had last seen him, leaning forward in his armchair at the Commonwealth Club, challenging Lucien for control of Gold Prow. He concentrated on the image, on Sykes's prematurely silver hair and long, gaunt face and dark blue suit. He tried to hold the image still and complete, for Mandy to see and study. And after he'd done so, for as much as a minute, he slowly opened his eyes and looked down at Mandy.

  Who looked stunned. “Who is he?” she said.

  “You see him?”

  “Yes . . . the tall Englishman, with those cold blue eyes.”

  “How did you know he was English?”

  “He was at the party, with Omar and Ali” . . . the night I was drowned. He was here,” she said, “in this very room.”

  “You're sure?”

  “About that night, I remember everything.”

  “Do you remember his name?” He wanted her to say it, on her own, without his prompting.

  “I never knew. But I saw him at the club once or twice. I think he was an ambassador, or a lord, or something like that. They got a lot of those at The Pleiades.”

  “Lord Sykes,” he said.

  But she just shrugged. “If you say so. But that's the man. He was on top of somebody over there.” She gestured toward the marble bench on the other side of the pool.

  “Do you know who?”

  “No. It was just some girl he'd picked up that night.”

  “Can you recall anything else about him?”

  She furrowed her brow, trying to remember. “No, I don't think so. He came up here in his own limo, and there wasn't exactly a lot of chitchat around the pool.”

  One of the parakeets chirped, quite sweetly, and the other answered. Mandy's expression instantly softened.

  “Why do you want to know about this man?” she asked.

  “It's to do with my business.” Then, on a hunch, he said, “Let me show you someone else.” He closed his eyes again, erased the image of Lord Sykes, and replaced it with one of Duncan Kwan. But only having met him that one time, and weeks before, he had trouble getting the image as clear as he'd like. He concentrated on the smooth Eurasian face, with the tinted blue aviator glasses . . . and then threw in, as he remembered them, the loose silk jacket, the gold bracelet, the arrogant, untroubled posture. His eyes still closed, he heard Mandy say, “I'm not getting it very well.”

  “I don't know him very well. His name is Duncan Kwan.”

  “Some name,” she said. “But it doesn't ring any bells. And what I'm seeing, it's kind of vague, doesn't look familiar.”

  “Was he ever at the club?”

  “I don't know. There were lots of people in and out of that place, and I was only there for a few months myself.”

  He gave it up; it had just been a passing thought.

  Mandy was looking pale and wearied; her face was still apparent to him, but her body had begun to fade.

  “I don't think I can do anymore tonight,” she said. Even her voice had grown faint.

  “I know that.”

  She looked up at him from the water with sad and frightened eyes. “Sometimes I don't know how much longer I can even stay here.”

  One of the parakeets flew away from its perch, fluttered aimlessly around the room, then landed on the bench where Sykes had once caroused.

  “You shouldn't stay here,” Lucien said, gently. “You have to let go of all this sometime.”

  “I know,” she said, so softly it was almost a whisper, “I know. I think I was just afraid to, with so much pain in me . . . and so little love.” She disappeared altogether for a second, then came back again, but nearly transparent now. “I'm still afraid to,” she confessed, “but not as much.”

  The birds called to each other, their sweet high cries echoing faintly around the room. Mandy was fading away into the green of the water and the air.

  “But don't worry,” she said, and he thought he heard her laugh softly. “I'm still not ready to go yet . . .”

  And then he found himself staring again into the empty pool, where her vanishing had left not so much as a ripple. Even the birds were silent.

  CHAPTER

  17

  Father Brendan had forgotten just how bad the road was. Pridi, his young assistant sitting beside him, was constantly pointing out potholes, rocks, bomb craters, deep ruts. The last time Father Brendan had driven to the convent, he'd only had himself to worry about; now he had Kevin Molloy strapped to a gurney in the back of the ambulance, and he was mindful of the pain he might be causing him every time he hit another bump in the road, or dropped a tire into a muddy depression. As a result, the trip was taking much longer than expected—ten or fifteen miles per hour was the fastest he could ever travel—and he doubted he'd make it to the convent before long after dark. Still, he remained convinced that he was doing the right thing.

  After his last visit to the convent, where he'd met Sister Celeste, he'd returned to the clinic outside Bangkok and written two detailed accounts of what had happened, what he'd seen, and what he believed. One he'd sent to his superiors, who had alerted him to the rumors in the first place, and the other he'd sent, via the airmail courier packet, to the New York offices of Lucien Calais; in Calais's report, he had added an account of what he planned to do with Kevin Molloy.

  “Hold on,” Pridi said, pointing one dark brown arm at the brush to the side of the road. “Water buffalo.”

  Father Brendan slowed to a halt, and a moment later a pair of great, gray water buffalo, driven by a farmer in a straw coolie's hat, lumbered up onto the road, their heads hanging low, a wooden yoke thrown across their shoulders; they were hauling an empty wagon that had probably contained sacks of rice. The river, which ran parallel to the road, was a couple of hundred yards off to the right; the farmer, like his predecessors for centuries before him, had no doubt just loaded his produce onto a barge floating downstream, and was now heading back to the rice paddies to work until the last of the daylight fled the sky. Brendan sometimes wondered
how these people so patiently endured such lives of unending toil and hardship, with the prospect of nothing more in the end than to escape the cycle of life altogether and disappear into oblivion. To him, it seemed so hopeless.

  But then, perhaps Heaven looked tiring to them.

  “It's getting late,” Pridi said, after the wagon had passed. “How much farther is it?” Pridi was a slim sixteen-year-old orphan, whose parents had both died of encephalitis at the clinic; Pridi had survived the same disease, miraculously enough, and had never left the clinic since. He was utterly devoted to Brendan.

  “Too far,” Brendan conceded, “to get there tonight. It would be too painful for Molloy. We'll get as close as we can, and go the rest of the way in the morning.”

  “Do you want to give him another shot?” Pridi was always fascinated by anything medical.

  “No, not yet,” Brendan said. “He seems to be sleeping still.” He glanced back through the little aperture, covered with a mesh screen, that looked into the rear compartment. He could see the top of Molloy's head, with its strangely different halves: seared clean on one side, a shock of stiff white hair on the other. He'd given him a shot of painkiller a couple of hours earlier, and it appeared to be still in effect. His body, except for an occasional twitching in his legs, lay motionless under the thin white sheet. But what turmoil continued in his mind, Brendan was almost afraid to imagine. There were demons besetting Kevin Molloy, and he was afraid that an injection of Demerol wasn't enough to keep them at bay. He hoped that Sister Celeste might be.

  An hour later, it had grown so dark that even with the aid of the one working headlight Brendan was having trouble seeing the obstructions in the road; Pridi had volunteered to ride on the hood, like a cowcatcher, but Brendan had denied him permission. Now he was just looking for a good place to pull over and wait until daylight.