by Sean Stewart
He didn't.
* * *
"Well, damn," Laura said.
She became aware of the way her hands were trembling. In fact, now that she came to think of it, her whole body felt pretty shaky. She decided she should sit on Dante's ghastly white couch for a moment and recover her equilibrium.
"Please," said a distant voice from Dante's bedroom. Adrenaline screamed back into Laura's bloodstream.
"Hang up, and try your call again. If you need assistance, dial your operator. Please hang up now. This is a recording."
It was the phone: just the phone.
Laura hissed slowly; tension leaked from her like air from a punctured tire. "Damn," she muttered. She scowled at her big shaking hands. "Must be the coffee," she said.
* * *
The cops finally showed up just past four in the morning. Officer Donnelly was young and white and had very pleasant manners, including covering his mouth when he yawned, which he did almost continuously. He had bored a hole through a flattened bullet and strung it on a red ribbon as a walk-away, cinched to a belt-loop at his hip. Officer Pierce was black and middle-aged, too old to believe in walk-aways; he played Grouchy Cop.
The police also brought an angel. "Ugh," she said, walking into Dante's apartment. Laura didn't blame her; she hated Dante's apartment too, calculated as it was to be as flatly impersonal as possible. The angel grimaced, looking around at the white-painted bookshelves, the white-painted table and plain-painted chairs. Everything bought new, of course: Dante avoided antique and design stores as if they were leper colonies.
The angel squinted unhappily. "What's wrong with the light?"
"He buys old-fashioned incandescents and there's no dimmer."
The angel peered disbelievingly at the (plain white) lamp beside Dante's coffee table. "They're not even full spectrum bulbs?"
Laura laughed, remembering that she had said pretty much the same thing in pretty much the same tone of voice three years ago when Dante had first invited her to drop by. Personally, she used Morning bulbs over her breakfast table and had a three-track dimmer to keep her living room light levels harmoniously adjusted. "Awful, isn't it?"
"Yuck," the angel agreed. She was a thin-faced woman in her early thirties who wore three charms on a red cord around her neck: a large irregular pearl overwritten with tiny Chinese characters, a pierced metal cap from a bottle of Coke, and mounted on a gold ring a fragment of what looked to be glass from a shattered windshield—presumably a walk-away from some accident. She had a four-character chop tattooed on her face: "Pearl," "River," and one Laura read as "Traveling," all around a Phoenix. She had a habit of periodically hunching her shoulders and peering out from between them, a mannerism which made her look like a questing ferret. It was particularly pronounced when she was running her fingers over Dante's dresser drawers, and around the frame of the smashed window. Every time she did it, Officer Pierce would shoot a questioning look at her, accompanied by an impatient grunt.
At first the angel volunteered her information quickly enough: one intruder; male; looking for something. Had been alarmed while in the bedroom.
"Extraordinary," Officer Pierce growled, looking down at the blackened package of firecrackers still lying on Dante's (bare, painted) living-room floor. "What would we do without you?"
"A question I often ask myself," the angel shot back. Pierce rolled his eyes.
While the young white cop took Laura's statement, Pierce strolled around the apartment, listening and making notes. As far as Laura could tell, nothing had been stolen.
The angel's shoulders jerked as she bent over Dante's dresser. A curious, guarded expression came over her face.
"Well?"
The angel glanced back at Pierce. "Nothing... definite," she said.
He scowled.
Brushing her skirt away from her knees, the angel knelt down and ran her fingertips over the handle of one of the drawers, very, very carefully, as if stroking a venomous snake. Her shoulders jumped up and she hissed with a sharp intake of breath.
Pierce's scowl deepened. "What have you got?"
"Not—not much," the angel stammered. Unthinkingly, she reached to touch the pearl hanging from her neck.
"It's some angel thing, isn't it? You all get that shifty look when you're concealing evidence."
The angel stood up, bristling. "I get paid by the hour, Sergeant, whether I'm here or at my desk. I'm perfectly happy to let you handle this on your own, if that's what you want."
"Now, now," young Donnelly said soothingly. "We all know it's late and tempers are a little—Awhh! (yawn!) Excuse me!—are a little short. Let's try to get along." He held up his hands diplomatically. He was smart enough not to direct his charm at Officer Pierce, Laura noticed.
Pierce rolled his eyes. He did it with an expressive power and economy of movement that suggested frequent practice. Scowling, he turned back to Laura. "You know the occupant?" Laura nodded. "What's he do?"
"He works in a biology lab at the University."
"Student?"
"No. Just a paid tech. Dropped out halfway through his Master's."
"How long has he been living here?"
"Three years, I think. He was here when I moved in."
Officer Pierce's eyebrows rose in some surprise. He looked around the room. "Awfully bare for a place someone's been living for three years. No television, no record player, no magazines. Everything neat."
Laura shrugged. "He spends a lot of time out. If Dante wants to watch something, he goes to the movies. If he wants music, he goes to a club, or the symphony. He always preferred the place bare. Less to clean up if you bring home, um, company, he says."
"Company?"
They heard the angel laugh sharply from the kitchen. "A stack of condoms in his bedroom drawer," she explained. "No bread or milk in the fridge, but a tin of pâté and two bottles of wine. Ooh, very nice," she added. "Front-du-Lac '84."
Officer Donnelly grinned broadly, and a small smile even escaped Officer Pierce. "Did Mr.—"
"Ratkay."
"—Ratkay have any enemies you know of, Ms. Chen?" He glanced at the bedroom. "Disappointed girlfriends, for instance?"
After a moment, Laura shook her head. "I don't think so. He was never really close with any of them. Dante's a nice guy, but he doesn't have the guts to get serious."
Officer Pierce studied his notepad. "Not even with you?"
Laura laughed. "I'm not stupid, Sergeant. We're good friends, that's all. He drops by my apartment two or three times a week and we drink tea."
"Funny. Sounds like the kind of guy who would have made a pass."
"You think I would have accepted?" Laura said lightly, but something about Pierce's comment needled her. Come to think of it, why hadn't Dante ever given her a line? She was no beauty, but then most of his women weren't. She wouldn't have taken him up on it, but it was galling to think she didn't live up to even Dante's fairly catholic standards.
Laura knew she wanted a husband and a family—just not quite yet. Was there something in her manner that warned men off? If so, she'd better find out what it was before she started looking for a mate; any signals that put off Dante Ratkay must be pretty hard to ignore.
Or—and this was another disturbing thought—maybe he had made a pass at her and she hadn't even noticed it. Was work absorbing so much of her attention (along with taking care of Mother), that the rest of life was passing her by?
A quick surge of loneliness washed through Laura. She found herself wishing that Dante were here himself, smartly dressed even in the wee hours and making coffee in the little espresso machine, answering questions with his indefatigable charm, joking with her and admiring (as he would) her courage in having driven the Bad Guy off.
But of course he was at the family home she envied so much, sleeping soundly in his childhood bed, no doubt, with the river rolling on at the bottom of the garden. He had a place to go home to for Thanksgiving, where he could still be someone's broth
er, someone's child. Unlike Laura, who never had a brother or a sister. Who was the only grown-up in her family now.
And what a grown-up thing to do: sit here feeling sorry for yourself! Laura thought, tartly reprimanding herself. It's the hour that's making you gloomy, and the aftershock from the excitement.
A faint, acrid smell of gunpowder still lingered in the living room, though a cold draft crept in from the broken kitchen window.
Officer Donnelly's hand crept to his mouth, and Laura couldn't help yawning herself.
"Almost done, Ms. Chen. Can you tell us what the firecrackers were all about?"
"To scare off evil spirits," the angel in the kitchen said promptly. "Right?"
Laura nodded. "I read about the Westwood minotaur in the paper yesterday. Dante has a bit of angel in him, so I guess it was on my mind."
"Does it work?" Donnelly asked, squatting down to examine the pack of used firecrackers with renewed interest.
Laura shrugged. "I don't know. It's what they do in China, and they never forgot how to deal with their ghosts and angels there. That's what my dad used to say, anyway."
Officer Donnelly smiled, and touched the walk-away clipped to his belt. "Man, anything to help out if we run into one of those creepy things."
"I think you'll find a clip of firecrackers in your holster there, Mr. Donnelly," Officer Pierce said witheringly. "A neat little firework that shoots off a steel-jacketed rocket, in fact." He looked back at his notebook. "Hey," he called into the kitchen, glowering. "Why didn't you tell me the occupant was an angel?"
The police angel returned. In her left hand she held a butcher knife, taken from the block on Dante's kitchen counter. "I don't know," she said slowly. "There's something... odd." She tapped the knife blade absently with her fingernails, and her shoulders hunched as she glanced at Laura. "Is your friend scheduled to go into the hospital? Elective surgery, something like that?"
"Not that I know of," Laura said, mystified.
"Oh." The angel's shoulders jumped again. With a small shudder of distaste, she slid the knife carefully back into its block. "Do you have the number where he's staying?"
"That's enough," Officer Pierce growled. "We'll be contacting Mr. Ratkay in the morning. Ms. Chen, if you speak to him before we do, please have him come down to the station and make a report. We'd like him to confirm that nothing's been stolen."
"What do you mean?" Laura demanded, glaring at the angel and now thoroughly alarmed. "You think I should call him?"
"No. Well—no." Briskly, the angel shrugged. "Might as well wait until morning. I don't think calling would matter much... one way or the other," she added, half to herself. "But if I were him, I'd see a doctor soon. And watch out for butter—"
She stopped herself with a quick jerk of her shoulders. Her eyes narrowed.
"Watch out for butter?" Laura repeated, confused. "You mean his heart? He comes from this Hungarian family; they eat about a cow a week. They spread lard on toast. I keep telling him it's slow suicide."
The angel blinked and smiled. "Sorry. I shouldn't have said anything. I think my own wires are crossed, is what it is." She yawned elaborately, avoiding Officer Pierce's suspicious gaze. She glanced meaningfully at young Donnelly. "Sure is a long night, isn't it?"
It sure is, Laura thought, as the cops slowly got ready to leave. When they were gone she swept up the smashed glass in the kitchen and covered the broken window in plastic wrap.
A long night.
But tired as she was, she couldn't sleep when she went back to bed. She lay there with her eyes stubbornly closed for almost an hour before admitting defeat. Finally with a resentful groan she heaved herself up, rummaged through her desk for a brush, ink, and three sheets of yellow charm paper like the stuff she kept at work. On them she drew three of Heavenly Master Chang's best charms. Going up to Dante's apartment, she taped the first charm, to protect the home, over the broken window. The second, a charm to prevent the entry of wild animals, she taped over his door. Finally she hid the Hundred Different Things Charm behind the headboard of his bed, where he wouldn't see it and take it down.
Feeling silly and determined all at once, she faced east, looking out the broken kitchen window at the murky maze of, tenements and street lamps, and recited in her rusty Mandarin the incantation her father had taught her to lend power to Chang Tien-shih's charms:
"The universe and yin-yang are wide, the sun comes out from the east. I use this charm to get rid of all evils. My mouth spits outs strong fire, my eyes can shine out rays like the sun. I can ask the Heavenly Soldiers to catch the devils and get all sickness out of the house. Heavenly soldiers can suppress evils and create luck. Let the Law be obeyed; let this order be executed straightaway."
Taking a sip of water from Dante's tap, she bowed to the east, clenched her teeth three times, and spat it out.
Then and only then, at ease at last and thoroughly exhausted, she clumped back downstairs and fell heavily into bed, and sleep.
NOW HE GOES ALONG THE DARK ROAD, WHENCE THEY SAY NO ONE RETURNS. —CATULLUS
CHAPTER
FIVE
Portrait
I prefer to shoot in black and white. Usually, when you say of a man, "He sees things in black and white" you mean he is inflexible and dogmatic; he treats complex issues with brutal simplicity. In fact, you should mean just the opposite. It is color film that embalms its subjects in workaday reality. Black and white leaves room for mystery, for subtle shades of gray. Without hue, the eye becomes aware of complexities of shadow and texture; you haven't really seen the texture of grass or sand or sea until you've studied one of Anderson's black and white studies of the Atlantic off the empty New England coast.
This, now: this is a portrait of Dante, black and white, that I took of him with my old Kodak the summer we were fifteen. We had just finished building the tree-fort in the big willow on Three Hawk Island. We built it airily, in the Chinese style, with a strong rail waist-high all the way around, and the rest of the walls made of bamboo blinds. When the wind blew, they clicked and rustled, murmuring in long, slow conversation with the twisting willow leaves, the running river.
It took six weeks to build that fort, six weeks of building through the long summer afternoons while the sun tanned the willow green, listening to the sap well and beat beneath its bark.
Six weeks of feeling the willow's long, slow grief.
Dante tried to ignore it, but even I could tell it was a tree that had known too much remorse. Even at summer's heart, its leaves never lost a certain gray pallor. Even on the calmest day, a sad breeze sighed through its trailing fronds. The river had eaten away at the island's southern tip, exposing the willow's great black roots, and I used to find myself wondering what lay trapped in the shadows beneath the river's surface there. What did the black roots pierce, and piercing, draw into themselves?
Then too there were the scars on its trunk and on many a broad limb where strips of bark two fingers wide and a handspan long had been carefully peeled away, seventy or eighty of them. Never clustered too closely together, never anything that might ring the tree or kill one of its boughs. Sap gummed these wounds like scabbing blood.
At first I thought those welts must be the cause of the willow's restless grief, but Dante told me once the opposite was true. He didn't know the story, he said; didn't want to. But he knew something lingered, some tincture of remorse for events now unremembered, that made gifts of these scars; each one a chance for penance. (For long after guilty memories fade, the urge for penance lingers: strong and blind as the will to drink rain and grope for sunlight.)
Maybe in the end it was the willow's melancholy that drove him away. Dante was never one to suffer clouds in his endless sky.
In this picture Dante is perched on the fort's west rail, one leg stretched out, the other dangling down. It is late afternoon. The sunlight is low, coming right down the river valley; it burns like silver along the line of his leg. Willow shadows knot and tangle on the bamboo wa
lls.
In life what you notice about Dante is the curly red-gold hair, the pale complexion, the freckles, the smile. But here in black and white you see the restlessness in his limbs, the hunch of his shoulders and the line of a flaring eyebrow as he squints upstream into a dazzle of sun. We had just spent weeks building this fort; poured countless hours into planning and constructing it, argued every detail of materials and tools and cost, ridden into the City on the bus and plunged into Chinatown looking for blinds and red lacquer and a set of glass chimes in the shape of dragonflies. But looking at the picture, you can tell Dante is already leaving this place, putting it behind him, gazing restlessly into the future, as if like Lot or Orpheus the world would be lost if he dared look back.
Dante—gregarious, charming, facile—thinks we could hardly be more different: day and night, sun and moon. He's wrong, of course: we just carry our aloneness differently. Mine is no secret. I stand always apart from the center of things, observing. Dante, on the other hand, carries his isolation into every crowd. He laughs and jokes and seizes conversation, satanic eyebrows flaring... but he only lends himself: he never gives. He never stays, he never puts down roots. He floats through time, too cagey to dock or let an anchor down; and life drifts by him on the bank.
It is a picture I return to: the two of us, in the place we built together. Dante, already eager to be gone; and me, behind the camera, absent from the picture, as if I wasn't even there.
* * *
It was the dark gray before dawn, clammy and cold, as Dante and Jet lowered the boat into the river with the corpse propped awkwardly across the thwarts. Jet sat in the stern, his pale hand resting on the tiller of the little Evinrude engine, just above the cadaver's head. Dante sat in the prow. When the boat rocked, his own dead feet bumped against his thigh. Rigor mortis had started, stiffening the corpse's face and neck. According to Dr. Ratkay's autopsy book, rigor would proceed down the length of the body from head to toe, passing off in the same order twenty-four to forty-eight hours later.