Shell Game

by Carol O’Connell

  Mallory looked up at the rabbi. „Louisa Malakhai?“

  Rabbi Kaplan nodded. „Good, isn’t it?“ He strolled back to the elevator, and she walked alongside him. „That was copied from old journal sketches he made when he was young – when he had plans to be an artist. Mr. Halpern is a talented man, and a very happy one. Now he has all the time in the world to draw his pictures. So you got him fired.“ The rabbi shrugged. „By his own son.“ He pressed the button to call the elevator. „So? All in all, you did well.“

  His smile was entirely too sweet, and she braced herself for the coming shot.

  „If it matters to you, Kathy, I still agree with Helen.“ The elevator opened, and he stepped inside the humming box. „I find you quite perfect – twisted as you are.“ The metal doors closed on his great pleasure in her annoyance.

  The rabbi’s timing was flawless, as always. Once again, he had gotten the last word. She had yet to beat him at this game. But he was getting older, slowing down – his day would come.

  Chapter 15

  Malakhai awakened, fully clothed, on the bed in his New York hotel room. He was not running through his dreams anymore, but neither had he shaken off the confusion of things unreal.

  And the ringing had not stopped.

  He switched on the bedside lamp and looked at his watch. It was two o’clock in the morning. He picked up the telephone receiver, intending to slam it down again, when he heard a woman’s voice.

  „Malakhai?“

  „Yes?“

  „When you were a prisoner of war in Korea, was your cell completely dark? Or did it have a light?“

  „Mallory.“ Odd child – and rude. Malakhai glanced toward his wife’s side of the bed. He stared at the glint of gold foil and his hand tightened around the telephone receiver. So it had happened again. He had fallen asleep before removing the hotel mint from Louisa’s pillow. No – he had forgotten. „I’m so sorry.“

  „That prison cell,“ said Mallory’s voice at his ear, no doubt believing that he had spoken this apology to her. „Was there a light? A window?“

  The sense of shame was overwhelming him – all for a bit of chocolate wrapped in gold foil. He kept the tears out of his voice when he spoke to Mallory. „There was light during the day, but not much.“

  This old history was an event with large gaps in it, but the physical surroundings were clear. „My cell had a small window facing a stone wall. I could see the light, but not the sky, not the sun. Shadows moved from one side of the wall to the other. That’s how I kept track of the time.“

  „What did you do with all that time?“

  „I spent it with Louisa.“

  „And that was the beginning of – “

  „My madness? That’s what the army psychiatrists said.“ But he had always thought of it as a discipline, a religion with a requisite of absolute faith and a complement of sins and atonements – even a litany of guilt. He took the mint off Louisa’s pillow and crushed it in his hand. I’m so sorry.

  What would he forget tomorrow?

  „It wasn’t war you loved – the killing,“ said Mallory. „That’s not why you signed up for Korea.“

  „It was Louisa I loved.“ He sat up and unbuttoned his shirt, averting his eyes from the other side of the bed. „But there’s an interesting parallel. I once saw a poster in Warsaw, a bit of political art. It was the portrait of a young woman. The top of her head was obscured in a wash of blood red, as if it had been blown away. Beneath the poster were the words – how shall I translate them? ‘War, what a woman you are.’ I think that sums it up.“

  The line went dead. Apparently, Mallory had been satisfied with the short answer. Would she have understood the music? No, it was pointless to attempt that explanation. It would only try her patience.

  He had given Louisa form and substance in a Korean cell, but she had come back for him years before that, in the chaos of World War II, when Roland had aptly named him Hollow Boy.

  Malakhai lay back on the pillow. The ceiling became low clouds over the plains of a European winter. His arms wrapped tight around his shoulders, for it was bitter cold. Not night anymore, but morning – first light.

  He could have spared the child if he had called out from the safe cover of the rock wall, but he didn’t. He watched a five-year-old boy walk into the field. It was perfect, really. Instead of waiting another hour for one of the Germans to trigger an explosion, the curious child was heading toward a land mine.

  Young Private Malakhai had been rubbing his frozen hands through the succession of annoying miracles that had kept the German boys alive. They had nearly finished dismantling the heavy tree, clearing it from the road, section by section. He didn’t know or care what all the soldiers in the troop truck were laughing at. One of them was pointing at the child who would be dead in minutes. The soldier beckoned to the little boy, and the small figure moved closer, stepping quickly now.

  Good.

  Malakhai’s fingertips were going the blue-gray color of frostbite, and he wished the child would hurry even faster to his dismemberment and death.

  A smiling, yellow-haired soldier was holding out a sausage. The little boy moved forward, shy eyes round as brown cookies, his tiny hand extending to the promised treat.

  The first mine blew under the child’s foot, and the rest followed. There was hardly a second in the chain of explosions for the soldiers to register the shock of what was happening to them as the parts of their bodies bid torsos farewell and flew elsewhere. And it rained blood for a time; a fine mist crystallized death into frozen red drops.

  The truck was on fire. The air was filled with the acrid stew of odors, sulfur and smoke, burnt tires and burnt boys. Malakhai had not yet felt the pain of the head injury made by a fragment of metal. He moved out from behind the cover of rocks and began the death count of the thirty-four soldiers for his report. He didn’t count the child, who was not a military statistic.

  When he was done, he stood over the smallest corpse. The little body at his feet was mutilated, but not divided. The boy had been at the center of the first explosion, yet the tiny, perfect face was unspoiled, and his limbs still clung to him by red tendons and bones.

  Malakhai felt the hardening of an erection. And this was also curious. He could not explain it away, but as Louisa’s face filled his mind, he found it natural to be thinking of her, coupling her with all things sexual. He could feel the heat in his crotch, more intense now – live fire in winter. And inexplicably, it had all begun with this little corpse at his feet. The child must belong to that farmhouse in the distance.

  Malakhai’s body stiffened and froze in the attitude of attention – lightening. Across the snowy plain, he heard the music of a violin.

  Impossible. The head wound?

  Auditory hallucination? Of course, and it was not his first. He was learning all the medical jargon, wound by wound. But this was not the familiar ringing, the pain of hellish bells and bombshells. This was music, and violins were not in his repertoire of injuries to body and brain.

  He looked down on the face of the child. Snowflakes settled upon the rounded glass of brown staring eyes, and they melted there. Malakhai felt nothing but the sex warming his crotch in a spill of cum.

  He turned his head in the direction of the farmhouse, the better to hear the music. A wind was rising, and the faint notes were drifting away from him. And now there was another sensation of wetness. His hand moved up to his face.

  Tears?

  For Louisa.

  Thoughts of her had conjured up no companion emotions of pain or loss. He was only tasting the salt of tears – Louisa’s gift. The hollow boy was weeping by conditioned reflex to an imagined violin. He credited Louisa with this trick, creating false tears for a dead child, trappings of sorrow, an illusion of regret.

  But why?

  Two indistinct figures were emerging from the distant farmhouse. The parents? Perhaps they had just discovered that their child was not sleeping in his bed. He kn
ew their frightened eyes would be turning toward the fire of the burning troop truck. And yet, Malakhai was feeling no empathy or sympathy, nothing but the throbbing of his head wound.

  What would Louisa have him do now?

  Ob, of course.

  Private Malakhai picked up the small body, which weighed nothing, and turned his back on the dark smoke and twisted metal, the charred uniforms and dead boys. He made his way across the white field newly dusted with snow, following the small tracks of the littlest boy.

  The young soldier walked with uncommon grace upon frostbit feet, moving slowly toward the farmhouse where the child’s footprints had begun.

  Mallory was bored with the wall where Oliver Tree was being murdered again in a larger-than-life projection.

  She ejected Louisa’s Concerto from her computer. A portable CD player lay on the desk. The old batteries had been tossed out long ago, and now she hunted through all the drawers, searching for the new ones. Where were they? The movers could not have lost them. She had packed the contents of this desk herself and carried the box in her own car.

  No batteries – no matter. She connected the CD player to an adapter for the wall socket, then draped a bulky audiophile’s headset around her neck. Tethered by a wire, she passed in front of the projector’s lens. The moving pictures wrapped around her body, and flying arrows moved silently through her hair.

  She opened the closet door and pulled out all the neatly folded cartons. One corner of the den had been cleared for use as two of the walls in a Korean prison cell. She reconstructed the packing boxes into large cardboard building blocks for two more walls only five feet high. When she was done, strips of masking tape ran from the top of one cardboard wall to the opposite wall of plaster – a reminder that there was no room to stand upright. The tape roughly effected bars across her view of the ceiling.

  Pulling the last of the boxes into position, she sealed herself off from the rest of the den and sat cross-legged on the floor of her cell, five feet square. After a few minutes she was aware of small noises never noticed before, the tick of the wall clock and rain pelting the window glass. Tinny music from a strolling boom box wafted up from the street. But the enclosing walls were at least devoid of Oliver’s flying arrows and his death. Mallory looked up at the faux bars of paper tape covering her new minimalist world. She put on the form-fitted headset, and its cushion blocked out every sound beyond the cell.

  Perfect peace.

  This was not what she had anticipated. There was no discomfort, though she could not see the door or the windows. Perhaps it was her absolute trust in the alarm system.

  No, it was more than that, something familiar. An old memory was surfacing.

  My little house.

  Mallory had re-created a piece of her childhood, a refrigerator carton that had once been home to a ten-year-old fugitive. Her cardboard house had been a peaceful sanctuary from the insanity of city streets, the roller coaster of emotions from flight to fight.

  She felt safe here.

  And Malakhai had done this for a year of solitary confinement. She would almost welcome such a sentence. But what had Malakhai done with his time, besides listening to interior music in his memory and reconstructing a dead woman?

  Mallory picked up the CD and set Louisa’s Concerto on replay so it would repeat endlessly. The stereo headset created the illusion that the orchestra played in the center of her skull. But there was nothing for her in this music, no ghosts from 1942, only notes chaining into one another, strings blending with horns.

  Malakhai, what did you do with all the days?

  Well, he had retained every detail of Louisa’s corpse, the blue dress, the blood behind her eyes and the pink froth at her lips. He must have replayed her death a thousand times inside his head.

  Mallory ceased to pay any attention to the music. She concentrated on an image of Faustine’s Magic Theater – Malakhai’s version, not Oliver’s. She decorated it with cafe tables and wine bottles, peopled it with civilians and soldiers, then filled the air with smoke. The chandelier dimmed and the stage was lit with a row of candles. Standing on the stage beside her was a red-haired girl, who held a violin. Mallory stepped into the girl’s skin and turned Louisa’s head toward young Malakhai. The boy stood in the wings, hidden from the audience by the edge of the curtain and awaiting his musical cue.

  Mallory’s hand was rising, lifting the violin to cradle it between her shoulder and her chin. Then Louisa stroked the strings with a bow that smelled of rosin. Hidden beneath the instrument was the arrow meant to replace the bow at the end of the act. Mallory turned her eyes back to Malakhai.

  Do you see him yet, Louisa? Do you see the uniform?

  No, not yet. And only Mallory could see the arrow loaded in his crossbow. Louisa’s eyes were closed. She was so involved in her music.

  This illusion was Max Candle’s routine. But tonight, Malakhai holds the weapon on her – on them.

  He’s so young. Eighteen years old, all new again. The pistol grip of the crossbow was in his right hand, and his eyes were shaded by the brim of an officer’s cap. The crossbow pistol was rising.

  The uniform’s material was gray, the buttons were silver – and the collar was red. No detail should be lost. She looked at young Malakhai through Louisa’s eyes. The handsome boy wore fine black boots. His crossbow pistol was aiming at her now.

  What was Louisa thinking? It was easier to creep inside the mind of a killer – so difficult to be a victim in the crosshairs of a weapon sight. First she saw the uniform, and then she saw the SS insignia. Malakhai?

  Yes, she knows him now. She was moving past her fear of the uniform. Louisa looked at her old love. His ringer was on the trigger. Was she wondering why Malakhai was doing Max’s routine? Yes.

  Why isn’t Max here?

  Max can’t shoot you, Louisa. Only Malakhai could do that – because he had loved this girl since they were children.

  Mallory waited for the boy to deliver the missile. Did Louisa still believe that a silk scarf would fly – harmless silk on a wire that she could wind round the hidden arrow? Franny Futura had spoken of her surprise. No, Louisa had no idea what was coming. She turned away from the audience, revolving as she played, to hide the switch of the violin bow for an arrow. She was going through with the act that had opened every show.

  Why do you trust him, Louisa?

  I’ve known Malakhai all my life.

  Mallory, less trustful, looked at the boy. His dark blue eyes were on Louisa’s face, probing, touching – the last caress of a distance. His finger pulled the trigger.

  Foolish, Louisa.

  There was no time for her to cry out with surprise. The shaft from the crossbow was buried in her shoulder, so deep, such pain. The violin and its bow fell to the stage. The hidden arrow dropped from Mallory’s hand. How could this be happening? Louisa stared at him as he turned to run. Why? Why did you hurt me?

  He was running away from her. Louisa was falling, and Mallory’s cheek was pressing to the cool wood of the stage. His boots made a pounding sensation that Louisa could feel through her skin as she lay on the floorboards.

  Over the next hour, Mallory played the scene over and over again. In one scenario, she left Louisa falling to the stage and ran away with Malakhai, weaving across the room, upsetting tables and startling patrons. Then they were outside the theater and breathing deeply, Malakhai and Mallory. It had rained that night. The air was damp and cold. Malakhai looked up the street and down, but Mallory saw no one on the sidewalk. In the cover of rain, the cover of night, he tore off the outer layer of his uniform. Beneath it, he wore street clothes. He ran back into the theater. Only a few minutes had passed by, not the fifteen he had estimated, not even ten. He was so young, time would crawl and drag for him, but only a few minutes were passing by.

  Louisa is dying. Is that what you wanted, Malakhai?

  The next time Louisa was wounded, Mallory lay down upon the stage with her and bled from the same arrow, from
many arrows, betrayed time after time, left ripped and bloody, listening to the sound of Malakhai’s pounding boots hitting the wood, running away, leaving her behind to bleed and die.

  Now Louisa was deep in shock. Someone lifted her from the floor and carried her to a room backstage. Strong arms laid her body down. Mallory could hear the door closing on the noise of the crowd, the sliding chairs and tables, the clink of glasses and babbling voices.

  A pillow was covering her mouth.

  No air. Panic was rising. The primal instinct to breathe was overriding all her senses. Her hands pushed the pillow away. Mallory fought with more strength than she had, adrenaline gorging every muscle, lungs burning, bursting, dying for a sip of air. He pressed the pillow down harder. Louisa writhed and pushed. Her legs kicked out. Blood poured from the wound, greasing the floor, making it all slick and red.

  Where is Malakbai?

  He’s gone, Louisa. He ran away. You know that.

  No help was coming, not ever. Her assassin was on top of her with his full weight, pressing down on the pillow. Mallory could hear voices on the other side of the door, speaking in foreign tongues.

  Why don’t you scream, Louisa?

  I can’t. There are German soldiers at the door.

  So soon? Only minutes had passed by since the shot. Soldiers from the audience?

  Her killer was so desperate now. She wasn’t dying fast enough. His knee pressed down hard on her chest with all the weight of his body. She could hear her breastbone breaking, snapping. Pain was layered over with shock. She could feel her heart being crushed under the weight of him, torn by shards of broken bone.

  No, no!

  And then her body ceased to thrash. Blood welled up behind her eyes. What Malakhai had begun was being finished now – nearly done. And then Louisa lay still, eyes wide and staring. A pink froth spilled past her lips, and tiny delicate bubbles burst, one by one.