Black Swan Rising

by Lee Carroll

  “He’s been waiting up since four in the morning to tell you about his visit from Saint Lion.” The voice came from a man leaning in the doorway. It took me a moment to recognize Obie Smith out of his nurse scrubs. He was wearing a long black leather coat over black jeans and an orange silk shirt. His long dreadlocks, which had been covered by a bandanna last night, hung loose down his back.

  “Saint Lion,” I repeated. “I haven’t heard anyone call him that in years.” Santé Leone—Saint Lion—had come from Haiti in the early eighties on a scholarship to Pratt. He’d dropped out and started painting luminous murals all over Manhattan, always signed with his trademark: a stylized lion with one raised paw and a halo above his head. Saint Lion. My father had tracked him down to the burned-out tenement building on the Lower East Side where he was living—camping out, really—and bought six of his paintings. He’d nurtured his career, brought him to the town house for meals, introduced him to the art world, and gave him his first show. The night before his work was to appear at the Whitney Biennial, Santé died of a heroin overdose.

  “My dad always thought he could have done something to save him,” I said, getting up and joining Obie Smith in the doorway. “I hope that thinking about him now doesn’t mean he’s reliving that guilt.”

  Obie Smith shook his head. “He said Santé came to show him there were no hard feelings.”

  I ducked my head to hide the tears that had sprung to my eyes. “Here.” I held out the orange bag for him. It matched his shirt. “You’ve been so kind, I wanted to—”

  “Don’t thank me,” he said, taking the bag from me. “I’m just doing what I do.” He opened the package and smiled at the multicolored scarf, then whisked it out of its wrapping paper so that it floated on the air like an exotic butterfly, then settled around his neck.

  “It suits you.”

  “I do believe it does,” he said, grinning at me. Then he gave me a courtly bow and swirled around, his black coat billowing around him like a cape, and walked away. He had a spring in his step that made me feel he was listening to music only he could hear. I watched him all the way down the long hall, and then just before he reached the corner, he turned back to face me and gave me another huge smile.

  I blushed to be caught watching him and quickly turned away . . . only to run into Detective Joe Kiernan.

  “Oh good, I’m glad you’re here,” he said, taking my elbow and steering me toward the waiting room.

  “I’m here to see my father, Detective.” I shook my arm free of his and started back toward my father’s room, but Kiernan caught up with me and blocked the doorway. “What? Is it about something my father said? You know I don’t think anything he says under the influence of the drugs he’s taking is admissible—”

  “It’s not something your father said. It’s what the men who robbed your house are saying.”

  “Really? You caught them?” I asked genuinely surprised and delighted at this turn of events. Now there’d be no question of my father having been involved in the burglary and we’d get our paintings back. “That’s great! Did they have the silver box?”

  Kiernan gave me a strange look. “They had your Pissarros, Miss James. No sign of a silver box.”

  “Oh . . . that’s too bad . . . but, thank God the Pissarros have been recovered. That’s really good news.”

  “I’m afraid it’s not all good news. The two men have both confessed, separately, that your father hired them to commit the burglary.”

  You’re not allowed to use cell phones in St. Vincent’s, so after I finished talking to Detective Kiernan, I went outside to call Chuck Chennery.

  “I simply cannot believe that of your father,” Chuck said in his reassuringly plummy drawl. “Someone is setting him up. I’m going to have a talk with Dave Reiss in our criminal division and then we’ll be down to see you at the hospital later this morning.”

  I thanked him and went back inside to see my father. He had woken up and was arguing with the nurse about eating his breakfast.

  “I’ll take it from here,” I told the nurse.

  When she was gone, I took away the tray of congealing eggs and runny Jell-O and presented him with the apple strudel from Lafayette’s. He didn’t seem to have any memory of me bringing it earlier—or, in fact, of seeing me earlier—so I didn’t bring up his “visit” from Santé Leone. Instead, when he had finished the strudel and I had brushed the crumbs from his bedsheet, I told him I had to ask him a question.

  “I want you to promise me not to get upset,” I said. “I’ll only ask it this one time and I’ll accept whatever you tell me.” I took a deep breath. “The police have caught the men who robbed the gallery—”

  “That’s great news—”

  “—and they’re saying you hired them to do it.”

  All the color drained from my father’s face and his hands knotted the hem of his bedsheet. I regretted having to tell him this, but it was better he heard it from me and not from a police officer. “Margaret,” he said—he only ever used my full name when something serious or momentous had happened—“do you think I would bring . . . ghouls like that into our home?”

  “I’ll believe whatever you tell me, Dad. Did you?”

  “On your mother’s memory, I swear I had nothing to do with it.”

  I squeezed his hand, easing his grip off the crumpled sheets. “Okay, Dad, that’s good enough for me. Chuck Chennery is coming over here and he’s bringing a criminal defense lawyer from the firm. We’ll take care of this. You’re not to talk to anyone about it but me and Chuck and the other lawyer. Okay?”

  My father held up one finger, a gesture he made when he had a point to make. “And your mother, of course.”

  “What about Mom?”

  “I can talk to her about it, can’t I?”

  I patted his hand. At least he hadn’t asked if he could talk to Santé Leone about it. “Sure, Dad. You can talk to Mom.” Then I smoothed down his sheets and tucked the ends back under the mattress. My hands brushed something rough on the fabric, as if something had spilled on the bed. I looked down and saw a spray of paint on the sheets—lime green, coral, sun-washed yellow, and aquamarine. The colors Santé Leone had favored.

  The Watchtower

  I spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon at the hospital. Charles Chennery came at noon with a young, clean-cut lawyer in a Hugo Boss suit and shiny shoes that squeaked on the hospital floors. They talked to my father for half an hour, then Chuck took me aside and told me he was filing for an injunction to keep the police from questioning my father any further as a “witness” while he was taking pain medication in the hospital. I didn’t ask him if my father had mentioned talking to Santé Leone or my mother, but he patted my shoulder and told me that when his eighty-six-year-old mother was in the hospital for her hip replacement, she had a long talk with Mamie Eisenhower.

  After Chuck left I filled out insurance forms and tried to find out whether Medicare would cover home nurse visits when my father was discharged. Zach Reese came around one with a take-out bag from Sammy’s Noodle Shop. “I’ll keep an eye on him,” he promised me, taking a container of hot soup out of the bag. I was glad to know that my father would have company—of a less ethereal kind than deceased painters, but before I left I checked the take-out bags for liquor bottles when Zach wasn’t looking.

  It was two-thirty before I could get out of the hospital. Barely enough time to get home and change into a slim black skirt, burgundy cashmere sweater, silk scarf, and high-heeled boots for my meeting with Will Hughes. I put on an old Jaeger raincoat that my mother had bought in London twenty years ago and took an umbrella. The forecast didn’t say rain, but that didn’t seem to mean much these days.

  It was clear out, though, when I stepped outside my door to find a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud waiting in front of the town house. As the driver held open the door for me, I had a fleeting urge to turn around and flee. I knew nothing about Will Hughes. I was going to him because I thought he
might be able to tell me where to find John Dee, but what if he was working with John Dee? What if he had something to do with the robbery? But then I saw how ridiculous I was being. Why would a billionaire hedge fund manager want to steal a couple of Pissarros and an old silver box? I slid into the backseat, telling myself to get a grip.

  The car drove west on Jane Street and then turned north onto the West Side Highway.

  “Are we going to Mr. Hughes’s office?” I asked.

  “Mr. Hughes works out of his residence,” the driver replied.

  “Oh,” I said, beginning to feel nervous again. “And where does Mr. Hughes live?”

  “Uptown.” The driver glanced in the rearview mirror. His eyes were dark and—I was relieved to see—perfectly normal.

  I settled back against the plush upholstery and looked out the window toward the Hudson River, which glittered in the late-afternoon sunlight. People were walking and biking on the Hudson River Greenway, enjoying the unusually mild December weather. It was a perfectly normal day in New York City. I leaned back and tried to enjoy the ride.

  When the car appeared to be getting off at the exit for the George Washington Bridge, however, I grew alarmed. “Are we going to New Jersey?” I asked, my voice shriller than I’d meant it to be. I had a brief, vivid picture of my body being dumped in the New Jersey Meadowlands, but then we switched lanes and continued north onto the Henry Hudson Parkway instead. We got off at the exit for the Cloisters.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “Mr. Hughes lives in the Cloisters. I knew he was rich, but I didn’t think he lived in a castle.”

  I saw the driver’s eyes glance at me in the rearview mirror, but he didn’t respond. We drove up and around the silent park, past the stone medieval towers of the Cloisters. My mother and I had spent many Saturdays of my youth exploring the echoing halls and colonnaded gardens of the museum. She often did research there when she was getting her master’s degree in French medieval literature, and like the lavender she grew, the place reminded her of her native France. She would point to a sign sometimes and say, “These old stones came over the ocean just as I did.” When I was in college, I often came up here to look at their collection of medieval jewelry for inspiration. I’d become friendly with one of the librarians my mother had known when I was researching my senior thesis.

  The car exited the park at Fort Washington Avenue, made a right turn on 181st Street, another right on Cabrini Boulevard, and pulled up in front of the Tudor Castle Apartments.

  “So he does live in a castle,” I remarked to the still taciturn driver as I surveyed the twelve-story redbrick apartment building trimmed in white granite stonework that gave it the look of a medieval English castle. I’d read about it in a Times real estate article once and knew that it had replaced an actual castle that had been built by a British financier at the turn of the last century and had burnt to the ground in the 1930s. The apartments were reputedly large and airy, contained working fireplaces, and enjoyed magnificent views of the river. Still, I was surprised that this was where Will Hughes lived. “I thought hedge fund managers lived on Park Avenue,” I said as the driver opened my door and offered a hand to help me out. “Not that this isn’t a great building. It’s so wonderfully romantic.”

  “Mr. Hughes will be delighted to hear you think so. He’s rather sentimentally attached to the building, seeing as he owns it.”

  The driver escorted me under the stone portico emblazoned with the heraldic shield I’d seen in the paper, and through the lobby, exchanging a nod with the liveried doorman. Apparently I was expected. Instead of taking me to the central bank of elevators, he showed me to one marked PRIVATE, waved me in, and bowed as the doors began to close.

  “Wait, what floor?” I shouted. But then I saw that there were no buttons to push. As soon as the doors closed the elevator began its ascent to what I assumed must be the penthouse. I closed my eyes and took deep ujjayi breaths—what my yoga teacher called ocean breathing—to calm myself down. Surprisingly, it worked. When the elevator came to rest, I felt calm. I opened my eyes as the doors opened and I stepped directly into a palatial living room surrounded on three sides by floor-to-ceiling glass windows. It was like standing on the top of a high tower. In front of me was the Hudson River and the New Jersey Palisades, to the south the skyscrapers of Manhattan, and to the north the square stone tower of the Cloisters. The glass appeared to be tinted, perhaps to cut down on glare. I took a step toward the north-facing windows, but then halted by a painting that hung on the wall near the elevator.

  The full-length portrait was of a young man in Elizabethan dress. Something in his wide, silver-gray eyes held me motionless before him. He had long, ringleted blond hair and a cupid-bow mouth twisted into a cruel smile. His throat was white against the black collar of his velvet doublet, as was the hand that lay on top of an opened book atop a marble pedestal. Stepping closer I saw the swan signet ring. My ring. Could it really be the same one I wore on my finger? I held my hand up in front of the painting so that the ring was level with the one in the portrait.

  “Remarkable,” came a voice from behind me, “it is the same ring.”

  I turned around and found myself looking into luminous silver eyes identical to those in the painting. This man was dressed in modern clothes—a tailored, white dress shirt and faded black jeans—and his hair was a shade or two darker and cut short. His mouth was the same shape, and in the first instant as I turned, I thought I detected the same potential for cruelty that I saw in the painted face. But then the polite smile he’d prepared for me faltered and I saw something that looked like surprise or vulnerability.

  “What’s more remarkable is that you look just like him,” I said, wondering why he looked so startled at my appearance. Had he expected someone else?

  “The Hughes family curse,” he said, recovering himself and holding out his right hand.

  His eyes locked on mine with an unsettling intensity. Then I felt my ring clink against one he wore, and I looked down to break the force I felt in those eyes. I thought he might have a copy of the swan signet ring, but he wore instead a gold ring set with a flat, black stone.

  “Please, come sit down.” He gestured toward a low velvet couch in front of the west windows. All the furniture in the room was low and unobtrusive, allowing the views to take precedence. The only objects on the glass table in front of the couch were a crystal decanter, two glasses, and an open laptop. Numbers and signs scrolled across the computer’s luminous screen. Stock-trading symbols, I assumed, but they were as arcane to me as the symbols I’d seen inside the silver box. Hughes closed the screen, poured two glasses of the amber-colored liquid, then sat in a leather-and-chrome Eames chair directly across from me. Then he leaned forward and took my hand. The intimacy of the gesture almost took my breath away, but then I realized that he was looking at the ring. I noticed, though, that I hadn’t tried to take my hand away.

  “It does look exactly like my ancestor’s ring,” he said. “Where did you find it?”

  “My mother gave it to me.”

  He looked up, but he still didn’t let my hand go and I didn’t take it away from him. I had the odd feeling that I couldn’t until he let me. I felt as powerless as I had when the thieves passed me in the hallway, but where that had been a repugnant sensation, this was . . . seductive. I wasn’t sure which was more dangerous.

  “What was your mother’s name?”

  “Margot James,” I replied. “Her maiden name was D’Arques.”

  “She was French?”

  “Yes. Her parents were killed in World War Two and she was taken in by an English family. She met my father there after the war.”

  “And she gave you her name—Garet is short for Margaret, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but she called me Garet from the beginning.”

  “Did she tell you what it means?”

  “Margaret means ‘pearl,’ ” I said, wondering what this had to do with anything. I’d come to get information from
him, but he was the one asking the questions. With an effort I wrenched my hand away from his—although in reality he’d held it lightly—and reached into my bag. I took out a small flannel jewelry bag and tipped it over. The silver seal that had been affixed to the box spilled out onto the glass and spun on its edge for a moment before landing faceup.

  Will Hughes looked up from it, his eyes flashing as silver as the seal. “Where did you get this?” he asked.

  “From a silver box that had been sealed.” I told him the whole story—from wandering into the jewelry store on Cordelia Street to opening the box (I left out the moving symbols) to the robbery and finding the abandoned storefront. “And now my father is being accused of insurance fraud. I know it might sound far-fetched that this John Dee fellow—”

  “Who told you that name?”

  I stared at him. I hadn’t mentioned not getting the name from the man himself. “From someone in a bakery at the corner . . .”

  “Puck? Did Puck himself tell you?”

  I laughed. “I didn’t know there was a Puck himself. I spoke to a baker named Fen—”

  “Fenodoree,” he said, smiling. “How is she?”

  “Uh . . . she looked fine,” I said, surprised he would know the baker. “Anyway, I know it probably seems crazy that this John Dee fellow had anything to do with the robbery—”

  “Not at all.” Hughes got abruptly to his feet and paced to the west window and turned to face me. The sun, beginning its descent over the Palisades, turned the river into a sheet of sparkling gold. Even though the glass was tinted, the light was so bright I had to close my eyes against the glare. . . . Immediately I saw myself in my dream standing on the shore watching the black swan gliding on the water. When I opened my eyes the only thing riding the Hudson was the reflection of the sun, but I had the same sensation of impending disaster.

  “When you opened the box, what happened?” he asked. He came over to the chair he had vacated, but remained standing. With the glare of the sun behind him he was only a silhouette, the only feature of his face visible, those oddly magnetic eyes.