"The sun here isn't as hot."
"And you've stopped imagining you have wrinkles, I hope."
"I don't intend to get them. I know you divorce your wives when that happens, and look for someone younger. You've done it twice before."
Ellison looked at her. She gave him back a smile, enigmatic, Mona Lisa. "Shall I cross my legs?"
"No," he said, pretending patience, wondering what was going on. "We have the pose all settled. Let's just concentrate on keeping it." A change in his wife lately, sure enough; he had thought it was only Helen's death, but it was more. Ellison squinted about the huge patio, all winey sunlight and bluish shadow, with more furniture than a small house. He was looking for his tube of titanium dioxide white. "Do you realize," he asked, "that's it's now been almost four years since you have posed for me?"
"Really? That long?"
"Since shortly after we were married."
"Surely it hasn't been that long."
"Oh, yes. I remember that Helen was hardly more than a little girl. She kept sneaking around to see what we were up to in those days I generally had you posing in the nude."
The mention of Helen seemed to have had no effect. Something else was certainly on her mind.
"I wish you would have posed nude again today. Out here, against the mountains. I gave all the help the day off, you know."
"I know. But it's too cold today. Maybe next time."
"There. That's just the smile I want. Hold it for me, if you can. Just like that."
Ellison found that he was a little nervous about the painting. God, it was a long time, it must be a couple of years now, since he had really tried to paint anything at all. Would he really be able to do it now?
He suddenly spotted the tube of paint he had been looking for. It was on a small stone ledge not an arm's length from where he had set up his easel; now he recalled setting it down there. He picked up the tube and fidgeted with it and dropped it back into the paintbox. Then holding a stick of charcoal he looked at his model, and then beyond her to the mountains, where the changing sunlight made blue folds slowly appear and disappear. The light changing like that, and it was so long now since he had really tried. It was going to be hopeless.
"Are we going to talk about Del, sometime?" Stephanie asked him suddenly.
"What's there to talk about?"
"We both know that he's still alive. You don't have to be so cagey with me."
"Yes," said Ellison. He was not going to try to get the background in at all today. Only Stephanie. "Yes, well, don't you think it's wiser not to talk too much about the fact?"
"No one can overhear us. I just wondered how much you knew about the—details. I know you're handling business deals for him. Do you think anyone else knows he isn't dead?"
"I say it's wiser not to talk, even out here. There could be someone up there, behind any of those rocks, listening. Directional microphones have amazing capabilities these days."
Stephanie glanced behind her, at the hillside, then resumed her pose without appearing to be convinced. "Someone? Who?"
"My dear, you must have some idea of how much that painting is worth. Whenever such amounts of money are concerned, a lot of people take an interest."
"Ellison, our phone might be tapped, but no one's hiding up on that mountain twenty-four hours a day watching our house."
"How do you know that?"
The sound of the doorchime came drifting coolly out through the open patio doors, from inside the cool caverns of the house. Ellison sighed, put down the charcoal stick, wiped his hands, and went to answer. Having all the help gone was not necessarily a boon. He supposed this would turn out to be some neighbor brat with Girl Scout cookies to sell.
The boy standing at the front door was undersized and shabby. He was a total stranger to Ellison, yet at first glance Ellison knew he was not selling cookies. Nor was his presence here merely some routine mistake. The young face waiting had something extraordinary about it; and not only extraordinary but wrong. This unusual wrongness Ellison accepted as a sign that the visitor knew what door he stood at.
"What is it?" Ellison demanded. In annoyance he used the lordliest tone he could produce, even though he was already sure that there would be no getting rid of this lad that easily.
The young eyes, cloudy blue, looked back at Ellison. Most people would have seen in them a probability of innocence. But Ellison saw more, and worse.
"I want to see Annie," the apparition announced, in a voice whose boyish appeal seemed to have been practiced.
The name meant nothing to Ellison. He only looked at the intruder, willing without much hope that he should go away.
"Annie knows me. My name is Pat O'Grandison, I'm a good friend of hers. I know she lives here."
"No one named Annie lives in this house. Or ever has."
"You her father?" the youth asked doubtfully. "Maybe she's not here right now, but if not she'll be back soon. Has she run away from home, or something like that? If that's it, she'll soon be back."
Ellison heard a soft sound behind him, and turned to see Stephanie approaching. She came looking like a great Spanish lady, with the old shawl still round her shoulders. Her face was troubled as she stared at the visitor.
Ellison spoke to his wife while nodding toward the boy. "One of Del's old crowd, perhaps?" he mused. "But he never brought any of them here, to my knowledge. I thought all that went on out in Arizona, not here under my roof."
Stephanie only shook her head slightly in reply. Eyeing the visitor up and down, she asked him: "Who are you? Why are you here?"
The boy put out a frail arm to lean his weight tiredly against real adobe bricks. He scratched at one with a black-rimmed fingernail, as if he wondered what it was. "Can I come in and get a drink of water, please? It's all right, I really know Annie." Then he focused on Ellison suddenly; as if, Ellison thought uncomfortably, he might be trying to recall where he had seen the big graying man before.
"I think we'd better let him in," advised Stephanie. "He looks a little sick to me."
"On something, more likely."
"What's the difference?"
"Oh all right, let him in."
The boy came in and like someone near exhaustion dropped himself into the first handy chair. He was blond and undersized, dressed in travel-worn jeans with white road dust on them, and a plain T-shirt, once white. A small knapsack of fabric dull as camouflage lay on the floor beside his chair, one of its straps still resting limply in his slack right hand. His snub nose and beardless cheeks made him look no more than fifteen or so. But Ellison was sure that he was older.
Several components of Ellison's mind, one of them artistic, considered that young face with growing fascination. Here was one of Del's people, certainly. The face was beautiful. And, leaving aside whatever might be due to present tiredness, there was that inward something that was very wrong, that had told Ellison at first glance that the boy was here for some real purpose. His coming meant trouble, maybe, but there was nothing accidental about it. Ellison wondered: Did Del send him here?
He asked: "Have you been here before?"
"No." A hesitation. "Though I got the feeling that maybe I seen you someplace."
Ellison looked at him.
"I guess I'm mistaken. Hey, if Annie's not here, how about Helen? It just occurred to me, maybe it's possible that you and I know this girl by different names? I mean, sometimes when people run away they'll use a different name?"
The blue eyes shifted from Ellison to Stephanie and back again. It was impossible to read just how much was truth in them, and how much guile.
Ellison looked at his wife, trying to get some cue from her, but he couldn't. She kept regarding the visitor very thoughtfully. At last Ellison said: "There was a girl named Helen in this family once, living in this house. She's dead."
The boy considered that. He had slumped down in his chair until his head rested on its padded back. The strap of the backpack had fallen free of his limp fing
ers.
Stephanie crouched down gracefully beside the chair. "Helen was my daughter. If we're really talking about the same Helen. It's true, she did run away from home once. And she is dead—there was a lot of publicity about it at the time. You must have read some of that? Seen it on television?"
The visitor opened his mouth, then closed it again, evidently reconsidering whatever he had been going to say. "I didn't know she was dead. Sorry."
"Where," asked Ellison, "did you think that you had seen me before?"
"I dunno. Maybe I was wrong about that, too. Sometimes my ideas get all, all screwed up."
Stephanie straightened up. She was smiling briskly, almost like a nurse, as she touched the youth on the shoulder. "You must be hungry and thirsty," she said in bright inviting tones. "Come along with me to the kitchen, and we'll see what we can find. What's your name?"
"Pat." And Pat got up out of his chair quickly, following Stephanie like a puppy entranced by a first kind gesture.
A few moments later, Ellison followed them both, keeping a little distance. Peering into the breakfast room, he could see the youth seated at the table there, his back to Ellison, already chewing on something. Stephanie was pouring milk into a plastic tumbler for him. Beyond, in the kitchen, the sink was modestly stacked with dirty dishes from lunch. It would be tomorrow morning before any of the help came back.
Once the wanderer in his dirty T-shirt had been launched on a meal, Stephanie rejoined Ellison for a conference. "What do you make of this?" she whispered.
Ellison tugged her a little further from the kitchen, into the next room. "I don't like it," he answered in his own almost rumbling whisper. Then with a gesture he retreated further still, to where the boy had left his pack. Ellison bent and opened it. A dirty, lightweight jacket came to view, along with a few other items of spare clothing. In the bottom were some granola bars, their wrappers worn with a long time of jostling in the pack.
Ellison stood, grunting. "And I don't know what it's about. But I'm going to take whatever steps are necessary to find out."
Chapter Seventeen
Oh, I could regale you now with all the sights and sounds and smells of fifteenth-century Rome. But it would be misleading, insofar as my story is concerned. The truth is, that at the time of my first visit to Rome I was scarcely aware of my surroundings except as they affected my search for Helen. I was beginning truly to wonder whether I might be the victim of some enchantment, so obsessively had this woman's image, in paint and sketch and memory, come to dominate my thought. Of course I wanted revenge on her, and on her lover—but gradually I was coming to realize that I wanted something more as well. More than mere vengeance, however ferocious, would be needed to give me satisfaction. What exactly the other thing might be, I did not know. But I hoped I would know, in the first moment when I looked on her again.
From Roman church to Roman church I plodded like a pilgrim, searching for the artist Perugino. I had not imagined there would be quite so many Roman churches. At my waist was the dagger that had once been left on a pillow, aimed at my head. Folded into my purse was a small bundle of sketches by Leonardo da Vinci, likenesses of the sister of the King of Hungary. I was having trouble finding any places to dispose of these pictures where I might reasonably expect them to be helpful.
On the third day of my Roman search I found a small church where, one of its priests told me, an artisan named Perugino had been painting some murals a few months past. But the painter was certainly gone from the neighborhood now, gone completely away from Rome the priest thought, and his mistress with him if he had had one. The priest had never noticed any woman at all in Perugino's company, let alone one speaking Hungarian and bearing a resemblance to my sketches.
I thanked him, and took my search for Helen to one of the nearby taverns. There some local men said they thought they might have seen her—said it with an exchange of winks. They were sophisticated city-dwelling jokers, metropolitan wits who jested at the expense of the lovelorn barbarian on his fool's quest. Somehow it was not plain to them that I was seeking vengeance and not love. I left one dead, two wounded, and had to take my searching elsewhere. My best talents are not in diplomacy, nor in the craft of the detective either.
After I had spent another day in fruitless prowling about Rome I visited the precincts of the Vatican. There I located my former traveling companions, the Hungarian delegation come to ask for a Crusade; while waiting to see His Holiness they had taken lodgings near the old St. Peter's. In Florence, where I had dropped out, they had been joined by my old acquaintance Morsino. Now Morsino greeted me in friendly style; he looked grave, though, when I told him of my recent brawl, and he counseled me to make no further requests or demands for official help in any Italian city. King Matthias, Morsino thought, was no longer fully committed to the search. As long as Helen continued to remain out of sight, committing no more public scandals, that seemed to be enough for the king; and Morsino thought perhaps it ought to be enough for me as well. The idea seemed to be to let sleeping Helens lie where and with whom they would.
My own views, I promptly explained, were different. The king had sent me here with orders to search for Helen, and search for her I would, for my own honor as well as that of royalty. If he, Morsino, thought that he could organize the hunt in Rome more discreetly and effectively than I, well, he was welcome to take a hand. And this invitation the worried envoy at last reluctantly accepted.
I hung around St. Peter's environs for another two weeks, undergoing fits of restlessness that alternated with periods of almost immobile depression. Then Morsino's efforts at last bore fruit. An agent hired by him brought me a witness, a poor woman who swore she had once lodged near an artist and a Hungarian woman who had been living together in the neighborhood of the church where Perugino had done his painting. Shortly before their disappearance some months past my witness had heard the couple talking about moving on to Venice.
* * *
I am not going to write much in these pages about the next twenty months of my life. It was a period in which I did things that I am not proud of, and which there is now very little purpose in remembering. My leg was fully healed by this time, and I could ride and fight effectively. Good fighting men, and, even more, capable military leaders, were at this time very much in demand in Italy because of the ceaseless squabbling of the city-states and petty principalities, not yet forged into a nation. I had not been many days in Venice before I signed a soldier's contract with the eminent mercenary Bartolomeo Colleoni. My funds were running low; and I expected to retain enough time to myself, and freedom of movement, to allow me to continue the search for Helen.
Colleoni had then been for ten years the General in Chief of all the Venetian armed forces. But, like most of the other successful condottieri of the time, he had as his ultimate goal the carving out of his own personal domain. Some of his colleagues, like the founder of the Sforza dynasty in Milan, succeeded admirably in this enterprise. Many others failed miserably; but, like Sforza and Colleoni, most had had but little to lose when they began.
My new employer was famed for his vigor, both marital and martial, at an advanced age; for his ferocity (which was somewhat remarkable even for the time); his collection of rare books (when all books were rare); and for his pioneering efforts in the development of what would now be called field artillery. Whereas if he is remembered at all today outside of a few history books, I suppose it is only because of Verrocchio's titanic equestrian statue of him, still standing in a square in Venice . . . but I digress.
When Colleoni heard from me that I had lived in Florence recently, he took it for granted that I had served there as condottiere also. What else would he expect a foreign soldier to be doing? He promptly began to pump me for all the information I could give about the state of Florentine military preparedness: How many in the militia? How well were the fortified walls maintained? I told him what I could, which was not much, and he evidently took my reticence as evidence of praiseworthy
loyalty to a former employer. I did not trouble to disabuse him of this idea. So it was that in the winter of 1466-67 I found myself serving as a company commander in Colleoni's nominally Venetian forces. I had under me about a hundred men—or, as the reckoning was usually kept then, thirty lances. In very early 1467 my troops and I were engaged in the investigation of the assassination of a Colleoni agent, the mayor of a village whose name I must admit I have forgotten but which could hardly mean anything to you now in any case.
The investigation was soon proceeding according to the standards of the time, which is to say that my men had taken a score of hostages, and we were on the point of beginning to hang some of them unless someone who knew something about the assassination should come forward. In fairness to myself I ought perhaps to be allowed to interject that the mayor had evidently been a good man, for his time; a good politician for any time, perhaps; and that I still think the assassins would fairly have deserved hanging if we had ever caught them.
Snow was in the village air, and misery was rife as usual among the populace. I found myself seated one morning at a writing table that might have belonged to some scholar, to judge by all the papers on it, in a house that was mine so long as I and my armed men chose to occupy it. I had sat down at the table to write out a report for Colleoni on the affair, and I suppose that those of my men who from time to time looked in at door or window assumed that the black frown upon my brow was due to the difficulty of wielding a pen in such a wise as to leave an intelligible message upon paper. Alas, no. I was even then something of a writer—I could at least set down my letters large and clear. What was troubling me were things more fundamental. I was grappling with matters of Conscience and the Law.
Contemplating the last year's work of my own hands, I found that it was not good. Oh, my activities had been legal, of course, or could be argued such, according to the contracts, the agreements, that I had with Colleoni, and he in turn with Venice. And there were the customs, traditions, treaties, oaths, and whatnot that established Venetian dominance over these poor sheeplike villagers I was oppressing.
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