by S L Zammit
She watches as the woman makes her rounds and claims the event, becoming increasingly brazen over the course of the evening, going as far as to nestle close to her husband and even corners him a few times.
Observing as her husband interacts with the fox, she realizes that the dough has been kneaded, rolled out, and is in the process of being reshaped.
Astonished by the unfolding scenario, incredulous that she has been completely blind to what has been happening right under her nose for so many years, she feels herself being unceremoniously pushed out of her own picture as red fox repaints her world without Esmie in it.
She suddenly feels like an outsider at her own party. Mentally disassociated from her surroundings, the music, the laughter, the chatter, everything seems distant. People talk to her, but drained of all energy, she loses her ability to respond and simply smiles and nods.
Feeling the dots of perspiration gather on her forehead, she mumbles something and stumbles towards the restroom, her vision hazy.
Once inside the room, she slides onto the floor crying and succumbs to a shuddering fit that she can’t control as Aurora approaches her.
Aurora immediately pours some water in a glass and rushes to her side.
“Is everything all right madam?” the girl asks softly, holding her hand.
Esmie shakes her head. “I feel like I’m drowning,” she says as she gasps for air. “I need to throw up.”
“It’s okay, let me assist you,” says Aurora kindly as she quickly helps Dame Esmie to the bathroom stall and pulls her hair back as the woman heaves into the toilet. She then grabs a towel and wipes her face and neck. She leads Esmie back to the sink, caressing her back.
“Here, have some more water,” coaxes Aurora, “you’ll feel better.”
Esmie leans against Aurora, and clasping the glass with her shaking hands, sips the water.
“You need to get back out there madam,” says Aurora gently. “The food will be served soon and people will be asking after you.”
“Oh God, I look horrible,” gasps Esmie catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror; her hair is disheveled and her makeup smudged. “I can’t possibly go back out there looking like this.”
“Don’t worry,” says the girl, “I’ll fix you up.”
Aurora leads Esmie, still in a state of shock and disbelief, to the stool at the side of the sink and deftly sweeps and pins back her loose hairs into a chignon. She uses a towel to wipe away the smudges from her face, and producing her makeup case from her purse, skillfully reapplies some makeup around her eyes and mouth.
“You look as charming as ever,” says the girl sweetly.
Esmie looks at herself in the mirror. The girl is right, she does look much better.
“I can’t go back out there and face those people,” she whispers miserably. “It’s like everyone knows. I’m so thoroughly humiliated, I feel like such a fool.”
“Don’t worry madam,” says the girl firmly, “I’ll be there by your side. But you need to take a deep breath and go out there and act like nothing’s bothering you. Remember that we’re here to collect money for the refugees. All those homeless women and children need you. We will deal with the other situation later.”
Amazed by the girl’s support and invigorated by her strengthening words, Esmie smiles fondly at Aurora. The girl seems like a beautiful angel sent to her from heaven. She suddenly doesn’t feel alone at the party any longer.
“Thank you for your help dear girl,” she says. “You’re a godsend.”
Aurora stands by Esmie’s side for the rest of the evening, waiting on her, diffusing attention away from the horrible woman in red. Until the looming red figure fades into the crowd and Esmie can’t see her anymore. Her mood is lightened to such an extent, that by the end of the party, Esmie is chatting and laughing again.
When the guests start trickling out into the night, Esmie scans the room searching for Aurora. That sweet girl had been her pillar of strength in the storm. The evening has turned out to be a huge success and an unprecedented amount of money from a single event has been collected for the families of refugees. Esmie is so pleased she wants to hug the girl. But Aurora is nowhere to be found.
As Esmie inches slowly towards her doughy Joe, her easily plied, mushy husband, she knows she’s going to have to suffer through several naked rolling session, she might even have to go the extra inch and perform on him with her mouth, she shudders at the though, but she knows she has a long way to go to rework the dough.
Outside, in the dark parking lot, the woman in red is waiting by the valet stand for her car. The woman smiles, satisfied with her reflection in the glass door, the evening has been a huge success. After years of slow, patient and cautious inching into that uptight crowd, everybody now seems to be genuinely warming up to her.
Above all, Joe is getting emotionally closer.
She recalls when Joe’s only interest in her was her dirty panties. She would drop them off at his office and watch as he sniffed them. She would crawl under his desk and take care of him and then leave without showing her face and he would pretend nothing had happened.
The climb out of the depths of being the woman he occasionally bends over his desk, to the one he takes to shady hotel rooms, had been an arduous one.
Remembering how the judge would arrive incognito after she’d been in the room for an hour or so, then clean up the whole place with disinfectant spray he brought with him to destroy any traces of his DNA before leaving, and make her wait at the hotel for an hour after he left so they wouldn’t be suspected of having been together, the woman stifles laughter.
Her progression from receptionist to secretary to personal assistant and office manager, and finally the judge’s companion on business trips, had been an even harder struggle.
She had prevailed, over the many years, through the many doubts and tears. And here she is now.
Last week, she thought she heard Joe mumble ‘I love you’ after they had sex. He had even insisted she become involved with the Foundation. Maybe not insisted, but he hadn’t discouraged her involvement either.
And after tonight, she’s convinced he is closer than ever to telling that frigid, stone-statue of a wife of his, that he no longer wants to be married to her.
‘And I haven’t even told him the news yet,’ the woman smiles as she lightly rubs her flat stomach, the color of her long pointed nails match the color of her dress perfectly. ‘Every man wants an heir and that glacial princess hasn’t been able to produce a baby. Well it’s too late for her now.’
In his vulnerable moments, Joe had confided various tidbits of personal information. Consequently, now she’s privy to intimate details about Esmie’s fertility problems and her several miscarriages, as well as the rift that had been created in their sex life as a result.
Well, he needn’t worry any more. ‘We can have as many children as he wants,’ she thinks, imagining herself at Joe’s side with a brood of little ones: beautiful, happy children, a perfect combination of herself and the judge.
A couple emerging from the venue recognize and greet her and are almost immediately escorted to their car. She wonders what’s taking the valet boy so long to drive her vehicle up.
“Hey, did you forget about me?” she asks the boy jovially as soon as she spots him driving up yet another car.
She recognizes all the people slowly leaving the hotel lobby and getting into their cars. Throughout the years in the office, she has become well informed about all kinds of cover-ups. Crimes stemming from lust, greed, envy and pride hidden behind the smokescreens of the law. And since his recent appointment to Judge of the High Courts had required an ethical detachment from his law practice, she has become his eyes and ears at the office, carefully sifting information and keeping him posted.
She knows exactly who the members of the judge’s bosom boys’ club are. Her progress with the judge has been slow but steady.
“I’m sorry miss,” apologizes the boy. “I asked
for help from one of the other volunteers. We’re so busy tonight.”
Although cold and exhausted, she forgives the boy for the interminable delay and for calling her miss, and decides to wait patiently for her car. Nobody knows who she is. Yet.
‘They will find out very soon and things will change,’ she thinks to herself. The tables are turning and she’s being dealt a good hand. She feels elated in spirits; nothing can possibly bring her down.
Finally, she spots her car being driven up by one of the girl volunteers, she recognizes her from the party. The girl apologizes profusely as she steps out of the car and holds the door open for her.
The radio is playing her favorite song as she drives out of the hotel’s parking area, and maximizing the volume, she speeds into the night singing at the top of her voice. Things couldn’t get any better. She can’t wait for tomorrow and the prospects the new day will have in store for her.
The coast road is mostly deserted as she drives home. On approaching a rather sharp bend, she hits the brake pedal to slow down, with no response. The woman pumps at the brake pedal, but the car hurtles on into the dark night.
Panic wells within her chest as the streetlights flash past her, a continuous stream of light, like a luminescent tube whizzing past both sides of her head. Repeatedly pumping at the break pedal, the woman feels the heel break off her shoe.
She speeds past the occasional car at such a high velocity, that the other vehicles sound their horn, but the sound of their loud honking immediately fades into the distance.
She screams hysterically as the accelerating car spins out of control. Attempting to turn the steering wheel in the opposite direction of the rotation only sends the car into a faster trajectory, skidding into a centrifugal swirl across the road.
The car goes beyond the boundary of the road, between a line of trees, plunging off the crag. Eyes squeezed shut, the woman dares hope for the best as the course of the tumbling car is blocked by an iceberg vine hanging over the edge of the precipice. She desperately screams for help.
The car is stuck in a balanced position, and every attempt she makes to move, simply jolts the vehicle forward with the possibility of dislodging it from its position. Sitting very still in the silence of the car, looking outside the windshield into the bottomless, black depth ahead, the woman realizes that her only hope of survival is climbing out of the car and scaling the side of the cliff back onto the road. Being very athletic, she is convinced that she has a good shot of getting out of her predicament alive.
Carefully inching sideways, she eases the door of the car open. A fountain of hope springs through her being as the car doesn’t budge. Unlocking her seat belt, she quickly stretches her right leg out of the car, purposely tangling her foot into the vine. Her plan is to gradually emerge from the vehicle and climb up the plant. Clinging to the back of the seat with her arm, she carefully ejects the bottom half of her body from the driver’s side.
What transpires next happens so fast and with such violence that even she can’t perfectly reconstruct the sequence of events in her head. Parts of the old vine tear out of the limestone and spit the car into the wide-open mouth of the quarry. A hulking chunk of metal hurtled into the dark depths, glass windows shattering during the fast fall.
The first thing they find is the woman’s detached leg tangled into the iceberg vine. The rest of her body is found smashed by the fall at the bottom of the precipice. Her head, severed clean off her shoulders where the windscreen sliced right through the neck, had rolled a few yards from the wreckage, the mouth still gaping open, bloodshot eyes bulging.
Several Foundation guests stated that the woman in red had been drinking heavily and acting inappropriately throughout the evening. The police also receive various phone calls reporting a hazardously driven car along the coast road that night.
So cut and dry is the case, that the small intentional nip in the brake line behind the dislodged front wheel of the car goes unnoticed.
The law offices of Judge Joe Montfort only remain closed for a couple of hours on Monday morning until the staff figures out some of the minute details the judge’s assistant normally takes care of, and reopen in late morning to continue their usual operation.
The first person Dame Esmeralda Montfort contacts when Joe mentions that he needs a new assistant is Aurora.
Chapter 16
The Old Professor and the Book
1
September 21st 2015
Aurora hurries out of the courthouse and making her way through the cluster of people on the steps, rushes across the small square disturbing pigeons foraging on the ground for food, and through the iron gates onto Republic Street amidst the chatter of the many shoppers present.
Having less than an hour before she has to be back in court, she picks up her pace. Although the old professor’s junk shop is only a few blocks away, her morning court session had run late and the flow of shoppers on the streets is slowing her down.
The ancient book Graziella found in the palazzo had haunted her thoughts for days on end. The symbols and patterns depicted on its pages looked strangely familiar creating an uncomfortable and maddening combination of anxiety and curiosity. The more she obsesses about it, the more she believes she should have never let Graziella leave the book with the old professor.
Graziella had insisted that she needed to have the cover restored and was hoping Profs could decipher some of the symbols and words on its pages.
“I’ve been in that house for days,” Graziella had said, panic in her voice, “and so far I have nothing substantial to show for it. The only thing of value I’ve come across in that library is ruined. After all that money we spent in Italy, I need to produce something, prove my worth. And I can’t present this to Andras unless it’s restored and I have some knowledge about its contents.”
Now Aurora wonders if that was such a great idea. She has seen those symbols before on two different occasions: first all over the walls of the crypt beneath the house on Charity Street, and then inscribed on that box her father had stolen from the church when she was a child.
After some very careful mind searching, she is certain that the writing in the book is somehow related to the writing on the box; the tenure of which had led to a quantum shift in her existence.
Although many years have passed, Aurora vividly remembers the powerful sensation simply holding the gold box for the first time had evoked, and the impression that being in possession of it had been the inception of everything worthwhile in her reality. Although not a superstitious person, barely a day goes by that Aurora doesn’t check on the box, safely hidden in a compartment under her bed in the apartment.
Feeling the need to become involved and have some sort of control over anything even loosely correlated to that surreal stage in her life, she has requested a meeting with Profs without consulting Graziella.
Heeding her advice, Graziella hadn’t mentioned where she found the book when Profs asked.
“We were given the book by a client who asked to be kept in confidence,” Aurora had promptly intervened.
To which the old professor raised a bushy eyebrow beneath his tortoise-shell glasses directed at Graziella, but thankfully she had remained mum. The closer Aurora comes to getting her queries answered, the stronger the urgency builds in her chest.
Letting herself into the antique shop, triggering the jangling doorbell, she looks around and wonders how someone who is so educated and supposedly clever, could end up in this depressing and musty dark room peddling trash.
Profs materializes out of the disarray where he stands camouflaged, everything about him is old and beige and brown.
“Oh hello my dear,” he says. “Do come in and have a seat. Will Graziella be arriving soon?”
“She won’t be joining us today,” says Aurora smoothly as she takes a seat in an old armchair, and noticing the obvious disappointment on his face, suddenly feels nauseous.
‘She’s found herself a lover and is ter
ribly difficult to get hold of these days,’ she’s about to say, but restrains herself. Which is the honest truth because although she had wanted to have this meeting in private, she had unsuccessfully tried calling Graziella the previous night.
Then, refocusing on the reason for her visit. “So,” she says sweetly, “did you have time to inspect the book?”
“That is one very interesting find,” says Profs, excitement evident in his voice and on his face, “which is why I was hoping Graziella would be here. I would like to discuss what should be done with it in her presence since she, like me, is a historian and I believe that what we have here is a very important relic.”
“The book is not a ‘find’,” says Aurora dryly, resenting where the conversation is headed and confirming in her head that they should have never left it with Profs. “It is the personal property of a client and will be returned to the client.”
Being vaguely familiar with laws protecting items considered to be cultural property, anxiety mounts in her chest. She remembers reading legal cases about the national appropriation of ancient artifacts and rulings decreeing that items of historic importance be given up to museums as cultural treasures. Studying the professor’s face and being very aware of his affiliations with various European archaeological and anthropologic institutions, she decides to thread very carefully.
“But of course we will have a conversation with the client and decide the best course of action if it comes to that,” she continues. “At this point I was wondering if it was at all possible to fix the damage on the cover since that is the main reason we brought the book over. And I have to admit, I’m also curious about the contents of the manuscript.”
“The cover was an easy fix,” says Profs enthusiastically. “I used a gentle enzyme to break down the protein in the stains.”
He moves towards the back of the room and craning her neck, Aurora watches as he removes a painting from the wall, opens the revealed cabinet and takes out the heavy tome. Pleased to see that the book is still in his possession, she settles back in her seat.