The Horses of the Night

by Michael Cadnum

  The carriage ride was long, and the old rutted road dusty. The feeling of travel seeped into the bones, the rocking, the clop of the iron shoes. At last Bach reached the court of Frederick the Great, and climbed down from the carriage. Attendants hurried him at once, dusty and hungry as he was, into the imperial presence. Frederick the Great proposed a difficult musical problem, a theme almost impossible to play, something that would make a musician’s hands, in my father’s phrase, “spider up and down the keyboard.” He asked Bach to improvise a sketch based on this challenge, and then sat back with his eyes half closed.

  Bach played. What was travel, and its weariness and disorientation, compared with a chance to make music? Bach performed, in the candlelight, before the hushed court of the emperor.

  The story changed at that point into a sketch of my father’s studies, a sunlit summer in Salzburg, hours of conversation with cellists, conductors, and the eventual tale of my father’s dislike for playing scales. “I realized I couldn’t sit still that long and play the same thing over and over. I was an audience member, a delighted consumer, not an artist at all.” The point of the story dwindled into a simple thesis: My father was not Bach.

  But while most people are somewhat aware that they are repeating an old story, my father’s telling grew smoother, and at the same time more detailed, and he never seemed to recognize in his audience—usually simply my brother and myself—the very slight reluctance to hear this fragment of musical history again.

  We left Palm Springs, flying northwest into a headwind that buffeted the small jet. In the pocket beside my seat was a blue folder. In the folder were several Sony micro floppy disks. On the foldout desk before me was a Toshiba laptop.

  I looked over at Anna and she seemed to sense my gaze. “We’ll be developing you tomorrow.”

  When I did not respond, she continued, “A video, still photos. Stratton Fields: the legend.”

  “You’ll put my signature on bars of soap.”

  She took a moment, and added, “It’s what you dreamed of, isn’t it?”

  As the jet bobbed and ducked in its flight, I reviewed files that at first made little sense to me. The files were labeled enigmatically, in the way of such computerized data, but it took me only a few minutes to begin to scroll through columns of numbers, paragraphs of explanation, drafts of letters and memos. These were Renman’s own records, copied, apparently, for my edification.

  The files included movie projects DeVere and Renman had discussed. They described loans to foreign governments in exchange for suppressing labor unrest that might have an effect on the cotton harvest. Memos involved highways through rain forests to “access raw material.” U.N. guidelines on worker exposure to insecticides were being indefinitely delayed. A Renman-controlled company owned coffee plantations in Brazil and needed to keep the costs within limits.

  Not all the projects smacked of what some journalists would have called exploitative strategies. Schools were being rebuilt in Armenia, to replace those lost in a major earthquake. Tuberculosis was being studied in China, the funds coming entirely from Renman’s sports profits. A vitamin supplement was being provided to infants in Africa, and mothers were to be encouraged to nurse their children. But there were opposition leaders to be persuaded, unions to be infiltrated, governments to be rewarded for their willingness to be “partners in progress.” The theme of Renman’s files dwindled to: We give, we take away.

  There was a file labeled FIELDS. I had unlimited access to ready money. It would all come out of medical research funds.

  But the files contained lies, too. Some of Renman’s interests had been losing money, according to one report. One consultant recommended “thoughtful cutbacks.” Renman had deliberately given me access to information that showed his empire faltering, failing around the edges. I was angry. I knew that he was trying to disguise his power.

  It was dawn.

  From DeVere headquarters there was a view of the East Bay hills. Headlights still glittered on the Bay Bridge. The big building was silent around us, DeVere’s desk a slab that reflected the light of the rising sun.

  “I don’t know how you managed it,” said Anna Wick, handing me a cup of coffee. When I didn’t respond, she continued, “Renman’s getting old. He’s losing it.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “You don’t know him.”

  “The man can do everything he wants to do.”

  She gazed with me out at the view of the bay. “Not everything,” she said.

  She surprised me by leading me to an elevator secreted behind a panel in the wall. We rose one floor, and stepped out into a suite with a broad bed, oak furnishings, and another view of the predawn Bay Bridge.

  “We’ll get it redecorated. All these earth colors make me feel dirty.” She waited, as though for my reaction.

  The furniture was all mission-style, some of it authentic early Californian. The worm holes and minor blemishes gave a feeling of gnarled authenticity. DeVere had not felt entirely happy in this tall, air-conditioned building, I realized. He had wanted something more real, more enduring.

  “Renman’s giving me what I wanted,” I said. “He had to.”

  She considered my words. “He makes mistakes. He’s making one with you.”

  I did not enjoy her tone. I asked, “What kind of person was DeVere?”

  She sat on the edge of the bed. “DeVere lived here for awhile. Here in this room. You might say he didn’t really ‘live’ anywhere, though. This was his address, but you couldn’t say it was his home. He was always meeting with someone, or on the phone. Even when he was here his mind was somewhere else. He was looking at videos, or spreadsheets.”

  “He sounds a lot like you.”

  “Men have often found me brittle. Too interested in work. Too amused at the wrong things, too interested in what I can get out of life.”

  “Too interested in money.”

  “Power. You deceived an old man. That’s what Renman is—soft and tired. He decided to be generous to you. You tricked him. I don’t know how—but you did. Congratulations.”

  I switched on the sound system, dialed through a jazz station and various spurts of static. When I found some Elizabethan music, nearly comical in its jaunty rhythms and bleating instruments, I drew close to her.

  “We’re not like Renman,” she said. “And Ty was never happy with any of this. He wanted to escape his past, and ended up wishing he was a farmer. I’ve decided that Ty didn’t have an empire so much as a sort of minor cattle drive.”

  I let her talk.

  “You’re crazy,” she went on. “But it may work. And if you’re going all the way, I want to go with you.”

  The room resounded to the sound of recorder and tambour. I smiled.

  She unbuttoned her blouse, and eased off her shoes. At my touch she closed her eyes. At the touch of her lips I felt something inside me go cold.

  Not right.

  This wasn’t right.

  “We’ll have time,” I said huskily.

  She kissed me, and did not seem to sense the reserve in me, the feeling I had that there was something wrong. Or if she did, she thought she understood. What was lust compared with power?

  “Yes,” she said with a smile. “I believe we will.”

  The rest of the day was a series of conference calls, faxed messages, employees hurrying in. Photographers clicked away at me as I studied designs. The big desk was covered with blueprints, contact prints, folders.

  Anna fumbled now and then for a vial of pills, and she smiled apologetically when she knew that I saw her swallowing three at once. “I’m not like you,” she said.

  DeVere had been in the midst of a deal to have his trademark signature on a pack of cigarettes. DeVere had insisted on top-quality Virginia tobacco, the cigarette company had wanted air-blown Maryland and “other well-regarded tobaccos” along with flavorings and “enhancers.” DeVere was moving heavily into the field of handwashed silks. There were sketches of wo
men in flowing blouses, and samples of imported silk, swatches of the stuff, some of it raw, with that wonderful creamy scent.

  Renman was building two new stadiums. He was building a hospital in Denver “exclusively for the study of cancers of the internal organs.” He was buying a da Vinci cartoon. He was buying a chemical company that was momentarily weakened because of a lawsuit. He was denying any knowledge in the disappearance of a Teamsters Union official who had vanished years ago but kept showing up in tabloids as a subject of controversy.

  I flipped through folders, printouts, fired off questions to Anna and a string of assistants. I took pleasure in every minute. There would be a Stratton Fields edition luxury car out of Detroit, and there would be a Stratton Fields sportscar out of Italy. I decided that it was perfectly all right to raid the medical research funds for some of my projects. We could always repay the money in the future.

  I did not let myself be deceived at the hints that Renman was losing control over his empire, that the rust that eats at all empires was slowly weakening his.

  My brother must have found out where I was. He called three times, but I didn’t have time to talk to him.

  The sketches I made were some of the best work I had ever done. The reading I did was stored in my memory. The presence of power refreshed me. I was more intelligent now. I was more energetic. I found myself thinking—knowing—that I could make no mistake.

  But in the midst of conversation with Anna Wick regarding the new DeVere scent I stopped. The cologne was being test-marketed in Tucson and Omaha, and Anna had been explaining to me that these cities were ideal for such experimentation.

  She passed me, running a finger over one of my eyebrows possessively.

  Her touch awakened a memory.

  What was I doing?

  Anna leaned forward with a frown, blinking to clear what I had begun to realize were contact lenses. “Are you all right?”

  I said that I was fine. “But maybe this isn’t a very interesting subject. Perfume for men is a little dull.”

  I let the file remain open on my lap.

  Too late.

  I looked around myself with new eyes. It was late afternoon, the bay taking on the neutral gray that would soon fill with darkness and begin to reflect light.

  Anna’s touch had reminded me of the woman I loved.

  “You look so tired, Mr. Fields,” said Collie.

  She was just leaving, buttoning her coat. “I feel great,” I said, barely recognizing the sound of my own voice.

  “You look just a little bit weary, if I may say so. I made something for you, just a beef burgundy, because I didn’t know really where you were …”

  “That will be fine,” I said. I was not hungry. I had not felt any appetite for what seemed like a long time.

  “Please let me stay and see you comfortable, just a little bit longer. It troubles me to see you so—”

  “I have never felt better in my life.”

  “Things are shipshape here,” she said. At some point in her personal history Collie must have known and admired someone whose life took him down to the sea. It might have been this naval tradition that allowed her to accept my polite but firm insistence that it was time for her to leave.

  I knelt and shaved kindling, and lit it. Gradually I nursed the fire into a blaze. Here, I reminded myself, was where I once burned a feather.

  This was where I burned my work.

  Now what I needed more than anything was to have that audience again, that court of Presences.

  “I’ve needed you so badly,” I breathed.

  I was trembling, sweating, unable to hold a thought in my mind, except for a sensation of self-loathing.

  I continued, speaking as though to the fire, “I need to ask you some questions.”

  There it was at last, that faint flicker of light. A woman’s figure, a distant galaxy, a wrinkle in my own aura—a thing I could barely see.

  I whispered, “There are things I need to know.”

  She did not make a sound.

  “The people I love,” I said. “I can barely remember them.”

  She did not have to respond. I could sense the answer: What did you expect?

  Is that what happens when there is no soul? With its loss, does memory go, too? Because love is in large part memory, bringing the absent voice, the absent face, into being.

  This is what I had exchanged for my fortune. Exchange: That was the essence of life, giving one thing for another.

  I turned to speak to the source of light, but she was gone.

  I supported myself against the mantel. I knew what I would have to do.

  Hurry, I told myself.

  There is a way to bring Nona back.

  52

  “Dr. Montague asked us to call him if you dropped by,” said the receptionist. “And your brother wants you to give him a call, Mr. Fields, and—” But I had given a wave and a smile and was in the elevator.

  I glimpsed the receptionist as the doors slid shut. She was reaching for the phone.

  “Good evening, Mr. Fields,” said an orderly.

  “It’s a quiet night,” I said.

  “Yes, sir,” he agreed, pushing the rolling bin of laundry, “very quiet.”

  Then he called back to me, “Did you report in, sir?”

  “Of course.”

  But I could sense him watching me as I hurried away from him.

  The tile floors gleamed. A buffing machine hummed far off, a man directing it methodically from one side of the corridor to another. The hospital at night was subdued, but still very much a place of power, a place where lives were lost.

  The floors gleamed too brightly. The murmur of the machine was an orchestra.

  “They told us to get permission before we let anyone see her,” said the rent-a-cop at the door.

  “I don’t think you have to worry about me,” I said.

  His eyes were full of apology. “Dr. Montague mentioned you especially,” said the tall, dark-skinned man.

  “You know just a look won’t do any harm,” I said.

  The man was pained, leaning to one side, unable to give permission.

  “Everyone has procedures,” I said. “You have to have them. Otherwise, you really wouldn’t know what to do when something unexpected happens.”

  “This is true,” he said.

  “I won’t really go into the room. I’ll just stand in the doorway.”

  There was a hesitation of just a second or two. “Right,” he said with a smile, letting me into the room.

  She was no longer curled up, but her head was still swathed. Her eyelids were sunken. She had resolved into a creature at once less tortured in appearance, and even further removed from life.

  There was a long whisper in the half-dark, and then, after a long time, another long airy syllable. She was breathing. But her breath was so slow it nearly stopped during the turn-around, the waiting period between inhale and exhale.

  The word came to me out of old tales, legends: deathbed. A commonplace-sounding word, but the actual bed, the actual death, has the feel of an abyss as one stands at the edge.

  There was another sound, too. It was insistent, approaching, a squeak and patter, soles against waxed surface. I could hear the footsteps of people hurrying closer behind me.

  Now I knew what it was I had to do.

  “Nona,” I said. “Everything will be all right.”

  The words had always been sincere, when I had murmured them after lovemaking, uttered them with delight or affection in my voice. Now they were a promise, a truth, a change in my life brought on by the advance of my own knowledge.

  I knew the secret.

  Life was an exchange, a cluttered trading pit. I knew what I could trade for Nona.

  As I left the room Barry ran down the corridor, slowed when he saw me, and fell against a wall, panting heavily. Security guards ran along behind him. The tall, dark-skinned man tucked a transmitter into his belt, and looked at me with something
like apology.

  When he had recovered his breath, Barry gave my arm a squeeze as he passed me. He switched on a light and bent over Nona’s recumbent body.

  “You seem to think you can do anything you want,” said Barry. He switched off the light and tucked in his shirt, still winded, trying to pull himself into something like professional appearance. His eyes looked puffy, and he had that new-born look of someone who has been asleep. I knew what he was about to say. He was about to say how concerned he was about me, how worried he was about what I might do.

  Whatever he said, I didn’t hear it.

  I was gone.

  53

  The door to the stairwell was locked, despite the fact that the door was labeled EXIT, in glowing green letters.

  I knew this hospital. I had stood with my father while we contemplated the blueprints of the new wing, the new laundry facility, the new emergency room, my father’s fingers slipping across the vacant rectangles that indicated the chambers of refuge and healing.

  I found another door, to another stairwell, and this one opened.

  My steps echoed in the shaft. I bounded up the stairs, from time to time gripping the handrail as I leaped three or four steps at once. Below, far below, was the slam and echo of pursuers.

  The lower stairs were well worn, the rail’s paint flaking to bare steel. As I climbed higher, however, the steps were newer in appearance. Each doorway was surmounted by a green exit sign, and I kept climbing, beginning to breathe hard, all the way to the top.

  The stairs ended. I struck the barrier with my fist and the resulting sound was loud. This was a trap, a cul-de-sac. I had run so far to end up nowhere. The top door was padlocked and chained, and the links rattled as I tugged at the latchbar of the door.

  I plunged downstairs, and a door I had raced past was labeled, clearly and in bright red letters: OPENING THIS DOOR WILL SOUND FIRE ALARM.

  Footsteps slapped the stairs below me. The sound of the steps had a continuous, reverberating quality, like the splash of water in a cave.

  As I tugged at the door I heard a faraway trill, a very faint shrill of fire alarm, which I knew was connected to my activities here in the musty air of the stairwell. A further notice on the door read: DOOR TO REMAIN UNLOCKED AT ALL TIMES.