Black Sand

by William Caunitz

  At a little before four o’clock a blue Buick stopped in front of her house. From behind the curtains, Adele could see two men and a woman get out of the car and stand on the sidewalk staring at her house. They made a handsome trio. She felt a strong desire to talk with them – and an equally powerful apprehension about the questions she feared they might ask.

  “Number eleven,” Lucas said, looking up at the house number as he lifted the metal bar. The gate hinge groaned, and almost as if on cue the front door opened.

  “Yes?” asked the woman in the wheelchair.

  Peering inside, studying the crippled woman, Lucas showed her his shield and made the introductions.

  “Please come in,” Adele said, reversing her wheelchair into the parlor.

  “I hope we’re not interrupting anything,” Lucas said, following behind the wheelchair.

  “As you can see, my dance card’s hardly filled these days,” Adele said, wheeling around to face them. She waved her crooked hand at the couch. “Please sit.”

  They sat, Katina in the middle.

  “What is this all about?” Adele asked.

  “We’re trying to locate relatives of Paolo Matrazzo,” Lucas said.

  A surprised expression transformed Adele’s heavily made-up face. “They’re all dead, except me.”

  “How were you related to him?” Lucas asked.

  “Uncle Paolo was my father’s brother. Why in the world would the police be interested in any of the Matrazzos?” she asked, reaching into the candy box on her lap.

  Lucas replied: “The Greek government has asked us to help them try and locate–”

  “Alexander’s Iliad,” Adele interrupted, digging out a candy with a walnut on top.

  “Yes,” Vassos said, resting his hands on his knees.

  Adele forced her hand up to her mouth and sucked the candy between her lips. After swallowing it, she said, “As a little girl I was forever hearing about Uncle Paolo’s Iliad. No one in the family really believed it existed. I can tell you one thing for sure, if he ever did find it, no one in this family ever benefited. He died on Santorini, leaving his wife and two sons almost penniless.”

  “Paolo Matrazzo was a well-known collector,” Katina said. “It’s hard to believe that he did not leave a substantial estate.”

  “Believe it. He might have been a famous collector, but he was no businessman,” Adele said sadly. “He squandered a small fortune running around the world searching for that wretched book. When he died, his partner told my aunt that there was almost nothing left in the business. Paolo’s Folly, my aunt used to call Alexander’s Iliad.”

  “Who was your uncle’s partner?” Vassos asked.

  “A man named Jean Laval. He bought out my aunt’s interest in the business.”

  “Do you know what happened to him?” Lucas asked.

  “He died in 1947,” Katina said.

  Lucas looked sharply at the beautiful woman sitting next to him. “How did you know that?”

  Katina shrugged, “Art world trivia.”

  “I see,” Lucas said, slowly turning his attention back to the woman in the wheelchair. “What happened to your uncle’s family?”

  “My aunt died in 1946. Anthony, the oldest son, was killed on Guadalcanal. Paolo, Junior came out of the army a captain. He married, had two sons and a daughter. After he received his Ph.D. from New York University, he accepted a job teaching art history at NYU. He died of cancer in 1968.”

  “What happened to his wife and children?” Lucas asked.

  Adele shook her head. “I don’t know. We just sort of lost touch.”

  “Did you ever hear anyone in your family suggest that your uncle might have smuggled the Iliad out of Greece before he died, or that someone was with him on Santorini when he allegedly sent that telegram to his partner?” Lucas asked.

  Adele laughed. “No, Lieutenant. My uncle’s obsession was his alone.” She looked suspiciously at Vassos. “Why after all these years is there interest in the casket-copy?”

  “We consider it a national treasure and would like to see it returned to Greece. My government, of course, would be willing to make any necessary payments to secure its return.”

  Looking at the stuffing leaking out of the couch’s arm, Adele said thoughtfully, “I could certainly use some necessary payments, but I’m afraid that there isn’t much hope of that.”

  “Does the name Orhan Iskur mean anything to you?” Vassos asked, opening his briefcase.

  “No, I can’t say that it does,” Adele said.

  Vassos got up and slowly walked over to the wheelchair. He held up the composite sketch and photograph of Aldridge Long. “Do you know this person?”

  Adele squinted, her eyes close to both sketch and photograph, looking from one to the other, taking her time. An expression of fright and disbelief pulled back her mouth, causing dimples to appear. “He looks an awful lot like my Uncle Paolo. But that’s impossible, isn’t it? He’s been dead since 1939.”

  10

  Teddy Lucas walked into the Sixteenth’s squad room and stopped dead. The detention cage was filled with shouting prisoners, many of whom wore silly-looking sailor hats. Detectives were busy at their desks, helping officers in uniforms prepare arrest reports and invoice property.

  Lucas looked up at the wall clock: 5:20. The joint was jumping. He looked behind him at Vassos and Katina. “We’ll go into my office.” He reached over the gate and pressed the release latch. The prisoners spotted Katina; a chorus of hoots and whistles issued from the cage.

  The two men conveyed Katina across the squad room into the Whip’s office. Vassos closed the door. “You’re busy this evening,” he said, lowering himself down onto the department-issue green swivel chair.

  “Seasonal trade,” Lucas explained, rolling the blackboard away from the wall. “Rivergoing office parties that get out of hand. Happens every summer.”

  “In Greece such persons would be taken directly to court,” Vassos said.

  “Here too, normally,” Lucas said, “but, according to our Patrol Guide, prisoners arrested on the navigable waters who can not be arraigned in court immediately must be brought to the nearest station house for search and detention. Those beauties outside won’t be arraigned tonight; there’s too much paperwork involved.”

  Vassos nodded in understanding.

  Katina stood off from the men, looking around the Whip’s office. Lucas picked chalk up from the runner of the blackboard and wrote the names of the people they’d interviewed, including the other dealer they had visited after leaving Adele Matrazzo’s house.

  Lucas stepped back from the board, his gaze fixed on the black slate. Out in the street a truck squealed to a stop; a cacophony of horns bubbled up into the squad room.

  “They all have one thing in common,” Lucas observed, leaving the rest of his thought unspoken.

  Katina focused on the blackboard.

  Vassos fingered his jade worry beads.

  “In addition to being dealers, each one of them is also a collector,” Lucas said.

  “Most dealers are,” Katina said.

  “My gut instinct tells me that whoever has the casket-copy has one powerful urge to show it off,” Lucas said, moving around his desk and sitting.

  “Before you get the wrong impression,” Katina said, “most dealers are also collectors, and many of them are secretive about their private collections.”

  Lucas made a dismissive grunt.

  A detective out in the squad room screamed for quiet. The ruckus continued. The familiar sound of a swivel chair crashing against the bars of the detention cage caused a knowing grin to pass between the two policemen.

  Lucas leaned back, his legs stretched across the desk’s side table, studying the slate. “If Iskur did have a coconspirator in the States, they’d have to communicate with each other, wouldn’t they?” He looked around at Vassos. “Were Iskur’s transatlantic telephone calls checked out?”

  Vassos muttered a curse in Greek
. “I don’t know, but I can find out.” He got up and went over to the squad commander’s red telephone. He lifted the receiver, and dialed. He spoke for about one minute in Greek and hung up. “I must meet someone within the hour.”

  “How do you manage getting around the city?” Katina asked him.

  “I have a book of maps in my briefcase,” Vassos said, asking her, “What time does Bloomingdale’s close?”

  A benevolent smile crossed her face. She asked in Greek, “Have you ever been inside Bloomingdale’s?”

  “Okhee.” No, he said.

  “I think they close at six-thirty tonight,” she said.

  Vassos turned the door knob. “Ten o’clock tomorrow, Lou?”

  Lucas smiled. “Ten o’clock, First Terror.”

  After Vassos had gone, Katina said, “I hope that we accomplished something today.”

  “Time will tell,” Lucas said, acutely conscious of her perfume. He looked into her beautiful face and wanted desperately to reach out and touch her, to ask her to have dinner with him. Don’t be a putz all your life, Lucas. Ask her. All she can say is no, or I’m busy tonight, or I’m involved with someone. He slipped his feet off the desk and was about to ask her when he looked at the elegant, educated woman that fate had thrown in his path and imagined the unbridgeable gulf between them. So he merely smiled ruefully and said, “Come on, I’ll drive you home.”

  Despite her sixty-two years and her infirmity, Adele Matrazzo’s big black eyes were still capable of capturing a man’s heart.

  Adele enjoyed putting on her makeup every morning, pretending that today was the day he would visit her. She loved to paint her lips a glossy red and add a heavy streak of eyeliner, then brush mascara onto her long lashes. It was a painful struggle for her to do these things now, but she did them nonetheless. She relished her morning “get ready for the day” sessions; they gave her something to look forward to during the long nights. And, you never knew, today might be the day when he’d visit.

  Adele’s world consisted of the bottom floor of the two-story house: a parlour, bedroom, small kitchen, and a full bath with gripping bars on all the walls. She spent a good portion of her day watching the soaps on the twenty-five-inch television screen that he had gotten for her last Christmas. And there were her chocolates. Oh, how she loved chocolate. She loved the way the creamy pulpiness of the candy felt as it melted in her mouth, and the way it felt when she mushed it about with her tongue. There was always a golden box nearby.

  Adele still received occasional telephone calls from old friends and colleagues. And there were her wonderful neighbors who would look in on her and even do her shopping. She was particularly grateful to Mrs. O’Rourke, who lived across the street. She would come by twice a week and have tea with Adele. They would watch “Search for Happiness,” and Adele would smilingly endure the same worn litany of complaints against Mrs. O’Rourke’s ungrateful daughter-in-law.

  Sometimes when she was alone she’d make the radio music loud and play with her wheelchair’s control box, spinning her cold metal throne about the room, pretending she was dancing with some remembered lover. She would close her eyes and dwell on the hardness rubbing up against her, and a shroud of lust would cover her loneliness.

  But the high points of Adele’s confined existence were his visits. She would never know when he would come by. There was always a telephone call first. “Adele, dear, are you alone?” She would say yes, and he would show up within the hour. She never dared question him about his other life; she knew better, He had always been withdrawn and secretive about himself, even as a child. She was thankful that they had been able to share a hedonistic life together. It had all begun when they were children. So long ago. A joyous shiver shook her shoulders as her mind replayed his last visit.

  He had stood over her watching as she popped chocolates into her mouth. With her eyes locked on his, she put them in one at a time and rolled them about, turning them into delicious dark brown mud. He took out his beautiful thing and ran it over her wet lips, and when he told her to, she opened her mouth wide and took him into the chocolaty muck, ravenously sucking him until his hot juice spilled into her mouth.

  Stepping back from her, his penis dripping with chocolate sludge, his arms suddenly went akimbo, his back arched, and he laughingly said, “Adele, dear, I’ve just made you a black and white soda. I do hope that you’ve enjoyed it.”

  “I did. I did.”

  Adele Matrazzo spun her wheelchair around to face her visitor. Her admiring eyes locked on him as he moved across the parlor and sat on her shabby sofa. He had come promptly in response to her phone call.

  He leaned forward, watching her. “Adele, dear, do tell me all about your unexpected company.”

  She clawed a chocolate from the box and proceeded to tell him about Lucas, Vasso, and a woman named Katina Wright. When she finished, her visitor leaned back, his gaze fixed on a cobweb of ceiling cracks. Adele put another candy into her mouth.

  “They know nothing about me?” he said.

  “Nothing.”

  His lips pulled into a menacing scowl as his head came up off the back of the sofa. “Adele, did you ever mention me to any of your neighbors or friends?”

  “I never mentioned you to a living soul. You’ve been my life’s secret.”

  “Do you have any pictures of me, anything from the past that might tie us together?”

  “There is nothing.”

  “Do you have me listed in your address book?”

  “Of course not.”

  Her eyes widened with sudden realization; her deformed hands crushed the sides of the candy box. Her mouth quivered as she whispered, “You have it, don’t you?”

  A beam of sunlight pierced the dirty window and reflected off his golden ring. “Yes, I have it.” He slid off the sofa and moved over to the wheelchair where he kneeled down next to her. He brushed a stray wisp of hair from her brow. “You’ve been a good, loyal friend all these years.”

  Her misshappen hand caressed his arm. “I’ve loved you since we were children.”

  “I know,” he said softly. “Would you like me to relax you?”

  She caught her breath, leaned her head against the back of her prison, and closed her eyes. “Yes.”

  He played with her breasts. She moaned.

  Her thoughts drifted to other times, other places. Her young, healthy body was straddling his, lowering onto his straining cock. She felt the warmth of past ejaculations and her breath began to come in hard gulps. “Do my nipples.”

  He unbuttoned the front of her housedress and unhaltered her breasts. He took one into his hands, milking it. Bending forward, he sucked it into his mouth and gnawed the thick, brown crown.

  “Harder,” she demanded.

  As he stimulated her, he looked up at her contorted face and saw that chunks of mascara had fallen on her cheeks. Her head lay still and she made mewing noises through her open mouth. She started to emit a hoarse, gagging sound, and her head began to rock back and forth. She stiffened. Her head came up sharply; she gagged several times and then screamed. She relaxed, slumping down into her seat.

  Gripping the chair’s arm, he pushed himself up onto his feet and, bending, buttoned the front of her dress.

  “Would you like me to give you a blow job?”

  “I have something else in mind,” he said, taking a length of thin wire from his pocket; slipping behind the wheelchair, he held it over her head like a blessing.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “The E string of a violin.”

  “What can we do with that?”

  “The ultimate thrill, Adele, dear,” He snapped the string around her neck, pulling tightly on both ends.

  At first Adele Matrazzo did not scream or attempt to defend herself. She sat still, not understanding what was happening, not believing that it could happen. And then, as life-sustaining air fled her body, her alarm gave way to wide-eyed panic, and a terrifying, almost inaudible scream burst fr
om her mouth. Her useless hands fought vainly against the E string. His powerful arm hoisted her up out of her seat, dark thick fluid drooling over her lips as her body convulsed in life’s final dance.

  Andreas Vassos walked into a wonderland of glass and black marble. Young, fashionably dressed women stood behind glistening counters, holding out perfumes in designer bottles. Weaving through the first-floor fragrance department at Bloomingdale’s, Vassos became more and more conscious of the obscene display of luxury. Names shouted from the walls: Chanel, Saint Laurent, Givenchy. He thought of the modest and rather drab perfume stores in Greece, and as he watched an elegantly dressed woman pause to allow a saleswoman to dab a fragrance on her wrist, he thought also of how his mother and grandmother had labored in the fields picking tobacco, his grandmother until well into her sixties.

  He stopped at a counter, looking confusedly at its contents.

  “May I help you, sir?” She wore strange makeup: bluish eyebrows, purple eyeliner, and mauve lipstick. Her nails were painted blood red; she wore large pieces of jewelry around her wrists and neck so that she clanked every time she moved.

  “I would like a bottle of Anais-Anais, please.”

  Her capped teeth gleamed. “You are Greek.”

  Bemused, he answered, “Yes I am.”

  The saleswoman clutched her chest. “I fell in love with your country. It’s sooo charming, and the people are sooo friendly. My girlfriend and I go to Mykonos every year. In fact, we’re going next month. We always go dancing at the Nine Muses; I mean, it’s like a sacred thing with us.”

  His face a blank mask, Vassos thought, why are they always so dumb and so damn nasal? He made a few agreeable grunts, lingered a few seconds more, and said, “I must hurry, miss, I have an appointment.”

  “I’m sorry. I do run off at the mouth whenever I talk about Greece.”

  He watched her wrap his purchase. He paid; she returned his change. As he was leaving, she said goodbye. “Ahndeeo.”

  He smiled at her and rushed out of the store, anxious to escape the cloying bouquet that fouled the air. He looked around for a cab.