by Avery Corman
“Maybe the man who worked for him, maybe the whore, maybe somebody else.”
“In any case, you couldn’t see the rear door from where you were standing?”
“No.”
Wilson did not add anything to the detectives’ knowledge and after a while they concluded with him. Ryan and Wilson were not identified by anyone as being anywhere other than at the protest spot. They said they were there at what was established by the coroner as the time of death, remaining until the police arrived. Interviews with a few of the onlookers at the crime scene had been unproductive. Nobody else had come forth or had been found who could contradict Ryan’s and Wilson’s account. They were each other’s alibi.
Alice Bayers, the last of the Anti-Satanist Group, was working at a storefront Republican Party office, the detectives directed there by a neighbor. She was unable to contribute anything about the murder. Her alibi for the day of Cummings’s death could have been upheld by as many as six other people; she was working in the office. She seemed a reasonably intelligent person, making phone calls for campaign contributions.
“Why did you ever join up in this protest against Randall Cummings?” Greenberg asked.
“My fellow church members. We saw it as taking a stand for God and against evil. They’re always saying people should get involved.”
“I think they mean involved politically,” Greenberg said.
“Thank you, Ms. Bayers,” Carter added and he pulled his partner away.
As they walked to their car, Carter said, “What are you doing getting philosophic with this person?”
“Sorry, but she’s totally screwed up on church and state.”
“They’re all screwed up, if you ask me. I think it’s a mixed blessing for these people, Cummings going down. It took away their fun.”
The man in the box had not made any appearances in the neighborhood of late, and he was back, in his place on 111th Street off Broadway, sitting in one of his favorites, a corrugated container from a refrigerator. With Ronnie’s idiosyncratic standard for determining the amount of money she gave him based on whether or not she happened to be thinking about work when she passed, he was in a good recipient’s position; she was thinking about the book much of the time. She took all her change from her wallet, about four dollars’ worth, and glanced at the man as she dropped it in his bowl. He was sitting while looking at his feet, indifferent to the world; he couldn’t be bothered with people’s need to give him money. He noticed it was Ronnie. He did not recoil as the last time, rather he stared at her, studying her, as if he were reacquainting himself with her, then he shook his head negatively, and turned over the bowl, spilling her change onto the sidewalk.
“Why did you do that?” she said.
He did not answer and drew himself into the box. Ronnie walked on, upset. She knew he was mentally unbalanced, still, his hostility was disturbing.
She was alone in the apartment that night and made herself warm milk before she went to sleep, second-guessing herself about not accepting medication from the doctor to “round out the edges.” Everything was edges. She watched the local news, realized she had already fallen asleep for a moment, turned off the set, and retired for the night.
The dream had the customary element, broken glass. This time the glass was from her bedroom window breaking and through it came Satan, a dark angel, winged, with human facial features; a profoundly evil face, black eyes, lascivious lips. He stood at the foot of her bed, smiling. Her being in the bed, her bed, in her bedroom, was part of the dream. She looked at him in the dream as Satan smiled at her. Within everything horrible of the dream, this was more horrible, that his being in the room while she was in the bed was so real. In the dream, she screamed. She awoke, screaming.
9
FROM THE ARTISTIC RENDERINGS of Satan in the books she had been researching, Ronnie dreamed a composite Satan, much as police artists create a composite drawing out of an eyewitness account. She came to this realization the following morning when she leafed through a few of the books and photocopies of pages she was using as reference and saw some of the same visual elements of Satan she had incorporated into her nightmare.
Wondering if anyone else had a similar dream, she entered a chat room on kindred spirits of Satan, hoping it was a commonplace type of dream, rather than the uniquely haunting dream it seemed to be.
Anyone have a dream of Satan, winged, evil, with human features, standing at the foot of your bed?
She sat for a while, received no response, then entered the same question on two online message boards on satanic Web sites. She took the day’s newspapers, read them in the chair at her desk, looking at the screen periodically, receiving no response. She checked on and off during the day, read some magazines, and began work in the late afternoon. The next day, a Sunday morning, she read The New York Times, declined an invitation to join Bob and Nancy for brunch since she was back in a writing mood. She worked for the rest of the day and went online once more. She found a response to her inquiry from someone signed CR.
I know that dream. Horrible. He stands at the foot of my bed. Superior. Like a father superior.
Ronnie was caught off stride. After nearly two days she assumed no one would weigh in, and this was so specific. She wrote:
Does he do anything in the dream?
CR was still there, and sent Ronnie an instant message:
CR: He just smiles.
Ronnie: And the surroundings, are they supernatural like he is?
CR: No, that’s what’s horrible. Everything is so real. He’s right at the foot of my bed. And I’m there. I see myself lying there. It’s a dream, but it’s like it’s really happening.
Ronnie: Are you sure? You’re not just thinking this was your dream?
CR: I know my dreams. Satan has been in them for about as long as I’ve been here.
Ronnie: Where is that?
CR: Empire State Psychiatric Facility.
Someone had a dream exactly like hers and the person was institutionalized. Ronnie signed off, got under the covers, channel surfed on the television set for a while to try distracting herself, and eventually turned off the set and fell asleep.
She dreamed that she was dreaming, that she was in bed, dreaming, and the dream was of Satan, who stood at her bed again, smiling, the dream of a dream, like a trick drawing of someone who is holding a picture of himself holding a picture, which is a picture of himself holding a picture.
“You said to contact you if I had any problems. I’ve had a couple of really disturbing nightmares, Doctor. I really need to see a shrink.”
“I think that would be a good idea.”
“Is there someone you’d recommend?”
“Best I know in the world is Martha Kaufman.”
Ronnie was familiar with the name. Martha Kaufman wrote a book about social hierarchies in a Brooklyn high school, which Ronnie had read, and was one of the psychotherapists whose names regularly appeared in the media.
“I couldn’t afford anyone like that. I don’t have coverage in my insurance.”
“I’ll suggest she see you in the clinic. I’ll have her call you. I’m sure she will. She’s my aunt.”
“Really? Thank you, Doctor.”
“We’ve got to get you well.”
She noted the pointed nature of the doctor’s remark, blacking out in random circumstances and experiencing disturbing nightmares was not being “well.” Martha Kaufman called a few hours later. She offered Ronnie time when she was in the clinic. Her normal rate was three hundred dollars an hour. If Ronnie would allow their time together to be recorded and ultimately used anonymously for research, under a grant at New York University Medical Center, Kaufman would see her at no charge. Ronnie was scheduled for 6:00 P.M. the following day and tried to apply a writer’s approach to the consultation, writing down an outline of her recent experiences to make a proper presentation.
Martha Kaufman was sixty-four, five feet six, slender, with gray hair cut short, wearing a
stylish black suit and white silk blouse, looking like someone who did indeed work for three hundred an hour when she was not in this clinic. The room was spare, impersonal; a desk, a couple of chairs, white metal file cabinets; a place used by rotating psychotherapists.
“You said on the phone you were a writer.”
They sat in chairs opposite one another. Her voice and manner were distinguished. Ronnie thought she could have been an actress.
“I freelance. I’m doing a book on satanic possession. What got it for me was a piece I did for New York magazine on a satanic cult leader, Randall Cummings.”
“That was yours? I read it. Very good.”
“He was murdered, as you may know. I was there the day he was murdered.” Nothing to conceal here, she thought, this was the place you tried to find out what was going on. “I blacked out at some point when I was talking to him, and woke up, or came to, I guess you would say, a few blocks away on a park bench over an hour later. It was the second time I blacked out. Which is why I went to see your niece. During a race in Central Park, I just went sort of unconscious, and kept running, and incredibly, I won the race. She said I was physically fine.”
Ronnie checked the index card to see if she had been making the points in the order she intended.
“Ms. Delaney, you needn’t work from notes. There’s no ‘getting it right’ in here. What matters is how you, with your particular emotional DNA, respond to the world around you. Now, is it important for you to get it right?”
“I suppose. I never thought of it that way.”
“That’s what we have to do in here, get you to think of what you never thought of that way. Were you a good student?”
“Yes.”
“Where did you go to school?”
“Bronx Science. Brown.”
“Anything you feel you haven’t gotten right lately?”
Ronnie virtually sighed.
“What?”
“This Cummings, I didn’t see eye-to-eye with him. I got a dead black cat sent to me after I did the article, and someone was stalking me, threw black cats in my path on the street, and a little death skull. And a picture of me came in an envelope, my head cut off—”
“How terrible!”
“I’m sure it was him, or somebody from him. It all stopped when he died. I had no—partiality toward him, but here’s the thing that troubles me. His father, he said something about Cummings, that he was just creating theater. And maybe I missed something there, came down too hard on him.”
“You didn’t get it right.”
“Maybe. And maybe somebody saw what I wrote and killed him.”
“You’re taking quite a lot on yourself there.”
Kaufman asked questions about Ronnie’s childhood, parents, her current day-to-day experiences, and Ronnie described those aspects of her life. Then she was asked about her social life and described the relationship with Nancy and Bob, and then Richard, his sexual attractiveness combined with his general unavailability, which Kaufman offered might be what made him desirable; for Ronnie to be passionate while not getting too intimate. Time was up and there were items on Ronnie’s index card they hadn’t touched.
“The bad dreams I’ve been having, they’re what made me realize I had to see someone.”
“If you choose to come back, we can deal with it.”
“I would like to.”
“My general observation—you’re entitled to come back not merely for the dreams. There are violent acts here for you to process. Not for a long time have I seen anyone, except for perhaps adolescents in the middle of a gang war, under as much stress.”
They were scheduled for another session in a week. Nancy and Rob went off for a two-week vacation to Canada and Ronnie filled herself up with the book. At seven in the morning, as she was about to get out of bed, the phone rang and it was Richard.
“Hi. How’s it going?”
“To answer you in Hemingway terms, the work, it goes well. The social life, that’s you, sir, it does not go so well.”
“The earth does not move for you.”
“Not if the one who can help move it is in Germany.”
“Then how’s this? Don’t say no until I make my speech. I rehearsed in front of a mirror.”
“You did not.”
“No, I did not, but I thought of rehearsing. There’s a conference next week in Paris, international players in the behavioral field. As part of my participating, the deal was a round-trip air ticket, business class, from New York. I am already in Europe, as we know. And we just got into the details, and they still owe me the ticket—Ronnie, how would you like to come to Paris this weekend?”
“What?”
“Come Friday night. We’ll have Saturday and Sunday, you can fly back Monday, take your laptop if you’re feeling driven and work on the plane going back. All expenses paid, not by me. There’s no morality involved, just for you to make the weekend available. Say yes.”
“Richard—”
“It’s Paris, Ronnie. Paris for a weekend, what could be a better change of pace?”
“I’ve never been to Paris.”
“You must do this. You must.”
He met her flight and they took a cab to the hotel on the left bank, the Hotel Lutetia, her very idea of what a Paris hotel would be, with a view of the Eiffel Tower from the room. She was tired from the lack of sleep on the plane and she did not require much coaxing for him to suggest she rest for a while, and then he was undressing her, and then he was inside her, she could have nearly passed out from the pleasure. She awoke, Paris outside the window. He left a note on the pillow; he had a meeting at a bookstore at 22 Rue Mazarine, a short taxi ride or a ten-minute walk from the hotel. He would see her there at one. He had left a wake-up call for noon. She was awake before the call. She showered, changed, and decided to walk, nearly disbelieving—a few days ago I was in a nightmare and now I’m in Paris.
Ronnie browsed store windows on her way over and reached the store before one. She looked in the window, a classic rare book store, vintage books throughout. Richard was dressed in his blazer, sports shirt, and jeans, talking with an elderly man wearing a bookseller’s apron, and another man, lean, with close-cropped hair, wearing a dark suit, dark sports shirt, and sunglasses. They appeared to be in an intense discussion. Ronnie entered the store.
“Sorry. I was early and thought I’d just come.”
“Perfect. Ronnie Delaney, this is Pierre Frateau.” As Richard made the introduction the man in the dark suit started out.
“Monsieur—” Frateau said, acknowledging his departure. The man was out the door, not waiting for an introduction. Ronnie watched him as he walked out of view, then turned back to take in the store.
“Your first time in Paris, I hear,” Frateau said.
“Yes.”
“How marvelous.”
“I wanted you to meet me here because Monsieur Frateau has something wonderful to show you.”
Frateau placed a leather-bound book with gilt-edged pages on a counter. He wore white gloves to open it for her.
“This is very rare,” Frateau said. “Possessions of the Heart, it’s called. From 1832. A visual history of a ten-year-long possession, of Sister Anna Marie, in the convent at Notre-Dame-de-Veniers. She described the various shapes Satan took in possessing her, man, demons, animals, fish, birds. An artist in the town, Michel Martray, we don’t know anything about him, drew these according to her descriptions. As far as we know, this is the only edition that has ever been found.”
He turned the pages for her, each black-and-white plate covered with linen paper; twenty-six plates, the renderings detailed, phantasmagoric, consistent in their madness. The possessing spirits flowed out of the head of the innocent-looking nun portrayed, her eyes closed, hands uplifted as if worshipping the Prince of Darkness in his various incarnations.
“Richard says you are writing a book on possession. If you would like, you may use any of this for illustration. We can ph
otograph the images.”
“That’s very nice of you. We haven’t discussed illustrations, or if there’s a budget for it.”
“Antoine has to know it’s required in a book like this,” Richard said.
“It’s fantastic work, monsieur. Very kind of you.”
“A pleasure.”
Frateau showed her around the shop, then Richard suggested lunch, and they said their good-byes. As they walked along, Richard said, “Café de Flore on Saint Germain? Touristy, but fundamental Paris.”
“I’m game. So, Richard, who was that other man?”
“Works for a collector, a very rich old guy who’s interested in buying the book.”
“He was so extreme he looked comical, like a CIA agent in a movie.”
“Just the way he dresses. He’s in the security business. He wants you to know that. Helps him maintain order, I would suppose.”
“Richard, are you CIA?” He laughed heartily. He had chuckled in the past, laughed a little, this was the biggest laugh she had ever heard from him. “To be around such a villainous-looking guy,” she said. “All your comings and goings. Flights here, flights there. I think this cult stuff is your cover and you’re a CIA agent.”
“I am not a CIA agent,” and he laughed again. “You’ve lost your category. You’re in nonfiction, not fiction.”
The next two days had a dreamlike quality of their own; long walks through what Richard described as “the greatest walking city in the world,” visits to the Musée d’Orsay, Musée Picasso, the Louvre, meals in his favorite Paris bistros. He was connected, alert to her, seemingly thrilled at her delight in everything, and the sex in a bed with the Eiffel Tower out the window was incomparable, movie magic. She was twenty-four, in October she would be twenty-five, and she had never been to Paris, never made love in Paris, and to have him so responsive to her being there made it feel like she was falling in love with him; not really love the way she understood what love should be, not when he already announced he was going back to Munich, and after that he might have to go to Rio, but close to love, like a song she heard on the radio a while back, “The Next Best Thing to Love.” Richard took her to the airport and they kissed good-bye, a long kiss, and she thought they looked like the couple in the Robert Doisneau photograph of the lovers kissing in Paris.