Immortal Muse

by Stephen Leigh

  Camille shook her head to rid it of the memories and looked again at David’s photograph.

  This … This had a humanity and emotion that Weston’s still lifes often missed, and again Camille felt the pull she’d noticed in the Bent Calliope. She stared at the photo for a few moments more before clicking on the next file.

  Black and white again, but a portrait this time: a woman sitting on a chair and staring directly into the camera. The background was in deep shadow, with light coming from the left, enough to the side that her light brown hair cast fine shadows over the hollow of her cheeks. It was the expression in her eyes and the pressure around her lips that caught Camille: a defiance, almost, as if she were daring the photographer to take the picture, or if she were defying the viewer to judge her. The way her hands grasped the arms of the wooden chair increased the tension in the portrait: she looked as if she were about to rise from the seat, perhaps in irritation, perhaps in actual anger. The woman wasn’t classically beautiful, but there was a delicate attractiveness to her features, even with the severity with which she stared back at the viewer.

  Camille wondered if this were just a model he’d happened upon, or if perhaps this was the wife.

  She glanced at the rest of the pictures, which confirmed her initial impression: David Treadway had the nascent talent. He had a vision for someone to mold and bring forth. That she could bring forth.

  The question was: did she want to do it, yet again? Did she need to do it? Did she dare? That’s not why you came here. You’re here to find Nicolas and take care of that problem. Once that’s accomplished, you can think about someone like David.

  She dragged the folder from the thumb drive onto her desktop and watched the progress bar as it copied the files onto her hard drive. She ejected the thumb drive and pulled it from the USB port. She turned it over in her fingers, looking at the name and the phone number, while her left hand stroked the pendant under her blouse.

  She fished her cell phone from her purse. This is a mistake. If you do this, then you risk having Nicolas find you before you’re prepared. You know he’s here in the city; you can’t let him slip away and you can’t let him turn on you. He’ll know. He’ll feel your presence here and you’ll turn from hunter into hunted.

  It’s a mistake I’ve made a dozen times now, and maybe I’ll make it a dozen more times, she told the scolding interior voice. Maybe I have no choice. Besides, if this causes Nicolas to show himself, then I can take care of him, once and for all. Taking a long breath, she dialed the number printed on the thumb drive. She heard a ring, and another, and another. A mistake … She started to press the “End Call” button when she heard someone pick up. If it had been a female voice, she would have ended the call immediately.

  “Hello?” she heard David say quizzically. There was noise in the background, muffled music and loud voices. She wondered if he was at a party—was that why he’d left in such a rush?

  “You really have a wonderful eye for composition,” she said. “I just have one question: do you still want to know my name?”

  There was silence for a few breaths, then: “Oh! The Bent Calliope, right? The ginger with the interesting face and the attitude.” He was pleased; she could hear it in his voice. She still liked the sound of him, though. She could feel the baritone tugging at her through the tinny speaker of the phone. “You’ve already looked at my portfolio?” The artist: always looking for reassurance that they actually possessed some talent.

  “Yes. As I said, you have an eye for composition, though I suspect you also know your way around Photoshop.”

  “C’mon, Photoshop’s just a tool,” he answered. “No worse than using any of the old darkroom tricks of dodging and burning. It’s no substitute for …” He stopped.

  “… for artistic vision?” she supplied.

  She could almost hear his shrug. “Yeah. I guess. If you want to call it that.”

  She laughed at his effort at modesty. “My name’s Camille. Camille Kenny. And now you have my number, too. It sounds like you’re busy right now, so let’s talk tomorrow.”

  “So I can photograph you?”

  “I don’t know yet. But we can talk about it, at least.”

  “I’d like that.” In the background, Camille heard a woman ask him distantly: “Who are you talking to?” She heard the sound of his thumb muffling his response. A mistake …

  “Look,” he said finally, “yes, I’d like to meet with you …”

  “Tomorrow,” she said quickly, before she could change her mind, before the doubting voice could convince her that this was wrong. “You know Annie’s, half a block east of the Bent Calliope? I’ll buy your lunch. 1:00.”

  A pause. She imagined him surreptitiously glancing at his wife. “Sounds good. I’ll be there.”

  *

  That morning, before she met David, Camille was doing what she’d done every morning, in different locations, for a year.

  Her butt cheeks were sore from sitting on the concrete planter, and she was worried because the security guard kept glancing at her from behind his desk at the hospital’s employee entrance. She touched the pendant she wore under her blouse, as she often did when she was nervous, then burrowed for the remnants of her bagel in the paper bag she was carrying, pretending to watch the pigeons in the little plaza rather than the stream of nurses and doctors entering Beth Israel Hospital.

  So far she hadn’t seen Nicolas, though that meant little. The Finding spell she’d placed within her pendant that morning echoed faintly around the building, so she was confident he’d been here, and not that long ago. Maybe he wasn’t a doctor or nurse; maybe this wasn’t his duty time; maybe he was working at some other hospital and had just stopped by here; maybe he wasn’t in any of the hospitals at all and had taken on some other identity and profession.

  Maybe her guesses and her research and her spells were simply wrong.

  But he was here in the city. She was certain of that. The spate of recent mysterious deaths—the so-called “Black Fire murders,” both female and male bodies that had been found charred beyond recognition by some unknown heat that had consumed them without touching anything around them—all said so, the Tarot cards said so, her intuition said so. She could feel his involvement.

  Nicolas was here; once she found him, she would kill him.

  The security guard pushed his chair away from the desk. He was staring at her, and she saw him speak briefly into the microphone attached to his uniform, his gaze still on her. Camille gathered up her paper bag and slid down from the planter. She started walking slowly away before the guard could leave the building, pretending that she’d never noticed his attention. She didn’t want to be stopped, not with the Smith & Wesson Ladysmith .38 revolver that was snuggled in her purse. She had a carry permit, but questions could be embarrassing.

  Another wasted morning.

  She hoped her lunch with David wouldn’t be similarly wasted.

  As she walked, she slid her cell phone from its pocket in her purse and hit speed dial 8. The phone rang four times and she was about to give up when she heard the clatter of the receiver and a gruff voice on the other end: “Bob Walters.”

  She’d hired Walters a week ago in semi-frustration at her inability to track down Nicolas. New York City was simply too big, too vast for her.

  She gave Walters copies of the few photographs she had of Nicolas. He looked at them with a raised eyebrow. “These look old,” he said. “Like this one …” A thick forefinger pinned one of the prints to his cluttered desk. A wastebasket seemed to have been upturned over the desk: papers were scattered everywhere, there were at least three Styrofoam coffee cups, each with black sludge at the bottom, and scribbled Post-It notes were stuck on every available inch of his grimy computer monitor’s sides. The investigator himself appeared to have neither slept nor shaved in the last week, and to be running entirely on caffeine. The overstuffed file cabinet behind him looked ready to explode at any moment. “This photo is
WWII vintage—the clothing and everything,” Walters told her. “In fact, that uniform collar looks Nazi. How old is this guy?”

  “He’s in his mid-to-late twenties,” Camille told him. “But he’ll look exactly like that man—at least in the face.”

  “So he’ll look exactly like this guy from over seven decades ago.” He made the statement slowly, with a droll lift of his eyebrows. Walters was a retired police detective who had gone into the PI business, and hard luck and decades on the force had carved deep lines in his stubbled face, made his brown eyes weary with sagging, dark bags underneath, and scrubbed away most of his gray, coarse hair, though it hadn’t managed to touch the sympathy she saw in his eyes. He looked to be somewhere in his late fifties and was nearly a cliché; all he needed was a dangling cigarette and a half-filled tumbler of cheap scotch, and he could have walked out of a Raymond Chandler story. There was a green soul-heart in him, also, deeply buried and small, but pulsing: it was the reason that Camille had felt comfortable with him. Camille wondered what creativity drove it, what aspirations or avocations the man might have that he kept so well masked. “You give me his grandfather’s photo, and you don’t have a name for me, either?”

  She laughed at that. “He changes names like you change your underwear,” Camille said. Walters displayed his false teeth in what looked more like a smirk than a smile.

  “No need to get personal, young lady,” he answered. “Look, I’ll be honest. I’m not exactly cheap, and I think you’re wasting your money with this. You give me a bunch of old photographs and say your guy looks like this, and he might be a doc or might not be, but wherever he is, people are likely to have died.” Walters sighed. “This is New York,” he said. “People die here all the time. And there are more than eight million people in the city. That’s a lot of haystack for your little needle who doesn’t have a name or a location, or even a decent photo.”

  “I know,” she told him. “But he’s here. I’m certain of that, and I need to find him.” Walters didn’t ask why she was so certain, for which she was grateful. She doubted that hearing that the Tarot array she’d laid out every night for the last two months and the spells she’d cast had told her that, or that she was certain that the current serial killings around the city were Nicolas’ doing. “He likes to hurt people, and I’m the only one who can stop him,” she told him instead.

  And I need to find him before he finds me. That’s the race we always have, she thought.

  “And you’re the only one who can stop him.” He sighed. “All right, Ms. Kenny. It’s your dime. I’ll make copies of these and put it out to people I know. They’ll flash it around the hospitals, and I’ll check with my old contacts on the force for any new murders that look strange. And what are you going to do if I find him? How are you planning to stop him?”

  To that question, she wasn’t willing to give Walters an answer. She only smiled. “Find him first,” she said. “Then we’ll see …”

  That conversation had taken place weeks ago. She could imagine Walters now on the other end of her cell phone connection, scowling at the cheap prints on his wall. “Hey, Mr. Walters. This is Camille Kenny. I was just wondering …”

  “Got nothin’ yet,” Walters said, interrupting her. “My people are checking things out, like I said, but …” She could hear his shrug. “It’s not like you gave me a hell of a lot to work with. Let me have another week; I got my folks checking all the hospitals and clinics, as you suggested, and I’m running my contacts with NYPD myself. If this guy’s as dangerous as you seem to think he is, maybe they have something on him. If I still got nothin’ by Monday, then we should talk about whether you still want to throw money at this.”

  “All right,” she told him. “Just let me know right away if you get anything.”

  “Yeah, sure.” His voice told her that he didn’t expect to be calling her any time soon.

  She hit the “End Call” button on her phone; she glanced at the time on the screen before she put it back in her purse alongside the Ladysmith—she had just about enough time to get to Annie’s before David got there. She glanced back; the guard was sitting at his desk behind the windows again, no longer looking at her. She kept going out to the street, and hailed a cab.

  *

  At 12:50, she was worried he wouldn’t show. At 12:55, she was certain of it, and was surprised at the relief she felt. At 1:00, she was certain Fate had intervened and she’d just dodged a huge mistake.

  At 1:02, as she was starting to slide out of the booth, David walked in. He saw her, waved, and she was trapped. He slid into the other side of the booth, placing a camera bag on the scarred, glossy tabletop next to Camille’s laptop and the condiment tray. “Sorry I’m a little late,” he said. “I didn’t get out of the apartment when I thought I would.”

  The wife …

  In the afternoon light shining through Annie’s front window, the lines around his eyes were deepened—Camille decided he must be in his mid 30s, still young enough to have his artistic dreams of fame and glory, old enough to have started thinking that maybe they weren’t going to be realized. But the eyes the wrinkles surrounded were clear and kindly, and his smile came easily when the waitress appeared at their table. She handed David a menu, and glanced at Camille. “The usual?” she asked, and Camille nodded. David closed the menu and slid it over to the waitress.

  “I’ll have the same,” he said. The waitress arched an eyebrow and took the menu. David grinned at Camille. “What am I having?” he asked.

  “You’ll just have to wait to find out, won’t you?” she told him.

  “How are we going to work together if you’re so uncooperative and secretive?”

  “We don’t know that we are going to work together yet, do we?” she answered.

  He spread his hands in mock defeat. She could feel the intensity of his creative energy: the emerald aura of his “soul-heart,” as she’d come to call them. His soul-heart surrounded and filled him, but only the surface was visible. There was far more of that energy still below, untouched.

  She could touch it, if she dared. She could bring it fully into him, so he could tap it. And so she could tap it as well. “You have me there,” David said. “But you liked the photos?”

  Camille nodded. She slid her laptop to the center of the table and opened it. The picture of the homeless man in snow appeared. “Tell me about this one,” Camille said. “Is this a staged shot?”

  David shook his head. “No. It’s from, oh, six or seven years ago. I’d just bought a new digital back for my Hasselblad, giving up my last vestige of using film, and I was out in the new snowfall checking out how well it worked—I thought that the heavy contrast between the snow and the dark buildings would be a good test to see what kind of dynamic range I could get. I saw that guy watching me, and took a couple shots with him in the frame. Turned out to be the best of the bunch, I thought.”

  Camille nodded, pressed a key. The portrait of the woman replaced the snow scene. “I like this one, too,” she said, watching his face carefully. “The expression she has is exquisite.”

  There was melancholy in the flicker of a gaze he gave the photograph. He looked more at the table than the screen. “Yeah,” he said. “Helen.” He looked over at Camille; she noticed him unconsciously twist the ring on his finger. “My wife. I took that last year; it was one of the few times she agreed to sit for me.”

  “Helen doesn’t like being photographed?”

  “Among other things.”

  Camille could feel the undertone in the comment. So there are problems… . She struggled not to let anything show on her face. “Maybe she thinks the camera steals her soul.”

  He gave a chuckle that was wrung dry of amusement. “Maybe. She didn’t seem to mind so much early on, though.” Again, Camille had the sense that there was much being left unsaid, that all it would take was the right word and he’d let the remainder of the bile spill out. She remained silent, waiting. He glanced again at the photograph
, pressing his lips tightly together. “What about you?” he asked. “Are you afraid of a camera stealing your soul?”

  “Not a camera, no.”

  His eyes held hers for a long breath, unblinking, and she felt again that inner, insistent pull toward him, the connection waiting to be made. She let her gaze drop, deliberately. “Then you’re willing to let me photograph you?” he asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “I still don’t know you well enough.”

  He spread his hands wide. “What do you need to know? I can give you references if you’d like. You can check ’em out. I promise I’m legit.”

  She closed the laptop’s cover on Helen’s face. She could feel the hunger already, even though she tried to deny it. The gnawing was not in her stomach, but in her chest and in her head. The green soul-heart … “Why were you in the Bent Calliope last night, David? I’ve never seen you there before.” And I’d have known if you’d been there. The thought made her smile to herself.

  He lifted a shoulder. “I don’t honestly know. I was supposed to meet Helen at a party one of her coworkers was giving, and I was a little early and—frankly—I wasn’t much looking forward to the evening. I saw the bar, and I’ve heard a bit about the Calliope Group of artists in the last year and thought I might drop in to see what’s going on; thought it might be a good place to have a beer before I went to Helen’s party. Maybe two. Or maybe I just wouldn’t go at all …” He stopped. “Sorry,” he said. “You didn’t need to know all of that.”

  “Strange how whenever a woman gets hit on by a married guy, their marriage is always in trouble, or it’s a sham, or they’re separating, or they have an ‘understanding.’ Which one is it for you, David? No, let me guess. I’m going to say it’s the ‘trouble’ gambit.”