Immortal Muse

by Stephen Leigh

  Camille remained silent, stroking Verdette. After a moment, Palento continued, leaning forward in the chair.

  “You don’t exist, either. There really isn’t a Camille Kenny, any more than there was a real Timothy Pierce. You killed two people—in evident self-defense, I know—but then you took the time to decapitate them afterward. I saw things last night that defy explanation. You got one for me?”

  Camille pressed her lips together. Verdette growled softly, glaring at Palento.

  Palento sighed. “You’re not making this easy. At least tell me this much. Is Pierce the guy who killed Bob?”

  “Yes,” Camille said. “He did. And he’s the Black Fire murderer, too. He admitted it to me. Hell, he bragged about killing Mr. Walters.”

  At the last words, a look of pain briefly touched Palento’s eyes. “How?”

  “You saw what he did to me,” Camille answered, lowering the shoulder of her robe to expose the blackened, crisp skin, already flaking away to show pink underneath. “That’s what he did to Mr. Walters and the other victims.”

  “You’re telling me that it’s magic.” Palento sat back in the chair again. She ran her fingers through her short-cut hair. There were dark circles under her eyes; she looked exhausted. “You’re saying it was magic that Pierce used, and magic that you’re still alive and looking far healthier than you have any right to look. I don’t believe in that crap.”

  “Then don’t,” Camille told her. “Would you like some coffee? Mercedes could bring some in.”

  Palento’s gaze flicked toward the kitchen and the sound of dishes. “No, I’m going home and I’m going to collapse. It’s been a long night. Pierce killed Helen Treadway also?”

  “Yes,” Camille answered. “Or rather, he had people do it for him.” It was hard to keep her eyes open; she was also exhausted, and Mercedes’ soul-heart could only nourish her so far. “What happens now?” Camille asked Palento. “Am I going to be charged?” And if I am, then it’s time to leave again … She suspected Palento knew that as well.

  But the detective shook her head. “You weren’t there, remember?” she said. “Neither was your girlfriend. I got your call about David being kidnapped, and you gave me the address. I was almost too late getting there. David had been shot and the place was going up in flames when I dragged him out.” She shrugged. “Lots of chemicals there that didn’t help. There were a couple explosions about the time the squad cars got there. The place is pretty much gone; there isn’t much left for Forensics to dig through.”

  “And the decapitations?”

  “There was obviously another person there we didn’t catch. We’re looking for him—because I have a witness who saw a man running away from the building. I’ve already taken David’s statement; the whole evening is hazy to him, understandably.” Palento rose from the chair, looking down at Camille. Verdette cowered back against Camille’s stomach, her back arched as she hissed up at the detective. “She’s gray, not black,” Palento said.

  “I’m not a witch,” Camille answered. “I’m more a scientist.”

  Palento grunted. “After this,” she said, “I don’t ever expect to hear from you again. If that turns out not to be the case, then I’ll do what I’m paid to do. I’ll look into everything about you, and I will follow what the law tells me to do. I promise you that.”

  “I understand.”

  Palento straightened her jacket and brushed imaginary dandruff from her blouse. She moved toward the door without looking back.

  “Detective Palento,” Camille called out, and the woman turned, her hand on the knob. “Thank you for what you’ve done for me.”

  Palento shrugged. “I didn’t do it for you. I did it for Bob and what he meant to me. You can thank him.”

  She lifted her chin as if in salute, then opened the door.

  *

  “You look like hell.”

  “Oh, yeah? Have you looked in a mirror lately?”

  Camille could feel the hesitation in David even as she stared at him in the hospital bed. His face was still pale, though both eyes were circled in dark, ugly bruises. The stand next to his bed held a quart of saline, plasma, and a morphine demand-drip; alongside, a monitor graphed his pulse, heartbeat, and BP readings. A catheter tube ran out from under the bedsheets to a plastic bag. His body was wrapped in bandages, and he grimaced as he moved his arm to raise the head of the bed slightly. She reached for his soul-heart, but he kept it inside himself, wrapped tightly around a ball of ugly scarlet that might have been his pain. She plucked at it, but she couldn’t get the energy to release.

  “What happened there?” David asked. “I don’t remember much of it after …” He stopped.

  “After I shot you?” Camille ventured. “You know why that happened, don’t you? I didn’t intend to shoot you.”

  He closed his eyes as he took a breath, grimacing. “Yeah,” he said. “I figured that. Speaking of mirrors … Pierce … he showed me my face, how I looked like him and he …” Another pained breath. “… looked like me,” he finished. “Bastard.”

  Camille ventured a smile. She sat on the chair next to his bed. She put her hand on his. “How are you?”

  “Pretty lousy, if you must know. The docs say that I’ll be here awhile, and there’s still some worry.” His eyes closed again, and he took another few breaths before opening cracked lips to speak again. “I’m looking at another surgery or two to get stuff they couldn’t take care of in the emergency operation. They said it’ll be a long recovery.”

  “I can change that for you,” Camille said. She lifted her hand from his and reached into her purse. She took out a small glass tube, placing it on the sheet over his chest where he could see it. A deep blue liquid nestled inside the glass.

  “Is that … ?”

  “Yes,” she told him. “All you have to do is drink it.”

  “Then what?” he asked. His eyes were darker bruises in the center of purple and green swellings. “I become like Pierce? Or like you? Or your damn cat?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered, stung by the vitriol in his response. “There’s no way to know. I’ve told you that. But I do know what else the elixir can do. I know you wouldn’t have to worry about your wound or surgeries, ever again.”

  David’s hands, shaking and trailing the plastic line of the saline, plucked the elixir from his chest. He held it up to the fluorescent lights in the ceiling, staring hard. His eyes closed again, fingers tightening around the glass. Then he was staring at her, and he was holding out the elixir toward her. “Take it,” he said. “I don’t want it.”

  “David …”

  “Take it!” he said loudly, which set him to coughing. She took the test tube as his body was wracked with the coughs. He groaned, pressing the button for the morphine drip. When the spasms stopped, he wiped at his mouth with the sleeve of his hospital gown. “Camille, you should go.”

  His soul-heart was closed, a tight shell inside him that she couldn’t touch. Her mind slid around it as if it were slick ice. “All right,” she said. “I’ll come back again soon. In the meantime, I’ll get the apartment ready for you. Mercedes is there right now; she’s been helping me.” She didn’t trust herself to say any more. She rose from the chair, reaching down to touch his hand again. It was like touching a stone. “I’ll see you soon.”

  “Camille,” David said as she started to leave. “I don’t know how to say this, so I’ll just spit it out. When I come home, I don’t want you to be there.” She stopped. She couldn’t look back. “I don’t hate you,” he continued. “But after all this … I can’t be with you, either. I’m sorry. I can’t.”

  She forced herself to smile as she turned. “I …” she began, then had to start again as her voice betrayed her. “This has been hard on both of us,” she said. “I’ll do whatever you want; I’ll be whatever you want me to be. It’s up to you, David. We’ll talk later, when we can both look at things more objectively.”

  He didn’t answer her. H
is eyes closed. She watched the rise and fall of his chest for several seconds before she left the room.

  EPILOGUE

  SARAH MILES

  THE PERCUSSIVE SOUND of the piano swelled in the front room of the house, the intricate twists and riffles of the melody wafting from the open windows to dance above the lawn in the cool Pennsylvania evening and pirouette between the oak and pines surrounding the house. The woman crouched over the keys—a Bosendorfer concert grand, the lid canted to throw the sound back into the room—was Asian, perhaps in her mid-thirties. Her name was Ami Huang. She played with her eyes closed as her right hand coaxed an intricate counterpoint from the shifting foundation of the block chords she played with her left hand. A faint humming came from her throat, just ahead of the melody, as if she were sounding out the path of the notes before she played them. A video foil was unrolled on top of the piano, transcribing the notes as she played them, an eternal double staff rolling across the screen, dotted with the black spermatozoa of quarter and eighth notes.

  A younger-looking woman sat on a worn leather couch facing the grand piano, a cat purring on her lap. She was red-haired and short, and the blue light of her own video foil touched the ridges of her face as she listened. She called herself Sarah Miles now, and she suddenly gave a cry as her gaze skimmed the text on the screen. Ami’s melody halted in mid-phrase, the video foil recorder on the piano going dark and the chords fading slowly as she rose from the piano bench and came over to sit alongside Sarah.

  She touched Sarah’s shoulder with long, delicate fingers. The cat looked up at her, its ears flattened, and it hissed warningly. Ami drew her hand back. “I’m not going to leave, Verdette, so you might as well stop it,” Ami scolded as the cat leaped to the floor and away. “What’s wrong, love?” she asked, and Sarah shivered as if noticing Ami for the first time. Sarah shook her head; she touched the video foil and it rolled into a tight, small scroll on her lap. The cat glared at them from under the piano.

  “Nothing. It’s nothing …” Sarah brushed at her eyes, her hand searching out a cameo brooch around her neck, dangling at the end of a golden chain. “Don’t stop. Play what you were just playing,” she said to the older woman. “That was a lovely melody.”

  The pianist smiled. “It’s your fault,” she said. “You inspire me, dear. These last several years, well …” Leaning in, she kissed Sarah, a brushing of familiar lips, a gesture between lovers who were well past the initial heat and flame of infatuation. Ami hugged Sarah hard.

  “I want to hear more,” Sarah told her. “Go on; I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”

  Ami kissed her again, then went back to the piano. A minor 7th chord sounded, low and resonant and as thick as liquid chocolate, then the melody began again, chasing the chord into brighter places. The foil on the piano began recording the notation once more. Sarah listened, a faint smile on her face. When Ami’s eyes closed again as she played, Sarah touched the video foil on her lap, and it snapped open. She glanced at the words, blurred by unbidden tears.

  David Treadway, Pulitzer-winning photographer and graphic artist, arguably among the best known of the “Bent Calliope Group” of creative artists, has died at age 83 after a series of debilitating strokes. Treadway is survived by his second wife, Kristin Emerson, who was also a photographer, though not a member of the Bent Calliope Group. Treadway’s career blossomed in the years following the death of his first wife Helen (née Meeks), murdered in an apparent robbery. Her suspected murderer then abducted Treadway and attempted to murder him as well, but died in a fire that followed Treadway’s rescue by a NYC detective.

  Treadway would meet Kristin a few years later, and the couple moved from New York City to New Mexico after their marriage. Treadway is also survived by two children with Kristin: Aaron Treadway, 49, and Michelle Treadway, 46, as well as five grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

  The Bent Calliope Group also included among its members the award-winning magic realist novelist Mercedes Vargas, whose longtime partner Camille Kenny had a small reputation as a landscape painter, though the two of them are far better known for their unexplained disappearance. The group was also renowned for the tragically short-lived sculptor Morris Johnson, whose piece “Vengeance” is displayed at the Rockefeller Sculpture Garden at MoMA.

  David Treadway himself is best remembered for …

  Sarah touched the foil again, this time wiping the obituary.

  “David …” She breathed the name, her fingers scissoring around a sardonyx pendant at her throat.

  The two bare syllables seemed to wrap themselves around the melody and the radiance of Ami’s green heart, lifting away from Sarah and floating out into the night.

  AFTERWORD

  As stated in the Acknowledgments at the beginning of this book, please do not mistake the genuine historical characters for the fictionalized versions I’ve presented here. However, I thought certain readers might find it interesting to know some details of what was “true” in the novel and what was not.

  PERENELLE & NICOLAS FLAMEL: These two characters really did exist, though the evidence that Nicolas was actually an alchemist is conjectural despite being much repeated (heck, even J.K. Rowling mentions the Flamels briefly in the first Harry Potter book). The Flamels were wealthy, and there are records of substantial charitable donations as well as several Parisian buildings owned by Nicolas. However, my speculation that Nicolas made himself richer through buying the houses of Jews who were forced to leave Paris, then reselling them for a profit, is exactly that: speculation … but then so are almost all of the details of his life. The restaurant at rue de Montmorency is a genuine establishment, and the building it inhabits was indeed built for Nicolas Flamel in 1407. However, it postdates Perenelle’s usual death date and was evidently not a house Nicolas built in which to live, but was another of his charitable works—a dwelling for the indigent.

  Étienne Marcel, Provost of Paris, was assassinated in July of 1358, but not by Nicolas Flamel and not at a dinner party—he was killed at the Porte Saint-Antoine when he attempted to open those gates for Charles of Navarre’s men. The Dauphin Charles, later to be King Charles V, entered the city a few days later to complete the downfall of Marcel’s faction.

  The story that Nicolas and Perenelle were alchemists appears to have been started in the 1500s and later—possibly as an explanation for how someone who sold books and served as a scrivener managed to become so wealthy. There is an alchemical book attributed to Nicolas, but the extant copy of that book was published in 1612, centuries after his lifetime. Whether Nicolas and Perenelle really possessed the Book of Abraham the Mage is anyone’s guess. The tale of Nicolas’ tomb being empty is an old one, but again has no definitive proof. I’ve actually viewed Nicolas’ tombstone in the Musée de Cluny in Paris. However, the “arcane alchemical symbols” that many claim are carved on it can also be construed as being straight Christian symbology as well. Want a look without going to Paris? Try here (http://hermetism.free.fr/images/Nicolas Flamel tombe.jpg) or search the web for “Nicolas Flamel tombstone.”

  And, obviously, there is absolutely no proof that Nicolas and Perenelle lived beyond the usual lifespan, nor that they interfered in anyone else’s lives.

  Alas, no paintings or sketches survive from the time to allow us to glimpse what Nicolas and Perenelle might have actually looked like.

  GIANLORENZO BERNINI: There is indeed a bust of Costanza by Gianlorenzo Bernini, which is considered to be one of his masterpieces, though the date of Costanza’s bust varies quite widely: I’ve seen attributions ranging anywhere from as early as 1633 to as late as 1638; I’ve gone with 1636-1637 in the novel. Costanza was Bernini’s mistress, and yes, she was married to one of Bernini’s assistants. When Bernini began to suspect that his brother was also having an affair with Costanza—Bernini supposedly saw him leaving Costanza’s house and kissing her when she was dressed only in her night shift—Bernini hired someone to slash poor Costanza’s face and tried to kill his brother
. For that, his brother was exiled, while Bernini was ordered to pay a fine. He wouldn’t ever pay that fine, since Pope Urban VIII stepped in to save his favorite artist, and forgave the fine provided that Bernini married Caterina Tezio (which is what Nicolas hints at the end of Bernini’s trial). Caterina was the daughter of a prominent lawyer who was also friendly with the pope. Bernini agreed to this arrangement, and he and Caterina would remain married for 34 years and produce 11 children.

  Of the poor disfigured Costanza, very little is recorded after that horrible incident; she vanishes from history.

  If you’d like to see the bust of Costanza, you can find a multitude of images on the web: for instance, here (http://www.wga.hu/frames-e .html?/html/b/bernini/gianlore/sculptur/1630/bonarell.html) or here (http://www.getty.edu/visit/events/mcphee_lecture.html). Or you can go to the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence, Italy, where it’s on display. That would be the best way of all to see it!

  ANTONIO VIVALDI: Anna Giraud (alternate spelling: Giro) was a student of Vivaldi’s in whom he took an intense interest, and Anna and her sister did indeed live with him for many years—the evidence that Vivaldi and Anna were lovers is rather convincing. It was convincing enough, in fact, that the Cardinal-Bishop of Ferrara did refuse Vivaldi permission to enter the city and revoked the musician’s commission to put on operas there. In response, Vivaldi wrote a letter to the Cardinal-Bishop emphatically denying his romantic involvement with Anna; that seems to have ended their public closeness, according to some accounts. Anna and Vivaldi certainly were with each other at various times afterward, but mostly away from Venice.

  The playwright Carlo Goldoni, in whose company Nicolas is found in the novel, is also a historical personage—and the Teatro San Salvatore, where Vivaldi and Anna go to see an opera in the novel, was a genuine theater, is still in use, and is now (interestingly) named the Teatro Goldoni. Goldoni’s words to his companions about Vivaldi and Anna are a paraphrase of a comment he wrote and which has been preserved: “This priest, an excellent violinist but a mediocre composer, has trained Miss Giraud to be a singer. She was young, born in Venice, but the daughter of a French wigmaker. She was not beautiful, though she was elegant, small in stature, with beautiful eyes and a fascinating mouth. She has a small voice, but many languages in which to harangue.” I loved that last line—so wonderfully wicked. And it fits Perenelle, who in this book speaks several languages.