The Last Will of Moira Leahy: A Novel

by Therese Walsh

  In the morning, I would walk to Sri Putra's home. One last time.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THE EMPU

  I rose early and dressed in clothes Giovanni would not approve of--khakis and a button-down cotton shirt. I was prepared to defend my comfortable choice when I stepped into the lobby, but I found he'd donned something a little more casual as well: a hat, white wig, wire-rim glasses, plaid skirt, black shawl, and apron. His face looked covered in soot, and he stood beside a broom as he passed gifts to two children.

  "Are you a good witch or a bad witch?" I asked him when the boys, who looked to be about three and five, sat before us to open their presents.

  "I am good, like Santa. You have not heard of Befana?" he asked, and I shook my head. "It is the holiday Epiphany today and we like to please the guests." He mouthed, "My mama."

  I smiled as the older boy ripped off the wrappings to reveal a panettone box. He seemed less than pleased; he sprang up, knocked Giovanni's faux glasses onto the floor, then raced to the bar. "Mama, Mama!" he cried, as his brother continued to work at his tape.

  "Who could not like panettone?" Giovanni said with a frown. "We ran out of knicky knacks two hours ago." He picked up his glasses and settled them back on his face.

  "You're a good man, Giovanni Benedetto Chioli," I said.

  "That is right. A good man." He smoothed his skirt.

  My mood degraded a bit as I walked to meet with the mysterious Sri Putra. He and Ermanno were brothers--half brothers. Were they alike or not? I'd once said, in an attempt to silence my father, that chasing the empu might find me chopped into bits and left in a suitcase. Truth was, I had followed a stranger to a foreign land. Anything could happen. Anything might. I continued on, though I hoped I wasn't treading my own personal plank.

  The familiar flag of Italy slapped back at the wind as I stepped under it and into the apartment building. I pulled the keris from my bag, walked the hall with light steps. There was no movement here, no life. No sound either, until I lifted my hand to knock on Putra's battered door and a thud emanated from the overcast end of the hall. I knew a stairway lurked in the darkness there--knew who used it, too.

  I'd just unsheathed the keris when the door beside me opened. A man stood there. Not Ermanno. In fact, this man couldn't have been more than five feet tall. His face bore deep creases, and he dressed all in black, including that funny hat I'd seen just once before.

  "Good. You are brave," he said with a light, melodic accent. Indonesian.

  "You're really real." I shook my head, tried again. "You're Sri Putra."

  "You are Maeve Leahy." He smiled, and I saw that the lines on his face were forged from these smiles. "I am sorry to miss you before now. Come then. Enter."

  He left the door open, but disappeared back into the room. I stood there as that familiar scent slithered into my nose and mouth, down my spine. What was it?

  "Frankincense," said Sri Putra's voice from within.

  "Excuse me?" The aroma strung me along, until I teetered on the threshold. No sign of Ermanno.

  "The smell is frankincense. You are safe here," he said, and I realized I still held the keris out before me. Was the man psychic? I'd never experienced anything like that outside of my own blood. I lowered the weapon and stepped into the apartment.

  All of my questions, even my apprehensions, vanished when I saw the ruin. The puppets that had charmed me weeks ago now dangled by their necks, their legs ripped off, cut off, burned, their brass tubes bent. Some were strung up by their feet, beheaded altogether. The shelves were emptied, hacked up, and splayed at haphazard splintery angles on the floor. Chimes that had once tinkled beneath the vent were torn down; a single strand hung alone now, never to make music again.

  I walked farther into the room, past walls marked with large red X's, to find the elaborate relief panels had suffered an active war--queens and forest animals defiled, smeared over with something I hoped was only soot. Chopped wooden figurines sat mounded on the floor along with the skinny-pot instrument I couldn't name before--its strings pulled out, its neck broken.

  "You are a musician. Why do you not make music?"

  I rounded on him. "What do you know about me? Why did you go to Betheny and leave that book and the notes and pound nails into my door? What's wrong with you people?"

  "I did not do this." He indicated the wreckage.

  "Then what's wrong with your brother?"

  "Ermanno is broken, so he likes to break." The words felt like a shrug.

  "You accept this?"

  "It is a sorrow, but I am still whole." He folded his hands. "Are you whole, Maeve Leahy, or are you broken?"

  He couldn't know about Moira, though I had the sense he did know, that he knew everything. The idea twined through me like ivy, until I felt choked by it. "I don't know how to answer that," I said, "and even if I did, you haven't answered my questions yet."

  "Come then. Let us speak together."

  I followed him to a nook just beyond the door, where rumpled purple pillows lay scattered on the floor beside several large unlit candles. Natural light filtered in from two adjoining rooms, though the red-X-ed walls were cast in shadow. I peered beyond to a small kitchen where pots hung from the ceiling, a scene strongly reminiscent of Time After Time.

  Feathers lifted from the ground as Sri Putra sat on a cushion. I sat as well and crossed my legs, then sheathed the keris with some reluctance. Around us, several fabric shells lay deflated--slashed and emptied.

  "I have many left to repair," he said. "The table is destroyed. Are you uncomfortable?"

  "I'm fine." I imagined him on his knees, searching for feathers, stuffing them back inside their sleeves and stitching edges together. But I didn't want to feel sorry for Putra just then. I wanted answers.

  "Ask your questions," he said. "I will answer."

  The man had an eerie knack. "Why were you in Betheny?"

  "That is where many dreams took me," he said, "so I went."

  I wouldn't focus on Ermanno and his poisonous behavior, but this much I wanted to know--it would be a test of the empu's forthrightness and my assumptions. "Was your brother in those dreams, too? Was he in Betheny?"

  "Ermanno was there, it is true. I should not have stayed so long with him, but I wanted to know you were the one for the keris."

  This made no sense to me. "How's that your place to say?" I argued. "I won it at an auction. I paid for it."

  "I would have given it to you, but that is how it happened after I brought it there."

  My eyes bugged, kicked open at last. "You brought it to the auction? It was yours? But you bid on it!"

  "I did," he said with a hint of a smile. "I admit I doubted fate. I had to make sure there would be only one who wanted it enough to fight."

  "There was more than one, though," I said. "Your brother wanted it. He still wants it. Why didn't you give it to him?"

  The empu nodded. "I believed that Ermanno understood the keris would choose its fate and that it was not meant for him. He knew that I had seen a woman in my dreams, and he said that he also wanted to see the keris find you. It was because I recognized you at the auction that I let you win."

  "Let me?" He obviously didn't know the power of Irish resolve. "Look," I said, "don't get me wrong. I'm glad I won the keris, but it could just as easily have been anyone else. It was a fluke I even went out that night."

  "I believe you are wrong. There is one meant for this keris. That is you. This at least you must believe."

  "Why must I?"

  "You feel no kinship with it?"

  "Kinship? I admired it, so I wanted it."

  Loved it at first glance.

  "I'm glad I have it," I continued.

  Felt sick when it was lost.

  But these feelings, bound with memory, proved nothing.

  It's changed you.

  "Has it changed you?" he asked, like a shadow sound with the power to stab. "Have you walked a bolder path since the keris found you?" />
  His wording rattled me. "I found it on a table with a bunch of other things people didn't want anymore."

  Like music.

  "I liked it," I said. "I bid on it, I wrote a check for it, I took it home. All actions I controlled."

  "Your mind and actions are always your own with no strings or wires." He indicated the myriad puppets around us, their broken parts useful now only for analogy. "The keris would wish to help you on your true life path and that is all."

  Despite the frown on my face, his smile didn't turn. He pulled several candles close, then lit them one by one until the shadows crept back into the creases of the wall. I noticed for the first time that the corners of the ceiling bore a scattering of sapphire blue stars.

  "So you wanted me to know about the keris," I said. "You left a book for me, and your address in Trastevere, but why not just tell me where I could find you while you were in Betheny?"

  "I left a note for you with the book," he said. "You were to let me know how it went with the keris and ask any questions you might have had. I left the phone number for my hotel."

  "I received only the book."

  "Only?" Sri Putra glanced at an empty cushion shell and blew out the match. I knew his thoughts: Ermanno had taken the note, buying himself time and ensuring my confusion. I had the feeling that Sri Putra had known little to nothing about his brother's machinations. Time for illumination.

  "This is everything I have." I pulled out seven notes: six from him and one from Ermanno. I set those down for him to see, then handed him an eighth--the note with his address that Ermanno had altered, the one that had lured me here. Sri Putra almost seemed to age as he studied the defiled invitation, then the extra note that had led me to the jazz bar.

  "This went further than I knew," he said. "I am sorry. My mind has been elsewhere."

  The X-marked walls featured prominently in my peripheral vision, and I remembered the illness he'd been attending to. Had someone died?

  "Ermanno's mother died."

  "I'm sorry for your loss," I mumbled automatically, and he inclined his head.

  "I have stayed beside her these last days as she slept the deepest sleep of near death. Her sickness began a year ago, and so I moved here to be close. The keris came to me shortly after that." He focused on a flame. "Perhaps I should not have stayed. Ermanno was intrigued by the keris and my way of finding you. I should not have told him as much as I did or let him travel with me, but I still have guilt."

  "Guilt?"

  He regarded me. "Let us speak more of Ermanno later," he said. "Focus now on what is in your hands. Your fate. Your questions."

  My fingers contracted around the keris in my lap. "Why did you travel all the way from Rome to a little upstate New York town over a dream and a keris?"

  "Why have you come so far to talk about it?" he countered.

  "I lost my mind," I said, then, "My father forced me." Still, another response rose above the others.

  Avventura.

  Yes, I'd had that during my trip to Rome. I'd played an instrument again and reconnected with my music. I'd accepted love. I'd taken a picture of a woman hanging laundry on a line.

  I flashed to a memory of Moira and me in our boat, young and dressed as pirates, as sure of our futures as my grip on a keris. Maybe I'd wanted unwavering confidence again, to be Alvilda for a while or just have the balls Ian used to say I had. Maybe that's why I'd bought the keris and come to Rome.

  "I don't know why I came," I said.

  He studied me with an intensity I thought only Noel possessed. "What have you learned? Consider your journey to know the will of the keris. Did you bow to the truth, the past, the present?"

  His words struck hard, reverberated through me like a gong.

  Truth: the Mouth of Truth, where I'd acknowledged some of my core self.

  Past: the Etruscan Museum, and Borghese Gallery and the rape statue, where I'd remembered what I'd lost.

  Present: Il Sotto Abbasso, where I'd reconnected with a piece of my soul, my music.

  So what was the Museum of Purgatory? Moira's present? Her future? Mine?

  It's what you fear. All of it.

  "What do you fear?" he asked.

  I drew a sharp breath. How could he, this small man, this outsider, probe with such precision through layers of skin and muscle and bone, to see the secrets lodged inside of me? How could he know what my experience had been? There'd only been one who could ever do that, only one who ever should.

  "I didn't come here to talk about me," I said, angry now. "I want to know about the keris and its luks. I want to know what it was made for, because I'm curious. More than anything, I want to understand why you came to Betheny and sold the blade to George Lansing, and why you and your brother followed me. I want to know why you left those notes for me here in Trastevere, and how you knew I'd come. And I don't want to hear anything other than fact and truth."

  Water dripped somewhere, magnified in the silence. Putra's black eyes seemed to spark a little in the candlelight. "I have explained myself for much of my life, and for this I grow weary. I am Putra. What has been has been. What will come will come. You would like truth, but only truth you understand."

  "That's wrong. That's not how it is."

  It's not how it used to be.

  "You are afraid to trust in fate, as most are," he said.

  "I'm not afraid. I just choose not to believe in things that don't exist. Santa Claus. The tooth fairy. Angels. Fate." How could anyone believe in such a concept when terror could rise with the flash of one black wing, one raging storm? "I don't understand why anyone would trust so blindly."

  He bunched his dark lips. "If I did not trust, if I did not listen to fate and the will of the metal, I would make a poor empu. This gift of listening came from my father and his father before him, back hundreds of years."

  "Listen to metal, to iron and steel and pieces of meteors?" The whole thing sounded crazy.

  "Many think as you do. Many no longer believe in my work or the keris. But this I know: Sometimes you have to step beyond sense to follow instinct."

  Eling.

  The word slapped out at me. I remembered with painful clarity the connection I once shared with Moira. Knowing her feelings and sometimes her thoughts. Flying high on life because the sense of her bolstered me like a brace to bone.

  Eling.

  I thought of my twin in a hospital bed in Maine, sustained, somehow, by her own breath. The truth of why beyond me.

  Eling.

  Music surged through me, silvery and serene. I closed my eyes and saw Moira and me dancing on the beach in Castine, our hands clasped and bodies tuned to the wind. My mouth watered as I tasted notes, as memory spun light and joy from the shadowed seams of my mind.

  Eling.

  Who was I to say what was true for other people, to define their experience as real or holy or freakish or anything else? Maybe Putra heard the will of the metal the way I used to hear the will of music on the air. Maybe I'd become closed to possibility. Closed the way my mother always had been.

  I opened my eyes, looked again at the scatter of feathers around us, the stars on the ceiling, Sri Putra's piercing gaze. "I'm sorry, Empu Putra," I said, and lay the keris between us.

  "You understand."

  My lips curled in reluctant humor. "Not everything in life can be measured or accounted for by the five known senses."

  "Good. We have much to talk about."

  EMPU PUTRA BROUGHT out a tray and set it on the floor between us. I added two slices of ginger to a plain white mug of tea and then suspended my inclination for disbelief as he told his improbable tale.

  The will of the keris and its desire for a journey had grown over many months, he said. He meditated over the pull he felt, and dreamed the name Betheny. At first he thought this referred to a woman the keris sought, and then he looked through the Third Eye--his name for the hole in the blade--and saw Betheny, New York, on a map.

  "The keris had needs
that I felt"--he clasped his arms over his chest and hit his hands against his shoulders twice--"every day. I knew I had to go."

  He used the Third Eye again and found the auction house, then he gave the keris to George Lansing to sell. This explained George's exasperation over Putra's competitive bidding that night.

  "You took a lot of risks," I said.

  "To me they were not risks." He dragged four additional unlit candles close to us and pulled out his matchbook. "I wanted to speak with you after the sale, but I could not find you. My brother learned your name and that you worked at the university from a woman at the auction house. I left the book, my business card, and the note."

  A card and a note I'd never received. Ermanno again. But I wouldn't be diverted. "That book left more questions than answers."

  He struck a match, and his smile glowed in its light. "I knew this. I hoped you would call to speak of the kern. I understand now why you did not." He lit the remaining wicks. Yellow light danced over the walls and turned the red Xs orange.

  "You left a note for me about eling." Remember. "Why?"

  "I knew the keris would need you open to affect you. I thought this a good clue. I thought everything would work, until one day I went to a store and found you."

  "Time After Time? You didn't follow me there?"

  "No," he said. "I thought it was kismet, and that I was led there because you were going to sell the keris. I'd felt certain you were the one, but that day I wondered if you might be a holder as I had been. After all I had done and believed to be true, I was curious. Later, I met the man from that store and learned you had kept the keris. He said he knew you. I asked him to contact me if you ever did sell him the keris. We heard earlier that day that Ermanno's mother had grown sicker and we were needed." Emergenza. "I wrote a last message for you and we left."

  I fingered the note Ermanno had tampered with--Visit with me in the New Year--and this time couldn't hold back my tongue. "Your brother's less subtle than you are."

  "He does not trust fate. And he was not ready to leave."

  "Why?"

  "Ermanno had a strong desire as a boy in Java to gain our father's attention and acceptance. He was very young when I became an empu, and he spoke often of becoming one of us. My father would not hear of this; he called Ermanno ora pati Jawa--half a Javanese."