“Yes.”
“Christ, it’s two in the afternoon there. Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t sound too good.”
“Are you back?”
“I’m still in London, but listen, I have some interesting news for you, about Céleste and Leda.”
He listened, couldn’t speak.
“I’ve been doing a little investigating over here,” Amado said.
He waited.
“Ross? You hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, Céleste lived in London for so many years that I thought if I asked around in the right places, I’d find people who knew her. So I did. And I did.”
“Okay.” He was concentrating mightily, trying to comprehend what Amado was saying.
“You’re in for a surprise, my friend. It’s a small thing, but a big thing, too.”
“What is it?”
“Well, Céleste and Sylvie were indeed sisters, it seems. They are indeed part Mexican and part Scot. And I even met a man who had known their mother, Eva. She was an amazing woman—stunning, he said, and as batty as hell.”
“Okay.”
“This man knew Eva when she died. In a car crash, yes, in Switzerland, yes, but that was about ten years ago, not three. Most important, though—and this fellow swears he knew her well enough to know—Eva had only two daughters. He never heard of anyone named Leda.”
Chapter 35
Lying on his back, Ross stared down the length of his naked body to his feet. The top of his feet. He thought of the bottom of Lacan’s feet, the first thing he had seen when he walked into Céleste’s blood-strewn bedroom. The bottom of Lacan’s cold, waxy feet.
He had let his hand go limp, and the telephone dangled from his fingers a few inches from his ear, and he could hear Amado’s voice, far away and tinny: “Ross! Ross . . . Ross!”
Suddenly he sat up and flung the telephone as hard as he could, sending the whole thing clanging across the foot of his bed, jerking the cord out of the wall. He sat there, thickheaded, clear thinking, livid.
He rolled over and got stiffly to his feet. His neck was tight from having slept on it crooked and from having worked for so many long hours on the endless string of maquettes. With great effort he made his way into his bathroom and through the back door to the outdoor shower. He turned on the water and stood there, sullen and aching under the spray.
He didn’t bother to shave. He dressed quickly, and with his hair still wet he went out and got into the Jeep and drove away. His anger did more to clear his head than a dozen cups of coffee. He was furious at the two women for their elaborate deceptions, and he was furious at himself for his own feckless self-deception. He had made it easy for them, and he was aghast at his own stupidity. But most of all he was furious because he still didn’t know what it was all about. Why had he been through what he had just been through?
He didn’t stop at the front of the house on Santa Elena but pulled into the driveway and up the incline to the back of the house and the garage. Céleste’s car was not in the driveway, and the garage door was closed. He jumped out of the Jeep and went around to the side of the garage and looked in the window over the workbench. No car.
He took the steps on the back porch two at a time, then started banging on the back door. He could see the length of the entry hall all the way to the front door. He could see part of the kitchen to his left. Nothing.
Without thinking, he took off his shirt, wrapped it around his fist, broke the glass in the top half of the door, and reached in and turned the dead bolt. He put his shirt on without bothering to button it and went inside.
He didn’t call their names; he just went looking for them. Stalking down the hall, he glanced into the living room, then turned right and started up the stairs. When he got to the head of the stairs he could see down the length of the landing to Céleste’s door. It was open. The bed was made; the room was immaculate: The sun was streaming in from the windows. His heart sank.
He found nothing in the closets, nothing in the bathroom, nothing in the drawers of the chests.
He stood in the middle of the sunny room. The windows were closed, and there was no breeze now to lift the thin curtains. The house reverberated with silence. It was a thing instantly understood. Nothing. He waited. The house creaked. He could smell the oldness of the wood. As he looked out the door of the room, he could see the upper hallway shining, the glint from the brightness where he stood gliding all the way to the landing where the stairs dropped off. The emptiness in the house and the emptiness within him resonated each with the other, and the two voids harmonized.
He stood there a long time.
• • •
He looked into the garage again on his way to the Jeep. A Realtor’s sign was leaning upside down against the wall.
He drove to Fielding’s Real Estate Agency on Romero Canyon Road. The agent he talked to said, no, he didn’t know the residents on Santa Elena had left, but the agency leased that particular summer home on a quarterly basis, and the clients had paid in full in advance. It would have been helpful, he said, to have known they were leaving nearly two weeks before the end of their lease—that was unusual, sure, that they had left without saying anything—but he was sure that their deposit would cover any maintenance problems the agency might encounter.
No, he couldn’t give Ross their home address. That was confidential. With their clientele, well, that was just standard agency practice. Sorry.
He drove home and called Amado in London.
“They just moved away without saying anything?” Amado was shocked.
“Yeah. We’d . . . we’d had a fight,” he lied. “Céleste and I. I hadn’t seen her in a couple of weeks.”
“A serious disagreement,” Amado said cautiously. He didn’t sound convinced.
“Yeah.”
“How did Leda react to that? She was mad to have the sculpture done, wasn’t she? Did she go crazy?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t talk to her either during those weeks. She quit coming, too.”
Jesus, did that make sense? He had to think about it. Yes, that would have worked. He had to make sure his lies would hold together. But why would she have quit coming to their sessions because Ross and Céleste had had a fight? Had Céleste forbidden it? That wouldn’t have happened. You didn’t forbid much to Leda. He panicked, trying to come up with reasons to back up the lie. There was a momentary silence from London. Amado wasn’t going to pursue it. Maybe because the lie was transparent, and he didn’t want to embarrass Ross by putting him on the spot. He didn’t know. But he was just grateful for Amado’s restraint.
“Okay, my friend,” Amado said at last, a sad tone of resignation in his voice. “I’ll see what I can do. It’s a long shot.”
“Sure, I know that.” He was desperate. “But I want to try to find her. I need to.”
“I understand.”
“Don’t bother to call me if nothing turns up. Just let me know if you get something.”
The conversation was cryptic. When the call was over, he played it back in his head. He had been too abrupt. Amado hadn’t bought anything but the truth: that Céleste and Leda had left San Rafael. The rest, well, the rest he knew was bullshit.
He sat at the kitchen table and stared out the screened door to the patio. The bougainvillea was brilliant on the arbor, so bright in the noon sun that he had to squint to look at them.
He couldn’t escape the feeling that Leda hadn’t told him entirely everything about Céleste’s situation. Or that maybe she had even been deceptive about her own situation. After all that had passed between him and Céleste, he couldn’t bring himself to believe that she had been a part of the wild scheme that Leda had described. Or, even if she had been, he couldn’t believe that she would have voluntarily left San Rafael without talking to him. Unless, of course, she was as distressed as Leda had described. Or unless Leda was, in fact, forced to make Céleste’s decisions for her. Even then,
though, why would they have left without even contacting him? One of them, anyway. And what about the sculpture?
And the videotapes . . . what about them, for God’s sake?
He could only surmise that he was going to be blackmailed. If Leda had managed to get her hands on them, wouldn’t she have let him know? But then, why should he believe that? He didn’t even know who the hell she really was. What in God’s name had made him believe her? What had made him trust her?
As it turned out, he had believed both women, each at different times, even when their stories eventually turned into contradictions, even when they both reversed themselves and very likely were lying about each other. Or, worse, if they were in collusion and not lying about each other, but rather were playing out a byzantine plan of coordinated deception, he had even believed them then, too.
Why had he not permitted himself to be forewarned by all these signs during these last strange weeks? When he thought about it, it reminded him of an incident that had happened to him years ago.
He was staying at a friend’s ranch and had walked out into a small pasture to bring in an old saddle horse. It was in the spring, and a thunderstorm was rolling in. The rain caught him while he was still on his way out. When he finally got to the horse in a far corner of the pasture, he was soaked and a wild lightning storm was moving in over the near hills. The horse was waiting for him, standing still in the downpour, watching him. The horse could hear the bridle jangling in his hand, but he was waiting anyway.
Then, as Ross approached the old horse carefully and was within an arm’s reach of him, he felt an inexplicable thrill of menace. His body tingled, there was a sense of excitement in his chest, his wet hair began to crawl and coil on his head. The horse had felt it, too. He threw up his head, his eyes walled in puzzled wonder. But he didn’t bolt; he didn’t run. They looked at each other, waiting. Then there was a sickening explosion.
When Ross woke up he was lying in the mud, his clothes smoking, and he was covered in black, smoldering shreds of horseflesh.
They both had felt it coming, he and the horse, that eerily heightened intoxication preceding the lightning, but neither of them had bolted. Thinking back on it, he realized now that they were held by a disturbing seductiveness that they felt in the wild sensations of that ominous moment before the blast. They were riveted by their own horrible curiosity.
And so it was with those rare days with Céleste and Leda. Maybe he could have turned away from it all, but for some reason he didn’t. Maybe it was a dark curiosity. He couldn’t really explain why he hadn’t. Nor could he explain what had happened.
Chapter 36
The following days didn’t lend themselves to work. The maquettes remained right where they were. He didn’t touch them. He didn’t work on the Beach commission, either. He didn’t work at all.
He milled around the studio, unable to think of anything but Céleste and Leda and the events of the last two months. What in God’s name had those two women tried to do? Or had they already done it? If they had actually intended to get at his money, why had Leda told him about it? Why hadn’t they just gone through with it? Or had Leda been lying about that? If she had been lying, why? And why were they pretending to be sisters? What was the point of it? And who the hell was Leda?
These questions tormented him, apart from the genuine heartache of confronting the possibility that Céleste’s affections might not have been genuine. That was the question he pondered most of all, and which caused him the most agony.
But it was the existence of the videotapes that filled him with dread. As long as Céleste and Leda were in possession of those tapes, they decided whether or not he had a future. And he could imagine that the videotapes would always exist; he would never be free of it. They owned him. But he didn’t have the slightest clue why they wanted to.
A week passed in this way, and then a second, and then a third.
• • •
When the telephone rang he was sitting on a wooden workbench in the kiln shed, chipping away at a small limestone block, carving a cicada. He couldn’t concentrate on anything of significance, but it made him restless not to be using his hands for any extended length of time. Every day, even if only for an hour, he had to do something with his hands; he had to make something. It provided him with a means of continuity, a link between his mind and the reality around him.
He started to ignore the ringing, then decided to go ahead and answer the telephone. He took off the leather apron he was wearing and tossed it down, grabbed a damp rag from the end of the bench, and headed for the front door of the studio, wiping his hands as he went.
The answering machine was already taking the call when he reached the telephone. He picked up the receiver just as the caller was beginning to talk.
“Hello, this is Ross.”
“Mr. Marteau?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Cecil Reisner, San Rafael Community Bank.”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Marteau, you know a Ms. Leda Verret, I believe?”
He hesitated. What the hell was this? Shit, he shouldn’t have hesitated.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and cleared his throat as if something there had caused his hesitation. “Yes, I know her.”
“Well, a couple of months ago Ms. Verret made arrangements with us to call you on this date and notify you that she has left something for you in a safety deposit box here. If you’ll bring some identification with you, I’ll be happy to give you access to the box whenever you want.”
He paused again. He couldn’t help it. The videotapes? She had left him the videotapes?
“You said, that was a couple of months ago?”
“Yes, uh . . .” He seemed to be referring to something in front of him. “As a matter of fact, exactly two months ago.”
He couldn’t be sure, but he thought that was before she had even told him the videotapes existed. It couldn’t be the tapes. Unless . . . Christ . . .
“Thank you,” he said, trying to sound as dispassionate as Mr. Reisner himself. “I’ll probably be down there later in the day.”
“Any time, Mr. Marteau.”
He put down the telephone. The light coming into the studio had gone harsh, sharpening the shadows. He looked at the scarlet cover on the model’s bed. His eyes drifted over to the workbench; Leda’s last maquette was still on the modeling stand, the others were still lined up along the back side of the bench. She had said they looked like insects, beetles, to her. Not to me, he’d said. What do they look like to you? she’d asked. You, he’d said.
• • •
Cecil Reisner wore a dapper navy blue summer wool suit with faint chalk stripes, white shirt, and powder blue silk tie with a cross-woven pyramid pattern. He was probably in his early fifties. Avuncular. A high forehead with thin brown hair. A sharp nose, thin lips. He was a nice guy.
“Ms. Verret was an unusual woman,” he said pleasantly as he pulled forms and seals out of the drawers of his desk. That was all he said about it, and he said it in a pleasant way, without the intention of probing or implying anything. He got Ross’s driver’s license number and recorded it, had him sign something, had him sign something else.
He pulled a key from a tray of keys inside the top lefthand drawer of his desk and gave it to Ross.
“Okay,” he said, standing, and Ross followed him to the back of the bank through several secured doors to a small room where the walls were filled with mahogany-veneered drawers and compartments. “Okay,” he said again. “Two zero seven . . .” He walked along the wall on the right side of the room, “Two zero seven . . . here it is.”
He put his key into the top hole and turned.
“You can put your box on one of those tables over there,” he said, motioning to a couple of stand-up tables, and then he turned and walked out of the room, closing the door behind him.
He opened the mahogany door of the bank drawer using his key in the bottom keyhole. He removed the black metal box f
rom inside. It was light. It actually felt empty. He set it on the nearest of the two tables and looked at it. He should have been able to feel the weight of the videocassettes. He looked at the box a moment before he reached out and lifted its top, which was hinged at the back.
He was stunned to see that the box was empty. At first glance. Then he saw a single slip of paper lying in the bottom, like something forgotten. He saw writing on it. He picked up the slip of paper, straightened it out. He recognized Leda’s handwriting, in blue ink.
He wasn’t dead! And you didn’t even bother to check. You killed him yourself. You burned him alive.
He was stunned at his stupidity. He hadn’t checked to see if Lacan was alive, by God, he really hadn’t. How could he not have checked? But the man had to have been dead. He remembered the darkening, coagulating blood. The wrapped head. And he had seen no movement, no reaction of any kind at being wrestled around, wrapped up, carted, no grunt or gurgle, no gasp or groan. Drugged? Was that it? The man was drugged into a coma?
But he could’ve died. How would Leda have known, really? She might have known he was alive just before he arrived, but a lot of time had passed before he had actually put Lacan into the kiln. And Leda had come nowhere near him. If he had died during that time, she would never have known.
And there was a second jolt: Neither Leda nor Céleste had cautioned him that Lacan might still be alive. They’d let him go ahead and put Lacan in the kiln! And then Leda—had Céleste been involved, too?—as far back as two months ago, had decided to reveal this to him in this particular way, two months into the future from that time. The timing could only have been an act of deliberate cruelty.
Why?
He couldn’t imagine. He could not imagine.
Had Céleste known about the note waiting for him in the bank drawer? He would not believe that. In fact, now he was beginning to think that maybe Leda had been lying about Céleste and the videotapes. Leda’s underlying talent for cruelty that he had seen flare up from time to time in the studio—and now in the premeditated note—made him see such a contorted device as the secret taping as more in keeping with Leda’s character than Céleste’s.
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