A Killer's Guide to Good Works

by Shelley Costa

  Glancing at Val, he asked, “Ready?” When she nodded, he began to read it slowly. In the warmth and quiet of Adrian’s apartment, his voice sounded beautiful to her, the two-thousand-year-old words floating all around them. As current as the smell of an extremely fine passel of wings or her very last heartbeat.

  At that moment Val could believe that everything around her throbbed—the heat from the gas fire, the Gershwin turned down low, the translated words that push and flee across centuries, just out of grasp. And then she was puzzled. “‘Among the olive trees of Gat Smanim’?”

  He looked over at her. “‘Gethsemane.’ Same in yours?”

  “Yes…” Val put her head in her hands, trying to work it out. “An important place name, so if the object of a new translation is to—” She stopped, feeling her way along.

  “Obscure the true meaning?” offered Bale.

  “Or,” with a sigh, she met his look, “to mislead.”

  “Let’s hold off deciding that right now.”

  “I agree.”

  “Maybe it’s all skin and sauce.”

  She smiled. “Ah, but even skin and sauce is—”

  “—still wings.”

  “Exactly. The fact that our translator did not monkey with an important place name suggests—” She drummed her fork on the glass-topped table.

  Bale suddenly said, “Gat Smanim was too recognizable to change. Do you know what I’m saying?”

  “Anyone who had seen the original translation in that secret drawer—Saul Bensoussan, for instance—would see right away if a place name as familiar across several cultures as Gat Smanim had been changed or deliberately mistranslated.”

  “Still, in the end,” Bale leaned back on his elbow, “in the end, maybe the setting wasn’t the most important thing about this text.” He gently waved Bensoussan’s paper.

  “Ah,” said Val, brandishing half a dill pickle, “then what is?”

  Bale picked up where he had left off but he didn’t get very far when Val caught a change between the original translation and the substitute. “Hold up, Antony, right there. What was that last word, ‘what binds his—’”

  “Feet. ‘What binds his feet.’”

  She met his look. “I’ve got ‘faith.’ ‘What binds his faith.’” She put a check next to the word. Bale continued to read, but Val soon stopped him again. “Nope, hold up. I’ve got ‘what crowns his heart.’ Heart, not head.” She jotted another check. “And tell me again, what have you got after ‘the way to life everlasting?’”

  Bale took a quick look. “‘Among the world of living men.’”

  “The new translation has ‘after the world of living men.’”

  They sipped their drinks silently for a minute. Then Bale set his down and turned the glass reflectively. “It’s very different, isn’t it? Changing only one word—”

  “—especially if it kind of sounds like the original—”

  “—makes a big difference. Here’s how the first section reads in the original translation that Bensoussan found in the box.” Bale read: “‘…the Son of God in this night among the olive trees of Gat Smanim. For he says what binds his feet, what pierces his flesh, what crowns his head are the way to life everlasting among the world of living men. So are body and soul healed, and death must find another, one who sees not. He who hungers for what is hidden in the divine must begin with what binds his feet, what pierces his flesh, and what crowns his head.’”

  Bale looked at her and smiled. “You’re the editor, Val. What do you make of the changes?” He handed her the sheet, and she set them side by side on the table.

  After studying both translations for a few minutes, Val sat back. “It’s the same translator at work, right? Same handwriting. Most likely Everett himself.” She lifted the sheet Saul Bensoussan had given them. “You know, Antony, there’s something about the original that reads like—like—a formula for something. It’s pretty concrete. What crowns the head, what binds the feet, what pierces the flesh.”

  Bale was watching her closely. “Like a set of instructions.”

  “Exactly.” Val gave a little laugh. “A recipe. If you do x, then y will happen.”

  “I see what you mean. But in the substitution, the translator changes just enough to make it…fail.”

  Val shook out more chips. “What binds his faith? Pretty words, but now it’s an abstraction. Same with ‘crowns his heart.’ There’s just enough figurative language that the basic formula…”

  “In the event anyone comes across it—”

  “…is utterly lost. And look at the small but important changes he made in the time frame.”

  “Where?” Bale reached for both sheets.

  “Wherever the original translation says ‘among’ the world of living men, or words to that effect, the substitution uses the word ‘after.’ It becomes ‘after the world of living men.’”

  Bale whistled softly. “It’s nothing less than the difference,” he helped himself to some chips, “between the here and the hereafter.”

  “After the world of living men, I think,” she clapped a hand on her chest, “adds color commentary to—what?—a heaven we’ve already heard about…and can never prove.” Then she added, “Or disprove.”

  “Is it the kind of color commentary someone’s willing to kill for?”

  In a way, Val realized, that question was at the heart of what she and Bale were trying to figure out. “I don’t think so.” She reached across the table and found one single word she tapped twice with the tip of her fingernail. “Behold. One final change.”

  “Let’s see.” Bale leaned in, his dark head turning from one sheet to the other. “Secret and sacred,” he said finally, his eyes drifting to the small and steady fire.

  “In the original, the instructions—if we want to call it that—carry a warning, right? This is a ‘secret’ inheritance. But in the substitute it’s become a ‘sacred’ inheritance. Here again, the true word has been replaced with one that sounds very much like it, but the point is completely different. A ‘sacred’ inheritance tells us we should treat it with respect.”

  “What crowns our heart and binds our faith,” said Bale wryly.

  She nodded slowly. “But a ‘secret’ inheritance warns us that whatever the formula is promising may not come to pass if—”

  Bale pushed away the sheets, suddenly full. “If we don’t kill to keep it a secret.”

  They finished the meal in silence, at one point Bale disappearing into Adrian’s kitchen and returning with a bottle of Prosecco. Something was needed, thought Val, who had felt herself disappearing into the disturbing translations from the Morgan Library, and it might as well be some wine. Along with the sexy, soaring notes she always counted on Gershwin for—pulled from those recesses she had always felt she shared with him. What crowns the heart, for Val, studying the blot of flames through the glass of sparkling Italian white wine, suddenly seemed like the better choice for translation…even if not the accurate one. It translated Val, that much she knew. No formula, no how-to with a translated fragment that to her editorial ear sounded self-consciously prophetic.

  Over a single glass each of the Prosecco—leave it to Adrian to buy the finest—she and Bale spoke a little about the memorial service the next morning. And what in the original translation certainly sounded like the need for the Crown of Thorns. And the goal to get the Hebrew scrap translated as soon as possible. A comfortable little string of afterthoughts, at day’s end, the way couples do as they tug off socks and set their alarms in the low light.

  The fire was low, the wine was low, the expectation was low. As she slipped on the white jacket for the short cab ride back to her apartment, she wondered what Bale did when the evening ends with an offer to stay the night. If it ever did. When she realized her cheeks were burning, she concentrated suddenly on fussing with the belt tha
t was proving to be a more complicated thing than she remembered. While she fumbled with it, damn twisted thing, Val reminded herself that the man who was watching her inscrutably, with his arms folded, barefoot, in his gray pants and plain white shirt, had a very full life elsewhere. Quite elsewhere, when it came right down to it, in every possible way. He had duties. And devotions. And genuflections. And mortification of the flesh, for all she knew. Whatever those were. He had chosen a life that contained a very different kind of love. Finally, Val made a frustrated noise at the belt and just let it hang there.

  His voice low, Adrian’s brother was telling her how she could come back to Adrian’s anytime over the rest of the month to take whatever she liked. While he spoke, she stuffed her hands in the pockets of the jacket, her left hand closing around a small sharp object she pulled out. She found herself looking down at a silver and vermilion bottle cap—Olde Bandylegs Mild Caper—as he finished by saying he’d be back in a month to dispose of everything else. In the meantime, Val should help herself.

  “But what I liked best,” she blurted to Bale, “isn’t even here.”

  In that second, as she looked away to keep herself from crying about her murdered friend, she caught a look in his eyes. He was disappointed somehow. In those intelligent brown eyes, she saw something very much like regret.

  26

  In the Jasper and Eleanora Witt room at the Coleman-Witt Museum, where French doors led out to a flagstone patio and garden with only the daffodils showing, Bale was alone in the receiving line. The memorial service for Adrian had lasted about an hour, and the Witt Ballroom—which was how a keyed-up Eva Toscano had referred to it—had drawn about forty of Adrian’s friends and co-workers. Bale, dressed in a charcoal gray suit and white shirt open at the neck, had officiated.

  At staggering expense two years ago, Adrian had told Val, the Witts had footed the bill for renovations to the west building that resulted in the ballroom with its wall of long windows, a ceiling that got bumped up two stories, a state-of-the-art sound system, and hardwood flooring with tasteful strips of Macassar ebony. Built-in caches had been added to the room at elegant intervals, where artifacts from the Coleman-Witt’s permanent collection were rotated. In honor of Adrian’s career, Toscano had filled the caches with the Sumerian pieces Adrian had acquired.

  The cool April morning sunlight was slanting low through the windows, and Val heaved a sigh, pushed herself out of the trim brown leather chair, and walked into the brightest patch. The sound system was on an endless loop of a playlist Antony had chosen from Adrian’s favorite music. Everything from the Rondo of Beethoven’s “Emperor Concerto” to Norah Jones breathily singing “Don’t Know Why.” Val gave Bale a lot of credit for avoiding any psalms or excerpts from Ecclesiastes, because Adrian had no use for them, and instead he and Eva Toscano and Val offered reminiscences. Then she read aloud what she knew had been Adrian Bale’s favorite poem, “Among School Children,” by Yeats.

  For Adrian, the final lines, which were actually provocative questions, had always seemed to Val like they held the answer to every obscure thing in their lives, if only they could answer them. O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer, are you the leaf, the blossom, or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, how can we know the dancer from the dance? Through drunken and disappointing dates, through sober and soaring academic achievements, these were always Adrian’s questions. With enough wine in them, sometimes they would make irreverent stabs at answering the questions. With enough wine in them, as long as Val and Adrian were together, sometimes they almost let the questions go forever unanswered. But never quite.

  Val had read the poem without a stumble, without a podium, standing there alone in the center of the ballroom in her navy blue jersey dress and matching heels, her toes touching a beautiful strip of ebony. Then she folded and re-folded the paper, and from among the mourners, her eyes found Bale watching her from the French doors, held slightly open with a reproduction doorstop in the likeness of an Etruscan bull. Nobody else’s eyes gave anything away, and maybe the Yeats poem seemed like a peculiar choice to the others. Funerals were the time and place for platitudes—maybe the one time and place where easy and familiar reassurances were craved. She’s in a better place. She’s with Jesus now. She’s out of pain. We’ll see her again someday. In the face of all those utterances that Bale was no doubt fielding—along with handshakes and fleeting kisses—from the others, Val would always choose the Yeats. She smiled at the thought that maybe Bale would too.

  The crowd was thinning, some flowing out into the garden to have coffee and chocolate croissants Toscano had ordered, knowing it was Adrian’s favorite breakfast. Others moved gravely toward the rack holding the coats by the doors leading back into the lobby. Val understood how even the smallest gesture meant something when they were all, all of them still on the better side of the grave. Coats got stroked, arms got held, steps got measured. Maybe murder didn’t make much of a difference when it all looked like death in the end.

  To Val, alone again in the sunlit center of this small ballroom, where she could see in the dazzling light beautiful variations in the tones of the ebony strips, the memorial service was adequate. For that one hour, she had been able to set aside the pain and mystery of Adrian’s death. But even now she was starting to feel it all creep back, making her poor skin crawl.

  Are you the leaf, the blossom, or the bole?

  What was she supposed to think about what had happened to her best friend?

  In a corner of the room, Toscano was heading for the patio with the remaining two mourners, as the endless loop was coming to the final breathless chords of “The Sounds of Silence.” Bale came up to her, his suit jacket over his shoulder. They stood apart, silent, no one knowing any better than the two of them that no funeral for Adrian could ever be more than just adequate. For a second, he sighed and looked away. Her arms hung at her sides, restless. She felt insubstantial in a high-ceilinged room where grief hung like humidity. Suddenly the bold discordant sounds of “España Cañi” pierced the air—Adrian’s choice for the paso doble, her favorite ballroom dance that she had taught Val over two sessions at Swing 46—and Bale strode to the closest chair, where he slung his jacket.

  No sooner had he rolled up his sleeves than he grabbed Val around her waist and she gasped a small laugh, and together they danced the four fast, turning two-steps of the paso doble. After the rapid hip-swinging chassé in each other’s arms, she spun away from him, then waited for him to spin up to her and pull her back into his arms. Then Bale passed Val behind him, a matador and his cape, and lifted her over his extended leg. Her hands clutching her skirt high over her hips, she made a feint, he struck a pose.

  When the music slowed, so did they, and she arched her back against his hand as Bale danced her backwards in an elegant turning two-step across the ballroom floor, casting all thoughts of murder away from them. Val felt as though she was living inside the music, her feet lighter than she remembered, and that she was something other than terrestrial—she was pulse and air and a flutter of beautiful brass notes.

  Val paused briefly, her back up close to Bale, her right leg overstepping his own, and they danced the chassé just far enough apart they could still add the flourish of a drag, and grab hold of each other’s hands. He spun her past him, and at the final notes, she came to a stop and arched her back, her arms bent at the shoulders. Very slowly, he extended a hand to her, as if he were making one last remark in what had been the conversation of paso doble. Without a word, Val knew they had danced it for Adrian.

  How can we know the dancer from the dance?

  27

  Avital Korngold, of Avital Korngold Situations, was torn between eating her pizza, addressing the Hebrew set out in front of her, and describing the poor personal hygiene of her social studies teacher. When Val called to suggest dinner, the girl chose Noi Due Kosher Café on W. 69th Street, east of Broadway. “Nice littl
e Italian place,” she had added in the offhand manner cultivated by thirteen-year-old girls. “I think you’ll like it. But let’s get there early,” she added, with exuberant weariness, “Noi Due is small and the only casual eatery that is also kosher on,” here Val heard the girl on the phone suck in a breath then blurt, “the entire Upper West Side,” as though the size and sweep of that neighborhood rivaled the planet Jupiter. They agreed on five p.m., and Val called Bale and gave him the address.

  Probably the last thing Adrian’s brother wanted to hear that day was a dinner plan that took him half a dozen blocks from the scene of her murder. But he was uncomplaining and agreed to meet that renowned Master of Situations, Avital Korngold, anywhere her heart desired. Besides, Italian was—by him—the best comfort food in the world. He said he’d come straight from the two-hour daily contemplative time observed by the Carmelites, and Val was reminded of how very different his life was from hers. When he added, “I manage to pack all my contemplation into about forty-five minutes,” she laughed and found she felt better.

  That afternoon, after clocking some serious time at work with back-to-back meetings, Val got an email from James Killian, who had attached his proposal for a new book, tentatively titled, Babes in Brewland: Sex, Intrigue, and the Almighty Buck Among the World’s Craft Beer Makers. Offhand, thought Val, clicking quickly through the fifteen page proposal—how does Killian manage to generate something that quickly?—it caught her interest. At any rate, more than Plumb Lines, his tell-all about the Excretory Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. What famous movie star had a toilet seat covered in leopard fur? What famous rap star had toilet paper made in the image of the Confederate flag?