A Trip to the Stars (58 page)

I nodded. “Me.”

Something in my voice must have told him I wasn’t a crackpot, or maybe he just wanted to get rid of me. Looking me in the eye, he said, “You have to go downtown for that,” and jotted down the address of the Missing Persons Bureau in lower Manhattan.

The bureau happened to be open on a Sunday, and after I’d answered a slew of questions and filled out some forms, a plainclothes detective sat me at a bare table in an empty room and placed a manila folder before me. When I saw the date on which my missing persons report had been filed, December 17, 1965, I felt the same mixture of astonishment and emptiness that had overwhelmed me that same day when, newly arrived in Las Vegas, I rode a bus to the County Clerk’s office to check my birth certificate and confirm that my name was Enzo Samax. Now I was reading about the disappearance of one Loren Haris, age ten, last seen at the Herschel Planetarium on River Avenue and Water Street on December 16, 1965, at 3:10
P.M
. Just seeing my old name on the tab of the folder had given me a shock. Over the next hour I experienced the impact of Loren Haris’s disappearance almost as if he were another person. But chilling as that was, it could not have compared with what Alma must have felt over the course of those painful, drawn-out days twelve years earlier—and for how long afterward, I asked myself.

That she was beside herself with fear, panic-stricken, was clear from her initial statement, made to a pair of detectives named Kinor and Turel. This document—six typed, single-spaced pages on onion skin—covered everything Alma and I had done and everyone with whom she recalled our having had contact on the sixteenth, from the time we left the house in Brooklyn to the moment she last laid eyes on me at the planetarium. This was followed by a blow-by-blow account of the frantic hour she spent scouring the planetarium’s theater and lobby, its anterooms of exhibits, its corridors and men’s rooms, and then the surrounding streets. Interspersed throughout were short, often fragmented digressions—how I had come to live
with her mother, the nature of her life in Boston—intended to provide the cops with pertinent bits of her history and mine. All of it was excruciating for me to read. Even in the clipped, dictated prose transcribed by the police, her terrible grief and helplessness were palpable, made all the more heart-wrenching to me finally by the detectives’ obvious skepticism. In their notes accompanying her statement I was stunned to discover that from very early on they simply didn’t believe her story. In his cramped script Detective Kinor ventured ominously that she might be a drug user. Or the victim of some trauma, weaving hysterical tales. For a brief time, the detectives even suspected her of foul play: supposedly driven to desperation by the sudden pressures foisted upon her as my guardian, she had bumped me off. Next they embraced some sort of Huck Finn theory: a wild, rootless boy with tragic family circumstances—my grandmother dead, Alma (by her own admission) a virtual stranger, unprovided for financially—I’d simply upped and run away.

When the cops finally did accept Alma’s story of my abduction, still with a strong dose of skepticism, their investigation immediately hit a wall. In fact, they got nowhere at all. There were simply no leads, they insisted in their own report. No witnesses, no ransom demand, no trail to follow. The F.B.I. was called in, to no avail, though my description was dispatched to police departments nationwide a month after my disappearance: five feet tall, 105 pounds, brown hair, gray eyes, wearing a navy pea coat, black watch cap, and plaid scarf; distinguishing features: my bent right index finger, broken in the car accident outside Pittsburgh, and a birthmark under my left arm. (And how had Alma known about the latter, I wondered.) The F.B.I. flirted with the notion I had been the victim of a sexual predator who had murdered two other children in New York that winter and was still at large. They questioned some pedophiles recently paroled from New York prisons. For their part, the NYPD interrogated my schoolteacher, the school nurse, and several of the neighbors, still trying to determine if I had it in me to take to the road on my own. Why I would have done so from a planetarium, without even a change of clothes, they never addressed.

Three months later, both these investigations slowed to a crawl. Obviously frustrated, Alma then hired a private detective and he quickly dug up a witness the police and F.B.I. had missed: an elderly
woman who was the cashier in the gift shop near the exit Ivy had taken me through. Blind in one eye, this woman had seen a young woman, dressed exactly like Alma and fitting her physical description, leading a boy fitting my description, out onto the sidewalk. That clinched it for the police, who, with little appetite for the case from the first, zipped right back to their hunch that Alma was either a hysteric or a wily criminal with tortuous motives. And despite the fact that I was still physically gone and unaccounted for, the police at that point relegated the case to “inactive” status, effectively ending their investigation. They did keep an eye on Alma, unknown to her, and Detective Kinor noted near the end of my file that she had left New York under rather suspicious circumstances: in the middle of the night on New Year’s Eve, 1966, in zero-degree weather. That was the last they ever saw or heard of her.

And so, in the improbable position of reading my own missing persons report, I learned not only the immediate torments Alma had suffered after my abduction, but even more devastating, the fact that after a torturous year spent searching for me, she had not returned to school, which I knew had been her anchor, the place where she lodged all her hopes after much personal turmoil. Instead she had left town and dropped out of sight, the entire course of her life altered—like my own life, but not so benignly, I was sure. I returned my file to the officer on duty and inquired about the two detectives, Turel and Kinor; the former was dead, he informed me, and the latter had retired—to Arizona, he thought, but wasn’t sure.

I was exhausted at that point, but so agitated by what I had just read that instead of returning to my hotel, I took a taxi up to the address I had possessed from the first but been saving for last. Everything I had been holding in that week—my ugly encounter with Ivy outside The Aladdin, my sudden return to my grandmother’s house, hearing Alma’s voice across the years in those police reports—rose up in me when I caught sight of the large white brick building my taxi was approaching. We had turned into the same narrow street Ivy and Nestor had sped down in the blue sedan when they took me to Samax. Now as then, my palms were sweating with trepidation, and when we pulled up at the curb moments later, my chest began shaking with suppressed sobs and tears welled up in my eyes.

The building was tucked into a forgotten corner of an industrial zone near the Harlem River. Mountains of rubble filled the vacant lots around it. A rooftop spotlight directed down the building’s side flickered badly, casting a flashing ellipse. With darkness descending, the moon appeared through the clouds and I heard a pack of dogs baying nearby. The streetlights blinked on, their powdery silver rays pooling on the pavement.

Now even the smells of that long-ago December day—the dry stinging snow, Ivy’s paralyzing perfume with the scent of Easter lilies, the smoke of Nestor’s cigarette—had come back to me, and I started crying silently. My driver peered over his shoulder without curiosity, awaiting instructions. My emotions did not engage him; though I could not see his eyes, shaded beneath his cap, it was clear he was nervous and just wanted to get out of there. He hadn’t expected the address I gave him when he picked me up near City Hall, and now that we had arrived at it, he wasn’t pleased. I told him I wanted him to wait, and he thrust his upturned hand through the sliding panel in the security wall atop the front seat, wiggling his index finger. To have him wait in that neighborhood was going to cost me.

He had a point. We seemed to be at the epicenter of a wasteland. In the last decade, this entire neighborhood had deteriorated. While I remembered the buildings in the surrounding streets as rundown, they were now decimated—windowless, roofless, with heaps of rubbish pouring from their doors. Even taking the passage of time into consideration, I couldn’t believe Samax had thought this would be a good location for a museum of rare collectibles. And the real estate outfit to which he had sold the building appeared to have done nothing with it. The building looked abandoned again, and even more neglected. The caged windows were still sealed and dirty, the doors at the loading zone were padlocked, and the sign over the entrance was now so corroded that even those few letters that had formerly been legible—
CHINE
—were reduced to a single faded
E
. Getting out my handkerchief, I tried to pull myself together there on the sidewalk. It had never been easy for me to cry, and here I had let myself go twice within a few days’ time, first with Auro in his dressing room, and now in this place. Sitting alone for half the afternoon in that airless room at police headquarters, reading those reports, had sent me spinning far
inside myself, until I felt all twisted up, vividly remembering the fear that gripped me when Ivy dragged me into that building.

The fare meter read twenty-nine dollars and was still running when I stepped from the taxi. I took out my wallet and offered the driver a crisp fifty-dollar bill. “And another of those when I get back,” I said. “That should cover the ride downtown, too. I’ll also need to borrow a flashlight, if you’ve got one, and a screwdriver.”

The driver pondered this offer, his eyes still shaded beneath the brim of his cap. “You ain’t going to do anything illegal, are you?”

I shook my head. “And I’ll only be a few minutes.”

He looked me up and down suspiciously, assessing the value of my leather jacket, two-tone cowboy boots, and the onyx ring glinting on my finger. “For the tools, the other fifty now,” he said finally.

My heart was thumping when I approached the metal door. Its lock was so old and rusted that I was able to jimmy it easily. As the door swung open, I was greeted by a rush of stale air. The interior, swirling with cold dust, was as dark as I remembered it, and I could hear the wind howling in a distant shaftway. The scuttling of rats, too, that preceded the tunnel of light my flashlight cut through the blackness. I picked my way down the only corridor unblocked by boxes and rubbish, and at the end of it found myself before another door. Pushing it open, I stepped onto a narrow balcony and felt a vast darkness yawning before me, its icy vapors flowing upward. I leaned into that darkness for a few seconds, holding my breath, closing my eyes, trying to gauge its depth before I directed the flashlight into it.

At first, in that open space, the beam exploded out so brightly that I couldn’t see anything. Then the light contracted into a white circle, and when my eyes adjusted I saw just how enormous the space before me was, wide and deep with a high ceiling. The balcony overlooked a kind of amphitheater lined with steep tiers of seats. Knowing the balcony was at street level, I calculated that the floor of the amphitheater itself must be about four stories underground. Whatever work had been undertaken there long ago by Samax’s successors was broken off abruptly. Tiny as toys below me, there was a cement mixer, a crane, a stack of lumber, and a pyramid of cinder blocks, all of them thick with dust and cobwebs. Ropes and wires dangled from the rafters. The floor was deeply recessed, with furrows full of dangling wires and large
craters crisscrossed by rusty pipes. Thinking I had seen those craters before, I realized I was looking down at the very room, enormous as a football field, in which I had first been brought to Samax.

The moment this realization hit me, I felt as if I could see that long-ago scene come alive before me in the amphitheater, as if the flashlight were a magic lantern reanimating those ghosts from my past. Ivy in her black coat. Samax in his black suit. Calzas with his shiny cropped hair unfurling a blueprint for Samax. And a boy in a pea coat sitting at a small table writing on a piece of paper.

Standing there on the balcony all those years later, I recalled the words I had written to Alma at the base of Samax’s letter:

Words lost in time, that no one ever saw.

Feeling very cold suddenly, I just wanted to get away from that place. Backing away from the edge of the balcony, I stepped through the door and sprinted down the corridor, the beam of the flashlight dancing crazily on the peeling walls, all the way to the street.

I leapt into the back of my taxi and the driver floored the accelerator and sped around the corner. The flashlight was still burning, and, as I switched it off, I saw how hard my hand was shaking.

The driver didn’t ask me if I had found what I was looking for. I passed him the flashlight and the screwdriver, with another fifty-dollar bill, and he slid the plastic panel shut and negotiated the narrow streets toward the Harlem River Drive. I sat back, dizzy, disoriented, staring at the oncoming headlights on the highway, and within no time it seemed, we were back in midtown Manhattan, in front of my hotel.

When I arrived in Las Vegas the next afternoon, I found my uncle had just returned from Japan. As invigorated as he was from his trip, I was exhausted from mine. Samax knew right away that something was terribly wrong, and it didn’t take him long to get me to tell him what Ivy had spat out at me in the parking lot of The Aladdin. On
learning the fate of his letter to Alma, he first turned deathly white, then grew as angry as I had ever seen him. He stormed out of the library, banging the floor with the cane he was now forced to carry, and went directly to Ivy’s rooms on the eighth floor.

White-haired for as long as I had known him, after his stroke Samax truly looked his age for the first time. He had the thinning hair of an old man now, as well as the concave chest, sunken cheeks, and braided throat muscles. Liver spots were surfacing on his hands and he had to wear glasses all the time because of retinal damage to his left eye. But taking all that into consideration, and the fact that he now almost exclusively wore his Chinese silk pajamas and velvet slippers around the hotel, the inner resources he had garnered over his long life and his still iron will nevertheless made him a formidable figure, capable of intimidating close acquaintances and strangers alike.