A Trip to the Stars (75 page)

“I was planning to go see him anyway,” I went on.

“About the amulet.”

“That’s right. I promised Samax I wouldn’t try to get it—but that promise ended with his death. Samax should have had that amulet.”

“Maybe so, Enzo. But it belongs to Vitale Cassiel. He got it first. That’s the way it went with everything between them.”

“I’ll make him a fair offer.”

“Money?” Forcas said. “May I give you some advice? Don’t offer him money.”

“I don’t think he’s just going to hand it over after all this time.”

Forcas blew softly on the ember of his cigar. “Are you going to tell him he’s your grandfather?”

“I don’t feel obligated. After all, I never told Uncle Junius about the letter—though I’m glad now that I didn’t.”

“You should tell him.”

I rose from the swivel chair behind the metal desk and looked out at the desert through the barred, dirty window. “Can you tell me what else he and my uncle were fighting over?” I said. “You would know.”

“In the last few years, nothing to speak of. They were both
wearing down—reduced to leveraging, shadowboxing with dummy corporations. That’s how they got in their shots. Even buying a property out from under the other guy, like I once told you about, had become too much for them.” From his cigar Forcas tapped a perfect cylinder of ash into the plastic ashtray. “You want me to call ahead to him for you?”

I had my hands in my pockets. Beyond the city limits, at the foot of the Spring Mountains, the thermals were swirling up curtains of sand. “You mean, you’ll tell him who I am.”

Forcas nodded. “And that you’re coming to see him. That’s all I’ll tell him.”

I thought about it for a long time. “All right. Today’s Wednesday—tell him I’m coming on Friday.” I turned back to him. “And thanks.”

Forcas stood up, smoothing out his tie. “He’s dying, you know.”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t know.” But I appreciated that Forcas had waited until after I decided to tell me.

Vitale Cassiel’s large white house shone in the glaring sunlight. Sitting on forty acres on the outskirts of Reno, the house had two long verandahs and a stucco roof. There was a single ancient elephant tree on the baked lawn and a line of mesquite trees around the property. Oleander bushes around the house itself. No flowers. It was too hot a place for flowers, even if you wanted them. That day it was 98°. Clouds like brown dust were fixed on the horizon, as if they were painted there. As soon as I stepped from the air-conditioning of my car, a blast of hot wind made my lungs ache.

It was about a hundred yards to the house from the cul-de-sac at the end of the driveway. There was a garage there that could accommodate six cars. Tar was boiling up through the asphalt. I walked gingerly to keep it from my shoes. On the first-floor verandah I could make out a solitary figure sitting under a slow ceiling fan. A birdcage hung from a hook on a wooden pillar. As I got closer, I saw it was a woman sitting stiffly in a straight-back chair.

The woman was Ivy, and the caged bird was a parrot, who watched me climb the limestone steps. “Good-bye,” he squawked.

Ivy didn’t say hello or good-bye. And she didn’t seem surprised to see me, though I hadn’t seen her in three years. “I know why you’re
here,” she said. “I told you I knew more about you than you knew yourself. I’ve always known.”

Her voice was weak, and she was slurring. Her hair had turned gray, dry as straw, her pale skin was tinged yellow, and she had a thin blue robe sashed tightly around her thinning waist. Her mouth seemed off-kilter, as did one of her cheekbones, as if she had suffered a stroke herself.

“I’m glad he’s dead,” she added. “And I’m glad the hotel is gone.”

“What have you always known, Ivy?” I said.

“You know what. What
they
never knew.”

“Meaning Samax—”

“Yes, and him,” she said, inclining her head toward the second floor. “I knew when your mother died that you were Geza’s son. I told no one. Now it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“You did it because Bel took him away from you. That day on the road near the Hotel Canopus.”

Her washed-out eyes flared. “What do you know about that?”

“I know you were in love with him, too.”

“He was my brother,” she snapped.

“Sure,” I said thickly. “And if you couldn’t have him, you’d make sure Bel didn’t either. That’s why you lied to him when he was in Colorado, telling him the cops were on to him, sending him a bad check.”

If it was possible for her to turn any paler, she did. “Geza is alive? You’ve talked to him?”

“I haven’t talked to him.”

“Then how could you know all this?”

I leaned down to her ear. “I know more about you than you think.” Then I rang the doorbell and a butler materialized from the gloom of the foyer.

“Good-bye,” the parrot squawked.

“Go to hell,” Ivy cried after me, and then started coughing.

The house was white on the inside too, and it looked and smelled like a hospital. A wave of ammonia and alcohol greeted me. A nurse with a tray disappeared through a swinging door. Through a window I saw a private ambulance parked by the rear entrance, on call. Immediately, no questions asked, the butler showed me up to the second floor. There I was met by another nurse, who asked if I would like a cold drink. Then
she took me down two long bare corridors to a room where an orderly, a burly man with a blond crew cut, sat on a stool outside the door. He looked up at me without interest as he opened the door.

I entered a spacious bedroom where there were two more nurses. It was difficult to make them out clearly because the room seemed to be full of fog. In fact it was mist, from an enormous humidifier. The mist was nearly as thick as the smoke in Spica’s room, and the little sunlight that penetrated the heavily curtained windows was deeply refracted, the beams crisscrossing sharply. Lining the walls were a mahogany desk, a chest, an armoire, and a long leather couch. In the center of the room was a white hospital bed surrounded by medical equipment—oxygen tanks, monitors, a breathing machine the size of a commercial freezer. There was a clear oxygen tent on the bed and a man beneath it, white-faced with a shaved head, peered at me as I crossed the room. His large white hands were nearly indistinguishable from the sheet drawn up to his chin.

His blue eyes studied me closely through the plastic tent. I could hear him wheezing as he breathed.

“Lift it,” he rasped to the two nurses hovering beside the bed.

They unfastened and lifted a small square of the tent so that he and I could see each other clearly. His nose was long, his ears large, and he had once had a strong chin. I had seen photographs of him in middle age, but the man inside the tent looked nothing like the tall, black-haired, broad-shouldered man in those photographs. Now his face was as bleached-out as his hands. And his lips had more blue to them than his eyes, which never left mine. After about ten seconds, one of the nurses refastened the square.

“You’re a Cassiel, all right,” he said. “Imagine.”

“My name is Enzo Samax.”

“Ah. Have a seat, then, Enzo Samax.” One nurse placed a metal chair behind me, and another appeared with a glass of ice water. Then the three nurses took up positions, forming a triangle around the bed, just out of earshot. The breathing machine whirred, lights flashed on the monitors, the mist continued to pour into the room. Already my shirt was clinging to my back.

“I’ve got half a lung left,” Vitale Cassiel said, his voice slipping into the rough whisper where it would remain. “And that half is no good.
So we’ve got ten minutes to talk. It’s all I can do. I don’t see anybody anymore.”

For more than half my life, this man’s name had been synonymous with fear, chaos, vengeance, destruction. Just as certain words can function in themselves as reproaches, his name, uttered without embellishment, was like a threat. I had often thought about what it would be like to meet him. I had concocted many scenarios—usually with me confronting him, sword in hand—but this had not been one of them.

“Forcas told me about the letter you found. I didn’t know,” he said. “And you knew me only as something else. You’ve never met your father?”

“No. I tried to find him, but I didn’t.”

“I never tried to find him. He knows where to find me, but I’ll never see him again. It’s December. Before March I’ll be dead, no matter how many machines they wheel in here.” He stopped to catch his breath. “Your father blamed me for everything.”

“You mean, like the fact he was forced to commit murder?”

“Who forced him? He put himself in that position. He was stupid. I gave up on him a long time ago.”

Sick as he was, his vehemence stopped me for a moment.

“Ivy knew about me all the time,” I said.

“Should that surprise either of us? I’ve learned that everyone’s a chameleon, but Ivy is the only one who never bothers to change her color. I used her when I needed to, but all the time she was using me, just like she was using Junius. That’s what she is.” He paused. “If I had known about you, things might have been different.”

“Between you and Samax?”

“No. Nothing could have changed that. Certainly not another illegitimate child.”

“Of course not.” He seemed to have no recognition of, or concern about, the cruelty in his words; he might as well have said “bastard.” I was seeing firsthand, I thought, why Samax and my father had been so repelled by him.

“Why did you hate my uncle so much?” I asked him.

“You think you know everything there is to know about all this,” he wheezed. “You think you know who all the heroes are, and all the villains. And who did what to whom—and why. But it’s not that
simple. It’s not one color, like with Ivy. Remember that. If that’s all you remember from me, remember that.” He paused. “What I did to Junius all those years ago, and then to your other grandfather, Nilus—those things didn’t happen in a vacuum. I lusted after money then, sure. And after women. But what do you think they were—saints? For Stella I would have cheated fifty men—a hundred—I’m not ashamed to say it. For the money to keep her, I would’ve put a thousand men like Junius in jail. That’s the way it was.” He laughed—more a dry cough than a laugh. “But the pendulum swung back. I ended up losing Stella, not in the end to Junius, or to a man with more money than me, or a man more foolish and vain than either Nilus or me. Worse, I lost her to men I would never know anything about. And that drove me crazy. Junius took her away, but she was using him all the time: after she ditched him, how many others were there? I had years and years to ponder that question. So, you see, Junius got his revenge. He made me suffer right back. You know that. And he knew how to get at me, where it would hurt the most. Not in my pocketbook, but in here.” Slowly he raised one ghostly hand and rested it on his chest. “Junius knew how to put a bullet through me without firing a gun.” He drew a long, rattling breath. “You’ve got so much bad blood in you, Enzo. Like a mix of chemicals that ought to have exploded the minute they came together. Yeah, I can see a few people in your face—especially your father.” He nodded toward the desk across the room, where there were two framed photographs angled away from us. “I used to keep them in the drawer, but last month I had them put out. Have a look.”

On the desk, in a plain black frame, was what looked like a graduation photograph of the same man—aged sixteen or so—I had seen in the Air Force uniform at the gas station outside Albuquerque. Here he was wearing a jacket and tie. Darkly handsome, with a pompadour, he wasn’t smiling. The other photograph, twice as large, with an ornate gold frame, was of a young blond woman in a black dress. Even without the description Samax had once given me, I knew at once who she must be. She was strikingly beautiful, with full lips and clear, lucent skin; her mouth was smiling, but her eyes didn’t go with that smile. I had never quite seen eyes like hers: not wicked, exactly, but knowing—in a way that was unsettling for someone her age. Of myself I
saw one notable characteristic in her face: the slight upturn of her lip beside a dimple on the right cheek.

“Ever seen a picture of your grandmother Stella before this?” Vitale Cassiel said, as I returned to his bedside.

I shook my head.

“I didn’t think so. Junius wouldn’t have kept them around.”

“She was very beautiful.”

“She was still in love with me then. Christmas, 1940. We were in Havana. Maybe you can see now why I would’ve sold what soul I had left for her. How Nilus who couldn’t find his own shoes in the morning discovered her in the first place, in the dung heap of this world, I’ll never know. But he never lived to regret it as much as I did. He stumbled on to something else. Another girl, it was all the same to him. But not to me. Not to Junius, either, no matter what he told you. I know he filled that place of his with things, but he would’ve traded every one of them, in a heartbeat, to have her back. And he never did. That’s my solace, I’m sorry to say. But enough. The ten minutes is up, and you came here for something more than conversation. I can see that.”

“I’d like that amulet Uncle Junius was looking for.”

“Ah, I should have known. And you want me to give it to you.”

I hesitated, remembering Forcas’s advice. “I do.”

“Maybe I can give you more than that.”

“That’s all I want.”

“And here I thought maybe you were going to visit here for a while. Spend a little time.”

He’s testing me, I thought. “I don’t believe you really thought that.”

The shadow of a smile crossed those blue lips. “You’re more Cassiel than you’ll ever know. But that’s all right.” He wheezed slowly, and ten, fifteen, twenty seconds ticked away. “What Junius always wanted, it’s in there,” he said finally, nodding toward a small chest directly across the room from the desk. “Take the two silver keys from the bottom drawer in the bedside table here. Open the top drawer of that chest and you’ll find another drawer inside it. It has two keyholes. Insert the keys and turn them simultaneously, the right one clockwise, the left counterclockwise. Then come back here.”

I did exactly as he said. The keys turned easily, and when the
tumblers were fully engaged, they produced a single musical note together. What I found inside the inner drawer was a small box that looked like a music box. It was covered in black velvet with an onyx circle inlaid on its lid, and it too had a silver lock.