Crazy for Cornelia (25 page)

“Marne,” Kevin said. “I’m not interested in her.”

“Yeah?” Marne chuckled without humor. “Well, good. ‘Cause if you’d gotten killed, she would have stepped over your body and
gone crying home to Daddy.”

As she spoke, he felt the sweet party of the painkillers wearing off. His ear felt like it had expanded to the size of a cantaloupe
and his shoulder throbbed. They alternated, like parts of a toy man, swaying mechanically back and forth to punch him.

Marne let him off in front of the black-streaked facade of his tenement building. All the windows were either gated or boarded
up. Nobody walked on the streets here, they only darted in and out of doorways.

“Nice,” Marne commented on Casa Kevin. “You want me to go up with you? Throw out the burglars?”

“No, go home.” He gave her a little hug. “Thanks for picking me up.

The cab lurched off with his sister.

* * *

Chester left the hospital surrounded by a small knot made up of Edgar Chase, Dr. Bushberg, Tucker, and two security guards.
Their route took them through the emergency room.

Suddenly a curtain was pulled back to his right, and he stared into the coal-like eyes of the crazy woman carriage driver.
Her tattered black suit coat reminded him of Abe Lincoln, if Honest Abe had tousled black curls that fell over his shoulders.
With one hand, she had yanked the curtain open, obviously seeing him pass. A young, balding doctor was still trying to stitch
a cut on her other hand. The procedure looked painful, a giant needle threading in and out of her flesh.

“Mr. Lord,” she called, as though the pain didn’t bother her. “Just a minute.”

Edgar Chase tried to keep him moving. “Don’t say anything. She’ll want money. I’ll deal with it.”

“Excuse me,” Roni Dubrov told the doctor working on her wrist. She stood up and reached Chester in a few sprightly steps.
God, her legs were long, like a person on stilts. Her grip on his arm felt firm, but not aggressive. “I have something for
you.”

She’s going to hit me, he thought recoiling, trying to throw her arm off, but her fingers held him in place. She reached into
the pocket of her black coat.

“Mr. Lord, this belongs to your daughter. She said it was for breaking my carriage.”

Then she pressed Cornelia’s… his Elizabeth’s… diamond engagement ring into his hand. Chester looked at the dazzling heirloom,
trying to puzzle out her motive.

“I don’t know what to say,” he told her truthfully. “Your carriage, do you have insurance? If not, call me. I can help.”

“Help your daughter first,” she leaned in and whispered, so people around them couldn’t hear. “She’s just a child.”

Chester could only mutter a feeble thanks before Edgar and Tucker pulled him away.

Kevin opened the door to the filthy foyer of his building. All three locks had been forced open by sledgehammers and crowbars
at various times, so he didn’t need his key.

He checked his mailbox, which had also been pried open, then
walked up the three deserted flights of grimy stairs. His ear and shoulder hammered away, an efficient factory churning out
pain.

He spotted a pattern of shadows on the wall that wasn’t usually there. He sensed somebody up on his landing. A mugger, probably.
Or a robber looking out while his partner ransacked his apartment.

“Get out of there, you pinhead junkie fuck,” Kevin screamed up the stairs.

He waited. Nothing.

Kevin climbed the last few stairs cautiously and peeked around the balcony.

Cornelia Lord sat on the dirty floor of the landing outside his door. A giant gray leather coat covered her body like a tent.
Philip Grace’s new coat. Underneath it, she was dressed in a green hospital outfit. On her feet were hospital sock slippers,
ruined from the slush outside. Her arms locked around her knees, one hand holding her other wrist, and she swayed forward
and back. She looked up at the top of his head. Her face shone, very fresh and young without makeup, the freckles showing
across her nose.

“Hi,” she said.

He helped her to her feet.

“How’d you find me?”

“Your address was on the list in my father’s study. I came to thank you again, Kevin.”

He didn’t think she would have fled the hospital and braved her way to Alphabet City in flimsy hospital booties to tell him
that.

“Just doing my job,” he said and wondered how stupid it sounded.

“May I use your bathroom?” she asked politely. She seemed to be having a hard time keeping still, moving from one foot to
the other.

He worried that she could be getting him into another jackpot, this flaky deb he had just ten minutes ago defended to his
sister. She had the staying power of a flea jacked up on Tabasco, running from everything, leaving broken carriages and limos
and probably people. Plenty of blood on the trail behind Cornelia Lord. But she also had that way of looking at the top of
his head.

“Sure,” Kevin said. “But keep your coat on, okay? It’s colder inside.”

He found his keys and opened his new lock, one that had not yet been plucked out of his splintered door. He let her go in
first. Before he could turn on the light, she gasped in the dark.

“Oh, Kevin, your corona!” she squealed.

When Kevin switched on the light, he could see that her eyes had locked on to the top of his head. Like the first night he
found her passed out in the limousine.

“What do you see up there?”

“Sorry. Nothing.” She walked into his kitchen looking right at home, past the rusty steel bathtub, studying the battered cabinets
he’d painted several coats of white, with a few lumps where he had accidentally trapped speeding roaches under the wet paint.

He sat in his living room and didn’t move while she used his bathroom. He heard her flush the toilet. Then she came into his
living room, her face poking out of the gray coat, taking in his rat hole like an explorer discovering the New World. All
the furniture had been stolen from his living room except for two webbed lawn chairs with some missing strips. The only remaining
light was a floor lamp from some kid’s room about thirty years before, its yellowed shade displaying pictures of spaceships.

She stopped at his wall where he had hung a print of Giotto’s
Lost Saint Sebastian
.

“Oh, you have Sebastian,” she breathed.

She touched the gold-leaf disk Giotto created around the man’s head and Kevin’s ear and shoulder stopped thudding in his shock.

“Do you know the story?” he asked her.

She didn’t take her eyes off the halo. “He was an officer in the Praetorian Guard. When he became a Christian, the emperor
ordered him killed.”

Kevin’s heart skittered. “Are you Catholic?” he asked her.

“No,” she whispered. “I saw this painting in Italy when I was a little girl.”

Naturally. He felt a familiar stab of resentment at this rich girl, bombing around Europe checking out Giottos while he put
in his time at a New York City high school that couldn’t even afford an art teacher. But, strangely, his envy felt like a
useless appendage now. She looked so impressed at Giotto’s
Lost Saint Sebastian
. And that was just a warm-up.
Her eyes moved to the Polaroid shots he had stuck on the wall with red pushpins. This was the step-by-step saga of how he
created his own neon Saint Sebastian, from his first sketches to pictures of the sculpture at different stages of completion.

“Kevin, what’s this?” she asked him breathlessly, touching the blue halo on the picture.

“I made a neon Saint Sebastian. It’s in a gallery…” Kevin hesitated. What the hell, she wasn’t doing much better in her life
than he was with his art. “Was in a gallery.”

She stared like a maniac at the Polaroid.

“I love what you did around his head. Why did you use blue?”

“You can’t do gold neon. I figured, he’s looking up at the sky, so maybe it’s a reflection. But I need to fix his halo. See
how it’s crooked? It ruins the piece.”

“I don’t know about that. I’ve never seen a neon saint before, Kevin, but it seems like a lovely halo.” Her voice was so hushed.
“Is this a school or something?”

Kevin exhaled. Even tonight, it seemed especially bizarre to have Chester Lord’s daughter standing with his paint-trapped
roaches and used lawn furniture, giving critical commentary on his art. How could he even start explaining to a Girl Who’ll
Always Have Everything what he went through to make the saint?

“It’s no school,” Kevin told her. “Unless maybe you’re thinking about the Ashcan School. That’s the only place it’s headed
right now. The subject matter, it’s kind of a personal thing with me.”

“I don’t want to pry.” Her eyes finally moved on to the last Polaroid shot stuck up on his wall. “Oooh. What’s this?”

“An experimental piece I did,” he told her. “I called it
Open Heart
. It didn’t go anywhere.”

She studied the roughly heart-shaped squiggles and wobbles, “Why not?”

“My teacher said it was too ephemeral or something. I made it by mixing a special set of neon gases. Krypton, argon, and xenon.
Then I electroded the mix to get a plasma effect.”

“Well, it’s nice ephemeral.”

“Thanks.”

“It’s more you than Sebastian, isn’t it?” She peered at the blob on
the Polaroid. “But I think you need to make it glow a little better, Kevin.”

“Tell me about it.” That casual insight stung and thrilled him in roughly equal measure. “I can’t do anything else until I
get Sebastian perfect.”

“Why?”

“I just do.”

“What more can you do for him?”

She pressed on innocently, like a curious ten-year-old. He knew she wasn’t really asking about the noble gases and ribbon
fires. She was worming into his deep tissue.

“Sebastian was my mother’s favorite saint,” Kevin finally said. “She died the day before Thanksgiving.”

“Oh.” Her hand flew up to her mouth. “I’m sorry.”

“She loved Renaissance art,” he told her. “She took me to museums.”

“Of course,” she nodded with matter-of-fact wisdom. “You won’t do anything else until you’ve made things right for her.”

He stared dumbly at the girl like some farmer might look at an extraterrestrial. She reached out and took his hand in both
of hers, like she had in the cab.

“What’s the matter with him, Kevin? He looks like a perfectly good neon saint to me.”

“Well”—he still felt spooked, but tingling and inspired, too—“I have this teacher named Max, and he makes his pieces glow.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Max’s work kind of shimmers. Mine still looks like a beer sign.”

“Then I’ll have to see Max’s work,” she told him, her enthusiasm beyond intense. “Where do you work on your saint?”

“On 14th Street. It’s at my school. NYIAT.”

“Gnat?”

“It’s called the New York Institute of Art and Technology.”

“Let’s go over there right now,” she told him, pulling her coat around her, ready to leave.

“Ms. Lord… Cornelia…” Kevin spoke slowly. “I can’t help you anymore. I need my job.”

He stepped back trying to get out of her space, an instinctive grasp at survival.

“No, Kevin, I can help you. Do you know who I first thought our doorman was? When I was little?”

She totally flustered him, always coming from different angles. “I give up.”

“Santa Claus,” she said. “One Christmas my father came home with gifts. The doorman had brought them upstairs from the car.
The man came through the door on Christmas Eve with a mountain of presents, so I thought he was Santa Claus.”

He wondered whether she made that up on the spot, to make him like her. He didn’t think so. But if that’s what she was doing,
it was working.

“Anyway,” Kevin said, “my school’s closed for Christmas. I can’t get in. Not legally, anyway.” He forced a laugh but she still
looked serious.

“This Max, is he a very good teacher?”

“He makes perfect bends.” Kevin shrugged, a little helplessly. “And he told me to become a better liar.”

“What?”

“Art is a lie that makes us see the truth,” he told her.

“Picasso.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Picasso said that. Your teacher was quoting him.”

For the first time, Kevin felt his awe of Max slipping.

“How much do you pay the New York Institute of Art and Technology? If it’s not too personal.”

She got the school’s formal name right on the first try. He was impressed. Most people didn’t bother.

“About seventy-five an hour, and it’s a three-hundred-hour course.”

Her eyelids darted up, opening like parachutes and gliding back down. “What do they teach you?”

“Neon flameworking’s kind of technical. You put on a space suit and work over a fire, bending tubes. The tubes are conductors.
After you get all the bends right to make your figure, you shoot neon gas
through to give it color. Then you wire your piece to a transformer and plug it in. The electrical current makes the gas
shine.”

She watched him, fascinated, breathing deeply and looking like she needed to compose herself. “Seventy-five dollars an hour.
I think that kind of money should buy you visiting rights to your saint. Especially at Christmas.”

That was the second time he saw her gray eyes explode into a violet constellation.

“Maybe. But we can’t just break in.”

K
evin wished he’d taken two more painkillers.

Now he leapt up in the air, grabbing the ladder of the fire escape with his good arm, his ear and shoulder both throbbing.

Growing up, he had perfected scaling fire escapes. He had needed that skill to get in and out of the apartment at night to
meet his friends and do nothing. Now he felt he was definitely going to do something here at the deserted New York Institute
of Art and Technology building. The not-knowing-what part kept him interested. He caught the bottom rung and pulled it down.

They scrambled up the fire escape, then over the roof of the building. Kevin twisted the lock on the metal door. If he could
force it open, they could go down the staircase. He kicked the door around the lock but only made it whang defiantly while
he worked up a sweat. The lock dented, but wouldn’t loosen.