Vigil (33 page)

It was perhaps because he was so absorbed in his work that he didn’t at first hear the scratching on the glass behind him. But by the time it had penetrated his consciousness, he could also hear the twisting of the doorknobs to the terrace. He whipped around in his chair and stared at the French doors; they were still closed, the floor-length curtains drawn, but something was stirring outside on the terrace, that much he could tell.

He threw a light cloth over the work on his drafting table and moved stealthily toward the doors.

The scratching stopped, and suddenly there was a hammering on the glass.

He parted the curtains with one finger, and an eye—a wild, green eye—was pressed against the glass, staring back.

“Let me in, Ezra,” he heard. “I have to show the decorator around!”

What? It was Kimberly—outside in the cold, dressed, he could see now, in only a pink satin robe. And alone.

“Open up! We’re freezing out here!”

The terrace ran all the way around this side of the apartment, from the master suite to his own rooms, but he had never known Kimberly to wander over this far. He pulled the curtain back and fumbled with the door handles. Used so seldom, they were sticky and hard to turn. When he did get the doors open, Kimberly popped through, her hair in loose disarray, her feet bare.

“Why do you always have to keep this place locked up like a jail?” she complained, and Ezra didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what to think, either. She glanced around the room—at the acetates on the walls covering sections of the reassembled scroll, at the worktable with its tensor lamp still burning, at the clutter of brushes and plastic gloves and X-acto knives atop the old toy chest—and her nose wrinkled in disgust. “Haven’t you even started packing up yet?”

“Why would I do that?” Ezra said.

“So we can get started on the nursery!” she replied, as if he were the stupidest man on earth.

Clearly, she was delirious. Ever since the party for the mayor, she’d been ailing; according to Gertrude, she’d slipped away from the party, and collapsed in her room. She hadn’t come out for a meal or anything else since; Gertrude had been bringing her chicken broth and medications, but apparently she had gotten much worse. His father, par for the course, was out of town on business in Dallas.

“Don’t you remember,” he said, “I have to keep living here, where I’m supervised?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The court order?” he replied, though he could see that none of this was going to make any sense to her. A few seconds ago, she’d thought the decorator was with her.

“All I know,” she said, sweeping her arm around the room, “is that all of this has to go. We have to paint, we have to put new carpeting down, and we have to make room for the bassinet!”

Her robe had slipped off one shoulder as she gestured, and to Ezra’s horror he saw that her shoulder blade was bruised. It looked as if someone’s fingers had squeezed her far too tightly . . . and the idea that it might have been his father—
that it had to be his father, who else could it be?
—made him distinctly queasy.

“What are you up to in here anyway?” Kimberly said, as she strode toward his drafting table. “Is this what you call your research?”

Ezra moved quickly to interpose himself between the table and Kimberly; in her present state, there was no telling what she would do.

“Yes, and it can’t be disturbed,” he said.

“Who says so?” she said, reaching around him and tugging the cloth off the section of scroll he’d been translating.

Ezra grabbed her wrist. “I told you not to do that!”

“You can’t tell me what to do!”

“Kimberly, you’re not well,” he said, trying to calm her down. “I think we need to get you back to your room and call a doctor.”

“Okay,” she said, suddenly docile, “you’re right,” but the moment he let go of her wrist, she lunged at the table, and snatched the precious fragment of the scroll in her hand.

“Kimberly, no!” he shouted.

Before he could stop her, she had danced away, a mad grin on her face, waving the strip in the air. “This what you want?” she said. “Then come and get it!”

She was making for the French doors, and Ezra had no choice but to run after her and grab hold of her again. She whirled around, her robe flying completely open now; she was naked, and even as her hands flew at him, in a frenzy of scratching and slapping, he registered that she had other bruises too—all over her body. What on earth had happened to her?

“Let go of me!” she screamed. “Let go!”

But Ezra was simply trying to snatch the scrap of scroll back. She held it away, then doubled over, twisted around, and he could see that she was trying, in vain, to rip it apart.

“Stop it, Kimberly!”

But she didn’t; she put the scrap between her teeth and tore at it—and it was as if she’d bitten into a live wire. A blaze of blue sparks shot into the air, buzzing like angry bees. She dropped to the floor, a tiny piece of the scroll still stuck to her lip. Her limbs shook and a white froth foamed at her mouth.

He knelt beside her, put one hand on her shoulder, and with the other tried to remove the piece of his precious scroll. But as if it were a snake slithering back into its hole, the scrap slipped into her mouth and then, though he wondered if he had only imagined it, he saw a rippling in her throat, as if it were traveling down that way, too.

Kimberly gagged and coughed. Her whole body went into convulsions.

Ezra didn’t know what to do. He said, “Hold on!” and ran out of the workroom, through his bedroom and yanked open the hallway door. “Gertrude!” he shouted. “Gertrude!”

“What?” It sounded as if she were four or five rooms away.

“Call 911! It’s Kimberly! We need an ambulance!”

By the time he got back to her side, she looked like she was entering a coma—her eyes were glassy and her breathing was growing very still. Her body was exposed by the open robe—there were black and blue spots beneath her breasts, as if they’d been manhandled. He pulled the robe closed and stroked her forehead. “Just rest,” he said, “you’ll be okay.” Her skin was damp with sweat, but hot with fever—and he wondered not only if she’d be okay, but if she’d even survive until the ambulance arrived.

Gertrude bustled into the room.
“Gott in himmel,”
she muttered under her breath. “I called,” she said to Ezra.

And ten minutes later, the paramedics were there, lifting her onto a gurney, wheeling her quickly out to the elevator. Ezra got on the phone to his father’s office, where the secretary forwarded the call to Dallas; Sam was sitting in a board-room there, negotiating some deal. When Ezra told him Kimberly had fallen ill and been taken to the hospital, there was a momentary silence, then he immediately started barking questions at Ezra. What hospital? Why hadn’t Sam’s own physician been called? What was wrong with her? Who had made the diagnosis?

Ezra fielded as many of them as he could, but as he didn’t know much, he could feel his father’s frustration growing by the minute.

“I’ll finish up here,” Sam declared, “and be back as soon as I can.”

“Is there anything else you want me to do in the meantime?”

“Yes! I want you to go to the hospital, and make damn sure she’s getting everything she needs!”

Hanging up, Ezra once again felt, as his father had always made him feel, that in yet another situation he had somehow failed.

He went back to his room—where he could barely look at the empty spot on his drafting table where the scrap of scroll had been—got his coat, and went back downstairs. He had the doorman, Alfred, call a cab, and while they waited, Alfred shook his head and said, “Awfully sorry about this.”

“Yes, it’s terrible.”

“She always looks so beautiful, and those parties she throws always get us in the newspapers.”

Which was exactly their purpose, Ezra thought.

“In fact, if you want this back,” the doorman said, slipping some papers from his uniform jacket, “Mrs. Metzger usually likes to have them.”

Ezra looked at the sheets of embossed stationery and saw that it was a list of party invitations, with little checks beside nearly all the names.

“She asks me to check off the guests as they arrive,” the doorman said, “and give it to her after the party. For her records, I guess.”

“I’ll give it to her,” Ezra said, as the cab pulled into the driveway and he got in back.

“Doctors Hospital,” Ezra said, and the cab took off.

As he sat in the backseat staring out at the late gray afternoon, he thought about all that had just happened—Kimberly’s delirium, the damage to the scroll. To his secret shame, he knew which one troubled him more. Kimberly would be cured of whatever it was that ailed her, but the scroll? That would never be restored; that portion of its text would never be recovered. He’d always felt as if the scroll had been entrusted to him, perhaps by some higher power; it had been his job, his duty, to protect it, and in that, too, he had failed.

The cab stopped at a light on First Avenue, and Ezra looked down at the printed party list in his hand. Some of the names—the mayor, some city councilmen, old family friends—he recognized. On other pages were rafts of names that probably only Kimberly knew. He turned to the end of the list and there he found a few more names, last-minute invitations, he presumed, scrawled in her own hand in lavender ink. There was a Mr. Donlan, a Mr. and Mrs. Lamphere, and finally, with a big question mark next to it, a Mr. Arius.

Huh. That was a strange name. And why the question mark?

He presumed it meant she wasn’t sure he’d come.

But then, as the cab started up again, and he thought back to that night, he remembered something else that was odd.

That blond man, the tall one he’d bumped into in the hallway. He hadn’t gotten his name, either.

But he’d been coming from the direction of the master suite.

He thought of the bruises he’d seen on Kimberly’s body. Marks he could never have imagined his father inflicting.

He thought of the blond man’s bizarre appearance.

And then he thought of the name, and looked at it again, with its attendant question mark. Was it there because she wasn’t sure he’d come . . . or because she wasn’t sure how to spell it?

He said it out loud, “Arius,” and the cabbie turned around.

“Nothing,” Ezra said, then uttered it again, more softly. “Arius.”

His mind flashed to the scroll he’d been working on, and its list of names. Gadreel, Tamuel, Penemue . . . and the last of them all . . . Ereus.

That had been his rendering of the sound, but couldn’t it just as easily—in fact, perhaps even more accurately—have been translated into English as Arius?

Suddenly he thought he knew what might be afflicting Kimberly. And for the first time, he thought she might not survive it after all.

If it was true . . . would any of them?

Carter’s first stop that day had been the main library—
and what he discovered there was bad enough.

But now, in the departmental office, things had only gotten worse. The secretary handed him an envelope from the law firm of Grundig and Gaines, informing him that Ms. Suzanne Mitchell, wife of the late Bill Mitchell, was bringing a wrongful death suit against New York University, and that he, Carter Cox, as faculty supervisor of the lab in which the lethal accident had occurred, was to be deposed.

“The chairman got one of those, too,” said the secretary, “and he wants you to make an appointment to see him this week.”

What next, Carter thought. In a matter of weeks, he’d been told he was sterile, his good friend had been burned beyond recognition, his wife had suffered some weird hallucinatory nightmare, and now it looked like the chairman wanted to ream him out for bringing disaster down on the whole department.

“So,” the secretary said, “how’s Thursday at three?”

Carter took a second. “Oh, sure—I’ll see him then.” He glanced at his watch and realized he was running late. Of course. He was due at St. Vincent’s, for the summit conference that both Russo and Ezra had been demanding.

When he got to the corner across from the hospital’s main entrance, he had to wait for the light—which gave him just enough time to note that the sign in front of the old sanatorium, the one announcing the Villager Co-ops to be built there, now sported a banner that read GROUNDBREAKING JANUARY 1ST! SALES OFFICE OPENING SOON! In fact, he thought he saw someone, maybe a member of the demolition crew, passing behind one of the windows in the top floor. Only in New York City, he thought, where real estate even now was so crazy, could a developer expect people to line up to buy apartments in a building that was no more than a picture on a billboard.

By the time he got up to the burn ward, he could already hear Ezra’s voice inside the room. Damn—he had wanted to be there to make the introductions, and if necessary to cover for any momentary shock Ezra might display at his first glimpse of Russo.

Entering, he realized that he had worried for nothing. Ezra had drawn a chair right up next to the bed, and Russo’s head was bent toward him attentively. They looked like close conspirators who, if anything, resented his intrusion. Russo raised his burnt fingers in acknowledgment, and Ezra simply nodded—then went on with what he was saying.

“Don’t mind me,” Carter said, perching on a radiator case on the other side of the bed and plopping his briefcase down beside him. Inside it, he was carrying Russo’s crucifix, which he meant to return to him in private.

“I was just telling Joe about the man he saw,” Ezra reiterated, “the one who emerged from the rock.”

Carter felt as if he’d suddenly started free-falling down the rabbit hole. “You were?” Carter said dubiously. “And what were you telling him?”

“His name.”

Carter glanced conspicuously at his watch. “I’m only fifteen minutes late, and already we’ve figured out that a man did indeed emerge from the rock—”