Greedy Heart, page 31
I felt as if I would suffocate in the black ugliness of it all. Because of my quotation-marks friendship with Angela, and my own act of spoon-jar theft, I had lost Viviane’s and Norah’s true friendship. That was bad enough. Now, another friend was actually dead. Judith was dead. The sightless but shrewd dealer. The imperious order-giver. The spoon-jar spotter. The separate sanitation department phrase-coiner. The relentless author of conspiracy theories—all of which turned out to be true.
What could I do? There was simply no way to take up arms against the world as it was, in some great conflict between light and dark as the Hungarian imagined. The Hungarian himself had not succeeded in such a battle. In 1956, he faced off against Soviet tanks and lost. As thousands were executed, and the iron curtain slammed down steelier than ever, he fled with a quarter-million refugees and ended his life training useless girls on broken-down horses at a second-rate finishing school.
What could anyone do in such a world where good and bad, actions and their consequences were twisted, braided, and knotted to a crochet of confusion?
Yet, it was necessary to do something. I went with the first thing that came to mind.
I grabbed a dish towel from the kitchen, as Gotham Bird instructed. I stalked back and opened the window. Frankie blinked and smiled. I breathed in and out, preparing. He preened a feather, suspecting nothing. I leaned out. He looked at me for a piece of apple.
I threw and hit my mark. Frankie tried to take off under the towel, but it was too heavy. I lurched and grasped, my body half out the window. There was a violent flapping. I closed my fingers on the fabric, drawing back inside. Frankie folded his wings and grew still, the way a tackled zebra mutely surrenders to the lion holding him by the neck.
With my toe, I nudged over the newly purchased birdcage from beside the yellow bookcase. I sank to my knees and uncovered the bird’s face. Frankie looked at me, smile painted on. It was probably just my imagination, but I thought I perceived his heart, impossibly small and fragile, in my hand.
No. It wasn’t my imagination. It was true. And the heartbeat was a plea. There, under my fingers, thrummed a clear drumbeat of entreaty. It was as if I could literally feel his heart’s desire. The bird-dream pulsed with earnestness and was colored in every rainbow shade of improbability. His heart told me he wanted to be free—to live right here in the Number-N window box.
I wanted to answer the bird and tell him how hopeless it all was. That Number N would be destroyed and he would die.
The bird’s heart heard me and replied such concepts had no meaning in the bird’s worldview.
I stood up and put my arms out the window. In a flutter of lime green against white fabric, he was gone.
My empty hand continued to pulse with the bird’s tiny heroic heartbeat.
It was an inspiration.
Chapter Forty-Three
Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors.
—Matthew 6:12
I had no black dress appropriate for Judith’s service, and I was strapped for cash. Rob would have bought me any dress on Madison Avenue, but I didn’t feel like asking him or, for that matter, like shopping. So, I called Mom to see if she had something and Bert offered to drive it in for me. I went down to the curb to meet him and was startled to see Mom in the passenger seat.
“Hello, Delia. You’re not looking very well.” Bert held the door for her and handed me the garment bag.
“Tough week,” I said. “Are you planning to go to the service?” Mom and Judith had a purely transactional relationship, but they still knew each other.
“No. I have some paperwork to take care of.” Mom carried a manila folder, papers leaking out the sides. “There’s something you need to sign.”
I knew what it was. Mom was no fool. After the run-in with Priest, she would close every loophole and squeeze caulk into every crevice. I was her daughter and had been living for a significant time in her apartment. It gave me a claim to the place. Mom would want an attestation releasing any rights to a claim. Nothing would jeopardize her payoff. I imagined the other papers in her folder were affidavits for Norah and other Number N-ers to aver Mom resided the required 183 days a year. For a hundred bucks, I was sure Norah would sign. The others would do it for twenty.
“We have to do this right now?”
“I want to make sure things are in order, and everyone is clear, so that there is no subsequent confusion.” Mom opened a packet of stapled-together pages with tightly packed type. A fluorescent flag, the color of my bird, marked a spot. “Sign here, dear.”
I sighed. What did it help to feel hurt? I had simply gotten the mother I had gotten. I took Mom’s pen.
“Aren’t you going to read it?”
“I know what it says.”
Mom looked somewhat disappointed as she turned to go, as if she expected me to admire her handiwork.
Back upstairs, I zipped open the garment bag and extracted a black silk sheath. There was more stuff in the bottom. A package of new hosiery in onyx, black Chanel pumps, a toiletry bag with a tube of lipstick, compact with foundation, and a palette of eyeshadow.
I probably needed to add “grooming and style consultation” to the list of insufficient ways to show love.
Dutifully, I dressed and applied the makeup. In the background, I heard my phone chime. It felt distant. Everything felt distant right now. Absently, I checked the screen. It was an alert. From Gotham Bird.
No. That couldn’t be. So much had happened. I must be confused.
I went to the window.
It was true!
Someone spotted it on the webcam. A second yellow-green parakeet pecked at my window box, maybe blown here by the brewing hurricane currents.
The new bird fluttered to a nearby tree branch. Frankie stayed put. Together, they blinked at me with little clown faces at once comic and anciently serious. They were bright and enigmatic, like a sweep of highlighter pen on a sentence in a language I could not read.
I checked my phone again. The birds were trending on Twitter.
I sighed. The birds were a victory of sorts. I believed the term was pyrrhic. A Number-N parakeet flock might be forming just before the building was torn down. It was nice to know such a thing could happen. In theory, at least.
*
In the guest-book sign-in at the funeral home, I saw the name Martin Norton.
“Mr. Norton?” I approached a man I thought was likely him, eyes twinkling above a white beard. With his diminutive stature, round middle, merry eyes, and neatly trimmed white beard, the only thing missing was the eight tiny reindeer.
“Marty,” he said.
“Judith gave me your card,” I said. “I thought you’d be here.”
“I am so sorry for our mutual loss.” The cheer in his eyes dimmed. “How did you know Judith?”
As he ladled me a glass of too-sweet punch, I explained that Judith had instructed me to contact him in the event of her death. That, hypothetically speaking, he might be the person to approach regarding an ancient artifact that had come into the possession of a friend. That Judith was pursuing the placement of that object when she died.
Marty finished ladling. “I think I know the special person Judith might have been speaking with. The one who was interested in…what did you call it…a spoon jar?”
“Yes.”
“I will contact him.”
“That’s not exactly what I’m asking.”
“Ask anything, my dear. Anything.”
For the second time, I was going to walk away from a fortune. I was not reckless this time, off on a Google goose chase through all human knowledge. Nor was I emotional, confused by the two different Delias. I was cold and weary and resolved. I was out. I was done.
“My friend doesn’t want to sell this object. She wants to take it back.”
“Take it back? What do you mean?”
I told him.
It was an ambitious idea—to return the spoon jar where it belonged. I would buy a ticket to Greece, locate the Dodecanese island of ancient legend, find a palikari, don scuba gear, and transport the jar to safety in an underwater cave.
It needed to be done.
Because didn’t all evil begin with theft?
I was no theologian, but even I could see Eve’s apple for the great metaphor it was. The act of stealing encompassed every malevolency: theft of property, theft of freedom, theft of life, theft of hope. Also, simply the taking of more than your fair share of earth and sky, no matter how convenient or technically legal.
I could see it clearly, a chain of evil beginning with that biblical fruit. It assembled itself, link by link, through all of human history. It stretched back to ancient times and the brutality that founded civilization. Through later centuries, its links were forged by insatiable empires. The links of the twentieth century turned war into genocide and bombs into weapons of planetary annihilation.
In the new millennium, the chain was harder to discern. It was comprised of ice floes melting on uninhabited poles and drowning bears; of human beings trafficked in secret as easily as spoon jars; of babies anonymously starving to death in war zones; and of the illicit billions zapping along fiber optic cables financing it all.
Amidst everything, a bewildered humanity could no longer even tell what was and wasn’t evil.
The chain had to be snapped, as far back as possible.
I couldn’t make it all the way to the apple. But I could go back to antiquity with a spoon jar.
I didn’t tell Marty the details about my scuba dream or the chain of evil. I simply asked him the logistics of transporting the jar.
Marty’s cheery eyes turned hard. He nudged me away from the punch bowl. In low tones, he explained they called the black market black for a reason. If you were found with treasure in luggage, no matter what your intention, the artifacts would be confiscated, and the bearer arrested.
“You can’t take it back. There is never any ‘back,’” Marty said and left me with my punch.
I had one more thing to try.
*
I mounted the sweeping white steps, the small indents in the marble palpable through the soles of my shoes. There was no movement in the any of the windows as the new Greek embassy offices were downtown.
I approached Nikos, the guard, who was still there. He waved me past without even checking my bag. Nikos witnessed me driving a horse and carriage into the garden and gave safe harbor to the entire contents of Viviane’s apartment at my request. What could he possibly have to say about my trespassing now?
The green-and-white lattice marble of the entrance hall floor intertwined underneath my feet, the grand staircase spiraled upward, and the pony-sized crystal chandelier cast small rainbow shards on the walls of the rotunda. All those rainbows, and not a single pot of gold, except the one I was carrying.
Great-grandfather’s study nested behind the sumptuous yellow parlor, its windows overlooking the park. Carved birds decorated every inch of the mahogany wood paneling. In my childhood, the room shelved countless leather-bound Audubon print folios. Priest stood in this study, apparently in thought, looking across Fifth Avenue.
“Delia,” he said, taken aback. Naturally, he was surprised. I waltzed in as if I owned the place.
“I’m not here to ask for a job again.” I laughed weakly. “So, you don’t need to worry about that.”
“To what do I owe the pleasure, then?” There was a bit of pleasure in his enunciation of pleasure. He was glad to see me. But the atmosphere in the room was unmistakably melancholy. This billionaire, this hedge-fund wizard whose every touch turned lead into gold, was not happy. I understood why, because I felt the same way. So much had happened. Priest and I shared a kinship made up of world-weariness and regret. He was brilliant as I was brilliant, but all that brainpower hadn’t brought either of us any joy. We were two sides of the identical coin, as it were. Only there was more money on his side of the coin.
I took the spoon jar out of my bag. The orange glowed. Dressed head to toe in black from Judith’s funeral, I might have joined the processing women on the jar. I set the object on Priest’s desk.
His eyes widened. He picked up the vessel and turned it. “Where did you get this?”
“A consignment shop.” Which was more or less true.
He looked bemused for a moment, glancing from the vase to me and back again, eyes questioning. “Why have you brought it to me?”
“You were the last option I could think of.”
“I see.” He bristled, shoulders stiffening.
I instantly wanted to take my words back. What I’d said was true. Priest was the only alternative to get the jar back where it belonged. But I didn’t want to offend him. Priest felt almost like a friend. Maybe the only thing even approaching a friend I had left. I stepped forward and softened my tone. “What I meant to say was—I’m hoping you might be willing to take the object and return it.”
Priest leaned against the desk, the treasure in his hands. He turned the jar for a long time, making the women march around and around. They, like me, must be bone-tired by now.
“You could get a lot of money for this object.” His black eyes met mine with significance. “May I ask why you’re giving it up?”
I decided to explain.
I told him about the chain of evil, and how I wanted to break it. He nodded and actually seemed to understand. Then I told him about another dream I had. That maybe, if the chain were broken, one day in the distant future there could be magical cloaks again—colorful and of immense stretchiness. Iridescent tropical birds would grasp the cloak’s corners and fly off to the horizons, winging on and on, as far as it took to envelop the earth.
I stopped, and there was silence between us as if neither of us knew where to go from there. What I’d just said sounded weird and mystical, chattering about cloaks and birds. So, I changed to Greek.
“I sotiria tis psychis einai poly megalo pragma.” The salvation of the soul is a really big deal.
His smile was sincere. “Akrivos.” Exactly. He gestured to a chair. We both sat for a moment and looked at each other.
“Someone told me a story once,” Priest said after a while. “About a fisherman ordering a boy to return an object to the sea.”
“I remember.” I smiled, thinking how I had made him laugh with that story.
Priest took a key out of his desk and went to the bookcase. Familiar with this study, I recognized the key and its destination. He unlocked a panel and opened the safe inside. Crouching down, his broad back obscured what he was doing. When he straightened and turned, he was holding something in his palm, presenting it to me. It was a small stone statuette of a woman, approximately four inches high.
My eyes grew wide, and my jaw dropped.
“It was you?” I gasped. “You were the palikari?”
“I was,” he said, putting the statuette on the desk between us. “I always felt guilty I didn’t do as the village men told me, but I kept her. I think I wanted to remember a redheaded American girl, one who was so pretty I was afraid to speak to her in English.”
I felt the warmth of his compliment, remembering the tall tan boy in cutoff shorts, a few years older than me, communicating silently through gestures. I understood him perfectly then. And, anyway, you don’t speak under water. I touched the worn surface of the statue. “I can hardly believe it.”
Priest shook his head with a soft chuckle. “When I saw your portrait in the embassy, I was struck how much it resembled that girl from long ago. I wasn’t sure, until you told me your story. Then I knew you were the same girl, grown up and still beautiful and brilliant.”
Peter looked at me intensely, and I knew he was searching for some sign—an opening into a different future for us both.
But in that moment, I had none to give.
Math taught you that a line slanted by even one degree will end thousands of miles off course if you extend it far enough. I was like that line. Things had progressed too far; my own chain of evil still bound me and, today, was growing too heavy to bear. I had just come from Judith’s funeral, a death I bore responsibility for. I didn’t feel as if deserved an alternate future.
I would pay a high price for my decision to take back the jar. My apartment would go into foreclosure, and I would be personally bankrupt. Staying in New York, I would look for a job and likely find one at another hedge fund. So, life would go. Returning the spoon jar had taken a lot of strength, and I simply had no more left to challenge the course of fate.
Waiting for a response, Peter seemed to know my heart. He sighed in a way that implied he, too, was giving up. “While I’m at it, I might as well return them both,” he said, touching the stone statue.
“Can you do it? Do you have a way?”
“I do.” I pictured a sequence of events. A bribe to an international customs official. A series of couriers, first on planes, then on boats—ferry boats, motorboats, and a small sailing skiff—culminating in a wizened old villager, nodding knowingly, taking possession of the parcel and handing it to a boy in scuba gear.
“Thank you.” I stood to leave. “That’s it, then.”
I took a last glance around. What a shame about the beautiful woodwork in here. There were birds at rest, birds in song, birds in flight. It would all be torn down just like Number N. I moved to the door.
With two long impetuous strides, Priest blocked the threshold. “You’re getting married.” He gestured to my ring. “To Goodman.”
“Yes, I am.”
Apparently, he was not going to allow me to leave quite so easily, at least not without bringing up the subject of Rob Goodman one final time. I braced for Priest’s scolding. I didn’t want to endure his opinions about Rob or hear that I was “too good” to marry him. I didn’t feel too good in any way. Only in this singular matter, the spoon jar, was I able to find the high road.
Hearing Priest’s view on my personal life was too much just now and turned my weariness to incipient anger. After all, Goodman said he loved me. What had Priest done except save a scuba-diving memento, buy an old mansion, and criticize my choice of boyfriend? He was obviously jealous, but jealousy really wasn’t enough. There really did need to be more.
