The Moth for the Star, page 11
“Please, no!”
“I’m not going to shoot you, Mr. Wolfowitz.” He smiled once more, slipping the gun into his trouser pocket. “Did you ever have your palm read? Hold out your hands.” When Wolfowitz’s eyes had flickered closed, and his hands extended, the Egyptian took his left hand and permitted a tender silence between them. Finally, with all the reassurance he could draw upon, Osman Raffi said, “I am not the Devil.”
Wolfowitz kept his eyes closed and smiled nervously.
From the inside jacket pocket of his pale suit, Raffi took a shaving razor and drew it swiftly across Wolfowitz’s throat.
The analyst fell back, the cords of his life severed, choking on his blood, his fingers testing the long and pulsing gill that the Egyptian had opened in his dirty skin. From some instinct of protection or dignity, Wolfowitz rolled and put his face into the dirty mattress, so that Raffi could only watch the shallow motions of his back as he lost consciousness and drained into the wadding.
The Egyptian detective said, “But, I am the Devil’s devil.”
Raffi searched the shanty. He gathered the long leather coats and the plague masks that Campbell and Varnas had worn and took them outside, making thirteen paces before dropping them on the grass. Calculating, he took one coat back for himself. He threw Campbell’s white mask back inside the hovel. Returning to the corpse, he found additional candles in the corner of the shelter, the dregs of a bootleg whiskey bottle protruding from beneath the bloody bedding, a newspaper, and a frayed shirt. He lit all of the candles, so that he worked in a circle of them. Alternating layers of paper and strips of shirt, he wrapped the head of the claw hammer and dowsed it with the alcohol, before adding the last drops to mattress where some of the wadding had ruptured out. Touching it with the candle, it flared with a blue light. It was weak, but sufficient. With this hammerhead torch he burned a section of cardboard wall, waited for the flame to find the corpse. It would not have to destroy it completely. He moved quickly, setting the other places alight. The flames passed furiously down the line of shanties, igniting the walls of detritus, the fire dragging the dwellings like the sparking tail of a red comet. Osman Raffi ran to the cover of the closest tree, a broad oak with names scratched into the trunk. From there, he watched the burning, and the smoke that coiled beneath the moon. Of those emaciated figures that broke screaming from the fire, he did not see the child. At the 72nd Street subway, Raffi used a payphone to report the murder and the arson to the police. Should he fail, then eventually, the costumes he laid out in the park would be traced back to the party at Konigsberg’s place. That would take time. But Campbell and Varnas would be identified, and a great murmuration of police would come after them through the city. They would be electrocuted or hanged. Yet, he would not fail. He was certain of this—
chapter sixteen
Varnas awoke with the frost of a nightmare on his skin. Campbell slept in his arms, damp and sheeted with it also, gin tainting her shallow breaths. He wondered how he might tally the multitude of times in his life that he had fallen asleep drunk, and how effortlessly he might have died in that sleep, choking on a thin line of vomit with no one to hear the sour languor of his breathing coming to a stop. Or perhaps, this could not happen to him. It could be that he had died many times before—Flat on his back, his arrogance disgusted him so that he shrugged abruptly from the bed, leaving Campbell to drowse in and out of consciousness in the white pillows. He grabbed his robe from the floor and prepared some coffee. In the street below his apartment, the early traffic moved stiffly.
“You have a melodramatic way of rising.” Campbell found him in the kitchen, fragile November light filtering through the shades. She had put on one of his shirts.
“How are you feeling?”
She hesitated. “I dreamt about the Egyptian detective. He followed us from the party, and he murdered Wolfowitz. Then he burned all the shanties to the ground. I saw him. And it was our fault.”
“Jesus.” He handed her a cup of coffee.
“It was as if I was with them, witnessing it, helplessly, unable to intervene. But really, I do think he was at the party. I only glimpsed him, but it was him, without a doubt. And I know his name, now.” Campbell breathed across the surface of her coffee, the cup close to her lips, pensive. “Either he has become careless, or he has chosen to reveal himself, just to spook me. His name is Osman Raffi.”
Varnas watched her green eyes. “You’re serious? You got his name in your dream.”
“Quite serious. Good morning, by the way.” She kissed his cheek and said, “I think we should go back to the Park today, later, just to see.”
“To see Wolfowitz?”
Campbell sipped her coffee.
Varnas noticed a thin tremor in her fingers.
She swallowed and inclined her head, struggling against that part of herself that persisted outside of time. She did not want to consider it now. “Maybe. I don’t know. We should also go to Katz’s again. The booze has me feeling all hollowed out. Can we do that, eat first? Then I might be able to think straight.”
He agreed.
They took some time to wash and get dressed. She applied some of Varnas’ cologne and studied his hairline. “You need to bleach again. The dark is coming through.”
Varnas said, “I like it this way.”
As they descended and stepped onto Park Avenue, Campbell changed her mind about Wolfowitz and the shanties. She must check on them first thing, before she could stomach breakfast. They were both delicate from drinking, but they had forgotten, or had ceased caring to dress for the cold weather. The weather was not that bad, Campbell said, all things considered. Appetite and anxiety flushed her with acid. They walked, she with her head down, toward the squalid place where they had discovered Wolfowitz. She anticipated a strip of ashes, smoldering stubs of wood. The spectral image of Osman Raffi hung over it all, exaggerated and discolored like a poster for a film.
“There. You see, it’s fine,” Varnas said. “Nothing has been burned down.”
She saw that everything was as it had been the night before when they had spoken with Wolfowitz. “He’s probably gone out. He said he walked a lot. I would, were I destitute. Wouldn’t you?” There in the daylight, she could decipher brand names on some of the cardboard walls, laundry that must have been done in the pond, now drying on improvised clothes lines. Derelict figures moved between the hovels. There was a smell of excrement, rot, and woodsmoke.
“Do you want to go further, see if he’s at home?”
“This is enough.”
At Columbus Circle, they flagged down a cab. It took them down a section of Sixth Avenue, then across to Fifth and down to East Houston and the red-bricked delicatessen. The men and women who clung to the city went like automata with solemn metal eyes. The cab driver’s skin, Campbell thought, had an eerie green stain. For a moment, she imagined pustules rupturing the clammy scalp at the places his cap had made sore. “I think that this Hallowe’en really got under my skin,” she said. They negotiated the cement trucks attending the new Empire State site, the building missing sections of its facade, vast girders probing the sky like bloody antennae, the construction teams reminiscent of larvae clinging to sickly nectar over the unfathomable streets. Everything, she felt, was peeling back, exposing all manner of her nerves, probes, suckers, labia, wings, hairs, raw flesh, and steaming viscera. Something was trying to break through.
“They say it’ll be the tallest tower,” Varnas observed. “But it won’t be the most handsome.”
The cab shivered like a scarab over the broken skin of Manhattan. Campbell looked at her wristwatch—a Tiffany on a black velvet strap—and found that it was not yet 10 a.m. She thought of her hunger as the permanent condition of the city now, gnawing on itself from the inside. Since the party, she thought, her self-pity had become infinite. If it was the weight of deceiving Charles about the money—and was he even really deceived, or merely too polite to expose her?—she could not say. If it was an effect of the suicide pact in the newspaper clipping—picturing the livid bullet and the girl’s resigned brain spattering the penthouse—she would never know. If it was some fear brought out by Charles’ perverse intimations of immortality—the pitiful hangover of poetry—she could not decipher it. Soon, they reached the delicatessen and Charles paid the driver who was, now that she looked again, reasonably young, and healthy with a greyhound’s reaching face. Inside, finding a Formica table, she ordered bagels and more coffee, scanning the room, her agitation evident. Varnas ordered a Reuben sandwich and coffee.
“It’ll be all right, Campbell. It was just a dream, after all.”
She watched the faces. “Yes, you’re right. Then why should I feel so sad, like everything is going to Hell?”
Varnas considered their position. “Honestly, I think we’re both utterly exhausted. I’ve felt it in myself for some time. And I’ve come to recognize that there’s a very fine line between the sentimentality that swells out of fatigue and the real evidence of sorrow,” he said. “One can lose the line. And it’s also true that remorse feeds on the weary souls first.” His mouth formed a smile that his eyes ignored. “And what have we got to be sorry for?”
Campbell stared at him. He added nothing more. Katz’s was hectic, but the crowd was pleasant, the people tolerant of one another’s raw edges. Certainly, they were not the only ones present who needed to shake off the intoxication and disturbed sleep of Hallowe’en. Campbell thought of it as a kind of camaraderie, gallows humor, the congeniality in shared suffering. She forced herself to brighten as she lifted corned beef on her fork. The flesh and the brine were delicious to her. “Okay. So, what did you dream of last night, while I was dreaming of the malign Osman Raffi?”
“You, of course.”
“Liar.” Her green eyes flashed.
“I don’t know.” He tried to recall something from the obscurity of the night or any night, where the luminous stalks of ice and of peels of snow had bloomed pallid over the stiff drag of Niagara, where his voice had returned to him in a torrent of feeling—something that he could not put into words. “I dreamed that I was young, again. I think.”
“That’s a nice dream,” Campbell smiled. She watched his face as he worked at recollection. Despite the pervasive cold and their carelessness, it did make her happy that they were dressed alike, in the trousers they had worn beneath their abandoned plague coats, and both of them wearing white shirts. “A nice dream. Like something from Oscar Wilde,” she said.
“Your father leant me that book,” Charles said. Unconsciously, not hearing his own voice, he muttered, “And a few well-placed coincidences can fray the mind.”
“What did you just say?” Campbell demanded.
“What? Oh, just how your father loaned me that Oscar Wilde book.”
“Of course, he did,” she said. “I like it here.”
Minutes passed before Varnas spoke again. “I always wondered, if there is no such thing as an immoral book, why Dorian Gray had to die. Are you almost finished?”
“I think so.”
Charles Varnas recalled the night that he stood alone on the balcony of the Hotel Danieli in Venice. Campbell had appeared angelic in her sleep, pale as the face of Psyche. He had never told her how the starless midnight had impelled him to dress and walk quietly from the room and out of the hotel. He had lit another cigarette as he drifted like a vampire, west over the Ponte della Paglia, under the pale wings of the Ducal Palace and toward the Basilica. Inside, drunk in the shimmering candlelight, he had stood beneath the Ascension dome where the Son of Man was suspended in his deep blue starfield, encircled with saints and sceptered hosts, his mother, painted palm trees extending their fanned leaves, and the virtues. Varnas had pressed himself onto his toes, eyes fixed on the golden Christ. There he stood, until the cramp in his calves was too painful. His throat was strained with a yearning to which he could not have then given voice and could not now. The distance between himself and the ascended man seemed infinite. The stone beneath his feet held him and refused him. Just to have slipped it for a moment, he thought, to have responded in kind to that gentle lure of life. If only he might ascend even a hair’s breadth—Varnas had staggered from that place. His blood had hissed in his veins. The knowledge that disappointment can be fatal was loud within him. When he returned to the hotel, slipping past the shunting gondolas in their salted dock, he locked the door to their room and undressed. He was cold from the night and his sweat. Without disturbing Campbell, he had settled on top of the sheets and closed his eyes. The obscure weeping in the next room continued—
“Gorgeous!” Campbell dropped her napkin onto her plate and gulped at the remains of her coffee.
“What do you want to do now?”
Campbell wanted to walk Bowery and see the queer signs of the tattoo artists. She wanted to see the latest flophouse rates in chalk like the signs at the champagne champing racetrack where nobody enjoyed themselves, the cost of indigestible food, the black-eyed men with leeches and dirty cotton towels at their sockets, the loud shambles under the elevated railway—All of this, she desired, picking their way through the broken glass to Chinatown and the thick amber in the air to buy a pillbox of white powder from an old man with skin like dried seaweed. “We won’t feel the cold so much with this,” she said. “How did you like the look of those leeches?” She shuddered amusedly. “We should get you some, Charles. They could live in a jar or some kind of aquarium in your apartment and you could feed them—What do they eat apart from the blood of recent wounds—scraps of meat, flies, or something?”
Wrapped in a stolen leather coat that skimmed the cobblestones, Osman Raffi followed them as they passed before the facade of the building whence Campbell’s father had fallen. He watched as Varnas held her hand. He took it quickly as if he were catching her balance. Varnas also caught the glance that Campbell gave the bend and brood of the noonday sky and the precipice where her father had been, as though he could have been in Venice, suspended with a tourist’s pleasure over the bright lagoons, the whispering bridges, and the canals of memory. Her father—
At the corner of Wall Street and Nassau, he plummeted into the crown of her head like a prisoner vehement to return to his certain cell. Into that benighted comfort she felt him come. She almost welcomed him. He fell like a coin tied up in a ribbon of black. She had felt it before.
Raffi, light as a hound, was more cautious now, having given Campbell an intimation of his presence. He did not wear his fez, but the brilliantine of his hair was as it ever was. This was a bleak city in the winter, he thought. The day was too dark for his new sunglasses to appear more than affectation. It could be, he thought, that she perceived him walking at this discrete distance from their pale backs, and that she was merely stringing him through the labyrinth of her remorse. Arrogant women like Campbell would make precisely such capricious gestures. Huddled together like two thin, blond beasts against the chill, the suggestion of salt harbored in the air between the tall buildings, she and Varnas turned south down Broad Street. To the East, rain hung in graphite and ashes over the Brooklyn Bridge. Osman Raffi was glad of the coat. He thought about the time he had shot a man and his brains had spat out after the slug in a crimson screw.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEn
Long before the war, her father had taken her to the Museum of Natural History, and she had pressed her face close to the cases of the Lepidoptera, her nervous breath misting the glass—thousands of wings, fixed open, pinned to pristine white canvas. An hour before, she had stood beneath the fossilized bones of dinosaurs, their aggressive skeletons held on wires and struts, the fleshless, bleached monsters arcing over her. Yet, looking into their empty jaws, counting the thorny teeth, she had experienced nothing of the horror she felt staring at the linen boards of that multitude of pinned moths, those neat and detailed rows of crucifixions, tiny Christs with delicately marked and dusty wings, stilled at last. A pollen of nausea had passed through her like a fluttering drift of decay, and she set one hand to preventing the bitter lurch of her throat. Then, her father’s firm hand was on her shoulder. He had sensed her disgust and refused it. She would face it, again. He turned her face back to the case. It seemed to Campbell that in such a constellation of darkness, the only thing was to understand the background, the shroud to which the moths were fixed like the stains of a single, vast corpse, to discover its negative. The hand upon her shoulder was firm, but warm and reassuring, as though she had just been given an important gift—all that was required of her was to learn gratitude.
Now with Varnas, Campbell guided their walk to Battery Park. Beneath the trees, the unkempt grass fanned toward the green water, the promontory low against the press of the Atlantic. A chill came off the water and morbid clouds churned over Ellis and Liberty. Close to the path, a figure was wrapped in a drab woolen blanket like a chrysalis, dark eyes watching as they passed, a spittle of resentment glistening at their heels. There were several others sleeping or staring wretchedly from the lawn or slumped like straw-filled mannequins bayonetted against the bark of trees. Varnas smelled diesel and salt water. Pointing at the curved brick of the fort near the water, Campbell told Varnas how her father used to take her to the aquarium there.
“We would look into the pools and name the colors of the fish,” she said. “There was a place with Japanese carp, and the bottom of the tank was a blue and white mosaic. People would drop pennies into it and make wishes. It really was very beautiful, with the large fish, orange and white, and the thousands of small blue tiles, and the golden light that reflected off the clean money. Don’t lean too far, he’d say. I suppose he was thinking about my mother. Or, he might not have been. I imagine that they scooped up all the pennies immediately as the stock market failed.”
