Solimeos, page 23
“Numi will tell me how to help. I won’t let you die, Mr. Axel.”
“Sure, Rainflower. Just don’t touch my leg.”
She cocked her head, listened to the wind, sniffed. “Awa follows. I must make you strong very quickly.” She whispered, sang, chanted into my mouth. Her breath was clean and sweet. It smelled like daisies in wet soil.
Time stood still, and I entered Rainflower’s forest. In spite of everything I knew and trusted, something small and weak in me hoped she could keep me alive. I could feel poison burning in my gut.
She closed her eyes, rocking back and forth. “Your spirit says she did not come here to die from an arrow wound. Numi says you should trust Okok. He is a good shaman. You will live.”
By the time we got to O Linda, I was feeling better. Mike took Rainflower to the convent with my promise that if Cecilia could temporarily shelter and protect her, I would build her a new sanctuary. Nearly twenty but old beyond her years, bossy, wealthy Sister Cecilia had taken over. She now ran the convent as she pleased.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The house pulsed with anger. Dietrich and Raven had been fighting. My leg throbbed as I entered the dining room for breakfast. I could feel the tension climbing my spine. They were both dressed smartly: Dietrich in a fresh, white silk shirt under a paisley smoking jacket, Raven in a black kaftan embroidered with pearls, her hair done up in a great bun, held with diamond hairpins.
I was the guest, the joker before the king and the queen. Both acknowledged me with a brief nod and continued sipping coffee. Each had a folded newspaper at which they glanced from time to time. The outside world got closer and closer.
Neither looked my way as I lowered myself to the chair, careful to avoid hitting my tender leg on anything. I had returned from the expedition the day before.
Raven rang her silver bell. Maria appeared. Raven held the coffeepot out for refilling. Maria dipped her head and left. Not once had Maria raised her eyes to look at us. I felt a deep shame. We sat politely, as if a normal family at breakfast, as if the temperature of the coffee was important.
Dietrich refolded his newspaper. “Axel, tomorrow Colony members will be flying to Rio together, for fittings and so forth in preparation for Raven’s birthday party. I’m assuming you don’t feel well enough to join us.”
“It’s your birthday party, darling,” Raven said. “Celebrating sixty glorious years.”
“My dear, it may be my birthday, but it will be your party.”
“Dietrich, enough. And I’m not going to wear your damned cross at the party. You hear me? No.” So that was the matter at dispute.
“Do you want me to leave?” I interrupted.
Raven patted my hand. “Oh, no. Please stay. It might get better. It can’t get worse.”
A large crystal vase containing an arrangement of birds-of-paradise sat on the table between me and Dietrich. Maria would have done this purposely, so we didn’t have to look at each other. I bent a few stalks sideways to see my father. He pushed the flowers upright, covering his face and, of course, mine.
He cleared his throat before speaking to his wife in a clipped tone. “I only request that you wear a cross so you will be safe in the time we have left here. Axel has arranged it so the Shamburos are searching for a relic of Solomon. When I have it, I will trade it with the Israelis for amnesty…for our amnesty.”
“Not ours. Yours. You may have forgotten I am a Jew. I don’t need amnesty.” Raven closed her eyes. “Are you serious? You think you can turn yourself in and lecture around the world? Solomon? That’s your bargaining chip on this suicidal ego trip? Jews don’t care about Solomon. They want to watch you squirm in the witness chair, to hear the bones snap when they hang you. They want sweet pure revenge, mein herr.”
Dietrich walked around the table, standing over her. “Goddamn it. You had better listen.” That’s when I saw long scratches on his cheek, deep scratches.
She sighed, shaking her head. “Alright, Baron Dietrich von Pappendorf, I am listening.” How had she made our name sound like an insult? She poured another cup of coffee, twisting a spoon of cream into it, watching the cream circle.
“Soon we will have proof that Solomon and his ships visited the Amazon. With that, we shall make ourselves known and negotiate our freedom. Then I will rearrange the history of mankind, the origins of consciousness, the source of civilization, the connection between language and the genetic code, the mutation of genes, the mutation of words.”
“And with whom do you intend to make these arrangements?” asked Raven. “Perhaps you could wear a sandwich board and walk around Rio. Wanted: Israeli Nazi hunter. For a good time, call. Details on rear.”
Dietrich retook his seat, then smiled crookedly at us both. “How I adore this. Have you ever taken a Jewish mistress, Axel? Well-advised. So much Jewish passion.”
Part of me wanted to hear everything. Part of me wanted to hear nothing. It invariably thrilled me when Luba made the occasional appearance, coming alive, swollen with anger, like a tick on Dietrich’s blood.
She threw one of her sparkling glass torso babies, a red one, at Dietrich. “I’m not leaving,” she said. “I’ve put my life into this place. You haven’t so much as touched a coffee bean or a centavo. Grevaldo and I have made this enterprise into a great success while you were playing with yarn in your study. Language and genes. Who cares about any of that? I care about this place and my life here.” She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. “You know, Dietrich, Bebe tells me everything…everything. And who Willi really is. Everything, Dietrich, because Hermann knows everything. He tells Bebe. Everything, Dietrich. And she tells me. As in Chile. As in the Fourth Reich.”
“These things are in the past. I have no control. Willi is in charge—”
“Don’t ‘Willi’ me, Dietrich. I know what’s going on in Chile, for God’s sake. They’re training an army of Nazis. Hard not to notice all the gorgeous Aryan waiters at La Familia. You think they’re really waiters?”
My leg throbbed. I excused myself and headed to the safety of the bathroom. Their words trailed me down the hallway. I heard shouts and the crashing of china through the walls.
Okok’s chants and plants had helped. Raven was no longer shaking.
“Don’t think I don’t know who you are and what you did, Dietrich. I was there. I can bear witness. I know how many Jews you killed.”
He choked, coughed, laughed. “Don’t be a fool. That’s ridiculous. You would never testify against me.”
“And do you know what your dear Colony will do to you if they find out you turned yourself in? They’d hunt a traitor like you down. You were the handsome aristocrat in their inner circle, an Aryan pilot flying to the glorious music of Wagner. A big-time, dangerous, murdering Nazi. But not just a Nazi, a criminal. You were one of Hitler’s madmen!” Her words echoed throughout the house.
“You bitch,” he shouted. Something dropped heavily to the floor. Dietrich shouted, demanding, “Axel! We have work to do. What’s taking you?”
“And you can shove your cross up your ass,” said Raven. “I’m not wearing it. I’m a Jew. Don’t forget, Dietrich!”
“Axel, what the hell is taking you so long?”
Leaving the bathroom a minute later, at the foyer I smelled baby powder. I stopped in my tracks. Had Dr. Hermann been here and let himself in? My fears were confirmed when I heard a horse outside galloping away. What had he heard?
Ten minutes later, Raven found me in the sunroom, collapsed in an armchair. I wasn’t quite ready to head up to work in my father’s study.
“Are we even sure that Dietrich is actually a wanted man?” I asked her. “What if he turns himself in and they don’t want him?”
“Then we have a hanging party. I’ll take you to the Swiss Alps. You are very wanted.”
She laughed a ragged laugh. She stood and walked around the room, breaking dead leaves from a ficus tree, crushing them, putting them in her pocket. “You know what I don’t understand, Axel? Why didn’t he change his name? Why did he insist on remaining—” she dropped her voice to a lower register as if announcing his entrance “—the Baron von Pappendorf?”
“It’s his heritage.”
“Stupid.”
“It’s who he is.”
She spun around to look at me. “Is his work…uh…essential, in any way?”
“What are you thinking?”
“Wernher von Braun and his rockets are seen as critical, needed, important. The Americans protected him, gave him an entire agency, made him a hero. Are your father’s studies even remotely as essential to, say, scholars as Wernher von Braun’s work is to science?”
“If he’s correct about Solomon, he will turn history upside down. If he’s correct about language and genetics—well, there is no telling what other scholarship will follow, building upon his research. The problem is how to get it out to the world. That’s why he wants to turn himself in. Of course, Dr. Hermann thinks Dietrich’s alphabet work is essential to the Fourth Reich so they can rule the world. Dietrich devotes maybe ten minutes a day to Dr. Hermann’s work, a lifetime to his own. He is conducting his own origins of consciousness work.”
“Malignant narcissism. I am, at least, only narcissistic. Axel, I saw Hermann’s horse from the dining room. What was he doing here?”
“I think he came in, heard the argument, and left politely.”
“Manfred Hermann is not polite. Do you think he heard Dietrich say he was turning himself in? What if he heard me say I’m a Jew—I don’t need amnesty? Oh, God!”
I stood and put my arm around her shoulders. “I don’t know what he heard. But it may be yet another reason for you to leave this place.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
In Hitler’s house, Dietrich, exiled genius, yearned for recognition. His son, an Amazonian Teuton, half Indian, half German nobility, yearned for the genius’s wife, certain that he would find, deep within her vagina, a golden homunculus who would tell him who he really was. Meanwhile, marvelous Raven, erstwhile wife, hid from history and pain, covering herself with jewels as if their glitter would blind others to who she really was.
That evening, Dietrich and Raven were to fly out with other members of the Occult Bureau Colony to Rio for haircuts and gown fittings in preparation for Raven’s vast extravaganza—Dietrich’s imminent birthday party.
It was midafternoon. Dietrich was upstairs; he had slept most of the day.
Maria had dyed, curled, and pinned Raven’s hair into a gleaming black chignon, which, stuck as it was with her diamond-tipped hairpins, looked like a star-studded night cloud, pubic, silken, easing the growing ferocity of what was, after so many surgeon visits, Raven’s sharp Inca profile.
She wore a handsome, white silk suit with black piping on the seams, sitting at her bridge table in the main room, dealing out endless games of solitaire, turning the cards face-up, bending the corners unnaturally slowly, as if she were a fortune teller teasing a client. Sliding them into their columns until, annoyed at losing, she began slapping the cards hard on the bridge table. Her long fingers drummed on the speckled surface of the bridge table. Her rings flashed.
I lay silent on a plush sofa nearby, content to be alone in a room with her.
“Everyone’s talking about your fat mistress,” she said after a few minutes.
Sperm boiled up within me and became venom. Or was it the other way around, venom preceding sperm? “Gossip travels fast.”
“Why can’t you just find someone pleasant and fashionable and get married for God’s sake?”
“Who do you know who is pleasant?”
I accomplished the dubious victory of having her look directly at me. “You seem different. What happened in the forest, Axel?”
I had yet to tell her about Rainflower and was reasonably certain this was not the time or place to do so. I was terrified of how she might react and what she might do when she found out the truth but decided to make a start: “We are on the trail of solid proof that Solomon was in the Amazon, and, oh yes, we saw a girl living with a group called the Shamburo. She’s very beautiful, with very sweet, intelligent eyes. The Shamburo are going to kill her as soon as she comes of age. She’s bad luck for the tribe.”
“That’s terrible, Axel.” Raven looked at me, waiting for something. She was not a person I could hide secrets from, I should have known. “You’re not telling me everything.”
“That’s correct.”
“Is there something I need to know?”
Dietrich arrived in a maroon velvet smoking jacket. Raven lay her cards down, stood, greeted him with a kiss on the cheek. “Well, look who’s here. And none the worse. You slept all day.”
Dietrich took his place in a winged chair. “How is it that shrewish rhymes with Jewish?”
“Silence, Baron,” said his wife.
Dietrich rattled his paper. He read slowly, holding his head at odd and awkward angles. From my vantage point, all I could see of him were his black velvet mules and one long, elegant hand tapping out the rhythm of the words he read, tapping on the arm of the wing chair, a hand with an enormous, yellow-diamond ring, the size of one of Raven’s Mah-Jongg tiles, the stone of which he had himself, he said, dug from a dry bed somewhere near the mouth of the Tapajos, which was a blatant lie.
Howler monkeys stole figs from the tree in the courtyard. Shitting, roaring, they raced above us along the roofs and the balconies. Under the howler screams, frogs riveted the ever-virgin forest with their demands. In response, Dietrich rattled pages of his newspaper. Raven slapped her cards.
A stream of urine splashed onto Dietrich’s newspaper. A howler monkey scrambled along a beam above us.
Dietrich pulled a pistol from the pocket of his smoking jacket and shot him.
The monkey, a small one, dropped to the floor.
Raven rang a bell for Maria. She entered with her head down. Dietrich pointed his soiled newspaper at the dead monkey. Maria, accustomed to the monkey invasions, kicked the carcass into the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. She returned with a bucket and a mop, scrubbing up blood.
From the kitchen, I heard Helen call, “Monkey see, monkey do.” Mohammed had yet to pick up his dreadful parrot.
We swung, this happy family, on a pendulum from pathological to normal, exhibiting the finest of manners between swings. I listened to Dietrich’s heavy footsteps as he trod up the stairs, then waited for the slam of his bedroom door.
At her table playing cards, Raven listened also, eyes shifting.
“Raven,” he called from above, “where are my cummerbunds? I can’t find them.”
“Top left drawer of your dresser, in a long brown box.”
Words exploded from my dream world. “I want to feel you under me,” I told her from the couch, sitting up. “I want to see you throw your head back in ecstasy. I want to hear you groan my name. I want to feel you come, Luba.”
She swept her cards into her lap, and they fell between her legs under the bridge table. “Pick them up,” she whispered, closing her eyes.
I dropped to the floor and crept around, ignoring any leg pain, picking up Raven’s cards, resting my hands on her knees, which opened for me.
“Tongue,” she commanded, pulling off her loose silk trousers.
Tongue, I did. I was at ecstasy’s gate.
She snorted, breathed, heavily, came almost instantly.
I scuttled about under the bridge table, picked up the remainder of the cards. When I had a full deck, I tossed them onto the bridge table and crept as fast as I could toward the sofa. I rolled into its crewel plush pillows to conceal, as they would say in my latest mistress’s romance novel argot, my throbbing member.
When I was again presentable and dared to look over my shoulder to see a room empty of Dietrich, I observed Raven still playing her cards like a fortune teller with her pants pulled up, rearranging her destiny. I kept my voice low. “Let him go to Israel. You go free. Get out of here. I’ll go with you.”
“Why I stay here is not your business. Why don’t you leave? You’re a little goose-stepping rubber stamp.”
“How can we so love each other as much as we do and be so cruel?” I asked.
It was a long time before she answered. And when she did, it was not Raven but the small voice of Luba, the wet nurse in my grandfather’s castle, of Luba, sitting on the roof at night with me, watching stars, watching the red blood of war in the sky. “Where would I go? I’ve been safe here, Axel.”
“Remember, in the forest, in the war, once, on the roof of my grandfather’s house. Remember when we were watching the cities burn in the sky, you said that. ‘Where will I go? What will become of me?’” I sat beside her. “You were Luba. What happened to her?”
“Tucked away. She’s too sad. She remembers the stars, Axel. You made an alphabet. She remembers the moon rolling through the stars and writing stories. I don’t want to remember her.”
“I loved you even then.”
“We were children. I was all you had. It’s different now.”
“You said Dietrich had blood on his hands. Back then I didn’t know what you meant.”
“You do now, don’t you?” she snapped, her voice again Raven’s. “Axel, there are two ways to survive. One, keep revenge burning in your heart and live on its fires. Two, try to forget and take the best of what you can. I have one hundred polo ponies, a closet full of designer clothes, furs, diamonds. And I control all the money. Luba grew up. It’s better to forget.”
“What about Dr. Hermann?”
“Dietrich will protect me.”
But she had not seen what I had seen: a stone pit surrounded by twelve demented men in robes. In a fiery circle, with Dr. Hermann chanting his magic and a knife held at Raven’s throat, could any of us save her?
“Sure, Rainflower. Just don’t touch my leg.”
She cocked her head, listened to the wind, sniffed. “Awa follows. I must make you strong very quickly.” She whispered, sang, chanted into my mouth. Her breath was clean and sweet. It smelled like daisies in wet soil.
Time stood still, and I entered Rainflower’s forest. In spite of everything I knew and trusted, something small and weak in me hoped she could keep me alive. I could feel poison burning in my gut.
She closed her eyes, rocking back and forth. “Your spirit says she did not come here to die from an arrow wound. Numi says you should trust Okok. He is a good shaman. You will live.”
By the time we got to O Linda, I was feeling better. Mike took Rainflower to the convent with my promise that if Cecilia could temporarily shelter and protect her, I would build her a new sanctuary. Nearly twenty but old beyond her years, bossy, wealthy Sister Cecilia had taken over. She now ran the convent as she pleased.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The house pulsed with anger. Dietrich and Raven had been fighting. My leg throbbed as I entered the dining room for breakfast. I could feel the tension climbing my spine. They were both dressed smartly: Dietrich in a fresh, white silk shirt under a paisley smoking jacket, Raven in a black kaftan embroidered with pearls, her hair done up in a great bun, held with diamond hairpins.
I was the guest, the joker before the king and the queen. Both acknowledged me with a brief nod and continued sipping coffee. Each had a folded newspaper at which they glanced from time to time. The outside world got closer and closer.
Neither looked my way as I lowered myself to the chair, careful to avoid hitting my tender leg on anything. I had returned from the expedition the day before.
Raven rang her silver bell. Maria appeared. Raven held the coffeepot out for refilling. Maria dipped her head and left. Not once had Maria raised her eyes to look at us. I felt a deep shame. We sat politely, as if a normal family at breakfast, as if the temperature of the coffee was important.
Dietrich refolded his newspaper. “Axel, tomorrow Colony members will be flying to Rio together, for fittings and so forth in preparation for Raven’s birthday party. I’m assuming you don’t feel well enough to join us.”
“It’s your birthday party, darling,” Raven said. “Celebrating sixty glorious years.”
“My dear, it may be my birthday, but it will be your party.”
“Dietrich, enough. And I’m not going to wear your damned cross at the party. You hear me? No.” So that was the matter at dispute.
“Do you want me to leave?” I interrupted.
Raven patted my hand. “Oh, no. Please stay. It might get better. It can’t get worse.”
A large crystal vase containing an arrangement of birds-of-paradise sat on the table between me and Dietrich. Maria would have done this purposely, so we didn’t have to look at each other. I bent a few stalks sideways to see my father. He pushed the flowers upright, covering his face and, of course, mine.
He cleared his throat before speaking to his wife in a clipped tone. “I only request that you wear a cross so you will be safe in the time we have left here. Axel has arranged it so the Shamburos are searching for a relic of Solomon. When I have it, I will trade it with the Israelis for amnesty…for our amnesty.”
“Not ours. Yours. You may have forgotten I am a Jew. I don’t need amnesty.” Raven closed her eyes. “Are you serious? You think you can turn yourself in and lecture around the world? Solomon? That’s your bargaining chip on this suicidal ego trip? Jews don’t care about Solomon. They want to watch you squirm in the witness chair, to hear the bones snap when they hang you. They want sweet pure revenge, mein herr.”
Dietrich walked around the table, standing over her. “Goddamn it. You had better listen.” That’s when I saw long scratches on his cheek, deep scratches.
She sighed, shaking her head. “Alright, Baron Dietrich von Pappendorf, I am listening.” How had she made our name sound like an insult? She poured another cup of coffee, twisting a spoon of cream into it, watching the cream circle.
“Soon we will have proof that Solomon and his ships visited the Amazon. With that, we shall make ourselves known and negotiate our freedom. Then I will rearrange the history of mankind, the origins of consciousness, the source of civilization, the connection between language and the genetic code, the mutation of genes, the mutation of words.”
“And with whom do you intend to make these arrangements?” asked Raven. “Perhaps you could wear a sandwich board and walk around Rio. Wanted: Israeli Nazi hunter. For a good time, call. Details on rear.”
Dietrich retook his seat, then smiled crookedly at us both. “How I adore this. Have you ever taken a Jewish mistress, Axel? Well-advised. So much Jewish passion.”
Part of me wanted to hear everything. Part of me wanted to hear nothing. It invariably thrilled me when Luba made the occasional appearance, coming alive, swollen with anger, like a tick on Dietrich’s blood.
She threw one of her sparkling glass torso babies, a red one, at Dietrich. “I’m not leaving,” she said. “I’ve put my life into this place. You haven’t so much as touched a coffee bean or a centavo. Grevaldo and I have made this enterprise into a great success while you were playing with yarn in your study. Language and genes. Who cares about any of that? I care about this place and my life here.” She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. “You know, Dietrich, Bebe tells me everything…everything. And who Willi really is. Everything, Dietrich, because Hermann knows everything. He tells Bebe. Everything, Dietrich. And she tells me. As in Chile. As in the Fourth Reich.”
“These things are in the past. I have no control. Willi is in charge—”
“Don’t ‘Willi’ me, Dietrich. I know what’s going on in Chile, for God’s sake. They’re training an army of Nazis. Hard not to notice all the gorgeous Aryan waiters at La Familia. You think they’re really waiters?”
My leg throbbed. I excused myself and headed to the safety of the bathroom. Their words trailed me down the hallway. I heard shouts and the crashing of china through the walls.
Okok’s chants and plants had helped. Raven was no longer shaking.
“Don’t think I don’t know who you are and what you did, Dietrich. I was there. I can bear witness. I know how many Jews you killed.”
He choked, coughed, laughed. “Don’t be a fool. That’s ridiculous. You would never testify against me.”
“And do you know what your dear Colony will do to you if they find out you turned yourself in? They’d hunt a traitor like you down. You were the handsome aristocrat in their inner circle, an Aryan pilot flying to the glorious music of Wagner. A big-time, dangerous, murdering Nazi. But not just a Nazi, a criminal. You were one of Hitler’s madmen!” Her words echoed throughout the house.
“You bitch,” he shouted. Something dropped heavily to the floor. Dietrich shouted, demanding, “Axel! We have work to do. What’s taking you?”
“And you can shove your cross up your ass,” said Raven. “I’m not wearing it. I’m a Jew. Don’t forget, Dietrich!”
“Axel, what the hell is taking you so long?”
Leaving the bathroom a minute later, at the foyer I smelled baby powder. I stopped in my tracks. Had Dr. Hermann been here and let himself in? My fears were confirmed when I heard a horse outside galloping away. What had he heard?
Ten minutes later, Raven found me in the sunroom, collapsed in an armchair. I wasn’t quite ready to head up to work in my father’s study.
“Are we even sure that Dietrich is actually a wanted man?” I asked her. “What if he turns himself in and they don’t want him?”
“Then we have a hanging party. I’ll take you to the Swiss Alps. You are very wanted.”
She laughed a ragged laugh. She stood and walked around the room, breaking dead leaves from a ficus tree, crushing them, putting them in her pocket. “You know what I don’t understand, Axel? Why didn’t he change his name? Why did he insist on remaining—” she dropped her voice to a lower register as if announcing his entrance “—the Baron von Pappendorf?”
“It’s his heritage.”
“Stupid.”
“It’s who he is.”
She spun around to look at me. “Is his work…uh…essential, in any way?”
“What are you thinking?”
“Wernher von Braun and his rockets are seen as critical, needed, important. The Americans protected him, gave him an entire agency, made him a hero. Are your father’s studies even remotely as essential to, say, scholars as Wernher von Braun’s work is to science?”
“If he’s correct about Solomon, he will turn history upside down. If he’s correct about language and genetics—well, there is no telling what other scholarship will follow, building upon his research. The problem is how to get it out to the world. That’s why he wants to turn himself in. Of course, Dr. Hermann thinks Dietrich’s alphabet work is essential to the Fourth Reich so they can rule the world. Dietrich devotes maybe ten minutes a day to Dr. Hermann’s work, a lifetime to his own. He is conducting his own origins of consciousness work.”
“Malignant narcissism. I am, at least, only narcissistic. Axel, I saw Hermann’s horse from the dining room. What was he doing here?”
“I think he came in, heard the argument, and left politely.”
“Manfred Hermann is not polite. Do you think he heard Dietrich say he was turning himself in? What if he heard me say I’m a Jew—I don’t need amnesty? Oh, God!”
I stood and put my arm around her shoulders. “I don’t know what he heard. But it may be yet another reason for you to leave this place.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
In Hitler’s house, Dietrich, exiled genius, yearned for recognition. His son, an Amazonian Teuton, half Indian, half German nobility, yearned for the genius’s wife, certain that he would find, deep within her vagina, a golden homunculus who would tell him who he really was. Meanwhile, marvelous Raven, erstwhile wife, hid from history and pain, covering herself with jewels as if their glitter would blind others to who she really was.
That evening, Dietrich and Raven were to fly out with other members of the Occult Bureau Colony to Rio for haircuts and gown fittings in preparation for Raven’s vast extravaganza—Dietrich’s imminent birthday party.
It was midafternoon. Dietrich was upstairs; he had slept most of the day.
Maria had dyed, curled, and pinned Raven’s hair into a gleaming black chignon, which, stuck as it was with her diamond-tipped hairpins, looked like a star-studded night cloud, pubic, silken, easing the growing ferocity of what was, after so many surgeon visits, Raven’s sharp Inca profile.
She wore a handsome, white silk suit with black piping on the seams, sitting at her bridge table in the main room, dealing out endless games of solitaire, turning the cards face-up, bending the corners unnaturally slowly, as if she were a fortune teller teasing a client. Sliding them into their columns until, annoyed at losing, she began slapping the cards hard on the bridge table. Her long fingers drummed on the speckled surface of the bridge table. Her rings flashed.
I lay silent on a plush sofa nearby, content to be alone in a room with her.
“Everyone’s talking about your fat mistress,” she said after a few minutes.
Sperm boiled up within me and became venom. Or was it the other way around, venom preceding sperm? “Gossip travels fast.”
“Why can’t you just find someone pleasant and fashionable and get married for God’s sake?”
“Who do you know who is pleasant?”
I accomplished the dubious victory of having her look directly at me. “You seem different. What happened in the forest, Axel?”
I had yet to tell her about Rainflower and was reasonably certain this was not the time or place to do so. I was terrified of how she might react and what she might do when she found out the truth but decided to make a start: “We are on the trail of solid proof that Solomon was in the Amazon, and, oh yes, we saw a girl living with a group called the Shamburo. She’s very beautiful, with very sweet, intelligent eyes. The Shamburo are going to kill her as soon as she comes of age. She’s bad luck for the tribe.”
“That’s terrible, Axel.” Raven looked at me, waiting for something. She was not a person I could hide secrets from, I should have known. “You’re not telling me everything.”
“That’s correct.”
“Is there something I need to know?”
Dietrich arrived in a maroon velvet smoking jacket. Raven lay her cards down, stood, greeted him with a kiss on the cheek. “Well, look who’s here. And none the worse. You slept all day.”
Dietrich took his place in a winged chair. “How is it that shrewish rhymes with Jewish?”
“Silence, Baron,” said his wife.
Dietrich rattled his paper. He read slowly, holding his head at odd and awkward angles. From my vantage point, all I could see of him were his black velvet mules and one long, elegant hand tapping out the rhythm of the words he read, tapping on the arm of the wing chair, a hand with an enormous, yellow-diamond ring, the size of one of Raven’s Mah-Jongg tiles, the stone of which he had himself, he said, dug from a dry bed somewhere near the mouth of the Tapajos, which was a blatant lie.
Howler monkeys stole figs from the tree in the courtyard. Shitting, roaring, they raced above us along the roofs and the balconies. Under the howler screams, frogs riveted the ever-virgin forest with their demands. In response, Dietrich rattled pages of his newspaper. Raven slapped her cards.
A stream of urine splashed onto Dietrich’s newspaper. A howler monkey scrambled along a beam above us.
Dietrich pulled a pistol from the pocket of his smoking jacket and shot him.
The monkey, a small one, dropped to the floor.
Raven rang a bell for Maria. She entered with her head down. Dietrich pointed his soiled newspaper at the dead monkey. Maria, accustomed to the monkey invasions, kicked the carcass into the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. She returned with a bucket and a mop, scrubbing up blood.
From the kitchen, I heard Helen call, “Monkey see, monkey do.” Mohammed had yet to pick up his dreadful parrot.
We swung, this happy family, on a pendulum from pathological to normal, exhibiting the finest of manners between swings. I listened to Dietrich’s heavy footsteps as he trod up the stairs, then waited for the slam of his bedroom door.
At her table playing cards, Raven listened also, eyes shifting.
“Raven,” he called from above, “where are my cummerbunds? I can’t find them.”
“Top left drawer of your dresser, in a long brown box.”
Words exploded from my dream world. “I want to feel you under me,” I told her from the couch, sitting up. “I want to see you throw your head back in ecstasy. I want to hear you groan my name. I want to feel you come, Luba.”
She swept her cards into her lap, and they fell between her legs under the bridge table. “Pick them up,” she whispered, closing her eyes.
I dropped to the floor and crept around, ignoring any leg pain, picking up Raven’s cards, resting my hands on her knees, which opened for me.
“Tongue,” she commanded, pulling off her loose silk trousers.
Tongue, I did. I was at ecstasy’s gate.
She snorted, breathed, heavily, came almost instantly.
I scuttled about under the bridge table, picked up the remainder of the cards. When I had a full deck, I tossed them onto the bridge table and crept as fast as I could toward the sofa. I rolled into its crewel plush pillows to conceal, as they would say in my latest mistress’s romance novel argot, my throbbing member.
When I was again presentable and dared to look over my shoulder to see a room empty of Dietrich, I observed Raven still playing her cards like a fortune teller with her pants pulled up, rearranging her destiny. I kept my voice low. “Let him go to Israel. You go free. Get out of here. I’ll go with you.”
“Why I stay here is not your business. Why don’t you leave? You’re a little goose-stepping rubber stamp.”
“How can we so love each other as much as we do and be so cruel?” I asked.
It was a long time before she answered. And when she did, it was not Raven but the small voice of Luba, the wet nurse in my grandfather’s castle, of Luba, sitting on the roof at night with me, watching stars, watching the red blood of war in the sky. “Where would I go? I’ve been safe here, Axel.”
“Remember, in the forest, in the war, once, on the roof of my grandfather’s house. Remember when we were watching the cities burn in the sky, you said that. ‘Where will I go? What will become of me?’” I sat beside her. “You were Luba. What happened to her?”
“Tucked away. She’s too sad. She remembers the stars, Axel. You made an alphabet. She remembers the moon rolling through the stars and writing stories. I don’t want to remember her.”
“I loved you even then.”
“We were children. I was all you had. It’s different now.”
“You said Dietrich had blood on his hands. Back then I didn’t know what you meant.”
“You do now, don’t you?” she snapped, her voice again Raven’s. “Axel, there are two ways to survive. One, keep revenge burning in your heart and live on its fires. Two, try to forget and take the best of what you can. I have one hundred polo ponies, a closet full of designer clothes, furs, diamonds. And I control all the money. Luba grew up. It’s better to forget.”
“What about Dr. Hermann?”
“Dietrich will protect me.”
But she had not seen what I had seen: a stone pit surrounded by twelve demented men in robes. In a fiery circle, with Dr. Hermann chanting his magic and a knife held at Raven’s throat, could any of us save her?
