Galilee. Part 42

ii The rain came on heavily as she drove back to the city. A few miles short of the bridge she was overtaken by a white Mercedes being driven at suicidal speed, which was pursued through the deluge by two police cars. Another two miles and she saw red lights flas.h.i.+ng through the downpour, and flames burning on the highway. The pursued car had plowed into the back of a large truck; and two other vehicles had then struck it, spinning across the slick asphalt. One was burning, its lucky occupants standing in the rain watching the conflagration. The other had turned over and sat in the rain like a tortured tortoise, while the officers attempted to free the family inside. As for whoever had been driving the Mercedes, he or she had presumably been given up for dead, along with any pa.s.sengers: it had concertinaed against the rear of the truck and was virtually unrecognizable. Needless to say, the entire highway was blocked. She waited for half an hour before the flow was reestablished, during which time she saw a whole melancholy scenario played out before her like a piece of rain-sodden theater. The arrival of firetrucks and ambulances; the freeing of the family (one of whom, a child, was delivered from the wreckage dead); grief and accusations; and finally the prying apart of the truck and the Mercedes, the contents of which were thankfully concealed from her view. It was only when she was off on her way again that she turned her thoughts to the business of the following day: the search for Danny's letters. If she was lucky Garrison would go to Ma.s.s in the morning, as he sometimes did.

He had his liberty to give thanks for. And while he was being a good Catholic boy she'd go up to the apartment in the Trump Tower and start her search. If she failed to find anything in the first attempt, she'd either have to wait for the following Sunday, when she could guarantee his absence, or else somehow monitor his whereabouts during the week. It would be hard to spy on the Tower without being noticed. There'd be journalists cruising around for a little while yet; and there had of course been some staff in residence, though she'd heard from somebody that two of them had left after Margie's murder and the third had been telling all kinds of tales to the gutter- press, so she'd presumably been fired.

In the end she'd just have to trust to luck, and have a good, solid excuse for her presence in the apartment if she was discovered. The fact was she felt perversely exhilarated at the thought of going into the Tower. For too long she'd been a pa.s.sive object; part of the grand Geary scheme.

Even her trip to Kaua'i had been initiated by somebody within the family. By helping Danny-or attempting to do so-she was defying her allotted role; and her only regret was that she'd taken so long to do it. Such were the seductions of luxury.

Now, as she began to see the path before her more clearly, she found herself wondering whether Galilee, the prince of her heart, was also one of those seductions. Was he the ultimate luxury?

Dropped in her path to distract her from looking where she was not supposed to look? How she longed to have Margie at the other end of a telephone, to share these ruminations with her.

Margie had always been able to go unerringly to the heart of a subject; to strip away all the high- minded stuff and focus on the real meat of a thing. What would she have said about Rachel'stheorizing? That it was irrelevant, probably, to the business of getting through the day. That attempting to understand the big picture was to partake of a peculiarly male delusion: the belief that events could be shaped and dictated, forced to reflect the will of an individual. Margie had never had much time for that kind of thinking. The only things in life that could truly be controlled were the little things: the number of olives in your martini, the height of your heel.

And the men who believed otherwise-the potentates and the plutocrats-were setting themselves up for terrible disappointment sooner or later; which fact, of course, gave her no little pleasure.

Perhaps, Rachel thought, these things worked differently on the Golden Floor. Perhaps up there the Grand Design was the subject of daily chitchat, and the spirits of the dead took pleasure in working out the vast patterns of human endeavor. But she doubted it. Certainly she couldn't imagine Margie having much time for that kind of business. Matters of destiny might be the subject of debate in other quarters, but where Margie held court there would be a happy throng of gossipers, rolling their eyes at the theorists.

The thought made Rachel smile; the first smile of that long, unhappy day. Margie had earned her freedom. Whether her suffering had been self-inflicted (or at least self-perpetuated) the point was surely that she'd endured it without losing sight of the sweet soul she'd been before the Gearys had found her. She'd made the trick look simple, but, as Rachel had found, it was hard to pull off.

This world was like a labyrinth; it was easy to get lost in, to become a stranger to yourself.

Rachel had been lucky. She'd rediscovered herself back on the island; found the wildling Rachel, the woman of flesh and blood and appet.i.te. She would not lose that woman again. However dark the maze became, however threatening its occupants, she would never again let go of the creature she was; not now that Galilee loved her.

VII.

Sunday morning, and the rain was heavier than ever, so heavy at times you couldn't see more than a block in any direction. If there'd been any photographers outside the Tower they'd taken refuge until their subject came back from Ma.s.s; or else they'd followed him there. Margie had given Rachel a key to the apartment when the first difficulties with Mitch.e.l.l had begun, telling her to use the place whenever she wanted to escape.

"Garrison's scarcely ever here," she'd said, "so you needn't worry about meeting him in his underwear. Which is quite a sight, believe me. He looks like a stick of dough with a paunch."

Rachel had never liked the Tower, or the apartment. It had always seemed, despite its glitz, a rather depressing place, even on bright days. And on a day like today, with the sky gray, it was murky and melancholy. The fact that the rooms were furnished with antiques, and the halls hung with huge, futile paintings which Garrison had collected as investments in the early eighties, only added to the charmlessness of the place.

She waited in the hallway for a few moments listening for any sound of occupancy. The only noise she heard came from outside; rain beating against the windows; the distant wail of a siren.

She was alone. Time to begin.She started up the stairs, her ascent taking her into still darker territory. There was a grandfather dock at the top of the flight and her heart jumped when she saw it looming there, imagining for a moment it was Garrison, waiting for her.

She paused while the hammering in her heart subsided. I'm afraid of him, she thought. It was the first time she'd admitted the fact to herself: she was afraid of what he might do if he found her trespa.s.sing where she had no business going. It was one thing to hear Loretta talk about his perversions, or to see him, weak and pale, standing before Margie's casket. It was quite another to imagine encountering him here, in the place where he'd slaughtered his own wife. What would she say to him if he did suddenly appear? Did she have a single lie in her head that he'd believe?

Probably not. Her only defense against his malice was the fact that she had once been his brother's bride, and how secure a lien against a.s.sault was that? The bond between the brothers was far stronger than any claim she might have. At that moment, standing on the stairs, she believed he would probably kill her if the occasion called for it.

She thought of what Mitch.e.l.l had said two days before; that remark about how dangerous her life would become if he weren't there to protect her. It wasn't an empty threat; it had carried weight.

She was forfeitable, just like Margie.

"Get a grip," she murmured to herself. This was neither the place nor time to contemplate her vulnerability.

She had to do what she'd come here to do and then get out. Daring the pale face of the clock (which had not worked, Margie had once told her, since the last years of the Civil War) she climbed the rest of the stairs to the second floor. Margie's private sitting room was on this floor; so was her bedroom, and the bathroom where she'd died. Rachel had intended not to go into the bathroom unless she ran out of places to search, but now, marooned on the landing, she knew the proximity of the place would haunt her unless she confronted it. Flipping on the landing light she went to the bedroom door. It was open a few inches. The room was bright: the investigating officers had left all the drapes wide. They'd also left the room in a state of complete disarray; the whole place had clearly been picked over for evidence. This was the only room in the house hung with pictures that reflected Margie's eclectic taste: a cloyingly sweet Chagall, a small p.i.s.sarro depicting a little French village, two Kandinskys. And in bizarre contrast to all this color, two Motherwell Elegies, stark black forms against dirty white, which hung like memento mori to either side of her bed.

Rachel picked her way through the numerous drawers which had been pulled out and laid on the floor to be searched, and went to the bathroom door. Her heart began to hammer again as she reached for the handle. She disregarded its din, and opened the door.

It was a big room, all pink marble and gold; the tub-which Margie had loved to lounge in- enormous. "I feel like a million-dollar hooker when I'm in that tub," Margie had liked to boast.

There were still countless reminders of her presence littered about. Perfume bottles and ashtrays, a photograph of her brother Sam tucked into the frame of the Venetian mirror, another photograph (this one of Margie in lacy underwear, taken by a society photographer who'dspecialized in aesthetically sleazy portraits), hanging beside the door to the shower. Again, there was also ample evidence that the police had been here. In several places the black marble surface had been dusted for fingerprints, and a layer of dust remained. The congealed remains of a pizza- presumably consumed while the investigators were at work-sat in a greasy box beside the bath.

And the contents of the drawers had been sorted through; a selection of questionable items set on the counter. A plethora of pill bottles; a small square mirror, along with a razor (kept for sentiment's sake, presumably; Margie had stopped using recreational cocaine years ago) and a collection of s.e.xual items: a small pink vibrator, a jar of cherry-flavored body lubricant, some condoms.

The sight of all this distressed Rachel. She couldn't help but imagine the officers smirking as they dug through the drawers; making tasteless jokes at Margie's expense. Not that she would have given a d.a.m.n.

Rachel had seen enough. She wasn't going to be haunted by this place; any power it might have had over her had been trampled away. At least so she thought until she went to switch off the light. There on the wall was a dark spatter. She told herself to look away, but her eye went no further than the next dried drop, which was larger. She touched it. The drop came away on her fingertip, like cracked paint. It was Margie's blood. And there was more of it, a lot more of it, invisible on the speckled marble until now.

Suddenly it didn't matter that the police had defiled the room with their pizza and their sticky fingers. Margie had died here. Oh, G.o.d in Heaven, Margie had died here. This was her lifeblood, spilled on the wall: a smear close to Rachel's shoulder, where she'd fallen back or reached out in the hope of keeping herself from falling, a larger dot on the floor between Rachel's feet, almost as dark as the marble.

She looked away, revolted, but the defenses she'd put up to keep herself from picturing what had happened here had collapsed. Suddenly she had the scene before her, in horrid detail. The sound of the shots echoing off the marble, off the mirrors; the look of disbelief on Margie's face as she retreated from her husband; the blood running out between her fingers, slapping on the floor.

What had Garrison done when the shots were fired? Dropped the gun and fallen to his knees beside her? Or stumbled to the phone to call for an ambulance? More likely he'd called Mitch.e.l.l, or a lawyer; put off the moment when help could come for as long as possible, to be certain that the life had gone from Margie. Every last breath.

Rachel covered her face with her hands, but the image refused to be banished so easily. It pulsed before her: Margie's face, openmouthed; her hands, fluttering, her body, robbed of motion, or the prospect of motion, darkening as the blood spread over it.

"Stop this," Rachel said to herself.

She wanted to get out of the bathroom without looking at it again, but she knew that was the worst thing she could do. She had to uncover her eyes and confront what she'd seen. There was nothing here that could hurt her, except for her own superst.i.tion.She reluctantly let her hands drop from her face and forced herself to study the scene afresh. First the sink and its surrounds; then the mirror and the tub. Finally, the blood on the floor. Only when she'd taken it all in did she turn to leave the bathroom.

Where now? The bedroom lay before her, with all the drawers laid out. She could waste an hour going through the room, but it was a fool's errand. If the letters were here, then they were so well hidden the police had failed to find them, and so, more than likely, would she.

Instead she picked her way back across the littered floor to the landing and crossed to Margie's sitting room. She glanced at her watch as she did so. She'd been in the house twelve minutes already. There was no time for further delay.

She opened the sitting room door, and immediately retreated, pursued out onto the landing by Didi, Margie's pug, who yapped with all the ferocity of a dog three times his size.

"Hush, hush-." She dropped down to her knees so he could sniff her hands. "It's only me."

He ceased his din on the instant, and instead began a round of grateful mewlings, dancing around in circles before her. She'd never much cared for the animal, but her heart went out to it now. It was doubtless wondering where its mistress had disappeared to, and took Rachel's presence as a sign of her return.

"You come with me," she said to the animal. It duly trotted after her into the sitting room, where a plate of uneaten food and an excrement-caked newspaper testified to its sorry state. The rest of the room was in a far tidier condition than either the bedroom or the bathroom. Either the police had neglected to examine it thoroughly, or else the officer who'd done so was a woman.

Rachel didn't linger. She immediately started to go round the room, opening every cupboard and drawer. There were plenty of plausible hiding places-rows of books (mostly airport romances), heaps of Broadway playbills, even a collection of letters (all of them from charitable organizations begging Margie's support)-but there was no sign of anything vaguely incriminating.

Didi stayed close by throughout the search, plainly determined not to lose his companion now he had her. Once only did he leave her side, waddling to the door as though he'd heard somebody in the house. Rachel paused and ventured out onto the landing, listening as intently as the dog, but it seemed to be a false alarm. Back to her search she went, checking on the time as she did so. She'd spent almost half an hour in the sitting room; she couldn't afford to stay in the house much longer. But if she left empty-handed, would she have the courage to return? Certainly she'd used up every cent of enthusiasm she had for the venture. It wouldn't be easy to persuade herself to repeat the process; not now that she had specifics to dwell on: the blood, the murk, the disarray.

When she returned into the sitting room Didi was not at her heel. She called to him, but he didn't come. She called again, and this time heard a lapping sound from the far side of the room. There was another door, which led into a small bathroom, with room for only a sink and a toilet. Didi had somehow scrambled up onto the toilet seat and was drinking from the bowl, the sight both sad and absurd. She told him to get down. He looked up, water dripping from his chops, and gave her a quizzical look. She told him again to get down, this time coming to pluck him off his perch.He was off the seat before she could get to him however, and scampered off between her legs.

She glanced around the tiny room: there was nowhere here to hide anything, except for the plain cabinet that boxed the sink. She bent down and opened it up. It smelt of disinfectant. There was a small store of bathroom cleansers and spare toilet tissue. She pulled them out and peered into the shadows. The pipes coming from the sink were wet; when she reached up to touch them her fingers came away covered in mold. She peered in again. There was something else in beneath the sink beside pipes; something wrapped up in paper. She reached a second time, and this time took hold of the object, which was wedged between the pipe and the damp-sodden plaster. It wouldn't move. She cursed, which sent Didi, who'd returned to see what was going on, scurrying from her side. Suddenly, the object s.h.i.+fted, and her cold fingers weren't quick enough to catch it before it dropped to the ground. There was the m.u.f.fled sound of a breaking bottle, and then the smell of brandy wafted up out of the cabinet. Clearly what she'd found was liquor Margie had stashed away during some long-surrendered attempt at drying out. Didi was back again, sniffing after the brandy, the smell of which was giddying.

"Get out of there!" Rachel said, catching hold of him to haul him from the muck. He squealed like a piglet. She told him to stop complaining and unceremoniously threw him in the direction of the door. Then she proceeded to put the bleach and disinfectant and toilet tissue back. Hopefully if she closed the cabinet door tight n.o.body would catch the smell of liquor. And even if they did, she reasoned, what were they going to find? Just a broken bottle. As she slid the last of the disinfectants into the cabinet she caught sight of something else, lying beside the brandy. Not one but two envelopes, both bulky. Either Danny wrote very long letters, she thought, or else he'd miscalculated the number of photographs he'd taken. She pulled the envelopes out into the light.

They had both been in contact with the wall; there were flecks of decayed plaster adhering to them. Otherwise, they'd survived their hiding place intact. One of them was considerably heavier than the other however. It didn't contain letters or photographs, she thought; more like a small, thick book.

This wasn't the place to examine the contents; she could do that at home. She finished putting the disinfectants into the cabinet, firmly closed the door, and bidding Didi a quick farewell headed out of the sitting room onto the landing.

If Garrison came in now, she thought, she wouldn't be able to tell a lie worth a d.a.m.n. The pleasure at her discovery was written all over her face. She tucked the envelopes into her coat and hurried down the stairs, keeping her eye on the front door as she descended; but the good fortune which had delivered the envelopes into her hands held. She opened the door a few inches, checking to see if there were any photographers out there, and finding that the ram was still pelting down and the sidewalk deserted, slipped out and down the steps, thoroughly pleased with herself.

VIII.

i I have to make room here for the briefest of digressions on the inevitable and probablyinexhaustible subject of my invert sister. The last I wrote of her she'd come into my room flushed with success, having read Sister Mary-Elizabeth's poem to her beloved, and had her proposal of marriage accepted. A few hours ago she came back with details of the arrangements.

"No excuses," she said to me. "You have to be there."

"I've never been to a lesbian wedding," I said, "I wouldn't know what to do."

"Be happy for me."

"I am."

"I want you to dance and get drunk and make a sentimental speech about our childhood."

"Oh what? You and Daddy in the dressing room?"

She gave me a fierce look. Maybe it's some remnant of an atavistic power lodged in her, but when she gets fierce she looks rabid.

"Has Alice ever seen you angry?" I asked her.

"Once or twice."

"No. I mean really angry. Crazy-angry. I-could-tear-your-heart-out-and-eat-it angry."

"Hm... no."

"Shouldn't she be warned, before you tie the knot? I mean, you can be a terror."

"So can she. She's the only girl in a family of eight."

"She has seven brothers?"

"Seven brothers. And they treat her very respectfully."

"Rich family?"

"White trash. Two of the brothers are in jail. The father's an alcoholic. Beer for breakfast."

"Are you sure she's not just after you for your money?" I said. Marietta glowered. "Jesus, I'm just asking. I don't want to see you hurt."

"If you're so suspicious, then you come and meet her. Meet them all."

"You know I can't do that.""Why not? And don't tell me you're working."

"But that's the truth. I am. Morning, noon and night."

"This is a d.a.m.n sight more important than your book. This is the woman I love and adore and idolize."

"Hm. Love, adore and idolize, huh? She must be good in bed."

"She's the best, Eddie. I mean, the very best. She eats me out like she'd just invented it. I scream so loud the trailer shakes."

"She lives in a trailer? Are you sure you're doing the right thing?"

Marietta picked at her front tooth, which she always does when she's uneasy. "Most of the time,"

she replied.

"But...?"

"But what?"

"No. You tell me. Most of the time's enough?"

"Okay, smarta.s.s. When you met Chiyojo were you absolutely certain-not even a breath of doubt- that she was the one?"

"Absolutely."

"You had an affair with her brother," she reminded me lightly.

"So?"

"So how certain could you be about marrying a woman when you were s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g her brother?"

"That was different. He was..." r "A transvest.i.te."

"No. He was an actor." She rolled her eyes. "How did we get into this?" I said.

"You were trying to talk me out of marrying Alice."

"No I wasn't. I really wasn't. I was observing that... I don't know what I was observing. Never mind."

Marietta came over to me and took hold of my hand. "You know, you're very good for me," shesaid.

"I am?"

"You make me question things. You make me think twice."

"I don't know if that's such a good thing. Sometimes I wish I hadn't thought twice so many times, if you see what I mean. I might have done more with my life."

"I think Alice is the one, Eddie."

"Then marry her, for G.o.d's sake."

She squeezed my hand hard. "I really want you to meet her first. I want your opinion. It means a lot to me."

"So maybe you should bring her here," I said. Marietta looked doubtful. "She's going to see this place eventually. And I think we'd both have a better idea of whether it was going to work out once we saw how she responded."

"You mean: tell her everything?"