Black Swan Rising (7 page)

“None at all,” I said with conviction. “My father does the Sunday
Times
crossword puzzle in twenty minutes and remembers the name of every customer and artist who’s passed through the gallery in the last forty years.”

“And you haven’t noticed any depression or suicidal thoughts?” The question came from Detective Kiernan.

I felt a prickle of unease travel up my spine but couldn’t imagine what he was after. “No. My father is not prone to depression. Of course he grieved when my mother died ten years ago, but my father is a survivor. He saw his entire family die in the Holocaust.”

“A lot of Holocaust survivors suffer depression—” Dr. Monroe began.

“Not my father. He’s always believed that it was his duty to live for those who perished. What is this about anyway? What
does my father’s mental state have to do with getting shot by a burglar?”

Neither the doctor nor the detective said anything for a minute. I saw the two men exchange a look and then, at a nod from Kiernan, Monroe pointed at another X-ray clipped to the light board behind his desk.

“This is an X-ray of your father’s shoulder. You can see where the bullet entered your father’s chest just above his heart and here”—he tapped another X-ray—“where the bullet exited just below his trapezius muscle in his back. From the angle of the bullet’s trajectory and the powder residue on his chest and hand—”

“His hand?”

“Yes,
his
hand.”

“The bullet came from the service revolver we found on the floor,” Detective Kiernan interrupted. “The one you identified as your father’s. There’s really only one likely conclusion. Your father’s wound was self-inflicted. He shot himself.”

Twenty minutes later I left the hospital, crossed Seventh Avenue, and started walking west on Greenwich as fast as I could go. I was too shocked and upset to go back to the gallery. I couldn’t bring myself to face Maia or any of our concerned clientele or neighbors who might drop by the gallery when they heard about the burglary. Once the rumor got out that Roman James had orchestrated the theft himself, they’d resent their own expressions of sympathy made now. And what other conclusion would anyone reach but that Roman James had shot himself to make it look as if he were the victim of the
burglars? Still, every time I tried to imagine my father aiming a gun at himself I just couldn’t picture it.

“The body is the sanctuary of the soul,” Roman had said to me when he’d learned I was thinking of getting a tattoo when I was in college. “You wouldn’t spray-paint graffiti on the synagogue wall, would you? So why do it to your soul’s house?” How could he have fired a gun into his own flesh? There had to be some other explanation.

I crossed Eighth Avenue and continued west on Horatio Street. I could see the Hudson gleaming at the end of the street. I could cross the West Side Highway and walk on the Hudson River Greenway for miles . . . walk until I was too exhausted to think or . . . I stopped and looked south on Hudson Street. The jeweler had to be on one of these streets near the river. I could work my way back and forth until I found him. Then I could tell the jeweler that the box had been stolen and I could also tell Detective Kiernan the address of the shop. He’d acted as if he didn’t believe the silver box or its owner existed. As if I were crazy.

I started working my way south along the narrow, cobblestoned streets that lay between Hudson Street and the West Side Highway. As I ticked off each street—Horatio, Jane, Bethune—failing to find the antiques shop, I felt a mounting sense of panic over my father’s situation. What if Detective Kiernan was right? What if my father had shot himself and had arranged the burglary to collect on the insurance? Although he’d not been charged in the Warhol case, I couldn’t help but remember the arguments about money he and my mother had had right before that theft. And now, just when I’d told him how dire our financial situation was, there’d been another burglary, albeit one that occurred only a few hours after
he’d received the information. It was inconceivable that there had been enough time for him to plan anything. I hated myself for thinking it, but doubt had seeped into my mind.
And,
an insidious voice inside me insisted,
if he is guilty, he’ll go to jail and you’ll be all alone.

I stopped in the middle of Cordelia Street, my eyes filling with tears, my vision swimming.
You’re okay,
I said to myself, trying to substitute the reassuring voice of my mother for that of the nasty pessimist who seemed to have taken control of my brain.
You’re okay
.

I wiped my eyes, blinked away the tears . . . and saw that I was facing a glass door that sparkled with gilt in the sunlight. It looked familiar. I stepped into the doorway and drew my fingers along the fragment of gold lettering and read
mist
. . . I’d noticed it yesterday and guessed that it was the remainder of the word
chemist.
Now I wondered if it could also be the remainder of the word
alchemist.
In any event, this was the place.

I tried to look through the glass, but it had somehow acquired a layer of grime overnight. I rubbed at it, uncovering a few more golden letters. An
a,
an
i,
and an
r
together, then below them an ampersand.
Air & Mist
. Nothing and nothing. The words seemed almost mocking. When I’d cleared a clean circle I peered though the glass, but everything was still gray. It took me a moment to realize that that was because everything inside the shop
was
gray. There was the same counter with its art-nouveau curves and the glass shelves, only they were broken and covered with a thick layer of gray dust. The damask curtain behind the counter hung in mildewed shreds festooned with cobwebs. The floor was dusted with a perfect silt of gray unbroken by footprints. It looked as if no one had set foot in the shop for years.

I stared through the glass until a voice from the street drew my attention. “. . . and then we’ll have our tea and scones and
then
we’ll go look at the puppies in the window and
then
we’ll go pick up Daddy’s dry cleaning . . .”

The voice was coming from a young woman pushing a toddler in a stroller. The little girl—she was somewhere between two and three I guessed—was wearing an olive-and-mauve, crocheted sweater over a plaid jumper and bright pink tights. She was waving a doll crocheted out of the same color yarns as her sweater.

“Excuse me,” I called, but the mother didn’t seem to hear me.

“. . . and then we’ll go back home and have our naps . . .”

I stepped out into the street nearly colliding with the stroller. The woman gasped and looked at me as if I were planning to snatch her child. “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I just wanted to know if you knew anything about this store. Did it just go out of business?”

“What store?” the woman asked, leaning down to adjust her daughter’s perfectly aligned sweater.

“
This
store.” I jabbed my finger at the grime-covered window
that yesterday had sparkled with gold and silver. The mother glanced cursorily toward the window but her eyes didn’t seem to focus. Her child waved her doll toward the door and made a gurgling sound.

“It was an antique-jewelry store yesterday,” I told her.

The woman shook her head. “We’ve lived on this block for over a year and I never noticed it,” she said, shrugging. “Sorry.”

I watched her push the stroller down the street. At the corner she went into a doorway under a painted wood sign that read
PUCK
. As I watched, another woman piloting a stroller approached, her little boy enthusiastically waving a toy truck at the store. A neighborhood spot for local moms, then.

I glanced over my shoulder at the abandoned storefront. I should at least get the address. There was no number on the door so I checked the number on the building west of it: 123. Then I walked to the building east of it. It was 121. Could there be odd and even numbers on the same side? But when I crossed the street I found 122 there, slightly to the west. Okay, then, 121½. It wasn’t as if it were the
only
half address in the city.

I paused outside the glass door of Puck looking in at a long narrow room under an old stamped-tin ceiling, full of mismatched chairs and unpainted picnic tables. There were metal lawn chairs painted in faded pastel colors, weathered Adirondack chairs, overstuffed easy chairs, and chairs that looked as if they had been made from bent branches still covered with bark. The tables were crowded with teapots, china plates, and three-tiered platters holding scones, sandwiches, and cookies. A tearoom, however rustic the décor. They were certainly getting popular in the city.

When I opened the door, the aroma of warm butter and sugar made me remember that I hadn’t eaten in over twenty-four
hours. I’d get something, then. It would give me an excuse to chat with the patrons, one of whom
must
have noticed the antiques store down the block. I sank into an Adirondack chair, which I suspected was going to be too low to the ground for comfort, but turned out to be surprisingly comfortable. The woman I’d accosted on the street looked at me and whispered something to another mother. I decided I might as well jump right in before they concluded I was a pedophile.

“I’m sorry I startled you before,” I said. “I’m trying to locate a jeweler who had a shop on Cordelia Street. You see he was fixing my father’s watch and now the store seems to have moved.”

The notion of losing a family heirloom instantly galvanized the crowd of mothers. “That’s awful,” the mother of a little boy in a red fleece hoodie said. “There’s no forwarding address on the storefront?”

“No. And I don’t even have the man’s name. Have any of you ever been in the store? It’s halfway down the block on the south side.”

The women conferred and discussed and resolved that no, no one had ever noticed a jewelry store or an antiques store or a watch-repair store on the block even though they all regularly traversed Cordelia Street between their homes and preschools and parks and shops. A woman whose little boy she addressed as Buster summed it up for the rest of them: “It’s strange there’d be a store there that none of us ever saw.”

I concurred. It was strange.

“But you should ask Fen,” another woman said. “After all, she works here.”

Realizing they meant the baker behind the counter, and also noticing that there was no table service, I thanked the women
and heaved myself up from the Adirondack chair. The woman behind the counter was just pulling a tray of scones out of a small convection oven. She was wearing a brown corduroy jumper over a cream turtleneck and a matching brown corduroy tam with green trim that sat straight on top of her light brown hair. She wore small round-framed glasses balanced on a diminutive nose. She looked as if she’d escaped from a Beatrix Potter illustration. If she had turned to reveal a bushy gray tail, I wouldn’t have been too surprised.

“The reason none of them remember the shop is that it was hidden by the mist yesterday,” she said before I could ask my question; clearly she’d been listening in on my conversation with the customers. “How did you find it?”

“I ducked into its doorway to get out of the rain,” I said.

“Ah.” Fen the baker pushed her glasses up her nose to look at me more closely. “You see,
they
all had umbrellas and raincoats and stroller canopies to keep the rain from chasing them into doorways. But you didn’t, did you?” Her gaze traveled from my face down to my hands and fastened there.

“No, I didn’t. The forecast didn’t say rain.” I wasn’t sure why I felt that I had to defend myself against the baker.

“No, it didn’t.” She looked up from my hands and into my face. “It didn’t say fog or mist either, did it? When I saw the fog rolling in from the river, I knew that something was up and now I see that it was you. Dr. John Dee’s Watch Repair and Alchemist hasn’t been at that address for quite some time.”

“John Dee, is that his name?” I asked grasping at the one solid piece of information to come out of the baker’s serpentine rambles. The name was familiar, somehow, but I couldn’t place it right away.

“One of them,” she replied. “Oh! My scones are done. You look half-famished, by the way. I’ll pack up something for you to take home for you and your friends.”

“I don’t need—” I began to explain that I didn’t need food for anyone but myself, but the baker had already disappeared into the back room. A man’s voice—a rich bass that sounded as if it belonged to a golden-age radio announcer—asked, “Is she the one who went into Dee’s yesterday?”

The baker’s murmured reply was impossible to make out, but whatever it was seemed to startle the man. “The swan?” he boomed. “The black swan?”

I looked down at the swan signet ring on my right hand. That’s what the baker had been looking at. It was also what the jeweler—
John Dee, where had I heard that name before?
—had noticed yesterday. But what could an old signet ring my mother gave me have to do with anything?

The baker returned with two large brown bags. I reached into my coat pocket for my wallet but the baker shook her head. “It’s on the house. Savory tea pies,” she said, holding up the bag in her right hand, “and scones,” holding up the one in her left. Before I could object, she pressed both bags into my arms. They were warm and deliciously fragrant.

“Thank you, it’s awfully kind of you . . .” I fell silent because I was afraid I might start to cry.