Black Swan Rising (9 page)

“Garet, can you hear me? Are you okay? Garet?”

“I’m here, Mom. I’m okay, but I can’t move. Are you okay?”

My mother hadn’t answered at first and then she told me that she was fine. She told me that she was sorry we’d argued about college. She trusted me to make the right decision for myself. “Marguerite,” she said, using the French version of my name, which she always pronounced like an endearment, “always trust your own instincts. You’re a rare bird . . . unique . . . think for yourself . . .”

She’d said something else that I lost in the blare of sirens that suddenly surrounded us. The face of a man in a fire helmet appeared at the driver’s-side window and my mother said
something to him that I couldn’t hear. Then the man was at my window, his face a menacing red from the emergency lights pulsing behind him.

“There’s something else I need to tell you,” my mother was shouting over the sirens.

“It’s okay, Mom, they’re getting us out,” I screamed back at her.

“Yes, yes, but just in case, honey—”

Whatever my mother was about to say was obliterated by the screech of tearing metal. Something rammed into the twisted doorframe. It looked like the snout of a giant beast and as I watched in horrified awe, it spread its jaws and let out an anguished scream.

Later I would understand that the rescue workers were using a hydraulic spreader and cutter—the so-called Jaws of Life—to cut me out of the wrecked car, and the sound I heard was the sound of ripping metal. But to me it would always seem as if the thing itself had opened its jaws and screamed.

When the fireman pulled me out of the car, I was screaming too, yelling at the man to go back and get my mother. We’d only gone ten yards or so when the car exploded into a ball of flames that narrowly missed us. Later I would learn that my mother had been impaled on the steel rod of the crushed steering wheel. She wouldn’t have lived even if they’d gotten her out. Guessing that, my mother had told the fireman to get me out instead. I’ve always felt, though, as if I had been snatched from my mother by that screaming, snapping
thing,
the Jaws of Life.

A few years later—in my senior year at FIT—I found the one I had now and knew immediately what I wanted to do with it. I had taken it home and using chain links and spare automobile parts welded it into a fire-breathing dragon. I called
it Jaws. I thought it would be cathartic to turn my worst nightmare into a piece of art. After all, isn’t that what art is all about? Turning chaos and pain into something meaningful? Looking at the creature now, though, all I saw was how scared I’d been in the days right after my mother had died, terrified that if my father were sent to prison, I’d be as good as an orphan. And here I was back in the same place. I’d almost lost my father last night. If Roman was convicted of arranging the robbery, I’d lose him to prison. How long would a man his age survive there? I might have been ten years older than when my mother died, but I was no more ready to be alone.

To be an orphan.

The words were in my head, but they were voiced in a sibilant hiss, which wasn’t my own.

It was the voice of the monster. Its red reflector-light eyes were leering at me, its serrated, rust-stained teeth grinning, mocking me for any hope I’d ever had that I was strong enough to make it on my own.

You’re a rare bird,
my mother had always told me.

You’re a lame duck,
Jaws quipped.

. . . unique
. . .

. . .
a freak
. . .

. . .
you’ve accomplished so much
. . .

. . .
you’re about to be out on the street, bankrupt, alone
. . .

I turned away from the metal monster toward my worktable. I caught a glimpse of myself in the befogged windows, my long black hair wild and scraggly around a pale, gaunt face, my eyes hollow black sockets.
A witch, a hag,
the monster hissed. I picked up the soldering torch that I’d used last night and then put it down.
No, it was too small
. I needed the welding torch. I’d melt the damn thing down to a puddle—a heap of scrap
metal and junk. That’s all it was—not art. I hadn’t wrested meaning from pain, there was no meaning, just chaos.

I put on my visor and gloves and adjusted the acetylene and oxygen levels in the welding torch. Then I climbed up onto the table, unhooked the sculpture from the wires that held it up, and dumped all six feet of the metal monster down onto the worktable. Its head bobbed on its chain-link neck, those sharp, serrated teeth brushing at my leather gloves, and it made an awful noise as it fell to the metal table. As I clambered down to the floor, part of my brain knew I shouldn’t be handling a welding torch in my current exhaustion and despair, but that part of my brain was curiously muffled, as if it had been swamped by the fog that pressed on the windowpanes and which, even now, was beginning to creep under the edges of the board Becky had nailed over the skylight. The part of my brain that wasn’t muffled wanted to destroy the leering metal monster. I clamped a pair of pliers on to the monster’s jaws and aimed the torch at the chain link at the base of its head. I’d break the damned thing’s neck first. Sparks flew up from the heating metal, cascading over its head, smoldering on its glass eyes and glowing bloodred on its needle-sharp teeth. Fog spewed out of its mouth like smoke. Just before I cut the chain link in two, something flashed in its eyes. It almost looked as if it were laughing.

The length of the chain that formed the monster’s neck, now cut from its head, unspooled to the floor.

Damn!
I screamed as twenty pounds of stainless steel hit my workboot. I took a step back and caught my ankle on the chain. I fell backward, the torch following me down like a serpent slithering over the table. It wriggled on the floor, spitting flame. Kicking my foot free of the chain, I scuttled backward. On the table the monster’s head turned.

It can’t,
I thought in that dim corner of my brain not paralyzed with fear, it’s not connected to the chain anymore. But that’s what it was doing. The head turned toward me, its eyes burning, and it opened wide its terrible jaws.

My back hit the oxygen and acetylene tanks. I pushed myself upright against them and turned—hating to turn my back on that
thing
—and turned off both tanks of gas.

Something hissed behind me. When I turned around, the extinguished torch was lying on the floor a few feet from the pile of chain. The Jaws of Life was hanging over the edge of the table. Flakes of black ash were falling through the air, which is what happened when the acetylene was too high.

Outside the fog pulsed against the window as if it would break the glass, but then it rolled back into the night, like a hurt animal slinking back to its lair.

When I woke up the next morning, I felt hungover, as if I’d gone out and done a dozen tequila shots. When I stumbled out into my studio, I was greeted by the malevolent eye of Jaws staring up at me from my scorched worktable. What had possessed me?

What had possessed me?

Roman had said that the burglars were possessed by demons. Last night I had felt as if I’d been possessed by the demons of despair and self-loathing, and then Jaws had come to life and attacked me. Or at least it felt as though he’d come to life. It could have been my imagination, just as the figures on the box could have been a trick of the eye. Maybe something was wrong with my eyes . . . or my head. What if I had a brain tumor? Should I check myself into St. Vincent’s for a CAT scan? I had a feeling, though, that if I told a doctor about the things I had seen in the last few days, it might not be so easy to check myself
out
of the hospital.

I went downstairs, hoping to fight off the creeping feelings of despair with a pot of strong tea. I found Becky sitting at the table reading the
Times
. She was so immersed in whatever article she was reading that I was two inches from her before
she noticed me. Then she jumped and wadded the paper into a ball, which she attempted to shove into her lap under the table.

“What?” I asked. “Did you get a bad review? Those bastards. Let me see.”

“No, it’s not a review. In fact we had a great night—there was this guy from a major record label who said he was going to bring a producer to our show at the Apollo tonight. So no, no bad review. Really.”

“That’s great.” I gave Becky a hard stare. I hadn’t seen her this twitchy since she took the LSAT, back when she was still going to fulfill her mother’s dreams of becoming a lawyer.

“Yeah . . . well, I just put some of those scones in the oven and made a pot of tea. You should have some tea, you look awful.”

“Thanks, Beck. I will.” I moved to open the oven door without an oven mitt and Becky jumped up to stop me from burning myself. The paper fell to the floor and I grabbed it to open it to the page she’d been reading. It was in the Metro section. The story was on the burglary of the James Gallery. “Second Theft in Decade at Village Gallery.”

“ ‘Second Theft,’ ”
I read out loud. “As if we’re the only business in New York City to be burglarized more than once in a decade.”

“Those bastards,” Becky swore as she took the scones out of the oven. “Don’t let them get you down, kid. They don’t know what they’re talking about.”

I read the rest of the story with a sinking heart. The reporter had dug up the ten-year-old fraud case against my father. Of course, the story made no claims that there was anything suspicious about this theft, but it was hard to avoid the implication. It ended with the line “Repeated calls to the gallery were not returned.”

“Like I have nothing better to do with my father in the hospital than return phone calls to the newspaper,” I said, guiltily glancing at the blinking light on the answering machine. I’d have to listen to messages sooner or later.

“Those bastards,” Becky repeated, pushing the plate of scones in my direction.

“Um,” I said, reaching for a scone, “I didn’t think we left this many scones last night. I didn’t think we left
any
.”

“Me, neither, but the bag was nearly full when I came down this morning.” She took a bite, closed her eyes, and let out a little moan.

“God, Becky, get a room.” Then I took a bite and closed my eyes and swooned a little, too. I felt instantly better. The article wasn’t such a big deal. If I could find John Dee, I might be able to redirect the police investigation. The only problem was I had no idea how to find John Dee.

I opened my eyes and reached for a wayward scone crumb that had fallen on the paper. My finger landed on a name. It was a name I had recently seen but for a second I couldn’t remember where.

Will Hughes: a hedge fund manager for hard times,
the story read.
Will Hughes reports that his fund, Black Swan Partners LP, is up +14% ytd despite the dramatic declines in all market indices this year.

“Will Hughes,” I said out loud. “That’s the guy whose name was on the paper in the box. Weird that his fund is called Black Swan . . .” I turned the page to where the story was continued. Will Hughes was pictured standing in the arched doorway of a Tudor-style building.

“Hm, he’s good-looking,” Becky said.

He
was
good-looking—wavy, light brown hair framing wide
cheekbones, pale eyes framed with dark lashes, and a full, sensuous mouth—but I wasn’t looking at him. I was looking at the crest on the arch above his head. It was the same device as the one on my ring and the one on the box.

Becky was skeptical that I’d be able to just call up a billionaire hedge fund manager and get an appointment. “I mean, how are you even going to get his number?”

“From Chuck Chennery,” I told her.

I called Chuck and after listening to his polite expressions of concern for Roman’s health—God bless his upper-crust reserve, he never once let on there might be something fishy about the burglary although he certainly knew my father’s history—I asked if he could get me Will Hughes’s phone number.

“Will Hughes of Black Swan Partners?” Chuck asked. “May I ask what for?”

“I recognized the coat of arms he’s standing under in today’s
Times
photo,” I said truthfully. “I’ve got a crest like it and I thought he might buy a medallion.”

“Ha! Make him buy a round hundred, Garet. He can give them out as Christmas presents to the partners in his fund.”

He had me hold on while he asked his secretary to look up the number. I gave Becky a thumbs-up sign and waved at Jay as he stumbled into the kitchen, bleary-eyed and unshaven. I wrote down the number while Becky explained to Jay what was going on.

“So,” Becky said when I ended the call with Chuck. “Let’s brainstorm how you’re going to approach Will Hughes.” But I’d already dialed the number. I got voice mail.

“Mr. Hughes,” I said to the recorder, “my name is Garet
James and I believe I have your ancestor’s signet ring.” Then I gave my cell phone number and hung up.

“That’s it?” Becky asked, squirming in her seat.

“Yup.” I handed her my cell phone. “I’m going to go shower. Let me know if he calls back.”

I took a long shower. I shampooed and rinsed my hair twice and applied a lavender cream rinse. The scent always reminded me of my mother. It was the thing she missed most about the village in France where she’d grown up—the fields of lavender. She grew pots of lavender in our tiny backyard garden, tied bunches in purple ribbons, and hung them from hooks in the kitchen to dry. Then she sewed the dried flowers into sachets that she put in the linen closets and clothing drawers. Just breathing in the scent made me feel clean and calm.