From the Corner of His Eye (55 page)

“That’s what
we
say.”

“Actually, if we have to say it at all, I’d rather we said
tinkled
off.”

He groaned. “That just doesn’t cut it, Mom. If I gotta be blind, I think I should get to say peed off.”

“You’re probably right,” she conceded.

“I get peed off, and I miss some things terrible. But I’m not sad. And you’ve got to not be sad, either, ’cause it spoils everything.”

“I promise to try. And you know what?”

“What?”

“Maybe I won’t have to try as hard as I think, because you make it so easy, Barty.”

For more than two weeks, Agnes’s heart had been a clangorous place, filled with the rattle and bang of hard emotions, but now a sort of quiet had come upon it, a peace that, if it held, might one day allow joy again.

“Can I touch your face?” Barty asked.

“Your old mom’s face?”

“You’re not old.”

“You’ve read about the pyramids. I was here first.”

“Bulldoody.”

Unerringly, in the darkness, he found her face with both hands. Smoothed her brow. Traced her eyes with fingertips. Her nose, her lips. Her cheeks.

“There were tears,” he said.

“There were,” she admitted.

“But not now. All dried up. You feel as pretty as you look, Mom.”

She took his small hands in hers and kissed them.

“I’ll always know your face,” he promised. “Even if you have to go away and you’re gone a hundred years, I’ll remember what you looked like, how you felt.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” she pledged. She had realized that his voice was growing heavy with sleep. “But it’s time for you to go to dreamland.”

Agnes got out of bed, switched on the lamp, and tucked Barty in once more. “Say your silent prayers.”

“Doin’ it now,” he said thickly.

She slipped into her shoes and stood for a moment watching his lips move as he gave thanks for his blessings and as he asked that blessings be given to others who needed them.

She found the switch and clicked off the lamp again. “Good-night, young prince.”

“Good-night, queen mother.”

She started toward the door, stopped, and turned to him in the dark. “Kid of mine?”

“Hmmmm?”

“Did I ever tell you what your name means?”

“My name…Bartholomew?” he asked sleepily.

“No. Lampion. Somewhere in your father’s French background, there must have been lamp makers. A lampion is a small lamp, an oil lamp with a tinted-glass chimney. Among other things, in those long-ago days, they used them on carriages.”

Smiling in the fearless dark, she listened to the rhythmic breathing of a sleeping boy.

She whispered then: “You are my little lampion, Barty. You light the way for me.”

That night her sleep was deeper than it had been in a long time, deep as she had expected sleep would never be again, and she was not plagued by any dreams at all, not a dream of children suffering, nor of tumbling in a car along a rain-washed street, nor of thousands of windblown dead leaves rattling-hissing along a deserted street and every leaf in fact a jack of spades.

Chapter 70

A MOMENTOUS DAY
for Celestina, a night of nights, and a new dawn in the forecast: Here began the life about which she’d dreamed since she was a young girl.

By ones and twos, the festive crowd eventually deconstructed, but for Celestina, an excitement lingered in the usual gallery hush that rebuilt in their wake.

On the serving tables, the canapé trays held only stained paper doilies, crumbs, and empty plastic champagne glasses.

She herself had been too nervous to eat anything. She’d held the same glass of untasted champagne throughout the evening, clutching it as though it were a mooring buoy that would prevent her from being swept away in a storm.

Now her mooring was Wally Lipscomb—obstetrician, pediatrician, landlord, and best friend—who arrived halfway through the reception. As she listened to Helen Greenbaum’s sales report, Celestina held Wally’s hand so tightly that had it been a plastic champagne flute, it would have cracked.

According to Helen, more than half the paintings had been sold by the close of the reception, a record for the gallery. With the exhibition scheduled to run two full weeks, she was confident that they would enjoy a sellout or the next thing to it.

“From time to time now, you’re going to be written about,” Helen warned. “Be prepared for a peevish critic or two, furious about your optimism.”

“My dad’s already armored me,” Celestina assured her. “He says art lasts, but critics are the buzzing insects of a single summer day.”

Her life was so blessed that she could have dealt with a horde of locusts, let alone a few mosquitoes.

At Tom Vanadium’s request, the taxi dropped him one block from his new—and temporary—home, shortly before ten o’clock in the evening.

Although the mummifying fog wound white mysteries around even the most ordinary objects and wrapped every citizen in anonymity, Vanadium preferred to approach the apartment building with utmost discretion. Whatever the length of his stay in this place, he would never arrive or depart through the front door or even through the basement-level garage—until perhaps his last day.

He followed an alleyway to the building’s service entrance, for which he possessed a key that wasn’t provided to other tenants. He unlocked the steel door and stepped into a small, dimly lighted receiving room with gray walls and a speckled blue linoleum floor.

To the left, a door led to a back staircase, accessible with the special key already in his hand. To the right: a key-operated service elevator for which he’d been provided a separate key.

He rode up to the third of five floors in the service elevator, which other tenants were permitted to use only when moving in or moving out, or when taking delivery of large items of furniture. Another elevator, at the front of the building, was too public to suit his purposes.

The third-floor apartment directly over Enoch Cain’s unit had been leased by Simon Magusson, through his corporation, ever since it became available in March of ’66, twenty-two months ago.

By the time this operation concluded and the sulphurous Mr. Cain was brought to some form of justice, Simon might have spent twenty or twenty-five percent of the fee that he’d collected from the liability settlement in the matter of Naomi Cain’s death. The attorney put a substantial price on his dignity and reputation.

And although Simon would have denied it, would even have joked that a conscience was a liability for an attorney, he possessed a moral compass. When he traveled too far along the wrong trail, that magnetized needle in his soul led him back from the land of the lost.

The apartment had been furnished with only two padded folding chairs and a bare mattress in the living room. The mattress was on the floor, without benefit of a bed frame or box springs.

In the kitchen were a radio, a toaster, a coffeepot, two place settings of cheap flatware, a small mismatched collection of thrift-shop plates and bowls and mugs, and a freezer full of TV dinners and English muffins.

These Spartan arrangements were good enough for Vanadium. He had arrived from Oregon the previous night with three suitcases full of his clothes and personal effects. He expected that his unique combination of detective work and psychological warfare would enable him to entrap Cain in a month, before these accommodations began to feel too austere even for one to whom anything fancier than a monk’s cell could seem baroque.

Allowing one month for the job might be optimistic. On the other hand, he’d had a long time to perfect a strategy.

Using this apartment as a base, Nolly and Kathleen had conducted some of the small skirmishes in the first phase of the war, including the ghost serenades. They left the place tidy. Indeed, the only sign that they had ever been here was a packet of dental floss left behind on the sill of a living-room window.

The telephone was operative, and Vanadium dialed the number of the building superintendent, Sparky Vox. Sparky had an apartment in the basement, on the upper of two subterranean floors, adjacent to the garage entrance.

In his seventies but vigorous and full of fun, Sparky liked to take an occasional jaunt to Reno, to pump the slot machines and try a few hands of blackjack. The off-the-record, tax-free monthly checks from Simon were gratefully received, ensuring the old man’s cooperation with the conspiracy.

Sparky wasn’t a bad guy, not easily bought, and if he’d been asked to sell out any tenant other than Cain, he probably wouldn’t have done so at any price. He greatly disliked Cain, however, and considered him to be “as strange and creepy as a syphilitic monkey.”

The syphilitic-monkey comparison struck Tom Vanadium as bizarre, but it turned out to be a sober judgment based on experience. In his fifties, Sparky had worked as the chief of maintenance at a medical-research laboratory, where—among other projects—monkeys had been intentionally infected with syphilis and then observed over their life span. In the terminal stages, some of the primates engaged in such outré behavior that they had prepared Sparky for his eventual encounter with Enoch Cain.

Last night, in the superintendent’s basement apartment, as they shared a bottle of wine, Sparky had told Vanadium numerous weird tales about Cain: The Night He Shot Off His Toe, The Day He Was Saved from a Meditative Trance and Paralytic Bladder, The Day the Psychotic Girlfriend Brought a Vietnamese Potbellied Pig to His Apartment When He Was Out and Fed It Laxatives and Penned It in His Bedroom…

After all he’d suffered at Cain’s hands, Tom Vanadium surprised himself by laughing at these colorful accounts of the wife killer’s misadventures. Indeed, laughter had seemed disrespectful to the memories of Victoria Bressler and Naomi, and Vanadium had been torn between a desire to hear more and a feeling that finding any amusement value in a man like Cain would leave a stain on the soul that no amount of penance could scrub away.

Sparky Vox—with less training in theology and philosophy than his guest, but with a spiritual insight that any overeducated Jesuit would have to admire, even if grudgingly—had settled Vanadium’s uneasy conscience. “The problem with movies and books is they make evil look glamorous, exciting, when it’s no such thing. It’s boring and it’s depressing and it’s stupid. Criminals are all after cheap thrills and easy money, and when they get them, all they want is more of the same, over and over. They’re shallow, empty, boring people who couldn’t give you five minutes of interesting conversation if you had the piss-poor luck to be at a party full of them. Maybe some can be monkey-clever some of the time, but they aren’t hardly ever
smart
. God must surely want us to laugh at these fools, because if we don’t laugh at ’em, then one way or another, we give ’em respect. If you
don’t
mock a bastard like Cain, if you fear him too much or even if you just look at him in an all-solemn sort of way, then you’re paying him more respect than I ever intend to. Another glass of wine?”

Now, twenty-four hours later, when Sparky answered his telephone and heard Tom Vanadium, he said, “You looking for a little company? I’ve got another bottle of Merlot where the last one came from.”

“Thanks, Sparky, but not tonight. I’m thinking of taking a look around downstairs if old Nine Toes isn’t stuck at home tonight with a case of paralytic bladder.”

“Last I noticed, his car was out. Let me check.” Sparky put down his phone and went to look in the garage. When he returned, he said, “Nope. Still out. When he parties, he usually parties late.”

“Will you hear him when he comes in?”

“I will if I make a point of it.”

“If he gets back within the next hour, better ring me at his place so I can scoot.”

“Will do. Check out those paintings he collects. People pay real money for them, even people who’ve never been in a looney bin.”

Wally and Celestina went to dinner at the Armenian restaurant from which he’d gotten takeout on the day in ’65 that he rescued her and Angel from Neddy Gnathic. Red tablecloths, white dishes, dark wood paneling, a cluster of candles in red glasses on each table, air redolent of garlic and roasted peppers and cubeb and sizzling soujouk—plus a personable staff, largely of the owners’ family—created an atmosphere as right for celebration as for intimate conversation, and Celestina expected to enjoy both, because this promised to be a most momentous day in more ways than one.

The past three years had given Wally much to celebrate, as well. After selling his medical practice and taking an eight-month hiatus from the sixty-hour work weeks he had endured for so long, he’d been giving twenty-four hours of free service to a pediatric clinic each week, providing care to the disadvantaged. He’d worked hard all his life, and saved diligently, and now he was able to focus solely on those activities that gave him the greatest gratification.

He’d been a godsend to Celestina, because his love of children and a new sense of fun that he’d discovered in himself were showered on Angel. He was Uncle Wally. Waddling Wally, Wobbly Wally, Wally Walrus, Wally Werewolf. Wally Wit Duh Funny Accents. Wiggle-Eared Wally. Whistling Wally. Wrangler Wally. He was Good Golly Wally the Friend of All Polliwogs. Angel adored him,
adored
him, and he could have loved her no more if she had been one of the sons that he had lost. Overwhelmed by her classes, her waitressing job, her painting, Celestina could always count on Wally to step in to share the child rearing. He wasn’t merely Angel’s honorary uncle, but her father in all senses except the legal and biological; he wasn’t just her doctor, but a guardian angel who fretted over her mildest fever and worried about all the ways the world could wound a child.

“I’m paying,” Celestina insisted when they were seated. “I’m now a successful artist, with untold numbers of critics just waiting to savage me.”

He snatched up the wine list before she could look at it. “If you’re paying, then I’m ordering whatever costs the most, regardless of what it tastes like.”

“Sounds reasonable.”

“Chateau Le Bucks, 1886. We can have a bottle of that or you could buy a new car, and personally I believe thirst comes before transportation.”

She said, “Did you see Neddy Gnathic?”

“Where?” He looked around the restaurant.

“No, at the reception.”

“He wasn’t!”

“By the way he acted, you’d have sworn that he gave me and Angel shelter in the storm, back then, instead of turning us out to freeze in the snow.”

Amused, Wally said, “You artists do love to dramatize—or have I forgotten the San Francisco blizzard of ’65?”

“How could you not remember the skiers slaloming down Lombard Street?”

“Oh, yes, I recall it now. Polar bears eating tourists in Union Square, wolf packs prowling the Heights.”

Wally Lipscomb’s face, as long and narrow as ever, seemed not at all like the dour visage of an undertaker, as once it had, but rather like the rubbery mug of one of those circus clowns who can make you laugh as easily by striking an exaggeratedly sad frown as by putting on a goofy grin. She saw a warmth of spirit where once she had seen spiritual indifference, vulnerability where once she had seen an armored heart, great expectations where once she had seen withered hope; she saw kindness and gentleness where they had always been but now in more generous measure than before. She loved this long, narrow, homely, wonderful face, and she loved the man who wore it.