Ghost Country (32 page)

What Hector couldn’t tell, wouldn’t tell himself, hidden in that underside of mind he didn’t want to inspect, was the reason he stayed at the curb: if he sat there long enough Starr might appear, as she had—was it only two nights ago? The winds of his emotional storms so buffeted him that every hour took on the weight of many days.

The women began chanting conflicting demands: free beds for the homeless; arrest the killers of Madeleine Carter; let us get to the Virgin’s wall. LaBelle was so overcome with the desire to get to the wall, to feel the Virgin’s saving power wrapped around her, that she began to tug on the spikes, trying to tear them loose.

Nicolo, the garage attendant, seconded her enthusiastically. “What it will hurt, we take off this one small area belonging to the
ingenua
?”

He bustled into the back of the garage, emerging a few minutes later with a pipe wrench. He unscrewed a few spikes, enough for the women to go one at a time to the wall, bent over almost double, and touch the bleeding crack.

The sparrows began chattering, swooping from the rafters to perch on the scaffolding, their cheeping so loud it drowned the women’s shouts and the static on the police walkie-talkies. Hector, looking up to see the bars darkened by the mass of birds, caught sight of Starr at the edge of the wall. His mind had tricked him so many times that day that he looked away, shut his eyes, held his breath, counted twenty, but when he turned she was still there, Luisa at her elbow.

U
NDER THE LEGS
of the grand piano Luisa’s dreams became feverish. At first she had been back at her apartment in Campania, nestled on soft grass in the garden. Suddenly the earth gave way and she was deep underground, bleeding from breasts and vulva. She tried to wipe the blood away, but found she was chained and couldn’t move her hands. Great copper shields bound her breasts to her body and a copper girdle encircled her vulva.

A chattering group passed, a happy family outing—the ruddy man carrying a great wooden bed, his parents and his own two sons at his side. She struggled through her drugged sleep to call to them, but in the nature of dreams could make no sound, and they did not see her.

Behind them came a procession, column upon column of drooping weary people, shuffling, not marching, heads bowed, each carrying a pitcher of beer. Luisa’s throat was raw; she yearned for that beer more than for life or freedom. As she watched, the people poured their beer in front of a giant crucifix. The earth opened and swallowed the family and the bed. The fissure was spreading across the ground to where she lay helplessly bound.

Boulders tumbled down from high cliffs, crashing and echoing,
and then their booming turned into the threatening hum of violins and she was in her familiar nightmare: kneeling in front of the Madonna, bass viols, red-faced man threatening to kill her, world whirling as she shrieked for help, her voice in danger, the Madonna leering at her with hawk’s eyes under a horrific wig with cow’s horns. She woke, thrashing in Starr’s arms, to a pounding on the door.

“Who is in here! What’s going on in here?” The voice was muffled by the heavy door.

Luisa struggled upright. The familiar bile rose in her throat. In the dark, windowless room she scrabbled for a cup or waste can to catch the greenish dribble but could find nothing but her silk jacket. She wiped her face on the sleeve.

The man pounded on the door again, and then turned a key in the lock. Flashlight sprayed the room, bounced off the piano, found the two figures underneath.

“Who the hell let you in here? What are you doing here? Get out of the opera house. You hear me?” It was the night watchman.

The diva’s full-voiced scream as she dreamt had echoed eerily down the hall, bringing him running on clumsy feet to the practice room. He’d imagined horrors, someone held hostage, rape, murder, and had already pressed the alarm button on his phone to summon help, seeing himself in the morning paper: hero saves tourist.

Well, there were horrors here aplenty, but none that would get him a mayor’s medal. Food scraps and an empty beer bottle on the floor, a smell of stale vomit, two naked women, so flushed with sleep and sex that his own stomach churned with mixed loathing and desire.

He slapped the light on. “Get your clothes on. Sluts! How’d you get into the opera house, anyway? Get dressed and get out!”

“I am Madame Montcrief, my good ape.” Luisa spoke haughtily from her pile of clothes. “Have the common courtesy to get out of my practice room.”

“Madam? I’ll say you’re a madam. Get back to your whorehouse,’

The watchman was shrieking with embarrassment; he couldn’t bring himself even to think the words of what had been going on between the women, both naked, one with the largest breasts he’d ever seen, even in surreptitious studies of porn magazines. Those breasts were brushing the shoulders of the scrawny one who’d spoken to him, while the look of satiation on the large woman’s face—it was terrible, that two women could … His own wife’s face flashed in his mind, lying beneath him in bed, her expression as empty as if she were washing dishes, what if his wife and another woman—this woman—were—how would she look?

He longed to seize those giant breasts, but they filled him with fear as much as longing; he hovered over her, his hands out. The big woman looked at him and laughed, so harshly that his desire withered, turned to shame, and then to a greater anger. He yanked the scrawny one from under the piano, thrust her into the hall, kicked the clothes after her.

“Get dressed, get these clothes on, you bitch.”

The big woman, still laughing, climbed easily to her feet and pulled on a skirt and a T-shirt. Once she was clothed, he saw she was really quite an ordinary size, no taller than he was himself. It was only that ridiculous hair, sticking out around her head like the horns of a wild cow, that made her seem so large.

“I can’t believe the opera would hire a cretin like you. How dare you?” Luisa hooked her bra with shaking fingers. “When I’ve talked to the management you’ll be lucky if you still have a job. Singers are not to be disturbed in their practice rooms. I am Luisa Montcrief, a name which doubtless means nothing to an imbecile like you. I am preparing my comeback. I had planned to make it in Chicago, but if this is how Lyric Opera treats its stars, it will be a cold day in hell before I return.”

She picked up the gold blouse, now a mass of stains and rips, the black Valentino suit turned gray and shapeless from vomit, dust,
nights of sleeping in it. She wouldn’t be bringing Clio back, either, not when the ungrateful bitch let her clothes get into this disgraceful shape.

The elevator pinged in the distance and heavy feet pounded up the hall toward them: a patrolman responding to the alarm, which the watchman had forgotten sending. The watchman waved his flashlight at the trash in the practice room, told the patrolman what he’d found: homeless women breaking into the opera house. And look at that, he shouted, seeing for the first time a pool of liquid inside the piano: the bitches poured beer into this Steinway. Seventy-thousand-dollar piano and the cunts trashed it.

They were everywhere, like rats, the patrolman agreed. Seeing Luisa naked from the waist down, you juice this one?

I think they were, you know, doing it together, the watchman’s face crimson. That one—pointing at Starr—you’ve never seen tits like that.

Doing it together? The patrolman’s eyes glistened: he’d always imagined, never seen. Maybe they need to see what a real man is like.

Pinning Luisa against the wall—asking for it, stupid bitch, standing there waving her bush in his face—unzipping his uniform pants; the watchman giving a warning as the other one came up behind him, kissing the back of his shirt with those breasts. One at a time, girls, he started to say, there’s plenty for everyone, when a weight—later, in his report, he claimed the woman had a stone, a boulder: it couldn’t have been her bare hands pushing him against the wall, shoving him to the floor, as the watchman stood with his mouth agape, too stupid to come to his help.

Luisa pulled on her clothes while Starr stood over the prone cop. Starr didn’t do anything else, just stood there roaring out that rasping mocking laugh, but in the morning, called to the First District to verify an assault of a police officer in the performance of his duties, the opera house watchman couldn’t remember Starr’s passive stance, positively saw her holding a weapon, yes, a slab of concrete, must have found it in the rubble around the side of the
building. And then the one who said she was a singer, she picked up her suitcase and the two of them took off. No, he didn’t follow them, he was too worried about the cop, although the officer got back on his feet without any trouble once the stairwell door banged shut on the women.

Starr and Luisa followed the river as it curved north and east through the city, stepping around sleeping bodies, bags of garbage, discarded refuse of every description. At Michigan Avenue they turned south and tracked through the maze of alleys to the Hotel Pleiades.

F
OR THE LAST
three weeks, miracle seekers as well as ordinary sightseers from all over America have been flocking to this unprepossessing spot below Michigan Avenue to discover whether a homeless woman’s hope was true. Madeleine Carter believed with all her heart that the Virgin Mary was weeping tears of blood through a crack on this wall. So intense was her faith that she kept returning to this spot despite the most strenuous efforts of the hotel that owns it to drive her away.”

Don Sandstrom’s chiseled good looks were replaced on the television screen by a photograph of Madeleine Carter. Harriet, watching on the firm’s television, had already seen the snapshot: a copy was in the file that Scandon and Atter’s investigators were putting together for the hotel’s defense. The photograph showed Madeleine twelve years earlier, in between her second and third pregnancies, holding her year-old son while her two-year-old daughter clutched her hand. Madeleine’s hair was neatly combed, her dark sweater buttoned up to the throat. She was smiling for the camera, but there was a strained, anxious look around her eyes that made her appear older than twenty-three.

Harriet had started her file on Madeleine Carter the previous
Friday, when Judith Ohana from the First Freedoms Forum filed suit on behalf of Mara Stonds, Jacqui Dotson et al, to require the Hotel Pleiades to maintain the garage wall as a place where people could worship the Virgin. Among the statements in the suit that the hotel—and Harriet—planned to contest was that the hotel had driven Madeleine Carter to kill herself because of the Pleiades’ extreme opposition to constitutionally protected expressive activity—in this case, worshiping at the wall.

Harriet foresaw no difficulty in proving Madeleine Carter’s psychosis to a jury, if it got that far: she’d found that Madeleine’s delusional episodes began when she was twenty and pregnant with her first child. After four children in seven years, a number of hospitalizations, and a deteriorating home life, her husband divorced her. Madeleine lived for a time with her parents, but when her mother died, her father found it impossible to care for his troubled daughter.

During the next few years she was fired from a series of low-skilled jobs, while passing in and out of mental hospitals. She had no medical insurance; in the absence of publicly funded mental health programs or useful halfway houses, she’d ended up on the streets, where she managed to survive another three years. She was dead now at thirty-five: three years older than Harriet. Curiously, although husband and father had both abandoned Madeleine years before, both were anxious parties to the Triple-F suit. The husband had found the snapshot of Madeleine with her children stuck in a drawer in the utility room.