The Coming of Bright (30 page)

Dr. Gonzalez gave his guests a little anatomy lesson, a demonstration of the finer points of cadaverous criminology, using the butchering of Sarah as his forum. He showed them with a scalpel, recreating the crime, how one of the knife thrusts had nicked the poor woman’s superior vena cava. He nicked her in the heart once again, but this time she hardly bled, a gentle oozing of thick black blood.

Zora could stand no more, her sense of disgust coagulating into a thicker, stronger sense of injustice. She turned to Victor, away from the desecrated murdered body, her eyes brimming with tears and recrimination.

“The Gatekeeper did this, I know she did. And you let it happen. You let her out.”

She had cut Dr. Gonzalez off mid-sentence, while he was explaining—and illustrating with the flair of a chef over a cutting board—the best way to dissect a heart. Struck into awkwardness, he quickly sank his gaze—and, grotesquely, his fingers—into the spaces between Sarah’s organs.

“You don’t know that. Remember what I told you, truth is blinding. Dorothy
will
get blamed for this, but that doesn’t mean it’s the truth. Dorothy is a victim too.”

The audacity of his words, spoken over the flayed-open body of an innocent woman, horrified Zora. The woman on the table was a real victim. Who had been mutilated, butchered, defiled.

In that cold bright room, over that pandemonium of bone and blood and muscle that had harbored a proud yet tragic soul, Zora felt no fascination with death. The passage of the soul, its liberation and its torment, had been her interest. The physicality of death only sickened her.

“You know what Victor, you are every bit as blind as Sarah. Only you have eyes, you just refuse to use them.”

She would have slapped him if that fucking face guard weren’t in the way, blocking her hand like it would have blocked a fragment of airborne bone.

For that he had no reply. He thought it better to let her words sink into stillness. Feelings untempered by words, she pressed on.

“I love you Victor, I really do, but I hate you for this.”

He broke the stillness with a pained apology. Scarcely louder than a whisper. And a clear reminder.

“I’m sorry my love. But you wanted to come.”

The tenderness of his tone, the echo of her heartbreak in his, tempered the searing heat of her feelings. She had new calm, and new resolve.

“I need to leave, clear my head, get some new air. Free of death and blood. You were right, I probably shouldn’t have come over here.”

Again, stillness.

Her slaughterhouse apron ended up in a heap on the floor, and she ended up in her room in a long sleepless night, cold on her bed like a cadaver.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Fear now ordered Zora’s daily path through life. Her eyes swept like falling water over the places she went, washing over the grounds of the law school as she walked over them. The library she avoided, and she only walked in daylight, when the sun was burning through the skies.

Always in the back of her mind, burning through to the front without warning, was a vision of the eyeless woman on the slab. Sarah the Slaughtered. Sarah the Forsaken. The brilliant darkness that had enveloped Sarah might envelop Zora. For days on end she felt this radiant fear, but something deeper lurked behind it, haunting her: a missing piece of herself.

Not eyes, not hands, not feet. Not yet. The missing piece was Victor. He hadn’t touched her, hadn’t kissed her, hadn’t loved her in the flesh, behind a shroud of words, during those terrible days. She began to feel forsaken.

Why hadn’t he reached out to her, why hadn’t he called, why hadn’t he come calling like the raven of the poem to her door?

He had promised he would. She needed the truth of his few simple words, the truth of a soft look. But in class he was merely the Judge, a façade of coldness and command. Where was Victor, where was her lover?

The end of another week had come. No end of fear, no new arrival of love. Of love consuming fear. At least sleep had finally come, and she was able to dream without horror.

It was not yet midnight. Reading cases for hours had hurled her early into dreams. The law of torts, open on a page, will do that to a person. A better cure for insomnia could not be found.

A harsh and urgent knocking on her door. A dream? A harbinger of the raven? Of death?

“Zora, wake up. We need to go. Everything’s ready.”

She knew it was him. She answered the door in her lacy lavender nightgown. Seeing that, he was tempted to come right in, shape his body to the curves and flows of the gown, liberate her body from its prison of sheen. But there was simply no time. And she hardly seemed in the mood.

“Victor . . .
now
? What’s the rush, I’m trying to sleep.”

“We’re leaving. Dimitrios and his wife are expecting us at 8 o’clock sharp. It’s a long flight to Greece. Hurry up or we’ll make the pilot wait.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Greece? I’ve always wanted to go to Greece, it’s always been my dream, but right now I just want to sleep. And dream. Come talk to me in the morning.”

She was still too groggy to be receptive to his charms, his entreaties. She started to close the door in his face. He held it there, his hand firm.

“Zora, I told you I’d come when I was ready to answer your question. The answer is in Greece. Our first stop is Koropi, 10 minutes from the Athens airport. Now get dressed, grab a few things, and we’ll go. You can sleep on the plane.”

Victor had a limo waiting downstairs, and about fifteen minutes from leaving the dorm, they were at the terminal of the Madison Springs Airport. Terminal is probably a strong word. It had standing room for about 100 people. The airport served no commercial flights–mostly cropdusters and a few private jets, wealthy ranchers and such.

They headed out to the tarmac a short time later. Out to the jet. It was a metallic beauty—a Bombardier Global Express XRS. The plane had just arrived from Los Angeles with a crew of three: pilot, co-pilot, and flight attendant. Victor had chartered the plane for the weekend, simply to answer Zora’s question. Answer it his way. Very elaborately. Enigmatically, sensually. By taking her through a labyrinth of meaning and feeling.

The crew introduced themselves. The pilot, Mary Kelling, had an air of professionalism and personal warmth about her that put Zora at ease. She normally didn’t like flying, had a fear of heights,
and
a fear of enclosed spaces, and she would have expected a small plane like this to make her churn with anxiety. But it didn’t.

The XRS was no ordinary small plane. It wasn’t even that small. Victor and Zora walked down the aisle. Both of them awestruck. They were in a flying penthouse. The opulence packed into that narrow metal tube was unbelievable. Everything was bolted to the floor of course. There was a dining room table made of solid cherry, matching chairs, a plush black leather couch facing an ultra-thin, and ultra-large, TV. And the obligatory surround-sound system. Beyond that, with a partition and door for privacy, lay the bedroom. A waterbed fit for a king. And a queen. As far as the makers of the XRS were concerned, coach class, and everyone traveling in it, could go to hell.

Zora wondered what kind of sloshing noises the waterbed would make when the plane hit turbulence. And how hard the people sleeping on it would hit the floor. She hoped she wouldn’t have to find out.

The plane was on its way. And Zora had every intention of putting that waterbed to good use. For sleeping. Victor didn’t send a single sign of seduction in her direction. He knew she was still tired, burned out, could see the dark exhaustion in her eyes, the darker rings beneath them. She would need the rest. Their time in Greece would be history-making. They would be living a myth.

Zora asked the flight attendant, a silver-haired, and silver-smiled, man named Donald, where they would be in 8 hours. When she planned to wake up.

“Let’s see, 8 hours from now we should be over the Bay of Biscay, it’ll be about 4 in the afternoon. Bright sunny day I’d expect.”

In the bedroom, Victor and Zora kissed and undressed each other. But nothing further happened—no forays into unheard-of realms of Eros. They merely fell asleep in each other’s arms. Eros could wait.

And wait it would. They would be traveling to an ancient dwelling place of Eros, in the shadows of Mount Helicon, where the worshippers of the mythic god believed the deity of love spent his time on earth. There would be no better place for erotic love than the domain of the god himself.

They both got their 8 hours, turbulence free. Or at least disturbance free. For the rest of the flight they wined and dined, making sure to leave enough room for the Greek feast waiting for them. Courtesy of Dimitrios and Ianthe Zateli. The couple who ran a B&B on a vineyard on the outskirts of Koropi. The place, overflowing with Grecian charm, where they’d be spending the night. Victor didn’t anticipate getting much sleep there. The Zatelis had promised to teach them a traditional Greek card game. And their hosts wouldn’t even be serving dinner until 10.

The food on the plane was as opulent as the furnishings. First class on a commercial airliner was a distant memory. Coach class had never even existed. Who knew braised pheasant on a bed of saffron risotto went so well with Guigal La Mouline Côte-Rôtie 2007? Who could have imagined the perfect harmony of persimmon sorbet, white truffle cake, and raspberry brandy?

Unwinding after their airborne experience of all things epicurean, they watched a movie together, cuddling on the couch. Victor picked it out from the onboard film database. A classic, one of his favorites.
The Red Shoes
.

It hardly mattered that Zora’s shoes were black. This was her first fling with the Archers, the British filmmaking team who had brought
The Red Shoes
to life. And who had brought to bloom another one of Victor’s favorite films,
Black Narcissus
. That would come a close second on Victor’s cinematic list, black in the wake of red. Black would have to wait for another day, another couch to cuddle up on. Or maybe the same black couch, maybe on the way home. Today they only had time for one shot of the Archers. One color. Red.

And Zora loved it, entrancingly, dancingly, painfully, all 133 minutes of it. The suicide of Victoria, the star ballerina, shone a spotlight into her soul. The spotlight that danced across the stage at the end of the film, in the place of the fallen dancer—that light leaped from the screen and permeated Zora’s being. Tears streamed down her face, and she nested herself, a weeping bird, in the hollow of Victor’s body. His strength supported her, his gravity supported her, his life supported her. At the film’s end, Zora was glad that her own shoes were black and not red. She was glad to be alive and not dead.

They touched down at 7:24 PM Athens time. Tears lingered in her eyes. Another limo took them right to the doorstep of the Zatelis. Before them was the archetype of the Greek cottage. The plaster was a shining blinding white and everything attached to the house—doors, shutters, you name it—was the deepest Greekest blue you could imagine. They lived inside a billowing abode of clouds reflected in azure water.

Stretching away from the home, acres and acres of them, were fields of Assyrtiko grapes. It just so happened that Dimitrios and Ianthe, husband and wife, had both grown up on the island of Santorini, where the Assyrtiko grape is legion. So they had made damn sure that their new home, their Attican vineyard, was awash in Assyrtiko.

The grapes were gorgeous. They had the soft translucence of fruit in an oil painting. Were the lovers standing in a Grecian field, or in the painting of a Dutch master? Even Zeuxis would have been fooled.

The Assyrtiko growers greeted the newcomers.

“Welcome, nice people, nice flying?”

“Yes, very nice.”

And Victor added, “
Den einai toso oraia oso e ellenikn ge
.”

Not as nice as the Greek soil
.

Delighted in his outlook and his tongue, the Zatelis spoke briefly with Victor in their native language. But for Zora’s sake, and for the sake of the other guests, the main language of conversation would have to be English. The only language that could possibly work as a lingua franca for the disparate nationalities that visited the B&B. Victor was simply paying homage to the new ground beneath his feet, the new culture that enveloped him. And showing off of course. He
was
Victor. Who could never let one of his many talents go unnoticed. Unpracticed.

Two other couples were staying in the cottage that night, a couple from England and one from Germany, and they all gathered in the dining room about a quarter to ten for dinner. The food was plentiful, and it looked sinful.

Sinful didn’t begin to describe it. Holy fuck, was that food rich. Copious amounts of Assyrtiko wine could barely wash it down. Lamb was the main attraction. Dish after dish of lamb. More screaming of the lambs had probably gone into that meal than into a Thomas Harris novel. At least now, mercifully, the lambs were silent.

They had
loukanika
in gravy, that’s lamb and veal sausage. Zora ate the
kokoretsi
with relish, not knowing they were barbecued lamb intestines stuffed with the other organs of the lamb, the spleen and lung and heart, finely chopped. If someone had told her, all those finely chopped pieces of lamb would have ended up back on the table. By the time she reached the
exohiko
, the lamb wrapped in phyllo dough, her stomach had started to protest the richness of the food, but she put on a ravenous face and kept going.