Black Swan Rising Read online

  I smiled at the Yiddish word for thieves. Roman had called them something else in Yiddish just after the shooting, but I couldn’t recall what now. “Maybe, Dad. You shouldn’t have tried to stop them. You could have gotten yourself killed. Do you remember which one of the men shot you?”

  Roman’s brow creased and his hands fluttered shakily above the folded bedsheet. “They all looked alike. In black . . . like Nazis . . .” He laced his fingers together and relaced them, as if trying to get a grip on some half-remembered impression. I placed my hand over both of his. I should have known that the burglars would remind him of the German solders who had rounded up his family and driven him from his home in Poland. “Don’t worry about it, Dad. It doesn’t matter which one shot you—”

  “And their eyes! Did you see their eyes? There was nothing there. It was like looking into a black pit . . . the pit of hell!”

  That’s what had been strange about their eyes. They had been completely black; no whites showing at all. I shuddered. “I know, Dad, they were really creepy. I’m sure the police will catch them.”

  My father’s eyes widened and then darted around the room as if he were afraid that the black-clad burglars were hiding in the shadows. “No, no, they won’t find them . . . or they’ll only find their shells.”

  “Their shells?”

  Roman’s head bobbed up and down and his restless hands twisted and seized my hands so hard that I almost cried out. I wrested one hand away to press the nurse’s call button. He might be having a bad reaction to whatever medication he was on. He certainly wasn’t making any sense.

  “The dybbuk latch on to weak men and possess them.”

  “The dybbuk?” It was the word Roman had used when he first regained consciousness in the house. “What does that mean, Dad?”

  “Demons,” he answered, his eyes skittering into the corners of the room. “I could feel them trying to get inside of me, trying to control me . . .”

  “It was a terrible shock coming upon those men. Of course you were frightened. And then you were shot and you hit your head when you fell. Try not to think about it anymore.”

  I looked up, relieved to see a nurse coming through the door. It wasn’t the kind nurse from last night, but a middle-aged woman with dishwater blond-gray hair and a harried look on her face. She was carrying a tray with a syringe. “Sounds like someone’s getting himself all worked up,” she said, but it was me, not Roman, whom she looked at reprovingly. “We can’t have that.” She injected the syringe into the IV line. Roman’s eyes were still skittering back and forth, but in an ever shortening arc until they settled back on me.

  “I made sure they couldn’t get inside me,” he said, smiling slyly as his eyelids began to close. “I tricked . . .” He lost consciousness before he could finish his sentence.

  “There,” the nurse said. “That’s enough of that nonsense. He was rambling something awful before.”

  “My father is usually quite sharp.” I understood that the nurse was just tired and overworked, but I didn’t like her giving him medication just to shut him up. “Is it possible he has brain damage from the fall? Or that the medication you’re giving him is causing hallucinations?”

  The nurse clucked her tongue and snapped the bedsheet tight over Roman’s narrow, sunken chest. “Your father’s eighty-four years old. Even the sharpest octogenarian can become a bit unhinged after a shock like the one he’s had. Thing to do is keep him calm, not get him all excited.”

  “I’ll remember that,” I said. “Still, I’d like to talk to his doctor about his medication.”

  “Dr. Monroe is in his office right now talking to that police officer. I believe they’re old friends from when the doctor used to work in the ER. Why don’t you poke your head in the office door?”

  With a mounting sense of dread I followed the nurse’s directions to Dr. Monroe’s office, along a serpentine path that seemed designed to keep the relatives of the sick and injured from tracking down their loved ones’ doctors. Detective Kiernan and Dr. Monroe might be “old friends,” but if the case came up, that might not stop the doctor from passing on to the detective something outrageous Roman had said to him. God knew what my father might say in his current mental state. While I still couldn’t believe that my father had engineered the theft, I could imagine him commenting on how lucky he was that the paintings were insured. I could only hope he hadn’t broadcast his belief that the burglars had been possessed by demons.

  When I reached Dr. Monroe’s office, I paused outside to see if I could get an advance hint of what my father might have said. The doctor and the detective weren’t talking about Roman’s case, though; they were discussing Sunday’s Jets game.

  “It’s a sign of things to come,” Kiernan was saying. “Once Favre gets fully used to the new system, it’ll be ‘bombs away’ every Sunday. Great to watch.”

  “I don’t know,” the doctor countered. “Favre has a knack for an interception at the worst time.”

  “I hope I’m not interrupting any medically crucial discussion,” I said as I poked my head in the doorway.

  Dr. Monroe, who looked about my age, smiled at me. The detective invited me in.

  “Not a sports fan I take it,” Kiernan commented.

  “I’m just concerned about my father,” I said, directing my gaze exclusively at the doctor. “He seems disoriented. Is his head injury serious?”

  “I should go,” Detective Kiernan said, starting to get up in an offer of privacy.

  “You can stay,” I responded. It was a debatable decision, but I felt that I should bend over backward to look as if we had nothing to hide.

  “The X-ray of his brain looks fine,” Dr. Monroe said, tapping one of the X-rays clipped to the light board behind his desk. “The disorientation is probably a result of the morphine he’s on—a very common side effect, especially in elderly patients. Had you noticed any cognitive impairment before this incident?”

  “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 ha
d 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.

  Tea and Scones

  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 a
lso 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.”