His appetite wasn’t as hearty as he had imagined it would be, and he left most of the pasta pushed to the side of his plate. Gino was hurt, and came out of the kitchen and stared at him with cow-like eyes.
‘There’s something wrong? Maybe I should cook you some of my rognoncini di agnello saltati con cipolla.’
‘You’ve got to be joking,’ Lloyd responded. ‘Gino, that was brilliant. Spaghettini like they make in heaven. But I guess my eyes were bigger than my stomach.’
‘Aren’t you the man who said to me, “to waste food is to waste life itself . . .”?’ Gino demanded.
‘Sure, but I’m also the man who said, “never eat anything you can’t lift”.’
Gino sat down at the table with him and snapped his fingers for the waiter to bring them two glasses of verdicchio. ‘You tease me, Lloyd, you make fun,’ he said, laying a hand on Lloyd’s arm. ‘But you must miss her so much. Such a lady. Such elegance.’
‘Yes, well,’ said Lloyd, and lowered his eyes. He was trying very hard not to think about the Celia that he could remember, but to concentrate on the Celia that he had obviously never known. The secret Celia, the Celia who had pretended that she had no parents. The Celia who had believed so obsessively in living for ever. The Celia who had gone to Otto’s religious study group, and who had burned herself alive not five blocks from where he was sitting now.
‘What are you going to do?’ Gino asked him. ‘Maybe you should take some time off?’
Lloyd nodded. ‘Two or three days, maybe. But I can’t keep away from the job too long. You know what it’s like. You take too much time off, you lose your edge.’
‘Hey . . . if you get bored, come back down here, and I will show you how to make insalatina tenera con la pancetta.’
‘What the hell is that? It sounds like a street direction to the Vatican.’
Gino swallowed wine and shook his head. ‘Lettuce, fried. It’s wonderful. But I can’t explain how to do it, I have to show you.’
Just then, Gino was called back to the kitchen to whip up some coste di biete saltate, and Lloyd was left to finish his wine on his own. He was glad of the chance to be silent. He was summoning up all of the courage he possibly could, so that he would have the strength to visit the place where Celia had died. He had to go. It was not just an investigation, it was a pilgrimage. He had to know exactly where it was before he could begin to visualize it, and then to understand. He couldn’t imagine what pain had been suffered by wives in wartime, to learn that their husbands had been killed, but never to know exactly where. It seemed to him then that the place where somebody dies is even more important than where they were born.
He stood in the car-park opposite McDonald’s with his hands by his sides, staring at the smoke-stained kerb. Some of the bushes had been scorched, too, so Lloyd could judge how fierce the fire must have been. He wished he had brought some flowers. Lilies had always been Celia’s favourite.
What a place to die. Barren and public, noisy with traffic. He couldn’t imagine why she had chosen such a dreary location.
He tried to say a prayer. He hoped that her soul was at rest. He hoped that she hadn’t suffered. He hoped that she would forgive him, for not understanding that she was suffering so much that she wanted to die.
‘And one day we’ll meet again, for sure. Amen.’
He was walking back to his car when one of the chefs came out of the side entrance of the McDonald’s restaurant and began to walk hurriedly toward him. A bulky man, with a startling wide-apart cast in his eyes.
‘Pardon me!’ he called. ‘Sir!’
Lloyd waited for him to reach him. He was in his fifties, grey-haired and sweating. He smelled strongly of hamburgers.
‘I’m sorry to bother you, sir,’ he said, wiping the palms of his hands on his apron. ‘But I couldn’t help noticing you standing over there.’
Lloyd said, ‘I’m not one of your sensation-seekers, if that’s what you think. The girl who was burned . . . well, she was my fiancée.’
‘I figured something like that. Well, I saw the BMW. Your average ghoul doesn’t usually turn up to gawp in a BMW.’
He held out his hand. ‘Bob Tuggey. Most people call me Unca Tug.’
‘Lloyd Denman.’
Bob said, ‘I was here when it happened. I tried to stop her. It was terrible.’
‘You were the one with the fire-extinguisher?’
Bob lowered his eyes, and nodded. ‘I tried, believe me, but I just wasn’t fast enough. Fifteen seconds sooner, and I could have saved her.’
Lloyd looked back toward the burned bushes. ‘I appreciate what you did.’
‘I saw her walking across the car-park, swinging this yellow can. I should have guessed right away what she was planning on doing.’
Lloyd shook his head. ‘I don’t think anybody could have guessed what she was planning on doing.’
‘I was in Saigon,’ Bob told him. ‘I saw one of those monks setting himself alight. Your young lady sat right down, crosslegged, exactly the same way that monk did, and then I knew for sure what she was going to do. I just wasn’t fast enough.’
‘Well, thanks anyway,’ Lloyd told him.
‘Hey, listen . . .’ said Bob, reaching into the breast pocket of his shirt. ‘I found something afterwards, in the bushes. I was going to take it to the police yesterday but I didn’t have the time. It must’ve been hers, so I guess the best person to give it to is you.’
Between finger and thumb, he held up a small gold charm, discoloured by heat. Its link was broken, as if it had been tugged from a chain or a bracelet. But Lloyd had never noticed it on Celia’s bracelet. Certainly he hadn’t given it to her, and she had never mentioned buying it.
‘I don’t recognize it,’ he frowned, holding it flat on the palm of his hand. ‘It must be somebody else’s.’
The charm was a circle, and inside the circle was a lizard, with its head bent sideways and its legs and its tail bent sideways, too.
‘You’re sure?’ asked Bob. ‘I found it right where it happened, the same afternoon. I kept meaning to take it in.’
‘I could show it to her mother, see if she recognizes it.’
‘Okay,’ Bob agreed.
‘Do you want a receipt for it?’ asked Lloyd.
Bob gave him a smile. ‘Don’t worry about it. You’re not going to get very far in a white BMW with a registration plate that says FISHEE.’
‘I guess not. Listen, Mr Tuggey—I run Denman’s Original Fish Depot, at La Jolla Cove. Here—here’s my card. Why don’t you call by sometime, and have a drink on the house?’
‘Thanks. I might just take you up on that.’
They shook hands. Bob returned to McDonald’s, and Lloyd walked back to his car, holding the charm tightly in his fist, as if he were afraid it might jump out of his hand. He unlocked his car, but as he was about to climb into it, he noticed a red neon sign on the opposite side of Rosecrans announcing Copie Shoppe: Xerox, Printing, & Fax. He picked up the sheets of libretto from the passenger-seat, relocked his car, and crossed the road.
As Bob reappeared in the kitchen, Sally the manageress called out to him, ‘Unca Tug? You just missed a phone call.’
‘Oh, yeah, who was it? Not the President again, asking for advice on the Middle East? I wish he’d formulate his own policies, for God’s sake, and leave me alone.’
‘It was a girl. She sounded sexy, too.’
Bob looked up from the grill. ‘A girl?’
‘Sure. Real hoarse and provocative, know what I mean?’
‘For me?’
‘Well, not specifically for you. She wanted to know if anybody had handed in a gold charm. Apparently she lost it in the parking-lot.’
Bob put down his spatula in exasperation. ‘Would you believe it? I just gave that charm to that guy out there. Well, he was out there. He’s gone now.’
‘What did you do that for?’
‘He said that girl who burned herself was his fiancée. I was sure the charm must have been hers.’
‘This girl sure didn’t sound dead.’
‘Well, the guy didn’t recognize the charm, either, so I guess it couldn’t have belonged to his fiancée, after all. Damn it.’
‘Do you know who he is?’ asked Sally.
‘Oh, sure. He owns a fish restaurant at La Jolla. Guess I’ll just have to call him and get it back.’
‘I told the girl on the phone you had it,’ said Sally. ‘She said she’d call by later to collect it.’
‘She described it?’
‘Sure, kind of a lizard, in a ring, that’s what she said.’
Bob nodded. He left the kitchen and went through to the corridor, and picked up the payphone. He punched out the number of Denman’s Original Fish Depot, and waited while it rang.
Waldo answered. Bob explained what had happened, but Waldo told him that ‘Monsieur Denman weel not veezeet ze restaurant aujourd’hui. Pairhaps tomorrow.’
‘Just tell him the gold charm didn’t belong to his fiancée, please, and maybe he could call me.’
‘Avec plaisir, monsieur.’
Bot put down the phone, and went back to the Big Macs and the Fillet-o-Fishes and the Egg McMuffins. The afternoon passed quickly: his shift was due to end at seven-thirty. Tonight he was planning on bowling with his friend Stan Kostolowicz, another marooned penpusher from the Far Eastern embassies of the 1960s.
As it gradually grew dark, however, he failed to notice the large silver-grey Mercedes saloon with darkly-tinted windows which drew up outside the restaurant, and which remained parked there, even though none of its doors opened. Whoever was inside it had obviously decided to remain inside it, waiting.
Lloyd arrived outside Sylvia Cuddy’s downtown apartment building a little more than ten minutes early, and Sylvia wasn’t yet ready. He walked up the tile-flagged steps to the second floor, and Sylvia let him in.
‘Excuse the chaos,’ she said, kissing his cheek.
Like the living accommodation of many people he knew, even successful musicians and restaurateurs and interior designers, Sylvia’s apartment was tiny. Real-estate prices in San Diego had risen stunningly, and even a cramped two-room apartment was beyond the reach of all but the most affluent.
Only one drawer had to be left open, or one newspaper dropped on the floor, and the whole place looked untidy.
Sylvia’s ‘chaos’ amounted to nothing more than a coffee-cup left in the kitchen area, and an open file of drawings for the San Diego Opera’s forthcoming production of Mefistofele.
‘Have a seat,’ she said. ‘There’s wine in the icebox. Or Perrier. Or freshly-squeezed pineapple. There’s even some stuffed olives. Or some strawberry Jell-O.’
Lloyd poured himself a glassful of cold Cakebread chardonnay, and stepped out on to Sylvia’s tiny redwood balcony. The balcony had been built up to chest-height to give her extra privacy, and to mask the view of watertowers and warehouses and tract housing rooftops. If you didn’t peer over the edge, all you could see was Banker’s Hill and the Coronado Bay, glittering gold in the distance.
‘You’ve worked miracles with this place,’ he told her, turning around with his back to the parapet. ‘I love this dark green wallpaper, and all these drapes.’
‘I have to have drapes because I don’t have room for closets,’ she called back. ‘I’m so tired of living in Lilliput, you know? It’s so damned small here I can do swan-dives off the ironing-board, straight down the toilet.’
She stepped out onto the balcony beside him. She was short, only a little over five-three, with a wild tangle of backbrushed Titian hair, an owlish pair of Paloma Picasso spectacles, lips as plump as pink-silk cushions, and huge rounded breasts that were wrapped up like well-ripened canteloupes in a crimson-and-green floral blouse by André Laug.
‘You know what Celia used to say about this blouse?’ asked Sylvia. ‘She said it was like somebody shouting in the jungle. Wasn’t that just typical?’
‘I went to see the place today,’ said Lloyd. ‘The place where she died.’
Sylvia didn’t answer, but waited to hear what Lloyd would say next.
‘It’s a car-park, that’s all,’ he told her. ‘A concrete carpark. What a goddamned awful place to die.’
‘Any place is a goddamned awful place to die,’ Sylvia told him, taking his hand and squeezing it. ‘Come on, let’s go find ourselves a real drink.’ They left the apartment and Lloyd drove them out to Harbor Island Drive, to Tom Ham’s Lighthouse. Apart from being a bar and a restaurant, Tom Ham’s was a genuine certified coastguard lighthouse, with a spectacular view of the harbour. It was dark now, except for a last diagonal streak of grainy orange light across the horizon. They sat at a window table, looking out over the dipping lights and the reflections of downtown San Diego. Sylvia ordered a Kahlua on the rocks, but Lloyd stuck to whisky. There were times when only whisky was any use.
‘You said you thought there might be some connection between Celia and Marianna,’ said Syliva.
‘I don’t know. I don’t have any proof. It seems too much of a coincidence, that’s all.’
‘Coincidences do happen.’
‘Well, sure . . . but I’ve got a weird kind of feeling about it. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to this Otto character.’
‘I’m afraid I haven’t had any luck finding out about him. Don hasn’t heard of him, but I’m sure that Joe North sometimes used to go along to see him, with Celia and Marianna. He’s back at the theatre the day after tomorrow. I’ll ask him then.’
‘Thanks,’ said Lloyd. Then, ‘Do you happen to know what was the last opera that Wagner ever wrote?’
‘That’s a peculiar question.’
‘Some pretty peculiar things have been happening.’
Sylvia frowned at him. ‘Listen, you’ve had a dreadful shock. Are you sure you’re okay?’
‘I’m not too sure of anything, to tell you the truth. But tell me what was Wagner’s last opera.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘the last opera that Wagner wrote was Parsifal, 1882. In 1883 he went to Venice and died of a heart attack.’
‘He didn’t write an opera in 1883?’
Sylvia took off her glasses. Her eyes were unfocused and a little bulbous, but they were richest shade of Belgian-chocolate-brown. ‘Lloyd, I could talk about Wagner till the cows come home. However, the question is, is this relevant to anything at all?’
‘I don’t know. But inside Celia’s piano, I found this manuscript.’ He reached under the table and produced the plastic envelope. ‘It’s probably a fake, or a mistake. I’m not sure what. But it looks like part of a Wagner libretto, for an opera called Junius. It’s dated 1883.’
‘Let me see that,’ asked Sylvia. She took the envelope, eased out one of the pages of manuscript, and peered at it closely. Lloyd watched her, feeling uneasy, as if he were the fall guy for some elaborate practical joke.
‘What do you think?’ he asked her, at last.
‘This isn’t a leg-pull?’ she asked him, suddenly suspicious.
But she realized from the expression on his face that he was serious, and why would he joke, at a time like this? She examined the pages carefully, turning them over one by one and laying them face down on the table.
‘If this is genuine,’ she said, ‘then it’s incredible. Do you have any idea where Celia might have found it?’
‘I have no idea. She never mentioned it to me. It was sellotaped inside the piano.’
Sylvia said, ‘Of course you won’t be able to tell if it’s genuine until you have the paper and the ink properly analyzed. But if it is genuine, you’re going to be rich—especially if you can locate the rest of the opera, too.’
She peered at one of the pages closely. ‘It certainly looks like Wagner’s handwriting.’
‘And if it is?’
‘Come on, Lloyd, think about it! If that’s an original score for an unknown opera written by Richard Wagner in the last year of his life, and you can show that you own it, then you’re made for life. You can retire. I can think of at least four musical publishing companies who would pay you millions for it.’
Lloyd said, ‘To tell you the truth, I wasn’t so much interested in the money. I’m more interested in how Celia got hold of it, and why she hid it, and whether anybody else knows about it. Obviously she never talked about it to you . . . but somebody broke into the house the night she died and I think this was what they were looking for. If it’s worth millions, then that could have been a motive for somebody killing her.’
‘You didn’t tell me that somebody broke in! That’s terrible! What did the police say?’
‘They didn’t say anything,’ Lloyd admitted. ‘I didn’t tell them, either.’
‘Any particular reason?’ asked Sylvia.
‘I don’t know . . . just a feeling, I guess.’
‘But if you think she might have been killed . . .’
‘Oh, I don’t think that. I mean, I guess I’m satisfied that she actually took her own life. But I want to know is, why—and whether anybody put her into a suicidal frame of mind.’
‘Are you sure that’s something you really want to find out?’ Sylvia asked him. There was no doubting Sylvia’s kindness or wisdom.
Lloyd nodded. ‘I know what you’re suggesting. There could have been another man involved. But, believe me, Sylvia, not knowing is worse than knowing.’
Their waitress came up and asked them if they wanted another cocktail.
‘No, no,’ said Sylvia. ‘Two’s my limit. Otherwise I start singing “Loike Old Times in Kilkenny, Begorra” and dancing on the tables.’
‘We’ll just have the bill,’ said Lloyd. But as he did so, he caught sight of a girl on the far side of the bar, in the corner of one of the booths, and she looked so much like Celia that he shivered as if somebody had unexpectedly laid a cold hand on the small of his back. She was deep in the shadows, and she wore dark glasses, and a black scarf that covered her head like a turban. But there was sufficient light from the small crimson-glass lantern on the table in front of her to illuminate her face, and if she wasn’t Celia then she was certainly Celia’s doppelgänger. He couldn’t take his eyes away from her, but her glasses were so dark that it was impossible to tell if she had noticed him.
Sylvia touched his hand. Then—when she failed to attract his attention—she turned around to see what he was staring at. ‘Am I missing something?’ she asked. ‘I’m terrible like that. I was out with Don the other night and Robin Williams came into the restaurant and I didn’t even see him.’
‘That girl opposite . . . in the corner booth.’
‘Excuse me, I must put my specs on. Which girl?’
‘That girl in the scarf and the dark glasses. There—right in the corner.’
But as he was trying to explain to Sylvia which girl he meant, a crowd of six or seven laughing businessmen came into the bar and stood between them. Lloyd leaned from right to left, desperate not to lose sight of the girl, but then the businessmen were joined by their wives, and for two or three minutes he couldn’t see the booth at all.
‘Lloyd—what on earth’s the matter?’ Sylvia asked him.
He grasped her hand. ‘It sounds totally crazy, but I keep seeing Celia. Or girls who look like Celia. I saw one just after I left the morgue. I tried to follow her, but she disappeared in the crowds.’
‘And now there’s another girl over there who looks like Celia?’
‘Exactly. It’s uncanny. She’s wearing dark glasses but she’s so much like her.’
Sylvia gave Lloyd’s hand a gentle squeeze. ‘Lloyd—Lloyd, sweetheart.’
He looked at her quickly, then went back to searching for the girl in the booth.
‘Lloyd, you’re only torturing yourself. Celia’s dead.’
‘But the resemblance is totally uncanny.’
‘Lloyd, she’s dead. Dead people don’t come back and sit opposite you in cocktail bars. You’re just projecting your grief on to a girl who looks a little bit like Celia. It’s like an after-image. I did it myself when my father died. I spent four thousand dollars on two shrinks, to sort myself out.’
At last, the crowd of businessmen moved away, still laughing noisily. ‘There . . .’ said Lloyd. But as the last man walked with infuriating slowness out of his sightline, he saw that the booth was empty, and that the girl was gone.
Sylvia looked at Lloyd with sorrow. ‘Oh, Lloyd. I know how much you must be hurting.’
Lloyd stood up, and searched around the bar for any sign of the girl. The front door was slowly closing, as if somebody had just walked through it, and through the brown-tinted glass he thought he saw a slim dark figure, and the back of a woman’s calf, but then there was nothing but darkness, and the reflection of a man lighting a cigarette.
He drove Sylvia back to her apartment, and helped her out of the car. A cool wind was blowing from the harbour, and Sylvia shivered.
‘Don’t bother to come up,’ she told him. ‘Get yourself safely home and take a couple of Nytol. You’ll feel better when you get some sleep.’
Lloyd kissed her, and hugged her. ‘Thanks, Sylvia. You’re a genuine authenticated angel.’
‘Listen . . .’ said Sylvia. ‘Do you mind if I keep that score? Oliver Drexler’s coming in for rehearsals tomorrow, I could show it to him. I know that he’d adore to see it.’
‘For sure,’ Lloyd told her, and reached into his car for the plastic envelope. ‘Take good care of it, though. It could be evidence.’
‘Oh, I’ll take care of it, all right. I’ll guard it with my life.’
She watched Lloyd U-turn across the street, then waved as he headed off northward, back to La Jolla. She let herself in through the heavy bleached-oak door of her apartment building, and climbed the tiled stairs.
As she climbed, she softly trilled Pace, pace from Verdi’s La Forza Del Destino. She felt worried about Lloyd. It was obvious that he hadn’t even begun to face up to the reality of Celia’s suicide. It was understandable, of course. Suddenly to lose the love of his life in such a grisly and baffling way must have been enough to drive him half-crazy. By concentrating with such ferocity on finding out why she had killed herself, his mind was still protecting itself from the shock. His hallucinations of Celia were probably a symptom of the same self-protective mechanism.
Sylvia opened the door of her apartment and stepped inside. She wished there were something she could do to help Lloyd get over Celia. But Celia had been so pretty and so talented and so full of life that nobody could ever take her place. Sylvia missed her, too. Until today, she hadn’t realized how badly. She had heard from Don that Exxon were going to put up the money for a major production of The Marriage of Figaro. She had actually started to say, ‘Wait till Celia hears about this,’ until it had struck her with almost physical pain that she would never see Celia again.
She went to the fridge and took out a bottle of white wine. She didn’t usually drink as much as she had today, but she felt like something to help her sleep. She shucked off her shoes and walked out of the kitchen into the tiny living-room, carrying a glass of wine in one hand and the libretto in the other. She sat down in her favourite spoon-back armchair, and put up her feet on the coffee table.
Provided they were authentic, the pages of this libretto was one of the greatest musical finds of the century. Even if Lloyd couldn’t find the rest of the opera, they were still worth a fortune. She didn’t read German very well—particularly Wagner’s spidery script—but she managed to work out some of the meaning.
Junius: I confess that I listened
To His sweet and tempting words
And that I gave myself willingly,
Body and soul.
And
Many hundred thousand goodnights,
Dearly beloved Veronica,
Innocent have I come into prison
Innocent have I been tortured
Innocent must I die.
She leafed through to the pages of music, and hummed a few bars to herself. The score was unusually monotonous for Wagner, although it had all of the Teutonic sinew of the Valkyries and Rhinegold. Sylvia slapped the arm of her chair with her hand to emphasize the timing. The music sounded almost like a barbarian war-chant, the kind of song that would have been sung by Goths and Visigoths on their way to battle.
She was still humming and slapping when she began to have the feeling that she was being watched. She used to feel it quite often, before she had built the high balustrade around her balcony, and it was a feeling that particularly disturbed her. She had imagined that somebody in one of the tract houses was spying on her with binoculars. Her then-headshrinker had told her that she suffered from a mild form of paranoia.
But this evening, the feeling was different. She didn’t feel that she was being watched from a long way off, but from very near. Almost as if somebody were standing right behind her, and breathing on her shoulder.
She stopped humming, stopped slapping, and glanced quickly and furtively around. There was nobody else in the room. But the building did seem unusually quiet. There were no televisions mumbling in other apartments, no music playing, no feet chip-chipping up the tiled steps outside.
A jet took off from Lindbergh Field, its engines thundering. The sliding-door out on to the balcony rattled and vibrated. For a moment, as the airliner circled out over the ocean, Sylvia’s whole world was engulfed by shattering noise. She looked toward the balcony, and there, to her intense fright, a dark figure was standing, with its back to her. A woman, in a black raincoat, her head wound around in a black turban-like scarf.
Carefully, her heart still caught on the hook of her fright, Sylvia set down her wineglass and the pages of Wagner’s libretto, swung her feet off the coffee-table, and stood up. She looked around for something to protect herself with, and decided that the swan’s-head umbrella beside her writing-desk would do. This was only a woman, after all, and not an especially big or powerful-looking woman; and by the way she was standing on the balcony with her back to the living-room, it certainly didn’t appear to Sylvia that she had the intention of doing anything violent or sudden.
All the same, the very presence of a stranger outside her living-room, treating her balcony as if it were her own, was more threatening than Sylvia could have believed possible.
Sylvia gripped the umbrella in her left hand, took a deep breath to steady herself, and then slid back the balcony door.
‘Hallo,’ she said, her mouth dried out. ‘Do you mind telling me what the hell you think you’re doing on my balcony?’
For a long time, the dark woman said nothing, but continued to stare out over the sparkling lights of downtown San Diego and Coronado.
‘This is a private apartment,’ Sylvia insisted. ‘If you don’t leave immediately, I’m going to call the super, and the super will call a cop.’
At last, the woman turned around. She wore glasses with lenses so perfectly black that she looked as if she had no eyes, just two circular holes in her head. Her skin was very pale, with almost a greyish pallor, but very smooth.
‘Hallo, Sylvia,’ the woman replied, with the faintest of smiles. ‘I believe that you’ve got something of mine.’
Sylvia recognized the voice at once. A thrill of fright ran down her arms, like ice-cold centipedes racing each other to reach her wrists. It was Celia. It had to be Celia. Yet Celia was dead, burned. There had even been photographs in the San Diego newspapers of Celia burning, although Sylvia hadn’t been able to do more than glance at them quickly. She had glimpsed flames, a bowed black head, knees that protruded through the fire like kindling-sticks.
Sylvia opened and closed her mouth. Celia stayed where she was, her hands in her raincoat pockets, watching Sylvia with just the faintest touch of a smile on her lips, her eyes masked by those two black circles, black as the Bible-paper that the pirates in Treasure Island had cut out to make the black spot.
‘Fine way to welcome your best friend,’ she said, and her tone was quite vinegary. ‘Now, you have something of mine. Something I need. I’d appreciate it a whole lot if I could have it back.’
‘You’re dead,’ Sylvia hissed at her. ‘I’m imagining this. You’re dead.’
Her feet and ankles felt as if they had grown cold clinging tentacles which had wound around the balcony and left her powerless to move. Celia stepped closer, and Sylvia’s brain said run, but she couldn’t even step back. Run, she’s dead! Run!
‘I followed you out to the lighthouse,’ said Celia. She didn’t take off her dark glasses, didn’t smile. She was so much like Celia, yet there was something about her which was unnervingly unfamiliar. ‘Then I followed you back here. Of course I’ve still got that key you gave me.’
She paused, and then she added, ‘Lloyd gave you my music, didn’t he?’
‘You’re dead,’ gasped Sylvia, breathlessly. Her voice sounded as if she had somehow spoken into her own ear—intimate, secretive, but utterly hopeless. She had never felt so frightened in her entire life. She couldn’t bring herself to move a single inch, couldn’t even raise her swan’s-head umbrella. Celia approached so close that Sylvia could have lifted her mouth and kissed Celia’s smooth grey cheek, but still her muscles refused to work. She wondered in dumb lungless panic if she would ever be able to move again.
‘I was waiting for you to go to bed,’ said Celia. ‘I was hoping so much that you wouldn’t see me.’
Sylvia at last managed to take one stiff step away from her, then another. ‘You’re . . . dead,’ she repeated. She couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Celia moved past her into the living-room—moved strangely and silently, her raincoat rustling. Sylvia caught a distinctive smell as she passed her by. A smell of heat, like a burned ironing-board cover.
She turned around and watched in fascination and horror as Celia bent over the Wagner libretto. With one black-gloved hand, Celia sorted quickly through the pages, obviously making sure that none of them were missing.
‘It was very wrong of Lloyd to give you this,’ she remarked, without looking up.
‘I’m sorry. I was only borrowing it, out of interest,’ Sylvia replied. Then, ‘You’re not dead, then? Are you all right? Were you really burned? Or wasn’t it you at all?’
Celia gathered up the pages and stood up straight. ‘Do I look dead? I’m more alive than ever.’
‘I don’t understand. You don’t seem like yourself at all.’
Celia almost smiled. ‘On the contrary, my dearest, I’ve blossomed at last.’
‘You’re going to tell Lloyd that you’re okay? He’s so upset he’s almost crazy.’
‘I can’t,’ Celia told her, dismissively. ‘Not yet. But I will, as soon as I can. Believe me. I miss him as much as he misses me.’
Sylvia came back into the living-room and managed to sit unsteadily down on the arm of her sofa. ‘Celia . . . you must tell me! What’s happened to you? Where have you been? If you weren’t burned, then who was? Whose body was it that Lloyd had to go to identify? And if you weren’t burned, why have you put everybody through so much anguish?’
Celia stared at her for a long time with those smoke-black glasses, saying nothing.
Sylvia said, ‘We love you, Celia. We care about you. If something’s wrong . . .’
Celia hesitated a moment longer, and then she said, ‘The truth is, Sylvia, that I was given the chance of a lifetime, and I took it. There was no other way.’
‘A chance? What chance?’
‘Look,’ said Celia, ‘I’m very sorry for all the pain that I’ve caused you, and everybody else. But I had no choice. It had to be done secretly. It had to be done without anybody knowing in advance. And until it’s truly finished, it has to remain secret.’
‘But what’s the secret?’ Sylvia demanded.
‘Life, Sylvia. That’s the secret. Life.’
‘I don’t understand.’
Celia said, as if she were quoting, ‘There is one sure way to everlasting life, and that is the baptism of fire.’
‘Celia,’ Sylvia persisted. She was still afraid, but she was becoming irritated, too. She had seen the distress that Lloyd had suffered, because of her apparent death. She had experienced that same distress herself. She didn’t consider it at all funny that Celia should now reappear, without regret, without apology, and behaving in the oddest, most arrogant way imaginable.
On the other hand (and here’s where she had to be careful) it was possible that Celia had gone through some kind of mental breakdown. She had always been a brilliant musician, effervescent but highly strung, and she could have been suffering a nervous crisis without anyone realizing that anything was wrong. Sometimes it happened that way. She remembered Giorgi Boutone disappearing, the night before he was due to play Truffaldino in Prokofiev’s Love For Three Oranges. The musical director had found him by accident three days later, on a child’s swing in Balboa Park, unshaven and filthy, singing muh-nuh-muh-nuh from the Muppet Show.
‘Celia . . .’ said Sylvia. ‘Maybe I should drive you back home. You owe it to Lloyd, if nobody else.’
Celia shook her head. ‘It isn’t time yet. We have to wait until the solstice.’
‘The solstice? What’s the solstice got to do with anything. How do you think he’s going to feel?’
‘How do I think he’s going to feel about what?’ Dead words, deadly spoken.
‘About your being alive, of course!’
Celia said, almost with regret, ‘I was hoping very much that you wouldn’t tell him.’
‘How could I not tell him?’
‘Even if I begged you not to?’
‘Celia, Lloyd’s been through hell, thinking you killed yourself. I couldn’t let him suffer a moment longer.’
Celia turned away. Sylvia said, ‘Celia? Celia?’ But Celia was plainly thinking very deeply about something, and didn’t even appear to hear her.
‘Celia, I have to tell Lloyd. I simply have to.’
Celia looked back at her. When she spoke, her voice was measured and quiet and chillingly matter-of-fact.’You know something, Sylvia, fire has two properties. The ability to destroy, and the ability to recreate. Do you know why the Germans burned the bodies of all the Jews they slaughtered?’
Sylvia was perplexed. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘The guards at the concentration camps didn’t know why they had to do it,’ said Celia. ‘Nor did the SS officers. But higher up it was policy. When Jews are exterminated, they must be burned.’
‘Celia . . .’ Sylvia protested. ‘What on earth does this have to do with . . .’
‘Everything!’ Celia retorted, and her voice came out in a soft, threatening roar. ‘If your body is burned, your soul will be damned. The Germans were determined to torture the Jews not only in this world, but the next, for ever and ever, for time everlasting.’
‘Celia, you’re sick,’ said Sylvia. ‘Why don’t you let me call Lloyd, or maybe your doctor?’
‘No!’ roared Celia. ‘Don’t you understand what I’m telling you? Fire can condemn you to hell, but it can save you, too! If the proper rites are observed when your body is burned, and if the proper sacrifices are made at the next changing of the year, your soul won’t be damned, but saved. Saved! And not for a month or a year, or ten years, or even one human lifetime. Your soul will be saved for ever!’
Sylvia was trembling. ‘Are you trying to tell me you did burn yourself?’
Celia nodded, triumphantly.
‘And are you trying to tell me that what I’m seeing here . . . this is just your soul?’
‘I’m a Salamander, Sylvia. A life everlasting, made of fire and smoke and human soul. A creature of perfect purity. Superior in mind, indestructible in body. The ultimate race that humankind was always meant to become.’
‘A Salamander?’
‘That’s what we call them. That’s what we are.’
‘Who’s we? Is Marianna one of these Salamanders too?’
Celia circled the room, until she was standing quite close. ‘Marianna and many others. Scores of others.’
‘So that bus . . .?’
‘That’s right! Burned on purpose. Burned happily. The time has almost arrived!’
Sylvia glanced up at her nervously. ‘Celia . . . this is very hard for me to believe.’
‘It was hard for me, too, when I first heard about it,’ said Celia. ‘In fact, I dismissed it. But then I met Otto and Helmwige and then I understood.’
‘What are you going to do next?’ Sylvia asked her. ‘Where are you staying?’
‘With Otto and Helmwige,’ Celia replied.
‘And you won’t talk to Lloyd?’
‘Not yet. Not until the solstice. He mustn’t see me yet. I’m not . . . well, I’m not stable. Physically, I mean. Not mentally.’
Sylvia said, ‘Do you want a drink? I could use one myself.’
‘A glass of water would be good.’
‘Is that all? Just water?’
Sylvia stood up, and circled around Celia, and went to the corner table where she kept her drinks. She poured herself a Kahlua, and then said to Celia, ‘Just going to the kitchen . . . get your water for you. And ice, too.’
Celia was standing with her back to her, leafing through Wagner’s libretto. She gave the smallest nod of acknowledgement.
‘You know something . . . I was saying to Lloyd, that libretto must be worth a fortune,’ called Sylvia, opening up the refrigerator, and rattling the ice-tray. ‘Darn it, this ice is all stuck! I’ll have to put it under the hot water tap!’
Celia said, ‘We were lucky to find it. In fact, we’ve found almost all of it now. All the pieces that matter.’
‘You mean there’s a whole opera?’ Sylvia dropped the ice-tray noisily into the sink and turned on the cold water tap at full volume. Then she quickly stepped across to the other side of the kitchen and unhooked the telephone. Holding her breath, she punched out Lloyd’s home number and prayed and prayed that he had managed to get back by now. Please Lloyd, please don’t decide to visit the restaurant, I don’t know the restaurants number. Please just be home.
Celia said, ‘Wagner wrote it in 1883. He still hadn’t quite finished it when he died. He took it with him to Venice, and after his heart attack it disappeared. Not many people know about it. His widow Cosima mentioned it in one of her diaries, but not by name.’
‘Oh, really?’ said Sylvia. ‘Damn this ice! I think there’s something wrong with my thermostat or something.’
Lloyd’s phone was ringing now. Please be there, Lloyd. For God’s sake, please be there.
‘In fact Otto was the first person to make any kind of serious search for it,’ Celia went on. ‘That was back in 1938, when Hitler was in power. Otto had Hitler’s personal approval to look for Junius, and as much Nazi party finance as he needed. And of course, Mussolini was only too eager to help.’
Lloyd picked up the phone, and said, ‘Lloyd Denman here.’
‘Lloyd,’ breathed Sylvia, with her hand cupped closely over the receiver. ‘Lloyd—it’s Sylvia.’
‘I’m sorry, I can’t hear you,’ Lloyd replied. ‘I just got in—the door’s open. Can you hold on for a moment?’
‘Lloyd, for God’s sake, it’s Sylvia!’
Celia was saying, ‘Otto was given a team of five musical historians. They searched the whole of Venice . . . following every possible clue. It took them three years, until 1941. But they found it in the end. It had been hidden by the Roman Catholic priest who had taken Wagner’s confession on his deathbed.’
‘Lloyd!’ begged Sylvia.
She could hear Lloyd closing the front door. She could hear his footsteps crossing the hallway. He picked up the receiver with a squeaking, jostling noise, and said, ‘I’m sorry about that. I just couldn’t . . .’
Sylvia slowly lowered her phone. She wanted to shout to Lloyd CELIA’S HERE, CELIA’S ALIVE but her lungs were empty and she couldn’t breathe. Celia was standing in the kitchen doorway, staring at her with those black, black glasses. Without a word, she came over to Sylvia and lifted the phone out of her hand, and laid it down on the kitchen counter. Lloyd’s tiny voice said, ‘Hallo? Hallo? Is anybody there? Hallo?’
Celia asked, ‘Is that Lloyd?’
Sylvia nodded dumbly. She didn’t know why she was so frightened. Perhaps it was Celia’s black glasses. Perhaps it was the thought that she might take them off.
‘Celia, he has to know. You can’t . . .’
Celia raised one black-gloved finger to her lips. ‘You promised me, Sylvia. You promised you wouldn’t tell.’
‘Celia, this is quite absurd. I don’t know what nonsense this Otto has been cramming into your head, but I really think this has all gone much too far . . .’
‘Sylvia! You promised!’
On an impulse, Sylvia reached up and snatched off Celia’s glasses. She was prepared for almost anything—bruises, burns, blindness. But when she saw Celia’s eyes she screamed and screamed and screamed and couldn’t stop. They were as black and empty as her dark glasses, holes in the grey featureless skin of her face. They gave her an expression of utter deadness, like a death-mask. She was a thing which walked but shouldn’t walk.
Celia seized Sylvia’s wrist and prized the glasses out of her fingers. ‘Stop screaming!’ she commanded her. ‘Stop screaming!’
‘Ah! Ah! Ah!’ Sylvia gasped, shuddering with terror.
‘Stop it!’ Celia shouted at her. ‘Stop it! Shut up!’
‘Oh God you’re not real, oh God you’re not real!’ Sylvia shrieked at her. ‘I’m having a nightmare! Go away! Go away!’
Celia seized the lapels of Sylvia’s dress and shook her so hard that one of her earrings flew off. ‘Shut up, shut up, shut up! Shut up! You’re hysterical!’
But Sylvia screamed and gibbered and dropped to her knees. Her brain felt as if it had fused, and she couldn’t stop herself. Seeing Celia alive when she thought she was dead had been frightening enough. But seeing her dead when she was obviously alive was more than her mind could accept.
Celia hesitated, turned, then turned back again. She could hear footsteps outside the apartment, then the doorbell jangled. ‘Ms Cuddy?’ called a man’s voice. ‘Ms Cuddy, you okay in there?’
Celia lifted her right glove and unbuttoned it, tossing it aside. Then her left glove. Her hands were as pale and as smooth and as grey as her face. Deftly, she unbuttoned her raincoat, all the way down, and slid out of it. Underneath the raincoat she was completely nude, except for her tightly-wrapped black turban, her black high-heeled shoes, and a wide black leather belt, cinched tightly around her waist. The skin of her naked body was the same pearly-grey—a grey that gleamed in the shadows of Sylvia’s kitchen like softly-polished aluminium, or the skin of a baby, three days dead.
She took hold of Sylvia’s hands, both of them. ‘Come on, Sylvia,’ she coaxed her. ‘Come on, Sylvia, up.’
Sylvia stared at her, wide-eyed. ‘You’re naked. You’re dead. . . .
Go away.’
‘Come on, Sylvia, up you get.’
‘Ms Cuddy!’ the man’s voice repeated. ‘This is Ramone the Super, Ms Cuddy? Is everything okay?’
‘Everything’s fine, thank you, Ramone!’ Celia called, in a fair imitation of Sylvia’s Bostonian accent.
Sylvia was standing with her knees slightly bent, as if she couldn’t find the strength to stand up straight. ‘What are you going to do to me?’ she asked, in a voice as scattered as a burst-open bag of dolly-mixtures. ‘What are you going to do to me? Please! I won’t tell! I promise you, Celia! I promise you!’
Celia held Sylvia close, wrapping her arms around, pressing Sylvia’s cheek close to her breast.
Slowly, almost sensually, she began to stroke Sylvia’s hair.
‘You feel hot,’ Sylvia muttered. ‘I thought dead people were supposed to be cold.’
‘Ah, but I’m not dead,’ Celia told her, still stroking her hair, over and over. ‘I’m very much alive. I’m so much alive that I shall never die.’
‘Celia, you’re so hot. Don’t hold me so close. I can’t bear it.’
Pale grey fingers stroked her hair, over and over. A first wisp of smoke, from the top of her scalp. A first smell of burning.
‘Celia, please! You’re hurting me! You feel so hot!’
But Celia’s eyelids closed over those empty eye-sockets as if she simply didn’t choose to hear, and she kept on stroking Sylvia’s hair, her fingers running deeply and sensually into her
curls. Another wisp of smoke, a small sharp crackle of burning ends.
‘I shall never die, Sylvia, my darling, and nor shall Marianna, nor David, nor Leonard, nor Carmen, nor Julie, nor any of us. We’re all pure now, every one of us. Salamanders! And we shall find more to purify, thousands more.’
Her fingers stroked and stroked. Sylvia tried to struggle free, but Celia held her even more tightly. Celia’s arms were so hot now that Sylvia’s silk blouse began to scorch, and the flowery fabric shrivel up. Smoke was pouring from Sylvia’s hair, and filling the kitchen with an acrid, eye-watering stench. Suddenly, her hair burst into flame, and she shouted in pain. Celia instantly clamped her hand over Sylvia’s mouth, and her fingers were so hot that Sylvia’s lips sizzled and seared, like raw steak pressed against a red-hot skillet.
Sylvia twisted and writhed and thrashed, but she couldn’t get free. Celia’s body temperature had risen so high that Sylvia’s blouse and skirt had scorched through and her first layer of skin had actually fused to Celia’s, breast and hip and thigh, so that for all practical purposes the two women were actually welded together.
Sylvia breathed in superheated air: it burned the hairs in her nostrils and dropped into her lungs like blazing petrol. She had burned herself badly only once before in her life, six or seven years ago, when she had dropped a panful of scalding water on her foot, and she had thought that what she had suffered then was agony. But she understood now that what she had suffered then was simply pain, and that true agony was so intense that it was beyond physical description. It was a spiritual experience, so unbearable that it was beautiful, so devastating in its effect on her central nervous system that she felt as if she had discovered at last the full implication of what it was to be a human being.
In Celia’s incandescent arms, she understood that God had created His children with the ability to be able to suffer to such a degree that death would seem like blessed relief. That was the horrible beauty of it.
She was incapable of screaming out loud. But inside her mind she was screaming and screaming until she couldn’t even think any more.
Celia held her tighter, caressing her shoulders, caressing her back. Celia’s hands left wrinkled, blistering tracks wherever they touched her. Blistering sheers of skin dropped from her back, until she looked as if she was wearing a ballet-skirt of curled-up crackling.
Sylvia lifted her puckering blistered face to Celia, and Celia opened her black empty eyes. Even though Sylvia couldn’t speak, she communicated with every shrivelling nerve in her body: Kill me, kill me, please. Don’t make me suffer any more.
Celia stared at her with terrible black blindness, and then closed her eyes again. It was at that instant that Sylvia exploded into flame. Her lungs swelled, and then burst apart, and blood and flesh geysered out of her mouth. Chunks of burning muscle flew from her shoulders, her legs collapsed like charred chair-legs; her intestines fell through her cracked-apart pelvis in a roar of fatty flame; her skull detonated.
The whole kitchen was strewn with burning ashes and lumps of shrivelled flesh.
Sylvia’s remains blazed on the kitchen floor with ever-intensifying glare and heat. Celia stood watching, naked, unmoved, even when the ceramic floor-tiles began to break, one by one, with a gritty popcorn crackle.
Smoke filled the entire apartment, although it was slowly beginning to drift out through the open balcony door. Celia paced slowly around, as if she were reluctant to leave, tense, anxious, almost angry. She kept returning to the kitchen to look at the last guttering flames. It was extraordinary how it took nothing more than heat to reduce a living, talking human being to a small heap of oily ashes, in which flames fitfully burned.
Celia wondered if she felt sad, or regretful. She wasn’t sure. She felt sorry that Sylvia was gone, yet Sylvia had brought it on herself and Otto had always said that we must all accept the consequences for what we do, no matter how painful those consequences might happen to be. In a way, she felt that she had saved Sylvia from something far worse, although she knew that Sylvia’s soul would suffer and suffer for all eternity.
She approached the antique mirror next to the front door, and stared at herself. She knew how much she had changed. She looked the same, but she wasn’t the same at all. She was purified, utterly purified. She could never again be swayed by lies or deceit or broken promises. She would never again succumb to any kind of weakness. She was one of the chosen, one of the truly eternal.
Her empty eyes, which had horrified Sylvia so much, were the symbol of everything she had now become. The eyes are the windows to the soul, somebody had once said. She needed no windows. She was all spirit, all soul, made flesh by the smoke of her own sacrifice. She had no need of eyes.
She cupped her hands over her small bare breasts. Her skin was cool now, the burning had passed. She thought of Lloyd and her nipples stiffened between her fingers. She knew how much pain she had caused him. She had known from the very beginning that he would have to suffer. But when the time came, they would be back together again, whole, perfect, and their passion would last for ever.
‘My dear, you will never die,’ Otto had told her, with a thin smile, clasping both of her hands between both of his.
She reached down and twined between her fingers and thumb the fine curly hair that grew between her legs. She watched herself in the mirror. She had always been highly sexed. She hadn’t realized how much she would miss Lloyd’s lovemaking, even though they had been apart now for only three days. It would be wonderful, after the solstice, when she could take him back into her arms.
It was then that the phone rang. She hesitated for a moment or two, then she walked back into the smoke-filled kitchen and picked it up.
A voice said, ‘Sylvia? Sylvia? Is that you?’
Lloyd, she thought, closing her eyes. She was almost tempted to answer, although she knew that she mustn’t.
‘Sylvia . . . I had a call about five minutes ago. I thought it was maybe from you.’
She didn’t answer, but she placed the receiver against her lips, and kissed it, slowly and lingeringly.
‘Sylvia?’ she heard him say.
She pressed the earpiece against her breasts, touching her nipples against the tiny holes from which his voice was emerging.
‘Lloyd . . .’ she murmured.
‘Sylvia . . . can you hear me? Are you able to talk? Should I call you back? Can you hear me okay?’
Now she massaged the receiver against her stomach, and between her legs. She rubbed it slowly around and around against her vulva, until the plastic was slippery and shiny. Bending her knees slightly, she opened herself with the fingers of her left hand, and pushed the end of the receiver inside herself. Cream plastic, shiny pink flesh.
‘Who’s there?’ asked Lloyd, right inside her.
‘Your lover,’ she replied, and then laughed. But all the time the tears were running out of her empty eyes.
She forced the receiver up even harder, gasping, churning it around. She hadn’t felt so desperately frustrated for years. She pushed it and pushed it, sinking gradually on to her knees, and pressing her forehead against the ash-strewn kitchen floor. Then, in the silence of Sylvia’s smoke-filled apartment, she heard the telephone click, and whine, as Lloyd rang off.
She drew the receiver out of herself, and clutched it in her left hand, and screamed at it in fury. Blue smoke began to pour from between her fingers, and the receiver started to soften and twist. She screamed and she screamed, a scream of fear and frustration and dark black anger, and the telephone burst into flame. Molten plastic dripped and crawled down her wrist, and dropped flaring on to the tiled floor.
At last, she threw it away, a smoldering knot of polystyrene on the end of a twisted telephone cord, and she knelt on the floor, shaking with emotion.
She had understood right from the very beginning that she would have to suffer. She had understood that she would be one of the first—different, and dangerous, and difficult for her friends and her lovers to understand.
But she hadn’t been prepared for the strangeness of it, nor for the huge surges of anger that she would feel. She was immortal. She had inherited the whole world, for ever. But what had she lost? What had she lost?
She stood up, picked up her raincoat, and hung it over her shoulders. Then she carefully replaced her smoke-black glasses. She would have given anything to see Lloyd that evening, but she knew that she couldn’t trust him to keep her secret, and most of all she couldn’t trust herself.
She collected the Wagner libretto, let herself out, and closed the door behind her.