Black Swan Rising (6 page)

“So you weren’t blocking the front door?”

“No. I don’t think they would have cared if I had been. They didn’t seem to take any notice of me. It was almost like they didn’t see me.” I stopped, trying to remember something. “There was something weird about their eyes.”

But Detective Kiernan wasn’t interested in the burglars’ eyes. “Hm . . . so why do
you
think they didn’t go out the front door?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know . . . maybe they were afraid the police were on the way . . . or maybe there was something they wanted upstairs.”

“Is there anything of value up there?”

“Some keepsakes of my father’s . . .”

“He lives on the second floor, right? The burglars don’t appear to have gone into his apartment. But the third floor . . .”

I was on the stairs before Detective Kiernan could finish his sentence. The thought of those creepy burglars trespassing in my studio and bedroom made me feel sick. I sprinted up the two flights of stairs, Kiernan a few steps behind me. What had they done in my studio? When I reached the open door, I thought for a moment that a snowstorm had swept through the room. The floor was covered in white.

I knelt on the floor and touched one of the flakes. It was dry to the touch and left a grayish streak on my hands. Of course. It was the paper that had come out of the silver box last night . . . only I was sure that I had swept all the paper debris up and put it back in the box. Then I had closed the box and left it on my worktable.

I crossed the room in three long strides, the paper confetti crunching underfoot. My soldering torch lay where I had left it last night, but the silver box was gone.

“What’s wrong? Is something missing?”

I looked up from the table to Detective Kiernan. I noticed that a flake of paper was stuck in a curl of hair that fell over his forehead. The paper was drifting around the room, buoyed by a draft from somewhere.

“A silver box,” I answered, looking around for the source of the draft. “Something I was working on last night.”

“Was it valuable?”

“I don’t really know. It wasn’t mine.” I described how I had come by the box, as briefly as I could.

“It doesn’t sound that valuable if the jeweler would just let you walk out with it.”

“No, I suppose not.” I thought of the blue symbols I had seen scrolling across the inside of the lid last night, but I certainly wasn’t going to tell the police detective about
that
. It had been an ocular illusion, that was all, a new twist in my ocular migraine symptoms.

“They probably just grabbed it on their way out.” Kiernan pointed up with one finger. I stared at him, confused. One might use that gesture to indicate a person had ascended to heaven,
but the burglars hadn’t died. Then I looked up and saw what he meant. The skylight above our heads had been shattered. The metal bookcase against the wall was tilted slightly out of line and pieces of scrap metal had been shoved aside. The burglars must have used it as a ladder up to the skylight and the roof above. “But you will have to add it to the list of stolen items,” he continued. “You should let the owner know as soon as possible.”

“I would, only I don’t have his name or address.” I was instantly sorry I had admitted to this. I could just have said I’d contact the man later. The detective was staring at me now as if I were crazy.

“I know, it sounds nuts, but you have to understand that I was distracted. I’d just gotten some bad news at our lawyer’s office.”

“Really?” Detective Kiernan took out his notebook and sat on the edge of the worktable. “Why don’t you tell me about
that
?”

An hour later I finally managed to get away from Detective Kiernan, but only because the hospital called to tell me that my father was awake and asking for me. I told Kiernan I really needed a few minutes to myself before returning to the hospital, and so he reluctantly left the town house as I practically shoved him out the door. Then after he’d turned the nearest corner, I walked the few blocks to St. Vincent’s, cursing myself for letting the police detective lure me into a full disclosure of our financial troubles. True, he would eventually have found out about the loan being called, but now it would color the whole investigation into the burglary. He’d focused on how
convenient,
as he kept saying, it was that the insurance money could be used to pay off the loan, or some of it. It was clear he suspected my father had arranged the burglary to collect on
the insurance. All he needed now was to find out that Roman had been arrested for insurance fraud once before.

It had happened eleven years ago when I was fifteen. I knew that money was tight because I’d had to switch from private school to public the year before. I hadn’t minded that—I’d gotten into LaGuardia and loved the art program there—but I hated hearing my parents arguing about money. Especially when I heard my mother complain that Roman had used money set aside for my college to buy a Warhol silk screen from one of Zach Reese’s friends.

“I’ll sell it for twice what I paid for it,” I heard my father say one night. “And Garet will go to Harvard if she wants to.”

But then the Warhol Board had denied authentication to the silk screen. They claimed that Zach Reese had run off copies of the silk screen without Warhol’s permission. Without the Board’s seal of approval the piece was almost worthless. Three days after Roman received the news from the Warhol Board the gallery was robbed. A few paintings by minor artists were taken, but the only item of “value” taken was the Warhol, which had been insured for the purchase price. When the same friend of Zach Reese’s who had sold the painting to Roman was arrested while trying to sell the same painting to a Japanese art collector, Roman was also arrested for conspiring to defraud the insurance company. The case had dragged on for a year, during which time the gallery’s reputation was nearly destroyed and my mother died in a car accident. Her obituary ran in the
Times
the same day that the case against Roman James was dropped due to lack of evidence. It wouldn’t take long for Detective Kiernan to dig up that information. In fact it was weird he didn’t know about it already.

Unless he did know and had only been waiting for me to
mention it. Had I looked more suspicious
not
bringing up the other case? But then why should I mention it? The cases were completely different. After all, Roman had been
shot
in this burglary. If he’d hired the burglars—and the idea of my father having anything to do with those
thugs
was unthinkable—surely they wouldn’t have shot him.

You could almost say he was lucky he had been shot.

I admonished myself for the thought as I entered my father’s room. He looked shrunken and ancient in the hospital bed, his skin a sickly yellow against the white bandages on his shoulder, the bruises on his bald scalp livid under the hospital’s fluorescent lighting. His eyes were open, but he was looking toward the window so he didn’t notice me until I bent down and kissed his forehead.

“There you are!” he exclaimed, as if we’d been playing hide-and-seek and he’d just discovered me crouched behind the couch. “I told that nurse you’d be back any minute. My Margaret wouldn’t abandon her old father.”

“I’m sorry I took so long, Dad,” I said, drawing a chair closer to his side. “I had to talk to the police at the gallery, give them the inventory list—”

“Our beautiful Pissarros!” he wailed, pressing his hands together as if in prayer. “That must be what they were after.” Then, lowering his voice to a hoarse whisper, he added, “I bet it was someone at Sotheby’s that tipped them off. How else would those
ganovim
know the paintings had just arrived back?”

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?”