Heart to Heart: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (20 page)

"But in the
meantime...?"

"All is error."

I glanced at Francesca,
replied to Valentinius, "Interesting concept."

"Error is but perfection in process," he
said.

I got the idea that he was enjoying
this.

I said, "Sergeant Alvarez is concerned about
the error on the beach last night. It's his responsibility to
understand what happened."

Alvarez shifted
uncomfortably in his chair and gave me a stop-that look but it
seemed to bother Valentinius not a whit. He took time to light a
cigar, then said to Alvarez, "Your autopsy report should be ready
for you now. You should find your responsibilities greatly
lightened by it."

Alvarez excused himself and left the room.
He was gone for just a couple of minutes during which time
Valentinius joined a conversation between Rosary and Catherine
—something having to do with the sanctity of sex under the church
versus the sanctity of not having sex under the church.

Catherine was saying, "I just don't
understand that position. If holy matrimony blesses sex within the
church, then why can't you and Hilary have sex? Aren't you united
within the church?"

Rosary patiently replied, "I am the Bride of
Christ, Catherine!"

"Then why can't you have sex with him? How
many brides does he need anyway?"

Rosary turned to their host and sputtered,
"Val! Will you tell this...this...?"

Valentinius bit down on his cigar and
chuckled merrily. He said to Catherine, "For whom or what would you
forswear the sexual embrace, my dear?"

"For no body or no thing I've seen yet," she
replied soberly.

"So you regard highly this idea of sexual
embrace, I take it."

"You take it right."

"Then be happy for your sister that she has
found something even more highly to be regarded."

Catherine looked at Rosary with a changing
light in the eyes and said, "Okay, maybe I understand that."

"Thank you, dear heart," Rosary said to
Valentinius.

He bowed gallantly in his chair and said,
"Remember me to your bridegroom."

Catherine said still very soberly, "You
know, that's really sweet."

Alvarez returned at that point, his face a
study in confusion and bafflement. He sat down and leaned against
me to quietly report, "I called in. They'd just received the
report. Natural causes, they say. Dead before he hit the beach,
they say."

Valentinius was looking at us.

I stared straight back at him and asked,
"What killed him?"

He removed the cigar from his mouth and
delicately flicked the ashes into a tray as he quietly replied,
"What kills us all, Ashton?"

"Error?" I ventured.

"Of course."

"But in this particular instance, this
particular error...in one so young...?"

He puffed on the cigar, glanced at Alvarez,
told me, "Sometimes our own error is the most difficult thing to
face."

Alvarez growled in a low voice, "Whatever he
faced scared hell out of him. That man died in terror."

Valentinius smiled sweetly, asked, "How do
you spell that word, Robert? With a T in front of error?"

With that Valentinius flat disappeared.

An instant later we heard him at the
piano.

Catherine leapt to her feet and clapped her
hands. "Showtime!" she declared happily. "I think tonight I would
like to do a striptease."

I doubt that my friend the Indian, Bob
Alvarez, even heard that interesting announcement.

He was still staring with open mouth at the
vacant chair of our host.

"That man is a devil," he muttered.

I thought of St. Germain, and the distress
with which he greeted that same accusation by the old Countess von
Georgy at Madame de Pompadour's in the middle eighteenth
century.

I leaned closer to Alvarez and whispered to
him, "He's playing with us, so play along. And don't worry about
the devil. There's no room for him at this inn."

"How do you know that?" Alvarez growled
back.

I did not know how I knew, but I knew. Also
I had never met the devil so had never experienced him.

"Trust me," I said.
"There's no devil here."

Everyone else had gone
into the lounge except Francesca. She paused between us and stared
at the cop while asking me, "Who is your friend,
Ashton?"

Alvarez's jaw wobbled a bit as he reminded
her, "We met this morning, Miss Amalie. I'm Sergeant Alvarez."

"Where is your uniform?"

"I, uh..." He looked at me for help. I just
shook my head and held my peace.

Francesca said, "Do you like the army?"

He replied, humbly, "Yes, Ma'am, I love
it."

"That's nice," she said.
Then she joined the others in the lounge.

I lit a cigarette and toyed with my coffee.
The sergeant of police just sat there, glowering at his hands. The
angels in the other room were singing of good times a'coming.

I quietly told my friend
the cop, "Stop feeling bad. That's not her."

"Not who?"

"Not the lady you met this morning. I'm sure
she knows who you are though, what you are, and why you're here.
This one I mean, Francesca II. And she was rubbing at me, not at
you. So don't take it to heart."

"Thanks," he said with a
tight smile. "I needed that. Even though I don't understand a thing
you're talking about."

"Is your case closed?"

"It is not."

"Okay," I said, "so let's go sing with the
angels."

He looked toward the lounge, stood up, asked,
"That what they are?"

"What do you say?"

He smiled and held out a hand to me. "I say
let's go sing with the angels. That's nothing new to my
family."

I knew that. The American Indians had been
communing with the celestials for time out of mind.

Sure, I knew that. And so must
Valentinius.

Chapter Twenty-Six: The Nether Stairs

The superb collection of paintings and
sculptures I'd seen the night before in Francesca's studio was now
on display in the lounge, but nobody was paying them any attention.
All were grouped at the piano singing their heads off and enjoying
it immensely.

I gave a nod toward the art display for
Alvarez's benefit and told him, "There's the show I saw last
night."

He nodded back in understanding and went
over to check it out. I was still working at my cigarette and did
not wish to blow smoke upon the singers so I trailed along behind
Alvarez to get his reaction to the artwork.

He stood for a long moment before a portrait
of Francesca—obviously a self-portrait—before commenting, "This is
good."

I said, "That, pal, is the understatement of
the year. Call it uncanny. Can you figure those colors?"

He gave me a sad smile and replied, "I don't
know much about art. But I think it's good." He was moving along
the display now, pausing here and there for a closer inspection of
those he recognized. "They're all here," he told me a moment later.
"Except the ancient man. Where's he?"

I said, "He's everywhere," and looked
pointedly at one of the sculptures.

That gave my a friend a start. He moved from
one to the other, inspecting several sculptures and then remarking,
"They're all alike. I thought they were just decorations for the
pictures."

I said, "Maybe so."

He said, "No, no; I don't
think so. This means something. It means something to the
pictures. Look at this face here now." He was indicating the
portrait of John the Ascetic. "Try to see the picture and the
statue at the same time. See what I mean?"

I saw what he meant, sure.

My friend the cop was now quickly becoming
an art critic, moving interestedly from portrait to portrait and
checking out the different angles of view.

I grinned and stepped away from that, then
suddenly stopped grinning and walked quickly to the end of the
line.

A new portrait was proudly
on display there—a double portrait—set slightly apart from the
others and bracketed by a pair of Valentinius heads.

Francesca was there and I
was there, both of us swirling from the background of riotous
color—but we were not together there; we were merely each present
there and juxtaposed within the colors in such a way as to suggest
that neither subject could be aware of the other.

It was stunning.

I was still staring at it when Alvarez
caught up to me. He reacted with a start too, and stood there
beside me without comment until I solicited one.

"What do you think?" I quietly asked
him.

"I think she's in love with you," he replied
without pause, "It's very obvious, isn't it?"

I said, "Well...maybe...but how do you get
that from the painting?"

He said, "I guess I get it
because she put it there. When did you pose for this?"

I said, "Hey, Bob, I didn't pose for this."
I put a tentative finger to the edge of the canvas—expecting very,
very tacky but encountering entirely dry paint. It was a shock.
Oils simply do not dry that fast, not any oils I'd ever
encountered before.

Alvarez was saying, "It's
the same effect with the ancient man, Ash. I don't understand how
that..."

Somehow the observation irritated me. Maybe
because I did not understand it either—or maybe I simply did not
like the effect. Any of it.

I told Alvarez, "Art is illusion, Bob.
Francesca herself told me that."

"Maybe so," he said, a bit mournfully, "but
I'd say the lady is in love with you. I mean if she painted this.
Let's see...how would I title it?"

I growled, "Knock it off."

"Soul Mates," he said. "Yeah I can't compete
with that."

This guy was no end of surprises.

I said gruffly, "What th' hell do you know
about it, cop?"

He just showed me a sad smile and replied,
"I know I can't compete with it."

I had no response to that.
I was still staring at the painting in silence when a long moment
later Alvarez cleared his throat and said, "Well, I'll leave you to
your study. I'm gonna go sing with the angels. Don't, uh, don't go
off the deep end here, eh."

I muttered, "Thanks. I'm fine, Bob."

He walked away, joining the others in song
as he approached them.

I certainly did not feel like singing.

I did not know what I felt
like at that moment. A bit sad, I think, an almost mournful
sadness—no, different than that—more subtle—disappointment...or
some sort of wistful...

I did know that I had seen enough of that
painting, for the moment anyway. It had a very disturbing effect on
me. I was standing near the hallway door so I roused myself from
that depressing whatever I was falling into and just stepped on
through and found my way around to the kitchen. From there I could
hear the Chinese girls busily clearing the dinner table in the
dining room. The kitchen was clear. I went through to the door I'd
noted earlier during my inspection of the house, tried it, found
it unlocked, entered.

There was, yeah, a cellar.

I found a light switch at the head of the
stairs and counted twenty steps as I descended. It was very neat
and tidy down there, stone walls, stone flooring, evidently a
pantry area and wine cellar combined. Really did not know what I
was looking for. Well, yes, I guess I did. Because I found it
another door set flush into the stone and barely noticeable behind
a stand of wine racks.

It featured a trick pivot
like the one in the elevator pit. Two square flashlights—similar to
the navy's battle lanterns—were affixed to a rough rock wall just
inside. I took one down and tried it. It worked and the battery
seemed fully charged. Another long flight of stairs invited me
downward.

Devils, eh?

I didn't know about that.

But I had the very eerie feeling that maybe
I was descending into the pits of hell...while the angels sang—
upstairs.

The concept of heaven being
located
up
there
and hell
down
there is probably as old as man himself. But that view is
tied in very closely to early man's model of reality. Even the
enlightened Greeks of Plato's time still used the mythical
cosmology derived from the much earlier Sumerians and Babylonians,
whose model of reality divided existence into the spheres of
celestial air, celestial water, and a crystal celestial fortress
which floats in the celestial water and in which is embedded the
physical world which man inhabits.

This was a very small world.

The crystal celestial fortress (or sphere)
of Sumerian- Babylonian legend is divided into twelve zodiacal
parts. Within the sphere, which rather looks like a round bowl with
a transparent dome, the waters of the Bitter Lake fill the bowl and
support the earth's disk (which is flat) beneath the dome, which
is filled with celestial air.

The Babylonians believed
that their Ziggurat, the Tower of Babel, was situated in the
precise center of the celestial sphere, so that all of the created
world radiated out from that center.

As I said, it was a very small world.

Above the Ziggurat is
stacked the vault of the sky, divided into three parts; below lies
the city of the dead, which is surrounded by seven walls containing
within them the dwelling places of the inhabitants of those nether
regions.

The Greeks of course decided that Mount
Olympus occupied the precise center of the universe. They still
had the earth as a disk floating upon the bitter (salt) waters. The
Mediterranean flowed in through the Strait of Gibralter (Pillars of
Hercules) at the extreme western edge of the disk, almost splitting
the world into two equal parts with the continents of Europe,
Africa, and Asia grouped about it.