Since Vina’s death and the loss of her incisive vision, her Rai, I have at many points felt myself separating more and more into moments, disparate, contradictory: ceasing, as I now see, to cohere. The “miracle of the videotape” has shown me what I should long ago have spotted for myself: that there are two of us mourning the loss of her redeeming judgements; and that it’s time we bridged the rift that has snaked between us over the years, widening by slow degrees. Now that she’s gone, we perhaps hold each other’s salvation in our hands.
Help Ormus. Yes. And maybe he’ll help me.
I’m loading up the Jeep to head back to the city and thinking about the old Bombay days with Ormus, in his dressing room or up on the Apollo Bunder roof. As a matter of fact I’m cheerful enough, feeling the return of old affection, of happier childhood times. But here’s Molly Schnabel in white shirt and khakis, Mack’s embattled ex and world-class all-around poor mouth, strolling hands-in-pockets up the garden path, grinning her lippy, sidelong grin.
Well if it isn’t the inconsolable Indian boyo, moping over the passing of another man’s wife. You great girl, Rai, will you look at you. Like Niobe, all tears.
I keep things neutral. Hey, Molly, quelle surprise.
She switches accents from Irish lilt to Hug-me.
O, baba, what to tell? Wehicle broke down just close by. I am thinking, can I use the phone and give mechanic a tinkle? Sorry to incon-wenience.
She has spent time in India—she’s a multinational conglomerate babe, her father was big in Union Carbide until the airborne toxic event, the cloud of methyl isocyanate that ate the eyes and lungs of Bhopal; old man Molony was one of the executives who took the fall for that PR disaster—and she prides herself on her mimicry of Indian idiolect. Once at some Colchis bash she drove Yul Singh to distraction with this type of goodness-gracious, until finally he snapped, For God’s sake, Molly, this is America. Talk American.
If she shows up don’t let her in the house under any circumstances, Mack had warned. I don’t care if she’s shot and bleeding. Barricade yourself in and hunker down for a siege if necessary. I mean it. One time when Chow was out there she showed up with a U-Haul panel van and tried to clear the place out. Now here she comes with her head cocked on one side so that her golden Veronica Lake-y hair falls in waves over one enormous eye, with her trumped-up pretext and her ingratiating Hug-me dialogue. Listen, Molly, I say, you know I can’t let you do that. If you want to make a call, sure, here’s my mobile.
Mobile shobile, this instrument I also have, she says, instantly dropping the cover story with a shrug, her voice rising a couple of notches. You think so you can keep me out of my own residence? What, because it is the desire of that putter of his penis into the fist of his own son?
Stop it, I tell her. Molly, just stop right now.
What, because you have received instruction from that inserter of narcotic toxins into the noses of his own kiddiwinks? That indulger within and without the marital bed in sexual perwersions both bestial and coprophile? That whited sepulchre, in whom only I have seen the worms of corruption writhe?
As well as the version that holds you together, there’s also one that tears you apart. This is it for my pal Mack, this thirty-three-year-old woman shrieking in counterfeit accents on the lawn of her own past, defaming what once she loved, making accusations which carry in many people’s minds an automatic guilty verdict and using the authority of her beauty and of the words “wife” and “mother” to acquire for her falsehoods the support of the law itself. This brilliant adversary who has already stripped Schnabel of his good name but wants everything he’s got. It doesn’t matter what Mack does for the rest of his life. This version has been branded on his forehead. It’s a letter sewn on to his coat in scarlet thread.
I’ll drive you to your car, I say. Or, if it really is bust, let’s get the mechanic.
You’d make the perfect dogsbody courtier for some murderous third-world despot, Rai, she says, dropping the Indian voice. Or the Chairman’s favorite lickspittle lackey and running dog. Or the little ratso soldier the big dons use to do their dirty work. There’s a woman to abuse, to what’s the argot injurize, to throw off her own land? Send for wiseguy Rai. Call him on his fucking mobile phone.
Get in, Molly, I tell her. And she does; and at once puts her hand in my lap. O, is that all, the old Adam is it, she says, feeling the movement I am unable to control. Is that where you’re keepin’ the keys now, why didn’t you say so, poor darlin’, just wait till I see you right, Molly’s got the combination for your lock.
I move her hand away and start the engine.
Raincheck, okay?, I say too hotly, and drive.
When I reach the Orpheum, Clea Singh is waiting in the lobby, beneath the Latin tag about love, holding an envelope addressed to me in Ormus Cama’s own—pretty unsteady—hand. Again he needs you, sir, Clea says. You must come.
The note inside the envelope is just five words long.
I’ve found her. She’s alive.
17
MIRA ON THE WALL
Doorman Shetty isn’t on lobby duty when we reach the Rhodopé Building. Tiny, purse-lipped Clea tells me he has finally been put out to pasture. Agelessly antique herself, she points out with some scorn and no irony that he, Shetty, was long past his superannuation date. They only kept him on as a favor to Madam, she says, but now it is better he rests. He’s out in Mineola, N.Y., there’s an excellent retirement home in that neighborhood, convenient for the crematorium, and he has what Clea describes as a generous allowance, we were under no obligation but he was her Daddy after all. There was never much love lost between Shetty and the Singhs, and once he lost Vina’s protection his fate was sealed. After a suitable grace period had been allowed to elapse Clea made her endgame move. He had nothing to fight her with. Checkmate in one.
I offer up a silent valediction. Old man, you wanted to die with your boots on, but in old age our power to write our own scenarios wanes, and the shape of our last acts is decided by the rewrite merchants. Goodbye, Doorman. Enjoy the sunsets if you can.
In the matter of Doorman Shetty, Clea has acted with her habitual toughness and clarity, which makes it all the more remarkable that on our journey uptown in the limo this customarily unflappable lady has been profoundly agitated. I realize that few people outside the closed circle of the Singhs have been where I’m about to go: into the heart of the silence and shadow that now completely envelops Ormus Cama. Ormus has been invisible ever since I was last brought into his presence, in the Guadalajara Hyatt. I have Shetty’s account of his activities—the visits to Goddess-Ma, etc.—but it’s possible that no outsider has visited him in his heavily defended lair in all this time. Certainly Clea’s acute concern is an indication of the exceptional nature of the event. No cameras, she insists before we leave. I hadn’t planned on bringing any, but I am interested by the prohibition. How bad is Ormus looking these days? What is it that he, or his aides, don’t want the world to see?
People in my line of work always think like this, I rebuke myself. There is no law which says that a man must agree to be photographed just because he wants to talk to a photographer. Give the guy a break.
Clea chatters without stopping all the way from the Orpheum to the Rhodopé. Mr. Rai, people have black tongues as you know, and maybe you have heard it said that we have not taken care of Sir. Probably you have read malicious comments on his physical and mental health, also cruel allegations regarding our husbandry of his assets. Mr. Rai, I beg you only to keep an open mind. If you desire I can open for you all the books, all the accounts, you will see that every cent is accounted for and all enterprises are in tip-top shape. If you require it I will present to you his personal physician who will confirm our absolute adherence to his orders. If it is your wish all things can be made plain.
He’s dying, I suddenly realize. These are his last moments and Clea and her people are scared stiff.
I don’t know why you’re telling me all this, I say.
br />
You see, Mr. Rai, Sir is such a lonely man. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, he thinks only of dear Madam. To him, that you were Madam’s good old friend makes you like his brother. It saddens him that you have been for so long absent from his side.
I decide not to challenge this remarkable statement. Help Ormus. That is my new resolve, and there’s no time for pettiness, old grievances or ill will.
Clea in the limo has more to confess. Mr. Rai, Sir is in dire straits. He is too much reliant on wrong things to help him bear his loss. I fear for him, Mr. Rai.
Wrong things, I repeat. She looks harassed, and actually wrings her hands. Then in a low voice she speaks the names of the illegal drugs. The chauffeur today is Will Singh. He faces front and drives, stone-faced, obscure.
How much stuff is he getting through, I demand, and when she replies I know that disaster can’t be far off. I ask, How did these substances come into his hands?
Clea looks defiant. I am able to acquire whatever Sir requires, she says simply. It is my duty, as it was for Mr. Yul and Madame in the days before.
I picture tiny Clea in her sari bargaining in the back rooms of Dopeland with the likes of Harry the Horse and Candymaster C, earning their respect by her calmness, her attention to detail, her insistence on the highest standards. You see, Clea, I say, keeping my voice friendly, many people would not understand that when you fed Ormus’s habit and allowed it to grow so big, you were acting as a true friend should. Many people would question your motives.
Clea Singh in the limo draws herself up proudly; straight-backed, almost shocked. But Mr. Rai, I am not his friend, how can you think it. I am his servant. Ever since Madam and Sir rescued us, we are all his sworn subjects. I do not question or dispute his needs, Mr. Rai, I concur. I accede.
And this physician, I say. Does he have qualms about what has been going on?
He is familiar with the music business, Clea Singh replies, and the old iron is back in her voice. Mr. Rai, you are a man of the world, I am sure. Then what is the need for such innocent quizzery? The world is what it is.
Even after these forewarnings, Ormus, waiting for me at the elevator door, is a shock. He’s upright, but only just. I have the feeling that even this unconvincing display of well-being has been put on purely for my benefit. If I weren’t here he’d be leaning on one of the Singhs. Strong young men dressed in white kung fu outfits wait anxiously in the corners of my eyes, looking concerned.
He was skinny in Guadalajara; now he’s positively emaciated. I could probably hoist him shoulder-high with one hand. His hair has almost completely gone, and although what’s left is shaved to the skull, the stubble I can see is all white. His nose looks dangerously narrow, and though he has a fine pashmina shawl pulled around his shoulders, he’s shivering on a warm evening. He’s walking with a stick, fifty-four going on ninety. It may be too late to help him.
There’s no eye patch. I realize that he, too, knows about the end of the otherworld. About which he was both right—because there actually were two worlds on a collision course, I know that now—and wrong, because the otherworld was in no way intrinsically superior to our own. In the end, it was that version which failed. Ours succeeded—or let’s just say survived.
This was the nature of Ormus’s madness: that in his thinking he privileged another version of the world over his own. Maybe now, if he can only stay alive, he has a chance to regain his mental balance, to re-enter the actually existing world. Ours.
Thanks for coming, he whispers. There’s just a thing you have to see: to, ah, confirm. At which he turns and totters away through his empty white universe.
The size of the apartment is astounding, dwarfing even his Mexican Hyatt billet: the endless albino spaces, the open doorways, the emptinesses, the room. In the distant corner of one enormous vacant zone I spy a white futon mattress and a white reading lamp on a low white table, in another gigantic area there’s only a white concert grand piano and stool. Not a speck of dust or used glass or item of dirty laundry in sight. I can’t imagine how many Singhs it takes to pick up after Ormus, to create this pristine unworldliness.
He’s whispering as he walks. I have to stay close to hear what he has to say.
Curtis Mayfield’s paralyzed, Rai. A lighting rig fell on him. And then his house burned down. Yeah. Steve Marriott burned to death, you hear that. Different fire. Right. And Doc Pomus died. David Ruffin OD’d. I guess too much Temptation, huh. Will Sinott of the Shamen? Drowned. Leo Fender, Uncle Meat, Johnny Thunders, Professor Longhair, Stan Getz, RIP, baby. That little kid falling from the penthouse window too. Just terrible. And the word is Mercury doesn’t have long, and Brian Jones was murdered, Brian Jones, they’ve got evidence. What’s going on, Rai, I don’t know what’s going on. They’re wiping us out.
This, I realize, is his strange, isolated, free-associative small talk. I do not judge him. I haven’t forgotten my own list of the dead, which I’d reeled off at Johnny Chow not so very long ago. Different names, same obsession. These are Vina’s new companions, the first social circle of her heaven or hell.
I follow Ormus through the white hectares until we turn a corner, a softly padded white door opens and shuts, and unexpectedly I’m in what looks like a minimalist version of Mission Control, Houston: floor-to-ceiling tv monitors on all four walls of a studio covering over a thousand square feet and, at the center, a space-odyssey command complex: computer banks, audio and video mixing-and-magic desks, Yamaha, Korg, Hammond, MIDI-B and Kurzweil keyboard equipment, and two white swivel chairs.
On every screen—there must be more than three hundred—a different phoney Vina pouts and twirls. The sound’s muted; three hundred dumb not-Vinas dizzily mouth and prance. If I want a model to play the almost-Vina in my unfinished photo sequence—and I guess I do—I’ve come to the right place.
Even after all these years, the money generated by rock music still amazes me. The resources required to own all this space and to build, at its heart, this cutting-edge audio-video facility featuring beyond-beyond PixelPixie morphotech capability and massed floating-point musicomputers that could, if reprogrammed, efficiently run a medium-range-missile guidance system; then to hire a small army of video crews to track down and tape hundreds upon hundreds of Vina surrogates: unimaginable. Unimaginable, too, is the luxury of being able to ask for anything you want, and knowing people will make it so, and you won’t even notice the cost.
To be given the world as a toy.
When my head stops spinning my heart starts to hurt, not only for myself but for Ormus too. Obsession is the enactment of hidden pain. I realize that I haven’t taken his note seriously until now. I interpreted it, too glibly, as the cry for help of a drowning man; it never occurred to me to make a literal reading. Now, as my eyes swim with fake Vinas, I realize he actually believes that one of these pathetic counterfeits is the real thing, poor crushed Vina whom we loved risen from her abyss-grave and singing her old hits to cowboys, militiamen, possible Unabombers and drunks in Grand Island, Nebraska, or some such humming center of the musical world.
Then Ormus sits down at a control desk, says Look at this, throws a bunch of switches, and there she is, three hundred times over and more, blazing from all the monitor screens. He pushes a set of audio slide controls, and her wonderful—her inimitable—voice wells up and drowns me.
Vina. It’s Vina, returned from the dead.
It’s not up to you, she sings. And again and again, as the old song accelerates towards its conclusion, no, it’s not up to it’s not up to it’s not up to you. Her voice is doing extraordinary things—new and familiar—with the song’s melodic line, stretching and bending the sound, bringing a jazzy feel to it, the way Vina used to do when she felt in the Holiday mood. She even throws in a climaxing moment of Ella-ish scat.
Be-bop! Re-bop! Rreee!
Skeedley-ooh!
Oh, mam’! Rama-lam’!
There’s nothin’ you can do …
Wo, pop! De-
dop!
Mop! A-lop-a-doo!
Oh it’s not, no no not, whoo whoo
Not up to you.
… Oh, yeah …
The invisible crowd goes crazy. She smiles: Vina’s smile, that can light up the darkest room. Oh Vina, Vina, I think. Where did you spring from, this isn’t possible, you’re dead. Three hundred Vinas surround me, laugh and bow.
I don’t recognize the performance, I stammer. What is it, an old bootleg, some gonzo recording from somewhere.
But I can see for myself that the tape carries a date ident. It was made less than a week ago. And I can see, too, that although this is Vina, it’s her to the life, it’s also an odd composite Vina, a Vina who never really was. She has the dyed red hair gathered above her head in that springy fountain I remember so well, that Woody Woodpecker crest, and she’s wearing the sequin-glittered gold bustier and leather pants from Vina’s last performance, but this is not a woman in her middle forties, this is not the mature solo artiste on the comeback trail. This Vina is no more than twenty years old. She is, however, wearing a moonstone ring.
When I turn to Ormus he has tears in his milky eyes.
I thought so, he whispers. I knew it wasn’t just my imagination.
What’s her name, I ask. I realize I’m whispering too.
He hands me a thin white file.
Mira, he says, coughing. That’s what she goes by now.
Mira Celano, from right here in Manhattan, the file tells me. Born at Lenox Hill Hospital in January 1971, so I guessed right about her age. Nineteen seventy-one, the year of Ormus’s celibacy oath, that’s how young she is. She is an only child. Her father Tomaso was sixty-one when she was born. She remembers him (here I’m embellishing the detective agency’s filed report with details gleaned from my later knowledge of her) as a short, chesty, thick-maned lion of a man, who became awkward in the presence of the adoring child of his old age, giving her quick rough embraces and handing her off, almost as quickly, to whatever female family member was closest. He was a man of honor, a high-flying corporation lawyer with an Upper East Side address, who nevertheless maintained close links with his community and prized his family roots in Assisi, Italy. He was also a decorated World War II hero with a distinguished service medal for his exploits as the oldest of the American dive-bombing aces who sank the Japanese aircraft carrier Hiryu at the Battle of Midway.