He didn’t walk for long. It was too cold, you could feel the air freezing the insides of your lungs. After perhaps twenty minutes he turned for home, walking briskly, and thirty-five minutes after he left he reached the high arched entrance of the Rhodopé Building. It was so cold that there was no doorman outside under the canopy. Everyone was sheltering within.
As Ormus reached the entrance, Will Singh, who was just arriving on the parkside sidewalk across from the Rhodopé, slipped and fell on the ice and sprained his right ankle. At the same moment a tall dark-skinned woman with red hair gathered above her head like a fountain stepped out of nowhere and approached Ormus. Astoundingly, given the weather conditions, she was dressed only in a sequin-glittered gold bustier, a pair of tight leather pants and stiletto heels. Her shoulders and midriff were bare.
Ormus Cama turned towards her and paused. I’m sure his eyes would have widened when he saw what she looked like, so he must have seen the small handgun that she aimed at him and emptied at point-blank range into his chest. After she had finished shooting she let go of the weapon, a .09 mm Giuliani & Koch automatic, she let it drop right there in the snow by his fallen body and walked quickly away, showing a surprising turn of speed in spite of the stilettos, turning right down a side street and vanishing from view. By the time Will Singh had hobbled slowly and painfully round the corner she was nowhere to be seen. There was a line of female footprints in the snow. Where the footprints stopped there was a red wig, a pair of leather pants, a sequinned bustier and a pair of stiletto shoes. Otherwise, nothing. No automobile tracks. Nothing, not even any witnesses, not at that time or any later date. It was as if a naked woman had flown through the air of Upper West Side Manhattan and disappeared and nobody saw a thing.
There were no prints found on the gun, either, although Will Singh remembered (but couldn’t swear) that the assassin had worn no gloves.
It was the perfect crime.
Ormus died there in the snow a few minutes later with his head in Clea’s lap. Clea had been pacing up and down in the lobby, worrying, and when she heard the shots she didn’t need to be told who the target was. She ran out in time to see the woman’s back disappearing round the corner, and screamed at Will to get after her, but she herself stayed with her Ormus, knowing that on so brutal a day the emergency vehicles would never reach him in time, even with their snow chains they’d skid and slide on the iced surfaces if they tried to hurry, and anyhow the holes in Ormus’s beautiful coat told her what she needed to know. They were clustered so close together that it was obvious nothing could be done.
Ormus, she said, sobbing, and he opened his eyes and looked at her. Oh, my Ormie, she mourned, my little shrimpy boy, what to do for you? Do you know what you want? What you need?
He looked vague and didn’t reply. Then in despair she asked, Ormus, do you know who you are? You still know that, don’t you? Do you know who you are?
Yes, he said. Yes, mother, I know.
Because the murder weapon was the same make as the one known to be owned by Mira, she was briefly questioned by two embarrassed detectives. Because it was widely rumored that I had been dementedly jealous of Ormus’s closeness to Mira during the Into the Underworld tour, I was questioned also, rather less shamefacedly. But we were each other’s alibis, and Tara could vouch for both of us, and when they ran tests on Mira’s gun they found it hadn’t been fired in years. In the end the police decided the murderess must have been a random crazy, a loose cannon, maybe one of the many disgruntled Vina wannabes who had been sending in hate mail, in which case the use of the gun was either a coincidence or a deliberate attempt to send detectives down a false trail. When this theory was made public, several Vinas of both sexes immediately confessed to the crime, but their confessions didn’t check out.
The investigators had no solution to the riddle of the killer’s disappearance. Their best guess was that she had an accomplice in one of the apartment buildings along the street where she vanished, and somehow entered the premises without leaving footprints, put on a new set of clothes and later left. Maybe the accomplice had been waiting with a broom to wipe away the traces. It was all pretty speculative, even the detectives agreed. But hey, they wound up saying, many murders are committed to which no solution is ever found. This was one such crime.
If you ask me, I think it was Vina, the real Vina, Vina Apsara herself. My Vina. No: I have to accept this too, that she was still Ormus’s Vina, always and forever his. I think she came and got him because she knew how much he wanted to die. Because he couldn’t bring her back from the dead she took him down with her, to be with her, where he belonged.
That’s my opinion. Oh, that’s right, I almost forgot to add: so to speak.
So this was how it came about that on an icy day in January, Mira Celano, her daughter Tara, Clea Singh and I went up from the West Side Heliport in Mo Mallick’s personal helicopter with Ormus Cama’s ashes in an urn on Clea’s lap, to perform the last rites of a life that began on the other side of the world, a life which was in reality lived not in one place or another, but in music.
(Clea and the Singhs got generously treated in the will, by the by; they’d never go hungry again. But apart from their lump-sum paymerits, all Ormus’s money, plus the enormous future income from his back-catalogue royalties and sheet music rights, as well as the bakeries, the winery, the real estate, the cows, in short the whole multi-million-dollar Cama estate, went to set up an Ormus and Vina memorial foundation to assist underprivileged children around the world. This will was the only indication Ormus ever gave that he regretted not having had children of his own on account of Vina’s barrenness. The enormous size of the bequest was a measure of the depth of his unspoken grief.)
Tara had brought a blaster. She turned it up to top volume, because of the noise of the rotor blades, and played the last VTO CD, the one featuring her mother’s stellar performance, and I didn’t like to tell her that I thought it was the wrong choice, because Vina should have been with us at such a time. Below us the city stood up iced and jagged and majestic as any Himalayas. The park was empty except for a couple of skiers and a few lone walkers wrapped up like bears. The fountains and reservoir were frozen, and as I looked down on Manhattan from the sky, it still seemed to be wrapped in winter, like a gift.
The pilot insisted on doing the ash-spilling. Clea gave up the urn reluctantly, and then Ormus was flying away from us, spreading out over the city he had loved, he was a small dark cloud dispersing over the great white metropolis, losing himself in all that whiteness; he merged with it, and was gone. Let his ashes fall upon the city like kisses, I thought. Let songs spring from the sidewalks and bushes where he lies. Let music be. From Tara’s music machine came the voice of Mira singing the end of the Dies Irae, and Mira at my side sang along.
O King of tremendous majesty
who saves the saveable for free
O fount of piety, please save me.
For no reason at all I suddenly thought of Persis Kalamanja, Persis the most beautiful girl in the world, who saved herself for Ormus and so lost herself altogether. I saw her again, still young and lovely, still standing on the roof of her long-demolished home, “Dil Kush” on Malabar Hill, Bombay, while above her the polychromatic kites of India swooped and soared, simultaneously at play and at war. Stay where you are, Persis, I thought, don’t move a muscle. Don’t age, don’t change. Let us all become ash and scatter on the wind, but stay on your old roof, Persis, stand forever silent in the evening breeze and watch the dancers in the sky. I want to think of you this way: eternal, unchanging, immortal. Do this for me, Persis. Watch those festive kites.
I see in the paper today that they shot another rai singer. There are more and more parts of the world now where they’re trying to wipe out singing altogether, where you can be murdered for carrying a tune. This particular rai singer had even taken the precaution of going into exile, leaving his North African home for a lightless cell in Marseilles. The killers followed him ther
e and shot him anyway. Pan! Pan! Now I’m reading his obit in the Times and I think to myself, what a wonderful world.
Rai is music. Rai is the ungodly forbidden sound of joy.
Not long ago there was a powerful earthquake in Italy and Assisi, the town of Mira’s forebears, was badly damaged. When I heard the news I didn’t think of quake wars and rift bombs. I thought of Maria from the otherworld, and her teacher talking calmly to my video camera while her world crumbled around her. Maybe it’s starting again, I thought. Another variant version is on a collision course with our own, and we’re starting to feel the first tremors, the pre-impact vibrations. Maybe this time it’s the Big Crunch and we’re the ones who won’t make it, however tough we’ve proved ourselves to be, however long we’ve survived. Or maybe it’s not necessary to hypothesize another reality smashing into our own. Suppose the earth just got sick of our greed and cruelty and vanity and bigotry and incompetence and hate, our murders of singers and other innocents. Suppose the earth itself grew uncertain about us, or rather made up her mind just to open her jaws and swallow us down, the whole sorry lot of us. As once Zeus destroyed the human race with a flood, and only Deucalion survived to repopulate the earth’s surface with beings no worse or better than the dead.
I’m up early today, the coffee’s on and I’ve squeezed the oranges and the muffins are warming nicely. It’s the weekend. I can hear Mira and Tara in the back, arguing, laughing, fooling with Tara’s mongrel, Cerberus, a grateful old stray whom we seem to have adopted. They’ll be out soon. We’ve moved in together at the Orpheum now—after Basquiat died Mira took over his floor, so there’s plenty of room—and things are good, they’re good. I’m not saying there aren’t problems, because there are, mainly in the traditional new baby area, but with a twist. Here I’m the one who wants a child. Mira, she’s got one, and she’s got a career bursting out all over, her first solo album After went platinum in just weeks, she’s just finished work on a new movie, the offers are flooding in. This is not a good time for her to be pregnant, or so she says. But we’re talking about it. It’s not out of court. It’s on the agenda.
There’s also my past. In Mira’s opinion I haven’t completely got Vina out of my system. She thinks I’m still silently making comparisons, physical, psychological, vocal. I tell her that if I am, I don’t mean to, and I’m doing my damnedest to stop. She’s a patient woman, and she’s waiting for the day.
And Tara: Tara, I love. How it is that she’s growing up with Vina’s wiry, springy hair, with a complexion many shades darker than her mother’s, I have no idea. Perhaps Luis Heinrich had a grandmother we don’t know about. Anyway, Tara and I have one important trait in common: surrounded as we have been and will always be by singers, we can’t hit a note. This makes us allies, musketeers to the death in a world of non-stop mockery by the self-satisfied croony-moony élite.
“After,” the title song of the album, is Mira’s elegy for Ormus. You were the stranger that I needed, she sings, the wanderer who came to call. You were the changer that I heeded. Now you’re just a picture on my wall. And everything is stranger after you.
In all the old stories, in different ways, the point is always reached after which the gods no longer share their lives with mortal men and women, they die or wither away or retire. They vacate the stage and leave us alone upon it, stumbling over our lines. This, the myths hint, is what a mature civilization is: a place where the gods stop jostling and shoving us and seducing our womenfolk and using our armies to lave their poxy quarrels in our children’s blood; a time when they move back, still leering, still priapic, still whimsical, from the realm of the actual to the land of so to speak—Olympus, Valhalla—leaving us free to do our best or worst without their autocratic meddling.
In my life time, the love of Ormus and Vina is as close as I’ve come to a knowledge of the mythic, the overweening, the divine. Now that they’ve gone, the high drama’s over. What remains is ordinary human life.
I’m looking at Mira and Tara, my islands in the storm, and I feel like arguing with the angry earth’s decision to wipe us out, if indeed such a decision has been made. Here’s goodness, right? The mayhem continues, I don’t deny it, but we’re capable also of this. Goodness drinking o.j. and munching muffins. Here’s ordinary human love beneath my feet. Fall away, if you must, contemptuous earth; melt, rocks, and shiver, stones. I’ll stand my ground, right here. This I’ve discovered and worked for and earned. This is mine.
Tara’s got hold of the zapper. I’ve never got used to having the tv on at breakfast, but this is an American kid, she’s unstoppable. And today, by some fluke, wherever she travels in the cable multiverse she comes up with Ormus and Vina. Maybe it’s some sort of VTO weekend and we didn’t even know. I don’t believe it, Tara says, zapping again and again. I don’t buh-leeve it. Oh, puh-leeze. Is this what’s going to happen now, for ever and ever? I thought they were supposed to be dead, but in real life they’re just going to go on singing.
Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet
(Series: # )
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