It was as pungent as it smelled. Sharp as a tamarind, with traces of clove and pepper. Like biting into a fleshy spice, just as Desirée had predicted years ago.
“The Samax Astrofructus,” I said, swallowing the pulp and feeling its faint afterbuzz on my lips. “Congratulations, Uncle Junius.”
“Thank you, Enzo,” he said, and for one of the few times in all my years with him, his eyes gleamed with tears. “You understand, I know.”
I did. I understood that with the various setbacks of late, and the increasing friction in his life on several fronts, this accomplishment was all the more important to him. He had worked at this for a long time, with a singular concentration, responsible only to himself, and, patiently, diligently, he had produced a tree that had never before existed. Which in turn had put forth a piece of fruit with its own unique color, texture, and taste, that still lingered on my palate. The Samax Astrofructus was Samax’s baby in every way, a hedge against mortality now that he could rest assured it would outlive him.
“There is something I wanted to do at this time,” he said softly. His tone was that of someone about to offer up a prayer, which in his own way was perhaps what he was doing. He pointed to the flower in his lapel. “I’d like to give this flower a name, too,” he said simply, “with which it can be officially registered.”
It stunned me to realize that in all those years, in an environment in which the names of things—whether asteroids, flowers, or stars—had been so important, this flower which I had seen nearly every day from the time I was ten years old had managed to remain anonymous. It was true I had never heard any name ascribed to it, nor had I ever sought one out. In my mind this flower had always been simply “the flower with the red and yellow petals and the orange center,” a variety of the desert poppy which it most closely resembled. But it was not a poppy. Samax told me it was a kind of marigold.
“It’s a hybrid that has no name,” he went on, “a lost flower developed in mysterious circumstances by a horticulturist who never registered it and whose own name has been lost over the years. That sense of mystery always appealed to me. But now I feel this flower should have a proper name. Because I’ve cultivated it, and possess the greatest concentration of the flower in North America, I can do so. With your permission, Enzo, I want to name it after your aunt.”
This was an even bigger surprise. “Alma?”
He nodded. “I want to call it the Alma. You can do that with a flower—give it just a single name.” Shaking his head ruefully, he looked me in the eye. “I wanted to make up, in a small way, for some of what we know she must have suffered. Is that all right with you?”
“Of course,” I replied, and now it was I who choked up.
“After two months, the flower will officially be known as the Alma.”
“It’s a fine gesture, Uncle Junius.”
He embraced me. “It’s done, then.”
He clipped and lit up one of his Upmann coronas, for despite his doctor’s instructions, he refused to give up cigars. Harahel had shuffled out of the greenhouse with the folders, Desirée was still typing, and after a long silence, Samax beckoned me over to a nearby table beneath ultraviolet lamps. “I’ve saved the best for last,” he whispered, “and for the moment I’m not showing it to anyone but you.”
“Not even Desirée?”
“No one.” He placed the other half of the blue fruit on a small plate. “Look at this, Enzo. It’s incredible.”
At first I thought that, with an old man’s pride, he was reaffirming the mere existence of the fruit.
“Look more closely,” he urged me, taking my elbow.
I studied the golden seeds in the indigo pulp, and they did indeed look like stars. In that lamplight, particularly, they glittered. Then I saw that the seeds formed a familiar pattern, which I recognized after a few seconds.
“It’s Gemini.”
“That’s right.” He was very excited. “Can you believe it?”
“But—”
“Enzo, each piece of fruit from this tree contains a different constellation. I’ve cut open four of them and already found Taurus, Orion, Libra, and this.” I heard a laugh deep in his throat. “I don’t know how it happened, but they’re there.”
I held the fruit up and turned it this way and that, marveling at the sixteen golden seeds that comprised Gemini, exactly as it looked in the night sky. “I’d say it’s a miracle,” I murmured, and Samax nodded in agreement.
After this, Samax’s spirits picked up considerably for a while. Though he had lived in the desert most of his adult life, he had rarely explored it much; during the considerable time he spent outdoors, he confined himself to the gardens and orchards of his own creation. Now he began making forays into the Mojave, always at twilight when the air was cool, with Sirius at his side. Though Sirius’s senses were keen as ever, he limped with arthritis now in his forepaws. Still, he could keep up with Samax, and together they circled out into the desert and returned to the hotel as the stars began to shine. At this time, too, Forcas, the enigmatic gangster, began staying at the hotel for weeks at a time; he and Samax often dined alone together, played a game of chess, and then talked late into the night. About what I didn’t know, though a couple of times I saw Forcas jot down whatever it was Samax was saying, as if it were a message to be conveyed. As in the old days, Samax even engaged a string quartet on occasion to come out and play Haydn and Mozart in the lounge. His good mood was undimmed, apparently, even by his admission to me one night, in the rich silence of his library, that he now doubted he would ever find the amulet he had been seeking all those years.
“It’s just not in the cards,” he said, with an equanimity that took me aback. “The codex Deneb brought back from Rhodes confirmed, without a doubt, that the amulet first surfaced in Alexandria over two thousand years ago and was a companion to the one my old friend Rochel left me in our cell at the penitentiary. I know the amulet existed at least until the second half of this century. Then, in 1952, the trail goes cold, right here in Nevada. Oh yes, it was here, all right—so close, yet so far away. I know it for a fact.” His eyes narrowed. “I even know who was last in possession of it. Whether that person hid it away or, more likely, destroyed it, it just disappeared at that time and there’s nothing I can do about it. It could be anywhere in the world now, and I don’t have the energy or the time to chase after it any longer. I told you when you got out of school that I wasn’t going to have you chase after it for me the way Calzas did. God knows he must have traveled a million miles in search of that amulet. He was able to trace most of its strange path through history over the centuries—from Coptic monasteries to a caliph’s library in Damascus to the royal vaults of the Byzantine Empire—but then we came up a little short.”
“The last owner died?”
“No, he’s very much alive.”
“And you know him?”
“I used to.”
“But who would destroy such a rare object?”
“Only one person I know. Finding out how badly I wanted it would be enough for him.” He laid his palms on his knees and leaned closer to me, barely parting his lips when he uttered the name of Vitale Cassiel.
“What?”
“He may still have the amulet in his possession, but even now he would destroy it in a second rather than let me get hold of it.”
“How did he know you were interested in it?”
Samax waved the question aside. “That’s no mystery. Many people knew because of all the specific queries we had to make over the years. You couldn’t keep it secret. Anyway, he got wind of my search and somehow beat me to the prize. Part of me would love to know how. Another part says it’s better I don’t because it would just make me sick.”
“But it’s wrong,” I said angrily. “Whenever this guy’s name comes up, it’s always the same story. Listen, I have my own gripes with him. Let me confront him and get the amulet for you.”
Samax’s eyes widened. “Don’t talk crazy,”
he said, grabbing my wrist. “And don’t ever go near him, you hear me?”
“What can he do to me?”
“Enzo, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Tell me what he can do.”
“He’s capable of anything, whether you cross him or he crosses you.” Samax was agitated, the little color in his cheeks draining fast. “You’re a young guy, full of stuff, and he’s old, like me, but he’d come after you like no one you’ve ever known.”
“I never knew you to be afraid of anyone, including him.”
“There’s a difference between fear and knowledge. Knowing your enemy, and what he would do, gives you power—unless you act as if you don’t know anything. Then you have plenty to fear. Understand?”
I nodded, but I was thinking that I couldn’t give up on the amulet so easily, not after all I’d heard about it since I was a boy.
“The lunar amulet is gone now,” he went on. “It might as well be on the moon itself. I have the other amulet. And, more importantly, I have my Samax Astrofructus tree. That makes up for plenty. It will keep growing, and you’ll have it after me. Forget the amulet and promise me you’ll stay away from him.”
“All right, I’ll forget the amulet,” I said, but I didn’t promise him anything. And that night, when I returned to the small apartment I now rented in West Las Vegas, I thought about the amulet some more.
Several months later, I went to Albuquerque. The day I was to oversee the demolition of the Hotel Rigel I woke in a cold sweat in my own hotel, hours before my alarm clock was to go off. I had been sleeping fitfully all week, but this was my worst night yet. I wasn’t hungry, so after I had showered and dressed, I drank a pot of maté tea while watching the sun rise from behind the mountains. Then I drove across the city to the Botanical Gardens. I had never seen the Bizzarria Orange tree Samax donated to the Gardens. In fact, on previous visits to Albuquerque I had avoided going to see it. Thinking about this, I realized it was because I had first heard about the tree while conversing with my uncle just prior to his stroke. The tree and the stroke had always been painfully linked in my mind. Finally, though, Samax seemed puzzled by the fact I had never visited the tree, so I decided I must do so while he was still alive.
I found it prominently displayed in the glass-enclosed arboreum with a plaque stating that it had been donated by Junius Samax and was a fourth-generation descendent of the first known chimera, discovered in Florence, Italy, in 1644. I studied the clusters of knobby lemon-oranges on the tree’s gnarled branches. I inhaled the fragrance of its thick leaves. I tried to imagine how the fruit would taste—sour or sweet? Samax had never told me if he had eaten one. His mind was elsewhere that night in the greenhouse, before he collapsed, telling me, “We are all of us accidents of nature, refined by thousands of graftings … some that take, some that don’t.” At the time he was rambling, but now I saw that those words could have been his credo.
For the next four hours, I was completely occupied with my preparations at the Hotel Rigel, running through checklists, issuing last-minute instructions to my crew. When I left the hotel roof with my foreman at one o’clock, completing our final circuit of the hotel, I was thinking again of Vitruvius, the father of modern architecture who nevertheless—despite his professions to the contrary—was deeply superstitious, constantly picking apart his dreams for portents. He subscribed, for example, to the Greek belief that it was beneficial to the strength and stability of a building to kill a cock and bury it under the foundation stone. Sometimes an architect instead enticed a man to the building site and maneuvered him into casting his shadow onto the foundation stone. It was believed the measured man, no longer able to cast a shadow, would die within a year—that his very soul had been fatally stripped from him. Eventually there sprang up a network of shadow-traders whose sole business it was to provide architects with men’s shadows, stolen by sorcerers.
Calzas told me one day that the Zunis shared this belief, as did people in places as far-flung as Japan and Finland. In all these places, as in the Zuni pueblos, burying the shadow was a substitute for the even more ancient custom of immuring a living person in the walls, or crushing him under the foundation stone, of a new building. (When I mentioned this to Samax, he observed with amusement that maybe the mob had read Vitruvius, too.) Whenever construction was about to begin, Zuni shamans customarily traveled as close to the Forbidden Mesa as they dared to rendezvous with shadow-traders. So for every building in Acoma, the sky-city, a man had literally lost his soul.
Superstitious himself, whenever he broke ground for a new office building Calzas had a Zuni shaman pay a visit, much as an architect in Hong Kong brought in a geomancer who practiced feng shui. At that particular time, Calzas was erecting many such buildings across the Southwest. His practice was thriving, and he was banking as much of his profits as he could in order to underwrite the project that truly consumed him, his magnus opus in the realm of fantastic architecture: an agronomically self-sufficient city atop Acoma. What he hadn’t told me with regard to the job at the Hotel Rigel was that a shaman would also be on site for the demolition. So I was startled when, on the landing to the fire stairs, the foreman and I suddenly came face to face with a reed-thin, moon-faced man wearing a multicolored vest, buckskin boots with fringes, and a blue fedora with a black feather in its ribbon. He held a tambourine in one hand and a stick in the other. Nearly his height, the stick was painted the same blue as his hat and was adorned with white stars and yellow moons. And there was a large white star dyed into the tambourine’s sky-blue skin.
Unblinking, unsmiling, the man looked me in the eye.
“Calzas sent you?” I asked. “You know, we won’t be laying a foundation stone for some time.”
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
Studying the feather in his hat, I decided it was a raven’s. “Well?” I said.
In the shaftway off the stairwell updrafts of hot wind were swirling pieces of trash. They hovered like paper fish outside the dirty window, then disappeared. There was a humming of machinery from the street. And the sound of hammers, drills, and crowbars on the lower floors as our crew stripped away the few remaining valuable fixtures that I had marked for salvage.
Finally the shaman raised his stick a few inches off the floor—he would never speak while it touched the ground—and addressed me in a thick voice, “Sometimes when you wreck a building, the soul of the dead man under the old foundation stone is released. That’s why I am here.”
The foreman, a burly, city-bred Zuni, said, “I never heard that before.”
“The spirits in this building are agitated,” the shaman said, stone-faced. Tucking his stick under his arm, he cupped his hands over his ears. “The moment I entered, I heard them.”
“Why this building?” the foreman asked. A seasoned demolition man—no squeamish soul—he was visibly shaken by this information.
The shaman slowly opened his palms.
“We set off the charges at three o’clock,” I said to him. “Where will you be?”
“Beside you, of course,” he said with a faint smile.
“You must know why,” the foreman persisted.
But the shaman’s stick had returned to the floor and he wouldn’t say another word. He followed the foreman and me down the stairs, chanting almost inaudibly under his breath. When we reached the elevator bank, I glanced over my shoulder and the shaman was gone, though there were no other doors off that stairwell. Then, as we rode down in the elevator, I was sure I could still hear his low murmur. Maybe the foreman could, too, but if so, that was the least of what was upsetting him.
“I worked on plenty of buildings, but I never heard of that,” he said, picking at the fingers of the heavy gloves he clutched in one hand. “It’s the new foundation stone those guys come in for. No, I never heard of it.”
In the lobby, through the opening where there had previously been revolving doors, two of the men were wheeling a cart filled with br
ass wall clocks and crystal chandeliers. Others were carrying out large mirrors with gilt frames that flashed wildly in the heavy sunlight. And still others were coming up from the basement, where they had inspected the charges and the nitroglycerine cannisters one last time. There was also a lone member of the crew with a crowbar prying a brass mailbox from the marble wall near the former front desk.
It was two-thirty. In ten minutes, we were all due to rendezvous in the parking lot across the street so the foreman could take a head count before I began the countdown to detonation.
I watched the man at the mailbox for a few moments, then turned to the foreman, who was still mumbling to himself.
“Did you tell him to remove that?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“I don’t remember even seeing a mailbox,” I mused.
The foreman started walking toward the man, but I took his arm.
“I’ll take care of it,” I said.
Coming up behind the man, I recognized him—the loner in a group of loners, the one with whom I had barely exchanged a word, a pale, spindly man with a thin red moustache. “Red,” I said, “there isn’t enough time for that. Just leave it.”
“I’ll have it down in no time,” he said, without pausing in his work.
The mailbox, brass with an eagle embossed on the front, was hanging by a single L-brace now. Red yanked it free in a cloud of marble dust and laid it on the floor.
“Who told you to take that down?” I said, waving the dust away.
“See, it was covered with a thick spiderweb,” he replied without looking at me, pointing his crowbar at a sticky ball of silver webbing that he had tossed off to one side.
“A spiderweb?”
Red whipped a large screwdriver from his belt and and went to work on the four ancient screws that secured the front panel of the mailbox.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“There’s stuff in here,” he replied matter-of-factly.
“What?”
“Must be some mail, right?”
We had fifteen minutes to demolition, but I stood there raptly watching him open the mailbox. For a man his size, Red was exceptionally strong: those large screws had obviously never been loosened before, and in less than a minute he had whirled them out. Then, prying it loose at the corners, he lifted off the panel. Sure enough, there was a single white envelope lying in the bottom of the box, beneath several layers of webbing.