So while the priceless artworks and rare astronomical objects were gone forever, it turned out that Desirée’s mystery opus had escaped the flames. That very night, after everyone else left, the firemen and the police, Mrs. Resh and Sofiel and his wife—for whom I would secure rooms at the Twin Stars motel—I thought I might finally get my wish and dip into those yellow folders, dated with neat red labels, beginning in December, 1961 and continuing right up to the present, November, 1980.
As we carried the last of the folders along the flagstone paths, Desirée said, “There’s just one other thing. I need to be sure about Dolores.”
“Sure that she killed him?”
“Sure that she’s dead. Will you come with me?”
“Back into the hotel?” I said incredulously.
“Through the tunnel. I don’t see her committing suicide. If she tried to get out, that would have been the only route from her office downstairs. Look, maybe it won’t even be passable, but I have to see.”
“All right.”
First I made sure Sirius was secure in the greenhouse, resting beneath the potting table. Then Desirée and I wended our way through the trees to the tunnel that ran between the greenhouse and the hotel.
“How can you be so sure it was Dolores?” I asked.
“Who else?”
“I can think of a bunch of people. Vitale Cassiel, Ivy—”
“No, no. Think back to the book Samax pulled out of the pile as he fell.”
“The Garden of Cyrus.”
“You know he was trying to tell us something. It’s a book about quincunxes—like the orchard. And who was it who always sat in the orchard? Dolores. That’s what Samax was telling us in the few seconds he had left.”
“Just like that?”
“If you need it to be more complicated, think about this: the quincunx is an arrangement of five things in a diamond—one at each corner, one in the middle. Those things can be trees, they can be people. Dolores, Denise, Della, and Doris at each corner, and Samax in the middle: my mother always said Samax set up the orchard with that concept in mind. Whether he did or not, that book tells me it was Dolores who murdered him.”
We went through the door and down the steps into the tunnel. Instead of the usual tropical smell, of moss and stone and flora, the air was acrid with smoke.
“And she did this because of the museum—because he wasn’t leaving the place to you?”
“It’s even more insane than that,” Desirée said sharply. “She always knew I didn’t want the hotel. No, she killed him because he wasn’t leaving the hotel to her. Even at 105, she was convinced she was going to outlive him. But when he finalized his will this week, endowing the museum, that became a moot point. It was premeditated murder, after which she set the fire. Knowing the hotel inside out, she could do that with a minimum of effort.”
“Alone?”
“Why not? A few gallons of gasoline, strategically placed …”
My head was reeling.
“I hope she’s dead,” Desirée said. “She deserved to die. Someone who lives so long and still wants to cheat death—who’s still greedy enough at her age to commit murder—ought to die.”
Though as a boy I had used it daily, I hadn’t been in the tunnel for a long time. And it had never felt so strange to me—not even the day I first encountered Auro there—as it did at that moment, walking side by side with Desirée over the steaming brick floor, around the loop beneath the swimming pool, toward the stairwell that spiraled down from the burning hotel. With each step, we felt the temperature climb a few degrees. The metal steps when we ascended them felt warm under our feet. The double door to the basement landing—a fire door—was shut. I gripped the handle and it was hot.
“Better step back,” I said, and as I pulled the door open, the rush of fiery air nearly blew us both off the small landing. The corridor’s walls and ceiling were livid with flames. The floor tiles had melted. And less than ten feet from the door, someone was lying flat on those tiles, face upward, on fire. As terrible a sight as I’ve ever seen, it was Dolores, all right, black dress and white hair burned away from her scarecrow frame, her bones beginning to protrude through her flesh. Her left hand had become one with the handle of a leather briefcase that was burned to a crisp. Where she had intended to go and what papers she had been carrying with her we would never know. But even in the throes of burning alive, she had not let go of that briefcase.
“Let’s get out of here,” Desirée muttered, and headed down the stairs.
Back in the greenhouse, gulping down the cool air, we locked the door to the tunnel behind us, as if to seal out not just the fire but the memory of what we’d seen. And for the next couple of hours, barely exchanging a word, we sat on one of the teak benches and watched the rest of the hotel burn. Sirius watched with us, his old pale eyes half-lidded and tears streaking his muzzle—for he knew well what was going on, and he loved Samax dearly—before finally dozing off. I put on Samax’s white lab coat, and draping my shirt over Desirée’s shoulders, touched her cheek. She surprised me yet again, pressing my hand to her face and holding it there for a long time before resting her head against my shoulder.
I took pleasure in feeling Desirée’s breath rise and fall as she leaned against me, even as the enormity of what had occurred began hitting me in waves. Samax murdered, the hotel torched. By Dolores! She was the Angel of Death all along, living in the hotel basement, rocking in the deep shade in her hidden corner of the orchard. The D at the top of a quincunx of D’s. Samax had kept Death close by all those years, had used her in fact (an efficiency expert without peer) to run the place, had even, carelessly, married one of her daughters, until the day arrived when she decided his time had come. And then, despite his bodyguards and street savvy and his gambler’s instincts, she not only struck him down, but also leveled the empire he would have left behind.
For now, despite a vast endowment and meticulous blueprints, the hotel would never become a museum. The trusteeships, the bequeathals, the charitable bequests—all gone up in smoke. Home to me for three-fifths of my life, the repository of so many of my own dreams and memories, the Hotel Canopus had been snuffed out as speedily as a barn filled with hay rather than a building brimming with the dreams of a man to whom dreams were everything. All that had survived on the property were the greenhouse and the orchard—Samax’s trees, which were rustling behind me in the currents of the ventilation fans.
In the evening, a trio of fire inspectors began the work which would culminate, four days later, in their officially declaring that the fire was an act of arson. But when they first arrived, I didn’t have the heart, or the armor, to deal with them. Before she left for the night, I assigned Mrs. Resh the task, speaking with her outside the greenhouse. That was the only time I got off that bench beside Desirée. When I returned, I was certain I didn’t want to leave her side again. Maybe because I knew what was about to happen between us. Looking back, I’m sure I did. The way she had looked at me, and touched me, and then rested her body against mine. I had wanted to be close to her in that way for so long, and I could never have guessed that it would happen on my very last day at the hotel. Although, looking back, I must have known, too, that it couldn’t have happened any other way.
Night fell like a curtain and still Desirée and I didn’t move. And then everyone really was gone. Not just Samax, and Alif and Aym, and Dolores, but all the living too. And Hadar, whatever and wherever he was now. They were all gone. There was just Desirée and me.
I said as much to her.
“Don’t forget Spica,” she said. “He’s gone, too.”
Spica, her father, to whose room she had raced after we left the penthouse together.
“I know the hotel was also your memory palace,” she said suddenly, touching my forehead. “So it will always live on, up here. You can imagine what it must have been like for me all these years, living in the hotel, knowing that my father had designed and built it and then disappeared.
‘The Man of Smoke,’ ” she added, shaking her head and gazing at the smoke rising from the rubble. “When I got there, his door was open and the room was filled with black smoke. The white smoke was gone. I called out over and over again, but there was no reply. I’ll never have the chance to talk to him now. Samax told me Spica wanted to talk with me,” she said bitterly. “I guess he was working up to it, hiding behind that cloud of his own making. But he was still my father.” Her eyes filled with tears. “Today I lost both my fathers.” She put her arms around me and I turned her face up to mine.
When she closed her eyes, I kissed her, tentatively at first, and then, when her lips parted, harder, her tongue slowly circling my own. Everything we did, every movement and gesture, unfolded slowly, yet afterward it seemed to have happened in a flash. We rose from the bench, leaving the lab coat and her robe there, and still embracing, made our way through the maze of the greenhouse to a dark triangle of Japanese cherry trees hidden away in a circle of date palms. We lit a kerosene lantern and hung it from a branch. Then we spread a blanket on the moss that carpeted the ground. Drawing in my breath, I unsnapped Desirée’s bikini top and peeled off the bottom, down her long legs and off her inturned feet, and then lay back while she removed my clothes, one by one. I had never seen skin like hers—her breasts with their pale nipples, the inside of her thighs, the small of her back where I found a constellation of beauty marks. She emanated a silvery, almost lunar, glow there in the sylvan twilight. I must have kissed and touched every inch of her, tasting the jasmine moisture of her body, drinking in her hair which was black and sweet as wine, lingering as long as I could before sliding on top of her. Her knees up high, her arms around my shoulders, I felt her yield as I eased into her, her mouth, too, yielding under mine.
At that moment I thought I heard piano music, a slow clear tune, very faintly, far away. And Desirée whispered in my ear, “I would have played my piano for you tonight.…”
I heard that music for the next hour while we made love, and then made love again, before I drifted off into the sweetest sleep with Desirée’s head resting on my chest.
When I opened my eyes again, she was gone. It was dawn. Exhausted, I had slept through the night. Pulling on my pants, I walked around to the potting sink. Where we had piled the dozens of yellow folders against the stone wall, I found only a single piece of yellow paper, held down by a stone. Typewritten, it read:
Dear Enzo,
You will never see me again.
All the pages I filled for nineteen years were about the men I became involved with. So many different men. I too was searching for a lost thing, trying to seduce it out of the darkness, but what that thing was, I couldn’t say. For obvious reasons, some would suggest it was my phantom father, the French pilot my mother invented, others that it was the real phantom whom Spica became, but I would prefer to think it was something in me.
That is what my life has been, and I chronicled it. You are the first and only lover of mine whom I will not—could not—write about. Everything I felt about you I was able to express when we made love. And that means the end of something for me. Along with the end of the Hotel Canopus. Watching the hotel burn, with Samax and Spica inside it, I knew everything had changed for me.
By the time you read this, I will have burned all my pages. They should have burned with the hotel. But that would have been too easy. Now I will start fresh—at what, I don’t know. I do know that you’ll find the things you’ve been looking for. You were always loving to me—I already miss you.
Love,
Desirée
She had never intended to read me her yellow pages; instead, she had given herself to me. And now she had confirmed what I had vaguely suspected: she had been writing a kind of history of her life, like Casanova’s or Byron’s, based on her sexual exploits and erotic explorations, from age sixteen to thirty-five. At her silent Olivetti she had in fact been her own Scheherazade. How many men there were, how many nights of lovemaking she had chronicled in how many different places, no one would ever know now. All I knew was that I still tasted jasmine on my lips, and that my hands, which had roved her body and lost themselves in her hair, smelled now of jasmine too. As they would for many days, no matter what else I touched.
Before leaving the greenhouse, I sat up on the zinc sink with Samax’s lab coat draped over my shoulders and read the Hopkins brothers’ report. They laid out every investigative step they had taken, all the twists and turns of the inquiry which led them to report that the woman named Mala Revell lived at #2 Kohale Road, in Haena, on the northwest shore of the Hawaiian island of Kauai. She was thirty-five years old, self-employed, and she lived alone. Later, from a pay phone on the road, I called the airline and bought an open ticket for Honolulu from Albuquerque, which I hoped to use within the next two weeks.
It took me nearly that long to close down the affairs of the hotel. I dealt with the fire inspectors and insurance underwriters, the county clerk and the medical examiner. The latter had only Dolores’s remains to examine before they were redundantly cremated; no trace of Samax, Spica, or Alif and Aym were recovered from the ashes. Calzas flew up from Santa Fe to help me out. When I picked him up at the airport, he embraced me hard, and later, as he surveyed the smoldering ruins of the hotel, I saw his eyes well up. Then Forcas arrived, two days after the fire. When they got word eventually, Labusi arrived in his bus from San Diego and Zaren Eboli flew in at the same time from Houston, but I missed them, having gone on that particular—and momentous—day to Reno to see Vitale Cassiel, my grandfather.
It was Forcas who urged me to do so after I told him what I’d read in my father’s letter.
“He hasn’t a clue who you really are,” Forcas said to me, lighting a cigar. He was wearing his usual black sharkskin suit and a silver tie with a silver clip. His features that were so difficult to recall showed no visible signs—no darkening or contraction—of the grief I knew he felt over Samax’s death. “To him, you were just one of Junius’s relatives,” he went on. “Once, a long time ago, he may have suspected something, but it’s his nature to be suspicious.”
“I wonder why,” I said drily.
We were in the tiny nightwatchman’s office of Samax’s warehouse on Paradise Road, which I had made my temporary headquarters.
“I was planning to go see him anyway,” I went on.
“About the amulet.”
“That’s right. I promised Samax I wouldn’t try to get it—but that promise ended with his death. Samax should have had that amulet.”
“Maybe so, Enzo. But it belongs to Vitale Cassiel. He got it first. That’s the way it went with everything between them.”
“I’ll make him a fair offer.”
“Money?” Forcas said. “May I give you some advice? Don’t offer him money.”
“I don’t think he’s just going to hand it over after all this time.”
Forcas blew softly on the ember of his cigar. “Are you going to tell him he’s your grandfather?”
“I don’t feel obligated. After all, I never told Uncle Junius about the letter—though I’m glad now that I didn’t.”
“You should tell him.”
I rose from the swivel chair behind the metal desk and looked out at the desert through the barred, dirty window. “Can you tell me what else he and my uncle were fighting over?” I said. “You would know.”
“In the last few years, nothing to speak of. They were both wearing down—reduced to leveraging, shadowboxing with dummy corporations. That’s how they got in their shots. Even buying a property out from under the other guy, like I once told you about, had become too much for them.” From his cigar Forcas tapped a perfect cylinder of ash into the plastic ashtray. “You want me to call ahead to him for you?”
I had my hands in my pockets. Beyond the city limits, at the foot of the Spring Mountains, the thermals were swirling up curtains of sand. “You mean, you’ll tell him who I am.”
Forcas nodded. “And that you’re comi
ng to see him. That’s all I’ll tell him.”
I thought about it for a long time. “All right. Today’s Wednesday—tell him I’m coming on Friday.” I turned back to him. “And thanks.”
Forcas stood up, smoothing out his tie. “He’s dying, you know.”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t know.” But I appreciated that Forcas had waited until after I decided to tell me.
Vitale Cassiel’s large white house shone in the glaring sunlight. Sitting on forty acres on the outskirts of Reno, the house had two long verandahs and a stucco roof. There was a single ancient elephant tree on the baked lawn and a line of mesquite trees around the property. Oleander bushes around the house itself. No flowers. It was too hot a place for flowers, even if you wanted them. That day it was 98°. Clouds like brown dust were fixed on the horizon, as if they were painted there. As soon as I stepped from the air-conditioning of my car, a blast of hot wind made my lungs ache.
It was about a hundred yards to the house from the cul-de-sac at the end of the driveway. There was a garage there that could accommodate six cars. Tar was boiling up through the asphalt. I walked gingerly to keep it from my shoes. On the first-floor verandah I could make out a solitary figure sitting under a slow ceiling fan. A birdcage hung from a hook on a wooden pillar. As I got closer, I saw it was a woman sitting stiffly in a straight-back chair.
The woman was Ivy, and the caged bird was a parrot, who watched me climb the limestone steps. “Good-bye,” he squawked.
Ivy didn’t say hello or good-bye. And she didn’t seem surprised to see me, though I hadn’t seen her in three years. “I know why you’re here,” she said. “I told you I knew more about you than you knew yourself. I’ve always known.”