Black Swan Rising (44 page)

“Don’t worry,” I told him in a hoarse voice that didn’t sound at all like my own, “I took care of John Dee. Everything will be all right now.” But that only made my father look more worried so I tried not to talk any more.

Detective Kiernan came and told me that he was sorry he
had ever suspected my father. “The men who were hired to rob your gallery no longer claim that your father hired them. They seem to have no memory of who did, but we matched the canvas we found at Dee’s shop to the canvas of your Pissarros. A man matching Dee’s description has been tied to an art theft in Paris which Interpol is investigating.” That worried me, but I didn’t say anything. I certainly couldn’t explain to Joe Kiernan that Dee had vanished from a burning tower.

I knew the burning tower itself had been real, though. A front-page headline in the first
New York Times
I read in my hospital bed told me that the High Bridge Tower was going to be completely restored after a severe fire on what had come to be called Arson Night left it “looking like a charred and smoldering ziggurat.” The cost would be upward of $300 million, the article went on, but that was just a small portion of the more than $5 billion Congress, the NYS Legislature, and the NYC Council had appropriated to repair and restore damage from the worst urban fires since the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

Miraculously, only fourteen people (including five firefighters) had been killed in the more than one hundred separate fires set, but property damage was in the billions and more than two thousand people had been left homeless. An additional nine fatalities, with twenty-four people seriously injured, had occurred in the massive traffic accident on the West Side Highway that same night, the largest single car accident in New York City history.

Wow,
I couldn’t help thinking; I had to stop reading for a moment, with a shudder.
If we hadn’t gotten to Dee
. . .
would anyone have survived?

Becky came, long sleeves covering the bandages on her wrists. “I’d slap you if you were up to it, James,” she said, plopping
herself down on the side of my bed. “What were you thinking of wandering around a New York City park at night? On Arson Night of all nights! You could have gotten yourself killed. And your poor hand!” She cradled my bandaged right hand in hers. “You won’t be able to weld for months!”

I had second-degree burns on my right hand and double pneumonia from lying out in the cold all night.

“Joe—Detective Kiernan says he thinks you were following some lead on the gallery robbery. Was that it?”

I nodded and pretended to be too weak to say more, but the next time Detective Kiernan came to visit (he came almost every day even though my father was no longer a suspect in the robbery), I told him I had spotted Dee on the subway and followed him uptown and into the park and then been ambushed by his hired thugs. The story sounded pretty silly even to me, but it was more plausible than the truth, and Kiernan only shook his head sadly and told me to stop playing detective. I promised him I would.

Although I had no lack of visitors—Jay and Zach came frequently, too—the one person I wanted to see the most never came. I knew it was foolish to hope that Will would regret taking the box and come back, but every evening, as soon as the light faded from the sky through my west-facing window, I waited. I insisted that the night nurse leave my window open a crack, even though she said the cold air wasn’t good for my recovering lungs. Sometimes too, I would take out the lover’s eye (which had been in my jeans pocket) and try to look through it, hoping for at least a glimpse of Will from Madame Dufay’s memory, but when I placed it to my eye, all I saw was the silver backing of the brooch. Perhaps Oberon had destroyed the portrait—or perhaps smoke had destroyed the eye’s ability to see.

And maybe Will was wary of visiting me in the hospital—as were Lol and Fen and the other fey and elementals I had met (I had asked for RN O. Smith, but drew only blank stares from the staff). I wanted to get home and look for them to see if any of them knew where Oberon and Will might have gone, but it was mid-January before I was released from the hospital. When I got back to the town house, I checked the DVR and found that the only movie recorded on it was
Bringing Up Baby.
I watched Robert Osborne do the introduction from his usual clubby-looking set, in his usual congenial manner. I couldn’t detect any sign of recent demonic possession.

The next day I managed to slip out of the house while my father was in the gallery, and walked over to the hotel on the corner of Jane Street and the West Side Highway where Oberon lived. I found the façade covered with scaffolding, a large sign proclaiming that it was the future site of The Jane, a tony boutique hotel from the looks of the picture on the sign. I went inside and asked the clerk behind the refurbished desk (no longer protected by bulletproof Plexiglas) if any of the former SRO residents still lived in the hotel, and he told me that yes, some did, but when I asked about the tower room he told me that it was being turned into a bar.

“What about the man who lived there?” I asked.

The clerk shrugged and told me he’d only been working there since the first of the year.

I went to Puck’s afterward and found that it had become a Starbucks.

I took the subway to City Hall and snuck into the basement, but Ignatius T. Ashburn III’s office had gone back to being a janitor’s closet.

I went to the National Jewelers Exchange and found that
Noam Erdmann’s stall was manned by a Hasid named Saul Levy, who told me that the previous tenant had retired to Miami.

As to Lol, I had no idea where she lived—if she lived anywhere—so there seemed no point in trying to search for her. I was still immensely grateful for her assistance with the second transmigration (and would never forget the sight of her upside-down face at the top of the window in Will’s Rolls just in the nick of time), so out of that gratitude and some sense of obligation, I did stare on more than one occasion into a wind in which I’d heard some rustling, but the source of that was inevitably dried brown leaves, or the morning’s newspapers, or discarded candy wrappers, or my imagination. If I ever crossed paths with Lol again, it would be her decision, not mine.

By the time I got back to the town house I was exhausted. I expected to find my father fretting over where I had been, but instead I found him glued to the TV set. “I just heard that a plane’s gone down in the Hudson,” he told me.

I had a sinking feeling as I sat down beside him. I might have got the box away from Dee, but the world was still a perilous place where planes crashed and people died. But when the CNN broadcaster came on, we learned that the airplane had, amazingly, landed safely on the Hudson near West Forty-second Street, navigated by a resolute and calm former fighter pilot named Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger. My father and I watched the coverage for hours, listening to the testimony of witnesses who’d watched the plane’s miraculous water landing, and those on the ferries and tugboats that immediately came to the rescue of the stranded crew and passengers. As we watched, I kept imagining what the story could have been—how many people could have died if the plane had, instead of landing safely, crashed into a Manhattan high-rise.

“It makes you feel hopeful,” my father said, wiping away a tear.

“Yeah,” I answered, my own voice husky, “it does.” What I couldn’t tell my father was that it gave me hope that what I had experienced meant something. It had gradually dawned on me while watching the coverage that the stretch of river where the plane had landed was exactly where I had observed a cylinder of fog suggesting a plane during our ride uptown on Arson Night. It chilled me to think of it. As far as I knew, there hadn’t been any aerial catastrophes on Arson Night, so that roll of malevolent fog had likely never reached its critical mass. And it went to oblivion with the annihilation of Despair and Discord, but now it sounded like something even better than annihilation could have happened. As if the positive forces out there, the same ones that allowed us to transport our atoms to so much more quickly confront Dee, had protected that part of the river after its possession and made it a refuge. Which the plane had found.

And if the world was in this way and many others a better place now, wasn’t it because I had gotten the box away from Dee? It was difficult to tell much from the news, though. The economy still looked bad, with home prices falling, car companies faltering, and unemployment claims reaching new weekly peaks, but there also did seem to be a mood of cautious optimism. Five days after Captain Sullenberger’s landing on the Hudson, I sat on the couch between Jay and Becky watching Barack Obama being sworn in as the forty-fourth president and felt myself tearing up when he said, “On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.”

There were more private, personal signs of hope as well.
Becky was happier than I’d seen her in months—mostly due to the influence of Joe Kiernan. He’d visited her every day in the hospital and then, when she was let out, gone to every show London Dispersion Force played. At first Becky had scoffed at the idea of dating a cop, but Joe endeared himself to her by constantly expressing his delight that she was
not
a lawyer. He endeared himself to Jay by agreeing that the big commercial record contract was a mistake and what they should really do was start their own indy recording label. He had a cousin in Brooklyn who had the equipment and space. I couldn’t begrudge Becky her happiness with Joe, even as the weeks passed without any sign from Will.

And, perhaps inspired by Becky’s hopeful example, I woke up one ice-blue morning with the warm inspiration that perhaps Will was skittish about contacting me exclusively because of how angry I might be about his theft, and that it was time for me to reach out. He could simply be too embarrassed to get in touch. With that in mind I contemplated paying a surprise visit to him one evening, but his silence had produced enough hurt—and caution—that I hit instead on the compromise of sending him a brief note. I selected a blank card with care at Barnes & Noble—the cover showed a young couple holding hands on the observation deck of the Empire State Building in the 1940s—and wrote that I had enjoyed our adventures together and I missed him. One sentence, no mention of the box. After further debate, I chose
Warm thoughts, Garet
over
Love, Garet
as my sign-off, mailed it to his apartment, and got it back a week later stamped
ADDRESSEE MOVED—NO FORWARDING ADDRESS
.

That was a pretty bad jolt—I cried all the next day—but
then I realized Black Swan Partners might have been harder to shut down than his apartment was to vacate. I wasn’t quite up to calling the office, but I did call Chuck Chennery and get a list of hedge fund websites where I might be able to get additional contact information for Will’s fund by pretending to be an investor. The first site I went to, Hedge World, reported Black Swan as having closed on the last day of the year, with a PO box in the Cayman Islands as an address for any partner needing further information. I mailed the old note in a new envelope, with low expectations this time that were fulfilled, although it did come back faster with its
ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN
stamp even though it had traveled thousands of miles as opposed to eight miles along Manhattan Island.

In a final act of semidesperation, I called Hedge World’s offices, hoping that by some wild chance I would speak to someone who knew Will or Black Swan and might just be in a mood to talk. The HW phone receptionist, a very young-sounding woman, was pleasant enough but told me, “Will Hughes was a famously reclusive manager when he was running a fund. Someone here once tried to set up an investor with him and he’d only meet with him between two and three in the morning. Not much chance of finding him now that he’s closed his fund, I’m afraid.”

So I finally had to give up on finding Will. Like Lol, I’d hear from him at a time of his own choosing—if ever.

In the last week of February my father brought me to Zach Reese’s studio. “He’s been painting nonstop since mid-December,” Roman told me in an uncharacteristically vague and halting manner, as if he wasn’t quite sure how to describe what he had seen. “What he’s doing is . . . different . . . more
controlled than his early work, but also more lucid . . . and luminous . . . Well, you’ll see. I want you to tell me what you think . . . whether I’m biased.”

Zach Reese had lived and worked in a loft on Mercer Street since the late seventies—one of the first lofts in the area converted from warehouse space into studio and living space. I remembered visiting with my father when I was little and being scared by the giant hook that hung on the first floor and the rattling metal steps that led up to the studio, but once in the studio it was like being at the circus or in a tropical garden. There were huge canvases splashed with color, cans of paint lined up like vats of ice cream, and everywhere—on the walls, the floors, the canvas drop cloths—multicolored paint splatters like confetti after a parade. Over the years the paintings had vanished, the cans of paint were closed and stacked against the walls, the drop cloths tossed away. Only the splatters on the floors and walls remained, mute testimony to the creative spirit that had once dwelled in this space, but as they faded with age, they began to look like blood splatter from some horrible slaughter. The smell of turpentine had also faded, replaced by the medicinal reek of vodka.

But when I walked up those stairs with my father on a cold, sunny day in February, I smelled turpentine and paint again. Zach greeted us at the door, a paintbrush held steady in his hand, his clothes speckled with fresh paint, his eyes shining. As soon as I stepped into the studio, a large canvas drew my attention . . . and immediately took my breath away. Incandescent colors glowed against a dark background that wasn’t quite blue or black or purple but somehow all of those. At first I thought the splatters were abstract, but when I looked closer, I saw shapes in the canvas—figures, flowers, wings. It took me a
few minutes to realize what it reminded me of—the heather garden at Fort Tryon Park the night I first walked through it with Will, my sight heightened by his blood in my veins.