Black Swan Rising (5 page)

I followed the EMT’s advice. I still felt, as I had right before I fainted, as if I weren’t completely tethered to my own body, as if I were floating above myself watching the ambulance speed toward St. Vincent’s Hospital, watching myself following my father’s supine body into the emergency room and holding his limp hand while his shoulder was stitched and he was hooked up to an IV.
Who is that calm woman?
I wanted to
shout aloud. It couldn’t be me because inside my nerves were sizzling like firecrackers and my heart was beating to a wild drumbeat. Apparently the calm façade didn’t fool everyone; when the nurse noticed my color, he sent an orderly to get me a chair.

“I don’t want you passing out on my watch,” he scolded in a lilting West Indies accent that felt like a warm breeze wafting through the antiseptic ER. His skin was the color of oolong tea, his long, tightly coiled hair was held back with a bright orange bandanna. His name tag read O. Smith.

“Is he likely to regain consciousness, Mr. Smith?” I asked.

“Not with all the painkillers I just gave him, darling. And if he does, he won’t be making much sense. You might as well get some rest.” He spoke as if he were used to people doing what he said, but I shook my head.

“I’ll stay here,” I said. “I don’t want him waking up alone.”

After an hour or so my father was admitted to a room. There was an empty bed that O. Smith said I was welcome to lie down in, but I was afraid to go to sleep, afraid that if I didn’t keep watch over my father, he might slip away. So I sat in the straight-backed chair between my father’s bed and a window that faced Seventh Avenue. The sky was dark over the buildings across the street, but their topmost windows reflected the pearl gray light of dawn in the east. Yesterday’s rain had finally stopped. The air looked clear and cold. Steam rose from the grates in the street in sinuous plumes. I had grown up thinking that every city was festooned with the floating white puffs until my father explained that New York had an unusual system of steam pipes beneath the streets that predated the use of electricity.

“I thought the city was floating on a cloud the first time I saw
it,” Roman had told me when he described sailing into New York Harbor in the late 1940s. “I thought I was dreaming.”

I had felt as a child that the steam rising from the grates and manholes was proof that there was another world below the surface of this one. Perhaps it was the world my mother talked about when she told me bedtime stories—the Summer Country, she called it, or the Fair Land, a place where it was always high summer but every flower that bloomed from early spring to late fall bloomed there all year long. A place where pure springs bubbled up from deep within the earth and spread over the green meadows like white lace and then gathered in a pool on which swans glided. Sometimes you caught a glimpse of the Summer Country in the green shimmer at the end of a wooded path, she told me, or in the reflection of a mountain pool, or even, sometimes, through an open door on a city street where there had been no door before and nothing but smooth stone when you went back for a second look. Because the door to the Summer Country opened only in a glimpse, never in a second look. You could never look for it, but you might slip into it unawares. And then you might spend a day there only to come back and find a score of years had passed in this world and all your friends and family had aged while you remained unchanged.

“Is that why you never seem to age a day?” my father would say when he heard her telling me this story.

My mother would laugh, but I believed when I was young that she held the key to that magical place. And I believed that if you watched the shapes the steam made on early winter mornings, you might catch a glimpse of that world—of white-breasted swans gliding on crystal lakes and enchanted steeds stepping out of foamy waves. This morning, though, the
wraithlike shapes massing in the shadows of the hospital did not suggest beneficent emissaries from a fairy-tale kingdom. They made me think instead of the shades of the damned rising up out of hell on Judgment Day. I don’t think I’d ever had that reaction to the steam before. It made me wonder if something had changed in the city overnight—or in me.

“Miss James?” The voice startled me out of my gloomy fantasy. I turned and saw at the foot of my father’s bed the detective who had been at the town house. I hadn’t heard him come in and I wondered if he’d deliberately snuck up on me, but then I dismissed the idea as ridiculous. The man was a New York City police detective, not a Native American pathfinder.

“Detective Joseph Kiernan, NYPD Art Crime Division,” he said, handing me his card. “I didn’t want to wake your father. I’m sure he needs his rest. The doctor said he’s in stable condition.”

“But he hasn’t regained consciousness,” I said. “I don’t think that can be good.”

“So he hasn’t been able to tell you what happened?”

“No, but I think that should be obvious. He surprised the burglars and they shot him.”

“Did you see them shoot him?”

“No. I was behind him on the stairs. By the time I reached the kitchen he was lying on the floor.”

“And was one of the burglars holding a gun?”

“No, he could have dropped it. They were packing away the canvases. They’d cut all but one out of their frames. They seemed to want to get out of there quickly once the alarm was triggered.”

“Yes, that’s another thing I’m confused about.” The detective tossed his trench coat on the spare bed and pulled up a chair.
He looked as if he was getting comfortable for a long talk. “The safe alarm was triggered, but the front-door alarm wasn’t. Did anyone else but you and your father know the front-door alarm code?”

“Several people. Our housekeeper, the receptionist . . . we always kept anything valuable in the safe, so . . .”

“And who knew that combination?”

“No one but my father and me. The burglars must have used an explosive . . .” I paused, recalling the moment when the men passed me in the hallway. It wasn’t something I wanted to remember. It made me feel as if something were pressing against my chest. “I smelled something when they walked by. Sulfur . . . and something
burnt
.”

“There was no sign of an explosion,” the detective said. “They either knew the combination or . . .”

“Or what?” I snapped.

He tilted his head and smiled. He was handsome in a boyish, clean-cut manner, I noted in the same numb detachment I’d felt since finding my father shot on the kitchen floor: curly dark hair, square jaw, cleft chin, broad shoulders, deep brown eyes. He was no doubt used to charming women with his looks. But why was he trying to charm
me
? I was the victim here, wasn’t I? “I don’t know,” he said. “You tell me.”

“I have no idea,” I said truthfully.

“Could your father have given them the combination?”

“Only if they forced him at gunpoint.”

“But you said you were right behind your father on the stairs and they had already cut all but one of the canvases out of their frames. So there wouldn’t have been time for your father to give them the combination. At least not then.”

It took a moment for his words to sink in, but when they did
I was furious. “Are you implying that my father was somehow
in
on the burglary?”

Detective Kiernan shrugged. “I’m just trying to figure out what happened. Are you sure the safe was locked?”

“Yes, I went back to the office to do it myself . . .” But I stopped, recalling that after I had walked Zach Reese to the door and come back to the kitchen, my father had already put away the Pissarros and locked the safe door. At least I’d assumed he had. “Actually my father closed the safe when I was seeing a friend to the door—”

“A friend?”

“An old friend of my father’s, Zach Reese.”

“The painter?” Kiernan took a notebook out of his suit jacket pocket. The motion revealed a flash of gun.

“Yes,” I said, my mouth dry. “So you have to study art to be on the Art Crime squad?”

“It helps,” he said, his lips curving into a brief, perfunctory smile. “But you wouldn’t have to be an art expert to know Zach Reese’s name. His exploits in the eighties made him pretty famous. There was that car accident out in the Hamptons. A young girl drowned.”

“Yes, that was awful. I was only a kid at the time, but my mother told me Zach was never the same. He became a heavy drinker—not that he’d been a light drinker before.”

“And he stopped painting. He ran into some trouble with gambling debts a few years later.”

“Yes, I heard something about that.” I had a cloudy memory of my parents arguing because Roman had bailed Zach out again, but I shook it away, anxious to deflect Kiernan from the direction he was headed in. “You can’t think Zach had anything to do with the burglary? He’s one of my father’s oldest friends.”

“We have to examine
all
possibilities, Miss James. I’m sure you want us to find whoever is responsible for doing this to your father.” He tilted his chin in Roman’s direction and stopped. Following his gaze I saw that my father’s eyes were flickering open. I got up and moved quickly to his side.

“Dad? Can you hear me?” Roman’s eyes opened and focused on me. His lips stretched apart—an attempted smile that turned into a grimace of pain. “Dad, it’s okay. You’re in St. Vincent’s. You were shot but you’re going to be okay.” I looked up at Detective Kiernan, who had moved to the other side of the bed and was studying Roman’s face. “Please get the nurse!” I said. Kiernan hesitated a fraction of an instant, then turned and strode quickly from the room. When I was sure he was out of the room, I looked back down at my father and took his hand.

“There was a burglary, Dad. Three men broke in and stole the paintings in the safe. Do you remember if you locked the safe after Zach left?” Then, lowering my voice to a whisper: “Did you give the safe combination to Zach?”

“It’s okay, dear,” Roman said. I felt his fingers moving; he was trying to pat my hand but barely had the strength. “They were insured. As long as you’re all right, Margot, everything . . . everything . . .”

“It’s me, Dad,” I said wincing at the sound of my mother’s name on my father’s lips. “It’s Garet. Mom’s . . . mom’s not here.”

My father tried to smile again, but another pain contorted his face. “Garet,” he said. “You look more and more like your mother every day . . .” Then his eyelids fluttered closed. The detective returned with the nurse and a doctor, who examined Roman and said his vital signs were strong.

“So there’s probably no danger in Miss James leaving for an
hour?” Kiernan said to the doctor. “She lives just a few blocks away and I need her to go over the crime scene with me.”

The doctor not only concurred, but urged me to go out and get some air. He assured me that the floor nurse would call my cell phone if there was any change. Within minutes Detective Kiernan and I were on the street walking west toward the town house. It did feel good to be out in the air. Yesterday’s storm had passed leaving a blue sky and crisp, cold air; the morning sun had banished the ominous shadows from the avenue. Detective Kiernan didn’t bring up Zach Reese again during our walk. Instead he asked about the paintings that had been in the safe.

“I’ll have to look at the inventory, of course,” I told him. “But I remember them.” I listed each painting and its estimated value, ending with the Pissarros.

“Of course value’s a relative term in the art market, isn’t it?” Detective Kiernan asked. “Those Pissarros didn’t sell at auction. That must bring down their value.”

“I’m just giving you the valuation the insurance company assigned when the current policy was renewed several months ago.”

“So that was prior to the current downturn in the market. Conceivably the paintings might be insured for more than they’re worth in this market, couldn’t they be?”

We’d reached the steps to the brownstone, but the detective’s question brought me up short.
The insurance.
My father had just reassured me that the paintings were insured. And last night before he went to bed he had said,
Something will turn up.
But he wouldn’t have . . . ? Detective Kiernan
couldn’t
think that my father had arranged the theft and being
shot to collect the insurance? He was smiling at me, his face as bland and mild as the morning sunshine.

I turned away without answering his question and climbed the steps. I wanted to be inside my home—the one place I had always felt safest—and yet, just yesterday I had learned that it didn’t even really belong to us anymore. I stepped inside . . . and immediately began to shake. The presence of those three black-clad men was so palpable I could feel it like a heaviness in the air. Detective Kiernan passed me in the hallway and went into the kitchen. “The forensic lab has finished in here, so you’re welcome to clean up the rest,” he was saying. I started to follow him, but stopped in the doorway; I wasn’t yet ready to step into the room where my father had been shot. Kiernan came back, holding an object in a plastic evidence bag.

“We found this on the floor. Do you recognize it?”

“Yes,” I told him, “It’s my father’s service revolver from World War Two. And no, I don’t suppose it’s licensed. Frankly, I can’t imagine it even works.”

“Uh-huh,” he said as if nothing surprised him anymore. “There’s one more thing. You said you were standing in this hallway when they passed you?”

“Yes.”