The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards (13 page)

“Got to go,” I said quickly. I heard her hesitate, as if there were something else that she’d just been about to say, but then she said, simply, “Good-bye,” and hung up.

Anton was trying to tip the raccoon man when I came running back up to the car.

“Let’s go,” I barked at him. “Before somebody takes a shot at us.”

And so we eased out into the honking river of cars and headed up the highway again. As we drove in silence, I imagined pulling a U-turn through a break in the divider and heading back down to the Russian Tea Room to duel with whichever prince it was. Maybe it would move Rose to stay with me. Maybe I’d get shot and my novel would be published posthumously to great acclaim. Either way, it didn’t sound like a bad plan, compared with sitting next to Anton another minute.

“It’s
nice
to get out into the country for a change,” Anton said, reclining a little in his seat. I ignored him. Anton pretended he didn’t care what was bothering me for about five minutes, at which point he simply couldn’t resist anymore.

“Troubles with
Rose
?” he mocked. “Is the Prince of Dullsylvania back in town?”

Though I was sorely tempted to sink into a long, disparaging discussion of Rose’s latest fiancé, a subject which Anton never tired of, I ignored the jab.

“Rose is fine.
She
loved my book, by the way.”

“Oh, is
that
your problem? Of course she loved it. It’s practically
about
her.”

Another long and stony silence, as I sped through the thin traffic, angrier and angrier, toward the nearest exit.

“I never meant you couldn’t fix it,” he said finally. “You’ve got a perfectly serviceable first draft.”

“You said it was
terrible
. And it’s my
sixth
draft.”

Anton reached back for the hatbox. “Well, I only got through part of it. Let me take another look.”

“Leave it!” I shouted. As we came into some small town, I suddenly wondered why I was even still driving. For weeks I’d barely heard from Anton, only finding little messes around the apartment in the morning and hearing death rattles through the walls, and here I was, motoring him up to the Siberian wastelands of Westchester to see some quack, right after he had insulted a year’s worth of my work.

“Screw this,” I said, seeing a sign for the train station up ahead. “I’m going to go back into the city.” I checked the time on my watch and figured that if I caught a train in the next half hour, I’d be back in time to make it to the Russian Tea Room. I wondered if it was still considered regicide if the prince in question had already been deposed. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be stuck in a car with Anton a minute longer, listening to Tevye asking Golde “Do You Love Me?”

“I suppose I do,”
she sang.

“And I suppose I love you, too,”
he replied.

“You can’t
leave
me here,” Anton said, looking around at the quaint little nearby shops—the sunny exterior of Paddy’s Funeral Home, the shuttered Yarn Ball, and a busy little diner named Silly Nick’s. To him, these might as well have been the gates to the gulags.

“I don’t have a license!” Anton added. “I don’t even know how to drive.”

We slowed to a stop at a red light and watched a family of brightly colored fleece jackets crossing to get breakfast at Silly Nick’s.

“You keep a
Jaguar
in a garage and you don’t know how to drive?”

Anton didn’t seem to understand why this wasn’t logical. “It’s my father’s car.”

“Which he left here, for you, to use in case of emergencies? With two crates of caviar in the trunk for safekeeping?”

At the mention of the caviar, Anton’s face lit up, and he suddenly opened his car door and scrambled around to the back.

“Get back in the damn car!” I shouted.

The light turned green and I had to set the car in park so I could run out after him. For the second time in an hour, I found myself standing in front of a line of furious drivers, thanks to Anton.

But Anton was exuberant in front of the open trunk. “I thought I’d lost these! My father was practically going to disinherit me over them.”

“Where did you think you had
lost
them?”

Anton, again, didn’t seem to understand the question. Crates of caviar, in his world, were perfectly capable of falling in and out of existence.

Before I could stop him, he had grabbed the tire iron and pried a crate open. The cars’ horns behind us were composing a collective atonal symphony. Though I was still stinging from what he’d said about my novel, I couldn’t help but begin laughing at the sight of the stringy Anton, dangling in midair as he tried to use his full weight to open the crate. At least he was earnest about things, even his abject helplessness. He had everything in the world and could do almost nothing for himself.

Gesturing rudely for the cars to drive around us, I rushed over to lend my weight to Anton’s lever arm. With a great splintering sound, the lid burst off. Inside were stacks and stacks of golden caviar tins, painted with pale blue maps of the Sea of Azov. Anton grabbed two of the pressurized tins with a loud cheer, and we rushed back into the car and got safely over onto the side of the road, across from the train station.

Scooping out the large, brownish pearls of caviar with our fingers, we sat on the hood of the Jaguar and watched the traffic roll by. For a while I waited for an apology, until I remembered that the word
sorry
was not in Anton Prishibeyev’s vocabulary.

“Do you think Silly Nick’s has blinis?” Anton asked, mouth full of fish eggs.

“No. I do not.”

“And you people call this the Land of the Free!” he shouted at the commuters.

“They call this Westchester.”

Three children leaned out the window of a yellow school bus to point at us. Anton’s hair had bushed out in all directions, and his overcoat, which I had given back to him, was two sizes too big. My wool cap had slid back, and I was wrapped in a large red scarf and my threadbare old blazer. We must have looked like two hobos, perched on the hood of a hundred-thousand-dollar car, sucking fish eggs from our fingertips.

The chorus of Fiddler rang out,
“We know that when good fortune favors two such men, it stands to reason, we deserve it, too!”

“How much does this stuff cost?” I asked, wishing I had some more
to wash it down with.

“And if our good fortune never comes . . . here’s to whatever comes.”

“These big tins are about two thousand. Depending on how the ruble is doing.”

I choked and sputtered, inadvertently spraying fifty dollars’ worth of caviar onto the icy pavement.

“Ours is
osetra
caviar,” Anton explained, beginning the inevitable lecture. “
Malossal
—which means a lightly salty flavor—large, and relatively dark. Darkness is typically a mark of inferiority, but ours contains a particular nuttiness that is unique to this
terroir
. The Sea of Azov is actually the shallowest sea in the world, and this makes our sturgeons particularly nutty for some reason.”

“Not just your sturgeons,” I joked. For that I received a flicking of eggs in the face, but I couldn’t resist another: “You know, it’s not at
all
surprising that you come from the
shallowest
sea on Earth.”

Anton leaped from the hood and started to come after me. After a few moments’ chase around the car, soon also speckled with fish eggs, we began shouting along with the tape deck in the car.
“Drink,
l’chaim,
to life!”

Soon full, Anton curled up in his seat and closed his eyes. He was out like a light. Cursing myself a little for letting him off the hook so easily, I reached back into the hatbox, eager to finish rereading my novel’s “terrible” ending.

Though I had hardly slept in a week, that night I could not stop dreaming up ways to somehow steal Colette away. She loved me, I was sure of it, but I had no money, no status. I could never offer her the life that she expected. But without her, what was the point? Why go on gilding until the riots ended? I’d be shipped off to the front lines and made to shoot my fellow men, lest they shoot me. There didn’t seem to be any choice. I dressed and stowed my few favorite camel-hair brushes away, along with my bundle of matches. From a hiding place behind my headboard, I took out a gold watch that had been handed down to me by my mother—one of the only things of hers that I owned. Then, like Leander, I crept out of the boardinghouse and traversed the dark night, steering occasionally away from the light of arsonists’ torches. Soon I came to Tammany Hall, slipped past a dozing night watchman, and silently snuck to the back room, where Chausser kept the next day’s supply of gold paint in the locked cabinet.

I plied the soft pine matchsticks into the keyhole, pressing gingerly against the tumblers, until the thing, at last, popped open. Inside, I found a jar still sealed with heavy beeswax. Holding it up to the moonlight, I studied its liquid glimmering and wondered how much I might be able to get for it out West. We could flee into the unexplored territories. Out where there was no draft, where I was not poor and she was not rich. Out where our love could begin. Suddenly drowsy with these dreams, I crept back into the portico. There, staring at the moonlight glinting off Hero’s light, I slipped into deep blue sleep.

I woke to the sound of resounding cheers from the Hall. Immediately, my heart seized, as I wiped dreams from my eyes. Surely I had not slept through the wedding! I checked the time on my watch and, cursing my sleepless week, pressed one eye to the crack in the wall. There, on a dais, was a gray-haired minister, and in front of him, Bertram Vanderbilt, in a high top hat and woolen tails, his leather boots gleaming with fresh polish. I did not see Colette anywhere, but then the music swelled and people began turning toward the entrance. Without a second thought, I grabbed the golden paint from the floor of the portico and rushed out through the doorway.

No one noticed me. Every rich, joyful eye was fixed on the rear doors where Colette was entering, gowned in the most beautiful white lace and silk—her golden hair cascading in curls across those sun-kissed shoulders. The crème de la crème of Manhattan was there—every Vanderbilt from the commodore on down, Boss Tweed, and even the mayor himself. Every eye was on her. But her eyes were on mine. She froze, there, in the petal-strewn aisle, quickly grabbing the arm of her father—the handlebar-mustachioed railroad tycoon Nathaniel Marsh. The old millionaire turned slowly to follow his daughter’s gaze to the painter’s apprentice coming out of the portico. Others began to turn in their seats. I shouted something—Colette’s name, I think—but with all the blood in my ears it sounded like gibberish. Half sure that someone, some Vanderbilt son, would rise up and fire a bullet through my breast then and there, I waited to die.

Then Colette let go of her father’s arm and rushed back down the aisle. My heart leaping, I flew to meet her there. There was no time to clutch at each other, nor even to kiss. In her brilliant eyes, I could see only delirious happiness.

Bursting from Tammany Hall, we shouted like small children. Colette kicked off her stiff shoes and she ran barefoot with me into the sooty streets. Ash floated everywhere. Somewhere behind us, we could hear the noise of wedding guests rising to their feet in the echoing chamber, and shouting out in confusion. But we did not care. We did not look back. Faster and faster we ran. In another moment, as we approached the square, I began to hear gunshots, and I was sure that we would be killed by the Vanderbilts at any moment. Valiantly, I would perish in the arms of my true love. And she would leap in front of the bullets that followed and take her own life, and we would walk arm in arm through the meadows of the afterlife, together eternally.