A Trip to the Stars (71 page)

As for Desirée, she was a reluctant trustee. Dolores was still vehement about Samax’s leaving Desirée the hotel, to run as a hotel—though Desirée had repeatedly made it clear that she had no wish to do any such thing. When Samax designated her a trustee, she was wary of even that much involvement in the property. After his death, she said, she wanted a clean break. Meanwhile, rather than being placated by Samax’s gesture, Dolores was only further enraged: converting the Hotel Canopus into anything else was to her a slap in the face.

“She’s getting to be impossible,” Samax muttered to me that last night. “I don’t have the energy for it anymore. But on Monday my lawyer’s bringing out all the papers, and once I sign them, it’s done.”

As on my previous visits since discovering the dead letter at the Hotel Rigel, I had been on the brink of telling Samax about its contents, but once again resisted the impulse. With his health so frail, I thought the emotional impact would be too tough on him, especially when he learned the identity of my father and the stark fact that by birth I was half-Cassiel. No less than the grandson of Vitale Cassiel.

Now that Samax was dead, part of me was relieved that he would never have to absorb that particular shock. Another part of me was saddened, for perhaps it would have been some small comfort, after the decades of antagonism, for him to know that he and his archenemy had something in common besides their enmity. That it should be me was something Samax, a man with the keenest sense of irony, would surely have appreciated. As he would have appreciated the many ironical layers pertaining to him and Vitale Cassiel that were implicit in my father’s revelations. Samax was an intensely curious man. At its core, his life had been constructed around his curiosity, and
around the raveling and unraveling of secrets. That is why, in the end, whatever the pain and repercussions, I believe he would have regretted—as I did—that he hadn’t shared in the discovery of my paternity.

At the same time, whatever his other regrets might have been, Samax was not one to talk about them. Even to do so obliquely, as he had the previous night, was unusual. He had walked me to my room just before going to bed, and standing in the corridor in these same pajamas and robe that he wore in death, he told me he had been having trouble sleeping.

“It’s not the physical stuff,” he said dismissively of his various ailments, “though the plumbing problems wear on me, getting up to piss every hour on the hour. And even if I dose myself with herbs, I don’t sleep deeply enough anymore to have nightmares. It’s an ongoing unease that eats at me—like the fungi that get my trees, working their way beneath the bark. I’ll be tossing, drifting in and out of sleep that’s indistinguishable from the darkness of my room, and suddenly I’ll be looking in on myself, watching scenes from my life play themselves out—as they happened, but with the smallest, disturbing variations. I’ll be with some people, having dinner, say, just as it was except that one person will be wearing another’s clothes, and another will say something, verbatim, that really someone else said, and through the window I’ll glimpse the streets of a city—Chicago in a rainstorm, say—though that dinner really took place in Miami on a clear night. It brings me up in a sweat. I know it doesn’t sound bad, but it’s as if I’ve lost my dreaming function; it seems what I do now in my sleep is alter my memories in strange ways, all the time knowing what occurred in reality, so the alterations aren’t even pleasurable. I mean, it’s not like you get to go someplace you always wanted to go but didn’t, or find a woman you had looked for everywhere but could never find.”

These were Samax’s last words to me before he shuffled down the corridor in his velvet slippers. It was a curious and poignant confessional for him to have delivered out of the blue, and I wondered what place he could have had in mind, world-traveler that he was, where he had never gone. As for the woman who could never be found, I had no doubt that must be my grandmother Stella, whose disappearance, Samax would have been interested to know, had also been one of the
great obsessions of my father’s life. Twelve hours before his death, Stella was still on Samax’s mind.

For several endless minutes, Desirée, Mrs. Resh, and I stared down at Samax’s body.

“It must have been a massive stroke,” Mrs. Resh remarked, wiping her eyes.

Without replying, Desirée said to her, “Would you find out what the delay is in finding Alif and Aym.” As soon as Mrs. Resh had left the room, Desirée turned to me. “Look more closely, Enzo.” She indicated the place on his side which Samax was clutching when he died.

“And move him?”

“Why not? It’s not like we’re going to call the police. We both know how he felt about them. But, more to the point, there is nothing they could do about this.”

Steadying my hands, I pried Samax’s hand away with difficulty, and was surprised at once by how wet it was. His robe, too, was soaked through at that spot on his side.

“Why, it’s blood.”

“No, not blood,” Desirée interjected. “Do you see a tear in the robe?”

I smoothed and tugged the fabric, but saw nothing.

“It will barely be visible,” she went on. “More like a puncture.”

“This might be it,” I said, pressing my fingers up behind the wet patch.

“Now look beneath that spot at the pajamas.”

The pajamas’ silk was thinner and I was able to find the puncture in it, barely the width of a pencil.

“But if that’s not blood, what is it?” I said.

“Water,” she replied. “Ice water, to be exact.”

All at once I saw what she was getting at. My mind flew back to a long-ago dinner when I was a boy at Samax’s side, hanging on his every word as he regaled the table with a description of the Borgias’ special methods of commiting murder. Foremost among them stabbing the victim with a dagger of ice, frozen in a mold, that left no fingerprints or evidence of a weapon, just a puncture wound—if one was looking for it—and a bit of water.

“He was stabbed?” I said incredulously.

“By the thinnest of blades.”

Just then, there was a deep howling in the corridor before the door burst open and Alif and Aym ran in with Sirius barking at their heels. Alif brandished a drawn pistol, and Aym in his blind man’s black glasses froze, cocking his head, alert for sound.

“You’re a little late,” Desirée said.

Sofiel had found them finally at the edge of the property, bringing Sirius back, and informed them of Samax’s death. Extremely agitated, Alif several times circled Samax’s body, examined it, circled again, and finally stood beside it, his hard black eyes shot through with grief. Aym also circled the body, his ear tilted toward it, listening intently, biting his lip. Then Alif burst into tears and Aym fell to his knees, wringing his hands. After all those years at my uncle’s side, watching over him wherever he went, seeing to so many of his needs as he grew infirm, his bodyguards had grown close to him. But, after all, their real mission was to protect him from death. And when the Angel of Death had finally come for him, stepping out of the spectral light of his visions, Alif and Aym were nowhere to be found.

“Who would want to murder a dying man?” I said, turning back to Desirée. This was the question I kept asking myself, like a mantra, thinking that if I answered it philosophically, I would be able to answer it practically.

Desirée took a blanket from the closet and spread it over Samax’s body. “Someone running out of time themselves, Enzo,” she said bitterly. “It doesn’t take inordinate strength to thrust a dagger. Especially when your victim isn’t expecting it.”

“You’re talking about the Man of Smoke?” I said, and she seemed puzzled for a moment.

Then she looked me in the eye. “Enzo, just so you know: the person you call the Man of Smoke is my father, Spica. He came back after all these years,” she said with a rueful smile, “not to see me, but to help redesign the hotel.”

“Spica?”

“Yes. Samax told me last night who he was.”

“Have you spoken with him?”

“Not yet. But I know this: he didn’t kill Samax.”

At that moment, we caught our first whiff of smoke. Desirée and I both knew immediately that it was a kind of smoke we had never
smelled before around the hotel. Only once had I smelled it elsewhere, I thought, as all the fire alarms around the hotel began going off.

“We’d better get downstairs,” Desirée said, grabbing my hand and pulling me into the corridor with Sirius at our side. “You, too,” she called back to Alif and Aym, but they shook their heads defiantly as if to say that if they had failed Samax in life, they certainly weren’t going to leave his side in death. Then Alif made a sign indicating they would bring Samax’s body down.

“Shouldn’t we wait for them?” I said to Desirée.

“They can take care of themselves. And nothing can hurt Samax anymore.”

At the door to the fire stairs she stopped suddenly and leaned closer to me. The clatter of the alarms was growing louder and we heard shouts from the lower floors. “It was Dolores who killed him,” Desirée said, her breath warm on my face. “And god only knows what she’s done now.”

I tilted the book into the rays of a small yellow light as I read.
“All the other moons in the solar system are either captured asteroids, like Phobos and Deimos around Mars, or satellites created at the same time as their planet, like Io and Europa around Jupiter. Our moon is neither.”

Cassiel had his head in my lap. “There have been plenty of theories about its origin,” he said, “all disproven. We’ve mapped it and broken it down geologically, but we still don’t where the moon came from or how it got there. It’s one of the great mysteries.”

I shut the book, a history of the solar system which I had picked up that morning. “Did you know,” I said, “that the Babylonians thought it was a mirror reflecting a lost portion of the earth which no one would ever discover?”

“I like that.” He closed his eyes and I began massaging his temples.

“Pythagoras, on the other hand, was convinced that the gods created the moon as a dwelling place for the souls of the dead.”

“Everyone from here who ever died? It would be very crowded.”

“Not in his time.”

“Hmm. I hadn’t thought of that. What else did you find out?”

“Oh no, it’s your turn. What has NASA discovered about the moon’s origin?”

“That would take me all night.”

“We have all night.”

We were lying in the rear seat of his speedboat, in the darkness, anchored far out on a misty lake. The sky was overcast, with low blue clouds. It had been overcast all week: we hadn’t once seen the moon. On
the shore, nestled among thickets of maple and elm trees, the houses twinkled with lights. In one house a blue light glowed in an upstairs window, where I had screwed a blue bulb into the bedside lamp.

This was where Cassiel lived, a small ranch house in Clear Lake City, on the outskirts of Houston, a mile from the Johnson Space Center. A lot of NASA people, including astronauts, lived around that lake. Cassiel said it was the first real house he had lived in since he was a boy. He had been renting it for two years, yet it contained very few possessions outside the basic furnishings. He had bought himself a stereo, an aquarium stocked with neon fish, and a pool table, and there was a black BMW motorcycle and a white Corvette in the garage. That was about it. For him, it was a lot. A career nomad, accustomed to carrying everything he owned in a pair of sky-blue Air Force duffel bags and a trunk, he simply wasn’t one to accumulate objects of any sort.

I had been visiting him for ten days. Five months had passed since our rendezvous in Honolulu. At the end of the week he and the other astronauts would fly from Ellington Air Force Base to the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral; twelve days after that, they would be launched into space. In Florida, they would live in quarantine in the Spartan quarters of the Space Center. Cassiel would have his own bedroom, but would share a living room, mess hall, and conference room—its walls adorned with lunar and astral maps—with the others. They would be served high-calorie meals, work out in an exercise room, receive endless briefings, and continue the daily sessions in the flight simulator that had been their second home in Houston. Eight hours a day for six months they had worked the complex control panels of switches, levers, and valves, learning to read every nuance in the dense array of dials and displays before them while they simulated hundreds of planned maneuvers and countless variations that might arise in a crisis.

Seeing the pressures Cassiel was under, feeling them palpably, vicariously, as I slept beside him, I understood why a number of Apollo astronauts a decade earlier had become religious zealots or alcoholics after their missions. Gazing back on the earth while standing on the moon might make me very religious, too—as if I’d seen the light and then some—but there was also a time it might have made me want to drink a great deal. In fact, Cassiel would stand on the far side, at the dead center of the forty-one percent of the lunar surface that is never
visible on earth, looking out to the stars—something no man had ever done. I thought that this image of himself, gazing into an enormous glittering expanse, must have been hovering in the back of his mind for months.

My own feelings about his mission remained the same: I was at once excited and fearful. He had explained the mechanics of the flight to me, and shared many of the briefing materials that he brought home at night. Many of the facts that related to the flight, crucial to him as a navigator, I now knew by heart.

For example, that the moon, 234,000 miles from earth, orbits it at a speed of 2,300 mph and is an elusive moving target, especially if you yourself are traveling at 5,000 mph.

That the three-stage Saturn V rocket which would propel him into space was 363 feet high, with five enormous engines to power the first stage alone. At liftoff, the combined thrust of those engines would be 160 million horsepower. 160 million horses pulling them into the sky. Burning half a million gallons of kerosene and liquid oxygen for 21/2 minutes in order to travel 40 miles. And then falling away.