Sleeping in Flame (11 page)

"Hello?"

"Walker, it's Maris. You've got to come back here. You've got to see something. You _have_ to.

It's incredible!"

"Right now? I just got in this minute. I really don't feel like driving anymore, Maris."

"Have you ever heard of a man named Moritz Benedikt?"

"No."

"All right, I'll take a picture. I've got the Polaroid with me, but it's not the same. When you see this picture you're going to drive out here in the middle of the night, believe me. Can I come over after?"

"Sure. I'll probably be asleep, so use your key."

Real sadness either keeps me up all night or punches me to sleep. This time it was all I could do to put the receiver down and get to bed before going out as if I'd been conked on the head. I dreamed of Nicholas sitting naked on a scarlet stallion twenty hands high in the middle of a beautiful pond. He looked very happy and called out to me, "Bathing the red horse!"

When I awoke, Orlando was asleep on my stomach and Maris was lying by my side. The room was completely dark and warm and smelled of her distant, hours-old perfume. It took some time for my mind to land back on earth. While it was circling the airfield, I gently combed her soft hair with my fingers.

It had grown much longer since she'd been in Vienna.

"How long have you been here?"

"About an hour. I'm glad you're up. I've been dying to wake you. You've got to see what I found. Can I turn on the light?"

"Uh huh."

The light burst the air like a flashbulb. I closed my eyes against the white shock. When I opened them again, she was holding a Polaroid photograph in front of me. It was a picture of an ornate black marble gravestone. Across the top, thick gold letters spelled out the name "Moritz Benedikt" and the dates he lived. Below them was a small cameo photograph of Benedikt; a common practice on Austrian gravestones. I couldn't see the photo very well, but before I had a chance to think, she handed me another snapshot, this time a close-up of the cameo.

"Holy shit!"

It was a picture of me. Same hair, soft tired eyes, large nose. It's common to hear people say they know or have seen someone who looks a lot like you. It's different when you're faced with a mirror image of yourself, thirty years dead. It's time blown through a horn -- right in your face.

"Who was he?"

"I don't know. I asked every groundkeeper out there I could find, but no one knew. It'd be easy enough to track him down, though, Walker. God knows, Vienna is famous for keeping records.

You could probably find out how many sugars he put in his coffee, if you looked hard enough."

I couldn't stop looking at the picture. The light wasn't good and some parts were a little out of focus, but the resemblance was stark and mysterious and . . . exciting in its way. You think you are the sole proprietor of your looks. Once you discover you aren't, you immediately start wondering what else there was in common between you and your double. What kind of life did he live? What were his secrets, what were his dreams? The world is a place of wonders, but the greatest of all is yourself. Finding that someone once walked the earth with your face is incentive enough to send you out searching for answers. But that was one of my greatest mistakes.

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Wonders don't always have answers or reasons. Or rather, even if they do, those answers are not necessarily what we want to know.

The black stone was so polished it looked like obsidian. The gold letters cut into its face were deep and done with great care and skill. I

stood a few feet away and took in the whole thing before moving closer to look at his picture on the stone. A bouquet of not-so-long-dead flowers lay at the foot of the grave. There was someone alive who knew and still cared for Moritz

Benedikt. Oddly, Maris hadn't mentioned the flowers, but she'd been right about something else: After her photographs, I'd had to come to the cemetery the next day to see for myself.

The cameo of Benedikt was large and vaguely yellow from age. He wore a dark suit and formal shirt, but no tie. Not only did we look alike, but for the first time I realized he wore an expression halfway between amusement and small exasperation that I often had on. My mother called me Mr. Long-suffering whenever she saw it. So, the last public image of Moritz Benedikt was as Mr.

Long-suffering. Too bad for him. It made me smile. I wanted to smile then or just generally lighten up because the more I looked at my . . . self, the more nervous and uncomfortable I became. Besides the impossible similarity in looks, I had a gooseflesh chill going up the middle of my spine from something else as well. Some people, after shivering involuntarily, are asked what's the matter. The common answer I'd heard all my life was "Someone just walked over my grave." How's this, though -- imagine coming across your grave, replete with a picture of you on it wearing one of your most recognizable expressions.

Only it isn't your grave and it isn't your stone and it isn't a picture of you and the person in the ground there has been dead thirty years. That ground two feet in front of you.

Two old women, both dressed in black, both carrying identical purses, walked by. One of them looked at me and nodded her head.

"_Guten Tag_, Herr Rednaxela."

The name stuck its finger in my ear, but I couldn't remember where I'd heard it before. I smiled at the woman as if I knew her and what she was talking about.

"It took you a long time to get here!"

Her friend looked angry and shook her head. "Leave him alone. He's way ahead of schedule."

Rednaxela. The crazy man on the bicycle the first day in Vienna with Maris. He had called me Rednaxela!

Without really seeing, I watched the two women start walking away.

"Wait!" I ran a few steps to catch them. "What are you talking about?

Who's Rednaxela?"

Both women smiled and exchanged glances -- they were in on something I didn't know anything about. One of them gave me a little coquettish shrug.

"That's your job to find out. You've come this far."

The other one came up and patted my shoulder. "Everybody's proud of you.

Don't mind what I said before. I was only teasing."

They began to leave again. I grabbed the one closest by the arm and pulled her around to face me. Her smile vanished. "Don't touch me! Stop asking questions. Fuck off!"

I shook her arm. It was thin as a pipe cleaner through the thick wool of her coat. "What are you talking about? Who's Rednaxela? How do you know me?"

A bunch of birds on the grass started as one and flew away.

The woman saw a young couple nearby and started screaming in a squeaky voice, "Help! Let me go! Leave me! Help!" Her companion hit me on the back with her purse. The couple came running over and the man pulled me away from the old woman.

"Who's Rednaxela, damn it!"

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"You'll find out, shithead!"

"Just tell me now."

"The fuck I will, sonny boy."

I started back at her, but the man held me.

"Hey, man, are you crazy? That's an old woman!" He was strong and wasn't going to let go.

The old women scuttled away, watching me the whole time over their shoulders. At first they both looked terrified, but when they were a safe distance away, one of them laughed like a loon and made a crazy face at me:

thumbs in her ears, pinkies pulling out the corners of her mouth, her tongue zipping in and out like a snake's. Her laugh was so strange and loud that the man, his wife, and I all stopped tussling to watch the two women as they turned and disappeared among the gravestones.

"Are you crazy, man? Beating up on old ladies? What the hell for?"

He let go of me and crossed his arms -- a father expecting an explanation from his ten-year-old.

"Forget it. It was a mistake." I was embarrassed and angry and wished like hell I knew where the

"ladies" had gone.

"You don't shake up old ladies in _graveyards_, man. I don't care what you do in your own country."

I looked at him. "What are you talking about?"

"This is Austria. I don't care how you treat people in your own country.

Even if that was your grandmother. Here you do it our way."

His wife came up and gave me a defiant look. "Where _are_ you from? What kind of language was that? I used to work out at the United Nations, but I never heard people talking as crazy as that before."

"What do you mean?"

"That language. Those sounds you were using. Both you and the old women.

Where are you from?"

Her husband gave a big snort. "The ocean maybe! Maybe they're all three dolphins in drag."

I looked at him, his wife. "What did it sound like?" I was frightened.

She looked at me as if I were putting her on. "You know what it sounded like. You were doing it!"

Her man snorted again. "What did it sound like? It sounded like this."

He put two fingers together and started whistling -- whistling so loud that it startled a flock of birds out of a nearby chestnut tree. I looked at him, then at his wife. She nodded at me.

"That's it. Just like that. Where do you speak like that? Can you do it again?" She smiled encouragingly.

I didn't tell Maris. What would I say? "I met two old women at the cemetery today. I attacked one and spoke dolphin-whistle to the other. Then they ran away and stuck their tongues out at me." It would have been a funny scene in a film, but in real life it had the ring of cuckooness deluxe.

And what _about_ that strange language I was supposed to have spoken with them? Where did it fit in, and why hadn't I been aware of speaking anything other than my good old American German?

Who was Rednaxela? Or if _I_ was him, as two nutty old women and a bearded UFO on a bicycle contended, who was he/I? How come I didn't know anything about who "we" were? Or did I?

Finally, what did Moritz Benedikt have to do with it? Joking, the old woman said it'd taken me long enough to figure out that I had to come to the cemetery to see his grave . . .

How did it all fit in? What screws or pieces or instructions were missing from the kit that would enable me to put things together correctly and understand?

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I knew a peculiar American in town named David Buck who spent most of his time in the National Library researching an obscure sixteenth-century German Anabaptist who'd camped out in Austria for a while. Buck was forever broke and looking for ways to make money. So I called and said I'd pay him to research Moritz Benedikt.

All I knew about the man were his dates and the fact that he was buried in the Zentralfriedhof, but Buck said that was enough to go on. He would get back to me when he had something.

Nicholas's death and the bizarre scene at the cemetery shook me badly. I spent days just reading, looking out the window, and eating the good meals Maris cooked. She kept me company and shared a comfortable, necessary silence.

At first I tried to hide the dark things swimming just below my surface, but she saw them fast and said I didn't have much faith in us if I did that.

"The whole purpose of friendship is to give the other strength when they need it. Don't cheat me out of that perk, Walker."

To complicate things, Eva Sylvian called two or three times a day, every day. The conversations (monologues) were all the same. It struck me she would have been happier taping what she said on a recorder, then playing it back so she could agree with herself. She asked if we would do this or that for her, ranging from helping to choose the inscription on Nicholas's vault to picking up her dry cleaning. The tone of her voice said she expected these things to be done. Maris said it sounded more as if Eva felt she deserved to be loved, if not for herself, then certainly for her loss. Funny how some people expect the dearest things in life to come to them simply because they exist or because they have suffered.

One night late the phone rang in my apartment and I was sure it was Eva again. Maris answered, but her eyes widened when she heard who was calling.

Excitedly, she waved me over to the phone and, pointing to the receiver, said, "It's Weber Gregston!"

Gregston was the hottest director in Hollywood. I'd read an interview with him about his newest film, _Breathing You_, which had been nominated for six Oscars. I knew about him through Nicholas, who'd once been his assistant on a film.

"Hello, Walker Easterling?"

"Yes?"

"Hi. Weber Gregston. Listen, I called about a couple of things. I just heard about Nicholas Sylvian. Jesus, I wish I'd known sooner. I'd've come to the funeral. I just talked with Eva. Can you tell me more about what happened?

I didn't get a very clear picture from her."

We talked half an hour about Nicholas and I liked everything Gregston said. He was genuinely grieved about the death. You could easily tell he'd admired and enjoyed Nicholas very much.

What was especially nice was his knowledge of the Sylvian films. He spoke about shots and angles in them as if he'd seen each film three times and paid the closest attention. Our dead friend would have loved to hear the conversation. He had thought Gregston the only near genius in contemporary film.

"Listen, Walker, there's something else. I'm right in the middle of shooting a film out here. It's a little embarrassing to say, but one of my actors had a heart attack yesterday and I need someone fast to fill in for him. It'd be about five days of shooting in L.A. I saw you in Nicholas's film and he said you're good to work with. Do you think you could get away for ten days and fly over? I know it's short notice, but you'd get good money besides doing me a great favor."

Maris was sitting right next to me. I put my hand over the receiver and asked if she wanted to go to California for a couple of weeks. She threw both hands up, closed her eyes, and gave the lucky air a big kiss.

1.

The bad thing about flying to California was that the trip would have to start at the Vienna airport so soon after the massacre. For some strange reason, I'd . . . forgotten for a while that Nicholas died there. Maybe because I didn't want to think about it, maybe because I'd thought about it too much. The realization struck me on the ride out there.