A Trip to the Stars (21 page)

Only once did I think I had glimpsed another side of him. It was a simple incident, which might have had terrible consequences for me. I was eleven, and had slipped out of the hotel by the back entrance to go for a late-night swim. I was forbidden to swim alone in the pool, and rarely did so. But as luck would have it, that particular night, after swimming for a half hour, exhausting myself, I took one last lap underwater and bumped my head against the side while surfacing too fast. Groggy, afraid I’d pass out, I began flailing and swallowing water while the hedges and trees surrounding the pool spun around on me like a carousel. Then out of nowhere a hand with fingers like steel closed around my arm, lifted me out of the water, and deposited me on the grass. I spat up some water and gulped for air. My eyes were closed, burning with chlorine, and when I opened them finally, there was no
one near me—all I saw was the bleary image of a man’s back, fifty yards off, rounding the hedges. I was sure it was Hadar. Shy and taciturn, he was the only person at the hotel who would have left my side at such a moment. But when I sought him out the next day to thank him, he gazed at me as blankly as ever. Finally he shook his head, and in his watery voice, as if delivering a biblical command, growled, “Obey Samax.” Then he walked away. And for a while afterward I felt he was watching out for me at times when I wasn’t watching out for myself.

Hadar, characteristically, worked out of the remotest corner of the hotel: a windowless office at the end of the very last corridor in the second subbasement. The adjoining laboratory was filled with meteorites, labeled and set out on metal tables. He also had a spectrograph, an X-ray machine, and an assortment of microscopes. With these he analyzed specimens for the eight minerals—most of them combinations of iron and nickel—that, in varying mixtures, make up the content of all meteorites. The latter, he once explained to me, are simply the roughly two thousand meteors out of a billion each year that survive the earth’s atmosphere and reach the surface.

Hadar subscribed to the theory, put forth in 1800, that meteors share their origin with asteroids: they are the fragments of a planet which once revolved around the sun between Mars and Jupiter. The planet exploded—for reasons unknown—leaving behind in the same orbit nine concentric asteroid belts, consisting of billions of asteroids. About 3,500 of these are large enough to have been given names. By collecting and examining meteorites from all over the world, and analyzing their shared properties, Hadar hoped to prove the hypothesis of the planetary explosion. So, while the two men seemed so different, at heart Hadar was very much like Deneb; but instead of a lost continent, Hadar’s Atlantis was a lost planet.

In fact, I thought, pouring myself some iced tea, the Hotel Canopus was filled with people looking for lost things, Samax most prominent among them, and with people who had once been lost—like me.

Hadar informed us that he had just returned from Mexico. Before that, he had been in Australia, crisscrossing the Tamani Desert in a Land Rover.

“A different kind of desert,” he said in his clipped voice. “Red stone juts from the ground. Slashes your tires. Pretzel-shaped cacti. Lizards
the size of dogs. Mountains with names like ‘Destruction.’ 116° at noon. Found two glass meteors. Type 3 chondrites. Olivine and pyroxene crystals surrounding pure glass cores. But in Mexico there was real booty.”

Reaching into a scuffed briefcase beneath his chair, he took out three shiny arrowheads and pushed them to the center of the table.

I saw that Labusi’s mind was elsewhere, for meteorites were not one of his passions, but Samax listened intently while serving each of us from the platter of fruit.

“Tell us about it,” Samax said.

“I found the arrowheads in a mountain valley south of Matahuala. They’re also chondrites. Valuable, but not surprising. As you know, Eskimos fashioned arrowheads from meteorites. Indians in Patagonia, too. But
this
,” he said, again dipping into his briefcase, “this is a surprise.” With a self-satisfied twitch of his nose, he produced a shiny black dagger with a bone handle and passed it down the table to Samax. I held it for a long moment—it was heavier than I had expected, and the curved blade was razor-sharp, with a six-pronged silver star near its base.

“Obviously Aztec,” Hadar continued, “used in sacrificial ceremonies. Animal and human. The star on the blade is a royal marking. Like the Egyptians with their pharaoh, the Aztecs had a god-king. Quetzalcoatl. Also had pyramids, of course. Aztecs and Egyptians believed their king was reborn as a star.”

Samax admired the dagger, holding the blade up to the light.

“For your collection, Junius,” Hadar said, sipping his tea.

Samax nodded his thanks. “So the king himself would have used this?” he asked.

“He would have attended the ceremonies. And kept the dagger in his temple.”

“I have seen a similar dagger,” Deneb put in, “but of clear quartz, in Morocco.”

Samax smiled. “I’ll tell you about a clear dagger,” he said, sitting back slowly. “In Florence. For their most important and dangerous murders, the Borgias used one which left no trace.”

“How so?” Calzas said.

“They had a dagger-shaped mold which they filled with water and froze. Then, with a dagger of ice, timing became everything, for their victim had to be stabbed while the ice was still hard. Once it had
penetrated the victim, the dagger melted, leaving no trace in the body except a tiny puncture and a bit of extra water. There might be a small amount of water beside the body, too, if the victim fell a certain way. Even today’s medical examiners and police laboratories would be hard-pressed to determine the cause of death. There would be no incriminating weapon. And water doesn’t hold fingerprints. I’m only surprised it’s a method that’s not caught on,” he added, smiling faintly.

I knew my uncle had made some serious enemies, and that in business dealings he was reputed to be as tough and ruthless as the occasion—and the antagonist—demanded. If he had been the sort of man to have one of those plaques with a motto facing outward on his desk, it might have read:
Bend, but only when you’re sure it’s a way to make the other guy break
.

Later that night, after he and I retired to his library for my Latin lesson, Samax finally told me where he had discovered the memory techniques that had served him as a gambler; at the same time, I also learned a piece of his private history to which only a few people were privy. We were sitting facing each another in leather easy chairs while Sirius sat attentively between us. I was eating fig ice cream with whipped cream while Samax carefully sectioned a white apple on a crystal plate.

“Uncle Junius, what were the other tricks the Borgias used?”

“Oh, so you liked that story. Well, they were big on poison. Hollow rings, for example, filled with poison that they could squirt into your glass when you weren’t looking. Hat pins dipped in arsenic, that kind of thing.” He slipped a wedge of apple into his mouth. “But one of their favorites they could do with what I’m holding right now.”

“You mean, you stab someone with a knife dipped in poison?”

“Nothing so crude. Observe, Enzo, that I am holding a knife
and
an apple.” He laid the knife flat in his palm. “Cesare Borgia would smear poison along only one side of a knife blade. While dining with his victim, he would halve an apple with the knife and casually eat his half. The victim would follow suit, but eat the half where the poison had come off the blade. Even to the most suspicious person, even to an enemy, it might not occur that one could so easily poison
half
a piece of fruit.”

Desserts were finished, Sirius was snoring softly on his side, and Samax had related a few more anecdotes about the Borgias before he
came to what was really on his mind. It was unusual for him to let me stay up with him there so late, just past ten-thirty. Usually at that hour he played a game of chess with Labusi or retired alone to read or spend time with his sculptures and ceramics. Sometimes he got on the phone with dealers, agents, and curators in Europe and the Middle East—where it was morning—in order to set in motion or complete the acquisition of some new piece.

Samax lighted a
petit-corona
, a Havana, and studied me for a moment through the smoke.

“Last year, Enzo, you asked where I had picked up the memory technique I used to gamble, and I said I would tell you sometime.”

I nodded.

“The technique itself is nothing to me now. It was a simple placement method which, because you have studied with Labusi, you would be able to learn yourself quite rapidly. Originally developed by astronomers, it is deceptively simple. Instead of a palace, a small circular garden should be the site of the
loci
. Like the flowers and plants on a gaming table, the garden repeatedly ‘sprouts’ new cards as they are dealt and turned over. Remembering a sequence at poker, blackjack, or chemin de fer became child’s play for me.” He smiled grimly. “It was at that time I discovered my love of gardens. Which was not surprising, considering where I was.” As he laid his cigar in the groove of a marble ashtray, I noticed that his other hand was tightly balled into a fist. “You see, I was in the Ironwater Federal Prison in Colorado. Now that you’re getting older, I thought you should know about this—and hear it from me, not someone else.”

If his eyes had evaded me when we skirted this subject the previous year, now, pained as they were, they remained fixed on mine. It was I who had trouble not looking away; whatever dark and soiled image I had at that age of a prison cell, one thing it could not accommodate in my mind was Samax as its inmate. With his dignified bearing, it was impossible for me to see him in the cartoonish striped shirt and baggy pants of a convict’s garb.

“I served time for exactly one year,” he went on, visibly less tense now that he’d gotten out the bare fact, “for something I did not do. This was in 1926, two years before I made my first fortune on that land in New York I told you about. My cellmate was the one who taught me the memory technique—and a good many other things, as
well. Had I not gone to prison and met him, I would not be sitting here today. As often happens, the worst thing that ever happened to me was at the same time the luckiest thing. Fortunately, I realized this soon enough to make the most of it.” He picked up his cigar and tapped off a neat cylindrical ash. “My cellmate’s name was Rochel, and he was the most extraordinary man I ever knew.” He paused again. “Would you like some juice, Enzo, or soda?”

Listening raptly, I shook my head.

“I was twenty-five years old,” Samax went on, “and he was only five years older, but it seemed like twenty. He had been sentenced to six years, of which he had served three when I arrived. His crime was desertion from the army during the First World War. As you know, I served in that war, and in the Argonne forest witnessed such carnage as I hope never to see again. Rochel was half Zuni, half mixed blood—mostly French and Mexican. And he was a crack shot with a rifle. In 1916, even before America entered the war he was a sniper with a small expeditionary force, attached to the British command, behind the German lines in Arabia. Having grown up in Arizona, near the Four Corners, he was well adapted to the desert. He was the only non-British soldier in his platoon, a dark-skinned man, and the other soldiers treated him as they would an Indian—the other sort of Indian—in their own army. He kept to himself, slept alone, and was often sent far afield on solo missions. He was good at his work, and by the time America did enter the war, he’d had a bellyful of it. By 1918, the Germans were on the run, but Rochel was informed that he was too ‘valuable’ to be sent home and would be transferred to the American forces in Salonica. Instead, he buried his uniform and rifle and went AWOL, across the desert, into Egypt. ‘For one man, I had killed more than my share of other men,’ he told me. ‘Others fought for twelve months. I was a sniper for two and a half years. I was sick of killing.’ This was his defense when he returned to the U.S. two years later and, to his surprise, was arrested at customs in New York Harbor. But it didn’t wash. Despite his war record—even the British had decorated him—the judge threw the book at him. Guys who had deserted without firing a shot were routinely given two years, but Rochel wasn’t a white man so he got the maximum.

“Certainly after two years in southern Egypt he looked and felt more Zuni than when he had left the States. In the mountains beside
the Red Sea he fell in with a group of Sufis, the mystical Islamic sect, and was amazed at the similarities between some Sufi and Zuni practices. Fasting, for example, to sharpen inner vision. Desert meditation which may evolve into active hallucination. Moral precepts delivered through fables and parables. But, according to Rochel, among the Sufis all this was accompanied by ferocious discipline, of which the Zunis had been sapped by the Spanish conquistadors and missionaries. Centuries of occupation had relegated the intricate, cyclical Zuni religious myths to the shadows. So Rochel sailed across the sea, infused with Sufism, ready to return to his people with a vengeance, and instead he went straight to jail.

“And that’s where I come in. Rochel had had other cellmates—bank robbers, a swindler, and a child murderer, but they had all been guilty, he told me. ‘You are an innocent man,’ he asserted, moments after I was locked in with him and before I had said a word. Thus I became his first and only student in prison, the recipient of some of the fervor he had been holding in all that time. And I
was
an innocent man. My supposed crime was tax evasion, for which I had been framed by none other than my brother Nilus, whom you’ve heard about before. For all his ruthlessness, Nilus was a weak man, easily swayed. And he was swayed on this occasion—the absolute nadir of our relationship—by his partner, who was also his lawyer, a man named Vitale Cassiel.”

Here Samax paused to relight his cigar and pour himself some pomegranate juice. It was nearly midnight. Through the large windows, the stars were glittering over the desert. Sirius was still sleeping. But I was wide awake, and felt as if I had scarcely drawn a breath for the last hour.