A Trip to the Stars (48 page)

Seeing Samax at work in his greenhouse was not like seeing him anywhere else. A man who had grown more formal with age, in the hotel he rarely wandered around in anything less casual than a jacket or silk robe. In fact, he rarely wandered around at all anymore. Even in his private quarters he favored the red smoking jacket mono-grammed in yellow that he had specially made for him in Milan every couple of years. But in the greenhouse, off-limits to everyone when he was at work, Samax had worn the same long white lab coat and scuffed rubber shoes—the outfit of scientists in old movies, I used to think—for years. The coat was thin from repeated washings, with countless plant stains and snags from thorns and twigs. In the lapel pocket he kept his reading glasses and a couple of cigars; in the side pockets, a pair of well-worn chamois gloves. He liked to handle soil, humus, peat moss, fertilizer. He liked the mud under his fingernails, the water drenching his sleeves, the fetid air clinging to his nostrils. Sensations alien to his everyday life in the hotel. He lost himself at that zinc sink, at the long wooden tables, on the ladders and platforms enveloped in mist in the upper reaches of the greenhouse. His movements were as precise and unhurried as ever—the legacy of his years as a professional gambler—but his face was far more relaxed and his eyes seemed fixed on what was before them. They seldom strayed into the middle distance, where he might have entered the more difficult byways of his memory, or, worse, the urgent, treacherous terrain of worry and calculation which so preoccupied him at that time.

“When I started out with this graft,” he went on, “everything indicated that it belonged to that category of failure. Not only had no one attempted to graft the
Averrhoa carambola
, or starfruit, of the wood sorrel family, on the
Chrysophyllum cainito
, or star apple, of the sapodilla family, but no one had ever successfully grafted other members
of their respective families across genera. All problems of scion and rootstock aside—and they are big problems—as far as I know no one has attempted this graft because it would be considered problematic fruitwise. The star apple is purple and apple-shaped, with a rough skin. It grows in Central America. The starfruit is bright yellow and five-angled, with a waxy skin. It grows in Indonesia. The one has many tiny black seeds, the other a few amber ones.”

“So what will your fruit look like?” I asked.

A smile played over his lips. “I appreciate your confidence, Enzo,” he said. “If I’m successful, I foresee a star-shaped fruit when it’s cross-sectioned, with a hard, waxy skin. Its flesh will be indigo, speckled with yellow seeds. The fruit will appear in profusion, many to a branch, as it does on both these trees. This guy is my best candidate,” he added, pointing to a large grafting planted in black humus and bathed in ultraviolet light. “If the graft takes, I’ll know in a year whether or not it will produce fruit. The scion will become the aerial portion and the rootstock will form the roots. On my previous attempts, the scion got killed off because buds and suckers sprouted on the rootstock. I also have to keep an eye on the nutritive balance, to prevent leaf scorch and chlorosis, which is like botanical jaundice.”

He held up the grafting for which he had high hopes and examined it carefully. “Right now the balance appears to be just right … so the only question is whether it can sustain fruit,” he said, his voice trailing off.

At the sink he drank two glasses of water before joining me on the bench. “I got so thirsty all of a sudden,” he said, unbuttoning his lab coat and loosening the collar of his shirt.

To me, he looked uncharacteristically pale. And his irises, usually the clearest blue, seemed smoky. “Uncle Junius, it’s late, maybe we should go in.”

He glanced at his watch. “Two-twenty. You go in. I’ll be finished here soon.”

“No, I’ll wait. I’m not tired.”

“When you are tired, go,” he said, mopping the back of his neck with his handkerchief. “I haven’t been able to sleep lately.”

“How come?”

He shrugged, averting his eyes. “The years are catching up with me, Enzo. When you get older, you sleep less.”

“You’re in better shape than men half your age,” I said. “You can still swim a mile without stopping.”

“You know I haven’t been swimming in weeks.” He shook his head. “I’m going to be seventy-three years old soon.”

I had never heard him bring up his age in this way. “You’re worried about something. What is it?”

He waved this away. “Why should I be worried? I want this tree to succeed, yes. And there’s that other amulet … we have some new leads … we’re getting closer.”

“I know all that.”

“Well?”

“Come on, Uncle Junius, you’ve always told me to level with you.”

He opened his hands slowly and examined his palms. “It’s Vitale Cassiel,” he said simply, evenly, but the mere mention of this man’s name sent a chill through me. “He’s been occupied elsewhere,” Samax went on, “but he always comes back, always from a different angle. Always with the same objective.”

“What’s that?” I asked quietly.

“My destruction,” Samax replied. “He may make it look like something else, he may be blunt or subtle, but that’s what he wants to accomplish.” He looked up at me. “And he never will, I promise you that.”

“But why?” I said. “It was
he
who wronged
you
.“

“It’s not that simple.” He hesitated. “You’ll know the whole story one day. To hear it now would be of no help to you. In fact, it would be a hindrance.”

Later I would be astonished to learn that one small part of that story which had taken on great importance was the fire I started in the ghost town of Hydra. An embarrassment in my own life, what should have remained an obscure incident had become the trip wire of the most recent flare-up in Samax’s private war with Vitale Cassiel. Through his own sources in the Las Vegas Police Department, Vitale Cassiel had discovered that the two boys who had burned down The Hotel Vega were none other than Junius Samax’s great-nephews. Because I was a minor at the time, he sued Samax for damages and tried to have Auro and me charged with arson and malicious mischief—charges that Samax used all his influence, and considerable energy, to block legally and also to keep from ever reaching our ears,
which was no small feat. This sequence of events could have been just another drop in what was already an ocean of bad blood, but because Auro and I were involved, it enraged Samax that much more. And, in retrospect, it became apparent that it marked the first moves in the endgame of Samax’s tortuous relationship with Vitale Cassiel.

“Did you know,” Samax said, veering to another subject, “that all imposed grafts go back to a single fruit tree in Florence?”

I shook my head, not happy to be put off in this way.

“The year was 1644,” he said in a leisurely voice, leaning back and changing his tone as abruptly as he had changed the subject. “The tree came to be called the ‘Bizzarria Orange’—for obvious reasons if you were a Florentine gardener at that time. Root grafts occur naturally on tropical plantations where all sorts of trees mingle in the soil. But in Italy, where species are more segregated, they’re unheard of. So when a certain Guido Angelli one spring day in a forgotten corner of the garden of his employer, the Barone Zelo, found a single tree with oranges on some branches, lemons on others, and combinations of the two fruits on still others, he dropped to his knees. Not in ecstasy or devotion, but because he was terrified that Satan himself had touched down in that garden. In fact, somehow, a scion of sour orange had been naturally grafted onto a stock of lemon. The tree turned out to be a true hybrid, eventually producing only lemon-oranges—the first known chimera in pomology. Years ago, I acquired one of its descendents, but I donated it to the Botanical Gardens in Albuquerque. It’s still there today.…”

His speech became increasingly slow, as if his voice were a phonograph slipping into the wrong speed. “We are all of us accidents of nature,” he concluded, “refined by thousands of graftings … some that take, some that don’t.” He ran his handkerchief over the back of his neck. “My history, yours—we can control our destinies up to a point. What shapes us is the extent to which we can adapt beyond that point.…”

His eyes were closed now. Samax was not a man given to rambling, and it frightened me to hear him go on like this. I sat stiffly for nearly a minute, waiting to see if he would continue. The giant humidifiers whirred overhead and the palm fronds rustled in the artificial breezes stirred up by the floor fans. Through the vapor on the ceiling panes the desert stars twinkled faintly. Samax was rocking his shoulders,
gripping his knees. I had never seen him look so tired and frail. His spine was bent. The creases in his brow seemed to have deepened, merging at his temples. His usually crisp white hair was damp. Suddenly his eyelids snapped open and he surprised me by standing up in one clean motion and walking to the sink, sure and steady on his feet.

What happened next I would watch again many times over the next two years on the nights I found it difficult to fall asleep myself.

Samax turned on the tap and began washing the leaves of a small quince tree with a piece of cheesecloth. For several minutes he neither spoke nor looked at me. In fact, he acted as if I weren’t still sitting there behind him on the stone bench. At first this was a relief: I told myself I had read him all wrong, that he was feeling fine after unburdening himself. That the rambling had been cathartic. He picked up a pair of scissors and snipped away several torn or wilting quince leaves. He loosened the soil at the tree’s base with a miniature pickfork. Then, rising up on his toes, he reached toward one of the overhead shelves for an aluminum sprayer. His fingers closed around the sprayer’s handle, but he never lifted it from the shelf. For an eternity he remained frozen on the balls of his feet, his right arm fully extended. Then without warning he wheeled around, wearing a quizzical expression. He opened his mouth to speak, I heard my name die on his breath, and then he started shaking violently and the sprayer crashed into the sink. In a matter of seconds, he lurched forward, tried to right himself, and, knees buckling, toppled sideways against the worktable before I could leap up and break his fall.

“Uncle Junius!” I cried.

His left arm and leg continued to twitch. His eyes stared up at me helplessly. I heard only a single word, just a whisper, escape his lips before his jaw locked: “Fire …”

He’s going to die and there’s nothing I can do, I thought, my heart hammering.

“Just hold on,” I whispered, stripping off my shirt and sliding it under his head. His skin was clammy and cold. All the blood seemed to have drained from his face: it looked white as a piece of paper. I didn’t want to leave him even for a moment, but I raced across the greenhouse and called Azu on the house phone. Within fifteen minutes
an ambulance had backed up to the greenhouse door and a pair of attendants were lifting Samax onto a stretcher.

Desirée and I followed the ambulance in her silver Corvette. Aroused from sleep, she had slipped into jeans and a denim jacket. Her hair was uncombed, her eyes heavy. She was chewing gum nervously. And all the while, I thought I was checking the tears welling up in me, until I felt the wind turn them cold on my cheeks. And though I had never cried in front of Desirée, I made no effort to conceal it.

Samax’s left hand remained numb for months, and his eyelid fluttered, but aside from a faint limp which he had from then on, he seemed to suffer no long-term damage to his faculties. “What does ‘long-term’ mean when you’re seventy-three?” he said drily when I visited him at the hospital one day. “Until I hit a hundred, like Dolores? No, that’s not in the cards for me.”

In fact, because of his strong constitution and rock-steady habits, his physical rehabilitation was hugely successful—a marvel, the doctors insisted, for a man his age. The emotional aftereffects were something else, especially for those of us who knew him well. His fixation on the Angel of Death was by far the most dramatic of these. “I saw him, Enzo, as surely as I see you now. He swooped down through the glass ceiling, through the trees, and bent over me, yellow with hundreds of eyes, and then pointed his long sword at me, the blade tilted so I could see my own eyes reflected in it.” Subsequent sightings, always when he was alone, took place in the quincuncial orchard, at the edge of the desert, and again in the greenhouse. Generally, however, after the stroke he kept to himself even more than usual—which meant he practically became solitary. He traveled little and entertained less. And of course he hired the bodyguards, which I was now certain had less to do with Vitale Cassiel than with the increased frequency with which Samax said he glimpsed that yellow fire with the blue eyes—as if two martial arts specialists and crack shots could protect him from his visions, much less from death itself.

During this period, it was not unusual for Samax to cancel dinner in the tenth-floor dining room four, even five, times a week; and when we did all dine together, he seemed distant, preoccupied not with archaeological digs or auctions in Hong Kong and Venice, but other matters, much closer to home. It was also around this time that Calzas
finally married his fiancée Cela and moved permanently to Santa Fe. He went with Samax’s blessing, even his encouragement, and a good deal of financial support to set up his own architectural firm. Samax missed Calzas, and said as much, but I don’t think even he knew how much of a loss it was to him; certainly none of us realized at first how great a toll the younger man’s departure would take on my uncle. Calzas had not only been a business confidant and trusted friend, but also the closest thing to a son Samax ever had. That is, until I had arrived on the scene. Now that I was becoming a man, as Delia had once pointed out to me, I was stepping more and more into Calzas’s shoes. Or, to be more exact, a moment came when I realized that I was
expected
to step into them. While affectionate to me as a child, Samax on many levels had always treated me as an adult, but even before he fell ill I saw that he had truly begun to rely on me, both in business and personal matters—and that was something quite different.