The Black Isle (51 page)

At nine that night, I went to the warehouse. It spanned the length of a short street in the southwest corner of the Isle that, only a few years before, had been entirely swampland. I wasn’t alone. As G. B. had promised, a band of freelance Gurkha guards stood watching the property, shirtless and smoking aromatic clove cigarettes. G. B. had also offered dogs but I politely declined—canines never liked me.

With my hair pulled back into a severe bun and my grim ensemble of black blouse, black shawl, black skirt, I made the guards a little nervous.

“Good evening, madam.” They put out their cigarettes and bowed to me.

I nodded mysteriously in return.

It was a bare-bones warehouse, with moonlight leaking through ventilation slats in the walls. I entered on my own. Stealth was key. I resisted turning on the lights. They would only send the culprits—I hadn’t ruled out human mischief—scattering into the shadows. In the silvery dark, I could make out the assembly of five hundred mannequins—bald, naked, grinning. All female. They stood in neat rows, ready to be activated, like a mechanical concubine army.

I moved to the darkest corner and sat down.

Nothing happened for hours. No noise, no motion, not even the scurrying of rats.

Then, around midnight, it began.

From the back of the hall rose a piercing squeal—the sound of a mannequin’s limb joint being turned. It was followed by another squeal, closer to the center. I stood up slowly, then, hearing the next sound, darted to its source. There I found at the front of the hall a dummy trio facing one another, their arms stretched out to join hands.

A patter of quick footsteps, from the deep center of the hall. A dark shadow flitted between the dolls, humanoid in form yet much too swift to be so. My client’s suspicions were right. This was no common thief.

There was no choice. I had to enter the mannequin maze.

The gaps between them were narrow, just enough for me to squeeze through. I inched along this beige forest, feeling the hard plaster arms grazing my sides. Gooseflesh sprouted all over me. Each of these bald women was identical—blue eyes, dark Slavic eyebrows, ruby lips, breasts without nipples—and they were all six feet tall. What outlandish fantasy was G. B. encouraging with these models? No housewife on the Isle looked remotely like them.

An earsplitting series of squeaks scattered my thoughts. I stopped moving.

Suddenly, the squeaks were replaced by rumbling that grew louder as it neared. One after another, beginning at the back, these Amazonian women had begun to tumble, face forward, like dominos. When the one before me came bearing down, laden with the shocking weight of her sisters behind her, I was pinned beneath her artificial grin.

She was as cold as ice. I screamed.

The warehouse grew eerily quiet.

“Who is it?” called a young girl’s anxious voice.

“A friend,” I said, freeing myself from the doll that had crushed me. “And
you
?”

Astride two felled bodies, at the back of the hall, stood a girl of twelve or thirteen—Indian, wrapped in a sari that glowed pink even in the dark.

“You can see me,” she said.

“I can hear you, too.”

I stood and showed myself. She advanced toward me, stepping on the dummies as if they were her bridge. This was a fearless child.

As she neared, I saw the blackened welts on her cheeks and neck: smallpox. The sight of her—so young, so spirited, so dead—brought a lump to my throat.

She eyed me. “You didn’t turn on the light. They always turn on the light when they come in.”

“I thought you might run away if you knew I was here.”

“Aren’t you afraid of me?” The boastful little thing.

“Frankly, I’m more afraid of them.” I gestured to the fallen women, some of whose arms and legs had popped off at the joint, their faces still placidly smiling.

She laughed, the bright laughter of a quick-witted girl. “But they’re so pretty! I wish I could look like them. But with hair, of course. And clothes. Not a stupid sari but nice, modern type of clothes. Like in the departmental stores.”

“I don’t understand. Why do you toss them around? Is it fun?”

“I can’t sleep!” She gave the nearest doll a firm kick. “It’s so unfair. I have a soul but obviously I have no body. And here are these bodies, and they have no souls!”

Again she laughed, but this time her eyes surveyed the mannequins with a mixture of longing and sadness.

“We can’t have everything, you know, dear,” I said gently.

“I’m not asking for everything. I’ve got
nothing
! I had nothing in life, and then in death,
nothing
! I mean, look at me!” She bared her arms and legs, darkened and deformed by disease. “All I want is a pretty body to go to sleep in, that’s all. If I had one, just one, I’ll finally be able to sleep.”

“So why don’t you choose one?”

“I can’t find the right one.”

“But they’re all the same.”

“
That’s
the bladdy problem!”

She cackled, shrill with frustration now. With a balled-up fist, she punched one of the mannequins near her, sending it flying several feet. “I hate you!” she yelled after it.

I longed to comfort her.
But wait
, I warned myself.
The girl doesn’t want my pity. She wants my help
.

“What if I chose one for you? Would you accept it?”

She looked at me, surprised by my offer.

“But how will you know which one to choose?”

I pointed at a random doll. “I say this one. She’s a bit prettier than the others.”

The girl stared at the mannequin, skeptical. Protectiveness took over quickly. She leapt to its side and examined her potential shell from head to toe.

“I still can’t tell,” she said. “What if she’s the wrong one?”

“You asked me to choose, and I think she’s the right one.” I removed the black ribbon from my hair and tied it around the doll’s left wrist. “See, I’ve marked her. Now she’s not like the others.”

The girl nodded and lay herself atop the dummy, fidgeting until she locked into a favorable pose, her knees around the mannequin’s waist, her arms around its neck. Mother and desperate, clinging child. It didn’t look very comfortable but the girl yawned, and within a few minutes, began to fade. Her staring eyes were the last things to go.

I quarantined the occupied mannequin, carrying her outside and leaving her against the warehouse door. The Gurkha guards moved themselves away from her, afraid even to glance in her direction.

The following day, I met G. B. at his club and gave him instructions: Get the doll a good wig, find it the most fashionable dress from his store, and take it to a Hindu priest to have a traditional death rite conducted.

“The days of your dancing dolls are now over,” I assured him.

A single tear rolled down my client’s cheek. I still remember it vividly—satisfaction always made me very happy.

I filled my wardrobe with black clothes—smart and stylish, rather than drab and funereal.

Most times when I was called in, once or twice a month, I could have offered a diagnosis in a matter of minutes, but had I done so, my judgments would have been valued far less. My clients were captains and overlords who watched over buzzing personnel. They needed to believe they were paying for detailed analyses from an expert who took weeks to close each case, not snap judgments made by a dilettante, however highly touted, to whom it came as no effort.

I worked up an act. In a pantomime of precision and thoroughness, I would walk gravely through proposed building sites for hours, even days, poking my fingers into the soil, sniffing the air, caressing door frames. “Dirty,” I would say, shaking my head. “Very dirty.” While this was in part theatrics, I was no charlatan; I always gave my clients exactly the information they sought, including the sad truth: Male ghosts of an older generation did not welcome expulsion by a woman like me. They required extra cajoling—and additional threats, trade secrets I shall take to my grave.

Only once did I absolutely forbid anyone from setting up shop. The self-made “Tour-Bus King,” L. W. T. wanted to establish his “hotel with a view” atop Forbidden Hill. The location was first-class, to be sure, but I had promised the spirits there an eternal home. I told Kenneth, and he grudgingly acceded to my verdict.

Usually, I spelled out the relevant risks and left the ultimate decision to build or abandon up to the client. I was merely a facilitator. My job was to reduce the possibility of conflict and inconvenience to both parties, living
and
dead. And I never, ever forgot to keep an eye out for the dog-man, my fugitive badi. That we hadn’t met again in all these years meant he preyed on my thoughts more than the ghosts I did see.

Because the Isle
was
dirty, work was steady. When I finished with one job list, Kenneth promptly furnished me with another, always incanting, until it became a cliché, “A sorcerer’s work is never done.”

I deposited the cash in my savings account and watched it grow—six years of my old salary in less than a year—withdrawing only the amounts I needed to get by on and for occasional indulgences like cognac, chocolate, and leather-bound editions of my favorite books. With the memory of poverty still close, I didn’t spend my earnings all at once but instead luxuriated in the dreaming—Italian handbags and shoes, dresses from the pages of
Vogue
, dinners at the Ship.

Though it had taken over a decade, I had finally pulled myself out of the postwar inertia. My destiny—and the Isle’s—was finally blossoming.

With my secret guidance, buildings were rising everywhere, ten, twelve, fifteen stories high. Thanks to me, there was clean land for the Balmoral Hotel’s expansion, accommodating new package-tour clientele from England, America, even Germany. But I was proudest of my contribution to Holland Halt, a low-cost housing estate that has continued to put roofs over ten thousand heads ever since its completion in 1964.

Kenneth proved to be less thrilled about my success than I thought he would be. The shadow, he decided, was getting too grand for its master, even as the master took credit for everything the shadow did.

“You’re gloating!” he said to me one night in my bed. “I saw your new shoes.”

“I’m not at all gloating. It’s just two pairs.”

“And both Christian Dior. God knows what else you’ve got hidden away.”

“You should talk. You’re the one who now plays
golf
.”

“Don’t change the subject. These assignments are supposed to be secret, Cassandra.
Sub rosa
.”

“And they are—I’ve not told a soul. And my clients,
our
clients, certainly aren’t going to be blathering about me around town. They’re always incredibly embarrassed by their problems. Sometimes I feel like a sex doctor.”

“I’m sure you do. I’ve heard the way they talk about you afterward. So sated.”

“Don’t be an idiot.”

He grew quiet. “I’d like thirty percent. Finder’s fee.”

“But you already skim the cream off the top…don’t you?”

He said nothing.

“Ten percent,” I said.

“Twenty-five.”

“Fifteen.”

“Done.”

On the night of Kenneth’s forty-second birthday in 1962, we celebrated quietly in his apartment. I brought him a Black Forest cake from the Balmoral’s bakery and, of course, a bottle of his esteemed Dom Pérignon. I could have invited Issa and Cricket, but it had become an unspoken custom with Kenneth that we celebrated our birthdays as a couple.

“Enjoy the view,” Kenneth said cheerily as we tucked into the cake at his wobbly excuse of a dining table. “Because very soon, all this will be no more.”

“What, your girlish figure?”

“Alas, no.” He smiled, his upper lip smeared with cream. “I mean this measly flat with its measly rooms and measly walls and measly cooking smells from the measly flat below and the measly old Sikh asleep in the measly guardhouse no matter the time of measly day or measly night.”

I burst out laughing. “Are they knocking this measly place down? I mean, I’ve a measly right to know. I live practically next door.”

“I’m moving at the end of the month. Found a nice new place by the Gardens. Two bedrooms, two baths, wraparound balcony. All mod-cons, as they say. And I’m buying, not renting.”

“Oh.” I tried to keep the wariness from creeping into my voice. “You never said a word. It sounds expensive.”

The area around the Botanic Gardens had been a highfliers’ enclave since the days of the British; it was still the dominion of diplomats and politicians, and their black-and-white mansions. Evidently, new apartments had been put up for arrivistes, though not under my advice.

“Expensive it is, but the down payment’s doable. I know, I know, I should have asked you to suss the place out before I signed all the papers, but”—he shrugged—“I suppose I got smitten. Didn’t want anyone telling me about the headless sadhu stationed in my kitchen or whatever it might be. You know how it is.”

“I wouldn’t tell you anything you didn’t want to know.”

“Ah, but I can always see it in your eyes.” He squeezed my hand. “The ghost of a ghost, ever visible.”

I let him finish his cake before I spoke again.

“I had no idea you were looking. This is secretive even by your standards.”

His eyes grew glassy, almost sentimental. “I ran into an old friend the other day, from prehistoric times. And it got me thinking, you know, about growing older, about having to grab hold of things. I mean, I’m forty-two. High time I made the commitment, don’t you think?” He gave me doe eyes, but as ever, he looked more wolf than doe.

“Who’s the friend from ‘prehistoric times’?” For some irrational reason, I thought of Taro and felt slightly ill.

He deflected my question with a spirited jangle of his keys. “Do you want to see the flat or not? We can take a quick drive over there right now.”

I shook my head.

“I’ve spoiled the mood, haven’t I?” He sighed. “I hoped you’d be happy for me.”

“I am, for
you
. But…I like having you near.”

He walked over and hugged me in my chair, stroking my head as he pressed my temple against his chest. I had seen him administer this same embrace to terminal patients in the cancer ward; he later explained it was so he didn’t have to look them in the eye.