The Color of Light (63 page)

A long time ago, another pale face, upturned in the dark.

With a strangled sound, he thrashed back the sheets and swung his legs over the side of the bed, bare feet thudding heavily against the floor.

“I have no right,” he said, a cry of torment. “I have no right.”

She rolled onto her side, placed a warm hand in the small of his back. He shuddered away from her touch.

“Is this about yesterday?” she asked, bewildered. “About what happened at the Met?”

He was pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes, as if he wanted to block something from his sight. “Not just yesterday,” he said, his voice strung tight. “All my yesterdays.”

She wanted desperately to help. “Does this have anything to do with…” she drew a shaky breath, “…something that happened in Auschwitz?”

He froze; then he turned slowly to face her.

“Who told you that?” he said. His eyes had changed, iced over, hard and pale. “Anastasia?”

She nodded.

“What else did she tell you?” His voice shifted now, ominous and low.

Now she felt fear. “She told me to ask you about the Angel of Healing,” she whispered weakly.

He got out of bed, dressing hurriedly.

“What?” she said, panic tearing a new edge in her voice. “What happened? Where are you going?”

He stopped for a moment, gazed at her. Poor Tessa, sweet, lovely Tessa, sitting there in the dark, her hair wild around her face, blankets fallen around her waist, her eyes mirroring his anguish. He couldn’t answer her, he could never answer her. The past had caught up with the present, and he couldn’t stay here anymore.

He grabbed his coat and he was gone. She heard the door slam shut behind him, listened to the sound of his footsteps running down the empty street.

Across the street at St. Xavier’s, one of the huddled shadows on the steps stirred, straightened up, and hailed a taxi going north up Sixth Avenue.

9

T
he rumors started the following morning. Geoff had been sacked, Tony had been sacked, Josephine had been sacked, Randy was on his way out. April was seen strutting around the hallway at Whit’s side, dictating as he scribbled away on his clipboard.

“What’s going on?” Tessa asked Portia. They were in the Anatomy room, waiting for Life Drawing to start, the animal skeletons encased in antique wood cabinets looking dolefully on the proceedings. Portia thought she looked tired. The skin under her eyes was a smudgy blue.

“Are you all right?”

Tessa grimaced. “I’m fine. But Rafe is coming apart.”

“Rafe’s been taking care of himself for a long time. It’s you I’m worried about.”

Graham came in, dropped his art box on the work table next to Portia. They both jumped. “Well, that’s it, then.”

“What?”

“Turner’s set a date to vote on the future of the school. It’s going to take place here, in the Cast Hall, at the end of the week. The board and the faculty all have a vote.”

“What about us?” said David, puzzled. “The students? Don’t we have a say? It’s our school, too.”

“Apparently not,” said Graham.

“What about Rafe?” asked Ben, sanding his pencil to a fine point. “Where is he? Why is he letting this happen?”

“Well,” said Graham, bending a look at Tessa. “As of this morning, it seems our Mr. Sinclair has been booted off the board for fraternizing with a student.”

Tessa blushed a furious scarlet. “That can’t be,” she stuttered. “We broke up. We did exactly what Levon told us to do.”

Graham looked more than a little pained. “Sorry, Tessa. Turner has pictures. Blesser knew this private investigator. Very artistic, incidentally, lots of atmospheric low lighting and grainy black-and-white.”

Her blood ran cold. “How long?” She gripped the side of her work table to steady herself. “How long was he watching us?”

“According to the date stamps on the pictures,” he said, “since the end of Winter Break.”

“What does this mean?” Ben interrupted.

“Rafe’s out,” Graham said glumly. “Our quaint little
atelier
will cease to exist as we know it. The board has lost their faith in Rafe’s ability to run the school. Without him, Whit has a free hand in hiring and firing. Seems like he’s going to let go of most of the teachers and replace them with April’s emerging artist buddies. Starting next fall, we’re going to be a groovy new boutique art school, something like Art Center in Pasadena. And the grant money will start rolling in. Or so says the word on the street.”

“So it’s over.” David said incredulously.

Ben sighed. “It was always too good to be true.”

“This isn’t right.” Harker struck the pick across his guitar strings, a harsh, discordant sound that bounced off the walls and echoed through the room. “There must be something we can do.”

“This is outrageous,” said Clayton indignantly. “I’d like to examine the evidence for myself. Now, where exactly are they keeping these pictures?”

No one wanted to look directly at Tessa, no one wanted to make her feel responsible, but as the conduit to the founder of the school, it was unavoidable. They turned to her for hope, for help, for an explanation.

Portia tried to draw attention away from her friend. She clearly had enough on her mind.

“Let’s go talk to Levon,” she said.

The call came at eight a.m. Rafe was in a deep sleep. It took him a moment to realize that the shrill ringing wasn’t part of his dream.

“You’d better get down here,” said Levon.

“It’s been a rotten night, Levon,” he said. “Can’t it wait?” Then, with a sudden stab of dread. “It’s not Tessa, is it?”

“No,” said Levon. “It’s not Tessa.”

The hallways were deserted that time of day; the first class started at nine. Rafe found Levon’s door wide open, his office oddly shrunken without his outsize presence.

Two doors further down was Whit’s office. Rafe pushed open the door. The walls were neatly hung with Whit’s paintings; sterile architectural renditions of plazas in Italy, or Spain, eerily devoid of human life. Painstakingly plotted landscapes, where nothing in nature seemed natural.

Whit was posed in front of his desk, legs crossed casually, humming to himself as he marked something off on his clipboard. Rafe was reminded of a patient spider at the center of an intricate web.

“I tried, Rafe,” he said weightily, shaking his head. “I really tried.”

Rafe looked to Levon for an explanation, but Levon seemed to be preoccupied with looking out the window at the wet gray morning.

With a look of grim satisfaction, Whit pushed a large manila envelope across the desktop. Rafe opened the flap and slid out the contents.

Grainy black-and-white photos, ten in all. Tessa getting out of the car in front of his house. Tessa kneeling between Rafe’s knees as he sat on the bordello couch in her studio. Tessa’s lovely bottom astride Rafe in her bedroom late last night, his hands around her waist, the photograph shot through a chink in her blinds. Rafe arched like a ballet dancer over her body, her hair flowing over the pillows. Rafe fleeing Tessa’s building last night, the photo time-stamped 5:00 a.m.

It struck him that Whit had already seen the pictures, salivated over them, God knows what else. Rafe slid the photos back into the envelope.

“Sorry, Rafe,” said Whit. A smile was breaking through his professionally somber expression. “As of now, you’re out. I know what you’re thinking; don’t bother. The other board members have already seen the pictures. And let me tell you, they are very disappointed. They want you out with as little fuss as possible.”

Rafe’s head pulsed, ached. “Who’s going to pay the teachers?” he demanded harshly. “Who’s going to pay for the ventilation system? And the new boiler? Do you have any idea how much all those things cost?”

“It’s not your business anymore, Rafe,” Whit said smoothly. For the record, he assembled a look of bland sympathy. “Look. No one wanted this to work more than I did. All I wanted was for you to meet me halfway.”

“No you didn’t,” said Rafe, gliding slowly towards him. “That’s what you want everyone to believe. We were struggling along very nicely before Blesser filled your head with pictures of dancing grant checks he could procure if only we hired these teachers, or filled these ridiculous requirements, or changed our program to fit whatever p.c. nonsense is being sold under the name of art this year. The minute Bernard promised fame and fatter paychecks, you were ready to sell your soul.”

Whit crossed his arms, smiled blithely. He could afford to be gracious now, he was the victor. But something mean in him wanted to hold the cool, aristocratic founder’s nose to the dirt and rub hard. “Look at the bright side, Rafe. You have no more obligations to meet. No more parties, no more galas, no more meetings. You have all the time in the world.” He turned back to his desk to arrange some papers. “I hope she was worth it.”

Levon didn’t know how he did it, Rafe seemed to fly over the desk. He seized Turner by the neck, punched him full in the throat, once, twice. Then he let him sag to the floor and stood over him.

Turner curled into a ball, gagging, lying helplessly between Rafe’s legs. Levon stared. Rafe’s eyes shone white, like an icy pond. He had never seen anyone look like that before.

“Rafe,” he said quietly. “Let him go.”

The wolfish eyes turned to stare at him.

“Get out of here,” said Levon.

The icy eyes flickered, went back to their usual cloudy, indistinct gray. With a swish of his coattails, he stepped over Turner’s body and was gone.

Despite the sleet falling from the sky, Rafe strode forward, driven into the wind. He should never have started with Tessa, he saw that now. It had promised heartache and ruin from the beginning, and yet he had pursued it, grasped for it with both hands.

People brushed past him, leaving an unwelcome smear of their passions across his soul. This one was in fear for his job. That one was lying to
her lover. A third had let credit card debt pile up with no way of paying it down. Another had a lump that needed further testing.

As the afternoon slouched towards an equally dreary evening, he placed a call to the agency from a last anachronistic phone booth in Cooper Square. Janina was already waiting at his door by the time he got home, the hairs on her fox coat flattened by the wind. She stamped her stiletto-heeled feet on the pavement as he found his keys and opened the door.

There was no coy conversation. His fangs were bared, his irises were wide and glacial white as he flung her onto the carpet in front of the dead fireplace.

She laughed a little breathlessly, excited. She was wearing almost nothing beneath her fur, breasts nearly bursting from a ludicrously tiny bra. Sheer black stockings stopped halfway up her long lean thighs, attached to the skinny black straps of a barely-there garter belt. Laying back on the rich pile of her coat, knees apart, she waited for him.

“Ooh,” she whispered, smiling. “Feisty.”

With a roar, he was upon her. Crushing her under his weight, his teeth ripped into her throat, drawing great drafts from the taut artery beneath her jaw. She cried out, first with professional sounds of passion, and then in terror. She bucked her hips into the air, trying to throw him off, but he had the strength of ten men. When she slashed at his cheek with her teeth, clawed at him with her nails, he pinned her wrists over her head as easily if she were a little girl.

The wet sucking sounds went on for a long time. Long past the time that she had stopped moving.

Finally satiated, he raised his head. “God,” he said, wiping his mouth. “Sorry about that, old girl. Been a rough week.”

There was no response. He rolled her face towards him. The eyes were closed, the skin mottled and gray. “Oh, no,” he whispered. “Oh, no no no.” Frantically, he patted her face, her wrists, trying to restore circulation, trying to wake her. Panicking, he put his ear to her chest, over her heart. He was rewarded with a thin, thready heartbeat.

There was a phone on the table between the chairs. He leapt to his feet, dialed 911. When the operator answered, he hastily hung up the phone. He was Raphael Sinclair, millionaire philanthropist, for God’s sake. How
would it look to have a half-dead vampire hooker in his foyer? Ashamed of himself, he picked up the phone again. Suddenly he remembered something, opened his wallet, took out a card.
Drohobych Import Export,
it read. Underneath the regular number was an emergency number, and he dialed it now.

“Drohobych Import,” droned the bored Russian voice.

“I need help,” he said. He could hear his voice shaking. “My, ah, friend, is not waking up.”

The voice was no longer bored. Within minutes, there was a cautious knock at his door. He opened it to two men in blue uniforms. They could have been plumbers, electricians, dishwasher repairmen. Behind them, idling on the street, was an unmarked van.

Together, the two men moved her onto a stretcher. One of them took her blood pressure, looked inside her eyelids, while the other slipped an oxygen mask onto her face and hooked her up to a tube that dripped a clear liquid into her arm.

Immensely sorry, Rafe touched Janina’s cheek. Cold, colder than any live human being’s cheek should be. “Is she going to be all right?”

The man administering the cuff wore glasses with black plastic frames. “We see this all the time,” he said reassuringly. “Don’t worry, she’ll be fine.” He glanced up from the dial. “You might want to change,” he added, almost apologetically.

Rafe glanced down at his shirt. It was striped with blood.

They carried her down the steps to the unmarked van. The man with the glasses climbed into the back and shut the door, the other went into the passenger seat. The van pulled away from the curb, and zoomed off, heading northwest. A prickle of fear touched him, like a breeze. Rafe wondered where it was going; it was navigating away from both nearby Beth Israel and the emergency room at St. Vincent’s.

The gaslights in front of the graceful nineteenth-century townhouses were just flickering on. Fuzzy catkins swelled on the magnolia trees in the gated park. Early snowdrops pushed their bowed heads up through the cracked crusts of ice holding out under the rhododendrons. Somewhere in the bushes, a bird twittered. Gramercy Park was beginning to wake from its bleak winter slumber.