The Ground Beneath Her Feet (89 page)

Mira took my mittened hand in hers and after that things were better between us. We went to a movie, some monsters or aliens were destroying New York as usual (this is L.A.’s way of telling Manhattan it cares), and when we got home there was a message from Clea on my voicemail.

Spenta was dead. It was cold in England too, and in a white house on a hill overlooking the Thames the octogenarian old lady had been
huddling in her parlor with her “boys” around an antiquated gas fire. (Virus was sixty-three, Waldo in his mid-forties, and although they had both forgotten long ago that they weren’t blood brothers, here, in truth, was another family relationship forged by circumstance rather than biology.) The heating system hadn’t been serviced in years, and that night a slow leak developed under the exposed and gappy old floorboards, releasing a flow of gas which first put the three residents peacefully to sleep and then ignited, burning the great mansion to the ground and setting fire, also, to several beautiful oak trees which had stood in those grounds for over two hundred years. Ever since Spenta sequestered herself and left the details of daily life to Waldo and Virus to arrange, the house had gone into decline, and in the nearby villages after the fire people shook their heads and turned their mouths down disapprovingly.
It was an accident waiting to happen, that place
, was the general consensus.
Those sons of hers were never up to it. She should’ve had better sense
. The loss of the trees was, everybody agreed, a real country tragedy.

Clea’s message said nothing about getting together to mourn the dead, nothing about a meeting of any kind. He just thought you’d want to know, she concluded, because of the old days. It was the last communication from Ormus I ever received.

Ormus didn’t go to England for the funerals. He did send a couple of legal Singhs over for the reading of Spenta’s will. When it was discovered that Spenta’s only named heirs had perished with her, the assembled Methwold cousins girded themselves for battle. The house had gone, but the grounds and financial holdings were well worth a war. The Methwolds eyed the American Singh lawyers with open fear and distaste: more Indians! Will there be no end of them? Then the Singhs announced gravely that Ormus Cama wished to renounce all rights to the Methwold estate, rose to their feet, bowed courteously and left the other claimants open-mouthed, and free to fight their parochial, irrelevant, bloody, savage wars.

Although he maintained his distance from his mother’s grave, her death had shaken Ormus. On the day after the reading of the will he told Clea that he was going out to walk in the frozen park alone. When she saw that it would be impossible to dissuade him she made him put on a pair of good snow boots, dressed him in his warmest coat, a navy-blue
cashmere, wound his soft pashmina shawl around his neck, placed kid gloves upon his meekly extended old man’s hands, and crowned him with his favorite cold-weather hat, a sixteen-dollar Chinese rabbit fur with ear flaps which Vina had bought for him in Canal Street long ago. Clea fastened the flaps with a bow knot under his chin, stood up on her tippytoes and kissed him on both cheeks. You’re a good man, she told him. Your mother would be proud. Meaning that she thought of herself as his mother, had done so for years, but had never felt able to speak while Spenta lived. Meaning that she loved him and was as proud of him as any mother could ever be.

He smiled faintly and went down in the elevator and crossed the street and went into the park.

Of course she sent Will to follow him, but at a distance, she enjoined Will, don’t you dare let him see. Which was not easy on that day of all days, the day when the snow and ice had forced all motor vehicles off the road and people were skiing down the city’s empty avenues to work. New York was like the loveliest of ghost towns on that day and we were its shivering ghosts. It was a movie set and we were only actors. Reality seemed elsewhere, someplace that had not been blessed by this faery fall of snow.

He didn’t walk for long. It was too cold, you could feel the air freezing the insides of your lungs. After perhaps twenty minutes he turned for home, walking briskly, and thirty-five minutes after he left he reached the high arched entrance of the Rhodopé Building. It was so cold that there was no doorman outside under the canopy. Everyone was sheltering within.

As Ormus reached the entrance, Will Singh, who was just arriving on the parkside sidewalk across from the Rhodopé, slipped and fell on the ice and sprained his right ankle. At the same moment a tall dark-skinned woman with red hair gathered above her head like a fountain stepped out of nowhere and approached Ormus. Astoundingly, given the weather conditions, she was dressed only in a sequin-glittered gold bustier, a pair of tight leather pants and stiletto heels. Her shoulders and midriff were bare.

Ormus Cama turned towards her and paused. I’m sure his eyes would have widened when he saw what she looked like, so he must have seen the small handgun that she aimed at him and emptied at point-blank
range into his chest. After she had finished shooting she let go of the weapon, a .09 mm Giuliani & Koch automatic, she let it drop right there in the snow by his fallen body and walked quickly away, showing a surprising turn of speed in spite of the stilettos, turning right down a side street and vanishing from view. By the time Will Singh had hobbled slowly and painfully round the corner she was nowhere to be seen. There was a line of female footprints in the snow. Where the footprints stopped there was a red wig, a pair of leather pants, a sequinned bustier and a pair of stiletto shoes. Otherwise, nothing. No automobile tracks. Nothing, not even any witnesses, not at that time or any later date. It was as if a naked woman had flown through the air of Upper West Side Manhattan and disappeared and nobody saw a thing.

There were no prints found on the gun, either, although Will Singh remembered (but couldn’t swear) that the assassin had worn no gloves.

It was the perfect crime.

Ormus died there in the snow a few minutes later with his head in Clea’s lap. Clea had been pacing up and down in the lobby, worrying, and when she heard the shots she didn’t need to be told who the target was. She ran out in time to see the woman’s back disappearing round the corner, and screamed at Will to get after her, but she herself stayed with her Ormus, knowing that on so brutal a day the emergency vehicles would never reach him in time, even with their snow chains they’d skid and slide on the iced surfaces if they tried to hurry, and anyhow the holes in Ormus’s beautiful coat told her what she needed to know. They were clustered so close together that it was obvious nothing could be done.

Ormus, she said, sobbing, and he opened his eyes and looked at her. Oh, my Ormie, she mourned, my little shrimpy boy, what to do for you? Do you know what you want? What you need?

He looked vague and didn’t reply. Then in despair she asked, Ormus, do you know who you are? You still know that, don’t you? Do you know who you are?

Yes, he said. Yes, mother, I know.

Because the murder weapon was the same make as the one known to be owned by Mira, she was briefly questioned by two embarrassed detectives. Because it was widely rumored that I had been dementedly
jealous of Ormus’s closeness to Mira during the
Into the Underworld
tour, I was questioned also, rather less shamefacedly. But we were each other’s alibis, and Tara could vouch for both of us, and when they ran tests on Mira’s gun they found it hadn’t been fired in years. In the end the police decided the murderess must have been a random crazy, a loose cannon, maybe one of the many disgruntled Vina wannabes who had been sending in hate mail, in which case the use of the gun was either a coincidence or a deliberate attempt to send detectives down a false trail. When this theory was made public, several Vinas of both sexes immediately confessed to the crime, but their confessions didn’t check out.

The investigators had no solution to the riddle of the killer’s disappearance. Their best guess was that she had an accomplice in one of the apartment buildings along the street where she vanished, and somehow entered the premises without leaving footprints, put on a new set of clothes and later left. Maybe the accomplice had been waiting with a broom to wipe away the traces. It was all pretty speculative, even the detectives agreed. But hey, they wound up saying, many murders are committed to which no solution is ever found. This was one such crime.

If you ask me, I think it was Vina, the real Vina, Vina Apsara herself. My Vina. No: I have to accept this too, that she was still Ormus’s Vina, always and forever his. I think she came and got him because she knew how much he wanted to die. Because he couldn’t bring her back from the dead she took him down with her, to be with her, where he belonged.

That’s my opinion. Oh, that’s right, I almost forgot to add: so to speak.

So this was how it came about that on an icy day in January, Mira Celano, her daughter Tara, Clea Singh and I went up from the West Side Heliport in Mo Mallick’s personal helicopter with Ormus Cama’s ashes in an urn on Clea’s lap, to perform the last rites of a life that began on the other side of the world, a life which was in reality lived not in one place or another, but in music.

(Clea and the Singhs got generously treated in the will, by the by; they’d never go hungry again. But apart from their lump-sum paymerits,
all Ormus’s money, plus the enormous future income from his back-catalogue royalties and sheet music rights, as well as the bakeries, the winery, the real estate, the cows, in short the whole multi-million-dollar Cama estate, went to set up an Ormus and Vina memorial foundation to assist underprivileged children around the world. This will was the only indication Ormus ever gave that he regretted not having had children of his own on account of Vina’s barrenness. The enormous size of the bequest was a measure of the depth of his unspoken grief.)

Tara had brought a blaster. She turned it up to top volume, because of the noise of the rotor blades, and played the last VTO CD, the one featuring her mother’s stellar performance, and I didn’t like to tell her that I thought it was the wrong choice, because Vina should have been with us at such a time. Below us the city stood up iced and jagged and majestic as any Himalayas. The park was empty except for a couple of skiers and a few lone walkers wrapped up like bears. The fountains and reservoir were frozen, and as I looked down on Manhattan from the sky, it still seemed to be wrapped in winter, like a gift.

The pilot insisted on doing the ash-spilling. Clea gave up the urn reluctantly, and then Ormus was flying away from us, spreading out over the city he had loved, he was a small dark cloud dispersing over the great white metropolis, losing himself in all that whiteness; he merged with it, and was gone. Let his ashes fall upon the city like kisses, I thought. Let songs spring from the sidewalks and bushes where he lies. Let music be. From Tara’s music machine came the voice of Mira singing the end of the
Dies Irae
, and Mira at my side sang along.

O King of tremendous majesty
who saves the saveable for free
O fount of piety, please save me
.

For no reason at all I suddenly thought of Persis Kalamanja, Persis the most beautiful girl in the world, who saved herself for Ormus and so lost herself altogether. I saw her again, still young and lovely, still standing on the roof of her long-demolished home, “Dil Kush” on Malabar Hill, Bombay, while above her the polychromatic kites of
India swooped and soared, simultaneously at play and at war. Stay where you are, Persis, I thought, don’t move a muscle. Don’t age, don’t change. Let us all become ash and scatter on the wind, but stay on your old roof, Persis, stand forever silent in the evening breeze and watch the dancers in the sky. I want to think of you this way: eternal, unchanging, immortal. Do this for me, Persis. Watch those festive kites.

I see in the paper today that they shot another
rai
singer. There are more and more parts of the world now where they’re trying to wipe out singing altogether, where you can be murdered for carrying a tune. This particular
rai
singer had even taken the precaution of going into exile, leaving his North African home for a lightless cell in Marseilles. The killers followed him there and shot him anyway.
Pan! Pan!
Now I’m reading his obit in the
Times
and I think to myself, what a wonderful world.

Rai is music. Rai is the ungodly forbidden sound of joy.

Not long ago there was a powerful earthquake in Italy and Assisi, the town of Mira’s forebears, was badly damaged. When I heard the news I didn’t think of quake wars and rift bombs. I thought of Maria from the otherworld, and her teacher talking calmly to my video camera while her world crumbled around her. Maybe it’s starting again, I thought. Another variant version is on a collision course with our own, and we’re starting to feel the first tremors, the pre-impact vibrations. Maybe this time it’s the Big Crunch and we’re the ones who won’t make it, however tough we’ve proved ourselves to be, however long we’ve survived. Or maybe it’s not necessary to hypothesize another reality smashing into our own. Suppose the earth just got sick of our greed and cruelty and vanity and bigotry and incompetence and hate, our murders of singers and other innocents. Suppose the earth itself grew uncertain about us, or rather made up her mind just to open her jaws and swallow us down, the whole sorry lot of us. As once Zeus destroyed the human race with a flood, and only Deucalion survived to repopulate the earth’s surface with beings no worse or better than the dead.

I’m up early today, the coffee’s on and I’ve squeezed the oranges and the muffins are warming nicely. It’s the weekend. I can hear Mira and
Tara in the back, arguing, laughing, fooling with Tara’s mongrel, Cerberus, a grateful old stray whom we seem to have adopted. They’ll be out soon. We’ve moved in together at the Orpheum now—after Basquiat died Mira took over his floor, so there’s plenty of room—and things are good, they’re good. I’m not saying there aren’t problems, because there are, mainly in the traditional new baby area, but with a twist. Here I’m the one who wants a child. Mira, she’s got one, and she’s got a career bursting out all over, her first solo album
After
went platinum in just weeks, she’s just finished work on a new movie, the offers are flooding in. This is not a good time for her to be pregnant, or so she says. But we’re talking about it. It’s not out of court. It’s on the agenda.