The Love Potion Murders In The Museum Of Man Part 15

28.

It swear that the Christmas glitter gets gaudier by the year. It really ought to be called "the Shopping Season." I was acutely aware of the prevailing incandescent ba.n.a.lity when, with Diantha accompanying me as a kind of cover, I visited the Nepalese Realm late this afternoon to do a little sleuthing as requested by Lieutenant Tracy. I didn't tell her very much as to what I was about, but said I was curious about the gift shop that forms part of the Green Sherpa restaurant. We had, in fact, some shopping to do. But what can you give, alas, to someone you love who is dying?

According to its squib in the Yellow Pages, the shop trades in "imported spices" and "the art and artifacts of Nepal." Both the restaurant and the shop, sharing a single awning, are located in Clipper Wharf, a renovated part of the old harbor, which, truth be told, had a good deal more charm when it was the haunt of fishermen with their boats, tackle, and smells. Now redbrick and boutiques with signs painted in old lettering on weathered board are starting to predominate.

"It's all so terminally cute," Diantha observed after we had parked and were strolling along. Her tone and words gave me a turn. It was exactly the kind of thing Elsbeth would have said.

I agreed, but pointed out that large trawlers, small freighters, and oceangoing barges still docked nearby.

We wandered into the shop like shoppers, glancing over the collection of what seemed to me an ordinary mishmash of orientalia - lacquered bowls, painted screens, batik prints, and a large selection of decidedly aromatic spices. The wrong note, if there was one, lay in the fact that, despite the season, we were the only customers in the store save for an older woman who looked like a street person.

We hadn't been there long when the proprietor came out of the back room and approached us. I noticed again how his closely barbered hair gave him an old-fas.h.i.+oned Germanic look. I also noticed, above the not unpleasant reek of spices, the distinctive musk of his cologne. He He had been in the room with the green baize door. I was sure now he belonged to the had been in the room with the green baize door. I was sure now he belonged to the Societe Societe.

This time I remarked the way his tawny eyes s.h.i.+fted about with the animation of a predator, even as he said, "Mr. de Ratour, how gratifying that you should visit us." Perhaps I am prejudiced, because he took an immediate interest in Diantha, turning on her a practiced charm.

"Are you gift shopping?" he asked, his voice deep, his accent again striking me as familiar and foreign.

Diantha flashed him a high-wattage smile, meeting his frank s.e.xual appraisal with one of her own. "Yes, it's such a ch.o.r.e when it should be..."

He left her hanging.

"Joyous," I supplied.

"Yes, joyous."

"Mr. Bain, this is my daughter, Diantha Lowe."

She extended her hand and he took it the way an old-school European would, keeping it in both of his, as though she had given him a token to hold. He brought his heels together. "Enchante "Enchante. I'm Freddie, Freddie Bain."

Diantha bowed her head and withdrew her hand. Enchante, aussi Enchante, aussi, she said and laughed, as though at a private joke.

"Joyous, yes," he echoed. "Then let us make it joyous for you." He produced a pair of small jade figurines, dancers, I would have guessed, but in poses more erotic than thespian. "You have a beau, perhaps. These would remind him of you in those days after Christmas."

Diantha looked at the price tag. "Pricey," she said.

"But these are for you. A mere token. Our mark-ups are..."

He had a very mobile face, so that one moment he was all smiles and the next nearly feral, the eyes askance then very direct.

"Thank you, but I simply can't."

"I must insist."

She laughed again and looked at me. I shrugged even as I gritted my teeth. Mr. Bain was not the sort in whose obligation I would want to be.

"I'll put them to one side for you, Miss Lowe..."

"Oh, please, call me Diantha. You have quite a spice collection."

"Yes. Thank you. And always fresh. We get in s.h.i.+pments all the time. We use them in the restaurant. You must join me for a cup of tea."

There was no escaping it. He ushered us most proprietarially into the Everest Tea Room, an alcove lined with a large photo mural of the famous peak. He rang a bell; a moment later a slight young woman appeared with a samovar and gla.s.ses in old silver holders. Tea Russian-style.

"These are so beautiful," Diantha exclaimed, holding one of the gla.s.s cups in her hand. Then, "Whatever made you think of opening a place with a Sherpa theme?"

Mr. Bain's agile face s.h.i.+fted from quizzical frown to a smile that came and went like a tic, then back again, staying in place. "I had occasion to spend time in Nepal. I became interested in the Sherpas. They are a fascinating people. They do what they have to do and never lose a particle of their pride or dignity."

"What took you to Nepal?" I asked, nodding toward the mountain in the photograph, indicating my question as rhetorical, to give him the opportunity to announce his alpinist proclivities and achievements, should he have any. He glanced at me sharply for a moment, perhaps sensing my ploy.

"I was going through my Buddhist phase," he said, directing his answer to Diantha, as though only she were present.

She laughed. "I'm still waiting for mine."

He bowed toward her. "I don't believe you will need it, Ms. Lowe." He poured our tea and offered around the sugar.

"So you came back enlightened and started this restaurant and shop?" She returned his glances in a way that made me feel extraneous.

"You could say that. As an exercise in enlightenment."

"Why the Irish..."

"Oh, a sheer whim. My grandmother Katie O'Flaherty was Irish."

It sounded to me like a blatant bit of fabrication, but Diantha nodded, charmed.

"Now you tell us about yourself, Ms. Lowe. Are you new to Seaboard?"

"Yes, but I feel I have been here forever."

"Or perhaps in another life?"

"Maybe. Deep in the gene pool."

"We all have past lives, Ms. Lowe."

They went on in that vein for a while, Diantha telling him really nothing, intriguing him the more as he made no secret of his interest in her.

Then he veered off suddenly, addressing me. "Has there been any more news of Professor Chard's fate?" he asked.

I was able to answer with technical honesty, saying, "None whatsoever. I'm sure that Mrs. Chard, his widow, would have called me had she heard anything from the State Department."

"Then perhaps there is hope."

"There is always hope," I said, mostly to make conversational noise.

"But don't you find the...silence intriguing? Mr. De Ratour?"

Diantha was about to say something when I shot her a quick glance. "Not at all," I said blithely. "To disappear among cannibals is to truly disappear."

The man laughed wickedly at my inadvertent bon mot bon mot, rubbed his hands together, and said he had things to attend to.

As we dawdled back to the car, I noticed the garish Christmas lighting blinking and winking all around us. I recalled that Malcolm Muggeridge had once remarked how he would like to show Christ around the Vatican. I think I'd rather show Our Lord the shopping areas of Seaboard and the way they get all tarted up like some old New England spinster trying to pa.s.s for a Las Vegas showgirl. Not that I disdain it. I was instead ineffably sad because Elsbeth loved it, even - especially - the front-yard displays. And I knew that next year she would not be here to share it with me.

"So, is Freddie Bain your villain?" Diantha asked, teasing me and bringing me out of my gloom as I drove us home in the creaking Peugeot.

"Possibly. I doubt very much that Freddie Bain Freddie Bain was his original name." was his original name."

"What's in a name?"

"Sometimes everything."

"I don't care. I found him fascinating."

"As he found you," I said, unaware of how dispirited I sounded.

She laughed, her wonderful, silly little laugh as we pulled up to the house. "Oh, Norman, I think you're jealous. How sweet of you." She gave me a peck on the cheek before getting out. We spoke of dinner and plans for the evening. But I sensed that before long she would have a love in her life.

As I drove back here to the office, I was filled with a distinct unease. The lingering smell of those pungent spices hung in the car like motes of suspicion.

29.

My darling Elsbeth died this morning just as the fog lifted and dawn broke over Mercy Island, which we can just see from the bedroom window when the trees are stripped of leaves. When she woke about five thirty, I asked her if she wanted an injection for pain. She could scarcely talk. She smiled at me and shook her head. "Lie down with me," she said with an effort. I got under the covers and put my arm around her as she turned to me. Somehow I knew what was happening. I didn't need the cuff to sense that her blood pressure was dropping, that her kidneys and her valiant heart were failing. We lay like that for some time as I stroked her head and gave her as much love as I could. But again, it was as though Elsbeth were comforting me, was telling me she was okay, that she had entered some blissful peace before the final darkness descends.

Elsbeth whispered her final words, "Take care of Diantha. I love you, Norman." Her breathing grew uncertain. It stopped. Then started again. Finally it stopped and didn't start again as, holding my own breath, I waited and waited. I hugged her to me, but she was gone. I called her name, "Elsbeth. Elsbeth. Elsbeth." But she was gone. And in my sorrow I experienced the faith of disbelief: I could not believe that this woman, this being, my love, had ceased to exist. You are not nonexistent You are not nonexistent, I said to myself, holding her lifeless form, you are only gone, gone somewhere else you are only gone, gone somewhere else. But where? "Come back," I murmured. I wept quietly. I sighed. I got up and went down the hall to tell Diantha.

I pushed open her door and sat on the side of her bed. "Diantha," I whispered, "Di..."

She sat up and turned on the bedside light. "Mom?"

I nodded.

She came into my arms, her tears running together with mine as I held her. And I had the strangest sensation, a sensation like a revelation: Diantha was Elsbeth. This is where Elsbeth had gone. It lasted only a moment, of course. No one is anyone else. But it lingered as we walked back to where Elsbeth lay, as Diantha knelt by the bed and ever-so-gently stroked her mother's wan, still face and moved the wisps of hair to one side.

Then Diantha said a strange and provocative thing. She looked directly at me. "I want a baby. I want a baby girl. I'm going to call her Elsbeth."

I nodded as though I understood, but didn't really, except in some abstract sense of knowing that we all have an impulse to answer death with life.

We got dressed and attended to the doleful necessities. I called the Medical School to whom Elsbeth had left her body. A couple of hours later a vehicle arrived from Flynn's Funeral Home and bore Elsbeth away after Diantha and I, alone and then together, spent a few more moments with the still and still-beautiful form lying on the bed.

Diantha called Win Jr. and remained some time on the phone with him. "Like talking to an imitation human being," she told me. She hugged me again, to a.s.sure and be a.s.sured. "It's amazing. He wanted no details, no times, or what she said, or anything else. Let me know, he said, when you've made arrangements for a memorial service. But Win's never quite connected with his own species, never mind his own family."

For some reason we found ourselves both quite ravenous. So together, already like a long-established couple, we made ourselves an old-fas.h.i.+oned breakfast - bacon, eggs, toast, orange juice, and coffee. But I'm afraid it only gave us the energy for grief, at first together, talking about Elsbeth, her vitality of old, her foibles, and her knack for turning life into an occasion.

Then alone. When I went upstairs afterward, the mystery of death persisted. Where had Elsbeth, where had life gone?

I spent the rest of the morning making phone calls to our little network of friends. I phoned Lotte and Izzy, who were very kind. "Come to dinner tonight, you and Diantha," Lotte insisted. I accepted for both of us.

I called Alfie Lopes, who said he would say a prayer for Elsbeth, "though, frankly, Norman, I doubt that she really needs one. I have feeling she's already the life of some heavenly party."

I called Korky and left a message. I fear for the dear boy's reaction. He already has so much to contend with.

I called Father O'Gould, and he said he, too, would say a prayer.

Upstairs, in the drawer of the little desk she used for her correspondence, I found a sealed envelope addressed to me. Inside was a letter written several weeks after we had learned the terrible news of her condition.

Norman dearest,I know you are sad right now (or, at least, I hope you are!), but time, I know, will heal your heart. Along with my dear children, the best part of my life has been you. I thanked G.o.d every day for the chance to spend these last few, blissful years as your wife. Perhaps it is only the courage of fatalism, but I find myself less fearful hour by hour of what lies ahead. My only worry is for you and Diantha. It would be mawkish to nudge you into each other's arms, but I only pray that you will, in some loving way, take care of each other. I am gone, Norman dearest, but I have every faith that somehow, somewhere, I will be waiting for you.With love forever, Your adoring Elsbeth I wept again, and then again later at dinner, with tears and with that inner weeping of the heart, with a kind of sorrowful joy, exacerbated, no doubt, by the generous hand of Izzy, who kept filling my gla.s.s at dinnertime with a wonderful new Malbec from Argentina. Indeed, as I write this now, my head and my heart both thump painfully, and I feel the first faint yearnings for that void where I might go in search of Elsbeth.

30.

Oh, Elsbeth, where are you? Why did you leave me again? My house is empty. My heart is empty. My soul is empty.

Grief is never comic. But it can be grotesque. I writhe on a rack of loss and l.u.s.t. The ghost of Elsbeth beckons but so does the living presence of Diantha. I have had to all but manacle myself to keep from leaving my empty bed and falling at the foot of hers, on my knees, imploring, take me, hold me, give me life again.

But Diantha has grown distant in her own grief. She spends more time at her work now, a fixture in front of a fixture. She has promised to go to the Curatorial Ball with me, but that seems a pathetic sop to what I now crave in the core of my being. I feel like one of evolution's bad jokes, surviving only to suffer. A poor forked animal. Forked, all right. Diantha has been gone nearly every night and does not return until the wee hours. On what debaucheries, I can scarcely, in my fevered state, imagine. I suspect she's going out with that mocking fraud of a restaurant owner. Perhaps it's a reaction to her mother's death. I am powerless to do anything, to help her in the way she needs help.

I'll probably excise this outburst later on, but I needed to get that off my chest. A reluctant Calvinist, I am of the old school, neither a Papist who can bare his soul to some sympathetic priest nor a dupe of the therapeutic racket that exacerbates, while purporting to cure, the pathologies of self-absorption. And I have, despite my many good friends, none I want to bother with my troubles. And self-pity is a poor form of self-reliance.

I've found work a solace. The very furniture seems welcoming. The contents of my in-basket have proved a balm where I can lose myself in detail, the pickier the better. And Doreen is being extra sweet to me. Not to mention that I am knee-deep in a murder investigation.

Indeed, I arrived to find an e-mail from Nicole Stone-Lee. She reports that it's clear from notes and memoranda deftly hidden on Professor Ossmann's hard drive that he was working on some kind of aphrodisiac. It seems likely that in reviewing research done by Professor Tromstromer and Dr. Woodley, he stumbled across a combination of compounds that had "a profound effect" on the s.e.xual activity of various small mammals. She noted that there seemed a lot more to plow through and would report back as soon as she had anything else of interest.

I forwarded the e-mail along to Lieutenant Tracy, made a hard copy for myself, and then erased it. I left word with Ms. Stone-Lee thanking her and asking her to refrain from e-mail in the future as I was not all that sure how secure it was. I'm wondering whether it would be helpful if the lieutenant and I paid a visit to Professor Tromstromer. I can think of several insinuations to lay before the big gnome. How much did he know about Ossmann's use of his research? Were Tromstromer and Woodley working on something that Ossmann stole? Does Tromstromer stand to gain with the removal of Ossmann and Woodley from the scene?

And speaking of Mr. Bain, I had a fruitful conversation with Professor Brauer early this afternoon. I had left word at his office to drop in when he got a chance. He came by just after lunch. Our relations have always been cool, and we didn't pretend any great cordiality beyond a business-like handshake. We indulged a minute or two of small talk before we got to the point.

"I understand," I said, "that a production company making a film of your book would like to use the premises of the MOM for background shots."

"That's true," he said. "I believe Malachy Morin is taking care of details."

"Mr. Morin isn't taking care of anything," I said, "despite what he might be telling you to the contrary."

Professor Brauer wrinkled his smooth pate in frowning. "He tells me it's a done deal."