He relaxed in the courtyard on his white cushioned chair centered amid the landscaped greenery. To his left, a fountain with seven naiads spraying blue water surrounded a statue of the spear-carrying Ares.
A guard notified Malcolm as Alchemy’s limo passed through gate and made its way to his driveway. A servant escorted Alchemy to the courtyard. This vaunted buck with his pococurante gait, prominent chin, and frosty blue eyes was imbued with a magisterial assurance reminiscent of his mother. His muscular arms and taut upper body were highlighted by a tightly fitting soccer jersey given to him during the televised concert by Ronaldo, the Brazilian football star.
Malcolm stood up and the two men shook hands, taking each other’s measure. Malcolm crossed his sturdy forearms across the chest of his short-sleeved, button-down green shirt. His frame was more roundish than trim, his white hair closely cut around the sides and back of his bald, freckled crown.
“Sit, please.”
Malcolm offered him a cognac. Alchemy assented. They did not toast.
Malcolm asked, “What do you hope to achieve with this meeting?” His accent lilted lightly Germanic, and his words resounded with the bellicose syncopation of a chopping knife against a wooden cutting board.
Alchemy replied, “To see if there is any benefit in Mose meeting you.”
“Acting as his savior was insufficient? Now you have anointed yourself the family unifier.” Malcolm dismissed any pretense of politesse.
Alchemy’s expression turned to one of slight amusement.
“You’re implying what? That I’m upset because you screwed my mom? You grossly overestimate your importance in her life. You’re just another slug in a very long line of unmemorable slugs she fucked and discarded.” Alchemy paused, barely repressing a rueful smile. “I imagine a man of your instincts would be curious to hear how she remembers you.”
“Your imagination reflects your ego’s need, not mine.”
Undeterred, Alchemy continued, “After I met Mose, I asked her about your relationship. She’d never mentioned you.” Alchemy chose his words with precision. “She said she wished you were her best friend Kyle when you fucked. She called you a ‘fiendish little man with the soulsmell of sour pickle juice.’ ”
Malcolm laughed jovially, as if he’d been complimented. “You should have been my son. You are hard. But he, he behaves like a weakling.”
“Mose is not weak.”
“If he were not so cowardly, he would be here instead of you.”
“That is where you are wrong. It takes great fortitude to accept your emotional deficiencies rather than pander for love and recognition.”
“Are you sure you are not speaking of your own situation?”
“Perhaps.” Alchemy conceded the point and shook his head solemnly. He relaxed his elbows on the chair’s armrests and clasped his fingers together in front of his chest. “Perhaps your ego is still smarting over the way Salome tossed you out because you loved her?”
“That assumes you believe I am capable of love.”
“I’ve made only one assumption about you.” Alchemy leaned forward, picked up his drink, swished it around his mouth, and then, like a Clint Eastwood avenging hero, spit it on the grass a foot to the right of Teumer’s chair. “Nothing you’ve said so far leads me to believe you have any remorse for how you treated Mose or Hannah.”
Malcolm stood up and grinned eerily. “Follow me.” This insolent child needed a lesson in humility. They entered the house and walked into a room dominated by one of the untorn canvases from Salome’s Flowers, Feminism, Fornication exhibit. “Wait here.” He turned and left the room.
Malcolm returned in less than two minutes. He handed Alchemy a medal — a silver iron cross with a red, silver, and black ribbon. “For you.”
“Why? Why do you have this? I don’t want this.”
“Give it to him, if you prefer. And these.” He placed a slim sheaf of stapled and typewritten pages on the table. “Take them. Show them to your half brother. Or destroy them. The choice is yours. It seems you are now his keeper. It has been my pleasure to entertain you.”
35 THE SONGS OF SALOME
No Exit Interview
The day Nathaniel departed, I took refuge in Orient. I didn’t want to beg him to stay. Still, I wrote him often, and although I missed him, through autumn I contentedly flaneured about.
At Alchemy’s Christmas break we flew to Paris and stayed at Nathaniel’s flat on Rue du Cherche-Midi. The three of us would lah-di-dah to the Luxembourg Gardens, where we read Alchemy the French canon of subversive lit.
Nathaniel often convened with the Babacools, a group of aging or neo-hippies, at the Rond Point café for a nightcap or three. In another noncoincidence, one night Marlene Passant, the Nouvelle Obs arts writer, rumbled into the café flanked by two aspiring artists. She shed them and sat beside me. After ten nonstop minutes condemning America, praising me, and a candid admission, “I, too, have been incarcerated for unbecoming societal behavior,” she fluffed her henna-colored hair and grinned like a feral cat. “I both detest and comprehend French sneakiness so I am sneakiest of all. You could use a viper like me on your side. Gibbon is selling the works you release to him too cheaply. You don’t have an exclusive with him, do you?” I shook my head. Marlene was a surefire homicider with a soulsmell mix of shag carpet soiled with dried semen and freshly minted French francs.
She called the next day. “I secured a commission from a collector for forty thousand dollars. Do whatever you want. I have access to a studio on Rue de la Roquette that you may use.” With a rush of adrenaline, I finished a Scourge painting: Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People with the face of Arletty (a famous pre-WWII French actress who became infamous because of an affair with a Nazi officer) as Liberty leading faceless Holocaust victims to the camps. On the painting I scrawled my version of the French motto: “Liberté, Egalité, Mendacité.” Marlene and the collector were more than pleased. She paid me sixty percent rather than the usual fifty.
After Christmas I flew off alone to London, ostensibly to see an exhibition of work by the conjurer William Blake. My true motive was to infiltrate the spirit of Phil Bent, Alchemy’s genetic dispenser. I located him through an executive at EMI, Bent’s former record company, who arranged the meeting but warned me to expect “a rather decrepit and pitiful sod.” I checked into the Hotel Russell Square, and the next morning I took the Underground to Earls Court. A gray and matted-haired Macbeth-like witch, with a golden front tooth, answered the door of the ground-floor hovel. If it weren’t for his scraggly three-day beard, I might’ve thought it was his mother. He reeked of old sweat, hard snot, vomit, beer, cigarettes, and greasy wrappings of fish and chips. “Who de, heh, fu — Salome? Wha?” Next to him, Keith Richards would’ve sounded like Churchill. I didn’t know if he’d forgotten our appointment or he was pretending. I blurted out, “You stink. Why don’t you take a bath?”
He regained a speck of lucidity. “It’s cold in ’ere and ain’t got rot to ’eat up the water.” The tub’s heater only worked when you deposited some coins. “Maybe you could gimme a nice body wash. You always did get ’ot in a loo.” He lamely reached to grab my right tit. I slapped his hand.