Janek understood. He also understood what Luis was really telling him-that because he did not share this total belief, the suffering he and his family endured on account of the shortages was neither beautiful nor luxurious, it was simply pain.
They embraced a final time, then Luis got into his car. Janek came around to the driver's window.
"Good luck," he said.
He slept well. In the morning, he took a dollars-only taxi to the airport. There were few cars, lots of bicycles, the usual throngs waiting glumly before the bus shelters. He passed a group of joggers and then a convoy of military trucks. On the outskirts he was struck by the way the early morning light cut through the sugarcane that lined the road and painted the worn asphalt splendidly with bars.
At the airport, when he passed through immigration, a supervisor stepped in to examine his documents.
"Ah, the labor organizer!" the supervisor said. Then he laughed.
"Good news, senora. Due to unforeseen circumstances this morning's flight for Mexico City will depart on time." Half an hour later, as his plane soared upward, Janek stared down at Cuba glittering below. It seemed to him that the country looked quite beautiful from the sky-a long, thin, verdant island set in an emerald sea. In his five days there he had experienced some of the worst moments of his life, had been blindfolded, stripped, beaten and humiliated. He knew he would never return.
Gelsey's Special He always called it "playtime" when he coaxed her to join him alone down in the maze. He was always tender with her there.
She adored their games, and, when his caresses became too ardent, she would simply turn away, face the mirrors, then watch her dream-sister and the Leering Man perform inside the glass… Gelsey was evoking him again, the Leering Man in the mirrors, the man she had drawn, painted and sculpted so many times. She thought she knew who he was and what he meant to her and why she felt compelled to re-create him. What she did not understand was why she could never seem to get him right.
But this morning was different. She had awakened with a new idea, had been working on it since dawn. Now, standing back from her easel, seeing the way the fragmented mirror portrait was taking shape, she felt exhilarated by the process. Perhaps this time I'm really on to something, she thought.
She used the skylit end of the loft as her studio. The space had been her father's workshop; it was here that he had constructed the many parts which, when joined, had become the fabulous mirror maze below.
Here, amid his old benches and tools, she kept her easels, paints, brushes and canvas, her supplies of pastels, charcoal, paper, plywood, mirrored glass and clay. She loved the fresh, clean smell of unused art materials and the feel of them in her hands. She remembered something an old art teacher had once said in class: "Every bucket of clay has the potential to become a work of art. In every fresh tube of paint there is a masterpiece waiting to be released."
She had started that morning to paint the outline of Leering Man onto an irregular slab of mirror. Then she had covered this mirror with a towel and smashed it carefully with a mallet. Now she was reassembling the shards onto a plywood board coated with glue. But rather than fitting the pieces back together the way they'd been, she was rearranging them into a more expressive order.
She knew what she was doing: She was putting Leering Man through her own personal "Fragmentation Serpent," then packing her image of him with her rage.
When she was finished, a viewer would look at the portrait and, confronted by bits of himself reflected in the shards, be caught in the web of her art.
At noon she paused briefly to eat an apple, then went back to work, gluing the shards on faster, with greater concentration, thinking that if she applied herself, she might complete the portrait by night.
Just before five, she heard a roll of thunder. She paused, looked outside, saw storm clouds forming in the east. She shrugged and began to put away her tools. A few minutes later sheets of rain began to sweep across Richmond Park. She stopped all work, sat by the window, watched the water spray the glass then run down in rivulets. As she listened to the rain pounding the metal roof, a new compelling need took hold.
Tonight, she knew, she would drive into the city, seek out a mark and take him down.
She did not linger too long in the maze. A few steady gazes at herself standing nude in the endless mirrored galleries, then she returned to the loft to disguise herself and to dress. At eight-thirty, wearing a conservative navy business suit, a classic pearl strand with matching earrings and a well-cut red-haired wig, she was on the rain-streaked highway heading for New York.
Because she had barely eaten that day, she felt gripped by pangs of hunger. But she didn't stop. It makes me feel powerful to feel hungry, she thought. She rarely ate before a foray, preferring to work with an edge, then treat herself afterward to ice cream. Self-discipline followed by satiation, taking down a mark then receiving a reward-the sequence made her feel like a warrior.
She was just emerging from the Holland Tunnel when the notion of infringement struck. The rain was still coming down, though not so forcefully as before. She smiled when she thought of driving to a hotel, working a hotel bar and thus encroaching on Diana's territory. If doing that meant going to war against Diana, then so be it, she would be prepared to fight.
Instinctively she wheeled her car toward lower Manhattan. She would make a hit against the Savoy, the new hotel across from the World Financial Center. She found a parking space near Battery Park City in sight of the twin towers. She checked her makeup in the rearview mirror, wished her mirror-sister luck, then locked her car, opened her umbrella and strolled to the hotel entrance.
There was a convention in progress. Men and women, well lubricated with alcohol, were pressed together conversing loudly in the lobby. They all had red "Hello! I'm badges stuck to their lapels. Gelsey eased her way through the throng, checked her raincoat and umbrella, found the lobby lounge and entered.
No ebullient conventioneers in here; the mood was dour. The customers, nearly all male, sat by themselves in gloomy booths. She sat down, looked around: dim lighting, dark carpeting, chairs and tables finished in black lacquer. A long, curving modernistic bar, with a dark, mottled mirror behind, carried out the Deco-style motif Gelsey had forgotten how mournful a hotel bar could be, so different from the stoked-up gaiety of the neighborhood joints she was used to working. But sitting there brought back memories of her days with Diana, when she was still learning the game. It was the particular lonely qualities of hotel lounges, Diana had taught her, that favored their special work: all those out-of-town businessmen sitting alone after dinner waiting for their fantasy strangers to appear. Someone young, attractive and mysterious who would hold out the promise of an erotic adventure.
"That's you," Diana had told her. "You're their fantasy. And then, of course, their nightmare afterwards," she had added, smiling.
Gelsey summoned the waiter, ordered a Bloody Mary, then stared off into space. Sooner or later her mark would find her. The more aloof she held herself, the more attracted he would be.
His name was Philip A. Dietz, according to his card, and he was everything Diana always told her girls to look for. He was from out of town ("San Jose-you know, Silicon. on Valley, computer chips"), he wore a wedding band ("Very important," Diana always said), an expensive Rolex ("A sure sign of flash," Diana always said) and when he picked up their first round of drinks he glanced at his room key, then wrote his room number on the check. ("Be careful if he shows too much cash, girls-he just might be a plant.
Perhaps the most important thing about him, from Gelsey's point of view, was his blatant conceit. She spotted him for a womanizer the moment he sat down. He could be Leering Man, she thought, reeking of gloss and selfassurance. Leering Man before he leers. She played with her swizzle stick as she looked him over. "I don't usually do this sort of thing."