Mallory followed the flight of the doves, never hearing these words; they meant nothing to her. She had also been deaf to the prison chaplain when he argued that Malakhai should be left in a state of ignorance – he had called it grace – so the prisoner might go to God with a clean soul.
Mallory had no soul, or she had heard rumors to that effect and seen it writ in the shredded pages of a child’s psychiatric evaluation. And she was not a believer in God, though she did have personal knowledge of a living hell, its flames and its agony.
After a massive stroke, Malakhai had awakened to look around his prison cell, bewildered and as innocent as the boy from 1942, not understanding what crime he was paying for. Though justice was someone else’s job, and Mallory was only the imperfect machine of law, she had been there to explain it to him – every visitors’ day until his death. She had brought him Mr. Halpern’s portrait of Louisa and given him back his own love story in every detail he had given to her. Mallory had carried the frightened boy through all the years of his life to rebuild the man – to keep him sane.
She had carried him out of the fire.
Long after St. John had departed from the cemetery, the gravediggers stood in the distance, leaning on their shovels and waiting for the young American to finally let go of the dead.
A reporter appeared at the iron gates – the first fly on a fresh corpse. And then another one turned up, and another, buzzing, buzzing, cameras clicking.
In a darker time zone half the world away, Nick Prado stood by the window looking out on the city lights of Chicago. Behind him, a television broadcast recapped the death of the man who had butchered Franny Futura.
Fools.
The reporters never got anything right. Malakhai had been one of the greats, and he deserved a better press release. In a further heresy, the news media had upgraded Franny from a tired hack to a legend among the magic men.
Ah, Fame – what a twitchy bitch you are.
He glanced at the telephone. He longed to speak with his oldest friend, but Emile St. John was not accepting his calls anymore. The past six months since Franny’s death had been one prolonged meal of ashes.
Mallory’s banquet.
Would she call again tonight? No, he thought not.
So many times, he had seen her on the street. At first, he had thought this was only an illusion – her face in the crowd – for Mallory did not belong on the sidewalks of Chicago. But each time she had appeared, the dates corresponded with first-class airline tickets and limousines charged to his personal credit cards.
Amusing child.
He had paid the bills without complaint.
But of course, she’s quite insane.
He had also been a good sport when a large sum of money was criminally transferred from corporate accounts to pay for Franny’s funeral expenses. Mallory did have exquisite taste in upscale cemeteries with lake-view mausoleums. Franny would have adored his fine marble house by the water.
Graciously and quietly, he had replaced the corporate money with his own personal funds.
In another act of creative accounting, she had emptied out several client accounts. With skillful computer trading, she had purchased a good selection of stocks for his own portfolio. A battery of lawyers and accountants had shuttled the illegally commingled money back to its rightful owners to thwart an embezzlement charge. But his own well-intentioned bribes to affected parties had brought on new charges for obstruction of justice and witness tampering. He had spent the entire day dodging the bearers of warrants for his arrest.
More stunning damage had been for a lesser amount, payment to a French stonecutter for a monument purchased long before Malakhai’s death – just a little memo from hell to tell him that an old friend was wasting, dying in prison, while Nick breathed the rarefied air of a penthouse mansion in the sky.
Lest he ever forget that, Mallory had awakened him every night with a silent reminder. He knew it was her, though she never spoke and no source number was ever caught by caller-identification equipment or phone-line traps. And whenever he traveled out of town, the calls had come directly to his suite, with no record of passing through a hotel operator.
Ghost calls.
Did she know how much they affected his sleep, his dreams? He suspected that she only called to hear the sound of his voice, a response to her silent inquiry about his health – What? Not dead yet? Click.
Actually, she always slammed down the receiver – still angry after all this time.
Now he took pills to make him sleep, and yet he always woke up tired. So there were more pills to get him through the days.
This morning he had found an envelope on the table by his bed. It contained receipts for his own funeral expenses. Mallory had selected a pauper’s plot, an apt metaphor for a man with no more friends. He had recognized her perfume in the air. Fortunately, he had not opened his eyes to catch her there.
He had not quite recovered from her last covert visit to his bedroom. That night, he had awakened to find her sitting close to his prone body, her green eyes glittering, so intense. All the fanged and clawed predators stared at their living, writhing meals in that same manner. A moment later, the lights had gone out, and Mallory had vanished. And that time, she had not charged her plane tickets to his credit card.
Had she really been there? Had he imagined her perfume this morning?
Perhaps his houseboy had taken the envelope from the hand of a common messenger, then left it on the bedside table while his employer lay sleeping.
Nick would never ask.
He looked at his watch. By now Malakhai must be lying deep in the earth of France, asleep beneath the City of Light. Goodnight, old friend. My regards to Louisa.
The reporters would not come until just before dawn. He stared at his own image floating in the night-dark glass, and over one reflected shoulder, he searched the room behind his back.
On one of her visits to Chicago, Mallory had suddenly appeared behind him in the mirror of a shopwindow, where he had paused awhile to admire himself. She had not spoken to him that day. He had stared at her reflection in stunned silence, only watching her hands curl into talons, rising slowly, as if she meant to rake his back – or push him through the glass. He had closed his eyes for a quiet moment of terror – and then she was gone. He had not turned his head to watch her disappear into the crowded Chicago street. His eyes had been fixed on the shop mirror, looking at himself with new clarity of vision and cruel daylight – seeing lines in his flesh never noticed before, veins in the whites of his eyes and broken capillaries beneath the paper-thin skin. The boy from Faustine’s wasn’t there anymore. Nor could he find his handsome young self anywhere in this sky-high mansion of many mirrors.
He had continued to look for Mallory in every crowd. Such a pretty face, but so cold and crazy.
Now he turned back to his first love, his own reflection in the penthouse window glass.
When beauty dies – what then?
Hours passed as he watched the sky lighten. Then the telephone rang on the table beside him – and that would be Mallory. Apparently, she had taken no time for sightseeing in Paris. He picked up the receiver and listened to the expected silence at the other end of the line.
Still checking for a pulse, my dear?
He only heard the background sounds of traffic on a busy street. Was she calling from a cell phone or a pay phone? Finally he spoke into the void, „No, Mallory, I’m not dead yet.“
He heard the receiver crash down on its cradle at the other end of the wire and recognized her phone-slamming style.
Nick ran to the front door and checked each one of the five locks – just on the off chance that she had come back for another visit. Three of the locks were new and guaranteed pick-proof, but he suspected that she had already gotten past two of them on previous occasions. He also toyed with the idea that she tapped his phones, though none of the security experts had found any trace of electronic bugs. But they had also failed to catch her phone calls.