There were no lines on my right palm. Or my left. No fingerprints, no lifeline, no love line. Only the soft pink hills of flesh and a purple trace of veins beneath the skin.
"Think of the name Melchior. Think of Caspar and Balthazar. They're next. I can tell you nothing else. I don't know what will happen to you. Fate is an open road. What you're capable of is beyond belief. But so is he. Touch the cat on his head."
I reached down and petted Orlando. Pushing his head up into my hand, he purred. Without warning, his completely white eyes began to grow darker and form pupils, irises. Whatever he saw for the first time in his life made him howl and arch his back as if he were about to be attacked. Spitting and hissing, he ran madly out of the room. I had given him sight.
"It won't last long; he'll be blind again in an hour. You don't have the power yet to make it stay, but you will soon, whether you work on it or not.
"One of my greatest mistakes was refusing to believe I could do things like that, things other people couldn't. In the beginning I made children fly, made myself invisible . . . You were there, you saw what I did. I couldn't accept it. But you have to, Walker, immediately, and work with it. It took me years to figure out only one problem – how to build my sand castle with the tools at hand. You don't have years, plus you have two problems. What does a man do with the power to raise the dead? Or give back sight, or see another person's future?" Both Venasque and his voice began to fade, the Cheshire Cat from Walker in Wonderland. "The first thing to do is believe fully in those powers, no matter how skeptical you are. Because the second problem is much worse and you'll need those powers to succeed: How do you kill magic without killing yourself?"
"Is my real father magic?"
"Yes, but so are you. Even more so, because of your relationship with Maris. Your father couldn't do that. You can, because you're more in this world than his now."
He was almost gone. I wanted to ask something else but couldn't think what. My tongue was thick as a tire. "Where do you go now, Venasque?"
"It wouldn't matter if I told you. You'll go someplace else. Don't miss your chance, Walker. Don't let him hurt your family. He's a jealous son of a bitch. He has been for four hundred years."
The bathroom was empty. The tile floor cold under my bare feet. Somewhere in the other room I heard my cat running and crashing into things he normally knew to avoid.
Orlando lay asleep on the floor, exhausted by his short, nightmarish tour through the land of vision. What would he think when he woke again to the dark world he'd always known? Did cats, like us, think Thank God, it was only a dream! when they woke from monsters, or the color blue, that took form in their sightless eyes?
I'd had a shower and was feeling better. Maris hadn't returned, but that was good because I wanted to think about what I would tell her of Venasque's visit when we were together again. Certainly not that she was pregnant. If it were true, it was her secret and joy to discover first. How long would it be before she knew? How would she tell me?
Lying on the bed in a bathrobe, I tried out different ways of reacting to it. "You're what?" "Pregnant! No, really?" How could I keep the news from her? The phone rang.
"Walker? David Buck here. Where've you been? I've been calling you for days."
"Hi. We've been in California. What's up?"
"I've been doing that research for you. You know, about your look-alike, Moritz Benedikt?"
"Right! What did you find?"
"Big scandal. A very interesting story. You want me to tell you now, or do you want to get together? I've got ten pages of notes."
"Both, but tell me the basics now."
"Okay. Moritz Benedikt is a pretty commonly found name in Vienna. One guy was a very famous editor of the Neue Freie Presse. But your Benedikt was famous for something else."
"Famous?"
"Yeah, wait, it was front-page stuff. He was born here in 1923 and died in 1955. Worked as a tailor for his father in a shop on the Kochgasse in the Eighth District, Benedikt und Sцhne, Schneiderei. The store was right down the street from the building where Stefan Zweig lived. Nothing special there, except he was raised by his father because the mother died when Moritz was born."
"Wait a minute, David, let me get this down." But I wasn't writing. I was thinking about the killer in St. Petersburg, Alexander Kroll. He was also raised by his father because the mother died in childbirth. "What was the name of Benedikt's father?"
"Kaspar. Kaspar Benedikt. The interesting thing about him was he was a midget."
"I know."
Buck paused. "You knew? How?"
"It doesn't matter. Go on." I started when something jumped up on the bed next to me. Orlando, his old calm, blind self. He rubbed against me, wanting to be tickled. Didn't he remember anything?
"From the different accounts I've read, Benedikt junior fought for the Germans in southern France in World War Two. He was taken prisoner by the Allies, held awhile, then let go. When he got back to Vienna, he started working again for his father. This is where it gets interesting. Seems like Moritz had a girlfriend named Elisabeth Gregorovius. She worked as a waitress at the Cafй Museum. She's still alive, if you want to contact her. I have the address and phone number, but I didn't talk to her. She's probably the one putting fresh flowers on his grave."
"You're sure she's alive?"
"Yes. I called the number when I found out about her. An old woman answered and said 'Gregorovius', so I assumed it was her.
"Anyway, she and Moritz had one of those great, years-long courtships that either end in marriage or both people dying of old age. Real nineteenth-century romance. From what I got, they were engaged forever before they got married. The newspapers said that was the first thing that made the old man crazy: His son was going to get married and leave the house. Remember, though, this was after like years of going out together, so it wasn't a big surprise to Papa.
"Elisabeth and Moritz got married in 1953 and lived in her apartment. He continued to work in the tailor shop and she at the cafй. Everything stayed peaceful for two more years. She and Kaspar didn't get along, but his son loved her, so there wasn't anything he could do but accept it.
"In 1955, January, Elisabeth discovered she was pregnant. She told Moritz, and he was thrilled. The first thing he wanted to do was give his father the good news. So he went over to the old man's apartment and told him. You know what Kaspar did? Pushed his son out of a fifth floor window and killed him!
"When the police came to take him away, Kaspar told them – wait a minute, let me read it to you – told them 'He would have loved it more than me.' That was it."
I looked down at Orlando. "What happened to the father?"
"I'm not finished! While they were taking him to the police station, there was a terrible crash and the two cops in the car were killed, along with the driver of the other car. There was a photograph of the accident in the paper. Both cars, both of them, Walker, were standing straight up on their noses! How the hell could that happen? It looked like a movie scene. And guess who the only one was who survived the crash? Kaspar Benedikt."
"You mean they never found him?"
"Yeah, they did. You know the Pestsдule, the plague statue down on the Graben? That night, after a big Viennese manhunt, they found him hanging from it, stone dead, with a note pinned to his shirt. The note said 'Two eyes too many.' Zwei augen zuviel."