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ranged about the cheerfully lighted space, the even illumination
making a mirror of the nightwalls beyond which the snow
continued to descend upon New York. I wanted to see the snow. I
walked past them and put my eye up against tne glass. The whole roof
of St. Patrick's was white with fresh snow, the steep spires shaking off
as much as they could, though every speck of ornament was decorated
in white. The street was an impassable valley of white. Had they
ceased to plow it?
People of New York moved below. Were these only the living? I
stared with my right eye. I could see only what seemed to be the living.
I scanned the roof of the church in a near panic, suddenly, expecting
to see a gargoyle wound into the artwork and discover that
the gargoyle was alive and watching me.
But I had no feeling of anyone except those in the room, whom I
loved, who were patiently waiting upon me and my melodramatic
and self-indulgent silence.
I turned around. Armand had once again decked himself out in
high-fashion velvet and embroidered lace, the kind of "romantic new
look" one could find at any of the shops in the deep crevasse below
us. His auburn hair was free and uncut and hung down in the way it
used to do in ages long past, when as Satan's saint of the vampires of
Paris, he would not have allowed himself the vanity to cut one lock of
it. Only it was clean, shining clean, auburn in the light, and against
the dark blood-red of his coat. And there were his sad and always
youthful eyes looking at me, the smooth boyish cheeks, the angel's
mouth. He sat at the table, reserved, filled with love and curiosity,
and even a vague kind of humility which seemed to say:
Put aside all our disputes. I am here for you.
"Yes," I said aloud. "Thank you."
David sat there, the robust brown-haired young Anglo-Indian,
juicy and succulent to behold as he had been since the night I made
him one of us. He wore his English tweed, with leather-patched
elbows, and a vest as tightly buttoned as my own, and a cashmere scarf
protecting his neck from the cold to which perhaps, for all his
strength, he wasn't yet really accustomed.
It's strange how we feel cold. You can ignore it. And then very
suddenly, you can take it personally.
My radiant Dora sat next, opposite Armand, and David sat facing
me between them. This left me the chair with its back to the glass and
the sky if I wanted it. I stared at it. Such a simple object, a black
lacquered chair, Oriental design, vaguely Chinese, mostly functional,
obviously expensive.
Dora rose, her legs seeming to unfold beneath her. She wore a
thin, long gown of burgundy silk, just a simple dress, the artificial
warmth surrounding her obviously and keeping her safe. Her arms
were bare and white. Her face was filled with worry, her cap of shiny
black hair making two points on either side of her face, mid-cheek,
the fashionable bob of eighty years ago and of today. Her eyes were
the owl eyes, and full of love.
"What happened, Lestat?" she said. "Oh, please, please tell us."
"Where is the other eye?" asked Armand. It was just the sort of
question he would ask. He had not risen to his feet. David, the
Englishman, had risen, simply because Dora had risen, but Armand sat
there looking up at me, asking the direct question. "What happened
to it? Do you still have it?"
I looked at Dora. "They could have saved that eye," I said, quoting
her story of Uncle Mickey and the gangsters and the eye, "if only
those gangsters hadn't stepped on it!"
"What are you saying?" she said.
"I don't know if they stepped on my eye," I said, irritated by the
tremour in my voice. The drama of my voice. "They weren't
gangsters, they were ghosts, and I fled, and I left my eye. It was my only
chance. I left it on the step. Maybe they smashed it flat, or smeared it
like a blob of grease, I don't know. Was Uncle Mickey buried with
his glass eye?"
"Yes, I think so," Dora said in a daze. "No one ever told me."
I could sense the other two scanning her, Armand scanning me,
their picking up the images of Uncle Mickey, kicked half to death in
Corona's Bar on Magazine Street, and the gangster with the pointed
shoe squashing Uncle Mickey's eye.
Dora gasped.
"What happened to you?"
"You've moved Roger's things?" I asked. "Almost all of them?"
"Yes, they're in the chapel at St. Elizabeth's, safe," Dora said. "St.
Elizabeth's." That was the name of the orphanage in its lifetime. I
had never heard her say it before. "No one will even think to look for
them there. The press doesn't care about me anymore. His enemies
circle his corporate connections like vultures; they zero in on his
bank accounts and floating bank drafts, and safe-deposit boxes,
murdering for this or that key. Among his intimates, his daughter has
been declared incidental, unimportant, ruined. No matter."
"Thank God for that," I said. "Did you tell them he was dead?
Will it all end soon, his story, and what part you have to play in it?"
"They found his head," said Armand quietly.
In a muted voice he explained. Dogs had dragged the head from a
heap of garbage, and were fighting over it beneath a bridge. For an
hour, an old man watched, warming himself by a fire, and then
gradually he realized it was a human head that the dogs were fighting over
and gnawing at, and they brought the head to the proper authorities,
and through the genetic testing of his hair and skin discovered that it
was Roger. Dental plates didn't help. Roger's teeth had been perfect.
All that remained was for Dora to identify it. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]