Melting Clock

12

Rasputin died twenty-six years ago in St. Petersburg,” Jeremy said, entering the room with baby Natasha in his arms.

“He died in Florida?” I asked.

“St. Petersburg, Russia. Leningrad,” Jeremy explained.

“A dead man killed Place and Street?” I asked, reasonably.

“Alice has taken the lady to see a doctor,” Jeremy went on. “She’ll then take her to the police. Dali went back to his party.”

“The painting, the one you told me to keep, the one with the hole shot in it,” said Gunther, removing his fake beard. “The clock.”

“A painting of one of the clocks,” I confirmed.

“There was writing on the clock in the painting. Is there writing in Russian on the bottom of the clocks?”

“Yes,” I said, “but what’s …?”

“The writing says, ‘I place a curse on these clocks, which I leave for Yusupov, Purishkevich, Pavlovich, and Lazovert. I remind them that time will end and they will join me where time has no beginning.’ And it is signed, ‘Rasputin.’”

“A curse killed Place and Street, a curse on some clocks by a dead … whatever he was,” I said, walking to the window.

“He was a mystic, a Siberian peasant, who apparently improved the condition of Alexis Nikolayevich, the hemophiliac heir to the Russian throne,” said Jeremy.

I wasn’t about to argue with a giant in a toga. Natasha started to make a humming sound. Jeremy bounced her gently in his arms and kept talking.

“He became an adviser to the Empress Alexandra and preached that sin was a necessary prerequisite to salvation. The Empress was convinced that this sexually obsessed holy man could not only save her son but also the Romanov dynasty, and the Russian autocracy. When World War I began, rumors of his having an affair with the Empress were accepted as truth, and just before the war a group of men-a prince, a physician, a member of the Duma, the legislature, and the Grand Duke-decided to kill Rasputin. There is reason to believe that Rasputin was aware of their plan but felt they would not dare to kill him. On the night of December 30-actually December 17 on the old Russian calendar-the doctor poisoned Rasputin. He did not die so the Prince shot him, but Rasputin ran and the member of the Duma shot him again. They then tied him up and threw him in the Neva River. An examination of the body showed that Rasputin drowned.”

“You want me to guess the names of the four guys who killed Rasputin?” I asked.

“Feliks Yusupov, Vladimir Mitrofamonov Purishkevich, Dmitry Pavlovich, and Dr. Lazovert,” Jeremy supplied.

“Dr. Lazovert,” I said. “I heard … He was a friend of Gala’s family. She mentioned him or someone with a name like that when she …”

“Time?” asked Jeremy.

I looked at my father’s watch. It said six-twenty, which may have been true in Paris, but not in Carmel.

“Midnight,” said Gunther, examining the pocket watch he pulled out from under his black tunic.

Jeremy handed me the baby and ran for the door with Gunther a few steps behind him. I followed them, cursing my healing leg, and got to the hill overlooking the beach in time to see first Jeremy and then Gunther hit the bottom and race across the sand toward Gala and Dali, who stood in front of the clock surrounded by the odd crowd.

Jeremy was shouting, but no one was listening. His toga dragged behind him. Crazy shadows from the bonfires danced on the side of the hill and along the sand. At midnight, Dali had said, his wife would wind the clock.

I tried yelling, but it was no use. Jeremy hit the crowd as Gala held up the key to the clock and said something I couldn’t make out, something in Russian. I had the feeling she was reciting the words written on the bottom of the clock. Her hand came down and the key approached the hole in the clock face. Dali stood triumphant on his throne, his hand on his wife’s shoulder. Jeremy was almost there. He was approaching from behind the Dalis. I suppose his idea was to stop Gala, but I could see there was no time.

Natasha chewed on my nose as Gala turned the key and the guests screamed and cheered.

Jeremy was at her side now. He shoved her toward the ocean as a bullet blasted out of the clock. Jeremy’s hand shot back as if it had been punched by Joe Louis.

The crowd stepped back. Screams. Shouts. One or two vegetables and a woman-man laughed. Gunther leaped onto the throne next to Dali, who put his hands over his eyes. Gunther ripped a piece from his coroner’s cloak and grabbed Jeremy’s bleeding hand. From where Natasha and I stood watching her father, he showed no sign of the pain he must have been feeling.

Dali jumped from the throne, took a quick look at his wife to be sure she was all right, and draped Jeremy’s uninjured arm around his shoulder. Gala took the other and together they helped Jeremy up the hill to where Natasha and I stood waiting.

Natasha reached for her father and Jeremy removed his good hand from Dali’s shoulder to take her.

“We’ll get you to a doctor, Jeremy,” I assured him.

“We will get him to the finest surgeon in the world,” proclaimed Salvador Dali.

“An emergency room will be fine,” said Jeremy. “I received a much more severe laceration when Carl ‘the Monster’ Frisson bit me during our match in Montreal in 1926.”

“My car is here,” said Gunther. “I will take him.”

“You’ll probably run into Alice and Odelle,” I said. “Sal, you’re standing in the grass.”

“So?” said Dali, a paw aimed at the ground.

“Grasshoppers,” I reminded him.

Dali laughed.

“Salvador Dali laughs at grasshoppers,” he said. “Monks have chased Dali with axes. Clocks have attacked his Gala. I will immortalize this moment. Gala will be depicted as a martyr. Dali will eat grasshoppers and laugh at the Metro.”

“I’ve got a question,” I said, turning to Gala. “You’re Russian. The curse on the clocks is in Russian. Why didn’t you …?”

“Nonsense, superstitious nonsense,” she said. “I knew the curse was put there to increase the value of the clocks.”

I was going to point out that in this case the curse had been real, that two people had died because of it and she had come close to being the third victim, but she was on to another topic.

“The painting,” said Gala, pulling at her husband’s white furry arm. “The third painting.”

“Yes,” Dali said, suddenly sober as we watched Gunther and Jeremy amble into the darkness.

Dali turned to look down the hill at what was left of his party. The bonfires were dying on the beach and the crowd had thinned to a few shadows. One of the tables had been carried out by the tide and waves and lay on its side half out of the water. The other table tottered with each wave, and the last of the food slid off into the surf.

“You know where Odelle lives?” I asked.

“A house, not far from here,” said Gala. “She lived with her mother till her mother died last year. The house is on Lotus Street. Three streets that way, then left, a blue wooden house.”

“Let’s go,” I said. “We can all squeeze into my car.”

“I will stay here,” said Gala.

I could see that Dali didn’t want to go without her, but she urged him to turn and go with me. I wanted to change clothes. I wanted him to change clothes, but I didn’t want him to take time to think. The Crosley was battered but it ran.

The house was a little bungalow about two minutes away, inland, on a street just off of what passed for downtown Carmel. There was a light on inside. We walked down the sidewalk to the front door, a battered William Tell and Sherlock Bunny after midnight.

The door was open. This was Carmel. People still left their doors open. I knew that was changing everywhere.

We entered the living room, a small, neat box of a room with old sun-faded furniture on spindly legs that didn’t look as if they could support Odelle. There was a Dali painting on the wall. I didn’t see anything different about it. Nude woman on the left, her back half turned. Some figures in heavy black dresses in the middle, under some rotting stone arches. A desert in the background. Hills, sky.

Dali saw me examining the painting.

“A reproduction,” he pronounced with distaste. “Dali disdains reproductions. Paint must have dimension.”

We moved past the tiny lighted kitchen into the only other room in the house, a bedroom with an unmade oversized bed. Above the bed was a big painting of a woman with two babies in her arms. I looked around and headed for the closet in the corner.

“Where are you going?” Dali asked.

“It might be in there,” I said.

“No,” said Dali. “Dali has changed his mind. He no longer wants to find the painting.”

“Changed his … well, Toby Peters has not changed his mind. I lost my hood, got clobbered by a state cop, almost fell off a tower, and came close to losing my head to find that painting. I’m finding it. Tell Salvador Dali when you see him.”

“It is not in the closet.” Dali’s round eyes were opened wide and moist. His mustaches were drooping and in need of a quick fix of wax.

“How do you know till we …” I began, but he pointed at the painting of the woman and two babies over the bed.

I looked at the picture again and understood why Dali was afraid of having the public discover his secret painting. There was nothing surreal about it. It looked almost like one of the religious paintings in National Geographic, a madonna and child, only this was two babies. The mother, obviously posed by Odelle, looked down at them: two naked, smiling boys.

“That is my mother,” said Dali, his eyes wet with tears. “And that is me and my brother, who died before I was born. We were both named Salvador Dali.”

“I like it,” I said.

“Sentimental romanticism,” said Dali softly. “My enemies would crucify me, call me a fraud. My paintings, those in the other room, come from the dungeons of my soul. This one comes from my heart. The world must never know that Salvador Dali has a heart. If the world knows that Salvador Dali has a heart, enemies will come and eat it.”

There was a washroom off the bedroom. Dali disappeared into it. I heard the water running and then he came out holding a sopping washcloth in his paw. He stepped up on the bed and stood in front of the painting for a moment, took a deep breath, and attacked his signature in the lower left-hand corner.

I could hear his breath coming in little gasps as he raised the cloth in front of the face of the little boy on the left. His hand swayed.

“I cannot,” he said.

“Your name’s not on it anymore.”

“But there are those who would know,” he said.

“I’ve got an idea. I’ll cut my fee in half and you give me the painting. I’ll hang it in my office. No one’s going to believe it’s a Dali, not in my office.”

Dali put the washcloth in his mouth and sucked it while he thought. When he removed it, a small blotch of orange paint showed on his right cheek.

“Take it,” he said with a great sigh. “Take it. Perhaps one day I shall visit it. Perhaps one day when I do not worry so much about the vulnerability of my heart I will clasp it to my soul.”

“Makes sense to me,” I said, getting on the bed and lifting the painting down.

We had to cover the painting with a blanket from Odelle’s bed and tie it to the top of the Crosley with some drapery cords we found in a closet. It wanted to slither down the windshield at first, but I eventually had it secured.

On the way back to his house, Dali spoke only once:

“Very few people know who I am. And I am not one of them.”