“Okay,” he says, smiling, being indulgent. “Tell me about the …”
“Aquinas,” she says.
“Doesn’t sound Japanese,” he says, putting on a shocked expression.
“It’s made in Italy,” she says.
“Good camera?”
“It’s about the best you can get.”
He says, “Why go for a used one? Isn’t it like a used car? Like you’re buying someone else’s problem?”
She smiles at him. He’s trying. He has to force the interest in cameras. She knows that he’d rather be talking about house hunting. Or maybe even wedding plans.
“You want to guess what a new Aquinas would cost?”
“Not a clue.”
She takes a deep breath. “Try over ten grand.”
This genuinely shocks him.
“You’re kidding.”
She shakes her head no.
He leans forward and says, “The house I grew up in? Okay? My parents bought it for around ten grand.”
“Yeah,” she says, “but the Aquinas doesn’t get water in the basement.”
“How much are they asking for this used one?”
She smiles and shakes her head no again, but says, “The ad said fifteen hundred.”
He stares at her and starts a slow nod and at the same time tries to hold off from smiling. He can’t manage it and the smile breaks and he turns his attention up to the screen as Alice starts a long jog down a supposedly deserted beach.
Then he looks back and says, “All right, let’s get it.”
She starts to fight him. “Perry …,” she says with this small pseudo-whine to her voice that she can’t stand.
He holds up a hand and says, “Listen, Sylvia, I want to get you something. I honestly do. And this is what you want.”
She shrugs. “I’d have to check it out. I mean, I’d have to check the age and the condition. See what’s included. Lenses. A case.”
“You check it out. If it looks good, if it’s what you want, write the check.”
She stares at the side of his face, more excited than embarrassed.
“Really? I should really get it?”
She thinks she sounds like a teenager. Like her mother said she could use the car on Saturday night. But Perry seems suddenly delighted with himself. He turns to her, leans in and puts his arm around her.
“If it looks good,” he repeats, “buy it.”
“You’re sure?”
He brings his mouth down to the side of her neck, kisses there a few times. Then he moves up to her ear and whispers, “I still want to get you the diamond studs.”
In five minutes Sylvia’s jeans are off and Perry’s pants are down around his ankles and she’s straddling him, riding him, her knees indenting the Buick’s backseat as Perry watches the exploits of the surf-bimbette flashed up on the Cansino’s huge and dingy screen.
And as Perry’s breath starts to catch and Sylvia feels the muscles in his thighs buck and tense and release and tense again and he starts to make that suppressed-whine sound through his nose, she’s thinking of the Aquinas. She’s thinking of the first time she’ll hold it up to her eye and pull something into focus.
She’s thinking of the rush that will come when she presses down on the shutter release and opens the lens and imprints some flawless instant, some slice of life. Some instinctively chosen and absolutely perfect image.
She’s wondering what it will be.
2
Until recently the Hotel St. Vitus served as a convent for a sect of Eastern European nuns known as the Sisters of Perpetual Torment & Agony, a cloistered Order always rumored to be on the precipice of papal destruction due to heretical word and deed. The nuns’ catechistic practice somehow managed to splice their traditional Catholicism with a vague line of occultist teachings. No one in Bangkok Park knows exactly what the Sisters dabbled in, but there was loose talk of midnight rites during the equinox, a kind of earth-mother, druidic gloss layered over their prayers and chanting.
For their part, the Sisters almost seemed to encourage the dark rumors, never venturing out of the convent but for the weekly shopping trip to the all-night Spanish market. Even then they’d remain encased in a cloud of silence, their bodies wrapped head to toe in black wool habits, their faces obscured by hanging black-lace veils. They seemed to purchase bulk quantities of blood sausage, sweet red wine, and candles.
In public, Bishop Flaherty tolerated the Order with pleas for an understanding of the deeply spiritual quest the women had devoted their lives to, but during private lunches with his banker pals in the chancery dining room, Flaherty called them spooky old hags, and voodoo fanatics. And alone in his room, after his nightly prayers, the bishop looked out his window toward Bangkok Park and genuinely wondered if the witches had it in for him.
Officially, the Quinsigamond Police Department does not know what happened to the Sisters. The nuns no longer occupy their old convent. A week after their disappearance, the chancery released a statement that the entire flock had returned to Eastern Europe where their services were desperately needed. The statement made no mention of the rumor that the walls of the abandoned convent’s chapel had been found covered with a mixture of human and animal blood. One of the Canal Zone’s more hysterical news-rags offered speculation that all the sisters had been massacred and the FBI was blanketing the entire event. Another weekly announced there was no mass murder, but rather the nuns had splintered from the Church and become some kind of pagan-feminist terrorists, vanished into an undisclosed mountain region of South America for training and recruitment. The Spy never bothered to cover the story beyond the box ad in the real estate classifieds announcing that the diocese of Quinsigamond was offering the convent for sale at a very reasonable price.
Hermann Kinsky picked up the building for a song and rechristened it the Hotel St. Vitus. He’s held the deed to the property for close to a year now but has yet to check in his first guest. This may have something to do with both the location — on Belvedere Street at the western end of Bangkok Park — and the fact that Hermann never bothered to renovate the place. The St. Vitus is still outfitted as a dark, icon-choked convent, full of stark wooden corridors hung with pictures of obscure and grotesquely martyred saints, small, mattressless cots in cell-like rooms, and a kitchen whose only concession to this century’s progress is running water.
But Hermann doesn’t care if he’s failing as a hotelier. He needs a profession for the tax forms and innkeeper is as good as any. And he’s immune to the spartan, gloomy ambience of the St. Vitus, the haunted, Gothic flavor that emanates from every crevice of the rambling building. It reminds him of his hometown of Maisel in Old Bohemia, the thousand-year-old city of golems and alchemists from which he fled three years ago with his only son, Jakob, his nephew, Felix, and his oldest friend and most trusted business aide, Gustav Weltsch.
In the old country, it had been a given that Hermann could rise only so high, that his will and his intelligence, his savvy and his tenacity would always be undercut by his ghetto birth and the mind-numbing, sloughing grip of decades of Communist puppet-regimes. But here in America, here in the new world, possibilities were endless. You practically had to shun them as they pounded on your door, day and night, saying, here’s a new idea, here’s a fresh venture, here’s another chance for improvement, investment, progress, success.
Back in Maisel, Hermann had labored by day as the owner of Kinsky Neckware, a small, open-air haberdashery booth in Old Loew Square, but it was his night work in the back alleys of the grey marketplace that earned his exit fee — the cash he had to pay to a whiny subminister of Emigration — to bring himself and his three charges to Quinsigamond. He sold contraband gasoline, cigarettes, racks of horse meat. He ran dice and lottery games. He advanced an always growing book of illegal loans, broke a record number of recalcitrant kneecaps. And ultimately, in a manner that became his trademark and gave an additional, darker meaning to the phrase face the music, Hermann garrotted an army of desperate but doomed men with Schonborn piano wire. I only use Schonborn, he would tell his gasping victim, it never breaks.