Black Elvis Read online

In the Capella Spagnola, Larry pointed out the dogs on the upper right wall. "Dominican is Latin for Dogs of God," he said. "Domine canes. These guys thought of themselves as the Pope's SWAT team. Dominicans and Franciscans were the Crips and Bloods of their day. Some monks even engaged in bare-knuckle boxing in the Lord's name."

  "I used to box," Bob said, quietly, staring at the kaleidoscope of figures and scenes sprawling across the ceilings and walls. "How I got this nose."

  They walked along Via Nazionale to Via Guelfa to Via Cavour through the heat and smog and traffic, Larry keeping up a steady patter of nonsense about Guelphs and Ghibellines. By the time they got to the convent of San Marco, he was exhausted. He checked his watch. "Listen, the monks' cells are upstairs. Fra Angelicos, one in each room. He's the guy the liqueur is named after. Heavy drinker, actually. I'm going to hit the bathroom. How about I meet you up there?"

  "All right," said Bob, mopping his red face with the back of his hand.

  When he got out of the bathroom, Larry sat on a chair and rested. A group of nuns passed by in light blue robes, their dark skin suggesting that they might be from Latin America. Then he climbed the stairs to look for Bob. He stuck his head in one cell after another, pausing to admire the frescoes. His favorite was The Mocking of Christ, with a disembodied head blowing air at the blindfolded Jesus. He was standing looking at this one, feeling the slight breeze that wafted through the window, imagining himself as the subject of the mockery, when he heard a moan.

  He hurried out into the hall and tried to decide from which direction the sound had come. The he heard it again. Three cells down, he found Bob, crumpled on the floor.

  "Hey," Larry said, kneeling beside him. "Are you okay? Do you need a doctor?" Larry had no idea how you even got a doctor in Italy. He didn't speak Italian, other than the few phrases he'd picked up to use in restaurants and bars. Bob looked up at him, his eyes lit with a kind of distant terror, and held out his hands, palms up. The center of each was bloody.

  It occurred to Larry, just for a second, that this might be some kind of elaborate prank, perhaps even one Julia had dreamed up. But there was nothing particularly funny about what was happening, and no one shouted "Surprise!" Bob attempted to speak, but seemed incapable, and instead just mumbled. His wounds were real, and they were still bleeding. There was some blood on the front of his shirt, and on his cargo pants, as well as on the floor.

  "What happened?" Larry looked up at the fresco in this room, which was of the Coronation of the Virgin, with various arrayed saints watching. Front right was Saint Francis, his hands upheld, clearly showing his stigmata. He looked back at Bob, who had the appearance of a person waking from a dream. There was no immediate apparent source of his injury—nothing sharp on which he might have gouged himself. The man was simply semiconscious and bleeding from the hands.

  Bob said something else unintelligible.

  "What happened?" Larry repeated, slowly.

  "I'm not sure," Bob said. He got unsteadily to his feet and examined his palms. "I've got a handkerchief in my vest. Would you get it out for me? I'm a mess." Larry patted his pockets, found it and removed it. Bob wrapped this around his right hand, then carefully withdrew his other, used handkerchief, and balled it up in his left. He stood for a good thirty seconds, feet apart, eyes half-closed, as if waiting for an ice cream headache to pass. "OK," he said. "I'm fine."

  Larry looked down at the blood smear on the floor. "Did you cut yourself on something?"

  "I guess," said Bob. "I don't remember. One minute I was looking at the painting, the next . . ." He stared down at his two hands, now both closed into loose fists. "Oh, boy."

  "I can try to find you a doctor," said Larry. "I think that might be the thing to do. I mean, if you want. Would you like to go to a doctor?"

  "I hate doctors, and I don't speak the language. I go to some Italian doctor, I'll end up having my tonsils out."

  "Are your feet okay?"

  "What do you mean? What would be wrong with my feet?"

  "Never mind," said Larry. "I'm sure you're right. It's nothing."

  Bob brought his hands up in front of his chest and peered cautiously inside, then let them fall again. "Maybe we should go now."

  "Yes," said Larry. "Absolutely. Where would you like to go?"

  "I don't know."

  "How about your hotel?"

  "Sure. Okay."

  But when they were outside, it became clear that Bob was confused. He leaned up against the side of a building. "Could we go back to your place?" he asked.

  "Not the hotel?"

  "This is hard to admit, but I'm afraid to be alone."

  "And you're sure you don't want a doctor?"

  Bob unclasped one hand and examined the palm, holding it in such a way that Larry could not see. "You got bandages at your place? Maybe some iodine? That ought to take care of it."

  "What the hell happened in there?" Larry asked.

  "I'm telling you, honestly, I have no idea."

  Julia was not home when they got to the apartment. Bob went into the bathroom and stayed a long time. When he came out, he had gauze around both hands. "They're still bleeding."

  "Bleeding a lot?"

  "Not a lot. Kind of oozing, you might say." He examined a photo of Gwen Larry had stuck onto the refrigerator door. It had been taken on top of Federal Hill, and it showed her framed by an impossibly blue sky, Baltimore's Inner Harbor spread out behind her. She looked very pretty in jeans and a white shirt, her hands on her hips, her eyes squinted against the sun. Larry had regular, rational conversations with her in his dreams ("Why did you do it? What were you thinking about while you were doing it?"), and in them she always looked exactly like she did in this picture, smiling, secret, her true self locked away.

  "This is strange," said Larry. "I don't know what to tell you. Maybe you can go on one of those afternoon talk shows."

  Bob turned away from the photo. "What I'd like most in the world right now is a drink." He smiled in a way that Larry had to admit looked beatific.

  They walked to an enoteca just outside the city walls and ordered a liter of wine. Everyone around seemed young, beautiful, and coupled up. An American family at the next table grappled with their menu, sounding out the various choices. Syllables of different languages fluttered like moths in the early evening air. A cell phone rang and was answered with a sharp "Pronto." Motorbikes buzzed by, briefly filling the area with their acrid exhaust.

  "Be honest with me," Larry said. "You did this to yourself, right? Like with a penknife or something?"

  Bob's eyes widened. "A penknife?"

  "Okay, okay. Do you have any history of this happening? Or anything like it? Sudden nosebleeds, for instance? What are those pills you take?"

  "Heart medicine. They don't make your palms bleed." He took a long swallow from his wine. "I pinched your sister."

  "You did what?"

  "On the butt. I couldn't help myself. I get around women, I don't know what to say to them. I pinched her, and then she talked to me about hiring you for a tour, and I couldn't say no. Maybe it's punishment."

  "Well, this sort of thing isn't usually about punishment."

  "What, then? What's it about? You're the expert."

  "A reward, I think. Sort of."

  "Some reward." Bob's eyes flickered shut, then open. "She told me about her boyfriend. It took my wife three years to die. She tried everything—shark cartilage pills, coffee enemas, meditation. Over time, you start to pull away. You're impatient. Every night, I'd think about the life I was going to have after she was gone." He pulled aside one of his bandages with the forefinger of his other hand and peered underneath. "I had various plans. One was to move to Australia and live by the beach. Another was to get a degree in something. Law, maybe, or economics. I'd be the old guy in class everyone wondered about. I also thought I could take up the trumpet. You like Herb Alpert?"

  "Who?"

  "'The Lonely Bull'? It's beautiful—like a whole movie in a t
wo-minute song. You feel the sadness of the bull. And then you hear the crowd, cheering. Cheering. It's really something."

  "I don't know it." Larry eyed Bob's pockets. Perhaps one of them contained a knife, or a corkscrew, and Bob had dug away at his palms with it, then stuck it back in. Larry could think of no earthly reason for Bob to have done this.

  "She wouldn't die," he said. "The prognosis was one year. When it gets to three, that's not dying anymore, that's living."

  Larry took a sip of wine. "Did you know that Saint Lorenzo, as they were grilling him, made a joke to his torturers? He said, 'I think I'm done on that side—go ahead and turn me over.'"

  "What should I do?" Bob asked. Larry thought there was something panicked in the man's eyes.

  "You should keep them bandaged and don't tell anyone. Couple of days, they ought to heal up fine." He thought of psychosomatic illnesses—hysterical pregnancies, hysterical blindness. The human body was capable of all sorts of betrayals.

  "She's got a nice butt, your sister."

  "Excuse me?"

  "Tight, like a honeydew." He grinned, showing teeth the color of weak tea.

  "She's my aunt. And I don't need to hear that."

  "She likes older men, it seems like."

  "I don't know what she likes. I can't speak for her. You shouldn't be pinching statues anyway."

  "Like a honeydew."

  "You know what?" said Larry, waving for the waitress. "The tour is over."

  Larry put Bob into a taxi and sent him back to the Hotel Vasari, then walked himself back to the apartment, where he settled into Frank Packard's overstuffed green chair and flicked on the television to an Italian game show he couldn't follow at all. He did his best to put Bob entirely out of his mind. The guy had problems. He'd probably dug at his own palms somehow. And if he hadn't? Well, maybe God did have a sense of humor. Feeling thirsty, he went to the refrigerator for one of Julia's Diet 7UPs. That was when he noticed the blank space on the door.

  He tried to think of some moment when Bob could have stolen the photo of Gwen, but couldn't—it seemed a magic trick. He stood frozen, unsure what to do. Maybe Bob had done him a favor. Even Julia had commented on the dubious wisdom of keeping her up there. "You'll never get anyplace," she said, "if you insist on looking backwards at where you've been, and not forward at where you might end up." On the other hand, the photo was the only thing he had that he cared about at all. Without even bothering to shut off the TV, he headed out the door and down the stairs to the street.

  The Arno glittered with reflected moonlight as he crossed the bridge and headed toward the train station and Bob's hotel, hurrying in the still heat. He found the building and asked for Bob Seitz, but was informed he'd checked out.

  "Checked out? Are you sure?"

  The woman behind the desk was sure.

  Larry walked to the station and looked at the board. A late train for Venice, a local that stopped in Bologna, was departing in fifteen minutes. He went downstairs and through the underground passageways to track nine. It was very humid, and he was sweating from the chin and behind his ears. He climbed the stairs to the platform and looked around.

  Fifty yards away, a figure separated from a group of figures. Larry shouted, then began to jog toward him, but the man hoisted a small bag and got onto the train. Larry climbed aboard, too, and made his way quickly down the aisle to the end of the car. He passed through to the next one just as the far door closed, and now he began to run. In the middle of the next car, there was Bob, putting his luggage up into the rack.

  "I want that picture back."

  "What picture?" said Bob.

  "You know exactly what picture." He looked down at Bob's hands, and saw that he now had on gloves.

  "Florentine leather," he said. "When I bought them two days ago I didn't realize they'd be coming in handy so soon."

  "Where is it?"

  "I have no idea what you're talking about." Behind his glasses, Bob's eyes were still red and wet. The train's whistle gave out a number of short blasts. "I'm going to Venice and try to forget this ever happened. And I'm not looking at any more paintings."

  Larry grabbed the man's shoulder. "You did it to yourself. I don't know what you used, but it wasn't holy rays. Here." Larry dug in his pocket and pulled out a wad of bills. "Here's your money back. Give me my photo and we'll forget everything. None of this happened."

  "This happened," said Bob, and held up his gloved hands.

  Larry dropped the money onto the seat. He was suddenly full of doubt about everything. Had he really seen the wounds? Could that have been an illusion, too? "Take them off."

  "No." The train's whistle blew loudly.

  "Take them off."

  Larry grabbed for a finger of a glove, but Bob pulled his hands away and crossed them over his chest defensively. "Giotto, my ass," he said. "You don't even know Jeff Goldblum."

  The whistle blew again, and Larry, out of time, hurried to the door.

  When he got back to the apartment, Julia was home, making herself tea.

  "I went to the hospital today," she said. "And you're not going to believe it. Frank is up and about. He opened his eyes this morning and asked how the White Sox were doing. It's a miracle." Steam snorted from the kettle as Julia took it off the stove. "How was your day? How was old Bob? He seemed kind of weird. I hope he didn't turn out to be some secret art expert."

  "Nope," said Larry, watching her carefully fill a mug. "He didn't know the first thing."

  Cowboy Honeymoon

  Kaufman drove from one fire to another. In Baltimore, there had been a train wreck in the Howard Street Tunnel, the northern end of which was not far from the small house he owned, tucked away on a side street behind the hulking wreck of a Victorian hotel, and three doors down from a gay bar with no sign or windows. The train was loaded with toxic chemicals, and stuck in the tunnel as it had been, there was little the authorities could do. The downtown air filled with the smell of melted plastic and electrical wire. Temperatures reached a thousand degrees in the tunnel, so hot that the cars glowed.

  In Jackson it was wood smoke, thick as a campfire when the wind blew from the south. A whole mountainside was burning. Fat insect helicopters traveled back and forth from the airport, huge baskets dangling under them like egg sacs. Around town, signs everywhere read, "Thank you, firefighters!" The air hurt your eyes, and Kaufman had to run his wipers to clear ash from the windshield of his Subaru.

  Everything in the hotel bar gleamed, from the hanging racks of stemware, to the long, polished mahogany bar itself, to the picture windows in the seating area. They were atop a mesa, with views in all directions. Kaufman felt as if he'd been somehow transported to the pages of the kind of magazine he'd never read on purpose.

  "See that couple?" asked Rhonda. It was cocktail hour at The Blue Buffalo. After one day working for Irving Straight, Kaufman was already wondering about his decision. The man did huge, saccharine oils with titles like Beddin' 'em Down and Chow Time, depicting sunburnt Marlboro men, cows and horses at twilight.

  At a table by the window, he observed a woman who looked to be in her midthirties, with frizzy dark hair and black plastic-framed glasses. The man with her seemed somewhat older, had a shaved head, and looked bored.

  "Yes," he said. "I see them."

  "They're here through an Internet auction—one of those travel sites. Only when she got here this morning and saw their room, she pitched a fit and said it was their honeymoon. They had room 11. It's small, and there isn't any view. She starts crying right there, I mean sobbing. What a show."

  "You think she's lying?"

  "Of course she's lying. She's some spoiled East Coast chick."

  "What did you do?"

  "I gave her the honeymoon suite." Rhonda applied Chap Stick to her lips. Her hair was tinted blonde, her skin tanned and creased around the eyes, and yesterday Kaufman had noticed a geometric tattoo barely rising out of the back of her jeans, the same as a lot of his students had back
in the city.

  "That was nice of you," he said.

  "It was available. With the fire, I'm getting cancellations like crazy. But I want to have some fun with them. I really want to push this. There is no way they're married. I don't even think he wants to be here, to tell you the truth."

  "How do you know? They're wearing rings."

  "That doesn't mean anything—I wear a ring. You get to a certain age, you just do. Hell, he might be married to someone else. Anyway, they've got reservations for dinner here tonight, and I've arranged to have a cake appear. I'm having Paco decorate their table with balloons, and the wait staff are going to come out and sing. You should have seen her, crying like a six-year-old. Like the world owes her something. Know what I wish you'd do? Hit on her. It'll be good practice for you, and who knows? Maybe you'll get lucky."

  Kaufman looked again at the woman, tried to imagine starting some kind of conversation. Jackie, the girlfriend he'd moved in with after college but never married, had died almost ten years ago, and though he'd dated on and off since then, it hadn't been with much success. There was no one in his life right now, although he liked to think he had prospects—the young blonde he'd met in his last painting class, for instance, who liked Elvis Costello. Or the antiques dealer he'd met recently at The Walters on Rhumba Night, who was interested in old maps (there had been an exhibit on). Who was he kidding? The blonde was twenty-three, maybe younger, while Kaufman was forty-two, surely out of her range. The antiques woman seemed to believe that Greek civilization had followed, and indeed improved upon, that of Rome. He had no prospects. "I don't hit on married women."

  "Here's what I'm telling you. That woman is in an unhappy relationship. She might sleep with you just to push things with him."

  "What would that say about me?"

  "I'm sorry, Skip. You're right. You need another drink?" She was the one who'd given him the nickname, and he didn't even know why. That was being a younger brother—eight years old and one day you suddenly had a new name, which no amount of protest was going to change. Even his parents had begun using it.