The Machineries of Joy Page 15

  They let their eyes play over the sand, the hills, the few lone clouds, the sky emptied of wind and very still.

  “Maybe if we just look out the sides of our eyes, not direct at it, relax, take it easy …”

  They both looked down at their shoes, their hands, the rocks at their feet, anything. But at last William mourned, “Are we? Are we the pure in heart?”

  Robert laughed just a little bit. “Oh, not like the kids who came through here today and saw anything they wanted to see, and not like the big simple people born in the wheat fields and by God’s grace wandering the world and will never grow up. We’re neither the little children nor the big children of the world, Willy, but we are one thing: glad to be alive. We know the air mornings on the road, how the stars go up and then down the sky. That villain, he stopped being glad a long time ago. I hate to think of him driving his cycle on the road the rest of the night, the rest of the year.”

  As he finished this, Robert noticed that William was sliding his eyes carefully to one side, toward the desert.

  Robert whispered carefully, “See anything?”

  William sighed. “No. Maybe tomorrow …”

  A single car came down the highway.

  The two men glanced at each other. A wild look of hope flashed in their eyes. But they could not quite bring themselves to fling up their hands and yell. They simply stood with the painted sign held in their arms.

  The car roared by.

  The two men followed it with their wishful eyes.

  The car braked. It backed up. In it were a man, a woman, a boy, a girl. The man called out, “You closed for the night?!”

  William said, “It’s no use—”

  Robert cut in. “He means, no use giving us money! Last customer of the day, and family, free! On the house!”

  “Thank you, neighbor, thank you!”

  The car roared out onto the viewpoint.

  William seized Robert’s elbow. “Bob, what ails you? Disappoint those kids, that nice family?”

  “Hush up,” said Robert, gently. “Come on.”

  The kids piled out of the car. The man and his wife climbed slowly out into the sunset. The sky was all gold and blue now, and a bird sang somewhere in the fields of sand and lion-pollen.

  “Watch,” said Robert.

  And they moved up to stand behind the family where it lined up now to look out over the desert.

  William held his breath.

  The man and wife squinted into the twilight uneasily.

  The kids said nothing. Their eyes flexed and filled with a distillation of late sunlight.

  William cleared his throat. “It’s late. Uh—can’t see too well.”

  The man was going to reply, when the boy said, “Oh, we can see fine!”

  “Sure!” The girl pointed. “There!”

  The mother and father followed her gesture, as if it might help, and it did.

  “Lord,” said the woman, “for a moment I thought … But now—Yes, there it is!”

  The man read his wife’s face, saw a thing there, borrowed it and placed it on the land and in the air.

  “Yes,” he said, at last. “Oh, yes.”

  William stared at them, at the desert and then at Robert, who smiled and nodded.

  The faces of the father, the mother, the daughter, the son were glowing now, looking off at the desert.

  “Oh,” murmured the girl, “is it really there?”

  And the father nodded, his face bright with what he saw that was just within seeing and just beyond knowing. He spoke as if he stood alone in a great forest church.

  “Yes. And, Lord, it’s beautiful.”

  William started to lift his head, but Robert whispered, “Easy. It’s coming. Don’t try. Easy, Will.”

  And then William knew what to do.

  “I,” he said, “am going to go stand with the kids.”

  And he walked slowly over and stood right behind the boy and the girl. He stood for a long time there, like a man between two warm fires on a cool evening, and they warmed him and he breathed easy and at last let his eyes drift up, let his attention wander easy out toward the twilight desert and the hoped-for city in the dusk.

  And there in the dust softly blown high from the land, reassembled on the wind into half-shapes of towers and spires and minarets, was the mirage.

  He felt Robert’s breath on his neck, close, whispering, half talking to himself.

  “It was a miracle of rare device,

  A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!”

  And the city was there.

  And the sun set and the first stars came-out.

  And the city was very clear, as William heard himself repeat, aloud or perhaps for only his secret pleasure, “ ‘It was a miracle of rare device … ’”

  And they stood in the dark until they could not see.

  And So Died Riabouchinska

  The cellar was cold cement and the dead man was cold stone and the air was filled with an invisible fall of rain, while the people gathered to look at the body as if it had been washed in on an empty shore at morning. The gravity of the earth was drawn to a focus here in this single basement room—a gravity so immense that it pulled their faces down, bent their mouths at the corners and drained their cheeks. Their hands hung weighted and their feet were planted so they could not move without seeming to walk under water.

  A voice was calling, but nobody listened.

  The voice called again and only after a long time did the people turn and look, momentarily, into the air. They were at the seashore in November and this was a gull crying over their heads in the gray color of dawn. It was a sad crying, like the birds going south for the steel winter to come. It was an ocean sounding the shore so far away that it was only a whisper of sand and wind in a seashell.

  The people in the basement room shifted their gaze to a table and a golden box resting there, no more than twenty-four inches long, inscribed with the name RIABOUCHINSKA. Under the lid of this small coffin the voice at last settled with finality, and the people stared at the box, and the dead man lay on the floor, not hearing the soft cry.

  “Let me out, let me out, oh, please, please, someone let me out.”

  And finally Mr. Fabian, the ventriloquist, bent and whispered to the golden box, “No, Ria, this is serious business. Later. Be quiet, now, that’s a good girl.” He shut his eyes and tried to laugh.

  From under the polished lid her calm voice said, “Please don’t laugh. You should be much kinder now after what’s happened.”

  Detective Lieutenant Krovitch touched Fabian’s arm. “If you don’t mind we’ll save your dummy act for later. Right now there’s all this to clean up.” He glanced at the woman, who had now taken a folding chair. “Mrs. Fabian.” He nodded to the young man sitting next to her. “Mr. Douglas, you’re Mr. Fabian’s press agent and manager?”

  The young man said he was. Krovitch looked at the face of the man on the floor. “Fabian, Mrs. Fabian, Mr. Douglas—all of you say you don’t know this man who was murdered here last night, never heard the name Ockham before. Yet Ockham earlier told the stage manager he knew Fabian and had to see him about something vitally important.”

  The voice in the box began again quietly.

  Krovitch shouted. “Damn it, Fabian!”

  Under the lid, the voice laughed. It was like a muffled bell ringing.

  “Pay no attention to her, Lieutenant,” said Fabian.

  “Her? Or you, damn it! What is this? Get together, you two!”

  “We’ll never be together,” said the quiet voice, “never again after tonight.”

  Krovitch put out his hand. “Give me the key, Fabian.”

  In the silence there was the rattle of the key in the small lock, the squeal of the miniature hinges as the lid was opened and laid back against the table top.

  “Thank you,” said Riabouchinska.

  Krovitch stood motionless, just looking down and seeing Riabouchinska in her box and not quite believing
what he saw.

  The face was white and it was cut from marble or from the whitest wood he had ever seen. It might have been cut from snow. And the neck that held the head which was as dainty as a porcelain cup with the sun shining through the thinness of it, the neck was also white. And the hands could have been ivory and they were thin small things with tiny fingernails and whorls on the pads of the fingers, little delicate spirals and lines.

  She was all white stone, with light pouring through the stone and light coming out of the dark eyes with blue tones beneath like fresh mulberries. He was reminded of milk glass and of cream poured into a crystal tumbler. The brows were arched and black and thin and the cheeks were hollowed and there was a faint pink vein in each temple and a faint blue vein barely visible above the slender bridge of the nose, between the shining dark eyes.

  Her lips were half parted and it looked as if they might be slightly damp, and the nostrils were arched and modeled perfectly, as were the ears. The hair was black and it was parted in the middle and drawn back of the ears and it was real—he could see every single strand of hair. Her gown was as black as her hair and draped in such a fashion as to show her shoulders, which were carved wood as white as a stone that has lain a long time in the sun. She was very beautiful. Krovitch felt his throat move and then he stopped and did not say anything.

  Fabian took Riabouchinska from her box. “My lovely lady,” he said. “Carved from the rarest imported woods. She’s appeared in Paris, Rome, Istanbul. Everyone in the world loves her and thinks she’s really human, some sort of incredibly delicate midget creature. They won’t accept that she was once part of many forests growing far away from cities and idiotic people.”

  Fabian’s wife, Alyce, watched her husband, not taking her eyes from his mouth. Her eyes did not blink once in all the time he was telling of the doll he held in his arms. He in turned seemed aware of no one but the doll; the cellar and its people were lost in a mist that settled everywhere.

  But finally the small figure stirred and quivered. “Please, don’t talk about me! You know Alyce doesn’t like it.”

  “Alyce never has liked it.”

  “Shh, don’t!” cried Riabouchinska. “Not here, not now.” And then, swiftly, she turned to Krovitch and her tiny lips moved. “How did it all happen? Mr. Ockham, I mean, Mr. Ockham.”

  Fabian said, “You’d better go to sleep now, Ria.”

  “But I don’t want to,” she replied. “I’ve as much right to listen and talk, I’m as much a part of this murder as Alyce or—or Mr. Douglas even!”

  The press agent threw down his cigarette. “Don’t drag me into this, you—” And he looked at the doll as if it had suddenly become six feet tall and were breathing there before him.

  “It’s just that I want the truth to be told.” Riabouchinska turned her head to see all of the room. “And if I’m locked in my coffin there’ll be no truth, for John’s a consummate liar and I must watch after him, isn’t that right, John?”

  “Yes,” he said, his eyes shut, “I suppose it is.”

  “John loves me best of all the women in the world and I love him and try to understand his wrong way of thinking.”

  Krovitch hit the table with his fist. “God damn, oh, God damn it, Fabian! If you think you can—”

  “I’m helpless,” said Fabian.

  “But she’s—”

  “I know, I know what you want to say,” said Fabian quietly, looking at the detective. “She’s in my throat, is that it? No, no. She’s not in my throat. She’s somewhere else. I don’t know. Here, or here.” He touched his chest, his head.

  “She’s quick to hide. Sometimes there’s nothing I can do. Sometimes she is only herself, nothing of me at all. Sometimes she tells me what to do and I must do it. She stands guard, she reprimands me, is honest where I am dishonest, good when I am wicked as all the sins that ever were. She lives a life apart. She’s raised a wall in my head and lives there, ignoring me if I try to make her say improper things, co-operating if I suggest the right words and pantomime.” Fabian sighed. “So if you intend going on I’m afraid Ria must be present. Locking her up will do no good, no good at all.”

  Lieutenant Krovitch sat silently for the better part of a minute, then made his decision. “All right. Let her stay. It just may be, by God, that before the night’s over I’ll be tired enough to ask even a ventriloquist’s dummy questions.”

  Krovitch unwrapped a fresh cigar, lit it and puffed smoke. “So you don’t recognize the dead man, Mr. Douglas?”

  “He looks vaguely familiar. Could be an actor.”

  Krovitch swore. “Let’s all stop lying, what do you say? Look at Ockham’s shoes, his clothing. It’s obvious he needed money and came here tonight to beg, borrow or steal some. Let me ask you this, Douglas. Are you in love with Mrs. Fabian?”

  “Now, wait just a moment!” cried Alyce Fabian.

  Krovitch motioned her down. “You sit there, side by side, the two of you. I’m not exactly blind. When a press agent sits where the husband should be sitting, consoling the wife, well! The way you look at the marionette’s coffin, Mrs. Fabian, holding your breath when she appears. You make fists when she talks. Hell, you’re obvious.”

  “If you think for one moment I’m jealous of a stick of wood!”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “No, no, I’m not!”

  “Fabian moved.” You needn’t tell him anything, Alyce.”

  “Let her!”

  They all jerked their heads and stared at the small figurine, whose mouth was now slowly shutting. Even Fabian looked at the marionette as if it had struck him a blow.

  After a long while Alyce Fabian began to speak.

  “I married John seven years ago because he said he loved me and because I loved him and I loved Riabouchinska. At first, anyway. But then I began to see that he really lived all of his life and paid most of his attentions to her and I was a shadow waiting in the wings every night.

  “He spent fifty thousand dollars a year on her wardrobe—a hundred thousand dollars for a dollhouse with gold and silver and platinum furniture. He tucked her in a small satin bed each night and talked to her. I thought it was all an elaborate joke at first and I was wonderfully amused. But when it finally came to me that I was indeed merely an assistant in his act I began to feel a vague sort of hatred and distrust—not for the marionette, because after all it wasn’t her doing, but I felt a terrible growing dislike and hatred for John, because it was his fault. He, after all, was the control, and all of his cleverness and natural sadism came out through his relationship with the wooden doll.

  “And when I finally became very jealous, how silly of me! It was the greatest tribute I could have paid him and the way he had gone about perfecting the art of throwing his voice. It was all so idiotic, it was all so strange. And yet I knew that something had hold of John, just as people who drink have a hungry animal somewhere in them, starving to death.

  “So I moved back and forth from anger to pity, from jealousy to understanding. There were long periods when I didn’t hate him at all, and I never hated the thing that Ria was in him, for she was the best half, the good part, the honest and the lovely part of him. She was everything that he never let himself try to be.”

  Alyce Fabian stopped talking and the basement room was silent.

  “Tell about Mr. Douglas,” said a voice, whispering.

  Mrs. Fabian did not look up at the marionette. With an effort she finished it out. “When the years passed and there was so little love and understanding from John, I guess it was natural I turned to—Mr. Douglas.”

  Krovitch nodded. “Everything begins to fall into place. Mr. Ockham was a very poor man, down on his luck, and he came to this theater tonight because he knew something about you and Mr. Douglas. Perhaps he threatened to speak to Mr. Fabian if you didn’t buy him off. That would give you the best of reasons to get rid of him.”

  “That’s even sillier than all the rest,” said Alyce Fabian tiredly. “I di
dn’t kill him.”

  “Mr. Douglas might have and not told you.”

  “Why kill a man?” said Douglas. “John knew all about us.”

  “I did indeed,” said John Fabian, and laughed.

  He stopped laughing and his hand twitched, hidden in the snow-flake interior of the tiny doll, and her mouth opened and shut, opened and shut. He was trying to make her carry the laughter on after he had stopped, but there was no sound, save the little empty whisper of her lips moving and gasping, while Fabian stared down at the little face and perspiration came out, shining, upon his cheeks.

  The next afternoon Lieutenant Krovitch moved through the theater darkness backstage, found the iron stairs and climbed with great thought, taking as much time as he deemed necessary on each step, up to the second-level dressing rooms. He rapped on one of the thin-paneled doors.

  “Come in,” said Fabian’s voice from what seemed a great distance.

  Krovitch entered and closed the door and stood looking at the man who was slumped before his dressing mirror. “I have something I’d like to show you,” Krovitch said. His face showing no emotion whatever, he opened a manila folder and pulled out a glossy photograph, which he placed on the dressing table.

  John Fabian raised his eyebrows, glanced quickly up at Krovitch and then settled slowly back in his chair. He put his fingers to the bridge of his nose and massaged his face carefully, as if he had a headache. Krovitch turned the picture over and began to read from the typewritten data on the back. “Name, Miss Ilyana Ria-monova. One hundred pounds. Blue eyes. Black hair. Oval face. Born 1914, New York City. Disappeared 1934. Believed a victim of amnesia. Of Russo-Slav parentage. Et cetera. Et cetera.”

  Fabian’s lip twitched.

  Krovitch laid the photograph down, shaking his head thoughtfully. “It was pretty silly of me to go through police files for a picture of a marionette. You should have heard the laughter at headquarters. God. Still, here she is—Riabouchinska. Not papier-mâché, not wood, not a puppet, but a woman who once lived and moved around and—disappeared.” He looked steadily at Fabian. “Suppose you take it from there?”

  Fabian half smiled. “There’s nothing to it at all. I saw this woman’s picture a long time ago, liked her looks and copied my marionette after her.”