Gods and Pawns (Company) Read online

  She was silent until Franklin Avenue, when she said: “Please, tell me. Is there a God? Do we have souls? Is there any fucking point to this life?”

  His voice was flat with exhaustion. “How would I know all that, mi hija? I don’t know. Nobody I’ve talked to in four hundred years has told me, either.”

  “Then what the hell do you know?”

  He looked sidelong at Philip as he drove. Reaching out, he touched the child’s sleeping face.

  “That this is all we have, mi hija. And it doesn’t last, so you have to take good care of it.”

  The Virgin of Guadalupe was still on duty, in her cloud of rose perfume. Tina still lay where she had fallen, in the silent house, but she was breathing. They lifted her onto the couch and covered her with a blanket. While Uncle Porfirio was cleaning up and changing into an old suit of Hector’s, Tina became foggily conscious. Maria told her she’d been sleepwalking and fallen down the stairs. When Uncle Porfirio came back, he pretended to be an EMT, checking her vital signs and asking her questions about how she felt.

  Maria left him sitting beside Tina, speaking to her in a low and soothing voice, while she went upstairs and bathed Philip. He woke crying, staring around; but, seeing no monsters, he calmed down and let her put him in fresh diapers and a sleeper. It took twice as long as usual with only one hand. When she carried him downstairs, in the pale light of dawn, Tina was sitting up, smiling if glassy-eyed.

  “There’s my little guy!” she said, reaching out for Philip. “Mommy fell down and went boom! Were you scared?”

  Philip wriggled into her arms, beginning to cry again, and she hugged him. Looking over his shoulder at Maria, she added: “I don’t think that new medication Dr. Miller prescribed was good for me, you know?” A shadow crossed her face. “I…don’t think I want to go back to Dr. Miller. I had a really creepy dream about him.”

  “Okay,” said Maria. Uncle Porfirio cleared his throat.

  “Ms. Aguilar, I need to give you a list of symptoms you need to watch for.”

  “Sure.” Maria picked up the TV remote, handed it to Tina, took the baby from her arms. “Why don’t you find some cartoons to watch, okay, mi hija? I’ll get breakfast for Philip.”

  They left her happily watching Bugs Bunny. In the kitchen, Maria made coffee while Uncle Porfirio looked into Philip’s eyes, spoke to him to in a voice so quiet Maria could barely make out what he said. Philip was tranquil after that, feeding himself, eating Cream of Wheat with his right fist while carefully holding the spoon in his left. He watched, in mild interest, as Uncle Porfirio fashioned a sling for Maria’s arm and made her take two aspirins.

  “What happens now?” Maria inquired in a murmur.

  “Now I steal your gun. And your car,” said Uncle Porfirio. “Too much to clean up, mi hija, and you won’t want it back when I finish what I have to do. It’s insured, right?”

  “I haven’t paid the premiums in a month. I’m unemployed right now,” said Maria, bemused. The night and all its horrible wonders had receded like tidewater, and the mundane rock of her old problems stood exposed again, quite unchanged.

  “I’ll send you money,” Uncle Porfirio told her, as though reading her mind. “I have some saved. Buy another car. No SUVs, okay?”

  “What’s an SUV?”

  “You’ll find out. Get another Buick, maybe, or a Volvo. Put the house on the market with a Realtor. Take Tina and the baby and go, get the hell out of Los Angeles. Find a place in Taos, near Isabel. She needs to meet her grandson.”

  “Oh, she’ll love that, being reminded she’s a grandmother!” Maria grinned involuntarily. But he wasn’t smiling.

  “You’re serious, aren’t you? About what that guy told you. Labienus.”

  Uncle Porfirio flinched. “Don’t even mention his name.” He gulped his coffee and stood. “I made a deal with a devil, so I’m not about to waste any inside information I get from him.”

  “But…you’re not really going to just look the other way, when he wants you to?”

  Uncle Porfirio shrugged into his coat, not answering.

  “But what you told me, about what those people do…doesn’t that mean innocent people will die?”

  “And other innocents will live,” he said. “There’s a price to pay for everything. But I made the deal, mi hija; not you. That weight, you don’t have to bear.”

  He stepped to the back door and opened it.

  “Keep the family together,” he said, and slipped out, and was gone into the morning.

  She never saw him again.

  One month and an epic garage sale later, Maria stood on the front porch of the house on Fountain. Tina was buckling Philip into his car seat, in the new—well, 1986—Buick Skylark, which was crammed to the roof with all their remaining possessions. But it was solid, dependable, insured, had side mirrors and a good spare, and there were no severed heads in the trunk.

  They were leaving late. The last-minute packing had taken longer than Maria had expected. All the same, she lingered on the porch, turning the key over in her hand. Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath. Acrid smell of dry rot, old plaster, dead leaves. The place of her childhood was long gone.

  This place would be a parking lot, in another year. The Hollywood sign would look down on…what? Riots? Epidemics? Ruins? This cycle of time was ending, but what could she do about it? Run through the streets shouting a warning, like the man at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers? As though anyone listened to the Maria Aguilars of this world.

  She walked down the front steps, scowling up at the hazy sky. Summer was gone, too; the late sunlight gave no warmth where it slanted, and the green leaves looked tired, frayed. Far off to the west, a few rifts of fog were drifting in from the distant sea. It would be a chilly night, and an early winter.

  But the family would be somewhere else by then, safe in a new place. When the new cycle started, that had been paid for in blood, they would endure.

  And she had to admit she felt less of a weight on her shoulders, now. Somebody else remembered her parents, so that Hector was more than a gravestone and Lupe more than a flickering black-and-white image in an old movie. Somebody else knew about Abuela Maria and the ranch in Durango. Somebody else was the guardian of their past, kept the family’s story safe, a long and perfect and unbroken chronicle. It could never be forgotten, and maybe it would never end.

  Doggedly she walked to the car, refusing to look back.

  “Auntie!” Tina was leaning out the Buick’s window, her face shining with awe. “Look at this. The Blessed Mother’s in the car!”

  “She’s in the trunk,” said Maria, going around to the driver’s side. “I packed her in with the bath towels.”

  “No, I mean the one that got stolen with the old car!” cried Tina, pointing. Maria slid behind the wheel and halted, staring. There on the dashboard was the plastic Virgin of Guadalupe, robed in the starry heavens, crowned in the glory of the setting sun.

  “If that isn’t a miracle, I don’t know what is,” said Tina, wiping away a tear. “You see? Everything’s going to be all right now. It’s a sign that somebody’s watching over us.”

  Maria nodded slowly.

  “I guess so. Fasten your seat belt, mi hija.”

  She closed the door, fastened her own seat belt, adjusted the mirrors. Pulling carefully out into traffic, she headed for the nearest freeway on ramp.

  Unseen, five cars behind her in a Lincoln Continental, Porfirio followed.

  Standing In His Light

  The country was so flat its inhabitants had four different words for horizon. Its sunlight was watery, full of tumbling clouds. Canals cut across a vast wet chaos of tidal mud, connecting tidy redbrick towns with straight streets, secure and well ordered behind walls. The houses were all alike behind their stepped façades, high windows set in pairs letting through pale light on rooms scrubbed and spotless. The people who lived in the rooms were industrious, pious, and preoccupied with money.

  A fantas
ist might decide that they were therefore dull, smug, and inherently unromantic, the sort of people among whom the Hero might be born, but against whom he would certainly rebel, and from whom he would ultimately escape to follow his dreams.

  Nothing could have been further from the truth. The people who lived in the houses above the placid mud flats had fought like demons against their oppressors, and were now in the midst of a philosophical and artistic flowering of such magnificence that their names would be written in gold in all the arts.

  Still, they had to make a living. And making a living is a hard, dirty, and desperate business.

  The Inn, 1659

  The weaver’s son and the draper’s son sat at a small table. They had been passing back and forth a pipe of tobacco slightly adulterated with hemp, and, now it was smoked out, were attempting to keep the buzz going with two pots of beer. It wasn’t proving successful. The weaver’s son, thin and threadbare, was nervously eyeing his guest and trying to summon the courage to make a business proposition. The draper’s son, reasonably well fed and dressed, seemed in a complacent mood.

  “So you learned a thing or two about lenses in Amsterdam, eh?” said the weaver’s son.

  “I’d have gone blind if I hadn’t,” replied the draper’s son, belching gently. “Counting threads on brocade? You can’t do it without a magnifying glass.”

  “I had this idea,” said the weaver’s son. “Involving lenses, see. Have you looked at de Hooch’s paintings lately? He’s using a camera obscura for his interiors. They’re the greatest thing—”

  “You know my Latin’s no good,” said the draper’s son. “What’s a camera obscura, anyway?”

  “All the words mean is dark room,” explained the weaver’s son. “It’s a trick device, a box with two lenses and a focusing tube. The Italians invented it. Solves all problems of perspective drawing! You don’t have to do any math, no calculations to get correct angles of view. It captures an image and throws a little picture of it on your canvas, and all you have to do is trace over it. It’s like magic!”

  “And you want me to loan you the money for one?” asked the draper’s son, looking severe.

  “No! I just thought, er, if you knew about lenses, you might want to help me make one,” said the weaver’s son, flushing. “And then I’d cut you in for a share of the paintings I sell afterward.”

  “But your stuff doesn’t sell,” said the draper’s son.

  “But it would sell, if I had a camera obscura! See, that’s my problem, getting perspective right,” argued the weaver’s son. “That was the problem with my Procuress. I’m no good with math.”

  “That’s certainly true.”

  “But the device would solve all that. I’ve got a whole new line of work planned: no more Bible scenes. I’m going to do ladies and soldiers in rooms, like de Hooch and Metsu are doing. The emblem stuff with hidden meanings, that people can puzzle over. That’s what everyone wants, and it’s selling like crazy now,” said the weaver’s son.

  The draper’s son sighed and drained his beer.

  “Look, Jan,” he said. “Your father died broke. He made good silk cloth, he ran a pretty decent inn; if he’d stayed out of the art business he’d have done all right for himself. Our fathers were friends, so I’m giving you advice for nothing: you won’t make a living by painting. I know it’s what you’ve always wanted to do, and I’m not saying you’re not good—but the others are better, and there are a lot of them. And you’re not very original, you know.”

  The weaver’s son scowled. He was on the point of telling the draper’s son to go to Hell when a shadow fell across their table.

  “I’m very sorry to interrupt, Mynheeren,” said the woman. They looked up at her. The weaver’s son stared, struck by the image she presented, the way the light from the window fell on her white coif, glittered along the line of brass beads on her sleeve, the way the layered shadows modeled her serene face.

  “What do you want?” asked the draper’s son. She didn’t look like a whore; she looked like any one of the thousand respectable young matrons who were even now peeling apples in a thousand kitchens. What, then, was she doing in the common room of a shabby inn on the market square?

  “Well, I couldn’t help but overhear that you two young gentlemen were talking about making a camera obscura. And, I said to myself, isn’t that the strangest coincidence! Really, when a coincidence this remarkable occurs it’s got to be the work of God or the holy angels, at least that was what my mother used to say, so then I said to myself, whether it’s quite polite or not, I’ll just have to go over there and introduce myself! Elisabeth Van Drouten, gentlemen, how do you do?”

  And she drew up a three-legged stool, and sat, and thumped her covered basket down on the table. Looking from one to the other of the men, she whisked off the cover. There, nestled in a linen kerchief, were a handful of objects that shone like big water drops, crystal-clear, domed, gleaming.

  “Lenses!” cried Mevrouw Van Drouten triumphantly. “What do you think of that?”

  The two gentlemen blinked at them like owls, and the draper’s son reached into the basket and held one up to the light.

  “Nice lenses,” he admitted. “Are you selling them?”

  “Not exactly,” said Mevrouw Van Drouten. “It’s a long story. There’s a friend of my family’s in Amsterdam, actually that’s where I’m from, you could probably tell from my accent, yes? Well, anyway, he grinds lenses, this friend of mine. And because he got in trouble with his family—and then later on the Jews kicked him out of their synagogue for something, I’m not sure what it was all about, but anyway, bang, there went poor Spinoza’s inheritance. So we were trying to help him out by selling some of his lenses, you see?

  “So last time I was here in Delft visiting my auntie, which was, let’s see, I guess it was five years ago now, I brought some lenses to see if I could sell them, which I did when I was at my cousin’s tavern to this nice man who was maybe a little drunk at the time, and I understood him to say he was a painter and wanted them for optical effects. Fabritius, that was his name!”

  The two men grunted. In a gesture that had become involuntary for citizens of their town, they both turned to the northeast and raised their beers in salute. The woman watched them, her brows knitted.

  “He died in the explosion,” the weaver’s son explained.

  “Oh! Yes, the ‘Delft Thunderclap,’ we called it,” said Mevrouw Van Drouten, nodding her head. “When your city powder magazine went blooie! Awful tragedy. And that’s what my cousin said, when I went back to her tavern yesterday. That poor Fabritius had been so drunk that he left the packet of lenses on the table, and he never came back to get them because the explosion happened the next day. So she kept them until she saw me again. And I said, ‘What am I supposed to do with them now? He paid for them, so I don’t feel right keeping them,’ and she said, ‘Well, Elisabeth, why don’t you find some other painters to give them to?’ And I said, ‘Where would I find some other painters?’ and she said, ‘Try that inn over in the market square,’ so I came straight over, and here you are, fellow artists, I guess, eh? Maybe you knew Fabritius?”

  “I did,” said the weaver’s son. “He was a genius.”

  “Well then! I’m sure he’d want you to have these, wouldn’t he?”

  The weaver’s son reached into the basket and the lenses rattled, clicked softly as he drew one out. He peered at the tiny rainbowed point of light it threw. It magnified wildly the lines of his palm, the yellow hairs on the back of his hand. He held it up to the window and saw his thumbprint become a vast swirl etched in silver. The draper’s son held his lens up beside it.

  “Ooh!” Mevrouw Van Drouten clasped her hands in pleasure. “I wish I could capture this moment, somehow. Can’t help thinking it’s portentous, in a way I can’t explain. Fabritius’s ghost is probably smiling down from heaven at you two fine young fellows. Now you can build your camera obscura, eh? And maybe find one or two other uses for t
he lenses.”

  “Are you sure you want to give them away?” said the draper’s son, a little vaguely because he was still entranced by the play of rainbows across crystal. The buzz from the hemp hadn’t quite vanished.

  “Quite sure,” said Mevrouw Van Drouten cheerfully. She spilled the remaining lenses out on the table and stood, tucking her empty basket under her arm. “There. Much as I’d love to stay and chat, I’ve got a boat to catch. Mynheer Leeuwenhoek, Mynheer Vermeer, may God keep you both.”

  Then she was gone, as suddenly and inexplicably as she’d arrived. The weaver’s son tore his gaze away from the liquid contours of the piled lenses and looked around. The light still streamed in, clear and soft, but the room was empty save for a drunk snoring on a bench in the corner.

  In the twenty-fourth century, it was unanimously conceded by art authorities that Jan Vermeer was the greatest painter who had ever lived.

  The other Dutch masters had long since been dismissed from popular taste. Rembrandt didn’t suit because his work was too muddy, too dark, too full of soldiers, and too big, and who wanted to look at Bible pictures anyway in an enlightened age? To say nothing of the fact that his brushstrokes were sloppy. Franz Hals painted too many dirty-looking, grimacing people, and his brushstrokes were even sloppier. The whole range of still life paintings of food were out: too many animal or fish corpses, too many bottles of alcohol. Then, too, a preoccupation with food might lead the viewer to obesity, which was immoral, after all!

  Had they known of their demotion, the old gentlemen of Amsterdam and Utrecht might not have felt too badly; for by the twenty-fourth century, the whole of Medieval art had been condemned for its religious content, as had the works of the masters of the Italian Renaissance. The French Impressionists were considered incoherent and sleazy, the Spanish morbid, the Germans entartete, and the Americans frivolous. Almost nothing from the twentieth or twenty-first centuries was acceptable. Primitive art was grudgingly accepted as politically correct, as long as it didn’t deal in objectionable subjects like sex, religion, war, or animal abuse, but the sad fact was that it generally did, so there wasn’t a lot of it on view.