Carol O’Connell - Shell Game

No, there’s nothing there.

„Then you’ll go straight to prison. No postponements, no legal games to buy you any time.“ There was no woman to make that shadow. Louisa had died more than half a century ago.

„Agreed,“ said Malakhai. „Tomorrow morning I’ll write it all down. And tonight we’ll close the deal with a drink – one last glass of wine.“

His hands fell away from her shoulders as she turned around to face him, saying, „I won’t drink with you.“

Malakhai stepped back. „No, of course you won’t.“ He was finally altogether broken. It was in his face, more sorrow than she had ever seen. He inclined his head in the ghost of a bow, a gesture of good night, then turned away from her and strode across the lobby to cut a solitary swath through the partyers. She watched his back until he was swallowed by the crowd.

„You won’t drink with me either, will you?“ The front door was swinging shut as Emile St. John walked toward her. He carried no umbrella, and the rain ran off the brim of his hat when he tipped it in salute, saying, „It’s about choosing up sides.“

She nodded.

„You’re a good cop, Mallory.“ He turned away from her and walked into the dining area, where Charles Butler rose from his chair to slap the man’s back in a warm greeting. A young brunette sallied over to Nick Prado with a wineglass in her hand. He swept her up under one arm and ran with her across the room, stepping in time to music – upbeat, alive. The wine spilled, the smoke swirled. Mallory could hear the high notes of laughter across the narrow divide.

Life was always going on in another room.

Charles Butler had not been invited to the funeral. He would be slow to forgive her for that, but he was no good at covert things. Mallory had prepared for this death long in advance, determined that Malakhai’s interment would not become a mass media event.

She had traveled to the prison with her entourage of undertakers and collected his body in the dark hours of early morning. The coffin was airborne before the first reporters converged on the prison gates.

Mallory wanted no flights of doves, no tricks, nor a legion of magicians in white satin. She had hurried Malakhai over the ocean and into this foreign soil. Now she stood before the monument ordered from a French stonecutter months before the death. Once the grave was filled with dirt, this slab of marble would cover husband and wife, reunited in a common grave.

She could not have done this without the influence of Emile St. John. Long ago, this historic cemetery had been closed to any more traffic with the dead. St. John had dealt with the officials and cut through reams of paperwork to expand Louisa’s plot and lay Malakhai beside her. He took no credit for his work, modestly explaining that the French would always favor lovers over bureaucracy.

He stared at the blue Paris sky, then slowly bowed his head to read a passage from the Old Testament. He had also done this service for Franny. And after today, St. John and Mallory could stop meeting like this.

The cover of his Bible opened to a rush of wings as two doves appeared to fly from the pages. St. John looked up from the book with a deep apology on his face, for this was not what they had agreed upon.

„Old habit,“ he said. „They just slipped out.“ He turned his eyes down to the text of Solomon, and read aloud from the Song of Songs.

Mallory followed the flight of the doves, never hearing these words; they meant nothing to her. She had also been deaf to the prison chaplain when he argued that Malakhai should be left in a state of ignorance – he had called it grace – so the prisoner might go to God with a clean soul.

Mallory had no soul, or she had heard rumors to that effect and seen it writ in the shredded pages of a child’s psychiatric evaluation. And she was not a believer in God, though she did have personal knowledge of a living hell, its flames and its agony.

After a massive stroke, Malakhai had awakened to look around his prison cell, bewildered and as innocent as the boy from 1942, not understanding what crime he was paying for. Though justice was someone else’s job, and Mallory was only the imperfect machine of law, she had been there to explain it to him – every visitors’ day until his death. She had brought him Mr. Halpern’s portrait of Louisa and given him back his own love story in every detail he had given to her. Mallory had carried the frightened boy through all the years of his life to rebuild the man – to keep him sane.

She had carried him out of the fire.

Long after St. John had departed from the cemetery, the gravediggers stood in the distance, leaning on their shovels and waiting for the young American to finally let go of the dead.

A reporter appeared at the iron gates – the first fly on a fresh corpse. And then another one turned up, and another, buzzing, buzzing, cameras clicking.

In a darker time zone half the world away, Nick Prado stood by the window looking out on the city lights of Chicago. Behind him, a television broadcast recapped the death of the man who had butchered Franny Futura.

Fools.

The reporters never got anything right. Malakhai had been one of the greats, and he deserved a better press release. In a further heresy, the news media had upgraded Franny from a tired hack to a legend among the magic men.

Ah, Fame – what a twitchy bitch you are.

He glanced at the telephone. He longed to speak with his oldest friend, but Emile St. John was not accepting his calls anymore. The past six months since Franny’s death had been one prolonged meal of ashes.

Mallory’s banquet.

Would she call again tonight? No, he thought not.

So many times, he had seen her on the street. At first, he had thought this was only an illusion – her face in the crowd – for Mallory did not belong on the sidewalks of Chicago. But each time she had appeared, the dates corresponded with first-class airline tickets and limousines charged to his personal credit cards.

Amusing child.

He had paid the bills without complaint.

But of course, she’s quite insane.

He had also been a good sport when a large sum of money was criminally transferred from corporate accounts to pay for Franny’s funeral expenses. Mallory did have exquisite taste in upscale cemeteries with lake-view mausoleums. Franny would have adored his fine marble house by the water.

Graciously and quietly, he had replaced the corporate money with his own personal funds.

In another act of creative accounting, she had emptied out several client accounts. With skillful computer trading, she had purchased a good selection of stocks for his own portfolio. A battery of lawyers and accountants had shuttled the illegally commingled money back to its rightful owners to thwart an embezzlement charge. But his own well-intentioned bribes to affected parties had brought on new charges for obstruction of justice and witness tampering. He had spent the entire day dodging the bearers of warrants for his arrest.

More stunning damage had been for a lesser amount, payment to a French stonecutter for a monument purchased long before Malakhai’s death – just a little memo from hell to tell him that an old friend was wasting, dying in prison, while Nick breathed the rarefied air of a penthouse mansion in the sky.

Lest he ever forget that, Mallory had awakened him every night with a silent reminder. He knew it was her, though she never spoke and no source number was ever caught by caller-identification equipment or phone-line traps. And whenever he traveled out of town, the calls had come directly to his suite, with no record of passing through a hotel operator.