As a Thief in the Night Read online

"Moral ones. This whole thing is more profound than that. Besides, it's him that I'm interested in."

  "What do you mean?" Elsie asked.

  Olyvia continued, "What I want to know is what inspires a person with that kind of conviction. Someone who discards everything—career, family, personal safety, acceptance, reputation—in favor of the thing that drives them."

  Sarah popped a grape into her mouth. "So you excuse the things he's doing then?"

  "I do, but that doesn't matter. What I'm saying is that I endorse the path, twisted or not, that he's taken. Take what you said about these experiments on the cornea—"

  "Wait!" Elsie interrupted. "What is all this about the eyes, anyway? I thought he was a pathologist."

  "I don't remember exactly," Sarah answered. "I saw something on it and some of the things he did previous to it, and—I may be wrong—all I kept thinking was that it looked like a bunch of stuff the Nazi doctors would dream up."

  Olyvia smiled. "You see! You hear all this and think he's demented, or at the very least way too eccentric. I hear it all and think he's fascinating. But you are wrong about the cornea work. What he was trying to do was capture the eyes photographically before, during, and after the time of death to see if they're a reliable indicator of whether or not resuscitation is possible. But it gets better: In high school he learns German and Japanese, but not because he needs them. He's Armenian, and those are the languages of his enemies. Later on, in his twenties, he has a tour of duty in the Korean War and learns to play and read music. And what does he play, almost exclusively? Bach, of course! Then, at forty, he drops everything and moves to Hollywood to lay it all on the line for a production of 'Handel's Messiah'."

  "One of the few male mid-life crises that might be worthy of respect," Elsie said with a note of bitterness.

  Olyvia ignored her comment with a sideways glance. "Then in the sixties he takes this art class. Have you seen his paintings?"

  "Yeah," Sarah answered hesitantly, "and he obviously has some talent, but to me they're gratuitous, like his speech. It seems more like he's just using death to be controversial, to make a name for himself. He enjoys the attention."

  "Death is what moves him. We don't know, maybe he's made a pact with it. And remember, it wasn't him who made it controversial; we did that. To think of it as any more controversial or taboo than birth is ridiculous." Olyvia tucked her tongue into the side of her cheek, smiled vaguely, and shook her head. "Harvesting the organs of death row inmates."

  Elsie looked at her quizzically. "So...walking around with, say, the heart of a murderer?"

  "I know. Really..." Sarah shook her head. "Come on, he's just another egomaniac."

  Olyvia was getting slightly annoyed, as if everything being said was beside the point. "If they need to call him a killer, they can. I don't see a moral problem at all. I see a man worth knowing; I see a man worthy of his crimes."

  "Worthy of his crimes?" Sarah asked in disbelief. "What is that supposed to mean? Honestly, Olyvia, when stuff like that comes out of your mouth I don't even know what you're saying." Olyvia filled a glass with wine from the thief and passed it to her.

  All three of Johann Mignon's surviving daughters were taller than average, intelligent, and of varying but considerable beauty. Sarah was the only one who still spoke to their father; Olyvia and Elsie had split bitterly with him as young women, yet Elsie had strangely insisted on keeping her maiden name even after she was married. Wishing to stay together, the sisters had made Walpurgis their home, and each of them now lived within a short distance of the other two. Ezra's mother, Moira, had been the fourth daughter, and by all accounts the most promising of the girls, but sadly she could no longer keep company with the other three. Despite prayers and séances, tears and entreaties, Moira now remained stubbornly inaccessible.

  Shortly after Ezra's brother Layne was born their father had given up his failing business and taken a job as the manager of a strip joint called The Manor. He was a restless man with a troubled past, and three months after he'd started the job he'd run away with one of the dancers. Ezra had almost no memory of him; had he bumped into him on the street, he would probably not have recognized him. By the time his father actually left his mother had grown more or less indifferent. During the six years they had been married he had had two affairs—two, that is, that she knew about—and his lack of discretion had been more a mark of self-destructiveness than stupidity or disrespect.

  The downward spiral had begun with the discovery that Moira was pregnant with their second son. Sensing that her husband's presence might now be more detrimental than beneficial, Moira had simply let him go. She had once loved him of course, but her present need for both emotional and financial survival, and her children's need for stability, dictated that if he was intent on destroying himself, then he would have to do so with them safely away from his considerable emotional grasp. By herself, she made it work as best she could.

  The night after Ezra had started kindergarten, while on her way home from the nursing home at which she worked nights, her car was hit by an eighteen-year-old drunk driver in a pick-up truck. He was killed instantly. Her car ran off the road and crashed into a little stone hut beyond the shoulder. She died, unconscious, in the fire that followed. By the time Elsie, who had been babysitting Ezra and Layne, received word and drove to the site of the accident, Moira's body had already been removed. Ezra's last memory of his mother was of the two of them waiting together for the school bus by the side of the road.

  What became of the man he might have called father, no one knew. And lacking a satisfactory explanation, which neither of his aunts was able to provide, to answer his inevitable questions, Ezra had cultivated a fantasy that had come to make sense—to him. A fantasy about lightning and an old tree...

  Elsie was the middle sister, and it was she and her husband Gord that had taken in Ezra and his little brother Layne. If there was a woman who was a natural caregiver among the three sisters, it was surely Elsie. She was the solid one, the nurturer. All one had to do was watch her hands at work trimming the vines, or around the winepress, or at the piano, or even with a hammer and nail, to sense how grounded she was. A calm determination could often be seen in the way she fixed her handsome features, giving one the impression that she carried some secret of strength that other women might never know. She was physically strong, even athletic, though not without a womanly appeal that she maintained despite limited resources.

  In the years following her marriage she had often despaired that her maternal gifts had been bestowed in vain. She had become pregnant only once, though Gord and she had tried for years, but the little boy she had carried to term had been stillborn. They buried him, nameless. And so the departing birds leave the branch naked. But the couple loved Ezra and Layne deeply, and both did all they could to try to spare the boys the pain implicit in having a father who had abandoned them, and a mother that Fate had taken by fire.

  In many respects Elsie was a staunch feminist; she had become so through contact with one of her own aunts, and subsequently through her readings. As a result she was often overly defensive and quick to anger whenever she bumped up against any of the masculine world's assumptions or prejudices. But always under these constructed, intellectual defenses the true powers of the feminine—those of receptiveness and a nurturing hand—called her home.

  Without freeing his blankets from under his mattress, Ezra crawled into bed and smoothed the sheets over his legs. He leaned over and turned his clock radio on to Global to listen to the Jays' game. Tony Fernandez, Ernie Whitt, Jesse Barfield, the familiar names and the sound of the announcer's voice gave him comfort when he was alone in his room at night. When the game was over he sat up in bed and opened his comic book upon his lap.

  Moon Knight, a hero plagued by the mercenary in him, a mercenary plagued by the hero, was Ezra's favorite character. Moon Knight, a schizoid seeker of justice for whom two identities could neither soothe nor save, who split himself from hims
elf again and again only to feel himself pulled into the gaps left behind. He hid behind the clothes of four men. Before the mask and hood he had been Marc Spector, a lost man who died the death of a sinner in the holy deserts of Egypt, he whom Khonshu called back from the jaws of Ammit and grip of Osiris to serve as his avatar. Ezra moves through the soiled streets of New York with Jake Lockley in his cab. Here his allies are the homeless, the prostitutes, the petty thieves, and it is among these he secretly feels most at home. With Steven Grant he lives in the circles of the wealthy, their cars, their mansions, their women. Then, just when it is quiet and the evil has been beaten back for a while, he faces the demons Marc Spector cannot leave behind. Like a white Lancelot, masked and veiled by the midnight sky, the burden of his sin driving him, Moon Knight falls through the night upon its corruption.

  Ezra carefully closed his comic book, placed it back in its plastic bag, sealed it at the back with scotch tape, and turned off his nightlight. He woke up with a start several times just as he was about to fall asleep, and then, finally, he gave himself over to the world to which his hero belonged.

  The youngest of the three girls, Sarah had dark brown hair, almost identical to Elsie's, though she wore it shorter, just above her shoulders, and often tied it back leaving a few wisps on her face that she was constantly blowing away or tucking behind her ears. Her eyes were the same blue as Ezra's, and so far as anyone knew, they were the only two of the Mignon line with eyes this color. The tallest of the three women, she often took a secret pride in what she saw as a mark of superior beauty.

  The only one of the sisters to graduate from university, Sarah was now a middle school English teacher. She was also the only one of the girls who still spoke to her father, and although she generally got along well with her sisters, she did derive a certain amount of satisfaction in believing the progression and order of her life to be a sort of correction of all the mistakes—mistakes, at least in their father's eyes—that Olyvia had made. Still, despite certain advantages she held in worldly matters, a marked insecurity was often visible, particularly around Olyvia, in the vaguely superior way Sarah sometimes carried herself.

  Olyvia Mignon was a different story altogether. The oldest of the three, she had fallen in love at age nineteen with a vineyard worker and as a result had split bitterly with her father. As a young violinist full of promise, and a bright, even gifted, student she had been accepted into several of the country's most prestigious music programs. However, after her mother's death her father had expected her to take on the family's maternal duties and put music aside. This he did with a stunning blindness, not only as to her questionable ability as a homemaker, but also failing to account for her inclination to rebel against the role; for Olyvia had a streak in her that in its lighter manifestations was a sort of playful rebelliousness, but that at its semi-regular peaks approached utter defiance—sometimes seemingly for its own sake—of anything attempting to fetter her intoxication with her own freedom and recklessness. And so, at nineteen, in the face of her father's often raging disapproval, and believing she was deeply in love, she had played her last recital, Beethoven's Violin Concerto in D Major, and then disappeared on the ferry the next morning. She told herself she was running away for the sake of art, and for love, and that these were the things worth running away for. No one heard from her for three months. Then, on the night she was to elope, she had run off with another man, and into another of what would be many short-lived relationships. In fact, Olyvia had gone through a period of promiscuity in her twenties that had become something of a legend in Walpurgis, but she was hardly one to blush behind it, and instead wore it as a kind of badge of defiance and honesty around those that would turn their noses up at her.

  That Olyvia was gifted was undeniable, but she was also, to this day, a stunningly beautiful woman. Now, at thirty-eight, streaks of gray had already appeared in her rich black hair—highlights that she either enjoyed on some level or did not care about. Her skin, perhaps her most remarkable feature, was soft and olive colored. Like her sister, she too was tall and often carried herself at her full height in such a way that gave one the impression that she had just ended an argument in which she had spoken her strongest convictions. Yet her movements were not rigid or unyielding; instead her body, particularly her hips and shoulders, moved with a sensuality that seemed to outline her defiant nature, as if her flesh and demeanor had melted into a cohesion of opposites that, thought of abstractly, could never have meshed, but that had, in her, found rhythm. She had full lips and brown eyes with slight wrinkles at their corners, the only visible mark of her reckless past. She had two tattoos, one of a vine that crept up her foot onto her thin ankle, and the other, the small image of a lion, on her stomach.

  Since she had moved to Walpurgis she had worked as a costume director and designer at the University theatre company, and was, to the collective sigh of her sisters, currently having an affair with the director of the company's production of The Master Builder.

  Girls chased the boys they liked around the schoolyard trying to kick them in the balls. Yet none of them chased him. He stood to the side, watching. Finally, he made his way into the fray. He purposely altered his course as he ran to cross the paths of the girls in hopes of catching their attention and becoming a target for their legs and feet. None followed him. Turning his head from side to side, he stepped to the edge of the circle, and then outside it.

  The west wall of the school was made up of a series of cubbyholes that looked in through windows on the primary classrooms and down and out over a large field that had two small hills on its west and east sides. Danny Hadron and Chad Lambda were reading comic books in one of the cubbyholes. Posing nonchalance after his departure from the chase Ezra sat down beside Danny. Hadron, looking up from his Daredevil comic, nudged him: "Did you get in trouble?" he asked.

  "Sort of, I guess," Ezra said without looking at him. "You?"

  "Yeah. My mom said that I'm not allowed in my parents' room anymore, and if anything like that happens again, I'll get the wooden spoon. And no friends allowed over either."

  "For how long?"

  "She said infinitely or something. What did your aunt do?"

  "She talked to me on the way home about sex and stuff and said that there's nothing wrong with those type of magazines as long as the women are treated respectfully. But she said I was going to be punished for invading your parents' privacy."

  Hadron shrugged his shoulders. Then, remembering something, he smiled at Ezra. "There was one they didn't find... In my night table, remember? Under my car magazines."

  Ezra looked to his side in disbelief: "Is it still there?"

  "Nah, I gave it to Todd. I told him he could keep it at his house for a few days. But he had to promise to bring it back."

  "You brought it to school?" Ezra asked in shock.

  "Yeah. But I hid it in my bag until I gave it to him."

  Chad Lambda, smaller, mouse-like, never looked up. Lambda was always reading. Once, in the fifth grade, Mrs. Willins had been giving an algebra lesson and Ezra had seen his friend hiding his Bruno and Boots novel behind the heavy math textbook. Mrs. Willins noticed it at the same time, took the textbook she was teaching from in both hands, raised it above her head, and hurled it at Chad across three rows of students. Her weapon crashed into his text, the much more important book behind it, and finally into his fragile chest. Ezra watched, at first with shock, but then with the twisted pleasure children get from seeing their classmates get in trouble.

  It was Monday, but on the Saturday just passed Ezra had spent the night at Danny Hadron's house. Recently, through some mischief, or by some whisper he had stolen, Danny had come to know where the materials that supplemented Mr. and Mrs. Hadron's sexual appetite were hidden. During the day he had let Ezra in on the secret, and a plan was formulated.

  Well past midnight the two boys had sat with their ears against the wall that connected Danny's room with his parents'. When the long anticipated signal�
�Mr. Hadron's snoring—was finally heard, Danny snuck into his parents' room on hands and knees while Ezra waited in the darkened bedroom. Danny moved quietly to the night table that sat directly beside his parents' bed, gently lifted the top of the small silver leaf-shaped box, and had soon felt out and removed a small key from among its tangled silver and gold contents. It was for the filing cabinet.

  He reappeared in the bedroom doorway with his arms full and a big grin on his face. Dim light filtered in from the hall around his slightly stocky body. "Jackpot!" he whispered, and then threw everything in his arms onto the waterbed.

  "What the hell...?" Ezra held up an oblong metallic object that shone in the dark.

  Danny looked at it curiously. Piece by piece the two boys examined what was really a heroic pile of adult related material. It included six Hustler magazines, three Penthouse, five Swank, two boxes of condoms, three unmarked videotapes, two marked (Position Impossible, Sharon Fluid's Greatest Hits), one pair of handcuffs, lotion of a strange smell they were unable to identify, one black dildo, and...

  "Hey," Danny playfully kicked Ezra down at the other end of the bed and held up the oblong metallic object beside the black dildo.

  "Oh..." Ezra said quietly as the revelation came.

  A smile broke across his friend's slightly pudgy face, which he held for a moment, and then fell face down on the bed in convulsive laughter. "Two!" Danny snorted. "Why would they need two?" And he collapsed again.

  The early hours of the morning had been spent exploring the exotic contents of the Hadrons' filing cabinet. The boys hid underneath a sheet with a flashlight and passed magazines back and forth, turning the pictures to various angles and holding them at varying distances from their eyes in hopes of understanding what the pages revealed.

  "Read the articles!" Danny kept whispering. "Read the articles!"

  When the sun finally began to melt the frost off the bedroom window, a decision had to be made. What would they do with their treasure? With confidence in the depth and intricacy of their cunning, they hid it all underneath the dresser, the edges of the magazines peeking out into plain view; but to their mutual surprise and terror, they awoke late the next morning to find it all missing.