Читать книгу Ghosts In the Heart - Michael J.D. Keller - Страница 3

SAN FRANCISCO, OCTOBER 2006

The lock clicked sharply and the door to the apartment swung open. Alexander Aneiren Mckenzie, Senior Lieutenant, of the San Francisco Police Department Major Crimes Division eased wearily into the entry way. “The Iceman Cometh.” The overused and trite jibe, coined by a department wit who had probably never seen the play, and employed by those other officers who resented his probing intellect and coldly aloof demeanor seemed appropriate. Another man returning home late on a Friday evening after a week of grindingly exhausting work might breathe a sigh of contentment. Another man might exhibit some semblance of relief, as the burdens of the profession eased away. Mckenzie did neither. He might live in this apartment, but he found no refuge there.

The rooms that lay before him exuded an aura of calculated austerity that matched his own. Others who lived alone, as Mckenzie did, often developed a fussy neatness - a compulsion to preserve all things in a proper order. His apartment extended far beyond that lifestyle. Even the most obsessive disciple of structured living usually left some visible evidence of human habitation. Mckenzie did not . Although he had occupied this apartment for nearly five years, there was no trace of him, no discernible sign of his existence. There was no physical evidence that any particular individual resided there. He was a wraith in his own existence.

There was, nevertheless, an undeniable elegance about the apartment. The photographer for Architectural Digest might have just stepped out. The feature could have been entitled “Minimalist Living in the City by the Bay.” From the polished hardwood floor in the foyer to the gleaming European kitchen/dining area, to the functioning fire place in the living room, the image of money well spent was unmistakable.

The outer wall in the living room was solid glass from floor to ceiling, providing a spectacular view of the city looking down Russia Street toward the water. Mckenzie, however, rarely glazed out at the twinkling lights and the distant silhouettes of ships crossing the bay. This evening he pulled the cord to close the curtains, thinking once more that he should sell the place. The monthly maintenance fees strained the limits of his salary. He was never entirely certain whether Marcus had left it to him in a belated attempt to heal years of a painfully strained relationship or as one last massive practical joke. The thought of pushing his estranged son to the edge of bankruptcy would have amused the elder Mckenzie.

Looking around the apartment, Alex could often hear his father’s nasal tone “If you had gone to law school the way I told you, you wouldn’t have any problem affording the place.” Yes Father, Alex thought, but then I might have ended up as an unprincipled, money grubby shyster like you. Even in death, the Mckenzies could not close the rift between them.

Walking out of the living room and down the hall toward the master bedroom, he loosened his red silk tie. Entering the bedroom, he removed the jacket to his carefully tailored blue pinstripe suit. Mckenzie did not believe that he was vain, but he did enjoy nice clothes. Wearing a suit crafted by one of San Francisco’s better tailors gave him a sense of quiet satisfaction.

Marcus’s voice was back in his head again. “If you had become a lawyer instead of a policeman, you wouldn’t have to wear a suit that’s three years old. Hell,” his father’s ghostly voice echoed through his consciousness. “If you hadn’t been passed over for Captain again, you could have afforded at least one new one.

Thank you Father, Alex thought. You know how much I appreciate your insights. He could hear Marcus shout angrily at the polished sarcasm. In his memories, Marcus was always angry.

As he carefully hung his jacket and tie in the closet before removing his shoulder holster and placing the pistol in the bureau drawer, Mckenzie caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. This had to be Marcus McKenzie’s last bitter jest. As he aged, Alex could see the resemblance to his father becoming ever more pronounced.

In his later years, Marcus had allowed the excesses of rich living to add flesh to what had once been a lithe body. The extra weight had probably contributed to the massive heart attack that ended his life at the comparatively young age of sixty-seven. Even then, father and son had shared the same flashing dark eyes, high cheekbones, and hawkishly aquiline noses.

With the fierce personal discipline that characterized every aspect of his life, Mckenzie, at

forty-eight, still maintained his physique through an exercise regime that left younger officers gasping in frustration when they tried to match him. Unfortunately, as the early streaks of gray broke the flow of his dark hair, and a spider web of wrinkles took shape around his eyes, he could see Marcus creeping up on him. The father he had battled for most of his adult life had found a peculiarly effective way to haunt him.

Smothering a sigh, Mckenzie turned and walked back down the hallway to the kitchen. He opened the cabinet nearest the refrigerator, removed the bottle of cognac, and filled the crystal snifter he kept beside the bottle. It was a stronger drink than he usually permitted himself but it was Friday. Even the Iceman could allow himself a little leeway on the weekend.

He sipped the tawny liquid, feeling the warmth flow down his throat as he replaced the bottle and closed the cabinet. With the kitchen restored to the same precise order, he moved to the adjoining living room and sat down in a leather arm chair. Punching the buttons, he turned on the television and the attached DVD player. The screen came to life as the opening notes of a lyrical piano solo announced the beginning of the Maurice Laviere score.

Leaning back in his chair, Alex took another sip of his cognac and closed his eyes. Sometimes he wondered whether bothering to turn on the television had become a needlessly superfluous act. In the deep recesses of his memory, he knew every word of dialogue, every note of the music, every scene in the film. Nevertheless, there was still nothing like watching it again and again and again.

On the screen, an open bowed vaparetto, the ubiquitous Venetian water bus, was working its way down the Grand Canal. As it swung around a broad curve, the camera panned briefly toward the crowd gathered at the fish market before turning back to the front. The Ponte di Rialto bridge filled the frame. For a moment the viewer could take in the matchless beauty of that ornate structure - the multiple curves of the intricately carved ballustrates and the high central archway that gave watercraft passage through the canal. The opening title, Holiday in Venice, was superimposed on the screen as the piano gained the romantically lush support of the full orchestra.

The credits rolled while the camera moved across the line of tourists gathered by the rail, waving at the approaching vaparetto. As the camera reached her, standing at the apex of the central arch, a breeze swept up the canal and her dark auburn hair billowed in the air. It seemed that God himself had gasped at the sight of her. Her delicate white skin provided a pristine setting for the sparkling blue eyes that glistened in the sunlight. At that moment, she recognized someone on the vaparetto as it was about to pass under the bridge. She laughed and waved. Anticipation and a touch of tender vulnerability all combined to illuminate her face.

Mckenzie pushed the pause button on the remote just as the credits displayed her name on the screen below her image, Mireille Marchand. Mckenzie took a sip of cognac and raised his glass toward the picture frozen on the television screen. “Bonsoir, ma coeur” he whispered.

It was that image, that very moment in the film, when a grumpy seventeen year old Alexander Mckenzie, sitting in a darkened theatre, had felt his heart drop out of his body. He had been dragged unwillingly by the nubile cheerleader he was dating - he had actually forgotten her name - to see a romantic woman’s movie instead of Rocky that was showing down the street. He was giving the screen only half-hearted attention while sliding his hand across his date’s knee when Mireille appeared on the Rialto Bridge. He had stared transfixed at a manifestation of beauty more complete than anything his young mind had ever envisioned.

Alex pushed the play button and the film resumed. He knew that he had hardly been the first teenaged boy to develop a crush on an unattainable female personality. From the beginning, however, he had been more than just another hormonal adolescent having wet dreams about his Farah Fawcett poster. From first sight, Mireille Marchand had awakened a longing ,a desire more searching, more demanding than anything he had ever experienced before or since. Thirty years later, she was still a void in his life that had never been filled.

He had slipped off alone to see the movie six more times. He searched out everything he could find in print about this vision that he could not expel from his mind. Within a month, he could repeat details about her life with the same assurance, that the mature Alexander Mckenzie would display when testifying at trial about an extensive criminal investigation.

He knew the hospital in Avignon where she was born. He knew the name of her father, her mother, her two sisters. He could recite the titles of the obscure French films where her acting career had begun in bit parts. He knew the place on the road in eastern France where she died.

Holiday in Venice had been an unexpected success at the box office. To cash in, the producer rushed to release her second English language film, The Diamond Thief in late summer. A light-hearted crime caper, it was an even bigger hit. Mireille’s face began to pop up in print media of every type from serious film journals to glossy fashion magazines. The still camera loved those ethereally blue eyes as much as did the movies. The trade papers were rife with rumours of future projects for this young French phenomenon, including a report that she was being considered for a lead role in the latest historical epic being developed by the famous British producer, Colin Berkley.

The newspapers later reported that it was the Berkley film that had put her on the road late that October night. She had been visiting friends in the small provincial village of St. Aubert when she abruptly decided to drive back to Avignon. Supposedly, she wanted to catch an early flight to Paris, and then on to London for a preproduction meeting with the director and her expected costar.

The story had not made the front page in San Francisco. Two pages in and below the fold, the heading noted that “French Actress Dies in Single Car Accident.” Alex had been sitting at the breakfast table with Marcus and his soon to be ex-step mother, Brittaney. She had been poking, in a desultory fashion, at her egg white omlet while Marcus intently studied the file he had brought to the table. Except for the law, Marcus Mckenzie quickly became bored with most things. It was a trait that was already edging Brittaney out of his life - although she had not yet grasped that inexorable process. Stepmothers two and three would be smarter and more predatory. Alex hated participating in this strained tableaux of a happy family at breakfast but silent endurance was generally preferable to another of his increasingly bitter oral confrontations with his father. Concentrating on the newspaper was usually the best way of getting through the meal. Alex’s gasp at the moment he read the article was so sharp, so painfully audible, that it broke even Marcus’s fixed attention on billable hours.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, more irritated by the interruption than from any genuine curiosity. When Alex’s voice, hoarse with emotion, started to recount the article, Marcus interrupted with a snort of contemptuous dismissal. “So there is one less French slut.” He chuckled at his own wittism. “An easily replaceable commodity.”

Another teenaged boy might have shouted at his father, raging against his heartless insensitivity. He did not. Alexander Mckenzie was already the Iceman in training. He slowly rose to his feet and folded the newspaper under his arm. He looked at his father with the dispassionate expression of a scientist examining a failed experiment. Without another word he turned and left the room. Neither Marcus or Brittaney grasped the fatal escalation of the conflict between father and son that had just occurred.

Another sip of the cognac warmed his throat as he watched the television screen intently. Mireille steeped out of a gondola and walked briskly across the wide expanse of St. Marks Square. The vast center of the city was filled with tourists and pigeons, but the throng could not hide her. She was wearing a deceptively simple white dress cut just above her knee and high heeled shoes that clicked on the pavement while accentuating her long beautiful legs. As she neared the Doge’s palace, a male voice called out her character’s name “Marie!” She turned to face the actor playing her lover and her already animated expression came alight with an ecstatic joy almost beyond the capacity of the screen to contain. There were times, many times, when the adult Alexander Mckenzie had concluded that he truly was demented. Boys had hopeless crushes, even grown men could entertain romantic fantasies, but eventually you put such things away. You grew up, you matured, you forgot about those imaginary loves. He had not. He could not. Every time he heard her voice, he felt his heart shake with a pain that would not heal.

More than twenty years ago, Carrie, his ex-wife, had given up her attempt to fill the emptiness he carried with him. As she walked out the door for the last time, she had looked at him and sadly whispered “I won’t compete with a ghost, Alex. I can’t win that fight. But neither can you.”

Mckenzie drained the last of the cognac from the glass. He pushed the mute button on the remote control and leaned has head back again closing his eyes. Over the years, he had made various attempts to study French with varying degrees of success. He had reluctantly concluded that he would never master the accent but he had a fair grasp of the vocabulary. Now with his eyes shut and his imagination supplying the images, he felt the need for only a brief expression “Je Taime, ma amour, Je Taime.”

The sudden ringing of the telephone shattered his reverie.