Epilogue

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.

Ghost calls.

Did she know how much they affected his sleep, his dreams? He suspected that she only called to hear the sound of his voice, a response to her silent inquiry about his health – What? Not dead yet? Click.

Actually, she always slammed down the receiver – still angry after all this time.

Now he took pills to make him sleep, and yet he always woke up tired. So there were more pills to get him through the days.

This morning he had found an envelope on the table by his bed. It contained receipts for his own funeral expenses. Mallory had selected a pauper’s plot, an apt metaphor for a man with no more friends. He had recognized her perfume in the air. Fortunately, he had not opened his eyes to catch her there.

He had not quite recovered from her last covert visit to his bedroom. That night, he had awakened to find her sitting close to his prone body, her green eyes glittering, so intense. All the fanged and clawed predators stared at their living, writhing meals in that same manner. A moment later, the lights had gone out, and Mallory had vanished. And that time, she had not charged her plane tickets to his credit card.

Had she really been there? Had he imagined her perfume this morning?

Perhaps his houseboy had taken the envelope from the hand of a common messenger, then left it on the bedside table while his employer lay sleeping.

Nick would never ask.

He looked at his watch. By now Malakhai must be lying deep in the earth of France, asleep beneath the City of Light. Goodnight, old friend. My regards to Louisa.

The reporters would not come until just before dawn. He stared at his own image floating in the night-dark glass, and over one reflected shoulder, he searched the room behind his back.

On one of her visits to Chicago, Mallory had suddenly appeared behind him in the mirror of a shopwindow, where he had paused awhile to admire himself. She had not spoken to him that day. He had stared at her reflection in stunned silence, only watching her hands curl into talons, rising slowly, as if she meant to rake his back – or push him through the glass. He had closed his eyes for a quiet moment of terror – and then she was gone. He had not turned his head to watch her disappear into the crowded Chicago street. His eyes had been fixed on the shop mirror, looking at himself with new clarity of vision and cruel daylight – seeing lines in his flesh never noticed before, veins in the whites of his eyes and broken capillaries beneath the paper-thin skin. The boy from Faustine’s wasn’t there anymore. Nor could he find his handsome young self anywhere in this sky-high mansion of many mirrors.

He had continued to look for Mallory in every crowd. Such a pretty face, but so cold and crazy.

Now he turned back to his first love, his own reflection in the penthouse window glass.

When beauty dies – what then?

Hours passed as he watched the sky lighten. Then the telephone rang on the table beside him – and that would be Mallory. Apparently, she had taken no time for sightseeing in Paris. He picked up the receiver and listened to the expected silence at the other end of the line.

Still checking for a pulse, my dear?

He only heard the background sounds of traffic on a busy street. Was she calling from a cell phone or a pay phone? Finally he spoke into the void, „No, Mallory, I’m not dead yet.“

He heard the receiver crash down on its cradle at the other end of the wire and recognized her phone-slamming style.

Nick ran to the front door and checked each one of the five locks – just on the off chance that she had come back for another visit. Three of the locks were new and guaranteed pick-proof, but he suspected that she had already gotten past two of them on previous occasions. He also toyed with the idea that she tapped his phones, though none of the security experts had found any trace of electronic bugs. But they had also failed to catch her phone calls.

Nick sauntered back to the front room, opened the terrace door and stepped outside. It was a rare calm night for a town called the Windy City. He walked toward the retaining wall and looked over the edge. Even through a fog of drugs and booze, he could still feel the vertigo, the sensation of falling while standing still, the irresistible pull of the earth so far below.

It had taken him a month only to approach this ledge. And now that he had hit on exactly the right dosage of sedatives and bourbon, he was free to look down at the insect life on the pavement, tiny people straggling along the sidewalk in the predawn hours, leaving night-shift jobs or rolling out of after-hours bars. From this distance, he could not distinguish between hookers and newsboys.

He turned to look over his shoulder.

She wasn’t there.

Mallory had been right – her job was the hardest one. And he had given her credit for that. The memoirs of the great Nick Prado lay on his coffee table. Within those pages, Mallory was mentioned as a corroborating footnote for three perfect murders. He had gone on at length about his greatness – so the world would fully appreciate how hard the young detective’s job had been – and why she had failed.

The manuscript was neatly packaged in an envelope addressed to a prominent literary agent. His cover letter detailed the reasons for his upcoming publicity stunt – to kick off the book auction of the century. He had included a press package. The glossy black-and-white photographs had all been taken when he was young and beautiful. He had spent hours selecting the best of them and burning every lesser image in his fireplace. All his imperfections were gone now. In his favorite portrait, he was only nineteen years old, and this one lay on top of the envelope so the reporters would have a picture to run with his obituary.

He looked down at the street again. Almost dawn. He had selected this hour in deference to the cameras. The sky would be light enough for a backdrop, but not too bright.

Timing is everything.

All the daily papers and local TV stations had been alerted in time for the morning news. The first reporter and cameraman had arrived on the street far below. Nick put on his glasses, the better to see one of the tiny ants emerge from a toy van with his video equipment. The headlights of another van were pulling up to the curb. And more of them were coming to the party in private cars. When he had counted one crew for each news channel, and a smattering of more ants to represent radio and the print media, he removed his eyeglasses.

He was never photographed with bifocals.

So they had all turned out, and right on time. Nick had not disappointed them once in all his years as the king of hype. He had promised them a stunt to rival the great Max Candle.

The terrace ledge was broad enough for a larger, wider man to walk with ease around the entire building, but from the street it would appear more dangerous. Back east in New York, Mallory would see him on television, for this act would certainly go national, maybe international with live coverage by satellite. Television executives would salivate over him. His show would crank up the figures for advertising sales beyond their wet dreams of profit. Throughout the hours of his ordeal, broadcast journalists would speculate on the reasons for his protracted stroll in the clouds, and not if he would jump, but when. They would probably put the cause to outstanding warrants for his arrest and his prospects of dying in prison.

Thank you, Mallory.

As he formed this thought, he turned around to look over his shoulder again. Satisfied that he was alone and none of his locks were undone, Nick climbed onto the ledge, still holding on to the belief that this was his own idea.

He had always maintained that he would end it when the last six minutes of joy were sucked out of life, and he must credit Mallory for that. But at least, she had not selected the day and the hour. She was ruthless enough, but not that talented. The timing was his own.

Faith faltered, and he looked behind him one last time. His legacy was still sitting on the coffee table, and Mallory was nowhere in sight.

Fool. Of course, she isn’t there.

But then, in thoughts of her, he made a misstep in his mind, and then his foot stumbled on the ledge.

He was in flight.

Too soon!

Too late. His arms waved wildly as he struggled to form his body into a swan dive, aiming for grace. His head pointed toward the street; his arms spread on the air as it rushed around his head, ripping the breath from his mouth. The lights of independent windows melded into bright streamers of electric yellow. And the pavement was coming up to kiss him on the lips as he flew ever nearer to the insects who were waiting for his close-up shot.

There were only seconds left to congratulate himself, for Max Candle could never have topped this finale:

Nick smiled for the cameras.

Or such was his intention.

The television film captured an expression of extreme horror, but only the tape of his scream was allowed to run on the morning news.

Later in the day, the Chicago police counted five locks at the entrance to the dead man’s penthouse, and despite this show of concern for security, the door had been left wide open. A search of the premises had turned up no suicide note, no personal papers of any kind. Based on a shredded photograph found on his coffee table, it was theorized that an affair with a younger man had gone tragically awry, and the deceased was written off as just another jumper in a city of tall buildings and lost loves.

There was only one remarkable aspect to the otherwise mundane death of a public relations man: A lone woman had been waiting in the street when the first camera crew arrived. Though there was not one clear photograph of her face, it was reported that she had been looking skyward minutes before the jumper appeared on the ledge. But it was not her prescience that made her newsworthy; it was her behavior while a human being was hurtling to his death – when every other pair of eyes was riveted to that screaming, flailing, falling body.

Her travesty went unnoticed until the film and photographs were reviewed. In wide-angle shots of crisscrossing lenses, taken among the frenzied newsprint and television media, the tall blonde could be seen turning her back on the spectacle in the sky. She was walking away from the circus – at the moment of impact.