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Part V
She should have killed him then and there.
"I had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in his grace, and it better fits my blood to be disdained of all than to fashion a carriage to rob love from any: in this, though I cannot be said to be a flattering honest man, it must not be denied but I am a plain-dealing villain. … let me be that I am and seek not to alter me."
~ William Shakespeare (Much Ado About Nothing; Act 1, Scene 3)
With Michael at her side, Rose had, of late, taken up the search for her sister, knowing that to find Snow White meant lifting this ugly lupine curse from Rose, paving the way for Michael to replace it with a far more beautiful form of damnation.
In the meantime, she had taken up with Michael's clan - or at least had taken up living with them, sharing her lover's apartment in the modest comfort of a converted hotel on Highland Avenue. It was a tallish brownstone with white enameled railings around the outside - not imposing by any means, but high enough to afford a view of the lemmings being herded down the 101 freeway at sundown. Most times of day, an equally sluggish traffic snarl oozed along Highland, as the street wound down from the freeway exit and into the concrete morass of the city. Looking up, one could see the office whose side was painted with the larger-than-life mural of Marilyn Monroe, and Angellyne's posterior, as one of her billboards peeked around the corner of this edifice. Just getting to the front door was a nuisance, particularly during the summer symphony season, when cars were detoured along the entire boulevard for the Hollywood Bowl, but the location was convenient to Universal City to the north, and Highland's polluted nightclubs in the other direction.
Rose found herself adjusting to life in the company of other undead with characteristic aplomb. Nearly all of the residence was occupied by creatures like Michael - pale and tragic characters who slept with the spirits by day and at night stole out into the world of the living to satisfy their bestial hungers. These were the beings with whom our heroine was most fascinated, but not everyone she met was a bloodsucker - the rest of the rooms were taken up by a veritable circus cavalcade of creeps.
Mikey and Don, for example, were the proprietors of a moderately successful tattoo business, went out in the sunlight, and did normal things, like shopping, or going on dates. As far as she could tell, only habit kept them sleeping all day and awake all night, for while they practiced their own particular brand of ghoulishness, they were otherwise in every respect human. Not so Thomas Blackwolfe, whose haunting and perpetual silence gave him a voice as ancient as the signet ring he wore on his left hand, an emerald cut in the shape of a crescent moon… or the ever-frazzled Pandora, with her familiars (not all of them cats, but all certainly of the small, furry variety, and all with a knack for escaping under doors, or perhaps through keyholes, into everyone else's rooms)… or Brandy, with her penchant for chain-smoking - and the ability to light cancer stick after cancer stick with her own fingertips…
A few weeks after the café incident, Rose was alone in the side lobby, a lounge from the building's hospice days made over into a well-kept but rarely-used common den. The room was furnished in shades of chocolate and burgundy, left over from the seventies but understated enough not to have passed straight into 'tacky' as soon as that decade was over. The only exceptions were the Spanish-style light fixture hanging from the center of the ceiling, and the diamond-tuck padding across the front of the wet bar (upholstered originally to disguise the speakers for a sound system that had long since been removed). A soft, overstuffed leather pit group swallowed up most of the floor space in the center, and adjacent were two matching easy chairs, all facing as directly as possible a color television at the head of the room.
It was late in the afternoon, and the place was eerily quiet - the transit thunder outside was muffled by glass and brick, so that as she meandered back from the wet bar with a martini glass in one hand, only the crackle of the television set and the rustle of a taffeta skirt sliding over her thighs and hips as she walked disturbed the silence. As usual, she was overdressed - arrayed for cocktail hour but spending it alone.
After the initial thrill of seeing TV for the first time, she had not become much of a television watcher herself, but the background noise kept her thoughts flowing and kept her company - it was several hours before sunset, after all, and most of the building's inhabitants were still abed.
"The movie 'Colors' opened around the country this weekend, despite fears that the film would attract violent audiences - this, after a debut last month at Hollywood's Egyptian Theater touched off an angry protest which resulted in several patrons being injured inside the theater. Assaults and disturbances were reported at openings in several major U.S. cities, and in our own Westwood Village, shots were fired in a nearby neighborhood after the screening, but no injuries were reported in connection with the theatre. Still, authorities say, this could be the result of beefed up security at most of the major complexes in the Los Angeles area. Police warn that, in spite of the relatively uneventful openings, the film may fuel the growing problem of gang violence in the city of Los Angeles."
The news anchor - one of those nameless, faceless blondes with perfect teeth and plastic smile chiseled in place - did her best to end on a somber note; one got the impression that seriousness, for her, was a mask reserved for deaths in the immediate family, and, perhaps, the words "and the second runner up is…" She would never move from the local afternoon news slot if she couldn't fake it better than that. Her dour expression was fixed for just a split second, but just as quickly the tide turned, and grim was replaced by downright bubbly.
"The recent incidents of gang violence in the downtown area may be the reason behind the extra precautions that are being taken for the 60th annual Academy Awards ceremony. With just one week to go and not a moment to lose, the fans haven't started lining up yet, but the stands are in place, and the Shrine Auditorium is getting a face lift for this anniversary presentation: an estimated two million viewers worldwide will be watching to see who takes home the gold. We'll have more on the Oscar preparations, the stars, the presenters, the music, and the predictions, tonight at 11."
Rose looked on with loathing as the camera panned over one of the most run-down parts of downtown Los Angeles. Her disgust was for a city that had begun to decay, far from the burgeoning spirit of adventure and growth she had known half a century before. Gone were the glory days when egos and finance would have dictated that such a ceremony be held at the stately Biltmore, or in the Blossom Room. The Shrine Auditorium was just to one side of one of the most foul, crime-ridden neighborhoods in downtown L.A.; only a freeway separated it from the crack houses and the vacant lots where the whores plied their trade, or the abandoned parlors where the homeless gathered to wallow in the stench of rotting meat and perspiration, feces and charred oil, a peculiar mixture of odors familiar to neighborhoods in the most advanced stages of decomposition.
It'd been a year since she'd gone free, and Rose had as yet not grown accustomed to the vast differences between the city on which she had last looked, and the city into which she had reemerged; all the glamour was gone, leeched out, and the City of Angels wore a complexion dried and cracked now, like an old crone, its buildings sagging, wrinkles in the veins in its pavement.
She turned her head, looking away with a delicate huff, and her feet were just about to follow, to lead her in the direction of the lobby and the elevator, when suddenly a name leapt up from the middle of all the babble, stopping her in her tracks.
It took a moment for the anagram to sink in, but when it did, realization plucked at her brain like sharp-nailed fingertips picking at the strings of a harp in malicious discord. She swiveled around, fever raging in her eyes, and wrapped one hand tight over her hip.
"…Dr. Raphael Giapanni…"
The mention turned out to be part of a news feature about Giapanni and his… church?? No… it couldn't be. This saint of a doctor from a Roman Catholic family in the east, was at the head of a multimillion dollar business conglomerate whose subsidiaries were dedicated to the betterment of mankind. Homeless shelters, education programs, hospital developments, medical research and aid to third world countries - all were funded through Tungsten Industries, whose primary source of income, in return, was the Tungsten Worldwide Ministry.
Between the glowing words, the newswoman's face was replaced by a videotaped montage: Giapanni tending to a sick woman in a hovel in Ethiopia, spreading the word of God to a homeless group in urban Chicago, helping on a Red Cross soup line over the recent Easter holiday. He was wearing an apron over his dress shirt, sleeves rolled past his elbows to make way for a pair of green rubber gloves, generously spooning stuffing onto a tray.
The paragon of virtue, the celebrated humanitarian and society favorite… and the fiend? Could they really all be the same man? Was Malphader Paganini hiding behind new hair, a new name… and a new con? She doubted her own instincts - until he looked up at the camera. He was helping, to be sure, but she could almost see that his skin was crawling with a certainty that he was far above these people, as though to be so near to the dregs of humanity threatened, as though he might himself become tainted with ugliness if he let them near enough to touch. Arrogance was the one thing they had always held in common, and her own vices were always so readily apparent when displayed in others. A certain note of reluctance crept into his eyes when he glanced up to the camera - she saw that ice-blue arrogance and knew immediately.
The martini glass turned end over end in slow motion, falling through space in a silence like a long, deep sigh of disappointment released with a puff of cigar smoke, dense with texture but in the end soundless. Fingers of liquid pitched and swelled around the lip, escaping the bowl and pinwheeling into gloss striations on the air, then parting into a shower of crystal bead droplets.
On hitting the thickly padded floor, the stem snapped; the bowl shattered into a few dozen pieces. Shards of glass danced over the carpeting, landing in puddles of vodka and vermouth. A spiced olive rolled across the stubble of yarn loops, stopping when the toothpick butted against the base of the bar.
She should have killed him when she had the chance, and not let surprise stop her.
Malphader had found God, or so it seemed, and found youth and prosperity in the same place. He wore his immortality in sickeningly bright streamers of gold that shone from his skin, beaming in all directions. Rose could only guess that he had sold his soul to God - eternal life, in return for his agreement to do the Lord's work. Some deal.
If so, the Christian god was a vengeful deity that could condone Malphader's atrocities - not that she was free of committing atrocities herself, but at least she could be said to be an honest villain, displaying no pretense, never hiding her dark desires or lust for causing pain.
And now she had a secret card that, if held and played correctly, could blow the lid on his profitable operation. Rose didn't believe for a moment that all that cash was flowing right into the pockets of the poor - what she did believe was that her archnemesis had also a talent for covering his tracks.
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