The tall clown spread wide his arms and spun about. Old-fashioned bicyclists in turn-of-the-century clothes wheeled around all the stages, juggling armloads of small antiques—clocks, jewelry, lamps. On the next turn, they were tossing pistols and rifles. How they switched, I could not tell. The music became cockeyed martial.
Tammy turned her golden brown eyes on me. “At sixteen, I became Philippe’s mistress. He was both lover and father. My master.”
Marquez held his hands behind his head and stared up at the screen. “You’re leaving out the ship,” he gently reminded her. He touched a button on a large remote control. The picture sped up, clowns and bicyclists racing, music rushing past at a cheerful jog.
“Oh, yes. They have built it for five years now. They call it Lemuria. Big.”
“The floating skyscraper—condominiums?” I asked. “I read about it in the papers.”
“Two thousand feet long,” Marquez said. “Tax haven for rich bastards like me.” He froze the picture just as the tall clown was leaving the main stage.
“That is Philippe,” Tammy said softly.
“Fucker,” Marquez said. He fast-forwarded until the clown was off the stage, then froze the picture again.
Tammy’s eyes were astonishing, irises like gold-flecked chestnuts. “On the ship, they did not sell all the units. They have money problems. Goncourt, director of Fantôme, our doctor, our father, suggested the circus rent space on Lemuria. We would provide entertainment and publicity. The Lemuria stockholders agreed, so that is where Dr. Goncourt moved his training and medical center, from Lee Stocking Island to Lemuria. I go aboard Lemuria last year to live with Philippe and take Dr. Goncourt’s treatments. He wants to make us the finest athletes, the most disciplined performers the world has ever known. We never get sick, we are always strong, always of the right temper. We are the best.”
Marquez started the video again. Five golden women climbed the steel columns to their ropes and began a high-wire act.
Tammy’s eyes took on a dreaming quality, remembering marvelous days, commitment and faith. “Philippe said Dr. Goncourt was a genius. To me, he was God. He chose our foods, supervised our training. He gave us special baths, smell very bad, like sulfur. Swabbed our skins. But he never gave us drugs. I never felt so good. I learn the boleadoras. I am top-notch, excellent even on the high wire. Philippe was proud. They told me I can travel now.”
The high-wire act was amazing. Strength and agility I had never seen before, and grace as well as ingenuity. The young women seemed to dance in the air, or sometimes just to fly.
“I learned from Philippe that a few of the family did more than just circus. They went places and did favors for Dr. Goncourt. He asked me if I wanted this. Everything was grand, exciting, I loved Philippe so, I would do anything. I agreed. He nominated me—took me before the Committee, older people who had been with Dr. Goncourt since long before Fantôme. Olympic athletes, performers from Russia.”
“Fucking Communists,” Marquez muttered. He hid his eyes behind his hands, then leaned his head back again to stare at the ceiling.
“Damn the Jews,” Banning shot back, as if in spasm.
Tammy held her hand to her mouth and bit a knuckle, blinking. “The Committee adopted me, with Philippe—”
Marquez boiled over. He stood and pointed his finger at Banning. “I’ll tell you about Jews,” he shouted. “I’ll fucking tell you about victims and crimes!”
Banning’s eyes went wide and his brows pushed up his forehead in furrows. “Marx, Trotsky, Sinoviev, Kamenev . . . The Communists were empowered by world Jewry, by Jews who hated themselves and their race!”
Marquez almost leaped over the chairs to get at Banning. Tammy held him back.
Banning was into it completely. He couldn’t stop. “The Jews orchestrated their own demise, bit by bit—and blamed it on Hitler, but it was also Stalin who killed so many, who killed all but one of the Jews around him, sent them to Siberia, and who put him in power? Jews. Who spied for him? Communist Jews. The Rosenbergs, Ted Hall . . . Jews! Damn the Jews!”
Marquez let out an anguished war cry. “I’ll kill you!” He pushed Tammy aside. Banning leaned back over a row of seats and braced to receive Marquez’s assault. Marquez wrapped his hands around Banning’s neck, shaking him like a chicken.
Cousins nodded to me as if we had always been beat partners, cops on patrol. While Tammy shouted, “Stop it! Stop it!” we grabbed the two men and pulled them apart. Banning slipped through my arms, tripped in the aisle, and fell with a loud thump.
Tammy whispered in her lover’s ear. Marquez screamed his curses but stopped trying to break free. “Goddamn that bastard, I don’t care what he knows—”
“He’s sick, shhh, he is a sick man,” Tammy soothed.
Banning stood, brushed his jacket and pants with as much dignity as he could muster. He inclined his head and extended his gloved hand as if politely requesting permission to leave, and minced out of the theater.
“I don’t care if his brain has got filthy Nazi syphilitic worms all through it, that’s enough, that’s more than I can stand!” Tears streamed down Marquez’s face.
Tammy started to sob. “I can’t bring a child into this!”
Marquez’s anger blew out like a candle in an open window. “Oh, shit,” he said.
Tammy fell back in her seat. “I can’t leave the house, I have to act brave, my head is like a hurricane. I have to keep it all inside, all day long! I don’t know who or what I am, or where I belong, I don’t know anything!”
“We’re sorry, honey,” Marquez said. “We are all so sorry.” He looked sick with remorse. Tammy tried to push him away, but he clutched her tightly and stroked her hair. It was a sad and scary moment and I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to slink off down the road.
We stood in silence while Marquez tried to placate the mother of his coming child. “I wish we could take it all back,” he murmured to her. “I surely do.”
Cousins had an odd look. Analytical, like watching fish in a bowl. It seemed out of character, and maybe I was just seeing his way of coping with emotional scenes.
From the entry, I heard the sound of a big piece of glass breaking. Cousins and I ran into the hall. Banning stood before a tall decorative arrangement of silk flowers rising from a marble table. He had shattered the gold-framed mirror behind the flowers, picked out a piece of glass as long as a dagger, and was shoving it by inches through his left palm. Blood fell in a thin red ribbon on the tiles, his shoes, his pant legs.
“I am such a wreck,” he said, then his eyes rolled up and he toppled like a sack of rice.
Together, we hauled him into the bathroom. Tammy told us we would find a first-aid kit under the bathroom counter. Marquez shook his head and clenched his fists and marched back and forth outside the door as we pulled out the shard, stanched the bleeding, and bound the wound.
“We have to get him to a doctor,” Cousins said. “He could have nerve damage. He’ll certainly need stitches.”
“I have my own doctor,” Marquez said through the bathroom door.
I opened the door. Banning was just coming to. Marquez backed off. Two of his bodyguards, brutes in black T-shirts and silk suits, heads shaven down to fuzz, flanked him, frowning mightily.
“Tammy,” Marquez said, “call Dr. Franks.” He rubbed his palms on his pajama bottoms.
Tammy made the phone call. Cousins and I carried Banning, groggy and disoriented, past the bodyguards, through the back door, and across the side yard to the guesthouse next door. Tammy unlocked the French doors and we laid him out on a bed.
