Night Work Page 21

  “Bowls,” said Maj. “Big ones.”

  “Everyone's outside on the patio, I think it's still warm enough. I'll bring some bowls and utensils.”

  Maj had brought the makings for very high-class banana splits: homemade ice cream yellow with egg yolk and speckled with vanilla bean, bitter chocolate sauce, crumbled pralines, and creme anglaise, with maraschino cherries for the top and delicate, brittle rolled cookies for the side. This was what Jon referred to as cuisine amusante, or gourmet junk food, and it succeeded completely in defeating the nice, healthy dinner they had eaten. In no time at all, the only things left were a few cherries and some cookie crumbs. The evening sky had shifted from blue through rose to dusky lavender and finally to no color at all, and they sat in easy companionship and admired the quarter moon riding low against the city. Eventually, it was getting too cool to sit outside, and they moved in for coffee. Mina asked for the globe puzzle again, and Lee obediently fetched it for her to dismantle.

  Roz wanted to talk about Song, and Sione repeated for her benefit the history of the production.

  Roz was thrilled. She sat forward on the edge of her seat as if she could pull theological and psychological truths out of the dancer by force.

  “Beloved submitting to her lover's expectations and his lack of sympathy,” she declared, “is just like all the women who fail to report rape, even now. And in a patriarchal society, when the woman's purity reflects directly on her menfolk, she wouldn't dare tell him— look at those poor women in Muslim countries who get murdered by their brothers for daring to shame the family by getting themselves raped.”

  Maj offered another interpretation. “You don't think Beloved is simply afraid that if she tells Lover she was attacked, he would go after the guards and be beaten up himself, or killed? That she's protecting him?”

  Roz waved away her partner's suggestion impatiently. “‘Tell him I am sick with love,’ Beloved says. She's hiding her injuries because she knows that if she doesn't, he'll be so put off by her lack of purity that he'll leave her.”

  “Interesting, isn't it,” Lee commented mildly, “that we call Beloved ‘she’ and Lover ‘he’ even though the players were reversed?”

  Sione, dressed in khakis, loafers, and a fleece pullover and showing not the least sign of transvestism or gender bending off the stage, smiled. “As it is written, the parts could be played by either sex, but the director had the two of us at hand, and thought it was more interesting this way. ‘A piquant touch,’ one of the reviewers said.”

  “But why Beloved's rage?” Roz demanded. “Why did Moreli decide to have Beloved come in with the bloody knife and then settle back into business as usual with Lover? Is that her idea of happily ever after?”

  Maj spoke up. “I'm sure it's your old friend the warrior-virgin, Roz love. Even if Dina Moreli didn't have that figure consciously in mind when she wrote the interpretation—after all, that's what an archetype is, a powerful upwelling from the unconscious. Women's shakti, like those women on the panel called it.”

  “Oh,” Lee broke in, “I meant to tell you how much I enjoyed that program. I taped it and watched it the other night.”

  Roz glanced involuntarily at Kate, looking uncomfortable, and Kate wondered in amusement which of the statements Roz had made during the discussion was embarrassing her in hindsight. Roz turned back to Sione.

  “But where did that interpretation come from? Did she just pull it out of thin air?”

  Sione shrugged apologetically. “I do not really know why Dina wrote it that way. I am only the dancer, not the person who created it. But,” he added, seeing Roz's impatience, “are Beloved's actions not, after all, what people do? When driven to uncharacteristic acts, do not most people then fade back into the obscurity of their daily lives?”

  Roz opened her mouth to argue, caught Maj's eye, and then threw out her hands with a smile. “I'm sorry, I realize it isn't your dance. It's just that it's so precisely what I've been working on for my dissertation, the juxtaposition of love and rage. And I find it exciting to come across an intelligent and sympathetic interpretation of a biblical text. So many people pretty things up and make them so sweet you want to vomit. Or they go the other direction and dismiss the whole thing as the tool of an oppressive patriarchy.”

  “You would see it somewhere in between?” Sione asked dutifully. Maj made a noise and rolled her eyes, but Roz ignored her partner.

  “Religion is passion,” the minister of God declared passionately. “The Bible is our document as well as theirs, and it holds all the human experience of fear and love and despair and terror and revenge, of power and the rights of the powerless. It is a paradigm of human behavior. Its theology is one of liberation, and not just in the hands of Latin American Marxism.”

  Sione was starting to look bewildered, Jon bored, and Lee stirred and objected mildly, “There is a lot of ugly stuff in the Bible, Roz; you have to admit that.”

  “Precisely. Because there's a lot of ugly stuff in daily life, and pretending there isn't doesn't make it so. Life isn't a fairy tale; the good guys sometimes lose. Hell, even fairy tales aren't pretty except in twentieth-century America. The original Grimm tales—have you ever read them? Grim's the word. Little Red Riding Hood doesn't rescue her granny, she finds her chopped up, bottled, and hanging in the smokehouse.”

  “Roz!” Maj protested, looking over to where Mina was kneeling, concentrating on the thick plastic shapes that Lee was fitting together for her. Roz started to bristle, but Sione got in first with a distraction.

  “I have always thought that Christianity and left-wing politics were poor bedfellows, which has been a sorrow to me, because the church of my childhood was such a place of joy, full of big women in white hats singing full-throated to the heavens.”

  Roz was nodding her head before he finished his sentence. “It is a terrible pity that the right wing has laid exclusive claim to the Bible, so inextricably that it seems impossible to reject the one without the other. But to do so only gives them a victory. It's not their Bible, and the fact that I claim the same Holy Book makes the Right angrier than anything else I can do. If I rejected their religion entirely I would simply be another poor lost heathen in need of their prayers. By declaring myself a Christian, by knowing the Bible better than most of them do, I became a maddening enigma. And I mean literally maddening: Twice I've had men try to rip off my collar.”

  “And she regularly gets threatening letters,” Maj told them.

  “You never said anything about threats,” Kate said sharply. “What kind—”

  “Kate,” Roz interrupted her, shooting a stern glance sideways at her partner. “Don't worry about it.”

  “Why the hell not? You have to take threats seriously these days. There are a lot of nuts out there.”

  “You think I don't know that? Of course I take them seriously, but I don't want you to get involved. One of your colleagues knows all about the problem.”

  “But—”

  “Kate, please. Unless one of them actually carries out his threat, it's not going to be your job.”

  “For Christ sake, Roz, that's not at all funny.”

  Lee spoke up as well. “Roz, please don't joke about this. It isn't fair to the people who care about you.”

  “Sorry, sorry. Anonymous letters come with the territory, and although I assure you that I take the nuts seriously, I have to say that I find the whole subject tedious, and can we please talk about something else?”

  “The threats to your immortal soul are much more worrying,” Maj commented, sounding considerably more amused than worried. She explained, “Roz seems to be a regular sermon topic at that grotesque church that tries to quote ‘heal’ gays and dykes.”

  Roz laughed aloud. “The last one was in retaliation for an article I'd written and they had obviously not bothered to read, about Hitler claiming to have been a Christian.”

  “Did he?” Jon asked, interested.

  “I have no doubt that he thought
of himself as a good Christian leader.”

  “Like those maniacs who bomb abortion clinics, killing to save lives,” Jon agreed. “They're mostly rightwing Christians. The guy who runs that Web site giving the names and addresses of abortionists that's little more than a hit list—he calls himself a man of God.”

  “We humans have a deep need to justify our behavior, especially the more extreme acts,” Lee commented, pausing in fitting the boot of Italy into the Mediterranean. “We drag God in to stand at our side, even if we have to bend reality to do it.”

  “Poor old God,” Jon said. “Must be frustrating having everyone claim your support. Like Albert Einstein being dragged in to advertise everything from Coke to computers.”

  “God definitely needs a press agent,” Lee said. Sione was looking ever more puzzled.

  “Issuing statements to clarify policy,” Roz agreed.

  “Headline: God says, ‘I do not support Pat Robertson,’” Lee joked.

  “God announces: ‘Only gay feminists of color admitted to heaven,’” Maj suggested.

  “God unveils heavenly affirmative action plan: One percent Christian Right to be admitted, qualified or not,” Roz contributed.

  The jokes escalated, the intellectual content plummeted, and a couple of minutes later Lee, seeing Sione looking worried and Mina positively alarmed at this incomprehensible adult descent into hilarity, leaned over and spoke to Kate.

  “How about some more coffee, hon? Kate?” Lee reached out and put her hand on Kate's knee, bringing her back to the present from some far-off place.

  “Huh?” Kate said, blinking.

  “Could you put on another pot of coffee?”

  “Sure,” she said, and went off to do it.

  Her mind was not on the chore, however. In fact, she had heard nothing of the discussion and joking, nothing after Jon's mention of the abortion clinic murders, an offhand remark that had sent a small tingle rising up in the back of Kate's mind, the kind of sensation that carries the phrase, “Listen to me.”

  Hit list. Web site. Maniac. Listen.

  Kate listened, and speculated in a state of distraction while the coffee was made and drunk, and the dishes were cleaned, and Jon and Sione left to feed Sione's recently adopted Siamese kitten. She helped gather up Maj's empty containers and walked with them out to Roz's car. The night sky was still clear, a rarity in the city of fog, and mild enough that none of them wore a jacket. Maj opened the Jeep's rear door and took the bowls from Kate, who leaned against the passenger door and addressed herself to Roz's backside, emerging from the back of the car while she buckled Mina into the car seat.

  “There were three women with picket signs in front of Peter Mehta's house yesterday morning. You know anything about that?”

  “I know that they've moved on to his place of business. Much more visible. Can you scoot back a bit, honey?” Roz asked, which Kate assumed was addressed to the child in the car seat.

  “It's an interesting question, isn't it, how much we allow immigrants to keep the customs of their birth country,” Kate noted. “When we have laws to the contrary. Like the conservative groups who refuse to send their kids to public schools.”

  “Customs or not, marrying off children is wrong.”

  “So is allowing half the kids in the country to go without medical care. So is spending a million dollars for a missile to drop on civilians.”

  Roz pulled her head out of the car and grinned at Kate. “Martinelli, we're going to make a flaming liberal of you yet.”

  “Roz, who did you tell about Pramilla Mehta's death?”

  Roz shut Mina's door and stepped back so Maj could approach the passenger door. Kate too stepped away from the car.

  “Why do you ask this, Kate?” Maj's voice asked, but it was Roz's gaze Kate held as she answered.

  “Someone may have known that Laxman was being investigated for his wife's death, and decided not to wait for the police. If we can narrow down the people who had that information, it might help us find his murderer. Roz knew of Laxman's violence against his wife. Roz and Amanda Bonner.”

  Maj answered before her partner could. “Roz knew. I knew. About eighty other people knew. And then whoever those people may have told.”

  “Eighty people?” Even for Roz, that seemed like a lot of phone calls.

  “I preached on it, Sunday morning,” Roz explained.

  Kate winced. “Mentioning names?”

  “Yes.”

  And on Monday night, Laxman Mehta had been killed.

  Maj reached for the passenger door, breaking the staring contest. Roz walked around the car to the driver's side.

  “It was good to see you,” Maj told Kate. “I hope you're taking care of yourself.”

  “Lee makes me.” To say nothing of her other partner, Al.

  “She is looking so well.”

  “She's doing great.” Kate opened her mouth again to say something further about Roz's threatening letters, and then closed it firmly. They were big girls, and neither of them naive.

  “Shall we go, my Maj?” Roz asked. Mymy, her favorite pun on Maj's name.

  Maj leaned forward and gave Kate an affectionate kiss on the cheek. Both women got in and closed their doors, Maj with some difficulty, which indicated that the Jeep's argument with the Yosemite rock face had damaged more than paint. The engine ground into life (something wrong under the hood as well—Roz's pet mechanic must have left the congregation) and the red car slid off down the hill.

  Kate stood for another minute with her face upturned to the faint impression of stars, then she went back inside, poured the dregs of the coffee into a cup, and took it upstairs, where she turned on the computer and then walked away from it, ending up on the small balcony off the guest room. Half an hour later Lee found her there, sitting and watching an overhead airplane rise up into the heavens.

  “What are you doing?” Lee asked.

  “Sitting.”

  “You okay?”

  “I am perfect,” Kate told her.

  Lee came up behind her chair and leaned down to kiss her on the same cheek Maj had used earlier. She smelled of soap and toothpaste. “You turned the computer on. Are you working tonight?”

  “You detective, you. Al thought I needed a night off, so I promised him I wouldn't work until tomorrow morning.”

  “So you're waiting until midnight,” Lee diagnosed. She laughed.

  “Tell me something,” Kate asked her. “Roz did something in India that gave you the creeps. What was it?”

  Lee stood still for a moment, and then with a sigh she put her hands back through the cuffs of the crutches and shifted over to sit down on the narrow bench.

  “I don't really want to go into detail, but basically what happened was Roz disappeared from the hotel and went off to live with a group of dacoits for a few days. What we would call, I don't know, a band of outlaws, I guess. Nasty people. Personally, I've always thought that she was given some powerful drug, a hallucinogen I'd say. She swore she wasn't, but it was all pretty ugly, and it took a major effort to get her out of there, and out of the country without being thrown in jail.”

  “I …” Kate shook her head. “I can't picture it.”

  “Completely uncharacteristic,” Lee agreed. “Which is why I decided she'd been given something. I've never known Roz to do drugs, other than that time. And at the end of it we were both more than a little uncomfortable around each other.”

  “You 've never talked about it?”

  “Never. She may not even remember it, not in detail.”

  “Thanks for telling me.” Though, Kate reflected, it was hard to know what, if anything, to make of this long-ago episode of youthful indiscretion. Except …

  “I don't suppose that there was one of the, what do you call them, dacoots, in particular?”

  “Dacoits,” Lee corrected, the wicked smile on her face clear even in the dark. “And how did you guess?” She stood up, kissed Kate's other cheek, and merely said, “I'm going
to bed.”

  “Okay, sweetheart,” Kate said absently. “I'll be there in a bit.”

  “Don't work too late.”

  Kate did work late—or rather, early, when a faint light in the east was bringing definition to the Bay and the northern shore beyond. Through the night, while the traffic fell silent and the streetlights dominated the darkness, while the sea haze coalesced into clouds and set the house's downspouts to their musical tapping, Kate searched the tangled threads of the Web for three lonely names, and eventually, working backward from Roz's Web site, using search engine and Web links, she found them.

  “Womyn of the EVEning,” they called themselves, and their Web site began with a soliloquy on the night.

  Eve was the first, a creature of the darkness, who with her apple freed her children from the tyranny of the Ruler of paradise. Eve, whose thirst for knowledge was so great, it changed humynkind. Eve, whose act was called shameful by males, who stands in pride and strength as the Mother of us all.

  We, too, are creatures of the night. Night is a Goddess who wraps Her dark cloak around us, allowing us to become invisible as we work Her will. For too long, womyn has been invisible in the daylight, a being with no voice, no face, whose labors in the home are only seen if they are not done, whose birthing and raising of children is only noticed when she fails.

  Males call us weak, males attack us with their stronger muscles, males try to convince us that the Night is a place of danger, that we must stay inside, lock our doors against the lurking, unseen threats of the dark.

  Why do we believe this? In truth, for too many of us, it is the well-lighted home that places us in danger, the locked and bolted door that traps us and makes us vulnerable.

  In truth it is the dark, all-concealing Night outside that will make us safe, Night's dark cloak that shields us with invisibility. Our weakness and our fear shall become our strength and our weapon, until it is the male who hides in the light, cowering from womyn's dark vengeance.

  The night is ours, to do with as we please.

  The dark is ours, to punish the evildoer.