“I do hope you can, Darwin. I do hope so.”
Cafe Avanti sat flush below a four-story brownstone on Southport within shouting distance of the Music Box Theater's marquee, just as Lucinda had described it to Giles. The doors to Cafe Avanti opened inward and a lilting bell sounded, announcing yet another customer. The place appeared as quaint and curious as Lucinda had told him it would be over pillow talk just before he'd fallen asleep, just before he'd had to kill her.
He stood at the center of the room, staring down a narrow corridor leading to the rear where he'd been told the cafe housed a small galleria-styled maze of nooks and crannies. Standing before the stenciled windows, Giles Gahran, his ornate box tucked under one arm, his huge artist's portfolio dangling from his other hand, drew the attention of the Spanish woman behind the counter.
“Good morning. Can I be helping you, sir?”
“Lucinda sent me.”
“Who?”
He replied, “Art dealer in Milwaukee, Lucinda Wellingham.”
“Ahhh… jes, jes. She sends you here to me? Ahhh… that is good then. Let me see your work.”
“Said you'd show my stuff on her recommendation. I have a note to that effect with her signature.”
“That's perfect timing. I just got the rooms cleared out again. Get tired of seeing the same things too long… not good for business. New exhibit is. Show me what you got.”
“Lucinda said Cafe Avanti is the premier place for a first showing in Chicago, and from there word will spread.” “Right, spread like spilled India ink on a white satin tablecloth. Lucinda told you that, sweetheart… good how she help us… good to us… and now they are showing her picture in the paper and saying she has been killed, do you know?” She handed him the Sun-Times lying on a nearby table. “Horrible… so horrible what that black- hearted bastard Orion done to her, and look how he goes walking free!”
Giles read the headlines and scanned for details. “Imagine letting a monster like that just walk away,” he muttered in response.
“God, so awful about her death-murdered, horribly disfigured.”
“Terrible, I agree.”
“I'd only seen her jus' last week in Milwaukee to preview Orion's work, too.”
“Oh, really? What'd you think of it?”
“The man is a pig. A murdering pig now. Such evil in him to horribly disfigure my beautiful Lucinda.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “It turns my stomach, the whole thing.” Giles pretended innocence for the part owner of the Cafe Avanti.
“It must've been so shocking for you. Oh, where are my manners. Coffee? Juice? Something stronger?”
“Coffee, yes, thank you. Yes, I… I just saw her a few days ago myself. How. could such a thing happen?”
“Well, how well do you know that arrogant ass Orion?” she asked. “I can just imagine if a girl were to cross him. It's been all over the news. Hated that man before, but now I really hate him.”
“I didn't know until recently. Been too busy moving in, you know. I rarely look at the papers, and I don't own a TV.”
“The bastard wasn't even arrested or arraigned! No jail time, no bail, nothing, but if he dares show his face here again, I'll make him wish they had kept him behind bars.
I'll personally scratch his eyes out, you know, for my poor, sweet Lucinda.”
She'd gone back around the counter and handed him an Irish coffee with whipped cream. “On the house.”
“Imagine, Keith Orion, theeeee Keith Orion, a killer.”
“He's finished in the art world, especially in the Chicago arts community.” She reared up. “When I saw her face on the tube… and then they flashed her death photo… Oh my God, I thought I'd throw up and faint. I called the authorities immediately, you know, to, you know, identify her as exactly who they thought she might be, but I think I… my word put a cap on it for them.”
She took a moment to compose herself. “Now tell me, Mr. Gahran, why should we display your art, your paintings, your sculptures at Avanti? I've got to fill out a flyer, get the word around, plaster it on some windows that original artwork is on display at Avanti. Got to have good reason, other than the fact Lucy sent you to us just before she died. In other words, defend your work.”
He spread out his show photos and several sketches and a few paintings to give her a broad range of the kind of work he was doing at the moment.
She tried to curb her immediate positive reaction to the unusual work.
Giles began speaking as she glanced over each painting and sketch slowly, carefully sizing each up, one at a time.
“Kinda reminds me of Goya, your style anyway, and maybe Picasso's Guernica like the way their bones are out of their bodies.”
“In occult physiology the most important bone in the body is the sacrum and-”
“What's a sacrum?” asked Conchita Raold, interrupting Giles's spiel.
“Ahhh… sacrum… it's not what you think,” he said with a little smirk.
“Oh, and what am I thinking?” “It's got nothing to do with the male member. It refers to the ancient sacer, meaning the sacred, so it's called… was called the sacred or holy bone-the-”
“Spinal cord.”
“Backbone to be exact-cord refers to the nerves. You mean spinal column.”
“Holy bone but not holy boner then. OK, so your show is about this holy bone.”
“You see in ancient civilizations it had a role to play… a role of like special-”
“Significance?”
Giles hated the way this woman finished all his sentences for him. “Yeah, significance in many systems of divination by the bones of the body, in religious rites, in sacrificial-”
“Ceremonies?”
“Ahhh… right again. It was commonly believed to contain the immortal part of the body and to be directly connected with the spirit realm. In the Western tradition this was the bone kissed at the witch sabbat.”
“Man, really? Wow. I didn't know that. I love Wicca stuff like they got next door in the candle and card shop. How many people would know that. That's kinda amazing. Man, Giles, you are going to fit right in around here. People coming to Avanti, they love shit like this.”
“It means different things to different people, still does,” he continued. “Semitic peoples have a tradition that there exists in every man a tiny bone that cannot be seen or felt, cannot be burned or otherwise destroyed, never rots or perishes, and is lodged in the sacrum.”
“You're shitting me?”
“No, really. I've studied it. At death this indestructible, incombustible, imponderable, impalpable, atomic bone particle will remain incorrupt in the earth, and when the time of resurrection comes-and it will-it will form the 'seed' around which a new body will be built, the body that will proceed to the last judgment and to its final destiny in heaven or hell.”
She had been silenced, awed by all this strange talk.
Finally, Conchita stammered, “Damn, I gotta get you a showing, and I mean immediately. Just start carting your stuff over. I love it… love it, fucking love it.”
“Formerly, Jews believed that when they died this bone, which they called luz or luez, would find a resting place in the Holy Land, and that if a Jew was buried far away, the luz would travel underground or find some means of getting to the sacred soil. If the bone was eaten en route by say a bird or an animal, it would not be absorbed into the system but passed out while using the bird or animal to trans-port itself.”
Wide-eyed at this, Conchita muttered, “That's some creep-azoid shit, Giles. OK, I call you by your first name?”
He nodded, but kept on explaining about the luz bone. “Muslims, too, believe in the existence of this bone, which they call al ajb.”
“Al-a-jib? What's that mean?”
“The curious bone, a tiny fragment around which the resurrection-body will take shape.”
