“Get out of our way,” she said. “We’re coming down.”
“You can’t come down here,” he said.
“Like hell I can’t! Now move out of the way! And put some real clothes on!”
Anthony came down the stairs backward, his hands raised in helplessness. Leopold just stood there for a moment, listening as one stair creaked above us, then another. Whoever was coming down was doing it slowly. When he finally pulled the gun away and started up the stairs himself, he didn’t get further than the first three steps.
“Leopold! Who do you have down there?”
“Mama, go back upstairs! Delilah, take your grandmother back upstairs!”
“She’ll do no such thing! What are you doing with that gun? What’s going on down here?”
“Mama, please! I’m begging you! You shouldn’t be up!”
“You’re destroying the house! Did you see the living room? What in the name of Mary and Joseph is wrong with you? You’re making enough noise to wake the dead.”
“Mama, I order you to go back upstairs right now!”
He stood there frozen. We heard the creak of two more steps, then the woman’s voice, softer now. “Leopold, dear, get out of our way.”
He stepped back. The woman took the final two steps, holding on to Delilah. She had to be ninety years old. Her white hair was tied back, a single strand hanging over her face. She kept holding on to her granddaughter, even after they had cleared the stairway. She had brought the sharp smell of menthol down into the basement with her.
“Who are these men?” she said.
“Harwood sent them,” Leopold said. “They’re looking for Maria.”
“Is that true?” she said to us.
“It’s true we’re looking for Maria,” Randy said. “You’re Madame Valeska. I remember you.”
“But we don’t know this man Harwood,” I said.
“They’re lying,” Leopold said.
“Let me look at them,” she said.
“Don’t go near them,” he said.
“Leopold, shush.”
Delilah kept in step with her grandmother as they came toward us. Delilah looked scared of us, but the old woman’s face was calm. Leopold stood behind them, biting his lower lip. Anthony had picked up the dumbbell, and now he stood holding it as if he would throw it at us if we so much as blinked.
The woman stopped in front of Randy and looked down at him. “I know your face,” she said.
“My name is Randy Wilkins.”
“Names, I don’t remember. Your face, I remember.”
“I came to you in 1971,” he said. “To have my fortune told.”
“You…” she said. She looked at him for a long time. “You were one of the baseball players. You’re the one who came back.”
“A few times, yes.”
She moved over a couple steps and looked at me. “You I don’t know.”
“No,” I said. “We haven’t met.”
“He’s my friend,” Randy said.
She came a step closer, close enough to touch my face. “Who did this to you? Did my son do this to you?”
“I did,” Anthony said. “But not the eye. His eye was already swollen when he got here.”
“Not the eye, he says. Everything but the eye. My grandson would make a good lawyer if he didn’t dress in his pajamas all the time.” She gave me a little wink.
“Mama, you don’t understand,” Leopold said.
“Let these men go,” she said.
“Mama, we can’t let them find Maria.”
“Who says we’re going to? Maria is safe. You know that. Now bring them upstairs so we can give them some tea.”
Five minutes later, I was sitting at the dining room table, across from the same men who had thrown me down the stairs and had threatened to blow away a piece of my body. I couldn’t stop the adrenaline. My hands were still shaking. Randy sat next to me, and for once, all of the charm and the jokes and the genius for making people like him were turned off. Madame Valeska sat at the head of the table, watching us with her dark, careful eyes. There was a thin tube running under Madame Valeska’s nose and down to a tank of oxygen on the floor. The soft hissing of the tank filled the silence.
Randy finally spoke up, giving Madame Valeska the quick version of why he was there, minus the details about how intimate he had become with her daughter. He said it like a teenager explaining himself to his parents, while Madame Valeska watched his face, without so much as nodding her head. Delilah stood behind her, gently rubbing her grandmother’s shoulders. When Randy was done talking, he sat back in his chair, his hands in his lap.
“That is quite a story,” she said. “That you would think of my daughter after all these years and try to find her. It would be romantic if it wasn’t so foolish. So much has happened since that time. Surely you don’t expect to find the same person.”
“No, of course not,” he said. “I know that.”
“So you say, and yet the image you have in your mind is of Maria as a young girl, with her whole life in front of her. This business with Harwood, it has changed Maria a great deal. He is evil, that man. He is a demon. He killed her husband, you know.”
She reached up and touched one of Delilah’s hands. “Delilah was born six months after Arthur’s death,” she said. “She never even got to meet her own father.”
Delilah stared at us. She didn’t say a word.
“Maria has endured so much sadness,” Madame Valeska said. “Beauty is a great burden, you must understand. The gods punish you for it. And those around you. Even you, Mr. Wilkins. Thirty years later, you come all this way just to see her again. And you, Mr. McKnight, you helped him do this?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You are a true friend,” she said. “And this is the reward you get. Are you badly hurt?”
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
“I think you are in more pain than you will allow us to see,” she said. “If you were to call the police right now, I wouldn’t blame you.”
“I’m not calling the police,” I said.
“My son and grandson owe you more than an apology,” she said. “But under the circumstances, I hope an apology will be enough. My daughter’s experience with this man has touched all of us. Perhaps it has made us a little deranged. Especially the men. You know how men are.” She looked at Leopold and Anthony. They didn’t look back at her. “My husband, Gregor. I believe it killed him, too. Another man Maria has lost. He could not sleep at night, thinking about Harwood.”
She stopped talking for a moment. The room was silent.
“In any case,” she said. “Maria is far away from here. It is hard for her to be away from her daughter.” She stroked Delilah’s hand again. “But this is the best way for now. Delilah will finish school here, and then perhaps in time things will be different.”
“Is that why you changed your name?” I said. “Valeska. Valenescu. Today, Delilah told us her last name was Muller.”
“It is easy to change your name in America,” she said. “A name on a mailbox doesn’t mean much anyway. Your real name stays in your heart. We know who we are.”
“Who is this man Harwood?” I said. “Maybe we can help.”
“That you would even say that after what has happened to you in this house,” she said. “You are very kind. But he is our demon. He is not yours.”
