The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards: A Novel Read online

  “Waccabuc!” Anton shouted suddenly.

  “He’s delirious,” I said, laying the back of my hand on Anton’s forehead. “Just tell his father we’re taking him to St. Vincent’s.”

  “Kak naschyet yesli mi voz’myem yevo v blizhayshooyoo bol’nitsoo?” Rose checked the time and then said to me, “I have rehearsal for The Cherry Orchard in six hours. I can’t go upstate tonight.”

  “Nobody can go upstate tonight. None of us has a car, for one thing. For another, there’s two feet of snow on the ground!”

  “Waccabuc!”

  “What does that mean? Is he saying something in Russian?”

  “It’s not Russian,” she said to me. Then to the phone, “Zdyes’ mnogo snyega.”

  “His son is coughing up blood,” I continued. “The man is twelve time zones away. Let’s just go to the hospital.”

  Rose shot me a tired look and whispered, “He says to take the Jaguar in the garage down the street. It’s for emergencies. He says his son has numerous rare conditions, and if you don’t take Anton to see Dr. Ivan Ivanych at Lake Waccabuc, then he’ll die, and then Mr. Prishibeyev will fly over here and kill you with his bare hands.”

  And so it was settled. I got Anton into a too big overcoat and grabbed a mismatched wool cap and scarf for myself. Rose pushed the yellow hatbox full of manuscript pages under my arm. More than anything, what I wanted to do now was read it all again, to relive each and every detail that was now dancing around in her head.

  “Masterful,” she said again, as she gave me a quick kiss good-bye.

  Then, with Anton leaning heavily on my other arm, he and I trudged out into the worst storm in several years, in search of the parking garage where Anton’s father kept the for-emergencies-only Jaguar. It was times like these, which cropped up more often than they ought to, when I wondered why exactly Anton and I were friends at all.

  A sleepy Pakistani attendant unearthed a camel-colored X300 from the bowels of the garage. The man seemed skeptical, double-checking Anton’s crimson Russian passport—his only form of photo ID—and jabbering in Urdu while motioning at the snow at the mouth of the garage. But I tipped him a hundred dollars out of Anton’s wallet, and the attendant reluctantly handed over the keys.

  Soon Anton was dozing in the passenger’s seat and I was guiding the Jaguar through a maze of plowed streets, going the wrong way on Sixth Avenue only briefly before finding my way onto West Street. There I found four empty, freshly plowed lanes and the great frozen Hudson to the left. It was a challenge keeping the sports car under thirty miles an hour, and I could only barely see the red lights I was running. A few snowplows passed in the other lane, but otherwise I had the roads almost entirely to myself—a good thing, because I hadn’t driven since high school and was feeling the effects of the .

  Fumbling with the radio controls in the dark, I managed to get the tape deck on, but the only music available seemed to be a scratchy recording of Zero Mostel in Fiddler on the Roof. I hadn’t suspected Mr. Prishibeyev to be a fan of Broadway musicals.

  As we passed the George Washington Bridge, I listened to Tevye sing about tradition—accompanied by Anton’s faint dream humming—and drifted back to thoughts of my novel. Titled Just Before the Gilded Age, it was about a young Southern gilder in the late 1800s in Manhattan who falls in love with the daughter of a railroad tycoon. I was going to dedicate it to Rose, as a wedding present if she gave me no other option.

  We were past Fort Tryon Park and rising up out of the city. Soon I found I could not keep my eyes open another second, so I pulled off the highway, under the shelter of an overpass. I checked the time on my watch and decided to skim through the final pages of my novel until I woke up a little.

  Monday the 13th. July 1863. Heartsick and thinking only of Colette Marsh, I went uptown to report for the Union draft. Colette would be married in a few days and my own life would be forfeit anyway. Why not go back down South to shoot my own cousins on some muddy battlefield? The Union had claimed victory at Gettysburg after three of the bloodiest days since the Revolution, and President Lincoln had declared every able-bodied man in New York must sign up to step onto the front lines. Fearing the wait would be epic, I clutched a well-worn Wilkie Collins novel as I rounded the corner of Third Avenue. I stepped onto Forty-seventh Street and found the 9th District Offices in flames.

  Smoke poured out so thickly that it plunged the block into grayness. Men swarmed all through it, heading in every direction at once. To my left, an Irishman in faded overalls clawed a paving stone out of the street, shouting, “Aileen! I’ll see you again, Aileen!” He reeked of whiskey. It was barely past ten. He pitched the stone up and it arced right into the window of the draft office. The crash was drowned by the roar of the fire, but shattered glass still rained down on our heads as fresh plumes of blackness burst from inside.

  A rock flew past my ear with a hollow whistle and then I heard it thwack into something behind me. Terrified, I spun, just in time to catch the falling body of a policeman whose club had been raised to split my head open mere seconds before. The front of his uniform was the color of cherry juice and his face nothing but a pulpy hollow. I let him fall, and I screamed, and I ran for my life—thirty-three blocks without stopping—until I arrived at Tammany Hall.

  I charged through the main doors, anxious to warn the others about the riot. But before I could, Colette Marsh appeared around the corner. Breathless, I stopped, almost forgetting why I’d come, and what I’d seen.

  Colette was of “the Railroad Marshes” of Georgia, and heiress to a fortune larger than I could begin to imagine. Her impending wedding to Bertram Vanderbilt was the talk of the Hall, where I, and my fellow apprentices, scrambled daily, making preparations for the big event.

  Many times, I had tried capturing her with my crude charcoals and my penny paints. All this failed. Only when I layered thin leaves of gold onto the columns of the hall had I ever felt near to capturing the deep hue of her Southern sun-kissed hair. Only when I delicately painted golden highlights onto the murals of the Revolution in the Great Room—glinting medals on uniforms and in the sunlight behind a musket blast—had I ever come close to the electric spark behind her eyes. But Chausser only kept a single day’s supply of gold paint on the premises at a time, locked in a back cabinet, and he weighed our jars at the end of the day to be sure none had been wasted. A single drop was worth more than I’d be paid in a week, but I had become so meticulous with my brush that I could conceal a few drips of gold each week, and with these precious drops I had painted a single portrait of Colette on the blank back page of my book.

  “D’you happen to have a match?” she asked, approaching me lazily, and withdrew a cigarette holder made of purest bone.

  Of course I did. I bought seven matches each week, at the tobacconist’s down the block from my boardinghouse, even though I had no money to buy tobacco. A Hungarian man there dipped a bundle of pine sticks into a great vat while I watched. He brought the sticks out with beads of lead and gum arabic and white phosphorus on the tips, exotic and potent substances that were befitting only of Colette Marsh.

  And so I took out a match then, as I did each time she asked me, and struck it against the buckle of my belt. The little stick sizzled into white flames while I lifted it to the slim line of bone and paper and tobacco that led directly to her perfect lips. She inhaled with ladylike deliberation.

  Then her eyes widened, and—bliss! Her hand reached to my face. “Is that blood on your cheek?” The policeman’s blood stained the white lace of her gloves. Her eyes flicked down to my Wilkie Collins novel. “The other men are always reading the newspaper. Not you.”

  “No, ma’am,” I said, pulling the novel out to show her. “This one’s called ‘No Name.’ It’s not quite as good as ‘The Woman in White.’”

  “That’s my favorite,” she said, plucking the book from my hands and turning it over in her own. I was so surprised to still be speaking to her that I completely forgot about what I�
�d painted on the blank page in the back—at least until she paused there, the blood-stained tip of her glove resting on a golden portrait of herself.

  “Oh. That’s just . . . ”—I grabbed for the book—“. . . a sketch. Of a woman. I knew back home.”

  But the verisimilitude was too great. Either my imaginary Southern woman was her identical twin, or that was a portrait of her. With no further word at all, Colette closed the book, tucked it into the folds of her flowing yellow dress, and left me standing there in the echoing hall. Far away, a clerk was rushing in the other entrance, shouting that the Colored Orphanage on Forty-fourth Street had just been set on fire.

  Later I listened to the booming voice of Boss Tweed, discussing with the others how to best protect Tammany. Still I couldn’t think of anything but Colette as I gilded the arrows of fat-faced cherubs, drawn and ready to pierce the hearts of men like me. The riots continued on and off for days. I was reassigned to touch up the ceiling in the room where Colette’s wedding reception was to be held. Below, the little tables were laid out with gold-rimmed china teacups. Once or twice I dared to peek down from my perch and I caught sight of Colette, bobbing below, like a star fallen from my ceiling and submerged in the sea.

  The Vanderbilts saw no need to cancel the wedding just because of the riots. The fires didn’t dare spread their way downtown; even the smoke seemed to always blow in the other direction. When, the day before the wedding, a servant clumsily slammed a vat of tomato soup into one of the Grecian frescoes in an adjacent portico, the Vanderbilts demanded even that tiny crack be repaired. Chausser sent me in to be sure it was done right. In the cracked fresco, Leander, the young Greek, swam across a turbulent river toward his forbidden love, Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite, who kept a light on in her tower so that he could find her. It was as I limned the rays of this light that I first heard Colette’s whispering.

  “You’re in there, aren’t you?”

  Jerking back from the wall, I looked all around me, but Colette was nowhere. And then I saw the shadow that had come over the crack in the wall. I bent down to peer through it. On the other side, out in the main hall, was a luminous blue eye. From where I stood, it seemed almost a part of the deep sea that Leander swam through.

  “It’s masterful,” she whispered, holding her sweet lips to the thin fissure. “In your book. The painting, I mean.”

  “It’s just a silly sketch,” I said. “I’m so sorry. Please—”

  “I’d love to see what you can do with more time,” she whispered.

  Before I could respond, one of the Vanderbilt daughters shouted Colette’s name, and she rushed away. I watched through the gap in the wall as Colette looked back over her pure white shoulder, just once, at me.

  The next thing I knew, I was shivering in the pale light of early morning and Anton was awake.

  “What happened?” I asked, snapping forward sharply into the leather-wrapped steering wheel. My eyes were so glazed over that I could barely see.

  “Apparently,” Anton said drily, “you tried to kidnap me and steal my father’s car but fell asleep in the middle of the getaway.”

  “You were dying. Coughing up blood and—”

  Anton protested, even as he let out another long hacking cough. “I’m from Russia. This is my natural state of being. What? You think I have tuberculosis? Consumption? Like some character in this terrible thing?”

  Suddenly my eyes focused on the pile of papers on his lap, and I twisted around to find the yellow hatbox, violated on the backseat.

  “Who said you could read that?” I grabbed the pilfered pages away from him. I felt my heart pounding harder: back in our college days, Anton had written a story not entirely unlike this one, about his great-great-grandfather, and for months now I’d feared his reaction when he realized I was, somewhat, stealing his story. He seemed, if anything, amused—hardly what I’d been expecting.

  “I wake up next to your snoring body, in a car with a dead battery, in the middle of nowhere. What else am I supposed to do to pass the time?”

  “Dead battery?”

  “Yes. I know Fiddler is enchanting, but perhaps you could have turned it off before you tucked in for the night?”

  Anxious to escape him, I shoved my door open and stepped out onto the side of the road. We were on the side of the Saw Mill Parkway. The snow had stopped, at least, and I waved at some approaching cars, hoping to find someone with jumper cables.

  Anton got out of the car. “Aren’t there perfectly good hospitals in Manhattan?”

  “That’s what I said, but Rose called your dad and he said you had some rare—”

  “Preposterous!” he shouted.

  “—condition and that we had to go see Dr. Ivanych at his lake house. And I thought you were, you know, dying, so it seemed like we’d better get on it.”

  Six cars sped past before a rusted blue Suburban slowed to stop, blocking half the neighboring lane. A large gentleman with a raccoon’s beard leaned through his passenger’s-side window.

  “You got cables?” he asked.

  I looked hopefully at Anton, who shrugged—possibly not even sure what jumper cables were. “We don’t know,” I admitted.

  The raccoon man seemed to consider leaving us there, but it was clear that he thought a fine piece of British engineering didn’t deserve to be stuck in Yonkers with two idiots like us.

  “She’s a beaut,” the man said. “Pop the hood and check your trunk for cables.”

  Anton fumbled about in the front, looking for a latch for the hood. I popped the trunk, where I found two huge crates marked heavily in Cyrillic. The only English I could find was on the Customs declaration, which read PRISHIBEYEV CAVIAR—SEA OF AZOV. Beside these was a complete roadside-safety kit, thankfully including jumper cables.

  I delivered these to the raccoon man. Anton was searching for his cell phone, which was ringing—the aria that ends the first act of Eugene Onegin. Suddenly I realized the phone was in the pocket of his coat, which I was wearing.

  “I’ll get it,” I said. “You start your car.”

  I answered the phone as Westchesterians honked and flipped me the bird as I nervously flailed at the traffic to go around us.

  “Where are you?” Rose asked, her voice warming me deep down to my toes.

  “We’re coming back. Anton is back to his usual, charming self again.”

  Had he really called my novel terrible?

  “Anton’s father keeps calling me for updates. You’d better take him the rest of the way up there.” Through the phone I could hear Rose instruct a taxi driver to head up Madison Avenue to avoid construction.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “The Tea Room,” she said after a pause. “I’m meeting someone.”

  “I thought you had a rehearsal?”

  Rose mumbled something to someone else in the cab with her, and somehow I just knew that she was with her prince.

  “It’s been canceled, because of all the snow,” she lied. If the cabs were running then the show, as it were, would be going on. And she would never miss a rehearsal, which could only mean there never had been one scheduled at all. She’d lied to get me out of town. I felt sick.

  There was a shout, either of pain or panic, and the roar of the Jaguar’s engine, followed by the booming bass of Tevye at the end of “Sunrise, Sunset.”

  “Got to go,” I said quickly. I heard her hesitate, as if there were something else that she’d just been about to say, but then she said, simply, “Good-bye,” and hung up.

  Anton was trying to tip the raccoon man when I came running back up to the car.

  “Let’s go,” I barked at him. “Before somebody takes a shot at us.”

  And so we eased out into the honking river of cars and headed up the highway again. As we drove in silence, I imagined pulling a U-turn through a break in the divider and heading back down to the Russian Tea Room to duel with whichever prince it was. Maybe it would move Rose to stay with me. Maybe I’d get
shot and my novel would be published posthumously to great acclaim. Either way, it didn’t sound like a bad plan, compared with sitting next to Anton another minute.

  “It’s nice to get out into the country for a change,” Anton said, reclining a little in his seat. I ignored him. Anton pretended he didn’t care what was bothering me for about five minutes, at which point he simply couldn’t resist anymore.

  “Troubles with Rose?” he mocked. “Is the Prince of Dullsylvania back in town?”

  Though I was sorely tempted to sink into a long, disparaging discussion of Rose’s latest fiancé, a subject which Anton never tired of, I ignored the jab.

  “Rose is fine. She loved my book, by the way.”

  “Oh, is that your problem? Of course she loved it. It’s practically about her.”

  Another long and stony silence, as I sped through the thin traffic, angrier and angrier, toward the nearest exit.

  “I never meant you couldn’t fix it,” he said finally. “You’ve got a perfectly serviceable first draft.”

  “You said it was terrible. And it’s my sixth draft.”

  Anton reached back for the hatbox. “Well, I only got through part of it. Let me take another look.”

  “Leave it!” I shouted. As we came into some small town, I suddenly wondered why I was even still driving. For weeks I’d barely heard from Anton, only finding little messes around the apartment in the morning and hearing death rattles through the walls, and here I was, motoring him up to the Siberian wastelands of Westchester to see some quack, right after he had insulted a year’s worth of my work.

  “Screw this,” I said, seeing a sign for the train station up ahead. “I’m going to go back into the city.” I checked the time on my watch and figured that if I caught a train in the next half hour, I’d be back in time to make it to the Russian Tea Room. I wondered if it was still considered regicide if the prince in question had already been deposed. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be stuck in a car with Anton a minute longer, listening to Tevye asking Golde “Do You Love Me?”