He held up the grafting for which he had high hopes and examined it carefully. “Right now the balance appears to be just right … so the only question is whether it can sustain fruit,” he said, his voice trailing off.
At the sink he drank two glasses of water before joining me on the bench. “I got so thirsty all of a sudden,” he said, unbuttoning his lab coat and loosening the collar of his shirt.
To me, he looked uncharacteristically pale. And his irises, usually the clearest blue, seemed smoky. “Uncle Junius, it’s late, maybe we should go in.”
He glanced at his watch. “Two-twenty. You go in. I’ll be finished here soon.”
“No, I’ll wait. I’m not tired.”
“When you are tired, go,” he said, mopping the back of his neck with his handkerchief. “I haven’t been able to sleep lately.”
“How come?”
He shrugged, averting his eyes. “The years are catching up with me, Enzo. When you get older, you sleep less.”
“You’re in better shape than men half your age,” I said. “You can still swim a mile without stopping.”
“You know I haven’t been swimming in weeks.” He shook his head. “I’m going to be seventy-three years old soon.”
I had never heard him bring up his age in this way. “You’re worried about something. What is it?”
He waved this away. “Why should I be worried? I want this tree to succeed, yes. And there’s that other amulet … we have some new leads … we’re getting closer.”
“I know all that.”
“Well?”
“Come on, Uncle Junius, you’ve always told me to level with you.”
He opened his hands slowly and examined his palms. “It’s Vitale Cassiel,” he said simply, evenly, but the mere mention of this man’s name sent a chill through me. “He’s been occupied elsewhere,” Samax went on, “but he always comes back, always from a different angle. Always with the same objective.”
“What’s that?” I asked quietly.
“My destruction,” Samax replied. “He may make it look like something else, he may be blunt or subtle, but that’s what he wants to accomplish.” He looked up at me. “And he never will, I promise you that.”
“But why?” I said. “It was he who wronged you.“
“It’s not that simple.” He hesitated. “You’ll know the whole story one day. To hear it now would be of no help to you. In fact, it would be a hindrance.”
Later I would be astonished to learn that one small part of that story which had taken on great importance was the fire I started in the ghost town of Hydra. An embarrassment in my own life, what should have remained an obscure incident had become the trip wire of the most recent flare-up in Samax’s private war with Vitale Cassiel. Through his own sources in the Las Vegas Police Department, Vitale Cassiel had discovered that the two boys who had burned down The Hotel Vega were none other than Junius Samax’s great-nephews. Because I was a minor at the time, he sued Samax for damages and tried to have Auro and me charged with arson and malicious mischief—charges that Samax used all his influence, and considerable energy, to block legally and also to keep from ever reaching our ears, which was no small feat. This sequence of events could have been just another drop in what was already an ocean of bad blood, but because Auro and I were involved, it enraged Samax that much more. And, in retrospect, it became apparent that it marked the first moves in the endgame of Samax’s tortuous relationship with Vitale Cassiel.
“Did you know,” Samax said, veering to another subject, “that all imposed grafts go back to a single fruit tree in Florence?”
I shook my head, not happy to be put off in this way.
“The year was 1644,” he said in a leisurely voice, leaning back and changing his tone as abruptly as he had changed the subject. “The tree came to be called the ‘Bizzarria Orange’—for obvious reasons if you were a Florentine gardener at that time. Root grafts occur naturally on tropical plantations where all sorts of trees mingle in the soil. But in Italy, where species are more segregated, they’re unheard of. So when a certain Guido Angelli one spring day in a forgotten corner of the garden of his employer, the Barone Zelo, found a single tree with oranges on some branches, lemons on others, and combinations of the two fruits on still others, he dropped to his knees. Not in ecstasy or devotion, but because he was terrified that Satan himself had touched down in that garden. In fact, somehow, a scion of sour orange had been naturally grafted onto a stock of lemon. The tree turned out to be a true hybrid, eventually producing only lemon-oranges—the first known chimera in pomology. Years ago, I acquired one of its descendents, but I donated it to the Botanical Gardens in Albuquerque. It’s still there today.…”
His speech became increasingly slow, as if his voice were a phonograph slipping into the wrong speed. “We are all of us accidents of nature,” he concluded, “refined by thousands of graftings … some that take, some that don’t.” He ran his handkerchief over the back of his neck. “My history, yours—we can control our destinies up to a point. What shapes us is the extent to which we can adapt beyond that point.…”
His eyes were closed now. Samax was not a man given to rambling, and it frightened me to hear him go on like this. I sat stiffly for nearly a minute, waiting to see if he would continue. The giant humidifiers whirred overhead and the palm fronds rustled in the artificial breezes stirred up by the floor fans. Through the vapor on the ceiling panes the desert stars twinkled faintly. Samax was rocking his shoulders, gripping his knees. I had never seen him look so tired and frail. His spine was bent. The creases in his brow seemed to have deepened, merging at his temples. His usually crisp white hair was damp. Suddenly his eyelids snapped open and he surprised me by standing up in one clean motion and walking to the sink, sure and steady on his feet.
What happened next I would watch again many times over the next two years on the nights I found it difficult to fall asleep myself.
Samax turned on the tap and began washing the leaves of a small quince tree with a piece of cheesecloth. For several minutes he neither spoke nor looked at me. In fact, he acted as if I weren’t still sitting there behind him on the stone bench. At first this was a relief: I told myself I had read him all wrong, that he was feeling fine after unburdening himself. That the rambling had been cathartic. He picked up a pair of scissors and snipped away several torn or wilting quince leaves. He loosened the soil at the tree’s base with a miniature pickfork. Then, rising up on his toes, he reached toward one of the overhead shelves for an aluminum sprayer. His fingers closed around the sprayer’s handle, but he never lifted it from the shelf. For an eternity he remained frozen on the balls of his feet, his right arm fully extended. Then without warning he wheeled around, wearing a quizzical expression. He opened his mouth to speak, I heard my name die on his breath, and then he started shaking violently and the sprayer crashed into the sink. In a matter of seconds, he lurched forward, tried to right himself, and, knees buckling, toppled sideways against the worktable before I could leap up and break his fall.
“Uncle Junius!” I cried.
His left arm and leg continued to twitch. His eyes stared up at me helplessly. I heard only a single word, just a whisper, escape his lips before his jaw locked: “Fire …”
He’s going to die and there’s nothing I can do, I thought, my heart hammering.
“Just hold on,” I whispered, stripping off my shirt and sliding it under his head. His skin was clammy and cold. All the blood seemed to have drained from his face: it looked white as a piece of paper. I didn’t want to leave him even for a moment, but I raced across the greenhouse and called Azu on the house phone. Within fifteen minutes an ambulance had backed up to the greenhouse door and a pair of attendants were lifting Samax onto a stretcher.
Desirée and I followed the ambulance in her silver Corvette. Aroused from sleep, she had slipped into jeans and a denim jacket. Her hair was uncombed, her eyes heavy. She was chewing gum nervously. And all the while, I thought I
was checking the tears welling up in me, until I felt the wind turn them cold on my cheeks. And though I had never cried in front of Desirée, I made no effort to conceal it.
Samax’s left hand remained numb for months, and his eyelid fluttered, but aside from a faint limp which he had from then on, he seemed to suffer no long-term damage to his faculties. “What does ‘long-term’ mean when you’re seventy-three?” he said drily when I visited him at the hospital one day. “Until I hit a hundred, like Dolores? No, that’s not in the cards for me.”
In fact, because of his strong constitution and rock-steady habits, his physical rehabilitation was hugely successful—a marvel, the doctors insisted, for a man his age. The emotional aftereffects were something else, especially for those of us who knew him well. His fixation on the Angel of Death was by far the most dramatic of these. “I saw him, Enzo, as surely as I see you now. He swooped down through the glass ceiling, through the trees, and bent over me, yellow with hundreds of eyes, and then pointed his long sword at me, the blade tilted so I could see my own eyes reflected in it.” Subsequent sightings, always when he was alone, took place in the quincuncial orchard, at the edge of the desert, and again in the greenhouse. Generally, however, after the stroke he kept to himself even more than usual—which meant he practically became solitary. He traveled little and entertained less. And of course he hired the bodyguards, which I was now certain had less to do with Vitale Cassiel than with the increased frequency with which Samax said he glimpsed that yellow fire with the blue eyes—as if two martial arts specialists and crack shots could protect him from his visions, much less from death itself.
During this period, it was not unusual for Samax to cancel dinner in the tenth-floor dining room four, even five, times a week; and when we did all dine together, he seemed distant, preoccupied not with archaeological digs or auctions in Hong Kong and Venice, but other matters, much closer to home. It was also around this time that Calzas finally married his fiancée Cela and moved permanently to Santa Fe. He went with Samax’s blessing, even his encouragement, and a good deal of financial support to set up his own architectural firm. Samax missed Calzas, and said as much, but I don’t think even he knew how much of a loss it was to him; certainly none of us realized at first how great a toll the younger man’s departure would take on my uncle. Calzas had not only been a business confidant and trusted friend, but also the closest thing to a son Samax ever had. That is, until I had arrived on the scene. Now that I was becoming a man, as Delia had once pointed out to me, I was stepping more and more into Calzas’s shoes. Or, to be more exact, a moment came when I realized that I was expected to step into them. While affectionate to me as a child, Samax on many levels had always treated me as an adult, but even before he fell ill I saw that he had truly begun to rely on me, both in business and personal matters—and that was something quite different.
For all of these reasons—but especially Samax’s stroke and Calzas’s departure—I changed my plans at the last moment with regard to college. Thanks to Labusi, I had passed my entrance and equivalency exams at sixteen and been accepted at Stanford; this would have been my first extended time away from the hotel, and though I had mixed feelings about it at first, I was excited about attending. Samax, who had never gone to college, had always spoken of my attending Stanford, a dream of his own as a young man, shattered first by his being drafted and then by his legal battles with his brother. But in the end, over his objections (though I sensed that deep down, with the pressures he had come under, he was relieved) I stayed in Las Vegas and in an accelerated program attended the University of Nevada, to which I could commute. So it was that in the spring of 1975, six months before my twentieth birthday, I would take my degree in architecture.
What exactly was going on again between Samax and Vitale Cassiel at the time of all these other crises, and what had transpired in the past, was first told to me in snatches by other people, especially Calzas before he got married and Desirée. As I got older, Samax himself filled me in more on what he would not tell me in the greenhouse the night of his stroke. The stroke hastened this; he had said that I would learn the whole story one day, but I don’t think he imagined it would be so soon.
Nearly fifty years had passed since Vitale Cassiel had engineered Samax’s imprisonment at the Ironwater Federal Penitentiary. At seventy-seven, Vitale Cassiel was two years older than Samax. But it was as if the wound left after all those years had never healed—never been allowed to heal. The source of Samax’s resentment was obvious to me from the start: disinherited, betrayed, framed, and jailed for a year in the prime of his youth, he had plenty to be angry about. But the ongoing virulence of Vitale Cassiel was more difficult to fathom. Especially since he had so clearly come out ahead all those years back, effectively funneling all of Samax and Nilus’s assets into his own pocket. What was Vitale Cassiel’s gripe? I asked myself.
Finally, one evening when we were sitting in the dining room drinking maté tea from black bowls, Calzas clued me in on some of the events after prison that Samax had never gotten around to in our breakfast or after-dinner conversations. For starters, Calzas told me that as soon as Samax had made his fortune on that land he stumbled on, he set out to exact revenge on Nilus and Vitale Cassiel. By then, Nilus was very much the junior partner in all their ventures. While Vitale Cassiel wheeled and dealed, Nilus was relegated to paper shuffling at their home office in San Francisco; for this, he was paid a fat salary that enabled him to carry on a full-time social life in the high-blown style of his father. So long as the money rolled in, this arrangement suited Nilus fine. As the years went by, Vitale Cassiel primed him with just enough cash to keep him happy, always but a fraction of the overall profits. Following in the family tradition, Nilus was a collector—not of rare antiques, like his brother, but of beautiful women, like his father. He never married, but instead lived with a succession of mistresses, among whom were the mothers of his daughters Bel and Ivy. For, outdoing himself, Nilus Samax in a single year, 1937, fathered his daughters on two different women.
Bel’s mother, Astrid—my grandmother—was the orphaned daughter of a doctor and his wife who perished in a Colorado mining camp during a typhoid epidemic. Astrid died within a month of Bel’s birth. Ivy’s mother, the other object of Nilus’s affections, gave birth to Ivy three months later. Her name was Stella, and she lived with Nilus less than a year before running off with another man, leaving Nilus with both his daughters.
The other man was Vitale Cassiel. Nilus apparently never knew this, but Samax, who had kept tabs on both men through private detectives, was fully aware of their activities, including Nilus’s amazingly chaotic domestic circumstances—the lifelong bachelor suddenly bequeathed, through death and desertion, two infants—and the fact that Stella and Vitale Cassiel lived briefly in San Francisco before moving to Reno. It was there that Stella gave birth to a boy, Vitale Cassiel’s son, twelve months after Ivy was born. Thus within a two-year span, like a mirror image of Nilus, Stella had two children by two different men. And so Ivy had a half-brother, whom I had never heard mentioned before. When I asked Calzas who and where this half-brother was, he couldn’t answer on either count; he knew nothing about him, and he had never heard Samax or Ivy speak of him.
It was also in Reno, Calzas told me, that Vitale Cassiel had begun setting up VC Enterprises, the sprawling company that would eventually control a large chunk of Nevada real estate, from office buildings and shopping centers in Carson City and Reno to the insignificant ghost town of Hydra where Auro and I burned down The Hotel Vega. How could we have known that it belonged to Auro’s grandmother’s onetime lover, much less that the seed money for VC Enterprises had come from the cash proceeds of our great-grandfather’s hat business? For while keeping Nilus busy, Vitale Cassiel not only snatched away his mistress, but transferred all the remaining assets of their partnership into the accounts of the company he was forming. This final transfer was accomplished gradually, secretly, and above all—on paper—legall
y, for Vitale Cassiel was nothing if not a crack attorney, skilled at perverting the law in order to commit a crime, whether it was framing an innocent man or embezzling his fortune. The upshot of all this was that when Nilus Samax died of cardiac arrest one rainy spring morning, slumping over in a taxi en route to an assignation after a breakfast of oysters Rockefeller and champagne, he had no idea that for all intents and purposes he was bankrupt. Leaving an estate so bare—for a man who lived so extravagantly—that it stunned everyone but his personal attorney, Vitale Cassiel. This was when Samax intervened, after his brother’s funeral (which he did not attend) taking charge of his daughters and putting them under his own roof.
And what was the revenge Samax inflicted upon Vitale Cassiel and Nilus? With Nilus, it was simple: once he got wind of how Vitale Cassiel was fleecing his brother, Samax simply sat back and watched it play out. Knowing Nilus the double-crosser was being double-crossed by his accomplice was far sweeter to Samax than anything else he could have concocted. Added to this was Samax’s knowledge of where Stella was and the fact that he was keeping it to himself. It was true Samax could have informed his brother of Stella’s whereabouts, thus poisoning the well between Nilus and Vitale Cassiel; but this might also have ended the possibility of a financial debacle for Nilus, which was what Samax most desired. Anyway, he wasn’t sure that his dissolute brother, involved with countless women after Stella left him, would have cared much at that point.
With Vitale Cassiel, revenge was more complicated—and more personal—because Samax knew that Vitale Cassiel, not his brother Nilus, was the brains behind the plot that had sent him to prison. To avenge himself on Vitale Cassiel, Samax bided his time, waiting for the opening that he hoped would allow for a blow akin to the one he had sustained: a year in prison and the loss of all his money. He knew Vitale Cassiel was too clever and vigilant to be set up for jail time, and bankrupting him would be nearly impossible with the tools at Samax’s disposal. So he got very personal.