Night-Bloom (51 page)

The new bloom itself, extravagant, gleaming white, is fully thirteen inches in diameter, its petals damp and still unfurling, panting from its recent labors. The air is suddenly suffused with something heavy, overpowering, almost cloyingly sweet.

Suddenly there is a burst of applause. The flash of cameras. Cheers and laughter. The popping of a champagne cork.

“Bravo.”

“Fantastic.”

“Mystical. Almost religious.”

“Creepy, I’d say. Something dark and awful about it. I don’t like it.”

“Have you never seen a foaling? It’s just like that. Mysterious. Terrifying. Downright beautiful, too. How the hell did you know exactly when, Peter?”

“When? By God, he had it timed right down to the second.”

“He always knows. He has it rigged. I’ve always suspected some hocus-pocus. Come on, Peter. Fess up.”

More laughter. More uncorking. More wine. People crowding about the large terra-cotta pot where the succulent, with its extraordinary white bloom, glowed with a strange, unearthly translucence.

Peter Quintius basked in the glow of approval generated by the assembled company.

“Valuable secrets are intended for transmission only at precisely the right moment,” he remarked sententiously. A wan, troubled smile played about the edges of Isobel Quintius’s mouth. As friends and relatives flocked around she sipped champagne with an air of amused distraction.

Quintius continued to answer questions evasively. Enjoying the pose of being cryptic, he preferred to create intriguing puzzles rather than shed light. He had raised the startling cactus from infant shoots, nurtured it tenderly through its first two or three uncertain years, ministered to it daily, until now it stood several feet tall, its rubbery, tentacle branches arching toward him.

The fact that his family was there to share the glory of the moment made it all that much better. Amid wife and children, brothers and nieces, nephews and grandchildren, Peter Quintius was a revered, hence deeply resented figure. The undeclared but tacitly acknowledged godhead of the great tribe of Quintius, there were many who felt an obligation to be grateful to him.

As patriarchs go, he looked the part perfectly. Tall, whip-thin, erect as the spar of a schooner, with a rich mane of undulant white hair, he was an arresting presence. On Madison Avenue in New York, on Curzon Street in London, on the Quai D’Orsay in Paris, his prestigious Quintius Galleries, where one could purchase a Vermeer or a Van Gogh as readily as a priceless French impressionist, were unmistakably the hub of the international art market.

His work itself demanded that he live a life of conspicuous privilege. A Sixty-second Street town house in New York, an apartment in London and, of course, the ancestral seat—a seventeenth-century farmhouse high on a breeze-tossed bluff above Long Island Sound on the North Shore at Cold Spring Harbor.

The first generation of Quintiuses had come to the New Land on the earliest wave of Dutch migration in 1680. Quintius’s great-great-great grandfather, Henryk, had built the farmhouse in 1683, paying at that time twelve cents an acre for each of the 130 acres he’d purchased from a Pequot chieftain called Bilbahhot. One of Quintius’s most prized possessions was the original, now crumbling parchment deed that lay in the family vault at the Morgan Guaranty Trust.

Since Henryk’s time generations of Quintiuses had inhabited the house, each adding to it something architecturally consonant with the original structure. Quintius himself had added porticoes and pergola-covered flagged verandas, gardens and topiary and the huge, stone and glass greenhouse cantilevered out from the rose-brick north wing built by his grandfather during the Federal period.

It was in this very greenhouse bursting with blooms of every conceivable sort—camellias, hybrid roses, row upon row of orchids—that the Quintius family had gathered shortly before midnight to observe the one-night-a-year appearance of the nightblooming cereus. The single bloom, born just before midnight, all dewy and quaking with new life, would be dead before midday tomorrow.

Each year since he’d grown it, Quintius celebrated the one-night-a-year blooming with a family party. How he was able to select the precise night of the blooming, what intuition and special affinity he enjoyed with the strange cactus, no one could say. When pressed on the subject, Quintius would nod sagely, but he would offer nothing in the way of concrete answers.

Later that evening Quintius awoke abruptly from his sleep, consumed with the notion that he’d been summoned. It was somewhere near 3:00
A.M.
A thick mist came rolling in off the Sound and a foghorn boomed mournfully like some lost and stricken creature out on the water.

The wind was afoot that night. It swept in off the Sound, growling and sobbing about the corners of the house, like some sad, fretful thing full of a deep grievance it was intent upon correcting.

Quintius peered into the dark—into a room he did not at once recognize. The bed, the dresser, the small divan with a silk robe thrown across its back, the skylight above him, showing a broad expanse of star-filled sky, were all, for a fearful moment, part of a landscape utterly foreign to him. And the small delicate figure deep in sleep beneath the quilts beside him was that of a person he’d never seen before. Like a man who’d stumbled inadvertently into some stranger’s world, he was frightened.

Slowly, his orientation returned. The robe across the divan he recognized as his own, and the measured breathing rising from beneath the quilt gave off the comfortably familiar scent of Isobel’s nighttime creams and lotions. He was aware that his mouth seemed unnaturally dry, parched even. Then he recalled that he’d been dreaming and that it was doubtless the dream that had jarred him from sleep.

Lying in bed listening to the wind buffeting about the eaves, he tried to recall the content of the dream. The substance of it remained shadowy and elusive, but shreds and tatters of it still clung about him. The dream, he knew, involved a box. It was a plain, unpainted wooden box three feet square and three feet deep with a hinged lid. He knew nothing about the box, only that it contained something living and that whatever it was smashed and flailed about inside trying desperately to get out. Sharp cracks and fearful rending noises issued from within it. The wood shrieked and groaned, and at one point so violent was the energy thrashing about inside that the box scraped horribly over the floor and the hinges of the lid stretched to the point where the hasps holding it seemed on the verge of being ripped away.

Quintius had no idea what was in the box. At one point in the dream he threw himself across the top of the lid, using the weight of his own body to bear down upon it. The struggle continued for hours, but despite all his efforts he knew he was losing. Slowly, inexorably, the lid rose. It was at that point that he awoke.

Slightly breathless, as if from his struggles, he stared down at Isobel. There was something unspeakably sad about her there. Like a doll in a child’s crib, she appeared to have been sleeping for thousands of years, just waiting there for someone to come and wake her from a spell that had been cast upon her.

The breeze had turned round into the west, causing the slats of the vertical blinds to tremble at the sill. They clicked against each other with a light hollow sound.

Outside beyond the windows, the large gardens sloping down to the water lay swathed in curling mists. The night was almost preternaturally still, an anticipatory stillness as if all life for that moment-all time and even the earth’s ancient rotation—were held in some breathless abeyance.

Quintius felt a sense of suffocating weight on his chest. There was within him a sense of dread, combined with a strange exaltation. Something was about to happen, he knew. Something within him was bursting to get out.

An owl hooted in the trees outside. The foghorns boomed and the long slat blinds clicked hollowly against each other. The sense of suffocation and unspecified rage swelled once again in Quintius’s chest. In the next moment he was up, moving about in the chill damp of the room, slipping into a robe and slippers, then stepping out into the cold corridor. Once up and going, Quintius moved with remarkable purpose, like a man governed by strong inner directives which under no circumstances were to be denied.

On the bar in his library one of the magnums of unfinished champagne sat in a bucket of melting cubes. Standing there in the close-muffled dark, a tremor rippled up the length of his right leg as he poured a glass for himself by the light of the moon. It was a full moon—white as rime and ringed with a ghostly halation. A hunter’s moon, Quintius thought, lapping tentatively at the wine which had grown tepid and flat.

In those gray, slowly shifting shadows, he gave the impression of a thirsty dog refreshing itself at a pool of brackish water. Then, refilling his flute with the dregs of the bottle, he maundered through the wide French doors of the library and out onto the flagged terrace. Old rattan chairs and chaises stood about in the shadows beneath a pergola thatched with the dry lacy stalks of unbloomed clematis.

Turning his robe collar up against the mizzling predawn chill of the hour, he sipped the flat, sourish wine, and stared down over the expanse of sprawling gardens toward the Sound. Though the water was not visible through the fog, he could hear its sound lapping at the pylons of the dock several hundred feet away. Farther out, a buoy bell tolled somewhere out on the dark water.

Quintius tipped his flute back and drained the warm, sour fluid. Grimacing slightly, he set the glass down on a marble table and stepped down off the patio flags onto the cold damp grass.

His tread, stiff and unhurried, cut a slurred trail through the misted grass. The path he was carving at the moment led unswervingly to the low, sprawling greenhouse up ahead where an image of the moon hung trapped in huge plates of skylight glass.

Once inside Quintius felt better. The sweet, dizzy fragrance of lush growth, the earthy smell of peat moss and manure all had a salutary effect upon him. They had the power to subdue the querulous, bickering voices that had beset him all day. Suddenly his expression appeared more relaxed, more reconciled. Moving through the orangery to the area where his huge collection of succulents were housed, there was no longer the unrelenting gnaw, that vexing sense of doubt and incompletion.

Here in the moon-dappled shadows of the greenhouse, his huge collection of cactus grew, virtually every species known to man. Over the years Quintius had collected and cataloged them all—the large
Euphorbia candelabras,
the
Opuntias,
some twenty-five species of Noto Cactus from South America, the gnarled Lithops from southwest Africa, almost forty-four species of
Kleinia tomentosa, Echinocactus,
and a grandly awesome
Cereus peruuianus monstrosus
thrusting upward thirty feet so that it brushed the greenhouse ceiling. Then Aloes, some three hundred species, and
Agaves,
and finally, above all, his beloved climbing, throbbing, pulsing nightbloomers. ‘

Cryptocereus anthonyanus,
Anthony’s rick-rack;
Hylocereus undatus,
the Honolulu queen;
Selenicereus werklei,
moon goddess—it would bloom in another night or so, he judged. Then
Selenicereus urbanus,
moon cereus—it would burst its calyx late in the month— Then his own special favorite, now fully bloomed, quivering, radiant, dominating all others by its sheer extravagance, but its life already half over—queen of the night,
Selenicereus grandiflorus,
nightblooming cereus.

Standing before it, Quintius closed his eyes and inhaled deeply the sweet, slightly citrine breath. He gulped it, ingesting the essence of the plant as if he were partaking of special magical properties. Shortly his eyes closed and he rocked slowly back and forth as if in prayer.

All was not well between the Quintiuses. In the nearly five months since the snowy evening of Mooney’s visit, they had quarreled incessantly. The crux of contention was the charge the detective had leveled at Quintius. Mrs. Quintius was unable to grasp why her husband had failed to answer the charge or even to seek advice from his attorneys. Quintius maintained that he was reluctant now to reopen something which appeared to have quietly closed of its own accord. Quite reasonably, he had an absolute horror of dragging the gallery and the family name through the mud.

At first Mrs. Quintius was puzzled; later she was angry and thereafter, a little frightened. When the situation between them had become intolerable, they agreed that she would go to London for a few weeks in May with her son Frederick on a buying trip. It would give them both a breather—time to think. Later, when she returned, they would decide on a course of action.

Before leaving she made Quintius promise that he would see their lawyers the moment she got back.

The morning of her departure he drove her out to the airport. When they kissed good-bye, she seemed worried and preoccupied. She couldn’t bring herself to tell him how sad it made her to see him look so distraught. She knew he had not slept well for weeks and that he no longer enjoyed food. She knew that he dwelled morbidly on the senseless death of their elder son, Billy, blaming himself for everything that had happened, and then this wildly outrageous charge. And that awful man Watford and the detective.