Black Dog(102)

Sighing, Natividad put her hand on the doorknob... took a breath... rolled her eyes at her own cowardice and finally, after an embarrassingly long pause, turned the knob.

The door wasn’t locked. Right. Who would intrude on Dimilioc’s famously vicious young executioner? Natividad pushed the door open and stepped into a big room with wall-to-wall dove-gray carpeting, low couches upholstered in black leather, and simple low tables of black-painted wood. No television, no stereo system, nothing like that. No bookshelves. A single thin bud vase stood on one of the tables, its transparent glass strangely contorted as though it had once been partially melted. There was no flower in the vase, though. She supposed this was because of the barren winter, and wondered what kind of flower Ezekiel put in the vase when flowers were available. A rose? An orchid? She couldn’t guess. Maybe he always left the vase empty. That sort of seemed like him, actually.

That was all there was in the room, except for one surprising painting dominating the far wall. If Natividad had thought about it, which she hadn’t, she would have guessed that Ezekiel might have chosen some horrible bloody scene of hunting or war, or else something disturbing by Dali. This painting – a real painting, she was sure, not a print – was nothing like that. It was obviously Chinese or Japanese, because there were those kinds of letters across the top and a couple more at the bottom, maybe the artist’s signature.

At first the painting seemed totally abstract, as though the artist had just splashed ink boldly across the lower third of a blank screen and called it good. Then shapes began to suggest themselves, first an angular tree – maybe a tree and a couple of shrubs? And maybe those triangular lines below the tree were a boat? Something little, like a rowboat. Maybe there was a person – two people? – in the boat. It was hard to be sure. Smooth pale-gray washes of ink below the tree implied water and mist. In the background, rising up through the height of the painting, tall skinny mountains were barely visible through the veils of mist. But most of the space had been left completely empty, the blank space used by the artist with as much deliberation as the grays and blacks of the ink.

It was a totally quiet, serene landscape, and it changed the whole character of the room. Without the painting, the room would have been stark and… What? Kind of soulless, maybe? Especially because there weren’t any other personal touches anywhere: nothing cluttered the tables or had been tossed carelessly aside on either of the couches. But with the painting, the whole room took on a kind of serenity. It was sort of Zen, Natividad thought. Not that she had any idea what Zen was, except something Chinese. Or Japanese. Whatever. Anyway, she thought it meant something like peace, something like acceptance. Certainly nothing she would have expected from Ezekiel. Except now that she saw it, she sort of thought it fit him after all.

Two doors led out of this first room. Natividad walked across to the nearest and put a hand on its knob – it was unpainted metal, cold to the touch, and it, too, was gray. A dark gray, neither steel nor aluminum. Pewter, maybe. Did they make doorknobs out of pewter? She wondered whether the door would open into the bedroom or some kind of study or just a closet. In a way she hoped not to find Ezekiel too quickly because she was now much more curious about what else she might find in his suite, what other surprising things it might tell her about him. On the other hand, though she no longer really felt that she might be in actual danger, she was ashamed to be intruding into a privacy she was sure Ezekiel valued.

But the door turned out to open into the bedroom. The room was dim, not only because of the early-evening hour, but because, although there were windows in two of the walls, the curtains were all drawn. Natividad hesitated in the doorway, to let her eyes become accustomed to the muted lighting and also just to look for a minute.

After the first room, this one was not such a surprise. There was very little furniture, only the bed and a single table with a tall, angular lamp standing beside it. The table was very plain, like the ones in the other room, but painted in a pale color. Not white, though. A pale gray. A statue, maybe eighteen inches high, stood on the table. It was not exactly like a Buddha because the figure was standing and slim instead of seated and fat, but it sort of reminded Natividad of a Buddha anyway – although it held a spear in one hand, which didn’t seem very Buddhist.

The bed was low, raised less than a foot off the floor, which was carpeted in the same dove-gray as the other room. The bedcovers – sheets and blankets and bedspread alike – were all a dark charcoal gray. Ezekiel lay in abandoned exhaustion across the bed, on his back. His hands lay empty and open, one arm crooked back by his cheek and the other flung out straight. His head was thrown back, his throat exposed. He didn’t stir. That he hadn’t woken when Natividad entered the room told her even more clearly how desperately he needed sleep.