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Put aside all our disputes. I am here for you.
"Yes," I said aloud. "Thank you."David sat there, the robust brown-haired young Anglo-Indian,juicy and succulent to behold as he had been since the night I madehim one of us. He wore his English tweed, with leather-patchedelbows, and a vest as tightly buttoned as my own, and a cashmere scarfprotecting his neck from the cold to which perhaps, for all hisstrength, he wasn't yet really accustomed.
It's strange how we feel cold. You can ignore it. And then verysuddenly, you can take it personally.
My radiant Dora sat next, opposite Armand, and David sat facingme between them. This left me the chair with its back to the glass andthe sky if I wanted it. I stared at it. Such a simple object, a blacklacquered chair, Oriental design, vaguely Chinese, mostly functional,obviously expensive.
Dora rose, her legs seeming to unfold beneath her. She wore athin, long gown of burgundy silk, just a simple dress, the artificialwarmth surrounding her obviously and keeping her safe. Her armswere bare and white. Her face was filled with worry, her cap of shinyblack hair making two points on either side of her face, mid-cheek,the fashionable bob of eighty years ago and of today. Her eyes werethe owl eyes, and full of love.
"What happened, Lestat?" she said. "Oh, please, please tell us.""Where is the other eye?" asked Armand. It was just the sort ofquestion he would ask. He had not risen to his feet. David, theEnglishman, had risen, simply because Dora had risen, but Armand satthere looking up at me, asking the direct question. "What happenedto it? Do you still have it?"I looked at Dora. "They could have saved that eye," I said, quotingher story of Uncle Mickey and the gangsters and the eye, "if onlythose gangsters hadn't stepped on it!""What are you saying?" she said.
"I don't know if they stepped on my eye," I said, irritated by thetremour in my voice. The drama of my voice. "They weren'tgangsters, they were ghosts, and I fled, and I left my eye. It was my onlychance. I left it on the step. Maybe they smashed it flat, or smeared itlike a blob of grease, I don't know. Was Uncle Mickey buried withhis glass eye?""Yes, I think so," Dora said in a daze. "No one ever told me."I could sense the other two scanning her, Armand scanning me,their picking up the images of Uncle Mickey, kicked half to death inCorona's Bar on Magazine Street, and the gangster with the pointedshoe squashing Uncle Mickey's eye.
Dora gasped.
"What happened to you?""You've moved Roger's things?" I asked. "Almost all of them?""Yes, they're in the chapel at St. Elizabeth's, safe," Dora said. "St.
Elizabeth's." That was the name of the orphanage in its lifetime. Ihad never heard her say it before. "No one will even think to look forthem there. The press doesn't care about me anymore. His enemiescircle his corporate connections like vultures; they zero in on hisbank accounts and floating bank drafts, and safe-deposit boxes,murdering for this or that key. Among his intimates, his daughter hasbeen declared incidental, unimportant, ruined. No matter.""Thank God for that," I said. "Did you tell them he was dead?
Will it all end soon, his story, and what part you have to play in it?""They found his head," said Armand quietly.
In a muted voice he explained. Dogs had dragged the head from aheap of garbage, and were fighting over it beneath a bridge. For anhour, an old man watched, warming himself by a fire, and thengradually he realized it was a human head that the dogs were fighting overand gnawing at, and they brought the head to the proper authorities,and through the genetic testing of his hair and skin discovered that itwas Roger. Dental plates didn't help. Roger's teeth had been perfect.
All that remained was for Dora to identify it.
"He must have wanted it found," I said.
"What makes you say that?" asked David. "Where have youbeen?""I saw your mother," I said to Dora. "I saw her bottle-blond hairand her blue eyes. It won't be long before they're in Heaven.""What on earth are you saying, my darling?" she asked. "Myangel? What are you telling me?""Sit down, all of you. I'll tell you the whole tale. Listen to everythingI say without interrupting. No, I don't want to sit, not with myback to the sky and the whirlwind and the snow and the church. No,I'll walk back and forth, listen to what I have to tell you.
"Remember this. Every word of this happened to me! I could havebeen tricked. I could have been deceived. But this is what I saw withmy eyes, and heard with my ears!"I told them everything, from the very, very beginning, somethings each of them had already heard, but which all of them togetherhad never heard梖rom my first fatal glimpse of Roger and my lovefor his brazen white-toothed smile and guilty, gleaming black eyes?
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