Black Swan Rising by Lee Carroll Read Free Book Online Page B

him.
    You could almost say he was lucky he had been shot.
    I admonished myself for the thought as I entered my father’s room. He looked shrunken and ancient in the hospital bed, his skin a sickly yellow against the white bandages on his shoulder, the bruises on his bald scalp livid under the hospital’s fluorescent lighting. His eyes were open, but he was looking toward the window so he didn’t notice me until I bent down and kissed his forehead.
    “There you are!” he exclaimed, as if we’d been playing hide-and-seek and he’d just discovered me crouched behind the couch. “I told that nurse you’d be back any minute. My Margaret wouldn’t abandon her old father.”
    “I’m sorry I took so long, Dad,” I said, drawing a chair closer to his side. “I had to talk to the police at the gallery, give them the inventory list—”
    “Our beautiful Pissarros!” he wailed, pressing his hands together as if in prayer. “That must be what they were after.” Then, lowering his voice to a hoarse whisper, he added, “I bet it was someone at Sotheby’s that tipped them off. How else would those
ganovim
know the paintings had just arrived back?”
    I smiled at the Yiddish word for thieves. Roman had called them something else in Yiddish just after the shooting, but I couldn’t recall what now. “Maybe, Dad. You shouldn’t have tried to stop them. You could have gotten yourself killed. Do you remember which one of the men shot you?”
    Roman’s brow creased and his hands fluttered shakily above the folded bedsheet. “They all looked alike. In black . . . like Nazis . . .” He laced his fingers together and relaced them, as if trying to get a grip on some half-remembered impression. I placed my hand over both of his. I should have known that the burglars would remind him of the German solders who had rounded up his family and driven him from his home in Poland. “Don’t worry about it, Dad. It doesn’t matter which one shot you—”
    “And their eyes! Did you see their eyes? There was nothing there. It was like looking into a black pit . . . the pit of hell!”
    That’s
what had been strange about their eyes. They had been completely black; no whites showing at all. I shuddered. “I know, Dad, they were really creepy. I’m sure the police will catch them.”
    My father’s eyes widened and then darted around the room as if he were afraid that the black-clad burglars were hiding in the shadows. “No, no, they won’t find them . . . or they’ll only find their shells.”
    “Their shells?”
    Roman’s head bobbed up and down and his restless hands twisted and seized my hands so hard that I almost cried out. I wrested one hand away to press the nurse’s call button. He might be having a bad reaction to whatever medication he was on. He certainly wasn’t making any sense.
    “The dybbuk latch on to weak men and possess them.”
    “The dybbuk?” It was the word Roman had used when he first regained consciousness in the house. “What does that mean, Dad?”
    “Demons,”
he answered, his eyes skittering into the cornersof the room. “I could feel them trying to get inside of me, trying to control me . . .”
    “It was a terrible shock coming upon those men. Of course you were frightened. And then you were shot and you hit your head when you fell. Try not to think about it anymore.”
    I looked up, relieved to see a nurse coming through the door. It wasn’t the kind nurse from last night, but a middle-aged woman with dishwater blond-gray hair and a harried look on her face. She was carrying a tray with a syringe. “Sounds like someone’s getting himself all worked up,” she said, but it was me, not Roman, whom she looked at reprovingly. “We can’t have that.” She injected the syringe into the IV line. Roman’s eyes were still skittering back and forth, but in an ever shortening arc until they settled back on me.
    “I made sure they couldn’t get inside me,” he said, smiling slyly