Death Orchid

Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine

After Lieutenant Garcia left, Mal began to giggle, for he actually thought he would begin to call himself “Just Mal” instead of plain old Mal.

Though corrupt cops in Brazil had murdered the only woman he had ever loved, his years dodging police, and moving in and out of the crack of lawlessness made him grow to respect the police. They did a thankless job in a dehumanized world and Mal knew without them there would be plain and simple, pure anarchy on the streets.

As he stood in his upstairs living area staring at his glass case with the hunting knives displayed with in it he knew he’d been lucky. He had always been lucky when it came to death, though he made his own cautious luck and had never been greedy.

During his time in Africa and especially during the years as a smuggler and thief in Morocco, Cannes and in Jamaica and The Virgin Islands, because he was super smart, he had escaped forever one step away from the police.

Thinking about Garcia and the dead homeless that were littering the slums of Vegas, he remembered the knife in his heavy work boot.

And again he knew that he had been fortunate.

Garcia had been so thunderstruck by his digs that he never asked him the obvious question.

“Are you armed Mr. Mal?”

That question had not materialized, and his good fortune, as always just kept cruising through his life.

How many dead men, as well as women he had been either directly or indirectly responsible for in the last thirty years never left the tote board in his brilliant mind.

Never being greedy and above all genius enough to know when to scoot and when to stay had been his saving grace. He left Morocco with ten-million dollars and The South of France with ten million dollars more.

Money can save a career criminal’s bacon and in his case it also could and did create new identities, ones that can shelter a man’s new life, where ever he may choose to live. The reality that he was no more Mr. Mal than the one woman that he had loved was still alive bore into his soul on a daily basis.

With money tucked away in The Caymans, Zurich, The Bahamas and other safe places allowing him to do his thing, no matter how twisted and odd that thing might be, he was a free man, though horribly imprisoned within a mental illness no one knew of, except of course himself.

If not for his pure passion for his writing and his other artistic endeavors, as well as that other thing he did, he knew that he would have simply committed suicide, ending the battle with his damaged mind once and for all.

His female twin that lived very close to him, and who he would soon meet, would change his life, as well as her own forever and of course he did not know that.

Revolving the jagged, razor bladed knife in his hand, he thought for a moment longer about his life, and for a moment, because he was perhaps the most passionate man on earth, he cringed in real mental pain.

Again he thought of killing himself, for in the past twenty-five years or so since SHE had died, he had never made love to a woman the way most men might understand such an act. Passion is paramount in a passionless world and because of his mental illness, one in particular, the act, the absolute fire in his soul, was impossible to get out.

No matter how much gold he molded, or ceramic he fashioned, or paint he placed on canvass, or words he placed on white parchment, none of it, though brilliant as it was, could replace the love of a woman, and lacking that, he felt vacuous inside.

Looking at the knife in his hand one last time, he opened the glass cabinet’s door, laying the ornate knife along many others of its kind.

Fighting back tears, his body began to shudder as he stepped towards his spiral staircase and moved down the metal rungs, until once down on the bottom floor, he looked at his vast, sprawling, various artist studios.

There was an area for everything stretched hundreds of feet across the room. For now, he thought of the covered painting before him and the beautiful young girl on it, and for a convoluted instant, he wondered if she were dead. Why he thought that at that moment he did not know, but he did.

After Garcia left and unable to look at the oil painting of the young girl he draped it with a paint-smeared white sheet. Stepping before the huge canvass draped with the sheet, he hesitated looking around his painter’s studio.

Everywhere there were brushes, paints, canvasses of most unusual paintings, large and small, almost freakish they were so odd and luminescent and above all abstract. It was what he saw while he dreamed, or in many cases entertained his horrific nightmares.

Stalling in front of the eight-foot canvass with the sheet covering it, he seemed reluctant pulling back its cotton cover.

Again his body shuddered and as his fingers reached out for the sheet he could see that they were shaking and he did not know why.

Slowly he pulled back the shawl and as it furled to the floor, he stared at a painting and what he saw was magnificent. In a style, very much his own, one of tints and hues he had created himself, and filled with what seemed paper thin wisps of air colors, was the painting of the beautiful, nude young girl.

She was laid upon on an Indian blanket of unimaginable age and filled with color. Her slender body was back lit from the sun, and ochre rays of gold seemed to be drifting through her skin. Her hair fell like liquid amber along her perfect breasts and she appeared to be sleeping.

For some moments the artist stared at what he had created. Tears began to fall down his face as he moved to a can holding his brushes. Taking one, he lifted his easel in his other hand and moved before the picture of the girl.

As the morning sun began to filter through the panes of glass that was his studio, he felt, one way or another that it was time to finish the painting of the angel, a girl named Lise DeCaprio.