Veronica - Softcover

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Nicholas Christopher is the author of four previous novels, The Soloist, Veronica, A Trip to the Stars, and Franklin Flyer, eight books of poetry, and a book about film noir, Somewhere in the Night. He lives in New York City.

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A master of the dazzling, the mystical, the erotic, author Nicholas Christopher has created a work of spellbinding power and originality -- a tale of detection, romance, and magic that unfolds across a miraculously disjointed world at once recognizably familiar and completely unknown.

On a snowy night in February -- at the improbable corner in lower Manhattan where Waverly Place intersects itself -- a photographer named Leo meets Veronica, the beautiful, enigmatic daughter of an illusionist who has been swallowed up in time. Veronica is looking for an apprentice, a savior. And she is soon leading Leo into a dangerous labyrinth of delights that winds beneath and beyond a luminously transformed city of underground streams, dragonpoints, and mystically altered time. At the frozen apex of an extraordinary winter, Veronica has enticed Leo into a wonderful, terrible world...and away from his ordinary life forever.

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Chapter One


In lower manhattan there is an improbable point where Waverly Place intersects Waverly Place. It was there I met Veronica, on a snowy, windy night.

She was looking for her keys on the sidewalk in front of a brownstone beside the Convent of St. Zita. She communicated this to me in pantomime: turning an invisible key in a lock. She wore a black coat and a wide-brimmed hat from which long black hair streamed over her shoulders. The hat shadowed her eyes, like a mask. I found the keys—a large, odd assortment on an oval key ring. Thanking me with a nod, she put it into her handbag and glanced over her shoulder toward Christopher Street. Following her gaze, I saw nothing but the streetlight on the corner, snow slanting through its cone of light, burying the fire hydrant in a drift.

"Would you walk me to Sixth Avenue?" she asked in a low voice.

Again she glanced up the street, as if there should be someone there, but there was no one. In the silence you could hear the snowflakes brushing through the bare branches of the trees with a metallic rush.

She walked headlong, erect, into the flying snow, her hair blowing out. No one else had walked along that stretch of sidewalk, and we left deep footprints in the snow.

The cars on Sixth Avenue were moving slowly, far apart, their tires crunching the snow. For an instant, she turned her face up to me, and it was illuminated by a flashing sign. Then she flagged a taxi, and slipping an envelope into my hand, jumped in quickly. The taxi sped northward, skidding around the other cars. The clock tower on the old courthouse for women read 1:15. Up to the right, the Empire State Building was lit up green and white.

The envelope contained an invitation to an opening the following week, at a gallery on Bond Street: Arctic Floes: Oil Paintings by Remi Sing. Stuffing it into my pocket, I realized I had not said a single word to this woman. And I had never seen her eyes.

Chapter Two


They were different colors: the right one blue, the left green. And her face in the light of the candle on the table startled me at first, just as it had in the icy night air. After seeing it on the street, I was afraid I had only imagined it: a still, luminous face with a silvery sheen. Finely hewn, with a long, straight nose and a wide mouth, it was nearly identical to another face, which I had photographed years before. Not on a person, but on the fragment of a frieze I found in some ruins near Verona. The frieze, which depicted a band of musicians, had once been shadowed beneath a cornice high on the temple of Mercury, god of magic. Belonging to one of the musicians, it was a riveting face—like a puzzle that could not be solved—which I had never found, or expected to find, on a living woman.

Unfazed by my stare, she was toying with the flesh of the tomato on her plate. We were sitting by the front window of a Tibetan restaurant, a small dark place on Morton Street, near the river. On the wall there was a mural of the Dalai Lama's monastery at Sera, high in the Himalayas. Clouds encircled the topmost peaks. The monastery's windows were blue and its roof was gold.

I had gone to the gallery opening on Bond Street, but she wasn't there. Remi Sing was a young Eurasian woman with a patch over her left eye. She was wearing a pink leather jacket with red zippers. Her paintings were all white, each with a single black line zigzagging through it.

The gallery was crowded. I took a glass of red wine off a tray. Remi Sing was standing in a knot of admirers beside a tall, red-haired man in his early fifties, powerfully built, who had a zigzag scar across his forehead, like the line in one of her paintings. He wore a black glove on his left hand and, tight-lipped, taciturn, smoked a succession of cigarettes rolled in zebra-striped paper. I noted that people were drawn to him, but never got too close.

I was standing near the door, glancing at my watch, when a slender, muscular young man in a suede jacket and tinted glasses bumped against me. He smiled, showing me a set of very straight, very white teeth.

"Pardon me," he said. "Are you, by chance, waiting to meet someone?"

"Could be. Who are you?"

"Yes, I thought it might be you," he said, taking a card from his pocket. "Veronica asked me to give you this."

On the card was the name and address of the Tibetan restaurant. Dabtong. When I looked up, he had disappeared into the crowd.

That was the first time I heard her name.

The waiter had taken our plates, and rummaging in her handbag for her lighter, Veronica laid the key ring I'd found in the snow on the tablecloth: a large map of Tibet with the sites of all the Buddhist monasteries indicated by red triangles.

I studied the keys. There were sixteen of them: for Medeco, Segal, and Fichet locks; also, mailbox keys, an enormous skeleton key, a tiny one, and a safe deposit box key. One of the house keys was marked with an X, in black enamel.

Veronica smoked kretek Indonesian cigarettes, crushed cloves rolled into the tobacco. When she spoke, the words slipped slowly, sometimes reluctantly, from her full lips. She was wearing an outfit consisting entirely of items with polka dots—dress, hat, scarf, and gloves. The dress and gloves were blue with black dots; the scarf was black with blue dots; and the hat was like a fez—blue on black—with black tassels and a gold feather.

"I'm into black holes," she said. "Like the black holes in outer space. You know, they think they might lead to other systems of time and space. A whole other universe of antimatter. But we would explode the instant we passed through one of the holes."

When I had entered the restaurant, she raised one hand in greeting and watched me carefully as I walked over to her.

"I was sure you would come," she said.

My nostrils filled with her perfume—a fiery scent—when I sat down. For several minutes we didn't talk. With other women, this would have been unbearable. But her silence I found comforting.

Then she asked me my name.

"Leo," I replied. "Is it always this complicated to see you?"

"Not always. I'm hungry, aren't you?"

Yet she had hardly touched her food. She drank cup after cup of hot black tea, seasoned Tibetan style, with butter and salt. And when the table was cleared, she continued to drink it, ordering a third pot from the waiter.

"How will you sleep?" I said, tapping the pot.

"I don't sleep much," she said.

Across the street, in the dark window of an antique store, I saw the full moon reflected alongside the water tower of the building we were in. It was a cold, clear night.

I called for the check, but when I reached for my wallet, it wasn't there.

"I know," Veronica said, stubbing out her cigarette, "your wallet is missing." She did not sound surprised. "I invited you to dinner, so I should pay."

I stood up and felt my pockets. "My driver's license, my—how did you know it was missing?"
"You'll have it back." She put some money on the table. "Come on."

She went outside, and through the window I saw her drinking in the night air and breathing out vapor through her nose while I searched under the table and then went through my coat.
We walked east on Morton Street. The steel taps on the heels of her black boots shot off tiny sparks on the pavement.

"What did you think of Remi's paintings?" she asked.

"Is that where we're going—back to the gallery?"

She smiled, for the first time. "No. Though I'm sure you...