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catkittens · 7 months

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Black Corfu

Žrnovo, 1620

The doctor sleeps naked, which is not a widespread practice on the island of Korčula, not even in summer; as if to atone for his bared skin, his wife sleeps in a cakelike tier of bedclothes. Only she is privy to the doctor’s secret shamelessness; by daylight, he is the model of propriety. Once upon a time, his wife found this and other bedroom vagaries of the doctor’s irresistibly appealing. Tonight he startles awake from his nightmare to find her surfacing from yards and yards of white linen. She rises like a woman clawing out of snow.

I have never lost a patient before…

He studies the tiny halved heart of his wife’s earlobe. Their room pulses with the moon. He can almost hear the purr of the rumor, yawning awake inside of her, stretching and extending itself. Does she believe it? Is she beginning to believe it? The naked doctor shudders. He imagines a man who resembles him exactly. That man is moving inside of his wife.

What tool can he use, to extract their rumor from her body?

The doctor’s costume is hanging on a hook. It is not nearly so frightening as the hooded uniforms worn by physicians during the Great Plague of 1529, the beaky invention of Charles de l’Orme. The doctor’s patients are safely buried under consecrated soil before they can pose any risk to him. The doctor wears a simple black smock, black surgical gloves, and his face, when he operates, is bare.

“It is not true,” says the doctor in a clear, sober voice.

His wife’s face is planked white and blue with moonlight. The one eye that he can see in profile is streaming water. She is like a stony bust granted a single attitude by her sculptor. Silently, the doctor begs her: Look my way. Crack.

It is not true.

What can he say, to check the rumor’s progress?

“You must promise me that you will put it out of your mind.” His voice is still his own. “You betray me by imagining me as that man.”

His wife parts her dark hair with the flats of her palm. Does this again and again, like a woman bathing under the river falls. Outside, the moon shines on with its eerie impartiality, illuminating this room, illuminating also the woods of Žrnovo. Where the doctor knows a dozen men are fanning out tonight, hunting for his patient.

“Please. Please. I performed my duty perfectly. I could never make such a mistake.”

“I am not even thinking about you. I am listening for the girls.”

She says this without turning from the door. Now the doctor hears what must have awoken her. Not his nightmare but their middle daughter’s sobbing. Ashamed, he reaches for his robe. “Let me go to her.”

The girl sits tall in the bed with white round eyes that seemed to pull in opposite directions, like panicked oxen. Her sleeping sisters bracket her, their faces slack and spit-dewed. The doctor has long suspected that his middle child is his most intelligent.

“Papa, will they punish you? Will you go to prison?”

“Who told you such a thing?”

In fact the punishment would be far worse than that, if it came.

“Nobody told me anything,” his daughter says sadly. “But I listen to what they say.”

So the rumor has penetrated the walls of his home, the mind of his child. He grows so upset that he forgets to console her and flees the room. In two hours, the dawn bells will begin to ring. Bodies will congregate at the harbor. What if the miasma of the rumor is already changing? Becoming an even-more-toxic, calumnious strain—

I will have to keep the girls indoors from now on, to prevent their further contamination. What will happen to him, if he cannot stop the rumor from spreading? He might be sent to the Venetian garrison. He might be strung up in the dark Aleppo pines before anything so official as a trial. Unofficially, of course, his punishment is well under way. A second death will only be a formality—already, his reputation has been destroyed.

Three days earlier, when this nightmare began, the doctor had never imagined how swiftly his life could be ruined. Other lives, certainly, but not his own.

* * *

The doctor had once dreamed of being the sort of doctor who helps children to walk again; instead, he found himself hobbling them. Children of all ages were carried to him on stretchers, with blue lips and seamed eyelids. A twisted plot, without a single author to blame. The disfigurement of his first dream still causes the doctor excruciating pain. As a younger man, he’d ventilated the pain through laughter. Sometimes the circumstances of his life struck him as so unbearably funny that he soared up to a blind height, laughing and laughing until his red eyes shut and spittle flecked his chin. (“Open your eyes,” his wife begged. “My love, you are frightening us—”) But it has been many years now since such an episode. Only behind the bedroom curtains does the doctor indulge such wildness today.

His wife is very proud of the doctor’s accomplishments. Because he loves her, he never shares the black joke with her. Not once does he voice an objection to the injustice of his fate, or rail against what the island has made of his ambition. Aboveground, the city physician, the chirurgo, practices medicine in his warm salon—performing salubrious bloodlettings, assisting the pretty young noblewomen with their lactation. Whereas the doctor must descend into the Neolithic caves near Žrnovo, under the cold applause of stars.

This doctor is known, more formally, as the Posthumous Surgeon of Korčula Island. Centuries after his death, he will be reverenced on Black Corfu as something more and less than a man. Everyone who has lost someone knows the doctor’s name. He operates on the dead—these are the only bodies a man of his class is permitted to touch. Before his good name was gutted by his accusers, the doctor had a perfect record. No vukodlak had been sighted on the island during his twenty-three-year tenure. Everyone slept more peacefully because of his skill—not only the dead. Whose relief was manifest in the green silence of the woods, in the depths of the cemetery air. Inside that pooling quiet he could hear, unwhispered, Thank you, Doctor. Bless you, Doctor.

These islands off the coast of Dalmatia, with their fertile twilights and their thin soils, breed a special kind of monster. A body that continues to walk after its death. Spasming emptily on, mute and blue and alone. Inhabited by air from some other world, or perhaps resuscitated by the devil’s breath. Soulless and restless and lost. Vukodlak, ukodlak, and vuk. These are several of its appellations, designed to distance a grieving family from a terribly familiar face in the woods. The face of a loved one, now bloated and emptied of light.

Korčula is entirely covered by a dark forest, rising out of the mirror-bright Adriatic like a hand gloved in green velvet. It seems to belong to some other world, lush and prehistoric. Trees peer blindly down at the water, black Dalmatian pines and soaring cypress laddering their thousand ruddy arms over the azure sea; below them grows the low macchia, that snarling undergrowth that breaks into sudden shouts of yellow and violet like the singsong joy of the mad. Korčula is the island of shipbuilders and explorers, the fabled birthplace of Marco Polo. That the dead also wander here should perhaps surprise no one. When the Greeks established a colony here in the sixth century B.C., they named the island for its pitch-colored forests. Korkyra Melaina. Corcyra Nigra. Black Corfu. Black Korčula.

The doctor was born during the longest period of Venetian rule over Korčula, a century before the republic would fall to Napoleon. He was the child of the child of a kidnapped child. Human trafficking was outlawed in the kingdom of Venice in the year of our Lord 940. In 1214, the Statute of Korčula Town abolished slavery. The doctor’s grandfather was a cook who had escaped from the galley kitchen of a Portuguese ship and oared with seven others through driving winds to reach Black Corfu’s shoreline. They lived as freedmen at the base of the cliffs, in the poorest quarter of the stone-walled city, in dwellings that had the fragile tenacity of the red and blue barnacles spiraling out of the rocks. They paid rent to the hereditary counts.

All this was relayed to the doctor by his mother in whispers, like a nightmare half remembered. Because of her skin color and her station, the counts of Korčula and their livid offspring would not touch her; the nobles attended a private Mass in Saint Mark’s Cathedral to avoid the threat of such contact. And yet she grew old loving the sight of her face in the mirror. She pushed through the market stalls in a perfume of oblivion, ignoring the catcalling sailors, the curled lips of the upper-class women, whose chins reminded her son of the tiny, hard nipples on lemons. All stares seemed to pass painlessly through his mother, like blades slicing at water. She resented no one, to her son’s amazement. However, by the age of seven, trailing her elbow, he’d learned how to gulp back rage. He knew the taste of fury as it sank into the body, that nasal salt of swallowed things.

His mother did not chafe against their lot, or even seem to experience it as a limit. Why not? Why not? I am smarter than my mother, this child decided, at an earlier age than most.

Not until he was a father himself did the doctor understand that her docility had been a strategy. Always, she had been protecting him. He’d missed the teeth inside his mother’s smile, hadn’t he? Now that he was a father, he could guess at the strength it must have taken to raise dark-skinned children on this island, under the flag of an unequal truce—they were accepted as Korčulans so long as they remained in their separate sphere and lived invisibly, beyond rebuke. To survive here required one to take sips of air; the sky belonged to the nobles. From his crabhole in the rocks, the doctor watched the gold and scarlet clouds cluster over the hills. The wide sky was not a birthright he could claim for himself, or for his children.

Although sometimes he sees the early stars and allows himself to feel otherwise. Isn’t it possible that a posthumous surgeon might be promoted from his cave to the upper world? Ambroise Paré, a barber’s apprentice, became surgeon to the kings of France. He made the ascent by treating battlefield wounds with rosewater and turpentine, instead of scalding wounded men with boiling oil. Perhaps the doctor will be granted a similar opportunity to impress the Council of Ten. To restore the sick to health would have been his preference. But to keep the dead in their coffins is certainly a valuable service to the Republic of Venice—La Serenissima, the “Most Serene.”

Why had the doctor grown up expecting something different than his childhood for his own children? What did he ingest as a boy that let him dream up such a life? His mother had died still wondering this. On Black Corfu, there is dispiritingly little friction between the counts and the lower classes. A third of the men are always gone, at sea. Sailors, for all their roistering, defer to the captain’s authority. Few Korčulans whose lives overlap with the doctor’s remember, or can imagine, an alternative order to the island hierarchies, the birthday assignment of possibilities to bodies.

Her son, the future doctor, was a special case.

* * *

The new student kept looking backward at the shrinking harbor, where the ship that brought him to Black Corfu that morning was now small as a toy. His legs jerked to a stop, twin animals balking in tandem at the wide cave mouth.

“Few people on the Continent know about the dangers that a body faces after death…”

The doctor’s voice grew ever more sonorous as they moved into the dim, enormous theater. Candles descended with them, leaning out of natural sconces in the rock. Dozens of red hands were ripening along the greenish walls, waving them on.

“Yet a body is at its most defenseless at this time, orphaned in its coffin.”

“In Lastovo,” the student muttered, “we all know the dangers now. Nobody can escape the knowledge.”

Later the doctor recorded his first impression of the student in his log:

January 3, 1620. What a petulant boy they have sent me. Mere fear of the outbreak infects him, and he counts himself foremost among its victims. How terrible for you, to have your mind occupied by the suffering of others!

On Lastovo, there had been an outbreak of vukodlaci. The first in three generations. The boy described a scene out of the doctor’s nightmares. Mass exhumations, emergency surgeries performed in the open. Gravediggers undoing their handiwork, spading up dirt (“They work under the moon, and look like large rabbits digging their warren,” said the boy with plainspoken horror). Torches lipping orange syllables over the toppled stones. The only posthumous surgeon in Lastovo was nearing seventy and half blind; in any case, no single surgeon could attend to so many patients at once. And so this boy had been sent here to learn a new trade.

A quarter mile deeper into the caves, the new student introduced himself: his name was Jure da Mosto, and he belonged to one of the most tightly closed aristocracies in all of Europe. Thirteen families have controlled Lastovo for generations. These patricians are identical, in their threatening languor, to those pale island raptors wheeling over the trees, their idle talons tearing at the seafaring clouds.

“A face like yours must irritate your parents, eh?” the doctor offered mildly.

Despite the Italian ancestry he claimed, the boy’s face would always raise suspicions. Who could account for the spiraling colors of the deep past, and where and when they might resurface? Jure da Mosto looked no older than sixteen. He had the stink of some precocious failure on him. The doctor thought: It would be a joy to be wrong about even one of them. They’d sent him another reject, perhaps. A dropout from the Ragusa hospital. The family disappointment. Councilmen too often assume that any half-wit can hack away at the dead. Nobody but the posthumous surgeons themselves, a subterranean guild, understand what is required. There is a necessary magic to the practice, in addition to its science. Something ill-expressed in language—a governing instinct that leads one to the right depth when making the first cut. This cannot be taught.

“What do you mean—a face like mine?”

“So… overcast. So dark with worry.”

The doctor had very little patience for the boy’s fear. Even less for his self-pity.

“Once upon a time, I also dreamed of being another sort of man…”

The gray-faced student looked startled awake.

“Many of us would have preferred a different life…”

The doctor had worked his entire life to ascend to this rank. And yet the pinnacle of his achievement would still be considered, by this boy’s people, to be a valley of the shadow. To become a posthumous surgeon is a terrible miscarriage of fortune, for one of their kind.

* * *

The boy from Lastovo confessed that he has never been in a cave before.

It looked as if the green stone was lighting the glass walls of the lantern, and not the other way around. Emerald moisture slid down the honeycomb of light. These Korčulan caves have been inhabited since the Ice Age: housing Neolithic tribes, sheltering Illyrian sailors. Since the medieval period, the largest hall has been a medical theater. Rock awning goes sprawling over the posthumous surgeons. Bodies are delivered by runners paid by the families, who take pains to avoid an encounter with the doctor. By some geologic fluke the stalactites here grow to an even length. White calcite, a bright wishbone chandelier over the theater. A patient was waiting quietly on the operating table, a pearl comb glinting in her red hair.

On the last leg of the descent their echoes lapped into one voice:

“What disease does a posthumous doctor treat?”

“Unnatural Life.”

* * *

All bodies rotting under the moon run the risk of becoming vukodlaci. How does a posthumous surgeon protect a corpse from this fate?

By severing the hamstrings. Few think of the humble hamstring as the umbilicus that tethers a corpse to our spinning world. But cut that cord, and no body can be roused to walk the earth. Hamstrung cattle are crippled for life, the doctor reminded Jure. On the other side of dawn, our patients are safely moored in their coffins, protected against every temptation to rise up.

Language is key, when communicating the risks posed by the vukodlaci. All posthumous surgeons take great care with their grammar. People need to know that should they cross paths with a vukodlak, this shell is not their beloved. Only the flesh has been reanimated; the soul, it is presumed, is safe with God. “An evil wind is blowing Cila’s body around” is a chilling sentence, but far less damaging to the surviving family than the deranging hope bred by “Cila walks again.”

We do this to ensure his rest will be eternal, uninterrupted…

We do this by the mandate of the Venetian courts, as a safeguard for all living citizenry…

We are not injuring your beloved. Your beloved is gone. We are preventing that old horse thief, the devil, from stealing her form.

As for what the doctor tells his own family?

He is very careful not to frighten them.

“Clipping the birds’ wings”—this is his preferred euphemism when speaking to the children about his work.

“Papa does that for humans who have died.”

“Why?” his daughters want to know. Touching one another’s shoulder blades and giggling, feeling for these secret wings.

“To free them from their pattern. Otherwise, the song will not release them. They need to sleep, you know. Just like us.”

But the girls are too smart for this; they know their father does something shameful, something ugly, doesn’t he? Otherwise why must he leave at night, in his black robe, for the distant caves?

* * *

“The hamstring extends between the hip and the knee joints.”

For the third time, the doctor explained the surgery to Jure da Mosto.

“We first locate the tendons at the back of the knee…”

Jure wanted to know: Do the eyes of a cadaver never flutter open? Had there never once been—

Never, said the doctor.

The bug-eyed boy wiped a gloved hand across his mouth, leaving a little spider line of dew. His lips curled, as if he was repulsed by his own interest:

“And in all cases… the surgery is a, a success?”

“I understand that these are dark days on Lastovo. You have my every sympathy. But you should know that here on Black Corfu, no such error has ever occurred.”

He clapped his hands, as if dismissing a horde of demons from the room.

The surgery of the young woman took a quarter hour and was wholly unremarkable. She was the only daughter of one of the hereditary counts. From this man, the doctor would collect triple his ordinary fee. “The surgeries I perform on the wealthy pay for those for the poor,” he explained to young Jure, who was staring at the countess’s mouth. Each lip looked like a tiny folded moth. She is your age, isn’t she? the doctor thought, wondering how many bodies the boy had seen in his short lifetime. Terrible things do happen to the people in the hills, but such cases are viewed as tragedies, aberrations of nature. This poor countess died of a sickness known locally as throat rattle. The same illness had claimed dozens of lives in the doctor’s quarter, where the death of children was commonplace.

Midway through the surgery, the student wandered away from the table, his eye caught by the gemstone sparkle in the corner of the theater. It was the doctor’s lectern, a naturally occurring pillar. It supported a priceless book, a gift from the Jesuit: a copy of the anatomical sketches of Vesalius. Jure began thumbing through the book with a pouty expression, as if he had already anticipated every flowering organ. “This is the brain, then?” He yawned.

“Come and watch what I am doing,” the doctor snapped.

The boy’s face went purple in the torchlight, which the doctor took as a hopeful sign. Perhaps young Jure knew enough to feel ashamed of himself.

She had rare red hair, bright as a garnet stone, a comet that resurfaces out of her genetic line once every eight generations. The doctor had never spoken to or touched her in life, but he had seen her scarlet hair moving through the market stalls and known: the Nikoničić scion. At last, thought the doctor sadly, making the final cut, her body will be freed from its earthly orbit; her soul was already gone, he believed, safely home.

That afternoon, they operated on an old sailor, now at anchor. The doctor drew the boy’s fingers down the hairy thigh to the sunken divot of the kneecap. Together their hands flew across a wintry isthmus of skin. They traced the muscles they would handicap. Was the boy attending to the lesson?

The boy’s hand stiffened under the doctor’s hand.

“Oh, God,” he said, jerking back with a shudder. “There has been some bad mistake. I do not belong down here with you. Please, I want to go home.”

“Home” being synonymous, for this lucky young man, with the sunlit world above.

Blessed are the living, thought the doctor with his scissors poised, who can move…

* * *

Animals, too, can become vukodlaci. Almost certainly, some of the birds flocking around Korčula are bloodless, caught in their old orbits. Many Dalmatian sailors have reported seeing the great mixed flocks of living and dead gulls. The undead gulls are easily identifiable. They circle the bay like dragonflies. They do not flap over the water but have a fixed-wing soar, and their cerulean feathers shine continuously, even on gray afternoons. They sing, and their song is unmistakable, weirding out over the sea.

As a boy, the doctor dedicated himself to tending injured animals. He’d splinted gulls’ wings, freed lame foxes from traps to rehabilitate them. He begged his father to tell him stories about the physicians who cured their patients of lameness, madness, blindness, gout. He dreamed of guiding the sick back to the country of health. Physicians seemed more powerful to him than all of the saints. The miracles of saints were original events, contingent on the action of the Holy Ghost, whereas surgery was a human achievement. It could be practiced, perfected, repeated. His father had let the boy believe he would become the city physician, and it was his mother who had at last explained to her son that because of his class and the darkness of his skin, this would never happen.

“Have you ever seen a doctor that looks like us, my son?”

There were two doctors on the island: the city physician, a wealthy old Croat, who, it was whispered, had been unable to cure his own sterility, and the Catholic priest, the former rector of Zagreb’s Jesuit college. His skin poured forth a yellow light, and his age was unguessable; he seemed somehow to be simultaneously aglow with health and minutes shy of his death. He refused to treat those who had not first made confession. Unbeknownst to most, the Jesuit had been filling an open post, covertly severing the hamstrings of the island’s deceased.

“Where do the doctors live?” the mother had prodded.

“With us, on Korčula.”

“No. Be more precise, my son. Think like them. What answer would a doctor give?”

The doctor’s mother often spoke to her son as if she were trying to gently jostle fruit from a tree without puncturing its skin. She believed in his extraordinary intelligence and did not want to deform its natural progression.

“They live above the rocks.”

“Yes.”

Where the hereditary counts of Korčula also resided, those pale rulers with belled chests and short femurs who paced their pink marble balconies in the hills. The island’s counts, including families Kanavelić, Izmaeli, Gabrijelić, and Nikoničić, reported to the Venetian Council of Ten. Together, his mother explained, they determined everything that happened on the island. And no count would permit somebody who looked like her son to treat his family.

Heartbroken, he’d approached the Jesuit doctor to plead his case. Was it just, he asked at age thirteen, that he should be prohibited from his life’s vocation—simply because of an accident of birth?

“I am a precocious young man,” he’d said, repeating the compliment he’d moments earlier overheard a tutor giving his thin-nosed student in the parish hall. “You can teach me anything, and I will master it.”

A year later, he found himself performing surgeries under the ground.

From the young doctor’s first log:

Absolute rest, starvation, sedation, and bloodletting. These are remedies for living bodies. What I do is a sanctioned desecration…

When he was a petulant student himself, luxuriating in a bath of self-pity, the doctor would heap effervescent salts into the boiling cauldron of his mind. Black grief, red rage, crystals quarried from the deepest wounds in his body. He did this until his eyes were wet and raw and his skin took on the shine of deep mud. At last the Jesuit had become exhausted with him. With a sharp cane rap to his shin, he roused the boy who would become the posthumous surgeon back into the room:

“Enough! You think it is beneath you to help the dead? Let me tell you a secret, because you have been too dense to realize it—we treat the living. We treat the fears of the living.”

* * *

The following morning, the boy from Lastovo appeared in the cave mouth looking half dead. Yellow sun puddled around his boots. Squirming miserably in the bright portal, he called for the doctor.

“You are two hours late.”

Already the doctor had cut the hamstrings of two patients.

“I did not sleep. Something was howling and howling. Circling right outside my window!”

The bright-eyed čagljevi, explained the doctor.

Jackals.

“In the winter months, when there is no food for čagljevi, we hear them howl all night.”

“But, sir… we have barely passed the vernal equinox…”

The doctor felt reasonably certain that the young man was describing a vivid nightmare. He was infected by the sounds of Lastovo.

“Yes, I suppose that’s true. Perhaps the hunger has overcome them prematurely.”

“I know what I heard. It was no animal.”

Jure da Mosto wore a look of such open hatred that the doctor could only laugh.

“Young man, why waste your energy on hating me? I am not responsible for the plague of life on Lastovo. Do you find this work beneath you? Tell me if you regret our time together when the dead come knocking on your door…”

He is drafting a letter home, isn’t he? Telling his mother how poorly he’s been treated here.

Jure said nothing. Now the doctor wondered if he was too embarrassed to admit that he had only been dreaming; and he softened a little, recalling how far the boy had traveled from his home.

“If the howling comes again,” he counseled his student, “walk outside, and confront the animal.”

It was a terrible morning. Even his reflexes are lazy, thought the doctor irritably. Jure da Mosto yawned and left his mouth hanging open. He sneezed like a cannon, his arms limp at his sides. He seemed to forget, for long stretches, to blink. How could a person stare and stare without blinking, and still take in nothing? Only from his dead patients did the doctor expect that sort of lidless inattention.

“Repeat what I just said back to me.”

“This block is to assist the…the extension of the thigh?”

“Incorrect.”

After the last surgery of the day, the doctor dismissed sulky Jure. He sat on the operating table and watched a black-and-orange spider ascend the craggy wall. It moved like a single hand scaling a mountain. At the seam where the wall became a ceiling, it deftly flipped itself and continued to the other side.

“I have risen as far as this world will permit me to go,” the doctor told the empty cave. “To travel farther, must I also invert myself entirely?”

Cave fauna had impressed a lesson on the young doctor. He watched the fat blue worms wiggle through minuscule clefts. Tiny bats hooking by the hundreds into the limestone. They held on wherever they could, dark puffs of breath in the glittering fissures. The lesson was this: You fit yourself to your circumstances. Wrapped your wings tightly around your skin and settled into your niche. Go smooth, stay flat. Do your breathing in the shadows. Grow even slightly wider, or wilder, and you risk turning your home into your tomb.

However, sometimes the doctor’s pragmatism went belly-up. Convictions, too, could upend themselves. Then the hopeful child inside him wondered: The lesson is this? He watched the worms slim and fatten as they moved through the cracks. If only there were other rooms, other worlds, than these. And other ways to reach them.

* * *

In late December, the doctor and his daughters had walked through the freezing bura smack into a funeral procession for the son of a count. A wailing train of mourners moved down the street, women with golden eye shadow and charcoal lips, men in round black hats and scarlet vests, music flung from the gaudy mouths of trumpets.

“Papa,” his middle daughter had asked. “Why do so many people come to cry for him? When little brother died, we told no one.”

Pneumonia was a frequent visitor to their windswept quarter. When informed that her infant brother had stopped breathing, his seven-year-old daughter had wept silent adult tears, comprehending immediately, with a heartbreaking precocity, that there was nothing against which to struggle.

One vertical mile separates the counts’ floating quarries from the hovels of the barnacle people. Their rooms he cannot enter, not even with the lockpick of his imagination. It amazed the doctor that the distance between their houses could be measured in human footsteps. They are neighbors, and yet their breath barely overlaps.

* * *

At dusk, they come to the doctor’s house. Four men from the hills, trailed by the city investigator. Flanking the parade is young Jure.

With his back to the doctor, the boy addresses the chirurgo in Venetian.

“What are you doing here?” the doctor asks. Everyone ignores him. He knows only a smattering of Venetian. Each word he catches comes as a cold, discrete surprise, raindrops hitting his head from a high ceiling. They explode into meaning: “yesterday,” “mistake.”

The doctor hears his own name several times, spoken in a tone that frightens him.

So Jure has found an older nobleman, the snowy Croat— the “real” doctor—with whom to lodge some complaint. What is it?

The chirurgo, his trapeze-thin brows knotted in astonishment, translates:

“Your patient, Nediljka Nikoničić, daughter of Peter, has been sighted in the woods behind the western cemetery.”

“No!”

“This boy says the procedure was done improperly…”

Improperly.

“She is a vukodlak now, walking the woods.”

“Impossible.”

Jure da Mosto does not look up to receive the doctor’s stare.

“The mistake is not mine,” the doctor insists. Perhaps the famished young visitor has hallucinated a woman in the woods? Or fled the early howling of jackals. The doctor asks what proof the boy can offer for his thesis. Waves of hate are sheeting off his skin in Jure’s direction. He keeps his voice low and controlled, aware of the open door. Behind him, a child’s voice rises: “Papa?”

“No one,” the boy says, “could mistake the color of her hair.”

The chirurgo smacks his dry lips.

“A bloodred color, known to all of us…”

“The committee persists in its inquiry…”

Hunters are already mounted, searching the woods.

Without turning, the doctor can feel his wife’s shadow behind him. His three daughters are hiding under its awning, listening. His throat closes with panic; what if they believe this?

Now Jure da Mosto tugs at the investigator’s sleeve, whispering something behind the closed shades of their Venetian. One hand lifts and falls, pantomiming slashing. Locked out of their dialect, he is nevertheless certain that the boy is lying.

“This boy does not know where the hamstring is located. Quiz him, and you shall quickly exhaust his knowledge about the surgery—he has none. Ask him what he believes I did improperly.”

A translation comes promptly:

“He remembers seeing your hand slip.”

Jure da Mosto has retreated behind a human wall of his fellow noblemen. Still he refuses to look at the doctor. His lips spread into a thin, jammy smile, one eye rolling off into space. He does not look like a malicious genius. He looks sixteen years old and embarrassed by his fright. It runs in circles around his pale eyes like a horse he cannot catch and bridle. Why has the boy invented this story? The doctor imagines the point of his scalpel driving toward the boy’s open blue eye, expertly peeling back layer after layer of falsehood until he reveals the true memory of yesterday’s surgery.

“On the basis of one troubled boy’s testimony, you have summoned the hunters?”

“Other sightings,” the chirurgo says, “are being reported.”

The tense shift makes the doctor shudder. Many people in the hills, it seems, have been waiting for this chance to give form to their fears and to accuse the Moorish doctor of malpractice. The chirurgo gargles his words, as if their shared language has become distasteful to him. He switches back to Venetian.

“Papa!” his youngest child cries again, followed by the sound of his wife herding the girls away from him. He swallows the globe in his throat.

“Where is she, then? Where was she last seen? Show me on the map.”

A map is unfolded.

“By whom was she seen?” he asks softly.

And so the doctor learns the names of his enemies.

* * *

That night, his wife presents to her doctor with no symptoms of the rumor’s progress inside her save one: her wounded, streaming eyes. He sweeps her black hair from her scalp to examine them, thinking, The eyes are so easily bruised. He is afraid that the injury is done; that her love for him is leaking away.

“Hundreds upon hundreds of deaths,” he mutters. “Thousands of successes. Years of my life spent under their earth. Which counts for nothing, it seems—”

“If you made a mistake,” his wife tells him softly, “that only means that you are fully human.”

She touches the top of his cheekbone, as if feeling for the lever of a secret door.

“Only admit it to them, so we might begin to make amends—”

The doctor is speechless. He hears her accusation. Incredibly, he also hears that she has already forgiven him.

In an act of spontaneous combustion, his wife burns up her image of him as a perfect man, resurrects him, and embraces him.

But that’s not me! That’s an impostor, flawed, ugly, clumsy, deluded…

The doctor recoils from her forgiveness, disgusted. Her eyes pool with love, and it seems to him there is something animal or alien about her ability to forgive him for this thing he has not done. Almost instantly, this occurs. The way a lake recovers its composure after a hailstorm. Blue to the bottom again, even the stitches dissolved. You are a better surgeon than I am, he thinks, horrified. It is a ghastly thing to behold. My death.

There is suddenly, he feels, no one left to defend—that man has been swallowed up into this forgiveness.

“No. No. I did nothing to deserve this, this—”

This love badly frightens him. He does not want it. If she could believe that he’d failed his patient, and lied to everyone about it—

He watches his hands shoving her away.

“If only you believe me, in all the world, I will live,” he promises her.

His wife looks up at him with injured, animal surprise; he has never touched her roughly.

“I myself have made a thousand errors—”

“But if you do not believe me,” he says. “If you have become…like them…”

Her small mouth drops open as she reaches for him. She has the face of someone at the top of a fall, her arms wheeling in space. She grabs for his shoulders, sobbing; the sound seems to come from somewhere else. Her small hands paste themselves to his chest. He thinks of the purple stars embroidered on his ceremonial robe. And when her hands at last fall to her sides, he sees stars plummeting from the night sky.

“They are going to strip me of everything now,” he tells her. “They will not stop at my reputation. I’ll soon be rotting in the garrison—”

Shadows dart down the hall. Stricken, the doctor lurches after his children.

“The surgery was a success, and no woman wanders the woods. If you cannot believe me,” he shouts, “then you are not my family.”

Several hours later, he dresses and leaves for the caves, although of course no patients await him; he has been suspended from performing surgeries pending the counts’ investigation and decision. To reach these caves requires a briary hour-long climb, where to this day the dark forests of Black Corfu loom in fathomless contrast to the turquoise Adriatic.

At the cave mouth, the doctor pauses. It occurs to him that they might be waiting for him deep below. An ambush. The hunters moving onto new quarry in the morning light.

* * *

Two nights pass. The doctor is unjailed. His wife and daughters do not leave the house. No hunter has captured or even glimpsed the vukodlak; at the same time, her presence on the island is ubiquitous. The wailing women in the harbor chapel see nothing else, kneeling in the candlelight with seamed eyelids like seals.

Another doctor is now caroming around Korčula Town: leering and fiendish and floppy-handed. Apocalyptically incompetent. The doctor’s twin, ruining his good name. Open your eyes. Give me a chance to fight him, the Other Man. The usurper who has replaced me in your memory.

Those few who do meet the doctor’s gaze still fail to see him. Eyes trawl over his skin, and a monster springs into their nets. His voice shakes, and they presume his guilt.

How can I go on living here, unseen…?

Could a rumor so neatly erase every prior memory of him?

Moving behind the market stalls, the doctor eavesdrops on his own death. Everyone is talking about his mistake. In some variants of the rumor, his crime. He hears his former self writhing and dying on the floors of their minds. Once-familiar voices are corrupted, rusty with fear:

“…because she was interfered with—”

“…the soil disrupted…”

“…and blood in her mouth!”

The doctor goes to the homes of his friends: Nicolas Grbin, Matthias Grbin, John and Jerome Radovanović. Look at me, he begs them. Could I do these things? Out of love, they overcome their horror. Unshade their eyes to meet the red eyes of the doctor. The terrible transparency of the eyes of his friends reveals this: Nobody, not even those who still love me, believes me.

* * *

Three nights without fresh news. The hunters chase a red-tailed squirrel, but have yet to sight a vukodlak. Many reputations are now at stake. Hunters grumble that perhaps the boy misled them, while the chirurgo defends the investigation to the Council of Ten. Many people, in the end, have a motivation to help a corpse to move again.

So when the doctor learns that the searchers have dug up the grave of Nediljka Nikoničić, over the family’s protestations, and discovered an empty coffin, he cannot even be certain that it is Jure da Mosto who has framed him.

“Her body is missing,” he tells his wife.

“So I’ve heard.”

Incredibly, she takes his hand.

* * *

On the night before his deposition is to be taken, the doctor himself comes down with a case of the rumor. The false memory feasts on his doubts. Parasitically, it grows stronger, brighter, more vehemently alive. How to combat it?

He feasts on me like a worm in mutton. To kill him, I must simply stop imagining him—

“My hand did not slip,” he practices in the mirror. “Never once, in a thousand surgeries, has my hand slipped.”

The doctor tries to conjure his wife’s face, and the faces of his daughters. He needs a shield composed of those faces who still love him. Instead, he sees his patient walking between the pines, her red hair brighter than the moon. She is moving downhill, toward Korčula Town. Try as he might to chop down these woods and blank his mind, he continues to watch her hissing descent. This, he knows, signals the beginning of the end. How can he convince anyone that he has a steady hand, when he cannot control even his own fantasizing, the tremors of his imagination?

“Why do you credit this boy’s account?” he shouts at the mirror. “A visitor who arrived mere days ago? It is clear that this vukodlak is nothing but a figment of the boy’s disturbed mind—”

But it’s too late. The vukodlak’s face has lodged inside him, pillary white. In his mind’s eye he watches himself lurching over the operating table, a character in their tale. Oh, Lord, help me, I have been infected—

Stunned, the poor doctor begins to believe their story.

* * *

Now it is not his patient with her flaming hair who haunts him, her bare feet taking crunching steps over the pine cones. It is the Other Man.

For the Other Man is everywhere. Leaping from mind to mind, eclipsing him like the false red lid drawn over the true moon…How can I kill the Other Man?

Who stole my name and my dignity, who stole the trust of my patients from me…

Who strolls from mind to mind, knocking on doors and evicting me…

The Other Man.

The monster-twin.

It is impossible to forgive his wife for forgiving him. If she is capable of loving such a creature, what can he ever have meant to her? He cannot face the terrible love pouring his way. It will erase him entirely.

“If you could love that—”

In his mind’s eye, he sees his hand rising and striking her. He watches her neck snapped back. He funnels these visions through the minds of his friends, imagining them imagining him. That he does none of these things does not, in the end, matter. The doctor thinks: I am their monster.

* * *

“I can be trusted with any patient.”

The tribunal has been assembled since dawn. When the bell comes again, tolling ten times, he stares from face to face to face for the eternity of that deafening gonging. All these men are well known to him. He has operated on many of their grandmothers, mothers, great-uncles, fathers. His voice is hoarse but controlled: “As evidence, I remind the court that I have performed this operation on several of my own children.”

But midway through his testimony, his composure breaks; at the worst possible moment, he loses control of his voice. His memory betrays him, sucking him into the past. He sees himself walking through the pinewoods of Žrnovo with the littlest of his children in his arms—the stillborn son who never breathed, who would not take a single step. What risk could such a body run of walking the woods? his wife had asked. “Leave him be, my love. He never crawled. He is in heaven now.” But the doctor had insisted on taking the precaution. The infant’s face was the doctor’s face, a tiny amber cameo. He recognized a larval form of his own lips. The bud of his nose, itself a cartilaginous copy of the nose of his grandfather. In the freezing theater, the doctor bent to kiss the lips of his son. A part of the doctor lives in permanent exile on the white calcite ceiling of the cave. He floats over his son, in the blank air above his gloved hands. He sees that this detachment is necessary, and he hates the necessity. That operation cost him more than he can admit to anyone, and he shrinks away from the memory.

“I can be trusted—” He winces to hear the high pitch of his voice, imploring them to trust him. He has already lost, then. Tears undam themselves and flow freely down the doctor’s cheeks. With his next breath, he manages to steady his voice:

“My record is perfect and I can be trusted with any patient.”

But look at what has happened to their faces!

* * *

“On January 3, the hand of our posthumous surgeon slipped while he performed his paralyzing surgery. It is possible that this slip was, in fact, deliberate—”

After they read out the accusations leveled against him, he is returned to his home. No vukodlak has yet been discovered in the woods; nevertheless, the case will be sent on to the Council of Ten that evening. Even now, the ship containing the investigator’s files is leaving the harbor. Months will pass before a verdict reaches him. Yet there are many impatient Korčulans who are certain of his guilt. Others, consumed by fear, conflate the end of their nightmares with the end of his life. Writing in his log, the doctor wonders: What has happened to the elderly surgeon on Lastovo? Has he been strung up in the pines?

His hand begins to tremble, knocking the oil lamp from the table. The doctor looks down at it in horror. His fingers are moving independently of him, pinching at the wick. It is possible that they have never been under his control.

I was a good doctor, and now I am not. It is the rumor that is turning him into a monster; he had not been one before, had he? But even that certainty is dissolving.

In later centuries, new etiologies for diseases like the Black Death will evolve. Germ theory replaces miasmatic superstition. Alexander Fleming fights microorganisms with penicillin. But Fleming does not predict how quickly disease-causing bacteria can mutate. Attempts at treatment breed a genetic resilience into the disease. Only the hardiest survivors spawn. And so the cure teaches the disease how to evade it.

The rumor continues to mutate. One strain has it that the Nikoničić countess had been pregnant with the doctor’s child at the time of her death. One strain has it that dozens of his patients are circumambulating the woods. Including a naked infant on all fours. One strain has it that his wife is a vukodlak, which he keeps boarded up in his house. With each passing minute, it seems, the rumor grows resistant to the truth. The evening after his trial, the investigator dismounts to share its latest evolution with the doctor.

“The boy remembers more and more of the story.”

“Does he?”

“Something else came back to him.”

Seagulls scream above the harbor. All over the island, in the minds of his neighbors, the red-haired vukodlak is just waking up.

“Tell me, what has returned to young Jure now? What imaginary memory?”

As it turns out, the doctor has badly underestimated Jure da Mosto. The boy has a creative gift that belies the poverty of imagination suggested by his bland seed-hull face. The doctor, after being introduced to another nightmare version of himself, walks stiff-legged to the docks and empties the contents of his stomach into the bay. Tiny red fish rise to nibble at his vomit, and the doctor feels consoled by this alone: the voracious appetite of nature and its yawning indifference to his reflection floating on the water.

That evening, the doctor discovers that his quarantine has failed. He finds his wife seated by the window, watching a pale-green sliver of sea. Despite having followed his orders to barricade herself inside the house, his wife has somehow caught wind of the rumor’s darkest variant.

She speaks with a calm that shakes him.

“They say you were in love with her.”

“No. That is neither possible nor true.”

“They say you did something…to her body. And kept it here to do more—”

“Oh, my love.”

Because she has already watched him doing these hideous things, hasn’t she? She has been entertaining him, the Other Man, all afternoon. He cannot prevent her from seeing whatever the rumor commands her to imagine.

“A woman like that,” he explodes, “would never touch me in life! Not even in church! She would not touch you, she would not touch our daughters—”

“They say,” says his wife, “that you touched her.”

She sleeps on the outer edge of their bed, like a caterpillar clinging to its leaf. Her back is to the doctor. And yet her palm is flung onto the bed behind her, for him to take if he so desires. Her arm bent backward. He stares at it with horror. She is still reaching for him. How could you possibly, possibly…, he wonders, afraid even to finish the thought.

* * *

The doctor spends the next three days knocking on doors, an uninvited guest. He pleads his case to whoever answers. He cannot rest until his reputation is restored. He begins in the poorest quarter of the walled city, crabbing his way up the sea-slick docks. One night soon, he will reach the counts.

“You are behaving like a guilty man,” his wife admonishes. “You are making their case for them. You can’t see that?”

He looks at his wife blearily. It does not occur to him that he has become a species of vukodlak himself, driven to circle the island streets.

“The rumor has polluted every mind on the island. If I cannot defeat it, I see no possibility of a new beginning for us. I would have to change our names, burn off my skin…”

His daughters adopt their mother’s pitch, blocking the door frame of the apartment with their tiny bodies: “Stay home with us, Papa!”

The doctor blinks at the four of them as if surprised to find intruders in his home. His thumb covers his lower lip, forming a little crucifix; he is afraid that he might cry, or scream.

“Don’t you recognize us? We are your family.”

That night, his wife approaches him with a new plan: they will flee the island.

“We can leave.”

“Oh? Where can we go?” He is smiling broadly now, as if this were the latest uproarious turn in a long joke. At last, he can whisper the punch line to her:

“I have one skill. And now that is in dispute.”

He turns his bony hand in front of her face in the light.

“Nobody believes in me anymore.”

“We believe you. We are the ones who believe in you.”

The doctor laughs until his eyes water. The Other Man is looking out at him.

“Please. Find a ship.”

“You all believe I did it.”

* * *

“I can be trusted with any patient,” he says aloud to the watchful rabbit. Her pink nostrils inflate and fall, and he feels a rush of love for her; animals, of course, are immune to the rumor. He enters the cave to prepare the theater for a new patient. For a long time the rabbit sits on the rusty-orange log, peering down the throat of the cave to where the shadows jump.

* * *

The windows of their fortressed houses leave these rich men surprisingly vulnerable, thinks the doctor.

He is genuflecting in a light dusting of snow, midway up the staircase cut into the limestone cliffside which spirals up to the ivory veranda of Peter Nikoničić. Leagues below him, the dark sea rolls into the coastline, gonging soundlessly on and on. Here is one dilemma which the counts of Korčula share with the barnacle people: to admit the rich light of the moon into one’s home, one must also expose one’s family to the stares of outsiders. Any pair of eyes can follow the moonbeams into one’s private rooms. The doctor feels he is exploiting a privilege of the already dead. If nobody believes that he exists any longer, the good doctor, why shouldn’t his ghost take a long look into the amber dining hall of the Nikoničić family? The doctor has never before climbed to this elevation; he grows dizzy staring out at the tall waves crashing down the length of the island. The main house with its colonnades and every outlying building are made of white stone quarried from Vrnik. He admires the unity of the house, the luminous domed roof, like a moon exhumed from under the earth. Edging closer, the doctor peers into the interior world of his accusers. A dozen plates are set on a long black table, with bouquets of nettles. The table itself is an elegant ungulate, an Italianate species of furniture, with legs that end in oak hooves. Perhaps it, too, has been hobbled so that it cannot gallop off with the silver, the golden decanter. The Other Man, the doctor guesses, has already dined here. Peter Nikoničić no doubt invited the Other Man into his thoughts a hundred times a day, to reenact the bungled surgery.

Can we be cured? the doctor wonders. Could the right words, spoken by the doctor, free both men from the grip of the rumor?

Roasted meats appear on thin platters. Dried berries heaped like red plunder and deliquescing vegetables. And there, seated at the middle of the table, surrounded by half a dozen healthy children, is the doctor’s assassin, Jure da Mosto. Who has combed his long bangs over his eyebrows, his thin torso swallowed by a scarlet vest. His family on Lastovo would be relieved that he’d found a berth in this castle, wouldn’t they? In this house, he looks younger than sixteen. He is eleven, ten, puddled and small. Unwillingly, the doctor feels his hatred relaxing, fist to palm. It is too easy for him to imagine why the boy from Lastovo would move the countess’s body. He pictures Jure carrying her from the cemetery. Terrified of a vukodlak appearing but more afraid of losing the regard of the living.

Ah, we are in the same predicament, then. You do not want to be a liar, any more than I want to be a monster.

�� Bones stack up beside the drained chalices. The doctor marvels at the speed at which the meal is consumed. He watches his former student laughing, one hand clapped to the shallow hole of his mouth. On his side of the glass, the doctor is deafened by a roaring wind, but his mind supplies the sound. It is nothing so light as laughter. It is quite terrifying, this noise he hears, or imagines he hears, pouring out of young Jure.

The doctor had intended to stand before the meal’s end and stride into their room; yet he merely watches, paralyzed, as the table is cleared by three servants. Hypnotized by the ebb and flow of life and shadow inside the great hall. Unaware of the snowflakes collecting on his crouching back. One by one, Jure da Mosto and every Nikoničić and servant disappear. Soon the room has emptied of people, and still the doctor kneels below the window, addressing himself to the count’s empty chairs: I am an innocent man. As the posthumous surgeon of Korčula Island, my record of service is faultless…

You can become numb to your numbness, a final disavowal of the body, and this is precisely what happens to the doctor, kneeling in the snow. He might be kneeling there still, had he not been discovered on the staircase. A hand claps onto his shoulder, wrenching the doctor to his feet.

“Who are you? You do not belong here.”

Craning around, the doctor collides with the Other Man. Who is reflected in the gray, frightened eyes of the man pinning him to the stone wall. A bright quarter moon floats over the harbor, winding stripes of light around their bodies. The doctor fights through an endless moment of vertigo. Staring into the count’s eyes, he watches himself dissolve into his double.

“Peter Nikoničić.” At last he recovers his voice. “Peter Peter Peter Peter Nikoničić! Estimable sir, your lordship, Peter Nikoničić.”

His voice, when it comes, is barely intelligible.

“Forgive my intrusion, but I have come to, to, to…”

The doctor slurs his words. His tongue, that trained slug, will not obey him.

“To defend myself!” he bursts forth.

The doctor is not a drunk, but it occurs to him that he might become one, in the future story of this encounter.

“I do not belong here. That is true.” The old laughter threatens to boil over. “You people let me fly to the roof of a cave, and no farther. You have blocked our ascent to the true sky. You call me the Moor, Peter Nikoničić, although my family has lived on Black Corfu for as long as your family.”

Giggles escape him, rising into the night. A steam of hysteria that does not seem to originate from his mouth but from the crinkling corners of his red eyes. He gapes up, for a moment confusing the frail sound with a column of snowflakes.

“Oh, you people should have hobbled me long ago! You must have guessed that I would one day climb your hills. But I imagined a different kind of ascent, Peter Nikoničić. A promotion!”

The joke of his life seizes him once more. Doubling over, he is convulsed by silent laughter. “Ah, look,” he murmurs. “We have an audience.”

Blue light floods through one of the upstairs windows; this would be Jure, the doctor feels somehow certain. Jure in his guest room, looking down on them. Looking down is Jure da Mosto’s great talent, isn’t it? Quite a feat, for an inbred adolescent.

With great effort, the doctor regains control of himself.

Up goes the lantern, illuminating the count’s gaunt face. Dozens of blood vessels sprinkle his eyes, like the red seams in green leaves. The doctor seizes the large man’s wrists.

“Peter Nikoničić, I never harmed your daughter. You must believe me.”

The Other Man lifts out of the dry eyes of Peter Nikoničić to stare at him.

“Please. Please. Please. Remember who I am,” the doctor begs. He leans in until their clammy foreheads touch. “Remember me?”

Loosening his grip on the doctor, the count steps back. Both men are breathing heavily. He lowers the lantern. Now only a slice of him is visible, caught in the gluey light: his large, flaring nostrils, a quivering orange mustache. This is enough to reveal the grief of Peter Nikoničić. The doctor came prepared for anger. He is unprepared to hear the horsey bellows of the big man’s sorrow in the dark. Now he quiets, recognizing the rhythm of his own despair, for which he knows no cure.

“That boy in your house is a liar. To protect himself, he has hidden the body somewhere. But the surgery was routine, and your daughter is no vukodlak.”

“She is gone.” Peter Nikoničić’s face is no longer visible in the darkness on the hill. “And you must go now, too.”

* * *

Midway down the highway that unwinds into the sea, the doctor becomes aware that he is not traveling alone. Snowfall is unusual on the island. On his way home, retracing his steps in the drifts, the doctor notices that there are two sets of prints.

Who is following me? the doctor screams.

Something is moving out of the thicketed darkness. Pleating the leaves. An almost-human whimpering rises out of the woods, a sound that is unbearably familiar.

In a whisper, the doctor asks the forest: “Nediljka?”

Out of the shadows steps a child he knows. His middle daughter.

“Papa!”

“What are you doing here?” How long has she been hovering a foot away from him in the snow? How lost must he be, to have no awareness of his daughter at his heels?

“I wanted to know where you go when you leave us,” she tells him. Flatly as always, and without apology. “I am very cold, Papa.”

It’s an agony to feel her shivering in his arms and to have no further protection to offer. He walks as fast as he dares through the falling snow. When the snow deepens, he carries his daughter on his shoulders. They move through a ravine of solid moonlight. In this lunar meadowland, they are not alone. His daughter sights the creature first, and screams.

The thing rears onto its hind legs. Its hair is matted to its heaving sides. The doctor’s mind, reaching for a name for the giantess’s shadow, can find only “monster.” It is his daughter who roars back at her, “Bear!”

Just when he’d thought the joke was done with him, a new surprise. We know this species as the European brown bear, a misnomer in this case, because the bear standing on its hind legs has striking reddish fur.

Here, then, is the answer to one riddle. They are staring at the vukodlak. The bear with her bloodred muzzle and coppery fur, standing upright in the woods. For an instant the doctor feels a surge of elation, thinking: I can explain everything to them, and kill off the Other Man. But of course that’s not true. The rumor has moved into the tower of fact. Of history. It does not want to be evicted.

The doctor has been carrying his daughter on his shoulders. When he turns, his daughter is eye level with the bear. Her snout falls open. He sees long black teeth. A levitating slate tongue. The bear, holding her great shaggy arms before her like tree limbs, lets out a roar that seems to shake the island to its bedrock. The roaring goes on and on. Inside of that sound, a miracle happens. There is really no other human word for it. The three stand under some spell of mutual hypnosis. Life recognizes itself, a beam of light flying around three mirrors. Life reorganizes itself into something new.

Out of their conjoined attention, a fourth mind rears. Large enough to encompass all of them—building itself out of them, as a molecule is born from atoms. Their collision sparks the instant evolution of a special, ephemeral intelligence. Before its collapse, each creature glimpses itself through the eyes of another. The girl sees herself small as a blossom atop her father’s shoulders, who is, after all, only a man; the doctor watches himself falling into the bear’s mind, a shadow on the snow, cleansed of every accusation; as for the bear, her perception floats outside the net of this language. The three blink once, twice. Each exists, without past or future, inside the other.

The spell ends—nothing breaks it—it simply runs its course. With a second roar, the bear resumes her solitary life. Dropping onto her paws, she shoulders into the pines.

The doctor is left with only an inky memory of the knowledge that engulfed them a moment ago. There is another country in which he exists, running parallel to this one.

Just before sunrise they reach another clearing, now a plain of fresh snow. Birds throb into the sky, startled from their feeding. Their cries are like thunder from another century, silvery and faraway. Even skimming the earth, they echo remotely.

Why do they sound like that, Papa?

They are dead and alive, he explains.

His daughter’s skin has a blue cast and her eyes are half lidded. The doctor has put his gloves on her hands. He has wrapped her in his robe. He is terrified that the cold may have already invaded her. By the time they reach Korčula Town, the sun is up, sending ice crashing into the sea. Ships loom like alien beasts, their gunwales transformed by ice into wooden gums with orange and violet fangs. The world will lose a thousand sets of teeth before noon, thinks the doctor. His daughter stirs, nuzzling her face into his hair.

In the doctor’s home, the freeze is only beginning. With a shriek to rival the morning birds, his wife falls upon him. He begins to explain about the bear, but he is interrupted half a dozen times by their middle daughter’s coughing. She blinks up at him, still sleepy from the cold.

“Where have you been? Why on earth did you take her out into this weather—”

“She followed me,” he says weakly.

“Tell your mother what you saw,” he urges her.

“Nobody.”

His wife is looking at the doctor as if he is a stranger. A look that tilts her into a future with her children from which he is barred. Quick as an animal, she swoops in and snatches back her daughter. She strokes the side of the girl’s skull that is still damp with snow, her colorless lips. Her own face becomes brighter and brighter with life.

“Get out.”

This, she says, she cannot forgive.

The doctor sighs. Now he feels almost happy.

“You did love me.”

* * *

That night, the doctor does not return home. He sleeps on a pallet in one of the sailors’ brothels, where even the seven-foot proprietor is afraid to touch him. He wakes at dawn and wanders the herringbone maze of the walled city, watching helplessly as the faces of his neighbors flinch away from him as if stung.

At sunset, light ribbons away from the moored ships. The doctor sits on the toothy rocks near the leaping waves. The wind has chased everyone else inside the walls. These rocks are filled in with pieces of chalky shells, and anyone who sits on them will rise with twin crescents of lunar powder on his trousers. The ordinarily meticulous doctor has not visited the barber in a fortnight, and he would have sat down without awareness in a pool of mud, or blood.

Sunset is a violent spectacle on the island of Korčula. The sun flies as if shot behind the rocks. Once the moon has fully risen, he stands and turns toward the pinewoods of Žrnovo, to look for him, the Other Man. It will be a duel to the finish. Scalpel in hand, the doctor starts up the hill.

* * *

From the doctor’s final log:

All believe me to be not only a failed surgeon, but a corrupter of bodies. Even in my wife’s embrace, I have begun to imagine my death. It is a dreadful rehearsal. My hands end my life, again and again; I see my body lamed in its coffin, removed to a realm beyond all suspicion.

Yet I am coming to see that this plan is the only means by which I can exonerate myself of those charges brought against me. With a steady hand, I will pour out my blood, and so cleanse my name, and the name of my family. First I will sever my hamstrings. I will complete this surgery perfectly, while still alive. This will mark the first and only surgery I perform on a living body. After hobbling myself, I will cut my throat. Thus will I prove to everyone on Korčula Island that emotion could never have stayed my hand or vitiated my efforts on behalf of the dead.

Meantime my wife is suffering…my daughters…the rumor continues to assail us from within, changing the contents of our minds.

These and other excerpts are included in the second file sent from the counts of Korčula to the Council of Ten, regarding the exhumations in the cemetery of Žrnovo. From Korčula these documents traveled to the capital of La Serenissima; from there they were forwarded to the Venetian central offices in the city on the lagoon. Today, copies translated into English, German, Spanish, and Chinese are available for study in the state archives. The doctor’s defense is nearly forty pages long:

As a boy, I dreamed of saving lives; I have answered that calling, in the peculiar and the only way available to me…

In addition to the testimony of the doctor’s student, Jure da Mosto, the archive includes two depositions of witnesses, Don Anthony Deševic and Janez Krčelić, confirming under oath that on the sixth of January 1620 the cemetery soil was disrupted and the body of a young countess had vanished.

Yet the grave was closed, and the investigation abandoned; it is unclear from these documents if or how the case of the accused was ever resolved.

* * *

Something comes whistling out of the cave—not stumbling, not lurching, but running down the hillside. Something becomes someone. On shaky legs, the vukodlak stalls between two yellow-mossed boulders. Thoughtfully, he pops a finger into his mouth. It is as cold and as dry as the cave he has just exited, devoid of even a drop of fluid. Plants lisp up around him, dark vines with turbulent blossoms. It was winter when he died, but as a vukodlak the doctor has emerged into a new season. The air, which he can still smell, is thick with pine resin and salt. He bends a knee and genuflects, staring up at the towering pines. Thin red scars cover the backs of his thighs. He touches these wonderingly, amazed at the supple angle of his leg unbending itself. From a numb core, he watches as pain explodes around him. He is lifted to his feet. Has the operation been a failure, then? For here he stands.

“Perhaps,” the doctor’s vukodlak admits softly to the thousand whispering pines of Black Corfu, “I made a mistake.”

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catkittens · 7 months

Text

A Short Story

Slowly, Slowly in the Wind

Patricia Highsmith

Edward (Skip) Skipperton spent most of his life in a thunderous rage. It was his nature. He had been full of temper as a boy, and as a man impatient with people’s slowness or stupidity or inefficiency. Now Skipperton was fifty-two. His wife had left him two years ago, unable to stand his tantrums any longer. She had met a most tranquil university professor from Boston, had divorced Skipperton on the grounds of incompatibility, and married the professor. Skipperton had been determined to get custody of their daughter, Margaret, then fifteen, and with clever lawyers and on the grounds that his wife had deserted him for another man, Skipperton had succeeded. A few months after the divorce, Skipperton had a heart attack, a real stroke with hemi-paralysis from which he miraculously recovered in six months, but his doctors gave him warning.

“Skip, it’s life or death. You quit smoking and drinking and right now, or you’re a dead man before your next birthday.” That was from his heart specialist.

“You owe it to Margaret,” said his GP. “You ought to retire, Skip. You’ve plenty of money. You’re in the wrong profession for your nature—granted you’ve made a success of it. But what’s left of your life is more important, isn’t it? Why not become a gentleman farmer, something like that?”

Skipperton was a management adviser. Behind the scenes of big business, Skipperton was well known. He worked free-lance. Companies on the brink sent for him to reorganize, reform, throw out—anything Skip advised went. “I go in and kick the ass off ’em!” was the inelegant way Skip described his work when he was interviewed, which was not often, because he preferred a ghostly role.

Skipperton bought Coldstream Heights in Maine, a seven-acre farm with a modernized farmhouse, and hired a local man called Andy Humbert to live and work on the place. Skipperton also bought some of the machinery the former owner had to sell, but not all of it, because he didn’t want to turn himself into a full-time farmer. The doctors had recommended a little exercise and no strain of any kind. They had known that Skip wouldn’t and couldn’t at once cut all his connections with the businesses he had helped in the past. He might have to make an occasional trip to Chicago or Dallas, but he was officially retired.

Margaret was transferred from her private school in New York to a Swiss boarding school. Skipperton knew and liked Switzerland, and had bank accounts there.

Skipperton did stop drinking and smoking. His doctors were amazed at his willpower—and yet it was just like Skip to stop overnight, like a soldier. Now Skip chewed his pipes, and went through a stem in a week. He went through two lower teeth, but got them capped in steel in Bangor. Skipperton and Andy kept a couple of goats to crop the grass, and one sow who was pregnant when Skip bought her, and who now had twelve piglets. Margaret wrote filial letters saying she liked Switzerland and that her French was improving no end. Skipperton now wore flannel shirts with no tie, low boots that laced, and woodsmen’s jackets. His appetite had improved, and he had to admit he felt better.

The only thorn in his side—and Skipperton had to have one to feel normal—was the man who owned some adjacent land, one Peter Frosby, who wouldn’t sell a stretch Skipperton offered to buy at three times the normal price. This land sloped down to a little river called the Coldstream, which in fact separated part of Skipperton’s property from Frosby’s to the north, and Skipperton didn’t mind that. He was interested in the part of the river nearest him and in view from Coldstream Heights. Skipperton wanted to be able to fish a little, to be able to say he owned that part of the landscape and had riparian rights. But old Frosby didn’t want anybody fishing in his stream, Skipperton had been told by the agents, even though Frosby’s house was upstream and out of sight of Skipperton’s.

The week after Peter Frosby’s rejection, Skipperton invited Frosby to his house. “Just to get acquainted—as neighbors,” Skipperton said on the telephone to Frosby. By now Skipperton had been living at Coldstream Heights for four months.

Skipperton had his best whiskey and brandy, cigars and cigarettes—all the things he couldn’t enjoy himself—on hand when Frosby arrived in a dusty but new Cadillac, driven by a young man whom Frosby introduced as his son, Peter.

“The Frosbys don’t sell their land,” Frosby told Skipperton. “We’ve had the same land for nearly three hundred years, and the river’s always been ours.” Frosby, a skinny but strong-looking man with cold gray eyes puffed his cigar daintily and after ten minutes hadn’t finished his first whiskey. “Can’t see why you want it.”

“A little fishing,” Skipperton said, putting on a pleasant smile. “It’s in view of my house. Just to be able to wade, maybe, in the summer.” Skipperton looked at Peter Junior, who sat with folded arms beside and behind his father. Skipperton was backed only by shambly Andy, a good enough handyman, but not part of his dynasty. Skipperton would have given anything (except his life) to have been holding a straight whiskey in one hand and a good cigar in the other. “Well, I’m sorry,” Skipperton said finally. “But I think you’ll agree the price I offer isn’t bad—twenty thousand cash for about two hundred yards of riparian rights. Doubt if you’ll get it again—in your lifetime.”

“Not interested in my lifetime,” Frosby said with a faint smile. “I’ve got a son here.”

The son was a handsome boy with dark hair and sturdy shoulders, taller than his father. His arms were still folded across his chest, as if to illustrate his father’s negative attitude. He had unbent only briefly to light a cigarette which he had soon put out. Still, Peter Junior smiled as he and his father were leaving, and said:

“Nice job you’ve done with the Heights, Mr. Skipperton. Looks better than it did before.”

“Thank you,” Skip said, pleased. He had installed good leather-upholstered furniture, heavy floor-length curtains, and brass firedogs and tongs for the fireplace.

“Nice old-fashioned touches,” Frosby commented in what seemed to Skipperton a balance between compliment and sneer. “We haven’t seen a scarecrow around here in maybe—almost before my time, I think.”

“I like old-fashioned things—like fishing,” Skipperton said. “I’m trying to grow corn out there. Somebody told me the land was all right for corn. That’s where a scarecrow belongs, isn’t it? In a cornfield?” He put on as friendly a manner as he could, but his blood was boiling. A mule-stubborn Maine man, Frosby, sitting on several hundred acres that his more forceful ancestors had acquired for him.

Frosby Junior was peering at a photograph of Maggie, which stood in a silver frame on the hall table. She had been only thirteen or fourteen when the picture had been taken, but her slender face framed in long dark hair showed the clean-cut nose and brows, the subtle smile that would turn her into a beauty one day. Maggie was nearly eighteen now, and Skip’s expectations were being confirmed.

“Pretty girl,” said Frosby Junior, turning towards Skipperton, then glancing at his father, because they were all lingering in the hall.

Skipperton said nothing. The meeting had been a failure. Skipperton wasn’t used to failures. He looked into Frosby’s greenish-gray eyes and said, “I’ve one more idea. Suppose we make an arrangement that I rent the land for the duration of my life, and then it goes to you—or your son. I’ll give you five thousand a year. Want to think it over?”

Frosby put on another frosty smile. “I think not, Mr. Skipperton. Thanks anyway.”

“You might talk to your lawyer about it. No rush on my part.”

Frosby now chuckled. “We know as much about law as the lawyers here. We know our boundaries anyway. Nice to meet you, Mr. Skipperton. Thank you for the whiskey and—good-bye.”

No one shook hands. The Cadillac moved off.

“Damn the bastard,” Skipperton muttered to Andy, but he smiled. Life was a game, after all. You won sometimes, you lost sometimes.

It was early May. The corn was in, and Skipperton had spotted three or four strong green shoots coming through the beige, well-turned earth. That pleased him, made him think of American Indians, the ancient Mayans. Corn! And he had a classic scarecrow that he and Andy had knocked together a couple of weeks ago. They had dressed the crossbars in an old jacket, and the two sticks—nailed to the upright—in brown trousers. Skip had found the old clothes in the attic. A straw hat jammed onto the top and secured with a nail completed the picture.

Skip went off to San Francisco for a five-day operation on an aeronautics firm which was crippled by a lawsuit, scared to death by unions and contract pull-outs. Skip left them with more redundancies, three vice-presidents fired, but he left them in better shape, and collected fifty thousand for his work.

By way of celebrating his achievement and the oncoming summer that would bring Maggie, Skip shot one of Frosby’s hunting dogs which had swum the stream onto his property to retrieve a bird. Skipperton had been waiting patiently at his bedroom window upstairs, knowing a shoot was on from the sound of guns. Skip had his binoculars and a rifle of goodly range. Let Frosby complain! Trespassing was trespassing.

Skip was almost pleased when Frosby took him to court over the dog. Andy had buried the dog, on Skipperton’s orders, but Skipperton readily admitted the shooting. And the judge ruled in Skipperton’s favor.

Frosby went pale with anger. “It may be the law but it’s not human. It’s not fair.”

And a lot of good it did Frosby to say that!

Skipperton’s corn grew high as the scarecrow’s hips, and higher. Skip spent a lot of time up in his bedroom, binoculars and loaded rifle at hand, in case anything else belonging to Frosby showed itself on his land.

“Don’t hit me,” Andy said with an uneasy laugh. “You’re shooting on the edge of the cornfield there, and now and then I weed it, y’know.”

“You think there’s something wrong with my eyesight?” Skip replied.

A few days later Skip proved there was nothing wrong with his eyesight, when he plugged a gray cat stalking a bird or a mouse in the high grass this side of the stream. Skip did it with one shot. He wasn’t even sure the cat belonged to Frosby.

This shot produced a call in person from Frosby Junior the following day.

“It’s just to ask a question, Mr. Skipperton. My father and I heard a shot yesterday, and last night one of our cats didn’t come back at night to eat, and not this morning either. Do you know anything about that?” Frosby Junior had declined to take a seat.

“I shot the cat. It was on my property,” Skipperton said calmly.

“But the cat—What harm was the cat doing?” The young man looked steadily at Skipperton.

“The law is the law. Property is property.”

Frosby Junior shook his head. “You’re a hard man, Mr. Skipperton.” Then he departed.

Peter Frosby served a summons again, and the same judge ruled that in accordance with old English law and also American law, a cat was a rover by nature, not subject to constraint as was a dog. He gave Skipperton the maximum fine of one hundred dollars, and a warning not to use his rifle so freely in future.

That annoyed Skipperton, though of course he could and did laugh at the smallness of the fine. If he could think of something else annoying, something really telling, old Frosby might relent and at least lease some of the stream, Skip thought.

But he forgot the feud when Margaret came. Skip fetched her at the airport in New York, and they drove up to Maine. She looked taller to Skip, more filled out, and there were roses in her cheeks. She was a beauty, all right!

“Got a surprise for you at home,” Skip said.

“Um-m—a horse maybe? I told you I learned to jump this year, didn’t I?”

Had she? Skip said, “Yes. Not a horse, no.”

Skip’s surprise was a red Toyota convertible. He had remembered at least that Maggie’s school had taught her to drive. She was thrilled, and flung her arms around Skip’s neck.

“You’re a darling, Daddy! And you know, you’re looking very fell!”

Margaret had been to Coldstream Heights for two weeks at Easter, but now the place looked more cared for. She and Skip had arrived around midnight, but Andy was still up watching television in his own little house on the grounds, and Maggie insisted on going over to greet him. Skip was gratified to see Andy’s eyes widen at the sight of her.

Skip and Maggie tried the new car out the next day. They drove to a town some twenty miles away and had lunch. That afternoon, back at the house, Maggie asked if her father had a fishing rod, just a simple one, so she could try the stream. Skip of course had all kinds of rods, but he had to tell her she couldn’t, and he explained why, and explained that he had even tried to rent part of the stream.

“Frosby’s a real s.o.b.,” Skip said. “Won’t give an inch.”

“Well, never mind, Daddy. There’s lots else to do.”

Maggie was the kind of girl who enjoyed taking walks, reading or fussing around in the house rearranging little things so that they looked prettier. She did these things while Skip was on the telephone sometimes for an hour or so with Dallas or Detroit.

Skipperton was a bit surprised one day when Maggie arrived in her Toyota around 7 P.M. with a catch of three trout on a string. She was barefoot, and the cuffs of her blue dungarees were damp. “Where’d you get those?” Skip asked, his first thought being that she’d taken one of his rods and fished the stream against his instructions.

“I met the boy who lives there,” Maggie said. “We were both buying gas, and he introduced himself—said he’d seen my photograph in your house. Then we had a coffee in the diner there by the gas station—”

“The Frosby boy?”

“Yes. He’s awfully nice, Daddy. Maybe it’s only the father who’s not nice. Anyway Pete said, ‘Come on and fish with me this afternoon,’ so I did. He said his father stocks the river farther up.”

“I don’t—Frankly, Maggie, I don’t want you associating with the Frosbys!”

“There’s only two.” Maggie was puzzled. “I barely met his father. They’ve got quite a nice house, Daddy.”

“I’ve had unpleasant dealings with old Frosby, I told you, Maggie. It just isn’t fitting if you get chummy with the son. Do me this one favor this summer, Maggie doll.” That was his name for her in the moments he wanted to feel close to her, wanted her to feel close to him.

The very next day, Maggie was gone from the house for nearly three hours, and Skip noticed it. She had said she wanted to go to the village to buy sneakers, and she was wearing the sneakers when she came home, but Skip wondered why it had taken her three hours to make a five-mile trip. With enormous effort, Skip refrained from asking a question. Then Saturday morning, Maggie said there was a dance in Keensport, and she was going.

“And I have a suspicion who you’re going with,” Skip said, his heart beginning to thump with adrenaline.

“I’m going alone, I swear it, Daddy. Girls don’t have to be escorted any more. I could go in blue jeans, but I’m not. I’ve got some white slacks.”

Skipperton realized that he could hardly forbid her to go to a dance. But he damn well knew the Frosby boy would be there, and would probably meet Maggie at the entrance. “I’ll be glad when you go back to Switzerland.”

Skip knew what was going to happen. He could see it a mile away. His daughter was “infatuated,” and he could only hope that she got over it, that nothing happened before she had to go back to school (another whole month), because he didn’t want to keep her prisoner in the house. He didn’t want to look absurd in his own eyes, even in simpleminded Andy’s eyes, by laying down the law to her.

Maggie got home evidently very late that night, and so quietly Skip hadn’t wakened, though he had stayed up till 2 A.M. and meant to listen for her. At breakfast, Maggie looked fresh and radiant, rather to Skip’s surprise.

“I suppose the Frosby boy was at the dance last night?”

Maggie, diving into bacon and eggs, said, “I don’t know what you’ve got against him, Daddy—just because his father didn’t want to sell land that’s been in their family for ages!”

“I don’t want you to fall in love with a country bumpkin! I’ve sent you to a good school. You’ve got background—or at least I intend to give you some!”

“Did you know Pete had three years at Harvard—and he’s taking a correspondence course in electronic engineering?”

“Oh! I suppose he’s learning computer programming? Easier than shorthand!”

Maggie stood up. “I’ll be eighteen in another month, Daddy. I don’t want to be told whom I can see and can’t see.”

Skip got up too and roared at her. “They’re not my kind of people or yours!”

Maggie left the room.

In the next days, Skipperton fumed and went through two or three pipe stems. Andy noticed his unease, Skipperton knew, but Andy made no comment. Andy spent his nonworking hours alone, watching drivel on his television. Skip was rehearsing a speech to Maggie as he paced his land, glancing at the sow and piglets, at Andy’s neat kitchen-garden, not seeing anything. Skip was groping for a lever, the kind of weapon he had always been able to find in business affairs that would force things his way. He couldn’t send Maggie back to Switzerland, even though her school stayed open in summer for girls whose home was too far away to go back to. If he threatened not to send her back to school, he was afraid Maggie wouldn’t mind. Skipperton maintained an apartment in New York, and had two servants who slept in, but he knew Maggie wouldn’t agree to go there, and Skip didn’t want to go to New York either. He was too interested in the immediate scene in which he sensed a battle coming.

Skipperton had arrived at nothing by the following Saturday, a week after the Keensport dance, and he was exhausted. That Saturday evening, Maggie said she was going to a party at the house of someone called Wilmers, whom she had met at the dance. Skip asked her for the address, and Maggie scribbled it on the hall telephone pad. Skip had reason to have asked for it, because by Sunday morning Maggie hadn’t come home. Skip was up at seven, nervous as a cat and in a rage still at 9 A.M., which he thought a polite enough hour to telephone on Sunday morning, though it had cost him much to wait that long.

An adolescent boy’s voice said that Maggie had been there, yes, but she had left pretty early.

“Was she alone?”

“No, she was with Pete Frosby.”

“That’s all I wanted to know,” said Skip, feeling the blood rush to his face as if he were hemorrhaging. “Oh! Wait! Do you know where they went?”

“Sure don’t.”

“My daughter went in her car?”

“No, Pete’s. Maggie’s car’s still here.”

Skip thanked the boy and put the phone down shakily, but he was shaking only from energy that was surging through every nerve and muscle. He picked up the telephone and dialed the Frosby home.

Old Frosby answered.

Skipperton identified himself, and asked if his daughter was possibly there?

“No, she’s not, Mr. Skipperton.”

“Is your son there? I’d like—”

“No, he doesn’t happen to be in just now.”

“What do you mean? He was there and went out?”

“Mr. Skipperton, my son has his own ways, his own room, his own key—his own life. I’m not about—”

Skipperton put the telephone down suddenly. He had a bad nosebleed, and it was dripping onto the table edge. He ran to get a wet towel.

Maggie was not home by Sunday evening or Monday morning, and Skipperton was reluctant to notify the police, appalled by the thought that her name might be linked with the Frosbys’, if the police found her with the son somewhere. Tuesday morning, Skip was enlightened. He had a letter from Maggie, written from Boston. It said that she and Pete had run away to be married, and to avoid “unpleasant scenes.”

...Though you may think this is sudden, we do love each other and are sure of it. I did not really want to go back to school, Daddy. I will be in touch in about a week. Please don’t try to find me. I have seen Mommie, but we are not staying with her. I was sorry to leave my nice new car, but the car is all right.

Love always,

Maggie

For two days Skipperton didn’t go out of the house, and hardly ate. He felt three-quarters dead. Andy was very worried about him, and finally persuaded Skipperton to ride to the village with him, because they needed to buy a few things. Skipperton went, sitting like an upright corpse in the passenger seat.

While Andy went to the drugstore and the butcher’s, Skipperton sat in the car, his eyes glazed with his own thoughts. Then an approaching figure on the sidewalk made Skipperton’s eyes focus. Old Frosby! Frosby walked with a springy tread for his age, Skip thought. He wore a new tweed suit, black felt hat, and he had a cigar in his hand. Skipperton hoped Frosby wouldn’t see him in the car, but Frosby did.

Frosby didn’t pause in his stride, just smiled his obnoxious, thin-lipped little smile and nodded briefly, as if to say—

Well, Skip knew what Frosby might have wanted to say, what he had said with that filthy smile. Skip’s blood seethed, and Skip began to feel like his old self again. He was standing on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets and feet apart, when Andy reappeared.

“What’s for dinner tonight, Andy? I’ve got an appetite!”

That evening, Skipperton persuaded Andy to take not only Saturday night off, but to stay overnight somewhere, if he wished. “Give you a couple of hundred bucks for a little spree, boy. You’ve earned it.” Skip forced three hundred dollar bills into Andy’s hand. “Take off Monday too, if you feel like it. I’ll manage.”

Andy left Saturday evening in the pick-up for Bangor.

Skip then telephoned old Frosby. Frosby answered, and Skipperton said, “Mr. Frosby, it’s time we made a truce, under the circumstances. Don’t you think so?”

Frosby sounded surprised, but he agreed to come Sunday morning around eleven for a talk. Frosby arrived in the same Cadillac, alone.

And Skipperton wasted no time. He let Frosby knock, opened the door for him, and as soon as Frosby was inside, Skip came down on his head with a rifle butt. He dragged Frosby to the hall to make sure the job was finished: the hall was uncarpeted, and Skip wanted no blood on the rugs. Vengeance was sweet to Skip, and he almost smiled. He removed Frosby’s clothes, and wrapped his body in three or four burlap sacks which he had ready. Then he burnt Frosby’s clothing in the fireplace, where he had a small fire already crackling. Frosby’s wristwatch and wallet and two rings Skip put aside in a drawer to deal with later.

He had decided that broad daylight was the best time to carry out his idea, better than night when an oddly playing flashlight that he would have had to use might have caught someone’s eye. So Skip put one arm around Frosby’s body and dragged him up the field towards his scarecrow. It was a haul of more than half a mile. Skip had some rope and a knife in his back pockets. He cut down the old scarecrow, cut the strings that held the clothing to the cross, dressed Frosby in the old trousers and jacket, tied a burlap bag around his head and face, and jammed the hat on him. The hat wouldn’t stay without being tied on, so Skip did this after punching holes in the brim of the hat with his knife point. Then Skip picked up his burlap bags and made his way back towards his house down the slope with many a backward look to admire his work, and many a smile. The scarecrow looked almost the same as before. He had solved a problem a lot of people thought difficult: what to do with the body. Furthermore, he could enjoy looking at it through his binoculars from his upstairs window.

Skip burnt the burlap bags in his fireplace, made sure that even the shoe soles had burnt to soft ash. When the ashes were cooler, he’d look for buttons and the belt buckle and remove them. He took a fork, went out beyond the pig run and buried the wallet (whose papers he had already burnt), the wristwatch and the rings about three feet deep. It was in a patch of stringy grass, unused for anything except the goats, not a place in which anyone would ever likely do any gardening.

Then Skip washed his face and hands, ate a thick slice of roast beef, and put his mind to the car. It was by now half past twelve. Skip didn’t know if Frosby had a servant, someone expecting him for lunch or not, but it was safer to assume he had. Skip’s aversion to Frosby had kept him from asking Maggie any questions about his household. Skip got into Frosby’s car, now with a kitchen towel in his back pocket to wipe off fingerprints, and drove to some woods he knew from having driven past them many times. An unpaved lane went off the main road into these woods, and into this Skip turned. Thank God, nobody in sight, not a woodsman, not a picnicker. Skip stopped the car and got out, wiped the steering wheel, even the keys, the door, then walked back towards the road.

He was more than an hour getting home. He had found a long stick, the kind called a stave by the wayfarers of old, Skip thought, and he trudged along with the air of a nature-lover, a bird-watcher, for the benefit of the people in the few cars that passed him. He didn’t glance at any of the cars. It was still Sunday dinnertime.

The local police telephoned that evening around seven, and asked if they could come by. Skipperton said of course.

He had removed the buttons and buckle from the fireplace ashes. A woman had telephoned around 1:30, saying she was calling from the Frosby residence (Skip assumed she was a servant) to ask if Mr. Frosby was there. Skipperton told her that Mr. Frosby had left his house a little after noon.

“Mr. Frosby intended to go straight home, do you think?” the plump policeman asked Skipperton. The policeman had some rank like sergeant, Skipperton supposed, and he was accompanied by a younger policeman.

“He didn’t say anything about where he was going,” Skipperton replied. “And I didn’t notice which way his car went.”

The policeman nodded, and Skip could see he was on the brink of saying something like, “I understand from Mr. Frosby��s housekeeper that you and he weren’t on the best of terms,” but the cop didn’t say anything, just looked around Skip’s living room, glanced around his front and back yards in a puzzled way, then both policemen took their leave.

Skip was awakened around midnight by the ring of the telephone at his bedside. It was Maggie calling from Boston. She and Pete had heard about the disappearance of Pete’s father.

“Daddy, they said he’d just been to see you this morning. What happened?”

“Nothing happened. I invited him for a friendly talk—and it was friendly. After all we’re fathers-in-law now... Honey, how do I know where he went?”

Skipperton found it surprisingly easy to lie about Frosby. In a primitive way his emotions had judged, weighed the situation, and told Skip that he was right, that he had exacted a just revenge. Old Frosby might have exerted some control over his son, and he hadn’t. It had cost Skip his daughter—because that was the way Skip saw it, Maggie was lost to him. He saw her as a provincial-to-be, mother-to-be of children whose narrow-mindedness, inherited from the Frosby clan, would surely out.

Andy arrived next morning, Monday. He had already heard the story in the village, and also the police had found Mr. Frosby’s car not far away in the woods, Andy said. Skip feigned mild surprise on hearing of the car. Andy didn’t ask any questions. And suppose he discovered the scarecrow? Skip thought a little money would keep Andy quiet. The corn was all picked up there, only a few inferior ears remained, destined for the pigs. Skipperton picked them himself Monday afternoon, while Andy tended the pigs and goats.

Skipperton’s pleasure now was to survey the cornfield from his upstairs bedroom with his 10¥ binoculars. He loved to see the wind tossing the cornstalk tops around old Frosby’s corpse, loved to think of him, shrinking, drying up like a mummy in the wind. Twisting slowly, slowly in the wind, as a Nixon aide used to put it about the president’s enemies. Frosby wasn’t twisting, but he was hanging, in plain view. No buzzards came. Skip had been a little afraid of buzzards. The only thing that bothered him, once, was seeing one afternoon some schoolboys walking along a road far to the right (under which road the Coldstream flowed), and pointing to the scarecrow. Bracing himself against the window jamb, arms held tightly at his sides so the binoculars would be as steady as possible, Skip saw a couple of the small boys laughing. And had one held his nose? Surely not! They were nearly a mile away from the scarecrow! Still, they had paused, one boy stamped his foot, another shook his head and laughed.

How Skip wished he could hear what they were saying! Ten days had passed since Frosby’s death. Rumors were rife, that old Frosby had been murdered for his money by someone he’d picked up to give a lift to, that he had been kidnapped and that a ransom note might still arrive. But suppose one of the schoolkids said to his father—or anyone—that maybe the dead body of Frosby was inside the scarecrow? This was just the kind of thing Skip might have thought of when he had been a small boy. Skip was consequently more afraid of the schoolkids than of the police.

And the police did come back, with a plainclothes detective. They looked over Skipperton’s house and land—maybe looking for a recently dug patch, Skip thought. If so, they found none. They looked at Skip’s two rifles and took their caliber and serial numbers.

“Just routine, Mr. Skipperton,” said the detective.

“I understand,” said Skip.

That same evening Maggie telephoned and said she was at the Frosby house, and could she come over to see him?

“Why not? This is your house!” Skip replied.

“I never know what kind of mood you’ll be in—or temper,” Maggie said when she arrived.

“I’m in a pretty good mood, I think,” Skipperton said. “And I hope you’re happy, Maggie—since what’s done is done.”

Maggie was in her blue dungarees, sneakers, a familiar sweater. It was hard for Skip to realize that she was married. She sat with hands folded, looking down at the floor. Then she raised her eyes to him and said:

“Pete’s very upset. We never would have stayed a week in Boston unless he’d been sure the police were doing all they could here. Was Mr. Frosby—depressed? Pete didn’t think so.”

Skip laughed. “No! Best of spirits. Pleased with the marriage and all that.” Skip waited, but Maggie was silent. “You’re going to live at the Frosby place?”

“Yes.” Maggie stood up. “I’d like to collect a few things, Daddy. I brought a suitcase.”

His daughter’s coolness, her sadness, pained Skip. She had said something about visiting him often, not about his coming to see them—not that Skip would have gone.

“I KNOW WHAT’S in that scarecrow,” said Andy one day, and Skip turned, binoculars in hand, to see Andy standing in the doorway of his bedroom.

“Do you?—And what’re you going to do about it?” Skip asked, braced for anything. He had squared his shoulders.

“Nothin’. Nothin’,” Andy replied with a smile.

Skip didn’t know how to take that. “I suppose you’d like some money, Andy? A little present—for keeping quiet?”

“No, sir,” Andy said quietly, shaking his head. His wind-wrinkled face bore a faint smile. “I ain’t that kind.”

What was Skip to make of it? He was used to men who liked money, more and more of it. Andy was different, that was true. Well, so much the better, if he didn’t want money, Skip thought. It was cheaper. He also felt he could trust Andy. It was strange.

The leaves began to fall in earnest. Halloween was coming, and Andy removed the driveway gate in advance, just lifted it off its hinges, telling Skip that the kids would steal it if they didn’t. Andy knew the district. The kids didn’t do much harm, but it was trick or treat at every house. Skip and Andy made sure they had lots of nickels and quarters on hand, corn candy, licorice sticks, even a couple of pumpkins in the window, faces cut in them by Andy, to show any comers that they were in the right spirit. Then on Halloween night, nobody knocked on Skip’s door. There was a party at Coldstream, at the Frosbys’, Skip knew because the wind was blowing his way and he could hear the music. He thought of his daughter dancing, having a good time. Maybe people were wearing masks, crazy costumes. There’d be pumpkin pie with whipped cream, guessing games, maybe a treasure hunt. Skip was lonely, for the first time in his life. Lonely. He badly wanted a scotch, but decided to keep his oath to himself, and having decided this, asked himself why? He put his hands flat down on his dresser top and gazed at his own face in the mirror. He saw creases running from the flanges of his nose down beside his mouth, wrinkles under his eyes. He tried to smile, and the smile looked phony. He turned away from the mirror.

At that instant, a spot of light caught his eyes. It was out the window, in the upward sloping field. A procession—so it seemed, maybe eight or ten figures—was walking up his field with flashlights or torches or both. Skip opened the window slightly. He was rigid with rage, and fear. They were on his land! They had no right! And they were kids, he realized. Even in the darkness, he could see by the procession’s own torches that the figures were a lot shorter than adults’ figures would be.

Skip whirled around, about to shout for Andy, and at once decided that he had better not. He ran downstairs and grabbed his own powerful flashlight. He didn’t bother grabbing his jacket from a hook, though the night was crisp.

“Hey!” Skip yelled, when he had run several yards into the field. “Get off my property! What’re you doing walking up there!”

The kids were singing some crazy, high-pitched song, nobody singing on key. It was just a wild treble chant. Skip recognized the word “scarecrow.”

“We’re going to burn the scarecrow...” something like that.

“Hey, there! Off my land!” Skip fell, banged a knee, and scrambled up again. The kids had heard him, Skip was pretty sure, but they weren’t stopping. Never before had anyone disobeyed Skip—except of course Maggie. “Off my land!”

The kids moved on like a black caterpillar with an orange headlight and a couple of other lights in its body. Certainly the last couple of kids had heard Skip, because he had seen them turn, then run to catch up with the others. Skip stopped running. The caterpillar was closer to the scarecrow than he was, and he was not going to be able to get there first.

Even as he thought this, a whoop went up. A scream! Another scream of mingled terror and delight shattered their chant. Hysteria broke out. What surely was a little girl’s throat gave a cry as shrill as a dog whistle. Their hands must have touched the corpse, maybe touched bone, Skip thought.

Skip made his way back towards his own house, his flashlight pointed at the ground. It was worse than the police, somehow. Every kid was going to tell his parents what he had found. Skip knew he had come to the end. He had seen businessmen, seen a lot of men come to the end. He had known men who had jumped out of windows, who had taken overdoses.

Skip went at once to his rifle. It was in the living room downstairs. He put the muzzle in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

When the kids streaked down the field, heading for the road a few seconds later, Skip was dead. The kids had heard the shot, and thought someone was trying to shoot at them.

Andy heard the shot. He had also seen the procession marching up the field and heard Skipperton shouting. He understood what had happened. He turned his television set off, and made his way rather slowly towards the main house. He would have to call the police. That was the right thing to do. Andy made up his mind to say to the police that he didn’t know a thing about the corpse in the scarecrow’s clothes. He had been away some of that weekend after all.

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catkittens · 7 months

Text

The Woman Who Took the Local Paper

Seicho Matsumoto

The Woman Who Took the Local Paper

Seicho Matsumoto is recognized and acclaimed in the East as Japan’s leading mystery writer and the most important figure on the Japanese detective-story scene today. He ushered in the second period in the history of the modern Japanese detective story. The first period, called the Tantei Era, began with Edogawa Rampo and ended just before World War Two; the second period, called the Suiri Era, shifted technique from “unrealistic” puzzles to “social” detective stories, and in this second period Seicho Matsumoto was the dominant influence, as he continues to be in the current period, called the Neo-Social Era.

Mr. Matsumoto’s novels, which epitomize contemporary life in Japan, are consistently among Japan’s best sellers. He has published approximately 50 books, with an average sale of 400,000 copies each, 100,000 in hardcover, 300,000 in paperback. His indefatigable curiosity and his enduring passion to learn have led him recently into the world of archeology and history, and his studies of Japanese society and economy have been praised for their depth and insight.

“The Woman Who Took the Local Paper” is shrewdly plotted, its details released slowly to keep the reader in suspense until the very end. . .

Yoshiko Shioda sent in her money to the Koshin newspaper for a subscription. This newspaper company is located in Kofu city, which is about two hours by express train from Tokyo. Although it is a leading paper in that prefecture, it is not sold in Tokyo, and if one wants to read it, one has to become a subscriber.

She sent the money by registered mail on February 21 and enclosed the following letter: “I would like to subscribe to your newspaper. Enclosed is my payment. The serialized novel, The Brigands, in your paper looks interesting and I want to read it. I would like my subscription to begin from the issue of February 19th.”

Yoshiko Shioda had seen the Koshin newspaper only once before. It had been at a small restaurant located in a corner of a building in front of Kofu station. The waitress had left the paper on the table while Yoshiko was waiting for her order of Chinese noodles. It was a typical local paper, with rather old-fashioned type, very provincial actually. The third page was devoted to local news. A fire had destroyed five homes. An employee in the village office had embezzled six million yen of public funds. The construction of an annex to the primary school had been completed. The mother of a prefectural assemblyman had died. That sort of news.

At the bottom of the second page there was a serialization of an historical novel. The illustration showed two samurai warriors engaged in a sword fight. The author was Ryuji Sugimoto, a name unfamiliar to Yoshiko. She had read about one-half of the serial episode when her noodles were served and she put the paper aside. But first Yoshiko wrote down in her notebook the name and address of the newspaper and publisher. She also remembered that the name of the story she had been reading was The Brigands. Under the title there was a notation that it was the 54th installment of the serial. The newspaper was dated the 18th. Yes, that day had been the 18th of February.

It was about seven minutes before three when Yoshiko left the restaurant and walked around the town. The square in the middle was crowded with people. Above their heads fluttered white banners printed with the words: Welcome Home, Minister Sato. A new cabinet had been formed the previous month and Yoshiko realized that the name on the banner was that of a local diet member who had been appointed one of the new ministers.

Then suddenly there was a stirring in the crowd and the people became agitated. Some of them cried, “Banzai!” A great clapping arose. People who were walking some distance away ran to join the crowd.

The speech began. A man had mounted a platform and his mouth was moving. The winter sun struck his bald head. A large white rose was pinned to his breast. The crowd became silent but at times the applause was thunderous.

Yoshiko looked around. A man standing near her was also watching the scene and he too was not listening to the speech. He seemed to have his way blocked by the crowd.

Yoshiko stole a look at the man’s profile. He had a broad forehead, sharp eyes, and a high-bridged nose. There had been a time when she had thought of them as an intelligent brow, trustworthy eyes, and a handsome nose. But that memory was now an empty one. The spell the man held over her, however, remained the same as it had been before.

The speech ended and the minister descended from the platform. The crowd began to disperse. An open space appeared in the crowd and Yoshiko began to walk. The man also began to walk away—with another person.

The Koshin newspaper arrived five days later. Three days’ issues came together. There was a polite note thanking Yoshiko for her subscription.

As she had requested, the subscription began with the issue of the 19th. Yoshiko opened it. She turned to the local news. A robbery had occurred. Someone had died in a landslide. Dishonesty had been exposed in the Farmers Cooperative. Elections for assemblymen had begun. There was a large photo of Minister Sato in front of Kofu station.

Yoshiko opened the issue of the 20th. There was nothing special in it. She looked at the issue of the 21st. Here too there was only the usual news. She threw the papers into the corner of the closet. They could be used later for wrapping paper.

The newspaper arrived by mail daily after that. Her name and address were mimeographed on the brown kraft-paper wrapper. After all, she was now a monthly subscriber.

Every morning she went to the mailbox in the apartment house to get her paper and slowly read it from beginning to end. There was nothing which attracted her special attention. Disappointed, Yoshiko threw the papers in the closet.

This was repeated for ten days. And every day she was disappointed. In spite of this, she was always filled with anticipation before cutting the brown wrapper.

On the fifteenth day a change occurred. It wasn’t an article in the paper but an unexpected postcard she received. The card was signed by Ryuji Sugimoto. Yohiko remembered seeing that name somewhere. It wasn’t someone close to her, but she had a clear recollection of it. Yoshiko turned the postcard over. The handwriting was almost indecipherable, but managing to read it, she immediately knew who it was.

“I understand you are reading my novel, The Brigands, which is being serialized in the Koshin newspaper and I would like to thank you for your interest.”

No doubt someone had told the author that she had subscribed to the paper because she wanted to read his story. The author had evidently been touched and had sent a card of thanks.

It was a small change from the daily newspaper routine. It was something different, however, from what she had expected. She hadn’t been reading the novel—like the handwriting on the postcard, it was probably poor.

But every day the paper arrived promptly. Of course, this was only natural because it had been paid for in advance.

One morning, nearly a month after she had subscribed to the paper, she glanced over the various items of local news. The head of the Farmers Cooperative had fled. A bus had fallen from a cliff and fifteen people had been injured. A mountain fire had destroyed three acres. The bodies of a man and woman who had committed suicide had been found at Rinunkyo.

Yoshiko read the report about the double suicide. The bodies had been discovered in the forest in Rinunkyo. The person who had found them was an inspector of the Forestry Bureau. Both bodies were partly decomposed. It was about a month since death and the bodies were partially skeletonized. Their identity was still unknown. The valley, with its crags and deep gorge, was famous as a suicide spot.

Yoshiko folded the paper, lay down, and pulled the quilt up to her chin. She gazed at the ceiling. This apartment was old. The boards in the dark ceiling were on the verge of rotting. Vacantly Yoshiko continued to stare.

In the following day’s paper there was a report on the identity of the dead couple. The man was a 35-year-old guard at the Toyo Department Store in Tokyo; the woman, aged 22, was a clerk at the same store. The man had a wife and children. It was seemingly an ordinary, run-of-the-mill case of double suicide.

Yoshiko raised her eyes from the paper. Her face was devoid of expression—emotionless and at the same time, peaceful.

Three days later she received a postcard from the circulation department of the Koshin paper.

“Your subscription has ended. We hope you will renew your subscription to our paper.”

Yoshiko wrote back: “The novel has lost its interest for me and I do not wish to continue my subscription.”

On her way to the club, where she worked as a hostess, she mailed the postcard. As she walked on, it occurred to her that the author of The Brigands would probably be disappointed. “I shouldn’t have written that,” she thought.

Ryuji Sugimoto read the subscriber’s postcard which had been forwarded to him by the Koshin newspaper and it displeased him considerably.

This subscriber was the same person who had taken the paper because she had found his novel interesting. At that time too the paper had forwarded her letter to him. He was sure he had sent her a note of thanks. But now she was saying that the novel had lost its interest, so she was discontinuing her subscription.

“These women readers—they’re so fickle,” Sugimoto said angrily.

Since The Brigands was written for a mass market, the primary purpose had been pure entertainment; nevertheless, he had taken considerable time and care in writing it, and was confident it was not hackneyed or dull.

Sugimoto laughed bitterly, but gradually he became angry again. He felt as though he were being made a fool of. As a matter of fact, the story was better now than when she had first expressed a desire to read it because it was “interesting.” The plot was now more complicated and the characters were engaged in a series of colorful encounters. Even he was pleased with the way the story had developed. He expected it to be well-received, and that was all the more reason he found this capricious woman so annoying.

This is really unpleasant, he thought, and for two days he couldn’t rid himself of the bad taste in his mouth. On the third day the hurt had faded, but it still remained in his subconscious. Occasionally it would flicker through his mind. Because he had worked so hard on the story, he felt worse than if a professional had criticized him. Besides, even though it might seem exaggerated, he felt he had lost prestige with the paper.

Sugimoto shook his head, stood up from his desk, and went out for a walk.

That woman began to read my novel in the paper midway. Now, where did she first see it?

The Koshin newspaper was sold only in Yamanashi prefecture, not in Tokyo. So she couldn’t have seen it in Tokyo. Therefore, that woman named Yoshiko Shioda, of Tokyo, must have been in Yamanashi at one time.

If that was so, there was no reason why a person who had taken the trouble to subscribe to a paper because she had found the serial interesting would have dropped her subscription after one month. Especially since the novel was undeniably more interesting now than before.

The more he thought about it, the odder it appeared. Obviously the real reason for subscribing to the paper was not to read his novel. She must have used that as an excuse; she was really looking for something else. And because she found it, she no longer needed the paper.

Sugimoto rose from the grass and hurried home. Ideas were whirling through his head.

When he got home, he took the original letter from Yoshiko Shioda out of his file.

“I would like to subscribe to your newspaper. Enclosed is my payment. The serialized novel, The Brigands, in your paper looks interesting and I want to read it. I would like my subscription to begin from the issue of February 19th.”

The handwriting was neat and precise. But that was beside the point. The puzzling thing was why she specified that the subscription should start two days prior to the date of her letter. In quick cases, newspapers carry news of the previous day. The Koshin did not publish an afternoon paper. Therefore, if she wanted to get the paper from the 19th, it meant she was looking for news of something that had happened from the 18th on.

He had copies of the paper which the company sent him daily. He opened them on his desk. Starting with the one dated February 19, he looked carefully through it. He read the local news and, just to be sure, he also looked at the tourist ads.

He decided to limit his search to something which would connect Yamanashi prefecture with Tokyo. He looked at the various items. During the month of February nothing fitted into this category. He started going through the March papers. Up to the 5th there was still nothing.

The same through the 10th. The 13th, the 14th. Then, on the 16th, he found the following story:

“On March 15, at two o’clock, a member of the Forestry Bureau discovered the bodies of a man and woman who had committed suicide. The bodies were partly decomposed and it has been about one month since the time of death. The man was wearing a gray overcoat and navy suit and was approximately 37 years old. The woman had on an overcoat of large brown checks and a suit of the same color and was about 23. The only thing found was a handbag with women’s cosmetics in it. It is assumed that they were from Tokyo because a round-trip ticket from Shinjuku to Kofu was found in the woman’s bag.”

The identity of the couple appeared in the next day’s paper. “The man found at Rinunkyo was a guard at the Toyo Department Store, named Sakitsugu Shoda (35) and the woman was Umeko Fukuda (22), a clerk at the same store. The man was married and had children.”

“This is it.” Sugimoto uttered the words without thinking. There was nothing else to link Tokyo and Yamanashi. On seeing this paper, the issue of March 17th, Yoshiko Shioda had decided to stop her subscription. There was no doubt in Sugimoto’s mind that this was the reason she had started taking the local paper. It was the type of news that would hardly have appeared in the Tokyo metropolitan papers.

“Wait a minute, though,” he thought.

Yoshiko Shioda specified that the paper was to start from February 19th. The bodies were discovered on March 15, approximately one month after the deaths. Therefore, the suicides had occurred around February 18. Time-wise, it tallied. She knew about this double suicide. She subscribed to the paper so she could learn when the bodies were discovered. But why?

Ryuji Sugimoto suddenly found himself becoming deeply interested in Yoshiko Shioda.

He studied her address on the postcard that had been forwarded to him. . .

Three weeks later, Ryuji Sugimoto received an answer to his inquiry from the private detective agency.

Ryuji Sugimoto read the report twice and thought to himself, “When they put their minds to it, they do a remarkable job. They certainly managed to find out a lot, even that Yoshiko Shioda and Sakitsugu Shoda had been having an affair.”

There was now no doubt that Yoshiko Shioda was somehow involved in the double suicide of Sakitsugu Shoda and Umeko Fukuda, and that therefore she knew they had committed suicide in the forest at Rinunkyo. One took the Chuo Line to Kofu to get to Rinunkyo. Where had she seen them off? At Shinjuku station in Tokyo or at Kofu station?

He thumbed through the train schedule. He saw that there were about 20 special express and express trains from the Shinjuku Terminus to the Kofu district daily.

According to the private investigator’s report, Yoshiko had left her apartment that day at around 11:30, so it was fair to assume that she had got on the one o’clock special express Azusa #3 which reaches Kofu at 2:53. From Kofu station to the scene of the suicide at Rinunkyo, by bus and on foot, would have taken a full hour. Shoda and Umeko, the suicide couple, would have finally reached the fateful spot just as the winter sun was about to set. Before his eyes, Ryuji Sugimoto could visualize the figures of the two in the craggy ravine, surrounded by woods.

Until their decomposed bodies were found approximately a month later, and the news was reported, only Yoshiko had known about them. She had been reading the local papers to learn when the deaths would come to light. Just what was her part in the whole affair?

Once again he went through the February 19th issue of the Koshin paper. Landslide. Dishonesty in the Farmers Cooperative. Election of town officials. There was nothing exceptional. There was a large photo of the local diet member, Minister Sato, in front of Kofu station.

Sugimoto pushed aside the manuscript which was due the next day, and holding his head in his hands, he sat, sinking deeply into thought. He never dreamed that one reader’s rejection of his novel could have involved him in detective work like this. . .

Yoshiko was one of several hostesses at the Bar Rubicon, a club in the Shibuya district. She was busy taking care of customers when one of the girls said to her, “Yoshiko, someone is asking for you.”

Yoshiko stood up. She went to the booth and there sat a plump man of about 42, with long hair. She had never seen him before and he was not a regular of the club.

“You’re Yoshiko Shioda?” he asked with a smile.

Yoshiko had not changed her name on coming to this club, but when the man addressed her by her full name she was surprised. In the dim indirect lighting, even though there was a lamp on the table with a pink shade, she searched his face, but she could not remember having seen it before.

“Yes, I am. And what’s your name?” asked Yoshiko, seating herself beside him.

“Let me introduce myself,” he said, taking a slightly bent name card from his pocket. When she saw the name, Ryuji Sugimoto, printed there she gasped.

Watching her face closely, he said, with a little laugh, “Yes, I’m the fellow who is writing The Brigands which you have been reading. The Koshin paper told me about your subscription and I dropped you a note of thanks. I happened to be in your neighborhood yesterday, so I stopped by your apartment. You were out but I was told you worked here. So tonight I came here—I wanted to thank you in person.”

Yoshiko thought, “Is that all? So he was just curious. I never read his story seriously anyway. What a character to be so pleased by one person’s interest in his story!”

“Oh, how kind of you to take the trouble, sir. I’ve enjoyed your novel so much,” gushed Yoshiko, moving closer to him.

“Don’t mention it,” replied Sugimoto good-naturedly; then, looking around him, he remarked, “This is a nice club.” Next he looked at Yoshiko sheepishly and mumbled, “You’re a beautiful girl.”

With a sidelong glance at him Yoshiko poured beer into his glass and smiled. “Really? I’m so happy you came tonight. You can stay a while, can’t you?”

So he still believed she was reading his novel. He couldn’t be a very popular writer if he made such a fuss about meeting one of his readers. Or maybe he was impressed because she happened to be a woman.

Sugimoto evidently couldn’t drink very much because after one bottle of beer he became quite flushed. Of course, Yoshiko was drinking too, and several of the other hostesses had joined them, so by this time there were half a dozen bottles on the table, as well as some snacks.

The girls kept calling him “sir,” which evidently pleased him, and he stayed for more than an hour.

Just after he left, Yoshiko noticed a brown envelope on the cushion where he had been sitting. She picked it up, and thinking it was his, went to look for him; but he was nowhere in sight.

“He’ll be back. I’ll just keep it for him,” Yoshiko thought and slipped the envelope into the bosom of her kimono, completely forgetting about it.

She became aware of it again after she returned to her apartment. As she undid her obi, the brown envelope fluttered to the floor. Remembering, she picked it up. There was nothing written on the outside of the envelope. It was unsealed and seemed to contain only a newspaper clipping. She decided to look at it.

It was a newspaper clipping about a quarter of a page in size and neatly folded. Yoshiko unfolded it and her eyes widened in surprise. It was the photo of Minister Sato in front of Kofu station, the photo from the Koshin newspaper.

Over the dark crowd were several white banners. The minister could be seen above the heads of the people. It was a scene that Yoshiko had actually witnessed, exactly as it was in the photo.

Yoshiko stared into space. Her hand shook slightly. One of the cords of her kimono still hung loosely from her waist.

Was this just a coincidence? Or had Ryuji Sugimoto intentionally left it in the club for her to see? She became confused. Her feet were tired, so she sat down on the floor. She didn’t even bother to put down her sleeping mat. What did Sugimoto know? She began to feel that he had left the envelope for some special purpose. Her intuition told her so. This was no coincidence. No, it certainly was no coincidence.

Ryuji Sugimoto, whom she had taken to be a pleasant popular novelist, suddenly began to appear in an entirely different light.

Two days later Sugimoto snowed up at the club again and asked for Yoshiko.

“Why, good evening, sir,” she smiled, sitting beside him; but her face felt stiff.

He smiled back and he didn’t look at all like a person with an ulterior or sinister motive.

“You forgot this last time you were here.” Yoshiko took the brown envelope from her handbag. The smile remained on her lips, but her eyes watched his expression closely.

He took the envelope and put it in his pocket. There was no change in his expression, but for a moment his narrowed eyes seemed to glint as he met her gaze. Then he quickly looked away and raised the foaming glass of beer to his lips.

Yoshiko felt restless, nervous, apprehensive.

The relationship between Yoshiko and Sugimoto deepened quickly after that. On the days when he didn’t come to the club, she called to invite him. She also wrote to him, not the usual letters a hostess would write to her customers to solicit their continued patronage, but very personal letters.

Anyone looking at them would assume theirs was an intimate relationship. Considering the actual number of times he came to the Bar Rubicon, the liaison formed swiftly. Proof of how far it had developed was shown one day when Yoshiko approached Sugimoto, saying, “Couldn’t we go away somewhere together? I could take a day off.”

Sugimoto looked delighted. “If it’s with you, I’d love to. Where would you like to go?”

“Wherever it’s nice and quiet. How about some place in Izu? We could leave early in the morning.”

“Izu? That sounds better and better.”

“Look now, I’m only suggesting a short excursion.”

“What do you mean?” he asked in a disappointed tone.

“I don’t want to get too deeply involved—not yet. So let’s just make this a pleasure trip. To make sure there is no misunderstanding, why don’t you invite a girl friend to go with us? I’m sure you have one.”

“I won’t say that I don’t,” Sugimoto said.

“I’d like to get to know her. That’s all right with you, isn’t it?”

Sugimoto frowned.

“You don’t seem very happy.”

“There’s no point in going if I can’t be alone with you.”

“Oh, please. That can be the next time.”

“Do you promise?”

Yoshiko took Sugimoto’s hand in hers and drew her fingernail lightly over his palm.

“Okay. If that’s the way you want it, that’s how it’ll be, this time.” Then Sugimoto added, “We might as well decide on the date and time now.”

“What? Oh, all right. Wait a minute.”

Yoshiko went to the office to borrow the train schedule.

Sugimoto arranged for a woman editor he knew to accompany them. He didn’t give her any special reason. Because she knew and trusted him, she accepted the invitation promptly.

Ryuji Sugimoto, Yoshiko Shioda, and Fujiko Sakata, the editor, arrived in Ito on the Izu Peninsula just before noon. The plan was to cross the mountains from there, over to Shuzenji, and return by way of Mishima.

Sugimoto wondered what was about to happen. He knew there was danger and his nerves were tense. It was an effort to look as though he suspected nothing.

Yoshiko appeared composed. She held a plastic-covered parcel in one hand. It probably contained a lunch she had packed. The three of them looked for all the world as if they were off on a happy picnic excursion. The two women seemed to be getting along fine.

The bus left Ito and began to climb the mountains. As they climbed, the town of Ito looked sunken and small, and before them spread Sagami Bay, the water purplish in the late fall and blending with the clouds in the distance.

“It’s absolutely lovely,” commented Fujiko.

Gradually the ocean disappeared from sight as the bus crossed the summit of the Amagi Mountains.

“Let’s get off here,” suggested Yoshiko.

The bus halted at a bus stop deep in the mountains.

Yoshiko suggested that they explore the area and then take either the next bus or the one on to Shuzenji.

“Wouldn’t you like to see where this goes?” asked Yoshiko, pointing to a mountain path leading into the forest. She looked cheerful and her forehead shone with perspiration.

In some places the path was deeply rutted. The shades of green of the different trees were breathtaking. The silence was so intense that it was oppressive.

They came to a thicket of shrubs. Here there was a break in the forest and the sun poured down onto the grass.

“We can take a rest here,” said Yoshiko, and Fujiko agreed.

Sugimoto looked around. He realized they had gone deep into the woods. Seldom would anyone come here, he thought. In his imagination he saw the forest in Rinunkyo.

“You can sit here,” said Yoshiko to Sugimoto, spreading the plastic wrapper she had undone from her parcel for him to sit on.

The two women sat down on their handkerchiefs and stretched their legs straight out in front of them.

The editor said, “I’m so hungry.”

“Then why don’t we have our lunch?” asked Yoshiko.

The two women unwrapped the lunches they had brought. Fujiko had made sandwiches. Yoshiko had prepared Sushi. These were placed on the ground along with three bottles of fruit juice.

Taking a sandwich, Fujiko said to the others, “Please have some.”

“Thank you, I will,” said Yoshiko, taking a sandwich, and added, “I made some Sushi and was about to eat it.”

“Watch out, Fujiko!” shouted Sugimoto, striking the Sushi from her fingers. His face had turned white.

“There’s poison in it!”

Fujiko looked at him dumfounded.

Sugimoto stared at Yoshiko’s pale face. She looked back fiercely and didn’t lower her gaze. Her eyes flashed.

“Yoshiko, this is how you killed those two at Rinunkyo, isn’t it? You’re the one who made it look like suicide.”

Yoshiko bit her trembling lip. She looked ghastly.

Stammering in his excitement, Sugimoto continued, “On February 18th you invited Sakitsugu Shoda and Umeko Fukuda to go to Rinunkyo with you. You poisoned them just as you intended to poison us now, then returned alone. No one would have dreamed they had been murdered. That area is famous for suicides, so it was a perfect setup. People would just think, ‘What? Another suicide?’ and not give it a second thought. That was what you were counting on.”

Yoshiko remained silent. Fujiko was staring wide-eyed. It seemed as if the slightest movement would tear the air.

“You accomplished your purpose. But there was just one thing that troubled you,” Sugimoto went on. “You were worried about what would happen to the bodies. You left when they collapsed, but you wanted to know the final outcome. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have been able to rest, isn’t that so? They say a criminal usually returns to the scene of his crime. You chose to do that through a newspaper. Or maybe you were worried whether the police would call it a suicide or suspect murder. But such a trifling incident was unlikely to appear in the Tokyo papers, so you subscribed to a Yamanashi paper, where Rinunkyo is located.

“That was smart, Yoshiko, but you made two mistakes. You thought you had to give a reason for subscribing to the paper. So you said you wanted to read my novel. You shouldn’t have done that. That’s what made me suspicious. The other mistake you made was in ordering the paper from the 19th. Therefore, I guessed that something had happened on the previous day, on the 18th.

“My inquiries revealed that you hadn’t gone to the club that day. Using my imagination along with the facts, I decided that you must have taken the 1:06 express train from Shinjuku. This train arrives in Kofu at 2:53. You would have to go to Rinunkyo from there, but it just so happened that the local diet member, Minister Sato, was making a speech to a throng of people at that very time. This was reported in the paper, with a photo. I was sure you would have seen it. So I decided to test you with that photo.

“I had a private detective investigate you and Sakitsugu Shoda, and it became clear that you and he were involved with each other. And Shoda was also involved with Umeko Fukuda, the other girl. If they were made to look like a double suicide, it wouldn’t cause much of a stir. As I became more and more convinced that my reasoning was correct, I purposely left that photo of Sato for you to see. I knew it would make you suspicious of me. In other words, I wanted you to know that I was testing you. It must have made you nervous, and then you probably became afraid of me. Now it was my turn to wait for you to make the next move. You didn’t fail me.

“You suddenly became more friendly and finally, this invitation today. You insisted I bring a girl along. That’s because if I were found dead by myself, it wouldn’t look like a suicide. If Fujiko and I had eaten your Sushi, the poison you put in it would have acted immediately. You could have left us here. Three minus one—that would leave another couple in the mountains of Izu who had evidently committed double suicide. People would be shocked to learn that we two had been so intimate. My wife would probably hide my ashes in a closet.”

Suddenly a laugh erupted. Yoshiko Shioda threw back her head and laughed. Suddenly the laughter died and Yoshiko spoke sharply.

“I must say, you really are a fiction writer! You couldn’t have made up a better story. So you claim that this Sushi is poisoned?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then let’s see if it will kill me. I’ll eat it all myself. Watch me. If there is poison in it, it should take about three or four minutes to kill me. If it’s a slower-acting poison, I’ll be in agony.”

Yoshiko took the box of Sushi from the shocked Fujiko and began to stuff the food into her mouth.

Sugimoto watched fascinated. He couldn’t utter a sound.

There were seven or eight pieces of Sushi in the box. One by one Yoshiko chewed them and swallowed.

“There, I ate them all. Thanks to you, I’m full. Now we’ll see if I drop dead.”

And so saying, she lay down full length on the grass.

The warm sun played on her face. Her eyes were closed. A nightingale was singing nearby. Time passed. Sugimoto and Fujiko didn’t say a word. More time passed.

Yoshiko seemed to be sleeping. She didn’t stir. But, from the corner of her eye, tears made a track down her cheek. Sugimoto was tempted to speak to her, but at that moment she jumped up. It was like a spring uncoiling.

“It’s been enough,” she said, glaring at Sugimoto. “If the Sushi had been poisoned, I would be dead now, or in agony. Yet here I am, perfectly normal. Is this proof enough that you’ve let your imagination run away with you? You should be more careful about making such wild claims!”

So saying, Yoshiko collected the lunch box and bottles and tied them up into a parcel, stood up, and shook the grass from her skirt.

“I’m going back. Goodbye.”

Yoshiko strode back down the path. Her step was firm. Soon her figure was lost in the tangle of branches.

Sugimoto received the following letter from Yoshiko Shioda.

“You were completely right. I did do it. It is true. I am the person who killed those two people at Rinunkyo. Why did I do it? Well, there was no other way, was there? It was just the usual story of a man and two women.

“The way he died is just as you deduced. When I invited the two of them to go with me to Rinunkyo, Shoda was delighted at the prospect of such a picnic. No doubt it gave him a perverse sense of pleasure to be accompanied by his two mistresses.

“I reserved seats on the 1:16 express at one o’clock. I didn’t want anyone we might know to see the three of us together. I had about thirty minutes before the other two arrived. During that time I went to a little restaurant in front of the station and had some noodles and that’s when I saw your novel in the paper. When I met them, Sato was making a speech in the square.

“At Rinunkyo I gave Shoda and Umeko some sweet cakes that I had made, in which I had put potassium cyanide. They died almost immediately. I got rid of the remaining cakes and returned, leaving the bodies there. Everything went perfectly.

“What a relief! The only misgiving I had was whether the police would suspect murder. Therefore, I decided to take the local newspaper, using your novel as the pretext for subscribing to it. Because of that I ended up arousing your suspicions.

“So I decided to kill you. In the same way I had killed Shoda.

“But you saw through my plan. You suspected I had poisoned the Sushi, but actually the poison was in the fruit juice. I thought you would drink the juice after eating the Sushi to quench your thirst.

“I brought the bottles of fruit juice back with me. They won’t be wasted. I will drink one now...”

0 notes

catkittens · 7 months

Text

Glyn Frewer: Tyto and Brila

The following dusk Tyto glided from the pines, eager for food. His flight had used a lot of energy and he was ravenous. He had not reached the foot of the hill before he heard the challenging cry of another male barn owl. Startled, Tyto turned towards the sound. Never in the previous time he had spent in the area had his sovereignty been put to the test by another of his species. Tyto swept around the hill with his facial disc feathers puffed out to give him his most fearsome look. As he rounded the fir trees in the half light, a barn owl crossed the gap on the hillside. Tyto veered towards it, then turned and circled, puzzled. The owl was a female and not the owl that had voiced the challenge. This put the situation in a different light. Far from sovereign of the area, Tyto was the trespasser, for a pair of his own kind had settled here. Tyto glided towards the tree where he could see the female perched. She far, he had not glimpsed the male.

The female was a yearling like himself, with prominent dark flecks on her breast feathers giving her a speckled look more like that of a tawny owl. Her head swivelled to look at him, her eyes luminescent in the shadow. Tyto flew to the branch above her and her head flexed around so that she was looking directly behind her. Tyto's grunts were answered by a soft mewing that sent a strange, unfamiliar tremble through his body. In that second of time, Tyto's maleness asserted itself in every cell of his body, and his purpose in life was never again that of a young owl seeking only to hunt and survive.

When the challenging cry of the male rang through the pine-black shadows, it was a different Tyto who screeched his answer. No longer trespasser, no longer immature, no longer undecided, Tyto flew out to combat for a mate as well as territory.

* * * *

The two owls knew each other instantly. Tyto recognized the bright orange facial colouring and the thick tarsal tufts of the owl he had fought on the boathouse roof. And Gar recognized the young owl he had already chased and dismissed. With a confident screech, he swept towards Tyto, eager to repeat his earlier success.

The initial confrontation was a testing. Both birds, now well matched in size, flew headlong on a straight collision course, stalling within inches of each other at the last split second so that only their wing tips met. But the second stoop was in deadly earnest, and they collided in mid-air, judging the impact to a nicety, each seeking with claw and beak to injure the other. The air was filled with the thudding of wing-beats, harsh angry cries and a storm-burst of feathers. Locked in combat, the two birds tumbled over and over in the night air down to the long wet grass where they rolled and squawked, stabbed and scratched, sending up a spray of silver dew.

Then, as suddenly as the fight began, it was over. Tyto's flailing claw found a hold on the flank of his enemy and Gar's skin was lacerated deeply. Letting out a croak of pain and chattering with rage and defeat, Gar broke free of Tyto and, blood running down his leg, the older owl beat a hasty retreat over the field. Relentlessly Tyto pursued him, but his aerial buffeting was mocking more than damaging. Behind him, a silent witness to the rout, the female, Brila, flew on a wavering course, anxious to keep both owls within sight and sound.

The river was the natural boundary. Gar, diving and swooping to avoid Tyto's stronger pursuit, flew low over the rushes seeking cover under the hanging willows on the far bank. With a final sharp screech of victory, Tyto turned away and winged slowly back to the shelling Brila. When he reached her he acknowledged her with a low cry, then both birds returned to the pines. Tyto landed heavily, exhausted but unhurt, while Brila swooped below the tree to snatch an incautious shrew. She took it to the next tree and devour it.

For two hours Tyto did not move, except to preen his ruffled feathers. Then his hunger drove him out again across the field. The sight of the river earlier had sparked a memory of successful hunting, and he headed there again, registering familiar landmarks. He reached the willows and the reeds. There was no sign of Gar. Two male water voles squeaked in angry combat as they fought, writhing in the water-filled cattle hoofprints on the mud-bank. Tyto dived and lifted both animals in his talons. One, struggling, fell back into midstream, where it dived immediately. Tyto landed on the water tower and smashed the skull of the other with his beak. He swallowed it partially and sat with the tail limp from his mouth. Minutes later, it was gone. A lift of his wings and he was off again, sealing the fate of a field mouse at the foot of the tower.

Long before dawn, Tyto's hunger was appeased. His last catch, a young rabbit, was left half eaten in the lane. Brila had already returned to the roost in the water tower which she had shared for several nights with Gar. Although the two had shared, the season had not been ripe, the winter cold too recent, for Brila to have responded to Gar's half-hearted attempts at courtship. No doubt, if Tyto's arrival had not disturbed things, she and Gar would have mated.

For Brila and Tyto, the mating urge which grew stronger as the spring nights passed was outside their experience. Both birds being young, their courtship owed nothing to mimicry or imitation of their elders. The unfamiliar urgings awakenings in Tyto were from the dawn of Time. Through him, Nature took its course, haltingly experimental, unhelped by confidence.

His awkward posturings whenever he approached Brila were rebuffed with sharp pecks, and her feathers rose aggressively. Yet Tyto would not accept these signs of antagonism from her as he would have done from any other barn owl. When on one occasion he approached her and she retaliated by fluttering and sparring with her talons, he did not retreat. Instead, he responded by acting aggressively himself. lowering his head, dilating his facial feathers and thrusting at her with his bill. Since Brila was an inch or so bigger than he was, he would have come off badly had a real combat developed, but apart from angry clacking of her mandibles as she parried his thrusts, the hen bird made no attempt to attack.

The two owls shared several roosts, sometimes the tower, sometimes the hole Tyto had used before in the dead Scots pine, and one very warm night they roosted in the canopy of ivy in the fork of a giant elm. Each night they quartered the countryside within a two-mile radius. There was no need to seek further since the food supply was plentiful. Gradually, it seemed to Tyto that Brila's rejection of his attention was becoming less determined.

Tyto persevered in his immature courtship. In the peak of condition, he was handsome, though his first real adult molt was yet to come. His breast, exceptionally pale even as a fledgling, was now snowy white with none of the usual buff shading. His wings and back, amber-yellow shaded with ash grey, were flecked with a striking pattern of brown and white markings. His broken pinion feather had fallen away, soon to be replaced by a perfect one, but the small dislocation would be with him for life and the gap was still there between the feathers. The broad soft feathers of his tail were again more white than yellow, barred with tawny brown. Grey and yellow featherlets formed a heart shape around the startlingly white down of his face, and his black eyes contrasted dramatically. He spent more time preening now, and was clearly conscious of his fine appearance, for his posturing in front of Brila took on a swagger of natural pride.

Brila, in contrast, was by nature less handsome. She was bigger than Tyto, but her plumage lacked the sheen of her male suitor. The whiteness was much less apparent, and her pale cram breast was edged by noticeable black flecks. Her back and wings were deeper in colour, too, a rich buff with darker grey. To Tyto she was everything desirable, but already he had noticed her strange hunched posture and the fits of violent trembling to which she was subject.

Then on a night when the air was rich with the scent of pine and insects danced in frenetic clouds over field and river, the youthful courtship took another turn.

The quarter moon had risen when Tyto returned to the pine with a water vole in his bill. Brila was in the hole, huddled and silent. She gave a low cry as Tyto arrived. Tyto approached her step by step, and his time she made no move of rejection. Motionless, she waiting until Tyto was beside her. His head made quick bowing motions and he shook himself, ruffling his feathers. He turned his face and rubbed it against the side of her head. She responded, bowing with him so that their faces stayed pressed together. Brila made a halfhearted peck at the vole but did not take it. Side by side, they sat uttering low cries, Tyto still with the vole in his beak. Then he stepped away, deposited the carcass on the branch outside and flew off, renewing the hunt.

The next night, Tyto repeated the performance, this time with no offering. Again Brila responded, snapping her bill and uttering a bubbling, chattering sound. Tyto, too, clicked his beak while he stretched his neck up and down as though trying hard to swallow. Both birds ruffled out their feathers as if putting on a display of aggression, and when Tyto began to sway his whole body from side to side, Brila followed suit. Now she was the one to edge closer to Tyto and the clacking sound turned into a churring snore. As on the previous night, the rubbed their heads, together, lowering and rising themselves while clicking their bills. Finally, Tyto did something he had not done before: he stretched forward and seized Brila by her neck feathers, shaking her from side to side. A loud squawk from the hen owl softened quickly to a chatter of acceptance. Well pleased with his reception, Tyto released her and the two birds stayed together. When Tyto stretched out his wings to fly, Brila followed immediately and the two soared over the pines, scattering the midges, their shadows freezing the shrew foraging among the pine needles into petrified immobility.

Five nights later, as the fierce March gale blew itself out, Brila flew back from the river after an unsuccessful foray and settled in the tower roost. Tyto followed minutes later with a filed vole in his claws. He flew into the crevice where she was waiting. For the eighth night in succession, Tyto repeated his ritual display. Tonight he added something new. He raised and ruffled his feathers, then compressed them again, repeating this many times. His manner too, was more aggressive, just as Brila's was more submissive. When he stretched to rub heads, she took the vole from his beak. Pinning it with a claw she began to devour it. Suddenly, after loud bill clapping, Tyto seized her neck feathers and shoo her as though savaging a prey. When he released her, Brila raised and lowered herself, uttering soft plaintive calls. She was begging Tyto to mount her, and Tyto did so. For several seconds the confined space echoed with the loud beat of mewing, in total submission as the two owls attempted to couple. But the coupling, doomed before it started, failed not only because of immaturity. There was a more deadly reason.

When Tyto stumblingly dismounted, he immediately began to preen his ruffled feathers as though nothing had happened. Brila's behaviour was the opposite. She stretched her neck and preened Tyto's head feathers with her bill. Pressed side to side, the two owls mutually groomed each other, uttering soft cries. Tyto departed only because Brila was overtaken by a violent fit of trembling. Tyto always left her when she suffered these attacks, as though he could tell there was nothing he could do. Brila was slowly dying of poison.

Brila had been born in a cow shed, eight miles north of Merford. The shed was on the land of a farmer who had taken every possible precaution to safeguard his crops and his livelihood. He had liberally dressed the seed with dieldrin before the spring sowing, and when the crops were through, he had sprayed them with a solution containing DDT. Insect pests on his farm, the farmer intended, would never stand a chance. Unwittingly, he was meting out destruction to more than insects.

A small proportion of the spring seed was eaten by the usual seed-eaters, birds and rodents alike; the ground-feeders flocked, sparrows, chaffinches, greenfinches, linnets and pigeons; mice and voles scratched their way to some of the grain. Small quantities of poison went into the bodies of all these creatures. But when the young green shoots showed their heads and the crop spray was applied, much more damage was done. This deadlier poison, though it dispersed gradually in the soil, stayed as a protective coat on the plants. Every bud swallowed by the birds and rodents had poison still on it, a poison that stayed a very long time in all living tissue, scarcely dispersing at all. Every meal, every grain, added one more minute dose of poison to the amount already built up in their systems. To some it brought death, but to most of them it simply slowed their reactions so that they were the first to fall prey to the hawks and the owls. Poisoned rodents and birds, by the score night after night, week after week, were fed to Brila and her sister chick. The parent owls themselves were doomed to sterility and death. Now, a year later, the poison absorbed by Brila had spread throughout her body, finally reaching her brain, causing increasing convulsions.

* * * *

Once the attempt at mating had taken place, Brila's earlier suspicion of Tyto vanished on the night wind and mutual affection grew up between them. The ensuing two weeks were spent in nights of easy hunting and days of companionship and trust. Often now, as the soft rains heralded the approach of April, Tyto would return to Brila in the water tower with an offering of food--sometimes a water vole, a shrew, a mouse, a frong, even once a young grey squirrel. And Brila accepted everything eagerly, devouring it and mewing for me. She made hunting forays of her own less and less now and stayed huddled and disconsolate in the roost.

During the day, Tyto would sit close to Brila and they would groom each other with much bill-clapping and soft calls. Brila's bouts of shivering occurred more frequently and more severely. Sometimes she seemed to lose her balance and staggered, other times her whole body would shake in a spasm of pain.

There was one dawn, however, when their troubles were forgotten. Tyto returned from devouring a newly hatched coot he had discovered in the reeds to find Brila clucking in the corner of the crevice with unfamiliar excitement. Her first egg was laid. She nodded rapidly, drawing Tyto's attention to it, a small white sphere, sterile in any event, but now smashed beneath her tail where she had dropped it. The poison in Brila's system had caused an abnormality to the calcium formation of the eggshell so that it was paper-thin- With the yellow yolk of the life that ws never to be spreading beneath her feet, Brila chittered proudly while Tyto hopped to and fro in excited satisfaction at the greatest feeling of fulfilment he had ever known.

For a night and another day, the two birds cherished the pathetic white object beneath the shivering, dull-eyed Brila. She laid a second egg, but this ws even thinner-shelled and broke on emerging. Even Brila took no pride in this, for she clawed the mess away with desultory scratching. In doing so, she utterly crushed the first egg, and now the situation was apparent to both birds.

That night, the two owls left the nest and the broken remains, though neither bird felt any strong inclination to hunt. That part of Tyto which had been so completely fulfilled was now empty and frustrated. As he listlessly scoured the edge of the wood, it was as though he was hunting from habit more than the need to survive. Eventually, a snuffling shrew crossed a bare patch of ground and was snatched, killed and eaten in seconds.

Brila, too, caught a shrew, then a field vole, but this she left of the branch where she took it. Crying plaintively, she flew to where Tyto was quartering the filed and followed him.

For the next week the two birds went through the motions of their natural routine, roosting by day, hunting by night, in a lacklustre and benumbed fashion. But as spring turned into summer, and the drawn-out evenings proffered plump pickings from the season's crop of new-grown creatures, the two owls responded to Nature's reassuring mood. At least, Tyto responded. Brila, whose shivering bouts had increased in spite of her recent renewal of appetite, began to get worse. In July, the birds tried mating again but Brila, in spite of Tyto's elaborate overtures, this time did not respond. She rejected him savagely, her instinct telling her she would never brood another clutch of eggs, and Tyto quickly dropped his attentions. As the summer wore on, she hunted less, until by August she was eating only the offerings that Tyto brought to her. Day by day Brila grew weaker, barely eating at all.

Towards the end of July, both birds went into the moult which owls and most birds undergo once the breeding season is over. The once-bright feathers,, which had become worn and bedraggled from the ardours of raising their broods, needed replacing with new. In Tyto's case, true to his kind, the feathers fell in regular sequence over the next three weeks, his large wing feathers going first, not pushed out by the new growths as with some birds, but dropping like dead hair as fresh plumes grew alongside. At the same time as his wing feathers changed, so did his tail, the outside feathers falling first, the others going in sequence to the centre until all the old had been replaced. Next, from rump to head, his body feathers dropped as new ones appeared. Bedraggled and half-plucked in appearance, Tyto's spirits were low during his time, and he spent the long days hunched unhappily and the nights embarrassed by his own imperfect flight.

The moult took even more out of Brila, weakened as she already was. For days she had not even eaten the prey that Tyto brought her. On a night in early September, when the first wisps of autumn drifted from the river at dusk, Brila did something she had not done for weeks. When Tyto flew from the tower to hung, she followed at once, as though she knew that this night would be different. Taking off from the ledge, she spiralled almost to the ground before she could coordinate her muscles. Only at the last split second did she stall above the grass and soar in pursuit of Tyto's white form.

Tyto reached the river and found his favourite reed bed. Brila stopped, exhausted, in the willow. She perched on a branch above the flowing streat, her breath a hoarse croak in her throat. As Tyto swooped at--and missed--a diving water vole, a severe convulsion shook the whole of Brila's body. She died as she sat there, toppling slowly as her talons loosened their grip. Her fluttering form fell into the water. Tyto, thinking it another vole diving for its life, did not even turn his head. He never saw the sodden bundle of feathers swirl past the reeds and out of his life. Instead, his keen eyes stayed riveted on a young rabbit in the middle of the field and he winged silently to it. S scream, a second's frenzied kicking and the white wings rose and beat their way back to the tower.

There was no answering cry as he landed. Leaving the rabbin on the ledge outside, for it had been intended as a gift, Tyto called softly. He rose and circled the pines, then flew back to the river. Up and down, the white shape, now silver in the moon's light, now black against the stars, quartered the riverbanks for a mile each way. Back and forth to the silent tower, only the distant yap of a fox mocked his calls. He returned to the willow where the leaves whispered in secret, and across the black rippling water his screech echoed like a soul in torment.

0 notes

catkittens · 7 months

Text

Neil Gaiman

Nicholas Was by Neil Gaiman:

Nicholas Was...

older than sin, and his beard could grow no whiter. He wanted to die.

The dwarfish natives of the Arctic caverns did not speak his language, but conversed in their own, twittering tongue, conducted incomprehensible rituals, when they were not actually working in the factories.

Once every year they forced him, sobbing and protesting, into Endless Night. During the journey he would stand near every child in the world, leave one of the dwarves' invisible gifts by its bedside. The children slept, frozen into time.

He envied Prometheus and Loki, Sisyphus and Judas. His punishment was harsher.

Ho.

0 notes

catkittens · 7 months

Text

Virginia S. Newlin

He Floats Through the Air

There were four of us guys who had saved the money to buy one, but only three of them, almost grown, playing around their mother. I already knew the one I wanted. The littlest. Grey-brown fur, a long fluffy tail, and curly fingers on his hands and feet. he was plaing keep-a-way with a raisin, and when Robert said, 'I have a rabbit cage for mine, Sir' he stopped tossing it and put his head on one side. looking at Robert with eyes like chocolate smartees, as if he were considering what a rabbit cage might be.

'They can't be kept outdoors. They catch cold easily,' said Mr Woolard.

'But flying squirrels live outdoors in Pennsylvania.'

'These have been raised in captivity. They're delicate, Robert.'

Captivity. I hated that word. My little fellow wasn't going to be in captivity--except from Growltiger, my sister's cat. He would live in my room and be my buddy.

'I'm going to put mine in a box,' said Ted.

'A cage is better,' Wooly said (We all called Mr Woolard Wooly, but never to his face. It was meant to be friendly anyway). 'They have sharp squirrel teeth.'

'Do they bite, then?' George asked.

'Not these.' Wooly reached into the cage and picked out my squirrel, put him into George's hand.

'He's soft!' George said.

All of us wanted to hold him, and he was passed around. I could see that he didn't like it. I wanted to yell at them, take him away before he got frightened.

'He's afraid. Let's put him back,' I said.

'Could we see him fly, first?' Robert asked.

'They don't really fly, they glide.' Wooly corrected. 'There's a membrane, running from writst to foot to base of the tail on each side of a flying squirrel's body, that he or she stretches out into a kind of parachute. He can glide as far as eighty feet.'

Wooly put him up on his shoulder, where he sat, his little hands folded on his chest, looking first one of us and then another, exactly like our Headmaster. We all laughed, he was so tiny there, no ore than six inches long, I thought, and didn't look a bit impressed by us, as if he were the King of the Lilliputians deciding to make pets out of a posse of Gullivers. Then, all of a sudden, he took off. He spread out his arms and legs and the skin between them and flew through the air, landing on my shoulder. Out of all the guys, he picked me. Maybe even he knew.

He landed on my shoulder, up against my ear, so soft there. I got a strange feeling down my back, but I laughed with the other guys, only quietly, so I wouldn't scare him. He wasn't scared. He jumped from me to Robert and then to Ted and back to me again and then just sat there. All the guys reached for him, asked if they could have him next.

'Please, Sir. He's the one I want if I get to keep one,' I said. 'I have an old aquarium I can use.'

'How big?' Wooly asked.

I held out my arms to show him the size.

'He seems to have chosen you too, Jeff. You'll have to make a lid for the aquarium, out of screenign to let in air, and you, Robert will have to move your rabbit cage indoors and besure that the mesh is fine enough for such a small animal. You, George and Ted, will have to get busy and fix a suitable home if you want one of the squireels. The first three boys ready will get them. If you're all ready, we'll draw lots. You'll have to bring the homes in for me to see and demonstrate that you understand the proper care of a small animal.'

'Do they have to be caged all the time, Mr Woolard?' George asked.

'Not all the time. They love exercise, and if you are careful, you can let your squirrels play in your room. You may find he's most playfl when you're ready for bed, since flying squrrels are nocturnal, but he'll soon adjust to your habits. There's one thing you must remember, though. Flying squirrels are not like dogs and cats that can be safely be left alone in the house.'

I won't keep you caged all the time, but you'll be safe with me, I promised him in my mind, as Wooly put him back with the others.

As soon as I got home, I went down in teh cellar to make a lid for the aquarium. I used to keep fish in it, but, if they were goldfish, they were forever floating belly-up, and if they were guppies and survived in our water, they did what guppies do and I ran out of containers for them. At one time, I had the aquarium and three fish bowls full of guppies sitting on my windowsill. It was too much work, so, when spring came, I set up a guppy stand on the road, sold them off as if they were lemonade, and was glad to forget them.

But I wouldn't forget my squirrel, come what may, I promised myself, as I measured the aquarium for a lid, sawed four pieces of wood to the right size, nailed them together int oa rectangle, andcut screening to fit. Of course, I didn't do it as fast as it sounds. Even though I'm good at carpentry, I made mistakes, and it takes time to correct or do again.

While I nailed the screening to its wooden frame, I thought of names. Squirrel Nutkin. My mother used to read me that book. Adn there was Sammy Squirrel, but my squirrel needed his own name. I thought of Fluffy Tail and Bright Eyes and Fly Boy, and then I remembered how much he looked like the Headmaster of my school, so I called him Mr Merryweather. That was a good name. When I looked at the Headmaster, it would make me laugh inside, too.

After the lid piece was finished, I decided I would make him a little house, so that he would have some privacy. That took quite a while. I worked after sports every day, made a little wooden house, with a door and a window he could look out of. Mr Woolard said that squirrels can see colours, so I painted it red. It had a roof but no floor. I put wood shavings and grass thickly on the bottom of the aquarium and set his house on top of that so he'd have a comfortable bed. Then I carried the whole business up to the windowsill in my room until it was time. At the end ofthe week I would find out if I got him or not.

My mother bought a wheel for him so he could exercise and Wooly gave us each a list of things that flying squirrels like to eat: apples and raisins and nuts, bird seeds, particularly snflower seed, greens like lettuce or celery leaves and bits of carrot. Hamster food was okay too. I'd forgotten a water bottle. I went to the pet shop and bought one that would fit, and then, on the right day, I took the aquarium to school. Mother would pick me and Mr Merryweather up at four o'clock. If I got him.

I did. Mr Woolard loved his home.

'Good work, Jeff!' he said.

Robert and George got the others, because Ted had nothing to keep one in but a cardboard box. I felt sorry about that and so did Wooly; but then, Ted could have tried harder.

When we got home, I put Mr Merryweather up on my windowsill, close to my desk where I could watch him. He went into his house and stuck his head out the window and then out the door. I gave him some raisins, and he carried them inside one by one. I couldn't tell if he ate them or not, he was so quick about it. I did more watching than homework until supper, and after supper, I brought him down for the family to meet.

'Where's Growltiger?' I asked Susie, my little sister, as I was carrying him down the stairs.

'On my bed,' she said.

'Well, be sure the door's shut tight.'

Everybody loved him. He jumped from my shoulder to Susie's and then to the curtain and then to Dad. Mother said that she felt left out, and then he jumped from Dad to the curtain to Mother to the mantelpiece, hid behind a candlestick and peered at us.

'He's lovely,' Mom said.

And my Dad sang:

He floats though the air with the greatest of ease,

the daring young man on the flying trapeze.

Dad is funny. He made that Mr Merryweather's theme song, and I only minded it once.

We were still watching Mr Merryweather play peek-a-boo from behind the candlestick, so we didn't see Growltiger sneak into the room. The first thing we knew was when this big black shape hurtled through the air and landed on the mantel beside Mr Merryweather, who leaped to the floor, teh cat after him.

Flying squirrels don't move very well on the ground, I could clearly see that and so could Growltiger and Dad said: 'Damn that cat!'

Susie squealed. For some reason, Mr Merryweather wasn't doing his best flying. I thought the cat would get him for sure. They were both so fast that none of us could lay a hand on them.

Growltiger had Mr Merryweather backed into a corner on top of the bookcase, was switching his tail, waiting to pounce, and Dad was climbing up on a chair to grab him when my flying squirrel made his best flight. He soared through the air and landed on my shoulder, putting his little hands on my neck, close to my ear. I thought I heard a very small chattering, as if he was telling me about his escape. I gave Susie what for, and Growltiger was dumped outdoors.

Actually, after they got to know each other, the cat stopped looking at Mr Merryweather as if he were tabby treat. I tried to keep Growltiger out of my room, as you never know, but sometimes he would come in and climb on the windowsill, sit beside the aquarium and stare at m squirrel. Mr Merryweather would run into his house nad peer out the window at Growltiger. First the window and then the door and then the window again, as if it was a game.

I used to tell the other guys about his games. George said that his squirrel didn't play very much, and Robert's had already died, but Mr Merryweather loved games. When I was doing my homework, I would let him out of his aquarium to play around the room, making sure that the door was closed and that Growltiger wasn't hiding under anything. I would put raisins or bits of cookie or chocolate on my desk, and one of my squirrel's games was to steal them from me when I wasn't looking. Long afterwards, I found a pile of raisins in my closet. It made me feel really bad.

Another place he liked to play around was the bathroom. I would take him in with me when I took a shower, make sure to close the toilet and open the closet door so he could play in the towels. he would hide under them, and you could see a tiny head peer at you from the yellow washcloths. Peer at you and then disappear and peer at you from the blue bath-towels instead. When I got into the shoer, I would sometimes find him clinging to the top of the curtain out of range of the water and jumping from there to the towel bar. One time he missed and slid down into the tub where he skidded all around tring to get out again. I put him up on the towel rack, where he shook himself and wriggled his little nose at me as if to say that squirrels hate baths more than anything.

Sometimes I'd leave him in the bathroom alone, since he liked it so much. Hee liked to pop out and surpirse people from under the towels, and he liked to leap from the closet shelves to the vasin to the shower curtain to the windowsill to the toilet seat. I always made sure it was closed, the window and the door too, and that there was no water in the tub. And I never went to bed leaving him there. Except once.

That once, I had a composition to hand in the next day. I hadn't done it when I should have, so I had to work late that night. Mom and Dad went out after saying, 'Do your homework, Jeff.' Susie watched television for a while and then went to bed.

I let Mr Merryweather out of the aquarium, but he had much too much energy for me that night. While I was working, he was playing around the room, and he kept running across the desk, rustling my papers, crawling under them even, and once carrying off my eraser. The composition was hard enough without him distracting me so much. I was making enough mistakes on my own, so I put him in the bathroom to play on his own for a while. Still I kept messing up, having to start over again, and it was very late when I finished. I guess I staggered to the bathroom, staggered back to my room and fell into bed, not remembering my squirrel at all. I was really tired, but that's no excuse.

Mr Merryweather must have been tired too after all his playing, because when Mom and Dad came back home and Mom started her bath, he didn't scramble out of the towers to greet her. Seh went back to her bedroom, where Dad was already asleep, and didn't know anything about my squirrel until she came in to take her bath and found him drowned in the tub.

I woke up with her shaking me. 'Mr Merryweather! Mr Merryweather...'

'What... what...?' I was still on the slump of sleep. And then I remembered where Mr Merryweather was.

'Drowned... in the bathtub. You forgot him.'

I ran into the bathroom, and he was lying on thebath mat, a heap of tiny wet-fur-covered bones. If his mouth had not been so small, I would have tried the mouth to mouth resuscitation that I'd learned in first-aid and life-saving lessons, but how do you breath into a mouth as small as your little finger? Maybe I should have tried. I should have tried anything, but I just stood there looking at his limp body and saying: 'This is horrific!' I also asked 'What happened? What happened?'

'I was running a bath,' Mother said. 'He must have fallen in.'

'Why didn't you save him?'

'I was in my room... Oh, poor little fellow...'

'It's your fault! You didn't watch out for him!'

'I didn't know he was in here. The door wasn't even closed. Oh, Jeff, how could you have left him in the bathroom!'

'You could have thought! Why were you taking a bath so late anyway?'

At that moment, I hated her for it.

'You poor little pet. Poor Mr Merryweather.' My mother was crying.

I went to my room, carrying him in my hand. He was so little and cold. I took a shirt from my drawer and wrapped him in it, laying him on the roof of his house, thinking, I guess, that if he was warmer and where he liked to be, he might come back to life. Then I got in my bed, trying not to picture how Mr Merryweather must have struggled to climb the sides of the bathtub, and cried into my pillow so my mother wouldn't hear me. But she came into my room and knelt by my bed and put her arm around my shoulders.

'It wasn't your fault, Jeff, or mine or anybody's. It's what happens when wild animals are taken from their habitat and kept as house pets. What you must remember, darling, is that, while Mr Merryweather was living here, you made him very happy. That's the most you or anyone could have done.'

Still, I cried myself to sleep.

When Susie found out about the horrible news the next morning, she wouldn't speak to me or go to school. I went, though: I had to hand in that composition, even though I wanted to tear it up. I didn't tell anybody what had happened. i didn't want anybody to know, particularly Mr Woolard, who had previously congratulated me for being the only guy who had kept his flying squirrel alive.

All during school, I kept hoping that a miracle would have happened, that my little fellow would have come to life again while I was gone, but his little body was still there, where I had left it, wrapped up on the roof of his house. Quite stiff.

I found a box for him and laid his body on some pretty material from Mother's scraps of sowing, and I went down in the cellar, got a board and made a marker for his grave. It took me till suppertime to burn in the words with my electric etcher:

'Here lies Mr Merryweather. Loved by all who knew him.'

After supper, we had his funeral. I dug a grave under the crab-apple tree and laid the box in it.

'We must sing a hymn,' Susie said.

'He Floats Through the Air,' Dad suggested. laying his hand on my shoulder.

I was surprised at his bad taste.

'No,' I said. 'Now the Day Is Over, for example.'

So we sang together:

Now the day is over;

night is falling nigh;

shadows of the evening,

creep across the sky.

And Mom said, 'Rest in peace, Mr Merryweather.'

#animals #pets #short story #fiction #student #boys #family #literature

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catkittens · 7 months

Text

Guy de Maupassant: Coco

Throughout the whole countryside the Lucas farn, was known as “the Manor.” No one knew why. The peasants doubtless attached to this word, “Manor,” a meaning of wealth and of splendor, for this farm was undoubtedly the largest, richest and the best managed in the whole neighborhood.

The immense court, surrounded by five rows of magnificent trees, which sheltered the delicate apple trees from the harsh wind of the plain, inclosed in its confines long brick buildings used for storing fodder and grain, beautiful stables built of hard stone and made to accommodate thirty horses, and a red brick residence which looked like a little chateau.

Thanks for the good care taken, the manure heaps were as little offensive as such things can be; the watch-dogs lived in kennels, and countless poultry paraded through the tall grass.

Every day, at noon, fifteen persons, masters, farmhands and the women folks, seated themselves around the long kitchen table where the soup was brought in steaming in a large, blue-flowered bowl.

The beasts-horses, cows, pigs and sheep-were fat, well fed and clean. Maitre Lucas, a tall man who was getting stout, would go round three times a day, overseeing everything and thinking of everything.

A very old white horse, which the mistress wished to keep until its natural death, because she had brought it up and had always used it, and also because it recalled many happy memories, was housed, through sheer kindness of heart, at the end of the stable.

A young scamp about fifteen years old, Isidore Duval by name, and called, for convenience, Zidore, took care of this pensioner, gave him his measure of oats and fodder in winter, and in summer was supposed to change his pasturing place four times a day, so that he might have plenty of fresh grass.

The animal, almost crippled, lifted with difficulty his legs, large at the knees and swollen above the hoofs. His coat, which was no longer curried, looked like white hair, and his long eyelashes gave to his eyes a sad expression.

When Zidore took the animal to pasture, he had to pull on the rope with all his might, because it walked so slowly; and the youth, bent over and out of breath, would swear at it, exasperated at having to care for this old nag.

The farmhands, noticing the young rascal's anger against Coco, were amused and would continually talk of the horse to Zidore, in order to exasperate him. His comrades would make sport with him. In the village he was called Coco-Zidore.

The boy would fume, feeling an unholy desire to revenge himself on the horse. He was a thin, long-legged, dirty child, with thick, coarse, bristly red hair. He seemed only half-witted, and stuttered as though ideas were unable to form in his thick, brute-like mind.

For a long time he had been unable to understand why Coco should be kept, indignant at seeing things wasted on this useless beast. Since the horse could no longer work, it seemed to him unjust that he should be fed; he revolted at the idea of wasting oats, oats which were so expensive, on this paralyzed old plug. And often, in spite of the orders of Maitre Lucas, he would economize on the nag's food, only giving him half measure. Hatred grew in his confused, childlike mind, the hatred of a stingy, mean, fierce, brutal and cowardly peasant.

When summer came he had to move the animal about in the pasture. It was some distance away. The rascal, angrier every morning, would start, with his dragging step, across the wheat fields. The men working in the fields would shout to him, jokingly:

“Hey, Zidore, remember me to Coco.”

He would not answer; but on the way he would break off a switch, and, as soon as he had moved the old horse, he would let it begin grazing; then, treacherously sneaking up behind it, he would slash its legs. The animal would try to escape, to kick, to get away from the blows, and run around in a circle about its rope, as though it had been inclosed in a circus ring. And the boy would slash away furiously, running along behind, his teeth clenched in anger.

Then he would go away slowly, without turning round, while the horse watched him disappear, his ribs sticking out, panting as a result of his unusual exertions. Not until the blue blouse of the young peasant was out of sight would he lower his thin white head to the grass.

As the nights were now warm, Coco was allowed to sleep out of doors, in the field behind the little wood. Zidore alone went to see him. The boy threw stones at him to amuse himself. He would sit down on an embankment about ten feet away and would stay there about half an hour, from time to time throwing a sharp stone at the old horse, which remained standing tied before his enemy, watching him continually and not daring to eat before he was gone.

This one thought persisted in the mind of the young scamp: “Why feed this horse, which is no longer good for anything?” It seemed to him that this old nag was stealing the food of the others, the goods of man and God, that he was even robbing him, Zidore, who was working.

Then, little by little, each day, the boy began to shorten the length of rope which allowed the horse to graze.

The hungry animal was growing thinner, and starving. Too feeble to break his bonds, he would stretch his head out toward the tall, green, tempting grass, so near that he could smell, and yet so far that he could not touch it.

But one morning Zidore had an idea: it was, not to move Coco any more. He was tired of walking so far for that old skeleton. He came, however, in order to enjoy his vengeance. The beast watched him anxiously. He did not beat him that day. He walked around him with his hands in his pockets. He even pretended to change his place, but he sank the stake in exactly the same hole, and went away overjoyed with his invention.

The horse, seeing him leave, neighed to call him back; but the rascal began to run, leaving him alone, entirely alone in his field, well tied down and without a blade of grass within reach.

Starving, he tried to reach the grass which he could touch with the end of his nose. He got on his knees, stretching out his neck and his long, drooling lips. All in vain. The old animal spent the whole day in useless, terrible efforts. The sight of all that green food, which stretched out on all sides of him, served to increase the gnawing pangs of hunger.

The scamp did not return that day. He wandered through the woods in search of nests.

The next day he appeared upon the scene again. Coco, exhausted, had lain down. When he saw the boy, he got up, expecting at last to have his place changed.

But the little peasant did not even touch the mallet, which was lying on the ground. He came nearer, looked at the animal, threw at his head a clump of earth which flattened out against the white hair, and he started off again, whistling.

The horse remained standing as long as he could see him; then, knowing that his attempts to reach the near-by grass would be hopeless, he once more lay down on his side and closed his eyes.

The following day Zidore did not come.

When he did come at last, he found Coco still stretched out; he saw that he was dead.

Then he remained standing, looking at him, pleased with what he had done, surprised that it should already be all over. He touched him with his foot, lifted one of his legs and then let it drop, sat on him and remained there, his eyes fixed on the grass, thinking of nothing. He returned to the farm, but did not mention the accident, because he wished to wander about at the hours when he used to change the horse's pasture. He went to see him the next day. At his approach some crows flew away. Countless flies were walking over the body and were buzzing around it. When he returned home, he announced the event. The animal was so old that nobody was surprised. The master said to two of the men:

“Take your shovels and dig a hole right where he is.”

The men buried the horse at the place where he had died of hunger. And the grass grew thick, green and vigorous, fed by the poor body.

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catkittens · 7 months

Text

J. M. Barrie

GILRAY'S FLOWER-POT.

I charge Gilray's unreasonableness to his ignoble passion for cigarettes; and the story of his flower-pot has therefore an obvious moral. The want of dignity he displayed about that flower-pot, on his return to London, would have made any one sorry for him. I had my own work to look after, and really could not be tending his chrysanthemum all day. After he came back, however, there was no reasoning with him, and I admit that I never did water his plant, though always intending to do so.

The great mistake was in not leaving the flower-pot in charge of William John. No doubt I readily promised to attend to it, but Gilray deceived me by speaking as if the watering of a plant was the merest pastime. He had to leave London for a short provincial tour, and, as I see now, took advantage of my good nature.

As Gilray had owned his flower-pot for several months, during which time (I take him at his word) he had watered it daily, he must have known he was misleading me. He said that you got into the way of watering a flower-pot regularly just as you wind up your watch. That certainly is not the case. I always wind up my watch, and I never watered the flower-pot. Of course, if I had been living in Gilray's rooms with the thing always before my eyes I might have done so. I proposed to take it into my chambers at the time, but he would not hear of that. Why? How Gilray came by this chrysanthemum I do not inquire; but whether, in the circumstances, he should not have made a clean breast of it to me is another matter. Undoubtedly it was an unusual thing to put a man to the trouble of watering a chrysanthemum daily without giving him its history. My own belief has always been that he got it in exchange for a pair of boots and his old dressing-gown. He hints that it was a present; but, as one who knows him well, I may say that he is the last person a lady would be likely to give a chrysanthemum to. Besides, if he was so proud of the plant he should have stayed at home and watered it himself.

He says that I never meant to water it, which is not only a mistake, but unkind. My plan was to run downstairs immediately after dinner every evening and give it a thorough watering. One thing or another, however, came in the way. I often remembered about the chrysanthemum while I was in the office; but even Gilray could hardly have expected me to ask leave of absence merely to run home and water his plant. You must draw the line somewhere, even in a government office. When I reached home I was tired, inclined to take things easily, and not at all in a proper condition for watering flower-pots. Then Arcadians would drop in. I put it to any sensible man or woman, could I have been expected to give up my friends for the sake of a chrysanthemum? Again, it was my custom of an evening, if not disturbed, to retire with my pipe into my cane chair, and there pass the hours communing with great minds, or, when the mood was on me, trifling with a novel. Often when I was in the middle of a chapter Gilray's flower-pot stood up before my eyes crying for water. He does not believe this, but it is the solemn truth. At those moments it was touch and go, whether I watered his chrysanthemum or not. Where I lost myself was in not hurrying to his rooms at once with a tumbler. I said to myself that I would go when I had finished my pipe, but by that time the flower-pot had escaped my memory. This may have been weakness; all I know is that I should have saved myself much annoyance if I had risen and watered the chrysanthemum there and then. But would it not have been rather hard on me to have had to forsake my books for the sake of Gilray's flowers and flower-pots and plants and things? What right has a man to go and make a garden of his chambers?

All the three weeks he was away, Gilray kept pestering me with letters about his chrysanthemum. He seemed to have no faith in me—a detestable thing in a man who calls himself your friend. I had promised to water his flower-pot; and between friends a promise is surely sufficient. It is not so, however, when Gilray is one of them. I soon hated the sight of my name in his handwriting. It was not as if he had said outright that he wrote entirely to know whether I was watering his plant. His references to it were introduced with all the appearance of afterthoughts. Often they took the form of postscripts: "By the way, are you watering my chrysanthemum?" or, "The chrysanthemum ought to be a beauty by this time;" or, "You must be quite an adept now at watering plants." Gilray declares now that, in answer to one of these ingenious epistles, I wrote to him saying that "I had just been watering his chrysanthemum." My belief is that I did no such thing; or, if I did, I meant to water it as soon as I had finished my letter. He has never been able to bring this home to me, he says, because he burned my correspondence. As if a business man would destroy such a letter. It was yet more annoying when Gilray took to post-cards. To hear the postman's knock and then discover, when you are expecting an important communication, that it is only a post-card about a flower-pot—that is really too bad. And then I consider that some of the post-cards bordered upon insult. One of them said, "What about chrysanthemum?—reply at once." This was just like Gilray's overbearing way; but I answered politely, and so far as I knew, truthfully, "Chrysanthemum all right."

Knowing that there was no explaining things to Gilray, I redoubled my exertions to water his flower-pot as the day for his return drew near. Once, indeed, when I rang for water, I could not for the life of me remember what I wanted it for when it was brought. Had I had any forethought I should have left the tumbler stand just as it was to show it to Gilray on his return. But, unfortunately, William John had misunderstood what I wanted the water for, and put a decanter down beside it. Another time I was actually on the stair rushing to Gilray's door, when I met the housekeeper, and, stopping to talk to her, lost my opportunity again. To show how honestly anxious I was to fulfil my promise, I need only add that I was several times awakened in the watches of the night by a haunting consciousness that I had forgotten to water Gilray's flower-pot. On these occasions I spared no trouble to remember again in the morning. I reached out of bed to a chair and turned it upside down, so that the sight of it when I rose might remind me that I had something to do. With the same object I crossed the tongs and poker on the floor. Gilray maintains that instead of playing "fool's tricks" like these ("fool's tricks!") I should have got up and gone at once to his rooms with my water-bottle. What? and disturbed my neighbors? Besides, could I reasonably be expected to risk catching my death of cold for the sake of a wretched chrysanthemum? One reads of men doing such things for young ladies who seek lilies in dangerous ponds or edelweiss on overhanging cliffs. But Gilray was not my sweetheart, nor, I feel certain, any other person's.

I come now to the day prior to Gilray's return. I had just reached the office when I remembered about the chrysanthemum. It was my last chance. If I watered it once I should be in a position to state that, whatever condition it might be in, I had certainly been watering it. I jumped into a hansom, told the cabby to drive to the inn, and twenty minutes afterward had one hand on Gilray's door, while the other held the largest water-can in the house. Opening the door I rushed in. The can nearly fell from my hand. There was no flower-pot! I rang the bell. "Mr. Gilray's chrysanthemum!" I cried. What do you think William John said? He coolly told me that the plant was dead, and had been flung out days ago. I went to the theatre that night to keep myself from thinking. All next day I contrived to remain out of Gilray's sight. When we met he was stiff and polite. He did not say a word about the chrysanthemum for a week, and then it all came out with a rush. I let him talk. With the servants flinging out the flower-pots faster than I could water them, what more could I have done? A coolness between us was inevitable. This I regretted, but my mind was made up on one point: I would never do Gilray a favor again.

#short story #fiction #literature #reading #classic

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catkittens · 8 months

Text

Angela Huth: Thinnest Ice

Laura’s cheek was cold.

Apart from that, it was a perfectly normal evening, a Tuesday. Philip stuffed his glass full of ice before filling it with gin and tonic, a trick he had learnt in America. He liked to show, through gestures rather than words, that he had been about a little in his time, although he had given up the travelling side of his business when he married. In spite of Laura begging him not to – she knew how much he had enjoyed his jet life – he had been insistent. Of course they could trust each other, but he had seen enough of what could happen to the most trusting married couples when one or the other of the partners was much absent. But his peripatetic bachelor days had left their mark. He still wore Indian cotton shirts and suits from Hong Kong, smoked Russian cigarettes and drank bourbon on the rocks.

Laura sat opposite him on the sofa, her evening face ready with concern. In two years, he had never come home to find her anything but full of love, welcome and interest. She had learnt, from her meticulous mother, that a man is entitled to be selfish at the end of a day. He needs to come home to a wife who casts aside – at any rate to begin with – the petty cares of her own day, and is all sympathy for his. On this score she never let him down. She was always there, ice in the bucket, dinner prepared, curtains drawn in winter, cushions on the garden chairs in summer. Philip had come to rely on these things, and would no longer trade for them a business trip to any part of the world.

He had, in fact, only the vaguest idea of how Laura spent her day. He imagined she shopped, and took care of domestic things in the morning; lunched with a friend, went to an exhibition in the afternoon – he was quite proud of her interest in the arts. One day a week, he knew for certain, she devoted to a group of disabled people in Kensington. But she rarely spoke of her activities at the Day Centre, perhaps for fear of boring him. Sometimes she mentioned taking a job – what job, exactly, was never discussed, and none of the plans had ever materialised. She seemed content enough with her quiet life. Soon they would have children and the peace and privacy would be changed. It was her right to enjoy the peace while it lasted. Philip approved.

In the dappled light of their sitting-room he studied her face. Such innocence, he thought. Such innocence, and a fist of pain screwed round in his chest. He had telephoned her at five, to check what time they were expected for dinner, and there had been no reply. There was never no reply at five o’clock. Laura was always there at that time, in her apron in the kitchen eating ginger biscuits (he liked it very much when he caught her on the telephone with her mouth full, barely able to speak) sifting through her cookery books choosing something for their dinner. He had rung at quarter past and half past. Still no answer, and he had left for home. There, of course – and the underground had never been so slow – she was waiting for him by the fire, holding up her peculiarly cold cheek for him to kiss. He had managed not to ask where she had been. Now, he studied the familiar patterns of room, aware that he was seeking something as he looked at the framed prints on the silky walls, plump cushions, fringes that hemmed the sofas and felt tablecloths – the autumn colours of the square conventional place, their sitting-room, that he loved so much. For a moment he found that each piece of furniture, each ornament, was back-lit by a strong light, making it strange. He struggled with the illusion, fighting it off like the end of a nightmare, pressing his fingers against his icy glass, and the room returned to normal. First signs of flu, he thought. Several people had it at the office. Or, as Laura had often said recently, he had been working too hard.

‘So what’ve you been up to this afternoon?’

Laura looked surprised. She shrugged.

‘Nothing much. The cleaners. Boring things.’ There was a lilt in her voice, an unusual brightness. She paused. ‘You don’t have to change,’ she said, ‘but I shall. We’re meant to be there at eight-thirty.’

‘What are you going to wear?’

The gin had melted the odd pain in his heart, replacing it with warmth. Laura’s smile, with its power to reassure, had become part of his existence. The spell of black fantasy, the signs of encroaching flu, were over.

‘You’ll see. Surprise.’

She surprised him in a flurry of smoky velvet that he had not seen before; jet beads at her neck, amber gloss on her cheeks. Philip frequently suggested she should buy new clothes, but, with a nice sense of economy when it came to other people’s money, Laura rarely took advantage of his encouragement. When she did, Philip was always pleased. She had taste, the girl. Wonderful taste. In the narrowness of their hall he congratulated her.

‘Christ,’ he said, ‘all those husbands will be after you.’

‘Nonsense,’ Laura laughed, spiralling about, making the velvet flutter with shadows. ‘You carry on just like a newly married man.’

They drove through fog to Hampstead. At dinner Philip was aware of every movement his wife made at the other end of the table. Bored by conversation with the high-pitched women on either side of him, he fell to musing, as he often did, on his luck in having found Laura. He quite understood why other men envied him. She was not only beautiful, as now, in the candlelight, but she was spirited. Exuberance blew off her like gold dust, touching other people, so that in her presence they found themselves reflecting her brightness. Her head was bowed. She was listening carefully to the man on her left, who taught Russian at Oxford. Philip heard the word Chekhov several times, and saw Laura smile. Ah! She was intent on educating herself. Having been unenthusiastic about coming to this business dinner party, she was now revelling in the don’s company. Revelling. Smiling. Smiling almost constantly.

With a sharp movement Philip pushed back his plate. The duck stuffed with brandied plums quite suddenly sickened him. The old pain stabbed at him again. He closed his fists on the polished table.

Philip was a man of instincts: this he often claimed. Several years back, big game hunting in Kenya with experienced guides, he had suddenly sensed the dangerous proximity of an elephant. His companions had scoffed at him; they had seen it charge, enraged, in the opposite direction. It would never have returned so soon, they said. But such was Philip’s conviction that they were persuaded to return to the Range Rover. No sooner had they done so than they saw the elephant a few yards from them, half hidden behind trees. It bellowed, prepared to charge; they escaped. Another time, alone in a bar in London airport waiting for a plane to Switzerland, Philip heard with uncanny clarity a voice telling him to switch flights. Without asking himself any questions at the time, he did so. A few hours later, he heard that his original flight had crashed in the Alps.

And now his instinct was at work again, gripping him in its horrible conviction. Laura, after only two years, was being unfaithful to him. What’s more, she was being pretty blatant about it. The previously innocent, once embarked upon deceit, are often the most skilful. Here she was, not six feet from him, putting up an immaculate show. No one would ever guess she and the arrogant don had spent afternoons, days, months, for all he knew, in some form of contact. Not just talking about bloody Russian writers all the time, either. Christ, what a fool he was not to have seen it all before. Philip’s mind jerked back to other occasions when they had met the don, Crispin – ridiculous name – with mutual friends in Oxford. Now he came to think of it, Laura had always made a point of paying him special attention, asking him questions and listening to his interminable answers with her big eyes. She said, he remembered, Crispin was shy – shy! But that when you got to know him, he was wonderfully entertaining.

Philip refused the cheese, the soufflé, the coffee. The heat of the room tightened about him; the candle flames, magnified by their own halos, pained his eyes. Only a lifetime’s training in the art of politeness enabled him to contribute to a conversation about duck-shooting with the woman on his left.

After dinner, regathered in a beige drawing-room, Philip saw a look pass between Crispin and Laura as they chose their places: Crispin sat by his wife on the sofa, Laura talked to her host. Unspoken calculation. A tedious hour passed until the goodbyes, when Laura and Crispin merely nodded to each other. Admirable restraint. Philip took Laura’s stiff velvet arm. Then they were in the car again, pushing through the solid fog.

‘Well, that wasn’t so bad, after all, was it? I was lucky getting Crispin. You know what he was telling me? He was telling me that the problem at Oxford these days –’

Philip wiped the windscreen with the back of his hand. Laura watched his face.

‘Are you all right, darling? You didn’t eat a thing.’

‘I’m all right. Get that rag and keep wiping.’

They concentrated on their journey.

The next morning the feeling of unease had died. On his way to work Philip convinced himself he was being ridiculous. It had all been in his imagination, due to overwork perhaps. He spent a contented two hours reading through a long report, able to give it his full attention. At eleven Laura rang. This was unusual. She did not like to bother Philip at the office. There was some minor problem about servicing the car. The conversation was brief. Laura ended:

‘See you at the usual time this evening, then.’

‘Of course.’

It was only when he had put down the receiver that Philip realised what Laura had done. By ringing him now, she was making fairly sure that he would not ring at five: there would be no need. Thus he would not discover her absence. She would have no need to lie.

Philip’s afternoon passed in a turmoil of disbelief. How could she? Laura? What had he done to deserve...? Where had he gone wrong? At five, hand shaking, he rang her. No answer.

Laura’s cheek was cold again. And again, apart from that, it was a perfectly normal evening. They watched a documentary on television and ate devilled chicken’s legs in the kitchen. Philip opened a bottle of her favourite Sancerre.

‘Why such extravagance?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know.’ He wondered if she noticed the quaver in his voice. He wondered why, when one human being can see a beast that haunts him, revolting as some creation of the devil, another person can remain unconscious of the vile, almost tangible presence.

‘I don’t know,’ he said again. ‘I was thinking. Laura: I was thinking – if ever all this... If ever you decided all this wasn’t what you wanted after all, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you? I mean, you wouldn’t put up with it, bravely, just for my sake, without telling me, would you?’

Laura looked at him in amazement.

‘What a funny idea,’ she said. ‘What on earth’s on your mind? You look quite pale.’

With a tremendous effort of will Philip forced himself to laugh.

‘I expect I sound quite mad. It’s just that – I don’t know. Such innocence as yours, such continuing innocence, makes one quite suspicious sometimes.’

‘Oh, you silly idiot!’ Laura laughed and blushed. ‘You should find yourself something really to worry about.’

She was so convincing that for a moment, in the warmth of their kitchen, Philip felt the chill of shame. In bed he made love to her with unusual violence: she responded with surprised pleasure. If she was tired from her don lover all afternoon, then she did not show it. If there were recollections of his touch in the recesses of her mind, they stood little chance of survival while Philip thrust himself, full of his own agony and love, upon her. In his frenzy he bruised her, hurt her, and she cried to him to stop. She slept quickly, as she always did, her body curved into his.

Philip lay on his back listening to her breathing, and watched the picture show of his wife’s infidelity glitter on the ceiling. She and the brute don lay on an anonymous bed, location impossible to define. Where did they go? How often and for how long? What did he do to her? The academic hands, luminous in the darkness, stroked Laura’s thighs, Laura’s cheeks, Laura’s... Sickened by the vision, Philip took a sleeping pill, shut his eyes, tried to shut his mind. But sleep would not come. Both drained and alert, he watched the fogged dawn infuse itself into the room. When Laura eventually opened her eyes Philip buried his face in her hair, clinging to her, murmuring he had had a nightmare.

He drank only a cup of black coffee for breakfast, and left for the office feeling icy cold, flesh taut against his bones. He crossed the road and stopped to look back at the leaf-green façade of their house – a small, narrow house in a quiet street behind Notting Hill Gate. They had found it soon after they married. In summer, Laura filled its window boxes with pansies and geraniums; now, they were planted with small evergreens bright with orange berries. It was a nice, conventional house, with a welcoming look about its windows. One of them, the kitchen, was lighted. Philip could see Laura moving about, a grey silhouette, gathering up the breakfast things. He wondered how long it would be before the telephone rang and she and Crispin arranged today’s meeting. As he wondered Laura bounced towards the telephone on the dresser. Philip saw her nod. He saw her smile. He felt his breath come very fast – for a moment he opened his mouth and gasped the air, letting out a small moan – then struggled for control. Laura put down the telephone and left the room. A light went on upstairs, in the bedroom. As Philip’s eyes travelled towards it he noticed a web of cracks over the green paintwork of the façade. The paintwork is cracking, he thought to himself: it’s time we had it done. I must tell Laura to organise repainting. He turned away, began to walk towards the underground. How strange, he thought, that green paint should last so little time. Must be pollution. Pollution destroys everything.

When he rang Laura from the office at five she answered the telephone. Relief confused him. He could think of nothing to say.

‘It was just – I noticed cracks all over the front of the house this morning. The paint. It’s worn so badly. We must get it done. Could you ring the builders before –’

‘Cracks? What are you talking about?’

‘Cracks, darling. All over the front of the house. Honestly.’

‘But there isn’t a crack to be seen.’

Philip could sense her puzzlement.

‘Well, never mind. Maybe, in the fog – I must have imagined it.’

‘You must have.’

‘Be back in an hour.’

So today she and Crispin must have done it at lunchtime. Crispin must have had to get an early train back to Oxford. The weekend. Of course, the weekend. How would they communicate between tonight and Monday? Philip decided to make sure he would answer every telephone call. He could not bring himself to ask questions, but if he caught her out she would have to explain.

And there was nothing else for it. He would catch her out. Exhausted by the thought, he set off for home.

Philip unlocked the front door very quietly, a sense of horror at his own action. He could hear Laura talking on the telephone in the kitchen. Unusually low voice. A laugh. Noiselessly, Philip pulled the door shut behind him, crept a few paces further into the hall. Then he stood, quite rigid, and listened.

‘That’s funny,’ he heard her say. ‘That’s terribly funny. I want to hear more when I see you.’ Oh, they had their jokes, she and Crispin. Riotous jokes he knew nothing about, killingly funny jokes to make them squirm and giggle between kisses.

‘So you’ll be here tomorrow, then,’ she was saying, ‘about three. We might see if there’s something good on locally.’

Tomorrow? Michael, her younger brother, was coming to visit them tomorrow. A great heat exploded in Philip’s head. He swung round, opened the front door, banged it shut, pulled off his coat, ran up the stairs as the telephone clicked. Laura must not see him in this state.

He shut himself in the bathroom. Its familiar pinkness was unstable, as if he had cocooned himself in a shaking blancmange. Breathe deeply, Philip, he said to himself, leaning against the basin, and take a look at yourself.

He saw in the pink glass mirror the face of a man who had been spying on his wife: a man haunted by suspicion, convinced by instinct Wild hair, huge eyes, fear.

‘You’re loathsome, you’re despicable,’ he said. ‘How far will you go?’

Later, some measure of equilibrium restored, he poured himself an extra large gin and tonic and paced the small sitting-room. Laura sat in one corner of the sofa doing her tapestry, half-smiling, innocent as usual.

‘You’re restless,’ she said.

‘I am, rather.’

‘Anything the matter?’

‘No. Not sleeping very well, I suppose.’

Sated by her own life, Laura had no notion how troubled were his nights. He had often thought of waking her, asking her for the truth which would put an end to his own suffering.

‘Come to think of it, you seem to be rather thin.’ Laura’s eyes travelled all over him. ‘Perhaps you’re getting something.’

‘Perhaps.’ Philip sat down at last, crossed his legs, spun one ankle. ‘I often wonder,’ he said, ‘how you fill your days. Sometimes at the office, you know, I try to image what you’re doing, and I’ve really no idea.’

Laura glanced at him. Quickly smiled.

‘I think I’d better keep you in the dark. If I told you the truth you’d not only be bored, you’d be ashamed of me for not thinking up better ways to pass the hours. But I’ve decided quite seriously that after Christmas I’ll get a job – in fact I’ve more or less found one. That art gallery in Notting Hill Gate – you know – they apparently want someone half-time. That would suit me very well. Be a good idea, don’t you think?’

‘I should think it would.’ Philip plucked at his Hong Kong trousers. Of course a part-time job would suit her well. Regular hours would mean terrible complications, maybe even the necessity of deceit. Oh Laura! So quiet, so tranquil, in the lamplight, how is it that you love someone else, that you count the hours till you see him, that you let him into the most private parts of you...?

‘Oh, Laura!’ he cried out loud.

‘Philip!’ She ran to him, put a cool hand on his forehead. ‘What is it? You’re looking most... peculiar.’

‘Don’t touch me, please.’ He removed her hand.

‘What is it?’

‘Leave me. I’m all right. I just... I’ll ring Dr Bruce in the morning. Get some tranquillisers.’ He rose and went to the tray of drinks. ‘Worry about all this... redundancy. It’s affecting us all.’

‘Of course.’ Laura’s face expressed perfect concern. ‘But you don’t normally let office worries get on top of you like this. Perhaps you need a break. Perhaps after Christmas we should go away for a week.’

‘Perhaps. But you wouldn’t want to go away for a week, would you?’

‘Of course I would!’ Her indignation was genuine enough. ‘What do you mean?

‘All right, then. I’ll get tickets for one of those cheap tours to Venice.’ You lying little hypocrite, I’ll take you at your word.

‘What a lovely idea!’ What’s more, you bloody little actress, not for one moment will I let you out of my sight – no chance of your slipping off to the Poste Restante...

Philip half filled his glass with gin.

As far as he could tell Laura and Crispin had no form of communication over the weekend, but the private canker within Philip spread. Tranquillisers did nothing to abate the torment of his suspicions. He could neither eat nor sleep. And yet, some basic habit of maintaining appearances kept him going, while within him a devil voice lashed constant abuse at Laura. Outwardly he was friendly, gentle: they continued to lead their quiet lives with little reference to Philip’s disintegrating appearance. He could sense Laura’s concern but, knowing he abhorred fuss, she refrained from questioning him, merely said all would be well in January.

Two weeks went by. During this time Philip rang Laura every day at five, and she was never at home. On his return each evening she flourished her cold shining cheeks, the sparkle in her eyes betraying her rewarding afternoon. Still Philip endured her condition in silence, though some evenings the physical pain in his chest was so bad he would shut himself in his study for half an hour, and bend double in the armchair to alleviate the ache.

Then, one morning after a particularly bad night, he came down early to make Laura breakfast. Having inwardly riled against her most of the night, he thought this was the least he could do for her, to make private amends. On his way to the kitchen he picked up the post from the mat, shuffled through the letters.

There was one with an Oxford postmark. Stiff white envelope, intelligent writing in black ink. Philip stared at it till the words blurred before his eyes, and a vile sweat pricked over his back.

He made two cups of coffee and took them upstairs on a tray with the letters. Laura was waking, stretching, smiling, pleased at the treat of breakfast in bed. For the first time for many mornings a pallid sun slanted into the room, cheering the timid blues of curtains and walls. Philip, conscious that the sweat that now covered his body smelt strongly, sat on the edge of the bed and watched his wife closely.

She was very clever. When it came to opening the thick white envelope she made no comment, simply slit it with a knife. She pulled out a white card, read it quickly, and passed it to Philip.

‘Crispin and Moira want us to go to some lunch party on Sunday.’ Voice quite level.

Philip held the card between finger and thumb as if it were edged with blades. This, of course, was all part of a well-constructed plan. Crispin and Laura apparently saw no treachery in organising social meetings as well as clandestine ones.

‘Don’t let’s go to that,’ he said.

‘Why ever not? It should be rather fun.’

‘Well, I’m not going. I don’t like Moira and I like Crispin even less. Pretentious man, to say the least. And most of all I don’t like donnish Oxford parties.’

‘Oh, Philip.’ Laura’s mouth, rather thin, was not made for pouting. It curved downwards. ‘That’s silly of you. You can’t generalise like that. You can’t simply say you don’t like all Oxford parties. Moira’s and Crispin’s might be quite different.’

Philip stood up.

‘It might, but I’m not going. You can do what you like.’ His dressing gown fell apart. Glancing down, he saw the gleam of sweat on his stomach, realised the ridiculous sight he must be to Laura. She smiled up at him.

‘No need to sound so fierce. I don’t really mind –’

‘And don’t lie to me, Laura!’ The roar of Philip’s voice shook the room. ‘Go to the party without me if you want to – I don’t care a damn how many parties you go to, but don’t lie to me!’ The sudden fear and miscomprehension in her eyes goaded him. ‘Go on, go! D’you hear me? All the way to Oxford for another little lesson in Chekhov. God Almighty!’ He flung off his dressing gown: the sour smell of his own sweat almost stifled him. He ran one hand down his stomach, wet flesh upon wet flesh: with the other he pulled back the bedclothes, watched the lilac slip of Laura’s body cower into itself like a night flower at dawn. She screamed.

Philip was upon her. He was aware, from the way she turned her head from his mouth, that his breath was evil, and that his jowl scratched her cheeks, inflaming them with ugly red. He was aware of tin tacks in his flesh, of the dryness of Laura, of terrible moaning noises from them both.

When it was over he left her exposed and crying on the bed. He dressed quickly and went from the house without saying goodbye.

In Holland Park the sun was gentle among bare trees. Philip sat on a bench, head in hands. I am ill, he thought. I have a virus that turns reason to unreason, makes me savage my wife, abuse her, suspect her. Dear God, he thought, I am a man debased by a feeling I should be able to overcome. I understand it to be irrational. Understanding that, perhaps it will go from me. He looked slowly about as if searching the air for a cure. The bare branches were cruel against his eyes, flaws in the winter sky. His whole body ached with the kind of pain caused by flesh that is too thin to protect raw bone from the elements. He stood. He began to walk back down the path, heavily as a man breast-high in water who pushes against a strong current.

At the office, dully, no greeting to his secretary, he shut the door. Telephoned Laura.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Oh... that’s all right.’ Pause. ‘I mean, it’s the first real row we’ve ever had, isn’t it? It had to happen some time. Though I’m not sure what it was all about.’

‘Nor am I.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well... thank you for ringing.’

‘And thank you for being so... I don’t know what came over me.’

‘No need to go on.’

Philip called for black coffee and a glass of brandy. The relief of his wife’s forgiveness gave him strength to start the fight. He would rid himself of the disease through an act of supreme will. He was, after all, a strong man. First thing to do was to resist ringing Laura at five. He achieved this. But when, on reaching home, he kissed her cold bright happy cheek, the physical pain restruck with a force that overwhelmed all his good intentions. He realised, as he lay awake that night, mind seething with vile possibilities, that it was going to be a long battle.

A week later, swallowing tranquillisers with his coffee in the office – they merely misted the superficial pain, did nothing to banish the fundamental ache and racing mind – he decided to tell Laura what had happened. This would mean risking possible disaster. There was also a small chance it might save and cure. A chance worth taking. Tonight. The positive decision fanned a small flame of strength. Philip picked up a long report, began to read. The uneasy looks of his colleagues, of late, had not gone unobserved; their concern for him was plain. He would now concentrate on putting their minds at rest. Then his private telephone rang. Laura.

‘Sorry to bother you – but do you think you could possibly take the afternoon off?’ She sounded breathless, excited.

‘Well, yes, I dare say. But why?’

‘It’s quite important.’

‘What is it?’

‘I don’t want to tell you now. Just come home in time for lunch. Please.’

‘All right. How very mysterious.’ He tried to sound light hearted.

He put the report back in a drawer knowing that further work that morning would be impossible, and decided to walk home. It would take an hour and so exhaust him, in his weakened state, that, by the time she broke the bad news, he would have achieved a protective sense of stupor. He strolled along the City pavements, St James’s Park, Hyde Park, afraid. When finally he reached the front door he felt faint and dizzy, as he had felt on occasions in church as a child.

For the first time Laura did not try to conceal her anxiety. He looked dreadful, she said, and insisted he should see the doctor again tomorrow. Philip, with little energy left to argue, let the warmth of the house seep into his cold flesh. Gratefully he drank a glass of red wine and managed to eat half a plate of soup.

‘Now,’ said Laura, ‘I’d like you to come with me in the car.’ She was authoritative, bossy, pretty. The warmth of her reached through Philip’s fatigue. In the car, he wanted to touch her. But he remained quietly with hands in his lap, asking no questions. He assumed they were going to some mysterious rendezvous to meet Crispin and decide upon their future.

Laura drove to Queensway and parked in front of the skating rink.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘We’re here.’ She paid their entrance money – Philip’s reactions were too slow to reach for his wallet – and led the way downstairs. There was a heavy chill about the place that made Philip visibly shudder. It vaguely occurred to him that this was a strange place to meet with an Oxford don: too cold. Perhaps they would sit in the cafeteria behind the glass screen. It would be warmer there, round a small Formica table with a cup of tea.

‘You wait here,’ Laura was saying. ‘I’ll be back.’

Philip sat on a chair behind the barrier at the edge of the rink, no longer much in possession of his senses. Before him several dozen skaters, mostly women and children, skittered about the ice. A few of them were fast and competent, masters of their movements, spinning and zooming in tight-lipped silence, the keen wind of their own speed their only awareness. Others clutched, squeaked, fell, and rose again without the benefits of grace or balance. Nightmare people. None of them was Crispin.

A gong boomed. Philip jerked, afraid: felt a skein of sweat over his back. Clutching at his neck with a cold hand, he looked about for Laura. Where was she? And what was he doing here?

The skaters crowded to the exits in the barriers. Only the good ones remained on the ice. Music, suddenly: an organ blurred by bad acoustics playing a tune from a fifties musical. The skaters, in pairs now, began to dance.

Not far from Philip a familiar girl stepped on to the ice. Laura, it was. She wore a short pleated skirt, red tights and new-looking boots. She waved at him, smiled. Behind her came a thin figure all in black, except for a small badge on his breast. He had the impassive look of a skating instructor, his sharp face frozen into inanimation that comes from years of skimming over blank ice. He put an arm round Laura’s waist.

The music changed to a slow waltz. Laura and her partner moved, cautiously. They were straight-backed, fluid. Gradually, they gathered speed, dipped and swerved in unison. They reached a corner: turning backwards, Laura quavered a little. The androgynous black arm tightened round her waist, supportive. Laura’s face was pinched with concentration. She did not look towards Philip.

Philip’s eyes never left the scarlet and black pair. They blurred and fuzzed, became dots, then fur, then for a moment hardened into sharp focus. All the while, beneath his raw skin, he felt the blood seep from his veins, taking with it the old pain in his breast-bone, and leaving an overwhelming feebleness. He lifted one arm on to the edge of the barrier, lowered his head on to the coldness of his sleeve. Beneath his feet the black rubber flooring, holed like crochet, gleamed with the water of melted ice. The dreadful organ thumped out a Beatles tune. Philip put his free hand to his face to prod the numbness. He felt a hot mess of tears on his cheek.

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catkittens · 8 months

Text

Diane Cook: A Wanted Man

There once was a man, a well-known man, we’ll call him “our man,” who could impregnate fifty women in one day.

He could bend a high-heeled dancer over a Dumpster; a waitress across the order counter; a teacher over the hood of her car in the teachers’ lot. You get the picture. He could have any woman he wanted, anywhere he wanted. He could take one and turn, find another waiting, and take her too. We’ve all heard the stories. Remember how he did a row of bank tellers, one after the other? How they begged and huffed and grunted, their faces pressed against their teller windows where they’d stuck a Closed sign when it was their turn? “We’re so lucky!” they squealed. Remember how they all took maternity leave at the same time? Remember the elevator story? That Little League game? Independence Day?

Our man was in his prime, his status secure. His offspring were the most coveted, the most successful, he was a sure thing—he never missed, and he was always ready (which can’t be said of lesser men). Women dreamed of having his babies. Young boys dreamed of being him. Other men knew to keep their distance and their eyes down.

But our man believed all of that was changing.

Impossible, you say? As proof, take that waitress story: When he’d bent her over the counter, the cooks had tried to ambush him. The waitress held them off with a kitchen knife, and they’d had to finish over the prep table, with her holding the knife out, jabbing it at the cooks with each thrust our man gave her.

Our man recognized the look in the cooks’ eyes. They were thinking, That should be me. He knew the feeling. For some young men it was a long-held life goal, and for others it came out of nowhere like a punch. They wanted what he had, and so deeply that they believed they could get it, should get it. They deserved it.

Lately young men had been ambushing our man from dark alleys, following him home, breaking into his apartment and setting traps. He’d had to move. Before, he would have walked unguarded and proud. Now he skulked and wore disguises. He saw the Wanted signs with his picture affixed.

But of all the changes, he was most bewildered by how much he wanted to see the waitress again.

Once they’d finished, he’d asked if she would like to sit with him, have a coffee, talk. He felt a heaviness in his stomach, a need to spend time with her. It was the strangest feeling—he’d never desired a woman twice. But she already had her order pad and pencil cocked and ready. “I work here,” she’d said briskly, and returned to her tables. He’d blushed and felt ashamed. When was the last time he’d felt that?

Now he thought of the knife, of the way she’d jabbed. She hadn’t been protecting him so much as her offspring. But still, the gesture touched him. He felt cared for. He hadn’t felt that since he was a much younger man, but he wanted to feel it again.

Our man returned to the diner, anxious and prepared to ask the waitress to meet him after her shift. He would offer to buy her a sandwich or a soup at a different diner where she could relax. That was better than coffee, right?

But the waitress wasn’t there. The cooks were, however, and they chased our man onto a dim side street, where he was able to lose them. He panted in a Dumpster until it was safe to emerge.

Our man knew of a cave in the big park near the diner. He could wait out the night and go back tomorrow, see if the waitress was working. Tell her he couldn’t stop thinking about her. They could marvel at how weird that was. He had a feeling she would totally get it, and get him.

The sun was bright, and the grass smelled extra grassy because of it. Park animals scampered. Our man kept his head down, slipped behind trees and into bushes when threatening types strode by. He stepped over two different ankle traps he assumed were set for him.

He entered a wide-open space with few hiding spots. A crowd of boys on bikes noticed him. “Hey,” they yelled. They lobbed stones at his head. Our man ran, and the boys chased on their bikes through the gravel paths. Of course it could only be a game for them—they were boys—but the commotion alerted others. An arrow was launched from somewhere in the trees, and it whizzed by our man’s head. A large group of healthy young men began tracking him. But our man is faster than most.

He gained ground by sprinting over a steep hill, and then he heard a sweet voice say, “Pssst.”

A woman in a yellow dress sat on a large blanket in the middle of the great lawn. She scooched over and lifted a corner. Our man dove under, and she laid it back down. She reclined so as to hide his bulk, then resumed reading her book with great languorousness.

Those pursuing our man crested the hill, breathless, and scanned the lawn for some movement. The woman yawned for effect. They ran on, fought with each other for the lead; the young boys were jostled off their bikes and limped away, crying bitterly, pining for the day they would feel like men.

When they were all out of sight, the woman tickled our man through the blanket, and he laughed.

“Shh, they’re very close,” she lied. She rubbed him until his breath quickened. “I’m taking you home with me. It’s safe there.”

Our man was happy to hear that. No one had ever offered him a home. He would stay with her, be cared for, and never have to run again.

She leaned and peeked under the blanket: her eyes shone like stained glass; her brown hair piled in the grass like curled dead leaves. His waitress was forgotten.

Our man woke to the woman snapping pictures of him; she’d tucked a flower behind his ear and was pretending to feed him grapes.

“My girlfriends are going to freak out.” She giggled. “Can I invite them over?”

“I only want you.” He grabbed her and tenderly kissed her cheeks, then her forehead, her eyes. “Let’s get married,” he said. He couldn’t remember the last time he felt so safe.

“Oh, I can’t.” She fake pouted. “I’m already married.”

“You are?”

She pulled away and snapped another picture.

“Run away with me then,” he said. “We could find a new home together, somewhere no one knows me.”

“Oh no, I couldn’t.”

It felt as if a chunk of ice was going down his throat. “Don’t you love me?”

She laughed. “You funny man,” she said, and tried to push his face between her legs.

The icy lump reached his heart, and then his stomach. It was a new sensation. He said, “But you want kids with me.”

“I want your kid, not, ‘I want to have kids with you.’ It’s different.” She shrugged. “The kids my husband gave me stink. They’re weak and they get terrible grades.”

“You have kids?” He had no idea. “Where are they?”

“At my mom’s.” She sighed. “I don’t know how much longer I get you for, and I don’t want to waste it. Now, come on.” She wiggled in his lap until he was ready.

Just as they finished, they heard the front door creak open, the sounds of a bag being tossed onto a table, papers in folders slapping down, and the tired sigh of someone who had no one to greet him.

“Hello? Anyone home?” a man called out.

“My husband’s home.” She groaned. “I was hoping for another go. It’s so fun with you.”

“Come with me then,” he said as he threw clothes on.

She sulked. “No, that would probably ruin it.”

They heard the husband pad around the apartment, into one room and then another, take something from the fridge, clink some glasses.

“Hello?” he called out again.

She jumped up to lock the bedroom door and barred it with her body. “I do love him,” she said, but she looked at our man like she was eating something delicious. “It’s complicated. Just be quiet for a minute. Maybe he’ll go away.”

The footsteps got closer. “Ellen?” the husband called out. “Are you in there?” The knob jiggled.

Our man began to tremble. “Let me out,” he hissed. He didn’t like being this close to a husband.

“Hey,” the husband yelled. “Who’s in there?”

Our man tossed Ellen aside and threw open the door.

He could tell the husband used to be handsome, but now he was older. His clothes were drab and hung on him poorly, his skin too; his hair was dyed shoe polish black to hide the gray.

The husband gasped, and our man recognized his look: as if a long-forgotten dream was resurfacing and giving him the wild idea to battle our man. It was folly. He was too old. But nostalgia and regret are powerful. He reached out.

Our man bolted past.

“Wait,” the husband cried, lumbering after him. “Come back. Let’s make a deal.” But our man could hear him rummaging for weapons even as he tried to sound friendly.

Our man bounded from the apartment and took the stairs half a floor at a time.

“Dammit,” the husband cried, and stomped his feet. He whined, “Ellen,” and our man heard her respond, “It didn’t mean anything.” He felt that icy lump again.

Our man rushed through the streets, his head down, but still he felt like everyone was about to pounce. He ducked into a parking lot, squatted between two cars, and cried. The sky threatened rain. The buildings squatted sullenly. The lights in windows were green and harsh. The expressions on passersby were angry. They all seemed to be searching for something. Probably him.

“Um, hi?” said a shy voice.

Our man shrank against a car, frightened. How careless. He hadn’t heard anyone approach; he could be facing his death right now.

A woman reached for him. “Don’t be scared.”

“What do you want?” he hissed, and blushed at how unkind it sounded. Where were his manners? She looked nice.

“This is my car,” she said.

He laughed with some relief. “I’m sorry.” He rose, though he remained hunched and averted from the crowded sidewalk.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” He wiped his eyes. “Hard day.”

“Don’t I know it.” She leaned where he had been leaning, and pulled a cigarette from her purse. She thoughtfully exhaled, and our man felt hidden in her fog.

“Thank you,” he said, relaxing a bit in her company.

“For what?”

“For just standing here with me.”

She smiled. “I’m happy to. You look like you could use a friend. I’m Jill.” She extended her hand. “And you are?”

His breath halted, his tongue swelled: she didn’t know him.

She was plain looking, with straightened black hair, small eyes, thin lips, but big rosy cheeks that made her whole self inviting. She was the kind of woman he might overlook. She seemed like a person who didn’t want to be seen. He wanted to be around someone like that forever. Maybe he would grow plain then. Blend in. He’d like that. He took her hand.

“Do you want to go somewhere?” He imagined her too insecure and unassuming to ask herself.

She blushed, elated. “Sure?” She ducked her head in disbelief and gleeful shame. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.” She hooked onto his arm and began to walk.

“Won’t we take your car?” he asked, his hand on the door.

“No, my place is just around the corner.”

He concentrated on watching her so he wouldn’t panic on the sidewalk. He felt ordinary with this woman on his arm, like he could look people in the eye. But he didn’t dare.

Her apartment was bare, but still she searched awhile for mugs.

“Did you just move in?”

“Oh yeah,” she said, now looking through drawers for tea.

“Where did you move from?” Our man sat on a spare wooden chair at an empty table.

“Uh, the Midwest?” she said scrunching her face at him as if she couldn’t believe it herself. “I’d like to forget about that, honestly.” Her voice swelled with emotion. He became aroused by her vulnerability.

“Well.” He walked to her and gripped her hips. “You’ll like it here.”

She let him touch her, then demurred, put her mug between them. “Stop.”

He raised his hands, surrendering. “I’m sorry.” When was the last time he’d needed to say that?

“No—” She laughed, though with some sadness. She pushed his arms down to his sides. “It’s just that I don’t know anything about you.”

He was flattered and thrilled. “What do you want to know?”

She opened her mouth like she would speak but didn’t. He badly wanted to slip his thumb between those lips, have her gently tongue it. The silence between them rushed into his ears. He was scared to fill it. He felt dumb in her presence. But he wanted her to know him. “I’m lonely,” he said.

She bowed her head, kissed his knuckles.

The tension in his shoulders released. He didn’t know when he’d felt such tenderness. Then he laughed, overjoyed. She laughed. They clasped hands and laughed together.

“I’ve always wanted a family,” he said.

“Me too,” she cooed.

“A real one, though. One I can watch grow.” He skimmed his finger above her waistband, under her shirt. “I’ve never told anyone that.”

She shivered and licked her lips. He thought, Here’s the future, so why wait?

He got down on a knee and tied the string from his tea bag around her finger.

“Will you marry me?” He couldn’t believe he had said it. He imagined waking on a sun-dazzled morning with her.

She jogged in place and screamed, “Yes!”

He scooped her into his arms as if she were a long, light pillow. “You’ll have to return to the Midwest,” he said, and when she looked confused, he explained, “It’s not safe for me here.”

She cupped his face. “You’re safe with me anywhere.” Her eyes were wet and searching. “Do you feel safe?”

“I do feel safe! I felt safe the very first minute,” he said, forgetting that in fact, he had felt in danger when he’d first encountered her.

He spun her in a circle. “I’ve got you and I won’t ever let go,” he cried, and she tossed her head and fluttered her legs like she was a captive in a monster movie. This time he wouldn’t have to run.

The bedroom was also bare, a mattress on the floor with a single sheet balled at the foot. The windows were shrouded in brown cloth, but a chair had been placed where someone could sit and look out a crack between the fabric panels. There was a shabby painted dresser. Our man swiped what little was on it to the floor.

He pulled her shirt over her head; her breasts, oblong and heavy, spilled from her bra with just a flick of the straps. She was plump. Her belly looked strangely swollen. All evidence to the contrary, he might have guessed she was already pregnant. But no, she had the hunger of an empty woman.

She moaned she was ready, and she was. He was about to bend her over that dresser when she said, “No,” and backed our man to the bed. He fell onto it, and she straddled him. “This way.”

The woman took him in with a long oooh. “It’s like you’re made of electricity,” she said. She began to rock slowly, smiling gravely. “I’m going to have the best kid.”

Our man concentrated on how tightly her legs locked around his hips, on how protected he felt.

“You’re going to be a great mom.” He sighed.

She began wiggling around on top of him, tossing her hair, bucking, and it felt so good. He couldn’t believe he’d been lucky enough to meet her, and at a moment when he most needed to. He watched her breasts sway, her belly heave, her mouth round into pleasure and then spread into surprise. He tucked his hands behind his head as if he were taking a nap in the park, not a care in the world, with his penis drawn inside her and about to start a family with her in just another minute or so. He was entering that buzzy state he loved, his body feeling like the glass casing of a thermometer, the liquid rising, swelling, getting dangerous—the casing could shatter!—when he thought he saw something move in the doorway; a man, a shadow, a ghost; and then it was gone.

“My kid will be the best,” she chanted as she writhed.

Our man became lost in the chant. She was coming. And then he was braying, grabbing at air, coming too.

Then she quieted and stopped moving.

His climax whimpered out, replaced by a new nervousness. He cleared his throat several times, but she stayed silent and still. “Did you like that?” It was not a question our man had ever asked.

“Sure,” she said, though she seemed displeased. Her smile had disappeared. She pressed her hands against his collarbones and said very somberly, “But it’s not why I brought you here.”

She slipped her hands around our man’s throat and tightened.

Everything in him cooled. His spent limbs went wax dead. He had never been threatened by a woman before. He didn’t know how to respond. Should he hit her? He couldn’t.

“What’s going on?” he wheezed. His rejected ejaculate gummed between them.

“Don’t hate me,” she said. “I’m doing this for my baby. I’m not a bad person.”

“Please,” our man sputtered. He struggled, but he’d been made defenseless on his back. She was strong and determined. A mother already. It all began to make sense. She was pregnant, had known exactly who he was, and was helping another man, the father of her child, conquer our man in order to rise in stature. She probably wasn’t even from the Midwest.

Our man’s sight turned to black smudges, his hearing clotted. He groped and kicked wildly, and she held tighter. He gurgled, his chest burned. He felt so stupid. He shut his eyes and couldn’t believe this was it.

How terrible life was, he marveled, but how fair. He was getting what he deserved. He thought back on how he became our man. You remember: how he’d come upon his predecessor—a man in his prime, powerful and unchallenged—copulating in the middle of Main Street, an admiring crowd gathered and traffic stopped. How our man had pummeled and bloodied him, broke his bones with his bare hands and left him to crawl a few paces away, where he died. Then how our man impregnated the woman, who was waiting and hungry, and then fourteen other women from the circle of onlookers. The crowd had never seen such a spectacle. You know the rest.

What you probably didn’t know is this: It wasn’t something our man had planned or ever thought he wanted. He had a girlfriend he enjoyed spending time with and fucking. She wanted to be a nurse. And he had always loved movies and thought it would be fun to do something with them. But when he’d come upon the scene—the man, the woman, the crowd—a raw yearning seized him. He felt an urgent desire to be more than he’d ever wanted to be. He gave in to this new vision: with blood on his hands he became our man. And he enjoyed it. He was proud of his work. That story of the bank tellers? He would want you to remember that he also took seven of the female customers waiting to withdraw money.

But now, what he would give to have taken a different route that day, so he wouldn’t have seen that man copulating, being adored, and he wouldn’t have had that feeling in his gut: That should be me.

He felt the woman’s grasp let go and thought, Okay, now I’m dead, I’m released from all of this, and maybe that’s a good thing. But then a hand pressed gently on his forehead, and a voice said, “Hello? Hello? Hello?”

He opened his eyes, and a woman stood over him, a different woman, one with yellow hair and wearing a nightgown. She smiled at him and lifted a baseball bat red with blood, and then he felt the sensation of something cold wrapped around his hips. He looked down to see the woman who’d attacked him, slouched to the side, rigid, her head a bloody nest of hair and bone.

The woman in the nightgown pushed the body over onto the floor and offered our man her hand. “Let’s get out of here before the others track you down,” she said. She pulled our man up and led him past a dead body slumped in the doorway, whose matter was sprayed along the wall. It was a man. He looked a bit like our man.

They ran through the night to another part of the city, our man barefoot and cold. Groups of young men roamed the sidewalks in search of him. They knew our man was weakened and hurt. They could smell it. They carried weapons, slapped them to their palms, jingled them if they were the jingling kind. Women lit candles in windows or on their front stoops, keeping vigil for him.

The woman was like a ghost in her nightgown, her hair blazing white under the streetlights, seemingly invisible to the others, and our man began to believe that as long as he was with her, he couldn’t be seen. They crouched behind the postal boxes on corners when they saw gangs stomping toward them. They slunk behind parked cars to avoid the windows of bars where the patrons sat listening for any sound of our man. The woman cloaked him with her body to hide his scent with her own. He was aroused by her warmth. “Later,” she said, touching his chest.

In the streets, sirens wailed and the city roiled, anticipating a grand change.

The woman flew through the streets, pulling our man onward.

“Just a little farther,” she encouraged.

His feet were bloodied and embedded with loose asphalt, broken glass.

“Keep going,” she begged.

They heard barking. A pack of dogs was gaining on the scent of the blood he spilled with each step. The woman turned into an alley and leaped to pull down a fire escape ladder. She pushed him to it. Go, go, she cried, and he climbed and she climbed after him. Above, she led the way across a mile of rooftops, still hot from the deserted sun. Pigeons startled up from their roosts and marked our man’s trail through the sky for the people below to follow.

Finally, after birds, after roof jumps, zagging to a whole other city section, the din of search parties falling behind, the woman swung open a plain door and our man threw himself inside.

A room full of women sucked in their breath.

Someone whispered, “It’s him.” They erupted noisily like geese taking flight.

Our man saw dozens and dozens of women wringing their hands with need. He was afraid.

The woman in the nightgown led him to a chair in the middle of the room.

“You’re safe here,” she said. “Do you believe me?” She locked eyes with him, and he believed her.

Our man woke to a naked blonde sucking him off.

“There’s a line, but I wanted to be first,” she said. She roused him to his feet. They were in a windowless room with a cement floor; the twin bed he’d been sleeping on stuck out from one wall, and a small television on a metal arm from another. That was it.

The woman squeezed his hand and gazed at him, and then our man recognized her.

He pawed at her bare chest and laughed. “Where’s your nightgown?” He almost wept at seeing her.

She rubbed at his face, wet-eyed, gasping. “I didn’t want it to get in the way. My word, you’re handsome,” she said and stroked his ears, his eyes, tried to put fingers into his mouth but then stopped herself. “It’s just remarkable,” she said. He folded her over the bed. “Oh wow,” she cried. They thrust the bed across the room.

After he came, the woman placed her hands on the floor and threw her legs up against the wall. “My doctor says this will help,” she said, red-faced, her hair falling all around her, her breath strained as her insides sank toward her throat.

“You’re hilarious,” our man said, near to joyful tears again. He tried to do a headstand too but fell over and laughed. “I want to spend every second with you!”

She giggled. “Don’t distract me!”

When she stood to leave, he asked to go with her.

“Too dangerous, babe. You stay here.”

Our man asked when she would be back.

“When I can,” she said, and left.

Immediately another woman walked in and began to undress.

“I’m sorry,” our man said, and remembered he was naked. “You must have the wrong room.”

The woman pulled a T-shirt over her head. Her tight breasts quivered. She had tattoos on her hips of terrible eagle faces. “I’m certain I don’t,” she said, and stepped toward him out of her skirt. She wore nothing under it.

“Oh.” His mouth got wet without him being able to stop it.

“They weren’t kidding,” she said, running her hands up and down his chest, her fingernails leaving a tingling map that made his ears ring.

He cleared his throat. “That woman who just left. We’re together.” He felt ready to make a commitment, and he believed the woman in the nightgown was ready too. It would mean saying no to other women. He wanted to say no.

She tongued his ear deeply. “Is that so?”

He could feel the heat between her legs. She lowered herself slowly until she was sitting in his lap. Her muscles contracted under her skin, and our man could smell her scent mixed with a ripe perfume on her neck. She was so close and so eager, and he just couldn’t help it.

A long line of women waited, and they didn’t like waiting. Many were gruff and got annoyed if he asked for a minute to himself. Some were old and others far too young, so that with his arousal came a feeling of shame. Some had ailments, deformities. They were not the kind of women he usually impregnated.

It felt like weeks before the woman in the nightgown circled back to him. She seemed sad.

“I didn’t think I’d need to return.” She frowned. “I thought you were a sure thing.”

“Didn’t you want to see me?”

“Of course.” She smiled thinly and patted between her legs. “Let’s go. I’m ovulating.”

He surprised himself—he could see he surprised her too—by weeping as he held her, as he came, and as he watched her leave. But it was different from the first time, before he knew what these captive weeks would bring, when he just felt lucky to be alive, when he thought he’d met the love of his life and he didn’t think he would survive until he saw her next. He yearned only for her. But he could not convince himself she felt the same, and it left him hollow.

“Please tell me your name,” our man said to the woman in the nightgown. She was curled in a ball in a corner of the mattress, as far away from him as she could be. She thought if she curled tightly enough, the baby would feel protected and so begin to grow.

“Mary,” she said.

He waited for her to ask his name. When she didn’t, he said, “Don’t you want to know mine?”

She shrugged. “Sure.”

“It’s Sam.”

“You don’t look like a Sam.”

“What do I look like?”

She peered at him. He wanted so badly to conjure a feeling of familiarity in her, a feeling like, You remind me of the past, of essences of people I once cared about, of times that might have been important to me. He wanted to be the kind of important that would make her stay. She said, “I don’t know. Not Sam though.”

The next time she visited him, he asked, “What do you do on the days I don’t see you, Mary?”

“I work, see friends, you know.”

That night he dreamed of her with her friends, and all the wonderful things they might talk about.

“Mary, can I go outside?” our man Sam asked. He’d grown pale, his shoulders had narrowed, he’d formed a paunch. “I could use a run.” He crossed his arms over his stomach to hide it.

“No, you’re still a wanted man.” She uncrossed his arms. “Don’t worry. It’s what’s inside that counts.”

“Where have all the other women gone?” He had more free time; when the door to his room opened for another woman to enter, the waiting room looked emptier.

“They went away to have babies,” Mary said sullenly.

He asked their names. He knew them only by symbols—leg scar, back tattoo, palsy. He thought knowing their names would help him imagine what their children—his children—might be like.

Mary told him: Claire, Veronica, Nan, and so on.

“What if one of them tells where I am?”

“They won’t. Men are all blustery and short-sighted feelings. Women are thoughtful. We think long-term. You’re good for the world.”

He touched his cheeks. They were hot. He was blushing. “Am I good for you?” he asked. He felt sick in his heart.

“You better be,” she said, disrobing. “You’re my last hope.”

But he wasn’t good for her.

Maybe outside these walls he’d been replaced. Or maybe he’d managed to satisfy each woman in the city, except one. After all the other women swelled with child and left, only Mary remained, empty. And with each visit, she grew more disappointed. He didn’t understand why she kept coming when all he did was fail her, but he didn’t want her to stop—he would have nothing left. So he tried to try harder, though he didn’t know how.

It wasn’t a good life. But it was a life.

When he felt most lonely, he focused on this: He had been kept. Not cast away to be chased, battled, killed. He was being cared for by a woman who still asked him to touch her again and again, and who, at least for now, believed beyond all proof that he had something to offer. And who, in their closest moments, when our man tried to give her what she most wanted, managed to abandon some bitterness and express something like joy or pleasure or peace. It might be unconscious. It might have nothing to do with him. But he called it love. And as long as he could see it in her, he would be grateful. He would miss her when she wasn’t with him, and with bile burning his throat, he would wait for her return.

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catkittens · 8 months

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Bessie Head: The Woman from America

THE WOMAN FROM AMERICA married a man of our village and left her country to come and live with him here. She descended on us like an avalanche. People are divided into two camps. Those who feel a fascinated love and those who fear a new thing. The terrible thing is that those who fear are always in the majority. This woman and her husband and children have to be sufficient to themselves because everything they do is not the way people here do it. most terrible of all is the fact that they really love eachother and the husband effortlessly and naturally keeps his eyes on his wife alone. in this achievement he is seventy years ahead of all the men here.

We are such a lot of queer people in the southern part of Africa. We have felt all forms of suppression and are a subdued group of people. We lack the vitality, the push, the devil-may-care temperament of the people of the north of Africa. They do things first, then we follow them. we are always going to be confederators and not initiators. We are very materialistically minded and I think this adds to our fear. People who hoard little bits of thins cannot throw out an expand, and, in doing so, keep in circulation a flowing current of wealth. Basically we are mean, selfish. We eat each other all the time and God help poor Botswana at the bottom of our worries and concerns.

Then, into this narrow, constricted world came the woman from America. Some people keep hoping she will go away one day of her own accord, but already her big strong stride has worn the pathways of the village flat. She is everywhere about because she is a woman, resolved and unshakeable in herself. To make matters more disturbing, she comes from the West of America, somewhere near California. I gather from her conversation that people from the West are stranger than most people. They must be the most oddly beautiful people in the whole world, at least this woman from the West is the most oddly beautiful person I have ever seen in my life. Every cross-current of the earth seems to have stopped in her and blended into an amazing harmony. She has a big dash of Africa, a dash of Germany, some Cherokee and heaven knows what else. Her feet are big and her body is as tall and straight and strong as a mountain tree. Her neck curves up high and her thick black hair cascades down her back like a wild and tormented stream. I cannot understand her intelligent and all-encompassing eyes, though, except in their size, they are so big, black and startled like those of a wild free buck racing against the wind. Often they cloud over with a deep, brooding look.

It took a great deal of courage to become friends with a woman like that. Like everyone else here I am timid and subdued. Authority, elders, dangerous situations, everything can subdue me. No because I like it that way but because authority carries the weight of an age pressing down on life. It is terrible then to associate with a person who can shout any authority down. Her shouting-matches with authority are the terror and sensation of the village.

It has come down to this. Either the American woman is unreasonable or authority is unreasonable, and everyone in his heart would like to admit that authority is unreasonable. In reality, the rule is as follows: if authority does not like you then you are the outcast and humanity associates with you at its peril. So try always to be on the right side of authority, for the sake of peace.

It was inevitable though that this woman and I should be friends. I have an overwhelming curiosity that I cannot keep within bounds. I passed by the house for almost a month every single day, but one cannot crash in on people. Then one day a dog they have had puppies and my small son chased one of the puppies into the yard and I chased after him. Then one of the puppies became his and there had to be discussions about the puppy, the desert heat and the state of the world, not necessarily in that order. As a result of my curiosity an avalanche of wealth has descended onto my life. My small hut-house is full of short notes written in a wide sprawling hand. I have kept them all because they are a statement of human generosity and the wide carefree laugh of a woman who is as busy as women the world over about those types of things women always entangle themselves in—a man, children, a home. Like this:

Have you an onion to spare? It’s very quiet here this morning and I’m all fagged out from sweeping and cleaning the yard, shaking blankets, cooking, fetching water, bathing children, and there’s still the floor inside to sweep, and dishes to wash and myself to bathe—it’s endless.

Or again:

Have you an extra onion to give me until tomorrow? If so, I’d appreciate it so much! I’m trying to do something with these awful beans and I’ve run out of all my seasonings and spices. A neighbour brought us some spinach last night so we’re in the green. I’ve got dirty clothes galore to wash and iron today.

Or:

I’m sending the kids over to get 10 minutes’ peace in which to restore my equilibrium. It looks as if rain is threatening. Please send them back immediately so they won’t get caught out on it. Any fiction at your house? I could use some light diversion.

And, very typical…

This has been a very hectic morning! First I was rushing to finish a few letters to send to you to post for me. then it began to sprinkle slightly and I remembered you have no raincoat, so I decided to dash over there myself with the letters and the post key. At the very moment I was stepping out of the door, in stepped someone and that solved the letter posting problem, but I still don’t know whether there is any mail for me. I’ve lost my p.o. box key! Did the children perhaps drop it out of that purse when they were playing with it at your house yesterday?

Or my son keeps on getting every kind of chest ailment and I prefer to decide it’s the worst every time:

What’s this about whooping cough? Who diagnosed it? Didn’t you say he had all his shots and vaccinations? The D.P.T. doesn’t require a booster until after he’s five years old. Diphtheria-Pertussis (what is usually called “whooping cough”)—tetanus is one of the most reliable vaccinations I know. All three of mine and I have had hoarse, dry coughs but certainly it wasn’t whooping cough. Here’s Dr. Spock to reassure!

Sometimes, too, conversations get all tangled up and the African night creeps all about and the candles are not lit and the conversation gets more entangled, intense; and the children fall asleep on the floor dazed by it all. the next day I get a book flung at me with vigorous exasperation! “Here’s C. P. Snow. Read him, dammit! And dispel a bit of that fog in thy cranium.”

I am dazed, too, by Mr C. P. Snow. Where do I begin to understand the industrial use of electronics, atomic energy, automation in a world of mud-huts? What is a machine tool? he asks. What are the Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution? The argument could be quaint to one who hasn’t even one leg of culture to stand on. But it isn’t really, because even a bush village in Africa begins to feel the tug and pull of the spider-web of modern life. Would Mr Snow or someone else please write me an explanation of what a machine tool is exactly? I’d like to know. My address is: Serowe, Bechuanaland, Africa.

The trouble with the woman from America is that people would rather hold off, sensing her world to be shockingly apart from theirs. But she is a new kind of American or even maybe will be a new kind of African. There isn’t anyone here who does not admire her—to come from a world of chicken, hamburgers, TV sets in every home, escalators and what not to a village mud-hut and a life so tough, where the most you can afford to eat is ground millet and boiled meat. Sometimes you cannot afford to eat at all; it happens in our village. Always you have to trudge miles for a bucket of water and carry it home on your head. And to do all this with loud, ringing, sprawling laughter!

Black people in America care much about Africa and she has come here on her own as an expression of that love and concern. Through her, too, one is filled with wonder for a country that breeds individuals about whom, without and within, rushed the wind of freedom. I have to make myself clear, though. She is a different kind of person who has taken by force what America will not give black people. We had some other American people here a while ago, sent out by the State Department. They were very jolly and sociable, but for the most innocent questions they kept saying: “We can’t talk about the government. That’s politics. We can’t talk politics.”

Why did they come here if they were so afraid of what the American government thinks about what they might think or say in Africa? Why were they so afraid of their own government? Africa is not alive for the. It seems a waste of the State Department’s money. It seems to strange a thing to send people on goodwill projects if they are so afraid that they jump at the slightest shadow. why are they so afraid of the government of America which is a government of freedom and democracy? Here we are all afraid of authority and we never pretend anything else. Black people who are sent here by the State Department are tied up in some deep and shameful hypocrisy. It is a terrible pity because such things are destructive to them and hurtful to us.

The woman from America loves both Africa and America, independently. She can take what she wants from us both and say: “Dammit!”

It is a difficult thing to do.

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catkittens · 9 months

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Diana Athill: Midsummer Night in the Workhouse

PLEASE DO NOT DETACH LUSTRES FROM THE CHANDELIER. This notice, in purple ink on white card, had not been on the board in the Chinese drawing-room when last Cecilia Mathers looked at it. Unlike many of the admonitions pinned up in Hetherston Hall it carried no explanatory clause such as THE DARK RINGS THEY LEAVE CANNOT BE REMOVED BY POLISHING... THOUGH SMALL IN THEMSELVES HAIRS ACCUMULATE AND CAUSE BLOCKAGE. Sometimes Mrs Lucas would address her guests in the third person: MRS LUCAS ASKS GUESTS TO REFRAIN FROM HANGING HATS ON THESE ANTLERS. THEY WERE MR LUCAS’S PRIDE.

‘Can he really have liked shooting deer?’ Cecilia had asked, shocked, on her first evening. It seemed incongruous in a man whose will had directed a large part of his fortune towards maintaining his house as an asylum for writers and painters.

‘People do,’ answered Philip Dunn, one of the painters. ‘I think he only came to fancy the arts because of the son who was killed. He wrote.’ Then, because Cecilia still looked distressed at the idea of owing her three months of repose to a blood-luster, he added: ‘Perhaps it was only this one. He may have valued it because it was so bizarre.’

Of the six refugees from poverty or domesticity now at Hetherston, Philip was the only one whom Cecilia might have met elsewhere, by choice.

Six was the maximum number of guests, there either by invitation or on application. Cecilia was among them because her publisher thought her pretty and was worried that she could afford to eat only baked beans. He had asked the trust to invite her, a poet veered unexpectedly from Hetherston to Majorca and she was in. But in, so she felt, under false pretences.

For some months she had believed that she did not feel like beginning a second novel, or even a story, because she was so poor and harassed. Given peace and lamb chops for lunch... but now that she was given peace and not just lamb chops but roast chicken and asparagus, and summer pudding with cream, she could still find nothing to write. Most guests took full advantage of their time at Hetherston. From ten in the morning till five in the afternoon the silence was broken only by muffled bursts of typing from behind the doors of the big country-house bedrooms now converted into bed-sitting-rooms. Breakfast and dinner were sociable meals – or were supposed to be – but in the hours between no one was disturbed and no one was to speak. Each room had an electric ring and the makings of tea and coffee, while at midday they could help themselves from a buffet in the dining-room watched over gravely by Kerridge, the butler. He was there to see that they had all they wanted, not to enforce the rule of silence, but his presence made it impos- sible for even the most frivolous to break it. Forks clinked against gold-rimmed Minton china , someone’s jaw cracked as he chewed, and back they would drift to continue their work – all except Cecilia. Shut in her room, she would look at her typewriter with loathing and would sometimes almost cry.

It was not for want of trying. She had now been there for five weeks and in that time she had painfully contrived a synopsis of a novel – a structure of cardboard and glue which would clearly fall to pieces if touched. She had also rewritten a story once scrapped and had seen why she had scrapped it. It was hard to sit idle in her pretty room day after day and she would wake each morning after a bad night thinking: No it is impossible, I must go back to London. But so far the food, the comfort, the beauty of the place and the distance between her and unsatisfactory love had prevailed. She wandered about the enormous garden, went for walks, talked to the men on the home farm. Guilt pounced less often out of doors than in. Now it had caught her again in the Chinese drawing-room – the common room – where she had come because it was raining and because it would soon be time for dinner.

Lustres from the chandelier. Who would wish to detach them and how could it be done? The chandelier hung high from the centre of the ceiling. The sofa table stood under it. If you lifted one of the ladder-back Chippendale chairs onto the table and then climbed on that, it would be possible. Someone must have done it or there would have been no notice. Mrs Borrowdale? She weighed over twelve stone.

Laura Preston rarely came into the drawing-room, her work had taken over so she said, damn her gooseberry eyes. Both the painters, Philip and the morose Norman Salviati, were physically capable of it but Philip was terrified of Mrs Lucas and Salviati would not even have noticed the existence of the chandelier. He must once have looked outwards – objects encountered in life were still sometimes recognisable in his canvases – but he never seemed to now. So it must have been Bouncer, thought Cecilia, though it was not easy to picture Charles Opie, smooth and rubbery behind his yellow waist- coat and carnation, balancing on a Chippendale chair to pluck crystal drops.

Opie was there for his celebrity, not because of need. The trust liked a salting of names among its old boys and invited one a year. When Cecilia had arrived, she like the others was met by the handyman in his shirt sleeves driving the guests’ station wagon (Mrs Lucas had her Morris Minor). Opie had driven up in his own car, an ancient Alvis. He should have looked foolish, coming up the front drive which no one used. It wandered three-quarters of a mile through the park for the benefit of none but the herd of Ayrshire cows. Grass grew down the middle of it and the remaining gravel was potholed so that the Alvis lurched as it came. But Opie had said smugly that it was the more convenient approach for him, coming as he did from a weekend with Sir Thomas Gregg whose place lay in that direction. He had bustled straight through to the Wing to see Mrs Lucas, instead of waiting like everyone else for the ritual invitation to a glass of sherry before dinner on his first evening.

If Cecilia had been working she would have enjoyed her encounters with their hostess: the first evening and coffee after dinner on Sundays. The trust’s London office handled the preliminaries but in the house itself the widow reigned. She had no secretary – it was she herself who wrote the notices. She always greeted guests with the same words:

‘Mr Lucas would have been very happy to see you here.’ It was devotion to her husband’s memory rather than to the arts which made her take so active an interest in the scheme. But by now she had developed a specialist’s knowledge of the creative process, as one who sees much of a market garden becomes informed on green-fly and rust. What these people produced she did not care to know, but the symptoms of production were familiar to her and she considered it her duty to ease them if she could.

‘So you are a writer,’ she had said to Cecilia. ‘Are you in the middle of something? No? A pity, that. They sometimes find it hard to start – the change of atmosphere, you know. It takes people different ways. Mr Doherty, the poet, used to find regular exercise very beneficial. He began two poems up in the rhododendron wood. But Miss – I forget her name – pretty red-haired girl – plays in verse, I think. She found the best thing was whisky. That was quite awkward. I don’t like to ask anyone to leave but in the end I had to. It kept Kerridge up so late – he had to wait until she had gone to sleep and then go in to see that she had not left a lighted cigarette in the bedclothes.’

Philip Dunn’s fear of Mrs Lucas began when for the second time she found him asleep in what had once been the rose garden. She had leant on her stick shaking her head. ‘It is possible,’ she had said, ‘that you are one of those who are not suited by soft conditions. There are some like that – like chickens, you know. They need their ration of grit.’ Philip’s ration of grit at that time would have included nights on park benches. He was angling for the rare privilege of an exten- sion. Mrs Lucas had spoken clinically rather than critically, but he was a persuadable man. He dreaded she might conclude that he should not be there and advise him in so many words to leave. He had rarely been seen in the garden since the incident among the rampaging rose-bushes.

All the flower garden was wild though many plants still won their battle with the weeds. It was beautiful but sad, haunted by its past perfection. Cecilia, knowing that Mr Lucas had been very rich, had expected grandeur. Small amounts of hard-earned money had not taught her how much could be done with large amounts of it. At first, on seeing the neglected flower garden and the small staff, she had been horrified to think that the old woman was compelled by a will to keep up something beyond her means. Now she was beginning to see the estate more clearly. The home farm, for instance, was a model; the kitchen garden was exquisitely run; in winter, they said, the central heating left nothing to be desired and there was the most modern deep-freeze unit in the kitchen to take care of the summer’s glut. Only money could nourish so sound a structure, even though there was not enough of it to maintain the elegancies of the past. That the two Italian housemaids got round to each bed-sitting- room no more than twice a week was not an indication of ruin but simply showed that Mrs Lucas knew how best to direct her spending. (And besides, YOU WILL FIND A DUSTER IN THE BOTTOM RIGHT-HAND DRAWER OF YOUR DESK. The widow was not a woman to waste anything, whether the scraps from their meat plates which Kerridge collected in an enamel basin for the dogs, or an artist’s occasional need to relax by indulging in some simple manual task.)

Cecilia doubted whether Bouncer, as she and Philip called Charles Opie, ever dusted his desk. His relationship with Mrs Lucas was unlike that of the others. They had friends in common – more than that, the old woman read his books. Most people did, and most critics praised them though they should, Cecilia felt, have known better. He had been described as a budding Somerset Maugham and he had, indeed, learnt several useful tricks from Mr Maugham which he used with assurance to disguise his own vulgarity. The day his advent was announced was the only day since Cecilia’s arrival when the five already there had gathered in the Chinese drawing-room with no sign of reluctance or strain. Garrulous, they became, under the influence of resentment. Everyone knew that he had a private income and a perfectly good house in Hampstead; everyone knew that he could work eight hours a day without trouble wherever he was, for this he continually boasted in articles and interviews. Laura Preston knew, moreover, that his reason for accepting the invitation was a base one. His wife had just divorced him because of his affair with a television actress and although the actress loved him he, once free, had become bored with her and wished to escape her recriminations. ‘I’d like to know whether Mrs L knows that,’ said Laura, though none of them had reason to suppose Mrs Lucas interested in her guests’ love affairs. ‘He’s getting his portrait done by Annigoni,’ said Philip. ‘Monied people have no business here,’ said Salviati (but he thought they had no business anywhere, except when he needed to borrow some). Even Mrs Borrowdale, who rarely spoke of anything but the facts of daily life because her opinions were too steady to need discussion, was moved to speak critically. ‘I read one of his books,’ she said shyly and reluctantly. ‘I – er... well, it was shoddy stuff.’

Cecilia had been sitting on the balustrade between the terraced lawn and the park when the Alvis came bumping up the drive. ‘Do you know where I should park the car?’ he had called, taking out his bags. She had gone over to him and he had smiled at her. His eyes, very dark and knowing, were eyes familiar to her – the eyes of a womaniser, saying without any particular intention, ‘You delicious thing, what I could do with you!’ Her one painless affair had been with a man called Max who had eyes like that, and it had given her a fondness for them. She, too, had smiled, with recognition and pleasure.

At once she saw him notice it. It was as though he had said, ‘Aha! Here we go again.’ And although she had realised soon afterwards that she liked him no better than she liked his books she could never quite suppress the feeling, now, that they knew each other too well. The way he spoke to her, the lazy passes he made at her – unflattering passes: if they worked they worked, if not no matter – implied that he felt them to be of a kind. They were not, of that she was sure, but her coldness, her withdrawal, remained slightly vitiated by that exchange of looks. She could not quite be free of a man so like Max, when with Max... well, never mind.

Alone in the drawing-room at half-past-six, Cecilia had put a record on the player. She was not listening. She was lying on the sofa thinking shall I go, shall I stay, when Charles Opie came in.

‘Hullo there,’ he said. ‘Alone and palely loitering?’ She grimaced a smile but did not answer.

He went straight over to take off the record, assuming that she would prefer him to music.

‘I’m dining out this evening,’ he said, ‘with the Greggs. It’s a staggering house. I don’t suppose you know it.’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Why not come? I’ll telephone them if you like – I know they wouldn’t mind.’

He sat on the arm of the sofa and smiled with crinkled eyes. Opie has charm, see.

‘Thanks, but I’d rather stay in. I must work after dinner – it’s taken over, as Laura would say.’

He made no answer to that, glancing at her obliquely under thick eyelids in a way that made her certain he saw through her.

‘Have you heard the latest?’ he asked. ‘Orgies in the dorm. Salviati had Rosa in his room last night – the fat Italian girl. Philip saw her come out.’

‘There’ll be notices on all the men’s dressing tables tomorrow,’ she said. ‘PLEASE DO NOT SLEEP WITH THE MAIDS. IT CAN CAUSE PREGNANCY.’

He laughed and she felt annoyed with herself for making his kind of joke. It happened from time to time and always left her disliking him more.

‘There’s a new one on the board,’ she said, to change the subject.

‘The lustres, you mean? Yes, it was Laura.’

‘Nonsense, it can’t have been.’

‘It was, too, she told me. She’s got some monstrous child in her novel. Its besotted grandfather hoists it on his shoulders so that it can touch a chandelier and make it tinkle. Old Lolly wasn’t detaching them at all – she was trying out the tinkle to find the mot juste. There’s an artist for you, dear. Kerridge came in and caught her at it.’

‘Good God! I wish I had.’

‘What are you up to when you spend all day pottering in the kitchen garden? Trying to find the mot juste for the smell of organic manure?’

‘I must go and wash for dinner,’ said Cecilia, getting up. ‘Won’t you be late for your party?’ and she was out of the door before he finished telling her not to be silly, it was not yet seven o’clock.

The kitchen garden was her weakness. It was enclosed within a magnificent serpentine wall stitched with espaliered fruit-trees. Worked by a dedicated man, Philby, it was the only part of the garden still exactly as it had been when the house was itself. Exuberant but controlled, vegetables made patterns against the soft black earth, and there was a smell of fruit, herbs and compost. Two or three times she had diffidently offered Philby her help and he, a thin silent man with kind grey eyes, had accepted it without (she thought) telling Mrs Lucas. While she picked strawberries into a punnet lined with a cabbage leaf, or hoed between rows of lettuces, she felt as though the rest of the garden, beyond the wall, lay about her as beautiful and orderly in its way as Philby’s domain still was. She forgot her frustrating struggle to find something to write and began to build up images of an unfamiliar kind of life. Smooth lawns, well-pruned roses, the floor of the Chinese drawing-room not simply clean but glowing again, and smelling of beeswax. The lovely stucco swags over the chimney pieces would not have dust-shadows in their mouldings. They would be flicked daily, as Kerridge had described, by housemaids with fresh feather dusters on long bamboo canes. Instead of queer fish out of water (or leeches, perhaps), there would be men and women who had lived there always – doing what? She would go in from these dreams in the kitchen garden more depressed than before. They gave her the discomfort under the ribs that she associated with the stirring of work, but they had no roots in anything she knew, they could come to nothing. She could feel in advance the falseness there would be in anything which came from her emotion over the beauty of this place. But turning back to what she knew – the tangle of her loves, the ramifications of failure, the gritty details of kipper-smelling stairs, half- pints of milk on windowsills and gas-bills unopened because of fear, she knew that all that was too close, too painful and too boring to do more for her than it had done already.

Supposing, she thought that evening, when she had left Charles and gone up to her room, supposing that I am never able to write anything again? It was frightening. She had long ago resigned herself to being inefficient at living. She could rarely find work that interested her and was bad at work that did not, growing hysterical between disinclination and obsessive scruples. Money ran through her hands as fast when there was more of it as when there was less, but never carelessly, always to an accompaniment of guilt and anxiety. She had never yet been able to love a man prepared to love her – unless he was one who, for some intractable reason, was unable to marry. Perhaps this had been by misfortune to begin with, but now it was made worse by her suspicion that it had become an addiction, that she equated love with pain and could no longer feel it good if it might give pleasure. When she had begun to write – stories at first, and then a novel which found a publisher at once – she had felt like the ugly duckling bending his neck for the first time to his own reflection. Here was her element, this she could do. The horror in wait at Hetherston, nearest in her room but present everywhere, even after dinner when she talked with the others or pub-crawled with Philip, came from the knowledge of how closely her work connected with her own experience and dread that everything of significance in that experience might have been used up.

She would cast back for the scene, the face, the overheard remark that might start to spread ripples, and each time the same things would come up, either done already or weightless as a dead leaf. What had happened to her, ever, except the old sad things, or else the trivia like the nonsense with Max? How do they do it, she wondered, the ones like Bouncer?

‘Today I will start a story about a solicitor who has been embezzling his clients’ money...’ and tap, tap, tap they go. Was it because she was a woman? But look at Mrs Borrowdale. In the time left her by marriage that silent woman spent five or six years accumulating her material on aspects of Roman history, then, with her book whole in her mind, would leave Mr Borrowdale to his sister and go away for a few months to write it. A dull woman she would be, if you did not know those admirable books. No, a woman does not have to be like me, thought Cecilia humbly.

Hearing Charles drive away, she went downstairs to wait for dinner. The rain had stopped so she joined Salviati on the lawn outside the dining-room. Had he really slept with Rosa? Yes, he probably had. He was a man who would choose the simplest way available to dispose of a distracting need. Philip shouted from his window to ask the time and soon afterwards came to join them. The other two would not appear until Kerridge sounded the gong.

Evenings at Hetherston went slowly. They all tried – civilised behaviour was a small price to pay for Mrs Lucas’s hospitality – but after the first few evenings they had little to talk about. Mrs Borrowdale would fall silent over her embroidery as soon as the talk turned on ideas. Laura would go back to her room. Salviati would attempt an argument with Philip only to have his dogmatism defeated by flip- pancy. Charles Opie was often out, but when he was in would be little help, irritating the others by talking when they wished to read or listen to records, or infuriating them by not listening when they wished to talk. Cecilia and Philip would sometimes take the station wagon and drive to the nearest town for a visit to the cinema, or to a village pub for darts and beer, but these resources were growing stale. The only unifying factor in the group was a slight regression towards their schooldays on the part of everyone but Mrs Borrowdale as a result of even so mild a degree of institu- tional living. They joined in a disproportionate interest in what Mrs Lucas said or did, or in childish amusement at some daring infringement of the notices – the time, for example, when Philip had hung his grotesque straw hat on Mr Lucas’s pride. They also, and as often, split. Laura had become waspish when Cecilia had been invited to after- dinner coffee with their hostess on a Thursday, and Philip’s good nature had cracked when Charles had helped himself to a third glass from the modest ration of sherry provided (together with beer and cider with meals – other drink they had to buy for themselves).

This evening they did not go out because Philip had letters to write. It was warm again, sweet-smelling as darkness fell. At about ten, bored by the pluck of Mrs Borrowdale’s needle through canvas and by Salviati in a lecturing mood, Cecilia decided to go for a walk. She took the path through the rose garden where reaching branches from the ramblers scattered her with drops and petals, out through the little iron gate and down to the stream which ran through the park. She had not remembered that walking alone in country darkness was so frightening. Her senses became as twitchy as a rabbit’s and she jumped when a water rat plopped, a disturbed moorhen scuttered.

When she had made her way almost to the wall of the park she sat on a fallen tree trunk to smoke. The prospect of almost two more months of such evenings, and all for nothing, was oppressive: there was no point in staying much longer. She could find enough money, somehow, to keep her going until she got another job, and if she had really gone dry, this one had better be a solid one. Tomorrow, she decided, she would tell Mrs Lucas that she was leaving.

Her feet were wet and beginning to grow cold. Now that it was really dark it would be easier to get back by striking up through the groups of oaks until she came to the front drive. It was farther away than she expected, and when she had almost fallen because of an invisible dip in the ground, stumbled into a patch of thistles and trodden in a cowpat – an old one, luckily – she began to feel rattled. Gravel under her feet at last, and, I came too far, she was thinking, when there was a loud snort and a shape rose up in front of her. A heifer, as startled as she was, lumbered to its feet and swung its head towards her, there to stand blowing indignantly. Its signal brought other shapes into movement, there was a scrambling of hoofs, more snorting and Cecilia realised that she was surrounded by the herd of young beasts which, unlike the milk cows, were left out all night. Quickly she said to herself, ‘I am not afraid of cows,’ but her heart was thumping with the shock.

‘Good cows,’ she said in what she hoped was a soothing voice. ‘Don’t be silly, it’s only me,’ and she advanced two steps. The creature ahead of her backed away but the others, with their usual inquisitiveness, began to gather nearer. Their blowing was gentler now but from what she could make out of their shapes their heads were down. Forgetting that in day- light the stance of a curious heifer held no terrors for her, she thought in panic, They’re going to charge! She pulled off her scarf and flicked it at them. ‘Shoo! Go away!’ she shouted, and they jumbled about among themselves but stayed where they were. Oh Lord, thought Cecilia, what an idiotic plight, what am I to do?

She had not heard the Alvis coming along the road beyond the park wall to stop at the gate. Not until Charles put it into gear to come through did she realise that help was at hand. In the time it took him to shut the gate and get back into the car she managed to pull herself together so well that when his headlights caught her she had started walking again, as though making her way calmly through the herd.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ he said, pulling up beside her.

‘Coming back from a walk,’ she answered coldly.

‘Hop in,’ and too quickly she was in the car, safe with the smell of brandy and cigars. Then, unable to keep up the pretence, she began to laugh.

‘Thank goodness you turned up,’ she said. ‘There I was, ambling happily through the night, and suddenly a herd of savage cows sprang out of nowhere.’

‘They didn’t look very savage to me, but you did. You looked as though you were offering to strangle them with your bare hands.’

‘Well, they took me by surprise. How was your party?’

‘Not a party, just the family. You ought to have come. The only pretty woman I had to look at all the evening was his great-great-great something or other by Kneller, and she looked prim. And you didn’t work after all, so you were just being tiresome. I hope you suffered for it.’

‘I did rather. First Mrs B told me how much she saved by using coke instead of anthracite in her boiler, then Salviati began to lecture me on the follies of expressionism. I wish she’d talk about her work and he wouldn’t.’

‘I wish you’d talk about yourself.’

‘The subject bores me,’ she said.

He drove past the front door, through the arch into the stable yard where the garage doors stood open. Running the car in beside the station wagon, he switched off ignition and lights together and they were side by side in complete darkness. The engine made ticking sounds as it settled, and, Bother! thought Cecilia, he’s going to slide his arm along the back of the seat.

Instead of doing this, Charles reached across her knees and opened the door.

‘I want another drink,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a bottle of brandy upstairs. I’ll bring it down and you must have a nightcap with me to make up for your perversity.’

‘I’d love one,’ she said, relieved.

When they went out in the evenings, Kerridge put the key of the back door under a brick in the roots of the ivy by the kitchen window. They groped their way in and through to the drawing-room. Cecilia kicked off her sandals and settled on the sofa with her feet under a cushion to warm them. He’s not so bad, she thought, while he was upstairs fetching his bottle. Why shouldn’t he sell well if that’s what people like to read? And a carnation a day is no sillier than Philip’s straw hat. But when he came back he began at once on a story about Laura Preston in Greece, refusing to eat dinner because she had seen the lamb on her plate waiting to be slaughtered, lying all day in the sun with its feet tied together, its tongue swollen with thirst. Listening to his mockery of Laura, Cecilia felt fond of her for the first time.

‘I’d have done the same,’ she said defiantly.

‘But you tuck into your mutton chops here,’ he said.

‘Oh don’t be silly, that isn’t the point.’

‘Have another drink and move your legs over,’ he said, coming to sit at the other end of the sofa.

He leant back and looked at her. Again she saw Max’s eyes narrowed with automatic charm in Charles’s face. They’ll still look at women like that when they are eighty, she thought, and then it will be touching – ‘What a one he must have been!’ – but there’ll be years in between when it will be gruesome.

‘Why won’t you come to bed with me, you silly girl?’ he said.

‘Oh Charles, for heaven’s sake!’

‘But why?’

‘Because I don’t want to.’

‘You’d enjoy it, you know.’

‘I would not.’

‘You would, you know. You ought to let up sometimes on all this doomed love. That’s what you go in for, isn’t it? Isn’t it?’

They have that knack, she thought, seeing a tribe of Charleses and Maxes. They know what kind of woman one is by instinct, on sight, and sometimes it’s such a comfort and sometimes, like now, it’s infuriating.

‘I told you,’ she said. ‘I get bored talking about myself.’

‘Of course you do, if you go on doing such boring things. If you’d just relax and come to bed with me for the fun of it you’d find yourself much better company.’

‘Look, Charles,’ she said. ‘I didn’t come to Hetherston to flip in and out of bed with you or anyone else.’

‘You don’t know yourself, moppet,’ he said.

It was far from easy to believe in a fatuousness so complete, but it was not that which made Cecilia lean forward and peer into his face. Do they even share a language? she thought. ‘You don’t know yourself, moppet.’ Different circumstances, of course, but oh Max! He had taken a handful of the hair at the back of her neck (she had worn it longer then) and pulled her head gently back against the arm of the sofa – the cover had been glazed chintz, rather unpleasant – and he had used those very words. And he had been right, too. She had never suspected herself of being able to live six whole months of warmth and easiness, without a bad ending – small but solid to remember even now, and to set against all the rest. Unreal, unimportant, but coming at the right time such a meeting could touch something deeper than its surface implications, might even, had she been another kind of woman, have changed...

‘Good heavens!’ she exclaimed. She still stared at Charles and he stared back.

‘Will you?’ he said.

‘Will I what? Oh – oh no.... No, of course I won’t.’

‘Then what is it?’

‘I’m not sure – but thank you very much, thank you a thousand times, dear Charles,’ and she began to laugh, while he looked a little hurt at her senseless response. All that raking through the ashes and she had never even remem- bered Max except to dismiss him. ‘You don’t know yourself, moppet.’ The girl would have to be someone different from her, more like Ellen (and she remembered a girl with whom she had shared rooms for three months two years ago). Oh my God, can this really be going to work?

Disgruntled, Charles got up to refill his glass and she rose too, released by movement and able to say good night and leave him. Going up the shallow curving stairs she ran her hand along the banister and remembered Max’s stud-box, dark pigskin, polished with use, and the lotion he used after shaving, too expensive to smell vulgar. Once she had come into a room and had known that he had just left it – the smell had still been there, making her smile. Reaching her room she crossed to the window, opened it and leant out, but she hardly noticed the scent of the roses growing below. Things were hooking onto each other – smells, words, gestures – not yet amounting to a sequence of events but weaving a feeling of Max, a response to that feeling in which at any moment something might happen. I’ll call him Louis, she thought, and now I’ll be strong-minded and go to bed, because if this is going to work it will still be here in the morning.

She could not sleep. The typewriter squatted on the desk in the darkness across the room. She remembered that Ellen wore a yellow kimono-shaped dressing-gown and saw her sitting cross-legged on an unmade bed in it, watching Max knotting his tie. He was saying: ‘Our house was almost burnt down in a bush fire when I was nine. The animals all streamed away from the fire, just like they say, and an old man with a long beard on a white horse came soaring over the gate into our yard.’ Ellen had always been Desdemona-like for traveller’s tales, that would have been his first attraction for her. What would happen? Cecilia did not know but her ignorance was not worrying. She was feeling the ache under her ribs, becoming more certain every minute that in the mist out of which these details were emerging there was hidden a solid shape. There had been something in the Max nonsense that was not nonsense after all, and if she went slowly, carefully, held onto each detail as it came, she would surely get at what it was.

Putting on her dressing-gown she went to the desk and found a pencil. ‘Yellow kimono,’ she wrote, then ‘bush fire story’, ‘stud-box’ and (to her surprise – it had never happened) ‘she finds his wife’s nightdress under pillow – doesn’t mind – is astonished at this.’ Good gracious me, she thought, what are we going to get up to? and went back to sit on her bed feeling restless, not ready to start work but unable to relax.

I want to go home, she thought suddenly. Absurd, with almost two months of leisure left to her. She would sit at that desk tapping away as busily as Laura and Charles, sleep- walking down to lunch, smugly accepting the tribute of Kerridge’s respectful silence, the slippered maids’ withdrawal from her room when they found her in it (they were used to leaving it till last, knowing it would often be empty during ‘silence time’). She would be a credit to Hetherston before she was done. ‘All I needed,’ she would report to Mrs Lucas, ‘was to have my bottom pinched, so to speak, by a best-selling novelist in a yellow waistcoat.’

She heard footsteps creaking slowly down the passage. They stopped outside her door and she held her breath. There was a gentle tap, repeated a few seconds later when she did not answer. If this is Charles, she thought, I am going to give him such a flea in his ear... and she walked quickly to the door and opened it wide. The man who almost fell on top of her was Philip.

‘Philip!’ she exclaimed. ‘What’s wrong?’

He took her hand from the knob and shut the door with elaborate care. Then he turned on her a proud smile.

‘I’m drunk,’ he said. ‘I’m exquisitely drunk.’

‘But weren’t you writing letters?’

‘I got bored – went out. I am so glad you’re still up, let’s do something gay.’

‘But, Philip dear, we can’t – everyone’s in bed.’

‘You aren’t. What were you doing?’ He walked rather stiffly to the foot of her bed and sat down.

She laughed – and suddenly knew that she, too, was feeling drunk. ‘I think I was writing a story at last.’

‘Isn’t that what you do all the time?’

‘It hasn’t been, not since I’ve been here,’ she said, the shameful secret coming out easily.

‘I’m not surprised. How any of us can work in this hellish place beats me. Silence, notices, tact, clinic stuff – and the evenings. If I had somewhere to go I’d go, and that’s what you should do – we all ought to. Get drunk and hire a motor coach and drive away singing “On Ilkley Moor”, like they do on Outings.’

‘But it’s all right really. It’s only us feeling recalcitrant. And don’t you think it might be a good idea to go to bed?’

Looking mournful now, he shook his head. Cecilia wished he had not put into words what she had been feeling herself.

‘If I go home,’ she said, ‘it will be hell. I lent my flat to a couple who never go away when you come back – they’ll stay and sleep on the floor. And the pipes will leak and the sashcords will break and bores will ring up and I’ll have to buy food – and now I’ve got this damned story to cope with. It really would be awful.’

‘You’ll go,’ said Philip, and her heart lightened to hear him.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘You must think of something mad for us to do before I get unhappy.’

‘Why not take your hat down and hang it on the antlers?’ she said absently.

‘Done it. And a scarf, too.’

‘Why not detach a lustre from the chandelier?’ – and she could have bitten her tongue, because when he lurched to his feet crying, ‘Cecilia! You’re a genius!’ she saw that he was really drunk and not pretending to be more so than he was. ‘Come on,’ he said, grabbing her hand. ‘That’s just what we’ll do.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said sharply. ‘You know quite well I didn’t mean it. Now you must go to bed or I’ll get angry.’

‘Oh come on – we’ll do it like mice and you can have it as a trophy.’ He had already pulled her to the door and got it open so that her protests necessarily became whispered. Snores came from Salviati’s room and the uneven tick of the tall clock on the landing was loud.

‘Philip honey,’ she whispered. ‘Stop it – do be sensible,’ but a giggle had started to rise in her throat. He hushed her and began to tiptoe heavily towards the stairs, still holding her hand.

‘The hosts of Midian,’ he croaked. ‘Prowl on regardless, girl.’

‘Please!’ she begged, feeling that she must stop him somehow, although the excitement of night and secrecy, the ridiculous dare of the darkened drawing-room across the hall down below, had begun to touch her as well as him.

As they went down the stairs her fluster increased. Dismay at what he might get up to, shame at the childishness of having come this far, were mixed with an absurd elation: she had her story! She could write it here, there or anywhere, but what had they to do with her, these well-meaning people who left houses for her and made no terms? Of course she would leave Hetherston – at once, while the story was still brewing up. Why suffer another evening when the comfort, the beauty and Philby’s kitchen garden would have become meaningless, having no gap to fill? She must be on her own and back in real life, to get on with it.

Philip switched on only one of the wall-lights in the Chinese drawing-room. It was large and shadowy, a lovely room from another life, the loveliest thing in it the great glass shower in its centre. Cecilia, who owned few objects, was scrupulously respectful of other people’s – but she found herself looking at this one as though it had no owner, were a cairn from which you picked a stone to prove that you had been there. Philip, who had gone quiet, lifted a chair but she stopped him. She found a copy of the Times Literary Supplement to spread on the shining top of the sofa table, then let him stand the chair on that. He was beginning to look glazed and did it clumsily. He was no longer, she saw, to be trusted as a climber.

‘Shall I?’ she asked, still whispering, and he nodded.

The table complained as she climbed onto it, but it was steady. Very carefully, distributing her weight evenly, she mounted the chair, stood up and reached into the centre of the chandelier. From one of its inner circles she detached two faceted lustres, handed one down to Philip and slipped the other into her dressing-gown pocket.

Philip helped her down and stood swaying slightly while she put everything back where it should be. She had a moment’s fear that she would not be able to get him up the stairs, but he pulled himself together and made it. Having seen him to his room she returned to her own and got into bed. For a little while she lay on her back staring into darkness, wondering what on earth had made her do such a silly thing – such an outrageous thing, really. Then, feeling very happy, she turned on her side and went to sleep.

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catkittens · 10 months

Text

Sara Paretsky

The Maltese Cat

HER VOICE ON the phone had been soft and husky, with just a whiff of the South laid across it like a rare perfume. “I’d rather come to your office; I don’t want people in mine to know I’ve hired a detective.”

I’d offered to see her at her home in the evening-my Spartan office doesn’t invite client confidences. But she didn’t want to wait until tonight, she wanted to come today, almost at once, and no, she wouldn’t meet me in a restaurant. Far too hard to talk, and this was extremely personal.

“You know my specialty is financial crime, don’t you?” I asked sharply.

“Yes, that’s how I got your name. One o’clock, fourth floor of the Pulteney, right?” And she’d hung up without telling me who she was.

An errand at the County building took me longer than I’d expected; it was close to one-thirty by the time I got back to the Pulteney. My caller’s problem apparently was urgent: she was waiting outside my office door, tapping one high heel impatiently on the floor as I trudged down the hall in my running shoes.

“Ms. Warshawski! I thought you were standing me up.”

“No such luck,” I grunted, opening my office door for her.

In the dimly lit hall she’d just been a slender silhouette. Under the office lights the set of the shoulders and signature buttons told me her suit had come from the hands of someone at Chanel. Its blue enhanced the cobalt of her eyes. Soft makeup hid her natural skin tones-I couldn’t tell if that dark red hair was natural, or merely expertly painted.

She scanned the spare furnishings and picked the cleaner of my two visitor chairs. “My time is valuable, Ms. Warshawski. If I’d known you were going to keep me waiting without a place to sit I would have finished some phone calls before walking over here.”

I’d dressed in jeans and a work shirt for a day at the Recorder of Deeds office. Feeling dirty and outclassed made me grumpy. “You hung up without giving me your name or number, so there wasn’t much I could do to let you know you’d have to stand around in your pointy little shoes. My time’s valuable, too. Why don’t you tell me where the fire is so I can start putting it out.”

She flushed. When I turn red I look blotchy, but in her it only enhanced her makeup. “It’s my sister.” The whiff of Southern increased. “Corinne. She’s run off to Ja-my ex-husband, and I need someone to tell her to come back.”

I made a disgusted face. “I can’t believe I raced back from the County building to listen to this. It’s not 1890, you know. She may be making a mistake but presumably she can sort it out for herself.”

Her flush darkened. “I’m not being very clear. I’m sorry. I’m not used to having to ask for things. My sister-Corinne-she’s only fourteen. She’s my ward. I’m sixteen years older than she is. Our parents died three years ago and she’s been living with me since then. It’s not easy, not easy for either of us. Moving from Mobile to here was just the beginning. When she got here she wanted to run around, do all the things you can’t do in Mobile.”

She waved a hand to indicate what kinds of things those might be. “She thinks I’m a tough bitch and that I was too hard on my ex-husband. She’s known him since she was three and he was a big hero. She couldn’t see he’d changed. Or not changed, just not had the chance to be heroic anymore in public. So when she took off two days ago I assumed she went there. He’s not answering his phone or the doorbell. I don’t know if they’ve left town or he’s just playing possum or what. I need someone who knows how to get people to open their doors and knows how to talk to people. At least if I could see Corinne I might-I don’t know.”

She broke off with a helpless gesture that didn’t match her sophisticated looks. Nothing like responsibility for a minor to deflate even the most urbane.

I grimaced more ferociously. “Why don’t we start with your name, and your husband’s name and address, and then move on to her friends.”

“Her friends?” The deep blue eyes widened. “I’d just as soon this didn’t get around. People talk, and even though it’s not 1890, it could be hard on her when she gets back to school.”

I suppressed a howl. “You can’t come around demanding my expertise and then tell me what or what not to do. What if she’s not with your husband? What if I can’t get in touch with you when I’ve found that out and she’s in terrible trouble and her life depends on my turning up some new leads? If you can’t bring yourself to divulge a few names-starting with your own-you’d better go find yourself a more pliant detective. I can recommend a couple who have waiting rooms.”

She set her lips tightly: whatever she did she was in command-people didn’t talk to her that way and get away with it. For a few seconds it looked as though I might be free to get back to the Recorder of Deeds that afternoon, but then she shook her head and forced a smile to her lips.

“I was told not to mind your abrasiveness because you were the best. I’m Brigitte LeBlanc. My sister’s name is Corinne, also LeBlanc. And my ex-husband is Charles Pierce.” She scooted her chair up to the desk so she could scribble his address on a sheet of paper torn from a memo pad in her bag. She scrawled busily for several minutes, then handed me a list that included Corinne’s three closest school friends, along with Pierce’s address.

“I’m late for a meeting. I’ll call you tonight to see if you’ve made any progress.” She got up.

“Not so fast,” I said. “I get a retainer. You have to sign a contract. And I need a number where I can reach you.”

“I really am late.”

“And I’m really too busy to hunt for your sister. If you have a sister. You can’t be that worried if your meeting is more important than she is.”

Her scowl would have terrified me if I’d been alone with her in an alley after dark. “I do have a sister. And I spent two days trying to get into my ex-husband’s place, and then in tracking down people who could recommend a private detective to me. I can’t do anything else to help her except go earn the money to pay your fee.”

I pulled a contract from my desk drawer and stuck it in the manual Olivetti that had belonged to my mother-a typewriter so old that I had to order special ribbons for it from Italy. A word processor would be cheaper and more impressive but the wrist action keeps my forearms strong. I got Ms. LeBlanc to give me her address, to sign on the dotted line for $400 a day plus expenses, to write in the name of a guaranteeing financial institution and to hand over a check for two hundred.

When she’d left I wrestled with my office windows, hoping to let some air in to blow her pricey perfume away. Carbon flakes from the el would be better than the lingering scent, but the windows, painted over several hundred times, wouldn’t budge. I turned on a desktop fan and frowned sourly at her bold black signature.

What was her ex-husband’s real name? She’d bitten off “Ja-” Could be James or Jake, but it sure wasn’t Charles. Did she really have a sister? Was this just a ploy to get back at a guy late on his alimony? Although Pierce’s address on North Winthrop didn’t sound like the place for a man who could afford alimony. Maybe everything went to keep her in Chanel suits while he lived on Skid Row.

She wasn’t in the phone book, so I couldn’t check her own address on Belden. The operator told me the number was unlisted. I called a friend at the Ft. Dearborn Trust, the bank Brigitte had drawn her check on, and was assured that there was plenty more where that came from. My friend told me Brigitte had parlayed the proceeds of a high-priced modeling career into a successful media consulting firm.

“And if you ever read the fashion pages you’d know these things. Get your nose out of the sports section from time to time, Vic-it’ll help with your career.”

“Thanks, Eva.” I hung up with a snap. At least my client wouldn’t turn out to be named something else, always a good beginning to a tawdry case.

I looked in the little mirror perched over my filing cabinet. A dust smudge on my right cheek instead of peach blush was the only distinction between me and Ms. LeBlanc. Since I was dressed appropriately for North Winthrop, I shut up my office and went to retrieve my car.

Charles Pierce lived in a dismal ten-flat built flush onto the Uptown sidewalk. Ragged sheets made haphazard curtains in those windows that weren’t boarded over. Empty bottles lined the entryway, but the smell of stale Ripple couldn’t begin to mask the stench of fresh urine. If Corinne LeBlanc had run away to this place, life with Brigitte must be unmitigated hell.

My client’s ex-husband lived in 3E. I knew that because she’d told me. Those few mailboxes whose doors still shut wisely didn’t trumpet their owners’ identities. The filthy brass nameplate next to the doorbells was empty and the doorbells didn’t work. Pushing open the rickety door to the hall, I wondered again about my client’s truthfulness: she told me Ja-hadn’t answered his phone or his bell.

A rheumy-eyed woman was sprawled across the bottom of the stairs, sucking at a half-pint. She stared at me malevolently when I asked her to move, but she didn’t actively try to trip me when I stepped over her. It was only my foot catching in the folds of her overcoat.

The original building probably held two apartments per floor. At least, on the third floor only two doors at either end looked as though they went back to the massive, elegant construction of the building’s beginnings. The other seven were flimsy newcomers that had been hastily installed when an apartment was subdivided. Peering in the dark I found one labeled B and counted off three more to the right to get to E. After knocking on the peeling veneer several times I noticed a button imbedded in the grime on the jamb. When I pushed it I heard a buzz resonate inside. No one came to the door. With my ear against the filthy panel I could hear the faint hum of a television.

I held the buzzer down for five minutes. It’s hard on the finger but harder on the ear. If someone was really in there he should have come boiling to the door by now.

I could go away and come back, but if Pierce was lying doggo to avoid Brigitte, that wouldn’t buy me anything. She said she’d tried off and on for two days. The television might be running as a decoy, or-I pushed more lurid ideas from my mind and took out a collection of skeleton keys. The second worked easily in the insubstantial lock. In two minutes I was inside the apartment, looking at an illustration from House Beautiful in Hell.

It was a single room with a countertop kitchen on the left side. A tidy person could pull a corrugated screen to shield the room from signs of cooking, but Pierce wasn’t tidy. Ten or fifteen stacked pots, festooned with rotting food and roaches, trembled precariously when I shut the door.

Dominating the place was a Murphy bed with a grotesquely fat man sprawled in at an ominous angle. He’d been watching TV when he died. He was wearing frayed, shiny pants with the fly lying carelessly open and a lumberjack shirt that didn’t quite cover his enormous belly.

His monstrous size and the horrible angle at which his bald head was tilted made me gag. I forced it down and walked through a pile of stale clothes to the bed. Lifting an arm the size of a tree trunk, I felt for a pulse. Nothing moved in the heavy arm, but the skin, while clammy, was firm. I couldn’t bring myself to touch any more of him but stumbled around the perimeter to peer at him from several angles. I didn’t see any obvious wounds. Let the medical examiner hunt out the obscure ones.

By the time I was back in the stairwell I was close to fainting. Only the thought of falling into someone else’s urine or vomit kept me on my feet. On the way down I tripped in earnest over the rheumy-eyed woman’s coat. Sprawled on the floor at the bottom, I couldn’t keep from throwing up myself. It didn’t make me feel any better.

I dug a water bottle out of the detritus in my trunk and sponged myself off before calling the police. They asked me to stay near the body. I thought the front seat of my car on Winthrop would be close enough.

While I waited for a meat wagon I wondered about my client. Could Brigitte have come here after leaving me, killed him and taken off while I was phoning around checking up on her? If she had, the rheumy-eyed woman in the stairwell would have seen her. Would the bond forged by my tripping over her and vomiting in the hall be enough to get her to talk to me?

I got out of the car, but before I could get back to the entrance the police arrived. When we pushed open the rickety door my friend had evaporated. I didn’t bother mentioning her to the boys-and girl-in blue: her description wouldn’t stand out in Uptown, and even if they could find her she wouldn’t be likely to say much.

We plodded up the stairs in silence. There were four of them. The woman and the youngest of the three men seemed in good shape. The two older men were running sadly to flab. I didn’t think they’d be able to budge my client’s ex-husband’s right leg, let alone his mammoth redwood torso.

“I got a feeling about this,” the oldest officer muttered, more to himself than the rest of us. “I got a feeling.”

When we got to 3E and he looked across at the mass on the bed he shook his head a couple of times. “Yup. I kind of knew as soon as I heard the call.”

“Knew what, Tom?” the woman demanded sharply.

“Jade Pierce,” he said. “Knew he lived around here. Been a lot of complaints about him. Thought it might be him when I heard we was due to visit a real big guy.”

The woman stopped her brisk march to the bed. The rest of us looked at the behemoth in shared sorrow. Jade. Not James or Jake but Jade. Once the most famous down lineman the Bears had ever fielded. Now… I shuddered.

When he played for Alabama some reporter said his bald head was as smooth and cold as a piece of jade, and went on to spin some tiresome simile relating it to his play. When he signed with the Bears, I was as happy as any other Chicago fan, even though his reputation for off-field violence was pretty unappetizing. No wonder Brigitte LeBlanc hadn’t stayed with him, but why hadn’t she wanted to tell me who he really was? I wrestled with that while Tom called for reinforcements over his lapel mike.

“So what were you doing here?” he asked me.

“His ex-wife hired me to check up on him.” I don’t usually tell the cops my clients’ business, but I didn’t feel like protecting Brigitte. “She wanted to talk to him and he wasn’t answering his phone or his door.”

“She wanted to check up on him?” the fit younger officer, a man with high cheekbones and a well-tended mustache, echoed me derisively. “What I hear, that split up was the biggest fight Jade was ever in. Only big fight he ever lost, too.”

I smiled. “She’s doing well, he isn’t. Wasn’t. Maybe her conscience pricked her. Or maybe she wanted to rub his nose in it hard. You’d have to ask her. All I can say is she asked me to try to get in, I did, and I called you guys.”

While Tom mulled this over I pulled out a card and handed it to him. “You can find me at this number if you want to talk to me.”

He called out after me but I went on down the hall, my footsteps echoing hollowly off the bare walls and ceiling.

III

Brigitte LeBlanc was with a client and couldn’t be interrupted. The news that her ex-husband had died couldn’t pry her loose. Not even the idea that the cops would be around before long could move her. After a combination of cajoling and heckling, the receptionist leaned across her blond desk and whispered at me confidentially: “The Vice President of the United States had come in for some private media coaching.” Brigitte had said no interruptions unless it was the President or the pope-two people I wouldn’t even leave a dental appointment to see.

When they made me unwelcome on the forty-third floor I rode downstairs and hung around the lobby. At five-thirty a bevy of Secret Service agents swept me out to the street with the other loiterers. Fifteen minutes later the Vice President came out, his boyish face set in purposeful lines. Even though this was a private visit the vigilant television crews were waiting for him. He grinned and waved but didn’t say anything before climbing into his limo. Brigitte must be really good if she’d persuaded him to shut up.

At seven I went back to the forty-third floor. The double glass doors were locked and the lights turned off. I found a key in my collection that worked the lock, but when I’d prowled through the miles of thick gray plush, explored the secured studios, looked in all the offices, I had to realize my client was smarter than me. She’d left by some back exit.

I gave a high-pitched snarl. I didn’t lock the door behind me. Let someone come in and steal all the video equipment. I didn’t care.

I swung by Brigitte’s three-story brownstone on Belden. She wasn’t in. The housekeeper didn’t know when to expect her. She was eating out and had said not to wait up for her.

“How about Corinne?” I asked, sure that the woman would say “Corinne who?”

“She’s not here, either.”

I slipped inside before she could shut the door on me. “I’m V. I. Warshawski. Brigitte hired me to find her sister, said she’d run off to Jade. I went to his apartment. Corinne wasn’t there and Jade was dead. I’ve been trying to talk to Brigitte ever since but she’s avoiding me. I want to know a few things, like if Corinne really exists, and did she really run away, and could either she or Brigitte have killed Jade.”

The housekeeper stared at me for a few minutes, then made a sour face. “You got some I.D.?”

I showed her my P.I. license and the contract signed by Brigitte. Her sour look deepened but she gave me a few spare details. Corinne was a fat, unhappy teenager who didn’t know how good she had it. Brigitte gave her everything, taught her how to dress, sent her to St. Scholastica, even tried to get her to special diet clinics, but she was never satisfied, always whining about her friends back home in Mobile, trashy friends to whom she shouldn’t be giving the time of day. And yes, she had run away, three days ago now, and she, the housekeeper, said good riddance, but Brigitte felt responsible. And she was sorry that Jade was dead, but he was a violent man, Corinne had overidealized him, she didn’t realize what a monster he really was.

“They can’t turn it off when they come off the field, you know. As for who killed him, he probably killed himself, drinking too much. I always said it would happen that way. Corinne couldn’t have done it, she doesn’t have enough oomph to her. And Brigitte doesn’t have any call to-she already got him beat six ways from Sunday.”

“Maybe she thought he’d molested her sister.”

“She’d have taken him to court and enjoyed seeing him humiliated all over again.”

What a lovely cast of characters; it filled me with satisfaction to think I’d allied myself to their fates. I persuaded the housekeeper to give me a picture of Corinne before going home. She was indeed an overweight, unhappy-looking child. It must be hard having a picture-perfect older sister trying to turn her into a junior deb. I also got the housekeeper to give me Brigitte’s unlisted home phone number by telling her if she didn’t, I’d be back every hour all night long ringing the bell.

I didn’t turn on the radio going home. I didn’t want to hear the ghoulish excitement lying behind the unctuousness the reporters would bring to discussing Jade Pierce’s catastrophic fall from grace. A rehashing of his nine seasons with the Bears, from the glory years to the last two where nagging knee and back injuries grew too great even for the painkillers. And then to his harsh retirement, putting seventy or eighty pounds of fat over his playing weight of 310, the barroom fights, the guns fired at other drivers from the front seat of his Ferrari Daytona, then the sale of the Ferrari to pay his legal bills, and finally the three-ring circus that was his divorce. Ending on a Murphy bed in a squalid Uptown apartment.

I shut the Trans Am’s door with a viciousness it didn’t deserve and stomped up the three flights to my apartment. Fatigue mixed with bitterness dulled the sixth sense that usually warns me of danger. The man had me pinned against my front door with a gun at my throat before I knew he was there.

I held my shoulder bag out to him. “Be my guest. Then leave. I’ve had a long day and I don’t want to spend too much of it with you.”

He spat. “I don’t want your stupid little wallet.”

“You’re not going to rape me, so you might as well take my stupid little wallet.”

“I’m not interested in your body. Open your apartment. I want to search it.”

“Go to hell.” I kneed him in the stomach and swept my right arm up to knock his gun hand away. He gagged and bent over. I used my handbag as a clumsy bolas and whacked him on the back of the head. He slumped to the floor, unconscious.

I grabbed the gun from his flaccid hand. Feeling gingerly inside his coat, I found a wallet. His driver’s license identified him as Joel Sirop, living at a pricey address on Dearborn Parkway. He sported a high-end assortment of credit cards-Bonwit, Neiman Marcus, an American Express platinum-and a card that said he was a member in good standing of the Feline Breeders Association of North America. I slid the papers back into his billfold and returned it to his breast pocket.

He groaned and opened his eyes. After a few diffuse seconds he focused on me in outrage. “My head. You’ve broken my head. I’ll sue you.”

“Go ahead. I’ll hang on to your pistol for use in evidence at the trial. I’ve got your name and address, so if I see you near my place again I’ll know where to send the cops. Now leave.”

“Not until I’ve searched your apartment.” He was unarmed and sickly but stubborn.

I leaned against my door, out of reach but poised to stomp on him if he got cute. “What are you looking for, Mr. Sirop?”

“It was on the news, how you found Jade. If the cat was there, you must have taken it.”

“Rest your soul, there were no cats in that apartment when I got there. Had he stolen yours?”

He shut his eyes, apparently to commune with himself. When he opened them again he said he had no choice but to trust me. I smiled brightly and told him he could always leave so I could have dinner, but he insisted on confiding in me.

“Do you know cats, Ms. Warshawski?”

“Only in a manner of speaking. I have a dog and she knows cats.”

He scowled. “This is not a laughing matter. Have you heard of the Maltese?”

“Cat? I guess I’ve heard of them. They’re the ones without tails, right?”

He shuddered. “No. You are thinking of the Manx. The Maltese-they are usually a bluish gray. Very rarely will you see one that is almost blue. Brigitte LeBlanc has-or had-such a cat. Lady Iva of Cairo.”

“Great. I presume she got it to match her eyes.”

He waved aside my comment as another frivolity. “Her motives do not matter. What matters is that the cat has been very difficult to breed. She has now come into season for only the third time in her four-year life. Brigitte agreed to let me try to mate Lady Iva with my sire, Casper of Valletta. It is imperative that she be sent to stay with him, and soon. But she has disappeared.”

It was my turn to look disgusted. “I took a step down from my usual practice to look for a runaway teenager today. I’m damned if I’m going to hunt a missing cat through the streets of Chicago. Your sire will find her faster than I will. Matter of fact, that’s my advice. Drive around listening for the yowling of mighty sires and eventually you’ll find your Maltese.”

“This runaway teenager, this Corinne, it is probable that she took Lady Iva with her. The kittens, if they are born, if they are purebred, could fetch a thousand or more each. She is not ignorant of that fact. But if Lady Iva is out on the streets and some other sire finds her first, they would be half-breeds, not worth the price of their veterinary care.”

He spoke with the intense passion I usually reserve for discussing Cubs or Bears trades. Keeping myself turned toward him, I unlocked my front door. He flung himself at the opening with a ferocity that proved his long years with felines had rubbed off on him. I grabbed his jacket as he hurtled past me but he tore himself free.

“I am not leaving until I have searched your premises,” he panted.

I rubbed my head tiredly. “Go ahead, then.”

I could have called the cops while he hunted around for Lady Iva. Instead I poured myself a whiskey and watched him crawl on his hands and knees, making little whistling sounds-perhaps the mating call of the Maltese. He went through my cupboards, my stove, the refrigerator, even insisted, his eyes wide with fear, that I open the safe in my bedroom closet. I removed the Smith & Wesson I keep there before letting him look.

When he’d inspected the back landing he had to agree that no cats were on the premises. He tried to argue me into going downtown to check my office. At that point my patience ran out.

“I could have you arrested for attempted assault and criminal trespass. So get out now while the going’s good. Take your guy down to my office. If she’s in there and in heat, he’ll start carrying on and you can call the cops. Just don’t bother me.” I hustled him out the front door, ignoring his protests.

I carefully did up all the locks. I didn’t want some other deranged cat breeder sneaking up on me in the middle of the night.

It was after midnight when I finally reached Brigitte. Yes, she’d gotten my message about Jade. She was terribly sorry, but since she couldn’t do anything to help him now that he was dead, she hadn’t bothered to try to reach me.

“We’re about to part company, Brigitte. If you didn’t know the guy was dead when you sent me up to Winthrop, you’re going to have to prove it. Not to me, but to the cops. I’m talking to Lieutenant Mallory at the Central District in the morning to tell him the rigmarole you spun me. They’ll also be able to figure out if you were more interested in finding Corinne or your cat.”

There was a long silence at the other end. When she finally spoke, the hint of Southern was pronounced. “Can we talk in the morning before you call the police? Maybe I haven’t been as frank as I should have. I’d like you to hear the whole story before you do anything rash.”

Just say no, just say no, I chanted to myself. “You be at the Belmont Diner at eight, Brigitte. You can lay it out for me but I’m not making any promises.”

I got up at seven, ran the dog over to Belmont Harbor and back and took a long shower. I figured even if I put a half hour into grooming myself I wasn’t going to look as good as Brigitte, so I just scrambled into jeans and a cotton sweater.

It was almost ten minutes after eight when I got to the diner, but Brigitte hadn’t arrived yet. I picked up a Herald-Star from the counter and took it over to a booth to read with a cup of coffee. The headline shook me to the bottom of my stomach.

FOOTBALL HERO SURVIVES FATE

WORSE THAN DEATH

Charles “Jade” Pierce, once the smoothest man on the Bears’ fearsome defense, eluded offensive blockers once again. This time the stakes were higher than a touchdown, though: the offensive lineman was Death.

I thought Jeremy Logan was overdoing it by a wide margin but I read the story to the end. The standard procedure with a body is to take it to a hospital for a death certificate before it goes to the morgue. The patrol team hauled Jade to Beth Israel for a perfunctory exam. There the intern, noticing a slight sweat on Jade’s neck and hands, dug deeper for a pulse than I’d been willing to go. She’d found faint but unmistakable signs of life buried deep in the mountain of flesh and had brought him back to consciousness.

Jade, who’s had substance abuse problems since leaving the Bears, had mainlined a potent mixture of ether and hydrochloric acid before drinking a quart of bourbon. When he came to his first words were characteristic: “Get the f- out of my face.”

Logan then concluded with the obligatory rundown on Jade’s career and its demise, with a pious sniff about the use and abuse of sports heroes left to die in the gutter when they could no longer please the crowd. I read it through twice, including the fulsome last line, before Brigitte arrived.

“You see, Jade’s still alive, so I couldn’t have killed him,” she announced, sweeping into the booth in a cloud of Chanel.

“Did you know he was in a coma when you came to see me yesterday?”

She raised plucked eyebrows in hauteur. “Are you questioning my word?”

One of the waitresses chugged over to take our order. “You want your fruit and yogurt, right, Vic? And what else?”

“Green pepper and cheese omelet with rye toast. Thanks, Barbara. What’ll yours be, Brigitte?” Dry toast and black coffee, no doubt.

“Is your fruit really fresh?” she demanded.

Barbara rolled her eyes. “Honey, the melon pinched me so hard I’m black-and-blue. Better not take a chance if you’re sensitive.”

Brigitte set her shoulder-covered today in green broadcloth with black piping-and got ready to do battle. I cut her off before the first “How dare you” rolled to its ugly conclusion.

“This isn’t the kind of place where the maître d’ wilts at your frown and races over to make sure madam is happy. They don’t care if you come back or not. In fact, about now they’d be happier if you’d leave. You can check out my fruit when it comes and order some if it tastes right to you.”

“I’ll just have wheat toast and black coffee,” she said icily. “And make sure they don’t put any butter on it.”

“Right,” Barbara said. “Wheat toast, margarine instead of butter. Just kidding, hon,” she added as Brigitte started to tear into her again. “You gotta learn to take it if you want to dish it out.”

“Did you bring me here to be insulted?” Brigitte demanded when Barbara had left.

“I brought you here to talk. It didn’t occur to me that you wouldn’t know diner etiquette. We can fight if you want to. Or you can tell me about Jade and Corinne. And your cat. I had a visit from Joel Sirop last night.”

She swallowed some coffee and made a face. “They should rinse the pots with vinegar.”

“Well, keep it to yourself. They won’t pay you a consulting fee for telling them about it. Joel tell you he’d come around hunting Lady Iva?”

She frowned at me over the rim of the coffee cup, then nodded fractionally.

“Why didn’t you tell me about the damned cat when you were in my office yesterday?”

Her poise deserted her for a moment; she looked briefly ashamed. “I thought you’d look for Corinne. I didn’t think I could persuade you to hunt down my cat. Anyway, Corinne must have taken Iva with her, so I thought if you found her you’d find the cat, too.”

“Which one do you really want back?”

She started to bristle again, then suddenly laughed. It took ten years from her face. “You wouldn’t ask that if you’d ever lived with a teenager. And Corinne’s always been a stranger to me. She was eighteen months old when I left for college and I only saw her a week or two at a time on vacations. She used to worship me. When she moved in with me I thought it would be a piece of cake: I’d get her fixed up with the right crowd and the right school, she’d do her best to be like me, and the system would run itself. Instead, she put on a lot of weight, won’t listen to me about her eating, slouches around with the kids in the neighborhood when my back is turned, the whole nine yards. Jade’s influence. It creeps through every now and then when I’m not thinking.”

She looked at my blueberries. I offered them to her and she helped herself to a generous spoonful.

“And that was the other thing. Jade. We got together when I was an Alabama cheerleader and he was the biggest hero in town. I thought I’d really caught me a prize, my yes, a big prize. But the first, last, and only thing in a marriage with a football player is football. And him, of course, how many sacks he made, how many yards he allowed, all that boring crap. And if he has to sit out a game, or he gives up a touchdown, or he doesn’t get the glory, watch out. Jade was mean. He was mean on the field, he was mean off it. He broke my arm once.”

Her voice was level but her hand shook a little as she lifted the coffee cup to her mouth. “I got me a gun and shot him in the leg the next time he came at me. They put it down as a hunting accident in the papers, but he never tried anything on me after that-not physical, I mean. Until his career ended. Then he got real, real ugly. The papers crucified me for abandoning him when his career was over. They never had to live with him.”

She was panting with emotion by the time she finished. “And Corinne shared the papers’ views?” I asked gently.

She nodded. “We had a bad fight on Sunday. She wanted to go to a sleepover at one of the girls’ in the neighborhood. I don’t like that girl and I said no. We had a gale-force battle after that. When I got home from work on Monday she’d taken off. First I figured she’d gone to this girl’s place. They hadn’t seen her, though, and she hadn’t shown up at school. So I figured she’d run off to Jade. Now… I don’t know. I would truly appreciate it if you’d keep looking, though.”

Just say no, Vic, I chanted to myself. “I’ll need a thousand up front. And more names and addresses of friends, including people in Mobile. I’ll check in with Jade at the hospital. She might have gone to him, you know, and he sent her on someplace else.”

“I topped by there this morning. They said no visitors.”

I grinned. “I’ve got friends in high places.” I signaled Barbara for the check. “Speaking of which, how was the Vice President?”

She looked as though she were going to give me one of her stiff rebuttals, but then she curled her lip and drawled, “Just like every other good old boy, honey, just like every other good old boy.”

Lotty Herschel, an obstetrician associated with Beth Israel, arranged for me to see Jade Pierce. “They tell me he’s been difficult. Don’t stand next to the bed unless you’re wearing a padded jacket.”

“You want him, you can have him,” the floor head told me. “He’s going home tomorrow morning. Frankly, since he won’t let anyone near him, they ought to release him right now.”

My palms felt sweaty when I pushed open the door to Jade’s room. He didn’t throw anything when I came in, didn’t even turn his head to stare through the restraining rails surrounding the bed. His mountain of flesh poured through them, ebbing away from a rounded summit in the middle. The back of his head, smooth and shiny as a piece of polished jade, reflected the ceiling light into my eyes.

“I don’t need any goddamned ministering angels, so get the fuck out of here,” he growled to the window.

“That’s a relief. My angel act never really got going.”

He turned his head at that. His black eyes were mean, narrow slits. If I were a quarterback I’d hand him the ball and head for the showers.

“What are you, the goddamned social worker?”

“Nope. I’m the goddamned detective who found you yesterday before you slipped off to the great huddle in the sky.”

“Come on over then, so I can kiss your ass,” he spat venomously.

I leaned against the wall and crossed my arms. “I didn’t mean to save your life: I tried getting them to send you to the morgue. The meat wagon crew double-crossed me.”

The mountain shook and rumbled. It took me a few seconds to realize he was laughing. “You’re right, detective: you ain’t no angel. So what do you want? True confessions on why I was such a bad boy? The name of the guy who got me the stuff?”

“As long as you’re not hurting anyone but yourself I don’t care what you do or where you get your shit. I’m here because Brigitte hired me to find Corinne.”

His face set in ugly lines again. “Get out.”

I didn’t move.

“I said get out!” He raised his voice to a bellow.

“Just because I mentioned Brigitte’s name?”

“Just because if you’re pally with that broad, you’re a snake by definition.”

“I’m not pally with her. I met her yesterday. She’s paying me to find her sister.” It took an effort not to yell back at him.

“Corinne’s better off without her,” he growled, turning the back of his head to me again.

I didn’t say anything, just stood there. Five minutes passed. Finally he jeered, without looking at me. “Did the sweet little martyr tell you I broke her arm?”

“She mentioned it, yes.”

“She tell you how that happened?”

“Please don’t tell me how badly she misunderstood you. I don’t want to throw up my breakfast.”

At that he swung his gigantic face around toward me again. “Com’ere.”

When I didn’t move, he sighed and patted the bed rail. “I’m not going to slug you, honest. If we’re going to talk, you gotta get close enough for me to see your face.”

I went over to the bed and straddled the chair, resting my arms on its back. Jade studied me in silence, then grunted as if to say I’d passed some minimal test.

“I won’t tell you Brigitte didn’t understand me. Broad had my number from day one. I didn’t break her arm, though: that was B. B. Wilder. Old Gunshot. Thought he was my best friend on the club, but it turned out he was Brigitte’s. And then, when I come home early from a hunting trip and found her in bed with him, we all got carried away. She loved the excitement of big men fighting. It’s what made her a football groupie to begin with down in Alabama.”

I tried to imagine ice-cold Brigitte flushed with excitement while the Bears’ right tackle and defensive end fought over her. It didn’t seem impossible.

“So B. B. broke her arm but I agreed to take the rap. Her little old modeling career was just getting off the ground and she didn’t want her good name sullied. And besides that, she kept hoping for a reconciliation with her folks, at least with their wad, and they’d never fork over if she got herself some ugly publicity committing violent adultery. And me, I was just the baddest boy the Bears ever fielded; one more mark didn’t make that much difference to me.” The jeering note returned to his voice.

“She told me it was when you retired that things deteriorated between you.”

“Things deteriorated-what a way to put it. Look, detective what did you say your name was? V. I., that’s a hell of a name for a girl. What did your mamma call you?”

“Victoria,” I said grudgingly. “And no one calls me Vicki, so don’t even think about it.” I prefer not to be called a girl, either, much less a broad, but Jade didn’t seem like the person to discuss that particular issue with.

“Victoria, huh? Things deteriorated, yeah, like they was a picnic starting out. I was born dumb and I didn’t get smarter for making five hundred big ones a year. But I wouldn’t hit a broad, even one like Brigitte who could get me going just looking at me. I broke a lot of furniture, though, and that got on her nerves.”

I couldn’t help laughing. “Yeah, I can see that. It’d bother me, too.”

He gave a grudging smile. “See, the trouble is, I grew up poor. I mean, dirt poor. I used to go to the projects here with some of the black guys on the squad, you know, Christmas appearances, shit like that. Those kids live in squalor, but I didn’t own a pair of shorts to cover my ass until the county social worker come ’round to see why I wasn’t in school.”

“So you broke furniture because you grew up without it and didn’t know what else to do with it?”

“Don’t be a wiseass, Victoria. I’m sure your mamma wouldn’t like it.”

I made a face-he was right about that.

“You know the LeBlancs, right? Oh, you’re a Yankee, Yankees don’t know shit if they haven’t stepped in it themselves. LeBlanc Gas, they’re one of the biggest names on the Gulf Coast. They’re a long, long way from the Pierces of Florette.

“I muscled my way into college, played football for Old Bear Bryant, met Brigitte. She liked raw meat, and mine was just about the rawest in the South, so she latched on to me. When she decided to marry me she took me down to Mobile for Christmas. There I was, the Hulk, in Miz Effie’s lace and crystal palace. They hated me, knew I was trash, told Brigitte they’d cut her out of everything if she married me. She figured she could sweet-talk her daddy into anything. We got married and it didn’t work, not even when I was a national superstar. To them I was still the dirt I used to wipe my ass with.”

“So she divorced you to get back in their will?”

He shrugged, a movement that set a tidal wave going down the mountain. “Oh, that had something to do with it, sure, it had something. But I was a wreck and I was hell to live with. Even if she’d been halfway normal to begin with, it would have gone bust, ’cause I didn’t know how to live with losing football. I just didn’t care about anyone or anything.”

“Not even the Daytona,” I couldn’t help saying.

His black eyes disappeared into tiny dots. “Don’t you go lecturing me just when we’re starting to get on. I’m not asking you to cry over my sad jock story. I’m just trying to give you a little different look at sweet, beautiful Brigitte.”

“Sorry. It’s just… I’ll never do anything to be able to afford a Ferrari Daytona. It pisses me to see someone throw one away.”

He snorted. “If I’d known you five years ago I’d of given it to you. Too late now. Anyway, Brigitte waited too long to jump ship. She was still in negotiations with old man LeBlanc when he and Miz Effie dropped into the Gulf of Mexico with the remains of their little Cessna. Everything that wasn’t tied down went to Corinne. Brigitte, being her guardian, gets a chunk for looking after her, but you ask me, if Corinne’s gone missing it’s the best thing she could do. I’ll bet you… well, I don’t have anything left to bet. I’ll hack off my big toe and give it to you if Brigitte’s after anything but the money.”

He thought for a minute. “No. She probably likes Corinne some. Or would like her if she’d lose thirty pounds, dress like a Mobile debutante and hang around with a crowd of snot-noses. I’ll hack off my toe if the money ain’t number one in her heart, that’s all.”

I eyed him steadily, wondering how much of his story to believe. It’s why I stay away from domestic crime: everyone has a story, and it wears you out trying to match all the different pieces together. I could check the LeBlancs’ will to see if they’d left their fortune the way Jade reported it. Or if they had a fortune at all. Maybe he was making it all up.

“Did Corinne talk to you before she took off on Monday?”

His black eyes darted around the room. “I haven’t laid eyes on her in months. She used to come around, but Brigitte got a peace bond on me, I get arrested if I’m within thirty feet of Corinne.”

“I believe you, Jade,” I said steadily. “I believe you haven’t seen her. But did she talk to you? Like on the phone, maybe.”

The ugly look returned to his face, then the mountain shook again as he laughed. “You don’t miss many signals, do you, Victoria? You oughta run a training camp. Yeah, Corinne calls me Monday morning. ‘Why don’t you have your cute little ass in school?’ I says. ‘Even with all your family dough that’s the only way to get ahead-they’ll ream you six ways from Sunday if you don’t get your education so you can check out what all your advisers are up to.’”

He shook his head broodingly. “I know what I’m talking about, believe me. The lawyers and agents and financial advisers, they all made out like hogs at feeding time when I was in the money, but come trouble, it wasn’t them, it was me hung out like a slab of pork belly to dry on my own.”

“So what did Corinne say to your good advice?” I prompted him, trying not to sound impatient: I could well be the first sober person to listen to him in a decade.

“Oh, she’s crying, she can’t stand it, why can’t she just run home to Mobile? And I tell her ’cause she’s underage and rich, the cops will all be looking for her and just haul her butt back to Chicago. And when she keeps talking wilder and wilder I tell her they’ll be bound to blame me if something happens to her and does she really need to run away so bad that I go to jail or something. So I thought that calmed her down. ‘Think of it like rookie camp,’ I told her. ‘They put you through the worst shit but if you survive it you own them.’ I thought she figured it out and was staying.”

He shut his eyes. “I’m tired, detective. I can’t tell you nothing else. You go away and detect.”

“If she went back to Mobile who would she stay with?”

“Wouldn’t nobody down there keep her without calling Brigitte. Too many of them owe their jobs to LeBlanc Gas.” He didn’t open his eyes.

“And up here?”

He shrugged, a movement like an earthquake that rattled the bed rails. “You might try the neighbors. Seems to me Corinne mentioned a Miz Hellman who had a bit of a soft spot for her.” He opened his eyes. “Maybe Corinne’ll talk to you. You got a good ear.”

“Thanks.” I got up. “What about this famous Maltese cat?”

“What about it?”

“It went missing along with Corinne. Think she’d hurt it to get back at Brigitte?”

“How the hell should I know? Those LeBlancs would do anything to anyone. Even Corinne. Now get the fuck out so I can get my beauty rest.” He shut his eyes again.

“Yeah, you’re beautiful all right, Jade. Why don’t you use some of your old connections and get yourself going at something? It’s really pathetic seeing you like this.”

“You wanna save me along with the Daytona?” The ugly jeer returned to his voice. “Don’t go all do-gooder on me now, Victoria. My daddy died at forty from too much moonshine. They tell me I’m his spitting image. I know where I’m going.”

“It’s trite, Jade. Lots of people have done it. They’ll make a movie about you and little kids will cry over your sad story. But if they make it honest they’ll show that you’re just plain selfish.”

I wanted to slam the door but the hydraulic stop took the impact out of the gesture. “Goddamned motherfucking waste,” I snapped as I stomped down the corridor.

The floor head heard me. “Jade Pierce? You’re right about that.”

The Hellmans lived in an apartment above the TV repair shop they ran on Halsted. Mrs. Hellman greeted me with some relief.

“I promised Corinne I wouldn’t tell her sister as long as she stayed here instead of trying to hitchhike back to Mobile. But I’ve been pretty worried. It’s just that… to Brigitte LeBlanc I don’t exist. My daughter Lily is trash that she doesn’t want Corinne associated with, so it never even occurred to her that Corinne might be here.”

She took me through the back of the shop and up the stairs to the apartment. “It’s only five rooms, but we’re glad to have her as long as she wants to stay. I’m more worried about the cat: she doesn’t like being cooped up in here. She got out Tuesday night and we had a terrible time hunting her down.”

I grinned to myself: So much for the thoroughbred descendants pined for by Joel Sirop.

Mrs. Hellman took me into the living room where they had a sofa bed that Corinne was using. “This here is a detective, Corinne. I think you’d better talk to her.”

Corinne was hunched in front of the television, an outsize console model far too large for the tiny room. In her man’s white shirt and tattered blue jeans she didn’t look at all like her svelte sister. Her complexion was a muddy color that matched her lank, straight hair. She clutched Lady Iva of Cairo close in her arms. Both of them looked at me angrily.

“If you think you can make me go back to that cold-assed bitch, you’d better think again.”

Mrs. Hellman tried to protest her language.

“It’s okay,” I said. “She learned it from Jade. But Jade lost every fight he ever was in with Brigitte, Corinne. Maybe you ought to try a different method.”

“Brigitte hated Jade. She hates anyone who doesn’t do stuff just the way she wants it. So if you’re working for Brigitte you don’t know shit about anything.”

I responded to the first part of her comments. “Is that why you took the cat? So you could keep her from having purebred kittens like Brigitte wants her to?”

A ghost of a smile twitched around her unhappy mouth. All she said was “They wouldn’t let me bring my dogs or my horse up north. Iva’s kind of a snoot but she’s better than nothing.”

“Jade thinks Brigitte’s jealous because you got the LeBlanc fortune and she didn’t.”

She made a disgusted noise. “Jade worries too much about all that shit. Yeah, Daddy left me a big fat wad. But the company went to Daddy’s cousin Miles. You can’t inherit LeBlanc Gas if you’re a girl and Brigitte knew that, same as me. I mean, they told both of us growing up so we wouldn’t have our hearts set on it. The money they left me, Brigitte makes that amount every year in her business. She doesn’t care about the money.”

“And you? Does it bother you that the company went to your cousin?”

She gave a long ugly sniff-no doubt another of Jade’s expressions. “Who wants a company that doesn’t do anything but pollute the Gulf and ream the people who work for them?

I considered that. At fourteen it was probably genuine bravado. “So what do you care about?”

She looked at me with sulky dark eyes. For a minute I thought she was going to tell me to mind my own goddamned business and go to hell, but she suddenly blurted out, “It’s my horse. They left the house to Miles along with my horse. They didn’t think about it, just said the house and all the stuff that wasn’t left special to someone else went to him and they didn’t even think to leave me my own horse.”

The last sentence came out as a wail and her angry young face dissolved into sobs. I didn’t think she’d welcome a friendly pat on the shoulder. I just let the tears run their course. She finally wiped her nose on a frayed cuff and shot me a fierce look to see if I cared.

“If I could persuade Brigitte to buy your horse from Miles and stable him up here, would you be willing to go back to her until you’re of age?”

“You never would. Nobody ever could make that bitch change her mind.”

“But if I could?”

Her lower lip was hanging out. “Maybe. If I could have my horse and go to school with Lily instead of fucking St. Scholastica.”

“I’ll do my best.” I got to my feet. “In return maybe you could work on Jade to stop drugging himself to death. It isn’t romantic, you know: it’s horrible, painful, about the ugliest thing in the world.”

She only glowered at me. It’s hard work being an angel. No one takes at all kindly to it.

VII

Brigitte was furious. Her cheeks flamed with natural color and her cobalt eyes glittered. I couldn’t help wondering if this was how she looked when Jade and B. B. Wilder were fighting over her.

“So he knew all along where she was! I ought to have him sent over for that. Can’t I charge him with contributing to her delinquency?”

“Not if you’re planning on using me as a witness you can’t,” I snapped.

She ignored me. “And her, too. Taking Lady Iva off like that. Mating her with some alley cat.”

As if on cue, Casper of Valletta squawked loudly and started clawing the deep silver plush covering Brigitte’s living room floor. Joel Sirop picked up the torn and spoke soothingly to him.

“It is bad, Brigitte, very bad. Maybe you should let the girl go back to Mobile if she wants to so badly. After three days, you know, it’s too late to give Lady Iva a shot. And Corinne is so wild, so uncontrollable-what would stop her the next time Lady Iva comes into season?”

Brigitte’s nostrils flared. “I should send her to reform school. Show her what discipline is really like.”

“Why in hell do you even want custody over Corinne if all you can think about is revenge?” I interrupted.

She stopped swirling around her living room and turned to frown at me. “Why, I love her, of course. She is my sister, you know.”

“Concentrate on that. Keep saying it to yourself. She’s not a cat that you can breed and mold to suit your fancy.”

“I just want her to be happy when she’s older. She won’t be if she can’t learn to control herself. Look at what happened when she started hanging around trash like that Lily Hellman. She would never have let Lady Iva breed with an alley cat if she hadn’t made that kind of friend.”

I ground my teeth. “Just because Lily lives in five rooms over a store doesn’t make her trash. Look, Brigitte. You wanted to lead your own life. I expect your parents tried keeping you on a short leash. Hell, maybe they even threatened you with reform school. So you started fucking every hulk you could get your hands on. Are you so angry about that that you have to treat Corinne the same way?”

She gaped at me. Her jaw worked but she couldn’t find any words. Finally she went over to a burled oak cabinet that concealed a bar. She pulled out a chilled bottle of Sancerre and poured herself a glass. When she’d gulped it down she sat at her desk.

“Is it that obvious? Why I went after Jade and B. B. and all those boys?”

I hunched a shoulder. “It was just a guess, Brigitte. A guess based on what I’ve learned about you and your sister and Jade the last two days. He’s not such an awful guy, you know, but he clearly was an awful guy for you. And Corinne’s lonely and miserable and needs someone to love her. She figures her horse for the job.”

“And me?” Her cobalt eyes glittered again. “What do I need? The embraces of my cat?”

“To shed some of those porcupine quills so someone can love you, too. You could’ve offered me a glass of wine, for example.”

She started an ugly retort, then went over to the liquor cabinet and got out a glass for me. “So I bring Flitcraft up to Chicago and stable her. I put Corinne into the filthy public high school. And then we’ll all live happily ever after.”

“She might graduate.” I swallowed some of the wine. It was cold and crisp and eased some of the tension the LeBlancs and Pierces were putting into my throat. “And in another year she won’t run away to Lily’s, but she’ll go off to Mobile or hit the streets. Now’s your chance.”

“Oh, all right,” she snapped. “You’re some kind of saint, I know, who never said a bad word to anyone. You can tell Corinne I’ll cut a deal with her. But if it goes wrong you can be the one to stay up at night worrying about her.”

I rubbed my head. “Send her back to Mobile, Brigitte. There must be a grandmother or aunt or nanny or someone who really cares about her. With your attitude, life with Corinne is just going to be a bomb waiting for the fuse to blow.”

“You can say that again, detective.” It was Jade, his bulk filling the double doors to the living room.

Behind him we could hear the housekeeper without being able to see her. “I tried to keep him out, Brigitte, but Corinne let him in. You want me to call the cops, get them to exercise that peace bond?”

“I have a right to ask whoever I want into my own house,” came Corinne’s muffled shriek.

Squawking and yowling, Casper broke from Joel Sirop’s hold. He hurtled himself at the doorway and stuffed his body through the gap between Jade’s feet. On the other side of the barricade we could hear Lady Iva’s answering yodel and a scream from Corinne-presumably she’d been clawed.

“Why don’t you move, Jade, so we can see the action?” I suggested.

He lumbered into the living room and perched his bulk on the edge of a pale gray sofa. Corinne stumbled in behind him and sat next to him. Her muddy skin and lank hair looked worse against the sleek modern lines of Brigitte’s furniture than they had in Mrs. Hellman’s crowded sitting room.

Brigitte watched the blood drip from Corinne’s right hand to the rug and jerked her head at the housekeeper hovering in the doorway. “Can you clean that up for me, Grace?”

When the housekeeper left, she turned to her sister. “Next time you’re that angry at me take it out on me, not the cat. Did you really have to let her breed in a back alley?”

“It’s all one to Iva,” Corinne muttered sulkily. “Just as long as she’s getting some she don’t care who’s giving it to her. Just like you.”

Brigitte marched to the couch. Jade caught her hand as she Was preparing to smack Corinne.

“Now look here, Brigitte,” he said. “You two girls don’t belong together. You know that as well as I do. Maybe you think you owe it to your public image to be a mamma to Corinne, but you’re not the mamma type. Never have been. Why should you try now?”

Brigitte glared at him. “And you’re Mister Wonderful who can sit in judgment on everyone else?”

He shook his massive jade dome. “Nope. I won’t claim that. But maybe Corinne here would like to come live with me.” He held up a massive palm as Brigitte started to protest. “Not in Uptown. I can get me a place close to here. Corinne can have her horse and see you when you feel calm enough. And when your pure little old cat has her half-breed kittens they can come live with us.”

“On Corinne’s money,” Brigitte spat.

Jade nodded. “She’d have to put up the stake. But I know some guys who’d back me to get started in somethin’. Commodities, somethin’ like that.”

“You’d be drunk or doped up all the time. And then you’d rape her-” She broke off as he did his ugly-black-slit number with his eyes.

“You’d better not say anything else, Brigitte Le-Blanc. Damned well better not say anything. You want me to get up in the congregation and yell that I never touched a piece of ass that shoved itself in my nose, I ain’t going to. But you know better’n anyone that I never in my life laid hands on a girl to hurt her. As for the rest…” His eyes returned to normal and he put a redwood branch around Corinne’s shoulders. “First time I’m drunk or shooting somethin’ Corinne comes right back here. We can try it for six months, Brigitte. Just a trial. Rookie camp, you know how it goes.”

The football analogy brought her own mean look to Brigitte’s face. Before she could say anything Joel bleated in the background, “It sounds like a good idea to me, Brigitte. Really. You ought to give it a try. Lady Iva’s nerves will never be stable with the fighting that goes on around her when Corinne is here.”

“No one asked you,” Brigitte snapped.

“And no one asked me, either,” Corinne said. “If you don’t agree, I-I’m going to take Lady Iva and run away to New York. And send you pictures of her with litter after litter of alley cats.”

The threat, uttered with all the venom she could muster, made me choke with laughter. I swallowed some Sancerre to try to control myself, but I couldn’t stop laughing. Jade’s mountain rumbled and shook as he joined in. Joel gasped in horror. Only the two LeBlanc women remained unmoved, glaring at each other.

“What I ought to do, I ought to send you to reform school, Corinne Alton LeBlanc.”

“What you ought to do is cool out,” I advised, putting my glass down on a chrome table. “It’s a good offer. Take it. If you don’t, she’ll only run away.”

Brigitte tightened her mouth in a narrow line. “I didn’t hire you to have you turn on me, you know.”

“Yeah, well, you hired me. You didn’t buy me. My job is to help you resolve a difficult problem. And this looks like the best solution you’re going to be offered.”

“Oh, very well,” she snapped pettishly, pouring herself another drink. “For six months. And if her grades start slipping, or I hear she’s drinking or doping or anything like that, she comes back here.”

I got up to go. Corinne followed me to the door.

“I’m sorry I was rude to you over at Lily’s,” she muttered shyly. “When the kittens are born you can have the one you like best.”

I gulped and tried to smile. “That’s very generous of you, Corinne. But I don’t think my dog would take too well to a kitten.”

“Don’t you like cats?” The big brown eyes stared at me poignantly. “Really, cats and dogs get along very well unless their owners expect them not to.”

“Like LeBlancs and Pierces, huh?”

She bit her lip and turned her head, then said in a startled voice, “You’re teasing me, aren’t you?”

“Just teasing you, Corinne. You take it easy. Things are going to work out for you. And if they don’t, give me a call before you do anything too rash, okay?”

“And you will take a kitten?”

Just say no, Vic, just say no, I chanted to myself. “Let me think about it. I’ve got to run now.” I fled the house before she could break my resolve any further.

Colleagues agreed they’d seen Servino arrive around a quarter of eight, as he usually did. They’d seen the notice and assumed he’d left when everyone else was tied up with appointments. No one thought any more about it.

Penelope had learned of her lover’s death from the police, who picked her up as she was leaving a realtor’s office where she’d been discussing shop leases. Two of the doctors with offices near Servino’s had mentioned seeing a dark-haired woman in a long fur coat near his consulting room.

Penelope’s dark eyes were drenched with tears. “It’s not enough that Paul is dead, that I learn of it in such an unspeakable way. They think I killed him-because I have dark hair and wear a fur coat. They don’t know what killed him-some dreary blunt instrument-it sounds stupid and banal, like an old Agatha Christie. They’ve pawed through my luggage looking for it.”

They’d questioned her for three hours while they searched and finally, reluctantly, let her go, with a warning not to leave Chicago. She’d called Lotty at the clinic and then come over to find me.

I went into the dining room for some whiskey. She shook her head at the bottle. I poured myself an extra slug to make up for missing my bath. “And?”

“And I want you to find who killed him. The police aren’t looking very hard because they think it’s me.”

“Do they have a reason for this?”

She blushed unexpectedly. “They think he was refusing to marry me.”

“Not much motive in these times, one would have thought. And you with a successful career to boot. Was he refusing?”

“No. It was the other way around, actually. I felt-felt unsettled about what I wanted to do-come to Chicago to stay, you know. I have-friends in Montreal, too, you know. And I’ve always thought marriage meant monogamy.”

“I see.” My focus on the affair between Penelope and Paul shifted slightly. “You didn’t kill him, did you-perhaps for some other reason?”

She forced a smile. “Because he didn’t agree with Lotty about responsibility? No. And for no other reason. Are you going to ask Lotty if she killed him?”

“Lotty would have mangled him Sunday night with whatever was lying on the dining room table-she wouldn’t wait to sneak into his office with a club.” I eyed her thoughtfully. “Just out of vulgar curiosity, what were you doing around eight this morning?”

Her black eyes scorched me. “I came to you because I thought you would be sympathetic. Not to get the same damned questions I had all afternoon from the police!”

“And what were you doing at eight this morning?”

She swept across the room to the door, then thought better of it and affected to study a Nell Blaine poster on the nearby wall. With her back to me she said curtly, “I was having a second cup of coffee. And no, there are no witnesses. As you know, by that time of day Lotty is long gone. Perhaps someone saw me leave the building at eight-thirty-I asked the detectives to question the neighbors, but they didn’t seem much interested in doing so.”

“Don’t sell them short. If you’re not under arrest, they’re still asking questions.”

“But you could ask questions to clear me. They’re just trying to implicate me.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose, trying to ease the dull ache behind my eyes. “You do realize the likeliest person to have killed him is an angry patient, don’t you? Despite your fears the police have probably been questioning them all day.”

Nothing I said could convince her that she wasn’t in imminent danger of a speedy trial before a kangaroo court, with execution probable by the next morning. She stayed until past midnight, alternating pleas to hide her with commands to join the police in hunting down Paul’s killer. She wouldn’t call Lotty to tell her she was with me because she was afraid Lotty’s home phone had been tapped.

“Look, Penelope,” I finally said, exasperated. “I can’t hide you. If the police really suspect you, you were tailed here. Even if I could figure out a way to smuggle you out and conceal you someplace, I wouldn’t do it-I’d lose my license on obstruction charges and I’d deserve to.”

I tried explaining how hard it was to get a court order for a wiretap and finally gave up. I was about ready to start screaming with frustration when Lotty herself called, devastated by Servino’s death and worried about Penelope. The police had been by with a search warrant and had taken away an array of household objects, including her umbrella. Such an intrusion would normally have made her spitting mad, but she was too upset to give it her full emotional attention. I turned the phone over to Penelope. Whatever Lotty said to her stained her cheeks red, but did make her agree to let me drive her home.

When I got back to my place, exhausted enough to sleep round the clock, I found John McGonnigal waiting for me in a blue-and-white outside my building. He came up the walk behind me and opened the door with a flourish.

I looked at him sourly. “Thanks, Sergeant. It’s been a long day-I’m glad to have a doorman at the end of it.”

“It’s kind of cold down here for talking, Vic. How about inviting me up for coffee?”

“Because I want to go to bed. If you’ve got something you want to say, or even ask, spit it out down here.”

I was just ventilating and I knew it-if a police sergeant wanted to talk to me at one in the morning, we’d talk. Mr. Contreras’s coming out in a magenta bathrobe to see what the trouble was merely speeded my decision to cooperate.

While I assembled cheese sandwiches, McGonnigal asked me what I’d learned from Penelope.

“She didn’t throw her arms around me and howl, ‘Vic, I killed him, you’ve got to help me.’” I put the sandwiches in a skillet with a little olive oil. “What’ve you guys got on her?”

The receptionist and two of the other analysts who’d been in the hall had seen a small, dark-haired woman hovering in the alcove near Servino’s office around twenty of eight. Neither of them had paid too much attention to her; when they saw Penelope they agreed it might have been she, but they couldn’t be certain. If they’d made a positive I.D., she’d already have been arrested, even though they couldn’t find the weapon.

“They had a shouting match at the Filigree last night. The maître d’ was quite upset. Servino was a regular and he didn’t want to offend him, but a number of diners complained. The Herschel girl”-McGonnigal eyed me warily-“woman, I mean, stormed off on her own and spent the night with her aunt. One of the neighbors saw her leave around seven the next morning, not at eight-thirty as she says.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. I asked him about the cause of death.

“Someone gave him a good crack across the side of the neck, close enough to the back to fracture a cervical vertebra and sever one of the main arteries. It would have killed him pretty fast. And as you know, Servino wasn’t very tall-the Herschel woman could easily have done it.”

“With what?” I demanded.

That was the stumbling block. It could have been anything from a baseball bat to a steel pipe. The forensic pathologist who’d looked at the body favored the latter, since the skin had been broken in places. They’d taken away anything in Lotty’s apartment and Penelope’s luggage that might have done the job and were having them examined for traces of blood and skin.

I snorted. “If you searched Lotty’s place, you must have come away with quite an earful.”

McGonnigal grimaced. “She spoke her mind, yes… Any ideas? On what the weapon might have been?”

I shook my head, too nauseated by the thought of Paul’s death to muster intellectual curiosity over the choice of weapon. When McGonnigal left around two-thirty, I lay in bed staring at the dark, unable to sleep despite my fatigue. I didn’t know Penelope all that well. Just because she was Lotty’s niece didn’t mean she was incapable of murder. To be honest, I hadn’t been totally convinced by her histrionics tonight. Who but a lover could get close enough to you to snap your neck? I thrashed around for hours, finally dropping into an uneasy sleep around six.

Chaim’s cleaning woman found him close to death the morning Penelope’s trial started. Lotty, Max, and I had spent the day in court with Lotty’s brother Hugo and his wife. We didn’t get any of Greta’s frantic messages until Lotty checked in at the clinic before dinner.

Chaim had gone to an Aeolus rehearsal the night before, his first appearance at the group in some weeks. He had bought a new clarinet, thinking perhaps the problem lay with the old one. Wind instruments aren’t like violins-they deteriorate over time, and an active clarinetist has to buy a new one every ten years or so. Despite the new instrument, a Buffet he had flown to Toronto to buy, the rehearsal had gone badly.

He left early, going home to turn on the gas in the kitchen stove. He left a note which simply said: “I have destroyed my music.” The cleaning woman knew enough about their life to call Greta at Rudolph’s apartment. Since Greta had been at the rehearsal-waiting for the oboist-she knew how badly Chaim had played.

“I’m not surprised,” she told Lotty over the phone. “His music was all he had after I left him. With both of us gone from his life he must have felt he had no reason to live. Thank God I learned so much from Paul about why we aren’t responsible for our actions, or I would feel terribly guilty now.”

Lotty called the attending physician at the University of Chicago Hospital and came away with the news that Chaim would live, but he’d ruined his lungs-he could hardly talk and would probably never be able to play again.

She reported her conversation with Greta with a blazing rage while we waited for dinner in her brother’s suite at the Drake. “The wrong person’s career is over,” she said furiously. “It’s the one thing I could never understand about Chaim-why he felt so much passion for that self-centered whore!”

Marcella Herschel gave a grimace of distaste-she didn’t deal well with Lotty at the best of times and could barely tolerate her when she was angry. Penelope, pale and drawn from the day’s ordeal, summoned a smile and patted Lotty’s shoulder soothingly while Max tried to persuade her to drink a little wine.

Freeman Carter stopped by after dinner to discuss strategy for the next day’s session. The evening broke up soon after, all of us too tired and depressed to want even a pretense of conversation.

The trial lasted four days. Freeman did a brilliant job with the state’s sketchy evidence; the jury was out for only two hours before returning a “not guilty” verdict. Penelope left for Montreal with Hugo and Marcella the next morning. Lotty, much shaken by the winter’s events, found a locum for her clinic and took off with Max for two weeks in Portugal.

I went to Michigan for a long weekend with the dog, but didn’t have time or money for more vacation than that. Monday night, when I got home, I found Hugo Wolf’s Spanisches Liederbuch still open on the piano from January’s dinner party with Chaim and Paul. Between Paul’s murder and preparing for Penelope’s trial I hadn’t sung since then. I tried picking out “In dem Schatten meiner Locken,” but Greta was right: the piano needed tuning badly.

I called Mr. Fortieri the next morning to see if he could come by to look at it. He was an old man who repaired instruments for groups like the Aeolus Quintet and their ilk; he also tuned pianos for them. He only helped me because he’d known my mother and admired her singing.

He arranged to come the next afternoon. I was surprised-usually you had to wait four to six weeks for time on his schedule-but quickly reshuffled my own Tuesday appointments to accommodate him. When he arrived, I realized that he had come so soon because Chaim’s suicide attempt had shaken him. I didn’t have much stomach for rehashing it, but I could see the old man was troubled and needed someone to talk to.

“What bothers me, Victoria, is what I should do with his clarinet. I’ve been able to repair it, but they tell me he’ll never play again-surely it would be too cruel to return it to him, even if I didn’t submit a bill.”

“His clarinet?” I asked blankly. “When did he give it to you?”

“After that disastrous West Coast tour. He said he had dropped it in some mud-I still don’t understand how that happened, why he was carrying it outside without the case. But he said it was clogged with mud and he’d tried cleaning it, only he’d bent the keys and it didn’t play properly. It was a wonderful instrument, only a few years old, and costing perhaps six thousand dollars, so I agreed to work on it. He’d had to use his old one in California and I always thought that was why the tour went so badly. That and Paul’s death weighing on him, of course.”

“So you repaired it and got it thoroughly clean,” I said foolishly.

“Oh, yes. Of course, the sound will never be as good as it was originally, but it would still be a fine instrument for informal use. Only-I hate having to give him a clarinet he can no longer play.”

“Leave it with me,” I said gently. “I’ll take care of it.”

Mr. Fortieri seemed relieved to pass the responsibility on to me. He went to work on the piano and tuned it back to perfection without any of his usual criticisms on my failure to keep to my mother’s high musical standard.

As soon as he’d gone, I drove down to the University of Chicago Hospital. Chaim was being kept in the psychiatric wing for observation, but he was allowed visitors. I found him sitting in the lounge, staring into space while People’s Court blared meaninglessly on the screen overhead.

He gave his sad sweet smile when he saw me and croaked out my name in the hoarse parody of a voice.

“Can we go to your room, Chaim? I want to talk to you privately.”

He flicked a glance at the vacant faces around us but got up obediently and led me down the hall to a Spartan room with bars on the window.

“Mr. Fortieri was by this afternoon to tune my piano. He told me about your clarinet.”

Chaim said nothing, but he seemed to relax a little.

“How did you do it, Chaim? I mean, you left for California Monday morning. What did you do-come back on the red-eye?”

“Red-eye?” he croaked hoarsely.

Even in the small space I had to lean forward to hear him. “The night flight.”

“Oh. The red-eye. Yes. Yes, I got to O’Hare at six, came to Paul’s office on the el, and was back at the airport in time for the ten o’clock flight. No one even knew I’d left L.A. -we had a rehearsal at two and I was there easily.”

His voice was so strained it made my throat ache to listen to him.

“I thought I hated Paul. You know, all those remarks of his about responsibility. I thought he’d encouraged Greta to leave me.” He stopped to catch his breath. After a few gasping minutes he went on.

“I blamed him for her idea that she didn’t have to feel any obligation to our marriage. Then, after I got back, I saw Lotty had been right. Greta was just totally involved in herself. She should have been named Narcissus. She used Paul’s words without understanding them.”

“But Penelope,” I said. “Would you really have let Penelope go to jail for you?”

He gave a twisted smile. “I didn’t mean them to arrest Penelope. I just thought-I’ve always had trouble with cold weather, with Chicago winters. I’ve worn a long fur for years. Because I’m so small people often think I’m a woman when I’m wrapped up in it. I just thought, if anyone saw me they would think it was a woman. I never meant them to arrest Penelope.”

He sat panting for a few minutes. “What are you going to do now, Vic? Send for the police?”

I shook my head sadly. “You’ll never play again-you’d have been happier doing life in Joliet than you will now that you can’t play. I want you to write it all down, though, the name you used on your night flight and everything. I have the clarinet; even though Mr. Fortieri cleaned it, a good lab might still find blood traces. The clarinet and your statement will go to the papers after you die. Penelope deserves that much-to have the cloud of suspicion taken away from her. And I’ll have to tell her and Lotty.”

His eyes were shiny. “You don’t know how awful it’s been, Vic. I was so mad with rage that it was like nothing to break Paul’s neck. But then, after that, I couldn’t play anymore. So you are wrong: even if I had gone to Joliet I would still never have played.”

I couldn’t bear the naked anguish in his face. I left without saying anything, but it was weeks before I slept without seeing his black eyes weeping onto me.

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catkittens · 11 months

Text

Anais Nin: Artists and Models

Artist and Models by Anaïs Nin

One morning I was called to a studio in Greenwich Village, where a sculptor was beginning a statuette. His name was Mil- lard. He already had a rough version of the figure he wanted and had reached the stage where he needed a model.

The statuette was wearing a clinging dress, and the body showed through in every line and curve. The sculptor asked me to undress completely because he could not work otherwise. He seemed so absorbed by the statuette and looked at me so ab- sently that I was able to undress and take the pose without hesitation. Although I was quite innocent at that time, he made me feel as if my body were no different than my face, as if I were the same as the statuette.

As Millard worked, he talked about his former life in Montparnasse, and the time passed quickly. I didn't know if his stories were meant to affect my imagination, but he showed no signs of being interested in me. He enjoyed recreating the atmo- sphere of Montparnasse for his own sake. This is one of the stories he told me:

"The wife of one of the modern painters was a nymphomaniac. She was tubercular, I believe. She had a chalk-white face, burning black eyes deeply sunk in her face, with eyelids painted green. She had a voluptuous figure, which she covered very sleekly in black satin. Her waist was small in proportion to the rest of her body. Around her waist she wore a huge Greek silver belt, about six inches wide, studded with stones. This belt was fascinating. It was like the belt of a slave. One felt that deep down she was a slave—to her sexual hunger. One felt that all one had to do was to grip the belt and open it for her to

fall into one's arms. It was very much like the chastity belt they showed in the Musée Cluny, which the crusaders were said to have put on their wives, a very wide silver belt with a hanging appendage that covered the sex and locked it up for the duration of their crusades. Someone told me the delightful story of a crusader who had put a chastity belt on his wife and left the key in care of his best friend in case of his death. He had barely ridden away a few miles when he saw his friend riding furiously after him, calling out: 'You gave me the wrong key!'

"Such were the feelings that the belt of Louise inspired in everyone. Seeing her arrive at a café, her hungry eyes looking us over, searching for a response, an invitation to sit down, we knew she was out on a hunt for the day. Her husband could not help knowing about this. He was a pitiful figure, always looking for her, being told by his friends that she was at another café and then another, where he would go, which gave her time to steal off to a hotel room with someone. Then everyone would try to let her know where her husband was looking for her. Finally, in desperation, he began to beg his best friends to take her, so that at least she would not fall into strangers' hands.

"He had a fear of strangers, of South Americans in particular, and of Negroes and Cubans. He had heard remarks about their extraordinary sexual powers and felt that, if his wife fell into their hands, she would never return to him. Louise, how- ever, after having slept with all his best friends, finally did meet one of the strangers.

"He was a Cuban, a tremendous brown man, extraordinarily handsome, with long, straight hair like a Hindu's and beautifully full, noble features. He would practically live at the Dome until he found a woman he wanted. And then they would disappear for two or three days, locked up in a hotel room, and not reappear until they were both satiated. He believed in making such a thorough feast of a woman that neither one wanted to see the other again. Only when this was over would he be seen sitting in the café again, conversing brilliantly. He was, in addition, a remarkable fresco painter.

"When he and Louise met, they immediately went off to- gether. Antonio was powerfully fascinated by the whiteness of her skin, the abundance of her breasts, her slender waist, her long, straight, heavy blond hair. And she was fascinated by his head and powerful body, by his slowness and ease. Everything made him laugh. He gave one the feeling that the whole world was now shut out and only this sensual feast existed, that there would be no tomorrows, no meetings with anyone else—that there was only this room, this afternoon, this bed.

"When she stood by the big iron bed, waiting, he said,

'Keep your belt on.' And he began by slowly tearing her dress from around it. Calmly and with no effort, he tore it into shreds as if it were made of paper. Louise was trembling at the strength of his hands. She stood naked now except for the heavy silver belt. He loosened her hair over her shoulders. And only then did he bend her back on the bed and kiss her interminably, his hands over her breasts. She felt the painful weight both of the silver belt and of his hands pressing so hard on her naked flesh. Her sexual hunger was rising like madness to her head, blinding her. It was so urgent that she could not wait. She could not even wait until he undressed. But Antonio ignored her movements of impatience. He not only continued to kiss her as if he were drinking her whole mouth, tongue, breath, into his big dark mouth, but his hands mauled her, pressed deeply into her flesh, leaving marks and pain everywhere. She was moist and trem- bling, opening her legs and trying to climb over him. She tried to open his pants.

" There is time,' he said. There is plenty of time. We are going to stay in this room for days. There is a lot of time for both of us.'

"Then he turned away and got undressed. He had a golden- brown body, a penis as smooth as the rest of his body, big, firm as a polished wood baton. She fell on him and took it into her mouth. His fingers went everywhere, into her anus, into her sex; his tongue, into her mouth, into her ears. He bit at her nipples, he kissed and bit her belly. She was trying to satisfy her hunger by rubbing against his leg, but he would not let her. He bent her as if she were made of rubber, twisted her into every position. With his two strong hands he took whatever part of her he was hungry for and brought it up to his mouth like a morsel of food, not caring how the rest of her body fell into space. Just so, he took her ass between his two hands, held it to his mouth, and bit and kissed her. She begged, Take me, Antonio, take me, I can't wait!' He would not take her.

"By this time the hunger in her womb was like a raging fire. She thought that it would drive her insane. Whatever she tried to do to bring herself to an orgasm, he defeated. If she even kissed him too long he would break away. As she moved, the big belt made a clinking sound, like the chain of a slave. She was now indeed the slave of this enormous brown man. He ruled like a king. Her pleasure was subordinated to his. She realized she could do nothing against his force and will. He demanded sub- mission. Her desire died in her from sheer exhaustion. All the tautness left her body. She became as soft as cotton. Into this he delved with greater exultancy. His slave, his possession, a broken body, panting, malleable, growing softer under his fingers. His hands searched every nook of her body, leaving nothing untouched, kneading it, kneading it to suit his fancy, bending it to suit his mouth, his tongue, pressing it against his big shining white teeth, marking her as his.

"For the first time, the hunger that had been on the surface of her skin like an irritation, retreated into a deeper part of her body. It retreated and accumulated, and it became a core of fire that waited to be exploded by his time and his rhythm. His touching was like a dance in which the two bodies turned and deformed themselves into new shapes, new arrangements, new designs. Now they were cupped like twins, spoon-fashion, his penis against her ass, her breasts undulating like waves under his hands, painfully awake, aware, sensitive. Now he was crouching over her prone body like some great lion, as she placed her two fists under her ass to raise herself to his penis. He entered for the first time and filled her as none other had, touching the very depths of the womb.

"The honey was pouring from her. As he pushed, his penis made little sucking sounds. All the air was drawn from the womb, the way his penis filled it, and he swung in and out of the honey endlessly, touching the tip of the womb, but as soon as her breathing hastened, he would draw it out, all glistening, and take up another form of caress. He lay back on the bed, legs apart, his penis raised, and he made her sit upon it, swallow it up to the hilt, so that her pubic hair rubbed against his. As he held her, he made her dance circles around his penis. She would fall on him and rub her breasts against his chest, and seek his mouth, then straighten up again and resume her motions around the penis. Sometimes she raised herself a little so that she kept only the head of the penis in her sex, and she moved lightly, very lightly, just enough to keep it inside, touching the edges of her sex, which were red and swollen, and clasped the penis like a mouth. Then suddenly moving downwards, engulfing the whole penis, and gasping with the joy, she would fall over his body and seek his mouth again. His hands remained on her ass all the time, gripping her to force her movements so that she could not suddenly accelerate them and come.

"He took her off the bed, laid her on the floor, on her hands and knees, and said, 'Move.' She began to crawl about the room, her long blond hair half-covering her, her belt weighing her waist down. Then he knelt behind her and inserted his penis, his whole body over hers, also moving on its iron knees and long arms. After he had enjoyed her from behind, he slipped his head under her so that he could suckle at her luxuriant breasts, as if she were an animal, holding her in place with his hands and mouth. They were both panting and twisting, and only then did he lift her up, carry her to the bed, and put her legs around his shoulders. He took her violently and they shook and trembled as they came together. She fell away suddenly and sobbed hysteri- cally. The orgasm had been so strong that she had thought she would go insane, with a hatred and a joy like nothing she had ever known. He was smiling, panting; they lay back and fell asleep."

The next day Millard told me about the artist Mafouka, the man- woman of Montparnasse.

"No one knew exactly what she was. She dressed like a man. She was small, lean, flat-chested. She wore her hair short, straight. She had the face of a boy. She played billiards like a man. She drank like a man, with her foot on the bar railing. She told obscene stories like a man. Her drawing had a strength not found in a woman's work. But her name had a feminine sound, her walk was feminine, and she was said not to have a penis.

* * *

The men did not know quite how to treat her. Sometimes they slapped her on the back with fraternal feelings.

"She lived with two girls in a studio. One of them was a model, the other, a nightclub singer. But no one knew what relationship there was among them. The two girls seemed to have a relationship like that of a husband and a wife. What was Mafouka to them? They would never answer any questions. Montparnasse always liked to know such things, and in detail.

A few homosexuals had been attracted to Mafouka and had made advances towards her or him. But she had repulsed them. She quarreled willingly and struck out with force.

"One day I was quite a little drunk and I dropped into Mafouka's studio. The door was open. As I entered I heard giggling up on the balcony. The two girls were obviously making love. The voices would get soft and tender, then violent and unintelligible, and become moans and sighs. Then there would be silences.

"Mafouka came in and found me with my ear cocked, listening. I said to her, 'Please let me go and see them.'

"I don't mind,' said Mafouka. 'Come up after me, slowly. They won't stop if they think it is just me. They like me to watch them.'

"We went up the narrow stairs. Mafouka called, 'It's I.'

There was no interruption of the noises. As we went up, I bent over so that they could not see me. Mafouka went to the bed. The two girls were naked. They were pressing their bodies against each other and rubbing together. The friction gave them pleasure. Mafouka leaned over them, caressed them. They said, 'Come on, Mafouka, lie with us.' But she left them and took me downstairs again.

"'Mafouka,' I said, 'What are you? Are you a man or a woman? Why do you live with these two girls? If you are a man, why don't you have a girl of your own? If you are a woman, why don't you have a man occasionally?'

"Mafouka smiled at me.

" 'Everybody wants to know. Everybody feels that I am not a boy. The women feel it. The men don't know for sure. I am an artist.'

" 'What do you mean, Mafouka?'

"T mean that I am, like many artists, bisexual.'

"'Yes, but the bisexuality of artists is in their nature. They may be a man with the nature of a woman, but not with such an equivocal physique as you have.'

"'I have an hermaphrodite's body.' "'Oh, Mafouka, let me see your body.' " 'You won't make love to me?'

" 'I promise.'

"She took her shirt off first and showed a young boy’s torso. She had no breasts, just the nipples, marked as they would be on a young boy. Then she slipped down her slacks. She was wearing a woman's panties, flesh-colored, with lace. She had a woman's legs and thighs. They were beautifully curved, full. She was wearing women's stockings and garters. I said, 'Let me take the garters off. I love garters.' She handed me her leg very elegantly with the movement of a ballet dancer. I slowly rolled down the garter. I held a dainty foot in my hand. I looked up at her legs, which were perfect. I rolled down the stocking and saw beautiful, smooth, woman's skin. Her feet were dainty and carefully pedicured. Her nails were covered with red lac- quer. I was more and more intrigued. I caressed her leg. She said, 'You promised you would not make love to me.'

"I stood up. Then she slipped down her panties. And I saw below the delicate curled pubic hair, shaped like a woman's, that she carried a small atrophied penis, like a child's. She let me look at her—or at him, as I felt I now should say.

" 'Why do you call yourself by a woman's name, Mafouka?

You are really like a young boy except for the shape of your legs and arms.'

"Then Mafouka laughed, this time a woman's laugh, very light and pleasant. She said, 'Come and see.' She lay back on the couch, opened her legs and showed me a perfect vulva mouth, rosy and tender, behind the penis.

'"Mafouka!'

"My desire was aroused. The strangest desire. The feeling of wanting to take both a man and woman in one person. She saw the stirring of it in me and sat up. I tried to win her by a caress, but she eluded me.

"'Don't you like men?' I asked her. 'Haven't you ever had a man?'

"'I'm a virgin. I don't like men. I feel a desire for women only, but I can't take them as a man could. My penis is like a child's—I cannot have an erection.'

" 'You are a real hermaphrodite, Mafouka,' I said. That is what our age is supposed to have produced because the tension between the masculine and the feminine has broken down, people are mostly half of one and half of the other. But I have never seen it before—actually, physically. It must make you very unhappy. Are you happy with women?'

'"I desire women, but I do suffer, because I cannot take them like a man, and also because when they have taken me like Lesbians, I still feel some dissatisfaction. But I am not attracted to men. I fell in love with Matilda, the model. But I could not keep her. She found a real Lesbian for herself, one that she feels she can satisfy. This penis of mine always gives her the feeling that I am not a real Lesbian. And she knows she has no power over me, even though I was attracted to her. So you see, the two girls have formed another link together. I stand between them, perpetually dissatisfied. Also, I do not like the companionship of women. They are petty and personal. They hang on to their mysteries and secrets, they act and pretend. I like the character of men better.'

" 'Poor Mafouka.'

" 'Poor Mafouka. Yes, when I was born they did not know how to name me. I was born in a small village in Russia. They thought I was a monster and should perhaps be destroyed, for my own sake. When I came to Paris I suffered less. I found I was a good artist.' "

Whenever I left the sculptor's studio, I would always stop in a coffee shop nearby and ponder all that Millard had told me. I wondered whether anything like this were happening around me, here in Greenwich Village, for instance. I began to love posing, for the adventurous aspect of it. I decided to attend a party one Saturday evening that a painter named Brown had invited me to. I was hungry and curious about everything.

I rented an evening dress from the costume department of the Art Model Club, with an evening cape and shoes. Two of the models came with me, a red-haired girl, Mollie, and a statuesque one, Ethel, who was the favorite of the sculptors.

What was passing through my head all the time were the stories of Montparnasse life told to me by the sculptor, and now I felt that I was entering this realm. My first disappointment was seeing that the studio was quite poor and bare, the two couches without pillows, the lighting crude, with none of the trappings I had imagined necessary for a party.

Bottles were on the floor, along with glasses and chipped cups. A ladder led to a balcony where Brown kept his paintings. A thin curtain concealed the washstand and a little gas stove. At the front of the room was an erotic painting of a woman being possessed by two men. She was in a state of convulsion, her body arched, her eyes showing the whites. The men were cover- ing her, one with his penis inside of her and the other with his penis in her mouth. It was a life-size painting and very bestial. Everyone was looking at it, admiring it. I was fascinated. It was the first picture of the sort I had seen, and it gave me a tremendous shock of mixed feelings.

Next to it stood another which was even more striking. It showed a poorly furnished room, filled by a big iron bed. Sitting on this bed was a man of about forty or so, in old clothes, with an unshaved face, a slobbering mouth, loose eyelids, loose jaws, a completely degenerate expression. He had taken his pants down halfway, and on his bare knees sat a little girl with very short skirts, to whom he was feeding a bar of candy. Her little bare legs rested on his bare hairy ones.

What I felt after seeing these two paintings was what one feels when drinking, a sudden dizziness of the head, a warmth through the body, a confusion of the senses. Something awakens in the body, foggy and dim, a new sensation, a new kind of hunger and restlessness.

I looked at the other people in the room. But they had seen so much of this that it did not affect them. They laughed and commented.

One model was talking about her experiences at an under- wear shop:

"I had answered an advertisement for a model to pose in under- wear for sketches. I had done this many times before and was paid the normal price of a dollar an hour. Usually several artists sketched me at the same time, and there were many people around—secretaries, stenographers, errand boys. This time the place was empty. It was just an office with a desk, files and drawing materials. A man sat waiting for me in front of his drawing board. I was given a pile of underwear and found a screen placed where I could change. I began by wearing a slip. I posed for fifteen minutes at a time while he made sketches.

"We worked quietly. When he gave the signal, I went behind the screen and changed. They were satin underthings of lovely designs, with lace tops and fine embroidery. I wore a brassiere and panties. The man smoked and sketched. At the bottom of the pile were panties and a brassiere made entirely of black lace. I had posed in the nude often and did not mind wearing these. They were quite beautiful.

"I looked out of the window most of the time, not at the man sketching. After a while I did not hear the pencil working any longer and I turned slightly towards him, not wanting to lose the pose. He was sitting there behind his drawing board staring at me. Then I realized that he had his penis out and that he was in a kind of trance.

"Thinking this would mean trouble for me since we were alone in the office, I started to go behind the screen and dress.

"He said, 'Don't go. I won't touch you. I just love to see women in lovely underwear. I won't move from here. And if you want me to pay you more, all you have to do is wear my favorite piece of underwear and pose for fifteen minutes. I will give you five dollars more. You can reach for it yourself. It is right above your head on the shelf there.'

"Well, I did reach for the package. It was the loveliest piece of underwear you ever saw—the finest black lace, like a spider web really, and the panties were slit back and front, slit and edged with fine lace. The brassiere was cut in such a way as to expose the nipples through triangles. I hesitated because I was wondering if this would not excite the man too much, if he would attack me.

"He said, 'Don't worry. I don't really like women. I never touch them. I like only underwear. I just like to see women in lovely underwear. If I tried to touch you I would immediately become impotent. I won't move from here.'

"He put aside the drawing board and sat there with his penis out. Now and then it shook. But he did not move from his chair.

"I decided to put on the underwear. The five dollars tempted me. He was not very strong and I felt that I could defend myself. So I stood there in the slit panties, turning around for him to see me on all sides.

"Then he said, 'That's enough.' He seemed unsettled and his face was congested. He told me to dress quickly and leave. He handed me the money in a great hurry, and I left. I had a feeling that he was only waiting for me to leave to masturbate.

"I have known men like this, who steal a shoe from some- one, from an attractive woman, so they can hold it and mastur- bate while looking at it."

Everyone was laughing at her story. "I think," said Brown, "that when we are children we are much more inclined to be fetishists of one kind or another. I remember hiding inside of my mother's closet and feeling ecstasy at smelling her clothes and feeling them. Even today I cannot resist a woman who is wearing a veil or tulle or feathers, because it awakens the strange feelings I had in that closet."

As he said this I remembered how I hid in the closet of a young man when I was only thirteen, for the same reason. He was twenty-five and he treated me like a little girl. I was in love with him. Sitting next to him in a car in which he took all of us for long rides, I was ecstatic just feeling his leg alongside mine. At night I would get into bed and, after turning out the light, take out a can of condensed milk in which I had punctured a little hole. I would sit in the dark sucking at the sweet milk with a voluptuous feeling all over my body that I could not explain. I thought then that being in love and sucking at the sweet milk were related. Much later I remembered this when I tasted sperm for the first time.

Mollie remembered that at the same age she liked to eat ginger while she smelled camphor balls. The ginger made her body feel warm and languid and the camphor balls made her a little dizzy. She would get herself in a sort of drugged state this way, lying there for hours.

Ethel turned to me and said, "I hope you never marry a man you don't love sexually. That is what I have done. I love everything about him, the way he behaves, his face, his body, the way he works, treats me, his thoughts, his way of smiling, talking, everything except the sexual man in him. I thought I did, before we married. There is absolutely nothing wrong with him. He is a perfect lover. He is emotional and romantic, he shows great feeling and great enjoyment. He is sensitive and adoring. Last night while I was asleep he came into my bed. I was half-asleep so I could not control myself, as I usually do, because I do not want to hurt his feelings. He got in beside me and began to take me very slowly and lingeringly. Usually it is all over quickly, which makes it possible to bear. I do not even let him kiss me if I can help it. I hate his mouth on mine. I usually turn my face away, which is what I did last night. Well, there he was, and what do you think I did? I suddenly began to strike him with my closed fists, on the shoulder, while he was enjoying himself, to dig my nails into him, and he took it as a sign that I was enjoying it, growing rather wild with pleasure, and he went on. Then I whispered as low as I could, 'I hate you.' And then I asked myself if he had heard me. What would he think? Was he hurt? As he was himself partly asleep, he merely kissed me good night when it was over and went back to his bed. The next morning I was waiting for what he would say. I still thought perhaps he had heard me say, 'I hate you.' But no, I must have formed the words without saying them. And all he said was, 'You got quite wild lastnight, you know,' and smiled, as if it pleased him."

Brown started the phonograph and we began to dance. The little alcohol I had taken had gone to my head. I felt a dilation of the whole universe. Everything seemed very smooth and simple. Everything, in fact, ran downwards like a snowy hill on which I could slide without effort. I felt a great friendliness, as if I knew all these people intimately. But I chose the most timid of the painters to dance with. I felt that he was pretending somewhat, as I was, to be very familiar with all of this. I felt that deep down he was a little uneasy. The other painters were caressing Ethel and Mollie as they danced. This one did not dare. I was laughing to myself at having discovered him. Brown saw that my painter was not making any advances, and he cut in for a dance. He was making sly remarks about virgins. I wondered whether he was alluding to me. How could he know? He pressed against me, and I drew away from him. I went back to the timid young painter. A woman illustrator was flirting with him, teas- ing him. He was equally glad that I came back to him. So we danced together, retreating into our own timidity. All around us people were kissing now, embracing.

The woman illustrator had thrown off her blouse and was dancing in her slip. The timid painter said, "If we stay here we will soon have to lie on the floor and make love. Do you want to leave?"

"Yes, I want to leave," I said.

We went out. Instead of making love, he was talking, talking. I was listening to him in a daze. He had a plan for a picture of me. He wanted to paint me as an undersea woman, nebulous, transparent, green, watery except for the very red mouth and the very red flower I was wearing in my hair. Would I pose for him? I did not respond very quickly because of the effects of the liquor, and he said apologetically, "Are you sorry that I was not brutal?"

"No, I'm not sorry. I chose you myself because I knew you would not be."

"It's my first party," he said humbly, "and you're not the kind of woman one can treat—that way. How did you ever become a model? What did you do before this? A model does not have to be a prostitute, I know, but she has to bear a lot of handling and attempts."

"I manage quite well," I said, not enjoying this conversation at all.

"I will be worrying about you. I know some artists are objective while they work, I know all that. I feel that way myself. But there is always a moment before and after, when the model is undressing and dressing, that does disturb me. It's the first surprise of seeing the body. What did you feel the first time?"

"Nothing at all. I felt as if I were a painting already. Or a statue. I looked down at my own body like some object, some impersonal object."

I was growing sad, sad with restlessness and hunger. I felt that nothing would happen to me. I felt desperate with desire to be a woman, to plunge into living. Why was I enslaved by this need of being in love first? Where would my life begin? I would enter each studio expecting a miracle which did not take place. It seemed to me that a great current was passing all around me and that I was left out. I would have to find someone who felt as I did. But where? Where?

The sculptor was watched by his wife, I could see that. She came into the studio so often, unexpectedly. And he was fright- ened. I did not know what frightened him. They invited me to spend two weeks at their country house where I would continue to pose—or rather, she invited me. She said that her husband did not like to stop work during vacations. But as soon as she left he turned to me and said, "You must find an excuse not to go. She will make you miserable. She is not well—she has obsessions. She thinks that every woman who poses for me is my mistress."

There were hectic days of running from studio to studio with very little time for lunch, posing for magazine covers, illustrations for magazine stories, and advertisements. I could see my face everywhere, even in the subway. I wondered if people recognized me.

The sculptor had become my best friend. I was anxiously watching his statuette coming to a finish. Then one morning when I arrived I saw that he had ruined it. He said that he had tried to work on it without me. But he did not seem unhappy or worried. I was quite sad, and to me it looked very much like sabotage, because it seemed spoiled with such awkwardness. I saw that he was happy to be beginning it all over again.

It was at the theatre that I met John and discovered the power of a voice. It rolled over me like the tones of a pipe organ, making me vibrate. When he repeated my name and mispro- nounced it, it sounded to me like a caress. It was the deepest, richest voice I had ever heard. I could scarcely look at him. I knew that his eyes were big, of an intense, magnetic blue, that he was large, rather restless. His foot moved nervously like that of a race horse. I felt his presence blurring everything else—the theatre, the friend sitting at my right. And he behaved as if I had enchanted him, hypnotized him. He talked on, looking at me, but I was not listening. In one moment I was no longer a young girl. Every time he spoke, I felt myself falling into some dizzy spiral, falling into the meshes of a beautiful voice. It was truly a drug. When he had finally "stolen" me, as he said, he hailed a taxi.

We did not say another word until we reached his apartment. He had not touched me. He did not need to. His presence had affected me in such a way that I felt as if he had caressed me for a long time.

He merely said my name twice, as if he thought it sufficiently beautiful to repeat. He was tall, glowing. His eyes were so intensely blue that when they blinked, for a second it was like some tiny flash of lightning, giving one a sense of fear, a fear of a storm that would completely engulf one.

Then he kissed me. His tongue went around mine, around and around, and then it stopped to touch the tip only. As he kissed me he slowly lifted my skirt. He unrolled my garters, my stockings. Then he lifted me up and carried me to the bed. I was so dissolved that I felt he had already penetrated me. It seemed to me that his voice had opened me, opened my whole body to him. He sensed this, and so he was amazed by the resistance to his penis that he felt.

He stopped to look at my face. He saw the great emotional receptiveness, and then he pressed harder. I felt the tear and the pain, but the warmth melted everything, the warmth of his voice in my ear saying, "Do you want me as I want you?"

Then his pleasure made him groan. His whole weight upon me, pressing against my body, the shaft of pain vanished. I felt the joy of being opened. I lay there in a semidream.

John said, "I hurt you. You did not enjoy it." I could not say, "I want it again." My hand touched his penis. I caressed it. It sprung up, so hard. He kissed me until I felt a new wave of desire, a desire to respond completely. But he said, "It will hurt now. Wait a little while. Can you stay with me, all night? Will you stay?"

I saw that there was blood on my leg. I went to wash it off. I felt that I had not been taken yet, that this was only a small part of the breaking through. I wanted to be possessed and know blinding joys. I walked unsteadily and fell on the bed again.

John was asleep, his big body still curved as when he was lying against me, his arm thrown out where my head had been resting. I slipped in at his side and fell half-asleep. I wanted to touch his penis again. I did so gently, not wanting to wake him. Then I slept and was awakened by his kisses. We were floating in a dark world of flesh, feeling only the soft flesh vibrating, and every touch was a joy. He gripped my hips tautly against him. He was afraid to wound me. I parted my legs. When he inserted his penis it hurt, but the pleasure was greater. There was a little outer rim of pain and, deeper in, a pleasure at the presence of his penis moving there. I pressed forwards, to meet it.

This time he was passive. He said, "You move, you enjoy it now." So as not to feel the pain, I moved gently around his penis. I put my closed fists under my backside to raise myself towards him. He placed my legs on his shoulders. Then the pain grew greater and he withdrew.

I left him in the morning, dazed, but with a new joy of feeling that I was growing nearer to passion. I went home and slept until he telephoned.

"When are you coming?" he said. "I must see you again. Soon. Are you posing today?"

"Yes, I must. I'll come after the pose."

"Please don't pose," he said, "please don't pose. It makes me desperate to think of it. Come and see me first. I want to talk to you. Please come and see me first."

I went to him. "Oh," he said, burning my face with the breath of his desire, "I can't bear to think of you posing now, exposing yourself. You can't do that anymore. You must let me take care of you. I cannot marry you because I have a wife and children. Let me take care of you until we know how we can escape. Let me get a little place where I can come and see you. You should not be posing. You belong to me."

* * *

So I entered a secret life, and when I was supposed to be posing for everyone else in the world, I was really waiting in a beautiful room for John. Each time he came, he brought a gift, a book, colored stationery for me to write on. I was restless, waiting.

The only one who was taken into the secret was the sculptor because he sensed what was happening. He would not let me stop posing, and he questioned me. He had predicted how my life would be.

The first time I felt an orgasm with John, I wept because it was so strong and so marvelous that I did not believe it could happen over and over again. The only painful moments were the ones spent waiting. I would bathe myself, spread polish on my nails, perfume myself, rouge my nipples, brush my hair, put on a negligee, and all the preparations would turn my imagination to the scenes to come.

I wanted him to find me in the bath. He would say he was on his way. But he would not arrive. He was often detained. By the time he arrived I would be cold, resentful. The waiting wore out my feelings. I would rebel. Once I would not answer when he rang the doorbell. Then he knocked gently, humbly, and that touched me, so I opened the door. But I was angry and wanted to hurt him. I did not respond to his kiss. He was hurt until his hand slipped under my negligee and he found that I was wet, in spite of the fact that I kept my legs tightly closed. He was joyous again and he forced his way.

Then I punished him by not responding sexually and he was hurt again, for he enjoyed my pleasure. He knew by the violent heartbeats, by the changes in the voice, by the contrac- tion of my legs, how I had enjoyed him. And this time I lay like a whore. That really hurt him.

We could never go out together. He was too well known, as was his wife. He was a producer. His wife was a playwright.

When John discovered how angry it would make me to wait for him, he did not try to remedy it. He came later and later. He would say that he was arriving at ten o'clock and then come at midnight. So one day he found that I was not there when he came. This put him in a frenzy. He thought I would not come back. I felt that he was doing this deliberately, that he liked my being angry. After two days he pleaded with me and

I returned. We were both very keyed up and angry.

He said, "You've gone back to pose. You like it. You like to show yourself."

"Why do you make me wait so long? You know that it kills my desire for you. I feel cold when you come late."

"Not so very cold," he said.

I closed my legs tightly against him, he could not even touch me. But then he slipped in quickly from behind and caressed me. "Not so cold," he said.

On the bed he pushed his knee between my legs and forced them open. "When you are angry," he said, "I feel that I am raping you. I feel then that you love me so much you cannot resist me, I see that you are wet, and I like your resistance and your defeat too."

"John, you will make me so angry that I will leave you."

Then he was frightened. He kissed me. He promised not to repeat this.

What I could not understand was that, despite our quarrels, being made love to by John made me only more sensitive. He had awakened my body. Now I had even a greater desire to abandon myself to all whims. He must have known this, because the more he caressed me, awakened me, the more he feared that I would return to posing. Slowly, I did return. I had too much time to myself, I was too much alone with my thoughts of John.

Millard particularly was happy to see me. He must have spoiled the statuette again, purposely I knew now, so he could keep me in the pose he liked.

The night before, he had smoked marijuana with friends.

He said, "Did you know that very often it gives people the feeling that they are transformed into animals? Last night there was a woman who was completely taken by this transformation. She fell on her hands and knees and walked around like a dog. We took her clothes off. She wanted to give milk. She wanted us to act like puppies, sprawl on the floor and suckle at her breasts. She kept on her hands and knees and offered her breasts to all of us. She wanted us to walk like dogs—after her. She insisted on our taking her in this position, from behind, and I did, but then I was terribly tempted to bite her as I crouched over her. I bit into her shoulder harder than I have ever bitten anyone. The woman did not get frightened. I did. It sobered me.

I stood up and then I saw that a friend of mine was following her on his hands and knees, not caressing her or taking her, but merely smelling exactly as a dog would do, and this reminded me so much of my first sexual impression that it gave me a painful hard-on.

"As children we had a big servant girl in the country who came from Martinique. She wore voluminous skirts and a colored kerchief on her head. She was a rather pale mulatto, very beautiful. She would make us play hide-and-seek. When it was my turn to hide she would hide me under her skirt, sitting down. And there I was, half-suffocated, hiding between her legs. I remember the sexual odor that came from her and that stirred me even as a boy. Once I tried to touch her, but she slapped my hand."

I was posing quietly and he came over to measure me with an instrument. Then I felt his hand on my thighs, caressing me so lightly. I smiled at him. I stood on the model's stand, and he was caressing my legs now, as if he were modeling me out of clay. He kissed my feet, he ran his hands up my legs again and again, and around my ass. He leaned against my legs and kissed me. He lifted me up and brought me down to the floor. He held me tightly against him, caressing my back and shoulders and neck. I shivered a little. His hands were smooth and supple. He touched me as he touched the statuette, so caressingly, all over.

Then we walked towards the couch. He lay me there on my stomach. He took his clothes off and fell on me. I felt his penis against my ass. He slipped his hands around my waist and lifted me up slightly so that he could penetrate me. He lifted me up towards him rhythmically. I closed my eyes to feel him better and to listen to the sound of the penis sliding in and out of the moisture. He pushed so violently that it made tiny clicks, which delighted me.

His fingers dug into my flesh. His nails were sharp and hurt. He aroused me so much with his vigorous thrusts that my mouth opened and I was biting into the couch cover. Then at the same time we both heard a sound. Millard rose swiftly, picked up his clothes and ran up the ladder to the balcony where he kept his scupture. I slipped behind the screen.

There came a second knock on the studio door, and his wife came in. I was trembling, not with fear, but the shock of having stopped in the middle of our enjoyment. Millard's wife saw the studio empty and left. Millard came out dressed. I said, "Wait for me a minute," and began to dress too. The moment was destroyed. I was still wet and shivering. When I slipped on my panties the silk touch affected me like a hand. I could not bear the tension and desire any longer. I put my two hands over my sex as Millard had done and pressed against it, closing my eyes and imagining Millard was caressing me. And I came, shaking from head to foot.

Millard wanted to be with me again, but not in his studio where we might be surprised by his wife, so I let him find another place. It belonged to a friend. The bed was set in a deep alcove and there were mirrors above the bed and small dim lamps. Millard wanted all the lights out, he said he wanted to be in the dark with me.

"I have seen your body and I know it so well, now I want to feel it, with my eyes closed, just to feel the skin and the softness of the flesh. Your legs are so firm and strong, but so soft to the touch. I love your feet with the toes free and set apart like the fingers of a hand, not cramped—and the toenails so beautifully lacquered—and the down on your legs." He passed his hand all over my body, slowly, pressing into the flesh, feeling every curve. "If my hand stays here between the legs," he said, "do you feel it, do you like it, do you want it nearer?"

"Nearer, nearer," I said.

"I want to teach you something," said Millard. "Do you want to let me do it?"

He inserted his finger inside my sex. "Now, I want you to contract around my finger. There is a muscle there that can be made to contract and expand around the penis. Try."

I tried. His finger there was tantalizing. Since he was not moving it, I tried to move inside of my womb, and I felt the muscle that he mentioned, weakly at first, opening and closing around the finger.

Millard said, "Yes, like that. Do it stronger, stronger."

So I did, opening, closing, opening, closing. It was like a little mouth inside, tightening around the finger. I wanted to take it in, suckle at it and so I continued to try.

Then Millard said that he would insert his penis and not move and that I should continue to move inside. I tried with more and more strength to clutch at him. The motion was exciting me, and I felt that at any moment I would reach the orgasm, but after I had clutched at him several times, sucking his penis in, he suddenly groaned with pleasure and began to push quickly, as he himself could not hold back the orgasm. I merely continued the inner motion and I felt the orgasm, too, in the most marvelous deep way, deep inside of the womb.

He said, "Did John ever show you this?" "No."

"What has he shown you?"

"This," I said. "You kneel over me and push."

Millard obeyed. His penis did not have much strength, for it was too soon after the first orgasm, but he slipped it in, pushing it with his hand. Then I reached out with my two hands and caressed the balls and put two fingers at the basis of the penis and rubbed as he moved. Millard was instantly aroused, his penis hardened, and he began to move in and out again. Then he stopped himself.

"I must not be so demanding," he said in a strange tone. "You will be tired out for John."

We lay back and rested, smoking. I was wondering if Millard had felt more than sensual desire, whether my love for John weighed on him. But although there was always a hurt sound to his words, he continued to ask me questions.

"Did John have you today? Did he take you more than once? How did he take you?"

In the weeks to come, Millard taught me many things I had not done with John, and as soon as I learned them I tried them with John. Finally he became suspicious of where I was learning new positions. He knew I had not made love before I met him. The first time I tightened my muscles to clutch at the penis, he was amazed.

The two secret relationships became difficult for me, but I enjoyed the danger and the intensity.

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catkittens · 11 months

Text

The Dream Lover by William Boyd

‘None of these girls is French, right?’

‘No. But they’re European.’

‘Not the same thing, man. French is crucial.’

‘Of course...’ I don’t know what he is talking about but it seems politic to agree.

‘You know any French girls?’

‘Of course,’ I say again. This is almost a lie, but it doesn’t matter at this stage.

‘But well?’ I mean well enough to ask out?’

‘I don’t see why not.’ Now this time we are into mendacity, but I am unconcerned. I feel good, adult, quite confident today. This lie can germinate and grow for a while.

I am standing in a pale parallelogram of March sunshine, leaning against a wall, talking to my American friend, Preston. The wall belongs to the Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen, a large stuccoed villa on the front at Nice. In front of us is a small cobbled courtyard bounded by a balustrade. Beyond is the Promenade des Anglais, its four lanes busy with Nice’s traffic. Over the burnished roofs of the cars I can see the Mediterranean. The Baie des Anges looks grey and grim in this season: old, tired water – ashy, cindery.

‘We got to do something...’ Preston says, a hint of petulant desperation in his voice. I like the ‘we’. Preston scratches his short hard hair noisily. ‘What with the new apartment, and all.’

‘You moved out of the hotel?’

‘Yeah. Want to come by tonight?’ He shifts his big frame as if troubled by a fugitive itch, and pats his pockets – breast, hip, thigh – looking for his cigarettes. ‘We got a bar on the roof.’

I am intrigued, but I explain that the invitation has to be turned down as it is a Monday, and every Monday night I have a dinner appointment with a French family – friends of friends of my mother.

Preston shrugs, then finds and sets fire to a cigarette. He smokes an American brand called ‘Picayune’ which is made in New Orleans. When he came to France he brought two thousand with him. He has never smoked anything else since he was fourteen, he insists.

We watch our fellow students saunter into the building. They are nearly all strangers to me, these bright boys and girls, as I have only been in Nice a few weeks, and, so far, Preston is the only friend I have made. Slightly envious of their easy conviviality, I watch the others chatter and mingle – Germans, Scandinavians, Italians, Tunisians, Nigerians... We are all foreigners, trying hard to learn French and win our diplomas... Except for Preston, who makes no effort at all and seems quite content to remain monoglot.

A young guy with long hair rides his motorbike into the courtyard. He is wearing no shirt. He is English and, apart from me, the only other English person in the place. He revs his motorbike unnecessarily a few times before parking it and switching it off. He takes a T-shirt out of a saddle-bag and nonchalantly pulls it on. I think how I too would like to own a motorbike and do exactly what he has done... His name is Tim. One day, I imagine, we might be friends. We’ll see.

Monsieur Cambrai welcomes me with his usual exhausting, impossible geniality. He shakes my hand fervently and shouts to his wife over his shoulder.

‘Ne bouge pas. C’est l’habitué!’

That’s what he calls me – l’habitué. L’habitué de lundi, to give the appellation in full, so called because I am invited to dinner every Monday night without fail. He almost never uses my proper name and sometimes I find this perpetual alias a little wearing, a little stressful. ‘Salut, l’habitué’, ‘Bien mangé, l’habitué? ‘Encore du vin, l’habitué? and so on. But I like him and the entire Cambrai family; in fact I like them so much that it makes me feel weak, insufficient, cowed.

Monsieur and Madame are small people, fit, sophisticated and nimble, with neat spry figures. Both of them are dentists, it so happens, who teach at the big medical school here in Nice. A significant portion of my affection for them owes to the fact that they have three daughters – Delphine, Stéphanie and Annique – all older than me and all possessed of – to my fogged and blurry eyes – an incandescent, almost supernatural beauty. Stéphanie and Annique still live with their parents, Delphine has a flat somewhere in the city, but she often dines at home. These are the French girls that I claimed to know, though ‘know’ is far too inadequate a word to sum up the complexity of my feelings for them. I come to their house on Monday nights as a supplicant and votary, both frightened and in awe of them. I sit in their luminous presence, quiet and eager, for two hours or so, unmanned by my astonishing good fortune.

I am humbled further when I consider the family’s disarming, disinterested kindness. When I arrived in Nice they were the only contacts I had in the city and, on my mother’s urging, I duly wrote to them citing our tenuous connection via my mother’s friend. To my surprise I was promptly invited to dinner and then invited back every Monday night. What shamed me was that I knew I myself could never be so hospitable so quickly, not even to a close friend, and what was more I knew no one else who would be, either. So I cross the Cambrai threshold each Monday with a rich cocktail of emotions gurgling inside me: shame, guilt, gratitude, admiration and – it goes without saying – lust.

Preston’s new address is on the Promenade des Anglais itself – the ‘Résidence Les Anges’. I stand outside the building, looking up, impressed. I have passed it many times before, a distressing and vulgar edifice on this celebrated boulevard, an unadorned rectangle of coppery, smoked glass with stacked ranks of gilded aluminium balconies.

I press a buzzer in a slim, free-standing concrete post and speak into a crackling wire grille. When I mention the name ‘Mr Fairfield’ glass doors part softly and I am admitted to a bare granite lobby where a taciturn man in a tight suit shows me to the lift.

Preston rents a small studio apartment with a bathroom and kitchenette. It is a neat, pastel-coloured and efficient module. On the wall are a series of prints of exotic birds: a toucan, a bataleur eagle, something called a blue shrike. As I stand there looking round I think of my own temporary home, my thin room in Madame d’Amico’s ancient, dim apartment, and the inefficient and bathless bathroom I have to share with her other lodgers, and a sudden hot envy rinses through me. I half hear Preston enumerating various financial consequences of his tenancy: how much this studio costs a month; the outrageous supplement he had to pay even to rent it in the first place; and how he had been obliged to cash in his return fare to the States (first class) in order to meet it. He says he has called his father for more money.

We ride up to the roof, six storeys above the Promenade. To my vague alarm there is a small swimming-pool up here and a large glassed-in cabana – furnished with a bamboo bar and some rattan seats – labelled ‘Club Les Anges’ in neon copperplate. A barman in a short cerise jacket runs this place, a portly, pale-faced fellow with a poor moustache whose name is Serge. Although Preston jokes patronizingly with him it is immediately quite clear to me both that Serge loathes Preston and that Preston is completely unaware of this powerful animus directed against him.

I order a large gin and tonic from Serge and for a shrill palpitating minute I loathe Preston too. I know there are many better examples on offer, of course, but for the time being this shiny building and its accoutrements will do nicely as an approximation of The Good Life for me. And as I sip my sour drink a sour sense of the world’s huge unfairness crowds ruthlessly in. Why should this guileless, big American, barely older than me, with his two thousand Louisiana cigarettes, and his cashable first-class air tickets, have all this. . . while I live in a narrow frowsty room in an old woman’s decrepit apartment? My straightened circumstances are caused by a seemingly interminable postal strike in Britain that means money cannot be transferred to my Nice account and I have to husband my financial resources like a neurotic peasant conscious of a hard winter lowering ahead. Where is my money, I want to know, my exotic bird prints, my club, my pool? How long will I have to wait before these artefacts become the commonplace of my life? . . . I allow this unpleasant voice to whine and whinge on in my head as we stand on the terrace and admire the view of the long bay. One habit I have already learnt, even at my age, is not to resist these fervent grudges – give them a loose rein, let them run themselves out, it is always better in the longer run.

In fact I am drawn to Preston, and want him to be my friend. He is tall and powerfully built – the word ‘rangy’ comes to mind – affable and not particularly intelligent. To my eyes his clothes are so parodically American as to be be beyond caricature: pale-blue baggy shirts with button-down collars, old khaki trousers short enough to reveal his white-socked ankles and big brown loafers. He has fair, short hair and even, unexceptionable features. He has a gold watch, a Zippo lighter and an ugly ring with a red stone set in it. He told me once, in all candour, in all modesty, that he ‘played tennis to Davis Cup standard’.

I always wondered what he was doing in Nice, studying at the Centre. At first I thought he might be a draftee avoiding the war in Vietnam but I now suspect – based on some hints he has dropped – that he has been sent off to France as an obscure punishment of some sort. His family don’t want him at home: he has done something wrong and these months in Nice are his penance.

But hardly an onerous one, that’s for sure: he has no interest in his classes – those he can be bothered to take – nor in the language and culture of France. He simply has to endure this exile and he will be allowed home where, I imagine, he will resume his soft life of casual privilege and unreflecting ease once more. He talks a good deal about his eventual return to the States where he plans to impose his own particular punishment, or extract his own special reward. He says he will force his father to buy him an Aston Martin. His father will have no say in the matter, he remarks with untypical vehemence and determination. He will have his Aston Martin, and it is the bright promise of this glossy English car that really seems to sustain him through these dog days on the Mediterranean littoral.

* * *

Soon I find I am a regular visitor at the Résidence Les Anges, where I go most afternoons after my classes are over. Preston and I sit in the club, or by the pool if it is sunny, and drink. We consume substantial amounts (it all goes on his tab) and consequently I am usually fairly drunk by sunset. Our conversation ranges far and wide but at some point in every discussion Preston reiterates his desire to meet French girls. If I do indeed know some French girls, he says, why don’t I ask them to the club? I reply that I am working on it, and coolly change the subject.

Steadily, over the days, I learn more about my American friend. He is an only child. His father (who has not responded to his requests for money) is a millionaire – real estate. His mother divorced him recently to marry another, richer, millionaire. Between his two sets of millionaire parents Preston has a choice of eight homes to visit in and around the USA: in Miami, New York, Palm Springs and a ranch in Montana. Preston dropped out of college after two semesters and does not work.

‘Why should I?’ he argues reasonably. ‘They’ve got more than enough money for me too. Why should I bust my ass working trying to earn more?’

‘But isn’t it... What do you do all day?’

‘All kinds of shit... But mostly I like to play tennis a lot. And I like to fuck, of course.’

‘So why did you come to Nice?’

He grins. ‘I was a bad boy.’ He slaps his wrist and laughs. ‘Naughty, naughty Preston.’ He won’t tell me what he did.

It is spring in Nice. Each day we start to enjoy a little more sunshine and whenever it appears within ten minutes there is a particular girl, lying on the plage publique in front of the Centre, sunbathing. Often I stand and watch her spread out there, still, supine, on the cool pebbles – the only sunbather along the entire bay. It turns out she is well known, that this is a phenomenon that occurs every year. By early summer her tan is solidly established and she is very brown indeed. By August she is virtually black, with that kind of dense, matt tan, the life burned out of the skin, her pores brimming with melanin. Her ambition each year, they say, is to be the brownest girl on the Côte d’Azur . . .

I watch her lying there, immobile beneath the iridescent rain of ultraviolet. It is definitely not warm – even in my jacket and scarf I shiver slightly in the fresh breeze. How can she be bothered? I wonder, but at the same time I have to admit there is something admirable in such single-mindedness, such ludicrous dedication.

Eventually I take my first girl to the club to meet Preston. Her name is Ingrid, she is in my class, a Norwegian, but with dark auburn hair. I don’t know her well but she seems a friendly, uncomplicated soul. She speaks perfect English and German.

‘Are you French?’ Preston asks, almost immediately.

Ingrid is very amused by this. ‘I’m Norwegian,’ she explains. ‘Is it important?’

I apologize to Preston when Ingrid goes off to change into her swimming costume, but he waves it away, not to worry, he says, she’s cute. Ingrid returns and we sit in the sun and order the first of our many drinks. Ingrid, after some prompting, smokes one of Preston’s Picayune cigarettes. The small flaw that emerges to mar our pleasant afternoon is that, the more Ingrid drinks, so does her conversation become dominated by references to a French boy she is seeing called Jean-Jacques. Preston hides his disappointment; he is the acme of good manners.

Later, we play poker using cheese biscuits as chips. Ingrid sits opposite me in her multicoloured swimsuit. She is plumper than I had imagined, and I decide that if I had to sum her up in one word it would be ‘homely’. Except for one detail: she has very hairy armpits. On one occasion she sits back in her chair, studying her cards for a full minute, her free hand idly scratching a bite on the back of her neck. Both Preston’s and my eyes are drawn to the thick divot of auburn hair that is revealed by this gesture: we stare at it, fascinated, as Ingrid deliberates whether to call or raise. (After she has gone Preston confesses that he found her unshavenness quite erotic. I am not so sure.)

That evening we sit on in the club long into the night, as usual the place’s sole customers, with Serge unsmilingly replenishing our drinks as Preston calls for them. Ingrid’s presence, the unwitting erotic charge that she has detonated in our normally tranquil, bibulous afternoons; seems to have unsettled and troubled Preston somewhat and without any serious prompting on my part he tells me why he has come to Nice. He informs me that the man his mother remarried was a widower, an older man, with four children already in their twenties. When Preston dropped out of college he went to stay with his mother and new stepfather.

He exhales, he eats several olives, his face goes serious and solemn for a moment.

‘This man, Michael, had three daughters – and a son, who was already married – and, man, you should have seen those girls.’ He grins, a stupid, gormless grin. ‘I was eighteen years old and I got three beautiful girls sleeping down the corridor from me. What am I supposed to do?’

The answer, unvoiced, seemed to slip into the club like a draught of air. I felt my spine tauten.

‘You mean –?’

‘Yeah, sure. All three of them. Eventually.’

I don’t want to speak, so I think through this. I imagine a big silent house, night, long dark corridors, closed doors. Three bored blonde tanned stepsisters. Suddenly there’s a tall young man in the house, a virtual stranger, who plays tennis to Davis Cup standard.

‘What went wrong?’ I manage.

‘Oldest one, Janie, got pregnant, didn’t she? Last year.’

‘Abortion?’

‘Are you kidding? She just married her fiancé real fast.’

‘You mean she was engaged when –’

‘He doesn’t know a thing. But she told my mother.’

‘The... the child was –’

‘Haven’t seen him yet.’ He turns and calls for Serge. ‘No one knows, no one suspects...’ He grins again. ‘Until the kid starts smoking Picayunes.’ He reflects on his life a moment, and turns his big mild face to me. ‘That’s why I’m here. Keeping my head down. Not exactly flavour of the month back home.’

The next girl I take to the club is also a Scandinavian – we have eight in our class – but this time a Swede, called Danni. Danni is very attractive and vivacious, in my opinion, with straight white-blonde hair. She’s a tall girl, and she would be perfect but for the fact that she has one slightly withered leg, noticeably thinner than the other, which causes her to limp. She is admirably unselfconscious about her disability.

‘Hi,’ Preston says, ‘are you French?’

Danni hides her incredulity. ‘Mais, oui, monsieur. Bien sûr.’ Like Ingrid, she finds this presumption highly amusing. Preston soon realizes his mistake, and makes light of his disappointment.

Danni wears a small cobalt bikini and even swims in the pool, which is freezing. (Serge says there is something wrong with the heating mechanism but we don’t believe him.) Danni’s fortitude impresses Preston: I can see it in his eyes, as he watches her dry herself. He asks her what happened to her leg and she tells him she had polio as a child.

‘Shit, you were lucky you don’t need a caliper.’

This breaks the ice and we soon get noisily drunk, much to Serge’s irritation. But there is little he can do as there is no one else in the club who might complain. Danni produces some grass and we blatantly smoke a joint. Typically, apart from faint nausea, the drug has not the slightest effect on me, but it affords Serge a chance to be officious and as he clears away a round of empty glasses he says to Preston, ‘Ça va pas, monsieur, non, non, ça va pas.’

‘Fuck you, Serge,’ he says amiably and Danni’s unstoppable blurt of laughter sets us all off. I sense Serge’s humiliation and realize the relationship with Preston is changing fast: the truculent deference has gone; the dislike is now overt, almost a challenge.

After Danni has left Preston tells me about his latest money problems. His bar bill at the club now stands at over $400 and the management is insisting it be settled. His father won’t return his calls or acknowledge telegrams and Preston has no credit cards. He is contemplating pawning his watch in order to pay something into the account and defer suspicion. I buy it off him for 500 francs.

I look around my class counting the girls I know. I know most of them by now, well enough to talk to. Both Ingrid and Danni have been back to the club and have enthused about their afternoons there, and I realize that to my fellow students I have become an object of some curiosity as a result of my unexpected ability to dispense these small doses ofluxury and decadence: the exclusive address, the privacy of the club, the pool on the roof, the endless flow of free drinks...

Preston decided to abandon his French classes a while ago and I am now his sole link with the Centre. It is with some mixed emotions – I feel vaguely pimp-like, oddly smirched – that I realize how simple it is to attract girls to the Club Les Anges.

Annique Cambrai is the youngest of the Cambrai daughters and the closest to me in age. She is only two years older than me but seems considerably more than that. I was, I confess, oddly daunted by her mature good looks, dark with a lean attractive face, and because of this at first I think she found me rather aloof, but now, after many Monday dinners, we have become more relaxed and friendly. She is studying law at the University of Nice and speaks good English with a marked American accent. When I comment on this she explains that most French universities now offer you a choice of accents when you study English and, like ninety per cent of students, she has chosen American.

I see my opportunity and take it immediately: would she, I diffidently enquire, like to come to the Résidence Les Anges to meet an American friend of mine and perhaps try her new accent out on him?

The next morning, on my way down the rue de France to the Centre I see Preston standing outside a pharmacy reading the Herald Tribune. I call his name and cross the road to tell him the excellent news about Annique.

‘You won’t believe this,’ I say, ‘but I finally got a real French girl.’

Preston’s face looks odd: half a smile, half a morose grimace of disappointment.

‘That’s great,’ he says, dully, ‘wonderful.’

A tall, slim girl steps out of the pharmacy and hands him a plastic bag.

‘This is Lois,’ he says. We shake hands.

I know who Lois is, Preston has often spoken of her: my damn-near fiancée, he calls her. It transpires that Lois has flown over, spontaneously and unannounced, to visit him.

‘And, boy, are my Mom and Dad mad as hell,’ she laughs.

Lois is a pretty girl, with a round, innocent face quite free of make-up. She is tall, even in her sneakers she is as tall as me, with a head of incredibly thick, dense brown hair which, for some reason, I associate particularly with American girls. I feel sure also, though as yet I have no evidence, that she is a very clean person – physically clean, I mean to say – someone who showers and washes regularly, redolent of soap and the lingering farinaceous odour of talcum powder.

I stroll back with them to the Résidence. Lois’s arrival has temporarily solved Preston’s money problems: they have cashed in her return ticket and paid off the bar bill and the next quarter’s rent which had come due. Preston feels rich enough to buy back his watch from me.

Annique looks less mature and daunting in her swimsuit, I’m pleased to say, though I was disappointed that she favoured a demure apple-green one-piece. The pool’s heater has been ‘fixed’ and for the first time we all swim in the small azure rectangle – Preston and Lois, Annique and me. It is both strange and exciting for me to see Annique so comparatively unclothed and even stranger to lie side by side, thigh by thigh, inches apart, sunbathing.

Lois obviously assumes Annique and I are a couple – a quite natural assumption under the circumstances, I suppose – she would never imagine I had brought her for Preston. I keep catching him gazing at Annique, and a mood of frustration and intense sadness seems to emanate from him – a mood of which only I am aware. And in turn a peculiar exhilaration builds inside me, not just because of Lois’s innocent assumption about my relation to Annique, but also because I know now that I have succeeded. I have brought Preston the perfect French girl: Annique, by his standards, represents the paradigm, the Platonic ideal for this American male. Here she is, unclothed, lying by his pool, in his club, drinking his drinks, but he can do nothing – and what makes my own excitement grow is the realization that for the first time in our friendship – perhaps for the first time in his life – Preston envies another person. Me.

As this knowledge dawns so too does my impossible love for Annique. Impossible, because nothing will ever happen. I know that – but Preston doesn’t – and somehow the ghostly love affair, our love affair, between Annique and me, that will exist in Preston’s mind, in his hot and tormented imagination, embellished and elaborated by his disappointment and lost opportunity, will be more than enough for me, more than I could have ever hoped for.

Now that Lois has arrived I stay away from the Résidence Les Anges. It won’t be the same again and, despite my secret delight, I don’t want to taunt Preston with the spectre of Annique. But I find that without the spur of his envy the tender fantasy inevitably dims; because in order for my dream life, my dream love, to flourish I need to share it with Preston. I decide to pay a visit. Preston opens the door of his studio.

‘Hi, stranger,’ he says, with some enthusiasm. ‘Am I glad to see you.’ He seems sincere. I follow him into the apartment. The small room is untidy, the bed unmade, the floor strewn with female clothes. I hear the noise of the shower from the bathroom: Lois may be a clean person but it is clear she is also something of a slut.

‘How are things with Annique?’ he asks, almost at once, as casually as he can manage. He has to ask, I know it.

I look at him. ‘Good.’ I let the pause develop, pregnant with innuendo. ‘No, they’re good.’

His nostrils flare and he shakes his head.

‘God, you’re one lucky...’

Lois comes in from the bathroom in a dressing-gown, towelling her thick hair dry.

‘Hi, Edward,’ she says, ‘what’s new?’ Then she sits down on the bed and begins to weep.

We stand and look at her as she sobs quietly.

‘It’s nothing,’ Preston says. ‘She just wants to go home.’ He tells me that neither of them has left the building for eight days. They are completely, literally, penniless. Lois’s parents have cancelled her credit cards and collect calls home have failed to produce any response. Preston has been unable to locate his father and now his stepfather refuses to speak to him (a worrying sign) and although his mother would like to help she is powerless for the moment, given Preston’s fall from grace. Preston and Lois have been living on a diet of olives, peanuts and cheese biscuits served up in the bar and, of course, copious alcohol.

‘Yeah, but now we’re even banned from there,’ Lois says, with an unfamiliar edge to her voice.

‘Last night I beat up on that fuckwit, Serge,’ Preston explains with a shrug. ‘Something I had to do.’

He goes on to enumerate their other problems: their bar bill stands at over $300; Serge is threatening to go to the police unless he is compensated; the management has grown hostile and suspicious.

‘We got to get out of here,’ Lois says miserably. ‘I hate it here, I hate it.’

Preston turns to me. ‘Can you help us out?’ he says. I feel the laugh erupt within me.

I stand in Nice station and hand Preston two train tickets to Luxembourg and two one-way Iceland Air tickets to New York. Lois reaches out to touch them as if they were sacred relics.

‘You’ve got a six-hour wait in Reykjavik for your connection,’ I tell him, ‘but, believe me, there is no cheaper way to fly.’

I bask in their voluble gratitude for a while. They have no luggage with them as they could not be seen to be quitting the Résidence. Preston says his father is now in New York and assures me I will be reimbursed the day they arrive. I have spent almost everything I possess on these tickets, but I don’t care – I am intoxicated with my own generosity and the strange power it has conferred on me. Lois leaves us to go in search of a toilette and Preston embraces me in a clumsy hug. ‘I won’t forget this, man,’ he says many times. We celebrate our short but intense friendship and affirm its continuance, but all the while I am waiting for him to ask me – I can feel the question growing in his head like a tumour. Through the crowds of passengers we see Lois making her way back. He doesn’t have much time left.

‘Listen,’ he begins, his voice low, ‘did you and Annique...? I mean, are you –’

‘We’ve been looking for an apartment. That’s why you haven’t seen much of me.’

‘Jesus...’

Lois calls out something about the train timetable, but we are not listening. Preston seems to be trembling, he turns away, and when he turns back I see the pale fires of impotent resentment light his eyes.

‘Are you fucking her?’

I look at him in that way men look at each other. And then I say, ‘Why else would we be looking for an apartment?’

Lois arrives and immediately notices Preston’s taut face, oddly pinched. ‘What’s going on?’ Lois asks. ‘Are you OK?’

Preston gestures at me, as if he can’t pronounce my name. ‘Annique . . . They’re moving in together.’

Lois squeals. She’s so pleased, she really is, she really really likes Annique.

By the time I see them on to the train Preston has calmed down and our final farewells are sincere. He looks around the modest station intently as if trying to record its essence, as if now he wished to preserve something of this city he inhabited so complacently, with such absence of curiosity.

‘God, it’s too bad,’ he says with an exquisite fervour. ‘I know I could have liked Nice. I know. I really could.’

I back off, wordless; this is too good, this is too generous of him. This is perfect.

‘Give my love to Annique,’ Preston says quietly, as Lois calls loud goodbyes. He grins. ‘Lucky bastard.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I say, looking at Preston. ‘I will.’

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