‘Poor Adam.’ She walked over to him, stroked his hair. ‘You expect the world to be so simple, and it is . . . just not in the way you want it to be.’
Her smell of heated oranges aroused him, and he pulled her onto his lap, both angry and lustful. With half his mind he tried to reject her, because to want her would ratify all the duplicity in which he had played a part and further weaken his fraying moral fiber; but the stronger half needed her, and he kissed her mouth, tasting the smoky sweetness of the opium. His lips moved along the curve of her neck to the slopes of her breasts. She responded sluggishly at first, then with abandon, whispering, ‘I’ve missed you so much, I love you, I really do,’ and it seemed she was as she once had been, open and giving and soft. It startled him to see this, to realize that the vulnerability underlying her dissipation was no act, for he had come to doubt everything about her. He kissed her mouth again, and he might have taken her then and there, but a man’s voice interrupted them, saying, ‘I wish you’d be more discreet, darling.’
Korrogly jumped up, dumping Mirielle onto the floor.
Lemos was standing in the doorway, a smile touching the corners of his lips. He looked prosperous, content, a far cry from the gray failure whom Korrogly had defended. His clothes were expensive, rings adorned his hands, and there was about him such an air of health and well-being, it seemed an obscenity, like the ruddy complexion of a sated vampire. Mirielle scrambled up and went to him; he draped an arm about her shoulders.
‘I’m surprised to find you here, Mister Korrogly,’ said Lemos. ‘But I don’t suppose I should be. My daughter is alluring, is she not?’
‘I told him, Daddy,’ Mirielle said in a sugary, babyish voice. ‘About Mardo.’
‘Did you now?’
To his horror, Korrogly saw that Lemos was fondling his daughter’s breast beneath the beige silk; she arched her back to meet the pressure of his hand, but he thought he detected tension in her expression.
Lemos, apparently registering Korrogly’s revulsion, said, ‘But you didn’t tell him everything, did you?’
‘Not about Mama. He thinks . . .’
‘I can imagine what he thinks.’
Lemos’ smile was unwavering, but behind it, in those gray eyes, was something cold and implacable that made Korrogly afraid.
‘You look disturbed,’ Lemos said. ‘Surely a man of your experience can imagine how love might spring up between a man and his daughter. It’s frowned upon, true. But society’s condemnation of such a relationship need not diminish it. In our case, it only made us desperate.’
The final pieces were beginning to fall into place for Korrogly. ‘It wasn’t Zemaille who killed your wife, was it?’
Lemos smiled.
‘It was you . . . you killed her!’
‘You’d play hell proving it. But let’s say for the sake of argument that you’re right. Let’s say that in order to . . . to enjoy one another fully, Mirielle and I needed privacy, something that Patricia prevented us from having. What better villain to use as our foil than Mardo Zemaille? The temple was at that time always open to the curious. It would have been easy for someone, someone like myself, to convince Patricia that it might be fun to pay the place a visit one night.’
‘You killed her . . . and you were going to blame it on Zemaille?’
‘Her death was ruled an accident,’ Lemos said with a shrug. ‘So there was no need to blame anyone.’
‘And then you saw your opportunity with Zemaille.’
‘Mardo was a weak man with power. Such men are easy to maneuver. It took some time, but the result was inevitable.’
Lemos’ hand slid lower to caress Mirielle’s belly. Despite her acquiesence, Korrogly sensed that she was less lover than slave, that her enjoyment was due to coercion, to confusion; a slack, sick look had come to her face, one that had not been evident when he had been touching her.
‘I don’t believe I’ve ever properly expressed my gratitude to you,’ Lemos continued. ‘Without you, I might still be back in Almintra. I’m forever in your debt.’
Korrogly just stared at them, uncertain of what to do.
‘Perhaps you’re wondering why I’m being so open,’ Lemos said. ‘It’s really no mystery. You’re a dogged man, Mister Korrogly. I have a lot of respect for you. Once you got the scent, and I’ve been aware that you’ve had the scent for some time, I knew you’d keep at it until you learned all there was to learn. I knew we’d play this scene sooner or later. I could have had you killed, but as I’ve said, I’m grateful to you, and I prefer to let you live. It’s unlikely you can harm me in any event. But you can consider this a warning. I’m watching you. If you ever get it in mind to try and harm me, it’ll be one of your last thoughts. And if you should doubt that, then I want you to think back to what you’ve heard today, to realize what I’m capable of, what I was able to do when I had no power, and to imagine what I might do now that I am powerful. Do you understand?’
Korrogly said, ‘Yes, I do.’
‘Well.’ Lemos disengaged from Mirielle, who tottered back to her lounge. ‘Then there’s nothing else to do except to bid you good day. Perhaps you’ll visit us again. For dinner, perhaps. Of course you’re always welcome to visit Mirielle. She does like you, she really does, and I’ve learned not to be jealous. I would hate to deny her whatever joy she might find with you. I’m afraid the things I’ve asked her to do have damaged her, and maybe you can help her overcome all that.’ He put his hand on Korrogly’s back and began steering him through the house and toward the front door. ‘Pleasure’s a rare commodity. I don’t begrudge any man his share. That’s something that being wealthy has given me to understand about life. Yet another reason to be grateful to you. So’ – he opened the front door – ‘when I say to you that what’s mine is yours, I mean it in the most profound and intimate sense. Do take advantage of our hospitality. Anytime.’
And with that, he waved and shut the door, leaving Korrogly blinking in the bright sunlight, feeling as if he had been marooned on a stone island in an uncharted sea.
Toward twilight, after walking and thinking for the remainder of the afternoon, Korrogly ended up in Henry Sichi’s museum, standing in front of the glass case in which The Father of Stones was displayed. Lemos had been right – there was nothing he could do to achieve justice, and he would have to accept the fact that he had been used by someone who if anything was more monstrous than Griaule. His best course, he decided, would be to leave Port Chantay and to leave soon, for while Lemos might have meant all he had said, he might well change his mind and begin to consider Korrogly a threat. But the danger he was in, that was not the thing that rankled him; he was still enough of a moral soul – a fool, Lemos would say – to want a judgment upon Lemos, and that there would be none left him full of gloom and self-destructive impulse, regarding the shattered fragments of his wished-for orderly universe.
He gazed down at The Father of Stones. It sat winking in its nest of blue velvet, a clouded lump of mystery giving back prismatic refractions of the light, the peculiar man-shaped darkness at its heart appearing to shift and writhe as if it truly were the soul of an imprisoned wizard. Korrogly focused on that darkness, and suddenly it was all around him, like a little pocket of night into which he had fallen, and he was looking at a man lying on the ground, an old, old man with sunken cheeks and a hooked nose and dressed in wizard’s robes, with black eyes threaded by veins of blue-green fire. The vision lasted only a few seconds, but before it faded, he became aware of the propinquity of that same cold, powerful mind that he had sensed back in the temple, and when he found himself once again standing in front of the glass case, looking down at The Father of Stones, he felt not afraid, not shocked, but delighted. It had been Griaule after all, he realized; the vision could mean only that Zemaille had been a serious threat, one that Griaule had been forced to eliminate. And he, Korrogly, had actually seen the moribund wizard that night in the temple; it had been no hallucination. The dragon had even then bee
n trying to illuminate him. He laughed and slapped his thigh. Oh, Lemos had worked his plan, but as the ex-member of the cult had said, it had still been Griaule’s idea, he had inspired Lemos to act . . . and he had done it through the agency of this shard of milky stone.
Korrogly’s delight stemmed not from his realization that in a way Lemos had been innocent – innocence was not a word he could apply to the gemcutter – but from a new comprehension of the intricate subtlety with which Griaule had acted; it spoke to him, it commanded him, it instructed him in a kind of law that he had neglected throughout his entire life. The law of self-determination. It was the only kind, he saw, that could produce justice. If he wanted justice, he would have to effect it, not the system, not the courts, and that was something he was well-equipped to do. He was amazed that he had not come to this conclusion before, but then he supposed that until this moment he had been too confused, too involved with the complexities of the case, to think of taking direct action. And perhaps he had not been ready to act, perhaps his motivation had been insufficient.
Well, he was motivated now.
Mirielle.
It might be that she was unsalvageable, that she had gone too far into perversity ever to emerge from it; but for a moment in his arms she had again been the woman he had loved. It had not been fraudulent. The least he could do was to deliver her from the man who had dominated her and seduced her into iniquity. That he would be also serving justice only made the act sweeter.
He strolled out of the museum and stood on the steps gazing over the shadowed lavender water toward Ayler Point. He knew exactly how he would proceed. Lemos himself had given him the key to successful action in his words concerning Zemaille.
‘Mardo was a weak man with power,’ he had said. ‘Such men are easy to maneuver.’
And of course Lemos was no different.
He was rife with weakness. His investments, Mirielle, his crimes, his false sense of control. That last, that was his greatest weakness. He was enamored of his own power, he believed his judgments to be infallible and he would never believe that Korrogly could be other than as he perceived him; he would think that the lawyer would either do nothing or seek redress through the courts; he would not suspect that Korrogly might move against him in the way that he had moved against Zemaille. Zemaille had probably thought the same of him.
Korrogly smiled, understanding how marvelously complex was this chain of consecutive illuminations, of one man after another being induced to take decisive action. He stepped briskly down the steps and out onto Biscaya Boulevard, heading for The Blind Lady and a glass of beer, for a bout of peaceful contemplation, of deciding his future and Lemos’ fate. By the time he had walked a block he had already come up with the beginnings of a plan.
But then he was brought up short by a disturbing thought.
What if he was obeying Griaule’s will in all this, what if The Father of Stones had had an effect upon him? What if instead of taking his destiny in hand, he was merely obeying Griaule’s wishes, serving as an element in some dire scheme? What if he was by dismissing ordinary means and moral tactics taking a chance on becoming a monster like Lemos, one who would in the end be cut down by yet another of Griaule’s pawns? There was no way of telling. His sudden determination to act might be laid to a long inner process of deliberation, it might be the result of years of failed idealism; the resolution of the Lemos case could have been the weight that caused the final caving-in of his unsound moral structure.
He stood for a long moment considering these things, knowing that he might never come to the end of considering them, but searching for some rationalization that would allow him to put aside such concerns, to cease his analysis and questioning of events, and he found that this had become for him a matter of choice; it was as if the decision to act had freed him from an old snare, from the hampering spell of his ideals, and introduced him into a new and – though less moral – much more effective magic. What did he care who was in control, who was pulling the strings? Sooner or later a man had to stop thinking and start being, to leave off fretting over the vicissitudes and intricacies of life, and begin to live. There was no certainty, no secure path, no absolutely moral one. You did the best you could for yourself and those you cared about, and hoped that this would be a sufficiently broad spectrum of concern to keep your soul in healthy condition. If not . . . well, there was no use in fretting over the prospect. Why trouble yourself with guilt in a world in which everyone was guilty?
He set off walking again, walking with a firm step and a smile for everyone who passed him by, bowing politely to an old woman sweeping off her stoop, stopping once to pat a young boy on the head, all the while giving thought to his campaign against Lemos, picturing the gemcutter in various states of ruinous defeat, imagining Mirielle in his arms, letting his mind roam freely through the realms of possibility, posing himself in judge’s robes, dispensing the dispassionate rule of the law, fair yet inflexible, full of imponderable wisdoms, and he saw himself as well on the sunny verandah of a mansion on Ayler Point, on a white yacht, in a glittering ballroom, in every manner of luxurious environment, with loyal friends and beautiful lovers and enemies whose secrets he had mastered. Life, which for so long had seemed distant, a treasure beyond his grasp, now seemed to embrace him, to close around him and make him dizzy with its rich scents and sights. What did it matter, he said to himself, who ran the world, it tasted no less sweet, it gave no less pleasure. He laughed out loud, he winked at a pretty girl, he plotted violence and duplicity, all things that brought him joy.
One way or another, the dragon was loose in Port Chantay.
LIAR’S
HOUSE
In the eternal instant before the Beginning, before the Word was pronounced in fire, long before the tiny dust of history came to settle from the flames, something whose actions no verb can truly describe seemed to enfold possibility, to surround it in the manner of a cloud or an idea, and everything fashioned from the genesis fire came to express in some way the structure of that fundamental duality. It has been said that of all living creatures, this duality was best perceived in dragons, for they had flown fully formed from out the mouth of the Uncreate, the first of creation’s kings, and gone soaring through a conflagration that, eons hence, would coalesce into worlds and stars and all the dream of matter. Thus the relation of their souls to their flesh accurately reflected the constitution of the Creator, enveloping and controlling their material bodies from without rather than, as with the souls of men, coming to be lodged within. And of all their kind, none incarnated this principle more poignantly, more spectacularly, than did the dragon Griaule.
How Griaule came to be paralyzed by a wizard’s magical contrivance is a story without witness, but it has been documented that in this deathlike condition he lived on for millennia, continuing to grow, until he measured more than a mile in length, lying athwart and nearly spanning the westernmost section of the Carbonales Valley. Over the years he came to resemble a high hill covered in grass and shrubs and stunted trees, with here and there a portion of scale showing through, and the colossal head entirely emergent, unclothed by vegetation, engaging everything that passed before him with huge, slit-pupiled golden eyes, exerting a malefic influence over the events that flowed around him, twisting them into shapes that conformed to the cruel designs his discarnate intellect delighted in the weaving of, and profited his vengeful will. During his latter days, a considerable city, Teocinte, sprawled away from Griaule’s flank over the adjoining hill, but centuries before, when few were willing to approach the dragon, Teocinte was scarcely more than an outsized village enclosed by dense growths of palms and bananas, hemmed in between the eminence of Griaule and a pine-forested hill. Scruffy and unlovely; flyblown; its irregularly laid-out dirt streets lined by hovels with rusting tin roofs; it was lent the status of a town by a scattering of unstable frame structures housing taverns, shops, and a single inn, and was populated by several thousand men and women who, in the main, embod
ied a debased extreme of the human condition. Murderers and thieves and outlaws of various stamp. Almost to a one, they believed that proximity to the dragon imbued them with a certain potency (as perhaps it did) and refused to concern themselves with the commonly held notion that they had been drawn to Teocinte because their depravity resonated with the dragon’s depraved nature, thus making them especially vulnerable to his manipulations. What does it matter whose purpose we serve, they might have asked, so long as it satisfies our own?
By all accounts, the most fearsome of Teocinte’s citizens and, at forty-two, its eldest, was Hota Kotieb, a brooding stump of a man with graying, unkempt hair, his cheeks and jaw scarred by knife cuts. His hands were huge, capable of englobing a cantaloupe and squeezing it to a pulp, and his powerful arms and oxlike shoulders had been developed through years of unloading ships at the docks in Port Chantay. Deep-socketed eyes provided the only vital accent in what otherwise seemed the sort of brutish face sometimes produced by the erosion of great stones. Unlike his fellows, who would make lengthy forays out into the world to perpetrate their crimes, then returned to restore themselves by steeping in the dragon’s aura, Hota never strayed from the valley. Eleven summers previously, after his wife had been run over in the street by a coach belonging to the harbormaster in Port Chantay, he had forsworn the unreliable processes of justice and forced his way into the man’s home. When the harbormaster ordered him ejected, Hota stabbed him, his two sons and several retainers, himself receiving numerous wounds during the skirmish. On realizing that he would be hung were he to remain in the town, he looted the house and fled, killing three policemen who sought to stop him outside the door. Casting aside a lifetime of unobtrusive action and docile labor, he had murdered ten men in the space of less than an hour.
Though he had never attended school and was ignorant of many things, Hota was by no means dull-witted, and when he meditated on these events, his red victory and the grim chaos that preceded it, he was able to place his actions in a rational context. He felt little remorse over the murders of the harbor-master and his sons. They were oppressors and had received an oppressor’s due. As for the rest, he regretted their deaths and believed that some would have been spared had he not been enraged to the point of derangement; yet he refused to use derangement as a sop to his conscience and recognized that the potential for extreme violence had always been his. He had not wished his wife to die, but neither had he loved her. Thirteen years of marriage had doused the spark that once leaped between them. Their union had decayed into indifference and sham. They were like two plow horses harnessed together, endlessly tilling a field barren of children and every other promise, yet led to continue their dreary progress by the litany of empty promises they spoke to one another. It seemed her death had less inspired than legitimized a violent release, and that he had been longing to kill someone for quite some time, motivated in this by feelings of impotence bred over years of abject poverty. Now this tendency had made itself known, he supposed it would rise all the more easily to the surface. For this reason, though he was lonely, he kept no one close.
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