What Lot's Wife Saw

by Ioanna Bourazopoulou

  Book pushed the notebook with the sketched crossword over towards the man and added:

  “You’re morally responsible for the murder of this youth, whoever he was. Don’t forget that. You have a serious legal case to answer.”

  “But how can you insist it was murder, Mr Book!” the man burst out. “Who was murdered? Who was the victim? Who on earth was this mysterious pirate? We’ve analyzed the ashes that we collected from the oven and have only found Governor Bera’s DNA and a golden earring of unknown origin. We employed the most advanced instruments to comb the Palace’s surfaces, but we found not a single fingerprint, nor a trace of his boots, a strand of his hair, a single skin cell or blood corpuscle. Can you tell me who he was?”

  “He was that He was, I presume,” said Book simply.

  “There is no hard evidence of his existence so we can’t judge who or what we were dealing with – it’s as if he were a wraith. Whoever laid eyes on him however, inclusive of Lieutenant Richmond, is so adamant that he was real that you give up. We gave a lot of credence to the latter’s testimony since, as you have ascertained, the six are of dubious morality, but Richmond is a paragon of honesty. Delusional, maybe, a bit lightheaded, perhaps, but honest through and through.”

  “It’s truly puzzling,” Book agreed. “So what do you plan to do with the unfortunate seven that you’ve had the effrontery to interrogate? Not only have you failed to protect them, but you’ve entrapped them into committing horrible crimes. Will you kill them or buy them off?”

  “Thankfully for them, they are as discreet as they are mercenary. The six will be staying with us for a while longer as there are numerous matters yet to be investigated. As for Bianca Bateau, well she’s probably a victim of this whole affair and she can’t really help anymore. On top of that she’s been nearly undone by the protracted ordeal and we’d rather she didn’t die in our care. She is departing this morning.”

  “For the Colony?”

  “No, she is persona non grata down there, as are all of them as you might have guessed.”

  Book was amazed at the irresponsibility of their position. He couldn’t imagine how a girl who’d lived her whole life in the glass bowl of the Colony could be expected to survive in civilisation.

  “That is not our problem, Mr Book.”

  “But Bianca Bateau is a native colonist, you are her guardians, the only ones she ever had.”

  “Good day, Mr Book.”

  Book stood up reluctantly and headed for the door. Before crossing the threshold he heard the parting warning:

  “If you keep your mouth shut, you have nothing to fear from the Consortium; we look after our people.”

  Book nodded in assent. He walked out of the floodlit lounge and instinctively wiped his shoes on the plush carpet as if wiping off his guise as an actor. The pseudo crossword had served its purpose. Now it was time for the blessed meandros.

  He buttoned up his raincoat and hurried to the lift. He was dying to catch Bianca Bateau before she left the building. He pressed the ground-floor button three or four times before the sliding doors shut off the danger of someone joining him.

  The glass partition that separated him from the main entrance allowed him to glimpse a diminutive female figure standing in front of the outer doors, escorted by a couple of security officers. She held her arms crossed over her chest and looked frail and vulnerable. Book went through the partition in her direction, knowing that the brief encounter that would follow would remain forever etched in his memory. It might even survive his death, if there was any truth that on departing we leave behind something more than organic dust.

  Conscious of the momentousness of the moment, he tried to will the internal cameras in his brain to start rolling so as to record all the details of her image, the colour of her hair, her profile, her expressions, everything down to her bitten fingernails. The men acknowledged his approach with an indifferent nod while the girl paid him no attention whatsoever. He stood in front of her and extended his hand. She turned towards him with her colourless eyes.

  “Phileas Book.”

  “Bianca Bateau.”

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  As he stood facing her, he discovered that two eyes without irises were not an off-putting sight because in her snow white eyes his own olive green irises were reflected back at him. A pair of coloured contact lenses would immediately camouflage the problem but it would be a pity to disguise eyes that so faithfully reflected the eyes of their beholder.

  “You have given credence to Epistlewords, Miss Bateau, and justified my existence. Is there something that I could do for you, perhaps?” he asked her with genuine gratitude.

  Bianca smiled demurely.

  “You’ve done more than enough already.”

  For a few more seconds, Book basked in the sight of his own olive green eyes mirrored in her eyes.

  “Where do you intend to go from here?”

  “Out.”

  Book bowed and he watched her leave the building and start walking uphill from the coast road. With every step she took, her bearing became more upright, her stride gained purpose and she held her head higher. He smiled contentedly because this gradual metamorphosis came as no surprise to him.Those few words that they’d exchanged in the entrance hall had sufficed for them to communicate perfectly under the watchful eyes of the Consortium. As he stepped out, he turned and heartily shook the doorman’s hand to the latter’s evident surprise. He stood, only inches away from the building, and inhaled the Parisian air. He thumped his chest with both hands and with a spring in his step took off in the opposite direction from the one Bianca Bateau had taken.

  The sense of euphoria that was flooding him was so absolute and unprecedented that Book had difficulty recognising himself. It had been finally worth being born into this world of woe just to savour this magnificent moment. If his own eyes hadn’t beheld it in the meandros, if the phrase that they, leaving him speechless with their courage, had masterfully sent him, hadn’t slotted perfectly into the diagonal and if they hadn’t proved themselves thoroughly capable of the impossible, he would never have believed that the seven determined conspirators could have managed to organise and execute such a daring ploy.

  The mysterious stranger had been nothing but a figment of the extravagant imagination of young Lieutenant Richmond, but he represented the opportunity that the seven had been waiting years for, especially since Richmond’s vision had preceded the Governor’s death by a scant few hours. “Which of our darkest dreams had spawned the boy with the black eyes and the blood-curdling voice; which of our grisly fantasies did he personify?” Montenegro rejoiced, rubbing his hands with glee. Obviously Lieutenant Richmond was totally unaware that he, as an unimplicated neutral, would be an ideal witness to corroborate their statements. The Star Bearers had known perfectly well what was expected of them in the case that their overlord died, because Bera himself had given them all the relevant confidential verbal instructions that the unwritten and secretive administrative system of the Seventy-Five demanded; they’d just decided to deny any knowledge of them. It’s unfortunate that the unwritten rules have that very disadvantage, that they lay the field wide open to the intelligent and unscrupulous. They adopted the Lieutenant’s vision, embellished it with all the characteristics of a gifted Governor and they proceeded to serve this phantasm with unmitigated devotion, tearing the Colony apart at the seams, destroying what the Seventy-Five had painstakingly constructed, and finally pinning the blame on the deceased overlord who was portrayed with the tarnish and guilt of a Judas. That exceeded Book’s wildest imaginations by such a margin that he could hardly contain himself. He kicked a discarded tin out of his path so as not to have a heart attack.

  He fingered the shoulder of his jacket, bringing the sketch of the meandros back into his mind. The name of the Black Ship that went “diagonally” across the bay was IEREMOI, seven letters but there must have been two missing, as it fetched up in the ninth cove, as Secretary Siccouane
kept reminding us. And the two letters could be found on the sand plateau in the desert where Captain Drake cleverly introduced them in his monologue. When Book added the “L” and “B” to the ship’s name he arrived at LIBERE MOI, which in the tongue of his sunken homeland means FREE ME. That comprised the seventh missing epistle, the epistle that Bianca Bateau would send him and would make sure that he would pay it the proper attention when she turned the tables and instructed him on the Epistleword rules. At least as they applied to her variant: “If you failed to find the key reversal, you would never find what you are looking for.” Book reversed the first of the two words of the ship’s name, changing “Black” to “White” and read it in French, Blanche Bateau, Bianca Bateau. Black Ship in blue waters. “I have not yet come across a spirit so brave that fails to shed tears when black and blue combine.” Bianca had not only become an expert in the techniques of meandroses, after solving countless puzzles over the years, but she’d understood its essence and ramifications. She was probably as conversant with them as their inventor was.

  The mere fact that her six mentors had taken deliberate pains to portray her as naïve, timid to the point of despair, harmless and confused, had been enough to put Book on his guard. She had been the instigator and cutting edge of their planning and the others would be reminded of her role every time they saw their eyes reflected in hers. The “Black Ship” that they were raising was rotting in the violet bay, forcing them to recognise their prison in which they were simultaneously guards and inmates. They’d gladly sacrifice their lives in exchange for Bianca’s freedom but they realised that that wouldn’t be enough. “If only it were that simple,” observed Siccouane on the deck of the Black Ship. Bianca’s freedom had to be achieved necessarily through their freedom as well. A true meandros.

  Book’s mind revelled in imagining Secretary Siccouane, alias Forger Le Rhône, distributing the directives of the invisible Governor, each bearing Bera’s perfectly forged signature, while Captain Drake, alias Thief Bercant, stole fully one-third of the daily production of salt right under the noses of the Consortium and sold it at exorbitant prices on the black market to the Suez Mamelukes, with whom he must have developed a working relationship over the twenty years of his patrolling the desert. Perhaps he had been accompanied by Smuggler Danilovitz, alias Priest Montenegro, on some of the nights when he was supposed to have been spending time with the cyclists. On other nights perhaps his purpose there was to study their capacity to ascertain whether large quantities of salt could be transported through the desert by berlinga. Regina Bera was responsible for keeping the seat of operations clear and also for destabilising the colonists. Dr Fabrizio provided medical assistance to those who participated in the caravans and Judge Bateau ensured that there wouldn’t be any legal repercussions from the blatant flaunting of regulations. The desert was traversed, the taboos were broken and with the Governor dangerously absent and obviously ineffectual, the Colony filled with seditious rumors and was moved to rebel.

  The seven conspirators not only fleeced the Consortium, they humiliated it. The Seventy-Five were out-manoeuvered by their creations, who brilliantly used every technique that they’d learned against their teachers. They had managed to capture the essence of exploitation as an administrative tool and had turned it against their employers, concealing it under layers of fabrication and misinformation and had left the baffled Consortium facing an impasse. They couldn’t accuse the seven of murdering a phantom, there was no victim to be found, nor could they charge them with theft and fraud since that would mean that they would have to admit their howling failure. The Seventy-Five had more pressing reasons than even the perpetrators to keep the crimes firmly under wraps, assuming, of course, that they could figure out what had happened in the first place.

  There’s one drawback that is a corollary of a perfect crime: there can be no recipient of its message. However, such an honourable crime at the expense of the Seventy-Five needs at least one witness to vindicate it and to testify that it was committed. It needs a Lot’s wife who’ll turn her head at just the right moment to verify that Sodom had indeed been destroyed, without flinching at the prospect of being turned into a pillar of salt. Phileas Book was chosen to fulfil this particular role.

  Book had swayed under the weight of the honour bestowed on him and of the trust and confidence of the seven strangers. A switched date in Regina’s letter had immediately aroused the suspicions of the Consortium as the Epistleword that Regina had claimed to be of the last Sunday in July had, in fact, been published on the 11th of February. A rather clumsy mistake, and so the Seventy-Five sought out the unsuspecting Book and dragged him to their lair for questioning. They gave him the letters to read and scrutinised his every reaction. That was exactly what the seven conspirators had hoped for. But this meant that a meandros would become the playing field, and Book was unbeatable on a meandros. From the moment that the quest became entwined with the labyrinthine structure of the meandros, the conceiver and creator of Epistlewords was playing virtually without opponent. He’d played the game coached by the seven, and, following a scare or two, had emerged from the building with his only preoccupation being how to spend the fat pension the Consortium had generously endowed him with for invaluable services rendered.

  It was a great shame that he’d never get to meet them, as he so wished that he could explain to Priest Montenegro that he hadn’t needed all those allegories about sabre-toothed tigers, Australopithecines and dinosaurs that he’d written to get the message across to Book. “Is this the dawn of a new era in which the laws of the previous era do not apply and the balance of power between the protagonists has altered?” Book had worried that Montenegro might have overdone it and was in danger of becoming exposed, so he took pains to strip him of trustworthiness in the eyes of the bald man. Alarmed, he’d discarded the dangerous pages to protect him, because the reckless Priest had reached the point of spitting at the Seventy-Five, right in their faces. “Was it the triumphant smile of the sabre-tooth that had emerged victorious from the isolated contest with the all-powerful Seventy-Five or the frozen smile of the first mighty dinosaur to die when their nemesis was unleashed on earth, and which heralded their complete extinction?” A smile frozen on the wicked lips of that first dead dinosaur that foretold the complete extinction of their kind. Would that it were, thought Book as he cast his eyes towards the standards of the Consortium proudly catching the wind at the four corners of their headquarters. He doubted whether there was any citizen of the submerged lands that now comprise the extension of the bed of the Mediterranean who hadn’t dreamt of the day those flags would be lowered, never to fly again.

  All of his worries now seemed superfluous, as the Seventy-Five had been totally blinded by their arrogance, just as the seven conspirators had foreseen. They’d read the letters without understanding what had been written. On the contrary, the breath had been knocked out of Book when he realised what he was reading, and under the spotlights of the Consortium at that. Almost the entire contents were allegorical. The letters didn’t describe facts as much as exhaustive and honest internal soul-searching. Leafing through the pages looking vainly for real events, he found instead the stories of six damned humans seeking their purification, who gave the details of their nightmares before they dispelled them and described each bar of their prison before sawing through them. They admitted their mistakes and overcame their faults, they were reborn from their ashes.

  Highlighted in the glaring luminance of the lounge, Book had been at a loss as to how to handle the incendiary material in the presence of the bald man, but Siccouane had reassured him that the Seventy-Five were ignorant of the subtleties of written language: “I can’t imagine any other major company treating the written word so contemptuously.” Every time the cadence of their handwriting minutely altered, he felt as if needles were pricking him, since from the depths of their monologue there would arise a brief message for him and then it would be lost in the cross-currents of their introspect
ion, allowing him to realise their unity: “Think of the symbol of the Consortium: the united arms” and their natural talents, deliberately nurtured in the Consortium’s bosom and finally put to good use: “The sole attribute of the Star Bearers is their ability to deceive,” but also about the values that they’d fought for with impressive pathos: “So what I do today, I do only for myself, for Judith-Regina Swarnlake-Bera, for my salvation!”, because the ultimate goal was not theft but to resurrect their dignity.

  Book walked to the edge of the quay and looked down at the waves breaking against it as if in a trance. To achieve such a monumental objective it would be necessary for there to be an impregnable bond of mutual trust between the comrades. Where did those dishonourable antagonists, steeped in the poisons and solvents of the Seventy-Five, find the strength to forge such an indivisible unit? How did six damaged souls, six dregs of society, who constantly suffered the oppression of the complex subjugation of the Colony, come to believe in themselves? Book realised with relish that he was regaining his own belief in humanity and his fascination for it.

  FREE ME, Bianca had begged him as she sailed along the diagonal but, in the end, it had been she who had freed Book. She had reunited him with his life, from which he’d departed in despair at the age of fifteen, and she’d forced him to re-evaluate all his beliefs in the grandiose sight of Bianca’s guardians, facing down the demons of their nefarious past and nightmarish present and overcoming them. Their demons had been more monstrous and powerful than those that had pursued Book, yet the six courtiers, one hundred times more subjugated and guilt-ridden than Book, had climbed, inch by torturous inch, the vertical wall of their miserable well of ignominy and were set free. If that could happen then everything was possible, he thought enthusiastically.