“Lord, my ass,” McTell said angrily. “He’s a faggot poseur.”
“How did that fuse blow?”
“How the hell should I know? It’s an old house, the lights are probably all on one circuit. Maybe Mona plugged in a hair dryer. And as long as we’re talking about instability, what was she doing running around on the balcony naked as a newborn fawn?”
In the tense pause, he pictured her lighting a cigarette. Nervously, he flexed the muscles of his forearm. It seemed thicker, brawnier, than usual.
“Maybe,” she finally said. “Anyway, here’s the point. I’m not going to feel comfortable in that house again. We’re going to have to pack the rest of Skip and Mona’s things and send them on; they’re certainly not coming back. I think we should just pack our own while we’re at it, and move on.”
Irrational resentment surged in him. “What about the lease?”
“The hell with the money. John, this is serious. I don’t know what went on, and you’re welcome to think I’m getting hysterical too, but I simply don’t want to stay there anymore.”
The weight of the book under his arm seemed huge. He thought of Pepin. And slumped. “Okay,” he said.
“Good,” she said, clearly relieved. “I hate to stick you with the packing, but Mona won’t stay in the hospital any longer and absolutely refuses to be alone for a second.”
“I’ll do the best I can.”
“Unless you’d rather come down and join us in Cannes. Then I could help you when we get back.”
“Honey, to tell the truth I’d just as soon take my chance with the spooks,” he said wearily.
“All right. I don’t blame you. I’ll call you when we check in. The Carlton.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“A bientot, cheri,” she said. “I miss you.” The line crackled when she hung up.
He put down the phone and walked back into the living room. So not just the book but the house, too, was leaving his life. It was strange how attached he felt to this place, how much like home it had come to seem in the short time they had been here.
But she was right. When sufficient time had elapsed, he would tell her the whole of the story. And at some point years down the line, an edited version would make good entertainment for guests—stored on some distant shelf of memory, to be taken down and dusted off from time to time, with the familiar streamers of unfulfilled longings and what-ifs that would accompany him into old age.
The tingling flared in his palm.
McTell stopped.
What could be hurt by one last look—at the only real mystery he would ever encounter?
He hesitated. The priest’s voice seemed to sound in his mind, urgent, warning.
He turned and strode to the stairs. In the study, his fingers fumbled to tear the cask from its wrappings and the book from the cask.
A new line of writing had appeared: Nomina florum viatori amorem tribuunt.
The language of flowers brings love to the pilgrim.
He closed the book and walked slowly back down the hall. Standing at the top of the,,stairs, he watched Alysse enter the dining room with an armload of freshly cut flowers and spread them on the table: mauve and yellow roses, daffodils, marigolds, lavender, other blooms whose names he did not know. Still damp, they dripped onto the glossy finish. Her fingers glided over the array like a gentle bird, suddenly swooping to pick stems. She placed them carefully in a vase, arranging their heights, pausing after every few additions to survey the whole. Her eyes never lifted. For minutes he stared, until the only sound he heard was the faint, soft brushing of stems against petals.
She grasped the slender vase with both hands, leaned forward, and set it at the table’s head. For the briefest of instants her gaze rose to touch his. Her eyes were dark, unreadable—empty. Then, like a moving doll that had been unplugged, she folded her hands, bowed her head, and stood motionless.
Sweat beaded his forehead, blurred his vision. A faint metallic burning had risen in the back of his throat. He closed his eyes, but her image remained before him, floating like the evening star.
When his hand touched her shoulder, her body went limp, falling into his arms. For minutes he held her. Her hands, doubled into fists, clung to his shirt, her face buried between them on his chest. As in a dream, he touched her face and hair, felt the beating of her heart through her slender back, the surging of his own blood, the roar in his ears that drowned out every other sound.
At last he raised her face with his hands. She gazed up through half-closed eyes, eyes that he knew saw nothing; and the tiny dying voice inside cried at him to take her home.
When he bent, her eyes closed and her lips parted. Trembling, he touched them with his own, and then lifted her in his arms and carried her up the stairs.
** ** **
Warm misty wind tore like fingers at Etien Boudrie’s cassock as he hurried out of the Church of Our Lady of the Flowers in Grasse. He had been shriven, all right, but instead of feeling that he had laid down his burden of sin, he felt it had been beaten out of him. Capuchins, he thought uncharitably; the old monk on the other side of the confessional screen had possessed the bearing, and the compassion, of an agent of the Inquisition. From now on, Boudrie vowed, he would make an appointment with a priest he knew instead of just walking into a church that happened to be close to where he had parked.
The mistral, he thought, eyes searching the cloudy sky. It had been trying to come on for days now, and had at last succeeded; early this year, but not unwelcome—yet. Though he had had enough of summer, by March he would be craving the warm Midi sun. It was all part of God’s plan, no doubt. As he turned the key in the 2CV’s ignition, he uttered an automatic prayer. The engine churned into what passed in it for life. He sat for a moment, a little dazed, trying to remember where he had to go next. Ah yes, all his errands were done—he could go home, thank God. He wheeled the little car around and drove through the narrow hilly streets as fast as he dared, counting on his clerical garb in case he was stopped by the flics. The breeze through the window was almost cool. At the city’s outskirts he swung onto the highway and accelerated to 105 km/h, grinding the gearshift as if he were at Le Mans, taking a mean satisfaction in the little car’s rattles and howls. Though confession might cleanse his soul in the eyes of the Church, it invariably put him in a bad mood—perhaps, he thought, because the sins of which he found himself capable at this point in life seemed either insignificant or too firmly established to combat. Someone had declared that it was not mortal sin which dragged down the soul, but venial. There were times when Boudrie secretly agreed. It could have been the full moon that had prompted him to confess—another remnant of peasant superstition—or perhaps waking to find the mistral to boot. Whatever insanity was simmering in the village, he thought, was a good bet to surface soon.
Then he remembered the odd confession of the previous evening. Grumpily, he slowed the car to a speed suitable to a man of the cloth.
He had been on his way out of the church, talking—or, rather, listening—to Mme. Durtal, the cousin who was nursing Amalie Perrin. While she knew that Monsieur le cure was a busy man, it seemed a long time since he had visited the sick . . .
Only two days, he thought, wincing. He had shooed her off with promises and had been about to lock the doors when the figure rose from a bench in the square and walked furtively toward him. Boudrie understood instantly that whoever it was had been waiting until he was alone, and quickly identified the young man as Philippe Taillou. Mumbling, unable to meet the priest’s eyes, he asked to confess. With interest sharpened, Boudrie led him back inside.
There followed the usual halting admissions about drinking, lying, petty theft, self-abuse, and mostly unsuccessful attempts of an adolescent male to channel his sexual desperation into the female complements God so clearly intended. But that He often made such consummation difficult in the extreme, at least for young men like Philippe Taillou, Boudrie could not deny. With a mixture of pit
y and amusement, he listened to the list of disappointments—nearly a year had passed since Philippe’s last visit to the confessional, and the tale was a long one—mitigated only by a brief encounter with a young lady working the grape harvest in Fayence. Perhaps in an attempt to lighten the sin, Philippe had added miserably that she both outweighed him and had a heavier mustache.
When the recital ended, silence occupied the booth for the better part of a minute. Boudrie was in his element, and he waited, knowing that the object of this visit did not he in the commonplaces he had just heard. At last, slowly, the story began to come.
It was a hard-eyed priest who left the church a quarter of an hour later, watching a relieved but still fearful young man hurry home in the dusk.
As Boudrie drove, the urge for a drink on this misty day coincided with the sight of the hotel run by the Marigny family at the intersection of the road to Mandelieu. He swung the car in front of the building and vaguely considered taking off his Roman collar in order to appear unofficial, but it was pointless. Everyone knew him. Besides, what harm was there? Even a priest needed to wet his throat occasionally. He climbed out and made his way to the door under the sign that sought to dignify the shabby little establishment: Grand Hotel Marigny.
The half-dozen men gathered at the bar were interchangeable with any such group in any rural tavern in France: berets, overalls, thin mustaches, shrewd faces. He nodded to them, the brothers Ticoutin, Gregoire Ariot, one of the sons of old Honore Fragonard, all evading whatever gainful employment might come their way, drinking up money they did not have.
“Qa va, mes enfonts?” he said heartily.
The words roused them sufficiendy from their shock at seeing him to elicit a mumbled chorus of “Oui, Monsieur le cure” and a general touching of caps. The men continued to stare as he lumbered to the bar. It annoyed him. Perhaps it was not so usual to see a priest in a tavern, but Christ had consorted with tax collectors and harlots, been crucified with criminals, had He not?
“I have only come in to use your WC,” he told Paul Marigny loudly, “but I may as well drink a glass of brandy. God, but there’s a dampness in the air.” He turned to glare at the group at his elbow, received a hasty murmur of assent.
Boudrie watched with thirsty eyes as Marigny filled the glass. He downed it in three slow, strong swallows, not sure he had ever tasted anything so good in his life. With a thunk, he set the empty glass on the bar and surreptitiously motioned for another.
Then he turned to the small window beside him, gazed out at the brooding gray afternoon.’ So old Henri Taillou had had something on his mind the last weeks of his life, something that, stubborn old fool that he was, he had died too suddenly to confess. Though his communications about it had been mainly limited to drunken mumblings overheard by his son, Philippe had not required much detail. He had been feeling it too: a sense of being watched, followed, even stalked; a foreboding of doom.
“It is impossible for me to take pleasure in anything, monsieur,” he had whispered. “Now that Papa is gone, I can’t help but feel that it’s turned to me. I think I hear voices, speaking some language I have never heard; I even think I see faces. I can’t bear to be alone in the dark. I know Monsieur Devarre did us a kindness by calling Papa’s death a stroke, but . . .” His voice had trailed off, leaving Boudrie to remember the contorted look on the face of Henri Taillou’s corpse—a look Boudrie had attributed to the recognition of Death.
And at last Philippe had told him about bootlegging water from the hidden spring, and passed through the confessional screen a piece of paper with the guardian stone’s inscription laboriously copied out.
It matched precisely the one in the legendary account of Guilhem de Courdeval’s tomb.
Legendary, Boudrie repeated: nothing more. If it was the actual tomb, it might prove to be a find of real archaeological significance, and he had already decided to walk up there as soon as time allowed, perhaps the next morning. Philippe himself seemed to have had no idea what the stone might connote—only that tampering with it had brought evil luck. A typical peasant superstition to explain away trouble.
As for the idea that there might be some real connection between the tomb and what had happened to Taillou pere—
Boudrie turned back to the bar to find a full glass at his place. Absently, he drank it, and fumbled in his pocket.
“Non, non, monsieur,” Marigny said. Palms out, he waved the money away. “Courtesy of the house.”
The simple kindness took Boudrie so much by surprise that it brought a sting to his eyes. “Merci,” he said hoarsely, and made his way to the door, barely aware of the respectful chorus of “Au’voir, Monsieur le cure” that followed him.
Not until he was once again fighting his way into the car did he remember that his bladder remained unemptied.
** ** **
McTell awoke in the cool gray of twilight. His arm was draped across the shoulders of the woman beside him. Foggy from slumber, he sat up. He first noticed how hard and powerful his upper body seemed to have grown—not the chiseled structure of a weight lifter, but the thick, functional torso of a middle-aged man who used his body strenuously for most of every day. This change pleased him, but there was a bother too—he seemed to have gotten something in his eye during sleep. He tugged at the lid, but the irritation went farther back, as if in the optic nerve itself. Linden was dug into the bedclothes like a burrowing mammal, her breath a tiny warm caress against his thigh. A wave of deep chestnut hair spilled across the pillow.
He blinked. Then the events of the afternoon flashed into his brain. With them came a surge of panic. “My God,” he whispered. Memories flicked with the speed of movie frames: the girl’s lips tightening in pain, head twisting to the side; himself lying afterward with his face against her small breasts, breathing in the salty musk of her skin. And then before grim reality could creep in, there had come sleep, irresistible in spite of his efforts to fight it off, so deep and absolute in the still gray house that he had awakened assuming the woman beside him was his wife. He twisted to look at the clock. It was almost eight. He swore quietly; Alysse was always home about seven.
“Wake up, wake up,” he whispered. He intended his voice to be soft, but it was harsh and throaty. She did not stir. More sharply he said, “Reveilles-toi,” and shook her. She moaned in protest, moving slightly. At last her eyes opened. He searched them with his, afraid of what he might see. Reproach? Accusation? But they were sleep-filled and vague.
“Cherie,” he said, pulling her to him. “You have to go, it’s late.” The feel of her skin against him was electric; his penis stirred, his hands moved. No time, he thought fiercely, and threw off the covers.
A patch of drying blood crusted the sheet beneath.
McTell squeezed his eyes shut briefly, then took her by the shoulders. She was limp, passive. “Get dressed,” he whispered. “Comprends?” He rose, gathered her clothes, gave them to her. Slowly, dreamily, she automatically began turning the tiny triangular panties to tell front from back.
Relieved, he picked up his own clothes, hurried down the hall to the bathroom, splashed water on his face, brushed his hair. His mind raced. When he came back she was dressed, sitting silent and motionless on the bed. “Are you all right?” he said, kneeling to take her hand. She gazed at him without expression. Fear tightened around him. It was only the shock of lost virginity, he told himself, so sudden and unexpected.
But he knew it was a lie—had known it when they first touched. She had not been, and still was not, herself.
“I love you,” he said, with desperation in his voice; “je t’aime.” And this, he knew, was true.
Holding her hand, he raised her to her feet. “You must say you stayed late to do some sewing for my wife.” He quickly straightened her hair with one of Linden’s brushes. The little makeup she wore was smeared, and panic touched him again; but he steeled himself. It would have to do. Arm around her, he led her through the gloomy, silent hall and down the
staircase. At the bottom he flipped on the wall switch—
To illuminate a sight that hit him like a sledgehammer in the chest.
Linden was sitting at the table, with Alysse’s purse at her elbow. An ashtray full of half-smoked cigarettes sat in front of her; she held another, smoke curling from its tip, between her fingers. Legs crossed, arms folded, she looked almost relaxed—except that her face was bloodless white, a taut mask of fury stretched across a living skull.
“How touching,” she said. Her voice trembled. She stabbed the cigarette into the ashtray. Through his filter of disbelief, McTell saw that there was something else on the table: the grimoire, which he had left lying on his desk. His notes and translation were scattered beside it. His grip tightened on Alysse’s hand.
“In case you’re wondering, I went upstairs and saw you two, curled up like a couple of kittens. You looked so sweet I couldn’t bring myself to wake you.” And then, in a shaking but measured tone, “You filthy, sneaking bastard.”
McTell’s arm circled the girl’s shoulders protectively. “Wait. I’ll send her home. Then we’ll talk.”
“You’re goddamned right we’ll talk!” Abruptly she stood, leaning forward into Alysse’s face. Her eyes were hard and glittering. “Don’t you ever set foot in my house again, you little bitch.”
Alysse made no sound, registered no sign of upset, fear, or curiosity. Linden’s eyes went uncertain. McTell turned the girl and walked her down the hall to the door.
“I’m sorry,” he said in French, “I can’t take you home. But I’ll see you again. . . .” She walked steadily and silently off into the twilight. Agonized, he strained to watch until she disappeared.
Then he turned back inside to face his wife, like a stubborn child called to task.
CHAPTER 12
Etien Boudrie raised his hand in weak protest as the cheese and fruit tray came his way again. The meal had been rich: fresh oysters, bright tomatoes bursting with juice, pates, peppers in marinade, and agigot—a heavily spiced leg of lamb that would have graced the table of a bishop.
Next, After Lucifer Page 18
