Dagger Key and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  We stopped at a sidewalk café on the corner of the Via Fiume and the Via Poseidone, where we were to meet Giacinta’s friend, Allessandra, for a drink before going to dinner. Incapable of other than the most primitive conversation, we endured an awkward silence of considerable length. She studied the wine list, wrinkling her nose as if responding to the various bouquets, and I examined the mural adorning the facade of the building across the street—it depicted several Renaissance children, elegantly clothed, chasing each other about the columns of a room in a palace, all done in sepia tones. There were hundreds of murals in Diamante. At least half a dozen were visible off along the block. I was mildly curious regarding the reason underlying such a proliferation, but I did not inquire about them, having no wish to endure a labored explanation couched in fractured English, with table objects used for demonstration purposes. The night air was growing cool. Giacinta threw on a light sweater over her yellow summer dress. She smiled anxiously at me, and I smiled in return.

  Allessandra, who arrived twenty minutes late, was a willowy brunette who had spent a great deal of time and money at the hair salon to achieve a fabulously tousled and frosted look. She wore a leather mini that showed off her long legs and enormous gold hoop earrings through which, it seemed, a toy poodle could have jumped. She bussed Giacinta on the cheek, lit a cigarette with scarcely an interruption to her rapid-fire chatter, and began to interrogate me as might an anxious mother on the occasion of her daughter’s prom, asking first how old I was.

  “I’m forty,” I told her.

  “Gia is twenty-six,” she said.

  “It’s a lovely age.”

  Giacinta looked to Allessandra, and Allessandra translated, apparently accurately, for Giacinta ducked her eyes and blushed.

  “Are forty and twenty-six incompatible?” I asked. Allessandra failed to grasp the word incompatible, so I presented her with alternatives. “Unsuitable? Ill-matched?”

  “No, no! I was pointing out that for you, Gia is much less, uh…sophisticated.”

  “Ah! I see.”

  Giacinta wanted to know what was being said, but Allessandra told her to wait and asked my occupation.

  “I do some travel writing,” I said.

  “For the magazines?”

  “Books, mainly. I own a travel agency with offices in Rome, Paris, London, New York…and elsewhere. The business more-or-less runs itself, and I’ve been at loose ends the past few years. So I’ve taken up writing.”

  Allessandra paused to translate. Her perfume overwhelmed the less aggressive aura of Giacinta’s scent. Within the café, under a bilious yellow bulb, two waiters in white shirts and aprons were playing backgammon at the bar, while the bombastic pop stylings of Zucchero leaked into the street, seeming to empurple the air. The lights along the Via Poseidone marked the curve of the shore, otherwise the darkened coastline would have been all but indistinguishable from the sea. Two elderly men in caps and bulky jackets strolled along the sea wall; one threw his right arm over the other’s shoulder and, making repetitive forceful gestures with his right hand, appeared to be offering advice.

  “Maybe,” Allessandra said, “you write the article about Diamante?”

  “No, I’m here to meet some friends. We try to get together every year somewhere in Europe. This year it happens to be Diamante.” I leaned forward and touched Allessandra’s cigarette pack, resting by her elbow. “May I?”

  “Of course.”

  “I quit years ago, but I still get the urge on occasion.” I lit up and exhaled a plume of smoke that a breeze swept toward the sea wall. “I’m meeting my friends for dinner tonight. At Baldassaro’s. They’re all bringing someone, and…well, I didn’t want to come alone. I thought Giacinta would make a charming dinner companion.”

  Hearing her name, Giacinta again asked for a translation and, following a brief exchange, Allessandra said, “There is a thing I don’t understand, Mister…You…”

  “Taylor,” I said. “Please.”

  “Very well. Taylor.” She stressed the T with a flick of her tongue, crossed her legs and lit another cigarette. “You are a man of wealth, of experience. And very handsome. Many beautiful women would be happy to take dinner with you. Especially at a place of elegance like Baldassaro’s. So why have you choosed this one?”

  I had a sip of wine. “I assumed that Giacinta invited you for drinks so she could ask questions through you and make a judgment on my character. But this is your question, isn’t it?”

  Allessandra made a wry shape with her mouth and gave the slightest of nods.

  “Perhaps you would care to go to dinner with me?”

  “Another night…” She gave her hair a toss. “It’s possible.”

  A Vespa with a pair of young men astride passed along the street—I allowed the angry rip of the engine to fade before continuing.

  “You’re a beautiful woman, Allessandra. I’m sure any man would be delighted to have you as a companion. However, I’m looking for a certain type of beauty. Beauty that falls short of the ideal. Innocence that’s been corrupted, but only just. A woman who’s been slighted by the world, perhaps treated roughly, yet maintains a belief in romantic possibility.”

  Giacinta, seeming to recognize that Allessandra was flirting with me, plucked at her friend’s sleeve. Her purpose in having me meet Allessandra had less to do with ascertaining my good character than with showing me off, and now she was afraid that she had made a mistake.

  Allessandra told her to wait a second and said, “Your picture of…What you say about the woman…uh…”

  “Description. Is that the word you’re looking for?”

  “Yes. Your description…it fits every woman.”

  “Yes, but Giacinta possesses this quality in a way you do not. If I were to send her to a spa, have experts counsel her on matters of diet and exercise, perhaps get some work done to her chin, her breasts, she’d be very much the kind of woman you are. As it is, she’s the absolute embodiment of the quality I’m seeking. Her body and mind flavored by a precise degree of sadness.”

  Allessandra’s frown took the measure of some poignant indelicacy, as if she detected a bad smell. “It seems you are a connoisseur, a…I don’t know how to say. Your feeling for Gia is not…” She snapped her fingers in frustration.

  “You’re suggesting that my appreciation of Giacinta’s charms may be perverse? Like a preference for dwarves or the morbidly obese? Why don’t you tell her that?”

  Once again Allessandra had to hold off Giacinta’s demand that she be filled in, saying forcefully, “Aspetta!”

  “I’m attracted to plain women,” I said. “Physical beauty bores me. I’m talking about what’s generally considered beautiful. And now that beauty’s become affordable…” I made a disparaging noise. “That qualifies me as jaded, not perverse. Still, it may be a phase I’m going through. Tomorrow night, for instance, I may feel differently.”

  For a second or two, Allessandra looked puzzled. Then she shook her finger at me in mock chastisement and laughed. “You fool with me!” she said. “I know!”

  She turned to her friend and delivered herself of a lengthy pronouncement detailing our conversation or, more likely, a fictive version of it, darting sideways glances at me as if to affirm an unstated complicity. Judging by Giacinta’s tremulous smile, I suspected Allessandra was informing her that I’d been attracted to her mental and spiritual qualities, that she could consider herself safe while in my company, and that she could expect nothing more threatening to her virtue than a fine meal at Baldassaro’s—in sum, diminishing the importance of the evening, so that when I asked Allessandra out, something both women were certain I would do, Giacinta would not be so distressed.

  Shortly afterward, Allessandra took her leave, seizing the opportunity of a perfunctory embrace to slip her business card into my jacket pocket, and, once she had rounded the corner, an act preceded by a wave, coquettishly fluttering her fingers, Giacinta’s mood grew instantly sullen and uncommunicativ
e. I caressed her forearm, asked if she was all right, and she shook her head, refusing to look at me. “Giacinta,” I said softly, making the name into a form of adoration, and held her hand, pressing my lips to the inside of her wrist, to the rapid pulse beating there, the smell of blood and lemons. With palpable reluctance, she swung about to face me and, after I laid my hand along her cheek, letting her lean into it, only then did she relent and favor me with a wan smile.

  Toward the southern extremity of the Via Poseidone, an ancient stone causeway extended several hundred yards out into the sea, connecting the mainland with a small island, almost invisible against the night sky, picked out by the lights of Baldassaro’s. In addition to a four-star restaurant, the island was home to some nondescript Roman ruins that attracted a few tourists, but no one had lived there for over a century, thus it was ideal for our meeting. The causeway itself, however, was populated by a number of young couples who had come for a twilight stroll and stayed to exploit the anonymity of the dark. Every few yards we passed a shadowy couple locked in an embrace or whispering with their heads together. I had slipped a drug into Giacinta’s wine back at the café, a hypnotic designed to lower inhibitions, and, upon finding an unoccupied stretch of railing, when I suggested we take our ease along it, she raised no objection. Perhaps she would have raised none in any case. If she had, I could have persuaded her with a mental nudge; but I never have liked manipulating them in that way—it tends to damage them and it might have cost me some effort. These Italian girls, whether due to Catholic fear or fleshly anxiety, were capable of reconstituting their virginity at a moment’s notice. And so I trusted the drug to liberate her from such impediments.

  We gazed out across the Mediterranean, lying flat beneath a salting of dim stars. I asked Giacinta to talk, telling her I liked the sound of her voice, although I understood little of what she said (a message that required some considerable time to convey, due to its relative complexity). She hesitated, but I urged her on and soon she started in reciting poetry like a schoolgirl regurgitating memorized verses on cue. After three poems she faltered, but then began speaking rapidly in a husky tone of voice. To my amusement, I recognized several vulgar words, words such as “pompino” and “cazzo”, that I had learned from a woman in Bologna. I put my right hand on the join of her waist and hip, and her breath caught; she half-turned so that my hand slid up onto her rib cage, very near the swell of her breast. Her voice thickened and her speech became peppered with crudities, particular emphasis being laid on terms like “…mi fica…” and “…mi culo…” and so forth, references to portions of her anatomy upon which, I assumed, she wished me to lavish attention.

  I was delighted to play a game with her, with someone so similar to and yet so vastly different from the women with whom I was accustomed to playing a more involving game. I kissed her, tasting wine and licorice from her tongue. My hand engulfed a breast, squeezing it a trifle hard, perhaps, for I felt her mouth slacken momentarily. I lifted her by the waist, boosted her up to sit upon the stone railing, and pushed her skirt up around her hips. She protested, of course, pushing feebly at my chest and saying, “No, Taylor! Non in questo!” But the distinction between passion and its counterfeit had blurred for us both. I fingered her panties to one side and, finding her ready, entered her. She clung to my shoulders, gasping with each thrust. I forced her to lie back, suspending her over the drop—twenty feet, I reckoned it. All that prevented her from falling was our genital union and my hands supporting her waist. She cried out…not loudly. Modesty was still a concern. She did not want to be caught, yet she needed this validation so desperately, this romantic violence in the service of her self-image, that she was willing to risk her reputation, not to mention her life, and entrust herself to a stranger’s whim.

  “Non preoccupe, Giacinta,” I said, and then repeated it. She gradually relaxed. Her head drooped, her arms dangled toward the dark water. Gleaming palely in the ambient light, her face was serene, enraptured, lips parted, slitted eyes directed to heaven, to a pattern of stars that exhibited the workings of a divine intellect and transformed our rutting into a mating of angels. God knows what fantasies populated her head! Perhaps she saw herself as a goddess suffering a vile martyrdom, or as a twenty-first century Leda. I gave passing thought to the notion of letting her fall, but though I am not known for my generosity of spirit, neither am I the cruelest of my kind, and I must admit to having some trivial affection for every creature who shares with us their inch of time. Yet the scent of her despair and desperation, the fact that she was surrendering herself in the faint hope that her ardor might persuade me to love her, to sweep her up into a moneyed life, one wherein she could afford the procedures I had mentioned to Allessandra, those that would make her uninteresting to me—all this yielded a fine perfume that stirred my emotions to such an extent, I believed I loved her more purely than those who had previously used her, and it occurred to me that I might want to keep her around for the winter, that I might, for my own amusement, if nothing else, grant some of her wishes.

  Afterward she brushed stone dust off her dress and cleaned herself with a tissue, casting furtive glances at lovers less bold than we; and when she was done with her toilette, she rested her head on my chest, as if sheltering there. I tipped her face toward mine and kissed her brow, an affectionate gesture unalloyed by irony. A worry line creased that kissed brow. She pushed me away and began berating me—that much was evident from her tone, but she spoke too rapidly for me to catch a single word until I heard “…profillatico…” The poor girl was rebuking me for not having worn a condom, a fact to which she had just awakened. I could have eased her fears on this score, but in the spirit of the scene I acted out my own concern, expressing that I had been swept away by passion, pledging that everything would be all right, that together we would find our way whether or not a little troglodyte had started its journey lifewards in her belly. At length I made myself understood and, mollified, she allowed me to guide her toward Baldassaro’s. We had scarcely gone ten paces when she quickened her step, allowing the hint of a smile to touch her lips, and latched onto my arm with a proprietary grasp.

  It was the last night of the season but one at Baldassaro’s and we had rented the entire restaurant for a party of nine. A waiter led Giacinta and me through the main dining area and along a corridor to a large room, where a table had been set with a white linen cloth, crystal, and gold utensils. The cream-colored walls bore a mural of Roman galleys engaged in battle with a fleet of sleeker ships manned by soldiers with Persian-style beards. At one end of the room were French doors that opened onto a balcony overlooking the water. Jenay, a brunette this year, resplendent in a blue business suit tailored to accentuate her statuesque figure, smelling of flowers, greeted me with a kiss and introduced her companion, a German furniture salesman named Vid, a pop-eyed little monster in a houndstooth jacket who might have been her pet frog. When I introduced Giacinta, Vid performed a jaunty bow and Jenay whispered to me in the Old Tongue, “She’s exquisite! I’m certain you’ll win this year.”

  “What were you going for?” I asked her. “Comic relief?”

  “I thought I’d give the rest of you a fighting chance.”

  “Just because you won last year doesn’t mean…”

  “I’ve won the last two out of three,” said Jenay with mock indignation. “And it should have been three in a row.”

  “What language are you speaking?” Vid asked. “It’s familiar, but I can’t place it.”

  “It’s an archaic French dialect,” I said. “From the Aquitaine region.”

  “We belonged to one of those secret societies in college,” said Jenay. “Learning it was required for membership.”

  “Aquitaine,” said Vid. “I would have thought farther west. It reminds me of Basque.”

  “My, you’re quite the linguist, aren’t you? But then…” Jenay made suggestive play with her tongue and smiled. “I suppose I already knew that.”

  Vid, I swear befor
e God, puffed out his chest, like a male bird fanning its plumage, and explained that in his undergraduate days, he had studied the French language and its origins; a family crisis had forced him to give up his studies.

  “May I have some wine?” Giacinta looked at me crossly—she was feeling left out.

  I hastened to serve her, also pouring Vid a glass, which he downed in a gulp, and the four of us began talking about Diamante, the only subject with which Giacinta seemed conversant. The town’s many murals, she told us, were the result of a contest held each year—artists were invited from all over the world to paint a wall and the best of their work became part of Diamante’s permanent exhibition.

  Next to arrive was Elaine, also a brunette, more slender than Jenay, her perfume more subtle, with darker hair and piercing blue eyes, her pale, classical features rendered saintly by a cowled evening gown of a shimmering beige fabric. She had in tow a leather-jacketed street hustler named Daniele, his chiseled chin inked with stubble, who challenged me with a stare and otherwise exhibited a cool indifference that doubtless accorded with the personal style of some cinematic tough guy. Both Jenay and I took the position that Daniele was far too handsome and self-assured. Elaine defended her choice by saying that his pathos was inherent to his fate, which was so precisely demarked as to be obvious, but Jenay reminded her that, pitiful though Daniele was, our contest was judged on appearances and behavior, not potential.