“Finally,” the woman said.
Geoffrey thought she was referring to Del’s passing, but looking down at the man’s groin realized his error. In extremis, Del was spurting like a whale.
“Jesus Christ,” Geoffrey said, nauseated.
The woman wandered over to admire the spectacle. “You could try the kiss of life,” she said. “You might still bring him back”
Geoffrey looked down at Del’s face, at his foamy lips and bulging sockets. Maybe there was a remote chance of starting his heart again—and maybe a better friend than he would have attempted it—but nothing on God’s earth could have convinced him at that moment to put his lips to the lips of Delbert Donnelly.
“No?” said the woman.
“No,” said Geoffrey.
“So you let him die. You couldn’t bear to kiss him, and now he’s dead.” She turned her back on Sauls and wandered away.
This was not a pardon, Geoffrey knew, just a stay of execution.
“Oh Mary, mother of God,” Geoffrey said softly. “Help me in my hour of need—”
“You don’t need a Virgin right now,” the woman said, “you need somebody with a little more experience. Somebody who knows what’s best for you.”
Geoffrey didn’t turn to look at her. She’d experienced some mesmeric hold over Del, he was certain of it, and if he met her eyes she’d get into his head the same way. Somehow he had to find a way out of here without looking at her. And then there were those damn ropes to be considered. The one that had garroted Del had already slithered away. He didn’t want to look at Del’s groin to see what had become of the other, but he had to assume it was loose somewhere. He would have one chance at escape, he knew. If he was not quick enough, or somehow lost his bearings and missed the exit, she would have him. However offhand she was being right now, she could not afford to let him escape, not after what he’d witnessed.
“Do you know the story of this place?” she asked him.
Happy to have her distracted by conversation, he told her no, he didn’t. “It was built by a man who felt injustice very deeply.”
“Oh?”
“We knew him, Mr. Steep and myself, many, many years ago. In fact, he and I were intimate, for a short time.”
“Lucky man,” Geoffrey replied, hoping to flatter. Her talk was all delusory, of course. Though he knew little about the Courthouse, he was certain it had been standing a century at least.
“I don’t remember him well,” she fantasized. “Except for his nose. He had the largest nose I have seen. Monolithic. And he swore it was this that made him so sympathetic to the condition of animals—” While she babbled, Geoffrey covertly cast his eyes left and right, the better to orient himself. Though he couldn’t actually see the door that led to freedom, he guessed it to be just out of sight near his left shoulder. Meanwhile, the woman chattered on: “They’re so much more sensitive to odors than we are. But Mr. Bartholomeus, because of his nose, claimed he could smell more like an animal than a man. Ambrosial, myrrhic, mephitic. He’d divided the smells up, so he had a name for every one: putrid, musky, balsamic. I forget the others. In fact, I forget him, except for his nose. It’s funny what you remember about people, isn’t it?” She paused. Then: “What’s your name?”
“Geoffrey Sauls.” Was that her footfall behind him? He had to get going, or she’d be upon him. He scanned the ground for her lethal rosaries.
“No middle name?” she said.
“Oh. Yes.” He could see nothing moving, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there, in the shadows. “Alexander.”
“That’s a lot prettier than Geoffrey,” she said, her voice closer to him. He glanced back down at Del’s dead face, to give himself that last jolt of motivation, and then he was up and turning toward the door. He’d guessed right. There it was, ahead of him now. From the corner of his eye he glimpsed the whore and felt her eyes burning into him. He didn’t give them the opportunity to work their hex on him. Loosing a shout he’d learned in the Territorial Army (it was designed to accompany a bayonet charge, while this was a retreat, but what the hell?), he fled for the exit. His senses were more acute than they’d been since boy-hood, his adrenaline-flooded system alive to every nuance. He heard the whine of the rosaries as they flew and, glancing over his shoulder, saw them in the air like beaded lightning, flying toward him. He dodged to his right, ducking as he did so, and watched them fly past him, striking the door. There they writhed for a heartbeat, and in that beat he snatched at the handle and threw the door wide. His own strength astonished him.
Though the door was heavy it swung fully open, its hinges screeching, and slammed against the wall.
“Alexander,” the woman called, her voice silky. “Come back. Do you hear me, Alexander?”
He pelted down the passage, unmoved by her summons, and for a very good reason. Only his mother, whom he had hated with all his heart, had ever called him by that name. The woman could call to him using all the voices of the sirens, and if she hung that dreaded Alexander upon him he would be immune.
Out now, down the steps and into the snow, plowing toward the hedgerow, never looking back. He plunged through the thicket and out onto the road with his lungs burning, his heart drumming, and such a sense of happiness he was almost glad he was alone to enjoy it. Later, when he recounted this, he would talk quietly and mournfully of how he’d lost his friend. For now, he shouted, and laughed, and felt (oh, the perversity of this) all the more glorious because he’d not only outwitted the whore but had Del’s death as proof of how terrible his jeopardy had been.
Whooping, then, and stumbling, he returned to his car, which was parked some fifty yards away and undaunted by the icy road (nothing could harm him now; he was inviolate), he drove with foolhardy speed back into the village to sound the alarm.
ii
Back in the Courthouse, Rosa was not a happy woman. She’d been content enough until Alexander and his overweight comrade had arrived, sitting dreaming of finer places and balmier days. But now her dreams had been interrupted, and she had to make some quick decisions.
There’d be a mob at the gates soon enough, she knew: Alexander would make certain of that. They’d be feeling righteous and wrathful, and they’d surely attempt some mischief upon her person if she didn’t make herself scarce. It would not be the first time she’d been harried and harassed this way.
There’d been an unsavory incident in Morocco only the year before, in which the wife of one of her occasional consorts had led a minor jihad against her, much to Jacob’s amusement. The husband, like the fat fellow lying at her feet now, had died in flagrante delicto, but—unlike Donnelly—had expired with a broad smile on his face. It was the smile that had truly inflamed his wife: That she’d never seen its like in her life had put her in murderous mood. And then in Milan—oh, how she’d loved Milan—there’d been a worse scene still. She had lingered there for several weeks while Jacob went south and had fallen into the company of the transvestites who plied their hazardous trade about the Parco Sempione. She’d always loved things artificial, and these beauties, who were self-created females to a man (the viados, the locals called them, meaning “fawns”) had enchanted her. In their company she’d felt a strange sisterhood, and might have elected to stay in that city had one of the pimps, a casual sadist by the name of Henry Campanella, not earned her ire.
Hearing that he’d made a particularly savage assault on one of his herd, Rosa had lost her temper. This happened infrequently, but when it did, blood invariably flowed, and copiously. She’d choked the bastard on what had passed for his manhood and left the corpse in the Viale Certosa, on public display. His brother, who was also a pimp, had raised a small army from the criminal fraternity and would have slaughtered her if she hadn’t fled to Sicily and the comfort of Steep. Still, she often thought of her sisters in Milan, sitting around chatting about surgeries and silicone, while they plucked and teased and squeezed themselves into a semblance of femininity. And when she thought of
them, she sighed.
Enough of memories, she told herself. It was time to vacate the premises, before the dogs came after her, two-legged and four. She carried a candle into her little dressing room and packed up her belongings, keeping her senses sharp every moment. Remotely, she thought she heard raised voices and assumed that Alexander was at the village, telling tales, the way men liked to do.
Finishing her packing hurriedly, she said farewell to the body of Delbert Donnelly and, calling her rosaries to her, made her departure. She had intended to head off northeast along the valley, putting the village and its idiots as far behind her as she could. But once she was out in the snow, her thoughts turned to Jacob. She was of half a mind to leave him in ignorance of what her deeds had unleashed. But in her heart she knew she owed him the warning, for sentiment’s sake. They had spent so many decades together, arguing, suffering, and in their curious way devoting themselves to one another. Though his recent frailties disenchanted her, she could not leave him until she’d performed this last duty.
Turning her face to the hills, which had emerged from the retiring blizzard, she rapidly sought him out. She had no need of senses in this: There was in them both a compass for which the other was north; all she had to do was let the needle swing and settle, and there he would be. Lugging her bags, she started up the slope in his direction, leaving a trail in the snow that she was well aware her pursuers would follow. So be it, she thought. If they come, they come. And if blood has to be spilled, I’m in a fine frame of mind to spill it.
XI
It was a sudden spring. The breath out of the earth came and went, and when it passed, it took winter with it. The trees were miraculously clothed in leaf and blossom, the frosted earth gave way to blades of summer grass, to bluebells and wood anemone and melancholy thistle; sunlight danced everywhere. In the branches birds courted and nested, and from the quickened thicket a red fox appeared, regarding Will with a fearless gaze before trotting off about his business, his whiskers and coat gleaming.
“Jacob?” said a reedy voice off to Will’s left. “I thought not to see you again so soon.”
Will turned to the speaker and found a man standing a few yards off, leaning against a graceful ash. The tree was better dressed than he, his stained shirt, coarse pants and ill-made sandals far less flattering than the flickering leaves. Otherwise, man and tree had much in common. Both slender in body and limb, yet finely made. The man, however, boasted something the tree could not: eyes of such a flawless blue it seemed the sky had found its way into his head.
“I must tell you, my friend,” he said, staring not at Jacob but at Will, “if you still hope to persuade me to go with you, you’re wasting your breath.”
Will looked around at Jacob in the hope of some explanation, but Jacob had gone.
“I told you the truth yesterday. I have nothing left to give Rukenau. And I will not be seduced with tales of the Domus Mundi—”
Stepping away from the tree, the man walked toward Will, and to add to the sum of the mysteries here, Will realized that, though the stranger was several years his senior, and lankily tall, they were looking at one another eye to eye, which meant that he had somehow sprung up a foot and a half in height.
“I don’t want to know the world that way, Jacob,” the man was saying. “I want to see it through my own eyes.” Jacob? Will thought. He’s looking straight at me and he’s calling me Jacob. That means I’m in Steep’s body. I’m looking out through his eyes! The idea didn’t frighten him; quite the reverse.
He stretched a little, and it seemed to him he could feel the muscle of the man enveloping him, heavy and strong. He inhaled and smelled his own sweat. He raised his hand and fingered the silken curls of his beard. It was the most extraordinary feeling.
Though he was the possessor here, he felt possessed, as though being in Steep had put Steep in his being.
There were appetites in his hips and head he’d never felt before. He wanted to be off, away from this melancholic youth, out under the sky testing this borrowed flesh, running until his lungs were furnaces, stretching until his joints cracked. To go naked in this glorious anatomy, yes! Wouldn’t that be fine? To eat in it, piss from it, stroke its long limbs.
But he was not the master here; memory was. He had sufficient freedom to scratch his beard or his groin, but he couldn’t leave the business that had brought Steep back to this place. All he could do was sit behind Jacob’s gilded eyes and listen to what had been said this sunlit day. He had conjured this encounter against Steep’s will, it had seemed— I don’t want this, Jacob had said, over and over—yet now that it was here, it had a momentum all of its own, and he wasn’t about to contest its authority, for fear he lose the simple joy of standing in the man, flesh in flesh.
“Sometimes, Thomas,” Jacob was saying, “you look at me as though I were the very Devil.”
The other man shook his head, his greasy hair falling across his forehead. He pushed it back with a long-fingered hand, stained red and blue. “If you were the Devil, you wouldn’t be Rukenau’s creature now, would you?” he said. “You wouldn’t let him dispatch you off to bring home runaway painters. And if you came for me, I wouldn’t be able to resist you. And I can, Jacob. It’s hard, but I can.” He lifted his hand up above his head and drew down a blossom-laden branch to sniff. “I had a dream last night, after you’d gone. I dreamed I was up in the heavens, higher than the highest cloud, looking down at the earth, and there was somebody close to me, whispering in my ear. A soft voice, neither a woman nor a man.”
“Saying what?”
“That in all the universe, there was only one planet so perfect, one so blue and bright as this. One so prodigious in its creations. And that this glory was God’s very being.”
“God’s delusion, Thom. That’s what it is.”
“No, listen to me! You’ve spent too much time with Rukenau. All this around us right now isn’t some trick God’s playing on us.” He let the branch he’d been holding go, and it sprang back into place, dropping petals down on Thomas’s head and shoulders. He didn’t notice. He was too inflamed by his dream and the telling of it. “God knows the world through us, Jacob. He adores it with our voices. He makes our hands do it service. And at night, He looks out through our eyes, out into the immensity, and names the stars, so that in time we’ll sail to them.” He dropped his head. “That’s what I dreamed.”
“You should tell it to Rukenau. He loves to read the meaning in dreams.”
“But there’s nothing to decipher,” Thomas replied, grinning at the ground. “That’s the genius of it, don’t you see?” He looked up at Will again, the sky in his head pristine. “Poor Rukenau. He’s been reciting his liturgies for so long, he’s more in love with them than with the true sacrament.”
“And what’s that, pray tell?”
“This,” Thomas said, plucking one of the petals off his shoulder. “I have the Holy of Holies here, the Ark of the Covenant, the Sangraal, the Great Mystery itself, right here on the tip of my little finger. Look!” He proffered the petal, balanced on his digit. “If I could paint this perfection,” he stared at the petal as he spoke, as though mesmerized by the sight, “put it on a sheet of paper so that it showed its true glory, every painting in every chapel in Rome, every illumination of every Book of Hours, every picture I ever made for every one of Rukenau’s damned invocations would be,” he paused for the word, “superfluous.” He blew the petal from his finger, and it rose up a little way before starting its descent. “But I cannot make such a painting. I labor and I labor, and I make only failures. Jesus. Sometimes, Jacob, I wish I’d been born without fingers.”
“Well, if you have so little use for their skills, then lend your fingers to me,” Jacob said. “Let me use them to make pictures half as fine as yours, and I will be the happiest man in creation.” Thomas grinned, regarding Jacob quizzically. “You say the strangest things.”
“I say strange things,” Jacob replied. “You should hear yourself,
today or any day.” He laughed and Thomas laughed along with him, his defeat momentarily forgotten.
“Come back to the island with me,” Jacob said, approaching Thomas cautiously, as though afraid of startling him. “I’ll make sure Rukenau doesn’t make a workhorse out of you.”
“That’s not the point.”
“I know how he always wants things his way, how he badgers you. I won’t let it happen, Thom, I swear.”
“Since when did you have that much authority?”
“Since I told him Rosa and I’d go off and leave him if he didn’t let us play a little. You wouldn’t dare leave me, he said. I know your nature and you don’t. If you desert me, you’ll never know what you are or how you came to be.”
“And what did you say to that?”
“Oh, you’ll be proud of me. I said: It’s true, I don’t know what made me. Yet was I made and made with love. And that may be knowledge enough to live in bliss.”
“Oh Lord, I wish I’d been there to see his face.”
“He wasn’t happy.” Jacob chuckled. “But what could he say? It was the truth.”
“So prettily put, too. You should be a poet.”
“No, I want to paint like you. I want us to work side by side, and, you teach me how to see the flow in things, the way you do. The island’s so beautiful, and there’s just a few fishermen who live there, too cowed to say boo to the likes of us. We can live as though we were in Eden: you, me, and Rosa.”
“Let me think about it,” Thomas said.
“One more persuasion.”
“Leave it alone now.”
“No. Hear me out. I know you don’t trust Rukenau’s gnostics, and a lot of the time, in truth, they confound me too—but the Domus Mundi isn’t an illusion. It’s glorious, Thomas. You’ll be astonished when you move in it and feel it move in you. Rukenau says it’s a vision of the world from the inside out—”
“And how much laudanum does he have you imbibe before you see this vision?”
“None. I swear. I wouldn’t lie to you, Thom. If I thought this was just another delirium, I’d tell you to stay here and paint petals. But it isn’t. It’s something divine, something we’re allowed to know if our hearts are strong enough. Lord, Thom, just imagine the petals you could paint if you studied them first in the seed. Or in the shoot. Or in the sap that made a bud come from a twig.”