Erik withdrew hastily from the child's clutching embrace, and as he turned away, with the cat in his arms, I signed for a servant to remove the wheeled chair from our presence.
"Well?" I demanded shakily when we were alone once more. "Was that not exactly what you wanted to hear?"
He did not answer. He passed one hand briefly over the cat's neck and in a moment the jeweled collar was gone.
I went up to him, keeping a hard grip upon my turbulent emotions, and obliged him to meet my eye.
"Take what you like," I said quietly. "Pillage the whole world if you must to satisfy your professional vanity. But don't take my child's heart from me just because you can. Don't shut me in that torture chamber, Erik."
He turned to look back regretfully at the house, as though silently taking leave of something very dear to him.
"All sensible men learn to close their doors against thieves," he said sadly.
And tucking the cat securely beneath his cloak he walked away.
The matter of the cat's missing collar was never resolved. The shah raged and had several of the guards thrown into prison for negligence, but if he suspected Erik, as he must surely have done, he kept his own counsel. It did not yet suit him to part with a man who performed so many unique and irreplaceable services. For now he was prepared to overlook the loss.
And yet there were subtle nuances that indicated his growing resentment of a servant who had made himself indispensable. Perhaps it had been amusing, even refreshing, at first, to deal with a man who never used a courtesy title, who spoke to him as an equal and never stooped to fawning flattery. But all novelty pales in time, and the shah was notoriously fickle in his choice of favorites.
Sooner or later, I knew, there would be a terrible price to pay; I only hoped that I would not be present when that day of reckoning finally dawned.
When the court returned to Tehran, Erik asked that he might be permitted to remain in Mazanderan to oversee the entire course of building. But since the khanum would not countenance his indefinite absence, permission was refused and consequently he was obliged to travel constantly back and forth across the Elburz Mountains all through the spring and summer of 1851.
Watching him grow progressively more tired and short tempered with each succeeding month, I sensed that the continued slights of the grand vazir were beginning to rankle ever more deeply in his mind. The enmity between the two men became increasingly open as Erik began to use his influence with the khanum to overset several of the prime minister's cherished proposals. And when I saw Mirza Ta-qui Khan storm out of the Council Chamber one sultry, airless afternoon in late summer, I guessed that there had been yet another heated exchange of views between them.
"It is insupportable," said the grand vazir loudly, "truly insupportable, when the opinions of a demented magician are permitted to carry weight in this fashion. How can Persia take her place in the civilized world if her affairs continue to be misdirected by the twisted fancies of this insane monster?"
A terrible hush fell over the prime minister's friends as first one and then another turned to glance in quiet horror at the door of the Council Chamber, where the
insane monster
now stood listening. The grand vazir followed their gaze and then, with an expression of cold contempt, continued to address his audience as if he were unaware of Erik's presence.
"Gentlemen, it is time for us all to consider how much longer the shah will be content to be served by a creature who properly belongs in a cage." saw Erik stiffen.
"A cage?" he repeated softly.
The prime minister wheeled around upon him angrily.
"A cage, sir, is where you belong and where I would most gladly see you confined, like the hideous beast that you are. Your pretended claim to humanity is an affront to every honest man at court!"
"Are there any honest men at court?"
Erik's voice was lightly sarcastic and raised a little nervous laughter even among Khan's supporters, but 1 was not deceived by his apparent calm. I could see from the faint tremor of his hands that he was ready to kill.
"God knows there are fewer since you came!" snapped the grand vazir furiously. "The depravity of your activities stains us all. You are neither an artist nor a scientist—you are a deranged fiend who should have been locked away from the world at birth! Your mind is as distorted as your face. I truly shudder to think what horrendous tales are being carried from court to the European missions!"
Turning abruptly on his heel, the grand vazir walked away, with the members of his entourage hurrying behind him. Erik stared after him, and as I came near I was able to feel the anger that throbbed inside him, like a tense swollen boil.
"A cage!" he muttered darkly, "a cage!"
"Erik," I said desperately, "I beseech you to forget this."
He gave a short, bitter laugh.
"How lightly you speak of forgetting," he muttered, "you who have never known the filth and degradation of a
cage
!"
I was stunned by the pulsing venom in his voice.
"They were only words," I protested, "hasty, ill-considered words spoken in the heat of the moment—"
"By a man with many enemies!" he said softly, still staring down the corridor. He was grimly calm of a sudden, no longer breathing in harsh gasps with one hand clutching fiercely at his chest. And this deadly, stone-cold serenity was somehow infinitely more frightening than his blazing anger.
"If you are his friend," Erik continued with the same unnerving dispassion, "you had better tell that man to guard his back. The planetary alignments in his birth sign are most unfavorable. His stars are against him."
He drew a tarot card out of the air with a flourish and dropped it on the floor at my feet. The card fell facedown, and as I bent to turn it over I found myself looking at a skeleton bearing a scythe.
Death…
When I looked up to protest, the corridor was completely empty; there was no sign of Erik anywhere.
Slowly I tucked the card into my coat and turned away with a heavy heart…
There was no more open show of hostility between the two men, but I did not make the mistake of confusing Erik's restraint with resignation. Like a prowling cat in the shadows he was secretly and silently stalking a reckless prey. He had the ear of the khanum, whose dislike of her son-in-law was well documented, and I suspected that whatever disaster Erik had in mind for the prime minister would be directed through the insidious influence of the harem.
The coup fell in November when, without warning, the shah suddenly summoned four hundred of his personal guard to the palace late at night and had the grand vazir placed under arrest. No accusations were made, no explanations given. The man simply fell from favor with all the abruptness that was commonplace in Persia, plummeting to the ground like a tangled kite and dragging his supporters with him in his wake.
Erik was standing at a window, looking down into the palace courtyard, when the grand vazir, his wife, and two infant children were placed in a
takheterewan
. The curtained litter was surrounded by an armed guard and the dismal torchlit procession proceeded to the main gate and was soon swallowed up in the blackness of the autumn night.
"Where are they taking him?" I demanded.
"To the palace of Fin in Kashan," he replied quietly.
"Indefinite exile?"
"It is enough." Erik made a brief gesture of resignation. "I had forgotten there were children."
I nodded and would have turned away both relieved and satisfied, but still he lingered at the window.
"She chose to go with him," he said after a moment, "his wife, the little princess. She defied the wishes of her mother and her brother and insisted on sharing her husband's fate. I think she would willingly have shared even a cage to be near him."
I raised my shoulders in a hesitant shrug.
"Their affection is well known. Did you expect her to desert him?"
"I have taken from him nothing of value," he said broodingly. "Even in his ruin their love defeats me. I have failed."
"Yes," I agreed with sad, unthinking absence, "there is nothing you can do to destroy the love of others."
There was a moment of silence and then, without warning, Erik suddenly struck both his fists against the window with a violence that shattered the glass.
"I have never accepted defeat!" he shouted. "Never! And I don't intend to begin now! I will find a better way to be revenged!"
As I stared at the blazing eyes behind the mask, I was suddenly afraid that I had quite unwittingly set my own seal upon the grand vazir's death warrant.
Two months passed peacefully enough, without incident, and I began to hope that Erik's vindictive anger had cooled.
The grand vazir remained in captivity, with his wife tasting all his food in order to shield him from the poison that had ended the lives of so many fallen favorites in the past. It was said that his fear of treachery was so great that he never left his wife's apartments for a moment, even to bathe.
I thought often of the beautiful palace of Fin, with its graceful cypress avenues, and its marble canals full of swift flowing water. I thought of a great and noble man reduced by his own folly to a state of cringing terror and I reflected that even if Erik showed forbearance now, there were still many others who would lose no time in seeking the grand vazir's death. A fallen favorite was rarely permitted to live for long.
In January Erik left court unexpectedly. None of his servants could tell me where he had gone or when he would be back, and I was deeply uneasy. I knew he would not have returned to Mazanderan without me… so where else could he have gone?
Several nights later, when the whole palace was buzzing with rumors of the grand vazir's murder, I went to Erik's apartments, sick at heart, and determined to wait for his return.
His rooms were filled with an odd assortment of creatures, most of them injured and in various stages of recovery. A lizard limped around a small tank with a tiny splint on its rear leg; a bat with a torn wing hung upside down and eyed me hopefully, as though it expected to be fed; a cat with a bandage swathed over one eye tried to climb onto my lap and made my flesh cringe so badly that I was forced to shut it in the marbled bathroom.
I sat there grimly in this menagerie of hospitalized animals and waited to ask the question that was burning into me like an acid.
Did you kill him, Erik? Did you?
The story was imprinted on my brain by now. I had it by heart, every last treacherous detail, except the one I had to know…
A lady of the harem had been sent to Kashan, bearing news of honorable retirement in Kerbela. Told that the Coat of Honor was even now upon its way to him, the grand vazir had been persuaded to leave his wife's apartments for the first time since his captivity began, to purify himself in the bathing chambers. There he had met with the shah's assassins and, being offered a choice of death, his veins were duly opened with ritual ceremony, in accordance with his last request. The assassins had not yet been named and I was stricken with a terrible feeling of foreboding and despair.
Erik walked into the room shortly after midnight, and if he was surprised to find me waiting there, he gave no sign as he tossed his hat and cloak into the arms of a hovering servant and waved the man away.
"Where have you been?" I demanded curtly.
"Nowhere that is any concern of yours," he retorted with infuriating calm.
"It is my business to know exactly where you are at all times. You know that I am answerable to the shah for your activities."
"Don't exceed your commission!" he snapped suddenly. "I am not a prisoner in one of your petty Mazanderan jails."
I watched him ladle sherbet into a glass with a fine wooden pear-spoon.
"Erik," I said hopelessly, "you must know what I suspect."
"How the devil should I know what you suspect?" he demanded. "I'm not a mind reader!"
"Mirza Taqui Khan…" I began hesitantly, "—what do you know of this tragedy?"
"I know that he is dead. I would hardly have called it a tragedy."
"No?" I countered bitterly. "And what of his wife, what of his young children…
yes!
… you turn away at that, don't you? Did you go to Kashan, Erik?"
He stared at me in silence with eyes that seemed strangely sad.
"Answer me!" I cried, suddenly beside myself with an emotion I could barely control. "Did you go to Kashan with his assassins? Did you?"
Reaching inside his capacious magician's sleeve, Erik withdrew a small enameled casket and handed it to me.
"There is your answer," he muttered grimly. "Take great care how you open it."
I took the casket to an oil lamp and lifted the lid warily. Inside, on the red velvet lining, lurked an angry black Kashan scorpion with its tail curled ready to strike. Disturbed by the sudden light the creature darted toward the raised lid and in my alarm I lost my grip upon the little box and dropped it.
I felt the sting just below my ankle and gave a gasp of shock at the scaring pain.
Erik moved like the god of lightning and a second later the scorpion was skewered to the floor with the point of his knife—the same knife, I presumed, that had rendered the last service to the grand vazir.
"You damned fool!" he said in concerned alarm. "I told you to be careful."
Pushing me into a chair he pulled the slipper from my foot, which was already beginning to swell like an angry red balloon. I saw him hold the tip of his knife in a candle flame before he made the incision in my flesh, and then, as the notorious venom coursed through my veins, I felt myself falling.
When I came to myself I was lying on his divan. My foot was throbbing like the devil beneath a layer of linen bandaging, and the room was filled with an unpleasant burning odor. Turning my head with difficulty, I saw Erik pouring a noxious, oily substance into a vial.
He came over to the divan when he saw me move, handed me a goblet, and placed the vial on the table beside me.