Authors: Tony Strong
He hands her a copy from the shelf, and she flicks through until she finds the page she wants. 'Remember this one?'
'Of course.
"The Martyr".
"Amongst rich piles of fabrics, flasks of wine…"'
She takes up, reading from the page:
Amongst rich piles of fabrics, flasks of wine,
the precious marble, and the glowing fire,
the sickly perfumes of pale hothouse flowers,
that live a day, and then expire:
a naked woman, sensuously sprawled,
her limbs spread wide to curious eyes,
her secret places shameless and exposed,
a glimpse of pink between the plump white thighs.
Only a candle, burning bright,
its still flame undisturbed by breath,
betrays this lover's dreamless sleep,
the cold compliancy of death.
Only a crimson swathe of blood,
encircling the severed head,
reveals that she is perfect now,
as all are perfect that are dead.
Tell me, cold beauty: did your intimate in death
— whose lusts you could not, living, sate —
on your inert, voluptuous corpse his
monstrous passion consummate?
And did he, all his passion spent,
take in his hands your icy head,
and press a warm and breathing mouth
against those lips no longer red?
No matter where that man goes now,
he cannot hope to hide or flee:
for he has tasted of death's fruit,
and loved for all eternity.
She closes the book. 'It's a beautiful poem. If you ignore what it's about.'
He shrugs. 'Beauty from evil, that was his philosophy. But it was only an idea he was playing with, he never really—'
'When I was working with Connie,' she interrupts, 'there was a murder. A black prostitute. The killer cut off her head; just like the woman in the poem, in fact. Then he took pictures — the pictures that found their way onto the Internet.'
Christian looks thoughtful.
'Stella — I'm sorry, Christian — Stella was disembowelled, wasn't she? The killer took her spleen.'
'Oh, no. Don't tell me you think—'
'Spleen. That's the title of another poem, isn't it?'
He says hoarsely, 'You're saying that it's my fault. That I inspired him in some way with my translations of the poems.'
'In the old days, connoisseur's editions of poetry would sometimes have plates, right?' she persists.
'Yes. There's a very famous edition of
Les Fleurs
illustrated by Doré. It's worth a fortune now. I have a facsimile somewhere.' He indicates the shelves of books with his hand.
'That's what he's doing,' she says. 'Don't you see? He's creating a sort of virtual edition of
Les Fleurs du Mal.
His photographs are the illustrations to the poems.'
'My God.' Christian closes his eyes, appalled. 'Then I
am
to blame. It's my translations which have made him do these things.' He puts his head in his hands and rocks. 'Stella, Stella. What did I do to you?' he mutters.
She wants to tell him that he isn't responsible for what this monster does, any more than the people who translated the Bible were responsible for the Spanish Inquisition. That sick people find sickness to feed on wherever they look. But she knows that this isn't the time.
'How do I get out of this?' she says gently indicating the lines of text on the screen.
'Just type "Sleep",' he mutters.
>>Sleep
Morpheus, God of Sleep, brings you a glass of cold, clear water from the icy river of Lethe. You drink it. The mineral, slightly sulphuric taste stays in your mouth long after you have returned to the world above. You will come back very soon.
===OO=OOO=OO===
In a rented apartment on the Lower East Side — rented via the Internet, from the computer in the cyber cafe — Glenn Furnish hooks up to a laptop, purchased in a similar fashion and delivered the same day to the apartment. As the modem whistles and stutters, he dips a knife into the pool of ripe Roquefort that spreads across a dinner plate on the table beside him, and licks the blade meditatively. A bottle of wine older than Glenn himself is open next to the cheese. He sniffs the cork, passing it back and forth under his nose in the way a smoker might sniff an unlit cigar, inhaling the smell of must and damp, cobweb-filled cellars.
Glenn enters Necropolis' underworld not as Charon, but in the guise of one of his other characters, Bran, Celtic god of forests. He has been keeping Bran in reserve for just such an emergency.
If you typed the command for a description of him you would read only:
You see a stockily built man dressed in black and without a head. He carries a bag slung over his shoulder, in which the errant extremity is presumably located.
Bran slips into the library by a roundabout route and watches the sleeping Charon for a while. He types:
>>@who Charon/last
and the computer replies:
Blanche was here.
Glenn sits very still, thinking. Blanche cannot have been in the library just now, because Blanche was the name of the translator's first wife, and she's dead. He types:
>>Go to Darkroom
and then:
>>@who Darkroom/last
Blanche was here.
Bran picks up the virtual edition of
Les Fleurs du Mal
from the table where Claire left it, unlocks it and flicks through its pages slowly, stopping to admire some of his work from time to time. So nearly finished. He will have to move all this, now that his hiding place has been discovered. Luckily, in this virtual world, creating a new space for oneself is no more arduous than imagining it.
In the real world, Glenn sits lost in thought, the wine cork forgotten between his fingers.
The decadence of nineteenth-century Paris. An underworld modelled on the ancient Greeks'. A brief stopover in twenty-first century Manhattan. And finally, fourteenth-century Denmark, as imagined by a seventeenth-century English playwright.
Not surprisingly, Claire's finding it hard to get her head round the part of Ophelia right now.
'"There's rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray, love, remember: and there is pansies, that's for thoughts,"' she says, miming the gesture of handing them out.
'No!' Paul roars from the side of the rehearsal room. 'Claire, this is terrible. You're not giving me the truth.'
What's the truth? she wonders. Ophelia handing out herbs seems to her about as remote from reality as it's possible to get.
'Do your Affective Memory,' he snaps. 'Try to ground this in something.'
Obediently, she closes her eyes and thinks back to the hospital. She tries to imagine what Bannerman's patients would have made of a scrip for twenty milligrams of pansies.
'What's funny?' Paul demands icily.
'When I was in the hospital, they weren't very big on herbs,' she says. 'Methadone and Primozide were more their thing.'
'Then swap them. You don't think Shakespeare would have used Methadone and Pimozide in this speech if they'd been invented? Try it.'
She pauses, then, 'There's Tuenol, that's for remembrance. Pray, love, remember: and there is Prozac, that's for thoughts.' She mimes pouring a jar of pills into the hand of the actor playing Laertes. Unexpectedly, she shivers.
'Better,' Paul snarls. He glares at her. 'Don't hold out on me, Claire. Don't start pretending just because it feels safer.'
He struts off to harass another group.
===OO=OOO=OO===
Glenn stares at the webcam image on his laptop. The Venus walks from left to right, oblivious to his gaze. She is holding what looks like folded linen. He clicks on the link marked 'bedroom' and sure enough, a moment later he sees her enter and float the sheet over the big double bed.
An autumn storm darkens the sky outside, and Glenn reaches out to switch on a table lamp. Then, his hand still on the lamp, he switches it off again.
On the screen of the laptop, a shaft of sunlight is falling through the window of Claire Rodenburg's bedroom.
He goes to the window of his rented apartment and looks south, towards Manhattan. Rain flecks the glass. It's so murky he can barely make out the skyscrapers. But he can see enough to be sure there's no sun there either.
He goes back to the screen, and clicks on it. There's a copy of the
New York Times
on the floor of Claire's bedroom, its headline pixellated.
Glenn goes in closer. For a long time he stares at the image, like a man waiting for a Magic Eye poster to slowly swim into focus.
===OO=OOO=OO===
The only other person she needs to tell about her engagement is her old employer, Henry. She takes a cab to the Lower East Side, tailed all the way by an unmarked Lincoln, and goes up to the fourth floor in the dilapidated grille elevator.
In the corridor she notices the fresh paint and renovated industrial-chic light fittings. But the real surprise is Henry's office itself. The 1950s furniture and bentwood hatstand are gone. Henry's office, now expanded to include the suite next door, has been redone in cream and red. Gleaming chrome-legged worktables bear a cluster of bright pastel-coloured iMacs.
Henry's feet are still up on the desk, but the soles that face her as she walks in bear the brightly coloured logo of a fashionable workwear label. And instead of the half-mast tie, he's wearing a T-shirt under his suit.
'Hey, Claire,' he says, with evident pleasure, as he swings his feet off the table and gets up to greet her. 'How are you doing?'
'I'm fine,' she says. She looks around. 'And this place looks great.'
'Neat, huh?' He jerks his thumb at the computers. 'We do most of our work online now. Sure as hell beats sitting in bars all day.'
She laughs. '
You've
started using computers?'
'Well, not personally,' he admits. 'I have a bunch of college kids who come in and do the hard work. Wanna drink?' He goes to a metal locker and pulls out a bottle.
'And this is all being paid for by missing pets?' she wonders.
He shakes his head. 'Missing persons, mostly. Kids who run away from home, fathers who default on their maintenance, middle-aged men who suddenly realize that girl they kissed in high school was really the love of their life. Information is a boom market now.' He leans forward and winks. 'Matter of fact, I could find out what our customers need to know with a couple of phone calls. But the computers look pretty, and I know a bandwagon when I see one. Now,' he hands her a glass, 'tell me all your news.'
'You're not going to believe this, Henry, but…' She tells him about Christian and her.
He listens, nodding thoughtfully. 'Tell me something,' he says when she's finished. 'Would you like Christian checked out? Kind of as a wedding present? I could run a few enquiries on him, see if he's susceptible to playing around, all the old stuff.'
'Henry!' she scolds. 'If I didn't trust him, I wouldn't be marrying him. Besides, he's been checked out. Remember? I made a pass at him and he turned me down flat. How many men could you say that of?'
'Yeah,' Henry says. 'That's true.' He looks thoughtful.
'What is it, Henry?'
The feet swing up onto the desk again. 'That whole decoy thing we did on him. What was that about, do you suppose?'
She shrugs. 'We were seeing if he had a wandering eye.'
'Not exactly.'
'What do you mean, not exactly?'
'In most cases, yes, that was how it worked. But some of the work we got' — he's avoiding her eyes now — 'was referred by a firm of lawyers. Divorce lawyers. These are tough guys, Claire. They like to fight as dirty as they can for their clients.'
'What are you getting at, Henry?'
'Well, most women who employed us wanted their husbands to be faithful, obviously. But the ones who were referred by the law firm, they wanted the opposite. They wanted the husbands to hit on you big time, and on tape, to give them more leverage in their negotiations.' He spreads his hands. 'What can I say, Claire? It's a dirty world.'
'Why didn't you tell me this at the time?'
'Hell,' he says, 'I wasn't sure how you'd take it. You seemed kind of innocent back then. A romantic. I figured the less you knew about all that, the better.'
She sighs. Yet another thing someone had decided she didn't need to know. 'You were probably right. So Stella, she was one of these divorce referrals?'
He nods. 'She was about to walk out on him. Christian didn't know that, of course. But the point I'm making is, the marriage was falling apart. And I'm figuring, maybe before you tie the knot yourself, you might like to know why. I can call my contact at the lawyers and get Stella's depositions sent over. That way, at least you'll know what you're getting yourself into.' He reaches out a hand for the phone.
'No,' she says.
He raises an eyebrow. 'Sure?'
'I'm sure,' she says. 'Look, Henry, I appreciate the offer, but I already knew that it wasn't working out for Stella and Christian. It happens, right? And I'm not saying it was all her fault, but let's face it, what kind of woman lets her lawyers pull a stunt like that? Christian's never said a word against her, but reading between the lines, she was a pretty neurotic individual. I think she simply couldn't handle the fact that he was devoted to her. Anyway, Christian deserves a second chance. Everyone does.'
'Suit yourself,' he says, shrugging. 'Looks like I'll have to buy the happy couple a toaster instead. But if you change your mind, let me know, right? It would only take a couple of calls.'
===OO=OOO=OO===
Glenn Furnish sits very still. He has been sitting without moving in the little Miata for over an hour now, his gaze fixed on the door of the office block he has followed the girl to.
Eventually, he sees Claire walk out. He watches as she walks past an unmarked Lincoln further down the street. He sees her raise her arm to stop a passing cab. As the cab pulls away, the Lincoln follows it.