The Gargoyle (52 page)

We were just outside the city limits when I saw Brandeis’ steed rear. The horse didn’t exactly throw him off; rather, Brandeis just slumped to the side. The animal gave out a confused whinny and twisted around, as if it had lost its bearings without its rider. There was blood everywhere, in the snow, on the horse’s flank, all down Brandeis’ leg. The cloth of his pants was ripped open and there was a huge gash in the upper part of his thigh where the skin was peeled back like a demon’s smile, spitting mouthfuls of blood. His face was pale, his lips quivering. “One of them threw an ax. It caught me on the way out of the window. I’m sorry.”

I pressed my hand to his forehead and it was so cold, so clammy. I didn’t know how he’d managed to stay on the horse as long as he had. You washed out the wound with a handful of snow, and a pink puddle collected around the steaming wound. You asked for fabric, so I pulled out the first thing I could find in my saddlebag. My nun’s habit. I should have found something different but I was in shock, I think, and it was on top. You shredded it into a makeshift binding and tied it above the wound.

You sent Brandeis’ horse in the opposite direction with a slap, hoping it might act as a decoy, and scooped Brandeis out of the snow. You reminded me that the trackers were still behind us, but now they were bound to be angry, and you pulled Brandeis up onto your horse and steadied him against your back. You looped his arms around you and tied his hands together in front of your waist. “We’re not far from Engelthal. Even mercenaries will respect a house of God.”

My stomach knotted because, of all the places in the entire world, Engelthal was the very last I wanted to visit. But I understood how dire the situation was and I swallowed any protest I might have had. Brandeis needed immediate attention, so we fled in the direction of the monastery.

He hung off your back like an overstuffed scarecrow being delivered to the field. Your horse struggled under the strain and we couldn’t travel quickly, but you pushed as hard as you could. We abandoned back paths and took the most direct route, because the time for stealth was past. We couldn’t stop to check Brandeis’ wounds and I had to fight my own racing heart. As we rode, I asked the question of you that I could no longer contain. “How could you shoot that man? Through his throat?”

“I was aiming for his chest.” It was so detached, the way you said it, and it was clear by your tone that the discussion was ended.

When I started to recognize the landscape, I pointed out the best paths. At the gates of Engelthal, I dismounted awkwardly and pounded on the door. It made more sense for me to make our plea and, besides, it would have been too time-consuming to unstrap Brandeis from your body.

Sister Constantia was the one to open the gate, and a look of confusion immediately crossed her face. “Sister Marianne?”

I explained our situation and I could see that she kept looking over to you, taking in the fact that you were the burned soldier she’d helped to tend years before. When Sister Constantia finally found her voice again, she said, “Normally…normally, I would let you in…but this is not normal.” Her eyes went down, almost with embarrassment, to my swollen stomach.

I couldn’t understand the hesitation. No matter what had been gossiped about my disappearance, we needed protection or Brandeis would die. I gestured towards him for emphasis. I saw Sister Constantia’s face register the fact that the bloody rags wrapped around his legs were the shredded remains of my nun’s habit.

“If you cannot invite us in,” I pleaded, “get Mother Christina. She will not allow this man to die.”

“The prioress is in Nürnberg and will not be back soon. Sister Agletrudis is acting in her absence. I will get her.” Before heading into the monastery, Sister Constantia added just one more thing. “But she has never forgiven your desecration of the scriptorium.”

I had no idea what Sister Constantia meant, but I could be certain that I’d find out when Agletrudis arrived.

N
ovember ended with the completion of statue
21,
bringing the month’s total to seven.

Statues
20
and
19
were completed in the first week of December. Statue
18
arrived in the second week. Marianne Engel’s preparation periods on the stone were becoming longer, but her bed had remained unvisited since the night she told me about Brandeis. Our lives now consisted of only three actions. She carved and forgot, and I watched.

I watched her ignore Bougatsa; she forgot to help me bathe. I watched her push aside every plate of food I prepared; she forgot to put a gift into my St. Nick’s shoes on the windowsill. I watched her smoke a hundred cigarettes a day; she forgot to change whatever album was on the stereo. I watched her eat jars of instant coffee; she forgot to clean the blood from her fingers. I watched the flesh of her body waste away, I watched her cheeks becoming shrunken, I watched her eyes becoming ever darker; she forgot how to string words into a coherent sentence.

YOU’RE
I am not
USELESS.

I pleaded with her to take a break, but she insisted that she was running out of time. It was now not only the statues but also her Three Masters who were urging her to work faster.

I called Gregor and Sayuri because I didn’t know what else to do. They tried to talk some sense into her, but they might as well have been talking to the walls. I’m not even sure that Marianne Engel registered that they were in the room with her. When I tried to enlist Jack’s help, she turned the conversation to how the situation was affecting her. “I’ve got no more room at the gallery and she keeps sending over all these statues. It’s not like they’re big Christmas sellers, you know.” I slammed down the phone and headed directly to my morphine kit for comfort.

I had to hire workers to move the extra statues out of the basement and into the backyard. I was against this, hoping the crammed workshop would force Marianne Engel to stop, but she insisted. When I protested she started screaming at me in a language I didn’t recognize, and I crumbled. It was obvious that something terrible was going to happen.

“You can’t keep working like this.”

“Monsters are divine portents.”

“You’re covered in blood. Let me give you a bath.”

“The blood of life.”

“Why don’t you eat something?” I coaxed. “You’re wasting away.”

“I’m becoming pure nothingness. It’s glorious.”

“If you get sick, you won’t be able to help the grotesques.”

“If I get sick, I will rejoice because God has remembered me.”

She refused to come upstairs, to bathe, or to sleep, so when she was stretched out over the stone in preparation, I would bring down a bucket with warm water and soap. If she would not go to the cleaning, I would bring the cleaning to her.

The sponge over her ribs was like a car over speed bumps. Gray liquid dripped off her body, falling to the workshop floor to create patterns in the dust. Bougatsa yelped in the corner. When I turned her onto her side so that I could clean her back, her angel wing tattoos seemed to sag with the loose skin.

Jack was doing nothing to help me, but she could hardly have been unaware of the frantic carving, given her overflowing gallery. The longer Jack did not offer the help for which I refused to ask, the more my resentment grew. When I could no longer contain it, I stormed her shop and demanded, without so much as a hello, that she do something.

“What do you expect
me
to do?” Jack said. “She cares more about you than she ever did about me, and you can’t get her to stop. So just try to make her eat and drink water, and wait until she collapses.”

“That’s it?” I said. “You’re making your fat commission, and that’s all you’ve got to say?”

“Christ, you’re a prick.” Jack jabbed me in the shoulder with the pen she was holding. “Is she taking her medicine?”

I explained that I had tried to mix it into her coffee crystals but she had figured out the deceit. She had marched up to the belfry and launched the jar past my head, shattering it against the wall. “Do you know how hard it is to get coffee crystals out of a bookshelf?”

Jack nodded. “The one time I tried to sneak her medicine into her, she wouldn’t speak to me for three months. Thought I was part of the plot against her.”

It calmed me somewhat to hear that Jack had tried the same trick that I had. We ended our conversation with moderate civility, and Jack promised to come by the fortress that evening.

She brought food that Marianne Engel would be able to see was not stuffed with drugs—bread, fruit, cheese, and so on—and tried to engage her in conversation. It didn’t work. Marianne Engel was angry at us for interrupting her; she stood breaking the bread into little pieces that she dropped among the rock chips on the floor, then turned up the stereo until it drove us away. Climbing the stairs, we could hear her talking to herself excitedly in Latin.

Though we’d accomplished absolutely nothing, the effort had drained us. Jack and I sat silently in the living room for a quarter hour, barely looking up from the floor. I finally realized it was not that Jack didn’t care, but simply that she—having been through this before—really did know that there was nothing either of us could do. Still, as she left, Jack said, “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

In the morning, I found Marianne Engel sprawled over newly completed statue
17
. I hooked an arm around her and she didn’t have the strength to pull away from me despite her best efforts. “No, I have to prepare for the next one.” She meant it but she simply couldn’t resist me, and I helped her up the stairs.

Once again I rinsed the dust, sweat, and blood from her body, while her head lolled around the tub’s porcelain rim as if she were a marionette whose puppet master was on a break. She kept telling me, all through the washing and even as I was putting her into bed, that she needed to return to her workshop. But within seconds of hitting the sheets, she fell asleep.

Marianne Engel was still unconscious when Jack arrived that evening. Finding myself alone with Ms. Meredith again, I spun the cap off a new bottle of bourbon.

Jack told me about the customers who purchased gargoyles. The names were impressive: prominent businessmen, heads of state, noted patrons of the arts, as well as a Who’s Who of the entertainment business. I recognized a number of chart-topping musicians and A-list Hollywood actors, as well as one writer who is almost universally recognized as the king of the horror genre. One director, known for his highly poetic films about outcasts, had purchased at least half a dozen works. (With his mop of wild dark hair and gaunt face, he could easily have been mistaken for Marianne Engel’s anemic half brother.) While I was not surprised to discover that a number of churches bought her gargoyles, I was caught unawares at how many universities were also major clients.

Jack ate most of the Chinese food that we ordered in, washing it down with glass after glass of bourbon. She wiped the sauce from around her mouth with the back of her sleeve and asked whether my penis was really gone. When I confirmed it was, she apologized for joking about the fact earlier. I accepted her apology with as much grace as I could muster and she got a little weepy at this point; I was discovering that alcohol—as it often does with even the manliest of drinkers—tended to make her sentimental. When I asked Jack whether she was planning anything for Christmas, she basically answered by reciting her life’s story.

She had become pregnant while still in her teens and had given birth to a boy, Ted, who was now in his thirties. Jack married Ted’s father, who proved violent and constantly drunken, and she stayed with him only because there didn’t seem to be any other option. She’d managed to finish high school, but college was out of the question. When Jack got pregnant a second time, her husband blamed her for trying to wreck his life: “You go get knocked up again, even though we got no money. Bitch!” Ted, six at the time, watched his father beat his child-heavy mother at least once a week throughout the pregnancy.