The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque (29 page)

I didn't mean to be so impatient, but I said, "You can bypass the metaphysics for my sake, Goren.

What was it you found?"

He looked momentarily startled, then smiled and con-tinued. "There are a number of references to this affliction in ancient texts. Pliny the Elder, Herodotus, Galen. It had a name in the ancient world, the

Tears of Carthage. When that great Phoenician city was sacked by Rome, its fields sown with salt, some of the women who were spirited away by the attacking force carried with them small vials of what was thought to be a rare perfume. They anointed their new masters with it, and lo and behold, tears of blood ran until the men's hearts had nothing left to pump. A parasitical Trojan horse, in so many words.

"The Phoenicians had made deep inroads into the African continent, and my guess is that this
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was some kind of river parasite, for there are rare diseases that involve this type of drastic exsanguination which have been recorded by explorers of that mysterious continent. It is interesting that the Phoenicians used it as a weapon. The technique must have been learned from the native peoples who had first introduced them to it. From my own travels in Africa I learned a great deal from the shamans of various tribes, who possess a knowledge of natural phe-nomena that exceeds anything the Western cultures have accumulated. I believe it was the Tears of Carthage that took Shenz."

Goren's disclosure excited me, and I told him in as truncated a manner as possible, not wanting to again recount the whole long saga of Mrs. Charbuque, about the lamp full of liquid that Luciere had stolen from the archaeologist. "Could the stuff still be potent after all these centuries?" I asked.

"It doesn't seem likely, but I suppose it depends on whatever the parasite was mixed with," said Goren. "Perhaps the organism can lie dormant indefinitely and then awake when it comes in contact with the heat of a larger organism. Once it finds itself awake, it invariably moves toward the eyes. The lamp sounds Arabic and is probably much older than its contents. The Phoenicians also traded extensively in the Orient. As a matter of fact, they most likely circumnavigated the entire globe, though I doubt you would find a professor of antiquities who would agree with this statement. But here is a kernel of proof.

Along with some of the later descriptions of the Tears, there was also mention of an antidote for it. The spice known to us as nutmeg, when made into a tincture and used to bathe the eyes, repels the vermin that feast on the soft ocular tis-sue. Specimens of this spice have been found in the ruins of Carthage and other Phoenician sites. The only place they could have procured this was in what we now call the Spice

Islands, Zanzibar, in the Indian Ocean, thousands of miles away from their cultural centers."

So much ran through my mind at the moment, I could not respond at first. Finally, "Did you give this informa-tion to the man who requested it?" I asked, remembering the small bottle Watkin had given me.

"Yes," said Goren. "He paid me well, as he had prom-ised."

"Someone is using these Tears of Carthage as a mur-der weapon," I said.

"I suspected this when I read about it in the news-paper," he said. "That is why I wanted to tell you.

I was hoping you would relate thit to the proper authorities. My personal philosophy prevents me from directly aiding the state."

"It's almost too convoluted to be believed; there's too much circumstance and such vast oceans of time involved," I said.

"An instant to the cosmos," said Goren. "A last piece of information: There was one isolated case of this disease reported in the medical literature. About fifteen years ago, in London, a young woman who

worked as a maid in a certain hotel. A mild panic ensued, but when no other cases emerged, the fear of it died, and it was written off as some kind of aberrant condition."

"I'm not sure if what you tell me is more astounding or disturbing," I said.

"It's both," said Goren. "By the way, have you been sticking to the prescription I gave you?" ;

"Religiously," I assured him.

"Results?" he asked.

"Absolutely explosive," I said.

"If you need anything else, you know where to find me," he said, and rose from his chair. "I will miss

Shenz. He was a devilishly fine man."

"I can hardly bear that he is dead," I said.

"Death is a relative term, Piambo. Think of it as a change. There is no death." Goren leaned over and shook my hand, holding it tightly for an instant. Then he walked out into the dark.

Later that night, I lay in bed thinking about Shenz's final plea for me to "finish it." That is precisely what I was determined to do. I would find Charbuque and avenge my friend's death. I did not buy for an instant Goren's belief that there was no death. His exacting equilibrium had left his mind anesthetized to the truth. Life was not about the perfection of balance. That kind of stasis was a death in itself. Life was the chaos that tipped the scales.

What I wanted more than anything at that moment was Samantha next to me. As important as it was for me to find Charbuque, I also had to find a way to regain Samantha's trust. Both these tasks would be at least as dif-ficult as portraying Mrs. Charbuque from her mere words, if not more so. Nonetheless, the successful completion of both was essential for my future happiness.

The commis-sion was gone, and I

wished it good riddance, pleased to have it cleared from my conscience so I could concentrate on what was now important. That night I slept little, so beset was I by a feeling of loneliness. I had experienced nothing like it since I was a child and my father was killed by his own creation.

They are all Her

In the days that followed the disappearance of Mrs. Charbuque and the death of Shenz, I roamed the city in the pretense of hunting down a murderer. I wandered on foot, uptown and down, keeping a lookout for anyone fitting his nebulous description. I stayed away from saloons and whiskey, for I knew that path would lead me pell-mell to ruination. As long as I kept moving, I did less thinking, felt less of the anguish that always hovered nearby, and that was all for the good. My daily sojourns also left me exhausted at night and facilitated the welcome oblivion of sleep.

The stories in the newspapers did not cause the wide-spread panic expected by city officials.

Much of the populace had lived through the conflict between North and South and its aftermath, in which the casualties were so monumental that, in comparison, the fewer than one dozen deaths caused by this strange disease hardly seemed something to get excited about. Every day there were hundreds more falling victim to murder, work accidents, consumption, and poverty, and the struggle to avoid those tragedies through the acquisition of wealth took prece-dence over all else and reinforced the importance of the usual routine. If anything, the tales of victims bleeding to death through their eyes were fascinating as well as horrifying.

Sills was pleased with the information I had passed along from Goren, and the New York Police Department put a strain on the local nutmeg market. The tincture described by the Man from the Equator became regular issue for all men working the case. The police had checked with the Jewelers Association and found the fellow, a Mr. Gerenard, who had created the cameos for Charbuque. Apparently two dozen of the expensive pins had been purchased. They were described as being carved from angel skin coral with a royal blue painted background contrasting with the Medusa head in relief and set in fourteen-karat gold with a two-inch pin attached. These were probably exact replicas of the one

Charbuque had given Luciere in London.

Gerenard remarked that he had balked at painting them, but the buyer insisted, saying, "She must be

sur-rounded by darkness." One thing that can be said for Charbuque, he wasn't playing cheap with his victims. The lot had cost him a small fortune. This information was useless, though, for the buyer had given no name or address, paid for them in advance, and picked them up many months earlier. The old artisan could not clearly remember any distinguishing details about him.

In the few minutes of rest I gave myself each day from my pointless meanderings, I could not help but wonder why Charbuque had infected Shenz. All his other victims were women who seemed to be picked at random. My only conclusions were that it was an attempt to hurt me, or
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that Shenz, having had experience with the commis-sion and having encouraged me to research outside the bounds of what was readily offered by Mrs. Charbuque, represented a wild card in what both Charbuque and Watkin had termed "the game."

I went many nights to the theater, paid, and hid in the back row, simply to see Samantha. There I sat in the shadows, trying to screw up my courage to approach her and beg her forgiveness. I couldn't even tell you what the play was about, so intent was I upon her every movement, each expression of her face, the sound of her voice. When the performance was over, I took up a position in the alley across the street from the playhouse to spy on her briefly as she got into a hansom cab.

Then, on the night on which I had assured myself that I would finally make my move and show myself to her, I was standing in my miserable alley, awaiting her exit from the theater, when I felt something cold press against the back of my head.

"Careful, Piambo, or I'll put a hole in you," Charbuque whispered.

This was the moment I had waited for. So often in the past few days I had told myself that if only I

had just one more chance to meet Charbuque, I would throw caution to the wind and wrestle him into submission, perhaps even strangle him with my bare hands. Now the time had come, and I stood there paralyzed, all my imagined courage instantly disintegrating with the first hint of dan-ger. The greatest show of defiance I could muster was to say, "You murderer."

"Are you always this clever?" he asked.

"Why Shenz?" I managed to ask.

"He was rooting around too much, the meddlesome old goat. It is my habit to make only the ladies cry, but I allowed this one exception."

"Very well," I said, thinking that if his intention were to kill me, he would have done so already.

"Why those women?"

"Revenge, of course,' he said.

"Upon whom?"

"My wife. My witch of a wife."

"Those women were not your wife," I said.

"Where is she? Where has she gone, Piambo? I want her to witness what I am doing," he said. I could hear his anger building and felt the barrel of the gun wobbling slightly against my scalp.

"I don't know," I said.

"You are lying."

"I'm telling the truth. She left no word of where she was going. I've been prevented from finishing my com-mission."

"If I discover that you know where she is and do not tell me, I'll see to it that your actress friend cries like a baby."

"Why don't you just confront your wife instead of involving innocent people?"

"There is a passionate force that binds us. Call it supernatural if you will. It both attracts us to each other and repels us at the same time. The closest we can get is but a distant orbit. From that frustrating perimeter, we commit acts against surrogates, meant to wound each other. I believe this devotion can only be described as love."

"What has Luciere done?" I asked.

"So you call her Luciere, eh? Don't you know about all the men she has robbed of their creativity through her ruse of that impossible commission? To a man, she has filled them with doubt, made them useless, as she tried to do with me. Which is the more terrible crime, to end a life or to torture the living

and leave them empty husks, dried gourds forced to bear witness to their own emptiness?"

"So you feel somewhat righteous about killing those poor women?" I said, and could not help
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but laugh out loud at the absurdity of his logic.

"You're wrong, Piambo. Those women I killed are her. They are all her. Every last one of them."

I felt the gun barrel leave my head, and in that instant made my move. I began to turn in order to seize him, but I did not get even a quarter of the way around before a heavy object smashed against the base of my skull. I stag-gered forward out of the alley, into the street, waiting to hear the shot that would finish me. I was still conscious when my legs buckled and I landed on my knees. I listed to the side and fell into unconsciousness.

I woke with blurred vision and an ogre of a headache, aware at first only of the fact that I'd been beaten and spent a lot of time on the street of late. When my vision had partially cleared I managed to look up, and seeing the vague forms hovering above, I realized a crowd of people was standing around me. I was groggy, and when I tried to speak, my words came forth as incoherent grumblings.

"Is he drunk?" a male voice asked.

"Help me get him to the cab. I know where he lives," said a woman. It was Samantha.

I felt two sets of hands lifting me beneath the arms, pulling me upright. Soon I was moving along, sliding my feet as best I could, but the pain in my head doubled in strength, spreading like a wildfire, and I

passed out again.

When I next awoke, sunlight was streaming through the lace curtains of my bedroom window. I tried to sit up, but the mere attempt at movement made me dizzy. Shifting my position, I turned onto my side and found Samantha lying next to me. "Perhaps it was all a dream, the whole bizarre thing—Mrs.

Charbuque, my betrayal of Samantha, Shenz's death," I thought. Then I saw that she was fully dressed and lying atop the covers. I reached my hand out to lightly touch her hair, but when my fingers were no more than an inch away from her head, Samantha's eyes opened and she sat up.

She saw me reach-ing for her and got out of the bed.

"What happened to you last night?" she asked.

"I was pistol-whipped on the back of the head by Mrs. Charbuque's husband."

"Serves you right," she said. "And why did it happen in front of the theater I just happened to be performing in? It was embarrassing having to, first, admit that I know you and, second, cart you off the street and bring you here. If Shenz hadn't just died, I would have left you where you lay."