The Secret Book of Paradys (72 page)

When he had completed his transaction, he went back to his room and locked himself
inside
. Beyond, the noises of the guests ebbed and flowed. He visualized Julie d’Is arriving, floating among them in a pale gown and padded hair, some of it loose on her white snake’s neck. Here she touched and here she breathed, and once or twice she merely looked, and the mark of death was on them. Chorgeh patted his pillow, beneath which lay something hard and cold now. Smiling, he slipped into sleep, and dreamed of Olizette’s burial at a tiny church in the fields, a grave with a willow, mourning doves. He did not feel sad for her, asleep. He threw the flowers on her mound, and drank the wine from the bottle cheerfully, and bought a cake from a tree.

The next day Chorgeh rose early and went out. His hours were often premature, for his business in the City was that of a sightseer, flighty and opportune. No one had remarked anything unusual.

When he reached the street of Julie d’Is, Chorgeh positioned himself as he had grown accustomed to do, almost opposite the apartment building where she lived. There was a portico there, into which he could conveniently slip and be hidden. It was a morning when, generally, she would go out, attend to her
minuscule amounts of shopping, and then perambulate the park. No one was about, the day was lowering and rainy, and now and then a sharp report of thunder came. It was made for him, this day, and he only feared it would put
her
off; perhaps she dreaded storms. But no, the door opened, and out stepped the creature of the legend, the serpent, clad in her squalid coat and coiled, unbecoming hat, with an umbrella to ward off the scimitars of heaven.

Chorgeh followed her, without undue caution, just as before. No one had ever noted him; she herself, the demoness, had never turned on him, never even looked over her shoulder. She went into a draper’s shop, into a shop that sold cold meats and cheeses. Did she eat these things?
What
did she do? He had never fathomed, no one had ever said, he had never seen her, crouched in her room, the spider in her web, grooming herself and preening, smacking her lips over her kills. He was inclined to think she went into a cupboard in her apartment, and stayed there, like a lead soldier in its box. Whatever it was, he would never know.

In the park, which he had thought she might avoid but which she entered as ever, the black trees dripped and hissed, the paths were wet. Everything was noise, flashes and rushes and the crack of the thunder. When Chorgeh shot Julie d’Is with his father’s pistol, the thunder obligingly roared and the lightning sparkled. The reek of powder was crushed in rain. He had been fifteen feet from her back and the bullet had gone in under her hat. There was a painterly wash of blood on the path, but it flushed away. Her purchases lay scattered, sodden in their paper wrappings. She was a pathetic heap of old clothes, as Olizette had seemed, a scarecrow. Chorgeh did not approach, but kept to his plan. He knew she was quite dead, for presumably she could be slaughtered in the normal fashion, and the bullet must have entered her brain. He hurried away, feeling nothing, only a little bit sick, but then he had taken no breakfast, it was probably only that.

Rain fell steadily for a week, then on the first clear day, the writer came to call on Chorgeh’s mother. She was taken aback, not having seen him for months. After a while, almost surreptitiously, the writer climbed the house, and knocked on the door of the study-shrine of Chorgeh’s father.

“Yes, you may come in,” said Chorgeh.

He sat in the leather armchair, while the writer tactfully passed about the room, examining items with the cunning reserve of a man in a museum. Presently the writer sat down also. The fire was lit. They stretched their legs to it.

“Had you heard?” said the writer.

“That the Beautiful Lady had been killed? Yes. There was a small passage in some of the journals. I was only waiting for you to come and ask.”

“What did the journals say?”

“Couldn’t you read them?”

“I never read them. Nasty things. I have my knowledge from another source.”

“Naturally. Likely you know much more than the rest of us. All that the journals said was that a Mademoiselle Julie d’Is had been bizarrely shot in a garden near the Temple-Church. That there were no witnesses. That nothing at all was known. They did add, a pair of them, that unpleasing speculation had surrounded Mademoiselle d’Is in her youth. But that nothing had been said against her latterly, she seemed to have neither relatives nor friends, no one in fact with a reason or wish to slay her.”

“We may always rely on our relatives and friends for
that
,” said the writer.

“Tell me all the rest of it, then,” said Chorgeh, apparently intrigued.

Under cover of his porcelain exterior he held himself tight. He knew perfectly well the “uncle” was here in his literary capacity only. He supposed that it was Chorgeh who had murdered Julie d’Is, maybe he had no doubts. Although such pistols as Chorgeh’s father’s were common, although Chorgeh, even Olizette, had no glaring link to Julie d’Is, and although the writer indeed knew nothing at all of the ultimate involvement of the pastry shop, yet he had deduced the obvious. Though the police would never attach Chorgeh to the killing, the writer did, and the writer was here solely as that, to observe him, to see how Chorgeh went on. And it was possible, if Chorgeh gave himself away to the writer, that the “uncle” might take over from the writer, and feel obliged to give Chorgeh up to the authorities. Chorgeh had known this moment would come, and he had prepared for it. He was a practiced deceiver, and his youngness was on his side, for with the widespread fault of the middle-aged, the writer coupled youngness with inexperience.

“I know very slightly more,” said the writer to Chorgeh. “I know there was, of course, a post-mortem. I know the result of this was the news that Julie d’Is died because of the entry of a bullet into her brain, which was evident from the first. I know that a few of her erstwhile familiars were questioned. But none of them had seen her for years. It seemed to me,” said the writer, uncrossing his legs, and lighting, without permission, a cigarette, “it seemed to me that you and I, say, were worthier of an interrogation. We’d been watching the woman and discussing her fairly recently.”

“Oh, not so recently as all that,” said Chorgeh. “I say, I’m very sorry, but you mustn’t smoke in here. Mother would fly into a fit. It’s awful isn’t it?”

The writer cast his cigarette into the fire and smiled. Chorgeh had revealed an arch-cleverness. The writer could not last for more than ten minutes longer without a cigarette. He would have to go out, and why should Chorgeh, plainly intent on his father’s books, go with him?

“You haven’t, then,” said the writer, “been following Julie d’Is?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because she fascinated you.”

“That’s true. Then I found someone else who fascinated me even more. You recollect how skittish I can be.”

“What do you think of it, though?” said the writer.

“Of what?”

“Of her death.”

“I think it’s ideal,” said Chorgeh. “I think it’s inevitable.”

“Since she had no life?”

Chorgeh did not fall into the trap.

“Well, she may have done,” he said, “for all we know.”

When the writer “uncle” withdrew, tapping his cigarette case, seemingly quite delighted with Chorgeh’s acting or innocence, not entirely sure now either way, Chorgeh relapsed, looking at the fire, himself overseeing what he had said. He had made no slip, yet he had been truthful in his pronouncement. The death of such a beast was both ideal and inevitable. He felt himself no hero, and no villain, for seeing to it. It was a shame the post-mortem had shown nothing of significance, but perhaps it had and the “uncle” merely had not learned in his prying what it was. Some things would be hushed up. Chorgeh constructed for himself something more fanciful than the spike in the ring. He saw one of Julie’s bony fingers, and out from under the nail a sort of talon extruded. It pricked the plump hand of Olizette, finer than a needle. But the bullet had not been fine, it had been harsh and shattering. He had taken no chances, aiming for the head. Her hat was so unalluring, it really served her right. For he would have found her more difficult to kill if she had been lovely and dressed with taste. He would not have wanted to spoil her appearance, and perhaps must have risked going close with a stiletto. She had fallen straight over, directly down, and her soul went deeper yet, diving into Hell. Chorgeh considered the twin of Julie d’Is, the sister she was supposed to have had, and to have killed in babyhood. He saw the cradle again under the netting, and the nurse-woman throwing out the bundle into the mud. Was that what had decided him, or was it only Olizette?

Chorgeh sat back in the chair and composed himself for a nap. He would be sensible to avoid the writer for a month or so – until any ideas or fresh rumors ceased after the postmortem and the burial. The firelight glittered, and went from under Chorgeh’s eyelids, and he heard his mother’s operatic laugh rill through the house. Everything was well.

God and men pass over the battleground, prizing great gems and silver bullets from the helms of the fallen. Then the rats come in gray, smooth coats and find the secrets of the labyrinth.

There was nothing ratlike to the appearance or manner of Monsieur Tritte, who was tall and plump, with the large and capable hands of a country doctor. He had a baritone voice, a balding head, a face at once handsome and benign. The watchman of the morgue, he was the exact antithesis of what such a man was reckoned to be and frequently was. Tritte was abstemious and sober, without perversity or cruelness. He pitied his charges, with a dignity that became him, yet he found them on occasion interesting. He was himself capable of scientific investigation, having studied at the elbows of eminent practitioners, unflinching, and uncareless, as they sometimes were not.

It had happened that the men laboring at the morgue had known the name
Julie d’Is
. They had therefore had great pains over her. Though the corpse had lain on its slab for a day and a half before any work commenced, precautions were taken. Not an inch of skin, other than that of the face, was presented to the cadaver, which was then gone over minutely for a hidden armament. None was found. Weighed, pierced, portionally dissected, the poor dead thing offered no answers. To Tritte this was only what he would have expected. Her method of inflicting fatality, whatever it was, had lost its potence in the moment of her death. He had no doubt, as did not the scientists in the chamber, that Julie d’Is had been executed by one she had wronged with the sickness or demise of a lover or family member. That the police had failed to curtail her had after all given the public some rights in this matter. It was only surprising the sentence had been so long in its enactment. The killer might be discovered through a mistake, or a confession, but there were so many potential assassins, among them even victims who had recovered, that apprehension on evidence alone would seem to be hopeless.

Solely one man of the three had scoffed at the stories of the Pestilent Angel. He was an old fellow who thought he had learned all there was to know, a casual butcher of the slab who made jokes over the severed organs and the cups of brains.

When they were all gone, and the corpse lay at peace in her white cold meat, Tritte watched through the night in his room, where many books, and a microscope worthy of the morgue’s visitors, gave notice of his serious inner nature.

In the morning the City was to bury Julie d’Is, arbitrarily, shoveling her off. Tritte felt no dismay at his last, second, night alone with her, but he felt a strong sense of her nevertheless, more so now she had been cut and overhauled, as if her silent flesh cried out – not for justice or remission, not even to be heard – it was more like the low, exhausted crying Tritte’s mother had once made nightly, from toothache and worry. Though he had grown, and rescued his mother, and now she did not cry, Tritte
felt
the sound. There had never before been such a weeping in his morgue.

Thus, when he went on his rounds, he left the remains of Julie d’Is for the end, and then, peeling off her gauzy mantle, he stood and looked on her under the ray of his lamp, not seeing her nudity, her thinness, the remnant of thin soft hair, but gazing slowly and thoroughly after whatever it could be to make her cry.

Her face appeared, under the debris of her brow (from which the bullet had ejected), like a carved stone. The undamaged eye was closed, and the lips also. Her ears and nostrils were exquisitely shaped, the mark of beauty showing up, as so often, at an unpublicized part. Her breasts too were lovely, and he was profoundly sorry, the watchman of the morgue, that she had lost herself. She was not old, not lined or wizened. What had it been, her wickedness, and what did it mean?

It was as he was viewing her that something flickered at the rim of his eye. He glanced aside, and there on the inner curve of her arm, he saw a speck. Tritte’s vision was keen, but the lamp smoked somewhat. The speck, whatever it was, had not moved but only seemed to. Then, it moved once more, the length of one of his fingernails, and so stopped and was still.

He watched it, the watchman, for several minutes, and then, when there was no further movement, he bent down and stared. But all he could see was the speck he had seen at the first, like a grain of tea, there on her arm.

Tritte went away, back to his room, and here he loitered for perhaps half an hour. And then, taking up the lamp, he returned, through the shrouded marble and the dark, to the place of Julie d’Is, and held the light over her.

The speck was still there, where he had last seen it. Suddenly Tritte, from faraway memory, knew what it was. It was a flea.

An abrupt and searing shock ran through him. A lesser man would have dropped the lamp. His emotion was made up of astonishment and horror and a violent influx of realization. Here,
here
, was the method of the murderess, the poisoner. It was a
flea
. A tiny drinker of blood, for some reason so venomous itself that when it feasted on another (for surely normally it had sustained itself by the blood of Julie herself), it was liable to cause illness, and even death. Some were immune, as happened in all cases of infection, others recovered, several perished. Julie obviously was among the initial category, and doubtless her parents, and long associates, often bitten, also. To a stranger, the flea might be always inimical. It leapt upon them – a second of vampire action – then leapt back again to the host. The bite was so minute they either did not feel it or did not know
what
they had felt.