Healthy mug jumbledAt about eleven he saw Marisabelle leave the house. She wore a brown skirt and a short fur jacket. Her long gloves were still under her arm, but she started to put them on as she headed towards the centre. Duncan struggled to understand.“You knew,” he said after a moment. “You knew about the stolen mask.” He heard a deep despair behind the Mohawk’s voice. He spoke as if he had some responsibility to the mask. Duncan’s breath caught in his throat as the strange words suddenly connected. He recalled the tattoo on Tanaqua’s forearm of snakes and birds, messengers of the gods. The Mohawk belonged to one of the secret Iroquois societies whose sacred duty was to protect the masks. millions of rocks on the road to the south. Almost immediately I regretted the question. Rash’s face scrunched up and his mouth twisted as if he’d eaten something bitter. I am on my own in Paris. Grand-Duke Dimitri, whom I had not seen since 1914, arrives in Paris at this moment. We dined together. I saw him the following day. In a very friendly way, I say to him: On page three was a stamped photograph of the dead man, jejune like all passport photos; a fairly young man with slicked-back hair, signed underneath: Jack Mortimer. One believed it was possible to drive crime under the asphalt and the concrete of cities, under multi-storey buildings, roadways and churches. It could be confined, so it was thought, in canals, under bridges, in abandoned cellars… But that was not true at all. It rose, it penetrated into houses, stations, offices. It penetrated into Mortimer’s bank, settled at his writing desk; it travelled with him to Europe, followed him invisibly, like Satan followed Judas Iscariot, and dragged him down again into the underworld, without a sound, without a trace, without leaving a single clue. He had sat there dead, as dead as a doornail, in the taxi, with three bullet holes in him — that was all. No sound, no shadow, no sign of the murderer; the dead man had just sat there as though not dead at all, his eyes fixed in a sidelong indifferent stare, and it was only when Sponer shook him that he slumped forward and lay between the suitcase and the seat, and Sponer then realized that the man was in cahoots with the Devil, and that Mortimer was now trying to drag him, too, down into hell. How was he allowed to do so, who gave him the right, why had the guilty one gone free, why hadn’t Mortimer clung to the real murderer?… “What happened to him?” the cop asked. healthy mug jumbled “Yeah,” I said. “I see him.” ‘Well done,’ came the response in a dry, cultivated voice that did not belong to the gatekeeper. I stopped dead, turned to the trees. ‘I’m not sure I care any more, Dessie, to be honest.’ “About the curse. That mask you stole. It is very old, like the things left by the Druids in England. You know about Druid relics. They terrify people. I recall a story about a man who stole some from a museum. Within months he and his family were all dead. Where is it?” Neither Duncan nor Tanaqua had given voice to the fear he knew they shared, that the mask had been destroyed. He looked back at me.“Only the angry ones,” he said. “So, yeah. All of them.” Secret love. That’s something for me, maybe for everyone. It costs nothing to desire in silence and stick to my own thoughts about things. There’s something elegant about desiring what can’t be had. Who was it that said he wished none such ill that his wishes were fulfilled? Could it be that the fulfillment of wishes in affairs of the heart is the slyest punishment meted out by the gods? How might it be to have desired a person for years, waited for him, fought for him, and in the end be granted the wish? To continue to love and be always in the red, because the other loves less. To discover latent defects, unworthiness. Not to be able to stop loving, not to be allowed to stop — because then life’s purpose would disappear. ‘Get off me, ya puff.’ He pushed me away but I slumped right back. The cheery contagion of the whiskey had turned my limbs to rubber.. |