Ink (19 page)

And now my brother sits in his place, his usually impeccable uniform unkempt, the top buttons on his gray tunic undone. I never really understood his fascination with the martial ethic—his choice to give his life to those who had little more than contempt for
his kind—but
his martial primness was always something of a benchmark for my own, more wayward character. Now he sits slumped in the half-light, more wild and disheveled even than Father was toward the end. Books and broken glass litter the floor of the library, debris from the cabinets that line the walls. I step carefully with both feet and words as I approach him.

“Since when did I ever give a damn about foxhunts, Johann?” I say. “You know I never had a taste for blood sports.”

My voice is casual, but, in my pocket, my fist squeezes a crumpled telegram.

“Well, I didn't want to be too obvious,
Fox,”
he says.

“You haven't called me that since we were children,” I say.

I must have been five years old or so when the folktale of Reynard the Fox, King of Thieves, gave me the nickname that was to become so deeply ingrained in my identity that, as long as I can remember, I have felt more of a Reynard than a Reinhardt. Before his change, you see, our father's books were as much a part of our life as of his. Mythology and folklore were his hobbies, and we learned our English and our French from translations of the Brothers Grimm and Aesop's Fables. As we grew older, we moved on to Greek and Roman myths, the Bible of course, and even Oriental texts. It seemed terribly important to him that we appreciate these myths and legends as he did, the universalities of them; and it was all one with his method of teaching us the languages that they were written in, how the vocabularies shared common roots.

“Bruier,”
he would say,
“brother, frater.frere.
You must listen to the similarities as well as the differences. If you learn the way the sounds shift, then you understand that we all once spoke the same tongue, told the same tales.”

Sometimes I think he was more interested in the
idea
of us, in who we might be, than in who we were. It can't be wrong, can it, to see the potential in your children? But perhaps one should keep the actualities in mind. Anyway, as Reinhardt I became Reynard to him, his little Fox, the King of Thieves; meanwhile my brother Johann became John, Jack, Killer of Giants. My brother would taunt me that my name fit because I was sneaky and a big coward, but I just rolled the
phrase around in my head: King of Thieves.
King of Thieves.
When we played, after that, I would often be the wily Fox, and my brother the noble hero Jack, thwarting my schemes, smoking me out wherever I hid, battling me, defeating me, though I, of course, always escaped.

Our mother kept photograms of us on a display cabinet in the front room of the family town house. One shows my brother as a member of the Wandervogel, out on some camping trip and looking quite the thing in his lederhosen and neckerchief; it was the trip that he came back from prattling excitedly about his new friend—Thomas this and Thomas that—and how they were going to be soldiers together. Another picture shows me as four-year-old fop, proud in his pressed attire. I'm told that at that age I had a girl who thought me so sweet she virtually adopted me at kindergarten, even tying my shoelaces for me if they came undone. Apparently, I was quite capable of tying them myself but, well, she did not need to know that.

I look at my brother in his rumpled uniform and I wonder how much our lives have been shaped by the stories told to us of ourselves.

“What exactly is this all about?” I ask.

“I have a job for you,” he says.

I smile. Although I know there is more to all this cloak-and-dagger than a sudden opportunity for respectable employment, I try to make light of it.

“Some dreary desk job in one of father's friends’ businesses?” I say. “You know I've rather done my best to avoid that horror up to now, and I wouldn't want all those years of baccarat to go to waste. No, I already have an occupation, thank you, and while it may not be the most respectable—”

“Respectable?” he interrupts.

He closes the book and lays it on the table at his side. Cracked black leather, brass clasp, I presume that it's one of Father's books, though I don't recognize it—it looks more like some fantastic grimoire than one of those interminable treatises on medieval Spanish romance literature or some such. His hand moves gently across the surface of the cover, fingertips just touching, almost fondling, and I look around at the shattered debris strewn across the library floor; is this the product of some fevered search, I wonder, or just a pointless tantrum? I had heard that, since Hitler's speech outside the Reichstag, my brother had become … unpredictable, but this disturbs me.

“I wouldn't describe your current employment as respectable,” he says.

I pull a second chair across from a corner of the room, sit it on the other side of the table. Glass crunches under my feet.

“I'm not defending the Fatherland against—what is it now—Jews? Futurists? No. But people do need entertainment. I provide a service.”

“Ah, yes,” he says. “Cabaret and whores. Drink and song.”

He taps one finger on the stopper of a crystal decanter sitting beside the glass. I wander over to the sideboard where the decanter belongs, to fetch another glass.

“Don't underestimate the value of simple … diversions,” I say. “You and your people can have your running battles with the Futurists, your rallies, demonstrations and counterdemonstrations. The rest of us just want to get on with our lives, to forget about our troubles in an evening of, yes, drink and song. It may not be noble but it serves a purpose. I should have thought you'd be thankful that I'm actually doing something constructive with my life these days.”

He picks up the glass of port and takes a sip of it.

“Sorry. Yes, I forget that you're on the straight and narrow now, so to speak. No more gambling. No more playing Casanova.”

He takes another sip of the port.

“So have you really stopped stealing women's jewelry?”

The silence is palpable, broken only by the
clink
of the crystal stopper as I take it out of the decanter, and then by the
driggle
of port into the glass. Another clink as I replace the stopper.

I sit down in the chair.

“You do specialize in jewels, don't you?” he says. “That's what I've heard. The most notorious jewel thief on the Riviera, so they say. I'm sure Mother would be proud.”

I weigh the options, consider the various possible pathways of lies and denials. It's unlikely that he could have any firm evidence, though it's not impossible. I could play dumb and deny any circumstantial chains of mere coincidence: a childhood nickname … the happenstance of dates and places. I could bluff it out, play the shocked naif, wounded that he would even suspect such things of me. But it would not be convincing. We know each other much too well. I simply shrug.

“We all have our vices,” I say.

I knew from the moment I got his telegram that my brother had rumbled me. To be honest, I find myself thinking, it's about time; I've been waiting for this moment for years. Year after year, whenever I would return to Strann from a summer in Nice or Cannes, with the newspapers full of the Black Fox's latest
daring heist, I was always rather disappointed to be welcomed simply as the perennial prodigal. For years I expected to be taken aside by my brother, newspaper in hand, to be asked, in his sternest voice,
just what exactly I had been up to. Instead
, on more than one occasion, I remember taking
him
aside and asking that very question myself. And was he proud to be associated with these thugs, with a deviant like Rohm?

I remember later nursing my sore jaw as he apologized, tried to explain himself—how he felt at home, part of a brotherhood, part of a greater purpose— and I realized that he was lying not to me but to himself. We all have our vices, indeed.
So, how is your young “friend”?
I think. Yes, I have my own leverage. But we are not children anymore. I grew out of tit-for-tat many years ago and even if we are playing some sort of game here, the hunter and the fox, there are limits on what is fair play.

“So what is this all about?” I say.

He lays his hand on top of the book and leans forward in his chair, light from the lamp slicing diagonally across his face.

“You
are
the Black Fox, aren't you?” he says.

I hold my hands up, wrists together as if waiting for the handcuffs.

“Guilty as charged,” I say. “But you're not going to rat on your own brother, are you?”

“I don't want to see you in prison,” he says. “I told you I have a job for you. There's a jewel I need you to steal.”

“I am on the straight and narrow, as you say, these days. I'm retired.”

“I
need
you to do this for me,” he says. “You
have
to do this for me.”

His hand still plays idly over the tome upon the table. He strokes the leather surface of the book as if it's some living animal he's petting, or an attache case containing secrets that will save the nation. I imagine it handcuffed to his wrist as in some dreadful novel of spies and adventures.

I always thought, in the games we played as children, that we were both heroes of sorts, the adventurer and the rogue, the hunter and the fox. I think that he still sees himself that way, but in reality the hunters of this world have dogs that rip the fox's throat out when they catch it. To the hunter, the fox is vermin to be killed, its blood smeared on a young man's face, red as his tunic, red as my brother's armband. Given the times we're living in, those games we played, and the stories that our father told us, don't seem quite the same.

“What do you want with this jewel?” I say.

“Power,” says Guy.

Don cuts the lights. Pierrot stands, a somber shape of black on black in the now-silent hall as, at his back, a thin veil falls, a flickering orange candlelight behind it. Now, in shadow play, we see Jack dragged by chains into a cell, thrown to the ground. Shapes, cut-out puppets of a magic lantern show, bestial, monstrous things, rise in the filtered glow, surround him.

“Hail to the dark, O sacred daughter of aching loss,” I sing. “In days gone by, you took the son of earth and sky into your springs.”

Among the moving shades one shape is still—a woman or a child? A girl.

“O holy maid, when up out of the never-ending fire his father came—”

A winged form rises suddenly above the girl, bright white among the black, a trick of Don's most intricate mechanical light-engineering skills. An angel Gabriel or Leda's swan, it swoops upon her.

“—and so,” I sing, “his father brought him forth between his thighs, a cry, a name.”

“Jack,” comes the whisper from the Princess.

The shapes disperse, they dissipate, angel of light and girl of shadow separate, and then there's only Jack, huddled in chains, Pierrot's prisoner waiting for his doom. He curls up on the ground.

“Sleep, twice-born son,” I sing, “within your father's womb, your mother's tomb, your dreams. We promise you, you will be back. You shall be known in Themes.”

The lights come up again on Pierrot and now, in his black suit, he is the only darkness on the stage.

“But you, the darkness now,” I sing, “cast us aside, when on your sacred grounds we strive to hold our revels garlanded with crowns.”

I stand behind him, soft voice at his shoulder.

“Why do you hate us? Why evade us? By the purple fruit that hangs upon the vine I promise there will come a time when you will turn your thoughts within and in your blood and in your brine, the salt of semen and of sin, you'll find one thing … the spirit.”

“Harlequin,” sneers Pierrot.

He wheels and, brushing me aside, exits stage left.

——

“These creatures born of clay,” I sing, “what rage and fury they display, this Pierrot, this son of the earth-born actions of the worms of an archaic age, savage and monstrous in his ways, a giant in his inhumanity, a murderous will against divinity. Just give him time and he'll have all the servants of the Harlequin in chains. He has our comrade even now plunged in the dismal, black, abysmal prison of his palace. Do you see this, Harlequin, how Pierrot reigns? Your prophets struggle under his relentless cruelty. Come, O King, holding your golden thyrsus high up on the slopes of oil lamps, curb the pride of this bloodthirsty fool.”

I sing to the silhouette of sleeping Jack.

“Where are you, Harlequin? Out in the night, among the dens of beasts and peaks of carcasses, gathering revelers around your green-veined flute? Or in the darkwood thick of oil lamps, where the orphan gathered trees and beasts of the fields around his lute.”

“He's in prison,” says the Duke. “We just saw him thrown in prison.”

“I believe it is a metaphor,” the consul says … “m'sire.”

“O blessed veils of Empyre, Harlequin honors you. To you he will come back with his rites to lead the dance—”

Behind the scenes, Don kicks the son et lumiere into action. This is where things should get interesting, I think—Harlequin's dream, the audience's trance. Color kaleidoscopes out of projectors mounted on the wagon's lighting rig, over the walls and ceiling of the dull gray hall.

“To lead the whirling maidens over the freefall,” I sing, “over the flow of the turning axis, over the churning ludic foam, the chaos of passion and praxis—”

Gold and cerulean, glittering gilded leaves and diamond flakes of snow tumble across the walls, fractals and fronds of shimmering color in a light show, shattering sapphires and carnelians. People
ooh
and
oh.
There's even one loud
wow.
There should be, though; the acid in the dry ice should be kicking in by now.

“Over the father of all rivers,” I sing, “that brings joy to humanity with its freshwater springs …”

Then bursting through the wash of light, blossoms of silversea, in waves, crash, dappling into horses, galloping palomino mares, black stallions in the night.