Mysterium (22 page)

His father-in-law had once warned him to beware of women.
They’re dangerous,
he had said, grinning lewdly.
They make your soft parts hard. And your hard parts soft
.

Briefly, Demarch wondered what hardness inside him Evelyn Woodward had somehow managed to thaw.

The wind was cold and Guy was beginning to seem nervous. The tip of his Victoire flared as he drew on it, and the tobacco crackled in the chill air. “How long can you wait?”

“A week.”

“That’s not much.”

“I know.”

Guy Marris took a last draw on the cigarette and crushed it under the heel of a dress shoe. “Come see me before you leave.”

“Thank you,” Demarch said.

“No, don’t thank me yet.”

He gave Christof a toy he had brought from Two Rivers: it was called a Rubik’s Cube, Evelyn had said, and Christof was delighted with the unexpected way it turned and twisted in his hands. He insisted on taking it to bed. Dorothea led him upstairs, and Demarch sipped an evening brandy with his
beaupère,
his father-in-law Armand. They sat in the library under the eye of more than five hundred books, property of the Saussère family—mainly bound collections of sermons, some of them older than Armand himself. Demarch had never liked this room.

Armand sat brooding in his wheelchair. Five years ago he had suffered a stroke that paralyzed his right leg and removed him from active Bureau duty. His mind was unaffected, the doctors said, but since the stroke he had seemed more withdrawn, less apt to share himself.

Tonight the brandy seemed to loosen him. He turned his head slowly and fixed Demarch with a birdlike one-eyed gaze. “Symeon . . . this hasn’t been an easy posting for you, has it?”

“You mean the enquiry?”

“Yes. The ‘enquiry.’ We’re so shy of words. Plain words are dangerous. But make allowances for me. I’m short of wind. Tempted to brevity. It must be difficult for you.”

“Well, I think I’ve done a respectable job.”

“Hard for a man to preside over such strangeness.”

You don’t know the half of it, Demarch thought. But Armand still cultivated his Bureau contacts: he obviously knew more than Demarch would have guessed. He said, “Of course. . . .”

“And so many deaths.”

“Actually, there haven’t been many.”

“But there will be. And you know it.”

“Yes.” He shrugged. “I don’t think about it.”

“But you do, you know. One always thinks about it. And if you
don’t
think about it, you dream about it.” Armand lowered his voice until it was a rumble from the deep barrel of his chest. Demarch leaned forward to listen. “I was at the Mandan River,” Armand said, “after the Lakota rebellion. They don’t tell you about that in the Académie, do they? No, nor in any other sort of school, except to say that a menace was disposed of. Careful words. Discreet. They don’t tell you what the camps looked like with their watchtowers overlooking the prairie sloughs. How the grass goes on for miles and miles. They don’t tell you how muddy it was that spring. Or how the smell from the furnaces lingered when the bodies were burned. The bodies of men and women and children—I know one isn’t supposed to call them that, but that’s what they were, or seemed to be, whatever the condition of their souls. I suppose their souls went up with the smoke. A body is some ounces lighter when it dies . . . I read that somewhere.” His eyes seemed to glaze. “Everything is a test, Symeon, in our line of work.”

“Am I being tested?”

“We’re always being tested.” Armand sipped his brandy. “We’re all subordinated, not just the ones we kill. There are no victims. You have to remember that. We’re all in the service of something larger than ourselves, and the difference between us and those corpses is that we are its
willing
servants. That’s all. That’s all. We’re spared because we put our bodies on the altar every day, and not just our bodies, but our minds and our wills. Remember the vow you took when you joined the Bureau.
Incipit vita nova
. A new life begins. You leave your priggish little intellect behind.”

The brandy made him reckless. He said, “And our conscience?”

“That was never yours,” Armand said. “Don’t be absurd.”

He turned out the lights after Armand wheeled himself away. The fire had burned down to embers. He finished his brandy in the dark and then moved upstairs.

The old man’s words seemed to follow him in stuttering echoes through the chilly house.
We put our bodies on the altar every day.
But for what?
Something larger than ourselves.
The Bureau, the Church, the Protennoia? Something more, surely. Some idea or vision of the good, a republic of permissible relations, a step up from the barbarism of the Lakota and all the countless other slaughtered aboriginals.

But the corpses pile higher every day, and need to be burned.

Dorothea was asleep when he joined her in bed. Her long hair lay across the pillow like a black wing. She reminded him of a temple, serene and pale even in sleep.

He stood a moment watching the snow that had begun to fall beyond the double panes of the bedroom window. He thought about Christof. Christof still acted like a stranger. The way he looks at me, Demarch thought. As if he’s seeing something alien, something that makes him afraid.

Bisonette telephoned after five days. “We think you should go back tomorrow,” the Censeur said. “I’m sorry to cut short your time with your family, but the arrangements have already been made.”

“What’s wrong? Has something happened?”

“Only Clement Delafleur getting a little overzealous in your absence. I’m given to understand he’s hanging children in the public square.”

He kissed Dorothea good-bye. Christof was presented for a kiss and consented to it. Probably he had been coached.

He told the Haitian driver to stop at the Bureau Centrality on the way to the airport.

Guy Marris was in his office. Demarch said he was stopping to say good-bye; he had been summoned back to duty.

His friend wished him luck and shook his hand. At the door, he tucked a sheaf of papers into the pocket of Demarch’s veston. Neither man spoke of it.

It had snowed a little, the Haitian driver said, but it would snow much more before long.

CHAPTER 12

Linneth arranged with the school’s principal to take Dexter Graham back to his apartment, as inconspicuously as possible, in the principal’s automobile, which he still drove from time to time although his hoard of gasoline was almost exhausted. Mr. Hoskins was wary of her intentions but understood the urgency of the situation. She was aware of the way he watched her in the rearview mirror. The distrust was mutual, but there was nothing to be done about that.

Fresh snow had fallen, and the rear tires slipped each time they turned a corner. No one spoke during the drive. When the car stopped, Linneth helped Dex out of the rear seat. His blood, she saw, had stained the upholstery. The principal pulled away quickly and left them alone in the twining veils of snow.

Linneth guided Dex up the steps to his apartment. He was lucid enough to use his door key but he passed out again when he reached the blood-stained bed.

Linneth had learned emergency aid during her three years with the Christian Renunciates. She stripped his shirt and unwound the sodden, dirty bandage from his arm. Dex moaned but didn’t wake. The injury under the bandage leaked blood and suppuration in lazy pulses. Linneth cleaned it with water and a cloth, as gently as possible, but the pain was unavoidable; Dex screamed and twisted away.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But this has to be done.”

“Get me something. The aspirin.”

“The what?”

“In the bottle on the kitchen counter.”

She fetched the small tubule of pills and peered at its label. The fragmented English defied interpretation. “Is it a narcotic?”

“A painkiller. And it’ll bring the fever down.”

She shook out four tablets at his instruction and he swallowed them with water. She said, “Do you have a disinfectant, too?”

“No. Uh, wait, there’s some Bactine in the medicine cabinet. . . .”

“For cleaning wounds?” She didn’t like the way his eyes wandered. He might not be coherent.

“For cuts,” he said. “You spray it on cuts.”

She found the Bactine and experimented until she understood the operation of the aerosol bottle. When she came back to the bed Dex had closed his eyes again. He didn’t rouse until she bathed his injury with the disinfectant; then he screamed until she gave him a wadded pillowcase to bite on.

The wound was patently a bullet wound. The missile had passed through the fleshy part of his upper arm. She would have liked to close the injury with stitches, but there was no needle or thread at hand. He did have sterile cotton in a bag in the bathroom medicine cabinet, and she used some of that to pack the wound and a clean linen bandage to wrap it. But his fever was very high.

She pulled a kitchen chair near to the bed and watched him. Within an hour the fever had subsided, at least to her touch, and he seemed to be sleeping peacefully. That was the effect of the antipyretics, Linneth supposed. Still, she didn’t like the way his wound had looked—or smelled.

The light from the window was thin and gray. The snowy afternoon had begun to wane. She called his name until he opened his eyes.

“Dex, I have to go. I’ll be back. If possible, before curfew. You’ll stay here, won’t you?”

He squinted as if to bring her into focus. “Where the hell would I go?”

“Out to make more trouble, I don’t doubt.”

She put a second blanket on him. The room was cold and he owned no fireplace or gas jets.

She hurried through torrents of dry, granular snow to the town’s medical clinic.

The town of Two Rivers lacked a hospital. This building was the nearest thing: a cube of consulting rooms with windows of tinted glass and a wide tiled lobby. Dr. Eichorn would be here today, if her luck held. She identified herself to the soldier at the door and asked where she could find him. “First office left off the lobby,” he said, “last time I saw him, Miss.”

Dr. Eichorn was the medical archivist who had been called in, like Linneth, by the Proctors. He was a tall, hairless, patrician Southerner, a teaching physician with a degree in natural history. She found him at a desk in a consulting room. He was wrapped in two woolen sweaters and a scarf, frowning over the pages of a medical journal, eyeglasses thick as jeweler’s loupes riding the end of his nose. She tapped the open door. He looked up and his eyes narrowed in some combination of suspicion and annoyance. “Miss, is it, Stone? We met in the commissary—didn’t we?”

“Yes. . . .” Now that she was here, she didn’t know how to begin.

“Is there something I can help you with?”

“Yes, there is.” Forge ahead, she thought. “Dr. Eichorn, I need a course of sulfa drugs.”

“You mean, you’re sick?”

“No. It’s for a friend.”

He was like a muddy pond. It took time for things to sink in. Eichorn pushed the journal aside and leaned back in his chair. “You’re that woman anthropologist from Boston.”

“I am.”

“I didn’t know you were also a medical prodigy.”

“Sir, I’m not. But I was trained by the Christian Renunciates and I know how to administer drugs.”

“And how to prescribe them?”

“The object is to ward off infection in a wound.”

“A
wound,
you say.”

“Yes.”

“One of your anthropological subjects?”

The question was awkward, but Linneth nodded.

“I see. Well, maybe the best thing would be if the patient came to me directly.”

“That would be difficult.”

“Or if you took me to the patient.”

“It isn’t necessary.” She worked to keep any hint of desperation out of her voice. “I know your time is valuable. I’m asking this favor as a colleague, Dr. Eichorn.”

“As a
colleague
? Am I the
colleague
of a woman who studies savages?” He shook his bald head ponderously. “Sulfanilamide. Well, that’s problematic. There was trouble last night—you may have heard of it.”

“Only rumors.”

“Shooting in the main street.”

“I see.”

“A fire.”

“If you say so.”

Eichorn studied her from his turgid depths. Linneth waited for his verdict. She counted silently to ten and was careful not to lower her gaze.

“In this building,” Eichorn said, “there are antibiotics the like of which I’ve never seen. I don’t know where this town came from or where it may be going, but there were some clever people here. We’ll be reaping the rewards for decades. We owe someone a debt, Miss Stone. I don’t know who.” He rubbed his scalp with a bony hand. “No one will miss a bottle of pills. But let’s keep this between us, yes?”

Linneth knew that something inside her had changed, but the change had been gradual and she couldn’t be sure of its nature or degree. It was as if she had opened a familiar door and found a strange new landscape beyond it.

Maybe the change had begun when the Proctor Symeon Demarch invaded her home in Boston, or when she arrived in this impossible town. But the axis and emblem of that change was surely Dexter Graham—not only the man but the qualities she had espied in him: skepticism, courage, defiance.

She thought at first his virtues might be common American virtues, but the evidence for that was scant. Linneth had sampled the magazines and newspapers of his world and found them brash but often vulgar and concerned above all else with fashion: fashions in politics as much as fashions in dress; and fashion, Linneth thought, was only that drab whore Conformity in gaudier paint. Dexter Graham defied convention. He seemed to weigh everything—everything she said to him, her words, her
presence
—on an invisible scale. He had the bearing of a judge, but there was nothing imperious or awful in it. He did not exempt himself from judgment. She sensed that he had long ago passed some verdict on himself, and the verdict was far from favorable.

Obviously, she should have turned him over to the soldiers as soon as she saw his wound. But when she thought about it she remembered a passage in the book he had given her,
Huckleberry Finn,
by Mr. Mark Twain. Much of the book had been hard to decipher, but there was a pivotal moment when Huck debated whether he ought to turn over his friend, the Negro Jim, to authorities. By the standards of his time, giving up Jim was the right thing to do. Huckleberry Finn had been told he would go to Hell and suffer unspeakable torment if he abetted an escaped slave. Nevertheless, Huck helped his friend. If it meant going to Hell, then he’d go to Hell.