The Dragon Griaule (15 page)

We’re proud of our little treasure, are we not, he thought, we like to give it lots of ventilation.

But Mirielle Lemos, for all her dissipation, was an extremely attractive woman, and despite his sarcasm, Korrogly – a lonely man – felt drawn to her.

The air in the apartment was thick with stale cooking odors, and the living room was a typical bachelor’s disarray of soiled dishes and tumbled piles of clothing and scattered books, all strewn across furniture that had seen better days: the sprung sofa, a couple of easy chairs shiny with dirt and grease, a thread-bare brown carpet with a faded blue pattern, a small scarred table that bore several framed sketches, one depicting a woman who greatly resembled Mirielle and was holding a baby in her arms – thin winter sunlight cast a glaze of reflection over the glass, imbuing the sketch with a mystical vagueness. On the wall were several paintings, and the largest of these was a representation of Griaule half-buried beneath centuries of grass and trees, only a portion of a wing and his entire massive head, as high as a hill itself, left visible; this painting, Korrogly noticed, was signed W. Lemos. He pushed aside some dirty clothing and perched on the edge of an easy chair facing Mirielle.

‘So you’re my father’s lawyer,’ she said after exhaling a stream of gray smoke. ‘You don’t look competent.’

‘Be assured that I am,’ said Korrogly, who had been prepared for her hostility. ‘If you were hoping for some white-haired old
man with ink on his fingers and crumpled legal notes peeping from his waistcoat pockets, I’m . . .’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I was hoping for someone exactly like you. Somebody with a minimum of experience and skill.’

‘I take it, then, that you’re anticipating a hard judgment for your father. That you’re embittered by his act.’

‘Embittered?’ She laughed. ‘I despised him before he killed Mardo. Now I hate him.’

‘And yet he saved your life.’

‘Is that what he told you?’ Another laugh. ‘That’s scarcely the case.’

‘You were drugged,’ he said. ‘Lying naked on an altar. A knife was found on Zemaille’s body.’

‘I’ve spent other nights lying on that altar in exactly the same state,’ she said, ‘and never once have I experienced other than pleasure.’ Her sultry, smirking tone made clear the nature of that pleasure. ‘As for the knife, Mardo always went armed. He was in constant danger from fools like my father.’

‘What do you remember of the murder?’

‘I remember hearing my father’s voice. I thought I was dreaming. Then I heard a crack, a splintering sound. I looked up and saw Mardo fall with blood all over his face.’ She tensed, looked up to the ceiling, apparently made uncomfortable by the memory; but then, as though also inflamed by it, she ran a hand along her belly and thigh. Korrogly averted his eyes, feeling an accumulation of heat in his own belly.

‘Your father claims there were nine witnesses, nine hooded figures, all of whom fled the chamber. None of them have come forward. Do you know why this might be?’

‘Why should they come forward? To experience more persecution from people who have no idea of what Mardo was attempting?’

“And what was that?”

She exhaled another stream of smoke and said nothing.

‘You’ll be asked this question in court.’

‘I will not betray our secrets,’ she said. ‘I don’t care what happens to me.’

‘Neither does your father . . . or so he says. He’s very depressed, and he wants to see you.’

She made a noise of contempt. ‘I’ll see him on the gallows.’

‘You know,’ Korrogly said, ‘despite what your father has done, he really does believe he was acting to save you.’

‘You don’t know what he believes,’ she said, sitting up, fixing him with a dead stare, her voice full of venom. ‘You don’t understand him at all. He pretends to be a humble craftsman, an artisan, a good honest soul. But in his heart he considers himself a superior being. Life, he used to say, had thrown obstacle after obstacle into his path, keeping him from achieving his proper station. He feels he’s been penalized with bad luck for his intelligence. He’s a schemer, a plotter. And his bad luck stems from the fact that he’s not so intelligent as he thinks. He bungles everything.’

The first part of what she had said was in such accord with Korrogly’s impression of Lemos that he was taken aback; hearing his feelings issue from Mirielle’s mouth acted both to reinforce his impression and – because she was so obviously her father’s antagonist – to invalidate it.

‘That may be,’ he said, covering his confusion by shuffling through papers, ‘but I doubt it.’

‘Oh, you’ll find out,’ she said. ‘If there’s one thing you’ll end up knowing about my father, it’s his capacity for deceit.’ She settled back on the sofa, her skirt riding up onto her thigh. ‘He’s been wanting to kill Mardo ever since I got involved with him.’ A smile hitched up the corners of her mouth. ‘He was jealous.’

‘Jealous?’ said Korrogly.

‘Yes . . . as a lover is jealous. He delights in touching me.’

Korrogly did not reject the notion of incestuous desire out of hand, but after going through the mental file he had begun on Lemos, he refused to believe Mirielle’s accusation; she had been so committed to Zemaille and his way of life that he could not, he realized, believe anything she told him. She was ruined, abandoned to the point of dissolution; the stink pervading the apartment, he thought, was scarcely distinguishable from the reek of her own spoilage.

‘Why do you despise your father?’ he asked.

‘His pomposity,’ she said, ‘and his stodginess. His stale conception of what happiness should be, his inability to embrace life, his dull presence, his . . .’

‘All that sounds quite adolescent,’ he said. ‘Like the reaction of a stubborn child who’s been denied her favorite treat.’

She shrugged. ‘Perhaps. He rejected my suitors, he prevented me from becoming an actress . . . and I could have been a good one. Everybody said so. But how I am, how I was, doesn’t have any bearing on the truth of what I’ve said. And it’s not relevant to what my father did.’

‘Relevant . . . possibly not. But it speaks to the fact that you’re not in the least interested in helping him.’

‘I’ve made no secret of that.’

‘No, you haven’t. But the history of your emotions will be helpful in pointing up that you’re a vindictive bitch and that your idea of the truth is whatever will hurt your father. It has no relation to what really happened.’

He had been trying to make her angry, wanting to get an idea of her boiling point, knowledge that would come in handy during the trial; but her smile only broadened, she crossed her legs and traced a florid shape in the air with the tip of her cigar. She was very cool, he thought, very cool. But in court that would work against her; it would cast Lemos in a more benign light, show him to be the patient, caring parent in contrast to her vengeful ingrate. Of course that would be more significant to a defense based on compulsion, on wrong-headed passion; but Korrogly believed he could color his actual defense with this other and so win the jury’s sympathy.

‘Well,’ he said, coming to his feet. ‘I may have some more questions later, but I don’t see any use in continuing this now.’

‘You think you’ve got me, don’t you?’

‘Got you? I don’t know what you mean.’

‘You think you’ve got me figured out.’

‘As a matter of fact, I do.’

‘And how you would portray me in court?’

‘I’m sure you must have an idea.’

‘Oh, but I’d like to hear it.’

‘All right. If necessary I’ll paint a picture of a spoiled,
indulgent creature who has no real feelings for anyone. Even her grief for her lover seems to be no more than a kind of adornment, an accessory to be worn with a black dress. And in her degeneracy, a condition prompted by drugs and the black arts, by the depraved rituals of the dragon cult, the only emotions she is capable of mustering are those she thinks will serve her ends. Greed, perhaps. And vengefulness.’

She let out a lazy chuckle.

‘That strikes you as inaccurate?’

‘Not at all, lawyer. What amuses me is that knowing this, you think you can use it to your advantage.’ She turned on her side, supporting her head with one hand, her skirt twisting beneath her, exposing even more pale firm flesh. ‘I’ll look forward to our next meeting. Perhaps by then your understanding of the situation will have grown more complex, and you’ll have more . . . more interesting questions to ask.’

‘May I ask one further question now?’

‘Yes, of course.’ She rolled onto her back, cutting her eyes toward him.

‘This display of yours, the dress up to your waist and all that, is it intended to arouse me?’

She nodded. ‘Mmm-hmm. Is it working?’

‘Why?’ he said. ‘What possible benefit do you think that’ll gain you? Do you think I’ll defend your father with less enthusiasm?’

‘I don’t know . . . will you?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Then it’ll be for nothing,’ she said. ‘But that’s all right, too.’

He couldn’t tear his eyes away from her legs.

‘Really, it’s all right,’ she said. ‘I need a lover now. And I like you. You’re funny, but I like you anyway.’

He stared at her, his anger alternating with desire. Knowing that he could have her alarmed him. He could go to her now, this moment, and it would affect nothing, it would have no resonance with the trial, it would merely be an indulgence. Yet he understood that it was this increasing openness to indulgence that signaled his impending moral shipwreck. To reject her would not be an act of prudishness, but one of salvation.

‘It’ll be good with us,’ she said. ‘I have a feeling for these things.’

His eye followed the line of her thigh to the white seashell curve of her hip; her fingers were long, slender, and he imagined how they might touch him.

‘I have to be going,’ he said.

‘Yes, I think you’d better.’ Her voice was charged with gleeful spite. ‘That was a near thing, wasn’t it? You might have actually enjoyed yourself.’

Two

During the next week Korrogly interviewed many witnessess, among them Henry Sichi, who reported that when Lemos purchased the gemstone, he had been so entranced by it, so absorbed, that Sichi had found it necessary to give him a nudge in order to alert him sufficiently to complete the deal. He spoke to various members of Lemos’ guild, all of whom were willing to testify to the mildness and honesty of his character; they described him as a man obsessed with his work, obsessed to the point of absentmindness, drawing a vastly different picture of the man than had Mirielle. Korrogly had known quite a few men who had presented an exemplary public face and a wholly contradictory one in private; yet there was no doubt that the guildsmen’s testimony would outweigh Mirielle’s . . . in fact, whatever Mirielle said in evidence would, no matter how hostile, benefit Lemos’ case because of its vile context. He sought out experts on Griaule’s history and talked to people who’d had personal experience of Griaule’s influence. The only witness whose testimony ran contrary to the defense was that of an old man, a drunkard who was in the habit of sleeping it off in the dunes south of Ayler Point and on several occasions had seen Lemos hurling stones at a sign post, hurling them over and over again as if practicing for the fatal toss; the old man’s alcoholism would diminish the impact of the testimony, but it was nevertheless of consequence.

When Korrogly related it to Lemos, the gemcutter said, ‘I often walk out past the point of an afternoon, and sometimes I throw stones to relax. It was my only talent as a child, and I suppose I seek refuge in it when the world becomes too much to bear.’

Like every other bit of evidence, this too, Korrogly saw, was open to interpretation; it was conceivable, for instance, that Griaule’s choice of Lemos as an agent had been in part made because of this aptitude for throwing stones, that he had been moved by the dragon to practice in preparation for the violent act. He looked across the table at his client. Jail, it appeared, was turning Lemos gray. His skin, the tenor of his emotions, everything about him was going gray, and Korrogly felt infected by that grayness, felt that the gray was the color of the case, of all its indistinct structures and indefinite truths, and that it was spreading through him and wearing him away. He asked again if he could do anything for Lemos, and again Lemos’ answer was that he wished to see Mirielle.

On a Sunday in late March, Korrogly interviewed an elderly and wealthy woman who had until shortly before the murder been an active member of the Temple of the Dragon. The woman was known only as Kirin, and her past was a shadow; she seemed not to have existed prior to her emergence within the strictures of the temple, and since leaving it, she had lived a secretive life, known to the public only through the letters that she occasionally wrote to the newspaper attacking the cult. He was met at the door by a thick-waisted drab, apparently the woman’s servant, who led him in a room that seemed to have been less decorated than to have sprung from a green and leafy enchantment. It was roofed by a faceted skylight, divided by carved wooden screens, all twined with vines and epiphytes; plants of every variety choked the avenues among the screens, their foliage so luxuriant that sprays of leaves hid the pots in which they were rooted. The sun illuminated a profusion of greens – pale pomona, nile, emerald, viridian, and chartreuse; intricate shadows dappled the hardwood floors. The fronds of sword ferns twitched in the breeze like the feelers of enormous insects.

After wandering through this jungly environment for nearly half an hour, growing more and more impatient, Korrogly was hailed by a fluting female voice, which asked him to call out so that she might find him among the leaves. Moments later, a tall white-haired woman in a floor-length gown of gray watered silk
came up beside him; her face was the color of old ivory, deeply wrinkled and stamped with what struck Korrogly as a stern and suspicious character, and her hands moved ceaselessly, plucking at the nearby leaves as if they were the telling beads of some meditative religion. Despite her age, she radiated energy, and Korrogly thought that if he were to close his eyes, he would have the impression that he was in the presence of a vital young woman. She directed him to a bench in a corner of the room and sat next to him, gazing out into the lushness of her sanctum, continuing to pluck and pick at stem and leaf.

‘I distrust lawyers, Mister Korrogly,’ she said. ‘You should know that from the outset.’

‘So do I, Ma’am,’ he said, hoping to elicit a laugh, some softening of her attitude, but she only pursed her lips.

‘Had you represented any other client, I would not have agreed to see you. But the man who has rid the world of Mardo Zemaille deserves any help I can give . . . though I’m not at all certain how I can help.’

‘I was hoping you might provide me with some background on Zemaille, particularly as regards his relationship with Mirielle Lemos.’

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘That.’

‘Mirielle herself has not been forthcoming, and the other members of the cult have gone to ground.’

‘They’re afraid.’

‘Of what?’

She gave an amused hiss. ‘Of everything, Mister Korrogly. Mardo has addicted them to fear. And of course now that he’s gone, now that he’s abandoned them to the fear he instilled in them, they’ve fled. The temple will never thrive again.’ She tore a strip of green off a frond. ‘That was Mardo’s one truth, that in the proper environment, fear can be a form of sustenance. It’s a truth that underlies many religions. Mirielle understands it as well.’

‘Tell me about her.’

The old woman fingered a spray of bamboo leaves. ‘She’s not a bad girl . . . or at least she didn’t used to be. It was Mardo who corrupted her. He corrupted everyone, he broke them and
then poured his black juice into their cracks. When I first met her, that was five years ago, I took her for a typical convert. She was an agitated, moody girl when she came to the temple. All dance and no standstill, as the saying goes. I assumed Mardo would have her – he had all the pretty ones and that then he would let her fall from grace, become an ordinary devotee. But I underestimated Mirielle. She had something, some quality, that fascinated Mardo. I originally thought that he might have met his match sexually, for I knew from some of the other members that she was’ – she seemed to be searching for the right word – ‘rapacious. And perhaps that did have something to do with it. But of greater relevance, I believe, was that she was driven in much the same way as he. And thus she is equally untrustworthy.’

‘How do you mean “driven”?’

The old woman looked down at the floor. ‘It’s difficult to explain Mardo to anyone who never knew him, and it’s entirely unnecessary to explain him to anyone who did. When you examine what he said closely, it was all doctrinal persiflage, mumbo jumbo, a welter of half-baked ideas stirred together with high-flown empty language. But despite that, you always had the idea that he knew something, or that he was onto something, some course that would carry him to great achievement. I’m not speaking of charisma . . . not that Mardo was short in that department. What I’m trying to get to is something more substantial. There was about him an air that he was being moved by forces within him that not even he fully comprehended.’

‘And you’re saying Mirielle had this air as well.’

‘Yes, yes, she was driven by something. Again, I don’t know if she understood its nature. But she was driven much like Mardo. He recognized this in her, and that’s why he trusted her so.’

‘And yet it appears that he was going to kill her.’

She sighed. ‘The reason I left the temple . . . no, let me tell you first the reasons I joined it. I fancied myself a seeker, but even at the height of my self-deception, I realized that I was merely bored. Bored and old . . . too old to find better entertainment. The temple was for me a violent dark romance whose characters were constantly changing, and I was completely
taken with it. And there was always the sense that Griaule was near. That chill scaly presence . . . that awful cold power.’ She gave a dramatic shudder. ‘At any rate, two years ago I began to have a sense that things were getting serious, that the great work Mardo had talked of for so long was finally getting under way. It frightened me. And being frightened awakened me to the deceits and evils of the temple.’

‘Do you know what it was . . . the great work?’

She hesitated. ‘No.’

He studied her, thinking that she was holding back something. ‘I have no one else to turn to in this,’ he said. ‘The cult members have gone to ground.’

‘They may have gone to ground, but some of them are watching even now. If I revealed secrets, they would kill me.’

‘I could subpoena you.’

‘You could,’ she said, ‘but I would say no more than I have. And there is also the fact that I would not make a very reliable witness. The prosecutor would ask questions about my past, and those I would not answer.’

‘I assume the great work had something to do with Griaule.’

She shrugged. ‘Everything did.’

‘Can’t you even give me a clue? Something?’

‘I’ll tell you this much. You have to understand the nature of the cult. They did not so much worship Griaule as they elevated their fear of him to the status of worship. Mardo saw himself in a peculiar relationship to Griaule; he felt he was the spiritual descendant of that first wizard who long ago did battle with the dragon . . . a sort of ritual adversary, both celebrant and enemy. That kind of duality appealed to Mardo; he considered it the height of subtlety.’

Korrogly continued to press her, but she would say no more and finally he gave it up. ‘Did Mirielle know about the work?’

‘I doubt it. Mardo’s trust of her extended to the material world, but this was something else, something magical. Something serious. And that troubled me. I didn’t want things to be serious, I began to be afraid. People vanished, conversations became whispered, the darkness inside the temple seemed to be spreading everywhere. Finally I couldn’t bear it. I started
to notice things. Perhaps I’d always noticed them, but had preferred not to see them. At any rate, I realized then how dangerous a thing had been my boredom, how low I had let it drag me. I understood that for all his drive and intensity, Mardo Zemaille was an evil man . . . evil in the blackest of definitions. He sought to master wizardly arts that have died away for lack of adherents corrupt enough to dig in the nightsoil where the roots of such power are buried.’

‘What things did you notice?’

‘Rituals of torture . . . sacrifices.’

‘Human sacrifice?’

‘Perhaps . . . I can’t be sure. But I believe at the least that Mardo was capable of it.’

‘Then you think that he was going to sacrifice Mirielle.’

‘It’s hard to credit. He doted on her. But, yes, it’s possible that he would feel he had to sacrifice the thing he most cared about in order to complete the great work. She may not have known it, but I think he may have had that in mind.’

Korrogly watched leaf shadows trembling on the sunlit floor; he felt tired, out of his element. What, he thought, am I doing here, talking to an old lady about evil, trying to prove that a dragon has committed murder, what am I doing?

‘You mentioned trust between the two of them.’

‘Yes, Mardo made it plain to everyone that in the event anything happened to him, she was to lead the temple. There was something . . .’

‘What?’ Korrogly asked.

‘I was going to say I always suspected that there was a secret history between them, and that was another reason for Mardo’s trust. It was something I felt was true . . . but it was only a feeling. Nothing admissible, nothing you could use. Anyway, I suppose he drew up documents that would grant her some kind of legal succession. He was a stickler for that sort of detail.’ She tilted her head to the side as if trying to make out some indefinite quality in his face. ‘You look surprised. I’ve never known a lawyer whose expressions were so readable.’

Failure, he thought, even my face is failing me now.

‘I had no idea the bond between them had been ratified in any way,’ he said.

‘Perhaps it hasn’t. I can’t be sure. But if I’m correct and it has, you’ll have no end of trouble unearthing the documents. Mardo would have never gone to a lawyer. If they exist they’re probably hidden in the temple somewhere.’

‘I see.’

‘What are you thinking?’

He made a noise of baffled amusement. ‘I thought this would be such a simple case, but everywhere I turn I come upon some new complexity.’

‘It
is
a simple case,’ she said, her wrinkled face tightening with a grim expression. ‘Take my word, no matter how villainous a creature you believe William Lemos to be, his act has made him an innocent.’

One night shortly before the opening of the trial, Korrogly visited the constabulary headquarters to have another look at the murder weapon – The Father of Stones, as Lemos had named it. Standing alone by a table in the evidence room, looking down at the stone, which rested at the center of a nest of tissue paper within a tin box, he was as confounded by it as he had been by every other element of the case. At one moment it seemed to enclose profane fractions of encysted light, its surface clouded and occult, a milky bulge with the reek of a thousand-year-old egg trapped inside; the next, it would appear lovely, subtle, embodying the delicate essence of some numinous philosophy. And at its heart was a dark flaw that resembled a man with upflung arms. Like Griaule himself, it was a thing of infinite shadings, of a thousand possible interpretations, and Korrogly could easily believe that its point of origin was a cavity in the dragon’s body. He was, however, still unable to believe Lemos’ story; it, too, was flawed, and this flaw would be enough to lead the gemcutter to the gallows. There was just no good reason, at least none he, Korrogly, could discern, why Griaule would have wanted Lemos to kill Zemaille. Not even Lemos could come up with a good reason; he simply continued to insist that it was so, and mere insistence would not save him. Yet it was that same
flaw, the lack of patness to the story, that kept forcing Korrogly to relent in his judgment, to be tempted to belief. What a case, he thought; when he was back in law school he’d dreamt of having a case like this, and now he had it, and all it was doing was making him weary, making him wonder if he had wasted his life, if every question, even the most fundamental, was as elusive as this one, and he just hadn’t noticed before.