Again I considered, and said, “It may surprise you, Wali, but I believe you. I believe that you have been dedicated in your service. I will probably never know why, at this late date, you have let an unworthy jealousy corrupt you into malversation.”
“So say you. In all my career, I have done nothing wrong.”
“Nothing wrong? Shall I enumerate? I do not think you conspired to put the Yi named Pao in a ministerial office. I do not think you even knew of his subversive presence. But you most certainly connived in his escape when he was revealed. I call that treasonous. You have misused another courtier’s yin to your private purpose, and I call that malfeasance of office, if nothing worse. You have most foully murdered the Lady Chao and the woman Mar-Janah—one a noble, one a worthy subject of the Khan—all for no reason but to afflict me. You have done nothing wrong?”
“Wrong must be proven,” he said, in a voice as stony as his eyes. “Wrong is an abstract word of no independent existence. Wrong is, like evil, only a matter of other people’s judgment. If a man do a deed and none call it wrong, then he did no wrong.”
“You did, Arab. Many wrongs. And so they will be adjudged.”
“Take murder now … ,” he went on, as if I had not interrupted. “You have imputed to me murder. However, if some woman named Mar-Janah is truly dead, and wrongfully, there is a reputable witness to her last hours. He can testify that the Wali Achmad never once laid eyes on the woman, let alone murderous hands. That witness can testify that the woman Mar-Janah died from a knife wound administered by a certain Marco Folo.” He turned on me a gaze of arch and mocking good humor. “Why, Marco Folo, how you do look! Is that a look of astonishment or guilt or shame at being found out? Did you suppose I have been tucked abed here all the night? I have been going about, cleaning up after you. I was only just now able to lay my weary self down to rest, and in you come, to annoy me yet further.”
But I was not discomfited by his sarcasm. I simply shook my head and said, “I will freely confess the knife wound, when we are on trial in the Hall of Justice.”
“This will never get to the Cheng. I have just told you that a wrong must be proven. But, before that, the wrongdoer must be accused. Could you do such a reckless and profitless thing? Would you really dare to lay charges against the Chief Minister of the Khanate? The word of an upstart Ferenghi against the reputation of the longest-serving and highest-ranking courtier of the court?”
“It will not be only my word.”
“There is no other to speak against me.”
“There is the woman Buyantu, my former maidservant.”
“Are you sure you wish to bring that up? Would it be wise? She also died by your doing. The whole court knows that, and so will every justice of the Cheng.”
“You know different, damn you. She spoke to me this very evening, and told me everything. She waits for me now on the Kara Hill.”
“There is no one on the Kara Hill.”
“This once, you are mistaken,” I said. “There is Buyantu.” And I may even have smiled smugly at him.
“There is no one on the Kara Hill. Go and see. It is true that earlier this evening I sent a servant up there. I disremember her name, and now I cannot even recollect on what errand I sent her. But when she did not return after a time, I went to look for her. Most considerate of me, to do that personally, but Allah bids us be considerate of our underlings. Had I found her, it might have been she who told me you had gone running to visit the Fondler. However, I regret to report that I did not find her. Nor will you. Go and see.”
“You murdering monster! Have you slain yet another—?”
“Had I found her,” he went on implacably, “she might also have told me that you refused her exactly that consideration. But Allah bids us be more considerate than you heartless Christians. So—”
“Dio me varda!”
He dropped the mocking tone and snapped, “I begin to tire of this jousting. Let me say just one thing more. I foresee that it will raise some eyebrows, Folo, if you start claiming publicly to have heard disembodied voices in the Echo Pavilion, especially if you insist that you have heard the voice of a person known by all to be long defunct, and she a person slain in a misadventure of which you were the cause. The most charitable interpretation of your babblings will be that you are woefully demented by grief and guilt arising from that incident. Anything else you may babble—such as accusations against important and well-esteemed courtiers—will be similarly regarded.”
I could only stand there and seethe at him, impotently.
“Mind you,” he went on, “your pitiable affliction may redound to the public good, after all. In civilized Islam, we have institutions called Houses of Delusion, for the safe confinement of those persons possessed by the demon of insanity. I have long pressed Kubilai to establish the same hereabout, but he stubbornly maintains that no such demon infests these more wholesome regions. Your obviously troubled mind and troublesome behavior may convince him otherwise. In which event, I shall order the commencement of construction of Kithai’s first House of Delusion, and I leave you to guess the identity of its first occupant.”
“You—you—!” I might have lunged across the lilak bed at him, but he was stretching a hand toward the bedside gong.
“Now, I have told you to go and look and satisfy yourself that there is no one on the Kara Hill—no one anywhere to substantiate your demented imaginings. I suggest you go. There or somewhere. But go!”
What could I do but go? I went, miserably disheartened, and I plodded hopelessly up the Kara Hill to the Echo Pavilion once more, though knowing it would be as the Arab had said, barren of people, and it was. There was no least trace of Buyantu’s ever having been there, or ever having been anything but dead. I came with dragging steps down the hill again, even more dejected and demolished, “with my bagpipes turned inside their sack,” as the old Venetian phrase—and my father—would express it.
The sardonic thought of my father put me in mind of him and, having now no other destination, I trudged off to his chambers to pay a homecoming call. Maybe he would have some sage advice for me. But one of his maidservants answered to my scratch at the portal, and told me that her Master Polo was out of the city—still or again, I did not ask which. So I moped on farther along the corridor to Uncle Mafìo’s suite. The maidservant there told me that yes, her Master Polo was in residence, but that he did not always spend the night in his chambers, and sometimes, not to disturb his servants unnecessarily, he came and went by a back door he had had cut in a rear wall of the suite.
“So I never know, at night, whether he is in his bedroom or not,” she said, with a slightly sad smile. “And I would not intrude upon him.”
I remembered that Uncle Mafìo had once claimed to have “given pleasure” to this servant woman, and I had been glad for him. Perhaps it had been only a brief foray into normal sexuality, and he had since found it unsatisfactory, and desisted, and that was why she looked a little sad, and why she would not “intrude upon him.”
“But you are his family, no intruder,” she said, bowing me in the door. “You may go and see for yourself.”
I went through the rooms to his bedchamber, and it was dark and the bed was unoccupied. He was not there. My homecoming, I thought wryly, was not exactly being greeted with open arms and shouts of joy, not by anybody. In the lamplight spilling in from the main room, I began feeling about for a piece of paper and something to write with, to leave a note saying at least that I was back in residence. When I groped in the drawer of a cabinet, my fingernails snagged in some curiously filmy and flimsy cloth goods. Wondering, I held them up in the half-light; they seemed hardly garments sturdy enough for a man’s wear. So I went back to the main room and brought a lamp, and held them up again. They were indisputably feminine gowns, but of voluminous size. I thought: Dear God, is he nowadays disporting himself with some female giant? Was that why the maidservant seemed sad: because he had discarded her for something grotesque and perve
rse? Well, at least it was female … .
But it was not. I lowered the robes to fold them away again, and there stood Uncle Mafìo, who had evidently that moment come sidling in through his new back door. He looked startled, embarrassed and angry, but that was not what I noticed first. What I saw immediately was that his beardless face was powdered blank white all over, even over his eyebrows and lips, and his eyes were darkened and lengthened with an application of al-kohl rimming the eyelids and extending out from them, and a little puckered rosebud mouth had been painted in the middle of where his wide mouth should have been, and his hair was elaborately skewered by hair-spoons, and he was dressed all in gossamer robes and wispy scarves and fluttering ribbons the color of the flower called lilak.
“Gesu …” I breathed, as my initial shock and horror gave way to realization—or as much of realization as I needed, and more than I wanted. Why had it not dawned on me long ago? I had heard from enough people, God knows, about the Wali Achmad’s “eccentric tastes,” and I had long known of my uncle’s desperate clutchings, like those of a man adrift on an outgoing tide, at one crumbling anchorage after another. Just tonight, Buyantu had looked puzzled when I mentioned Achmad’s “large woman,” and then she had said evasively, “If that person had a woman’s name … .” She had known, and she had probably decided, with female cunning, to save the knowledge for bargaining with, later on. The Arab had more forthrightly threatened, “I will make public some paintings …” and I should have remembered then the kind of pictures the Master Chao was forced to paint in private. “The very name of Polo will be a laughingstock … .”
“Gèsu, Uncle Mafìo …” I whispered, with pity, revulsion and disillusionment. He said nothing, but he had the good grace to look now ashamed instead of angry at being discovered. I slowly shook my head, and considered several things I might say, and at last said:
“You once preached to me, uncle, and most persuasively, on the profitable uses of evil. How it is only the boldly evil person who triumphs in this world. Have you followed your own preachings, Uncle Mafio? Is this”—I gestured at his squalid disguise, his whole aspect of degradation—“is this the triumph it won for you?”
“Marco,” he said defensively, and in a husky voice. “There are many kinds of love. Not all of them are nice. But no kind of love is to be despised.”
“Love!” I said, making of it a dirty word.
“Lust, lechery … last resort … call it what you will,” he said bleakly. “Achmad and I are of an age. And both of us, feeling much apart from other people … outcasts … uncommon … .”
“Aberrant, I would call it. And I would think you both of an age to subdue your more egregious urges.”
“To retire to the chimney corner, you mean!” he flared, angry again. “To sit quiet there and decay, and gum our gruel and nurse our rheumatics. Do you think, because you are younger, that you have a monopoly on passion and longing? Do I look decrepit to you?”
“You look indecent!” I shouted back at him. He quailed and covered his horrible face with his hands. “At least the Arab does not parade his perversions in gossamer and ribbons. If he did, I should only laugh. When you do it, I weep.”
He almost did, too. Anyway, he began sniffling pitifully. He sank down on a bench and whimpered, “If you are fortunate enough to enjoy whole banquets of love, do not ridicule those of us who must make do with the leavings and droppings from the table.”
“Love again, is it?” I said, with a scathing laugh. “Look, uncle, I grant that I am the last man qualified to lecture on bedroom morality and propriety. But have you no sense of discrimination? Surely you know how vile and wicked that man Achmad is, outside the bedroom.”
“Oh, I know, I know.” He flapped his hands like a woman in distress, and gave a sort of womanish squirm. It was ghastly to see. And it was ghastly to hear him gibber, like a woman agitated beyond coherence, “Achmad is not the best of men. Moody. Fearsome temper. Unpredictable. Not admirable in all his behavior, public or private. I have realized that, yes.”
“And did nothing?”
“Can the wife of a drunkard stop him drinking? What could I do?”
“You could have ceased whatever it is that you have been doing.”
“What? Loving? Can the wife of a drunkard cease loving him just because he is a drunkard?”
“She can refuse submission to his embrace. Or whatever you two—never mind. Please do not try to tell me. I do not want even to imagine it.”
“Marco, be reasonable,” he whined. “Would you give up a lover, a loving mistress, simply because others found her unlovable?”
“Per dio, I hope I would, uncle, if her unlovable characteristics included a penchant for cold-blooded murder.”
He appeared not to hear that, or veered away from it. “All other considerations aside, nephew, Achmad is the Chief Minister, and the Finance Minister, hence he is head of the mercantile Ortaq, and on his permission has depended our success as traders here in Kithai.”
“Was that permission contingent on your crawling like a worm? Demeaning and debasing yourself? Dressing up like the world’s largest and least beautiful whore? Having to flit through back halls and back doors in that ridiculous garb? Uncle, I will not excuse depravity as good business.”
“No, no!” he said, squirming some more. “Oh, it was far more than that to me! I swear it, though I can hardly expect you to understand.”
“Sacro, I do not. If it were only the casual experiment in curiosity, yes, I have done some such things myself. But I know how long you have persisted in this folly. How could you?”
“He wanted me to. And after a time, even degradation becomes habitual.”
“You never felt the least impulse to break the habit?”
“He would not let me.”
“Not let you! Oh, uncle!”
“He is a … wicked man, perhaps … but a masterful one.”
“So were you, once. Caro Gèsu, how far you have fallen. However, since you spoke of this as a business affair—tell me, I must know—has my father been aware of this development? This entanglement?”
“No. Not this one. Not this time. No one knows, except you. And I wish you would put it out of your mind.”
“Be sure I will,” I said acidly, “when I am dead. I trust you know that Achmad is bent on my destruction. Have you known it all this time?”
“No, I have not, Marco. That, too, I swear.”
Then, in the manner of a woman—who, in any conversation, is always eager to turn it down some avenue where she can run without check or hindrance or contradiction—he began to prattle most fluently:
“I know it now, yes, because tonight when you came there and I fled from the room, I put my ear to the door. But only once before was I in his chambers when you and he had words, and that time I took mannerly pains not to overhear. He never otherwise disclosed to me the full extent of his animosity toward you, or the clandestine moves he was making to harm you. Oh, I did know—I confess this much—that he was no friend of yours. He often made disparaging remarks to me about ‘that pestiferous nephew of yours,’ and sometimes facetious references to ‘that pretty nephew of yours,’ and sometimes, when we were every close, he would even say ‘that provocative nephew of ours.’ And lately, after a messenger from Xan-du confided to him that Kubilai had rewarded your war service by letting you play stud to a string of Mongol mares, Achmad began speaking of you as ‘our wayward warrior nephew’ and ‘our misguided voluptuary nephew.’ And recently, in our most intimate moments, when we were … when he was … well, he would do it uncommonly hard and deep, as if to hurt, and he would moan, ‘Take that, nephew, and that!’ And at the surge, he would almost shriek, saying—”
He stopped, for I had clapped my hands over my ears. Sounds can sicken, as well as sights. And I felt nearly as nauseated as I had felt earlier, when I had to look upon the flayed and limbless meat that had been Mar-Janah.
“But no,” he said, when I would listen again
, “I did not know until tonight how much he really hates you. How he has been impelled by that passion to do so many dreadful things—and how he still seeks to discredit and destroy you. Of course, I knew him to be a passionate man … .” And the nausea rose in me again, as he once more lapsed into broken sniveling. “But to threaten to use even me … the paintings of us … .”
I barked harshly at him, “Well, then? It was some while ago that you heard those threats. What have you been doing since? Did you linger in his company—I devoutly hope—to kill the son of a bitch shaqàl ?”
“Kill my—kill the Chief Minister of the Khanate? Come, come, Marco. You had as much opportunity as I, and more reason, but you did not. Would you have your poor old uncle do the deed instead, and doom him to the fondling of the Fondler?”
“Adrìo de vu! I have known you to kill before, and without such womanly compunction. In this instance, you would have had at least more chance than I to escape undetected. I presume Achmad has a back door for sneaking through, as you do.”
“Whatever else he is, Marco, he is the Chief Minister of this realm. Can you imagine the hue and cry? Can you believe that his slayer would go undiscovered? How long would it have been before I was revealed, not only as his murderer but—but—so much else revealed besides?”
“There. You almost said it. It is not the murder that you shy from, nor the penalty for it. Well, neither do I fear killing or death. So this I promise you: I will get Achmad before he gets me. You can tell him so, next time you cuddle together.”