Bad sat slumped. His whole posture was leaden. His face was so softened by exhaustion that he had a hint of jowls, a sling of flesh gathered under his jaw. “Okay,” he said, “I get it. Dawn can’t make me. She’s too young.”
“Yes. She’s trying to force Ila’s hand by making you fade, as his brothers and sisters faded. Did she ask you to ask him why he took her to Corsica?”
Bad nodded.
“Ila took Dawn to Corsica because he knew she’d not be able to stop trying to take me—not just her sister, but her twin.”
Eve watched Bad muse, saw the tremor in his head—a vibration of denial. She said, “Dawn persuaded Ila to take Tom fifteen years ago. She tricked Ila into it, and tricked Tom, too, really, who after months of her attentions was so anemic that he wasn’t mentally competent. And Ila doesn’t like the way Tom turned out.”
Bad thought about this. Eve watched him thinking. It was like watching bubbles rise through syrup. Eventually he asked her what had happened to Chambord and Grazide.
“I know from my research that when he left his château in 1771 the marquis went straight to Marseille, from where he sailed to Naples. Chambord never returned to France. He died in Sicily in 1788. And Grazide is known to history only as a fictional character, the heroine of Chambord’s romance, Daylight.”
Chapter 15
TOM’S INVITATIONS
Early that evening Eve was rolling ripe figs into clingy strips of fat-striped prosciutto. The table on the terrace was covered in dirty glasses. Eve had just filled two flutes with Gioioso, a sparkling white, and with a deliberate, slightly unsteady hand had dribbled into each a measure of crème de framboise. When the phone rang, Bad hadn’t yet touched his glass, was still studying with drunken appreciation how the red liquor had formed billowing clouds on the updraft of bubbles. Bad heaved himself up, settled the damp towel around his loins, and went to get the phone. He carried it to Eve. “It’s Father Octave. I told him we’d been drinking all afternoon. But that I’d been for a swim.”
Eve took the phone. She said, “Bad’s been for a swim and I’ve basted my chicken twice.” Eve listened to the phone, then said to Bad, “Father Octave gathers that this isn’t a good time.”
“Tell him we are at cruising altitude.”
Eve did, listened, then said to Bad, “He says that he senses that there is little he could say at the moment that would be regarded as improper or trespassing.” Eve enunciated very deliberately. “He says he’s tempted to pursue his inquiries anyway, though it feels like taking an unfair advantage.”
“You’re good at that,” said Bad. “Quoting. I admire you for that. I want to be like that when I’m old.”
“So, I’m old,” said Eve. “I admire Father Octave’s frankness.” Then, softer and only audible to Bad, “His manipulative, Jesuitical frankness.”
“Tell him we’re having a golden hour,” said Bad.
Eve conveyed this to Father Octave. She listened, smiled, and said, “Yes. Please do,” and ended the call. “He says he’ll call again in the morning when we’re less burnished and more tarnished.”
Bad laughed and slapped the tabletop. The glasses rattled.
“He said he has something to tell me. Something about Jacques Palomba.”
“Who?” said Bad, then, “Oh, right. The boy Dawn saved.”
Ila appeared on the twilit terrace and settled in a chair, moving as though he was subject to a lighter gravity. He reached across the table and brushed the back of Eve’s hand with his withered fingers. Eve told him that Father Octave—the priest who’d written the Life of the Blessed Martine Raimondi—wanted to visit.
“Good,” said Ila. “I can ask him what he thinks about the brainless people. And clones.”
Bad saw that Eve was astonished—though it was bleary astonishment. She said, “What?”
Ila said he’d been reading that there were people who didn’t have brains but only a cerebellum, cranial fluid, and a thin layer of cerebral tissue lining their skulls. This thin layer kept them fully functional, did all the work of walking, hand-to-eye, speech and memory, reason and feeling and self-consciousness. No one knew how many of these brainless people there were since they were only ever discovered when they suffered a head injury requiring an X ray. Their whole selves were stored in a tiny deposit of matter. It took only so much to house a self—of sorts. “And then there are clones,” said Ila. “If I cloned you, Eve, where would your soul be? Does God sublet souls?”
Eve was thinking. She pulled faces, pressed a thumb against one eyebrow, and held her eye wide open. Then she took Ila’s hand and held it. “Dear, do you want to meet Father Octave? It’s a little risky because you’re a little odd. Odd, and old. Do you want to discuss your soul with him?”
Ila told Eve that he’d met Father Octave already, on the mule track above Dardo and in the cemetery at Menton—where he’d told him about Martine’s research and the parasite.
“Oh,” said Eve.
Bad tried to think of something to say, a protest about secrecy and Dawn’s safety. He opened his mouth but only produced a spiritous belch.
“When you talked about the parasite, did Father Octave understand you?” Eve said, coaxing.
“He listened.”
“Did you mention to him that you’re a vampire?”
Ila frowned. “I don’t remember. I do remember that he was unhappy to hear about Martine’s state of mind.”
Eve slapped her chest; she practically bounced in her chair with a mixture of relief and ebullience. “Good. You told him about Martine’s discoveries, and he thought you were telling him that she was delusional.” She’d lit up, seemed younger, lighter—dry and jittery, not at all like someone who had been drinking since noon.
“No,” said Ila, “I told him what Martine thought. I reported her findings. I was serious, and he listened.” Ila said that, besides, Father Octave couldn’t imagine that Martine was mad and killed herself, because Father Octave had cause to believe that she’d been killed. “It was he who told me that Tom was at Martine’s house and had answered her phone.”
Eve now seemed fully sober. She said that, just because Tom had answered Martine’s phone, it didn’t mean he’d killed her.
Dawn slipped through the gap in the yellow curtain and strolled onto the terrace. She was wearing a satin slip, and the ends of her hair were still damp from the shower. She flipped the switch that turned on the outdoor lights. The terrace became a room, the rising moon pale beyond its lights. The Ligurian tree frogs stopped trilling, perhaps wary, perhaps busy shuffling around to put a tree trunk between themselves and the electric light.
“Daniel Octave wants to come and speak to me,” Eve said to her sister. “And apparently Ila has been talking to him.”
Dawn caressed Bad’s salt-stiffened curls. She said to Ila, “I thought you weren’t speaking to anyone.” She stooped to touch Bad under his ear with her mouth.
“Now, now,” said Eve. “Bad has to eat.”
“So do I.”
“Bad’s a nursing mother,” Eve said.
Dawn kept her head by Bad’s ear—he could feel her breath misting its polished curves. She said softly—and Bad at first thought she was speaking only to him—“I know what you’re doing.” She straightened. “I know you’ve been quietly chiseling away at Ila about Bad, behind my back.”
“Oh, Dawn.” Eve was exasperated.
“I found someone I want to keep. Is that clear? This decision is none of your business, Eve. Ila has to be guided by me in this matter. He can’t think straight. He’s starving himself!”
Ila said, “It’s not myself I’m starving.”
Dawn put her bunched fists to her chest. “I’m choosing for our nest.” She was speaking only to Ila now. Pleading with him. “There aren’t enough of us. I can’t keep you alive—even if you’re as little trouble as an Eskimo grandmother. Our nest can’t be just you and me with Eve to look after us—no matter how much money and goodwill Eve can muster.
And Eve’s not getting any younger.”
“Stop,” said Ila. “Stop now. I won’t take anyone, Dawn. I’m finished with that.”
Dawn looked skeptical. “We’ll see,” she said.
Daniel Octave dialed the number from the hairstylist’s appointment book. An answering service said merely that he should leave a message. He gave his name and the number of the mobile Martine had bought him—then had to dig it out of his luggage. It told him that its batteries were low, then promptly switched itself off. He attached it to its charger and plugged it in.
Daniel tried to read, to catch up on some work. An hour passed. Then, when his mobile was charged, he used it to call Father Neske in Montreal.
Father Neske said he was sure Daniel didn’t want to hear about his sciatica, but it was kind of Daniel to ask about his health. “Or is it my heart you’re asking about?”
“Your heart?” Daniel was alarmed. “What’s wrong with your heart?”
“Or my soul, perhaps,” said the old man. “But let’s hear about you, Daniel. How’s your work? If I ask you about that, you’ll find something to say.”
“My work? Well … I’m absorbed by it.”
“And absolved of yourself, I trust.”
“No,” Daniel said. “Not anymore.”
There was silence on the end of the phone. Then, “At last,” said Father Neske. “A crack.”
Daniel thought of the cave system at Dardo, the Pilgrim’s Way, and the black mouths of its unlit, funneling side passages. He said to Father Neske that, for years, since the novitiate really, he’d been so proud of his intellectual attainments and what he’d thought of, complacently, as his spiritual progress. But he had only processed other people’s wonder, had let it pass through his hands.
“Daniel,” said Neske. “The trouble with you is that you have no desires. Or you’ve made them small. You’ve let your fears and former miseries digest them—you’ve ground desire down with miseries like gizzard stones.”
“There was something I wanted. That I knew I wanted.”
“What was that?”
“A blessing.” Daniel said he didn’t mean a ceremonious blessing—those hadn’t ever been in short supply. It was some other kind he wanted. When he’d played hockey in high school—and had been regularly trampled—his coach would check his cuts and say, “You’ll live.” That was as good as communion.
Daniel told Neske that when he was a boy of about twelve—it was shortly after his mother had been taken in hand by the Welfare people—he’d come home and walk past the ramparts of stacked newspapers (Welfare hadn’t quite got around to that) led by habit through the darkness to the kitchen and his mother. Father Groux had told Daniel to give his mother some time every day. Daniel would get himself a glass of milk and would sit and listen to her for a while before making his now foolproof excuse, “I have to do my homework.” His mother might be washing clothes at the sink and he’d have to remind her about the washing machine. She might be talking about the woman from Welfare—the smell of detergent on the woman’s clothes: “That dreadful chemical smell that’s in everyone’s backyards.” She’d say that she supposed the woman from Welfare was considered pretty. “But she’s just another of those,” she’d say. “Daniel, you should know that there are women who like sex and women who don’t. And the women who don’t like sex use it to get what they want out of men.”
Daniel told Neske that every day he’d open his illustrated Bible at a certain page. The picture showed women fetching water at a fountain. He would dip his fingers into his milk and would dab it on his forehead, where first it was cool, then, much later, dry, the milk forming a thin glaze that would stiffen if he frowned. It stayed there, as if someone were touching him lightly. It stopped him from frowning—was a kind of biofeedback. It reminded him of the picture. The way the woman in the foreground had balanced a full jar on her shoulders. The way that, when he looked at the picture, he’d begin to float and imagine that anything he touched, of any weight, he could carry. But even as he floated up he’d be thinking; he’d be nervously pleased that he was a boy, not a girl, and wouldn’t be obliged to choose—to like sex, like his mother, who wasn’t a prude and was neglected, or to be squeamish and scheming and successful. “I don’t know why I believed her,” Daniel said. “I guess I tried to follow her thinking, and it began to seem real.”
Daniel became impatient with himself. He said to Neske, “But you’ll think I’m talking about sex.”
“No,” said Neske. “You’re saying that you were discouraged from being fully alive in your senses by the squalor of your mother’s house, and by what she claimed for herself. You’re saying you were alive only in one spot, where the milk dried on your forehead, where you tried to give yourself a blessing.”
Daniel shut his eyes. He was mute with love. How he loved this man—if gratitude were love—for understanding him. When he found his voice, however, it was merely polite and gracious. He said thank you. Then he went on to explain that the Bible illustrations were Twenties aquatints. The water in the fountain had looked sweet. Daniel told Neske that he had wanted to carry it up to wash everything. He had lived with that; the water he hadn’t been able to carry apparently piled above him, behind its dam. The water came from a river that—he now knew—had carved its way out of a cave, out of the dark of God’s imminence. “For ten years now the Pilgrim’s Way under Dardo has been, for me, a place where I know God is. Where I know I can find Him.”
“But?” said Father Neske.
Daniel pinched his temples. He squeezed his eyes shut. He tried to stop himself. “But it isn’t God,” he said.
“Tell me what happened.”
“My life with my mother equipped me to follow irrational thinking. To give it a fair hearing. I’ve been hearing some strange stories, some alternate evidence. That’s how I know that it isn’t God in the cave. It’s a puzzle, and a horror.”
“Daniel?”
“I know it is.”
“Daniel, listen to me,” said Neske.
“I know it is,” Daniel said again. He was thinking of Jacques Palomba, the boy preserved by his prayers to Martine Raimondi and the man who’d been found, eighteen days before, in the open basement of a beach café, his neck nearly severed and his hands pressed to his head. (“As if he was holding it on,” the detective said.)
“Daniel, you have to tell people when you’re having trouble. When something is too much for you. You’re not providing cover for your crazy mother. That habit has never helped you.”
Daniel told Neske to please stop playing psychologist.
“Ask for help, Daniel. Tell me what it is that you feel you have to cover up.”
“I’m only trying to get to the bottom of something.”
“Talk to your confessor. Have you any idea the high regard in which you’re held? The time and attention that are there for the asking, for you? Within the Company—”
“I’m trying to get to the bottom of something whose bottom is invisible to me. My rope isn’t long enough, and I’m at the end of it. You, Father, being you—not going soft on me—should say, ‘Then let go.’ I should be able to rely on you to give me that advice.”
Father Neske laughed unhappily. “But, Daniel, I am soft on you.” Father Neske said he’d talk to the Superior of his house, who would call Daniel’s confessor in Rome to report that Father Octave was having a spiritual crisis.
“But this isn’t despair,” said Daniel. He thought of Martine Dardo in a boat without engine or oars. “I have to let go. To get to the bottom I have to fall. I must have faith that my faith won’t be destroyed by what I find.”
“Don’t do everything alone,” Neske said, pleading.
“But I do,” said Daniel, surprised.
When he finished the call his phone chirruped. He dialed its mailbox and was told by a man with an American accent—the man who had been in Martine’s apartment—that he would like Daniel to meet him, two days hence, at ten in the evening, in the
Chapel of the Gray Penitents, on the Rue des Teinturiers, in Avignon.
In the small hours, Eve, parched and hungover, took a similar call.
“Let’s parley,” said Tom.
Eve heard “party.” “Pardon?” she said, then, “Tom.”
“English, Eve.”
“You want to talk?”
“To meet. To talk. Ila’s nest and mine.”
Eve wormed her way up in bed, out of the stew of damp bedclothes. “Tom, you don’t have a nest.” Tom was being grand and managerial.
He gave her directions, an address, the time of a rendezvous. He didn’t argue with her.
“Where have you been?” Eve said. “Your publisher told me you’re still banking their royalties. And I saw your essay on Anna Beder in the New Yorker last year.”
Tom said, “Well, what do you expect? I was a whole person, a mature human being, a man of the world, when Ila made me.”
Eve asked Tom why he’d attacked her in the elevator.
“I wanted to see how many of you there were, how many would come to your assistance. I was counting—one, two. Also, I was very upset. I thought you must all know—but you don’t, do you? You still haven’t realized that Martine was a murderer.” Then Tom said it was hot inland, in Avignon, and that Eve should remember to pack her support hose.
“That’s beneath you,” said Eve.
Tom sniggered and hung up.
Dawn was still awake, intertwined with the pallid, stuporous Bad in her shuttered room. When Eve finished telling her about Tom’s proposal Dawn thought for a bit, then told Eve to take Bad by train. “Today. I’ll drive Ila tonight. First I’ll hit the clubs and gorge, then feed Ila. Make him eat. I’ll tell him that I’m not going anywhere near Tom unless he’s up to full speed. I’ll remind him that Tom’s not scared of being caught out. But, Eve,” Dawn said, “it’s beginning to look as if Martine did harm someone of Tom’s. Why would Tom turn up only to lie?”