Read the third installment.

CHAPTER X

"One dwells deeply with sorrow," Fontana mused, as the two, reunited, communed safely in the crypt of the Church of St. François Xavier, "while happiness is as shallow as each breath we take."

"Better to be breathing," answered Joey, by nudging his little head under Fontana's chin and doing just that: breathing in Fontana's odour, which was contentment enough.

That morning, as the dawning sun dusted the palms along the River Huveaune with gold, Fontana had found him drinking at the water's edge. Now, with Joey hidden under his jacket, anthropoid snout tucked into a fragrant armpit, Fontana hailed a taxi and off they went to the Café Beauvau on Marseilles' old harbour to celebrate.

Sitting on the bar of the Café Beauvau, a cigarette imprinted with rouge--swiped from a nearby ashtray--stuck to his pouting lower lip, Joey awaited his master. Fontana swayed blearily with drink as he relieved himself in the loo, while Joey, lousy with minute pulsations of love, quaffed what was left of Fontana's dry martini, then savoured his master's breath mingled with the pungent vapours in the goblet.

Having a fascination for Fontana's member, when funnelling down urine like a pediment gargoyle, Joey impulsively leapt from the bar, past the unfamiliar woman his master had been chatting to, onto a stool, thence over the telephones, and scurried down the narrow hallway to the loo, dragging the woman's purse behind him. The woman, called Fleuri, was too drunk to notice.

Fleuri Brunet knew the Côte d'Azur as well as any woman. Her shoes, although dreadfully expensive, were badly run-down, for she often found herself walking alone late at night, as she had in Nice the night before--or had it been two nights before? Fleuri couldn't remember where she had been the night before, only that the handsome young actor had been kind to her. She had an aversion to spending her money, actually her estranged husband's money, and preferred to give the appearance of having lived too grandly for too long. Consequently, affable drinkers, and especially gentlemen who recognised her finer qualities, naturally saw to it that she was never made to feel wanting or awkward when seriously hinged on a stretch of drinking, as she certainly had been for a while now. Fleuri had a way of gazing out over a room, usually stale with smoke and irrelevant opinions, that many of her acquaintances found unnerving in its stillness, and others, yearning for some form of instant philosophical resolve, found galvanising. Fontana had spied her melancholy pose from the street.

By the time Joey had entered the loo, Fontana had gone from contemplatively shaking the last recalcitrant droplets through the eye of his urethra to dementedly trying to squeeze more osmotic substance into the disaffected stuff of his penis.

"How do you expect me to perform if you won't co-operate?" he muttered, his penis hanging on every word.

Joey offered up Fleuri's sequined clutch from the wet tiled floor. "Here, fuck her purse," Joey seemed to be saying. When Fontana glanced, bemused, from the purse to his penis, Joey opened the accessory and poked his nose inside.

"I don't think it'll help, but I'll give it a try," said Fontana, taking the purse from his little pal and placing it over his nose and mouth. "Bloody hell, it's that awful, awful sachet--the very same Lifar dusts round his sofa and things! I can't bear it!" Somewhat recovering the stoical sarcasm his readership so admired, Fontana lit a cigarette and, upon exhaling, said, "Oh, what's the use--it wouldn't last anyway," and folded his disinterested part back into the freshly laundered darkness of his white flannel trousers. Joey had missed the peeing, but his master's comical response to the sweet stench of the purse had been some compensation. Fontana dreamily caught the drift of Joey's thoughts, such as they were, and smiled down at the persona grata who knew him so well.

"You keep boozin' it, Joey, and you'll end up like me--full of desire, but of the useless variety." Fontana put Fleuri's purse into his jacket pocket and scooped Joey up from the floor.

"Not as long as there's a quim in a crib" was the punchline Gerard Joncs, the bartender, his moustache standing squared over his toothsome grin, was delivering to Fleuri as Fontana settled back at the bar.

"What was that?" asked Fontana, not really smiling.

"Your monkey--" laughed Joncs, "it reminded me of the joke that's going around about Bishop Feydeau and Balbec the cop…"

"Oh?" urged Fontana, slyly.

I hope this doesn't turn bellicose, worried Joey, who then keened his ears toward the door onto the Quai des Belges and the click-click-click of a perambulator passing by in the street.

"This blasphemes the Church--this stupid joke of yours, Gerard," said Fleuri. "I wouldn't tell it ever again, if I were you."

"Actually, I'm quite curious about it. Social discourse is my primary subject in life," offered Fontana.

"Some subject," said Fleuri, incensed.

"It's what I do," pleaded Fontana. "I thought you liked me?"

"Don't look quite so abashed," she replied, "it's only this joke that truly offends me. You, I can tolerate."

"Good. Then please have the patience to bear with me until I've had the opportunity to absorb this rancid bit of drivel. Then I shall comment accordingly."

"'Accordingly'?" drawled Fleuri, now turning haughty. "There's no comment necessary when one's comparing the Immaculate Conception to the actions of a deranged monkey, especially when His Holiness--"

"Whose Holiness?" interrupted Fontana.

"Bishop Feydeau of Marseilles--who else are we talking about?--especially when the Bishop is caricatured as a madame presiding over a zoo."

"And how does the cop--?"

"Balbec," said Gerard Joncs.

"Balbec--feature in the telling?" Fontana continued.

"I don't remember," said Fleuri.

"I do," offered Joncs.

"Oh, don't tell it again," groaned Fleuri. "Gerard, I'll have another glass of wine."

Gerard Joncs pointed to the bottle, which stood between Joey and his master.

"Tell it to stop smoking my cigarettes," insisted Fleuri.

Joey understood and positioned the cigarette exactly as it had been in the ashtray.

"Back to Balbec," said Fontana. "How?"

"Balbec was caught with a prostitute in the Parc Borély when he was meant to be looking for Joey! The monkey!" Joncs doubled over with laughter.

Fontana looked at Joey, as if to say, "Frankly, I don't see the connection."

Joey, having followed the conversation by intonation only, could but gaze sympathetically back at his master.

"Drink?" asked Joncs of Fontana, recovering his professional aplomb.

"The same," consented Fontana, pondering the incoherence of all that he had heard.

In the late afternoon, when the sun was low enough to streak across Marseilles' most elderly waters, sending brilliant faceted reflections shivering over the tin ceiling of the Café Beauvau, Fleuri and Fontana moved to a table in the corner where it was dark enough to lapse unseen into momentary unconsciousness. It was during one of these lapses that Joey, ravished by the scent of his darling Raphaela, left to retrace the path her perambulator had taken to the Rue St Säens.

The hand delivering the pamphlet came down on the table with a thud. Reynolds Fontana's head sprang up and Fleuri's sprang forward. Squinting at the clock over the bar, Fontana couldn't quite accept that it was 8:13. The Café Beauvau would soon be full of men in from their idle day on the sea. Fleuri looked less attractive than she had earlier. Another drink would, hopefully, fix that. But she had managed somehow, in her sleep, to undo the buttons at her bodice and her dress, in eager accommodation of the night ahead, was now provocatively décolleté.

"What you need is a nice string of pearls to slither between them," said Fontana as they both stared down at her chest.

"Too predictable. And they wouldn't last long. I'd rather have my drinks than jewellery any day."

"You need a bloke who'll buy you drinks and jewellery."

"A rich Jew maybe," said Fleuri, and gasped. On the table before them lay the pamphlet, its cover bearing a cartoon rendering of the Crucifixion, the customary figures at the base of the cross replaced by curly-locked hook-nosed caricatures with protuberant lips and gleefully leering eyes. Christ himself was caricatured, it struck Fontana, as Hansel--of Hansel and Gretel fame. "I feel awful," Fleuri offered, as an apology.

Fontana glanced around the room. Several pamphlets had been left on each table and stacks at either end of the bar.

"Someone wants to fill our fellow drinkers with the vile juice of intolerance," observed Fontana, his mouth susurrous with the fruit of the juniper.

"What fellow drinkers?" asked Fleuri, signifying the emptiness of the café with a turn of her head.

"They'll be coming in any minute from their boats. I drink here on the weekends. Sunday evenings the local fishermen come in with their sons. It's a family ritual. This putrescence--" Fontana ground his thumb into the pamphlet "--is meant to poison their innocent minds."

"'Innocent?'"

Fontana stood suddenly, too suddenly, and faltered.

"Where're you going?!" Fleuri blurted, clutching at him.

"To dispose of the Martin Luther school of journalism!"

Fontana strode about the Café Beauvau snatching up the pamphlets and tearing them into quarters. This went on for several minutes, until Gerard Joncs returned from the loo. When he saw Fontana scattering the cheap paper about the floor, Joncs stopped, glared at Fontana, and shouted, "I knew it--a fucking kike! Just like her!"

Fontana frowned, looked back at Fleuri. She was smiling and gently extracting something from between her breasts--perhaps a peanut or a stray eyelash. No, it wasn't either. It was a tiny Star of David on a delicate silver chain, and it glinted, like Venus on a clear night, over her lavish endowments.

"I'm an Englishman," snarled Fontana.

"Still a Jew," Joncs exploded, saliva drenching his chin.

Dazed, Fontana directed his enfeebled powers of concentration to fall once more on Fleuri. He contemplated her reddish hair, which one had assumed was more Celtic than Israelite.

"Thought you said you were Catholic…?" ventured Fontana.

"Never," Fleuri replied.

"Thought you said this joke about the Bishop and Balbec was an abomination…?"

"It is."

"She's rich, is all," interrupted Joncs. Sneering, he sucked in his fat gut and plumped up his chest.

Fontana shot a look at Gerard Joncs as if to say: Open your mouth again and I'll kill you.

Staring back at him, Joncs spat on the floor and said, "You take your drunken Hebrew slut and get out. I don't want you fucking English Jew degenerates around when decent people are coming in--not on a fucking Sunday. And I don't want your filthy Jew money either. Get out. Oh, and take your kid with you. Your kid, dimwit, the hairy one with his finger up his anus and his penis sticking out all the time."

Fontana, now wondering where Joey had got to, took out his pistol and shot Gerard Joncs in the face.

CHAPTER XI

"What sort of riffraff have I been drinking with?" Fleuri asked herself, astonished by the unthinking swiftness of Fontana's destruction of Gerard Joncs and his face. Hearing the slurring of her words echoing in her ears, she was too embarrassed to ask where her purse had got to. Fontana ignored Fleuri's remark as he gazed down at the blubbering thing still evidencing an undeniable but inchoate vitality at the top end of the bartender's corpulent body. He then did something even he as a journalist and student of human sociology found hard to believe--he placed the toe of his shoe in the gaping wound that had once been Gerard Joncs's mouth and flicked the loose teeth floating upon the bloody slush into the air.

Attempting to leave the corner in which she had resided for the past several hours as gracefully as she could and exit the Café Beauvau without glimpsing the gruesome remains of their bartender, Fleuri glided by Fontana on very wobbly skates. But Fontana reached out, found her sleeve, and held fast. "Let's push on to Le Mabillon--for a drink."

"A drink?!"

"Yes--a drink." Fontana wiped the toe of his shoe on Gerard Joncs's pants.

"I can't find my purse," said Fleuri, staring at the exploded bag of wet meat and bone above the bartender's dainty collar stud.

"Joey'll have it." Fontana grasped Fleuri's arm more firmly at the elbow and led her out, as any gentleman would, onto the Quai des Belges.

"Fine! My honour remains intact!" she declared, each syllable broadly enunciated.

"Hardly," sighed Fontana. "The inviolability of your genealogy was the subject of this altercation, not your reputation as a lady."

Hugo de Hauteville had decided to return to Nice without seeing Reynolds Fontana again, but, just as the hour of La Bonne Santé's departure was upon him, he ordered his crew to delay. Two hours later, La Bonne Santé was still drifting round the Pointe Rouge, the crew's behaviour bordering on drunken disarray. Something horrendous was in the air, and de Hauteville was helpless to know what it was. Then it came to him: the image of Fontana's monkey at the centre of his nativity scene, lying in the manger--although in his motion picture, the manger was designated as Mr. & Mrs. Didot's kitchen sink. As he gazed out over the black water, the sea leaden beneath the darkening sky, de Hauteville began to grasp the fundamental failure of his concept.

A rational God, he speculated, surely wouldn't entrust His secrets to a Victor Didot. Ergo, it was doubtful God had entrusted His secrets to Jesus of Nazareth. To infuse a human, even an astute one with a mystical ken, with such knowledge only to give other humans a false sense of importance and pride would, he realised, be altogether contrary to the very premise of goodness. Saints he could almost appreciate--their tortured straining for sacrifice and divinity--but Victor was meant to be more than a saint. Victor was meant to be wholly unaware of his godly nature. Had that been Duckie's bright idea? De Hauteville couldn't quite recall. But of course it hadn't. Every truly significant idea within the context of Golden Lamb was generated by de Hauteville himself, and he knew it. But how had he got it so wrong?

Summing up, de Hauteville concluded that only a fool like himself would imbue a human celluloid spectre with such power and glory, and that God Himself would have come up with something more interesting. God certainly wouldn't have knowingly played into the hands of mere humans! It wasn't that de Hauteville liked the idea of Victor, or Jesus, any less, it was just that his vision for the picture really wouldn't do anyone any good, including himself, at least not the kind of good that would enable humans to forego their egocentricity and commune lovingly with all living things. Fontana's monkey had it all over Mr. Didot as an idea with which to possess the imagination of the vast masses of humankind: Joey, with no effort whatsoever, could make them love something other than themselves.

"But how on earth do we capture such a thing on film?" de Hauteville asked himself, sparkles of wonderment alighting on his sleeves as he took the wheel of his vessel.

De Hauteville now knew that the only need he might have for Reynolds Fontana would be as a link to procuring the miraculous monkey for the transformation of Mr. Didot. With Lombardi in the role of Fontana, and Joey in, yes, the role of Joey, his travesty of divination would attain the status of sacred event! He must also convince any two of the parents that filming their daughter giving birth was essential to the spiritual development of the world; and he intended to have an angle on that conundrum before setting foot upon the dock at Nice. La Bonne Santé went circling round and round, entering ever deeper waters, as de Hauteville, in a state of extreme excitation, tried to work out what he should do first, while intermittently glimpsing, in his producer's mind's eye, Jerome Lombardi up there on the silver screen with Joey slung over his shoulder.

"Aieeee!" cried de Hauteville with joy, as he pictured Violette Desroches in the role of Joey's first angelic offspring to grow into a woman. On the screen, pooled in her enormous limpid eyes, de Hauteville saw the realisation of her mission in life, while Jerome, the louche confidence man who had enslaved and exploited her, caressed her hand and tearfully sought forgiveness. By reversing their psychology, de Hauteville would bring Violette and Jerome into focus. His audience would come to know and appreciate the beauty of true empathy as his actors found themselves reflected in each other's performances. Who but himself would ever have conceived such a breathtaking innovation in the methodology of screen acting? De Hauteville knew something altogether exceptional was taking place. His imagination frothed and fulminated, a weird fire burning like phosphorous in the silky black pocket of his soul.

The crew sat around watching de Hauteville and, with his blessing, drinking his best champagne and brandy. They had, among themselves, concluded that the fey one had finally gone mad. The Mediterranean, lying deceptively still all around them, had, of course, seen such infamy countless times before, and resisted reaching up and plunging La Bonne Santé into oblivion.

Joey hunched under the white sheet sniffing the chasm of mucous and pulverised gristle, both intermingling spotily with glutinous blood, that had previously been recognisable as Gerard Joncs's nose. It had been the scent of his own excrement, formerly adhered to the toe of his master's right shoe, that had drawn him to the corpse.

Before he had finally expired, the bartender had managed to say, or so he thought, "My mama was God's gift to the brave men of Marseilles." However, no one could possibly have understood what he had said with only part of his lower jaw and tongue intact. And anyway, no one had been there to try.

It thus fell upon Joey to administer the Last Rites. Ironically, Joey didn't know what they were, but he did remember a christening he had attended when living in Bermuda. It was the christening of an unwanted mulatto infant, dying of malaria, who had been left at the gates of the British Consulate. When the Consul's daughter Rose, who had refused to let her widowed father send the beautiful brown baby away to die, brought the infant in for Joey to see, Joey had fallen in love. For days, he had sat by the basket in which the baby, whom Rose named Mary after the King's bride, languished. Mary was baptised by the Bishop of Bermuda himself, as a favour to the Consul--however not in the font of his church but in the fountain behind. Joey could still picture that afternoon vividly, even after years of careless debauch. The night she died, Joey lay plaintively by her side, his soul clinging to the retreating mists of her sweet breath as it subsided in her perfect little chest. Before leaving for school in England--where a healthy monkey looked more rabid than a spuming ferret to any Customs Officer--Rose had tearfully given Joey up to her father's kindly chum, Fontana. Joey, feeling terribly alone, had carried Mary's memory away with him like a solitary orchid plucked from the jungle.

It was in this spirit of dejection, sensing that he had been abandoned, absurdly and against all odds, by Fontana--for a mature female who hadn't emitted even the faintest musky door!--that Joey baptised Gerard Joncs with the contents of his aching bladder. As the coroner stooped to empty Joncs's blasted head into a metal pan and ordered the rest of him taken away with it, Joey crept off into the evening shadows in search of his master.

"Heh, what's this…?" said the one stretcher-bearer, pleased by what he had found on the floor. He gingerly lifted Fleuri's purse from between the thickening puddles.

"Joncs always did like pretty things," said the other out of disrespect for the dead.

"Shit."

"How's that?"

"No money…"

"Jewellery?"

"A packet of cigarettes, a few stray matches, a tortoise-shell comb--"

"With both black and white hair."

"So?"

"I can see it from here."

"Congratulations. A tiny vial of cologne--label worn and illegible."

"A slip of paper."

"What?"

"A slip of paper. Right there, by your thumb."

"Actually, it's a paper serviette--with Mr. Didot and La Bonne Santé printed on it--and blotted with lipstick."

"That's good."

"The lipstick itself, a broken disc of rouge--loose--and dented case, and a baby rattle with a pink bow bearing the name…"

"What?"

"I can't read it. There's food on it, or something."

"Here, give it to me." The one stretcher-bearer painstakingly wiped the rattle on his trousers. "That's better…"

"So, what's it say?" demanded the other.

"'Raphaela.'"

"That's a girl's name."

"No kidding." He unfolded a small square of pale blue paper and scrutinised the elegant letters rendered fretfully upon it. "Now we've got her…"

Unable to contain his curiosity, the other stretcher-bearer stepped over the body of Gerard Joncs and came to lean, the soles of his shoes slick with blood, against his colleague. The two read in silence:

By 9:01, La Bonne Santé was again abreast with the Parc Borély and heading for Marseilles' Vieux-Port. De Hauteville studied the cheap card for the Hotel Beauvau. He wished he hadn't been quite so antagonistic towards Fontana, although Fontana probably wouldn't see it that way: he had, hopefully, become inured to the abuse of his social betters as a professional necessity. And de Hauteville wondered, if Fontana had found Joey, how he would keep him from the public and, by extension, the authorities. Then he worried that the Bishop Feydeau might have designs on Joey, designs which, if carried out, would cancel out his best bid by far for motion picture immortality. De Hauteville knew the Catholic Church and its minions capable of almost anything, especially when aboriginal creatures were involved. His worry turning to terror, he imagined the Bishop sending out the Jesuits on an unrelenting mission to entrap Joey and, once having milked him of the essence of his own unprecedented divinity, embalm him. He could see the candles flickering around the glass sarcophagus in the darkness of an immense cathedral.

Rounding the desolate cliffs of Malmousque, de Hauteville began to feel a trifle easier about what, in his childlike anticipation, he had too quickly come to see as a potentially insurmountable predicament: no monkey, no movie. Although he had conceived Mr. Didot with true intellectual panache and would certainly have executed his production plan with blessed impunity, it was as clear as the sea was deep: Joey's place in the fabulous unfolding scheme of his life had been preordained by a force greater than himself.

As La Bonne Santé entered the old harbour, the shadow of the lighthouse on the Pointe du Pharo passed over the vessel for a long moment. On four sides of the basin rose terraced buildings, masts and rigging below enveloped in dusk. De Hauteville, his eyes quickly becoming accustomed to the subdued light, searched the low commercial façades along the water, a few with their canopied patios already alight, for the Hotel Beauvau. His attention was drawn to a crowd--men, he discerned, in traditional summer whites--gathered before one building at the narrowest end of the harbour. Referring to his map, he identified the stretch as the Quai des Belges.

"Banish the thought," said de Hauteville, making no sense at all to his man at the wheel.

But the dreaded assumption was--cruellest of tardy entrances--that Fontana and his monkey were just now being apprehended by the police. There were indeed police in amongst the white-shirted dozens.

"Oh, fuck me ..." grunted de Hauteville. Then, pounding his fists on the roof of the cabin upon which the map lay open, he raged, "Fontana, you sentimental fool, what have you gone and done now?!"

Reynolds Fontana and Fleuri Brunet watched from the little balcony of her husband's fourth story flat overlooking the old harbour as La Bonne Santé drew closer to the commotion on the quay before the Café Beauvau. Fontana couldn't imagine what had brought de Hauteville in from the sea, and desperately hoped his friend wouldn't be foolish enough to make inquiries concerning his whereabouts. He reckoned he and Fleuri would be safe hidden away for the night in the flat of a retired government official, as she had so blithely described the man from whom she was apparently now estranged. Fontana gazed silently at the sleek white vessel, assuming Fleuri was doing the same, but then realised she was dozing on her feet. He lifted her in his arms and carried her inside.

"Bernard and I are more like brother and sister than two people who were ever married." Fleuri eased back on the vast sofa with its shawl of black Spanish lace draped over a threadbare arm.

"As long as you don't expect him back," said Fontana, pulling off a shoe.

"He's visiting his mother in Propriano. There won't be a ferry now until the morning."

"Good."

Yes, all that was fine, but where was Joey? Now the irrepressible little scamp wouldn't know where to find him. But Joey had a good nose. In fact, in Bermuda he had tracked a diminutive chameleon relentlessly for three and a half hours in the garden of the British Consulate before finally presenting the exhausted lizard to his mistress Rose in a china cup; Fontana had been there and partaken of the child's joy, and Joey's. There was sufficient reason to believe that Joey would eventually find his way to Brunet's balcony.

Fleuri watched as Fontana set his shoes side by side on the carpet and unbuttoned his shirt to allow the breeze wafting in from the balcony to wash over him. Instinctively, Fleuri recognised a recklessness in Fontana that only a woman set upon her own destruction might perceive. Although he was a kindly man, companionable and amusing, he was also a man of keen appetites and uncontrollable impulses. She had been shocked by his violence, and the satisfaction he had taken in the gory results had been truly appalling. Perhaps it was the irrationality of Fontana's behaviour that she found so compelling. No, this was unthinkable. How could she possibly think rationally herself in such an advanced state of intoxication? Love is madness, she concluded. As she shifted on the sofa, her thighs began to tingle pleasurably, a sensation she hadn't known for years. She had to admit, she found Fontana irresistible.

"Leave your trousers on," she said, "and your shirt. Just sink it in. Yes, just like that."

Hugo de Hauteville sensed he shouldn't himself disembark, and ordered his most swarthy man into the dinghy and over to the quay before the Hotel Beauvau. Once there, the Turk accosted another Turk and slyly asked, "When aren't Englishmen lying dead drunk outside our bars on a Sunday night?"

"Not English."

"What then?"

"This is Joncs they are carting away."

"'Joncs?'"

"He pours the drink, the bastard."

"No English?"

"There was one. The smart cop says it was the one with the monkey--the monkey that makes babies all over Marseilles. He was seen in here earlier, with the wife of the Ex-High Commissioner of Corsica. Both drunk."

"Which one is smart?" The Turk from La Bonne Santé glanced over the assortment of uniformed men milling about before the entrance to the hotel's café.

"Balbec," the knowledgeable Turk replied, distracted by the golden ^deH on his fellow Turk's singlet.

"One day the stinking Greeks will pay also," said de Hauteville's man, clasped the other's callused hand affectionately between his own, and walked stiffly off toward the steps down to the dinghy.

Already in the dinghy, hiding under the seat in the stern, was Joey, his snout pressed to the leather band, still moist with perspiration, of the straw boater Reynolds Fontana had left when landing by the Parc Borély the evening before.

CHAPTER XII

Jerome's pillow was slick and cold with perspiration. With some effort, he lifted his head, pushed the torpid pillow to one side, and gazed through the open window at the wall across the alleyway. The wall's subdued colour was not reassuring: if day were imminent, a smouldering violet would be urging the surface to retreat, but instead the wall remained steadfastly blue, a blue slowly pulsing with the stifling heat.

"The boiling breath of God," Jerome concluded, without much conviction.

Was he still dreaming, or did the voices quarrelling in the street below belong to Violette and the Count? No, the Count couldn't possibly have known at what hour Violette would leave his flat. Jerome hadn't known that himself. Perhaps the Count had been lurking in the shadow of the ancient yew at the corner of the square all evening. But why would the Count, having supposedly just pledged himself anew to Duckie, court such indignity? The Count knew only too well that the procurer of Violette's favours of a particular evening was at best an arbitrary participant in the ritual. Again raised voices.

"Either you'll tell me," shouted the man, in very bad French, "or I'll--"

"Or you'll what?!" demanded Violette--yes, it was Violette. "You fool, it's Hugo who arranges everything. I'm surprised he hasn't arranged to have your fat tongue cut out!"

"You mind your own tongue, young lady," snorted the man, now in English--and with no Russian accent.

No, it wasn't like the Count to address Violette as 'young lady,' not when he preferred to regard her as a peasant vixen requiring punishment for her ill-tempered ways.

Jerome lunged upright and propelled himself to the window. There, he collapsed onto his knees with his elbows on the sill. He hadn't the strength to raise his head, and so continued to listen with his chin resting on his chest, his hands hanging limply over the alleyway.

"Why I should be privy to his dealings with--what's his stupid name?!" raged Violette, in French.

"Frankel."

"This is such a very stupid idea!"

"Without me, Mademoiselle, you wouldn't have a job," the Englishman replied, in English.

"Oh, I'd have a job. Don't you worry about that."

"Actually, I'd like to see your bit of crumpet hoisted on its own petard."

"Charming. Then you shan't have any more hoisted on yours."

"Oh, that's rich."

"'Rich,' is it? If you want to know what Hugo gets up to in the privacy of his own rooms, perhaps you should ask someone who knows!"

"And who might that be--Dudu?!"

Jerome, his astonishment only serving to further exhaust him, didn't bother to glimpse Billingsley as he continued to press Violette, facetiously and without result, for information on de Hauteville's secret modus operandi. He simply dozed by the open window, his hands drooping over the sill like the Pontiff's on Easter Sunday. Eventually, he gave up leaning on the sill and lowered himself fully onto the floor. Again he slept, while below in the alleyway Billingsely had finally found himself standing alone in the lamplight. But he wasn't alone for very long.

"Judas," someone growled, and the fat man turned. Again the name was spoken, but joyously. And again, as with each syllable the blade was plunged deeper into the solicitor's breast.

A look of tremendous disappointment passed over Billingsley's face as he realised that Violette, having already attained the farthest edge of the square before the Chapel of St. Giaume, could not possibly be aware of his plight. The quiet dignity with which he now lay dying would never live on in the beautiful girl's memory. And what was Billingsley's last sad thought? She really couldn't care less anyway...

Turning brusquely on his heel and marching after Violette, while flinging Billingsley's blood against the pulsing blue wall in long streaks, the killer chanted:

"Roll away the stone…see the bag of bones… gathering dust upon the shelf…"

*

"Amen," said Dudu, and lay the volume of Schopenhauer in his lap. From the balcony, his view of the sea was indeed a majestic one. He had Hugo de Hauteville to thank for that. He had his boss to thank, in a small way, for nearly everything of any consequence that had recently occurred to him. During his seemingly idle moments, sunning himself and sipping iced lemonade, Dudu persisted in diligently following the way hacked by young Arthur Schopenhauer through the blighted brambly landscape of so many other men's inferior thoughts. His life, Dudu now fully accepted, was a useless, even a worthless one. But the magnitude of man's greed and self-regard, as manifest in his own inconsequential person, had not been revealed to him by the admirable young Schopenhauer alone. No, Hugo de Hauteville had helped considerably. This emaciated dynamo, whose deforming will held so many in its grip, had made demands upon Dudu, and for that matter everyone else in his employ, that were indecent. Hugo said as much himself, didn't he? He had shed a dazzling light on the rotten underbelly of mankind's folly, being himself the proud embodiment of such obscene foolishness. Only such an egotistical bastard, loveable though he might be at moments, would have the arrogance to satirise the life of Our Saviour, because that was in fact what he intended to do, it didn't matter what anybody said. And who were the slimy maggots he had chosen to enact his puerile dictates? Lombardi, the Count, and Billingsley, all of whom had ridden the hapless Violette into the dawn. And then, of course, there was Lady Duckworth. Hugo had demonstrated that without such a sick and useless person in his employ nothing of a truly sophisticated nature ever gets done!

"He thinks I'll follow him into that fucking toilet forever?!" burst from Dudu. And again he shouted, but this time the anguish in his voice was clear. "Just as long as I get paid properly, heh?!" The gulls perched on the pediment overhead scattered. "Oh come back, little friends!" he pleaded, but they were already en route to a bucketful of slops that had been tossed into an alleyway several blocks away.

Urgently feeling the need for physical exertion, Dudu threw himself down on the balcony's hot tiles and did thirteen exuberant press-ups. He would have done more had he not spied Duckie and the Count making their way, as if sleepwalking, through the harsh light of day and into the hotel's restaurant far below.

"I think maybe we'd better have a little chat," he said, and bounded back into de Hauteville's suite to throw on his clothes.

"Hugo de Hauteville's yacht," said Reynolds Fontana, as he and Fleuri Brunet stood before Nice's finest hotel, the Negresco naturally, gazing out over the bay.

"One would hardly have guessed, what with that enormous deH on the main sail," scoffed Fleuri.

Fontana's good manners wouldn't allow him to mention the vessel's appearance the evening before, when they had both been less attentive to such things. "New decoration. It wasn't there when I visited with Hugo along the Plage du Prado on Sunday."

"Surely you know everyone, Reynolds," cooed Fleuri, gripping his remarkably firm bicep a little more tightly.

"It's a small world." Fontana turned them round to face the hotel. "And that's his suite--the one on the very top floor with all the balcony doors thrown open."

"I should think an invitation to lunch would be in order."

"He's bored with me, hasn't any need for a spot on the society page just now. In fact, he'd be bloody stupid to have anyone write anything."

Fleuri's eyebrows, drawn in two perfectly sympathetic arches, rose ever so slightly at this intriguing remark. "I know a secret," she whispered.

"Oh…?" Journalism percolated in Fontana's very marrow.

"It's about his actor…"

"Which actor?"

"His leading man."

"Do tell," tittered Fontana, and guided Fleuri up the wide white steps, across the bustling terrace, and into the Negresco's bar.

When Fontana and Fleuri took their places at the bar, Lady Duckworth and Count Lazovsky were already seated in a distant corner of the dining-room. They had finished dessert--both had had cold creme brulée--and were trying to decide whether a brandy or two might be in order before returning to La Victoirine Studios. Their meeting with de Hauteville had left them altogether confused, so confused in fact that they couldn't work out what to report to Billingsley later that afternoon. By unspoken mutual consent, it was decided that brandy would be appropriate under the circumstances. Jacques, the headwaiter, left the bottle on the table.

Dudu, who had remained poised by the bar ever since entering the restaurant in pursuit of the two, was fascinated by what he saw. Duckie and the Count behaved very differently when alone together, and the intimacy Dudu now observed led his imagination down even more provocative pathways. He imagined the Count whispering wetly into Duckie's ear, his large square head growing redder with impatience, while she lay listlessly back upon her bed, her pale pudgy hands and arms lolling from side to side in weak resistance. He saw the Count mounting her with great urgency, his heavy knees bruising her soft blue thighs as he thrust himself repeatedly into her. But now Dudu wanted to hear what they were saying so he directed his attention to a pair of rather elderly lovers, their eyes locked in a forlorn trance, who had lapsed into silence at the bar. Sidling along behind the other drinkers, most of whom were equally inert, as if he were going to join the infatuated pair, he moved closer to Duckie and the Count.

"Another please," Duckie managed, her request barely audible.

The Count filled her glass and set it gently down. Dudu sensed the fumes rising sharply to fill her nostrils. She lowered her head in her hands and attempted to sip from the glass without lifting it to her lips. The Count raised the glass for her to drink. When she finally lowered her hands, her eyes were teary.

"I think it's catching," she said, offering the Count the fractured expression he always acknowledged with a warm smile. "I must have whatever Jerome has."

"Let's hope not."

Duckie took another sip of brandy without the Count's assistance, then reached out and pinched the fabric of his white jacket between her damp fingers. "One of your Specials…?" Once having got the sweet Turkish smoke into her lungs, she said, "I don't believe Hugo went to Marseilles to talk to a rich Greek about money, I believe he went there to find the real Jerome."

The Count looked perplexed.

"That's where it happened, years and years ago. Hugo was still working for the postal service. He'd gone to visit an ailing aunt. During his stay he was obliged to take his younger cousins to the Ascension service on the square they call St. Rita's Apron. Jerome's flat is--"

"I know it," volunteered the Count. "The Chapel of St. Giaume. It's very highly regarded for its finely detailed stonework. The altar is dedicated to St. Rita. But it's here in Nice."

"My God, of course it is. Obviously, your years at the Sorbonne weren't altogether wasted."

"Kind of you to say--there were only two--but they were, actually."

"Then perhaps it was the Church of Saint Therese of the Infant Jesus? Now I know that's in Marseilles."

The Count shrugged. "Never studied that particular edifice."

Impatient for Duckie to say something of consequence, Dudu caught himself squeezing his one bicep and then the other, testing the firmness of their mass.

"I've seen a postcard of that one," said Duckie.

"As you were saying?" urged the Count.

"On the square before the chapel is performed a passion play, if that's the correct term, and Jerome--the child Jerome, that is--performed the role of the angel who rolls away the stone so that Jesus can leave the cave and set his sights heavenward."

"The crucified Jesus."

"Who else? Hugo said Jerome had everyone convinced that Jesus was there with them, on the square--rising from the slab, walking out into the daylight, lifting his arms and…?"

The Count nodded for her to go on.

"Yes, ascending. He said Jerome watched in pious wonder as Jesus transformed himself into the Christ. But there wasn't any Jesus, only our little friend the actor. As Jerome believed, so too the throng assembled on St. Rita's Apron believed."

Now the Count frowned at Duckie.

Dudu stared at the two hunched together at their table. Lady Duckworth never really knew where she was, whether telling a story or walking down the street. This, he assumed, was due to her drinking, although it could have been a result of her spoiled life, a life in which people were never held accountable for their actions, regardless of where they were or who they were with.

"Naturally, wails of devout supplication echoed throughout the city and Jerome was taken away and hidden. Many believed he was himself divine," Duckie concluded with a flourish, much to the Count's relief.

"He is," said the Count. "He is a very beautiful man."

"Yes," agreed Duckie, "he is. But little does he know that he was the inspiration for Hugo's becoming a motion picture producer. Hugo had fallen in love--firstly, with the angelic Jerome Lombardi and, secondly, with the mysterious transcendence of the spectacle itself."

"That's not what he told me," argued the Count.

"Well, he wouldn't, would he?!" Duckie exclaimed, suddenly enraged.

"And that's not what he told me either," insisted Dudu, who was now standing only inches from their table.

"Oh God..." groaned Duckie. "I despair with these intrusions."

"You've been taken in by one of Hugo's sentimental fantasies, Lady Duckworth. It never happened." Teeth gritted, Dudu quietly proceeded on. "Your little friend the actor hasn't any convictions. At least, not that I can tell. Lombardi only sits on the right hand of his holiness to pick the flies off him, which he then pops into his mouth. He'll never make anything of the role of Victor Didot. He'll ruin your script and he'll waste your money. He's nothing but a leech, a foppish leech."

"And who are you to call an educated man shabby, a man who has dedicated his entire life to the theatre?" Duckie could taste the hypocrisy souring her mouth. "Who?!"

"I never saw him perform on stage," said the Count, only infuriating her more. "Perhaps we should listen to what Dudu has to say."

"The Count's right," said Dudu. "Mind if I sit?"

"Oh for Christ's sake," muttered Duckie.

The Count gestured for Dudu to sit, while Duckie hung her head.

"I'm feeling rather tired," she droned.

"I'm sure you are," chirped Dudu, agreeably.

"No need to be quite so fresh," said the Count.

"No disrespect intended," Dudu replied.

Duckie knew she would have to retire shortly to de Hauteville's suite to calm herself, but then there would be this nonsensical lout obsequiously scurrying around bringing her things. She couldn't bear it.

After Dudu had sat for a moment, waiting for Lady Duckworth to acknowledge his presence, which she didn't, he began:

"Surely you know that this actor is in well over his head. He's a threat to us all. Hugo, as you've just proven by your pathetic story, has an unnatural fondness for him. But he's not Hugo's kind of fellow at all, is he? He's not even Violette's kind of fellow. He's nothing. He's not even a very good actor, not according to my pals in Paris."

"You've pals in Paris?" The Count couldn't quite believe it.

"I've got pals. They know some of the fairies who've worked with him. They say he should be in the Japanese theatre, where he could play a woman. You're telling me you want Victor, the Son of God, played like that? Limp? What a bleeding fucking disaster. He'll ruin all the marvellous work you've done. You may be asking yourselves, 'Why does this pushy young man, this mere secretary, feel he has the right to confide in us?' Well, it's quite simple--I'm a devout Catholic. I have some idea how this thing should be done. You've got to go back to the tried and true. You've got to bring the Nazarene to life as He was in ancient times. You've got to use His words, not your own. Victor talks nothing but shit--I've read the script!"

To Dudu's complete surprise, and the Count's, Duckie looked up and said, "It wasn't my idea to make a picture on this subject. I'm a hired writer."

"You're hardly just that," argued the Count.

"That's none of Dudu's business," said Duckie.

"Everything's my business," said Dudu.

"I'm not at all certain I know what you're saying," the Count offered, hesitantly, "and I'm not at all certain I like it, whatever you're intending."

"I'm intending," Dudu answered grandly, "to bring purity and integrity to the venture and redeem myself in the bargain!"

"Let's go, Sergei." Duckie rose wearily from the table. "Please..."

"Shall I come up and fix you a nice drink?" Dudu inquired, leaping to his feet.

"Absolutely not," she replied.

After they had left, Dudu glanced over the room, thinking. His attention was once again drawn to the middle-aged lovers at the bar, who were now openly fondling each other. The headwaiter caught Dudu's eye and gave him a sly smile.