Read the sixth installment.

CHAPTER XIX

Reynolds Fontana had feared the sea as a boy. He had fought hard to overcome this phobia, his imagination sent perilously into motion by his mother, who had a compulsion to describe literally everything the two encountered during his youth with extravagant detail, even though it all lay before him, waiting for his own mind to decipher and absorb.

Once, as they had taken the ferry across the Channel from Dover to Calais, she had taken it upon herself to describe the sea to her son. She spoke of the ocean's floor as though it were the surface of the moon--seemingly at a similar distance, but straight down--and peopled by creatures so grotesque as to prohibit polite description. Naturally when little Reynolds peered over the side of the ferry he saw himself plummeting, then swirling like a sodden leaf, to the very bottom, where he was slowly torn to bits by the talon-like teeth of innumerable ghastly fish, his ankles manacled by the hoary claws of a ginger-haired crab.

And so, when Ernst Balbec grabbed hold of Fontana's feet with the intention of grabbing more of him and pulling him to shore, Fontana panicked. He kicked and kicked, and as he kicked he breathed with the great gulps of an athlete. But he couldn't kick free of Balbec's grip, and his lungs quickly filled with sea water. Ironically, Fontana's last thought was of Joey, and yet the swirling depths, bringing his soul to harbour, sang, "Fleuri, Fleuri…"

Hugo de Hauteville watched the two men embracing on the beach from the celestial height of his balcony. He wished he were one of them. No, he wished he were both. How truly marvellous it would be, he conjectured, to know what it is to give so unselfishly but also, in like fashion, to receive so unselfishly, and all at once. But perhaps love was meant to be selfish, even in its most minute and scientific forms. Certainly, the tiny creatures that gave the vast sea its living volume felt the same selfish tremors upon the inclination to commune and reproduce. The sea was vibrant this night with glimmering pulsations of selfish and unselfish love.

As he continued to watch the two men stagger about the beach in each other's arms, their heavy movements evoking the primitive bacchanal of ages past, de Hauteville's eyes filled with tears of joy. Only in reflection, without the confusion so often engendered by the presence of merely civilised men, did he know such tearful happiness. He was happy tonight, resigned and contented in his fervent longing to restore to the world the primordial grandeur lost over centuries of man's incessant folly. A civilised man's brain was tiresomely sentimental, with a pathologically heroic image of itself. Increasingly, de Hauteville saw this everywhere he looked. As far as he was concerned, Bishop Feydeau, unquestioningly honoured and obeyed, and Frankel, the oppressive banker, were interchangeable figurines in the same paved garden of artificial terrors. They were made of plaster, the Bishop and the banker, the one purple and the other gold.

On the silvery plain of the beach below, the two men huddled, panting for their conjugal moment in defiance of the meaninglessness of the universe. Predictably, overcome by the beauty and clarity of the moment, de Hauteville wanted sex--with himself. But first he vowed that the magnificent images of "The Miracle Monkey" would not be the resentful manifestations of an elderly man who had in his youth so desperately wanted to bear the infant Christ within his own body. The lustrous images he would shower down upon the sorry masses, with his singular brilliance, would be the unselfish gifts of a loving father. In spirit, of course, he knew he was a woman, a very clever woman. As he gazed down proudly at his slatted stomach, the lined muscle like scorched leather in the moonlight, his enormous soul was infused with the sensuality of everywoman, and he saw once again, miraculously, with the eyes of the visionary he knew himself to be. In the darkness of the dankest theatre, the radiant face of little Raphaela Gambetta shone to warm the screen. She would summon primordial man, in all his majesty, back into the world. Of this, de Hauteville was certain.

Now, as he stared out over the Baie des Anges from his balcony, his erect penis in his hand, the two men on the beach were quite suddenly of no consequence whatsoever to Hugo de Hauteville. In fact, he retreated into his filigreed suite at the Negresco without another glance downward. If he hadn't been quite so distracted and had chosen to savour their insect-like ballet just a few seconds longer, de Hauteville would have seen the one man pacing maniacally, arms switching overhead, round and round the prone figure of the other, who lay deathly still.

Joey had been torn by the unexpected presence of his once beloved master in the bar of the Negresco. He had only just become acclimated to what he had come to interpret and accept, in his inadvertently developing worldliness, as a kind of nebulous conspiracy among humans to entrap and possess one another with a subtle viciousness. His once dearest friend was the most uncalculating person he had ever known, but, as Joey had perhaps understood all along, Fontana was an anomaly among humans. Notwithstanding the calming stillness of the night sky, Joey found the ride from Nice to Juan-les-Pins not only interminable but nearly unbearable as the man he knew as Lommie babbled on and on, in English and in French.

"How can Duckie possibly write a character like Reynolds Fontana?" Jerome was horrified by the thought.

"She should write him as she imagines him," mumbled Violette, her index finger lodged in Joey's mouth in lieu of a proper dummy.

"Oh, please. Who can tell anything from a photograph in the newspaper? Surely she has to meet him."

"How do you know what Hugo has planned? Wait and see, by the time we leave Gluckman's, he'll have recast the picture."

"Really, Violette, I'm unburdening myself. He doesn't know anything about my misgivings."

"You sound like you're reading from one of Duckie's weaker efforts. Your misgivings are one thing, and mine are quite another. And I won't play Raphaela Gambetta's beastly daughter. I won't." Violette began unbuttoning her blouse.

"Your breasts are larger than I've ever seen them."

"For Joey--he's distressed. He needs to suckle."

"I can't bear this..." Jerome commenced moaning unconsciously, but loudly enough for the driver to hear.

"Lommie, please," Violette whispered, wincing at him. The moonlight, softly reflected by the glittering dark waves hugging the roadway, lay contentedly upon her bosom. "Try to see him as our child, as our baby. Try to love us both. Maybe then I'll let you love me."

"I want to love you now."

Violette glanced from her breast buoyantly mounded over the cup of her brassiere, the nipple hard as a thimble, down at Jerome's aching penis, which he had eased out into the briny air. With Joey's mouth fastened to her sweetly throbbing breast, she reached over and squeezed it with all her might, then smoothed the fluid that had formed in a globule on the tip over the featureless rubbery head. Again she squeezed, and again, until she felt the wetness that had shot silently from Joey against her belly. It really wasn't altogether fair that Joey should have his fulfilment and not Jerome, and so she gave up simply squeezing Jerome's penis and commenced pulling on it with care and determination, while he took out his handkerchief and, with some difficulty, laid it open in his lap.

The last place in Marseilles Fleuri should have considered going was the first place she went: the bar at the Hotel Beauvau. Shortly after midnight, she fell from her stool onto the floor, cracking open her head, and remained unconscious long enough for Germaine Joncs to scurry round from behind the bar with a photograph of the once High Commissioner of Corsica's estranged wife, left earlier that day by the police. The Joncs woman could hear Madame Brunet whimpering with pain as she summoned the police on the pay-telephone at the rear of the café. It was during this conversation that Lady Duckworth came down to the bar for more gin, saw the injured woman on the floor, and went to her aid.

"You've bust your noggin," observed Duckie, the 'bust' susurrous with drink.

"Eggomancy," came slurring, similarly, from Fleuri's lax mouth.

This word, eggomancy, conjured several diverse images for Duckie, as she knelt there on the bar-room floor by the very green and very badly injured stranger. Literally, in her mind's eye, Duckie saw three images go fleeting by: an egg with a moustache, plumed hat, and sword; a politician pontificating to a clutch of rapt school children; and a woman thrusting her belly against a long knife as if it were the erect member of a man with whom she was hopelessly obsessed. She associated these images, respectively, with three distinctly related and vitally demoralising realisations she had had over the course of that day, its twenty-four hours now spent: Sergei had never been the man she had imagined, Sergei was a pompous blowhard, and Sergei had a streak of sexual cruelty about him that both worried and excited her. As she gazed blearily down at Fleuri, Duckie wondered if such appalling disenchantment had ever visited itself upon this person, for in the stranger's face Duckie saw a sadness that surely could only have come from some grave disappointment--a bleak chasm hinging on the bedraggled and broken roots of a ruined love. I must remember this last phrase, mused Duckie, it's quintessential Alworth.

Duckie cradled the woman's head in her hand. Fleuri's hat was a sagging ladle of blood.

"Bernard loved his mother," whispered the stranger, as Duckie strained to hear her. "He loved her more than me," came even more weakly from her.

"I'm sure he loved you too," Duckie whispered back, her mouth hovering very near the woman's ear.

"Not well enough," she answered. "But the other one did."

The woman's eyes shifted to stare imploringly into Duckie's, but the meaning of her words and the terrible emptiness of her gaze were lost on Duckie.

"She's dead," said the Joncs woman, from somewhere very far away.

Was her Aunt Lucia imagining things or had breasts begun to form on Raphaela Gambetta's narrow chest? As she had bathed Raphaela before putting her to bed, Lucia had also noticed a silkiness about the child's mons veneris. These developments, signifying adolescence, worried her greatly. Would Raphaela, angel of her dreams, now never know the joys of childhood? Increasingly, the child's attention was drawn to the little boys who cavorted below her window. They of course knew of her condition, and often stood along the street in solemn attendance when Bishop Feydeau came for his weekly visit.

Raphaela had recently outgrown her crib, but slept comfortably each night on the sofa that resided at one end of the kitchen. There was only one bed in the tiny flat and that was kept empty for her father, who often collapsed into it without removing his dusty uniform upon returning home from work early in the morning. Lucia spent her evenings with Raphaela in a kind of blissful slumber, her niece providing the familiarity so sadly lacking in her otherwise contented life: Lucia enjoyed the hubbub of her daily to-ing and fro-ing as a bus conductor, but, secretly, found so many friendly faces a trifle numbing. Only one face filled her heart with true tenderness, and that was Raphaela's.

Having shared a little supper, the two would usually go for a short walk down to the fountain protruding from the outer wall of Madame Florescu's garden. After this, Raphaela was made ready for bed, then read to by Lucia, which they both found comforting. Often Raphaela would lie awake for a time and watch her aunt sewing, or cutting clippings from the newspapers and journals left on the bus each day for the scrapbook she was making for Raphaela's baby. The clippings were concerned with a limited number of subjects Lucia felt would be appropriately stimulating for an infant saint to read, and many were simply charming photographs of innocuous subjects, like airy sporting events, animals clowning at the zoo, and garden fetes or champetres, as the French would say.

On this night, Lucia found herself unable, in her weariness, to remain dozing upright in the tattered leather office-chair her brother kept stationed by the window. The tepid air only hung in the open window, refusing to enter the confines of the close garlicky kitchen, and she awoke thoroughly dampened with perspiration. Carelessly forgetting to bolt the door onto the hallway, Lucia wandered into her brother's room, yanked off the smock weighing upon her slip, and fell heavily onto the bed.

"I'd rather have dog piss on my floor than her stinking Jew blood."

In her mind's eye, Duckie saw herself springing to her feet and flying at the Joncs woman in what would certainly be one of her character's most heroic scenes in "The Madman and the Monkey." In a whirl of violently syncopated action, her character's long fingers became entwined in the woman's coarse hair. In blurring close-up, the Joncs woman began to swing her head violently from side to side, like a horse trying to dislodge a choking bit from its slavering jaws. As a little girl, Duckie had pranced about her father's office in imitation of the white mare she had seen carry the King along London's Pall Mall. She now took nearly as much joy in imagining her character riding the Joncs woman's head into the edge of the bar, its pumpkin-bulk meeting the marble with a blackening thud. Medium shot, down the Joncs woman would go, onto the floor to lie beside the stranger. Cut to a detail of Duckie's character's expressive, perfectly manicured fingers, clumps of moist hair clinging to them, repellent as cobwebs.

"Filth!" Duckie swore under her breath, and, heaving with the effort, pulled Fleuri Brunet out into the street. The gin she had been drinking all evening would, she prayed, see her through.

Relying utterly on this negligible surge of confidence, Duckie commandeered a taxi which had stopped to collect an African prince, his lean aubergine cheeks welted with ritual scars, who was also staying at the Hotel Beauvau.

"Can I be of some assistance?" asked the African, much to Duckie's surprise.

"You can give me that turban to wrap around this woman's head," she replied without hesitation.

The African prince obliged her, assisting in the unpleasant procedure, then helped Duckie load Fleuri's body, her legs now springing with convulsions, into the taxi. He then got in next to the driver and ordered him to take them to the nearest hospital.

"What a nonsensical way to die," fumed Ernst Balbec, as he pondered Reynolds Fontana's handsome Roman head. Upon a porcelain-topped litter lay the journalist, naked, unfettered, and at peace with the world. "Too stupid-drunk to know his salvation was at hand."

Of course, Balbec didn't mean exactly that. He had, after all, intended to make Fontana his playmate only to, most probably, then arrest him.

Balbec glanced at himself in the ugly mirror that hung over the coroner's assistant's desk at the other end of the windowless basement room.

I too am handsome, he hoped--in my own peculiar way. My wife finds me handsome. Well, at least she says she finds me handsome. But then, I pay the bills, don't I?

The coroner's assistant had given Balbec a set of long pristine whites to wear over his wet shorts. Balbec liked the way he looked in them. Like a Greek senator, if there was such a thing, or a sunburnt…(Balbec had only ever read the name of this race of seafaring conquerors and, although he could vaguely picture it, the name--Phoenicians--was too foreign-looking to now remember).

My head, Balbec guessed, is larger than most. Not as large as Fontana's perhaps, although it doesn't look so large dead.

Balbec's eyes were set well back in his skull, and his cheekbones were as prominent as any Eskimo's, giving his head a highly sculptural dimension.

Almost like that round of cheese my boy Martin got at with the baby's spoon, thought Balbec. Perhaps not, perhaps this is not a sufficiently flattering likeness. The sculptural dimension to my head, Balbec speculated, is more precisely like that of a wild boar: fiercely extended, but tucked neatly in at the sides, like the fenders of some of the new American cars.

"Whatever became of Mr. Fontana's monkey?"

Balbec's moment of narcissistic revelation was over, abruptly ended by the coroner's assistant, who had returned to his desk from the chilliest reaches of the morgue.

"He was drowned in a barman's sink," answered Balbec, with exquisite nonchalance.

"By whom?" asked the assistant.

"A ruffian named Gerard Joncs," lied Balbec.

"Thought Joncs was murdered down in Marseilles on the Vieux-Port?" countered the assistant.

"He was," said Balbec, "by Mr. Fontana's monkey-loving mistress."

"Not the High Commissioner Brunet's widow? Nobody around here believes that," scoffed the assistant. "They all believe your boss in Marseilles is trying to bring down the municipality."

Balbec found the assistant's insolence as offensive as it was idiotic. "Why would he want to do that? They pay his wages!"

"To usher out the Jews and usher in the Catholics--the militant ones, like your interfering Bishop. He's here in Nice right now, you know, stirring up trouble over Hugo de Hauteville's latest moving picture. Something to do with Jesus returning to earth as a porthole cleaner."

"So that's it," mumbled Balbec, "de Hauteville's in league with the Jews."

"They own the banks," said the assistant, frowning at Balbec.

With that, Reynolds Fontana, a man who had effortlessly dignified his life for 47 years with a smile, accidentally evacuated his bowels.

"They're calling for me upstairs," said the assistant, handing Balbec a damp cloth. "Here, make yourself useful. The man needs a friend."

"I'm having a crisis of nerves," said Jerome.

"But you just came," Violette replied. "Normal men doze off at this point."

Jerome perceived what he took to be an eavesdropping sneer on their driver's face. "Perhaps their minds are left flaccid too."

"I'm too sleepy to worry about such riddles," yawned Violette.

"I don't see that there's any correlation between orgasm and the cessation of anxiety," argued Jerome, as he ruminated further on his condition.

"Then what's the point?" Violette's tone inferred an extensive knowledge of the desolation that dwells in the male libido.

"I've told you before, I'm not normal."

Violette knew her lover to be anything but normal. He was depressive, and he fuelled his depression with a large daily dose of guilt. However, he was kind and he was unquestionably the most intelligent man she had ever met, with the exception of Hugo de Hauteville, who lacked Jerome's sensitivity.

"I love you," she said.

"But do you really?" asked Jerome, simultaneously realising that she was only cooing over Joey.

He gazed down at the monkey sleeping peacefully between them, his head cushioned on Violette's fruity belly.

"I love him too," whispered Jerome, and leaned over to nibble the peachy plush of her earlobe.

"I'll fuck you properly when we get to Gluckman's," Violette assured him.

CHAPTER XX

As Raphaela Gambetta slept, she dreamt of mice. While milling around Les Santons with her father and Aunt Lucia, she had seen the mice, hundreds of them, darting under the market stalls. The mice hadn't frightened her, they had interested her, because they were so small and fast, but not so small or fast as flies. She had observed the mice on the same day she had met Joey. That had been later in the afternoon, after her father had laid her in her crib to nap and he and Aunt Lucia had gone down into the street to have Aunt Lucia's scissors sharpened by the scissors sharpener who made his rounds every Saturday. Her dreaming about the mice, she knew, even in her sleep, meant she longed to have Joey with her.

The Count stood on the landing below Gambetta's door, wondering why he was there and not in the marketplace, where he had intended to accost Raphaela's father as he returned home from work. Joey would have known: it was the scent of a mature woman sleeping moistly unawares within Gambetta's flat that had drawn him there. Aunt Lucia had remained a blurry image for the Count as he and Duckie had planned their violence on Gambetta. Neither one of them had even ventured close to the subject of what was to be done with her. The Count now knew he must murder her too.

Lucia awoke with her brother standing over her, but the room was still too dark for his dawn return. The man's long coat drifted over her bare legs as he leaned over her, took her jaw in one hand, and, with the wide blade he held in the other, slashed her throat. As her body rose in shock like a huge fish reeled in onto a ship's deck, the Count dropped his knife and plunged his pick through her liver and into her spine, fastening her to the bed. Then, using her blood for lubricant, he slid himself inside her.

What kind of man drags his daughter around drinking with him in the middle of the night? wondered the taxi driver, thoroughly put off by the look of the Count, his big hand draped over the child's tiny bodice as he sluiced vodka from the bottle.

"I said, on the Vieux-Port," insisted the Count.

"I heard you," snarled the driver.

As he drove, the driver watched the two in his rear-view mirror and listened carefully to what was said. Whenever the child asked her father where her Aunt Lucia was, she was answered only by his staring eyes, and occasionally a little song he sang in an ugly high-pitched voice in imitation of her own.

"Scungili, scungili, bucatini," he sang.

When the man paid the driver before the Hotel Beauvau, the child standing clutched between his knees, the driver saw the blood oiling the tips of the man's waistcoat and the pleats of his trousers.

"You're a fucking pig," said the driver, to the Count's utter astonishment.

The hallway outside the room he and Duckie had let was dark and the door to their unlit room stood open. The Count took the top sheet from the bed, tore it into strips, gagged the whimpering Raphaela, knotted her hands and feet together, and set her down well back in the closet. He then changed his clothes and threw his bloody coat, waistcoat, and trousers in the closet with the child before closing its door, locking it, and taking the key. Upon leaving the room, he also locked the door onto the hallway.

"Call me Dudu," said Dudu, as he gazed admiringly at his newly shaven head in the mirror in the stateroom of La Bonne Santé. Even though the cook had proffered his culinary scissors, the Turk had skimmed the curls from Dudu's pate with a razor alone, and hadn't nicked him once. Dudu intended to find a tatooist in Cap d'Antibes to do a bit of crewel-work on his scalp too.

"Actually, it was the New Englander said that, not the injun," the Turk casually corrected his new captain.

"Let's throw the bones," ordered Dudu happily, and the two went on deck and squatted down in the moonlight, and the crew gathered round.

"Break out the grog," he ordered, after only one toss of the phalanger's desiccated joints. "Rum will do nicely."

Dudu and the Turk sat on the deck of La Bonne Santé throwing the bones until nearly dawn without ever knowing what any of it meant. One throw had landed the marsupial's various digits all in a row, which had made the drunken crew gasp, and the Turk had counted out each day of the week--they had been casting down seven--in his native tongue, a mystifying performance which only deepened the men's pleasurable mood.

"The brain of Corsica's premier Jewess," commented Dr. Oliphant, as he prised open Fleuri Brunet's split scalp and prepared to saw through her cranium in search of some metaphysical element that might explain the singular beauty of her unseeing, unfeeling, and unknowing countenance, or so it seemed to the poet in Lady Duckworth.

"Once, when I was ridding an Algerian child of lice, I found spiders' eggs nestling in her filthy mange," offered Dr. Oliphant's assistant Crapelet enthusiastically.

"But she isn't dead?" insisted Duckie, her view from the metal stool upon which she stood rich with their indelicate activity.

"Not yet," answered Crapelet, good-naturedly.

"I don't see the need for this," argued Duckie, in defence of the defenceless stranger.

"No need?" countered Dr. Oliphant. "This is how we learn."

"Oh," said Duckie.

"Why don't I check and see if the rabbit's dead," suggested Crapelet, "while you're on the first lateral?"

"Be my guest," replied Dr. Oliphant.

"How'd you get the urine?" inquired Duckie.

"So you do know about these things," grumbled Dr. Oliphant, as he began to saw.

"We took it directly from her bladder with a syringe. How else? But it was weak, diffuse with--how shall I put this?--alcohol and pickling acid," explained Crapelet, somewhat self-consciously, before exiting.

"Please," Dr. Oliphant admonished his assistant, although he had already gone off in the direction of the laboratory, "don't try to explain such things in the common vernacular."

When Crapelet returned, he could barely restrain his excitement.

"Cease sawing, I think, Oliphant--I read zygote."

"He means, she's pregnant," said Dr. Oliphant, glancing up at Duckie and only slightly easing up on the blade. "We have to take the pressure off her brain. If we don't do it now, she may never recover her senses. Then we have an embryo developing in--in--"

"A legume?" proposed Crapelet, apologetically.

Dr. Oliphant stared at Crapelet for a long moment, not critically, but pensively, thinking his way through the probability of such a result.

"Madame Brunet is a very beautiful woman," murmured Dr. Oliphant, as much to the woman whose skull now bore his partial incision as to himself.

"S-s-some would be more guarded in their praise," stammered Crapelet, having always, for fear of succumbing to the graciousness of those he admired, detested such characterisations of gentility and refinement.

"And who exactly is Madame Brunet?" inquired Duckie.

Ignoring her, but not discourteously, Dr. Oliphant drew his conclusions upon the still, warm air of the room:

"A traveller without a map or a compass--"

"And indeed without a mission," interposed Crapelet.

"Rather the light in which we stand should mingle with her blood," spoke Duckie, so softly that both men turned to listen, "and her sleeping thoughts awaken into pain, her last coherent thought bursting with its harsh wonder, than her darling baby's hands reach one morning for her breast to find only an unloving and frightful thing."

As Dr. Oliphant resumed sawing, Duckie lowered herself onto the operating-room floor, took up paper and pen from a table nearby and copied out her speech, improving it only very slightly.

Gambetta's feet fell upon the gravel of Les Santons, a sound the butcher Rabat knew so well he needn't raise his head to say hello. After choosing his gifts this dawn with rare delight, Gambetta slowly made his way in the direction of his address and all that he loved most.

"It's a pretty thing, that," commented the stranger, referring to the tiny sackcloth doll Gambetta had just bought for Raphaela.

Thinking he was alone among the vendors, Gambetta was startled by the large Russian gentleman's presence.

"I'm with the police," said the man, and gripped Gambetta firmly by the elbow.

Gambetta stared at him, unmoving. Vowels thick with Slavic indigestion, the man's Italian was nearly incomprehensible.

"It's your sister," he said.

Gambetta remained unmoving, and silent.

"She's been murdered, and your daughter abducted."

Gambetta neither lurched away, as the Count had expected, nor did he erupt dithering with questions, which the Count was ill-prepared to answer. He simply asked, "Why should I believe you?"

"Because--because I was there when they took her body away," the Count replied.

"You're lying," said Gambetta. "You're not a cop. I know the cops. No cop dresses or smells like you do."

"And how might that be?" huffed the Count.

"And cops never show their indignation."

"What?" said the Count, backing away from Gambetta.

"Your suit's too well made and your shirt smells of talc."

"I bathe," sneered the Count.

"And your moustache is shaped and trimmed regularly, and not by you."

"I was sent down here from Nice. I'm an expert--in forensic medicine," insisted the Count, aggrieved by his own ineptitude.

"You must take me for a fool."

"See here fellow, we're wasting precious time!" shouted the Count.

"No patience. Police are the most patient of men. Have you ever met an excitable policeman? No, you haven't. No one has. Not in Nice, not in Marseilles. They're all a load of layabouts and jokers."

"You shouldn't say such things. You should show some respect for those of us who serve you." Upon impulse, the Count strode away from Gambetta, in the direction of the man's flat. "Come along, ye who doubt," he barked over his shoulder.

Gambetta followed.

"I know," Gambetta called after him, "you're taking me to see the Bishop. They're with His Holiness, aren't they? He's got them all at St. Victor. I've been waiting for this!"

Suddenly, instinctively, the Count knew where to take Gambetta.

The Count did not enter Gambetta's bedroom, where the drapes were drawn against the dawn light. No, only Gambetta did. Lucia's face was very white. Gambetta had never imagined his sister in the throes of her own passion, but this was what he saw: he saw her writhing beneath a man whose strength she could ill afford to resist. The passion she knew with this faceless man was the only passion she would ever know, and the sadness she felt, in her solitude, was caught, there upon her face. Her brother went to her, knelt by her, and covered her mouth with his, wanting himself alone to hear her cries. Tenderly, he laid his hand on her throat, to quiet her, only to feel, cooling as if it were drifting through an icy cavern, his own breath on his palm.

A row of ornamental orange trees stood just behind Gambetta and the Count as they leaned over the limestone wall edging the Jardin du Pharo and gazed down the sundrenched cliffs at the three fisherman's boats bobbing upon the shifting currents in the cove below. The shadow of the lighthouse lay behind them too, like a long trench waiting to swallow up the dead.

"Marseilles' wharves are busy this morning," observed the Count.

"Libyan vessels returning to Bengasi," said Gambetta.

"And there--one Turkish, destined for Istanbul no doubt," said the Count.

"No, Zonguldak." Gambetta was certain. "I know that insignia, the dragon and the sword."

"St. Christopher," said the Count.

"Zonguldak remains a satellite of Rome," Gambetta stated matter-of-factly. He glanced farther out to sea. "This can't be God's will."

"Oh, but it is," said the Count. "You must love God sufficiently to understand."

"Lucia loved God as much as anyone," said Gambetta.

"But she resisted His will."

Gambetta turned. His gaze, hollow and drained of life, encompassed the entirety of the Count's past and pres ent as he stared beyond him at the vastness of the city.

"They came in the night and took my daughter. They took my sister too. They took her life for no good reason. And now you're here to take mine," he said.

The Count watched as Gambetta turned away to again lean on the wall. He was holding the tiny sackcloth doll he had bought Raphaela in the market only hours earlier. The Count thought for a moment that Gambetta was praying, but Gambetta had given up talking to himself years before. His last thought was for his daughter, and how he might have been able to save her, had he been allowed to live by the man standing behind him.

In the complete darkness of the closet, Raphaela saw a light. For a brief while, she may have apprehended this light, in its comforting radiance, as that reflective source of belonging that issues from the mother and the father and is called upon by the child whenever intimations of abandonment intrude. But this was not that reassuring light come to wrap itself, like two arms, warmly about her. The light that came to comfort Raphaela was the soft light that falls through the leaves of the towering trees to dapple the jungle flowers in all their infinite variety. The same crystalline light that glistens in the eye of the yellow-beaked macaw and the orange-finned iguana. The dazzling light that races across the green pool to find the tiger drinking in the shade. And this light was Joey's light. Again Raphaela's gentle soul mingled with the gentle soul of another, and she was not alone, there in the depths of the garden. When the Count finally returned and, with a contented groan, opened the closet door, Raphaela Gambetta was dead.

CHAPTER XXI

The spider's legs gave a distinctly longitudinal aspect to Dudu's shaved head. This was altogether appropriate as Dudu had finally accepted his destiny: on the sea such a short time and already the crew had proclaimed him their new captain. The tatooist had rendered the oval of the black widow's body at the top of his client's dome, giving particular care to the colouring of the legendary hourglass, which he had laid in with a pale shade of mauve. The arachnid's eyes, which hovered over Dudu's own just above the hairline, were grotesquely large, however delicately and divertingly faceted with an even paler shade of green.

What had occurred on La Bonne Santé had hardly been a mutiny, especially when, as the Turk had pointed out, the vessel, and a grand vessel she was, had such an inattentive owner. This was an arguable point. Everyone knew how Hugo de Hauteville loved his ship, but this everyone represented the wrong people, as far as many of the crew were concerned. They knew it wasn't their place to judge what sort they ferried round the coast, but it was agreed that they detested just a few too many of de Hauteville's acquaintances, business colleagues, and friends to make life on the sea, under their previous captain, worth living. And they all agreed that the sea was their life, and would remain their life, regardless of who paid their wages or whether their wages were paid at all.

When they decided to take a vote on who were the three most detestable of de Hauteville's occasional passengers, Dudu saw to it that Jerome Lombardi's name was among them. Many of the men had expressed a strange fondness for Reynolds Fontana, even though he had come aboard only the once. And when it was agreed that, in all fairness, a woman's name should be added to their list, they gleefully chose Violette Desroches, and went so far as to say that had she been there at that moment, they would gladly have raped her and thrown her into the sea. Dudu explained that it was this very effect she had on men that would one day make her a star. With that, the Turk had gone below, brought forth a glossy photograph of the actress, and nailed it to the mainmast. La Bonne Santé was then re-christened Le Vagin Violette, the crew reverently peeing upwards round the mast. Eventually, in the wee hours of the morning, she put in on the Juan Golfe, a secluded inlet celebrated for its nude sunbathing.

Torrents of warm rain tangled and untangled themselves as they cascaded down the palatial front steps of the Hotel Negresco and into the street. Bishop Feydeau, his slippers soaking, stoically trod up the steps and into the lobby. Although the morning hadn't progressed sufficiently for such a reward, the Bishop went into the bar and ordered a brandy.

"I'm here to call upon Hugo de Hauteville," he said to the barman, in which capacity, at this early hour, the headwaiter was serving.

"Your Holiness," answered Jacques, "I believe he's left the hotel."

"Not for good and all, I hope?" said the Bishop.

"A brief jaunt to Juan-les-Pins," Jacques replied.

"I shan't follow him there. No, I shan't," said the Bishop, always agreeable with himself, and took a ladylike sip.

"Going into the motion picture business?" joked the headwaiter.

"That would be grand, wouldn't it? Actually, we have a friend in common. He was meant to be passing this way."

"And who might that be?"

"No one really, a British journalist."

Jacques had seen Reynolds Fontana sitting in that very spot, Jerome Lombardi hanging on his every word. "It's always the same with that sorry lot," he said.

"How's that?" asked the Bishop.

"Your Holiness, de Hauteville and his cronies, they run their rear ends ragged dashing here and there but never seem to stray very far from the starting-gate, if you see what I mean?"

"No, I'm not certain I do," the Bishop replied.

"All sound and fury signifying nothing," said Jacques, tugging on his immaculate satin jacket.

"Nice bit of tailoring," remarked the Bishop.

"Maison Alphonse Lamartine," said the headwaiter. "He makes all my clothes. Yes, including this handsome uniform."

*

They've vanished, the whole sickly lot of them, concluded Ernst Balbec. No de Hauteville, no Lebowitz, no Desroches and, obviously, no Fleuri Brunet. What was he to do with Reynolds Fontana's remains? He had wired through to Scotland Yard but the response had been so half-hearted that Balbec figured he might just as well go to London and parade up and down the streets under a banner proclaiming THE DEATH OF FONTANA if he were ever to raise anyone who knew the man. Once a gadabout and a loner, always a gadabout and a loner, came Balbec's second momentous conclusion of the day. Ashes to ashes, filth to dirt, was his third. But then a logical alternative presented itself. If the sea had taken Fontana's life, why shouldn't the sea take his death--his corpse, that is? That's where Fontana was headed, wasn't he? To this end, with the full weight and authority of the law, Balbec hired a trawler, the only vessel readily available, in which to take Fontana out to sea and dump him. By rights, Balbec should not have claimed Reynolds Fontana's body. That should have been left to Hugo de Hauteville or another of Fontana's friends then basking somewhere along the Côte d'Azur. But that would have spoiled Balbec's fun.

Bernard Brunet's flat overlooking the old harbour suited Duckie's purposes nicely for the moment: she would need, perhaps sooner rather than later, to rely on the Brunet family's money to look after Fleuri, and this windfall would enable her to write her version of the unfolding events that would become, in scripted form, The Madman and The Monkey without distraction. She had returned briefly to the Hotel Beauvau to find that the Count hadn't bothered to check out upon leaving the premises, and she had continued to speculate on the Count's ineptitude as assassin and child-abductor. She reckoned the odds were in her favour when she envisioned the Count running stiffly through Les Santons, the wounded Gambetta in pursuit, and she reckoned they were not when she envisioned him arriving at her door with Raphaela's little hand affectionately gripping his.

For all practical intents and purposes, Duckie had made herself Fleuri Brunet's guardian and keeper. She even looked forward to changing her mute companion's diaper whenever she sensed it might be necessary, which it often was. At moments, Duckie knew without a doubt that this was truly all she had ever needed in life--a comfortable room with an intoxicating view, rather than a bottle of gin, and someone who, whenever Duckie discoursed on the marvellous singularity of her poetical vision, wouldn't contradict her, even by innuendo.

It was in this spirit of tranquil celebration that Duckie had wheeled Fleuri out onto the balcony into the brilliant Mediterranean light and begun singing a passage from Puccini's Madame Butterfly, the curious lyric taken to memory upon her very first visit at the age of six to her family's box at the opera house in Newcastle:

Fat and lazy are the gods of Japan.
The American god, I'm convinced,
is much quicker in answering
those who pray to him.
But I'm afraid he may not know
our house is here, Suzuki…

Duckie would occasionally ask herself why she should care so much for a stranger--Could it simply be that we're both royalty of a sort? she would girlishly wonder--but soon she came to realise that her friendship with Fleuri Brunet could not compensate for her need for a man.

The cellar of the Hotel Beauvau was not sufficiently dark to feel private. There were two shaftways entering at the back, chutes which allowed provisions, cases of drink, and, even on an overcast day, paired excrescences of hazy light to fall diagonally into the dusty larder. Within this indifferent setting, the Count had hidden Raphaela Gambetta's body. He had buried her at the bottom of a potato bin, first stripping her naked--he had later given her dress and shoes to a gypsy woman begging on the street--and now, having had second thoughts, was digging her out with the intention of stuffing her into a golf bag he had spied waiting in a hotel lobby.

"She'll fit," he said, distracted by a potato falling onto his foot.

As the Count handled the child's cool limbs, he again wondered why Gambetta had turned away, allowing him to end his life with so little effort. He had slain him with one slash across the back of the neck, a piercing blow between the ribs, and a leisurely arc, carved like a rounded doorway up from one hip and down to the other, laying open his liver and his stomach. Rabat couldn't have done better or quicker with a rabbit. Then it came to him: the three boats bobbing in the cove below the Jardin du Pharo had had a profound significance for Gambetta. One would have been his sister Lucia, the second his daughter Raphaela, and the third himself, all sacrificed inadvertently for their faith. That's how the Count saw it, his powers of revelation vibrating sympathetically between the child and the father, who would never have thought him capable of such profound identification with the beautiful simplicity of their lives. But he was wrong.

When Gambetta saw the three boats in the cove far below, he had thought of his wife drifting upon purgatorial waters, taken from him by a supposedly all-loving God who worked in such mysterious ways that his questioning, as he had been told in so many words by Bishop Feydeau himself, was not so much worthless as it was irrelevant. This had been during the first visit, when the Bishop and Dr. Oliphant had come to examine their child. Gambetta remembered the Bishop leaning forward to ask him, in his softest motherly voice, to promise not to wilfully abhor or deride, especially in his own secret loving heart, the arbitrariness of life and death. Their very randomness was, after all, God's way. And the Bishop's God, and surely Gambetta's God, was a good and a just God. Gambetta had stopped seeing the boats after remembering that, his gaze fixed inwardly on an image he would always cherish: his smiling wife holding Raphaela in her arms, her eyes and the baby's locked in joyful astonishment.

The Count, souring at the sight of the child's grimy hair protruding stiffly from the top of the golf bag, suddenly remembered where he was. On a side-street, away from the shimmering light of the harbour, he found an empty taxi, its driver most likely lingering in a café nearby, and put the golf bag in the boot. He then situated himself cosily in the back with his bottle of vodka.

No one ever really knew what Harry Gluckman, unusually serene for an American tycoon, was thinking, not even Hugo de Hauteville. Gluckman was, in a word, inscrutable. And so, when de Hauteville sought to further ingratiate himself by--apropos of nothing--expressing great affection for the Triple Crown and especially the Kentucky Derby, Violette could not contain her amusement and begin giggling without restraint.

"Was it something I said," asked de Hauteville, "or something Harry didn't?" But his rather too self-conscious cleverness was lost on those assembled on the terrace overlooking the Juan Golfe, sunglasses glinting over their plates. "Harry," he blundered on, "what do you make of my darling Violette? Isn't she sublime? Like a porcelain doll with the breasts of a dove--"

"And the scales of a shrimp," said someone, his mouth full of a mixture of champagne and imported lox.

"I'm fairly smothering in nuance, aren't I?" twittered Violette to Jerome, who failed to understand her over the din.

"Stand up, my darling!" ordered de Hauteville. "Violette, stand up and let us appreciate you fully!"

"You needn't do that," Jerome assured her. His hand went to rest sensibly on her thigh. The stiff skirt she wore over her new bathing costume felt surprisingly like flimsy wire mesh.

"Oh, I know," she sighed. She suddenly missed Joey, who had been left eating a plate of figs in her cabin.

Now regretting that he and Violette had heeded de Hauteville's warning not to share a room for the sake of appearances, Jerome whispered, "I wish we'd made other plans."

"I told you," she whispered back, "I will not play Raphaela Gambetta's beastly daughter. I intend to come away from here with something."

"Yes, I know," said Jerome, glumly, "with the miracle of Fontana's monkey strapped to your tummy."

"A waste of goose feathers," Violette replied, "I'm already pregnant."

Jerome was somewhat relieved to learn why Violette had been behaving as she had, but then, in the next instant, realised with horror that he might well be the father, and knew, with profound regret, that for this role he was congenitally unsuited.

Grimacing had never come easily to Joey. But Joey was now grimacing effortlessly as he stared at the Turk who stared gaily back, ribboned cap set at a jaunty angle, through the decorative ironwork of the open window. Joey feared sailors. Sailors had abused his kind for ages. Either they were loading his kith and kin onto their ships, four and five and often more to a crate, or they were dragging them around the ports on leashes to be ridiculed and fondled, then fed scraps of fat from their tables.

Joey had finished his figs and was lying with his head resting in the cup of the brassiere Violette had dropped on the bed before donning her new bathing costume. He would have been content to lie there listening to the canaries in the pines all afternoon had the intruder not appeared bringing with him the phantoms of confinement and subjugation. The waiting went on and on, Joey grimacing, but the Turk only stood and stared, his shadow lengthening upon the sandy floorboards of Mr. Gluckman's guest-cabin. Eventually, the Turk's stillness summoned in Joey a listlessness that he associated with the bleaker moments of his brief existence. Imperceptibly, the listlessness turned to fatigue, and the fatigue finally, and thankfully, submerged itself in somnolent reverie.

Although he had known many welcoming females, Joey fastened on one in particular as he felt his penis stir with the balmy caresses of his slumbers, and that was the delectable Raphaela. Granted, Violette had been his Goliatha. But he also accepted that this mature human female, her hairless glutei compellingly soft and smooth as a doochoo's (infant monkey's) palms, had been napping, unlike his smaller amours, and had neither truly appreciated his dexterity and consoling longevity nor benefited fully from them. The truth of the matter was that Violette smelled differently now that she was sheltering an embryo, and he could no longer relate the randy scents emanating from the unlaundered underthings she had carelessly carried along in her valise, to the font of lactose she was quickly becoming. Inconveniently, Joey was losing interest in her. Having a mistress rather than a master was not nearly so exciting, his master having had prowling instincts akin to his own. And so, Joey was dreaming not of Violette Desroches but of Reynolds Fontana, and the bittersweet afternoon he had gone off to lie with Raphaela, when the Turk burst in, yanked him from the bed by his tail, and shoved him into a sack.