The Mona Lisa Sacrifice

by Peter Roman

  And then he got up off the stool and took the tools from his men and went to work on me himself. And I was forced to concede that if the pope thing didn’t work out for him he had an excellent future as a torturer.

  At the end of it all he brought in the one-eyed man who’d stabbed me in the tavern.

  “Find out what this thing is,” the pope told him, “and I will put an end to your suffering.”

  I never did find out what the one-eyed man’s suffering was, because he came at me then and I used a little trick a fellow gladiator had shown me in the pits and caught him in my chains. He was old or weak, or maybe both, otherwise I never could have held him. Or maybe he just wanted to be caught.

  I twisted the chains so hard a little gasp escaped his lips. And in that breath was a bit of grace. Just like what I’d taken from that angel in the Colosseum. When I breathed it in, my body screamed for more. I may have even screamed aloud. Every part of my body yearned for what was in his. And the grace made me stronger, so I twisted the chains even more, until the skin on his neck tore open as he struggled, and the grace poured out.

  It filled the cell with light, but a light only I could see. The pope and the torturers just stared as I strangled the life out of the angel. I guess it wasn’t the sort of thing you saw every day, even in a pope’s dungeon.

  And then a bit of grace splashed out of the cell and onto the statue across the hall. And a spectral face formed there above the stone body. Victory, although we didn’t know each other by name at that point. She began to shriek in Greek, and the pope and his men turned white when they looked across the hall into her cell. And then they fled and didn’t return.

  I finished killing the angel and taking his grace. Then I sundered the chains and stood there for a moment, just savouring the feeling of the light in me. I didn’t feel hungry anymore. I didn’t feel empty anymore. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be whole.

  I went out into the hall to the other cell and kicked down the door. That spectral head shrieked some more, but I didn’t know enough Greek to make sense of it.

  “I don’t know what you’re saying,” I said, “but I’m a man of my word.” That was a bit of a stretch, but I figured no one deserved to be in this dungeon, no matter what they’d done. No one except for Judas.

  I dragged Victory out of the cell and up the stairs, into a small fortress filled with soldiers. But they all ran away too when Victory screeched at them. I realized she must have been someone special indeed in her day.

  So we went back out into the world. Her head eventually faded away and she was a statue again, but I knew how to summon her now. I took her to a special antiquities dealer and blew a bit of grace into her to call her back. I was learning how to use the grace. And she came, shrieking once more, but she calmed down when she saw she was in a shop instead of a dungeon cell. The dealer just nodded like he’d seen this before and dropped some coins into my hand.

  “I’ll check up on you again,” I told Victory, and waved at her in case she didn’t understand. I tossed a couple of the coins back to the dealer. “See if you can teach her a language that people actually still use,” I told him, and then I gave her enough grace to keep her around for a while.

  Because you just never know who your friends might turn out to be.

  And then, because I knew who my enemy was, I went back outside and after Judas once more.

  ALICE AND THE LOST KISS

  I walked until I hit the Champs-Élysées, and then I wandered down it until the rain turned into a grey mist.

  When dawn burned the mist away, I found a café that had opened early—not an easy task in Paris—and went in for another croissant and espresso. I was hungry for more, for a proper meal, because it had been a while since I’d had one of those. But I was used to being hungry.

  I could see the top of the Eiffel Tower from my table. Most people think it’s just an old communications tower. It is, but most people have no idea what it was used to communicate with. It’s probably better if they don’t know, but who am I to say?

  I drank my espresso and ate my croissant and thought about Victory’s request.

  I understand what it is to be separated from your spirit. I don’t mean Christ—he’s more like a fading dream to me these days.

  I mean Penelope.

  I wasn’t entirely honest earlier when I said the only things that make life bearable for me are grace and death. There’s also Penelope. Or rather, there was Penelope.

  Penelope who raised me from the dead, in her own way, and who’s dead now herself.

  I finished my breakfast and made my way to the Montparnasse graveyard. I wandered it for a while and listened to the sounds of the city fade. I thought of the last time I’d been here, with her. It was after the Nazis had been driven out of the city and everyone thought maybe that had been the war to finally end all wars.

  This day was sunny, with clear skies, but that day had been grey and wet, more of a Copenhagen day than a Paris postcard. We were looking for angels, but the only angels we found were on grave stones. I revisited them all now. They didn’t have any more to say to me this time than they did back then.

  I stopped in front of Baudelaire’s grave and nodded my hello to him. Penelope and I had kissed there that day, in this same spot. Our breath was visible in the air, and a breeze lifted her hair around our heads. It was a moment that could have lasted forever.

  That’s the way I like to remember it now, anyway. The truth is I don’t really know what happened when we kissed in Montparnasse, because that memory has been taken from me. I know there was a kiss in the cemetery. It’s just that I can’t remember where or even when. But a made-up memory is better than no memory at all.

  Just let me have this one.

  It was time to see Alice. I couldn’t put it off anymore. I left the cemetery and waved down a taxi. I asked the driver to take me to the nearest library. He eyed me a little, because I guess his fares didn’t usually want libraries, but I threw some money on his lap and then we were friends again.

  When he dropped me off at the library I patted the stone lions flanking the stairs to its entrance. You never know. If they were really something other than sculptures and came to life some day, I’d like them to have fond memories of me.

  Then I went up the stairs and inside in search of Alice.

  Here’s the thing about Alice. You can only find her in libraries. Well, and sometimes bookstores. But that depends on the bookstore. She’s a little moody about them. She likes most libraries, though, so that’s where I tend to look for her first.

  This is the way you summon Alice: You find the right book in the library and start to read it. That’ll bring her to you from wherever it is she hides in libraries. Simple, right? So what’s the right book? Well, that’s the hard part. It depends on the library. Sometimes the book even changes in the same library. In the New York Public Library it had been a biography of Lewis Carroll for years, and then one day I tried it and it didn’t work. It took me three weeks to find the new book, a copy of Alberto Manguel’s History of Reading. Also, the book has to be misshelved. Did I mention Alice was moody?

  And yes, I said summon. Alice is a lot like a demon in some ways, except she’s not a demon. And she doesn’t have any grace in her, which is why I’ve never tried to kill her and we’re still friends. But she’s definitely not human. In fact, I’m not even sure she exists. It’s a strange little world we live in sometimes.

  I’d never been in this library before, so I had nothing to go on. At least it was a small neighbourhood branch. It would probably only take a few hours to skim the stacks, looking for the books out of place.

  I started in the fiction section. Whenever I found a book that wasn’t where it was supposed to be, I took it from the shelf and read a few pages, then looked around. When Alice didn’t appear, I put the book back and moved on. I’d been doing this for about 45 minutes when a woman we
aring a librarian’s name-tag came over and asked me if I needed any help. I was reading a passage from Donald Barthelme’s Snow White at the time, but she had a look on her face that said we both knew I wasn’t there for the great literature.

  “I’m looking for an old friend,” I told her. “Only I’m not sure where to find her.”

  She folded her arms across her chest and gazed at me. It was a look I recognized well from all the time I’d spent in libraries. She was trying to decide whether she should go back to her mystery novel or call the police. They usually went back to their mystery novels, because reading a book is always better than filling out paperwork. But some had read too many of those mystery novels and saw danger everywhere.

  While she was still making up her mind, a chorus of young voices wailing together came from the children’s literature section.

  “Never mind,” I said, putting Snow White back on the shelf. “I think I know where she is.”

  I went over to the other side of the library and found Alice sitting on a stool in an open area in the children’s literature section. She was wearing a dress with stains on it that could have been blood, as well as a top hat. Today her hair was blonde, although there were streaks of mud in it. She looked like she was barely out of her teens, which was the same way she’d looked when I’d met her many, many years before. She was reading from an ancient leather tome to the weeping children seated around her. At least I think it was leather. It could have been human skin. And the stool was a giant mushroom that looked like a real giant mushroom.

  “And that’s how the world will end,” Alice said as I walked up. She closed the book and slipped it into one of the shelves beside her and the children cried even harder and ran for their parents. None of the librarians seated at a nearby desk even looked up. I think Alice casts some sort of charm on them, so they recognize her as one of their own. They’re a mysterious bunch, librarians.

  When Alice saw me, she clapped her hands together and ran over to give me a hug. I tried to think of the last time I’d seen her. Athens, maybe? When she had sported the shaved head and the military uniform?

  “Cross!” she said. “Have you come to tell me you’ve finally found what you were looking for? I hope so. I want to see what it is.”

  “Hold on,” I said. “I want to know how the world ends.” I looked for the book she’d been reading to the children, but now I didn’t see it on the shelf. It had vanished.

  Alice giggled. “You should know how it ends,” she said. “You were the one who wrote the book.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve had the good sense to never write anything more than a few lines of romantic drivel,” I said. “I’ve certainly never tried anything as ambitious as a book.” And I would never try. The novelists I’ve known over the centuries have all been drunks and vagabonds. Or insane. It’s best to stay clear of that business.

  “You didn’t write it in this story, silly,” she said, ruffling my hair. “You wrote it in one of the other ones.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Of course.”

  She looked around and then leaned close to whisper in my ear. “But I like you better in this one,” she said. “You’re too mean in the other one. I think running all those armies and torturing all those people is getting to you.”

  “I can only imagine,” I said.

  I once found Alice by reading an article in a magazine about multiple universes. When I finished the article, Alice was sitting in the chair beside me, wearing a bridal gown and knitting a hat for someone who had a head at least three times the size of mine.

  “They have it all wrong,” she’d said that time. “There aren’t any other universes. There are only other books.”

  Make of that what you will.

  Now she stepped back and twirled her hair with a finger. “So,” she said, “what brings you here?” She looked around. “Where are we anyway?” she asked.

  “Paris,” I told her, and then I added the year. Just in case.

  “Ohhh, I like Paris,” she said and smiled. “You should see the things people do in the stacks sometimes.”

  “I need to find out something,” I told her and pulled her into one of those stacks.

  “Me too,” she said, nodding. I waited, but she didn’t say anything else. That was Alice. So I carried on.

  “I don’t suppose you know where Judas is?” I asked.

  “Of course I do,” she said, pulling some of her hair out of her head with that same finger. “He’s where he always is.”

  “And where’s that?” I asked. I tried not to get my hopes up.

  She tapped me on the forehead. “In here, of course,” she said. Then she noticed the hair wrapped around her finger. She stared at it like she didn’t know where it came from.

  I always asked Alice about Judas, and she always gave me an answer like that. Maybe she was trying to be philosophical. And you thought the Wonderland books were hard to read.

  Right, next.

  “You know the gorgon in the Louvre?” I asked her.

  She nodded again. “I’ve read everything about her,” she said. “Even her diaries. She just needs to find the right man.”

  “That could be tricky,” I said. “And it’s not my problem. But I do need to find her head.”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” she said. “It’s where it’s always been. Well, not always of course. Because once upon a time it was on her neck and shoulders.”

  I waited. Patience is a virtue and all that, especially with Alice.

  “And after that, of course, it was at the bottom of the sea until the kraken found it and wore it as a charm for one of its tentacles. But then Ahab cut that tentacle off when he fought the kraken. So I guess it wasn’t that good of a charm.”

  “I thought all the krakens were dead,” I said.

  “Not the ghost krakens,” she said, rolling her eyes at me.

  “Of course,” I said. “Pardon me.”

  “And then what happened to it?” she asked, scrunching her eyes tight. “Hmm, let me see.”

  I watched a mother try to pull her son into the children’s section, but he screamed and ran away at the sight of Alice.

  “Oh yes,” Alice said. “Then a sea diver found it and took it back to his tribe. They all thought it was the skull of one of their gods, but she’s not really a god, you know, she’s—”

  “Condensed version?” I suggested.

  Alice pouted at me. “What will you give me for my library?” she asked.

  I’d already figured that one out. “A memory of Xanadu,” I said. “Back before the phoenix destroyed it.”

  Alice made a face. She brushed the hair from her hand. She pulled off her hat and looked inside it, then pulled out the bones of some small creature.

  “I already have memories of it,” she said, dropping the bones behind some of the children’s books on the shelf. “There was a man with a secret library who used to make me the best tea. It tasted like spider webs. Do you have anything better?”

  I thought of Penelope, of our kiss in the Montparnasse cemetery, but I didn’t want to offer Alice that memory.

  It was too late though.

  “That’s a nice one,” Alice said. “I’ll take it.” I tried not to cry out and wail like the children. And just like that, as what felt like a cold wind moved through me, my memory of that moment with Penelope in that Paris graveyard was gone. That’s why I can’t remember the details now. I remember having the memory of her, I know what happened, but I can’t bring back the memory itself. So I try not to think about it too much.

  Alice closed her eyes for a moment. “That’s lovely,” she said when she opened them again. “I’m keeping it in a secret box in between a dream of Anaïs Nin’s and a book idea that Fitzgerald thought up while drunk but forgot about when he was sober.”

  “Keep her safe,” I said. It was all I could manage.

  Alice nodde
d and put her top hat back on. “The British Museum,” she said.

  “What about it?” I asked.

  “The gorgon’s head. It’s in the museum,” she said. She considered the ceiling. “Don’t you think it’s odd that museums don’t have muses?” she said.

  “Where in the museum?” I asked.

  She smiled at me. “Why, where it’s supposed to be, of course.”

  “All right,” I said. I wasn’t going to get anything else out of her. I kissed her on her cheeks, in the French way.

  “Until next time,” I told her. “Hopefully it won’t be as long a wait.”

  “You can’t have things worth waiting for without the wait,” she said.

  She turned and walked off into the stacks, disappearing behind a display of Tintin comics. I went back out into the street. I had a train to England to catch.

  Back outside, I tried to summon up the memory of Penelope again. I knew it had something to do with us in Paris, something I desperately wanted to never forget.

  But it was gone. It was as gone as she was.

  PENELOPE

  Penelope has been dead for decades. There’s nothing left of her now. No body, no grave anywhere, marked or unmarked. Even her photos are all gone. All that remains of her are my memories.

  Penelope and I in the forgotten graveyard in the forest where we met, the morning mist burning away between us as we looked at each other across the simple crosses shoved into the ground.

  Penelope and I at the bow of a ship in the Pacific, watching the sun set until we were alone in the darkness. Our own little world.

  Penelope and I sitting on a blanket under a row of cherry blossom trees beside the Kamo River in Japan during the annual hanami, toasting the other people around us with sake. The lights of the lanterns better than any stars.

  And now another moment of her life—of our life—was gone.

  Someday I’ll have nothing left to remember her by. I hope that’s the day I die and stay dead.