by Roman Payne
They opened a side-door of the palace and ordered me into a dimly lit corridor. They ordered me to walk ahead of them. With the sudden shelter from the sun, and the cool air that blew down the corridor against my face, I felt my strength renewed. I actually fooled myself for a moment into thinking I was free, that I was alive and fortunate… then the chains were put on me.
“We’re going to see the boss now. We’ll have to put you in irons.” They fastened cuffs on my wrists, and locked iron shackles on my ankles. “Continue on up here,” said the chief guard, and I walked and clanked like a galley slave.
As we approached what looked like the main hall of the palace, the light in the corridor grew brighter and then came the odor of incense, and rich foods: roasting meats and red wine. “It seems my executioner is having a feast,” I mumbled aloud. Then I heard a man’s laugh. I stepped down a step and the light of the main hall filled my eyes. It was a small hall for a palace, big enough for fifty men, no more; and in it, I saw only a few scattered souls sitting on the far-side of a long wooden banquet table. And those souls, the image of that room that lay before my eyes, was a scene belonging to a drama that no madman’s nightmare could even create. That scene could only have been written by the most evil of all gods.
Looking at that banquet table, at the people sitting behind it, facing me, I no longer wanted my freedom. I no longer wanted my life, but death for them, and then death for me, life erased from memory—for at the center of the table, seated in the head chair, smiling at me, his prisoner, was Dragomir.
“Saul!” he laughed, “So good of you to come back to Tripoli!”
I trembled in my humiliation. “I can’t understand it,” I said, “You?, Dragomir?, a bounty hunter?!”
“I said to you once in Málaga, I’ve worn many hats in my day. This is just another…”
I was stupefied… How, of all the assassins, special agents, and police in the Mediterranean, how could it have been a simple clairvoyant and opium dealer from Spain who managed to capture the son of Solarus? But this quandary ceased to interest me as soon as I saw the person who was sitting beside Dragomir…
She lifted her head and her hair toppled away from her face and I saw the portrait of a someone too inhuman to be of this earth—hell would have been a paradise for me then, rather than to have to look upon what I saw: for there at the table, seated at the right hand of the lord, my captor Dragomir, as if she were his mistress, sat my love, Saskia.
My entire soul died at that moment. As I looked at those two, I felt all who I was and had been molting away like the skin of a snake: my body and life had died and only my chains remained. So Saskia conspired to sell me for money! Was it for her love of money? For her love of Dragomir?! Or was it that she hated me?! I needed the answer then, my heart could beat not another time without it, yet I could not speak a word…
She looked at me a few times—oh, my eyes were fixed on her!—but each time she looked at me, she turned away again as though she were completely uninterested in my presence in that hall. Can you imagine?! …after all we’d been through together!, and now, being brought in shackles and chains before her!, a prisoner, before the eyes of your beloved, while she sits at a banquet table to accompany the man who has sentenced you to death? To see your love attend your death as your executioner’s maid of honor!
Moments of silence passed. Saskia no longer bothered to look at me. Soon I managed to say to her in a feeble voice… “Saskia… Why… Why are you sitting there?!” It was the most pathetic thing I had ever asked; but then again, I was pathetic at that moment—it had just been revealed to me, after all, that my entire life had been nothing but pathetic farce in which I was the dancing fool.
“Saskia! I crossed the sea for you!” My voice was bolder this time, although neither time I’d said her name did she bother to look at me.
“Saskia!” I called again, “But why if I call to you don’t you run to me? Why don’t you embrace me? We are on a new continent together! Am I not your beloved standing before you after a long absence? And now we are on a new continent together… why then don’t you run to me?” Dragomir, all this while, sat with a smirk on his face as he watched me address her. I imagined it amused him greatly to watch me begging love from a marble goddess.
“I went for the day and night to Florence, Saskia… to see my mother. My mother… she died. So I spent the entire night in vigil by her grave, crying. Then at daybreak, I came back to Petrognano where you said you would be waiting for me, but you had gone. They said you went to Tripoli. Why Tripoli?! Because it was your fortune, no doubt? It said you would realize your destiny after entering the country of my birth and the city where my father was raised. Or did you come to be with Dragomir? You knew he was here, obviously. Did you know why he was here?… So wait… now I know!… it was he!, wasn’t it? The one who sent you that letter… That letter you read a hundred times on our way up from Siena. You told me you would let me read that letter once we saw my mother… you said the letter was unimportant compared to my reuniting with my mother. Of course you knew that after I saw my mother, both you and that letter would be gone. Did I tell you that my mother is dead?…”
During all of what I said to her, the only times Saskia seemed to acknowledge that I was speaking to her were the two times I mentioned that my mother died. Twice I told her my mother died, and twice her lower-lip quivered, twice her eyelids closed solemnly momentarily. Was she actually feeling sorrow? So why then did she say nothing?! Why didn’t she even look at me?… I had the crazy idea then that she couldn’t even see me. Was I just a ghost standing in that room? I tried to find other clues to help me understand this incomprehensible situation. And can you believe that Saskia interested me so much that it was only then that I noticed there was a second girl in the room! There was another girl at that table, seated at Dragomir’s left, a girl of about Saskia’s age. I studied this other girl for a long time. And while I studied her, I sensed that only now Saskia was looking at me. I flashed my eyes back to my beloved and I saw that she was in fact looking at me!… Yet before our eyes even met, she looked away with an expression of… I would say scorn, or rather, shame…
‘Shame?’ I asked myself, ‘Saskia ashamed of looking at Saul? Ashamed of me because I am no longer a man? Because I am just a prisoner in chains?, a caged dog? Or is she ashamed of herself? Ashamed of herself for betraying me?’
“All right, that’s enough getting reacquainted, time is ticking…” Dragomir waved his hand and the chief of the guards obediently approached him and listened to what Dragomir whispered in his ear. The guard politely asked Saskia and the other girl if they would wait outside for a minute. Saskia stood up and took the hand of the other girl, and walked out of the palace hall. By the way they held hands, I knew then that the girl was the famous Adélaïse.
“You two can leave as well,” Dragomir said to the two other guards. “But wait right outside the main door. I will need you in a few minutes.”
The guards exited and I was left alone with Dragomir in the hall. My mind began to race as I thought of ways I might attack and kill him now that we were alone. Had my ankles not been fettered along with my wrists, I know I would have tried. But Dragomir interrupted my thoughts to begin giving me the revelation…
“Forgive me, my dear Saul, if I keep those chains on you. I know that you have a fiery temperament… You’re the willful, capricious type of man. You are strong too. I don’t want to give you any unfair advantages.”
“Hmm, the willful and capricious type? And what type of man are you, Dragomir?”
“Me? I am the patient and resourceful type. The type of man who wins in the end. You know, Saul, I knew you wouldn’t follow me here to Tripoli where these chains awaited you. No, I knew you wouldn’t follow me… but you would follow her. Isn’t that true?”
“That is true!” I agreed, “You are clever. But you’re cheap as well. You’re cheap because you could not bring me to Tripoli on your own. You had to get an innoc
ent girl mixed up in this. Why?! Why did you have to involve Saskia?!”
“Saskia? …Oh, you mean Clara! Nit-nit-nit, my poor, poor Saul, you really don’t understand this whole thing, do you?… I’d say it’s lucky for you that I involved her in this. Otherwise you would’ve never had the pleasure of meeting her! You are happy you got to meet her, aren’t you?…
“You see, Saul, that is how very clever I am. I’ve been engineering this trap for you for the past five years. Five years! Can you believe it? Five long, patient years of work on a plan that will only reach its climax and conclusion today. Do you realize what patience is required for such a task?…
“You see, Saul, it was five years ago that I first read about you in a newspaper: ‘Twenty-five thousand gold louis d’or to the one who catches the son of Solarus, first name: Saul, and brings him to Tripoli.’ …Twenty-five thousand louis! That’s enough gold to make the wealth of five men! I knew that if I had this money, I would never have to tell another single fortune for the rest of my life. I could do whatever I want, I could live like a Sultan… like a god!…
“I told you when we met in Málaga that I’m no mystic. Remember what I said to you then?… ‘I am no clairvoyant. I am just a charlatan who does what he can for money…’ Life feeds on life, you know, and human life means relatively little to me.
“…It was just after I read in the newspaper about the reward offered for you that Clara came to me at my home in Málaga. It was her choice to come to me. She was a wanderer. Thirteen at the time, she was a mere child, out on her own in this mad, confusing world, and she was hoping that I could give her a roadmap to guide her through the labyrinth of life. The poor girl was so baffled. But how could a girl not be baffled at that age?, with no parents or relatives, wandering around the world alone because she doesn’t know what else to do with herself!…
“She desperately wanted help to know what to do in life. So I took the liberty of choosing her path for her… I decided the best use of her life was to catch my prey for me!” Dragomir laughed a good deal after saying this, “You must admit, Saul, she did the job perfectly!
“…But in order to have her catch you, I first needed to get your two lives entwined; and this I did by planting the seeds of obsession. The first step was to get her to really believe that I possessed psychic awareness, which I did by guessing things about herself and her life—easy enough in her case, so much about her was transparent. Then, once she had complete confidence in my psychic powers, she didn’t need any convincing that I knew her future and her destiny. She had complete faith in me. So this is when I told her what was needed to get you here standing before me in chains today. I told her the key to her destiny was you!
“…As for you, Saul, you were a lot harder to get a hold of in the beginning. And it wasn’t until the summer before last that I managed to get you to my home, thanks to Pulpawrecho… may he rest in peace…
“Of course that tainted opium that made you collapse beneath Clara’s balcony, that was actually meant for you, not for my old friend Penelope Baena in Barcelona. I lied to you about that in Paris. You see, I couldn’t think of another way to make sure you would eat all of that poison the night of your birthday unless I planted the ruffians at her house to make you eat it—I know that wasn’t the most ‘elegant’ part of my whole orchestration—but just so you know, Saul, that opium didn’t contain enough poison to kill you, only to make you wander beneath Clara’s balcony and fall unconscious. Don’t think I wanted to kill you!… The proof: remember your girl told you then about some ‘tall man in a black suit’ who gave her a book once? It was a novel in which the character was poisoned with verdigris, and the novel had information on how to cure the poisoned person… Guess who that man was who gave her that novel! You see?! I didn’t want you dead… I wanted Clara to heal you and make you nice and strong again.”
Dragomir stopped his explanation and there was a moment of silence. Then I realized it all!… “So you weren’t just that man!” I said to Dragomir, “You were all of these men! You were also the man in Barcelona dressed head-to-foot in black crêpe, weren’t you? The one who told me I looked ill and pointed me the way to the hospital!”
“From the looks of you that night!” laughed Dragomir, “If I hadn’t been the one who poisoned you, I would have given you up for dead! But everything was in order… a nice coincidence that the girl I’d chosen for you lived on the exact street that led to the hospital I sent you to find!…
“Although I didn’t really want you to find it, of course. I didn’t send you on a walk through the garden of Aphrodite just so that you might come out the other side at a public infirmary! You wouldn’t have wanted to pass the night of your birthday in some public hospital, would you? No, I knew little Clara would be singing her gypsy songs on her balcony that night—the fortune I gave her told her to do so. Oh, Saul, there were so many reasons why I chose her for you… one being that she was so young. When we are young like that we are so easy to convince of fate and destiny. A simple fortune read to her in an eerie Spanish mansion and she was seduced! Yes, it was easy for me to seduce her, yet it wasn’t easy for her to seduce you, no. That was one drawback of her age. Older women are much better than young girls when it comes to seduction. You weren’t seduced at first, no… You even tried to abandon her in Barcelona, remember? That had me worried. I had to bribe the workers at the boat docks to lie to you and invent some departure delays. They told you that you were stuck in Barcelona for a while, do you remember that?”
“Quite clearly.”
“I had to bribe quite a lot of people on your account. This was not a cheap five years for me. It will be good when I have the twenty-five thousand louis to cover my losses. I almost forgot, I still have to pay the guards who arrested you at the port today. You see, I had to pay a lot of people off to get you in these chains you’re in today, Saul. I even had to kill! I had to get rid of that snooping ‘Andrea’ boy. He would have fouled everything up if he had stayed alive. Then there were the businessmen staying at the Hotel Sant Felip Neri in Barcelona… You see, it was important to my plan that you stay at that precise hotel. You wanted a suite when you returned there after abandoning Clara. But the only two suites were now occupied by two men who wouldn’t take the hint I gave them—I did give them their chance to give up their rooms! But they were stubborn, so they each got knifed in the gut and thrown into the street. It was meant to look like a very suspicious and very absurd double-suicide. What an absurd death-scene that was!, it made me laugh… But what baffled me Saul, is that for all your brains, it didn’t seem to occur to you to book one of the dead men’s suites after that. Why did you insist on remaining at that cockroach farm up in Urquinaona? I had to go scrounge-up that old toothless guitar player and put him in that dirty tavern and tell him to talk to you about some scarf you dropped. You see how you made me work to capture you?!…
“Oh, then there was Paris... you absolutely loved Paris, didn’t you Saul? You are a decadent soul… each night at the Comédie-Française, fashionable strolls in the gardens all day… You and your girl would still be there today if I hadn’t ransacked your apartment on the quai to give you a scare. I still regret that I didn’t get you to leave soon enough. I knew that your mother was dying of loneliness in Tuscany…”
“What did you know of my mother?!” I shouted. I trembled with fury at hearing my mother mentioned by this ‘creature.’
“Her neighbors said that her one wish was to reunite with her only son. But truthfully Saul, I only knew the story of your dear mother from the gossip of the Florentines. I never once checked-up on her myself. And never did I hear any Florentine say a word about your mother that wasn’t full of praise. I have a mother too, Saul. I know that they are holy. I never tried to speak to your mother in order to get to you. I may be a charlatan, but I have a mother too.”
Dragomir sat a minute, quiet and pensive. He then resumed talking… “So while your dear mother was worrying herself to death in Tuscany,
you were playing around in Paris—I wasn’t happy about this; so in order to get you to Tuscany, I poisoned your wine. Again, it was not enough to kill you, only enough to make you sick—as you found out the next day when you tried to get that donkey drunk.”
“Dragomir, bring Saskia in here. Let me talk to her.” “Saul, I’m almost finished sharing with you the organization of your capture… it’s almost through, be patient…
“You remember Mademoiselle Lingot in Paris? The girl who told you and your girl that Adélaïse ran off to Tuscany with some older couple? She was telling the truth… the couple was Penelope Baena and me. We convinced Adélaïse to come with us to Italy; and then she gladly came here to Tripoli when we promised her a reunion with her best friend, Saskia. She is a very pretty, very sweet girl, this Adélaïse. Did you notice when she was just in here? Oh, no… you only had eyes for your Clara… Sorry, your ‘Saskia.’ I know how much you love her. Well, as we were leaving Italy to come here, we had Adélaïse write a letter to Saskia—Adélaïse calls her Saskia as you do. The letter contained personal clues, references to private secrets that only the two of them could know about… then we mailed the letter to Saskia’s bank in Siena. Yes, it was a letter from Adélaïse, not from me. Adélaïse told Saskia in her letter that she would be waiting for her in Tripoli. This is what made Saskia abandon you in Italy. Your girl does love you, Saul. Believe it or not, she loves you as much as you love her. She didn’t want you to see that letter from Adélaïse because, as you know, she knew from the innkeeper and his wife in Staggia that you are wanted in Tripoli, and that your coming here to Tripoli meant your death. As for herself, she had already made up her mind—and she even told you, don’t forget!—she would travel any distance, and alone too, to reunite with her best friend, Adélaïse. And she did find Adélaïse, so now she is happy! …You know, Saul, the life of a man with whom a young woman is intimate for a short while means relatively little to her where lifelong friendship is concerned.” Dragomir broke once again into great laughter after saying that. “That’s funny, is it not? But truthfully, Saul, she does love you, as much as you love her.”