All this while Straït’s chant had purred oppressively out of his throat to hang heavily about him, so that, by the time he had finished his mystic architecture and had gone to the table to unroll the silken bundle, the room’s atmosphere was thick, repressive of movement: the talmid, carrying the brazier of virgin charcoal into the triangle, moved sluggishly, and the dumb boy’s hands, setting the candles in the stars that were outside the circle, moved clumsily, stiffly, as if they needed the eyes’ help to tell when they held the candles and when not. When the candles and the charcoal in the brazier had been lighted, Straït took the hazel rod inscribed Tetragrammaton and the sword whose legend was Elohim Gibor from the table and stepped into the circle’s square. At their master’s heels, one holding each of the lesser swords with their lesser legends—Panoraim Heamesin and Gamorin Debalin—Simon and the boy knelt.
Straït planted his feet firmly apart, looked to Dantalian’s ring on his left hand that its bezel was out, shrugged his shoulders for greater ease under the heavy robe, hitched his girdle, freshened his grip on rod and sword, cleared his throat, and lifted his face to the west.
“I invoke and conjure you, O Spirit Dantalian, and, fortified with the power of the Supreme Majesty, I command you by Baralamensis, Baldachiensis, Paumachie, Apoloresedes and the most potent princes Genio, Liachide, ministers of the Tartarean Seat, chief princes of the Seat of Apologia in the ninth region; I exorcise and command you, O Spirit Dantalian, by Him Who Spake and it was done, by the most holy and glorious Names Adonai, El, Elohim, Elohe, Zebaoth, Elion, Escherce, Jah, Tetragrammaton, Sadai: do you forthwith appear and show yourself to me, here before this circle, in a fair and human shape, without any deformity or horror; do you come forthwith, from whatever part of the world, and make rational answers to my questions; come presently, come visibly, come affably, manifest that which I desire, being conjured by the Name . . .”
And so, on and on, the mystic rigmarole rose and fell in carefully cadenced strain, on through its tedious length, now contradictory, now tautological, now repetitious, but not ever in its emptiest phrase to be escaped. When it was done, except for the more rosy light of fuller risen sun, there was nothing in the room that had not been there before.
“Um-hmmm,” Straït hummed briefly. “We shall see.”
And he swung into the second conjuration, less restraint in his voice, loosing a gong-like resonance in his broader vowels. He called now on the Name Anehexeton which Aaron spoke and was made wise, the Name Joth that Jacob learned, the Name Escerchie Ariston which Moses named and the rivers and waters of Egypt were turned into blood, and others. And when he was done there was a vague flickering between brazier and window, a distortion of the air that was gone as soon as it was come.
Straït’s face was bleak and Straït’s eyes were hard and Straït’s knuckles were white on rod and sword hilt.
“So?” he said softly, and softness went out of his voice. The third conjuration was a brazen song that beat the velvet walls, beat back on itself, beat the candle-flames to dim sparks, beat dark dampness out on the linen garments of the kneeling apprentices from armpit to hip. Besides the Names he had already invoked, Straït now called on Eye and Saray, and the Name Primematum, and others.
When he had done that, something was in the room without having come there in any manner: a soldier in russet, a narrow band of yellow metal around his brows, sat a sorrel horse between brazier and west window. If you chose to think he had materialized there, or had whisked himself there from another place, you were welcome, but it was certain you could not say when.
Straït’s lids crept closer around his mad eyes, and there was no favor in the face with which he faced the soldier.
“O Spirït Berith, transmuter of metals, revealer of the past and the present and the future, giver of dignities, liar: because I have not called you, do you at once depart, without injury to man or beast. Depart, I command you and be you . . .”
Here the soldier Berith, fingers toying with red mane, leaned over his charger’s neck and sought to stem the dismissal. His scarred face was bland, and his harsh voice counterfeited bluff friendliness.
“But since I am here, Straït, you may as well make use of me.”
“. . . ready to come whensoever, and only when, duly exorcised and conjured,” the magician’s voice went heedless on. “I command you to withdraw peaceably . . .”
The soldier urged the sorrel nearer, and leaned farther over its neck.
“But, Straït, what is the—?”
With “and quietly, and may the peace of God continue forever between me and you,” Straït had finished, and the russet soldier was no more in the room than his russet mount.
The magician rubbed the back of one hand over his forehead that was wet and shiny, and with camphor and brandy he revivified the brazier’s weakening flame, while the apprentices shifted their knees on the floor behind him and breathed with unguarded noisiness through open mouths.
The charcoal burning afresh, Straït put away his vials, braced himself on his short legs, lifted his face once more to the west, and became an iron horn through which thunder trumpeted the invocation of King Corson of the West. That invocation completed to no effect save the shivering of the two behind him, Straït hunched his shoulders, smiled a basilisk’s smile, and the Chain Curse came cruelly out of his mouth. The dumb boy tried to stop his ears with his fingers, but Simon struck his arm down.
When the last hard black word of the Chain Curse had been uttered, and no thing had come into the room, Straït took a small black box from under his robe, and held his other hand behind him. Into that hand the talmid put the virgin parchment inked with Dantalian’s seal. Into the box, among the assafetida and brimstone that was there, went the parchment, the lid closed, iron wire went thrice around the box, Straït’s sword found purchase in a loop of the wire, and the box dangled down in the charcoal’s flame.
The jagged, crackling phrases of the Fire Curse dulled the walls’ embroidery into colorlessness, made a cringing small heap of the boy, painted the talmid’s chin with blood beneath the sob-checking cut of his teeth. Straït’s face was a cold, dry, white blur as the box slid off his sword and nestled among the hot coals.
Between fire and window stood a man-shape. The face atop his neck was not ugly even in its sullen endurance of agony. Some of his other faces grimaced hideously in their pain. The faces that were his right hand’s finger-tips were smeared into shapelessness by the book they held.
Straït plucked the box from the fire, dropping in its stead a pinch of incense that clouded the room with pungent sweetness. He spoke politely to the man by the window, but he held aside the fold of his robe that bared the Seal of Solomon until that man had come into the part of the drawn triangle which lay outside the circle.
“I am here, Straït,” that one said meekly enough, however confusing it was to have each word in turn come from another of his faces. “Command me.”
The magician wasted no time in recrimination, in railing against the obstinacy the spirit had shown. Into the hand Straït held behind him Simon put two written slips of paper. From the first of these Straït looked up at the demon.
“There is a man Eton who had some ships with another man Dirk. A while ago they divided their ships and each took his portion to himself. Now I must know does Dirk prosper more than Eton, who seems to prosper little?”
Dantalian raised the book in his right hand while his finger-tip faces turned the leaves with their tiny white teeth. Dantalian nodded with all his faces.
“Dirk prospers more,” three of his mouths affirmed.
“So? Now you will put it in Dirk’s mind that he should return to Eton, that they should pool their boats again, share and share alike.”
The woman’s face on Dantalian’s left shoulder smiled slowly and heavily through her weight of seductiveness, and took the answering from the other heads:
“Will it serve to put the idea first into the head of Dirk’s wife?”
“I have heard the gossip. So the matter is arranged, you may suit yourself how. Now there is another thing; there is a jeweler Buclip who wants the love of a woman”—Straït bent his head to the second slip in his hand and clicked his teeth together—“named Bella Chara. You will—”
“Wait!” Dantalian called deafening, discordantly, with all his mouths at once. “Don’t do this foolish thing!”
Though there was nothing yielding in his cold eyes, Straït withheld his words and looked at the demon.
“Why should you do this foolish thing?” the vocal change-ringing went on. “You have—”
Now Straït checked the demon’s words with upraised rod in the hand on which the demon’s seal glowed, looking meanwhile for an uneasy instant over his shoulders at his kneeling assistants.
“We will take all that for granted,” he said. “You and I know what we know. Let us only say what needs to be said from that point, if anything.”
“Then why should you give her away?” some of Dantalian’s voices were asking while the courtesan’s head on his shoulder leered knowingly. “Is it any fairer to herself than to you to bind her by these means in a place she has not gone of her accord? She is yours—keep her.”
“What of the jeweler’s gifts?”
The courtesan sniggered, but a fair face elsewhere on Dantalian spoke softly:“Weren’t you away for weeks at a time with your abstinences and your fastings? Was she, knowing nothing, to sit in her house and twiddle her fingers and wait for you to find time to visit her? And what of the jewelry? Does not Buclip’s coming to you show that he needs more than jewelry?”
Straït frowned and said, “I made a bargain. I set my theurgy to do a thing. You will—”
“Wait!” Dantalian cried again, and tried scoffery. “You made a bargain, yes. But what of your bargain with her? That, of course, is nothing where your silly vanity is concerned! That is not enough to balance the fear that this dolt Buclip might tell his neighbor Straït’s sorcery failed him. Are you a child, Straït, to toss away that which you value for the sake of a traffic in which you have no belief? Does being pointed out as Straït the magician mean that much to you?”
Scowling, Straït replied, “You will give—” and he stopped to look at the book whose pages spun swiftly to the click of Dantalian’s snapping finger-mouths. The white whir of the leaves became less a whir, less a book, and into the demon’s hand came a woman’s face.
This face was the first thing to come eerily into the room. For a demon to materialize, however abruptly, however trickily, can be nowise genuinely weird, for such is the nature of spirits. But the matter is different when a face of ripe pink flesh comes out of a book, a warm oval of compact meatiness and creased lips and merry eyes that so awfully do not belong apart from a soft pulsing body.
“This is what you will pay for the privilege of showing off,” Dantalian accused the magician. “This is what, in your empty vanity, you will throw to a baldly grey jeweler.”
Straït swallowed and wet his lips and looked away from the delectable face held up in a hand whose finger-ends were tiny faces that kissed and ran red tongues over the round throat they held. Straït looked at the floor and wrinkled his forehead under his linen cap and seemed in every way ashamed.
And Straït said, “You will give the jeweler Buclip the love of this woman so she will never see any other man with love.”
Dantalian was a pandemonium of voices that barked and growled and screamed, a horrible gallery of rage-masks that snarled and spat.
Straït said, “O Spirit Dantalian, because you have diligently answered my demands, I do hereby license you to depart, without injury to man or beast. Depart, I say, and be you willing and ready to come, whensoever duly exorcised and conjured. I conjure you to withdraw peaceably and quietly, and may the peace of God continue forever between me and you.”
Straït flourished sword and rod and copper ring, and there was not anything in the room but the magician and his paraphernalia, and white Simon swaying up from his knees, and the boy fainting across the floor, his face all smudged by the charcoal with which the mystic circle had been drawn.
Simon the talmid touched his master’s sleeve.
“Oh, Master, if I had only known when the jeweler gave me her name!”
Straït said that was nonsense. He said it did not matter; Dantalian had made much of little. He said he was a middle-aged man who should not be trifling with love.
“But, Master, isn’t the jeweler at least ten years older than you? And she herself—she’s twenty-five if she’s a day!”
Straït smiled sidewise then into the talmid’s pale face, and asked if Simon had considered her ancient hag’s face not at all desirable.
Simon blushed contritely and tried to wipe out the slight.
“No, Master!” he protested. “She was—if she had been mine, I would never have—” and there he floundered, for that way lay another slight.
But Straït did not seem to mind. He confessed he had not played the man’s part. He said Simon would understand, when his day came, that to the extent one becomes a magician one ceases to be a man. And he added that this same thing might hold true of sailors and jewelers and bankers, and the boy seemed to be stirring, and Simon might let the cleaning of the room wait while he went out to market for a fat goose and whatever else they would need for the evening meal, now the fasting was over.
MONK AND JOHNNY FOX
I was pretty tired. When Monk came over to my table I didn’t see him until he put a hand on my shoulder, and then his face was fuzzy. He said, “I’m sliding, Kid. Why don’t you?”
“Listen, Monk,” I said, “I only had three drinks. I’m all right.”
He smiled along one side of his mouth. “Sure, Kid sure, I know. It ain’t that. But use a little sense. You’re walking on your heels right now. I’m not trying to pull you out. All I’m asking is don’t make it all night.”
I said, “All right, all right,” and he went away.
The blonde on my right asked, “What’s the matter with that guy?”
“There’s nothing the matter with that guy,” I explained carefully. “He’s a swell guy. He don’t give a damn for you and he don’t give a damn for me and he don’t give a damn for anybody but himself. He’s a swell guy.”
“I don’t see anything swell about that,” she said.
“Sometimes I don’t either,” I said, “but it’s there. Listen, let’s scram out of here, let’s go some place where we can talk, take a ride or something.”
She said, “I don’t know about the fellow I’m with.”
“All right. Forget it.”
“Don’t be like that,” she said. “Wait till I see what I can do.” She got up and went around the table.
Johnny Fox came over from the bar to shake hands with me. “What a fight, Kid!” he said. “Did you walk to and fro through that mug!”
I said I was glad he liked it, or something like that. If he—if none of them but Monk and me—didn’t know it wasn’t a good fight I wasn’t going to argue.
I introduced Johnny to the others, waving a hand at the ones whose names I couldn’t remember, and he said he would like to buy a drink.
The blonde came back to her chair, saying, “Yes, sir,” to me as she sat down.
I said, “Swell. We’ll break away after this drink.”
We had to wait a little longer than that because Johnny was telling me a long story about something and then everybody said it was still early, but I told them I was all in—“Those pokes I stopped with my chin didn’t harden me up any”—and we finally got away.
My car was around the corner on Fifty-Third Street. “Anywhere?” I asked. She said, “Sure,” so I turned the car over towards the river.
She lit a cigarette, gave it to me, lit another for herself, slid down comfortable in the seat, and asked, “When do you fight again?”
“First of the month, in Bosto
n.”
“Who?”
“Pinkie Todd.”
“I never saw him fight.”
“Neither did I,” I said, “but I hear he’s all right.”
She laughed. “He’ll have to be a lot better than all right to—”
“Yes,” I said, “I’m great, I’m marvelous, I’m the toughest, gamest, cleverest middle-weight since some guy whose name I forget. Now shut up.”
“What’s the matter with you?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said, “except I’d like to bust out crying.”
We were riding over the bridge then. She put her face close to mine, staring at me, and said, “Listen, Kid, I don’t care how fast you drive if you’re sober. Are you?”
“I’m sober.”
She said, “OK,” and made herself comfortable again.
I said, “But I don’t see why you take my word for it.”
She sat up straight. “And I don’t see why you brought me out here just to pick a fight with me. I never did anything to you. You never saw me before tonight. You don’t know me from Adam.”
“That’s just it,” I said. “Why do I have to pick up some girl I don’t even know her name and might be any kind of tramp and go—”
“You didn’t pick me up,” she said. “We were introduced by Fred Malley and my name’s Judith Parrish and I’m not any kind of tramp and you can let me out right here at the end of the bridge.”
“Stop it. I didn’t mean anything personal. I’m just trying to—”
She laughed and said, “You must be a honey when you get personal.” Her laugh was nice.
“I’m just trying to get something straight, for myself I mean.”
She put a hand in the crook of my arm. “It’s that fight tonight that’s worrying you, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“Fixed?” she asked.
“No. That’s happened without bothering me, but tonight was on the level.”
“Well, then, what’s the matter with you? It was a swell fight. You were swell.”
“I know better,” I said, “and Monk knows better.”
Crime Stories Page 136