Lady Caroline does not flinch. She looks the policeman straight in the eye, not batting an eyelid, and says, articulating each syllable, “I fail to understand what you are trying to suggest.” But Duchamp is not to be put off so easily. He calmly returns her gaze, then says, after a pause to give his words their full effect, “We found one of the delicate, pale-blue, high-heeled leather shoes that you were wearing on the beach around mid-afternoon. There were blood-stains on the toe. I've just had the result of the analysis: it's neither your own blood nor the late Lord G.’s.”
This time the offender has blushed so violently that she is incapable of carrying it off any longer. She immediately decides to accentuate the outward signs of her embarrassment even further: she brings her hands up to her forehead, sketching in the process a few distracted gestures as if to drive away spectres flickering before her pale-blue pupils. “Forgive me,” she gasps. “It's been a hard day and I'm exhausted. I'm going to have to retire. Do please call back in the morning if you need to ask me any more questions.” “Thank you, madam, but that will probably not be necessary,” the chief commissioner replies, rising from his chair and executing a formal bow in her direction without making the slightest allusion to her alleged indisposition. As he is going out through the door he turns to add, “We shall, however, have to come back to take some of your young soubrettes and confidantes away in order to question them more conveniently at the criminal police's special premises.”
As soon as she is alone Lady Caroline hurries upstairs to her all-white room, where she throws herself on the thick polar-bear skin coverlet gracing the great brass bed. Although she need not, now, go on play-acting for over-inquisitive spectators, she abandons herself to her distress in the ever-vain hope of making it pass more quickly. She lets her blond head toss from side to side among the cushions, the long hairs of which become mingled with her own tresses, and suddenly she stops still, eyes wide and staring at the angle of the wall beneath the cornice, to say aloud a series of confused syllables recognizable, possibly, as the three words: Angelique's Crimson Curse. Up under the ceiling the little round pearl bulbs of the chandelier, bright and clearly visible among all the crystal pendants, begin to move, slowly at first, then more quickly, tracing co-axial circles. Caroline thinks in terror that she is going to start screaming again.
Dr. Morgan, standing beside the bed, leans a little farther over her and observes her with his cold eyes as if trying to decipher a difficult text, or to hypnotize her. But she braces herself, refusing to submit yet again to his power. She shakes her head desperately in order to break free. She says, “Can't you see I'm burning?” The little points of light are now moving all over the room. She is in the convent chapel, which is lit by the dozen very slender candles that have just been brought in, standing at least a metre high, like needles tipped with fire. She is fifteen. Her name is Christine. Today is her solemn communion.
She is kneeling on a black wooden prie-dieu with a perforated back carved in flames and volutes (like the smoke of incense, or of a martyr's pyre), the padded seat and arm-rest of which are covered with bright-red velvet. The six companions flanking her, three on each side, in line before the row of silver church candlesticks, dressed like her in white tulle and kneeling on low prayer-stools (more rustic, though, made of plain, hard wood), seem much less old than she is: twelve or thirteen at most; one can see by their bodices that they are still children.
Christine cannot quite remember why she herself is late in performing this religious ceremony. Another, more disturbing delay weighs heavier on her mind. But the priest who is to insert the host in their half-open mouths, having first heard the confessions of all seven in public, enters from behind the altar. And whom should she recognize to her horror than Dr. Morgan himself. He says, pushing his stern face close and with his whole massive body looming like a giant above the brass bed that he is about to crush: You have a temperature. We're going to give you an injection to let you sleep. An involuntary movement of rebellion half-raises her on one elbow: No! No! No injections, I beg of you! But she slumps back, her strength exhausted, in the white fur.
Brutally wrenched from a deep sleep in the middle of the night, she thinks she is battling with a nightmare that will not go away; but it really is two officers of the law in black tunics and leather belts dragging her from her bed to take her for questioning. All she is wearing is a young bride's—or whore's—chemisette of transparent pink tulle, full and flounced, that starts only just above her breasts and scarcely reaches below the tip of her pubis. It is like one of those that Caroline took on the Turkey trip when she was still hoping to recall her husband to an allegiance that held no attraction for him. That'll be fine for the road, declare the policemen, who seem to be in a hurry to have done with her.
So it is in this attire, and barefoot, that they fling her into their car, only to leave it again soon afterwards not far from the “Mermaid” brand salmon factory and continue the journey on foot on the pretext of taking a short cut, crossing the bay to the old fort by way of the wide expanse of beach left exposed by a very low tide. The night is bright, the sky almost completely clear, and the full moon makes the wet strand glisten with innumerable flickering highlights, gone in an instant, and with great glossy patches that move along, keeping pace with every step.
The smooth sand is littered with clumps of blackish seaweed, slippery if trodden on so best avoided, but also with large numbers of drowned corpses washed up by the sea, children and youths of both sexes, most of them quite naked and with fresh injuries. Judging by their perfect state of preservation, their deaths can only have been recent and none of them can have been in the water for very long. Huge green crabs, bigger than rats, move from wound to wound, adding variety to their feast.
The two uniformed policemen walk in front, turning round from time to time to shout at the young woman to go faster. But the distance between her and them becomes progressively greater. Sometimes, to wait for her for a moment, they stop near a prostrate form, and it is invariably a boy, whereas the girls are far more numerous. Having just lingered for an instant by the dislocated body of one of these, whose arms and legs are almost completely torn off, she having probably been quartered on some machine, Caroline lifts her eyes to look for her warders. For as far ahead as she can see, there is no one there any more.
Nevertheless she resumes walking, though she has now forgotten where she was going. The moist, warm air of the tropical night is laden with smells: over-ripe fruit or sickly-sweet flowers, mingled with iodine and slime. The pieces of jetsam dotted all over the flat, gleaming strand are like the discarded objects of some old, abandoned story: an apple core, a broken chair, the skeletal framework of a wrought-iron bed. Angelica's pink-and-white beach ball is there too, serving no purpose now, as well as several clear light-bulbs: at least, such is one's first impression on seeing these small, scattered bubbles, all white and shiny; looked at more closely, however, their completely spherical shape, lacking any sort of cap by means of which they could be screwed into a socket, makes that application most unlikely. No, these must in fact be the eggs of some chimera, dredged up from the depths of the ocean by the high tides.
And now Caroline stoops to pick up another piece of rubbish: her second blue shoe, the faceted cabochon of which has been ripped off with a pair of pliers, leaving a wide, open wound in the soft leather extending from the middle to the tip of the triangle that constitutes the front portion of the upper. This forms a kind of mouth, gashing the toe of the shoe along its longitudinal axis. And there is blood flowing from between the two parted lips; the thick liquid, however, looks black in the moon's funereal beams.
In the dawn, once again, my face to the wan, almost horizontal rays of the rising sun, I am walking along the immense, deserted strand, right at the water's edge. The sea is a milky jade-green, the distances tinged with very pale yellow and violet; the tide is in now, and all it leaves uncovered at the foot of the dune with its stiff tufts of grey grasses is a
narrow, gently sloping strip of dry sand, evenly dented all over by the romping bathers in daily, elusive attendance, and now gone.
Below the black line formed by tiny fragments of dead algae mixed up with other refuse of more questionable origin that marks the highest point reached by the tide, a uniform surface alternately flooded and exposed by successive little waves in ever-changing festoons makes progress less arduous at times, if still under constant threat, strewn with pitfalls, to say nothing of the big conical or ovoid shellfish with the pearly-pink vulvae—said to be dangerous even to touch—that stand out here and there in the arcs of shiny beach as if on a moving mirror.
And here comes the little beggar-prostitute in her tattered white veils that might once have been some virginal wedding or first-communion dress. In spite—or perhaps because—of the wild radiance of her beauty, a blend of violence and fragility, which with her red-gold hair puts one in mind of a young lioness escaped from a circus, or come down in the night from the nearby forest, men are afraid of her: she is believed to cast spells on those rash enough to take her to their beds; as a result her unstable clientele is recruited mainly among foreigners, the insane, sex maniacs, and murderers. For my part, there is one thing that has been bothering me for a long time: it's always in the same direction that she follows the curving shoreline like this, without her ever being seen to return. Does she do so at dead of night, under cover of the deepest darkness, which only ghosts seek to share with the votaries of drugs and crime? Or does she come back by a secret route, passing through the hinterland by way of dubious suburbs not marked on any map, where temporary huts are dotted in confusion among ruined quarters, derelict sites, and areas of waste ground? It is possible she lives in the underground passages of the old fort, despite the giant scorpions that prevent tramps as well as lovers in search of solitude from venturing inside, or it might be in the luxurious ruins of the hydropathic: all dusty marble and flaking gilt, mirrors punctured with stars or firework patterns by the impact of machine-gun bullets, smashed columns, crumbling balustrades, empty fountain basins, broken statues, rooms with neither windows nor doors and now given over to the seabirds.
Walking faster than she (for in the absence of any onlookers I do not use my stick, which obviously serves no purpose), I have soon caught her up, and my attention is drawn yet again by her curious gait: the foot left behind for a second too long, poised on tiptoe at right angles to the ground, motionless for a moment before taking off, the same fascinating phenomenon recurring identically with every step she takes. All of a sudden the idea flashes through my mind that it would probably be wiser to get rid of this possible witness to my presence so early in the morning in a place so little frequented at such an hour . . .
But whom would she tell? And why? And who would place the slightest credence in the evidence of a half-mad girl who was a witch into the bargain, suspected of the direst misdeeds? Then, on second thoughts, having long ago passed her whereas her foot in that vertical position remains present in my retinal memory, I tell myself it was perhaps this disturbing detail that had the effect of checking my dagger . . . What dagger? Don't make me laugh! I've never carried a weapon. Or was it fear that kept my hands from closing for ever round that slim throat? But fear of what?
Strangling! What am I talking about? Why not impalement with my iron-tipped walking-stick? I have already forgotten where I am coming from and what is hunting me or has marked me down; I cannot even remember how long I have been walking. One after another the heavy, silent pelicans flying along just above the water, all moving in a straight line in the same direction as myself, have passed me without turning their heads, their long necks bent back in the shape of an S. I am so tired now, exhausted by this interminable trek through sand that gives way beneath the soles of my shoes, that without realizing it I have started limping again. And when at last I reach the firm promenade, which has been ballasted, rolled, and asphalted for automobiles to drive and park on, I have to lean heavily on my silver-topped walking-stick to complete the last three hundred metres to the terrace of the Café Maximilian, where I sit down in my customary place. Pursued? But by whom? And for what reason?
The ball-players are there, as they are every morning. They are constantly on the move, and so suddenly and unpredictably that it is almost impossible to check their numbers in order to make sure that none of the girls is missing today, exceptionally. The few drinkers are fully occupied in reading their newspapers and the brown-haired student of the apricot-coloured complexion, sitting two metres from me, in writing, with repeated resumptions, some college essay or thesis on the ruled pages of the fat notebook covered with black canvas that she is holding open on her upraised knees, her bare feet with their vermilion-painted toenails resting on the next wicker chair along. And here comes the white-coated waiter with the strong Portuguese accent, walking towards my table in his nonchalant way to ask me what I want. All is in order.
I have had the first edition of The Globe, which had just arrived, brought to me at the same time as my white coffee and brioches. Almost the entire front page is given over, with enormous photos and banner headlines, to the mysterious murder of David G., the society dress-designer who was recently elevated to the peerage. My attention is immediately caught and held by a support article telling of a tragic episode that goes back to the adolescent years of his still very young wife, Lady Caroline: the suicide of the banker George de Saxe, father of the latter, the sole reason for which had been—according to the paper—a kidnap and ransom affair made up by the girl herself, the supposed victim of it, in aid of a terrorist organization. The banker, fearing the worst, apparently paid the incredible sum demanded, but at the cost of an operation that subsequently ruined his credit. Hearing then, in consequence of some error of communication that was never accounted for, of the execution of the prisoner by her abductors, he took his own life without waiting any longer.
Moreover other stories circulated about the father's disturbed relationship with his daughter as well as about the latter's astonishing resemblance to her own mother, who had disappeared at some time in the past in a ghastly accident, the circumstances of which were, again, never satisfactorily explained. It was this death that the girl had apparently wished to avenge. The article is headed: The New Atridae. The most surprising aspect of all this is undoubtedly the tranquil assurance with which so respectable a daily carries these utterly scandalous rumours concerning a family that, only a matter of days ago, appeared in high favour in the most official milieux of power and infuence.
At this precise point in my reflections, however, leafing through the remaining pages somewhat at random, I come across the photograph taken ostensibly by a reporter in an abandoned cannery and representing, so the caption says, the latest find made by the police in the ritual-sacrifices affair: the tortured body of an exceptionally beautiful adolescent girl, exhibited with arms chained behind her back and legs quartered on a machine designed for quite another purpose.
It is in this attitude, as I said, that Dr. Morgan finds her when he enters the cell where he does his work. He sits down by the bed, on the white-painted chair made of turned wood. He is tired after his long, harassing walk. After an indeterminate period during which he remains plunged in a kind of absence, or lethargy, he goes over and washes his hands carefully in the regulation enamelled basin; and he takes the opportunity of splashing a little water on his face. Then he commences the prescribed sequence of operations.
He first takes the usual measurements with regard to cardiac rhythm and respiration, applying his chromium-plated instruments to various points on the left breast, which he caresses mechanically in the process. Having established that all is in order, as I have already indicated, he administers the subcutaneous softening-up injection, the so-called total-availability shot, directly into the plump, firm flesh of the pubic pad. Finally, and very gently, he inserts a programmed ovule in the patient's vagina; this, it will be remembered, is a smooth white globe, the shape, appearance
, and consistency of which are exactly those of a hard-boiled egg, shelled, from a small chicken. When the object: has been completely sucked in and the orifice has almost closed up again, Morgan looks at the exact time on the large, old-fashioned gold watch he has taken from his waistcoat pocket.
Then he waits, from time to time consulting the table of mean durations and the indications of the stop-watch. When the time comes he checks the subject's reactions by means of short scratches, some deeper than others, executed with the point of a scalpel in the lower groin, on the insides of the thighs, and in the blond fleece around the vulva; the responses, gauged by looking at the eyes, which remain very mobile, the half-open mouth, and the whole body, which is free to express itself in various contortions or quivers, pass within the normal times from sharp pain to mild discomfort, and soon to quiet pleasure. Things are going to move fast now. The humiliation-method interrogation is scarcely finished before Angelica von Salomon embarks on her second narrative.
She is in the brightly-lit main foyer of the Opera House on the evening of a special performance. It is the interval. She wants to go to the lavatory, but she is experiencing very great difficulty in negotiating a passage through this throng of black suits and pale-coloured dresses blocking every possible exit with little groups that are both compact and in constant motion. Finding herself at last, without understanding why, in a less well lit but also very much less crowded gallery, she is struck by the presence, in these splendid surroundings, of a child virtually in rags who is attempting to sell her rosebuds to preoccupied gentlemen whose elegant hands, without their seeing her, push her away as one drives off smoke.
Recollections of the Golden Triangle Page 12