Mum told me about it while Melanie was in the shower.
“She’d already told him she thought we had to go ahead,” she said. “Before I got there, I mean. She says Melly might crack up completely if we don’t. She’s worried, of course, but she’s a bit more down-to-earth about it than I am. She says the only thing that matters is that the girls are convinced this is the right way for them to meet, and it makes no difference if Monsieur Albert’s a complete charlatan. In fact what would be worrying would be if he wasn’t. She says he can’t really expect us to believe there’ll only be one of the girls left at the end of it, that’s just mumbo jumbo, and of course they’ll both be there and he’ll claim he was talking metaphysically, or something, but it’s worth letting him see he’s not going to get away with trying anything like that. And tomorrow morning she’s going to look for some sort of paging gadget for you to have on you, so that you can call us the moment you think there’s anything wrong.”
“All right,” I said.
“You’re sure, darling. You’d say, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, of course,” I said.
Actually I didn’t know what I felt. All this was making me pretty anxious. I couldn’t think properly. One side of me agreed with Eddie and Janice, that Monsieur Albert was a crook, a con man, and all he was probably after was the money, though he might try something nasty with the girls and it was up to me to stop it. That’s what my brain said. But another side of me—well, I’d spent so much time with Melanie, and I minded so much for her and about her, and she was so sure that this thing mattered more than anything else in the world … well, I believed that too. I had to.
Not just that. I was actually praying that Eddie didn’t find someone else with the right birthday. I was scared stiff, but I wanted to be there. Me and no one else.
We waited for it to get a bit cooler, but it didn’t, so in the end we went out and had supper at a restaurant in one of the main squares, with tables out on the pavement. Just being with Melanie now was like being on some kind of wonderful high, she was so happy, bubbling and chatting, and then going dreamy for a few minutes, and then coming back to us and telling us what Melly and Janice were up to. I could almost feel them, Melly and Melanie, swooping to and fro between their two bodies like the swifts swooping and wheeling against the evening sky.
“I don’t know if I can bear this much more,” Mum whispered to me at one point. “It’ll be so agonizing if it all goes wrong.”
“Not much longer now,” I told her.
But it was. It was forever. The night was forever, and the morning longer, and the afternoon longer still, and I’d look at my watch thinking that would be another twenty minutes gone and it was maybe three. The heat made it worse. It was almost as if time had sort of melted, like a road melts on really hot days, and everything stuck to it as it went along.
Eddie came round soon after breakfast. He talked to Mum alone for a bit. Melanie seemed to have gone all sleepy. She said she didn’t want to talk or think because she was getting herself ready. She seemed perfectly happy, but we didn’t want to leave her alone, so I waited with her until Mum came up and told me that Eddie hadn’t found anyone else and he needed to tell me what I’d got to do.
I went down feeling nervous as hell and we sat in a dark, hot little bar smelling of last night’s smoke and drink while he explained.
“I saw him again yesterday evening,” he said, “and I got most of what we wanted. I wasn’t expecting the lot. The chief thing I didn’t get was that he wouldn’t hear of anyone waiting in the two lobbies at the top of the stairs. The whole of that floor has to be free of irrelevant astral influences, believe it or not. At least the bastard’s consistent. But we can wait on the landings below, and we can see the top of the stairs from there, and that’s pretty well as good. I’ve got a French colleague coming from Marseilles to give a hand, so that means there will be two each side. And I’ve been over the whole place again, measuring up, and I’d bet my life there’s no other way out.”
“He didn’t mind?” I said.
“Didn’t turn a hair. Amused, if anything, but he doesn’t give much away. The other thing he wouldn’t stand for was me taking you round there this morning to show you the layout. More astral contamination, of course. Best I can do is a sketch map. I made him take me through the whole process, as far as it concerns you. This wasn’t just so that I could check it out. It’s so that if he tells you anything different you’ll know he’s up to something. And he is. I’m still dead certain of that.”
He unfolded a piece of paper and showed me his sketch. It was not quite square, with two smaller squares on the corners on one of the long sides, leaving a space like a fat T. This was the main room. The small squares were the two lobbies, with stairs leading up to them.
“Right,” he said. “There are four good windows, so there should be plenty of light. Once the proceedings have begun, Albert will be at this end here, where I’ve written ‘A,’ and you will be here at ‘K,’ behind the mirror. I haven’t seen the mirror, but he says it’s a bit under three feet wide and about five foot six high. He wanted to put you right down here by the bottom window, but I insisted that you must be able to see him throughout the proceedings. He didn’t like it, but in the end he agreed on condition that once things are under way you keep absolutely still and don’t do anything to distract him. By the way, I haven’t told him that you’ll have a pager, assuming Janice can find one.
“When you first come into the room, take a good look round. Apart from the mirror there’ll be only what’s already there—that’s to say this stack of chairs in the corner and this table here. The tablecloth hangs down a few inches. If he’s moved it or changed it so that it prevents you from seeing under it except by lifting it up, object. That’s the only hiding place I can see in the room, and I think it’s too obvious for him to consider. There are little balconies outside the three main windows. Take a look out and check there’s no one on them.
“When you’re satisfied, tell him, and he’ll then go through the procedure with you. I’ve told him that you understand simple French, provided he speaks slowly and clearly. All right? Now this is what he says is going to happen.
“Sunset is at eight-forty-six, local time. A few minutes before that he’ll tell you to fetch the girls. You come to this lobby here, go to the top of the stairs, and beckon to Melanie to come up. You don’t speak unless you have to. Trish and my French colleague will wait on the lower landing. Once Melanie’s in the lobby you lock the outer door and blindfold her with the cloth she’ll give you. You then go and call Melly from the other lobby. This way, you’ll be able to see Albert from the top of the stairs all the time he’s alone in the room with Melanie, and you can signal to me if you think everything’s OK. You lock that door—don’t worry, I’ll bring a jimmy—and blindfold Melly.
“You go back into the main room and wait for Albert to tell you to bring the girls in. You do that, Melly first, and stand them-back to back here, in front of the mirror, where I’ve put these crosses. He’s seen what they’ll be wearing, but he’ll check them over and go back to his chair. When he signals to you to remove the blindfolds you do so, and go back behind the dotted line. He’ll signal again, and you tell them to turn round. After that you keep complete silence. The girls will do what they are compelled to do, he says, whatever that means.
The upstairs room at the Orangerie
“The mirror has a leather cover, fastened with two buckles at the back. He’ll ring a bell three times, twice for you to undo the two buckles, and the third time for you to remove the cover. You fold it and put it on the table and you then move to K and stay there, until—”
“Will I be able to see the girls from there?” I said.
“No, you won’t. I couldn’t shake him on that. This was the best I could get. He says it’s not to stop you seeing the girls, but so that they aren’t distracted by seeing you. They mustn’t be aware of anything except the mirror. But you’ll b
e able to see him and everything else except that narrow section of the room, and I don’t see what he can get up to from where he is. That window is three storeys up a sheer wall with a busy square outside. That curtain will be closed, by the way, but he’s leaving the other two open for light.
“All right? Then you stay in your chair until everything’s over. He’ll ring the bell again for you to put the cover back on the mirror and fasten the buckles. You don’t need to wait for him to ring three times. And that’s apparently it. You can unlock the doors and we’ll come up and check that the girls are all right.”
“Did he actually say girls? Two of them?” I said.
“No, he didn’t. He’s still going through this charade of pretending there’s only going to be one of them. Right up to the point when you take the cover off he was talking about les jeunes filles, and from then on it’s la jeune fille. I know it’s nonsense, and I’m dead certain there’s nothing he can do to make it happen, but it makes me bloody uneasy and I wish to hell I’d never got into this.”
After Eddie had gone we got through the day somehow. I just remember the heat, and the sweating tourists, and a cafe with air-conditioning where we had ice creams, and the way the sun slammed into us when we went outside again, and the stuck minutes. I don’t think Melanie noticed anything at all. She was in a different kind of dream today, not soaring about, but sleepwalking round with us.
She actually managed to sleep after lunch. I just lay on my bed and sweated, and Mum read. By teatime I was too nervous to stay there anymore, so I decided to go out again, though it wasn’t any cooler. Melanie woke up and said she was coming too, so we went back to the cafe and had Cokes. She seemed wide awake now, but very quiet and solemn, so I didn’t try to chat. Time oozed by.
We were on our way back to the hotel when Melanie took my hand and said, “I’ve a thing to tell you, Keith. It came to me while I was asleep. But first you must promise me you won’t say a word of it to Trish or Janice or Eddie.”
Once, after some mess I’d got myself into at school, Dad had told me what to do if somebody asks you this. You say, “If it’s something I can promise.” But you don’t, of course—certainly not if it’s someone like Melanie who asks you.
“All right,” I said.
“I ken now why Papa sold his lions,” she said. “He didn’t want this day to come. He couldn’t just leave and go to another circus, because Monsieur Albert would find him there, easy. But he thought maybe if he crossed the sea … Edinburgh would be a good long way … But it was never enough … Papa loved his lions more than anything in the world. But he sold them for me.”
“I suppose that means he loved you more than the lions,” I said. She looked at me sideways and smiled. I knew why, because I’d heard the silly jealousy in my own voice.
“Why don’t you want me to tell Mum and the others?” I said, to cover up.
“Because Eddie’s right. You can’t trust Monsieur Albert. He’ll be trying something.”
“But what? I mean, if he does what we want without any cheating at all he’s going to get a lot of money.”
“I dinna ken. But he’ll be trying something yet.”
When we got back to the hotel we found that Eddie had been and left a sort of electronic gadget for me which Janice had found. I’m going to go on calling it the pager, though I don’t know what it was really for. It looked like a pencil torch. There were two of them and Eddie was keeping the other one. They each had a button on them which you could press, and when you did the light on the other one lit up and it gave a buzz. Mum and Eddie had tested it, and it worked from the street outside up to our rooms in the hotel. I dug out a shirt with a breast pocket and put it in there with a couple of pens. It looked like the sort of thing a kid carries around anyway.
Then we had a bit over half an hour left before our taxi came. I felt extremely nervous again. Time went slower than ever and I kept swallowing and feeling sticky-chilly in spite of the heat, and getting up and walking around and sitting down again, and not being able to concentrate on anything for more than a couple of minutes. Mum read, and Melanie, in her yellow dress, lay on her bed with her eyes shut, but she wasn’t asleep.
When the taxi came it took us a fair distance, right out of the touristy parts, past a lot of ugly modern flats, to a bit where the buildings were old again. I guessed this must have been a village right outside Arles, once, and then Arles had grown round it. We stopped in a grubby square with a church on one side and trees in the middle, where men were playing that game which is a bit like bowls, except that the balls are made of steel and you throw them through the air. The houses had heavy dark shutters and brown or orange plaster, peeling and soft-looking. The roadway was cobbles. Noisy little vans buzzed and bumped across them.
Round from the church the pavement was broad enough to hold a few tables, where men were playing dominoes and drinking beer or wine. The tables belonged to the hotel. It looked so shabby you couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to stay there. Its name, Orangerie, was written in dark green paint across its front.
The men at the tables gave Mum the eye as she led the way in. Melanie drifted along in a kind of trance. I had to hold her elbow and steer her.
Eddie was waiting for us in the lobby. He led us along a corridor and up two flights of stairs to a landing, where he introduced us to the detective from Marseilles, who’d come to help. His name was Pierre.
“All set?” said Eddie. “We’ve still got about twenty minutes till kickoff, but Keith should go up straight away and meet our friend. Just give me a minute to get round to the other side, Keith, then carry on up these stairs and through the door at the top. You’ll find yourself in a small room with another door on the far side. Knock, and wait till he tells you to come in. After that, carry on as we’ve arranged, and if he tells you anything different, you do what I said. Don’t argue with him. Just do it. And if there are any problems, send for me. OK? Well, good luck. See you later.”
We counted sixty seconds on my watch, and then Mum kissed me and wished me luck. Melanie just smiled vaguely at me. I wasn’t sure she even knew I was there.
I climbed the stairs with my heart hammering, opened the door at the top, and went through into a little square dusty room with one small window and not a scrap of furniture. I knocked on the door on the far side, waited until a voice said, “Entrez,” and went in.
For a moment I could hardly see. The room faced west, and the setting sun was blazing in through three tall windows which ran right down to the floor. The light from the middle one was straight in my eyes, dazzling after the darkness of the stairs, but hazy too, and the air was full of a horrible sweet oily smell. I bumped into a table and felt my way round out of the direct sun, where I could see.
The right-hand window was open and a man was standing there, looking out over the trees in the square and the jumbled roofs to watch the sun go down. He was smoking a funny short pipe with a tiny bowl. That was where the haze was coming from. It wasn’t pot—I know what that smells like.
It was incredibly hot up there, in spite of the open window. It was right up under the roof and the sun had been beating down on the tiles all day. I thought I’d been sweating like a pig already, but now it really streamed off me. And the air was foul to breathe, too, with that sweet, sticky smoke mixed in with the dry, hot dust.
The man didn’t move, so I took a look round. The room seemed pretty much like Eddie had told me, with the stack of chairs down at the bottom beside the far window, and the table on the corner where he’d drawn it. I took a special look at the tablecloth, which was a grubby old red thing with tassels at the corners. It hung only a little way down and I decided it must be the same one he’d seen.
He hadn’t seen the mirror, but that was where he’d drawn it too, opposite the middle window. It was about as tall as I am, but all I could see of the mirror itself was a round stand of very dark wood, right at the bottom. The rest of it was covered by a sort of black leather sheath, very
old and crackled, with two straps that buckled behind.
I opened the middle window and looked out. There was a tiny balcony—really it wasn’t much more than a railing to stop people falling out—but there wasn’t anyone hiding out there or on either of the other two, so I came back in and waited there, thankful for the outside air.
At last the man turned round and beckoned, and I went over. He looked at me for a while, so I looked back. He was short and square with big, trembling hands. He was half bald, and the rest of his hair was clipped short. His eyes seemed extra large, and soft, and deep. His face was brown but had a funny dead look to it, like your hands go when you’ve kept them a long time under water. (I’d seen a program about retired clowns once, and one of them had a skin like that. He said it was from the old-style makeup.)
After a bit he said, “Bon. Eh bien, tu t’appelles Keet?”
His voice was quiet and flat, and came a lot through his nose. He sounded tired and bored.
“Oui, Keith,” I said.
He nodded and took me through my instructions in French, in the same order as Eddie had done. I was shuddering with nerves inside, and I thought the easiest thing was to act a bit dumb. We looked into the two little rooms I was going to bring the girls through. The other one was no different from the one I’d already seen. He showed me where he wanted me to make the girls stand, and the signals he’d give me to take the blindfolds off and then to tell them to turn round. Then he took me behind the mirror and unfastened and refastened the top buckle, and made me do the same. He told me to wait and fetched a small handbell out of his bag. I think it may have been silver, but it was almost black.
“Je sonne une fois,” he said, and shook the bell, holding the clapper with his other hand so that it didn’t actually ring. “Tu défais la première boucle.”
The Lion Tamer’s Daughter Page 21