Beautiful Blood (12 page)

“I’d say you’re planning to look into Ludie’s death. But why not use your own operatives?”

“I have no operatives, merely eyes and ears on the street. Your people are bound to be more efficient than anyone in my employ.”

Following an exchange of patently fraudulent pleasantries, Breque left Rosacher to contemplate the view, but his contemplative mood was broken. He felt agitated, ill at ease. No matter how hard he tried he was unable to enfold himself in the landscape, to sink into it and become part of a harmonious whole. None of the particulars of his life seemed properly aligned. As he sat and stewed over a variety of trivial issues, he recognized that although it appeared that Breque had been neutralized, the councilman would continue to be a significant problem because he had fallen in love with power and Rosacher knew from experience that nothing, not even the threat of destruction, would discourage him from seeking more.

Until his meeting with Breque, Rosacher’s days had been relatively undemanding. He would spend a few hours handling logistical issues at the House and, once he was assured that things were running smoothly, he would pass the remainder of his time in reflection upon his newfound faith, an imperfect thing that he examined in various lights, trying alternately to shore it up and pick it apart. On occasion he was summoned back to the House to deal with some crisis, but these instances grew more infrequent as the men and women he had trained to be his aides grew more competent. Following the meeting, however, he was forced to spend hours each day in the treatment room, located beneath the amphitheater, there pretending to work some magic with the blood to make it suitable for human consumption. Since no one was permitted to oversee this process, he initially whiled away the hours by daydreaming and playing mental games; but he wearied of these pastimes and took to writing down his thoughts. Sitting in a wooden chair beside a ceramic-lined tub of Griaule’s blood (which, against logic, gave no sign of congealing), staring at the the black cryptograms that materialized upon its golden surface, then faded and vanished, it was hardly surprising that his thoughts were of Griaule—insights into the dragon’s intent, meditations on man’s place in relation to Griaule and other like topics. Soon he began to organize these thoughts into essay form and, after several months of pruning and polishing, he read one of the essays, an examination of Griaule’s influence upon the history of Teocinte entitled “On Our Dragon Nature,” delivering it by means of a speaking tube that carried his raspy whisper throughout the amphitheater. The reaction was overhelming, outstripping his expectations—the gift shop was besieged with requests for printed copies of the essay and also with inquiries as to when the next “sermon” would be read. It seemed that a tremendous audience had been waiting for just such a preachment to give shape and substance to their inarticulate feelings, and so Rosacher was encouraged to construct a second essay. As he searched about for an appropriate topic, he cast his mind back to the beginning of his involvement with the dragon, to his study of the blood and the peculiar lapses in time (as if, he imagined, he had been skipped across the river of time like a flat stone across an actual river) that had marked the dragon’s efforts to thwart that study. Viewed in retrospect, it was an unwieldy tactic. It would have been much easier for the dragon to arrange his death—he’d had ample weapons at his disposal. Yet instead of letting flakes or enemies or some other element of the natural world do his bidding, Griaule had imperiled Rosacher time and again only to save him for some mysterious purpose, perhaps the very purpose he was now serving, the deification of the dragon. It was as if through his interaction with humanity, Griaule had adopted a human means of problem-solving, a haphazard empiricism, trying this ploy, discarding another, rummaging through innumerable potentials until he had winnowed them down to a single promising thread, one that embodied an immortal perspective on mortal circumstance…and thus was Rosacher led to write the essay entitled, “Is The God I Worship The God I Cause To Be?”, which elicited a more enthusiastic response than had his first attempt at theological discourse.

While visiting with Meric Cattanay on his tower one sunny, blustery afternoon, he brought up the subject, asking the artist if he had ever thought much about it. Cattanay was belted into a sturdy chair atop the platform, dabbing paints onto blank pages in a sketchpad, mixing colors together and adding linseed oil, then gauging the effect. He had aged markedly during the previous decade—his hair had gone from mostly gray to mostly white, the lines on his face had deepened into seams and his movements were stiff and halting, so much so that whenever the tower creaked in the wind, Rosacher would imagine the creaking issued from Cattanay’s joints. He required assistance in order to ascend and descend from the tower—thus the chair. “I used to think a great deal about things of that sort,” he said, wiping off a brush with a rag. “I never got anywhere with it. Too busy, I guess. And now I don’t have the time. If the mural’s going to be finished before I die, I’d better work swiftly.”

“You’re being overly dramatic,” said Rosacher. “You’ve long years ahead of you.”

Cattanay dunked the brush into a jar of cleansing solution. “I wish I could believe you, but I listen to what my body tells me…and it’s telling me I don’t have much longer. Both my parents were dead by their early sixties. Unlike yours, I’d wager. The years have been extremely kind to you.” He selected a finer brush. “When I used to wonder about Griaule, whether he was a god, all that, I concluded that of course he was. What else could he be? He’s the most godlike being I’ve ever run across and if there’s a consensus about the question, which there seems to be, who am I to argue? I’m a simple craftsman and not a deep thinker—I’ll leave that to you and Breque.”

“You must have gone round and round about Griaule,” said Rosacher. “I mean, you didn’t just make a snap decision.”

“I gave it due consideration.” Cattanay dipped the brush in indigo, daubed it onto the page, and mumbled something that Rosacher didn’t catch. “The truth is,” he went on, “once I stopped thinking about Griaule as a metaphysical problem, I became more content. I realized that a lot of what had been bothering me…you know, woman troubles, logistical matters, and so forth. I had complicated them by paying so much attention to Griaule. It was more satisfying to focus on questions I had the ability to answer. For instance.” He showed Rosacher the page on which he’d been painting—a splotch of gold partly limned in indigo. “I’ve been debating whether or not to edge the lower right quadrant of the mural with indigo. It wouldn’t serve as a border. It wouldn’t be this neat. Just a ragged evolution of the paint from gold to indigo in this one area. What do you think?”

Rosacher studied the page. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Of course you don’t. To make a judgment, you’d need to have some expertise, you’d need to understand how the color would work on the scales. You’d have to learn about varnishes. I’ve been using beeswax to fix the colors, but I’ve been considering a more conventional finish on the indigo.” He chuckled. “You’re not qualified to make that sort of decision. And none of us are qualified to assess Griaule’s mystical potential. Let it go. Concentrate on the things you’re expert in. You’ll be much happier.”

“I’ve become expert on how to handle whores.” Rosacher said glumly. “And drugs. I know how to create a demand for drugs.”

“You’re a businessman,” said Cattanay. “And a scientist. Perhaps you should focus on science for a while. Stop worrying about Griaule.”

Rosacher suppressed a laugh. “I’m afraid that science is entwined with metaphysics in this case.”

The old man’s white hair lashed about in the wind and he groped for his beret, lying on the platform beside the chair. Rosacher handed it to him.

“When you go down,” Cattanay said. “And I’m not trying to run you off. But when you do go, you may see a redheaded boy standing by the tower. Ask him to bring up a blanket, won’t you?” He turned to a fresh page in his sketchbook and looked toward the lowering sun, halfway obscured by Griaule’s majestic head. “Astonishing…to be sitting here. I hoped I might open my own gallery, sell a few of my paintings. I certainly wouldn’t have predicted that I’d be fortunate enough to have witnessed all that I have. You ever think you’d see anything like him?”

“Yes, I did,” said Rosacher. “But I thought it would be different.”

Though much of what Cattanay said rang true, Rosacher failed to follow his advice. Encouraged by the reception given his essays, he embarked upon the creation of one a week (a task that entailed his working many late nights), and read it aloud to those assembled in the amphitheater each Friday evening prior to the weekend bacchanal. The most pronounced effect of these essays was not, as might be surmised, upon the audience, but was their effect upon Rosacher himself. Before taking up the pen, he had reached the conclusion that the dragon exerted a powerful influence on human affairs, but his belief was based upon a preponderance of evidence, rarely rising to the level of faith, and he was constantly assailed by doubt; but with every word written and spoken, his belief in Griaule’s divinity was strengthened and transformed into a devout reverence, until he became as zealous in his affirmation of the dragon’s divine potency as he had once been in his determination to paint Griaule as an exemplar of the mundane, somewhat larger than most, yet ordinary nonetheless.

Rosacher’s investigation into Ludie’s death proved fruitless. Her will, as he had presumed, was a sham, and either the killer had covered his tracks too well or else the accident had been no more than an accident; but he was confident that Breque knew of his agreement to hand over the business to the Church and that he was attempting to turn him against Mospiel in hopes that he would abrogate the agreement. Each week brought a fresh complaint from Breque’s office—the prelates wanted a larger percentage of the foreign markets or demanded a tightening of quality control or else were creating a fuss about some trivial issue that they claimed ran contrary to their doctrine. Rosacher advised Breque to appease them by offering a crumb of what they asked for, and Breque did as advised; yet he kept up his saber-rattling and made bellicose gestures against adjoining countries, massing troops along their borders and holding training exercises. Rosacher felt that something would have to be done to muzzle Breque’s ambitions, but he decided to bide his time. Though the relationship was sorely taxed on occasion, Breque had proved himself a dependable and trustworthy partner, one to whom Rosacher owed much of his success. Not the least of this debt related to Amelita Sobral, one of the operatives that Rosacher had borrowed from Breque in order to investigate Ludie’s death. She was a slender, black-haired woman with a milky complexion and features of an unearthly delicacy (enormous dark eyes, tiny chin, high cheekbones, a face that might have been the work of a master carver with a bent for the exotic) that lent her a deceptively frail, fey manner, like a fairy tale maiden in constant need of rescue, though this was far from the case, and a manner so grave, it challenged Rosacher to extract a smile from her. He assumed that she and her male counterpart would inform Breque about his activities, and his deeper motive in requesting them was to control the stream of information between his office and Breque’s by feeding them material and having his own agents report on what the operatives had communicated to Breque. In particular he wished to learn by this experiment whether Breque would react to false information about the murder investigation and thus prove himself complicit in Ludie’s death.

Amelita and Rosacher became lovers shortly after she entered his employ. He had thought this would happen, and that it would be entirely cynical on her part, but he allowed the relationship to prosper because it suited his strategy and further because he was smitten with her. Yet he noticed over the months that the information she passed on to Breque excluded details designed to inflame the councilman and eventually became an uninformative digest of what Rosacher permitted her to see. One drizzly morning almost two years after he had requested her services, she came to him out on the ledge, where he had gone to write and to draw inspiration from the shifting pastorale visible from Griaule’s side. She wore the khaki trousers of a Hangtown woman and a blouse of black broadcloth, a garment that signaled self-abnegation among her people, puritanical cultists who dwelled along the banks of the Putomaya in the jungly lowlands of the country. Sitting with her knees drawn up beneath her chin, she confessed her betrayal, telling him that she had reported to Breque on Rosacher’s activities—as her feelings for Rosacher grew, however, she had come to censor her reports, omitting whatever she considered to be crucial, but she could no longer maintain even this level of subterfuge. He was unable to rid himself of suspicion and, though moved by her apparent sincerity, with a fraction of his mind he reserved judgment, knowing her to be an accomplished deceiver—he thought the confession might be a ploy designed to engage his trust. He drew her into an embrace and, his face buried in her hair, said that he loved her, words he fervently believed as he spoke them, but that seemed devalued once he released her.

“I should never have accepted the assignment,” she said in a small voice. “My instincts told me to avoid you at all costs.”

“Then we would have never met,” Rosacher said. “Would you have preferred that?”

“It might have been for the best.”

“We can move past this,” he said.

“I’m not so sure.”

“Well, I am!”

“I have higher standards for my behavior than do you…or so it would seem.”

He tried to read her face, but it remained impassive. “What would you have me do?” he asked. “Devise some punishment? You were following orders and deserve none. Forgive you? I forgive you. That should go without saying.”

She gave him a penetrating look, then hung her head, picking at a fray on her trouser cuff. At last she said, “You’re taking this rather well…and I find it odd that you don’t seem at all surprised by my duplicity.”