Black Easter (9 page)

‘Stercor,’
Ware said. The word meant nothing to Jack. ‘You keeping thinking I’m talking about public relations, and getting along with people, and all that goose grease. Far from it. A little hatred never hurts the Art, and studied insult is valuable in dealing with demons – there are only a few who can be flattered to any profit, and if man who can be flattered isn’t a man at all, he’s a dog. Do try to understand me, Mr Ginsberg. What I’m talking about is neither your footling hostility nor your unexpectedly slow brains, but your rabbit’s courage. There was a moment during the last ceremony when I could see that you were going to step out of your post. You didn’t know it, but I had to paralyze you, and I saved your life. If you had moved you would have endangered all of us, and had that happened I would have thrown you to M
ARCHOSIAS
like an old bone. It wouldn’t have saved the purpose of the ceremony, but it would have kept the demon from gobbling up everybody else but Ahktoi.’

‘Ach …?’

‘My familiar. The cat.’

‘Oh. Why not the cat?’

‘He’s on loan. He belongs to another demon – my patron. Do stop changing the subject, Mr Ginsberg. If I’m going to trust
you as a Tanist in a great work, I’m going to have to be reasonably sure that you’ll stand fast when I tell you to stand fast, no matter what you see or hear, and that when I ask you to take some small part in the ritual, you’ll do it accurately and punctually. Can you assure me of this?’

‘Well,’ Jack said earnestly, ‘I’ll do my best.

‘But what for? Why do you want to sell me? I don’t know what you mean by your ‘best’ until I know what’s in it for you, besides just keeping you your job – or making a good impression on me because it’s a reflex with you to make a good impression on people. Explain this to me, please! I know that there’s something in this situation that hits you where you live. I could see that from the outset, but my first guess as to what it was evidently was wrong, or anyhow not central. Well, what
is
central to you: the situation has now ripened to the point when you’re going to have to tell me what it is. Otherwise I shall shut you out, and that will be that.’

Wobbling between unconventional hope and standard caution, Jack pushed himself out of the Florentine chair and toe-heel-toed to the window, adjusting his tie automatically. From this height, the cliff-clinging apartments of Positano fell away to the narrow beach like so many Roman tenements crowded with deposed kings – and with beach boys hoping to pick up an American heiress for the season. Except for the curling waves and a few distant birds, the scene was motionless, yet somehow to Jack it seemed to be slowly, inexorably sliding into the sea.

‘Sure, I like women,’ he said in a low voice. ‘And I’ve got special preferences I don’t find it easy to satisfy, even with all the money I make. For one thing, in my job I’m constantly working with classified material – secrets – either some government’s, or the company’s. That means I don’t dare put myself into a position where I could be blackmailed.’

‘Which is why you refused my offer when we first talked.’ Ware said. ‘That was discreet, but unnecessary. As you’ve probably realized by now, neither spying nor extortion has any attraction for me – the potential income from either or both would be a pittance to me.’

‘Yes, but I won’t always have you around,’ Jack said, turning
back towards the desk. ‘And I’d be stupid to form new tastes that only you could keep supplied.’

‘“Pander to” is the expression. Let’s be precise. Nevertheless, you have some remedy in mind. Otherwise you wouldn’t be being even this frank.’

‘Yes … I do. It occurred to me when you agreed to allow Hess to tour your laboratory.’ He was halted by another stab of jealousy, no less acute for being half reminiscent. Drawing a deep breath, he went on, ‘I want to learn the Art.’

‘Oho. That
is
a reversal.’

‘You said it was possible, ‘Jack said in a rush, emboldened by a desperate sense of having now nothing to lose. ‘I know you said you don’t take apprentices, but I wouldn’t be trying to stab you in the back or take over your clients, I’d only be using the Art for my specialized purposes. I couldn’t pay you any fortune, but I do have money. I could do the reading in my spare time, and come back after a year or so for the actual instruction. I think Baines would give me a sabbatical for that – he wants somebody on his staff to know the Art, at least the theory, only he thinks it’s going to be Hess. But Hess will be too busy with his own sciences to do a thorough job of it.’

‘You really hate Dr Hess, don’t you?’

‘We don’t impinge,’ Jack said stiffly. ‘Anyhow what I say is true. I could be a lot better expert from Baines’s point of view than Hess ever could.’

‘Do you have a sense of humour, Mr Ginsberg?’

‘Certainly. everybody does.’

‘Untrue,’ Ware said. ‘Everybody claims to have, that’s all. I ask only because the first thing to be sacrificed to the Art is the gift of laughter, and some people would miss it more than others. Yours seems to be residual at best. In you it would probably be a minor operation, like an appendectomy.’

‘You don’t seem to have lost yours.’

‘You confuse humour with wit, like most people. The two are as different as creativity and scholarship. However, as I say, in your case it’s not a great consideration, obviously. But there may be greater ones. For example, what tradition I would be training you in. For instance, I could make a kabbalistic magician of you, which would give you a substantial
grounding in white magic. And for the black, I could teach you most of what’s in the
Clavicle
and the
Lemegeton
, cutting out the specifically Christian accretions. Would that content you, do you think?’

‘Maybe, if it met my primary requirements,’ Jack said. ‘But if I had to go on from there, I wouldn’t care. These days I ‘m a Jew only by birth, not by culture – and up until Christmas Eve I was an atheist. Now I don’t know what I am. All I know is, I’ve got to believe what I see.’

‘Not in this Art,’ Ware said. ‘But we’ll think of you as a
tabula rasa
for the time being. Well, Mr Ginsberg, I’ll consider it. But before I decide, I think you ought to explore further your insight about special tastes becoming satisfiable only through magic, whether mine or yours. You like to think how delightful it would be to enjoy them freely and without fear of consequences, but it often happens – you’ll remember Oscar Wilde’s epigram on the subject – that fulfilled desire isn’t a delight, but a cross.’

‘I’ll take the chance.’

‘Don’t be so hasty. You have no real idea of the risks. Suppose you should find, for example, that no human woman could please you any more, and you’d become dependent on succubi? I don’t know how much you know of the theory of such a relationship. In general, the revolt in heaven involved angels from every order in the hierarchy. And of the Fallen, only those who fell from the lowest ranks are assigned to this sort of duty. By comparison, M
ARCHOSIAS
is a paragon of nobility. These creatures have even lost their names, and there’s nothing in the least grand about their malignancy – they are pure essences of narrow meanness and petty spite, the kind of spirit a Sicilian milkmaid calls on to make her rival’s toenails split, or give an unfaithful lover a pimple on the end of his nose.’

That doesn’t make them sound much different from ordinary women,’ Jack said, shrugging. ‘So long as they deliver, what does it matter? Presumably, as a magician I’d have
some
control over how they behaved.’

‘Yes. Nevertheless, why be persuaded out of desire and ignorance, when an experiment is available to you? In fact, Mr Ginsberg, I would not trust any resolution you made from the
state of simple fantasy you’re in now. If you won’t try the experiment, I must refuse your petition.’

‘Now wait a minute,’ Jack said. ‘Why are you so urgent about this, anyhow? What kind of advantage do you get out of it?’

‘I’ve already told you that,’ Ware said patiently. ‘I will probably need you as a Tanist in Dr Baines’s major enterprise. I want to be able to trust you to stand fast, and I won’t be able to do that without being sure of your degree and kind of commitment.’

Everything that Ware said seemed to have behind it the sound of doors softly closing in Jack’s face. And on the other hand, the possibilities – the opportunities …

‘What,’ he said, ‘do I need to do?’

The palazzo was asleep. In the distance, that same oblivious clock struck eleven; the proper hour of this day, Ware had said, for experiments in venery. Jack waited nervously for it to stop, or for something to begin.

His preparations were all made, but he was uncertain whether any of them had been necessary. After all, if the … girl … who was to come to him was to be totally amenable to his wishes, why should he have to impress her?

Nevertheless, he had gone through all the special rituals, bathing for an hour, shaving twice, trimming his finger- and toenails and buffing them, brushing his hair back for thirty strokes and combing it with the West German tonic that was said to have allatoin in it, dressing in his best silk pyjamas, smoking jacket (though he neither smoked nor drank), ascot and Venetian-leather slippers, adding a dash of cologne and scattering a light film of talcum powder inside the bed. Maybe, he thought, part of the pleasure would be in taking all the trouble and having everything work.

The clock stopped striking. Almost at once there was a slow triple knock at the door, so slow that each soft blow seemed
like an independent act. Jack’s heart bounded like a boy’s. Pulling the sash of his jacket tighter, he said as instructed:

‘Come in … come in … come in.’

He opened the door. As Ware had told him to expect, there was no one in the dark corridor outside; but when he closed the door and turned around, there she was.

‘Good evening,’ she said in a light voice with the barest trace of an accent – or was it a lisp?’ I am here, as you invited me. Do you like me?’

It was not the same girl who had brought the letter to Ware, so many weeks ago, though she somehow reminded him of someone he had once known, he could not think who. This one was positively beautiful. She was small – half a head shorter than Jack, slender and apparently only about eighteen – and very fair, with blue eyes and a fresh, innocent expression, which was doubly piquant because the lines of her features were patrician, her skin so delicate that it was almost like fine parchment.

She was fully clothed, in spike heels, patterned but otherwise sheer stockings, and a short-sleeved, expensively tailored black dress of some material like rayon, which clung to her breasts, waist and upper hips as though electrified, and then burst into a full skirt like an inverted tulip, breaking just above the knees. Wire-thin silver bracelets slid and tinkled almost inaudibly on her left wrist as she ruffled her chrysanthemum petal coiffure, and small silver earrings echoed them; between her breasts was a circular onyx brooch inlaid in silver with the word
Cazotte
, set off by a ruby about the size of a fly’s eye, the only touch of colour in the entire costume; even her make-up was the Italian ‘white look,’ long out of style but so exaggerating her paleness as to look almost theatrical on her – almost, but not quite.

‘Yes,’ he said, remembering to breathe.

‘Ah, you make up your mind so soon. Perhaps you are wrong.’ She pirouetted away from him towards the bed, making the black tulip flare, and lace foam under its corolla and around her legs with a dry rustling. She stopped the spin facing him, so suddenly that the skirts snapped above her knees like banners in a stiff gust. She seemed wholly human.

‘Impossible,’ Jack said, mustering all his gallantry. ‘I think you’re exquisite. Uh, what shall I call you?’

‘Oh, I do not come when called. You will have to exert yourself more than that. But my name could be Rita, if you need one.’

She lifted the front of the skirts up over the welts of her stockings, which cut her white thighs only a few inches beneath the vase of her pelvis, and sat down daintily on the side of the bed. ‘You are very distant,’ she said, pouting. ‘Perhaps you suspect I am only pretty on the outside. That would be unfair.’

‘Oh no, I’m sure – ‘

‘But how can you be sure yet?’ She drew up her heels. ‘You must come and see.’

The clock was striking four when she arose, naked and wet, yet somehow looking as though she was still on high heels, and began to dip up her clothes from the floor. Jack watched this little ballet in a dizziness half exhaustion and half triumph. He had hardly enough strength left to wiggle a toe, but he had already surprised himself so often that he still had hopes, Nothing had ever been like this before, nothing.

‘Must you go?’ he said sluggishly.

‘Oh yes, I have other business yet.’

‘Other business? But – didn’t you have a good time?’

‘A – good time?’ the girl turned towards him, stopping in the act of fastening a garter strap. ‘I am thy servant and thy lamia, Eve-fruit, but thou must not mock me.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Jack said, struggling to lift his head from the bunched, sweaty pillow.

‘Then keep silent.’ She resumed assembling herself.

‘But … you seemed …’

She turned to him again. ‘I gave thee pleasure. Congratulate thyself. That is enough. Thou knowest well what I am. I take no pleasure in anything. It is not permitted. Be grateful, and I shall come to thee again. But mock me, and I shall send thee instead a hag with an ass’s tail.’

‘I meant no offence,’ he said, half sullenly.

‘See thou dost not. Thou hadst pleasure with me, that sufficeth. Thou must prove thy virility with mortal flesh. Thy
potency, that I go to try even now. It comes on to night i’ the other side of the world, and I must plant thy seed before it dies in my fires – if it ever it lived at all.’

‘What do you mean?’ he said, in a hoarse whisper.

‘Have no fear, I shall be back tomorrow. But in the next span of the dark I must change suit.’ The dress fell down over the impossibly pliant body. ‘I become an incubus now, and a woman waits for that, diverted from her husband by the twofold way. Reach I her in time, thou shalt father a child, on a woman thou shalt never even see. Is that not a wonder? And a fearful child it shall be, I promise thee!’