Pilgrim (56 page)

“Eat,” said Emma.

“No,” said Jung. And finally, “later.”

“It is chicken, Carl Gustav. A favourite. Frau Emmenthal has excelled herself—the best we have been offered in years.”

It smelled delicious. There was a tarragon-based sauce with chanterelles in cream; there was a British stuffing, with bread and onions, sage and walnuts; there were
haricots verts
and tiny beets the size of thumbnails. In Jung’s case, all this effort had been spent for nothing.

“How can we have lost him?” he said, waving his hand in the air. “How can this have happened?”

“Looking the other way, my darling. It is the very same as happened with the Countess. You were not sufficiently attentive. You were seated in your office receiving favours from that woman.”

As Jung looked down the table towards his wife, he realized that from her point of view, he was not there. Emma no longer referred to him physically. Her gaze was elsewhere. When she spoke, she was looking out the windows at the sun in the early stages of its evening decline. She was still enough, but he could perceive in her posture the gentle nodding of someone reciting an interior mantra for survival:

You were

Not there.

You were

Somewhere

Unavailable.

We were

All here

Waiting.

You were absent.

Will you

Never

Understand?

That was the gist of it, he reckoned. And sadly, she was justified—given her grieving. Her own loss—the dead child—the marriage seemingly shipwrecked, the death of Blavinskeya and now the disappearance of Pilgrim.

All his fault.

Nothing in his character would allow Jung to admit this was true—aloud. Never, to Emma. It would give her powers he could not afford to lose. But reluctantly, he did admit it to himself. In the dark, he knew all this was true. Therefore, that evening at table he said nothing in response to Emma’s silent recitation.

What he did say was: “is it possible he has somehow managed to kill himself? I have people searching the building—others searching the grounds. We know only that he was last seen in the exercise yard. One minute there—the next, not. Apparently the other patients were singing a song in English, of all things. Then he disappeared.”

“Half the patients—
more
than half the patients at the Burghölzli are English, Carl Gustav. Why should they not sing English songs?”

“I didn’t say they shouldn’t. I merely said it was what they were doing.”

Emma drank from her wine glass, set it aside and went on eating.

“How could he kill himself when he’d already tried so many ways and failed?” she said. “No. He has found some way back into the world. We shall find him here amongst us. Have you sent someone to the Col d’Albis where Lady Quartermaine perished? He might have gone there.”

“No. I never thought of that.”

“You must stop thinking of Mister Pilgrim’s escape as your loss, Carl Gustav, and begin to think of it as his gain. If you were him, knowing what you know, where do you think he would go?”

“To the ends of the earth,” Jung said—and smiled at last.

“I don’t think so,” said Emma. “I think he’d go to Paris.”

“Paris?”

“Oscar Wilde. Rodin. The
Mona Lisa.
After all, for Mister Pilgrim, Paris is almost his spiritual home.”

In the morning, the messenger in green arrived from the Hôtel Baur au Lac and presented Jung with an envelope on which was written:
from Dominic Fréjus
, plus the address. Inside was Pilgrim’s final message:
goodbye
—delivered by pigeon post.

Emma said: “
finito
. Are you satisfied?”

Jung said nothing. He was thinking:
my prize patient is gone—and my wife is sharpening her knives. I will go into the garden and fill another grave.

3

In Paris, on Friday the 28th of June, Pilgrim and Forster registered at the Hôtel Paul de Vere, rue Berger, on the right bank of the Seine, about six blocks from the Louvre.

The hotel had been selected from a guidebook and offered all the amenities at a modest price. By choosing a middle-class residence rather than one at either end of the social scale, Pilgrim reasoned it would be the last place anyone would expect him to lodge in Paris—if indeed anyone had guessed his destination.

The journey had taken them seven days in all, their route having been determined by the availability of suitable roads. Most of the roads they travelled had once been cattle paths and sheep tracks, elevated to public highways in the days of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century coaching. The towns and villages they passed through or used as stopping places were amply populated with cafés, restaurants, inns and hotels. From Basel, they had journeyed through Alsace to Belfort and from Belfort through Langres and Chaumont to Troyes.

At Troyes, they had the car serviced at a livery stable where the blacksmith had taken up a study of
automobiles and was extremely knowledgeable on the subject of internal combustion engines.

While Forster and the blacksmith chatted and the blacksmith cleaned the spark plugs and oiled the crank shaft, Pilgrim went into the stables and revelled in the smell of hay and horses. It was a happy moment in this otherwise anguished episode—a moment to savour and to relish.
Hay and horses,
he thought,
horses and hay. It seems I have loved the smell of them forever.

His mind slowly formed a previously forgotten picture of himself as a stableboy on a great estate. The word Waterford occurred to him, but all it conjured was glass. And Ireland.
If I was Irish once, I wouldn’t mind at all.

He saw himself elevated to the rank of exercise-boy—of
walker
, as they said—when he would go out on misted mornings with the dew like ice against his naked ankles. And he would walk the horses one by one with another lad or two, and once the view from the stables and the manor house was obscured by a shroud of fog, the boys would mount their charges and ride out into the morning, full tilt.

Oh, the feel of them and the smell of them, and me lying out along their necks…the black steeds, the roan steeds, the greys and the rare, rare whites. If I could have it back, it was the best of my lives—the simplest of all I ever had, though I don’t know when it was, or where, precisely…

Later, he went and leaned against a stone wall in the livery yard and looked off over the farmland fields towards the city of Troyes itself—its fires and its smoke, its roofs and its trees and towers. He narrowed
his eyes and conjured another city in another place and time where the sunlit woods of the landscape had been entirely different than this—less lush, more arid—less serene, more troubled.
The Royal City of Troy
rose up in its majesty from the Truvian steppes descending to the sea and to the Hellespont.

He played with this image the way a child will play with imagined fairy-tale locales. It was his Camelot and his Atlantis. It was his Emerald City of Oz.

It had been walled, its walls of enormous height and thickness, and beyond it rose the slopes of foothills leading off through a dusty haze of heat to distant Mount Ida and her sisters. The trees on the surrounding hillsides were plane trees and oaks and in places had been decimated for the building of supplemental battlements and battle-towers and battle-cars and battle-rams, battle-bridges and battleships.
Battle—battle—battle—battle…

Pilgrim closed his eyes.

He could smell the charcoal burning in the forge behind him. He could hear the sound of hammers.

Nothing changes, he thought. All our ingenuity and genius have been turned to the making and devising of war machines. We have followed Leonardo into the darkest reaches of his imagination, forgetting that he also promulgated light.

Pilgrim opened his eyes and looked again at the city in the immediate distance. Troyes. Already it had sprouted factories and industrial warehouses. Buildings of gigantic size and monumental ugliness scarred the approaches to the town. Trains belching smoke
and cinders rolled through the meadows, scattering sheep and cows and stampeding horses. A low grey cloud of dusty vapour hung above the rooftops. And it was all…

The same.

No wonder the gods are departing,
he thought
. We have driven them away. Once, every tree out there was holy—every tree and every strand of grass and clod of earth. The very stones were holy and everything that lived, no matter how small or large…every elephant and every ant—every man and every woman. All were holy. Everything—the sea—the sky—the sun—the moon—the wind—the rain—the fairest and the worst of days…All of it gone and only one deaf God, who cannot see, remains—claiming all of creation as His own. If people would invest one hundredth of their devotion to this God in the living brothers and sisters amongst whom they stand, we might have a chance of surviving one another. As it is…

Pilgrim closed his eyes again and the vista before him vanished. He turned once more to the livery stable and spoke to Forster.

“We shall make next for Fontainebleu,” he said—a name that had the scent of forests to it and the ring of water falling into water.

The Renault was ready, and having thanked and paid the blacksmith and waved goodbye to the horses, they continued their journey.

At Fontainebleu, they had taken a picnic basket organized by Forster into the woods, where they sat amidst ferns and wildflowers, eating breast of chicken
sandwiches, pears, Boursault and assorted petits fours while consuming also two bottles of Montrachet.

Pilgrim had lain back at the end of their meal and let the leafy tent above him lull him into sleep. Forster also rested, but remained awake. Only one sleeper from now on, he decided. We are on our way to danger.

On waking, Pilgrim had made notes in a book which Forster had secured for him. He wrote down the words:
from here to the end, only earth, air, fire and water. Nothing else.

He had looked at Forster then and said:
thank you for being with me, now.

It was the only semblance of an endearment passed between them, but it meant the world to Forster, who would long remember it.

The Hôtel Paul de Vere was not very large. It had twenty
chambres
and did not serve meals. It did offer connecting rooms with a bath and W.C., and a choice of tea, coffee or chocolate with a brioche in the mornings.

On the first evening, they took their dinner in a nearby restaurant on the rue Berger. The height of summer had produced a good many tourists and the voices around them, besides French, were speaking English, German, Italian, Spanish and the now ubiquitous American.

“Can you believe it, Calvin?” said one woman. “We’re sittin’ here in a French bee-stro! I never felt so sophisticated in my whole life!”

The sophisticates were everywhere, and they were
by no means all American. Englishmen complained to their male companions that it was incomprehensible that no one on the Continent seemed to understand the source of Britain’s greatness.

“It’s our stamina,” one insisted.

“It’s our industry,” said another.

“It’s our dedication to bringing civilization to the poor benighted niggers of the world,” said a third.

It is our bloody-mindedness
, Pilgrim muttered to himself.

When the coffee and cognac arrived, Forster ventured: “may one know, sir, why we have chosen Paris?”

Pilgrim laid his left hand on the white tablecloth, spreading his fingers as wide as they would go. With his other hand, he made a circular motion around the rim of his glass, wetting one finger in his mouth to facilitate the gesture.

“We are here to abduct a certain lady,” he said.

To Forster, this was pure Sherlockese. A thrill passed through him. He was, indeed, to play the role of Doctor Watson.

As if in tribute to the character he was about to assume, he fingered his moustache.

“And what lady might that be, sir?” he asked.

“Madonna Elisabetta del Giocondo,” said Pilgrim. “La Gioconda.”

The
Mona Lisa.

Forster paled.

“But we can’t, sir. They won’t allow it.”

Pilgrim smiled.

“Of course they won’t allow it,” he said. “Why
would they? She is the greatest treasure in the whole of France. And one day soon, she will be ours.”

Forster stared and then forced himself to look away. Say nothing, he told himself. Say not a word.

Pilgrim drank from his glass and said: “a most pleasant evening, Forster. Thoroughly enjoyable.”

Forster said: “yes, sir. Indeed.”

4

On the morning of Saturday, June 29th, Pilgrim and Forster arrived at the Louvre, where Pilgrim soon recognized a distinct difference in the presentation of the paintings from his last encounter with them three years earlier. Many of the greatest amongst them had been put behind glass. This had been done at the request of the Louvre’s curators, and had been decreed by the Director of National Museums, a man whose name was Théophile Homolle. This unprecedented glazing of works in oil had been generated by an increase over the past few years of vandalism and accidental damage. A Rubens had been daubed with excrement (no permanent effect); a Botticelli had been slashed with a knife (repairable); and a Giotto had been found partially cut from its frame in an obviously thwarted attempt to steal it (no noticeable harm).

In spite of the fact that each of these works was salvaged, there were growing fears that a successful attempt at theft or an even more disastrous attempt at outright destruction would result in irreparable losses.
Glass, it seemed, was the only answer. Strangely, no one instigated an increase in security staff.

When the newly glazed paintings had been rehung, there was something of a public outcry.
How can one view the pictures if all one can see is oneself!
And:
the Louvre has a new hall of mirrors that rivals Versailles!