The Avignon Quintet (154 page)

But there was time enough in hand, so having fixed a rendezvous at the airport at nine with the hope of a midnight departure, he left all the details to his friend, asking only that he might be met with a parcel containing a change of clothes, male clothes. He did not expatiate upon his present disguise because at bottom he trusted nobody. But his freedom and the secrecy of his whereabouts put him in a strong position to dictate his own terms. All the rest was up to him. He decided, since the afternoon was agreeably warm, to walk slowly across Geneva, and this he did, humming happily under his breath.

His route took him across the seedier parts of the old town, the poorer quarters, full of
maisons closes
and oriental cafés and moribund hotels; not to speak of the blue cinemas playing pornographic films. The one thing the war had not changed or debased was pornography; if anything, far from reducing it, it had caused an efflorescence, an increase. So necessary is it for the scared human ego to belittle a force which it recognises as being incalculably stronger than itself – the only really uncontrollable force man knows: for even if repressed it bursts out in symbolism, violence, dreaming, madness … Mnemidis slackened his pace in order to take in the whole scene with a just pleasure. There were a few sleazy whores already on the street, and the cinemas were rich in promise. He lingered at the entrance looking at the stills, attracting a number of curious and amused looks for he was still in his nun’s garb. What marvellous titles the films had, expressing the age-old wishes and dreams of poor man, revealing him in all his frailty. He chuckled with an ape-like sophistication!

In the rue Delabre there was Queue de Beton or The Concrete Prick; further down Plein Le Cul or A Cuntfull and further on
Les Enculées
or
The Buggered
. It was absolutely delicious! He tore himself away with difficulty. It was with deep regret, however, for he simply longed to pass away an hour or so watching the antics of a blue film – it sharpened his intelligence. In it he felt the profound succulence of abused flesh. Even to think of it gave him hot flushes. However, he could hardly enter such a place in his present garb, and of course he did not wish to draw too much close attention to himself. But how reassuring it was to think that if all went well – and why should it not? – he would be leaving the country of his unjust captivity that very night! It elated him beyond measure, and he almost made the mistake of lighting a cigarette, for he bad bought a packet. But he resisted the impulse successfully. He wandered past the cinemas and along the silent avenue leading to the park. He was not far off now, and he was filled with a silent felicity for he knew that luck would be with him in this just enterprise.

The mad must be people without selves: their whole investment is in the other, the object. They are ruled by the forces of total uncertainty. At this point Mnemidis did not know, with one half of his brain, what he might do under the promptings of the other half. A delicious uncertainty!

Like the greatest of mystics he had arrived at an unconscious understanding of nature as something which exists in a state of total
disponibilité
, of indeterminacy, of
hovering
? He was the joker in the pack, he was equally ripe for black mischief or the felicity of pure godhead. It was all according to how the dice fell, the wheel spun. Moreover he recognised that nature itself was completely indifferent to the outcome – to human bliss or pain. He felt only the electrical discharge of impulse throbbing in his body, like the engine of a ship, driving him onwards to the harbour of his realisation, a mystic of crime!

There is no therapy for reason, any more than for original sin. Yet sometimes even now he almost awoke from this mood, shook himself like a dog, wondering of a sudden if some small element had not worked loose somewhere in his inner thinking … some tiny link. But he could not bear the wave of oppression and mistrust which followed in the wake of this sentiment and he closed his mind upon it like a steel door. His mouth set in a grim line. And now here he was in the street he had been seeking, standing before the very house he proposed to visit, utterly sure that everything had been planned for him, so that he might execute an exemplary punishment in the form of a farewell to Swiss medicine. And, by goodness, the door was ajar into the hall, for Constance had slipped out to the nearest pharmacy in search of a febrifuge for her fever-bound lover. She would not be gone very long. Hence she left the flat door ajar. Mnemidis saw with deep satisfaction the black shadow of the nun like some allegorical bat mount the stairs with a kind of Luciferian deliberation – as if she had been summoned to read a service for the sick or to hear the confession of someone
in extremis
. He chuckled to find that the flat door was also open. He entered and stood for a long moment looking about him, as if to memorise the geography of the place; but in fact he was simply listening to his own heartbeats and soliciting his soul, asking himself what he should do next. He heard the faint stirring of the bed in the next room and boldly opened the door – also ajar! His heart swelled up in triumph for there was a figure in the bed, covered from head to foot in a towelling dressing-gown with a hood drawn right over the head. Its face was turned to the wall, away from him, and from the whispering and trembling he at once guessed that she must be in a high fever, practically a delirium. But it was mysterious that she should be here all alone, lying ill in this darkened room. Perhaps there was someone else in the flat? With great swiftness now he explored all the other rooms, and then subsided with relief, for there was not a soul. What a perfect situation. “I told you so!” he said to himself under his breath, and breathing deeply like a voluptuary he advanced towards his victim.

It was lucky also that he had to deal with this inert and passive form and not a target presenting more difficulties – having to struggle, use force or ruse. No, the white form lay before him as if upon a slab, waiting to be operated on; in the beautiful simplicity of the whole business he felt he could read the handwriting of higher providence. Yes, this was how it had to be! And poising himself with profound concentration he put one hand upon the shoulder of the figure and completed his work with such speed and dexterity that he quite surprised himself. There was no cry, no groan, no sudden spasm. Just a deep sigh, as if of repletion, and a small gulp – a mere whiff of sound. With knives so preternaturally sharp it was hardly necessary to thrust with force, nevertheless he took no chances and gave of his best.
Consummatum est!
A whole mass of gloom-laden preoccupation seemed at once to fall from his shoulders. It was as if his conscience had voided itself like a sack. He almost cheered in his elation. But he wiped the weapons most carefully upon the silent shoulder of the corpse and then crossed the room on tiptoe. In the salon was a writing desk with a framed photo of his tormentor looking particularly pretty and intellectual. He stared at it for a long time, smiling grimly with a satisfied air. It was here, under this picture, that he at last placed the missing letter which she had been kicking up so much fuss about during recent weeks. Once when young he had been apprenticed to a conjuror and had retained a few of the skills he learned – making things appear and disappear with professional skill. It had not been difficult to do this with the letter. But now he was going to surrender it – like a parting snub!

He withdrew as silently as he had entered, closing the flat door behind him with a slight click – indeed this is what puzzled Constance on her return a quarter of an hour later: finding the flat door shut. It was vexatious for she had no key and she did not want to tap and awaken her patient. She returned downstairs and rang for the concierge who had a master key which she loaned her. She entered at last to stand in startled surprise at the open door of the bedroom, her arms full of medicines. But almost at once the unnatural silence and inertness of the figure on the bed struck a chill of premonitory alarm in her. And peering as she advanced she saw the bloodstains on the sheet and shoulder of the wrap. She held her breath and let drop the package she held. She called his name once, then twice on an even sharper note of interrogation, alarmed by the stillness. One thin hand stuck out of the wrap, contracted up now in death like the claw of a dead bird. She fell upon the pulse for a long moment, ferociously concentrated with total attention. Then with a gasp she drew back the sheet and began to unwrap the silent parcel, letting out a wail of anguish as the reality of the affair came rushing at her, engulfing every feeling. How could it be real, and as she drew back the wrappings strange jumbled thoughts and memories contended in her head with her concentration upon the terrible reality of the situation – the wounds! Once someone had told of unwrapping an Egyptian mummy to get at the precious eatable flesh which is the soul-nourishment of the gnostic – and noticing that it had been stabbed
through
the wrappings, that is to say after its death. Now who would fall upon and stab a a body already dead and parcelled up for the grave? The mystery remained! Yes, it was Affad who had told her. And now this white towelling dressing-gown was the very same into which she had bled so copiously upon her first sexual encounter with him. They had stolen it from his hotel as a kind of lover’s talisman. When she had uncovered his body and made quite sure she started to faint; she had just enough presence of mind to dial the emergency code, four-number four-ambulance which might come to her aid. But it was someone else’s voice it seemed that told the operator to summon Schwarz to her side. Then she fainted away. And so they found her.

Half-falling, half-subsiding upon the bed beside him she was possessed of a private stupefaction which would soon (like rings widening in water from a thrown stone) become public – or at any rate more public, for this sudden abrupt disappearance from the scene of Affad seemed as unbelievable to everyone as it seemed incomprehensible to her. But by now she was on the way to recognising the handiwork of her most interesting patient. She was stunned and bemused into an incoherence of mind which alarmed Schwarz when he at last arrived, though he did not go as far as opening the black leather suitcase which housed his drugs. It seemed more appropriate that she should cry, should give public expression to her shock – not just sit bereft and stunned and tearless in a chair with blood all over her skirt. Gazing in puzzled silence at his face with its now gigantic reserve, its depth and weight. All the memoranda of past conversations swarmed over her, invaded every corner of her apprehension. She was absent-minded, tongue-tied, shocked into aphasia almost. She said to herself something like, “So the future has arrived! Life will be no longer a waste of breath!” But the dazzling fact of his death still blinded her – like stepping in front of a firing squad and refusing the bandage. Was the death of a heart impossible to accept – it had, after all, been part of the original contract? How deafening was the silence in which they must now communicate with each other!

Yet the mechanical part of reality still held together like a stage-setting defying an earthquake – once the ambulance with its duty-doctor and team arrived, followed very shortly by her colleague, a rather trembly version of Schwarz. His gestures also were part of the whole stereotype, only they were more efficacious for he knew the flat; and from the cocktail cabinet under the window he extracted the bottle of vodka. The fiery dose he poured out for her made her hesitate; but then she drained the glass and the liquid poured into her like fuel into a furnace bringing heat without joy, without surcease. Nevertheless.

The intern was making a gingerly examination of the wounds before permitting the parcelling up of the body for the stretcher. “Surprisingly little blood,” he said in a whisper almost, as if talking to himself. “Considering …”

Considering what, she wondered? Then of course she saw that one of the crew had found a knife which seemed to correspond to the victim’s wounds. It was wrapped up carefully in newspaper for the coroner. It was another of Mnemidis’ little offerings. “Finish your drink,” said Schwarz sternly, “and sit quiet for a moment.” He felt suddenly very angry with her, irrationally angry. He could have smacked her face. This is what came of meddling with other people’s destiny – he did not say it aloud, but that is what he felt. Constance said, “He told me he was leaving his body to the hospital. He said, ‘I like to think that I shall end up in chunks like a pineapple; after all, I was built up that way on the assembly line!’ Easy to say.” Schwarz did not at all like the note of her laugh at this awkward pleasantry so he sat down and put his arm about her shoulders.

There was some documentation to be completed and here Schwarz was master; he filled in the forms with expert swiftness, talking all the while to the intern. Meanwhile the stretcher was raised and borne away to the waiting ambulance and the flat door closed. The two doctors shook hands; Schwarz had already sketched in the context of the murder. Later on, the next day, he would find a message on his telephone recorder from the Egyptian doctor which would tell him that everything had worked perfectly, and Mnemidis had duly arrived at the airport, ready to embark for Cairo. There was nothing to be done in effect. What would have been the point in trying to get the madman back? He would be judged unfit to plead and locked up once more – to what end?

SEVEN