The Shape Stealer (17 page)

He took surveillance strolls at roughly thirty-minute intervals, careful to reserve his table in the crowded dive with the waiter each time he left. The Malefactors persisted as sentinels until around ten p.m. At ten-thirty, the coast was suddenly clear. He went back to the club, in an eruption of manners tipped the waiter handsomely, and then once again found himself climbing the steps to the black pools.

He followed the same entrance route as the night before. This time his credentials were perfectly in order, and there was no encounter with acquaintances of Will Hughes. The apparent discrepancy between the long, futuristic corridor and the narrow, shabby building startled him once again, even with his limited ability to distinguish futuristic design when he was already so far into the future. But he didn’t reflect much on the contradiction. He was there not to be an architecture critic but to demonstrate that he was better at stock trading than Will Hughes.

As he returned, this time unescorted, to Hughes’s trading screen and settled in, Marduk thought he detected a difference in the atmosphere in the room. Faces looked more worried, voices were quieter, and he found a recurring pattern in overheard words like
gold
and
short selling
. He began to be concerned that Renoir had started his trading plan sooner than Dee had told him, or at least that rumors of it were being circulated. What sort of double cross could
that
be? He couldn’t imagine that Renoir, or Dee, could be up to any good. He briefly took pride in being personally part of a machination that was evidently of concern to all these spoiled, wealthy traders. Maybe, he told himself, this was a rumor leaking not from Renoir or Dee but from a lower-level sort of person, maybe one of Renoir’s assistants. After having a drink or two, or more.

He sat down at the screen. In the upper right hand corner a red band was pulsing, the word
alert
in bold black letters superimposed on it. When he clicked on it, text appeared on the screen:

ATTENTION TRADERS: DUE TO BASELESS RUMORS AND RESULTANT PRESSURES AGAINST LIQUIDITY, THE SHORT SELLING OF GOLD FUTURES HAS BEEN TEMPORARILY SUSPENDED.

Hmm. Rumors were rumors, but “pressures against liquidity” did not sound trivial. Renoir. That bastard. If word of the pump-and-dump scheme had gotten out prematurely, or intentionally, short sellers would already be circling like vultures. According to what Marduk had learned in Dee’s crash course, they would sell into the pump and buy the dump, profiting from the difference. Except Marduk had made a point of listening to the financial news before leaving his apartment and had even overheard a snatch of some financial conversation in the street just minutes earlier—there’d been nothing in either about any unusual activity concerning gold, which, in France as everywhere, had its price reported to the public virtually by the minute. Of course, black pools were a different world …

He could behead Dee, if it came to it: perhaps with one swipe of his Acheulean axe, a fearsome prehistoric weapon he had found in the woods near Rennes in the twelfth century and had carried ever since. (Acheulean tools demonstrated that the human species had always been violent, even in early incarnations like
Homo erectus
, a fact Marduk enjoyed.) Behead Dee and save even better mutilations for Renoir, now revealed to be a beast of deceit and hypocrisy. Still: better to get on with the trading, before revenge. He was there more for the currency futures than the gold, anyway. He shut down the alert message. Currency was alive and well. Let the trades begin.

From the beginning, they went better. Whether because he’d learned something from his first experience, or because random luck ruled the stock market, or because his biorhythms had a moon-sourced pattern on the upswing … the profitable trades started early, multiplied, and piggybacked on one another. Forty-five minutes into the evening, having started out with seven million euros, he’d made back the losses of the previous session for a total of fourteen million. Ninety minutes into it and he’d made eight million
new
euros, for a total of twenty-two million, with the caveat that money did not mean here what it meant in the world outside: here it had a slick, slippery, even quicksandish feel to it. After two full hours at the screen, Marduk’s profit was past twenty-five million euros and he decided to quit. Not because of caution or to save profits for a rainy day, but because he was getting hungrier for the meal he’d promised himself after victory. If this wasn’t victory, what was?

Marduk opened a new, secret online banking account for himself at Société Générale and transferred all his profits into it. Dee might have fronted him some seed money—and any losses would have been Dee’s, of course—but Marduk never questioned the idea that the gains would be his alone. Then he left, ignoring a few attempted hellos to Will Hughes that traders made as he went down the corridors to the exit. His days of having to imitate Hughes were numbered in the low single digits now. He’d kill him in San Francisco, then return to Paris to rule the world.

23

Neanderthal

Octavia La Pieuvre’s apartment at number 1 Avenue de l’Observatoire, a lovely beaux-arts building, was as beautiful as it had been the first night I had seen it. I saw Jules give the naked statue on the landing a scandalized look, but even he had to admire the elegant salon furnished in gilt and silk-upholstered Louis Quatorze furniture and thick Persian rugs, all in shades of blue and green that recalled the sea. Will seemed transfixed by the floor-to-ceiling windows, which opened to a terrace affording a view of the Luxembourg and, in the distance, the Eiffel Tower lit up like a Roman candle, while Kepler was excited to learn that there was a telescope in the tower room.

The apartment was remarkably spacious—I’d only seen a couple of rooms the first time I was there—allowing us each to have our own guestroom. I showered in my private bathroom with great relief, letting the spray tingle on my skin like an endless-fingered massage. I hadn’t showered since the grime and stench of the catacombs, and I felt as cleansed as if I were bathing in radiance. My hands lingered on the places on my face and neck where Will’s kisses had lingered and left a heat that had nothing to do with the heat of the water. Although I’d finally and reluctantly agreed with Will’s reasons for not joining our group at Octavia’s, I couldn’t help imagining as I climbed out of the shower and wandered into the luxuriously appointed bedroom what it would feel like to bask with him in the lingering lilac light of the Parisian dusk that bathed the spacious, soft bed. I had left the doors to the balcony open before my shower and now I stood, wrapped in a thick towel, gazing at the view of the Luxembourg Gardens as dusk gathered in the pollarded plane trees, deepened the colors of the ornamental beds, and turned the stone walls of the Luxembourg Palace a deep honey gold. Was Will out there somewhere? He had said he would keep a close eye on me … What better location than the park…?

The sound of wings startled me. A covey of pigeons roosting on the ledge below my balcony took sudden flight, as if alarmed by some predator. Something landed on the balcony beside me. I opened my mouth to scream but a hand covered it. I struggled in the grip of the dark-coated figure until I heard Will’s voice in my ear.

“It’s only me,” he whispered, his lips nuzzling the flesh beneath my ear. “I saw you standing here and I couldn’t stay away.”

I turned in the circle of his arms, the towel sliding lower on my breasts, and gazed at him. The rich golden light of the Parisian dusk bathed his face, turning his skin a sun-kissed tan as if erasing the centuries he had spent in the dark, but the same light turned his silver eyes the yellow of a jungle cat, reminding me that he was still a predator. I traced the lines of his face with my hand. When I came to his lips my fingers slipped between them and touched the tips of his fangs. He shuddered.

“Garet…” he began, but his time I covered his mouth with my hand.

“I know,” I said, “you’re afraid that if we make love you’ll need my blood again, but you won’t. You’ve spent four hundred years showing me how much you love me…” I took his hand and stepped back, letting the towel fall to the floor. “Let me spend a few moments showing you how much I love you.”

*   *   *

After, I fell asleep in Will’s arms. When I awoke in a darkened room, he was gone. One of Octavia’s brigade of servants was knocking on the door. After checking that Will was really gone, I opened the door. A young uniformed maid held out a green silk dress.

“For mademoiselle, with madame’s compliments,” she said in careful, rehearsed English.

I thanked her and took the dress, which I found fit perfectly. Octavia, who had spent days traveling with me, and whose multiple arms might give her some unusual insight into space as well, had judged my size to a T.

I joined the others in the dining room feeling some semblance of well-being for the first time in weeks. Will and I were together again, even if he couldn’t be there at the moment, and there was a sense of safety in the group and in my Will looking out for me and us that was sorely needed after the catacombs. My mood might have been irrational—we could all still be in the midst of who knew what degree of trouble—but I enjoyed it. And I wore the dress like a second skin, even more lustrous than my well-washed, so recently caressed, real skin.

On the way into the dining room I noticed a framed print of a poem hung on the wall, and I stopped to read it.

Morning

It’s always the same Frenchman in his beret,

shopkeeper with her one good dress,

child with bateau à voile at play.

It’s always the same Frenchman in his beret,

baguette that hardens towards end of day,

white cup with café espress.

It’s always the same Frenchman in his beret,

shopkeeper with her one good dress.

The French of my dreams a palimpsest,

language lost with each new day.

All that’s left is the regret,

the French of my dreams a palimpsest.

Black-rimmed glasses, cigarettes,

fresh flowers on a grave;

the French of my dreams a palimpsest,

language lost with each new day.

I was charmed by the poem—by an American poet named Elizabeth Coleman—by its evocation of character and atmosphere; it reminded me of what it was like to experience Paris as an ordinary visitor. I made a note to myself that, if Will and I survived all this, we should come back here and do all these ordinary, but magical, things together. The margins of the poster were embroidered with miniature sketches of Paris street scenes: a kiosk on a tree-lined boulevard, deep green leaves rippling in the rain; a sidewalk café, sun-lathered on a summer day, with a pair of lovers eating pizzas and sipping wine; the Eiffel Tower, surrounded by lacy clouds at sunset. These sketches were also reproduced in larger forms and hung in polished wooden frames at intervals around the dining room.

There were eight of us: the five of our group, Octavia and Adele, and a guest whom I inferred, as the evening went along, was an old friend of Octavia’s, Dr. Frank Lichtenstein from Philadelphia. He was an evolutionary biologist from the University of Pennsylvania who had spent the past year as a visiting scholar at the Sorbonne. Frank was a tall, gangly man of about fifty, clad in a brown and yellow checked sports jacket and button-down beige shirt that looked like they had last been in style in the early 1960s. But his conversation was the opposite of his look: very contemporary and well informed. I could not help but wonder, of course, how far back his friendship with Octavia went: decades, or centuries, or even longer. But I thought it rude to inquire, and he did not volunteer any information. If he wasn’t a human being, there was no overt way to tell.

The dinner had so many courses to it, served slowly, that it was hard to tell what the entrée was. Perhaps it should have been accompanied by a drum roll. But at a certain point a serving person did come around to ask our preference among salmon, chicken, and vegetable ravioli, so that was a clue. The question, coming at last, encouraged me because, much as I loved the sensuous and delicate food, elegant surroundings, quiet but witty conversation, and most of all the sense of stability and civilization, I had no desire to dine all night long as if at some Roman feast.

Most of us chose the salmon, arousing my curiosity regarding Octavia: did octopi eat salmon in the wild? I was again too timid to ask such an otherworldly question. Dr. Lichtenstein elected the vegetarian choice. I noted him gazing at Will after the orders were taken.

“Beg your pardon, Mr. Hughes,” he said.

“Yes?” Young Will had seemed out of sorts all evening, participating only on occasion in conversation. I wondered if he had some way of sensing my reconciliation with his older twin, but I doubted it. He was probably uncomfortable with the contemporary—i.e. French politics—nature of the talk.

“I believe I’ve seen you on television recently. Are you not some sort of financial manager involved with animal rights? I would have assumed you were a vegetarian!”

“Animal rights?” Will asked. “What sort of rights might a beast possess, other than to be eaten quickly?” He laughed. The rest of us tried to smile. I keenly felt the awkwardness of the moment, since I didn’t know how fully Dr. Lichtenstein could be taken into our confidence. But Kepler was astute enough to intervene.

“My good doctor, Mr. Hughes has had no sleep for the past couple of nights, due to a variety of crises. He barely knows his own name at this point. You must forgive him.” He extended his arm across an empty place and patted Will affectionately on the shoulder. Will glanced at him, still baffled, but respecting him. He’d go along with whatever Kepler said. “Everyone in Paris, and hopefully soon the world, knows about the dedication of Will’s Green Hills Partners to humane justice. Don’t they, Will?”