What Lot's Wife Saw (48 page)

“His neck is mine,” I stated.

We opened the door and saw the imposter, wearing the uniform of our master, lying down on Bera’s bed. The judge demanded to strangle him but I wouldn’t hear of it. I’d already laid claim to his throat! I tested the blade of the razor on a hair from my head. It cut like butter.

We fell upon him and pinned him down. The Priest and Siccouane held his legs, the Doctor and the Captain secured his hands to the bed, while the Judge held his head in a vice-like grip so that it couldn’t move. I jumped on his chest and stuck my nose to his neck. I smelled his aroma, the unmistakable fragrance of Liverpool! I should have guessed. A youth with such an aura could never have originated from the Seventy-Five.

In keeping with his pedantic, bureaucratic character, Siccouane said that it was important that we ask him his name before killing him, as if it made any difference to us. He added that the pirate had promised him that were he to pose the unique, key question to solve the riddle, the pirate would answer it.

“Then hurry,” I said, “because the pirate had promised me that one day, when the time was ripe, I would kill, and that day has come!”

The Judge shouted that to him the pirate had said that one of the persons present in this room was superfluous and that he had finally identified the supernumerary beyond doubt. Fabrizio followed suit, murmuring that he had just realised why the pirate had assigned Regoleone to him. The tenor had told him that killing liberates. Drake shook his head with the sudden understanding that the Suez Mamelukes had disappeared from the desert because the supreme threat was no longer outside the Colony’s boundaries but in its very heart. The Priest crossed himself with fervour, and thanked God for permitting him to identify the Biblical King of Sodom and granting him the tremendous honour of meting out his punishment with his own hands.

Siccouane thrust his face close to that of the pirate and asked him in a frenzy, “Who are you, curse you, because you certainly are not our Governor! The true Governor would have executed us at midnight.”

The Judge released his stranglehold enough to allow the youth to speak. The youth gasped and with great effort spoke in a hoarse voice, accompanied by drops of blood that spattered the walls, “I Am That I Am.”

With that my arm descended and the razor viciously slit his throat. Simultaneously, my mind was haunted by Bera’s sardonic death smile, so that, with my return stroke I sliced his cheeks from ear to ear, making sure that we would never have to endure the sight of such a smile again.

The shrouds of the night were slowly parting and the ill-matched old and new buildings of Paris started appearing awkwardly in the struggling light, as if embarrassed by each other’s proximity. The heavy rain must have just let up and the wet pavements were reflecting the first rays of the autumn sun.

Phileas Book watched the raindrops that were still sliding down the windowpane. He was trying to imagine the rest of his life without
The Times
and Epistlewords, with no Tuesday delivery of his reader’s correspondence from London and no meandros. Up to the previous day the prospect of an early pension sounded like a harsh punishment, but today he wasn’t so sure. He had begun feeling that the twenty-five-year journey along the columns of thousands of meandroses was coming to its natural conclusion with this last Epistleword. Paradoxically, the hunt for the words to fill the blanks that had started in his youth and was ending today was bringing him back to the starting blocks. He could reconcile himself to a life without meandroses, but he could no longer abide a life without Phileas Book. It was the first time the absence of himself from his own body had become so tangible and his desire to reunite his shattered parts so honest.

His assignment in the lounge of the Consortium’s building was also reaching its natural conclusion. Book had produced what had been asked of him; that is, to distil from the six letters those passages that truly described the events of that fortnight in the Colony. The six courtiers described the events so differently from each other that it was impossible for those studying the letters to decide which account was closer to the truth. The face-to-face interrogation – and also the cross-examination which was conducted in Paris – confused things even more because the oral testimony proved to be more contradictory and fanciful than the letters themselves. Book had not been given the opportunity of talking with the six courtiers, but he held their written accounts, which sufficed for him to draw reliable conclusions.

He explained to the bald man that the truth was fragmented among the six letters, for although none of them represented the whole truth, not one of them was a complete fabrication either. Before Book they had spent hours getting nowhere by analysis, synthesis and cross-referencing but he had applied his own method, listening to the letters. His ultra-sensitive ear easily picked up pretence, exaggeration, fantasy, vindictiveness, obsession and despair, which he could then filter out to clear the texts. What remained started off as piecemeal as a mosaic, but it contained bits of the truth that could be synthesised into a remarkably continuous and uniform whole.

He spread the relevant sheets on the table and demonstrated how the six courtiers had gone from fear to desperation and, from there, to mental confusion and murder, following a path that the Seventy-Five had laid out for them. They hadn’t deviated from their prescribed path nor had they resisted; in fact they had hardly ever even questioned it. The innumerable objections that they’d raised throughout the fortnight were but bridges, rationalisations if you prefer, that they themselves had constructed to guide them back to the path whenever they might stray from it.

After Friday the 21st of August, when they’d found Governor Bera dead, they were faced by the first irrationality since the regulations do not allow for such an event and ignore the problem of succession. Gradually confusion and fear grew in them until independent, constructive thought was crowded out of their brains by the clever manipulations of the second Governor Bera. He, in turn, was comfortably manoeuvering on pre-prepared terrain. As can be imagined, neither his appearance nor his behaviour nor his commands would have achieved the recorded results if the Seventy-Five’s masterminds hadn’t spent the past twenty years paving the way. All the mythical elements, including the anticipation of the destruction of Sodom, were firmly entrenched in their minds and were simply, but cleverly, activated. The colonists, despite their apparent reactions, weren’t really taken by surprise because events were in keeping with what they’d been led to expect. They were overawed, not surprised.

There were some elements of the case that seemed metaphysical, like the “pirate’s” dive from the railing in front of an amazed Lieutenant Richmond and the Black Ship that ploughed through semi-solid sea. Here Book declared incompetence, since only the Seventy-Five knew whether they’d cleverly stage-managed these events or whether they were a product of the witnesses’ disturbed fantasy. He could attest, however, that the witnesses experienced everything as reality and didn’t in the least doubt the veracity of what they saw, smelt, heard and touched, particularly in the case of the Black Ship. Taking into consideration that Lieutenant Richmond, who was the first to herald the arrival of the Angel of Retribution, shouldn’t have been a member of the Green Box’s procession, Book could again discern the machinations of the Seventy-Five. Was it a chance virus that had laid low all the ship’s officers and forced Cortez to replace the First Mate with the unbalanced Richmond, thus bringing the latter into contact with the courtiers? The fog and the ensuing curfew which condemned the Lieutenant and the Judge to spend the evening discussing in a wine cellar – was that pure chance as well? Could the Seventy-Five control the weather? It wouldn’t take much for Book to believe even that.

If the Consortium had conducted this staged crime as a test of the colonists’ reflexes, then the results must be more than gratifying. The six courtiers went through their paces like robots. They submitted to the young Governor, no matter how outrageous he appeared and no matter how outrageous his directives were. To be exact, the more extreme he became, the more certain the six were that he’d been sent by the Seventy-Five. The moment the young Governor deviated from his expected pattern, he was immediately declared a fraud and was executed in the belief that the Seventy-Five would have demanded it of them. Then they’d carved up the body and burnt it in the kitchen ovens to avoid contaminating the salt just as the regulations prescribe – thus displaying obedience even after the murder. They then realised that they’d re-enacted what they’d done a fortnight before to the first Bera’s body. The pattern was repeating itself. They had every reason, therefore, to suspect that the next Governor Bera would appear at any moment. Afterwards, they’d gathered, naked again, wrapped in strips of curtains and pot lids, pretending to try to break into the Green Box so that the newcomer would find them in the same position his predecessor had. Twenty-four hours passed without anyone showing up. They became worried. They couldn’t fathom why things weren’t evolving as expected. Had they done something wrong or interpreted their orders incorrectly? They’d then panicked. They’d split into separate rooms and written the letters, which, although they resembled reports or confessions, were in reality protests about the Seventy-Five not keeping to the pattern, when they themselves had performed their part so perfectly. The interesting point in the case was that they’d cut the keychain from around their victim’s neck and put it into the folder, along with the six letters, without thinking that they could’ve used the key to look through the Box. The scenario that they were following demanded that they would try to break into the Box without success. Your administrative model has triumphed at all levels.

Deep in thought, the bald man studied the pages that Phileas Book had spread on the table.

“So, in your opinion, Mr Book, is this the correct order of events?”

“Yes, this is the true order of events. As I’ve told you, the truth is spread throughout the six letters and only if you read the excerpts in the order I’ve indicated will you get a true picture. I’m afraid that I’ve had to exclude most of the pages of Priest Montenegro’s letter because they get lost in the same visions and nightmares that haunt him again and again. I’ve found, however, occasional islands of honesty and clarity in this sea of madness and I’ve used these.”

“And what about the Epistleword?”

“The crossword, like every one of my Epistlewords, doesn’t refer to the facts but to an attitude towards them. Here my work was quite a bit more difficult.”

He placed his notebook upright on the table so that the man could have a clear view of the square crossword. Book showed the man the horizontal and vertical lines, explaining to him that those were separated chronologically, as the former corresponded to initial thoughts and the latter their further development. The letter-writers were writing to their employers, whom they considered, not unjustly, responsible for the hellish fortnight, and they basically were telling them what was on the first line:

We hate you for testing us.

Book rotated his notebook by ninety degrees and the first vertical line read:

We admire you for doing it so successfully.

Book explained that this crossword lacked depth but that he could do nothing about it.With only six letters the diagram was two-dimensional, and that applied to its importance and its interpretation, too.

The man could not conceal his annoyance.

“Two measly cut and dried sentences, is that all? Isn’t that disappointing for the hours you’ve spent studying, Mr Book? Are you certain that the authors have nothing else they wish to convey in these hundreds of pages?”

Book nodded in agreement. No matter how hard he’d looked and no matter with how much concentration he’d “listened” to the authors, he hadn’t found anything more than these two straightforward sentences. He hadn’t found traces of remorse nor even uneasiness since they’d had no intention of changing anything in their lives. Just hatred mixed up with admiration.
We hate you for testing us. We admire you for doing it so successfully
. Since they believed that the Consortium had sent the “pirate” to ascertain whether the Star Bearers and the Private Secretary would commit murder to protect its interests, the six were satisfied with themselves.

“They blindly obeyed him as long as they thought that he was the Governor and they killed him the moment they realised that he wasn’t. In both instances their reflexes were perfect and they acted promptly without second thoughts. The experiment, as you can see, was a complete success,” said Book.

The man rubbed his forehead in consternation but he didn’t respond.

Book carried on, putting emphasis on his words. “Of course I’ve no idea if the execution of your experimental Governor and the burning of the Colony was part of the plan or if the plan went to hell but your subjects reacted just as you’d trained them to.”

The man remained silent.

“I see that you are dissatisfied,” observed Book.

The man admitted that he had hoped to get richer information from such a charismatic interpreter of letters. Book indicated that he understood the problem. He said that the paper had been thinking of terminating his employment for some time now, but that he was sure that the Seventy-Five would expedite the matter so that upon leaving this building he’d be totally at their mercy. They shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble since he was already at their mercy from the moment he had betrayed his Epistleword for their thirty pieces of silver. He would resign from the paper because, after this disgrace, he couldn’t presume to design another meandros. Grudgingly he conceded that the Seventy-Five were particularly generous to those they destroy, so, in gratitude, he’d taken the initiative to go one step further to expand the drab square crossword and he’d contrived a diagonal which represented the gist of the hypothetical answer of the Seventy-Five. In other words, what the letter to the six colonists would have said, if the Consortium had deigned to compose it. He turned over the page of the notebook and showed the answer: