In the Skin of a Lion (23 page)

She held the cloth bunched over his nakedness.

This time he did not take the canoe. He had already walked the shoreline before dusk, remembering the swamp patches. Now, dressed in dark clothes, he traced his path towards the compound belonging to the woman with the canoe – the main building, outlying cottages, a boathouse, an icehouse. He had no idea what the lake was called. He had passed a sign when he was
running that claimed the area was Featherstone Point. That was when he saw the telephone wires which he knew must come from her group of houses.

He came through the last of the trees into the open area and everything was in darkness, as if the owners had packed up and left. He had expected to see rectangles of light. Now he lost all perspective and did not know how fully he would have to turn to be aimed back at his cottage. He needed some context of the human. A dog on a chain, a window, a sound. He turned once more and saw moonlight on the lake. But there was no moon. He realized it had to be light from the boathouse. The landscape, the blueprint of the compound, sprang back into his brain. He walked towards the water knowing where the low shrubs were, the stone hedge, the topiary he could not see. He slipped inside the boathouse and listened for sounds of activity. Nothing. With a pulley-chain used for hoisting up boat engines he swung up onto the first roof which was like a skirt around the upper cabin. He walked up the slope. The woman named Anne was sitting inside at a table.

Light from an oil lamp. She faced the water, her night window, and was writing hunched over the table unaware of anything else in the room. A summer skirt, an old shirt of her husband’s, sleeves rolled up. She glanced up from the page and peered into the kerosene of the lamp. The mind behind the gaze did not know where it was. Caravaggio had never witnessed someone writing before. He saw her put down the fountain pen and later pick it up, try it, and realizing the nib was dry, lift the tail of her shirt to wipe the dry ink off the nib, preening the groove, as if the pause was not caused by the hesitation of her mind but the atrophy of the pen. Now she bent over earnestly, half-smiling, the tongue moving in her mouth.

If she had turned to her right she would have seen his head at
one of the small panes of glass, the light from the oil lamp just reaching it. He thought of that possible glance and moved back further. He thought of all those libraries he had stepped into in Toronto homes, the grand vistas of bookcases that reached the ceiling, the books of pigskin and other leathers that fell into his arms as he climbed up the shelves looking for whatever valuables he imagined were there, his boots pushing in the books to get a toe-hold. And then from up there, his head close to the ceiling, looking down on the rectangle of the rooms, hearing his dog’s clear warning bark, not moving. And the door opening below him – a man walking in to pick up the telephone and dialling, while Caravaggio hung high up on the bookcases knowing now he should move the second he was seen up there in his dark trousers and singlet, as still as a gargoyle against Trollope and H.G. Wells. He could land on the leather sofa and bounce into the man’s body before he even said a word into the phone. Then go through the French doors without opening them, a hunch of his body as he breaks through the glass and thin wood, then a blind leap off the balcony into the garden, where he would curse his dog for the late warning, and take off.

But this boathouse had no grandeur. The woman’s bare feet rested one on top of the other on the stained-wood floor. A lamp on the desk, a mattress on the floor. In this light, and with all the small panes of glass around her, she was inside a diamond, mothlike on the edge of burning kerosene, caught in the centre of all the facets. He knew there was such intimacy in what he was seeing that not even a husband could get closer than him, a thief who saw this rich woman trying to discover what she was or what she was capable of making.

He put his hands up to his face and smelled them. Oil and rust. They smelled of the chain. That was always true of
thieves, they smelled of what they brushed against. Paint, mushrooms, printing machines, yet they never smelled of the rich. He liked people who smelled of their trade – carpenters cutting into cedar, dog-catchers who carried the odour of wet struggling hounds with them. And what did this woman smell of? In this yellow pine room past midnight she was staring into a bowl of kerosene as if seeing right through the skull of a lover.

He was anonymous, with never a stillness in his life like this woman’s. He stood on the roof outside, an outline of a bear in her subconscious, and she quarried past it to another secret, one of her own, articulated wet and black on the page. The houses in Toronto he had helped build or paint or break into were unmarked. He would never leave his name where his skill had been. He was one of those who have a fury or a sadness of only being described by someone else. A tarrer of roads, a house-builder, a painter, a thief – yet he was invisible to all around him.

He leapt through darkness onto the summer grass and then walked up to the main building. Without turning on lights he found the telephone in the kitchen and phoned his wife in Toronto.

She began to talk about her brother-in-law’s house, which she had moved into. This time through a darkness which was distance.

She was standing in the centre of the living room in the darkness as he came away from the phone. His ear had been focused to Giannetta’s voice, nothing else. His head imagining her – the alabaster face, the raven head.

She lifted the glass chimney and held the match to the wick. It lit up the skirt and shirt and her red hair. She moved away from it and leaned against the back of the sofa.

She waved the suggestion away.

He shook his head, looking around the room. A fireplace, a straight staircase, bedrooms upstairs.

He followed her into the kitchen feeling relaxed with her – as if this was a continuation of his conversation with Giannetta.

She sits across from him laughing at the story of his escape, not fully believing it. A fairy tale. She cups her hand over the glass chimney and blows the lamp out. Two in the morning. As they go into darkness his mind holds onto the image of her slightness, the poreless skin, the bright hair leaning into the light. The startling colours of her strange beauty.

Her voice is exact, crystal clear. He has his eyes closed, listening to her.

Caravaggio lies on the carpet. He had, when there was light earlier, been looking up at the tongue and groove, theorizing how one removed such floors. She continues talking.

There is now a silence in the room. He stands up.

He sees her clearly on the other side of the unlit lamp, her chin on her clenched fist.

After his marriage to Giannetta, Caravaggio had one pit to fall into before his career as a thief became successful – he was overwhelmed suddenly by a self-consciousness. He broke into houses and became certain there was a plot concocted to snare him. Giannetta could not stand it. She did not wish to live with a well-trained thief who feared going out.

He stole a dark-red fox terrier and named it August. A summer robbery. The dog was his salvation. He had a quick bark, like an exclamation – one announcement, take it or leave it – enough warning for his master as far as the dog was concerned.

On a job they behaved like strangers – Caravaggio strolling along one side of the street and August aimless on the other.
When he entered a house the dog sat on the lawn. If the owners returned early the dog would stand up and give one clear bark. Moments later a figure would leap from a window with a carpet or a suitcase in his arms.