Mindswap (11 page)

Gone! Cathy was gone! Could it be possible? Could Life, that deadpan practical joker, be up to disastrous tricks agam?

Marvin refused to believe it. He searched the confines of the posada, and he poked patiently through the little village beyond it. She was gone. He continued his search in the nearby city of San Ramon de las Tristezas, and he questioned waitresses, landlords, shopkeepers, whores, policemen, pimps, beggars, and other inhabitants. He asked if they had seen a girl fair as the dawn, with hair of indescribable beauty, limbs of a previously unheard-of felicity, features whose comeliness was matched only by their harmony, etc. And those he questioned sadly replied, 'Alas, senor, we have not seen thees woman, not now or ever in our lives.'

He calmed himself enough to give a coherent description, and found a road-mender who had seen a girl like Cathy travelling west in a large automobile with a bulky, cigarsmoking man. And a chimney sweep had spied her leaving town with her little gold and blue handbag. Her step had been firm. She had not looked back.

Then a gas-station attendant gave him a hastily scrawled note from Cathy that began, 'Marvin dear, please try to understand and forgive me. As I tried to tell you so many times, it was necessary for me-'

The rest of the note was illegible. With the aid of a cryptanalyst, Marvin deciphered the closing words, which were: 'But I shall always love you, and I hope you can find it in your heart to think of me occasionally with kindness. Your Loving Cathy.'

The rest of the note, made enigmatic by grief, was unsusceptible to human analysis.

To describe Marvin's emotion would be like trying to describe the dawn flight of the heron: both are ineffable and unspeakable. Suffice it to say that Marvin considered suicide, but decided against it, since it seemed entirely too superficial a gesture.

Nothing was enough. Intoxication was merely maudlin, and renunciation of the world seemed no more than the act of a peevish child. Because of the inadequacy of the attitudes open to him, Marvin struck none. Dry-eyed and zombie-like he moved through his days and nights. He walked, he talked, he even smiled. He was unfailingly polite. But it seemed to his dear friend Valdez that the real Marvin had vanished in an instantaneous explosion of sorrow, and that in his place there walked a poorly modelled representation of a man. Marvin was gone; the ringer who moved in his place looked as if, in its unfailing mimicry of humanness, it might collapse at any moment from strain.

Valdez was both perplexed and dismayed. Never had the wily old Master of Searches seen such a difficult case. With desperate energy he tried to rally his friend out of his living death.

He tried sympathy: 'I know exactly how you feel, my unfortunate companion, for once, when I was quite a young man, I had quite a comparable experience, and I found-'

That did nothing, so Valdez tried brutality: 'Christ damn me for a winnieburne, but are ye still mawking abaht after that bit of fluff wot walked out on yer? Now by God's wounds, I tell thee this: there's women past counting in this world of ours, and the man's no man who'd curl himself up in the corner when there's good lovin' to be had without …'

No response. Valdez tried eccentric distraction:

'Look, look over there, I see three birds on a limb, and one has a knife thrust through its throat and a sceptre clutched in its claw, and yet it sings more merrily than the others! What do you make of it, eh?'

Marvin made nothing of it. Undismayed, Valdez tried to rouse his friend by piteous self-referral.

'Well, Marvin, lad, the medics have taken a look at that skin rash of mine and it seems that it's a case of pandemic impetigo. They give me twelve hours on the outside, after that I cash in my chips and make room for another man at the table. But for my last twelve hours, what I'd like to do is-'

Nothing. Valdez attempt to stir his friend with peasant philosophy:

'The simple farmers know best, Marvin. Do you know what they say? They say that a broken knife makes a poor walking-stick. I think you should bear that in mind, Marvin …'

But Marvin absentmindedly did not bear it in mind. Valdez swung to Hyperstrasian Ethics as expressed in the Timomachaean Scroll:

'Thou considerest thyself wounded, then? But consider: Self is Ineffable and Unitary, and not Susceptible to Externalities. Therefore it is merely a
Wound
which was
Wounded
; and this, being External to the Person and Extraneous to the Insight affords no cause for the Implication of Pain.'

Marvin was not swayed by this argument. Valdez turned to psychology:

'Loss of the Beloved, according to Steinmetzer, is a ritual re-enactment of the loss of the Faecal Self. Therefore, amusingly enough, when we think we mourn the dear departed, we actually are grieving the irreparable loss of our faeces.'

But this, too, could not penetrate Marvin's close-held passivity. His melancholic detachment from all human values seemed irrevocable; and this impression was heightened when, one quiet afternoon, his nose ring stopped ticking. It was not a bomb at all; it was merely a warning from Marduk Kras' constituents. And thus Marvin no longer stood in imminent danger of having his head blown off.

But even this stroke of good fortune did nothing to alter his grey robotic spirits. Quite unmoved, he noted the fact of his salvation as one might observe the passing of a cloud from the face of the sun.

Nothing seemed to have any effect upon him. And even the patient Valdez was finally led to explain: 'Marvin, you are a goddamned pain in the ass!'

Yet Marvin persevered, unmoved. And it seemed to Valdez and to the good people of San Ramon that this man was beyond human recall.

And yet, how little we know of the twists and turns of the human mind! For the very next day, contrary to all reasonable expectations, an event occurred that broke at last through Marvin's reserve, and inadvertently threw wide the floodgates of susceptibility behind which he had been hiding.

A single event! (Though it was in itself the beginning of yet another chain of causality – the quiet opening move in yet another of the uncountable dramas of the universe.)

It began, absurdly enough, with a man's asking Marvin for the time.

The event occurred on the northem side of the Plaza de los Muertos, shortly after the evening paseo and a full fifteen minutes before matins. Marvin had been taking his customary walk, past the statue of Jose Grimuchio, past the row of bootblacks gathered near the fifteenth-century pewter railing, to the fountain of San Briosci at the eastern corner of the grim little park. He had come even with the Tomb of the Misbegotten when a man stepped into his path and raised an imperious hand.

'A thousand pardons,' the man said. 'This unsolicited interruption of your solitude is regrettable to me, and perhaps offensive to you; yet still it is incumbent upon me to ask if by chance you could tell me the correct time?'

A harmless enough request – on the surface. Yet the man's appearance belied his commonplace words. He was of medium and slight build, and he wore a moustache of outmoded design, of a sort that can be seen in the Grier portrait of King Morquavio Redondo. His clothes were tattered but very clean and neatly pressed, and his cracked shoes were highly polished. On his right forefinger was an ornate signet ring of massy gold; his eyes were the cold hawk eyes of a man used to command.

His question concerning the time would have been commonplace had there not been clocks facing the plaza, and disagreeing in their separate computations by no more than three minutes.

Marvin answered the man with his usual unfailing politness, glancing at his ankle watch and announcing the time as just five past the hour.

'Thank you, sir, you are most obliging,' the man said. 'Five past already? Time devours our feeble mortality, leaving us with but the sour residue of memory.'

Marvin nodded. 'Yet this ineffable and ungraspable quantity,' he replied, 'this time which no man may possess, is in truth our only possession.'

The man nodded as though Marvin had said something profound, instead of merely voicing a well-mannered conversational commonplace. The stranger bent forward into a sweeping bow (more to be seen in a bygone day than in this plebian age of ours). In so doing he lost his balance and would have fallen had not Marvin grasped him strongly and set him upon his feet.

'Many thanks, ' the man said, never for a moment losing his poise. 'Your grasp of time and of men is most sure; this shall not be forgotten.'

And with that he whirled and marched away into the crowd.

Marvin watched him go, faintly perplexed. Something about the fellow had not rung true. Perhaps it was the moustache, patently false, or the thickly pencilled eyebrows, or the artificial wart on the left cheek; or perhaps it was the shoes, which had given an extra three inches to the man's height, or the cloak, which had been padded to augment the natural narrowness of the shoulders. Whatever it was, Marvin found himself bemused, but not immediately distrustful, for beneath the man's rodomontade there had been evidence of a cheerful and sturdy spirit not lightly to be discounted.

It was while thinking of these things that Marvin happened, by chance, to glance down at his right hand. Looking more closely, he saw a piece of paper in the palm. It certainly had not come there by natural means. He realized that the cloaked stranger must have pressed it upon him while stumbling (or, as Marvin realized now, while
pretending
to stumble).

This cast the events of the past few minutes into an entirely different light. Frowning slightly, Marvin unfolded the paper and read:

Marvin mused for a considerable time upon that note and its implications. He sensed that in some unimaginable fashion a group of interrelated lives and problems, hitherto unknown to him, had crossed his path.

But now was the moment when he could choose. Did he really care to involve himself in anyone's scheme, no matter how noteworthy? Might it not be best to avoid involvement and pursue his own solitary way through the metaphoric deformations of the world?

Perhaps … yet still, the incident had intrigued him and offered an apparently inconsequential diversion to help him forget the pain of Cathy's loss. (Thus action serves as anodyne, whereas contemplation is revealed as the most direct form of involvement, and therefore much shunned by men.)

Marvin followed the instructions given to him in the note from the mysterious stranger. He bought a copy of the
Diaro de Celsus
(4-star edition), and procured a white rosebud for his lapel. And at nine o'clock sharp he went to the Inn of the Hanged Man and sat down at the table in the far left-hand corner, near the paired embrochures. His heart was beating with some rapidity. It was not an entirely unpleasant sensation.

The Inn of the Hanged Man was a low yet cheerful place, and its clientele was composed, for the most part, of hearty specimens of the lower classes. Husky fish peddlers bawled for drink, and inflamed agitators howled abuse at the govemment and were hooted down by the heavy-thewed blacksmiths. A six-legged thorasorous was roasting in the great fireplace, and a scully basted the crackling carcass with honeyed juices. A fiddler had got up on a table and was playing a jig; his wooden leg rattled merrily in time with the old refrain. A drunken strumpet, with jewelled eyelids and artificial septum, wept in a corner with maudlin self-pity.

A perfumed dandy swept a lace handkerchief to his nose and threw a disdainful coin to the tightrope wrestlers. Farther to the left, at the common table, a bootblack reached into the pot for a morsel of scrag, and found his hand skewered to the table by the poniard of a riisman. This exploit was greeted with cheers by the assembled company.

'Gawd save'ee, sir, and whut'll thee be drinking?'

Marvin looked up and saw a waitress with red cheeks and extensive bosom waiting for his order.

'Mead, and it so please you,' Marvin answered quietly.

'Aye, that we do be havin',' the girl replied. She bent to adjust her garter and whispered to Marvin, 'Lawks, sir, do be mindful of yourself in this place which is in truth no fitten for a young gentleman such as thyself.'

'Thanks for your warning,' Marvin replied, 'but if it comes to the rub, I hope that I may be allowed to believe that I might not be entirely unavailing.'

'Ah, ye don't know them as is 'ere,' the girl replied; and then moved away hastily, for a large gentleman dressed entirely in black had approached Marvin's table.

'Now by the sweet bleeding wounds of the Almighty and what have we here?' he shouted.

A silence fell over the inn. Marvin looked steadily upon the man, and recognized in his huge expanse of chest and abnormal reach that one whom people called 'Black Denis'. And he remembered the man's reputation as a ripper and tearer and general bully and spoiler.

Marvin affected not to notice the man's sweaty proximity. Instead, he took out a fan and wafted it gently in front of his nose.

The crowd roared with peasant mirth. Black Denis took a half-step closer. Muscles along his arm writhed like cobras in travail as his fingers closed on the gaunt handle of his rapier.

'Damn me blind for a turnip-filler!' Black Denis shouted, 'but it seems most marvellous to me that we have here in our midst a fellow who looks most exceedingly like a king's spy!

Marvin suspected that the man was trying to provoke him. Therefore he ignored the sally and buffed his fingernails with a tiny silver file.

'Well, slash me up the middle and tie me guts for a sash!' Black Denis swore. 'It seems that some so-called gentlemun ain't no gentlemun at all since they don't acknowledge when another gentlemun is speaking at um. But maybe um's deaf, which I shall find out by examining the fellow's left ear – at home, at my leisure.'

'Were you addressing me?' Marvin asked, in a suspiciously mild voice.

'Indeed I was,' Black Denis said. 'For it came to me of a sudden that me likes not your face.'

'Indeed?' Marvin lisped.

'Aye!' thundered Black Denis. 'Nor like I more your manner, nor the stench of your perfume, nor the shape of your foot nor the curve of your arm.'

Marvin's glance narrowed. The moment was filled with murderous tension, and no sound could be heard save Black Denis' stertorous breathing. Then, before Marvin could reply, a man had run to Black Denis' side. It was a little hunchback who thus rashly interfered, a sallow man with a great white beard, standing no more than three feet high and dragging a club foot behind him.

'Ah, come now,' the hunchback said to Black Denis. 'Wilt shed blood on St Origen's Eve, and it unworthy of your lordship's attention? For shame, Black Denis!'

'I'll shed blood an I so please, by the cankers of the holy red mountain!' swore the bully.

'Aye, spill his guts for him!' shouted a spindly, long-nosed fellow from the crowd, blinking with one blue eye and squinting with one brown.

'Aye, spill it!' a dozen other voices roared, taking up the cry.

'Gentlemen, please!' said the fat innkeeper, wringing his hands.

' 'E ain't never bothered you!' said the frowsy barmaid, a tray of glasses trembling in her hand.

'Nay, leave the popinjay to his drink,' said the hunchback, tugging at Black Denis' sleeve and drooling from one side of his mouth.

'Unhand me, lump-shoulder!' Black Denis shouted, and struck out with a right hand the size of a padding mauler. It caught the little hunchback fair across the chest and propelled him across the room, driving him comple across the aleyard table until he fetched up against the cinch rack with a great clatter of broken glass.

'Now, by the maggots of eternity!' the huge brawler said, turning to Marvin.

Still Marvin fanned himself and sat back in his chair, relaxed but with eyes slightly narrowed. A more observant man might have noticed the faint anticipatory tremor along his thighs, the merest suggestion of flexion in his wrist.

Now he deigned to notice his molester. 'Still here?' he queried. 'Fellow, your importunities grow wearisome to the ear and redundant to the senses.'

'Yeah?' Black Denis cried.

'Yeah,' Marvin replied ironically. 'Reiteration is ever the emphasis of the disingenuous; yet it amuses not my fancy. Therefore remove yourself, fellow, and take your overheated carcass somewhere else, lest I cool it for thee by a bloodletting which any chirurgeon might envy.'

Black Denis gaped at the effrontery of this deadly quiet insult. Then, with a speed which belied his bulk, he swept out his sword and brought it down in a stroke that cleaved the heavy oak table in two, and would have most assuredly done for Marvin had he not moved nimbly out of the way.

Bellowing with rage, Denis charged, swinging his sword like a windmill gone berserk. And Marvin danced lightly back, folded his fan, tucked it away in his belt, rolled up his sleeves, bent low to evade another stroke, leaped backwards over a cedar table, and plucked up a carving knife. Then, gripping the knife lightly in his hand, he moved forward on gliding steps to do combat.

'Take flight, sir!' the barmaid cried. 'He'll split 'ee, and 'ee with naught but a tinysome table steel in 'ee's hand and it with no great edge on it!'

'Take care, young man!' the hunchback cried, taking refuge beneath a hanging side of bartels.

'Spill his guts for him!' the spindly, long-nosed fellow with the piebald eyes cried.

'Gentlemen, please!' cried the unhappy landlord.

The two combatants were met now in the centre of the common room, and Black Denis, his face twisted with passion, feinted and swung a cutlass stroke powerful enough to split an oak. Marvin moved with deadly sureness inside of the blow, deflecting it with his knife in
quatre
, and immediately riposting in
quinze
. This deft counter was blocked only by the abnormal swiftness of Denis'
revanche
, else it would surely have cut the gullet out of the man.

Black Denis came back on to guard, looking upon his opponent with more than a suggestion of respect. Then he roared with berserker rage, and drove forward into the attack, forcing Marvin back across the smoky room.

'A double Napoleon on the big fellow!' cried the perfumed dandy.

'Done!' cried the hunchback. 'That slender lad has the footwork, mark it well.'

'Footwork ne'er stopped swinging steel e'er now,' the dandy lisped. 'Wilt back thy judgement with thy purse?'

'Aye! I'll add five Louis d'Or!' said the hunchback, fumbling for his purse.

And now others in the crowd had caught the gaming fever. 'Ten rupees on the Denis!' shouted the long-nosed fellow. 'Nay, I'll offer odds of three to one!'

'Make it four to one!' cried the ever-cautious landlord, 'and seven to five on first blood!' And so saying, he swept out a bag of gold sovereigns.

'Done!' screamed the piebald-eyed fellow, putting up three silver talents and a gold half-denarius. 'And by the Black Mother, I'll even offer eight to six on a chest-cut!'

'I'll take the bet!' shrieked the barmaid, taking a bag of Maria Theresa thalers out of her bosom. 'And I'll give you six-five pick 'em on first amputation!'

'I'll take that!' the perfumed dandy shrilled. 'And by my wattles, I'll even offer nine to four that the slender lad runs out of here like a scorched greyhound before third blood!'

'I'll take that bet,' Marvin Flynn said, with an amused smile. Evading Denis' clumsy rush he plucked a bag of florins out of his sash and threw it to the dandy. Then he settled down seriously to fight.

Even in these few brief moves, Marvin's skill at fence could clearly be seen. Yet he was faced with a powerful and determined opponent, who wielded a sword many times larger than Marvin's inadequate weapon, and who seemed determined to the point of madness.

The attack came, and all in the crowd except for the hunchback held their breaths as Black Denis rushed down like an incarnation of Juggernaut. Before that impetuous rush, Marvin was forced to give ground. He backed away, vaulted over a table, found himself wedged into a corner, leaped high and caught the chandelier, swung across the room and dropped lightly to his feet.

Bewildered, and perhaps feeling a shade unsure of himself, Black Denis resorted to a trick. As they came together again, Denis' long arm swept a chair into Marvin's path; and as Marvin dodged, Denis grasped a collard of black Ignean pepper from a table and flung it into Marvin's face …

But Marvin's face was no longer there. Pivoting and driving off his left foot, Marvin evaded the treacherous tactic. He feinted low with his knife, double-feinted with his eyes, and executed a perfect stepback crossover.

Black Denis blinked stupidly and looked down to see the handle of Marvin's knife jutting from his chest. His eyes opened wide in astonishment, and his sword hand came swinging up to the riposte.

Marvin turned serenely on his heel and walked slowly away, leaving his unprotected back exposed to the glint-edged cutlass!

Black Denis began his downward swing; but already a thin grey film had formed over his eyes. Marvin had judged the severity of the wound with exquisite precision, for Black Denis' sword clattered to the floor, to be joined a moment later by the great body of the brawler.

Without looking back, Marvin crossed the room and regained his chair. He opened his fan; then, frowning, he slipped a lace handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbled at his forhead. Two or three drops of perspiration marred its marble perfection. Flynn wiped the drops away, then threw away the handkerchief.

The room was in absolute silence. Even the piebald-eyed man had stopped his stertorous breathing.

It was perhaps the most amazing exhibition of swordsmanship that the inhabitants had ever seen. Brawlers one and all, and calling no man master, still they were impressed.

A moment later, pandemonium broke loose. All crowded around Marvin, cheering and exclaiming, and marvelling at the skill he had shown with pointed steel. The two rope wrestlers (brothers, born deaf-mutes) made squealing noises and turned somersaults; the hunchback grinned and counted his winnings with foam-flecked lips; the barmaid looked at Marvin with an embarrassing excess of ardour; the proprietor gruffly served drinks on the house; the piebald-eyed man snuffled through his long nose and talked about luck; even the perfumed dandy was moved to offer perfunctory congratulations.

Slowly the room returned to normal. Two bull-necked servitors dragged out Black Denis' body, and the fickle crowd pelted the corpse with orange peels. The roast was set again to turning on the spit, and the rattle of dice and swish of cards could be heard over the playing of the blind, one-legged fiddler.

The dandy strolled over to Marvin's table and looked down upon him, hand on hip and feathered hat akimbo. ' 'Pon my honour, sir,' the dandy said, 'you do indeed have some qualifications at fence; and it seems to me that your skills could be rewarded in the service of the Cardinal Macchurchi, who is always on the lookout for apt and agile fellows.'

'I am not for hire,' Marvin said quietly.

'I am glad to hear it,' the dandy said. And now, looking at the man more closely, Marvin perceived a white rosebud in his buttonhole, and a copy of the
Diario de Celsus
(4-star edition) in his hand.

The dandy's eyes flashed a warning. In his most effete voice, he said, 'Well then, sir, my congratulations again; and perhaps, if you would care for a bit of sport, you will join me in my chambers on the Avenue of Martyrs. We could discuss the finer points of swordplay, and drink a rather adequate little wine which has lain in my family's vaults for 103 years, and perhaps even hazard another topic or two of mutual interest.'

Now Marvin was able to recognize, beneath his disguise, the man who had pressed a note into his hand earlier.

'Sir,' Marvin said, 'your invitation does me honour.'

'Not at all, sir. Your acknowledgement of my invitation does me honour.'

'Nay, sir,' Marvin insisted, and would have examined the honour question further had not the man cut short the punctilio and whispered, 'We'll leave at once, then. Black Denis was but a harbinger – a straw to show us which way the wind blows. And I greatly fear, lest we get ourselves promptly hence, it may well blow us a hurricane.'

'That would be most unfortunate,' Marvin said, grinning very slightly.

'Landlord! Set this upon my account!'

'Aye, Sir Gules,' the landlord replied, bowing low.

And so they went out together into the fog-bound night.