Phantom (33 page)

"Drink that," he said curtly.

I tasted copper, honey, and vinegar—the prescribed antidote—and my glance wandered to the vial.

"What is that?" I asked uneasily.

"The oil of the scorpion. It will relieve the pain and reduce the swelling."

He sat down beside me on a cane chair and laid two bony fingers on my pulse.

"You'll live!" he said with grim satisfaction. "Next time I warn you to take care, perhaps you will listen to me. How do you feel?"

"Cold and sickened," I said grimly.

He nodded as though I had merely confirmed his expectation.

"That is a natural reaction to a scorpion bite."

"And to murder," I said.

Erik sighed. "You know that there is only one way with enemies in Persia. You've cut down a few yourself in your time as chief of police, haven't you?"

"Criminals perhaps… enemies of the state… but all by due process of the law."

He shrugged. "Death is death however it comes, legal or otherwise. Why do you plague me with these pointless questions? There were many cutthroats involved in the opening of his veins."

"I'm not concerned with paid assassins—mindless, soulless animals who excel at nothing else. But you, Erik—you love all the beauty in this world… You are a genius in so many different fields. Why do you set yourself beyond the pale of humanity by such a despicable crime?"

He took off the mask and turned slowly to let me see.

"This face, which has denied me all human rights, also frees me of all obligation to the human race," he said quietly. "My mother hated me, my village drove me from my home, I was exhibited like an animal in a cage until a knife showed me the only way to be free. The pleasures of love will always be forbidden to me… but I am young, Nadir, I have all the desires of any normal man."

I watched him replace the mask wearily.

"I did not kill the grand vazir," he continued unexpectedly. "Oh, for God's sake, spare me that pitiful look of relief! I can assure you that I fully intended to take part. I

went to Kashan for the express purpose of taking his life. The
meerghazabs
had orders not to touch his throat—the coup de grace was to have been mine."

"What happened?" I demanded.

Erik made a gesture of impatience.

"I saw the scorpion and wasted a few precious minutes on its capture. In my absence the fools misjudged his strength and opened too many veins. When I arrived the bath was full of blood and he was already dead. I was so
angry
— you cannot begin to imagine my fury and frustration. I hated him! I hated him for being wise and respected… and loved. I hated him for making me look in the mirror of his eyes to see the loathsome thing I have become…"

Erik sank back on the chair beside me and stared at the floor.

"Go on," I prompted grimly, "you had better tell me everything."

"I would have killed them all for their disobedience," he continued dully, "but they were too many in number and already half crazed with bloodlust. I left the bath in haste before my rage betrayed me, and as I walked back through the gardens to my horse, the princess ran from the palace with her hair streaming in the wind. It was dark. She didn't see me until we collided, but as soon as she recognized me she understood that he was dead. She backed away against the palace wall and started to scream… My God, I'll never forget those screams… such terrible, demented grief! It made me remember… so many things I thought I had forgotten." Suddenly he buried his masked face in his hands. "She went on screaming"—he sobbed— "on and on and on. I cannot shut the sound from my head."

I let him weep, relieved beyond measure by this astonishing show of emotion, the first evidence of a remorse and regret which might yet save him.

"There is nothing I can do," he said in despair. "I can't turn back the clock and see this terrible thing undone. It's too late… too late."

"Too late for the princess, perhaps, but not for you." I suggested with sudden hope, "Erik… have you no religion to turn to?"

"I was raised a Catholic," he said slowly, "but I have not heard Mass since I was a child."

"There are missions here in Persia," I pointed out gravely, "priests who would hear your confession and grant you absolution."

He lifted his head and looked at me curiously.

"You have no belief in the doctrines of the Catholic church."

"No," I agreed, "but I have a great respect for its morals. And I would sooner see you an infidel than an atheist and murderer."

He got up and went to open a window.

"A sung Mass is very beautiful," he said wistfully. "I think tonight perhaps I could begin to compose my own setting of the requiem. I have neglected my music for too long… far too long."

I said no more.

A short time later, when I was able to hobble to my own apartment, loaning on the arm of a servant, Erik was already too absorbed in the score to take note of my departure.

Unseemly celebrations attended the demise of

Mirza Taqui Khan, and those who had suffered inconvenience and straitened circumstances as a result of his sweeping reforms were the first to raise a glass to absent friends. I suppose I should have been among them, but the general hilarity of the court was distasteful to me, and I felt Persia to be a poorer place for the loss of an inherently noble man.

When the princess was brought back to court, prostrate with grief, to be given in marriage to the son of the new grand vazir, Erik came to me in a terrible rage.

"Is this another of your quaint and delightful customs?" he demanded furiously. "Has no one in this godforsaken court heard of a decent period of mourning?"

I raised my shoulders helplessly.

"The shah's sister is his personal property, to be disposed of as he sees fit."

Erik looked at me incredulously.

"Are you telling me the girl is
transferable
, like the grand vazir's signet ring—that whoever takes one must take the other?"

I sighed. "It is often the custom in such matters."

"Oh, I see," he said contemptuously. "Legalized rape is the done thing here, is it? Any man may force himself upon a woman and say it is the custom? My God, what a country!"

And he turned away with such fierce disgust that I felt faintly ashamed of my own race.

I was fully aware that he was by no means indifferent to the opposite sex, indeed quite the contrary. A powerful sexuality informed his every gesture. Curbed and leashed, expressed in the enormous sensuality of his hands, this sexuality gripped every audience and made him a uniquely compelling performer. 1 believe it was this very quality that had fascinated the khanum, a woman of intense and urgent passions. If the eunuchs were to be believed, the fancy she entertained for his presence went far beyond her interest in his magical skills. They say that each time she watched him kill, the intensity of her pleasure bordered on sexual gratification, and I had heard a whisper that she would have invited him to her bed, had she only dared to take the risks involved. Oddly enough, I would have said that Erik and the shah himself were the only people in the palace who remained unaware of that whisper. No one would dare to carry such a tale to the king of kings, who believed, like all good Moslems, that heaven lay beneath his mother's feet. But Erik… Allah! Had he no eyes to see what the woman really wanted from him? To be so corrupted with vice and yet maintain a child's essential innocence! Strange, but whenever I looked at him I found myself remembering that Lucifer himself had been an angel before he fell…

I felt cold at the thought of what tragedies might ensue if Erik should ever open his eyes and fall in love. Surely God, who had punished him so cruelly in his birth, would spare him the cruel travesty of such sight…

No, I did not seriously believe he was falling in love with the princess. What he felt for her now was only the same angry pity he experienced for anything vulnerable and damaged. She was merely a helpless creature who aroused his deep, and astonishingly contradictory, instinct to heal and protect; had she been a bird he would have mended her broken wing, set her free, and safely forgotten her.

The door of the torture chamber had not closed on him yet and I could find it in my heart to hope that it never would.

"Are you to perform at the wedding celebrations?" I inquired at length, seeking to divert his dark thoughts.

He laughed shortly.

"Yes… I am to be the skeleton at their little feast. The shah has already asked me to prepare a spectacular show. I think some trick with a coffin might be rather appropriate, don't you? I shall have to think about it."

And he turned back to the window already deep in thought.

If I live to be a hundred I know I shall never see a sight more extraordinary than that astonishing trick Erik performed with the coffin.

There was no stage, no visible place to conceal whatever mechanics govern the secret of levitation, and when the sarcophagus began to open a tense, expectant silence descended upon the watching court.

Erik was dressed like a god and wore a mask that had been specially fashioned for the occasion out of beaten gold. He snapped his fingers once and the stone lid of the coffin fell to the floor of its own accord with a deafening thud that made everyone jump. When silence descended once more, he held out one hand and beckoned toward the sarcophagus with a gesture of awesome authority that left everyone holding his breath. I had enough French now to translate the words that he began to weave into soft, enticing song.

Come forth from your dark sleep.

Come to the Angel of Doom,

And show the living the fate which awaits…

As the last note died, there was an answering shriek from the coffin, a horrible, heart-stopping wail that chilled us all to the bone. And then, with a faint, eerie rattle, I saw the Kazan skeleton rise slowly into the air and come to rest, erect and unsupported, beside its master.

My gasp was lost among the communal intake of breath as Erik took the skeleton by the hand and led it toward the place where the new prime minister stood. I saw the man tremble visibly as the terrible apparition approached, and the shah himself leaned forward in his chair, his face a little paler than normal as he watched intently.

The bony visitor from the tomb raised an accusing finger at the grand vazir; there was a tense heartbeat of silence and then, as Erik clapped his hands abruptly, the skeleton collapsed to the floor in a mass of inanimate jumbled bones.

Swooping forward, like some golden bird of prey, Erik retrieved the skull and from its jaw withdrew the prime minister's signet ring, tossing it at the feet of the stupefied man with a gesture of contempt.

"I trust Your Excellency's son will prove less careless with his secondhand possessions," he said pointedly.

There was a moment of stunned silence, all the court staring at the young shah to see whether they dared to show approval at an astonishing trick so blatantly colored with dangerous political overtones. The moment could not have lasted for more than a second or two, but it seemed like all eternity before the shah leaned forward to toss a large drawstring purse to Erik.

Immediately the court burst into thunderous applause.

Erik bowed and walked away, taking the skull with him, but leaving the rest of the skeleton lying where all might examine it with greedy curiosity. He had no further use for this particular device now, and so arrogantly confident was he of his own unique expertise that he had no qualms in exposing the apparatus of this illusion to the curious gaze of the ignorant. He had made his point and he was satisfied; nothing could have better expressed his contempt for mankind than the utter carelessness with which he abandoned the instrument of this remarkable deception once it had served its purpose.

saw the shah looking at him as he walked away, and there was a certain coldness in his eyes as they rested on this uniquely favored servant. The political gesture had been aimed at the grand vazir, but neither the shah nor the khanum could escape from the associated ridicule that would always attach to the remarriage of the princess now. I could not help feeling it was remarkably foolhardy of Erik to risk offending his mighty patron in such a dangerously-public manner.

As for the new grand vazir, once having recovered from the unnerving experience, his humiliation and resentment were very plainly etched upon his face. When I saw him deep in conversation with his son and their supporters, I felt increasingly uneasy.

Wine is forbidden to followers of the Prophet, but, regrettably, at court, this injunction was very commonly ignored. A slave brought a tray containing goblets and a flagon of arrack to the whispering group and a few minutes later I saw this same man serve Erik on bended knee. For some time Erik lingered, speaking to no one, as was his wont, and viewing the remainder of the evening's entertainment with an aloof and scornful eye. I was drawn into a lengthy, tedious conversation with the undersecretary and a clerk of the foreign office and when I chanced to look around later I saw that Erik had disappeared. Not in itself an unusual event, but this time, for some unknown reason, his sudden absence disturbed me; and excusing myself hastily from the conversation, I hurried through the palace to his apartment.

The rooms were deserted, no servant in sight.

I found Erik alone in the beautiful bathing chamber, vomiting blood with a terrible, choking violence. He looked around briefly and swore when he saw I was there.

"The wine," I said dully, staring at the blood streaking the sides of the great white marble bath. "How many times have I warned you to employ a taster? Where are your servants?"

"I sent them away," he gasped. "And now if you don't mind… I should prefer to conduct my final performance without an audience… Ask nicely and I'm sure they'll give you your money back at the door!"

He turned his face away from me and was convulsed once more by the agonized retching that seemed as though it would tear him apart. A little blood splashed up. on my hand as I reached out helplessly to hold him steady.