The Dragon Griaule (16 page)

He picked up The Father of Stones and juggled it; it was unusually heavy. Like dragon scale, like ancient thought.

Damn, he thought, damn this whole business, I should give it up and start a religion, there must be sufficient fools out there for some of them to consider me wise and wonderful.

‘Thinking about murdering someone?’ said a dry voice behind him. ‘Your client, perhaps?’

It was the prosecutor, Ian Mervale, a reedy, aristocratic-looking man in a stylishly cut black suit; his dark hair, combed back from a noble forehead, was salted with gray, and the vagueness of his eyes, which were watery blue, set in sleepy folds, belied a quick and aggressive mentality.

‘I’m more likely to go after you,’ said Korrogly wryly.

‘Me?’ Mervale affected shocked dismay. ‘I’m by far the least of your worries. If not your client, I’d consider an attack upon our venerable Judge Wymer. It appears he’s not at all sympathetic to your defense tactics.’

‘I can’t blame him for that,’ Korrogly muttered.

Mervale studied him a moment, then shook his head and chuckled. ‘It’s always the same every time I run up against you. I know you’re being honest, you’re not trying to underplay your hand; but even though I know it, as soon as the trial begins I become positively convinced that you’re being duplicitous, that you’ve got some devastating trick up your sleeve.’

‘You don’t trust yourself,’ Korrogly said. ‘How can you trust anyone else?’

‘I suppose you’re right. My greatest strength is my greatest weakness.’ He started to turn toward the door, hesitated and then said, ‘Care for a drink?’ Korrogly juggled The Father of Stones one last time; it seemed to have grown heavier yet. ‘I suppose a drink might help,’ he said.

The Blind Lady,
a pub in Chancrey’s Lane, was as usual crowded with law clerks and young solicitors, whose body heat fogged the mirrors on the walls, whose errant darts lodged in white plaster or blackened beam, and whose uproarious babble made quiet conversation impossible. Korrogly and Mervale worked their way through the press, holding their glasses high to avoid spillage, and at last found an unoccupied table at the rear of the pub. As they seated themselves, a group of clerks standing nearby began to sing a bawdy song. Mervale winced, then lifted his glass in a toast to Korrogly.

The singers moved off toward the front of the pub; Mervale leaned back, regarding Korrogly with fond condescension, an attitude more of social habit than one relating to their adversary positions. Mervale was the son of a moneyed shipbuilder, and there was always an edge of class struggle to their conversations, an edge they blunted by pretending to have a fund of mutual respect.

‘So what do you think?’ Mervale asked. ‘Is Lemos lying . . . demented? What?’

‘Demented, no. Lying . . .’ Korrogly sipped his rum. ‘Every time I think I have the answer to that, I see another side to things. I wouldn’t want to hazard a guess at this stage. What do you think?’

‘Of course he’s lying! The man had every motive in the world to kill Zemaille. His daughter, his business. My God! He could have done nothing else but kill him. But I have to admit his story’s ingenious. Brilliant.’

‘Is it? I might have gotten him off with a couple of years if he’d pled some version of diminished capacity.’

‘Yes, but that’s what makes it so brilliant, the fact that everyone knows that’s so. They’ll say to themselves, God, the man must be innocent or else he wouldn’t stick to such a far-fetched tale.’

‘I’d hardly call it far-fetched.’

‘Oh, very well! Let’s call it inspired then, shall we?’

Growing annoyed, Korrogly thought, you pompous piece of shit, I’m going to beat you this time.

He smiled. ‘As you wish.’

‘Ah,’ said Mervale, ‘I sense that a trial lawyer has suddenly taken possession of your body.’

Korrogly drank. ‘I’m not in the mood tonight, Mervale. What are you after that you think I’m willing to give away?’

Displeasure registered on Mervale’s face.

‘What’s wrong?’ Korrogly asked. ‘Am I spoiling your fun?’

‘I don’t know what’s got into you,’ said Mervale. ‘Maybe you’ve been working too hard.’

‘These little ritual fishing expeditions are beginning to bore me, that’s all. They always come to the same thing. Nothing. They’re just your way of reminding me of my station. You drag me in here and butter me up with the old school smile and talk about parties to which I haven’t been invited. I expect you believe this gives you a psychological advantage, but I think the false sense of superiority it lends you actually weakens your delivery. And you need all the strength you can muster. You’re simply not that proficient a prosecutor.’

Mervale got stiffly to his feet, cast a scornful look down at Korrogly. ‘You’re a joke, you know that?’ he said. ‘A tiresome drudge without a life, with only the law for a bed partner.’ He tossed some coins onto the table. ‘Buy yourself a couple of drinks. Perhaps drunk you’ll be able to entertain yourself.’

Korrogly watched him move through the crowd, accepting the good wishes of the law clerks who closed around him. Now why, he thought, why did I bother doing that?

He waited until Mervale was out of sight before leaving, and then, instead of going directly home, he walked west along Biscaya Boulevard, heading nowhere in particular, moving aimlessly through the accumulating mist, his thoughts in a despondent muddle; the dank salt air seemed redolent of his own heaviness, of the damp dark moil inside his head. Only peripherally did he notice that he had entered the Almintra quarter, and it was not until he found himself standing in front of the gemcutter’s shop that he suspected he had tried to hide from himself the fact that he had intended to come this way. Or perhaps, he thought, I was moved to come here by some vast and ineluctable agency whose essence spoke to me from The Father of Stones. Though that thought had been formed
in derision, it caused the hairs on the back of his neck to prickle, and he wondered, what if Lemos’ story is true, could I also be vulnerable to Griaule’s directives? The silence of the dead street unnerved him; the peaks of the rooftops looked like black simple mountains rising from plateaus of mist, and the few streetlamps left unbroken shone through the haze like evil phosphorescent flowers, and the shop windows were obsidian, reflective, hiding their secrets. It was still fairly early, but all the good artisans and shopkeepers were abed . . . all except the occupant of the apartment above Lemos’ shop. Her light still burned. He gazed up at it, thinking now that Mervale’s insulting and accurate depiction of his life might have motivated him to visit Mirielle, thereby to disprove it. He decided to leave, to return home, but remained standing in front of the shop, held in place, it seemed, by the glow of the lamp and the sodden crush of the surf from the darkness beyond. A dog began to bark nearby; from somewhere farther away came the call of voices singing, violins and horns, a melancholy tune that he felt was sounding the configuration of his own loneliness.

This is folly, he said to himself, she’ll probably kick you down the stairs, she was only playing with you the last time, and why the hell would you want it anyway . . . just to be away from your thoughts for awhile, no matter how temporary the cure?

That’s right, that’s exactly right.

‘Hell!’ he said to the dark, to the whole unlistening world. ‘Hell, why not?’

The woman who opened the door, though physically the same woman who had sprawled brazenly on the sofa during their first meeting, was in all other ways quite different. Distracted; twitchy; pale to the point of seeming bloodless, her black hair loose and in disarray; clad in a white robe of some heavy coarse cloth. The dissolute hardness had emptied from her face, and she seemed to have thrown off a handful of years, to be a troubled young girl. She stared for a second as if failing to recognize him and then said, ‘Oh . . . you.’

He was about to apologize for having come so late, to beat a retreat, put off by her manner; but before he could frame the words, she stepped back from the door and invited him in.

‘I’m glad you’re here,’ she said, following him into the living room, which had undergone a cleaning. ‘I haven’t been able to sleep.’

She dropped onto the sofa, fumbled about on the end table, picked up a cigar, then set it down; she looked up at him expectantly.

‘Well, have a seat.’

He did as instructed, taking his perch again on the easy chair. ‘I was hoping you wouldn’t mind answering a few more questions.’

‘Questions . . . you want . . . oh, all right. Questions.’ She gave a fey laugh and picked nervously at the fringe on the arm of the sofa. ‘Ask away.’

‘I’ve heard,’ he said, ‘that Mardo had in mind for you to take over the leadership of the temple in case of his death. Is that correct?’

She nodded, kept nodding, too forcefully for mere affirmation, as if trying to clear some painful entanglement from her head.

‘Yes, indeed,’ she said. ‘That’s what he had in mind.’

‘Were there papers drawn up to this effect?’

‘No . . . yes, maybe . . . I don’t know. He talked about doing it, but I never saw them.’ She rocked back and forth on the edge of the sofa, her hands plucking at ridges of its old embroidered pattern. ‘It doesn’t matter now.’

‘Why . . . why doesn’t it matter?’

‘There is no temple.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘There is no temple! Simple as that. No more adherents, no more ceremonies. Just empty buildings.’

‘What happened?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘But . . .’

She jumped to her feet, paced toward the back of the room; then she spun about to face him, brushing hair back from her cheek. ‘I don’t want to talk about it! I don’t want to talk at all . . . not about . . . not about anything important.’ She put a hand to her brow as if testing for a fever. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

‘Oh, nothing,’ she said. ‘My life’s a shambles, my lover’s dead, and my father goes on trial for his murder tomorrow morning. Everything’s fine.’

‘I don’t know why your father’s plight should disturb you. I thought you hated him.’

‘He’s still my father. I have feelings that hate won’t dissolve. Reflex feelings, you understand. But they have their pull.’ She came back to the sofa and sat down; once again she began picking at the embroidered pattern. ‘Look, I can’t help you. I don’t know anything that can help you with the trial. Not a thing. If I did I think I’d tell you . . . that’s how I feel now, anyway. But there’s nothing, nothing at all.’

He sensed that the crack in her callous veneer ran deeper than she cared to admit, and, too, he thought that her anxiety might be due to the fact that she did know something helpful and was holding it back; but he decided not to push the matter.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘What would you like to talk about?’

She glanced around the room, as if searching for something that would support a conversation.

He noticed that her eye lingered on the framed sketch of the woman and baby. ‘Is that your mother?’ he asked, pointing to it.

That appeared to unsettle her. ‘Yes,’ she murmured, looking quickly away from the sketch.

‘She’s very much like you. Her name was Patricia, wasn’t it?’

Mirielle nodded.

‘It’s a terrible thing,’ he said, ‘for a woman so lovely to be taken before her time. How did she drown?’

‘Don’t you know how to talk without interrogating people?’ she asked angrily.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, wondering at the vehemence of her reaction. ‘I just . . .’

‘My mother’s dead,’ she said. ‘Let that be enough for you.’

‘I was only making conversation. You choose the subject, all right?’

‘All right,’ she said after a moment. ‘Let’s talk about you.’

‘There’s not much to tell.’

‘There never is with people, but that’s all right. I won’t be bored, I promise.’

He began, reluctantly at first, to talk about his life, his childhood, the tiny farm in the hills above the city, with its banana grove, its corral and three cows – Rose, Alvina, and Esmeralda – and as he spoke, that old innocent life seemed to be resurrected, to be breathing just beyond the apartment walls. He told her how he used to sit on a hilltop and look down at the city and dream of owning one of the fine houses.

‘And now you do,’ she said.

‘No, I don’t. There’s a law against it. The fine houses belong to those with status, with history on their side. There are laws against people like me, laws that keep us in our place.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I know that.’

He told her about his first interest in the law, how it had seemed in its logical construction and order to be a lever with which one could move any obstruction, but how he had discovered that there were so many levers and obstructions, when you moved one, another would drop down to crush you, and the trick was to keep in constant motion, to be moving things constantly and dancing out of the way.

‘Did you always want to be a lawyer?’

He laughed. ‘No, my first ambition was to be the man who slew the dragon Griaule, to claim the reward offered in Teocinte, to buy my mother silver bowls and my father a new guitar.’

Her expression, happy a moment before, had gone slack and distraught; he asked if she was all right.

‘Don’t even say his name,’ she said. ‘You don’t know, you don’t know . . .’

‘What don’t I know?’

‘Griaule . . . God! I used to feel him in the temple. Perhaps you think that’s just my imagination, but I swear it’s true. We all concentrated on him, we sang to him, we believed in him, we conjured him in our thoughts, and soon we could feel him. Cold and vast. Inhuman. This great scaly chill that owned a world.’

Korrogly was struck by the similarity of phrasing with which the old woman Kirin and now Mirielle had referred to their apprehension of Griaule, and thought to make mention of it,
but Mirielle continued speaking, and he let the matter drop.

‘I can still feel his touch in my mind. Heavy and steeped in blackness. Each one of his thoughts a century in forming, a tonnage of hatred, of sheer enmity. He’d brush against me, and I’d be cold for hours. That’s why . . .’