The Ghost Rider (9 page)

No one will ever know what happened between mother and daughter, what explanations, curses or tears were exchanged once the door swung open.

Events then move rapidly. Doruntine learns the full
dimensions of the tragedy and, needless to say, loses all contact with her lover. Then the dénouement. Stres’s mistake was to have asked, in his very first circular to the inns and relay stations, for information about two riders (a man and woman riding the same horse or two horses) coming into the principality. He should have asked that equal effort be concentrated on a search for any solitary traveller heading for the border. But he had corrected the lapse in his second circular, and he now hoped that the unknown man might still be apprehended, for he must have remained in hiding for some time waiting to see how things would turn out. Even if it proved impossible to capture him here, there was every chance that some trace of his passage would be found, and the neighbouring principalities and dukedoms, strongly subject to Byzantium’s influence, could be alerted to place him under arrest the moment he set foot in their territory.

Before going home for lunch, Stres again asked his aide whether he had heard anything from the inns. He shook his head. Stres threw his cloak over his shoulders and was about to leave when his deputy added:

“I have completed my search through the archives. Tomorrow, if you have time, I will be able to present my report.”

“Really? And how do things look?”

His deputy stared at him.

“I have an idea of my own,” he replied evenly, “quite different from all current theories.”

“Really?” Stres said again, smiling without looking at the man. “Goodbye, then. Tomorrow I’ll hear your report.”

As he walked home his mind was nearly blank. He
thought several times of the two strangers now riding back to Bohemia, going over the affair in their own minds again and again, no doubt thinking what he, in his own way, had imagined before them.

“You know what?” he said to his wife the moment he came in, “I think you were right. There’s a very strong chance that this whole Doruntine business was no more than an ordinary romantic adventure after all.”

“Oh really?” Beneath her flashing eyes, her cheeks glowed with satisfaction.

“Since the visit of the husband’s two cousins it’s all becoming clear,” he added, slipping off his cloak.

As he sat down by the fire, he had the feeling that something in the house had come to life again, an animation sensed more than seen or heard. His wife’s customary movements as she prepared lunch were more lively, the rattling of the dishes more brisk, and even the aroma of the food seemed more pleasant. As she set the table he noticed in her eyes a glimmer of gratitude that quickly dispelled the sustained chill that had marked all their recent days. During lunch the look in her eyes grew still softer and more meaningful, and after the meal, when he told the children to go take their naps, Stres, stirred by a desire he had felt but rarely in these last days, went to their bedroom and waited for her. She came in a moment later, the same gleam in her eyes, her hair, just brushed, hanging loose upon her shoulders. Stres thought suddenly that in days to come, the dead woman would come back often, bringing them physical warmth, as now, or else an icy chill.

He made love to his wife with heightened sensuality.
She too was, so to speak, at fever pitch. She offered herself to him by pushing her pelvis as high as it would go, and he entered her as deeply as he could, as if he were seeking out a second passageway inside her. He managed to get close to it, he felt, to a place where a different kind of damp darkness began, then the lips of the inner vagina drew him in further and invited him to an apparently inaccessible realm. An inhuman
aah
escaped him as his seed managed to spill, or so it seemed, into that other place, the dark kingdom where he would never go. Good God, he mumbled involuntarily as the tension subsided and he could feel himself collapsing all at once.

A few minutes later, lying beside his wife, whose blushing cheeks were lit by a smile, he heard her whisper words which, despite their long intimacy through many years of marriage, she had never dared say to him before. She confessed she had rarely had such strong pleasure and that his organ had never before been so … hard …

In other circumstances her lack of modesty would have taken him aback, but not today.

“It seems to me,” he said without looking at his wife, “that you’ve got something else to say.”

She smiled.

“Well, yes,” she replied, “it’s a curious sensation … I was thinking that it wasn’t just very hard … but also, how can I put it … very cold.”

Now it was his turn to smile. He explained that it was a feeling a woman has when she herself is at fever pitch.

As their breathing slowed they lay silent, gazing alternately at the carved wooden ceiling and through the half-shuttered window at the low late autumn sky.

“Look,” she said, “a stork. I thought they’d gone long ago.”

“A few sometimes stay behind. Laggards.”

He could not have said why, but he felt that the conversation about Doruntine, suspended since lunch, now threatened to return. Caressing a lock of hair on her temple, he turned his wife’s eyes from the sky, convinced that he had managed, in this way, to escape any further talk of the dead woman.

The next day, before summoning his deputy to get his report on the Vranaj archives, Stres glanced at the files on crimes committed in the last seven days. One burglary. Two murders. One rape.

He ran through the report on the murders. Both of them honour killings. Presumably taking advantage of all the commotion about Doruntine, the killers had seized an opportunity to
take back the blood
in accordance with the ancient
kanun
. Even so, you won’t get away with it, Stres muttered. When he reached the sentence, “The marksmen have been arrested,” Stres crossed out “marksmen” and replaced it with “murderers”. Then he added in the margin: “Put them in chains like ordinary criminals”.

“You thought you would get treated as special one more time”, he grunted. After lying dormant for many years, the
kanun
seemed for some reason to have come back to life and to be rising from its own ashes. Despite repeated and unambiguous warnings from the prince, who was adamant that only the laws of the state and not those of the
kanun
now held sway, family killings had gone on increasing in number.

Stres underlined “ordinary criminals” before reading the last file. Maria Kondi, aged twenty-seven. Married. Died suddenly as she left mass on Sunday. Raped at night two days after her burial. No bodily harm. Jewellery and wedding ring not stolen.

He rubbed his forehead. It was the second case of necrophilia in recent years. Good God, he sighed, in a sudden fit of weariness. But it wasn’t a true rape, just ordinary sex. Almost normal …

His deputy looked just as worried as he had the previous day. He also looked very unwell, Stres thought.

“As I have said before, and as I repeated to you yesterday,” he began, “my research in these archives has led me to a conclusion about this disturbing incident quite different from those commonly held.”

I never imagined that lengthy contact with archives could make a man’s face look so much like cardboard, Stres thought.

“And,” the deputy went on, “the explanation I have come to is also very different from what you yourself think.”

Stres raised his eyebrows in astonishment.

“I’m listening,” he said as his aide seemed to hesitate.

“This is not a figment of my imagination,” the deputy went on. “It is a truth that became clear to me once I had scrupulously examined the Vranaj archives, especially the correspondence between the old woman and Count Thopia.”

He opened the folder he was holding and took out a packet of large sheets of paper yellowed by time.

“And just what do these letters amount to?” Stres asked impatiently.

His deputy took a deep breath.

“From time to time the old woman told her friend her troubles, or asked his advice about family affairs. She had the habit of making copies of her own letters.”

“I see,” said Stres. “But please, try to keep it short.”

“Yes,” replied his deputy, “I’ll try.”

He took another breath, scratched his forehead.

“In some letters, one in particular, written long ago, the old woman alludes to an unnatural feeling on the part of her son Kostandin for his sister, Doruntine.”

“Really?” said Stres. “What sort of unnatural feeling? Can you be more specific?”

“This letter gives no details, but bearing in mind other things mentioned in later letters, particularly Count Thopia’s reply, it is clear that it was an incestuous feeling.”

“Well, well.”

Thick drops of sweat stood out on the deputy’s forehead. He continued, pretending not to notice his chief’s ironic tone.

“In fact, the count immediately understood what she meant, and in his reply,” said the aide, slipping a sheet of paper across the table to Stres, “he tells her not to worry, for these were temporary things, common at their ages. He even mentions two or three similar examples in families of his acquaintance, emphasising that it happens particularly in families in which there is only one daughter, as was the case with Doruntine. ‘However, alertness and great caution are needed to make this somewhat unnatural emotion revert to normal. In any event, we’ll talk about this at length when we see each other again’.”

The deputy looked up to see what impression the
reading had had on his chief, but Stres was staring at the tabletop, drumming his fingers nervously.

“Their subsequent letters make no further mention of the matter,” the aide went on. “It seems that, as the count predicted, the brother’s unhealthy feeling for his sister had become a thing of the past. But in another letter, written several years later, when Doruntine was of marriageable age, the old woman tells the count that Kostandin is unable to conceal his jealousy of any prospective fiancé. On his account, she says, we have had to reject several excellent matches.”

“And what about Doruntine?” Stres interrupted.

“Not a word about her attitude.”

“And then what?”

“Later, when the old woman told the count of the distant marriage that had just been arranged, she wrote that she herself, alongside Doruntine and most of her sons, had long hesitated, concerned that the distance was too great, but that this time it was Kostandin who argued vigorously for the prospective marriage. In his letter of congratulations, the count told the old woman, among other things, that Kostandin’s attitude towards the marriage was not at all surprising, that, on the contrary, in view of what she had told him it was understandable that Kostandin, irritated by the possibility of any local marriage which would have forced him to see his sister united with a man he knew, could more easily resign himself to her marriage to an unknown suitor, preferably a foreigner as far out of his sight as possible. It is a very good thing, the count wrote, that this marriage has been agreed upon, if only for that reason.”

The deputy leafed through his folder for a few moments. Stres was staring hard at the floor.

“Finally,” the aide continued, “we have here the letter in which the old woman described the wedding to her correspondent, and, among other things, the incident that took place there.”

“Ah yes, the incident,” said Stres, as if torn from his somnolence.

“Though this incident passed largely unnoticed, or in any event was considered natural enough in the circumstances, it was only because people were unaware of those other elements I have just told you about. The Lady Mother, on the other hand, who was well acquainted with these elements, offers the proper explanation of the event. Having told the count that, after the church ceremony, Kostandin paced back and forth like a madman, and that when they had accompanied the groom’s kinsmen as far as the highway, he accosted his sister’s husband, saying to him: ‘She is still mine, do you understand, mine!’ the old woman tells her friend that this, thank God, was the last disgrace she would have to bear in the course of this long story.”

Stres’s subordinate, apparently fatigued by his long explanation, paused and swallowed.

“That’s what these letters come to,” he said. “In the last two or three, written after her bereavement, the old woman complains of her loneliness and bitterly regrets having married her daughter to a man so far away. There’s nothing else. That’s it.”

The man fell silent. For a moment the only sound came from Stres’s fingers tapping on the table.

“And what does all this have to do with our case?”

His deputy looked up.

“There is an obvious, even direct, connection.”

Stres looked at him with a questioning air.

“I think you will agree that there is no denying Kostandin’s incestuous feelings.”

“It’s not surprising,” Stres said. “These things happen.”

“You will also admit, I imagine, that his stubborn desire to have his sister marry so far away is evidence of his struggle to overcome that perverse impulse. In other words, he wanted his sister to have a husband as far from his sight as possible, so as to remove any possibility of incest.”

“That seems clear enough,” said Stres. “Go on.”

“The incident at the wedding marks the last torment he was to suffer in his own lifetime.”

“In his lifetime?” Stres asked.

“Yes,” said the deputy, raising his voice for no apparent reason. “I am convinced that Kostandin’s unslaked incestuous desire was so strong that death itself could not still it.”

“Hmm,” Stres said.

“Incest unrealised survived death,” his aide went on. “Kostandin believed that his sister’s distant marriage would enable him to escape his yearning, but, as we shall see, neither distance nor even death itself could deliver him from it.”

“Go on,” Stres said drily.

His aide hesitated for a moment. His eyes, burning with an inner flame, stared at his chief, as if to make sure that he had leave to continue.

“Go on,” said Stres a second time.