The Teleportation Accident (17 page)

‘So?’

‘What if it tells the girl what we did?’

‘How would it do that? It doesn’t talk.’

‘I think they have some sort of . . . some sort of
connection
. Catch it and put it in your bag.’

Loeser made a grab for the iguana, but it leaped from the mantelpiece and fled through the doorway into Elisalexa Norb’s bedroom. That was enough to put it out of sight, so Scramsfield began the operation. ‘
Das ist ein Tiefpunkt
,’ muttered Loeser several times to himself after that. ‘
Das ist ein echter Tiefpunkt
.’

Within an hour, the Norbs had begun to stir. Margaret was lagging behind so Elisalexa kept pinching her aunt’s calf until she woke up properly. Both then tottered over to the mirror to examine their ripe gemmeous xeno-transplants.

‘They do rather stick out,’ said Margaret Norb. ‘The glands.’

‘Yes,’ said Scramsfield, ‘but they’ll soon be absorbed into your body.’

‘Can I touch it?’

‘If you like.’

She hesitantly brought an index finger up to the little moist bulb, then stiffened in shock. ‘It’s so sensitive.’

Elisalexa Norb did the same, then licked her finger. ‘It tastes sweet,’ she said.

‘Please don’t do that, dear, it’s disgusting,’ said Margaret Norb. She turned to Voronoff. ‘This is wonderful, Doctor. Mr Scramsfield, perhaps you’d be so good as to telephone down for a bottle of champagne.’

A few minutes later an olive-skinned boy arrived with a bottle of Veuve Cliquot and four glasses. He looked at Margaret Norb, then he looked at Elisalexa Norb, then he squinted in puzzlement and raised his hand to his own neck as if he were about to point out a minor oversight in the guests’ toilette – but of course he thought better of it. On his way out, Margaret Norb gave him fifty francs, which he nodded at philosophically as if somehow it explained everything.

Margaret Norb led a toast to Dr Voronoff. ‘How is the health of our donor?’ she said after her first sip of champagne. Scramsfield couldn’t work out what she meant until she nodded at the birdcage on the trolley under its black sheet.

‘Still under sedation,’ he said. ‘But stable.’

‘They lead comfortable lives, do they? After their . . . sacrifice?’

‘Luxurious, yes,’ said Scramsfield.

Elisalexa Norb gave a small burp. Scramsfield looked over and saw that she had already drained her glass.

‘Purhayps zay lady should not bay dvinkink so soon aftur hur anayzaytic,’ said Dr Voronoff with genuine concern. But his warning was too late, because Elisalexa Norb almost immediately staggered backwards and bumped against the writing desk.

‘Oh dear,’ said her aunt. ‘Elisalexa, you must be put straight to bed to recuperate.’ She stepped forward with the intention of carrying this out, but was almost as unsteady herself. Dr Voronoff caught her arm as several ounces of champagne hopped from her glass to the carpet. ‘Or – goodness – well – Mr Scramsfield, might you be kind enough to . . .’

‘Certainly, Miss Norb,’ said Scramsfield. He guided a giggly Elisalexa into her bedroom. She was quite pliant, but as they went through the doorway she grabbed for the brass knob so that the door swung most of the way shut. This didn’t worry Scramsfield until he was helping her down on to her bed and he realised she was pulling him down with her by the lapels of his doctor’s coat. He lost his balance.

‘Miss Norb!’ was all he had a chance to say before her mouth was on his. Somehow she got his tongue between her lips and began to suck it down like a steamed mussel that wouldn’t slip out of its shell. With one hand she was unbuttoning her dress and with the other she was bullying his crotch. Her whole body was quivering like a nervous poodle. At last she gave up the kiss and he got his tongue back. He felt as if he’d been punched in the mouth. ‘For Christ’s sake stop this,’ he whispered. ‘Your aunt is in the next room.’ But by then her girdle was half unlaced, and he got a glimpse of a cranberry nipple.

Elisalexa Norb flung her head back against the pillow. With his mouth on her breast, the lychee glued to her neck was only inches from his eyes, and there was something soothing, almost spiritual, about its smooth pale surface, so that by meditating on it he could almost forget that at any moment they might be caught. He switched to the girl’s other nipple. He would not have thought that anything could possibly improve on the first breast, but the second breast was, somehow, even more sensational, and he was enjoying this so much that he was beginning to think he might be able to support an erection for long enough to make love to her.

Then there was a daub of green in his peripheral vision.

Scramsfield couldn’t believe how fast the reptile could move. Already it was crouched beside its mistress’s neck, sniffing the lychee, flicking its tail. He tried to shoo it away with his hand, but Mordechai just gave him a contemptuous glance and then went back to the fruit. He wondered if he ought to say something, but he decided it was better not to. And he was still fiddling with his belt buckle when the iguana opened up its jaws, fit them somehow around the counterfeit genital, ripped it away with one jerk of its head, and leaped from the bed with its prize.

Elisalexa Norb screamed. Her hand shot to her neck. ‘My gland!’ Looking to the door, she was just in time to see Mordechai escaping into the drawing room, so she pushed Scramsfield off her with surprising force and made after the pet. He lunged to catch her wrist. ‘Miss Norb, you’re not dressed! What will the others think? Please just—’ But she broke free and rushed out of the door, bare breasts bouncing. Scramsfield, not knowing what else to do, followed. Beyond, he was expecting to find his doom. What he found instead was Margaret Norb bent forward over the writing desk with an expression of anticipatory ecstasy and Dr Voronoff manoeuvring himself into position behind her.

‘Elisalexa!’ shrieked Margaret Norb. She hurriedly and ineffectually rearranged her petticoats, then turned and slapped Dr Voronoff so hard in the face that he nearly fell over sideways.

‘Where is he?’ said Elisalexa Norb, totally uninterested in what her aunt was doing. Scramsfield had just caught sight of the lizard in the opposite corner of the room, so, like an idiot, he pointed. The girl hurled herself towards the iguana, but her legs were still muddled, and she tripped, bounced off an armchair, and collided finally with Dr Voronoff’s trolley, knocking it to the ground with a crash and sending the birdcage flying through the air. It slipped its black sheet, landed by the Japanese screen, and rolled to a stop.

The silence afterwards was so total that you could hear the little brass creak of the empty cage’s door as it fell slowly open.

‘Perhaps we’d better be going,’ said Scramsfield to Dr Voronoff. And, with some haste, they were going.

The two men were out of the Concorde Sainte Lazare and around the corner before Loeser said, ‘What the hell were you doing with her in there?’

‘I could ask you the same question,’ Scramsfield panted, making a dance step to avoiding getting tangled in somebody’s dog leash.

‘I said no but she insisted.’

‘Yes. Mine too. Champagne and nembutal. Must remember that. “Scramsfield’s Patent Aphrodisiac Serum”.’

‘Oh God, don’t talk like that, we sound like rapists.’

‘Rapists? We’re not rapists. They’re the rapists.’

‘I’m not going to debate free agency with you, Scramsfield.’

They passed a pharmacist with an unsettling window in which nine plastic pelves each demonstrated a different herniary bandage. ‘Come on, buddy, I’ve heard how you all do things in Berlin. Are you telling me you never used dope and booze to get a girl to go to bed with you?’

‘I’ve never done that.’

‘And you never tried?’

Loeser coughed. His right cheek was still pink. ‘When are we going to see Picquart?’

‘We can go now if you want. He’s always at home.’

Picquart lived on the fifth floor of a dirty building in the Latin Quarter with a staircase so hellishly steep and narrow that halfway up you began to wonder if it wouldn’t have been easier to try your luck with a drainpipe. Scramsfield knocked on the door.

‘
Quoi?
’

‘It’s Scramsfield.’

‘
Bien
.’

They went inside.

Heraclitus taught that all is change. Scramsfield knew this from his first semester at Yale, and he was sure Picquart’s three cats would agree with the Greek. The entire apartment was crammed with piles of old books, often with only the narrowest of pedestrian corridors between them, and these piles were continually being rearranged, relocated, or removed, so that after every nap the cats woke up to an entirely unfamiliar topology, like a tribe dwelling in some impossible mountain range that rumbled every hour with random, hyper-accelerated geological convulsions. Yesterday, they might have found a nice ledge, hidden between two volumes of a dictionary, which caught the morning sunlight through the window; today, it would be gone, or it would be too high to reach, or it would topple as soon as they set paw on it. The cats didn’t seem to leave the apartment very often, and Scramsfield imagined it was because they found the great city outside to be eerily, almost unbearably static. However, Picquart said they did sometimes go outside to mate. Heraclitus taught, also, that all things come into being through strife, and Scramsfield hadn’t believed this in Boston, but he believed it in Paris, because the sound the local cats made when they fucked on the roofs in the middle of the night was really enough to persuade anyone.

Picquart himself was a wiry and warty old man with a nose like an eroded cathedral gargoyle. They’d met in a prison cell when Scramsfield had been arrested for running away from a restaurant without paying the bill and Picquart for swearing at a policeman. The next morning they both got out and Picquart now sometimes bought stolen books from Scramsfield. They didn’t particularly like each other.

‘What do you have for me? Who is this?’

‘I don’t have any books today, Marcel. This is Egon Loeser. He’s an old pal of mine.’

‘
Un Allemand?
’

‘Yes.’

‘What does he want?’

Loeser took out the letter from Lavicini to Sauvage, along with a box of cigars they’d bought on the way, and gave both to Picquart. ‘Scramsfield said you might know what this character Sauvage is talking about there,’ he said.

Picquart read the letter, then looked up. ‘What do you think he’s talking about?’ he said.

‘I don’t know. But I wondered if it might be . . .’

‘
Oui?
’

‘Some sort of black magic.’

Picquart laughed. ‘Black magic?
Non
. You’re an imbecile.’

‘What, then?’

‘This isn’t about the devil. This is about Louis XIV. Do you know what Villayer was doing in the Cours des Miracles?’

‘No.’

‘He was trying to build a post office.’ Villayer, Picquart explained, was a politician, a shrewd and particularly disloyal member of Louis XIV’s Council of State. Every day, as a consequence of his position, he sent his servants out to deliver hundreds of messages and pick up hundreds of replies: political, commercial, philosophical, social, and sexual. But the bigger Paris grew, the more expensive and complex this network became, and the more obsessed Villayer became with its failures, drawing diagrams and annotating maps late into the night – many of his friends grew used to receiving notes that just read ‘This is a test’ – until at last he realised that the only constituency with which he now spent any real time was the pulsatile village of his own couriers. He decided that the capital needed a universal postal service, if only so that he could go back to being a real politician. Around that time, the journalist Henri Sauval was working on the Sun King’s behalf to make every respectable citizen of Paris believe that the Court of Miracles was full of criminals and cultists. Really, it was just an impoverished square like any other, but Louis was in the process of reshaping the city by finding excuses to evacuate and demolish every section, no matter how small, that wasn’t under his power. And Villayer saw that if he put Paris’s main post office in the middle of the Court of Miracles, he could expose Sauval’s manipulations, and perhaps save the Court’s inhabitants from losing their homes. He not only signed his own death warrant, therefore, but countersigned it too: Louis didn’t want a postal service in Paris, because he didn’t know if he could control it, and he especially didn’t want a post office in the Court of Miracles. So he had Villayer snatched on his way home from a banquet and beaten to death.

Lavicini learned all this because through de Gorge he’d met several of the King’s closest advisors. And when Lavicini warned Sauvage in the letter, it was because Sauvage was about to make a very similar mistake. The first public transport in Paris was a fleet of carriages that Sauvage himself had installed. Half a dozen strangers could ride together and they only had to pay five sous each. He’d paid Blaise Pascal to design the routes, working from some of Villayer’s old maps, so that they would be optimal down to the yard, an endeavour that Pascal later spent an unsuccessful week trying to adapt into a strategic board game. But the carriages were still slow. The streets of Paris were too crowded. So Sauvage had the idea of using the abandoned quarries under the city for the world’s first underground public carriage system. Once again, Louis didn’t want that because he didn’t know if he could control it. ‘Lavicini was warning Sauvage that if he carried on with the plan, Louis would have him killed just like he had Villayer killed,’ concluded Picquart. ‘ “If you persist in your intention to conquer those dark lower depths, then you will soon find yourself entombed in them.”
Comprends?
And that is just what happened. A hundred years later, de Crosne started burying our dead in the Catacombs, but Louis and his assassins were avant-garde in that respect.’