"No. I stay with the animals. I don't want games that need a board or dice or anything like that."
Henry remembered the story the taxidermist had sent him, "The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator". Henry now understood the taxidermist's keen interest in the Flaubert story: Julian slaughters quantities of innocent animals, but it doesn't affect his salvation. The story offers redemption without remorse. That would be an attraction to a man who had something to hide.
The grocer across the street had got it right, Henry realized: a crazy old man. Sarah, in one glance, had got it right: a creep. The waiter at the cafe had got it right. Why had he taken so long to see it? Here he was, rubbing shoulders with a stinking old Nazi collaborator, now casting himself as the great defender of the innocent. Take the dead and make them look good. How was that for murderous irrationalism neatly packaged and hidden? Taxidermy indeed. Henry now understood why all the animals in the showroom were so stilclass="underline" it was dread in the presence of the taxidermist. Henry shuddered. He wanted to wash his hands, his soul, of this man forever. He felt tainted by him.
Henry looked at the taxidermist. "I'm leaving," he said.
"Wait," the taxidermist replied.
"What for?" Henry snapped.
"Take my play with you." The taxidermist gathered the pages on the counter, seven or eight of them. "You can have the whole play." He went to his desk and hastily collected in his large hands all the pages lying on it. "Read it and tell me what you think."
"I don't want your play. Keep it," Henry said.
"Why not? It would help me."
"I don't want to help you."
"But I've been working on it for so long."
"I don't care."
Henry looked across the room at Beatrice and Virgil. He felt a pang of sadness. He wouldn't be seeing them again. Such lovely animals.
He turned back to the taxidermist because the man was stuffing pages from his play into the pockets of Henry's jacket. Henry grabbed the pages and slammed them onto the counter.
"I told you, I don't want your damn play. Here, have these too."
Henry took out the parts of the play he had brought with him and threw them down. The pages fluttered in the air and skittered across the floor.
"Well, in exchange, take this," the taxidermist said calmly.
He turned away momentarily. When he was facing Henry again, he had a short, blunt knife in his hand. He stabbed Henry. He wasn't even hurried about it. He looked at Henry, then drove the knife into his body, just below the ribs. It took Henry a moment to realize what had happened. The pain was briefly dulled by utter disbelief. The taxidermist stabbed him a second time, but instinctively Henry put his hands in the way and they took some of the thrust.
"What, what…?" Henry puffed.
Henry could feel wetness beneath his shirt and there was blood all over his hands. Suddenly fear and pain shot through him electrically. A keening sound emerged from his mouth. Gripping the counter so as not to fall over, he turned and with leaden legs headed for the door of the workshop. He must have run, but it felt like a shuffle to him. With every beat of his heart his whole body was jolted and more blood poured out of him. He was petrified that the taxidermist would catch up with him and finish him off. The words "Sarah! Theo!" pulsed in his head.
He reached the door. In turning to go through, he caught a glimpse of the taxidermist. He was walking up behind him, his face passive, the red knife still in his hand.
Henry careened into the tigers and fell over. The pain ripping through his midriff was so intense and uncontrollable that he didn't so much get back onto his feet piecemeal as jerk himself up in one motion, as if he were a marionette pulled up by his strings. He made for the front door of the store as fast as he could. Would it be locked? The closer he got to the door, the more improbable it seemed that he would reach it. A hand would land on his shoulder. Worse, the taxidermist's blade would cut through his back.
Henry grappled with the doorknob. The door wasn't locked. It opened slowly and heavily. Henry threw himself out of the store and staggered across the pavement onto the street. Just then a car was approaching. He stood in front of it. The car braked and he collapsed onto its warm hood. Until then he may have been grunting. Now he was screaming as loudly as he could, though he was starting to snort and cough blood through his nose and mouth. The two women in the car came out, and when they saw the state he was in, they too started to scream. The man from the grocery store rushed out. Other people started appearing, alerted by the noise. Henry was surely safe now. Murder doesn't take place in the open, in front of so many witnesses, does it?
It was at that moment, as people blurrily crowded the edges of his vision, that Henry looked back at Okapi Taxidermy, still afraid the taxidermist might be following him. But he had stayed inside. The taxidermist was calmly looking out through the glass of the closed door, as if he were admiring the sunny day. Their eyes met. He smiled at Henry. It was a full smile that lit up his face. He had beautiful teeth. Henry barely recognized him. Was this the taxidermist's version of empty good cheer expressed in extremis? He turned and disappeared into his store, as if uninterested by the commotion at his doorstep. Henry collapsed, drowning in an internal sea of blood.
Even before the ambulance had arrived, the flames could be seen bursting out of Okapi Taxidermy. There was little the fire brigade could do. With that much wood and dry fur and so many flammable chemicals, the store burned quick and hard. A howling inferno.
With the taxidermist in it.
In a healthy individual, a broken bone that has healed properly is strongest where it was once broken. You have not lost any life, Henry told himself. You will still get your fair share of years. Yet the quality of his life changed. Once you've been struck by violence, you acquire companions that never leave you entirely: Suspicion, Fear, Anxiety, Despair, Joylessness. The natural smile is taken from you and the natural pleasures you once enjoyed lose their appeal. The city was ruined for Henry. Sarah, Theo and he would leave it soon. Only, where would they settle now?
Where would they find happiness? Where would he feel safe?
Henry regretted not having saved Beatrice and Virgil. He missed them with an ache that made itself felt even years later. It was the same kind of pain he felt when he had to be away for any length of time from Theo, a physical hunger for presence. He chided himself. Beatrice and Virgil, they didn't exist, not really; they were only characters in a play, animals at that, and dead ones. So what did that mean, save them? They were already lost by the time he had met them. But there it was: he missed them terribly. In his mind, he saw them as they stood in the taxidermist's workshop, Virgil so, Beatrice like this-he tried to make the pictures in his mind as clear as possible. But they faded, as memories of appearance always do.
All that remained now was their story, that incomplete story of waiting and fearing and hoping and talking. A love story, Henry concluded. Told by a madman whose mind he had never understood, but a love story nonetheless. Henry wished he had taken the taxidermist's play. That was another regret, that he had been so blinded by anger. But some stories are fated to be lost, at least in part.
Later on, on a few occasions, Henry looked at pictures of howler monkeys, nearly always photographed high up in tropical trees, but the evident wildness of the animals made it impossible for him to see anything of Virgil in them. Donkeys, on the other hand, were another matter. Once, at a Christmas Nativity scene with live animals, as Henry got close to the donkey, it looked at him and, as if recognizing him, shook its head and twisted its ears and made a gentle snuffling sound. Of course, it was likely only hoping for a treat. Henry knew that in his mind. Nonetheless, under his breath, he said her name-"Beatrice!"-and tears welled up in his eyes. He could never again see a donkey without thinking of Beatrice and Virgil and feeling grief and misery.