While visiting with Meric Cattanay on his tower one sunny, blustery afternoon, he brought up the subject, asking the artist if he had ever thought much about it. Cattanay was belted into a sturdy chair atop the platform, dabbing paints onto blank pages in a sketchpad, mixing colors together and adding linseed oil, then gauging the effect. He had aged markedly during the previous decade—his hair had gone from mostly gray to mostly white, the lines on his face had deepened into seams and his movements were stiff and halting, so much so that whenever the tower creaked in the wind, Rosacher would imagine the creaking issued from Cattanay’s joints. He required assistance in order to ascend and descend from the tower—thus the chair. “I used to think a great deal about things of that sort,” he said, wiping off a brush with a rag. “I never got anywhere with it. Too busy, I guess. And now I don’t have the time. If the mural’s going to be finished before I die, I’d better work swiftly.”
“You’re being overly dramatic,” said Rosacher. “You’ve long years ahead of you.”
Cattanay dunked the brush into a jar of cleansing solution. “I wish I could believe you, but I listen to what my body tells me…and it’s telling me I don’t have much longer. Both my parents were dead by their early sixties. Unlike yours, I’d wager. The years have been extremely kind to you.” He selected a finer brush. “When I used to wonder about Griaule, whether he was a god, all that, I concluded that of course he was. What else could he be? He’s the most godlike being I’ve ever run across and if there’s a consensus about the question, which there seems to be, who am I to argue? I’m a simple craftsman and not a deep thinker—I’ll leave that to you and Breque.”
“You must have gone round and round about Griaule,” said Rosacher. “I mean, you didn’t just make a snap decision.”
“I gave it due consideration.” Cattanay dipped the brush in indigo, daubed it onto the page, and mumbled something that Rosacher didn’t catch. “The truth is,” he went on, “once I stopped thinking about Griaule as a metaphysical problem, I became more content. I realized that a lot of what had been bothering me…you know, woman troubles, logistical matters, and so forth. I had complicated them by paying so much attention to Griaule. It was more satisfying to focus on questions I had the ability to answer. For instance.” He showed Rosacher the page on which he’d been painting—a splotch of gold partly limned in indigo. “I’ve been debating whether or not to edge the lower right quadrant of the mural with indigo. It wouldn’t serve as a border. It wouldn’t be this neat. Just a ragged evolution of the paint from gold to indigo in this one area. What do you think?”
Rosacher studied the page. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Of course you don’t. To make a judgment, you’d need to have some expertise, you’d need to understand how the color would work on the scales. You’d have to learn about varnishes. I’ve been using beeswax to fix the colors, but I’ve been considering a more conventional finish on the indigo.” He chuckled. “You’re not qualified to make that sort of decision. And none of us are qualified to assess Griaule’s mystical potential. Let it go. Concentrate on the things you’re expert in. You’ll be much happier.”
“I’ve become expert on how to handle whores.” Rosacher said glumly. “And drugs. I know how to create a demand for drugs.”
“You’re a businessman,” said Cattanay. “And a scientist. Perhaps you should focus on science for a while. Stop worrying about Griaule.”
Rosacher suppressed a laugh. “I’m afraid that science is entwined with metaphysics in this case.”
The old man’s white hair lashed about in the wind and he groped for his beret, lying on the platform beside the chair. Rosacher handed it to him.
“When you go down,” Cattanay said. “And I’m not trying to run you off. But when you do go, you may see a redheaded boy standing by the tower. Ask him to bring up a blanket, won’t you?” He turned to a fresh page in his sketchbook and looked toward the lowering sun, halfway obscured by Griaule’s majestic head. “Astonishing…to be sitting here. I hoped I might open my own gallery, sell a few of my paintings. I certainly wouldn’t have predicted that I’d be fortunate enough to have witnessed all that I have. You ever think you’d see anything like him?”
“Yes, I did,” said Rosacher. “But I thought it would be different.”
+
Though much of what Cattanay said rang true, Rosacher failed to follow his advice. Encouraged by the reception given his essays, he embarked upon the creation of one a week (a task that entailed his working many late nights), and read it aloud to those assembled in the amphitheater each Friday evening prior to the weekend bacchanal. The most pronounced effect of these essays was not, as might be surmised, upon the audience, but was their effect upon Rosacher himself. Before taking up the pen, he had reached the conclusion that the dragon exerted a powerful influence on human affairs, but his belief was based upon a preponderance of evidence, rarely rising to the level of faith, and he was constantly assailed by doubt; but with every word written and spoken, his belief in Griaule’s divinity was strengthened and transformed into a devout reverence, until he became as zealous in his affirmation of the dragon’s divine potency as he had once been in his determination to paint Griaule as an exemplar of the mundane, somewhat larger than most, yet ordinary nonetheless.
Rosacher’s investigation into Ludie’s death proved fruitless. Her will, as he had presumed, was a sham, and either the killer had covered his tracks too well or else the accident had been no more than an accident; but he was confident that Breque knew of his agreement to hand over the business to the Church and that he was attempting to turn him against Mospiel in hopes that he would abrogate the agreement. Each week brought a fresh complaint from Breque’s office—the prelates wanted a larger percentage of the foreign markets or demanded a tightening of quality control or else were creating a fuss about some trivial issue that they claimed ran contrary to their doctrine. Rosacher advised Breque to appease them by offering a crumb of what they asked for, and Breque did as advised; yet he kept up his saber-rattling and made bellicose gestures against adjoining countries, massing troops along their borders and holding training exercises. Rosacher felt that something would have to be done to muzzle Breque’s ambitions, but he decided to bide his time. Though the relationship was sorely taxed on occasion, Breque had proved himself a dependable and trustworthy partner, one to whom Rosacher owed much of his success. Not the least of this debt related to Amelita Sobral, one of the operatives that Rosacher had borrowed from Breque in order to investigate Ludie’s death. She was a slender, black-haired woman with a milky complexion and features of an unearthly delicacy (enormous dark eyes, tiny chin, high cheekbones, a face that might have been the work of a master carver with a bent for the exotic) that lent her a deceptively frail, fey manner, like a fairy tale maiden in constant need of rescue, though this was far from the case, and a manner so grave, it challenged Rosacher to extract a smile from her. He assumed that she and her male counterpart would inform Breque about his activities, and his deeper motive in requesting them was to control the stream of information between his office and Breque’s by feeding them material and having his own agents report on what the operatives had communicated to Breque. In particular he wished to learn by this experiment whether Breque would react to false information about the murder investigation and thus prove himself complicit in Ludie’s death.