And all the while, when she wondered how all this could be possible - that her eyes could live to witness this last supper - the only reply she could think of was Swann's:
'It's magic,' he'd said.
Indeed, she was thinking that very thing, that this must be magic, when the tiger ambled across to her head, and swallowed it down in one bite.
Amongst a certain set Harry D'Amour liked to believe he had some small reputation - a coterie which did not, alas, include his ex-wife, his creditors or those anonymous critics who regularly posted dogs' excrement through his office letterbox. But the woman who was on the phone now, her voice so full of grief she might have been crying for half a year, and was about to begin again, she knew him for the paragon he was.
'-1 need your help, Mr D'Amour; very badly.'
'I'm busy on several cases at the moment,' he told her. 'Maybe you could come to the office?'
'I can't leave the house,' the woman informed him. Til explain everything. Please come.'
He was sorely tempted. But there were several out- standing cases, one of which, if not solved soon, might end in fratricide. He suggested she try elsewhere.
'I can't go to just anybody,' the woman insisted.
'Why me?'
'I read about you. About what happened in Brooklyn.'
Making mention of his most conspicuous failure was not the surest method of securing his services, Harry thought, but it certainly got his attention. What had happened in Wyckoff Street had begun innocently enough, with a husband who'd employed him to spy on his adulterous wife, and had ended on the top storey of the Lomax house with the world he thought he'd known turning inside out. When the body-count was done, and the surviving priests dispatched, he was left with a fear of stairs, and more questions than he'd ever answer this side of the family plot. He took no pleasure in being reminded of those terrors.
'I don't like to talk about Brooklyn,' he said.
'Forgive me,' the woman replied, 'but I need somebody who has experience with ... with the occult.' She stopped speaking for a moment. He could still hear her breath down the line: soft, but erratic.
'I need you,' she said. He had already decided, in that pause when only her fear had been audible, what reply he would make.
Til come.'
'I'm grateful to you,' she said. 'The house is on East 61st Street -' He scribbled down the details. Her last words were, 'Please hurry.' Then she put down the phone.
He made some calls, in the vain hope of placating two of his more excitable clients, then pulled on his jacket, locked the office, and started downstairs. The landing and the lobby smelt pungent. As he reached the front door he caught Chaplin, the janitor, emerging from the basement.
'This place stinks,' he told the man.
'It's disinfectant.'
'It's cat's piss,' Harry said. 'Get something done about it, will you? I've got a reputation to protect.'
He left the man laughing. The brownstone on East 61st Street was in pristine condition. He stood on the scrubbed step, sweaty and sour-breathed, and felt like a slob. The expression on the face that met him when the door opened did nothing to dissuade him of that opinion.
'Yes?' it wanted to know.
'I'm Harry D'Amour,' he said. 'I got a call.'
The man nodded. 'You'd better come in,' he said without enthusiasm.
It was cooler in than out; and sweeter. The place reeked of perfume. Harry followed the disapproving face down the hallway and into a large room, on the other side of which - across an oriental carpet that had everything woven into its pattern but the price - sat a widow. She didn't suit black; nor tears. She stood up and offered her hand.
'Mr D'Amour?'
'Yes.'
'Valentin will get you something to drink if you'd like.'
'Please. Milk, if you have it.' His belly had been jittering for the last hour; since her talk of Wyckoff Street, in fact.
Valentin retired from the room, not taking his beady eyes off Harry until the last possible moment.
'Somebody died,' said Harry, once the man had gone.
'That's right,' the widow said, sitting down again. At her invitation he sat opposite her, amongst enough cushions to furnish a harem. 'My husband.'
Tm sorry.'
'There's no time to be sorry,' she said, her every look and gesture betraying her words. He was glad of her grief; the tearstains and the fatigue blemished a beauty which, had he seen it unimpaired, might have rendered him dumb with admiration.
'They say that my husband's death was an accident,' she was saying. 'I know it wasn't.'
'May I ask ... your name?'
'I'm sorry. My name is Swann, Mr D'Amour. Dorothea Swann. You may have heard of my husband?'
The magician?'
'Illusionist,' she said.
'I read about it. Tragic.'
'Did you ever see his performance?'
Harry shook his head. 'I can't afford Broadway, Mrs Swann.'
'We were only over for three months, while his show ran. We were going back in September ...'
'Back?'
'To Hamburg,' she said, 'I don't like this city. It's too hot. And too cruel.'
'Don't blame New York,' he said. 'It can't help itself.'
'Maybe,' she replied, nodding. 'Perhaps what hap- pened to Swann would have happened anyway, wherever we'd been. People keep telling me: it was an accident. That's all. Just an accident.'
'But you don't believe it?'
Valentin had appeared with a glass of milk. He set it down on the table in front of Harry. As he made to leave, she said: 'Valentin. The letter?'
He looked at her strangely, almost as though she'd said something obscene.
'The letter,' she repeated.
He exited.
'You were saying -'
She frowned. 'What?'
'About it being an accident.'
'Oh yes. I lived with Swann seven and a half years, and I got to understand him as well as anybody ever could. I learned to sense when he wanted me around, and when he didn't. When he didn't, I'd take myself off somewhere and let him have his privacy. Genius needs privacy. And he was a genius, you know. The greatest illusionist since Houdini.'
'Is that so?'
'I'd think sometimes - it was a kind of miracle that he let me into his life ...'
Harry wanted to say Swann would have been mad not to have done so, but the comment was inappropriate. She didn't want blandishments; didn't need them. Didn't need anything, perhaps, but her husband alive again.
'Now I think I didn't know him at all,' she went on, 'didn't understand him. I think maybe it was another trick. Another part of his magic.'
'I called him a magician a while back,' Harry said. 'You corrected me.'
'So I did,' she said, conceding his point with an apologetic look. 'Forgive me. That was Swann talking. He hated to be called a magician. He said that was a word that had to be kept for miracle-workers.'
'And he was no miracle-worker?'
'He used to call himself the Great Pretender,' she said. The thought made her smile.
Valentin had re-appeared, his lugubrious features rife with suspicion. He carried an envelope, which he clearly had no desire to give up. Dorothea had to cross the carpet and take it from his hands.
'Is this wise?' he said.
'Yes,' she told him.
He turned on his heel and made a smart withdrawal.
'He's grief-stricken,' she said. 'Forgive him his behaviour. He was with Swann from the beginning of his career. I think he loved my husband as much as I did.'
She ran her linger down into the envelope and pulled the letter out. The paper was pale yellow, and gossamer- thin.
'A few hours after he died, this letter was delivered here by hand,' she said. 'It was addressed to him. I opened it. I think you ought to read it.'
She passed it to him. The hand it was written in was solid and unaffected.
Dorothea, he had written, if you are reading this, then I am dead.
You know how little store I set by dreams and premonitions and such; but for the last few days strange thoughts have just crept into my head, and I have the suspicion that death is very close to me. If so, so. There's no help for it. Don't waste time trying to puzzle out the whys and wherefores; they're old news now. Just know that I love you, and that I have always loved you in my way. I'm sorry for whatever unhappiness I've caused, or am causing now, but it was out of my hands.