Surplus, who had quickly scanned the papers, said, “You are most generous, Monsieur. The sum on completion is nothing short of breathtaking.” Neither he nor Darger expected to collect that closing sum, of course. But they were careful to draw attention away from the start-up monies (a fraction of the closing sum, though by their standards enormous), that were their true objective.
Monsieur snorted. “What matter? I will be dead by then.”
“I see that the Tour d’Etranger is to be given to the City of Paris,” Darger said. “That is very generous of you, Monsieur. Many a man in your position would prefer to keep such a valuable property in their family.”
“Eh? What family?”
“I speak, sir, of your wife.”
“She will be taken care of.”
“Sir?” Darger, who was sensitive to verbal nuance, felt a cold tingling at the back of his neck, a premonition of something significant being left unspoken. “What does that mean?”
“It means just what I said.” Monsieur snapped his fingers to catch his apes’ attention. “Take me away from here.”
When Darger got back to his rooms, Mignonette was already waiting there. She lounged naked atop his bed, playing with the chrome revolver she had sent him before ever they had met. First she cuddled it between her breasts. Then she brought it to her mouth, ran her pink tongue up the barrel, and briefly closed her lips about its very tip. He found the sight disturbingly arousing.
“You should be careful,” Darger said. “That’s a dangerous device.”
“Pooh! Monsieur had it programmed to defend me as well as himself.” She placed the muzzle against her heart, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. “See? It will not fire at either of us.” She handed it to him. “Try it for yourself.”
With a small shudder of distaste, Darger placed the gun on a table at some distance from the bed. “I have a question to ask you,” he said.
Mignonette smiled in an amused way. She rolled over on her stomach, and rose up on her knees and elbows. Her long tail moved languidly. Her cat’s eyes were green as grass. “Do you want your answer now,” she asked, “or later?”
Put that way, the question answered itself.
So filled with passion was Darger that he had no memory of divesting himself of his clothing, or joining Mignonette on the bed. He only knew that he was deep inside her, and that that was where he wanted to be. Her fur was soft and sleek against his skin. It tickled him ever so slightly—just enough to be perverse, but not enough to be undesirable. Fleetingly, he felt like a zoophile, and then, even more fleetingly, realized that this must be very much like what Surplus’s lady-friends experienced. But he abandoned that line of thought quickly.
Like any properly educated man of his era, Darger was capable of achieving orgasm three or four times in succession without awkward periods of detumescence in between. With Mignonette, he could routinely bring that number up to five. Today, for the first time, he reached seven.
“You wanted to ask me a question?” Mignonette said, when they were done. She lay within the crook of his arm, her cold nose snuggled up against his neck. Playfully, she put her two hands, claws sheathed, against his side and kneaded him, as if she were a true, unmodified cat.
“Hmm? Ah! Yes.” Darger felt wonderfully, gloriously relaxed. He doubted he would ever move again. It took an effort for him to focus his thoughts. “I was wondering…exactly what your husband meant when he said that he would have you ‘taken care of,’ after his death.”
“Oh.” She drew away from him, and sat up upon her knees. “That. I thought you were going to ask about the pamphlet.”
Again, a terrible sense of danger overcame Darger. He was extremely sensitive to such influences. It was an essential element of his personality. “Pamphlet?” he said lightly.
“Yes, that silly little thing about a man in a rowboat. Vingt Ans… something like that. I’ve had my book scouts scouring the stalls and garrets for it since I-forget-when.”
“I had no idea you were looking for such a thing.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I was looking for it. And I have found it too.”
“You have what?”
The outer doors of their apartments slammed open, and the front room filled with voices. Somebody — it could only be Monsieur — was shouting at the top of his weak voice. Surplus was clearly trying to soothe him. The Dedicated Doctor was there as well, urging his client to calm himself.
Darger leapt from the bed, and hastily threw on his clothes. “Wait here,” he told Mignonette. Having some experience in matters of love, he deftly slipped between the doors without opening them wide enough to reveal her presence.
He stepped into absolute chaos.
Monsieur stood in the middle of the room waving a copy of an ancient pamphlet titled Vingt Ans dans un Bateau à Rames in the air. On its cover was a crude drawing of a man in a rowboat holding a magnet from a fishing pole. He shook it until it rattled. “Swindlers!” he cried. “Confidence tricksters! Deceivers! Oh, you foul creatures!”
“Please, sir, consider your leucine aminopeptidases,” the Dedicated Doctor murmured. He wiped the little man’s forehead with a medicated cloth. “You’ll put your inverse troponin ratio all out of balance. Please sit down again.”
“I am betrayed!”
“Sir, consider your blood pressure.”
“The Tour d’Etranger was to be my immortality!” Monsieur howled. “What can such false cozeners as you know of immortality?”
“I am certain there has been a misunderstanding,” Surplus said.
“Consider your fluoroimmunohistochemical systems. Consider your mitochondrial refresh rate.”
The two apes, released from their chair-carrying chore, were running in panicked circles. One of them brushed against a lamp and sent it crashing to the floor.
It was exactly the sort of situation that Darger was best in. Thinking swiftly, he took two steps into the room and in an authoritative voice cried, “If you please!”
Silence. Every eye was upon him.
Smiling sternly, Darger said. “I will not ask for explanations. I think it is obvious to all of us what has happened. How Monsieur has come to misunderstand the import of the chapbook I cannot understand. But if, sir, you will be patient for the briefest moment, all will be made clear to you.” He had the man! Monsieur was so perfectly confused (and anxious to be proved wrong, to boot) that he would accept anything Darger told him. Even the Dedicated Doctor was listening. Now he had but to invent some plausible story — for him a trifle — and the operation was on track again. “You see, there is —”
Behind him, the doors opened quietly. He put a hand over his eyes.
Mignonette d’Etranger entered the room, fully dressed, and carrying the chrome revolver. In her black silks, she was every inch the imperious widow. (Paradoxically, the fact that she obviously wore nothing beneath those silks only made her all the more imposing.) But she had thrown her veils back to reveal her face: cold, regal, and scornful.
“You!” She advanced wrathfully on her husband. “How dare you object to my taking a lover? How dare you!”
“You…you were…” The little man looked bewildered by her presence.
“I couldn’t get what I need at home. It was only natural that I should look for it elsewhere. So it costs you a day of your life every time we make love! Aren’t I worth it? So it costs you three days to tie me up and whip me! So what? Most men would die for the privilege.”
She pressed the gun into his hands.
“If I mean so little to you,” she cried histrionically, “then kill me!” She darted back and struck a melodramatic pose alongside Darger. “I will die beside the man I love!”
“Yes…” Belated comprehension dawned upon Monsieur’s face, followed closely by a cruel smile. “The man you love.”
He pointed the pistol at Darger and pulled the trigger.
But in that same instant, Mignonette flung herself before her lover, as if to shelter his body with her own. In the confines of so small a room, the gun’s report was world-shattering. She spun around, clutched her bosom, and collapsed in the bedroom doorway. Blood seeped onto the carpet from beneath her.
Monsieur held up the gun and stared at it with an expression of total disbelief.
It went off again.
He collapsed dead upon the carpet.
The police naturally suspected the worst. But a dispassionate exposition of events by the Dedicated Doctor, a creature compulsively incapable of lying, and an unobtrusive transfer of banknotes from Surplus allayed all suspicions. Monsieur d’Etranger’s death was obviously an accident d’amour, and Darger and Surplus but innocent bystanders. With heartfelt expressions of condolence, the officers left.
When the morticians came to take away Monsieur’s body, the Dedicated Doctor smiled. “What a horrible little man he was!” he exclaimed. “You cannot imagine what a relief it is to no longer give a damn about his health.” He had signed death warrants for both Monsieur and his widow, though his examination of her had been cursory at best. He hadn’t even touched the body.
Darger roused himself from his depressed state to ask, “Will you be returning for Madame d’Etranger’s body?”
“No,” the Dedicated Doctor said. “She is a cat, and therefore the disposition of her corpse is a matter for the department of sanitation.”
Darger turned an ashen white. But Surplus deftly stepped beside him and seized the man’s wrists in his own powerful paws. “Consider how tenuous our position is here,” he murmured. Then the door closed, and they were alone again. “Anyway — what body?”
Darger whirled. Mignonette was gone.
“Between the money I had to slip to les flics in order to get them to leave as quickly as they did,” Surplus told his morose companion, “and the legitimate claims of our creditors, we are only slightly better off than we were when we first arrived in Paris.”
This news roused Darger from his funk. “You have paid off our creditors? That is extremely good to hear. Wherever did you get that sort of money?”
“Ci, Ça, and l’Autre. They wished to be bribed. So I let them buy shares in the salvage enterprise at a greatly reduced rate. You cannot imagine how grateful they were.”
It was evening, and the two associates were taking a last slow stroll along the luminous banks of the Seine. They were scheduled to depart the city within the hour via river-barge, and their emotions were decidedly mixed. No man leaves Paris entirely happily.
They came to a stone bridge, and walked halfway across it. Below, they could see their barge awaiting them. Darger opened his Gladstone and took out the chrome pistol that had been so central in recent events. He placed it on the rail. “Talk,” he said.
The gun said nothing.
He nudged it ever so slightly with one fmger. “It would take but a flick of the wrist to send you to the bottom of the river. I don’t know if you’d rust, but I am certain you cannot swim.”
“All right, all right!” the pistol said. “How did you know?”
“Monsieur had possession of an extremely rare chapbook which gave away our scheme. He can only have gotten it from one of Mignonette’s book scouts. Yet there was no way she could have known of its importance—unless she had somehow planted a spy in our midst. That first night, when she broke into our rooms, I heard voices. It is obvious now that she was talking with you.”
“You are a more intelligent man than you appear.”
“I’ll take that for a compliment. Now tell me — what was this ridiculous charade all about?”
“How much do you know already?”
“The first bullet you fired lodged in the back wall of the bedroom. It did not come anywhere near Mignonette. The blood that leaked from under her body was bull’s blood, released from a small leather bladder she left behind her. After the police departed, she unobtrusively slipped out the bedroom window. Doubtless she is a great distance away by now I know all that occurred. What I do not understand is why.”
“Very well. Monsieur was a vile old man. He did not deserve a beautiful creature like Mignonette.”
“On this we are as one. Go on.”
“But, as he had her made, he owned her. And as she was his property, he was free to do with her as he liked.” Then, when Darger’s face darkened, “You misapprehend me, sir! I do not speak of sexual or sadomasochistic practices but of chattel slavery. Monsieur was, as I am sure you have noted for yourself, a possessive man. He had left instructions that upon his death, his house was to be set afire, with Mignonette within it.”
“Surely, this would not be legal!”
“Read the law,” the gun said. “Mignonette determined to find her way free. She won me over to her cause, and together we hatched the plan you have seen played to fruition.”
“Tell me one thing,” Surplus said curiously. “You were programmed not to shoot your master. How then did you manage…?”
“I am many centuries old. Time enough to hack any amount of code.”
“Ah,” said Surplus, in a voice that indicated he was unwilling to admit unfamiliarity with the gun’s terminologies.
“But why me?” Darger slammed a hand down on the stone rail. “Why did Madame d’Etranger act out her cruel drama with my assistance, rather than…than…with someone else’s?”