“It’s still pretty small,” Miranda observed. Then, moving forward, she gazed downward. “Oh, my goodness, they look so in love!”
The room filled with a hushed silence.
Officer Naismith was quietly jubilant. Morgan smiled enigmatically. Miranda’s lack of professional propriety or affected indifference seemed a genuine relief. Candour from Miranda was not always forthcoming, especially in front of colleagues.
Miranda stifled what might have been laughter or a sneeze, the officer started to giggle, Morgan scowled. But the grisly scene, while eerie, was not oppressive. Death seemed so long in the past, solemnity was no more obligatory than grieving over displays at a waxworks museum.
Morgan kneeled to scrutinize the skin on the back of the male’s hand. Leaning forward, he nudged the body and jumped when the hand seemed to flinch.
“My goodness,” he said defensively. Not swearing was a modest perversity in a world where obscenities vied with profanities to displace more thoughtful expletives. “They’re light as a feather. I hardly touched him.” He fingered the man’s sleeve. “This material is incredibly well-preserved. It’s stood up better than its occupant.”
Miranda squatted down opposite, examining the woman’s clothing.
“What a lovely dress,” she noted, glancing up at the officer then back at her partner. “Satin and lace, and there’s no sign of a struggle, no bloodstains. It’s a bit odd, Morgan. There’s no blood on either of them.”
She eased around to look at their severed necks.
“Clean cuts, by someone who knew basic anatomy,” she observed. “Even if they were dead, there should have been residual blood. They must have been dressed like this after they were decapitated.”
“They don’t seem to have shrunk very much,” Morgan said. “The frock coat seems a little big, maybe. Her dress is right on.”
“How come there’s no collateral degradation? You’d think their flesh would meld with the materials, that the cloth would show signs of decay.”
“They must have been sealed up virtually airtight in the heat of the summer,” Morgan observed. “I suppose the flesh would dry out before rot had a chance to set in. I don’t know; it seems a bit strange.”
Morgan took a pen from his pocket and probed into the dark folds of the frock coat, retrieving a signet ring that had slipped from the man’s wizened finger. He held it up to the light.
“Masonic. It has the same pyramid capped with an all-seeing eye that’s on the American one-dollar bill.”
“Is it really?”
“Yeah. Take a look the next time you have one.”
“I know what’s on their dollar bill, Morgan. It’s the ring: I’m surprised it’s a Mason’s ring.”
“How so?”
“Because. Look what’s in her hand,” Miranda unclasped the fingers carefully so as not to break them off and revealed a small, gleaming crucifix on a length of fine gold chain.
“She’d have trouble wearing anything around her neck.”
“It’s an unlikely combination,” Miranda said, ignoring his quip. “A Roman Catholic and a Mason. I wonder if that’s why they’re like this.”
“Dead?”
“In the romantic posture. Doomed by love — destroyed by a righteous father?” “What do you think, Officer Naismith?” Morgan asked. “You haven’t said anything.”
“I was just watching the masters at work,” she responded.
Morgan suspected she was being ironic.
Miranda smiled, rising to her feet.
“I’m Miranda,” she said, holding out her hand awkwardly. They had already passed the level of intimacy where exchanging first names seemed inane. They shook hands with whimsical formality.
“Morgan is Morgan. He has another name but keeps it a secret.”
“I’m Naismith.”
“Naismith Naismith,” said Morgan.
The woman laughed. “Well, you’re Morgan Morgan.”
“David.”
“Rachel.”
“And I’m still Miranda. So what do you think, Rachel? What’s happening here?”
“I really have no idea.”
“Yes you do.”
“Do I? Well, I doubt it’s her father who did it. I think they’ve been set up as a sentimental paradox.”
“A paradox?” said Morgan.
“Intimate lovers; but headless, their identities erased.”
“Subversive,” said Miranda.
“Do either of you know ‘The Kiss’ by Auguste Rodin?”
“Yes,” said Miranda.
She summoned to mind the enduring embrace of bronze lovers. One of the most famous portrayals of romantic passion ever conceived, bigger than life, highly erotic, the caught moment of absolute love.
“Yeah,” said Morgan. “The plasters were at the ROM exhibition last year.”
“Did you read the fine print?” Rachel Naismith asked. “Beside the display?”
They felt a little truant; both looked inquisitive.
“The story behind ‘The Kiss’ is intriguing,” she continued. “Once you know it, the sculpture changes. It literally turns from dream into nightmare, a diabolical vision of sensual entropy — ”
“Sensual entropy! I like that,” Morgan exclaimed.
“Translation, please,” said Miranda, not in the least embarrassed for not knowing what the officer meant. “You honoured in art history, I take it.”
“Yeah, art and art history.”
Morgan took it on himself to explain Rachel Naismith’s esoteric phrase, perhaps to prove he understood. He seemed oblivious to the possibility of appearing pedantic.
“Entropy is a measure of inefficiency, say in an organism or engine where heat is wasted rather than being transformed into energy. A perfect trope for suspended passion.”
Rachel smiled, indicating she liked Morgan, pedantry and all.
“That’s more or less where I was going,” she said. “Rodin apparently had Dante in mind when he sculpted ‘The Kiss.’ There’s a passage in The Divine Comedy about lovers locked in a perpetual clinch, having been dispatched in flagrante delicto by the woman’s husband, who was the man’s brother. They fetch up in Hell, an inferno of their own making. Sentimental inversion: they are doomed to hold the posture of their passion forever.”
“That’s what ‘The Kiss’ is about?” exclaimed Miranda.
“That’s what Rodin apparently had in mind. It was supposed to be part of a tableau of Heaven and Hell; it was his unfinished masterpiece.”
“Beauty becomes horror,” Morgan mused in quiet astonishment. “And horror becomes beauty.”
“Becomes, both ways,” Miranda offered.
He looked at her quizzically.
“Beauty becomes, transforms horror; beauty becomes, complements horror. Change, no change.”
Miranda sometimes spoke in a kind of syntactical shorthand. He nodded approval. She turned to Officer Naismith, who seemed to be playing with the verbal permutations in her head.
“You’re right,” Rachel Naismith continued. She wasn’t sure who was right about what. She lapsed into silence, apparently not wanting to sound like a gallery brochure or an academic treatise.
Miranda gazed at the ghastly sensuality of the corpses intertwined at their feet, who now seemed part of something infinitely more sinister. Rachel’s comparison was anachronistic, of course. These lovers had been here long before Rodin translated Dante’s words into sculpture. But they certainly embodied an unholy paradox. Beneath the sad drape of their clothing, the absolute stillness of articulated limbs conveyed a haunting absence of life. But, as Rachel had suggested, without heads, they were not individuals. The true horror, Miranda realized, lay in the extinction of their personalities.
Morgan had seen one of the original marble versions of Rodin’s sculpture in the Tate Gallery when he lived in London after graduating from university. The plaster at the Royal Ontario Museum seemed more real, though, perhaps because it was shaped by the hands of the master, and the stone and bronze versions were done in large part by artisans. Or perhaps it was because London was another life.
Miranda pictured “The Kiss” in her mind. Although she had only seen the plaster, she now imagined the image in bronze. The lovers were naked; the bronze seemed alive, flesh trapped in illimitable torment. “I like it better, knowing the story,” she said. Unable to resist sounding like a brochure herself, she continued, “It anticipates the age of irony and the death of romance.”