He had two fingers in the pocket of his waistcoat, nervously ready to pull out the vial of garlic and bite it open if some roaring monster appeared in the smoky air.
He approached the table from behind Carpace, if that was indeed who the fat woman was, and McKee had not noticed him yet. Carpace had slid two wine glasses forward across the tablecloth, but she was looking at McKee, and so Crawford reached out and reversed the glasses.
Then he stepped back and said, “Am I intruding, ladies?”
McKee blinked at him in alarm and glanced around the room, but no devils seemed to be manifesting themselves. Still, he noticed that she stepped back to slightly increase the distance between them — and for just a moment he was distracted by her parted lips and wide eyes and chestnut hair, and the irrelevant realization that she was in fact very pretty.
“Hard to say,” she answered. “Mr. Crawford, this is Miss Carpace.”
Crawford looked away from McKee to the old woman.
Carpace turned to him with a smile that wrinkled her heavily powdered face. She was holding a decanter of red wine, and now she filled the two glasses and carefully handed one to McKee.
“Enchante, Mr. Crawford,” she said in a husky voice, “but Miss McKee is a sad hand at foreign names.” She waved her glass at the decanter. “Would you care for some wine? You must be the new poet.”
“No, thank you,” Crawford said, resolving, though, to pour a fresh glass for himself at the first opportunity. He too took a moment to look uneasily up toward the dark moldings in the corners of the vast room.
“Mr. Crawford,” said McKee, “is the father of Johanna. He knows my entire history.”
“Ah,” said Carpace, giving Crawford a reassessing look, “but nothing’s to be gained by stirring up our histories at this point, is there?” She lowered her voice and leaned forward. “What could be more dull, really, than an old whore and an old bawd and an old cad reminiscing?” She sipped from her glass. “You have family, friends, business acquaintances, I’m sure, Mr. Crawford. My name is Carpaccio, hmm?”
“Carpaccio,” said Crawford, sweating with embarrassment. “Fair enough.”
“And you’ve brought us some verse, I trust!”
Crawford remembered the lines from Southey in his pocket. “I hope not.”
McKee touched her lips to the wine in her glass. “We need to know where the baby was buried.”
“Well now, I’ll tell you,” Carpace said. “Miss Thistle, I must hear the newest canto!” she added more loudly to a woman who had bustled up to the table. “But excuse me a moment while I recommend a good book on grammar to these neophytes.”
The poetess gave Carpace an amused, pitying glance and retreated into the dimly red-lit crowd.
Carpace drained her glass and put it down, then waved the decanter toward McKee. “Drink up, my dear, I know you love the stuff.”
“I’ve given it up. Where is she buried?”
Carpace frowned, rippling her whitened forehead. “Given it up? Oh dear. Not even just one, for old time’s sake? No? I see. Well, I can’t really give you adequate directions in the midst of this affair, now can I? You can see that. Let’s meet tomorrow, if you choose. Then I can even draw a map.”
McKee was frowning too. “Very well, that will have to do. Where shall we—”
But the glasses and decanters on the table rattled as Carpace suddenly leaned her hips back against it, and she dropped her wine glass to claw furrows in the powder on her pendulous cheek.
“You,” she whispered, “no, you were—” She turned clumsily toward Crawford. “You switched the glasses!”
Crawford just stared at her helplessly as McKee looked down at the dropped glass and then up at him with surprised comprehension.
Carpace’s hips slid off the table edge and she sat down heavily on the floor. The bass-drum thud was followed by alarmed cries and hurrying footsteps, but McKee, and then Crawford, knelt on the carpet beside the panting old woman. Crawford’s face was cold with sweat.
“Fetch an ave!” gasped Carpace. “Save me from Hell!”
“They don’t do that,” said McKee impatiently. “Where is Johanna buried?”
Carpace’s eyes were wide. “Fetch the woman who’s with Trelawny!”
“Tell me first.”
“Ach, too late, too late, the damned stuff works fast.” Her words were slurring. She bared her yellow teeth and squinted at McKee. “I’ll leave the world with truth on my lips. Johanna is alive.” She was barely able to articulate syllables now. “She — dith — did not — die.”
Carpace sneezed, inhaled deeply, and expelled her breath in a sigh that seemed to go on far too long, and then toppled sideways against Crawford’s quickly extended arm. Her head lolled loosely on his elbow, and her feathered headdress fell off her artificially darkened curls.
Crawford looked up in horrified bewilderment at the people who were now crowded around, and the first pair of eyes he met were those of the tall woman who had been with Trelawny — and he instinctively recoiled back from her, letting Carpace’s head fall to the floor. As a boy he had once awakened to see a leggy black wasp on his pillow, and this reflex now brought that icy moment forcefully to mind.
Now the woman had glided closer, or else had got bigger. The chattering of the crowd seemed to slow and fall in pitch until it was isolated clicks in total silence.
The woman was taller now, with a stark red light on the vast marble planes of her face like sunset on the highest of the Alps, and the intelligence in her glittering eyes was alien and old, older than organic life. The mouth opened like a rift in clouds, and suddenly he was profoundly cold. The whole world seemed to tilt toward her.
When he had moved — when he had still been able to move — there had been the faintest tug against his cheek and forehead, as if he had blundered into a cobweb, and now his nostrils stung with the acid scent of freshly broken stone…
But it was immediately subsumed in a sulfury reek of garlic; and the rapid exclamations and questions all around crashed back in his ears, and the dimensions of the room and the people in it seemed to fall back to their normal proportions. Warm air tingled on his cheeks and forehead. Able to move again, Crawford glanced at McKee and saw that she had unstoppered a vial and spilled the mushy yellow contents into her hand and on the carpet.
Crawford’s hand darted to the little bottle in his waistcoat, but the robed woman, once again just a tall woman, had flinched back, and her place at the front of the crowd was taken by ordinary people with anxious faces, and he decided to save it.
But the tall, gray-bearded figure of Trelawny pushed through the press of people then and knelt beside Crawford and McKee to peer at Carpace’s limp body where it lay in dimness half under the tablecloth hem.
“You two glow,” he growled. His lips were distorted by old scars into a snarl. “Did you come here to do this? You must be mad to come here, even with garlic.”
“I needed to find out something from her,” said McKee. Her lips were firm, but tears glittered in her eyes.
“Did you learn it?”
McKee shook her head.
Trelawny glanced sharply at her purse, though in the babel of querulous questions and shrill advice any noise her linnet made would surely have been drowned out. “You know Chichuwee?” asked Trelawny. “The Hail Mary man?”
“Of him,” said McKee.
“See him.” Trelawny glanced over his shoulder — Crawford followed his look, but didn’t see the tall, robed woman in the jabbering crowd.