So engrossed were we in our search that we did not perceive the opening and closing of the store’s front door. Unless he’d already been there before we arrived… We heard him speak before we saw him.
“Egad! You fellows nearly frightened the dickens out of me!”
It took us a moment to recognize this nondescript man with his thin gray hair and thin gray suit; we stood quietly appraising him for a moment before his ridiculous phraseology and the leather valise clutched to his side reminded us of his identity.
“You are the literary agent. Philip Leshio. You represent Magnus Valison. And you also represented Shirley MacGuffin, before she died.”
“Right ho.” He grinned at us maliciously. “And you’re those chaps who made such a botch of the Bean-Ymirsons’s L’anse aux Meadows[28] case, yes?”
“If that is how you choose to remember it.”
“Yes, so. Is Jorgen anywhere to be found? I have two books right here that I think he’d be greatly interested in.” He patted his valise as he spoke.
“He is not on the premises, to our knowledge.”
“Ah. Well, I’ll just toddle off then. Valedictions!”
“You are in town for Ms. MacGuffin’s funeral, we assume.”
He paused on his way toward the door. “Is this to do with her murder? She never earned me a single schilling, that girl, with her houses and Hamlets and scribblings in the sand, but I always had a special place in my heart for her.”
“Yes, she shall be missed. We knew her only slightly, though we were enthusiasts of her works. Indeed, we look forward to reading her Hamlet, if ever you secure a publisher.”
“If you refer to the preposterous Thomas Kyd emulation that she was working on, I’m afraid you’ll be waiting a rather longish time. I don’t believe she ever quite finished it. And even had she done so, I don’t suppose I could find a publisher for it.”
“Indeed?” we asked.
“Yes, indeed,” he answered. “For one thing, who—besides, apparently, the two of you—would be enticed by the prospect of a perfect imitation of a minor sixteenth-century playwright? Few enough read the Bard, these days, and all the fewer Kyd.”
“We see. Yet—”
“And, for another thing, there are simply far too many overzealous Shakespeareans in the world, and I’m afraid most of them would take her play as nothing less than a straight up ‘Nuts to you!’ She actually had the audacity to include some of the true Hamlet’s most memorable moments, nigh verbatim, in her version. Polonius’s speech to Laertes, the gravedigger scene… The upshot being, of course, that Shakespeare’s greatest play was little more than a polite knock off of Kyd. I found the suggestion a trifle insulting myself, and I am not of a particularly sensitive temperament, I assure you.”
“We see. Though no one would find it a sufficient insult to commit murder over, we trust.”
“Oh, of course not. It was just a hypothetical reconstruction, after all… But I don’t suppose we should really be hanging about here without him like this, now, should we? So, shall we leave?”
“Feel free.” We escorted him to the door. “But we shall linger for a time.”
“Hmph. Well, if you require any further assistance with the investigation—”
“You have assisted us enough,” we told him.
He hesitated at the door, but stepped finally across the threshold when Mr. Pacheco harrumphed with peculiar zeal. We locked the door behind him before he could say anything further, then, and we turned to resume our search.
The son hesitated a moment and cast a glance at his father as he considered my request to be allowed inside the temple.
“It is a sacred place to the Refurserkir,” he said. “Only a few outsiders have ever seen its inner chambers.”
“Well, maybe I could just see its outer chambers.”
He said something to his father, who paused before nodding.
“We will see what we can do,” the son told me. “My father apparently is fond of you.”
That was a little hard to believe, but I followed the two of them up to the entrance anyway. A middle-aged guard playing with a Swiss Army Knife and dressed in clothing similar to theirs stopped us as we approached. He spoke to the father while I just stood there admiring my shoes for fear of looking too lustingly at the doorway. I was down to my aglets when they stopped and the son finally spoke to me.
“My father wants you to know that he believes you to have the heart of a Refurserkur, or we would not be doing this. After much passionate niggling with the guard on your behalf, he has determined that you may enter. But the temple is in need of constant upkeep, and the guard has many children—”
“Okay, how much?” I asked.
“Sixty American dollars.”
I pulled out my wallet; there was eighty dollars left in it.
“All right, here you go.” I handed the money over. “But there better not be any other tourists in here who have the hearts of Refurserkir,” I mumbled, “or I’m gonna want my money back.”
Shirley always mumbled her meaning beneath shouts of misdirection. Like legerdemain, but sleight of words. By way of example, a representative salutation from one of her letters:
Lisp and stutter; bless your throat. My aim is true.
The first sentence is clear enough. It is a variation on one of her common greetings to me. Saint Blaise once prevented a man from choking to death on a fishbone and has since been regarded as the patron of healthy throats. “Bless” shares consonance with my name, which itself signifies a defect of speech, such as a stutter or particularly a lisp.
“Aim,” however, is more complex. Sensitive to my native language, she implies the truth of her love, though aimer indicates something more familial than the feelings of passion which we shared. “Adore” is the cognate that she should have sought, unless this “truth” was in reference to her love for someone other than me. Yet she was fond of stratifying her words with as many meanings as possible. “Aim” could also here mean simply “direction” or “purpose.” Perhaps, fully expanded, the sentence stands for something like “My purpose is noble and I mean not to misdirect you, only to express the purity of my love.” Unless I have missed the point entirely. Her text is rich with such ambiguities.
It is this morning and I have laid her journals aside. I must mull the ambiguities. I rub my eyelids with the corns of my palms, but my tear ducts are drained. Pots of coffee have not helped to maintain my store of fluids. I move somehow from the bedroom to the kitchen to brew another pot. Perhaps I should change to tea.
My wife is dead. Light shines into the kitchen from the snow outside and then reflects off of the knife-scratched metal of our countertops. Through the window I stare for a moment at the Two-Story House in our backyard. It was built shortly before Shirley’s departure to Denmark in the summer of 1998, though Shirley only finished the text after her return. The stories each had something to do with fish. I run the tap for a glass of water to replenish my fluids, but as the tumbler fills I realize that I am not thirsty for water after all. I am angry at my wife.
The percolator splutters its last liquid into the pot, and I pour some into the tumbler. It burns my hand to hold, but I am angry at myself for being angry at my wife. How can I be angry at her when she is dead? I believe that I know something of what happened while she was in Denmark. I sit in my chair at our small wooden table and place my coffee in front of me, attempting to drain it of heat with both of my hands. I do not use a coaster. Shirley would have been angry about this.
28
L’anse aux Meadows is the site of an early Viking settlement in Newfoundland from circa 1000 A.D. The details of the strange crimes that occurred there in 1980 can be found in