Hel nodded. Very strong leverage indeed.
After a simple meal of sausage, bread, and onion washed down with raw red wine in Pierre’s littered room, they took a walk together over the grounds, staying well away from the painful scar of the château. Evening was falling, wisps of salmon and mauve clouds piling up against the mountains.
Hel mentioned that he would be gone for several days, and they could begin the work of repair when he returned.
“You would trust me to do it, M’sieur? After how I have failed you?” Pierre was feeling self-pitying. He had decided that he might have protected the Madame better if he had been totally sober.
Hel changed the subject. “What can we expect for weather tomorrow, Pierre?”
The old man glanced listlessly at the sky, and he shrugged. “I don’t know, M’sieur. To tell you the truth, I cannot really read the weather. I only pretend, to make myself seem important.”
“But, Pierre, your predictions are unfailing. I rely on them, and they have served me well.”
Pierre frowned, trying to remember. “Is this so, M’sieur?”
“I wouldn’t dare go into the mountains without your advice.”
“Is this so?”
“I am’ convinced that it is a matter of wisdom, and age, and Basque blood. I may achieve the age in time, even the wisdom. But the Basque blood…” Hel sighed and struck at a shrub they were passing.
Pierre was silent for a time as he pondered this. Finally he said, “You know? I think that what you say is true, M’sieur. It is a gift, probably. Even I believe it is the signs in the sky, but in reality it is a gift—a skill that only my people enjoy. For instance, you see how the sheep of the sky have russet fleeces? Now, it is important to know that the moon is in a descending phase, and that birds were swooping low this morning. From this, I can tell with certainty that…”
The Church at Alos
Father Xavier’s head was bent, his fingers pressed against his temple, his hand partially masking the dim features of the old woman on the other side of the confessional’s wicker screen. It was an attitude of compassionate understanding that permitted him to think his own thoughts while the penitent droned on, recalling and admitting every little lapse, hoping to convince God, by the tiresome pettiness of her sins, that she was innocent of any significant wrongdoing. She had reached the point of confessing the sins of others—of asking forgiveness for not having been strong enough to prevent her husband from drinking, for having listened to the damning gossip of Madame Ibar, her neighbor, for permitting her son to miss Mass and join the hunt for boar instead.
Automatically humming an ascending interrogative note at each pause. Father Xavier’s mind was dealing with the problem of superstition. At Mass that morning, the itinerate priest had made use of an ancient superstition to gain their attention and to underline his message of faith and revolution. He himself was too well educated to believe in the primitive fears that characterize the faith of the mountain Basque; but as a soldier of Christ, he felt it his duty to grasp each weapon that came to hand and to strike a blow for the Church Militant. He knew the superstition that a clock striking during the Sagara (the elevation of the Host) was an infallible sign of imminent death. Setting a clock low beside the altar where he could see it, he had timed the Sagara to coincide with its striking of the hour. There had been an audible gasp in the congregation, followed by a profound silence. And taking his theme from the omen of impending death, he had told them it meant the death of repression against the Basque people, and the death of ungodly influences within the revolutionary movement. He had been satisfied with the effect, manifest in part by several invitations to take supper and to pass the night in the homes of local peasants, and in part by an uncommonly large turnout for evening confession—even several men, although only old men, to be sure.
Would this last woman never end her catalogue of trivial omissions? Evening was setting in, deepening the gloom of the ancient church, and he was feeling the pangs of hunger. Just before this self-pitying chatterbox had squeezed her bulk into the confessional, he had peeked out and discovered that she was the last of the penitents. He breathed a sigh and cut into her stream of petty flaws, calling her his daughter and telling her that Christ understood and forgave, and giving her a penance of many prayers, so she would feel important.
When she left the box, he sat back to give her time to leave the church. Undue haste in getting to a free dinner with wine would be unseemly. He was preparing to rise, when the curtain hissed and another penitent slipped into the shadows of the confessional.
Father Xavier sighed with impatience.
A very soft voice said, “You have only seconds to pray, Father.”
The priest strained to see through the screen into the shadows of the confessional, then he gasped. It was a figure with a bandage around its head, like the cloth tied under the chins of the dead to keep their mouths from gaping! A ghost?
Father Xavier, too well educated for superstition, pressed back away from the screen and held his crucifix before him. “Begone! I! Abi!”
The soft voice said, “Remember Beñat Le Cagot.”
“Who are you? What—”
The wicker screen split, and the point of Le Cagot’s makila plunged between the priest’s ribs, piercing his heart and pinning him to the wall of the confessional.
Never again would it be possible to shake the villager’s faith in the superstition of the Sagara, for it had proved itself. And in the months that followed, a new and colorful thread was woven into the folk myth of Le Cagot—he who had mysteriously vanished into the mountains, but who was rumored to appear suddenly whenever Basque freedom fighters needed him most. With a vengeful will of its own, Le Cagot’s makila had flown to the village of Alos and punished the perfidious priest who had informed on him.
New York
As he stood in the plush private elevator, mercifully without Musak, Hel moved his jaw gingerly from side to side. In the eight days he had been setting up this meeting, his body had mended well. The jaw was still stiff, but did not require the undignified gauze sling; his hands were tender, but the bandages were gone, as were the last yellowish traces of bruise on his forehead.
The elevator stopped and the door opened directly into an outer office, where a secretary rose and greeted him with an empty smile. “Mr. Hel? The Chairman will be with you soon. The other gentleman is waiting inside. Would you care to join him?” The secretary was a handsome young man with a silk shirt open to the middle of his chest and tight trousers of a soft fabric that revealed the bulge of his penis. He conducted Hel to an inner reception room decorated like the parlor of a comfortable rural home: overstuffed chairs in floral prints, lace curtains, a low tea table, two Lincoln rockers, bric-a-brac in a glass-front étagère, framed photographs of three generations of family on an upright piano.
The gentleman who rose from the plump sofa had Semitic features, but an Oxford accent. “Mr. Hel? I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. I am Mr. Able, and I represent OPEC interests in such matters as these.” There was an extra pressure to his handshake that hinted at his sexual orientation. “Do sit down, Mr. Hel. The Chairman will be with us soon. Something came up at the last moment, and she was called away briefly.”
Hel selected the least distasteful chair. “She?”