The gemcutter’s apartment was on the second floor of one of the frame houses, located directly above his shop, and it was there that Korrogly interviewed the daughter, Mirielle. She was a slim young woman in her early twenties with long black hair and hazel eyes and a heart-shaped face whose prettiness had been hardened by the stamp of dissipation; she wore a black dress with a lace collar, but her pose was hardly in keeping with the demureness of her garment or with her apparent grief. Her cheeks were puffy from weeping, her eyes reddened, and yet she lay asprawl on a sofa, smoking a crooked green cigar, her legs propped on the back and the arm, affording Korrogly a glimpse of the shadowy division between her thighs: it appeared that grief had offered her the chance to experience a new form of dissolution, and she had seized upon it wholeheartedly.
We’re proud of our little treasure, are we not, he thought, we like to give it lots of ventilation.
But Mirielle Lemos, for all her dissipation, was an extremely attractive woman, and despite his sarcasm, Korrogly – a lonely man – felt drawn to her.
The air in the apartment was thick with stale cooking odors, and the living room was a typical bachelor’s disarray of soiled dishes and tumbled piles of clothing and scattered books, all strewn across furniture that had seen better days: the sprung sofa, a couple of easy chairs shiny with dirt and grease, a thread-bare brown carpet with a faded blue pattern, a small scarred table that bore several framed sketches, one depicting a woman who greatly resembled Mirielle and was holding a baby in her arms – thin winter sunlight cast a glaze of reflection over the glass, imbuing the sketch with a mystical vagueness. On the wall were several paintings, and the largest of these was a representation of Griaule half-buried beneath centuries of grass and trees, only a portion of a wing and his entire massive head, as high as a hill itself, left visible; this painting, Korrogly noticed, was signed W. Lemos. He pushed aside some dirty clothing and perched on the edge of an easy chair facing Mirielle.
‘So you’re my father’s lawyer,’ she said after exhaling a stream of gray smoke. ‘You don’t look competent.’
‘Be assured that I am,’ said Korrogly, who had been prepared for her hostility. ‘If you were hoping for some white-haired old man with ink on his fingers and crumpled legal notes peeping from his waistcoat pockets, I’m . . .’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I was hoping for someone exactly like you. Somebody with a minimum of experience and skill.’
‘I take it, then, that you’re anticipating a hard judgment for your father. That you’re embittered by his act.’
‘Embittered?’ She laughed. ‘I despised him before he killed Mardo. Now I hate him.’
‘And yet he saved your life.’
‘Is that what he told you?’ Another laugh. ‘That’s scarcely the case.’
‘You were drugged,’ he said. ‘Lying naked on an altar. A knife was found on Zemaille’s body.’
‘I’ve spent other nights lying on that altar in exactly the same state,’ she said, ‘and never once have I experienced other than pleasure.’ Her sultry, smirking tone made clear the nature of that pleasure. ‘As for the knife, Mardo always went armed. He was in constant danger from fools like my father.’
‘What do you remember of the murder?’
‘I remember hearing my father’s voice. I thought I was dreaming. Then I heard a crack, a splintering sound. I looked up and saw Mardo fall with blood all over his face.’ She tensed, looked up to the ceiling, apparently made uncomfortable by the memory; but then, as though also inflamed by it, she ran a hand along her belly and thigh. Korrogly averted his eyes, feeling an accumulation of heat in his own belly.
‘Your father claims there were nine witnesses, nine hooded figures, all of whom fled the chamber. None of them have come forward. Do you know why this might be?’
‘Why should they come forward? To experience more persecution from people who have no idea of what Mardo was attempting?’
“And what was that?”
She exhaled another stream of smoke and said nothing.
‘You’ll be asked this question in court.’
‘I will not betray our secrets,’ she said. ‘I don’t care what happens to me.’
‘Neither does your father . . . or so he says. He’s very depressed, and he wants to see you.’
She made a noise of contempt. ‘I’ll see him on the gallows.’
‘You know,’ Korrogly said, ‘despite what your father has done, he really does believe he was acting to save you.’
‘You don’t know what he believes,’ she said, sitting up, fixing him with a dead stare, her voice full of venom. ‘You don’t understand him at all. He pretends to be a humble craftsman, an artisan, a good honest soul. But in his heart he considers himself a superior being. Life, he used to say, had thrown obstacle after obstacle into his path, keeping him from achieving his proper station. He feels he’s been penalized with bad luck for his intelligence. He’s a schemer, a plotter. And his bad luck stems from the fact that he’s not so intelligent as he thinks. He bungles everything.’
The first part of what she had said was in such accord with Korrogly’s impression of Lemos that he was taken aback; hearing his feelings issue from Mirielle’s mouth acted both to reinforce his impression and – because she was so obviously her father’s antagonist – to invalidate it.
‘That may be,’ he said, covering his confusion by shuffling through papers, ‘but I doubt it.’
‘Oh, you’ll find out,’ she said. ‘If there’s one thing you’ll end up knowing about my father, it’s his capacity for deceit.’ She settled back on the sofa, her skirt riding up onto her thigh. ‘He’s been wanting to kill Mardo ever since I got involved with him.’ A smile hitched up the corners of her mouth. ‘He was jealous.’
‘Jealous?’ said Korrogly.
‘Yes . . . as a lover is jealous. He delights in touching me.’
Korrogly did not reject the notion of incestuous desire out of hand, but after going through the mental file he had begun on Lemos, he refused to believe Mirielle’s accusation; she had been so committed to Zemaille and his way of life that he could not, he realized, believe anything she told him. She was ruined, abandoned to the point of dissolution; the stink pervading the apartment, he thought, was scarcely distinguishable from the reek of her own spoilage.
‘Why do you despise your father?’ he asked.
‘His pomposity,’ she said, ‘and his stodginess. His stale conception of what happiness should be, his inability to embrace life, his dull presence, his . . .’
‘All that sounds quite adolescent,’ he said. ‘Like the reaction of a stubborn child who’s been denied her favorite treat.’
She shrugged. ‘Perhaps. He rejected my suitors, he prevented me from becoming an actress . . . and I could have been a good one. Everybody said so. But how I am, how I was, doesn’t have any bearing on the truth of what I’ve said. And it’s not relevant to what my father did.’