It was hard not to be impressed by Koolhaus’s insulting sincerity.
“Very well,” said the Marshal. “Let Simon tell me how all this was arranged from the start to this evening. And don’t add anything or make him seem wiser than he is.”
So for the next fifteen minutes Simon had his first ever conversation with his father and the father with his son. From time to time the Marshal would ask questions, but mostly he listened. And by the time Simon had finished, tears were pouring down the Marshal’s face and that of his astonished sister.
He finally stood up and embraced his son. “I’m sorry, boy, so sorry.” Then he told one of his guards to fetch Cale. Koolhaus heard this command with decidedly mixed feelings. The explanation given by Simon had, in Koolhaus’s opinion, been unfairly biased in favor of Cale’s idea of teaching Simon a simple sign language and had insufficiently taken into account that Koolhaus had turned it from a crude and simple-minded series of gestures into a real and living language. Now it looked as if that yob Cale was going to steal all his thunder. Cale had, of course, been almost as taken aback by what had happened as the rest at the banquet, having had no idea of the advances Koolhaus and Simon had made, mainly because the former had sworn the latter to secrecy with the intention of pulling off a brilliant surprise and taking the credit.
Cale was expecting a bollocking and was somewhat confused at being hailed as a savior both by Arbell and the Marshal, guilty about his ungrateful but not necessarily misguided decision to get rid of Cale.
But Arbell too was feeling guilty. In the days after the terrible events at the Red Opera, she had spent lascivious nights with Cale, passionately devouring every inch of him, but days listening to her visitors discussing the horrors of Solomon Solomon’s death. As she had expressed only distaste for her mysterious bodyguard in the past, no one felt awkward about describing what had happened in all its unpleasant details. Some of this could be dismissed as gossip and bias in favor of one of their own, but when even the honest and good-natured Margaret Aubrey said, “I can’t think why I stayed. I felt so sorry for him at first. He seemed so small out there. But, Arbell, I never saw a colder or more brutal thing in all my life. He talked to him before he killed him. I could see him smiling. You wouldn’t treat swine like that, my father said.”
After hearing this, the feelings of the young princess were in a great moither. Certainly she was aggrieved at the insult to her lover, but had she not also seen that strange murderous blankness for herself? Who could blame her if a quietly suppressed shudder did not make its way into the deepest recesses of her heart, there to be locked away? But all these dreadful thoughts were banished by the discovery that Cale had as good as brought her brother back from the dead. She took his hand and kissed it with both passion and wonder-and thanked him for what he had done. Not even the fact that he offered the credit to Koolhaus made much difference. Koolhaus felt betrayed, conveniently forgetting that it had been Cale who had spotted the hidden intelligence of Simon Materazzi and who had seen the way to unlock it. Cale’s attempt to include him in the general mood of congratulation and indebtedness was just his way, Koolhaus began to think, of backing into the light and nudging him out of it. So on a day Cale finally won around two of his doubters, he balanced this by making another enemy.
33
That night Arbell Materazzi held Cale in her arms, having banished all reservations about him. How brave he was and how ungrateful she had been to harbor any doubts-and now he had worked this miraculous change upon her brother. How generous toward others it made him seem and how clever and full of insight. She was almost burning with adoration as she made love to him that night, worshipping him with every inch of her lithe and exquisite body. What graceful magic this worked on Thomas Cale’s abraded soul, what joy and astonishment it brought him. Later, as he lay wrapped in her elegant arms and endless legs, he began to feel as if the deepest layers of his icy soul were being touched by the sun.
“No harm can come to you. Promise me,” she said after nearly an hour of silence.
“Your father and his generals have no intention of letting me anywhere near the fight. I have no intention of going anyway. It’s nothing to do with me. My job is to look after you. That’s all that interests me.”
“But what if something happened to me?”
“Nothing’s going to happen to you.”
“Not even you can be sure of that.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” She held his face in her hands and looked into his eyes as if searching for something. “You know that picture on the wall in the next room?”
“Your great-grandfather?”
“Yes-with his second wife, Stella. The reason I put it up there was because of a letter I came across when I was a girl, rooting around in some old family bits and pieces I found in a trunk. I don’t think anyone had looked inside for nearly a hundred years.” She stood up and walked over to a drawer on the far side of the room, naked as a jaybird and enough to stop the heart of any man. How is it, he thought, such a creature loves me. She rooted around for a moment and then returned with an envelope. She took out two pages of dense writing and looked at them sadly. “This is the last letter he wrote to Stella before he died at the siege of Jerusalem. I want you to hear the last paragraph because I want you to understand something.” She sat down at the foot of the bed and began reading:
My very dear Stella,
The indications are very strong that we shall attack again in a few days-perhaps tomorrow. Lest I should not be able to write you again, I feel impelled to write lines that may fall under your eye when I shall be no more.
Stella, my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me to you with mighty cables that nothing but God could break; if I do not return, my dear Stella, never forget how much I love you, and when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield, it will whisper your name.
But, Stella! If the dead can come back to this earth and move unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; in the garish day and in the darkest night-amidst your happiest scenes and gloomiest hours-always, always; and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath; or if the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.
Arbell looked up, tears in her eyes, “That was the last time she ever heard from him.” She scrabbled closer to Cale from the foot of the bed and held him tight. “I am bound to you too. Always remember that, no matter what occurs, I will always be near, always you’ll be able to feel my spirit watching over you.”
Blasted and bowled over by this beautiful and passionate young woman, Cale did not know what to say. But in a short time words were no longer necessary.
34
Wilfred “Fivebellies” Penn, watchman of the city of York, a hundred miles to the north of Memphis, stretched his eyes wide to keep himself awake as he looked over the city walls. Another beautiful sun rose over the woods that surrounded the town, and Fivebellies thought, dreary and dull as the night watch always was, this was a time of day that, no matter how often seen, made you wonderfully glad to be alive. It was then that he noticed something so odd that its strangeness, its impossibility, puzzled rather than alarmed him. It could not, what he thought he saw, be happening. From behind the tree line about a mile and a half away, a large black object had risen from the forest and was soaring into the reddish blue sky as it moved toward the city. The black object got bigger and seemed to move ever faster until, stunned as an animal before slaughter, Fivebellies watched as a large rock the size of a cow flew over him not twenty feet away, lazily turning on its axis. It curved into the city below, destroying four large town houses as it bounced through a shattered collapse of stone and dust and came to rest in the Municipal Garden of Nightingales.