Etienne had paled. This, a phenomenon of whiteness which, even when he was fully clothed, had been known to affect the beholder with a kind of nameless terror, was now, in his huge nudity, little short of stupefying. The young man drew back, closed his eyes. Bubu ran to hide his head in a corner; Gertrude hummed a bar of “Throw out the Life-line,” delicately belched. Then Etienne’s blood surged to his veins again and he pinkened back to life.
“What do you know, dark youth,” he demanded in a thunderous whisper, “of my problems, my prayers, my heart’s dearest wish?”
“That which I do not know I have divined,” said the young man quietly, opening his eyes. “Such is the frailty of flesh that you have come now, finally, to founder in perfection.”
Etienne pondered this at length. Here, in a simple and felicitous turn of phrase, this extraordinary fellow had named his malady. Perfection . . .
“And how,” he slowly lowered his stare to the package, “and what has this contraption to do with me?”
“Everything.”
“And how did you come by it?”
“I invented it.”
The young man had leaned forward to tear off almost savagely the ribbons, the bright paper; a glossily dark gray box resembling a small phonograph was revealed, its simplicity marred only by four jointed metal arms on one side, folded now, at the extremities of which were deftly welded a knife, a fork, a spoon, and a kind of two-pronged hook. There was a small round aperture in the same side, and the conical projection on top, which now turned out to be a plexiglass tube containing a single hair-thin filament.
“I invented it,” the young man repeated, then breathed devoutly, “for you.”
Bubu had turned from the corner, and Gertrude swooped to light upon his shoulder; together they approached to examine the gift with timid skepticism. It is typical of Etienne that he did not laugh, nor smile, nor anything, but accepted the validity of the machine as easily as he would have accepted the color of an Oncidium orchid – not so much from naïvete as from a kind of congenital innocence of cynicism.
And now, although the young man had pressed no buttons, turned no knobs, Etienne momently became aware that the machine was working. There was a deep but gentle whirring sound and slowly, very slowly, one of the metal arms – the one with the fork – was unfolding, reaching out and – snick! – it had suddenly speared the largest, ripest, and most luscious grape from a cluster on a nearby salver. Quickly it carried this dripping, glittering morsel to the aperture and popped it in; the filament glowed, ever so faintly and then – Etienne felt his whole soul shudder slightly with gratification – the machine sighed . . .
Softly, languidly, it heaved a tiny sigh of satisfaction.
“Observe that, having chosen the best grape on the bunch, it spurns the rest,” the young man murmured. “It, too, is designed only for perfection . . .”
But now the two-pronged hook was reaching towards the salver, seized, with the speed of light, a magnificently unblemished tangerine. The knife went snicker-snee and peeled it in a twinkling. It, too, disappeared into the aperture, and the machine moaned gently, slaveringly smacked its internal lips.
Bubu clapped his heavily bejeweled hands tinklingly in small Nubian delight. Gertrude whistled shrilly, warbled “Damn my eyes – but that’s a pretty sight!” Etienne rose. The young man stirred, smiled up at him.
“No longer,” he crooned, “shall you be subject to the idiosyncrasies of your patrons’ moods, Monsieur: quirks of digestion, ravages of time, and repletion upon the taste buds and the gastric system. No longer need your spirit cringe beneath the human equation with all its foibles and fallibilities . . .” He rose. “The Machine is infallible. Its taste is exquisite. And” – his lips curved for a split second to something almost frighteningly like a sneer – “it will never wear out . . .”
They stood there. The thin suggestion of a sneer had swiftly gone from the young man’s mouth, and he was smiling almost tenderly. Gertrude chortled, screeched, “Damn my bloody eyes!” and flew back to her perch. The cuckoo clock on the floor below distantly caroled seven.
“This is it” – Etienne groped for adequate words – “this, indubitably, is beyond adequate words . . . But how did you know? And what, dark youth, is your name?”
“I divine . . .” The young man extracted a square of cobalt linen from his sleeve and gently blew his nose. “And my name is Vincent.”
“If you have divined this” – Etienne had squatted to examine more closely the wondrous mechanism; it was silent now, its filament cold, its arms demurely folded – “then, Vincent, you have divined that, though penniless, I am vastly rich in jewels and doodads and sundry tokens that admirers of my art have left for me.”
The young man nodded, his face expressionless.
Etienne rose again and stroked his jowls. “My treasure chests and coffers bulge and overflow with diamonds, rubies, square-cut emeralds. Ask what you will.”
The young man slowly shook his head.
“But,” Etienne fell back apace, “I cannot accept this miracle as a gift!”
The young man stopped shaking his head; his voice was barely audible: “I had thought, rather, of a trade, Monsieur.”
Etienne beamed. “A trade! Excellent! Then name it!”
The young pan’s eyes were fixed upon the small still life that Braque had wrought.
“I had thought, Monsieur,” he said, “of Mercedes . . .”
There was a moment of fraught silence. Then Bubu hid his face in his hands, sank to the floor, and frightfully, soundlessly sobbed; Gertrude screamed raucously, “Man the lifeboats, men! Stand by to abandon ship!” Etienne? Etienne was as one turned to stone; his lips framed the word, but no sound came forth.
The young man whispered, “Mercedes,” smiled, then stooped to pluck a single grape from the salver and consume it.
“Mercedes . . .”
In the immediately ensuing three and one-half seconds, an aeon of time, a universe of space, a billion thoughts crowded through Etienne’s brain, simmered away to these:
How did this young upstart know of Mercedes – and what? Mercedes, whose skin was as the petals of the moonflower, whose hair was Thracian silk, whose mouth was carven, yielding coral. Mercedes, whom he, Etienne de Rocoque, had, after wading through veritable seas of blood, snatched from the harem of a mighty caliph at the age of three and reared in luxury these fifteen years, inviolate from the world. Mercedes, who even now he could hear splashing happily in her perfumed bath. Never had she set her perfect foot beyond his door – yet this unspeakable poltroon had mouthed her name! How? How?
And then he saw that Bubu, feigning still to sob, had crawled behind the villainous youth and now was winking up at his master invitingly. All he need do is push – and push he did; Vincent, taken entirely unawares, stumbled back with one of the unintelligible oaths favored by knaves and varlets, turned a highly unlikely double somersault, and smacked his skull smartly against the newel post.
“Quickly,” bellowed Etienne, “into the freezer with him!” And moving with well-nigh incredible speed, he snatched up the youth’s limp upper body, Bubu grabbed his feet, and they clattered down the stairs.
Gertrude slowly raised one pink and wrinkled talon to scratch her ear. “Glory be to God,” she muttered. She sat thinking for a time in silence, jumped when she heard the door of the freezer slam two floors below. Then, conscious of something moving in the room, she turned, looked down; the Tasting Machine, by some means of locomotion known only to God and its inventor, had crept across to just beneath her perch, its fork was poised, whish-t-t through the air at the exact moment Gertrude took wing, snipped out one of her tail feathers.