“Thank you.”
The woman who served me moved with a light rustling of skirts. I had not lifted my eyes, busy as I was choosing the least disgusting available meats. I smiled at my own discomfort. Who looks at a waiter’s face while he’s serving us, anyway? I saw her walk away, from behind, with the platter in hand.
“That’s why I love children,” Vlad said, not touching his food but inviting me to eat with a gesture of his hand and those long, glassy fingernails. “You know, a child is like a small, unfinished God.”
“An unfinished god?” I asked, surprised. “Wouldn’t that be a better definition of the devil?”
“No, the devil is a fallen angel.”
I took a gulp of wine to steel myself for a long, unwelcome exchange of abstract ideas with my host. Why hadn’t my wife come to my rescue yet?
“Yes,” Vlad said, resuming his discourse. “The abyss in God’s understanding is his awareness that he is still unfinished. But if God were finished, his creation would end with him. The world cannot be the simple legacy of a dead God. Ha, a retired God, collecting a pension. Imagine the world as a circle of corpses, a heap of ashes. . No, the world must be the endless work of an unfinished God.”
“What does any of that have to do with children?” I muttered, realizing as I spoke that I was a little tongue-tied.
“I believe that children are the unfinished part of God. God needs the secret life force of children in order to continue to exist.”
“I, ah. .” I muttered with a voice now faint.
“You don’t want to sentence children to old age, do you Mr. Navarro?”
I protested with a helpless gesture, slamming my hand down, spilling the remnant of my wine on the lead table.
“I lost a son, you old bastard. .”
“To abandon a child to old age,” the Count repeated impassively, “to old age. And to death.”
Borgo picked up my glass. My head fell to the metal table.
Just as I lost consciousness, I heard Count Vlad continue, “Didn’t the Unmentionable One say, ‘Suffer the little children, and forbid them not to come unto me’?”
Chapter 9
I woke with a start. I didn’t know where I was. This displaced feeling was one I’d experienced before on long trips. I didn’t recognize the bed or the large room in which I found myself. When I checked my watch, it was twelve o’clock. But was it noon or midnight? My head pounded. Heavy baize curtains covered the windows. I stood, and when I pulled back the curtains found myself staring into a brick wall. This brought me to my senses. I was, I realized, in Count Vlad’s house. All his windows had been walled off. From inside the house, there was no way to distinguish day from night.
I was still dressed in the same clothes as at that execrable dinner. So what had happened? The Count and his servant had drugged me. Or was it that invisible woman? Asunción must never have come to rescue me, as she had promised. Magdalena would still be at the Alcayagas’ house. No, if it were noon, she’d be at school. Today wasn’t a holiday. The feast of the Assumption of the Virgin had concluded. The two girls, Magdalena and Chepina, were together at school, safe.
My head was a maelstrom, and the profusion of drains in the Count’s house made my body feel like a liquid that was losing its shape, flowing away, spilling into the ravine. .
The ravine.
Sometimes one word, just one word, gives us an answer, restores our reason, or inspires action. And more than anything, I needed to think and to act: not to rehash how I ended up in this absurd and inexplicable situation, but to get out of it as soon as possible. I was sure that, if I escaped, I would understand everything later.
With a natural and reflexive gesture, I touched my chin and cheeks. Rubbing the stubble of my growing beard, I could tell that about twenty-four hours had elapsed since I’d last shaved. . so I knew that the dinner had taken place “the night before” and that now was “the day after.” I ran my impatient hands over my wrinkled suit, my smelly shirt, and my mussed hair. I tried to straighten the knot of my tie. I did all this as I walked out of the bedroom on the top floor of the house and opened the doors to the other bedrooms, one after the other, taking note of the fact that each room was in perfect order, with perfectly made beds, and in each one discovering no sign that anyone had spent the night there. Unless, I reasoned — and was grateful that my erstwhile sense of logic had returned from its long nocturnal exile — unless everyone had gone out, and the industrious Borgo had already made the beds. .
One bedroom caught my attention. I was drawn to it by a distant melody, which I recognized as the French lullaby, “Frère Jacques.”
Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques
Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?
Sonnez les matines! Sonnez les matines!
Ding-dang-dong. Ding-dang-dong.
I walked into the room and approached a chest of drawers. A small music box was playing the little song, while a little shepherdess, dressed in an eighteenth-century style, holding a hooked staff, and with a lamb next to her, turned in circles.
Here everything was pink: the curtains, the backs of the chairs, the nightdress carefully laid out next to the pink pillow. The short, little girl’s nightie trailed ribbons from its embroidered hem. There was a pair of pink slippers too. No mirrors. A perfect but unoccupied room. It was a room that was waiting for someone. There was only one thing missing: there were no flowers here. And all of a sudden I noticed that there were half a dozen dolls reclining against the pillows. They were all blonde and all dressed in pink. But none of them had legs.
I left the room refusing to allow myself to think about it, and I went to the Count’s bedroom. The wigs were still there, on their wig stands, as though warning of the presence of some otherworldly guillotine. The bathroom was dry. The bed, untouched.
I went downstairs to silent sitting rooms. There was a faint smell of mold. I continued through the impeccably clean dining room. I entered the kitchen, messy and nasty smelling, clouded by the steam coming off heaps of entrails strewn across the floor, and from the remains of a huge, indescribable animal I could not identify, drawn and quartered on the tiled table. Beheaded.
The blood of the beast was still running into the drains on the kitchen floor.
I covered my mouth and nose in horror. I wanted to prevent even a single trace of the miasma rising off of this butchery from entering my body. Taking small steps backward, half-fearing that the animal would come back from the dead to attack me, I bumped up against some kind of leather curtain that gave way when I leaned against it. I drew the curtain aside. It was the entrance to a tunnel.
I recalled Vlad’s insistence on having a passage connecting his house with the ravine. It was too late to turn back. I entered, groping the dark space between the walls. I moved with extreme caution, unsure of what I was doing, looking for a way out, some guiding light in the dark tunnel, with no luck, allowing myself to be guided solely by my subconscious, which impelled me to explore every inch of Vlad’s mansion.
It was too dark. I reached for my cigarette lighter. I lit it and saw what I feared, what I should have known I would see. Unadulterated horror. The heart of the mystery.
Coffins and more coffins, there were at least a dozen coffins lined up along the tunnel’s length.
The impulse to turn tail and run from that place was strong, but not as strong as my will to know, my foolish and detestable curiosity, my investigative lawyer’s reflexes, as I opened coffin after coffin in a fit of self-loathing, unable to find anything but earth inside each one, until I opened the coffin in which my client, Count Vlad Radu, lay in perfect peace, dressed in his turtleneck shirt, his pants, and his black moccasins, with his glass-fingernailed hands crossed over his chest and his bald head resting on a small red silk pillow, as red as the cushioned interior of the box.