“Bozhemoie, what does that impotent old paederast want here?” he asked. But under the porte-cochere he said, “Altesse, Altesse, mille fois bienvenu!”
“The keys, Giaour, ” said Grizzly Pasha. And paused.
“The keys, Your Highness? At once. Certainly. Which keys?”
Another pause. The Pasha had after all been in many cities; if he were not immediately sure which one he was in now, the doubt must be forgiven him.
Yet another pause. “The keys ... the keys to Belgrade, Giaour, ” said Grizzly Pasha. “Mmmuhh. . . .”
The Bulgarian Minister, who was a Bulgarian, was perplexed; the Bulgarian First Secretary, who was an Armenian, was not. In less than a minute he had returned with the largest keys available (they were those of the potting-shed, big and brass and bright), reposing on the red plush cushion which usually served for the repose of his wife’s pet poodle. “Avors, void, Altesse, les clefs a Belgrade, avec grande submission“ he said, offering them up. What, after all (his manner enquired) was Belgrade to him, or he to Belgrade?
Grizzly Pasha accepted and dropped them negligently in his lap, whence they slipped unnoticed to the carriage floor. Then he blinked. Then he said, “Three days looting for the troops.” Then he saw a plate, hastily prepared with bread and salt, also being thrust into his hands. “Oh, very well, then,” he conceded, in a disappointed tone. “We spare your lives, and your churches need not become mosques, either. But,” he licked his dry mouth with a dryer tongue, frowned; “Ah yes! A hundred thousand pieces of gold, a hundred pretty boys — fat, mind you, very, very fat! A glass of quince sorbet, and a dancing-girl (also fat). At once, getir!”
The sorbet, at least, was quickly brought. And then, to the tune of a music-box, the wife of the First Secretary (she had been born in Cairo, and was of a rather full figure) performed a beautiful belly-dance. Until the soi-disant Occupier of Bella fell suddenly asleep. And was wheeled back home in his carriage rather more rapidly than he had come. The Kurdish lancers were getting on in years, and badly wanted their yogurt.
“Bozhemoie!” said the Bulgarian Minister. “The things one has to put up with, here in Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania!”
His First Secretary shrugged. “Your Excellency may light a candle to his saint that he has been spared my first post, a place called St. Brigids- garth, where the sun does not shine from one year to another what with night and fog and mist and where one eats boiled stockfish with mutton-fat.”
His Excellency shuddered. “Where was that?”
The First Secretary thought for a moment. “It is in Froreland,” he said at last, “Isn't it?”
“Bozhemoie!” said His Excellency.
Then he said, “Where?”
And meanwhile? What of the “three witches”?
Very soon the Countess Bix and Bix began to feel that all prayers might be safely left to The Mamma and her Chaplain. Her own best guns were of another order, and consisted of a deck of worn and greasy old cards concealed inside the lining of her musty old muff of marten-skin. Squatting on the dung-smeared stone paving-blocks, she began to lay them out in the antique — the terribly, terribly antique pattern of the Abracadabra:
ABRACADABRA
ABRACADABR
ABRACADAB
ABRACADA
ABRACAD
ABRACA
ABRAC
ABRA
ABR
AB
A
(Perish like the word it meant ... or rather was supposed to mean; actually it should have been Abdacadabra, the ancient error of confusing the Resh with its near look-alike the Dalet had been committed by a scribe unskilled in Aramaic sometime in the days of Darius (or was it Tiberius?) and had never been corrected: Perish like the word it should have meant, but though blurred its power was, yet potent, as witness its still being used.)
Hers was no ordinary Adversary or Opponent — and, then, hers were no ordinary cards, for they bore (all of them) the BAPHOMET on their backs. What were they made of? Perhaps parchment. What was the parchment made of? Do not ask.
And of the second of the “three witches”? The Countess Critz?
The Countess Critz — as the drone of the growing throng increased — reached through a bottomless pocket in her skirt and rummaged till she found the pouch she wanted: not the one with the dried apple for sassy stepdaughters, no: the — First she spread out her moth-eaten woolen shawl, then she spread her worn old silk handkerchief. Next from the very small pouch came a smaller ball, the covering of it the scrotum-skin of an all-black bull-calf: the game she played resembled jacks but she used no jacks. Instead of jacks she cast out and gathered in, cast out and gathered in as the small ball bounced, cast out and gathered in the bright-white teeth of a hangman who had been hanged. And all the while she whined and she sing-songed and she chanted in the words of a language so old that (save for this sole incantation) it had quite died before the invention of any signs or letters which could write it.
And the third of the “three witches”? The Highlady Grulzakk had her own role to play; taking from a packet concealed in her rusty bosom she shook out into her dirty cracked palm a pair of rude dice carved from the ankle-bones of a wild white jackass, and began to play at dice with the Devil for the fate of Bella; not to give the Prince of Hell too much of a chance, she cast his dice with her left hand — but even so the fate of Bella was far too important to be left to a throw of dice, and therefore she used loaded dice. “Never give the Devil an even break” was her motto.
Thus, the Highlady Grulzakk.
Down the road from the Bulgarian Ministry and in a somewhat, but only somewhat, larger building: “Gin’ral Abercrombie,” asked the wife of the American Minister to the Triune Monarchy, “is they any ice for to make a nice cool glass o’ liminade?”
“Not a morsel, my little honey-bee; I have already checked, but for some reason unaccountable the iceman has not yet arrived,” said H. A.B. Abercrombie, formerly Sutler-General to the Army of the Missoula.
“Oh, I am jest drinched with presspiration!”
“Endure it, my dear dew-drop, for the sake of Our Great Republic; it is no hotter here than back in La Derriere, Del., and pays much better.” “I b’lieve I’ll take off my corset and put on my wrapper and go lie in the hammock you hung between thim funny old iron rengs sut in the walls down in that nice cool deep of cellar.”
“Do so, my dear, till the cool of the evening. How I wish I might join you and do likewise, but duty calls. ‘Toil,’ she says. ‘Toil on, toil on, toil —’ ” But Mrs. General had not tarried to hear.
“Safe for hours,” muttered the General. He glanced at himself in the tall pier-glass. More than one had commented on his resemblance to the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, a point which he felt obliged to concede, although his own figure was perhaps a trifle fuller. Next he rang for his butler. General Abercrombie had learned neither Gothic nor Avar, the principal tongues of the T riune Monarchy; and to foreigners wherever he found them, used the language he had learned in a previous diplomatic station (except to servants back home, to whom he might better have spoken in Gullah or Gaelic). “Boy,” he said, “washee whiskey glassee in office. Callee my horsee and buggy. And, ah, by the way ... Boy ... you know where findee Turkey Gypsy sing-song girly?”