Dagger Key and Other Stories

DINNER AT BALDASSARO’S

Though she herself was not beautiful, Giacinta had a beautiful sneeze. Scarcely more than a musical sniff, it seemed to restate the cadence of her name and was followed, in short order, by a giggle as she wiped a residue of white powder from the rims of her nostrils. She was thick-waisted, heavy in the thighs, with an undershot chin and breasts no bigger than onions. But her eyes were shots of dark rum, her pale olive skin held the polish of youth, and her thin face had a desperately merry quality. For all her flaws, I considered her quite a prize.

“This…” She scowled dramatically and pointed to the little heap of cocaine on the mirror in her lap. “No good! But I like! I like too much!” She made to hand me the mirror and a straw—the same she had used—and adopted a mischievous look designed to tempt me. I declined temptation and, in faltering Italian, explained that drugs were not beneficial to my health.

“Salute,” she said, correcting me—I had used the Spanish word for health, salud. Her eyes flicked across my body, as if inspecting me for signs of frailty. “Va bene.”

She dipped her head again to the mirror, face obscured by the fall of her chestnut hair.

We were sitting in the offices of the Villa Ruggieri, where Giacinta worked as a receptionist and I had taken a suite. A showplace in the eighteenth century, its high-ceilinged rooms and muraled walls reverberating with the strains of archlute and cello, by the early twenty-first it had matured into a seedy relic of the Late Baroque, a hotel whose best two weeks came during the annual chile pepper festival (just ended), when all the shops of Diamante, the Calabrian seaside village it overlooked, featured fanciful decorations in their windows contrived of chile peppers, and tourists promenaded along the Via Poseidone wearing chile pepper T-shirts and chile pepper hats. Now in October, both the hotel and the village were in the process of shutting their doors, and, that evening, as Giacinta and I walked down the cliff trail and along a narrow, meandering street, we encountered only a few shopgirls hurrying home.

We stopped at a sidewalk café on the corner of the Via Fiume and the Via Poseidone, where we were to meet Giacinta’s friend, Allessandra, for a drink before going to dinner. Incapable of other than the most primitive conversation, we endured an awkward silence of considerable length. She studied the wine list, wrinkling her nose as if responding to the various bouquets, and I examined the mural adorning the facade of the building across the street—it depicted several Renaissance children, elegantly clothed, chasing each other about the columns of a room in a palace, all done in sepia tones. There were hundreds of murals in Diamante. At least half a dozen were visible off along the block. I was mildly curious regarding the reason underlying such a proliferation, but I did not inquire about them, having no wish to endure a labored explanation couched in fractured English, with table objects used for demonstration purposes. The night air was growing cool. Giacinta threw on a light sweater over her yellow summer dress. She smiled anxiously at me, and I smiled in return.

Allessandra, who arrived twenty minutes late, was a willowy brunette who had spent a great deal of time and money at the hair salon to achieve a fabulously tousled and frosted look. She wore a leather mini that showed off her long legs and enormous gold hoop earrings through which, it seemed, a toy poodle could have jumped. She bussed Giacinta on the cheek, lit a cigarette with scarcely an interruption to her rapid-fire chatter, and began to interrogate me as might an anxious mother on the occasion of her daughter’s prom, asking first how old I was.

“I’m forty,” I told her.

“Gia is twenty-six,” she said.

“It’s a lovely age.”

Giacinta looked to Allessandra, and Allessandra translated, apparently accurately, for Giacinta ducked her eyes and blushed.

“Are forty and twenty-six incompatible?” I asked. Allessandra failed to grasp the word incompatible, so I presented her with alternatives. “Unsuitable? Ill-matched?”

“No, no! I was pointing out that for you, Gia is much less, uh…sophisticated.”

“Ah! I see.”

Giacinta wanted to know what was being said, but Allessandra told her to wait and asked my occupation.

“I do some travel writing,” I said.

“For the magazines?”

“Books, mainly. I own a travel agency with offices in Rome, Paris, London, New York…and elsewhere. The business more-or-less runs itself, and I’ve been at loose ends the past few years. So I’ve taken up writing.”

Allessandra paused to translate. Her perfume overwhelmed the less aggressive aura of Giacinta’s scent. Within the café, under a bilious yellow bulb, two waiters in white shirts and aprons were playing backgammon at the bar, while the bombastic pop stylings of Zucchero leaked into the street, seeming to empurple the air. The lights along the Via Poseidone marked the curve of the shore, otherwise the darkened coastline would have been all but indistinguishable from the sea. Two elderly men in caps and bulky jackets strolled along the sea wall; one threw his right arm over the other’s shoulder and, making repetitive forceful gestures with his right hand, appeared to be offering advice.

“Maybe,” Allessandra said, “you write the article about Diamante?”

“No, I’m here to meet some friends. We try to get together every year somewhere in Europe. This year it happens to be Diamante.” I leaned forward and touched Allessandra’s cigarette pack, resting by her elbow. “May I?”

“Of course.”

“I quit years ago, but I still get the urge on occasion.” I lit up and exhaled a plume of smoke that a breeze swept toward the sea wall. “I’m meeting my friends for dinner tonight. At Baldassaro’s. They’re all bringing someone, and…well, I didn’t want to come alone. I thought Giacinta would make a charming dinner companion.”

Hearing her name, Giacinta again asked for a translation and, following a brief exchange, Allessandra said, “There is a thing I don’t understand, Mister…You…”

“Taylor,” I said. “Please.”

“Very well. Taylor.” She stressed the T with a flick of her tongue, crossed her legs and lit another cigarette. “You are a man of wealth, of experience. And very handsome. Many beautiful women would be happy to take dinner with you. Especially at a place of elegance like Baldassaro’s. So why have you choosed this one?”

I had a sip of wine. “I assumed that Giacinta invited you for drinks so she could ask questions through you and make a judgment on my character. But this is your question, isn’t it?”

Allessandra made a wry shape with her mouth and gave the slightest of nods.

“Perhaps you would care to go to dinner with me?”

“Another night…” She gave her hair a toss. “It’s possible.”

A Vespa with a pair of young men astride passed along the street—I allowed the angry rip of the engine to fade before continuing.

“You’re a beautiful woman, Allessandra. I’m sure any man would be delighted to have you as a companion. However, I’m looking for a certain type of beauty. Beauty that falls short of the ideal. Innocence that’s been corrupted, but only just. A woman who’s been slighted by the world, perhaps treated roughly, yet maintains a belief in romantic possibility.”

Giacinta, seeming to recognize that Allessandra was flirting with me, plucked at her friend’s sleeve. Her purpose in having me meet Allessandra had less to do with ascertaining my good character than with showing me off, and now she was afraid that she had made a mistake.

Allessandra told her to wait a second and said, “Your picture of…What you say about the woman…uh…”

“Description. Is that the word you’re looking for?”

“Yes. Your description…it fits every woman.”

“Yes, but Giacinta possesses this quality in a way you do not. If I were to send her to a spa, have experts counsel her on matters of diet and exercise, perhaps get some work done to her chin, her breasts, she’d be very much the kind of woman you are. As it is, she’s the absolute embodiment of the quality I’m seeking. Her body and mind flavored by a precise degree of sadness.”

Allessandra’s frown took the measure of some poignant indelicacy, as if she detected a bad smell. “It seems you are a connoisseur, a…I don’t know how to say. Your feeling for Gia is not…” She snapped her fingers in frustration.

“You’re suggesting that my appreciation of Giacinta’s charms may be perverse? Like a preference for dwarves or the morbidly obese? Why don’t you tell her that?”

Once again Allessandra had to hold off Giacinta’s demand that she be filled in, saying forcefully, “Aspetta!”

“I’m attracted to plain women,” I said. “Physical beauty bores me. I’m talking about what’s generally considered beautiful. And now that beauty’s become affordable…” I made a disparaging noise. “That qualifies me as jaded, not perverse. Still, it may be a phase I’m going through. Tomorrow night, for instance, I may feel differently.”

For a second or two, Allessandra looked puzzled. Then she shook her finger at me in mock chastisement and laughed. “You fool with me!” she said. “I know!”

She turned to her friend and delivered herself of a lengthy pronouncement detailing our conversation or, more likely, a fictive version of it, darting sideways glances at me as if to affirm an unstated complicity. Judging by Giacinta’s tremulous smile, I suspected Allessandra was informing her that I’d been attracted to her mental and spiritual qualities, that she could consider herself safe while in my company, and that she could expect nothing more threatening to her virtue than a fine meal at Baldassaro’s—in sum, diminishing the importance of the evening, so that when I asked Allessandra out, something both women were certain I would do, Giacinta would not be so distressed.

Shortly afterward, Allessandra took her leave, seizing the opportunity of a perfunctory embrace to slip her business card into my jacket pocket, and, once she had rounded the corner, an act preceded by a wave, coquettishly fluttering her fingers, Giacinta’s mood grew instantly sullen and uncommunicative. I caressed her forearm, asked if she was all right, and she shook her head, refusing to look at me. “Giacinta,” I said softly, making the name into a form of adoration, and held her hand, pressing my lips to the inside of her wrist, to the rapid pulse beating there, the smell of blood and lemons. With palpable reluctance, she swung about to face me and, after I laid my hand along her cheek, letting her lean into it, only then did she relent and favor me with a wan smile.

Toward the southern extremity of the Via Poseidone, an ancient stone causeway extended several hundred yards out into the sea, connecting the mainland with a small island, almost invisible against the night sky, picked out by the lights of Baldassaro’s. In addition to a four-star restaurant, the island was home to some nondescript Roman ruins that attracted a few tourists, but no one had lived there for over a century, thus it was ideal for our meeting. The causeway itself, however, was populated by a number of young couples who had come for a twilight stroll and stayed to exploit the anonymity of the dark. Every few yards we passed a shadowy couple locked in an embrace or whispering with their heads together. I had slipped a drug into Giacinta’s wine back at the café, a hypnotic designed to lower inhibitions, and, upon finding an unoccupied stretch of railing, when I suggested we take our ease along it, she raised no objection. Perhaps she would have raised none in any case. If she had, I could have persuaded her with a mental nudge; but I never have liked manipulating them in that way—it tends to damage them and it might have cost me some effort. These Italian girls, whether due to Catholic fear or fleshly anxiety, were capable of reconstituting their virginity at a moment’s notice. And so I trusted the drug to liberate her from such impediments.

We gazed out across the Mediterranean, lying flat beneath a salting of dim stars. I asked Giacinta to talk, telling her I liked the sound of her voice, although I understood little of what she said (a message that required some considerable time to convey, due to its relative complexity). She hesitated, but I urged her on and soon she started in reciting poetry like a schoolgirl regurgitating memorized verses on cue. After three poems she faltered, but then began speaking rapidly in a husky tone of voice. To my amusement, I recognized several vulgar words, words such as “pompino” and “cazzo”, that I had learned from a woman in Bologna. I put my right hand on the join of her waist and hip, and her breath caught; she half-turned so that my hand slid up onto her rib cage, very near the swell of her breast. Her voice thickened and her speech became peppered with crudities, particular emphasis being laid on terms like “…mi fica…” and “…mi culo…” and so forth, references to portions of her anatomy upon which, I assumed, she wished me to lavish attention.

I was delighted to play a game with her, with someone so similar to and yet so vastly different from the women with whom I was accustomed to playing a more involving game. I kissed her, tasting wine and licorice from her tongue. My hand engulfed a breast, squeezing it a trifle hard, perhaps, for I felt her mouth slacken momentarily. I lifted her by the waist, boosted her up to sit upon the stone railing, and pushed her skirt up around her hips. She protested, of course, pushing feebly at my chest and saying, “No, Taylor! Non in questo!” But the distinction between passion and its counterfeit had blurred for us both. I fingered her panties to one side and, finding her ready, entered her. She clung to my shoulders, gasping with each thrust. I forced her to lie back, suspending her over the drop—twenty feet, I reckoned it. All that prevented her from falling was our genital union and my hands supporting her waist. She cried out…not loudly. Modesty was still a concern. She did not want to be caught, yet she needed this validation so desperately, this romantic violence in the service of her self-image, that she was willing to risk her reputation, not to mention her life, and entrust herself to a stranger’s whim.

“Non preoccupe, Giacinta,” I said, and then repeated it. She gradually relaxed. Her head drooped, her arms dangled toward the dark water. Gleaming palely in the ambient light, her face was serene, enraptured, lips parted, slitted eyes directed to heaven, to a pattern of stars that exhibited the workings of a divine intellect and transformed our rutting into a mating of angels. God knows what fantasies populated her head! Perhaps she saw herself as a goddess suffering a vile martyrdom, or as a twenty-first century Leda. I gave passing thought to the notion of letting her fall, but though I am not known for my generosity of spirit, neither am I the cruelest of my kind, and I must admit to having some trivial affection for every creature who shares with us their inch of time. Yet the scent of her despair and desperation, the fact that she was surrendering herself in the faint hope that her ardor might persuade me to love her, to sweep her up into a moneyed life, one wherein she could afford the procedures I had mentioned to Allessandra, those that would make her uninteresting to me—all this yielded a fine perfume that stirred my emotions to such an extent, I believed I loved her more purely than those who had previously used her, and it occurred to me that I might want to keep her around for the winter, that I might, for my own amusement, if nothing else, grant some of her wishes.

Afterward she brushed stone dust off her dress and cleaned herself with a tissue, casting furtive glances at lovers less bold than we; and when she was done with her toilette, she rested her head on my chest, as if sheltering there. I tipped her face toward mine and kissed her brow, an affectionate gesture unalloyed by irony. A worry line creased that kissed brow. She pushed me away and began berating me—that much was evident from her tone, but she spoke too rapidly for me to catch a single word until I heard “…profillatico…” The poor girl was rebuking me for not having worn a condom, a fact to which she had just awakened. I could have eased her fears on this score, but in the spirit of the scene I acted out my own concern, expressing that I had been swept away by passion, pledging that everything would be all right, that together we would find our way whether or not a little troglodyte had started its journey lifewards in her belly. At length I made myself understood and, mollified, she allowed me to guide her toward Baldassaro’s. We had scarcely gone ten paces when she quickened her step, allowing the hint of a smile to touch her lips, and latched onto my arm with a proprietary grasp.

It was the last night of the season but one at Baldassaro’s and we had rented the entire restaurant for a party of nine. A waiter led Giacinta and me through the main dining area and along a corridor to a large room, where a table had been set with a white linen cloth, crystal, and gold utensils. The cream-colored walls bore a mural of Roman galleys engaged in battle with a fleet of sleeker ships manned by soldiers with Persian-style beards. At one end of the room were French doors that opened onto a balcony overlooking the water. Jenay, a brunette this year, resplendent in a blue business suit tailored to accentuate her statuesque figure, smelling of flowers, greeted me with a kiss and introduced her companion, a German furniture salesman named Vid, a pop-eyed little monster in a houndstooth jacket who might have been her pet frog. When I introduced Giacinta, Vid performed a jaunty bow and Jenay whispered to me in the Old Tongue, “She’s exquisite! I’m certain you’ll win this year.”

“What were you going for?” I asked her. “Comic relief?”

“I thought I’d give the rest of you a fighting chance.”

“Just because you won last year doesn’t mean…”

“I’ve won the last two out of three,” said Jenay with mock indignation. “And it should have been three in a row.”

“What language are you speaking?” Vid asked. “It’s familiar, but I can’t place it.”

“It’s an archaic French dialect,” I said. “From the Aquitaine region.”

“We belonged to one of those secret societies in college,” said Jenay. “Learning it was required for membership.”

“Aquitaine,” said Vid. “I would have thought farther west. It reminds me of Basque.”

“My, you’re quite the linguist, aren’t you? But then…” Jenay made suggestive play with her tongue and smiled. “I suppose I already knew that.”

Vid, I swear before God, puffed out his chest, like a male bird fanning its plumage, and explained that in his undergraduate days, he had studied the French language and its origins; a family crisis had forced him to give up his studies.

“May I have some wine?” Giacinta looked at me crossly—she was feeling left out.

I hastened to serve her, also pouring Vid a glass, which he downed in a gulp, and the four of us began talking about Diamante, the only subject with which Giacinta seemed conversant. The town’s many murals, she told us, were the result of a contest held each year—artists were invited from all over the world to paint a wall and the best of their work became part of Diamante’s permanent exhibition.

Next to arrive was Elaine, also a brunette, more slender than Jenay, her perfume more subtle, with darker hair and piercing blue eyes, her pale, classical features rendered saintly by a cowled evening gown of a shimmering beige fabric. She had in tow a leather-jacketed street hustler named Daniele, his chiseled chin inked with stubble, who challenged me with a stare and otherwise exhibited a cool indifference that doubtless accorded with the personal style of some cinematic tough guy. Both Jenay and I took the position that Daniele was far too handsome and self-assured. Elaine defended her choice by saying that his pathos was inherent to his fate, which was so precisely demarked as to be obvious, but Jenay reminded her that, pitiful though Daniele was, our contest was judged on appearances and behavior, not potential.

“What do you expect?” said Elaine. “I only had a few hours to find someone.”

“You could have arrived sooner,” said Jenay. “Everything is always so last-minute with you.”

Elaine made a dismissive noise.

“No, really,” said Jenay. “It’s tiresome. You’ve never taken your responsibility seriously.”

“This hardly qualifies as a responsibility.” Elaine pushed back her cowl and I saw that she had left a white streak in her hair. “This is a pig party. It cheapens us. Though I must say…” Coquettishly, she touched my chest. “Yours is wonderful! Where you did find her?”

“She found me,” I said. “She more-or-less fell into my lap.”

Elaine smiled. “Repeatedly, no doubt.”

I had grown weary of Lucan’s dramatic entrances, as had we all, this mostly a reaction to his overabundant personality, which was redolent of a gay maitre de; yet I must confess that I also anticipated them. Music preceded him, piped in over hidden speakers: Verdi’s March from Aida. Next came Professor Rappenglueck, Lucan’s lover for a term, now reduced to a familiar, and a guest at our dinners for nearly thirty years: a diminutive man, once handsome, his looks severely diminished by age and a slovenliness attributable to mental deterioration. He shuffled forward, gray and shrunken, like a piece of fruit left too long in the icebox, mumbling as he came, absently stroking his beard, and stood at the end of the dinner table, his voice increasing in volume and waxing lectoral, addressing the empty chairs as if they were a vast assembly, holding forth in an erratic fashion on the subject of Cro-Magnon sky maps in the caves of El Castillo.

“…the Northern Crown,” he was saying. “Remarkable in its accuracy. Of course, these maps are not the greatest…the greatest secret of El Castillo.”

The professor fell silent in mid-ramble, and Lucan stepped into the doorway, his white hair combed back from his face and glowing like a flame, lending him a leonine aspect. He swirled his opera cape with a magician’s flair, as if making himself reappear after an occult disappearance, then bowed to each of us in turn, reached into the corridor and drew forth not a rabbit, but a rabbity, stoop-shouldered girl. Liliana (so Lucan introduced her) was at least six feet tall, no older than eighteen or nineteen, with dark circles under her eyes, possessed of a morose expression and a flat chest that seemed hollowed due to her posture and loose-fitting blouse. Everything about her testified that here was a girl who had contemplated (and perhaps attempted) suicide more than once, and was likely to do so again, possibly before the evening was over. A distinct threat to Giacinta in our competition, but one I was confident that she would withstand, for although Liliana’s presentation offered a complex palette of disaster, she was long of limb and doe-eyed, and neither bad skin nor poor posture nor the attrition caused her flesh by the poisons of depression hid the fact that she was a real beauty who, but for the indifference of chance, might have been walking a runway in Milan. Lucan, who had not spoken a word other than her name, presented her to Giacinta with an ornate gesture, and Liliana put out her hand.

“We’ve met,” Giacinta said, and turned away, ostensibly to select an appetizer from the table; but the insult was clear.

Liliana snatched back her hand and held it clenched at her waist, looking crushed. I suspected, if given the opportunity, she would brood over this slight the rest of the evening and later memorialize it with a cutting or some other form of self-punishment.

Lucan winked at me and said, “I’ll bet those two become a lot friendlier before the night is done.”

“If you say so.”

“Oh, I absolutely do.” Lucan removed his cape, folded it over the back of a chair. “It’s a natural pairing, you see. Liliana has gotten the better of this one”—he indicated Giacinta—“in an affair of the heart. Nothing else could have provoked such a reaction. It’s our duty to heal the breach between them.” He lifted a glass of wine, held it to the light to judge the color. “Lovely little town, don’t you think? Have you seen the murals?”

“A few.”

“Liliana took me on a tour this afternoon,” he said. “Really spectacular, some of them. But I feel they need a centerpiece, something monumental to provide them with an overall context.”

“Talk English!” Giacinta slapped my arm, demonstrating once again her shrewish side, a flaw she hastened to cover by conveying her frustration with being unable to understand what I was saying. She wanted to understand, she said, because…well, I understood, didn’t I? She gazed up at me adoringly. Lucan rolled his eyes and, taking Liliana’s arm, escorted her to the table.

At dinner, the four guests were seated all on one side of the table, Vid and Daniele bracketing Liliana and Giacinta; our side had a similar arrangement, Elaine and Jenay separating me and Lucan. By the time the seafood course had been served, Vid and Daniele were sneaking glances at one another over the top of the women’s heads, and Liliana was casting shy looks at Giacinta, who was grumpily toying with her shrimp risotto. They struck up a conversation during the main course, an excellent veal marsala, and, when next I noticed, while the waiters cleared away the dishes, the women were chatting amiably, as if there had never been the slightest bitterness between them—it was clear that someone had influenced Giacinta to be receptive to Liliana. Recognizing this, I was incensed. An overreaction, perhaps, but I had grown fond of Giacinta and felt protective of her.

“Now that Taylor has overcome his reluctance for the game, we can proceed,” said Lucan, dropping back into the Old Tongue. “I’d like first…”

“It’s not reluctance,” I said. “I simply find it jejune, this business of having guests at our dinners.”

Lucan arched an eyebrow. “Yet Giacinta carries your scent. You had sex with her. You had sex with the one you brought last time…and the time before that. You enjoy that part of it.”

“I’m prone to the same perversity as the rest of you,” I said. “I fuck them because they’re there to be fucked. Because their helplessness encourages me in some fundamental way. However, I don’t make a big deal about it. And more to the point, I haven’t used my influence on her tonight.” I pointed to Giacinta, who, unaware of our attention, was leaning toward Liliana, touching her forearm as she spoke. “This is someone else’s work.”

“Why, that’s damned impolite!” Lucan said, not trying to hide his smile. “Interfering with another man’s…what shall we call it? Dinner date? Catch of the Day? A cross between the two, I’d reckon. It verges on the criminal.”

“I know it was you, Lucan,” I said. “You’ve always abused your authority, even in trivial matters.”

“Very well! I admit it!” With a theatrical display, Lucan made as if to bare his chest so it might more readily accept my blade. “I’m the guilty one! The poor creatures looked so lonely, I felt compelled to give them a push.”

“Whatever,” I said.

“You don’t need my permission,” Lucan continued, “to return them to something approximating their former state. But you’ll be denying them pleasure, and there’s so little pleasure in their lives.”

I refused to look at him. “Degrade them however you wish. I won’t take part in it.”

“Let me make sure I understand you,” Lucan said. “It’s not our behavior in general you’re objecting to; it’s the formalization of that behavior. Yes?”

“That’s it basically,” I said. “Though we might do well to examine the entire range of our relationships with them. It seems we’re not doing ourselves much good by…”

“Must we always have this conversation!” Jenay threw down her fork in disgust. “You or Elaine trot out the same tired argument every time. It’s become as much a part of our dinners as Rappenglueck.”

At the sound of his name, the professor began mumbling—Lucan hushed him with a snap of his fingers.

“Are you insane?” I said to Jenay. “We never have this conversation. Each time we start to have it, you complain how tedious it’s become. I was thinking about this the other night. We haven’t done more than touch on the subject since Torremolinos, and that was nearly sixty years ago.”

“Is there anything new to say?” Jenay attempted to make the question rhetorical by framing it in an indifferent tone.

“I don’t know! Is there?” I put down my napkin and stood, stepping around to the opposite side of the table, walking behind the guests, who took incidental note of me, but not so as to subtract from their attentiveness to one another. “Let’s find out. Does anyone have anything new to add to the conversation that we never have?”

“We’ve tried to help them—that hasn’t worked,” said Elaine. “And they’ve thwarted our best efforts at destroying them.”

“That goes without saying…though it’s been centuries since we made a concerted effort in that regard,” said Jenay. “They’re like roaches in their perseverance.”

“We don’t have the strength of will we once had. I’m sure that’s due in part to my leadership, but I won’t accept all the blame.” Lucan shook his head ruefully. “I wish you could have known Furio. If ever a man was suited for a time…”

“My mother knew him,” said Jenay. “In fact, he sent a gift on the occasion of my birth.”

“Furio was perfectly suited for the Dark Ages,” Lucan went on. “He was as decisive as an ax, and as pitiless. When it came time for his release, he…”

“We know,” said Elaine with heavy sarcasm. “It woke volcanoes, knocked down walls a hundred miles away, and created a symphony in the process.”

“You’ve never attended a release,” Lucan said. “If you had, you might not be so disrespectful.”

Elaine wrinkled her nose in distaste. “Nobody I know would be so vulgar as to perform such a ritual. It makes you wonder at the sensibilities of our ancestors. The pyrotechnic release of one’s life energy to entertain a crowd of drunks. It’s…” She cast about for an appropriate word. “Primitive!”

“Being primitive has its uses,” said Jenay. “There’s a reason for the persistence of these cultural relics.”

“That’s how it’s come to be viewed,” said Lucan. “A cultural relic. I prefer to see it as something more vital. When Furio knew death was upon him, he gathered his friends so they might witness the vigor of his passing and celebrate the potency of his days.”

“For all his potency, he failed to destroy the humans,” I said.

Lucan scowled. “The animals. They outbred the plague. That’s all. The one thing they do well is breed.”

“They outbred us, to be sure. If we hadn’t found our little French thistle, we’d have gone the way of the wooly mammoth.” I paused, tamping down my annoyance with Lucan. “Yet if they hadn’t outbred us, if it were a choice we’d been presented, a trade-off, giving up procreative dominance in exchange for long life and the enhancement of our mental gifts, who here would have it otherwise? We should view our survival as a gift, not a privilege. They earned their right to survive. They…”

Lucan snorted. “Next you’ll be telling us their survival is God’s will.”

“My problem is,” Elaine said, “I don’t enjoy it anymore.”

“Enjoy what?” Jenay asked impatiently.

“Exploiting them.” Elaine half-turned to her. “Taylor’s right. This ritual dominance, this antiquated behavior, colors our lives. It’s a debased practice, no different from a release. And I don’t like how it makes me feel.”

“How does it make you feel?” asked Jenay, archly.

“Taylor’s not right!” Lucan said. “Not in the way you mean, at any rate.”

“Uneasy.” Elaine met Jenay’s challenging stare. “Uncertain of myself. You know.”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Jenay.

I saw that Liliana had let her head fall back, exposing the arch of her throat, and Giacinta was pressing her lips to it, feathering her tongue along a vein that showed beneath the skin. The sight infuriated me.

“This is ridiculous!” I said. “The entire conversation.”

“You insisted on having it.” Jenay signaled to a waiter that he could remove her plate.

“We’re not having the conversation I wanted. Far from it.” I paced to the end of the table. “Look. We’ve established that we can’t exterminate them, not without killing ourselves in the process. Now, despite our best efforts to save them, they’re on the verge of destroying themselves…and us. We’re the superior beings. Can’t we come up with a scenario other than one that involves mere containment or their destruction?”

Without bothering to excuse themselves, a silent communion having been reached, Vid and Daniele left the table and, soon after, the room. His expression bemused, Lucan started to speak, but I cut him off and said, “We have to examine the possibility that our intervention is stimulating their urge toward self-destruction.”

“Not this again,” said Jenay.

“Yes, we’ve mentioned it,” I said. “But always as a drollery. We need to take it seriously. If these dinners have any purpose, they remind us how easily we can damage them. One touch and they start to come apart. Look at their leaders, the ones whom we’ve influenced most frequently. They’re pathetic. The majority of them can’t even muster coherent speech.”

“Pish-posh,” said Lucan.

“Look at Rappenglueck,” I said.

The professor lifted his head and belched, and Lucan said, “Let’s not make this personal, shall we? The thing is, our affairs are inextricably mingled with theirs. We can’t afford to take the chance that Taylor may not be right.” He pointed at the door. “Someone should check on the boys. Elaine?”

Elaine lowered her head. “Somebody else go.”

Lucan turned to Jenay.

“They’re just off to have sex,” she said.

“We don’t want that, do we? Not with the staff still here. And the manager. Why complicate things?”

“Oh, all right. I’m sick of this blather, anyway.” Jenay stood, adjusted the fit of her jacket, and strode from the room.

“You have a point, Lucan. We can’t change course abruptly,” Elaine said. “At the same time, we shouldn’t be overcautious. We’ve been acting within narrow parameters. Too narrow, if you ask me. We’ve been trying to maintain the status quo. It’s like trying to stop a two-ton boulder from rolling downhill by jamming a doorstop beneath it. Given we’re stuck with the situation, what I’m suggesting is, let’s change what we can safely change and see what happens. This, the dinners, is one area in which we can experiment.”

“That’s not all you’re suggesting.” Lucan pretended to be concerned with shooting his cuffs. “What you’re suggesting has larger implications.”

“I realize that,” Elaine said. “Changing our attitude toward them during these dinners may have a ripple effect. Perhaps it’ll engender cultural change and one day we may find ourselves in partnership with them. As things stand, we only weaken ourselves with this kind of interaction.”

“Partnership,” Lucan said. “You mean, reveal ourselves to them?”

“Not right away,” she said. “Eventually, perhaps. We’re not so different from them, after all. Our superiority is based on a plant, for heaven’s sake. An accident of biology.”

“And we’re not certain that the thistle can’t be of benefit to them,” I said. “We’ve only done the most primitive of experiments in that regard. It’s quite possible…”

“You’re talking about our enemy.” Lucan enunciated his words precisely, as if speaking to a child. “Surely you comprehend that much. Our natural enemy. They very nearly destroyed us. We’re at war with them. How can you forget?”

“When’s the last time we took a casualty in that war?” I asked. “They’re more our victims than enemies. Our governance of them sets the model for terrorism. We’ve become invisible, yet if we lift a finger, the earth shakes. As for our nature, I’d like to think we’ve risen above it.”

Jenay re-entered the room. “They’re fine,” she said as she sat down. She glanced along the table. “Did I miss anything?”

Lucan gave a limp wave, as if commenting on the hopelessness of our impasse. “Taylor was saying he thinks we’ve risen above our natures in respect to the animals. I won’t bother detailing how incredibly stupid I find that presumption.” Then, addressing me: “If we reveal ourselves, you know what will happen.”

“It would be nasty,” I said. “No doubt. But if we prepare the way, who knows? And if worst comes to worst and there’s a war, we’ll win it.”

Lucan studied me, as if weighing what I had said, but then he brought his hand down on the table, giving everyone a start…except for Giacinta and Liliana, who remained intent upon one another. “This is absurd! It’s like listening to children prattling on about their favorite puppy.”

“If you’ll just listen—” I began.

“No.” Lucan came to his feet. “I won’t waste any more time with this shit. If Elaine and Jenay want to discuss…”

“Leave me out of it,” said Jenay.

“If they want to discuss it, do it another day. As eldest, I determine the agenda for this meeting. It’s time we got down to business.”

Vid and Daniele wandered back into the room and stopped by the door. Daniele’s mouth was agape and there was spittle on his chin; Vid’s lips moved silently.

“Damn it!” Elaine spun about to confront Jenay. “You didn’t have to ruin them!”

Jenay took in the scene by the door. She gave an amused sniff. “Sorry.”

Elaine clenched her fists. “If you think I’m going to clean up after you…”

“Be quiet!” Lucan shouted it. “Jenay. Get them seated. And you…” He glared at me. “Sit. We’ve got work to do.”

Jenay herded Vid and Daniele toward the table and, after returning Lucan’s glare, I sat. Lucan refreshed his wine glass and said, “State the concerns of the clans you represent.”

“China,” said Jenay. “China, China, and China.”

“Agreed, the question of China troubles us,” said Elaine. “Iran remains an issue. And Africa.”

“Africa?” Lucan laughed derisively. “That’s not a problem. Taylor?”

“We’d like to accelerate the imposition of an overtly Fascist government in the United States,” I said. “We need stricter immigration controls, surveillance policies. And we need those things now. The timetable that’s been established is, in our view, dangerously slow. They’ve got so many black agencies within their government, no one knows what the other is doing, and I’m not certain we know. We have to get a handle on that immediately,”

“Skyler Means will take care of it,” he said. “I have complete confidence in him.”

“Means and his people are stretched too thin,” I said. “We’re all stretched too thin. Cracks are starting to show, especially in the States.”

“All right,” he said. “We’ll discuss it. Is that all?”

“For the moment.”

“Isn’t that odd? I’m not hearing anything about a redefinition of our relationship with the animals.” Lucan built a church-and-steeple with his fingers. “We’ll begin with China. I believe it’s time to consider another thinning of the herd.”

It was past eleven before we concluded our business. The waiters brought in the cheese cart; the manager put in an appearance, thanked us for our business, and then they withdrew. Vid and Daniele occupied one end of the table, carrying on a faltering conversation that, judging by what I heard, made sense only to them. At the other end, Lucan sat with the professor, prompting him in his ceaseless lecture, rewarding him now and again with a wedge of cheese. Their political differences set aside for the moment, Elaine and Jenay chatted and laughed by the door, while Giacinta had followed Liliana out onto the balcony. She had unbuttoned Liliana’s blouse and they were embracing.

We had that night made significant decisions that would affect millions of lives, but I was more interested in Giacinta’s well-being, in repairing the damage Lucan had done, than I was with assessing my evening’s work, second-guessing the compromises I had made and weighing them out against what I had won. Goaded by Lucan’s tampering, encouraged by Jenay-and-Elaine’s validation of my choice, but mainly due to the thrust of my own peculiar tastes, I had developed an affection for Giacinta during the brief span of our relationship and I felt no small jealousy toward Liliana—though Giacinta’s attraction for her was a contrivance, a falsity, mine for Gia was equally false, equally contrived, and the only way I could deny this was to steer her away from Liliana and immerse both of us in an illusion I created. But manipulating a human mind is like entering a room filled with mist and fashioned of fragile crystal, and you must step carefully or else you will break everything. Restoring a mind is still more difficult—it was nothing I could accomplish without a degree of concentration difficult to achieve at Baldassaro’s. And so, deciding that repairs would have to wait until we were back at the Villa Ruggieri, I went to refill my wine glass, coming within earshot of Lucan and the professor.

“One might reasonably conjecture,” Professor Rappenglueck was saying, staring at the cheese cart, “that the great turns in human history were accomplished by force of arms, by inventions that caused society to evolve, and so forth. Who could imagine…” His features twisted as he sought to complete the sentence.

“Come on, Rappy.” Lucan waggled a wedge of gouda in front of the professor. “‘That for all intents and purposes…’”

“Who could imagine,” the professor went on, “that for all intents and purposes our history ended in the mid-Paleolithic with the discovery by Cro-Magnon man that a variety of starthistle, when attacked by rhinocyllus conicus…”

“‘…yielded a chemical,’” Lucan prompted.

“…a chemical…” The professor licked his lips. “…that slowed the rate of…”

Lucan clicked his tongue in annoyance and fed Rappenglueck the cheese.

I pulled back a chair and sat, stretching out my legs. “Doesn’t your pet mouse know any other tricks?”

“It’s a synaptic response,” Lucan said absently. “He senses the importance of these gatherings, and he tends to think he’s back in Geneva, giving the address he prepared for the IGY conference.”

“The one you prevented him from giving,” I said. “By destroying him.”

Lucan’s face hardened, yet he refused to rise to the bait. He cut another wedge from the wheel of gouda. The professor was still nibbling on the previous wedge, yellow crumbs in his beard; he chewed faster on seeing the fresh wedge.

“A year ago,” said Lucan wistfully, “he could have recited entire paragraphs. Now he can barely get through a sentence. He’s falling apart.” He fed the professor the second wedge, stroked his hair, and spoke to him as though to a precious child. “But you were almost famous, weren’t you, Rappy? You might have been as famous as Newton or Leakey.”

“Tell me. Do you still fuck him?” I asked, repulsed by Lucan’s display of intimacy.

“You know, I think I’ll answer your question. One day the information may come in handy.” Lucan resettled in his chair. “At home, Rappy’s almost his old self some days. On those days, sometimes the illusion of wholeness suffices and we’re affectionate with one another. Is there anything more you’d care to know?”

The professor made a complaining noise; he had finished his gouda.

“No,” I said. “I think I’ve got the picture.”

“You really are an astonishing fool!” Lucan hacked at the cheese. “For someone who became a clan leader in so short a time, you have the most appalling blindness. You can’t see yourself at all.”

“And you can, I suppose?”

“See you? Oh, yes. The fact is, I’ve always recognized your potential. One day you’ll be my successor, and I have the highest of hopes for your term. If a cure for your blindness is found, that is.” He tipped his head to the side. “Would it surprise you to learn that I espoused attitudes similar to yours when I was young? Regarding the animals, I mean.”

“I’d be more surprised if you didn’t make that claim,” I said. “The elderly are prone to react that way when confronted with the logic of the future. ‘Ah, yes!’ they say. ‘Once I thought as you, but experience has cured me of such enthusiasms.’”

Lucan fed another wedge to the professor. “Forget it.”

“Wait! Aren’t you going to tell me? I’m dying to hear. Let me think. What would you say?” I sat beside Lucan, affecting the pose of someone in deep study. “When you were younger, you were afire with possibility. You had a vision of the world based upon trust, upon accords, not on the hard-won wisdom of your elders. The long centuries armored you against such foolishness, but in your dotage you took a lover from among the animals. You’d had many such lovers, but this one…he was special. A professor who had stumbled across the secret of our primacy, of our very existence. After you were forced to destroy him, you continued to love him. Of course, it wasn’t altogether love you felt. Part of your emotional commitment was a tribute to the youthful philosophies you once embraced. It may be you understood now that they were not so foolish, after all. But it was too late in life, your position was such that you couldn’t publicly espouse them. So in a sense, your love became an emblem that demonstrated you bore the gene of caring. The taint of the animals, our cousins, whom we detest and love…it’s a crutch we have to carry. We must proclaim it, wear it like a lapel pin in order to testify that, though we assault them with AIDS, with endless warfare, with pollutants to which we are immune, we love our deficient cousins. What a tragedy we’re forced to poison them like rats!” I leaned back, crossed my legs. “Perhaps one day even someone as blind as I may come to adopt this posture.”

“One day,” said Lucan distantly. “Even you.”

It was unlike him to be so docile—he had always been fierce in his arguments. He went back to grooming Rappenglueck, cleaning the crumbs from his beard. In hopes, perhaps, of receiving more cheese, the professor said, “On the shoulder of the buffalo, if you’ll note the slide, there is a pattern of dots.”

“It’s all right, Rappy,” Lucan said.

The professor tried again. “Unlike similar patterns in the other paintings, this does not represent a constellation, but the starthistle. Its position relative to the Northern Crown, appearing directly over the bull’s shoulder, leads me…leads…”

“That reminds me,” I said. “We haven’t discussed the project.”

“There’s nothing to discuss.” Lucan wiped Rappenglueck’s lips. “No progress.”

“We were told to expect a breakthrough.”

“Do you really believe we’ll abandon them? That we’ll just slip off through some sidereal door and leave them to heaven?”

I was shocked to notice that tears had collected in Lucan’s eyes…so shocked that I failed to respond.

“There’ll be no breakthrough,” Lucan went on. “The science is there, but there’s no will for a breakthrough. If we inadvertently stumble upon one, we’ll only use it as a last resort.”

“…leads me to suspect,” the professor said triumphantly, “that Cro-Magnon man associated the thistle in a most specific way with the stars of the Northern Crown.”

Lucan patted his hand.

“Am I to infer from what you say that the project staff is slacking?” I asked. “Because if that’s…”

“Not at all. I’m saying we’re bound by the patterns of the past. We’re enslaved by our natures. Our hatred of the animals, our love for them…it’s the same emotion. That’s why our only recourse is extermination. We’re capable of killing something we love, but abandon it? Never.” Lucan made a show of cracking his knuckles. “Our ambivalence toward them has caused our current troubles. Over the millennia, it’s developed into a weakness. A terrible weakness. We need something to rouse us from our stupor.”

“I’ve heard this song far too many times,” I said. “I’m sick of listening to it.”

“Oh, I understand. Really, I do. You need a lesson to drive it home. I don’t know if I’m the one to teach you, but tonight I’ll teach you at least one small lesson. You’ll learn that mercy is more of an indulgence than a grace.”

“What are you talking about?”

“For one thing, your companion for the evening. Giacinta.” Lucan had completed the professor’s toilette and now he set about adjusting the knot of Rappenglueck’s tie. “I’m afraid I left her in a rather delicate condition. As it stands, she’ll likely live out her years in excellent mental health. But any further interference with her mind, if you attempt, let’s say, to sway her from her passion for Liliana…They’re so flimsy. She won’t be able to withstand another alteration. You’ll spend the rest of her life trying to restore her. Not the happiest of choices, as you can see.” He put a hand on the professor’s shoulder. “You could kill her. That would be the simplest course. I can tell you’re smitten and I know that makes things difficult. But it would spare you a lot of grief.”

Furious, I wanted to strike him, and I would have done so had we been elsewhere, engaged in less public business. I made for the balcony, intending to ascertain the extent of the damage he had done to Gia.

“Oh, Taylor!” he called.

I looked back to where he sat plucking at Rappenglueck’s clothing.

“My compliments on your choice of a companion.” Here Lucan offered a final florid gesture, one of such ornate, ironic precision, it seemed a summing up of the evening. “As eldest, it’s my pleasure to declare Giacinta the winner of our competition. She, more than anyone I’ve seen in recent years, embodies the frailty and strength of the human weed. You have my sincere congratulations.”

I shooed Liliana away from the balcony, closed the French doors after her, and examined Giacinta. It was as Lucan had said. Having been altered, the stability of her mind, of that crystal, mist-filled room, had been compromised and any further alteration would cause the walls to crack, only a little at first, but the cracks would spread, leading inexorably to collapse; yet I found myself altering her even before I had decided to do so, obeying an impulse I was unable to resist. Steeped in her thoughts, discernable as might be glints and movements, the dartings of fish in a murky bowl, I could not abide the notion that her passion, the focused product of all that indistinct energy, be directed toward anyone aside from myself for an instant longer. When I pulled back from her, I felt drenched, dripping with her, droplets of pure need, her sweet yearnings, her sour greed, her sullen ambition, her tangy lust, her bloody hungers. Her face, tilted up toward me, was once again adoring, heartbreakingly plain. But absent was that accent of desperation. My restoration having been clumsier by necessity than Lucan’s alteration, I knew I would never again glimpse the original Gia.

My good-byes were perfunctory and once out on the Via Poseidone, I hailed a taxi and had the driver convey us to the Villa Ruggieri. Giacinta giggled and clung to me as we rode the ancient elevator up to my suite, where, in an immense teak bed with sheets marbled by moonlight, dappled with shadow, beneath a high frescoed ceiling, and under the regard of pale torturers and poisoners and assorted monsters of the ruling class who glowered from decaying tapestries on the walls, their rich velvets and silks reduced to a brownish ferment by the centuries, I made love to her, wanting as much of her as I could gather before she began to decline. After she had fallen asleep, I put on a shirt and trousers, went into the sitting room and lay down upon a sofa. I thought briefly of the evening, of the business we had done, and then I thought of Gia and what I intended to do about her.

She was irretrievably broken and thus unattainable, at least in her original form, the form that had initially attracted me, and I saw the trap into which I was about to walk, entering into a relationship that could be no more than a heterosexual copy of Lucan’s with Professor Rappenglueck. However, her unattainability was half her charm. Love in all its forms, I supposed—love between the animals, between us, love between the subspecies—followed a similar development, beginning with a flirtatious glance, a dash of pheromones, thereafter progressing to doting looks, then to sex, and at every step along the way a decision was involved: you decided to take the first step, to walk the next step farther; you contrived the illusion that this was it for you, this was the ultimate; and once past its peak moment, you decided whether you wanted to stick around for the tragedy, whether that suited your notion of love, whether you were going to attempt to create the illusion of unconditional love, to believe that there was more to love than your contrivance of it, that it was not your creation but a powerful universal force that swept us along. These little dramas in which we cast ourselves so as to inspire our lives, to give us reason to persevere…They would be amusing if not for the fact that, no matter how often our faith is proven unwarranted, we believe in them.

The cynicism of these thoughts and their underlying naïvete should have been sufficient to persuade me to rid myself of Giacinta. They seemed proof of her negative effect upon me. Yet I continued to debate the matter. An enormous face, counterfeited by shadows and the visible portions of a fresco, stared down at me from the ceiling, and I was contemplating that face, thinking it superior in design to the sylvan scene actually depicted, when I heard a chthonic rumbling, followed by a tremor that shook the building for more than a minute, toppling a clock from the mantel, sending ashtrays scampering across tabletops, overturning a chair, bouncing me onto the floor. I staggered up, knowing at once what had happened, having a clear perception of it, though I tried to persuade myself that I must be wrong, and hurried into the bedroom. Gia was still on the bed, poised on all-fours, her eyes wide with fright. I convinced her to lie back, gentled her, and told her she would be all right if she stayed in the suite, but that I had to go.

“Please!” She put her arms about my neck. “You take me.”

“I can’t,” I said. “Wait here. Two hours. I’ll come back in two hours. I promise.”

My cell phone rang. Elaine. I switched it on and said, “Yes, I know.”

“I can’t believe the son-of-a-bitch…”

“Have you called Rome?”

“No, I thought you…”

“Call Rome. Now. Tell them to send helicopters. We have some in Palermo. Seal off the area. You coordinate from the hotel. Have you heard from Jenay?”

“No. Shouldn’t you coordinate?”

“That’s your job now.”

Following a silence, she said tremulously, “I guess it is.”

“Find out which satellites are passing over southern Italy and blind them. Knock them down if you have to.”

“God, what a mess!”

“Call Rome. I’ll get back to you.”

Gia renewed her pleading after I switched off, but once again I rebuffed her.

“Stay. Here you be secure,” I told her in fractured Italian. “Due oras. Okay?”

She put on a sad face, but she drew the blankets up to her neck. “Okay.”

I kissed her and backed from the room, reassuring her with a smile. Then, not trusting the elevator, I raced down the stairs, ignoring the hotel guests and staff that I encountered, and descended the hill into the ruins of Diamante.

There was a tremendous amount of dust in the air. It coated my tongue, the membranes of my nostrils, got into my eyes. In the upper reaches of the town, the buildings were some of them intact, others partially demolished, yet I saw no one on the streets and I assumed Lucan’s release must have killed everyone in an instant. His mental signature, which had been palpable at the hotel, boiled like steam from the wreckage, overwhelming all other sensory impressions. My cell phone rang. It was Elaine again. She told me the helicopters were on their way, the satellites had been dealt with, and our operatives within the Italian government were busy attempting to defuse the situation. As I listened, I began to feel the weight of my new responsibilities.

“Where are you?” she asked and, when I told her, she said, “I’m on top of the hotel. Wait until you see the waterfront. We’re going to play hell cleaning it up.”

“Call Skyler Means. Find out how much the Americans know. They’re certain to have picked up something on satellite. Tell him to do whatever he has to.”

I told her to continue checking in with me and switched off.

Shortly after Elaine’s call, I found the body of a young woman lying under some bricks, but I did not pause to examine her, nor did I allow her death to disturb me—there were many dead that night, and I had no time to ponder my emotional state. As I descended through the town, the devastation increased. Buildings were flattened and the rubble in the winding street provided a surreal accent to the scene. Portions of Diamante’s murals lay everywhere. Here a chunk of stucco bearing the pointillist rendering of an elephant’s foot; here a sunrise broken into five sections; here a child’s arm, a little dog trotting, a piece of a carousel, the bell of a tuba; half a Madonna’s face was intact—the other half was pitted and unrecognizable. It was as if the pretty shell of the world had been blown apart to reveal its true disastrous nature.

Because of the extent of the destruction, I was able to see the waterfront long before I reached the Via Poseidone. The sea wall and the causeway had been obliterated, and, surrounding the islet on which Baldassaro’s was situated, the water had been transformed into glass or something like, and the glass twisted into hundreds of tortured, translucent shapes, some diminutive, others towering thirty feet into the air, gleaming in the moonlight. The island itself was burning with a strangely steady, reddish flame, marking Lucan’s grave and that of his lover. From where I stood, the entirety of the scene resembled an enormous, complicated blossom with a fiery stamen and irregular stiff petals.

The burning came to me as a faint windy sound. I was too far off to discern what the translucent shapes were, but when I stepped out onto the Via Poseidone, I realized they were heroic figures, none of them complete, yet all the more heroic for their lack of completion. Had they been finished figures, correct in every detail, they would have looked cartoonish; unfinished, mired in webs of glass, leaping out of glass waves, trying to shrug off glassy shrouds, charged with moonlight, like silver blood flowing through their limbs, they seemed more what Lucan would have had in mind: ancient warriors, both succumbing to and struggling to break free of the moonstruck glass that gave them substance. How long, I wondered, must he have trained himself in order to produce so complex a result at the moment of release? Decades, I reckoned. And I had no doubt that he had achieved his intent—the imagery and its incompleteness spoke to his obsession with the old days, to his belief that we had repressed our warrior instincts, restrained them beneath a decadent veneer. Confronted with the visible expression of those beliefs, I was moved a ways toward agreement with them.

I walked toward that barbaric sculpture garden, to the crumbling verge of the Via Poseidone, and examined a figure with a half-formed face and flowing hair, the muscular torso straining, with a two-handed grip on a club. As I inspected it from various angles, light glided back and forth inside it like the shiftings of a spirit level, bringing up bits of detail. Hulking just beyond, one of the larger figures appeared to be effortfully rising from a crouch, its head lowered, using a spear to push itself up, weighed down by a glass robe. I was about to call Elaine, thinking to modify my previous orders, when I spotted Jenay off along the street, standing beneath the immense figure of a woman depicted in the act of slashing at an invisible enemy with a knife. She was approximately a hundred feet away, anonymous at that distance, but it could only be Jenay. I hailed her and, as I approached, I saw that she had changed into jeans and a short jacket. Her hair was loose about her shoulders; she wore no make-up. She might have been the sister of the sculpted woman, who was also buxom, her wide hips flowing up from a glassy wave. They shared the same calm expression.

“Did you see it?” she asked as I came up. “The light he made?”

I told her I had been otherwise occupied.

“It was magnificent,” she said. “He ruled the sky for nearly a minute.”

Her poised demeanor and admiring tone aroused my suspicions. “You knew,” I said.

“A few years back, he told me he wanted to die with Rappy. He only had about fifty years left, he thought, but he was emotionally spent. He said he was contemplating a release.”

“And you knew he would do it tonight.”

“I didn’t know. Perhaps I suspected. He didn’t seem himself.”

I tried to turn her, wanting to search her face for signs of a lie, but she knocked my hand aside.

“You watched for the light,” I said. “You must have known.”

“I wasn’t watching, I happened to be looking out the window,” she said defiantly; then she put a hand to her forehead and blew out a breath, as if trying to steady herself. “Perhaps I knew.”

“You should have told me, even if it were only a suspicion.” Agitatedly, I opened and closed my cell phone several times. “He’s left us a hell of mess.”

“Is that all you take from it?” She shot me a hard look.

“I don’t have time to appreciate Lucan’s artistry now that I’m in command.”

“Are you…in command? We’ll see.”

“You’re challenging my authority?”

“If I’m challenging anything, it’s your willingness to exercise authority.”

“So you are challenging me. Do you want to formalize the challenge?”

“Not at this point,” she said.

She glanced up at the sculpture and I, too, glanced up—the flame of the burning island brightened, and the fall of the woman’s hair glowed redly. Jenay strolled off a couple of paces, her attention gathered by a smaller figure, a bearded, transparent, ax-wielding barbarian. The cell phone made a chilly noise in the empty street. I switched on and, keeping an eye on Jenay, said, “Yes.”

“I can’t reach Skyler,” said Elaine.

“Try him in New York.”

“I’ve tried all his numbers. Everybody’s tried. The whole network is down. We haven’t been able to reach any of our people on the east coast. It’s Rome’s opinion we’ve been compromised.”

“That’s obvious.” I came a step toward Jenay. “What action do they recommend?”

“They recommend we go to a war level,” said Elaine.

“Not yet.” I closed to within arm’s length of Jenay. “Go to Bronze…but tell them to go to Iron if they don’t hear from me every half-hour. And tell the helicopters to fucking clean-up and get us out of here. If the Americans are going to react locally, it’ll take a while, but there’s no point running a risk. Jenay and I are down by the water, about seventy-five yards north of where the causeway used to stand.”

“This is no coincidence,” said Elaine. “Lucan and Skyler, both the same night.”

“No,” I said. “It’s no coincidence.”

Jenay’s face betrayed, I thought, an almost undetectable trace of amusement. I shaped the words, You knew, with my mouth and said to Elaine, “Tell Palermo to prepare a nuke. We may be able to pass Diamante off as some sort of terrorist incident. I doubt it, but it’s worth a try.”

“What’s happening?” Jenay asked as I switched off.

“Don’t treat me like an idiot. You know very well what’s happening.”

She was silent a moment. “Lucan’s forced your hand.”

I chose not to reply.

“It follows that he would,” she said. “Once he made his personal decision, he wouldn’t have let the opportunity pass. And if the Americans are involved…Are we facing war?”

I folded my arms, scarcely able to contain my anger.

“You have to tell me,” she said.

“If you want to continue with your pretense, call Elaine,” I said. “She’ll fill you in.”

Jenay put her hands on her hips. “I realize you’d like to think of me as an element of a conspiracy, but there’s no conspiracy. You’re our leader now. People are going to watch you, they’ll judge you by your actions. If I hesitate to give you my absolute approval, you shouldn’t assume that’s due to a conspiracy.”

“Judge all you want. I won’t be pressured or coerced any further. I’ve been maneuvered into a bad situation, but I may not do what Lucan wanted.”

“What Lucan wanted was for someone to take decisive action. Action he couldn’t bring himself to take, except in the way he did. He was well aware of his weaknesses. He used to tell me you were our hope. He saw in you a leader capable of making the kinds of decisions that we needed.” Jenay touched my forearm. “Whatever he’s done, he did it in part for you.”

“This? This selfish, indulgent act? This treason? Yes, I can see that.”

“Don’t be obtuse! However you perceive it now, it’s an opportunity to prove that Lucan was on the mark about you.”

“Right. He created this fucking disaster just to make my leadership skills bloom.” I went nose-to-nose with her. “He’s killed Skyler! And probably hundreds more! Once they were taken, I’m certain Skyler and his people did what was necessary to preserve our position. But that they were taken, an entire network, it implies the Americans have a means of defeating our mental control. Skyler’s people may not all be dead; a few may be in rooms somewhere spilling our secrets.”

“Well, then. You have your work cut out for you.” She said this flatly, as if to suggest it proved her point.

“Once this gets sorted out,” I said, “if it can be sorted out, I promise there’ll be an investigation.”

Jenay shrugged. “And you’ll have my full support.”

A searchlight swept over the nearby figures, bringing them to flashing life, and a helicopter descended out of the night, its rotors swirling the dust that lay everywhere and making conversation a chore. Jenay and I moved apart, waiting for it to land.

From directly overhead, the burning island and its immediate surround looked even more like a blossom. I thought of those gigantic Sumatran flowers. Corpseflowers. The helicopter veered inland, and we began passing over the darkened Calabrian hills. My headset crackled. The pilots’ helmets were silhouetted against the lights of the control array. Beside me, Jenay gazed out the window as I plotted the next days. Sleeper cells would have to be activated throughout the United States. Hundreds of individuals would be terminated, dozens of hard targets neutralized. I could feel the constrictions that Lucan had devised closing in around me, limiting the scope of my actions, enforcing a restructuring of my attitudes, leaving me to orchestrate the parameters of a new and improved holocaust. Thanks to him, we were entering a dangerous phase of history, one in which we would be more visible, thus more imperiled, than at any time since the Iron Age. This enlisted my paranoia and I imagined, not for the first time, that—unbeknownst to us—another group was monitoring our activities, and, above them, another group, and another, and so on and so forth. The universe as terrorist. Conspiracies of angels and demons. God the infinite suicide bomber.

“I’ve got Palermo on,” said the co-pilot. “The package is ready for delivery.”

“Have we reached a safe distance?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Patch them through to me.”

I hadn’t had a moment to think of Giacinta since rushing out of the hotel. I wondered if she had gone back to sleep, or if she had disobeyed my admonition and was wandering the streets, terrified and confused by the destruction of her home. The image troubled me, but at heart I was indifferent to her fate. Lucan’s actions had nipped that passion in the bud and stripped from me all but the thinnest veneer of sentiment. I wished things were different, that I could indulge in mercy, that I could wound myself with love or its imitation, that I had time for such games, but that wish was subsumed by the eagerness we feel at the onset of war. The desire to wield power, to destroy, to win—they were the enticements of a more involving game. Yet as I gave the order that would erase Diamante from the maps of the world, I nourished a twinge of regret, I savored it, I stored it away in memory for whatever use I might one day find for it. Though we were flying away from the town, the flash, when it came, was visible as a reflection in the helicopter’s plastic canopy. It held for several seconds, considerably less long than the light of Lucan’s release, then swiftly faded. Jenay sighed—in satisfaction, I believed. She rested her hand atop mine, and we continued north toward Rome.