Taltos

“I haven’t been very clever, have I?” asked Yuri. “Showing you her picture. I was a fool.”

He was still staring at the dark wool. Then, right before his face, he saw the white fingers of Ash’s right hand. Slowly he turned and looked up, and the nearness of the man’s large face horrified him, but he made no sound. He merely peered up into the eyes that were fixed on him with a glassy curiosity, and then looked at the voluptuous mouth.

“I think I’m going mad now,” said Yuri.

“No, you are not,” said Ash, “but you must begin to be clever from now on. Sleep. Don’t fear me. And remain here safe with Samuel until I return.”

Four

THE MORGUE WAS small, filthy, made of little rooms with old white tile on the walls and on the floor, and rusted drains and creaking iron tables.

Only in New Orleans, she thought, could it be like this. Only here would they let a thirteen-year-old girl step up to the body and see it and start to cry.

“Go out, Mona,” she said. “Let me examine Aaron.” Her legs were shaky, her hands worse. It was like the old joke: you sit there palsied and twisting and someone says, “What do you do for a living?” and you say, “I’m a ba- ba-ba-rain surgeon!”

She steadied herself with her left hand and lifted the bloody sheet. The car had not hurt his face; it was Aaron.

This was not the place to pay him reverence, to remember his multiple kindnesses and his vain attempts to help her. One image perhaps flared brightly enough to obscure the dirt, the stench, the ignominy of the once- dignified body in a heap on the soiled table.

Aaron Lightner at the funeral of her mother; Aaron Lightner taking her arm and helping her to move through the crowd of utter strangers who were her kin, to approach her mother’s coffin; Aaron knowing that that was exactly what Rowan wanted to do, and had to do-look upon the lovely rouged and perfumed body of Deirdre Mayfair.

No cosmetic had touched this man who lay here beyond distinction and in profound indifference, his white hair lustrous as it had always been, the badge of wisdom side by side with uncommon vitality. His pale eyes were unclosed, yet unmistakably dead. His mouth had relaxed perhaps into its more familiar and agreeable shape, evidence of a life lived with amazingly little bitterness, rage, or sinister humor.

She laid her hand on his forehead, and she moved his head just a little to one side and then back again. She figured the time of death at less than two hours ago.

The chest was crushed. Blood soaked the shirt and the coat. No doubt the lungs had instantly collapsed, and even before that, the heart might have been ruptured.

Gently she touched his lips, prying them apart as if she were a lover teasing him, preparing to kiss him, she thought. Her eyes were moist, and the feeling of sadness was so deep suddenly that scents of Deirdre’s funeral returned, the engulfing presence of perfumed white flowers. His mouth was full of blood.

She looked at the eyes, which did not look back at her. Know you, love you! She bent close. Yes, he had died instantly. He had died from the heart, not the brain. She smoothed his lids closed and let her fingers rest there.

Who in this dungeon would do a proper autopsy? Look at the stains on the wall. Smell the stench from the drawers.

She lifted the sheet back farther, and then ripped it aside, clumsily or impatiently, she wasn’t sure which. The right leg was crushed. Obviously the lower portion and the foot had been detached and put back into the wool trouser. The right hand had only three fingers. The other two had been severed brutally and totally. Had someone collected the fingers?

There was a grinding sound. It was the Chinese detective coming into the room, the sound of dirt under his shoe making that awful noise against the tile.

“You all right, Doctor?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m almost finished.” She went round to the other side. She laid her hand on Aaron’s head, and on his neck, and she stood quiet, thinking, listening, feeling.

It had been the car accident, plain and savage. If he had suffered, no image of it hovered near him now. If he had struggled not to die, that too would be unknown forever. Beatrice had seen him try to dodge the car, or so she thought. Mary Jane Mayfair had reported, “He tried to get out of the way. He just couldn’t.”

Finally she drew back. She had to wash her hands, but where? She went to the sink, turned on the ancient faucet, and let the water flood over her fingers. Then she turned off the faucet and she shoved her hands in the pockets of her cotton coat, and she walked past the cop and back out into the small anteroom before the drawers of unclaimed corpses.

Michael was there, cigarette in hand, collar open, looking utterly wasted by grief and the burden of comfort.

“You want to see him?” she asked. Her throat still hurt, but this was of no importance to her whatsoever. “His face is all right. Don’t look at anything else.”

“I don’t think so,” said Michael. “I never was in this position before. If you say he’s dead and the car hit him and there’s nothing for me to learn, I don’t want to see him.”

“I understand.”

“The smell’s making me sick. It made Mona sick.”

“There was a time when I was used to it,” she said.

He drew close to her, gathering the back of her neck in his large, roughened hand, and then kissing her clumsily, wholly unlike the sweet and apologetic way he had kissed her all during her weeks of silence. He shuddered all over, and she opened her lips and kissed him back, and crushed him with her arms, or at least made an attempt to do so.

“I have to get out of here,” he said.

She drew back only a step, and glanced into the other room, at the bloody heap. The Chinese cop had restored the covering sheet, out of respect perhaps, or procedure.

Michael stared at the drawers lining the opposite wall. Bodies inside made the abominable smell. She looked. There was one drawer partly open, perhaps because it couldn’t be closed, and she could see the evidence of two bodies inside, the brown head of one facing up, and the molding pink feet of another lying directly on top of the first. There was green mold on the face, too. But the horror was not the mold; it was the two stacked together. The unclaimed dead, as intimate in their own way as lovers.

“I can’t …” said Michael. “I know, come on,” she said.

By the time they climbed into the car, Mona had stopped crying. She sat staring out the window, so deep in thought she forbade any talk, any distraction. Now and then she turned and threw a glance at Rowan. Rowan met the glance and felt the strength of it, and the warmth. In three weeks of listening to this child pour out her heart-a lovely load of poetry which often became simply sound to Rowan in her somnambulant state-Rowan had come to love Mona completely.

Heiress, the one who will bear the child that will carry on the legacy. Child with a womb inside her, and the passions of an experienced woman. Child who had held Michael in her arms, who in her exuberance and ignorance had feared not at all for his battered heart, or that he might die at the pinnacle of passion. He hadn’t died. He’d climbed out of invalidism and readied himself for the homecoming of his wife! And now the guilt lay on Mona, far too intoxicating, confusing all the mighty doses which she had had to swallow.

No one spoke as the car moved on.

Rowan sat next to Michael, in a little heap against him, resisting the urge to sleep, to sink back, to be lost again in thoughts that flowed with all the steadiness and imperturbability of a river, thoughts like the thoughts that had gently overlaid her for weeks, thoughts through which words and deeds had broken so slowly and so gently that they had hardly reached her at all. Voices speaking to you over the muffling rush of water.

She knew what she meant to do. It was going to be another terrible, terrible blow for Michael.