Hepburn in love with a journalist in Rome—keeping her big dark eyes fixed on him, eyes that constantly expressed her wonder at life. By then, they already hinted at the hardness and reproach, premonitions of the loneliness closing in like an inexorable, fixed-interest debt. The hunter with his prey, Nikon had whispered, amazed at her discovery, because maybe she was seeing him like that for the first time. Corso recovering his breath, like a hostile wolf rejecting his prize after a long chase. A predator feeling no hunger or passion, no horror at the sight of blood or flesh. Having no aim other than the hunt itself. You’re as dead as your prey, Lucas Corso. Like the dry, brittle paper that has become your flag. Dusty corpses that you don’t love either, that don’t even belong to you, and that you don’t give a damn about.
For a moment he wondered what Nikon would think of him now, and his groin tingled and his mouth was dry, as he sat at the narrow table in the bar, watching the street and unable to leave because here, in the warmth and light, surrounded by cigarette smoke and the murmur of conversation, he felt temporarily safe from the dark premonition, from the danger without name or shape that he sensed approaching him through the deadening thickness of the gin in his blood, through the sinister low mist rising from the river. As on that English moor, in black and white. Nikon would have understood. Basil Rath-bone, alert, listening to the hound of the Baskervilles howling in the distance.
at LAST HE MADE up his mind. He finished his gin and left some coins on the table. Then he put the canvas bag over his shoulder and went out into the street, turning up his coat collar. As he crossed, he looked in both directions and, when he reached the stone bench where the girl had been reading, he turned and walked along the parapet on the left bank. The yellow lights of a barge on the river lit him from below as he passed a bridge, surrounding him with a halo of dirty mist.
The street and the riverside seemed deserted, with few cars passing. By the narrow passageway of the Rue Mazarin he hailed a taxi, but it didn’t stop. He walked on to the Rue Guenegaud, intending to cross the Pont Neuf to the Louvre. The mist and dark buildings gave the scene a somber, timeless appearance. Sniffing the air like a wolf sensing danger, Corso felt unusually anxious. He moved the bag to his other shoulder to free his right hand and stopped to look around, perplexed. In that precise spot—chapter 11: the plot thickens, d’Artagnan saw Constance Bonacieux emerge from the Rue Dauphine, also on her way toward the Louvre and the same bridge. She was accompanied by a gentleman who turned out to be the Duke of Buckingham, whose nocturnal adventure almost earned him a thrust of d’Artagnan’s sword through his body: /
Maybe the feeling of danger was false, the perverse effect of the strange atmosphere and reading too many novels. But the girl’s telephone call and the gray BMW at the door hadn’t been figments of his imagination. A clock struck the hour in the distance and Corso breathed out. This was all absurd.
Then Rochefort jumped him. He seemed to emerge from the river, materializing from the shadows. In fact he had followed Corso along the riverside below the parapet, and then climbed a flight of stone steps to reach him. Corso found out - about the steps when he found himself rolling down them. He’d never fallen down steps before, and he thought it would go on for longer, one step at a time or something, as in films. But it was over very quickly. A very professional first punch behind the ear, and the night became a blur. The outside world seemed distant, as if he’d drunk a whole bottle of gin. Thanks to this, he didn’t feel much pain as he rolled down the steps, hitting the stone edges. He reached the bottom bruised but conscious. Possibly a little surprised not to hear the splash—a Conradian onomatopoeia, he thought incongruously—of his body hitting the water. From the ground, his head on damp paving stones and his legs on the bottom steps, he looked up, confused, and saw Rochefort’s black outline descend the steps three at a time and jump on top of him.
You’re buggered, Corso. This was all he had time to think. Then he did two things. First he tried to kick as Rochefort jumped over him. But his weak attempt hit only air. So all he had left was the old, familiar reflex of forming a ball and letting the gunfire fade into the dusk. With the damp from the river and his own private darkness—he’d lost his glasses in the scuffle—he winced. The guardsman dies but falls down the stairs too. So he formed a ball, curled up to protect the bag, which was still hanging from, or rather was tangled around, his shoulder. Maybe great-great-grandfather Corso from the other shore of Lethe would have appreciated his move. It was difficult to tell what Rochefort thought of it. Like Wellington, he rose to the occasion with traditional British efficiency: Corso heard a distant cry of pain, which he suspected came from his own mouth, as Rochefort dealt him a clean, precise kick in the back.
Nothing good was going to come of this, so he closed his eyes and waited, resigned, for someone to turn the page. He could feel Rochefort’s breathing very near, could feel him leaning over him, searching inside the bag. Then Rochefort yanked violently at the strap. This caused Corso to open his eyes again, just enough to make out the flight of steps in his field of vision. But as his face was pressed down against the paving stones, the steps appeared horizontal, crooked, and blurred. So at first he couldn’t tell whether the girl was going up or down. He just saw her move incredibly fast, from right to left, her long legs jumping from step to step. Her duffel coat, which she had just taken off, spread out in the air, or rather moved toward a corner of the screen surrounded by swirls of mist, like the cape of the Phantom of the Opera.
He blinked with interest, in an attempt to focus, and moved his head a little to keep the scene in the frame. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Rochefort, his image inverted, give a start as the girl jumped down the last few steps. She fell on top of him with a brief, sharp cry, harder and more piercing than broken glass. He heard a thick sound—a thump—and Rochefort disappeared from Corso’s field of vision as suddenly as if he’d been on springs. Now all Corso could see was the
empty steps. With difficulty he turned his head to the river and lay his other cheek on the paving stones. The image was still crooked: the ground on one side, the black sky on the other, the bridge below and the river above. But now at least it contained Rochefort and the girl. For a split second Corso saw her silhouetted against the hazy lights of the bridge. She was standing, her legs apart and her hands out in front of her, as if asking for a moment of calm to listen to some distant tune. Rochefort was facing her, with a knee and a hand on the ground, like a boxer who can’t quite get up while the referee counts to ten. His scar was visible in the light from the bridge. Corso just had time to see his look of amazement before the girl again gave a piercing cry. She balanced on one leg and, raising the other in a semicircular movement that seemed quite effortless, kicked Rochefort sharply in the face.
XII. BUCKINGHAM AND MILADY
-E. de Queiroz, THE MYSTERY OF THE SINTRA ROAD
Corso sat on the bottom step, attempting to light a cigarette. Still too stunned, he hadn’t recovered his spatial sense and couldn’t get the match in the same plane as the tip of the cigarette. Also, one of the lenses in his glasses was cracked, and he had to squint with one eye to see with the other. When the flame reached his fingers, he dropped the match between his feet and kept the cigarette in his mouth. The girl, who had been collecting the contents of the bag strewn over the ground, came and handed the bag to him.
“Are you all right?”
Her tone was neutral, without concern or worry. She was probably annoyed at the stupid way that Corso had been taken by surprise in spite of her warning on the phone. He nodded, humiliated and confused. But he was comforted when he remembered the look on Rochefort’s face just before the kick. The girl had struck precisely and cruelly, but she didn’t follow up as Rochefort lay sprawled on his back. He didn’t challenge her or try to retaliate, but turned over in pain and dragged himself away, while she, no longer interested in him, went to pick up the bag. Corso, had he been able, would have gone after the man and, without a second thought, throttled him until he’d extracted everything from him. But the girl might not have allowed that, and anyway he was too weak even to stand.
“Why did you let him go?” Cors6 asked.
They could make Rochefort out in the distance, a staggering figure that was now disappearing into the darkness around a bend of the riverbank, among moored barges that looked like ghost ships in the low mist. Corso pictured the man retreating, humiliated, his face swollen, wondering how on earth a woman could have done so much damage. Corso felt jubilant at this revenge.
“We should have questioned the bastard,” he complained.
