nervous poodle. At last she gave up the kiss and he got his tongue back. He felt as if he’d been punched in the mouth. ‘For Christ’s sake stop this,’ he whispered. ‘Your aunt is in the next room.’ But by then her girdle was half unlaced, and he got a glimpse of a cranberry nipple.
Elisalexa Norb flung her head back against the pillow. With his mouth on her breast, the lychee glued to her neck was only inches from his eyes, and there was something soothing, almost spiritual, about its smooth pale surface, so that by meditating on it he could almost forget that at any moment they might be caught. He switched to the girl’s other nipple. He would not have thought that anything could possibly improve on the first breast, but the second breast was, somehow, even more sensational, and he was enjoying this so much that he was beginning to think he might be able to support an erection for long enough to make love to her.
Then there was a daub of green in his peripheral vision.
Scramsfield couldn’t believe how fast the reptile could move. Already it was crouched beside its mistress’s neck, sniffing the lychee, flicking its tail. He tried to shoo it away with his hand, but Mordechai just gave him a contemptuous glance and then went back to the fruit. He wondered if he ought to say something, but he decided it was better not to. And he was still fiddling with his belt buckle when the iguana opened up its jaws, fit them somehow around the counterfeit genital, ripped it away with one jerk of its head, and leaped from the bed with its prize.
Elisalexa Norb screamed. Her hand shot to her neck. ‘My gland!’ Looking to the door, she was just in time to see Mordechai escaping into the drawing room, so she pushed Scramsfield off her with surprising force and made after the pet. He lunged to catch her wrist. ‘Miss Norb, you’re not dressed! What will the others think? Please just—’ But she broke free and rushed out of the door, bare breasts bouncing. Scramsfield, not knowing what else to do, followed. Beyond, he was expecting to find his doom. What he found instead was Margaret Norb bent forward over the writing desk with an expression of anticipatory ecstasy and Dr Voronoff manoeuvring himself into position behind her.
‘Elisalexa!’ shrieked Margaret Norb. She hurriedly and ineffectually rearranged her petticoats, then turned and slapped Dr Voronoff so hard in the face that he nearly fell over sideways.
‘Where is he?’ said Elisalexa Norb, totally uninterested in what her aunt was doing. Scramsfield had just caught sight of the lizard in the opposite corner of the room, so, like an idiot, he pointed. The girl hurled herself towards the iguana, but her legs were still muddled, and she tripped, bounced off an armchair, and collided finally with Dr Voronoff’s trolley, knocking it to the ground with a crash and sending the birdcage flying through the air. It slipped its black sheet, landed by the Japanese screen, and rolled to a stop.
The silence afterwards was so total that you could hear the little brass creak of the empty cage’s door as it fell slowly open.
‘Perhaps we’d better be going,’ said Scramsfield to Dr Voronoff. And, with some haste, they were going.
The two men were out of the Concorde Sainte Lazare and around the corner before Loeser said, ‘What the hell were you doing with her in there?’
‘I could ask you the same question,’ Scramsfield panted, making a dance step to avoiding getting tangled in somebody’s dog leash.
‘I said no but she insisted.’
‘Yes. Mine too. Champagne and nembutal. Must remember that. “Scramsfield’s Patent Aphrodisiac Serum”.’
‘Oh God, don’t talk like that, we sound like rapists.’
‘Rapists? We’re not rapists. They’re the rapists.’
‘I’m not going to debate free agency with you, Scramsfield.’
They passed a pharmacist with an unsettling window in which nine plastic pelves each demonstrated a different herniary bandage. ‘Come on, buddy, I’ve heard how you all do things in Berlin. Are you telling me you never used dope and booze to get a girl to go to bed with you?’
‘I’ve never done that.’
‘And you never tried?’
Loeser coughed. His right cheek was still pink. ‘When are we going to see Picquart?’
‘We can go now if you want. He’s always at home.’
Picquart lived on the fifth floor of a dirty building in the Latin Quarter with a staircase so hellishly steep and narrow that halfway up you began to wonder if it wouldn’t have been easier to try your luck with a drainpipe. Scramsfield knocked on the door.
‘
‘It’s Scramsfield.’
‘
They went inside.
Heraclitus taught that all is change. Scramsfield knew this from his first semester at Yale, and he was sure Picquart’s three cats would agree with the Greek. The entire apartment was crammed with piles of old books, often with only the narrowest of pedestrian corridors between them, and these piles were continually being rearranged, relocated, or removed, so that after every nap the cats woke up to an entirely unfamiliar topology, like a tribe dwelling in some impossible mountain range that rumbled every hour with random, hyper-accelerated geological convulsions. Yesterday, they might have found a nice ledge, hidden between two volumes of a dictionary, which caught the morning sunlight through the window; today, it would be gone, or it would be too high to reach, or it would topple as soon as they set paw on it. The cats didn’t seem to leave the apartment very often, and Scramsfield imagined it was because they found the great city outside to be eerily, almost unbearably static. However, Picquart said they did sometimes go outside to mate. Heraclitus taught, also, that all things come into being through strife, and Scramsfield hadn’t believed this in Boston, but he believed it in Paris, because the sound the local cats made when they fucked on the roofs in the middle of the night was really enough to persuade anyone.
Picquart himself was a wiry and warty old man with a nose like an eroded cathedral gargoyle. They’d met in a prison cell when Scramsfield had been arrested for running away from a restaurant without paying the bill and Picquart for swearing at a policeman. The next morning they both got out and Picquart now sometimes bought stolen books from Scramsfield. They didn’t particularly like each other.
‘What do you have for me? Who is this?’
‘I don’t have any books today, Marcel. This is Egon Loeser. He’s an old pal of mine.’
‘
‘Yes.’
‘What does he want?’
Loeser took out the letter from Lavicini to Sauvage, along with a box of cigars they’d bought on the way, and gave both to Picquart. ‘Scramsfield said you might know what this character Sauvage is talking about there,’ he said.
Picquart read the letter, then looked up. ‘What do you think he’s talking about?’ he said.
‘I don’t know. But I wondered if it might be…’
‘
‘Some sort of black magic.’
Picquart laughed. ‘Black magic?
‘What, then?’
‘This isn’t about the devil. This is about Louis XIV. Do you know what Villayer was doing in the Cours des Miracles?’
‘No.’
‘He was trying to build a post office.’ Villayer, Picquart explained, was a politician, a shrewd and particularly disloyal member of Louis XIV’s Council of State. Every day, as a consequence of his position, he sent his servants out to deliver hundreds of messages and pick up hundreds of replies: political, commercial, philosophical, social, and sexual. But the bigger Paris grew, the more expensive and complex this network became, and the more obsessed Villayer became with its failures, drawing diagrams and annotating maps late into the night — many of his friends grew used to receiving notes that just read ‘This is a test’ — until at last he realised that the only constituency with which he now spent any real time was the pulsatile village of his own couriers. He decided that the capital needed a
