Mysterium

His father-in-law had once warned him to beware of women. They’re dangerous, he had said, grinning lewdly. They make your soft parts hard. And your hard parts soft.

Briefly, Demarch wondered what hardness inside him Evelyn Woodward had somehow managed to thaw.

The wind was cold and Guy was beginning to seem nervous. The tip of his Victoire flared as he drew on it, and the tobacco crackled in the chill air. “How long can you wait?”

“A week.”

“That’s not much.”

“I know.”

Guy Marris took a last draw on the cigarette and crushed it under the heel of a dress shoe. “Come see me before you leave.”

“Thank you,” Demarch said. “No, don’t thank me yet.”

He gave Christof a toy he had brought from Two Rivers: it was called a Rubik’s Cube, Evelyn had said, and Christof was delighted with the unexpected way it turned and twisted in his hands. He insisted on taking it to bed. Dorothea led him upstairs, and Demarch sipped an evening brandy with his beau-pere, his father-in-law Armand. They sat in the library under the eye of more than five hundred books, property of the Saussere family—mainly bound collections of sermons, some of them older than Armand himself. Demarch had never liked this room.

Armand sat brooding in his wheelchair. Five years ago he had suffered a stroke that paralyzed his right leg and removed him from active Bureau duty. His mind was unaffected, the doctors said, but since the stroke he had seemed more withdrawn, less apt to share himself.

Tonight the brandy seemed to loosen him. He turned his head slowly and fixed Demarch with a birdlike one-eyed gaze. “Symeon… this hasn’t been an easy posting for you, has it?”

“You mean the enquiry?”

“Yes. The ‘enquiry.’ We’re so shy of words. Plain words are dangerous. But make allowances for me. I’m short of wind. Tempted to brevity. It must be difficult for you.”

“Well, I think I’ve done a respectable job.”

“Hard for a man to preside over such strangeness.”

You don’t know the half of it, Demarch thought. But Armand still cultivated his Bureau contacts: he obviously knew more than Demarch would have guessed. He said, “Of course…”

“And so many deaths.”

“Actually, there haven’t been many.”

“But there will be. And you know it.”

“Yes.” He shrugged. “I don’t think about it.”

“But you do, you know. One always thinks about it. And if you don’t think about it, you dream about it.” Armand lowered his voice until it was a rumble from the deep barrel of his chest. Demarch leaned forward to listen. “I was at the Mandan River,” Armand said, “after the Lakota rebellion. They don’t tell you about that in the Academie, do they? No, nor in any other sort of school, except to say that a menace was disposed of. Careful words. Discreet. They don’t tell you what the camps looked like with their watchtowers overlooking the prairie sloughs. How the grass goes on for miles and miles. They don’t tell you how muddy it was that spring. Or how the smell from the furnaces lingered when the bodies were burned. The bodies of men and women and children—I know one isn’t supposed to call them that, but that’s what they were, or seemed to be, whatever the condition of their souls. I suppose their souls went up with the smoke. A body is some ounces lighter when it dies … I read that somewhere.” His eyes seemed to glaze. “Everything is a test, Symeon, in our line of work.”

“Am I being tested?”

“We’re always being tested.” Armand sipped his brandy. “We’re all subordinated, not just the ones we kill. There are no victims. You have to remember that. We’re all in the service of something larger than ourselves, and the difference between us and those corpses is that we are its willing servants. That’s all. That’s all. We’re spared because we put our bodies on the altar every day, and not just our bodies, but our minds and our wills. Remember the vow you took when you joined the Bureau. Incipit vita nova. A new life begins. You leave your priggish little intellect behind.”

The brandy made him reckless. He said, “And our conscience?”

“That was never yours,” Armand said. “Don’t be absurd.”

∞

He turned out the lights after Armand wheeled himself away. The fire had burned down to embers. He finished his brandy in the dark and then moved upstairs.

The old man’s words seemed to follow him in stuttering echoes through the chilly house. We put our bodies on the altar every day. But for what? Something larger than ourselves. The Bureau, the Church, the Protennoia? Something more, surely. Some idea or vision of the good, a republic of permissible relations, a step up from the barbarism of the Lakota and all the countless other slaughtered aboriginals.

But the corpses pile higher every day, and need to be burned.

Dorothea was asleep when he joined her in bed. Her long hair lay across the pillow like a black wing. She reminded him of a temple, serene and pale even in sleep.