I walked down the long, dark hallway. Every board I stepped on creaked and groaned above the muffled voices from the cubicles. Who would huddle inside in the dark in the middle of such a day? The sick, the old, the infirm and crippled, the weak and starving, the lame. Ancients beyond any use, infants unable yet to walk. There was no reason that Polia and her son should be home at all, and yet my heart caught in my throat as I rapped on the door.
A young girl pulled the door wide open, giving me a view of the whole room. An ancient crone huddled amid blankets in one corner. A little boy knelt in the open window. He glanced over his shoulder at me, then went back to watching the street below. Except for its size and shape, everything about the room was different.
Two watery eyes looked out from the blankets. 'Who is it, child?'
'I don't know, Grandmother.' The little girl stared at me suspiciously.
'What do they want?'
The little girl made an exasperated face. 'My grandmother says, what do you want?' 'Polia,'I said.
'Not here,' said the boy in the window. 'I must have the wrong room.'
'No,' said the little girl crossly. 'Right room. But she's gone.'
'I mean the young widow and her son, the little mute boy.'
'I know that,' she said, looking at me as if I were an imbecile. 'But Polia and Eco aren't here any more. First she left, and then he left,'
'Gone,' added the old woman from the corner. 'That's how we finally got this room. Lived across the hall before, but this room is bigger.- Big enough for all five of us — my son and his wife and the two little ones.'
'I like it better like this, when Mommy and Daddy are out and it's just us three,' said the boy.
'Shut up, Appius,' snapped the girL 'One day Mommy and Daddy will go out and never come back, just like happened to Eco. They'll disappear, like Polia. You'll run them off because you're always crying. We'll see how you like that.'
The little boy started crying. The old woman clucked her tongue. 'What do you mean?' I said. 'Polia left without taking the boy?'
'Abandoned him,' said the old woman. 'I don't believe it.'
She shrugged. 'Couldn't pay the rent. The landlord gave her two days to get out. The next morning she was gone. Took everything she could carry and left the boy all alone to fend for himself. Next day the landlord showed up, took what little was left of their things, and threw the boy into the street. Eco hung around here for a few days. People felt sorry for him, gave him scraps to eat. But the doorkeepers finally ran him off. Are you a relative?'
'No.'
'Well, if Polia owed you money, you'd best forget it'
'We didn't like them, anyway,' said the little girl. 'Eco was stupid. Couldn't say a word, even when Appius would hold him down and sit on him and I'd tickle him till he turned blue. He'd just make a noise like a pig.'
'Like a pig getting poked,' said the little boy, suddenly laughing instead of crying. 'That's what Daddy said.'
The old woman scowled. 'Shut up, both of you.'
Business was brisk at the House of Swans, especially for so near to midday. The proprietor attributed the traffic to a slight change in the weather. 'The heat riles them all up, sets a man's blood boiling — but too much heat can cause even a vigorous man to wilt. Now that the weather is at least tolerable again, they're back in droves. All those pent-up fluids. You're certain you have no interest in the Nubian? She's new, you know. Ah!' He gave a sigh of relief as a tall, well-dressed man entered the vestibule from the inner corridor. The sigh meant that Electra was no longer occupied and would be able to see me, which meant that the tall stranger must have been her previous client. He was a handsome man of middle age with touches of grey at the temples. He made only a faint, compressed smile of satisfaction as he nodded to our mutual host. I felt a stupid twinge of jealousy and told myself that the reason he smiled with his mouth shut was because his teeth were bad.
In a perfect house of this sort we should never have seen one another, being consecutive customers of the same whore, but the perfect house of this sort does not exist. Our host at least had the decorum to step between us, nodding first to the stranger as he passed and then spinning back around to me. His wide body made a formidable screen. 'Just another moment,' he said softly, 'while the lady composes herself Like a fine Falerian wine, one wouldn't want to open the bottle too quickly. Haste might spoil the bouquet with bits of cork.'
'Do you really imagine there's anything of Electra's cork left intact?' said one of the girls from the comer of her mouth as she passed behind me. My host made no sign that he heard, but his eyes flashed and his fingers twitched. I could see he was accustomed to using his hands on his whores, but not in front of a paying customer.
He left me for a moment and then returned, smiling unctuously. 'All ready,' he said, and waved me into the corridor.
Electra was as striking as I had remembered, but there was a weariness about her eyes and mouth that cast a shadow on her beauty. She reclined on her couch with one knee raised and her elbow balanced atop it, her head thrown back on the pillows amid the great mass of her dark hair. At first she failed to recognize me, and I felt a pang of disappointment. Then her eyes brightened a bit and she reached up self-consciously as if to compose her hair. I flattered myself that for another man she would not have cared how she looked, and in the next instant I wondered if she pulled the same subtle trick on every man who came to use her.
'You again,' she said, still acting, using a low, sultry voice that she might have used with anyone. And then, as if she suddenly, finally remembered exactly why I had come before and what I had sought, she unmasked her voice and gave me a look of such naked vulnerability that I trembled. 'This time you came alone?'
'Yes.'
'Without your bashful little slave?' A trace of wickedness, easy ' and lilting rather than studied, came back into her voice.
'Not only bashful, but naughty. Or so his master thinks. And too busy to come with me today.' 'But I thought he belonged to you.' 'He doesn't.'
Her face was suddenly naked again. "Then you lied to me.'
'Did I? Only about that.'
She raised her other knee and clasped them both against her breasts as if to hide herself from me. 'Why did you come here today?'
'To see you.'
She laughed and arched one eyebrow. 'And do you like what you see?' Her voice was sultry and false again. It seemed to change back and forth beyond her control, like the closing of a lizard's inner eyelid. She stayed just as she was, but her pose seemed suddenly coy rather than shielded. When I had first met her she had seemed so strong and genuinely lusty, almost indestructible. Today she seemed weak and broken, fragile, old, dreamless. A part of me had been excited at the prospect of seeing her again, alone and at my leisure; but now her beauty only caused me a kind of pain.
She shivered and looked away. The slight motion caused the gown to part across her thigh. Against the pale, sleek flesh there was a slender stripe, red at the edges and purple at the centre, like the mark of a cane or a stiff leather thong. Someone had struck her there, so recently that the bruise was still forming. I remembered the vaguely smiling noble who had left with his nose in the air.
'Did you find Elena?' Electra's voice had changed again. Now it was husky and thick, like smoke. She kept her face averted, but I could see it in the mirror.
'No.'
'But you found out who took her, and where.' 'Yes.'
'Is she all right? In Rome? And the child.. ?' She saw me watching her in the mirror. 'The child died.' 'Ah.' She lowered her eyes. 'At birth. It was a hard birth.'