“You say she is young with a plump chest?” Le Cagot asked. “No doubt she is seeking me, the final experience.”
The widow pinched his thigh.
Hel rose from the table. “I think I’ll go home and take a bath and a little sleep. You coming?”
Le Cagot looked at the widow sideways. “What do you think? Should I go?”
“I don’t care what you do, old man.”
But as he started to rise, she tugged him back by his belt.
“Maybe I’ll stay a while, Niko. I’ll come back this evening and take a look at your girl with the naked legs and the big boobs. If she pleases me, I may bless you with an extension of my visit. Ouch!”
Hel paid and went out to his Volvo, which he kicked in the rear fender, then drove away toward his home.
Château d’Etchebar
After parking in the square of Etchebar (he did not permit automobiles on his property) and giving the roof a parting bash with his fist, Hel walked down the private road to his château feeling, as he always did upon returning home, a paternal affection for this perfect seventeenth-century house into which he had put years of devotion and millions of Swiss francs. It was the thing he loved most in the world, a physical and emotional fortress against the twentieth century. He paused along the path up from the heavy gates to pat the earth in around a newly planted shrub, and as he was doing this he felt the approach of that vague and scattered aura that could only be Pierre, his gardener.
“Bonjour, M’sieur,” Pierre greeted in his singsong way, as he recognized Hel through the haze of his regularly spaced glasses of red that began with his rising at dawn.
Hel nodded. “I hear we have a guest, Pierre.”
“It is so. A girl. She still sleeps. The women have told me that she is a whore from—”
“I know. Is Madame awake?”
“To be sure. She was informed of your approach twenty minutes ago.” Pierre looked up into the sky and nodded sagely. “Ah, ah, ah,” he said, shaking his head. Hel realized that he was preparing to make a weather prediction, as he did every time they met on the grounds. All the Basque of Haute Soule believe they have special genetic gifts for meteorological prognostication based upon their mountain heritage and the many folk adages devoted to reading weather signs. Pierre’s own predictions, delivered with a quiet assurance that was never diminished by his unvarying inaccuracy, had constituted the principal topic of his conversation with M’sieur Hel for fifteen years, ever since the village drunk had been elevated to the rank of the outlander’s gardener and his official defender from village gossip.
“Ah, M’sieur, there will be rain before this day is out,” Pierre chanted, nodding to himself with resigned conviction. “So there is no point in my setting out these flowers today.”
“Is that so, Pierre?” How many hundreds of times had they had this conversation?
“Yes, it is so. Last night at sunset there was red and gold in the little clouds near the mountains. It is a sure sign.”
“Oh? But doesn’t the saying go the other way? Isn’t it arrats gorriak eguraldi?”
“That is how the saying goes, M’sieur. However…” Pierre’s eyes glittered with conspiratorial slyness as he tapped the side of his long nose. “…everything depends on the phase of the moon.”
“Oh?”
Pierre closed his eyes and nodded slowly, smiling benevolently on the ignorance of all outlanders, even such basically good men as M’sieur Hel. “When the moon is ascending, the rule is as you have said; but when the moon is descending, it is the other way.”
“I see. Then when the moon is descending it is: Goiz gorriak dakarke uri?”
Pierre frowned, uncomfortable about being forced to a firm prediction. He considered for a moment before answering. “That varies, M’sieur.”
“I’m sure it does.”
“And… there is an additional complication.”
“You’re going to tell me about it.”
Pierre glanced about uneasily and shifted to French, to avoid the risk of offending the earth spirits who, of course, understand only Basque. “Vous voyez, M’sieur, de temps en temps, la lune se trompe!”
Hel drew a long breath and shook his head. “Good morning, Pierre.”
“Good morning, M’sieur.” Pierre tottered down the path to see if there was something else requiring his attention.
His eyes closed and his mind afloat, Hel sat neckdeep in the Japanese wooden tub filled with water so hot that lowering himself into it had been an experience on the limen between pain and pleasure. The servants had fired up the wood-stoked water boiler as soon as they heard that M. Hel was approaching from Larrau, and by the time he had scrubbed himself thoroughly and taken a shock shower in icy water, his Japanese tub was full, and the small bathing room was billowing with dense steam.
Hana dozed across from him, sitting on a higher bench that allowed her to sit neck-deep too. As always when they bathed together, their feet were in casual embrace.
“Do you want to know about the visitor, Nicholai?”
Hel shook his head slowly, not willing to interrupt his comatose relaxation. “Later,” he muttered.
After a quarter of an hour, the water cooled enough that it was possible to make a movement in the tub without discomfort. He opened his eyes and smiled sleepily at Hana. “One grows old, my friend. After a couple of days in the mountains, the bath becomes more a medical necessity than a pleasure.”
Hana smiled back and squeezed his foot between hers. “Was it a good cave?”
He nodded. “An easy one, really. A walk-in cave with no long crawls, no siphons. Still, it was just about all the work my body could handle.”
He climbed the steps on the side of the tub and slid back the padded panel that closed the bathing room off from the small Japanese garden he had been perfecting for the past fifteen years, and which he assumed would be acceptable in another fifteen. Steam billowed past him into the cool air, which felt bracing on his skin, still tight and tingling from the heat. He had learned that a hot tub, twenty minutes of light meditation, an hour of lovemaking, and a quick shower replenished his body and spirit better than a night’s sleep; and this routine was habitual with him upon returning from a caving bash or, in the old days, from a counterterrorist stunt.
Hana left the tub and put a lightly padded kimono over her still-wet body. She helped him into his bathing kimono, and they walked across the garden, where he stopped for a moment to adjust a sounding stone in the stream leading from the small pond because the water was low and the sound of it was too treble to please him. The bathing room with its thick plank walls was half hidden in a stand of bamboo that bordered the garden on three sides. Across from it was a low structure of dark wood and sliding paper panels that contained his Japanese room, where he studied and meditated, and his “gun room,” where he kept the implements of the trade from which he had recently retired. The fourth side of the garden was closed off by the back of his château, and both of the Japanese buildings were freestanding, so as to avoid breaking the mansard perfection of its marble facade. He had worked through all of one summer, building the Japanese structures with two craftsmen he brought from Kyushu for the purpose, men old enough to remember how to work in wood-and-wedge.
Kneeling at a low lacquered table, facing out toward the Japanese garden, they took a light meal of melon balls (warm, to accent the musky flavor), tart plums (glaucous, icy, and full of juice), unflavored rice cakes, and a half glass of chilled Irouléguy.