Outside, the heat was worse than ever, the dense air drumming, making her think of a great brass gong that someone has struck. The people walking about were fewer now, most of them gone into the restaurants and hotels in search of shade and coolness. Vander again complained of feeling dizzy. His brow and upper lip were stippled with beads of sweat, and there were dark patches of damp on his jacket under the armpits and down the back. A man with carrot-coloured hair went past. He was wearing a blazer and a dirty yellow shirt and soiled running shoes; he looked, she thought, like an off-duty clown. Vander seemed to know him, and tried to say something to him, but the fellow hurried on, glancing back nervously over his shoulder.
At last they found the place where the Shroud was on display. It seemed to be in a big striped marquee set up in a grassy square between a church and a small, squat palace; when they got inside, however, they discovered that the marquee was only an elaborate entrance to the church, or to the palace, they could not tell which, but it must be in one of them that the Shroud was on show. The light under the canvas was cottony and dense, like the light in a dream. There were ticket booths, and souvenir stalls, and upright plastic display panels that lit up when this or that button was pressed and recounted the history of the Shroud. Vander began to read one of them and snorted. They went on. A stream of people pressed against them, blank-faced and vague, like the people in the piazza. Vander tried to buy entry tickets but the man in the glass booth shook his head and made a sideways chopping motion with his hand. "Chiuso," he said, grimly pleased. "Chiuso." Vander spoke rapidly, raising his voice, but the man shook his head again, and gave a great, shoulder-rolling shrug. "Domani," he said. So that was it: she had not been meant to see it. All along, she had not been meant to see it; that too was part of the pattern. Relief flowed through her, like a liquid flowing just under the skin, warm and swift as blood. She began to weep, or laugh, or both at once. With a hiccuppy sob she turned quickly and walked away from Vander, from the man in the booth. Outside the marquee she stood on the scant grass and wiped her tears, taking big, wobbly breaths. She looked about in all directions, a hand to her forehead shielding her eyes against the noonday glare. What was she searching for, what did she expect to see? She did not know. She had the impression of something huge and dreadful hovering over the city, invisible, a phantom of the air, palpitant and bright, unbearably bright, too bright to be seen.
By the time Vander had followed her back to the hotel she was in the room lying on the bed in the dimness with the curtains drawn. For a second she did not know who he was, standing in the doorway with the light of the corridor behind him. She had a vague, disembodied sensation. Had she suffered a seizure without knowing it? He came in and shut the door and crossed the room and stood beside the bed, looking down at her. She could hear his harsh breathing. He was trying to make out if she was sleeping or awake. He threw something on to the bed beside her. She sat up, and he went and opened the curtains. The light dazzled her eyes. She picked up the thing he had left on the bed. It was a cardboard tube. Inside was a reproduction of the Shroud, printed on a long narrow strip of imitation parchment. She tried to unroll it along the length of the bed but it kept snapping shut again, like a window blind; she put her sandals on one end of it and a heavy guidebook on the other to weight it down. Vander stood at the window with his back turned to her, his face lifted at an angle, as if he were searching for something in the sky, as she had searched, standing on the grass outside the marquee. She stayed still there for a long time, kneeling on the bed, studying the curiously tranquil face of the crucified Saviour. "It looks like you," she said to Vander's back. "Just like you."
There was something wrong inside her; she felt something slip and swell. She hurried into the bathroom and was sick.
She wrote in her notebook, her hand flying over the pages. The Treaty of Vienna what year? reinstated the Savoyard Kings and gave them suzerainty over the city of. Adelaide of Susa married Otho son of Humbert the White-Handed. His hands are mottled, old. Suzerainty over. How would they not be when the rest of him is old? The child with no face. No the doll had no Jace. Emanuele Filiberto the Iron-Headed. White hand iron head no face. Father. I am writing down these things so you will know. It is because of you that 1 am here. I asked you how to live and you said not to live but only act. And laughed. I do not know what to do. All the time I feel I am Jailing. He will not catch me. The ancient marquisates of Ivrea and Monferrato, iron mountain does that mean ferrous ferrous, at the foot of the iron mountains the mountains the mountains
He asked her what she was writing, tried to read over her shoulder. He sounded like her father, the way he spoke, teasing her, making fun of her. He imitated her accent, called her his colleen, his Cathleen Ni Houlihan, his wild Irish girl. She saw herself lying down under his hand, docile as… as something, she did not know what. She devised ways of making him attend her. She saw herself as a puppet, with lacquered cheeks and fixed mad grin, popping up in front of him, look at me, look at me! She told him about Otho and Adelaide. He only laughed. The weeks went on, the summer burgeoned. The voices spoke to her about him, always about him, now. His hands were beautiful, she was afraid of them, those long, fine fingers. Again and again he asked her what Max Schaudeine had told her, demanding to know. She lied to him, said she knew nothing more about him than that he had written those things for the newspaper. Then he would look at her, thinking, thinking, his jaw working. He was afraid of her, she could see it. But she would not harm him. No, she would not harm him. Harlequin.