"You've been going after these mass murderers for some time now. You leave their bodies in the open. You left this last one in a hotel, where he was found only an hour after his death. As for the old woman, you were equally careless! Her son found her the following day. No wounds for the coroner to find on either victim. You're a nameless celebrity hi Miami, quite overshadowing the notoriety of the poor dead man in the hotel." "I don't give a damn," I said angrily. But I did, of course. I deplored my own carelessness, yet I did nothing to correct it. Well, this must surely change. Tonight, had I done any better? It seemed cowardly to plead excuses for such things.
David was watching me carefully. If there was one dominant characteristic to David, it was his alertness. "It's not inconceivable," he said, "that you could be caught."
I gave a scornful, dismissive laugh.
"They could lock you up in a laboratory, study you in a cage of space-age glass."
"That's impossible. But what an interesting thought."
"I knew it! You want it to happen."
I shrugged. "Might be fun for a little while. Look, it's a sheer impossibility. The night of my one appearance as a rock singer, all manner of bizarre things happened. The mortal world merely swept up afterwards and closed its files. As for the old woman in Miami, that was a terrible mishap. Should never have happened-" I stopped. What about those who died in London this very night?
"But you enjoy taking life," he said. "You said it was fun."
I felt such pain suddenly I wanted to leave. But I'd promised I wouldn't. I just sat there, staring into the fire, thinking about the Gobi Desert, and the bones of the big lizards and the way the light of the sun had filled up the entire world. I thought of Claudia. I smelled the wick of the lamp.
"I'm sorry, I don't mean to be cruel to you," he said.
"Well, why the hell not? I can't think of a finer choice for cruelty. Besides, I'm not always so kind to you."
"What do you really want? What is your overriding passion?"
I thought of Marius, and Louis, who had both asked me that same question many a time.
"What could redeem what I've done?" I asked. "I meant to put an end to the killer. He was a man-eating tiger, my brother. I lay in wait for him. But the old woman-she was a child in the forest, nothing more. But what does it matter?" I thought of those wretched creatures whom I'd taken earlier this evening. Fd left such carnage in the back alleys of London. "I wish I could remember that it doesn't matter," I said. "I meant to save her. But what good would one act of mercy be in the face of all Fve done? I'm damned if there is a God or a Devil. Now why don't you go on with your religious talk? The odd thing is, I find talk of God and the Devil remarkably soothing. Tell me more about the Devil. He's changeable, surely. He's smart. He must feel. Why ever would he remain static?"
"Exactly. You know what it says in the Book of Job."
"Remind me."
"Well, Satan is there in heaven, with God. God says, where have you been? And Satan says, roaming around the earth! It's a regular conversation. And they begin arguing about Job. Satan believes Job's goodness is founded entirely upon his good fortune. And God agrees to let Satan torment Job. This is the most nearly true picture of the situation which we possess. God doesn't know everything. The Devil is a good friend of his. And the whole thing is an experiment. And this Satan is a far cry from being the Devil as we know him now, worldwide."
"You're really speaking of these ideas as if they were real beings. . ."
"I think they are real," he said, his voice trailing off slightly as he fell into his thoughts. Then he roused himself. "I want to tell you something. Actually I should have confessed it before now. In a way, I'm as superstitious and religious as the next man. Because all this is based on a vision of sorts-you know, the sort of revelation that affects one's reason."
"No, I don't know. I have dreams but without revelation," I said. "Explain, please."
He sank back into reverie again, looking at the fire.
"Don't shut me out," I said softly.
"Hmmm. Right. I was thinking how to describe it. Well, you know I am a Candomble priest still. I mean I can summon invisible forces: the pest spirits, the astral tramps, whatever one wants to call them ... the poltergeist, the little haunts. That means I must have always had a latent ability to see spirits."
"Yes. I suppose . . ."
"Well, I did see something once, something inexplicable, before I ever went to Brazil." "Yes?"
"Before Brazil, I'd pretty much discounted it. In fact, it was so disturbing, so perfectly unaccountable, that I'd put it out of my mind by the time I went to Rio. Yet now, I think of it all the time. I can't stop myself from thinking of it. And that's why I've turned to the Bible, as if I'll find some wisdom there."
"Tell me."
"Happened in Paris right before the war. I was there with my mother. I was in a cafe on the Left Bank, and I don't even remember now which cafe it was, only that it was a lovely spring day and a simply grand time to be in Paris, as a!l the songs say. I was drinking a beer, reading the English papers, and I realized I was overhearing a conversation." He drifted away again. "I wish I knew what really happened," he murmured under his breath.
He sat forward, gathered up the poker in his right hand, an jabbed at the logs, sending a plume of fiery sparks up the dark bricks.
I wanted desperately to pull him back, but I waited. At last he went on.
"I was in this cafe, as I said."
"Yes."
"And I realized I was overhearing this strange conversation . . . and it wasn't in English and it wasn't in French . . . and gradually I came to know that it wasn't in any language really, and yet it was fully understandable to me. I put down my paper, and began to concentrate. On and on it went. It was a sort of argument. And suddenly I didn't know whether or not the voices were audible in any conventional sense. I wasn't sure anyone else could actually hear this! I looked up and slowly turned around.
"And there they were . . . two beings, seated at the table talking to each other, and just for a moment, it seemed normal-two men in conversation. I looked back at my paper, and this swimming feeling came over me. I had to anchor myself to something, to fix on the paper for a moment and then the tabletop, and make the swimming cease. The noise of the cafe came back like a full orchestra. And I knew I'd just turned and looked at two individuals who weren't human beings.
"I turned around again, forcing myself to focus tightly, to be aware of things, keenly aware. And there they were still, and it was painfully clear they were iflusory. They simply weren't of the same fabric as everything else. Do you know what I'm saying? I can break it down into parts. They weren't being illuminated by the same light, for instance, they existed in some realm where the light was from another source."
"Like the light in Rembrandt."
"Yes, rather like that. Their clothes and their faces were smoother than those of human beings. Why, the whole vision was of a different texture, and that texture was uniform in all its details."
"Did they see you?"
"No. I mean to say, they didn't look at me, or acknowledge me. They looked at each other, they went on talking, and I picked up the thread again instantly. It was God talking to the Devil and telling the Devil that he must go on doing the job. And the Devil didn't want to do it. He explained that his term had already been too long. The same thing was happening to him that had happened to all the others. God said that He understood, but the Devil ought to know how important he was, he couldn't simply shirk his duties, it wasn't that simple, God needed him, and needed him to be strong. And all this was very amicable."