Майкл Суэнвик - Даргер и Довесок (ЛП)

The morning had been spent, as usual, in another round of the interminable negotiations with Monsieur’s business agents, three men of such negligible personality that Surplus privately referred to them as Ci, Ça, and l’Autre. They were drab and lifeless creatures who existed, it sometimes seemed, purely for the purpose of preventing an agreement of any sort from coming to fruition. “They are waiting to be bribed,” Darger explained when Surplus took him aside to complain of their recalcitrance.

“Then they will wait forever. Before we can begin distributing banknotes, we must first receive our earnest money. The pump must be primed. Surely even such dullards as Ci, Ça, and l’Autre can understand that much.”

“Greed has rendered them impotent. Just as a heart can be made to beat so fast that it will seize up, so too here. Still, with patience I believe they can be made to see reason.”

“Your patience, I suspect, is born of long afternoons and rumpled bed sheets.”

Darger merely looked tolerant.

Yet it was not patience that broke the logjam, but its opposite. For that very morning, Monsieur burst into the conference room, carried in a chair by his apes and accompanied by his Dedicated Doctor. “It has been weeks,” he said without preamble. “Why are the papers not ready?”

Ci, Ça, and l’Autre threw up their hands in dismay.

“The terms they require are absurd, to say the…”

“No sensible businessman would…”

“They have yet to provide any solid proof of their…”

“No, and in their position, neither would I. Popotin —” he addressed one of his apes — “the pouch.”

Popotin slipped a leather pouch from his shoulder and clumsily held it open. Monsieur drew out three handwritten sheets of paper and threw them down on the table. “Here are my notes,” he said. “Look them over and then draw them up in legal form.” The cries of dismay from Ci, Ça, and l’Autre were quelled with one stern glare. “I expect them to be complete within the week.”

Surplus, who had quickly scanned the papers, said, “You are most generous, Monsieur. The sum on completion is nothing short of breathtaking.” Neither he nor Darger expected to collect that closing sum, of course. But they were careful to draw attention away from the start-up monies (a fraction of the closing sum, though by their standards enormous), that were their true objective.

Monsieur snorted. “What matter? I will be dead by then.”

“I see that the Tour d’Etranger is to be given to the City of Paris,” Darger said. “That is very generous of you, Monsieur. Many a man in your position would prefer to keep such a valuable property in their family.”

“Eh? What family?”

“I speak, sir, of your wife.”

“She will be taken care of.”

“Sir?” Darger, who was sensitive to verbal nuance, felt a cold tingling at the back of his neck, a premonition of something significant being left unspoken. “What does that mean?”

“It means just what I said.” Monsieur snapped his fingers to catch his apes’ attention. “Take me away from here.”

When Darger got back to his rooms, Mignonette was already waiting there. She lounged naked atop his bed, playing with the chrome revolver she had sent him before ever they had met. First she cuddled it between her breasts. Then she brought it to her mouth, ran her pink tongue up the barrel, and briefly closed her lips about its very tip. He found the sight disturbingly arousing.

“You should be careful,” Darger said. “That’s a dangerous device.”

“Pooh! Monsieur had it programmed to defend me as well as himself.” She placed the muzzle against her heart, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. “See? It will not fire at either of us.” She handed it to him. “Try it for yourself.”

With a small shudder of distaste, Darger placed the gun on a table at some distance from the bed. “I have a question to ask you,” he said.

Mignonette smiled in an amused way. She rolled over on her stomach, and rose up on her knees and elbows. Her long tail moved languidly. Her cat’s eyes were green as grass. “Do you want your answer now,” she asked, “or later?”

Put that way, the question answered itself.

So filled with passion was Darger that he had no memory of divesting himself of his clothing, or joining Mignonette on the bed. He only knew that he was deep inside her, and that that was where he wanted to be. Her fur was soft and sleek against his skin. It tickled him ever so slightly—just enough to be perverse, but not enough to be undesirable. Fleetingly, he felt like a zoophile, and then, even more fleetingly, realized that this must be very much like what Surplus’s lady-friends experienced. But he abandoned that line of thought quickly.

Like any properly educated man of his era, Darger was capable of achieving orgasm three or four times in succession without awkward periods of detumescence in between. With Mignonette, he could routinely bring that number up to five. Today, for the first time, he reached seven.

“You wanted to ask me a question?” Mignonette said, when they were done. She lay within the crook of his arm, her cold nose snuggled up against his neck. Playfully, she put her two hands, claws sheathed, against his side and kneaded him, as if she were a true, unmodified cat.

“Hmm? Ah! Yes.” Darger felt wonderfully, gloriously relaxed. He doubted he would ever move again. It took an effort for him to focus his thoughts. “I was wondering…exactly what your husband meant when he said that he would have you ‘taken care of,’ after his death.”

“Oh.” She drew away from him, and sat up upon her knees. “That. I thought you were going to ask about the pamphlet.”

Again, a terrible sense of danger overcame Darger. He was extremely sensitive to such influences. It was an essential element of his personality. “Pamphlet?” he said lightly.

“Yes, that silly little thing about a man in a rowboat. Vingt Ans… something like that. I’ve had my book scouts scouring the stalls and garrets for it since I-forget-when.”

“I had no idea you were looking for such a thing.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I was looking for it. And I have found it too.”

“You have what?”

The outer doors of their apartments slammed open, and the front room filled with voices. Somebody — it could only be Monsieur — was shouting at the top of his weak voice. Surplus was clearly trying to soothe him. The Dedicated Doctor was there as well, urging his client to calm himself.

Darger leapt from the bed, and hastily threw on his clothes. “Wait here,” he told Mignonette. Having some experience in matters of love, he deftly slipped between the doors without opening them wide enough to reveal her presence.

He stepped into absolute chaos.

Monsieur stood in the middle of the room waving a copy of an ancient pamphlet titled Vingt Ans dans un Bateau à Rames in the air. On its cover was a crude drawing of a man in a rowboat holding a magnet from a fishing pole. He shook it until it rattled. “Swindlers!” he cried. “Confidence tricksters! Deceivers! Oh, you foul creatures!”

“Please, sir, consider your leucine aminopeptidases,” the Dedicated Doctor murmured. He wiped the little man’s forehead with a medicated cloth. “You’ll put your inverse troponin ratio all out of balance. Please sit down again.”

“I am betrayed!”

“Sir, consider your blood pressure.”

“The Tour d’Etranger was to be my immortality!” Monsieur howled. “What can such false cozeners as you know of immortality?”

“I am certain there has been a misunderstanding,” Surplus said.

“Consider your fluoroimmunohistochemical systems. Consider your mitochondrial refresh rate.”

The two apes, released from their chair-carrying chore, were running in panicked circles. One of them brushed against a lamp and sent it crashing to the floor.

It was exactly the sort of situation that Darger was best in. Thinking swiftly, he took two steps into the room and in an authoritative voice cried, “If you please!”

Silence. Every eye was upon him.

Smiling sternly, Darger said. “I will not ask for explanations. I think it is obvious to all of us what has happened. How Monsieur has come to misunderstand the import of the chapbook I cannot understand. But if, sir, you will be patient for the briefest moment, all will be made clear to you.” He had the man! Monsieur was so perfectly confused (and anxious to be proved wrong, to boot) that he would accept anything Darger told him. Even the Dedicated Doctor was listening. Now he had but to invent some plausible story — for him a trifle — and the operation was on track again. “You see, there is —”

Behind him, the doors opened quietly. He put a hand over his eyes.

Mignonette d’Etranger entered the room, fully dressed, and carrying the chrome revolver. In her black silks, she was every inch the imperious widow. (Paradoxically, the fact that she obviously wore nothing beneath those silks only made her all the more imposing.) But she had thrown her veils back to reveal her face: cold, regal, and scornful.

“You!” She advanced wrathfully on her husband. “How dare you object to my taking a lover? How dare you!”

“You…you were…” The little man looked bewildered by her presence.

“I couldn’t get what I need at home. It was only natural that I should look for it elsewhere. So it costs you a day of your life every time we make love! Aren’t I worth it? So it costs you three days to tie me up and whip me! So what? Most men would die for the privilege.”

She pressed the gun into his hands.

“If I mean so little to you,” she cried histrionically, “then kill me!” She darted back and struck a melodramatic pose alongside Darger. “I will die beside the man I love!”

“Yes…” Belated comprehension dawned upon Monsieur’s face, followed closely by a cruel smile. “The man you love.”

He pointed the pistol at Darger and pulled the trigger.

But in that same instant, Mignonette flung herself before her lover, as if to shelter his body with her own. In the confines of so small a room, the gun’s report was world-shattering. She spun around, clutched her bosom, and collapsed in the bedroom doorway. Blood seeped onto the carpet from beneath her.

Monsieur held up the gun and stared at it with an expression of total disbelief.

It went off again.

He collapsed dead upon the carpet.

The police naturally suspected the worst. But a dispassionate exposition of events by the Dedicated Doctor, a creature compulsively incapable of lying, and an unobtrusive transfer of banknotes from Surplus allayed all suspicions. Monsieur d’Etranger’s death was obviously an accident d’amour, and Darger and Surplus but innocent bystanders. With heartfelt expressions of condolence, the officers left.

When the morticians came to take away Monsieur’s body, the Dedicated Doctor smiled. “What a horrible little man he was!” he exclaimed. “You cannot imagine what a relief it is to no longer give a damn about his health.” He had signed death warrants for both Monsieur and his widow, though his examination of her had been cursory at best. He hadn’t even touched the body.

Darger roused himself from his depressed state to ask, “Will you be returning for Madame d’Etranger’s body?”

“No,” the Dedicated Doctor said. “She is a cat, and therefore the disposition of her corpse is a matter for the department of sanitation.”

Darger turned an ashen white. But Surplus deftly stepped beside him and seized the man’s wrists in his own powerful paws. “Consider how tenuous our position is here,” he murmured. Then the door closed, and they were alone again. “Anyway — what body?”