The Wanderess (24 page)

Chapter Twenty-seven

My wanderess and I walked back down the shabby streets around
the rue Saint-Denis. I was torn between my honor and my wish to
be with her, until finally I decided those sentiments were one and
the same… “Saskia,” I said to her, “a man cannot watch the woman
he loves suffer to sleep at night in a miserable place. Let us then
pay for only two nights at this strange hostelry. The day after
tomorrow, we will check-out in the morning and go to the post
office to see if Juhani came through on the money. If he hasn’t,
we will use the rest of what we have to buy you a ticket to Italy. I
will then go to Madrid and take an advance from Juhani, and then
come immediately to Florence to meet you. Can you promise me
to go along with this? Otherwise, I won’t be able to sleep at
night…”

“I agree to this. We will both leave Paris the day after
tomorrow, either together or alone.”

At the hostelry, I paid for two rooms for two nights and
gave the attendant one franc for a tip, telling him that I wanted
our two rooms opposite each other in the courtyard, facing one
another so that we could look out of our windows and see the
other one. The attendant agreed to this and showed Saskia to her
gate, and me to mine.

My room was cold, there was mold on the walls; but the
sheets were clean and the bed smelled fine. The night was clear
outside and I could easily see across the courtyard, which was
only about forty paces wide, to where Saskia stood in her room
waving to me, bathed in the yellow light. That night we had
several pantomime conversations through our closed windows.
The cobblestone bed of the courtyard was six long floors down
below. At a quarter past ten at night, the gas lamps in all the
rooms shut off automatically and each prisoner in that hostelry
was left to the dark world of his or her private cell.

The first night there, I slept like a stone. In the morning
Saskia signaled to me from her room across the courtyard as soon
as she was ready to come downstairs. Just seeing her that next
day was pleasure in itself, having spent the night in two separate
buildings. She said she hated her room, but that it was a happy
room because she knew I wasn’t too far away.

That day was our last day of innocence together. That
night would bring death and a new epoch. We enjoyed simple
pleasures that day. We didn’t want to spend any money, as we
were afraid we would need to buy Saskia a ticket to Italy the next
day. At lunch, we shared a single loaf of bread. This was enough,
for our spirits were joined through our refusal to separate; thus
our very privations became our delicacies, we feasted together on
our abstinence. I was even fine to go without wine—which was
for the best, as the moon was waning.

* * *
The 1
^st
Revelation…

Ô, it matters not if I die in sorrow, ecstasy, boredom, or pain. Just
so long as I die—not by day, but by night!—while the moon does
wax, and not wane…

Our last night at the hostelry, everything seemed to be
slipping away: from the moon that grew blacker each evening, to
the mild autumn evenings that slipped one by one into the frozen
nights of winter. We returned to the hostelry just before the
curfew after a happy and innocent day walking around Paris. The
thought of coming back to sleep was dreadful, as our rooms were
lonely and miserable places. After saying goodnight on the street,
we walked under the foreboding arch towards the gates. I took a
final look at Saskia as she disappeared through the silent gate of
the women’s quarters. The attendant eyed me carefully from his
station as I turned away from everything, and walked through the
men’s gate, smelling the sour air.

Once inside my room, after locking my door, I checked the
bed for insects. I barely had time to get undressed before the gas
lamps shut off. The night was clear yet the moon was thin, and
the hostelry beyond my window was steeped in darkness. Only
the lights in the halls remained burning, thus I could see a slim
beam of light outlining the shape of my door. For a long time, I
stood at my window, staring out. I tried to imagine Saskia in the
pitch-black of her room. Had she been lying in her bed? Or was
she at the window looking out to me, as I was looking to her? I
eventually shrugged my shoulders, got into the bed, and lay on
my back thinking of how Saskia and I would be abandoning Paris
that next morning—
come-what-may
—whether we were together
or separate, all that would depend on the whim of fortune. I was
so soul-sick, I never did sleep that night. It must have been four
or five in the morning, (the nights were so long, it could have
been later), that I heard a short, quick knock on my door. It was
a knock that belonged to a hard hand. I leapt up in the darkness,
unable to determine where the door was.

“Who is it?” I demanded, loud and sharp.
“Maintenance!” called a man’s voice.

“Damn you! I didn’t call maintenance… what time is it?!”
While I stood in that utterly black room cursing, I heard the
sound of the bolt on my door being unlocked, whoever it was had
a key or else picked the lock. My door began to open slowly… the
light from the hall then spilled into my room cutting the black
silhouette of a very tall man standing in my doorway. He was
carrying a lit lantern but held it in front of his face so that it
obscured his features completely. The only thing I saw around
the blinding hallow of lantern light was the illumination of the
man’s black coat and his black hat.

I clenched my fists, ready to leap on him. The man said
calmly, “That won’t help you tonight, Saul.”

“How do you know my name? Who are you?!”
“Sit down on the bed, Saul. We’ll have a little talk.”

I backed away from the intruder until my legs hit the bed
frame, causing me to stumble and almost land on my back. It was
then the intruder took away the lantern away from in front of his
face and I recognized him… “You!” I called out, looking at that
long and gaunt face that belonged to none other than the
clairvoyant from Málaga.

“It’s you! Dragomir! You’re in Paris?!…”
“I knew you’d remember me, Saul… Relax your fists.
Don’t try to strike me, there are others outside.”
“How did you get in here? Past the guard? How did you
get a key to my room?”

“The attendant was ‘tied-up,’ as you would say—
still is,
actually
—so I helped myself to his keys. Sit on the bed. I want to
talk to you a moment.” Dragomir set the lantern on a wooden
footstool near the door, and he closed the door. The other stool
in my room, he pulled close to my bed and sat himself down on it.
By now I was accustomed to the lantern-light in my room, so I
could discern clearly the features of his face, his hands, his
clothing.

“Please, sit on the bed so we can talk. I have come for
matters of peace, you have my word.”

“Is your word good, Dragomir? Just as you said your
poisoned opium was good opium? Did you come to finish what
you wanted to finish by sending me to Penelope Baena’s?”

“You thought that was a trap, did you? No, Saul. I did,
however, hear what happened to you at Miss Baena’s home, and
yes, I admit I gave you poisoned opium
on purpose
… but Saul,
the
poisoned opium was meant for Señorita Baena! You
were not
supposed to eat her opium.
Your own opium was not poisoned!
I
could not have known you were going to eat her opium!”

“…Going to be
forced
to eat it,” I corrected him, “So you
didn’t want to poison me, alright, you just wanted me to commit
murder?”

“Not murder. It wasn’t poisoned to the extent it would kill
the woman—only make her very sick, as you yourself
unfortunately found out. But it all turned out well, didn’t it? You
are in Paris, and you are with an absolutely gorgeous girl as a
result! ..
are you not happy?!”

“How did you know about her?! How did you find us
here?! Tell me,
how did you know that I was in Paris?!”

“Oh, Saul, come now… it’s impossible
not
to know where
you are these days. Saul, ‘the son of Solarus of Tripoli,’ lives a very
transparent life in Paris, you ought to know. I see you regularly at
the Comédie-Française. I also saw you once on the Île SaintLouis… I was in a house talking out of the window to a woman in
the yard…”

I felt the blood rush out of me when he said this. I
realized then, that mysterious man in the window, the mysterious
man on the balcony at the Comédie-Française… they were both
him… Dragomir! He was the “messenger,” the one who never
stopped showing up in my life!…

I shook my fist at him… “
So it was you! You were the man
who
followed me in Valencia…
You
were the one in Barcelona…
You
were the skipper at the docks, and
you
are the one who gave
me directions to find a hospital the night after the night you
poisoned me! You have been following me! You, Dragomir!…
And whatever your motivation is, it the same motivation that
brought you to Paris this time!…
You have followed me here!”

Dragomir simply raised his eyebrows… “Who knows
whom
I have been following, my dear Saul… but no, to reassure you, if I
have
been keeping tabs on you, it certainly was
not
to see that you
poisoned Señorita Baena. Anyways, let’s forget it, please, for
tonight I’ve come on business. I’ve come to help you, Saul. ‘How,’
you ask? I’ll show you how… Come with me to the window. Let’s
look down at the courtyard.”

I walked beside Dragomir to the window of my room. I
watched his movements carefully, full of suspicion, mistrust. I
opened the pane and felt the frozen chill of the late-autumn air
against my face. The lights were off in the rooms of the women’s
quarters across the way. Down in the courtyard, four tall street
lanterns were lit to keep sentry in the night. All the gas lamps
were unlit, as was usual while the tenants slept. Beneath the
lanterns, the cobblestones of the courtyard shone slick and dark
with the rain from the evening past.

“In a moment,” said Dragomir, “you will see what looks
like a very short and oddly-shaped woman enter this courtyard…”
I stayed silent and watched below.

“…I say ‘looks like’ a woman, because in actuality, it isn’t;
it’s a man you know: my servant Pulpawrecho. He’ll be dressed
like a woman. He wants more than anything to gain access to the
female quarters tonight. He would even die for it….
Do you know
why?…
”

I shook my head. He continued… “Remember in Málaga
when we told you the story of how Pulpawrecho and I met? It
started with a thirteen-year-old girl he was stalking in the streets.
And how she kissed her hands as she read my name and title:
‘Clairvoyant.’

“…Because Pulpawrecho knew that she had consulted me
for her fortune, he assumed
—and rightly so, by the way!—
that I
could keep track of her long into the future. This is why he
begged me to let him be my servant. He knew that someday—
yes,
someday!—
I would have the heart to pay him for his loyal service.
And so he’s worked for me… waiting and waiting… Now he’s
decided that tonight’s the night! So, tonight he has come here to
collect on what he is owed…”

I didn’t make the connection right away. So Dragomir
continued with a twist of a smile, “Let us just say that it has taken
Pulpy four years—
yes, four long years!—
to catch-up with the fee
that he requested for his loyal service; but it was not for nothin
g
—
not for nothing, you see!
Tonight, Pulpawrecho has now finally
caught up with his little girl!”

At that moment a crash sounded in the courtyard. It
sounded like sheets of glass breaking on stones. And then there
was the sudden light of a dozen fires: the gas lamps in the
courtyard lit up with the crashing sound, they chugged their
flames. I looked out the window, scanning the pools of light in
the dark night, wondering why the gas lamps had come on. And
then, there in the center of the courtyard, I spotted a terribly
deformed feminine creature. She wore a sort-of dress: mud
brown, with coarse twill fabric. In all actuality, it was not a dress,
but a potato sack. The woman stopped in the middle of the
courtyard looking left and right, and then… upwards… apparently
sizing-up the hostelry. But when her head lifted up for the first
time, it sent her knotty, long hair tumbling down to the ground—
you see it was a wig! Then I understood what Dragomir had
meant about the creature dressed as a lady, a deformed lady
entering the hostelry; it was no lady—
it was a Pulpawrecho!

“Dragomir!…” I whispered loud and urgently, “What is
your servant doing down there?! And dressed like a woman!…”

“He has special reasons to want to get through the
women’s gate tonight… You realize, don’t you son of Solarus, that
tonight is only the second meeting between us two? Even if you
say you’ve seen me ‘here and there’ since then, tonight is only the
second night we meet together as Saul and Dragomir. And just as
Pulpawrecho stole your gold watch on the first night we met you
down in Málaga, on this second night he has decided to steal your
girl.”

Dragomir pursed his lips silent, while below, Pulpawrecho
disappeared through the women’s gate. Dragomir the clairvoyant,
meanwhile, resumed narrating scenes from my life, from my
future… “In a few moments, you see, Pulpawrecho will be in your
girlfriend’s room. And once he’s there…”

“Once he’s there?!” I demanded, flashing my eyes from
master above to servant below…
“Where has he gone?!”
I pounded
the window of my room so hard that one of the plates of glass fell
inside my room and shattered on the floor. I turned and started
for the door… “I’m going downstairs!” I yelled furiously, “I will
catch Pulpawrecho before he reaches her room.”