The Dragon Griaule (22 page)

Six

Korrogly’s dissatisfaction did not wane with time; he remained uncertain of Lemos’ innocence, and everything that happened as a result of the gemcutter’s acquittal caused his dissatisfaction to grow more extreme.

Mirielle was declared incompetent, and the temple and its grounds were ceded to Lemos, who promptly sold them for an enormous sum; the buildings were razed and a hotel was planned for the site. Lemos also sold The Father of Stones at a large profit back to Henry Sichi, for it was now considered a relic of Griaule and thus of inestimable worth, and Sichi wanted it for an exhibit in the museum he had built to house such items. Lemos had invested the majority of his new wealth in indigo mills and silver mines, and had purchased a mansion out on Ayler Point; there, with the court’s permission, he and a staff of nurses took charge of nursing Mirielle back to health. They were rarely seen in public, but word had it that she was doing splendidly, and that father and daughter had reconciled.

Whenever he had a spare hour, his practice having grown large and profitable following the trial, Korrogly would use the time to do the pretrial work that he neglected and continued to investigate all the circumstances surrounding Zemaille’s death. In this he made no headway until almost a year and a half later, when he interviewed an ex-member of the dragon cult on the beach below the bluff where the temple had once stood. The man, a slight balding fellow whose innocuous appearance belied his dissolute past, was nervous, and Korrogly had been forced to pay him well in order to elicit his candor. He was of little help for the most part, and it was only toward the end of the interview that he provided information that substantiated Korrogly’s doubts.

‘We all thought it strange that Mirielle took up with Mardo,’ he said, ‘considering what happened to her mother.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Korrogly asked.

‘Her mother,’ said the man. ‘Patricia. She came to the temple one night, the night she died as a matter of fact.’

‘What?’

‘You didn’t know?’

‘No, I’ve heard nothing about it.’

‘Well, I don’t suppose it’s public knowledge. She only came the once, and that same night she drowned.’

‘What happened?’

‘Who can say? Word was that Mardo had her into his bed. Probably drugged her. Maybe she fought him. Mardo wouldn’t have liked that.’

‘Are you saying he killed her?’

‘Somebody did.’

‘Why didn’t any of you come forward with this?’

‘We were afraid.’

‘Of what?’

‘Griaule.’

‘That’s ludicrous.’

‘Is it, now? You’re the man who got Lemos off, you must understand what Griaule’s capable of.’

‘But what you’re saying, it throws a different light on things. Perhaps Lemos and Mirielle plotted this whole affair to get revenge, perhaps . . .’

‘Even if they did,’ said the man, ‘it was still Griaule’s idea.’

Following this interview, Korrogly checked the tides on the night of Patricia Lemos’ death and discovered that they had been sweeping out from the temple bluff toward Ayler Point, that had her body entered the water in the early morning, she might well – as had been the case – have washed ashore on Ayler Point. That, however, was the extent of his enlightenment. Despite exploring every avenue, he could come up with no evidence to implicate Lemos or his daughter in a plot against Zemaille. The matter continued to prey on him, to cause him bad dreams and sleepless nights; having been used, he had an overwhelming compulsion to understand the nature of that
usage, to put into perspective all that happened, so that he could know the character of his fate. He did not know whether he wanted more to believe that he had been manipulated by Griaule or by Lemos and his daughter. Some nights he thought he would prefer to cling to the notion of free will, to think that he had been the victim of human wiles, not those of some creature as inexplicable as God; other nights he hoped that he had won the case fairly and freed an innocent man. The only thing he was certain of was that he wanted clarity.

Finally, having no other course of action open, he went to the source, to Lemos’ mansion on Ayler Point, and asked to see the gemcutter. A maid advised him that the master was not in, but that if he would wait, she would find out if the mistress was at home. After a brief absence she returned and ushered him onto a sunny verandah that overlooked the sea and provided a breathtaking view of the Almintra quarter. The strong sunlight applied a crust of diamantine glitter to the surface of the water, spreading it wider whenever the wind riffled the tops of the wavelets, and the gabled houses on the shore looked charming, quaint, their squalor hidden by distance. Mirielle, clad in a beige silk robe, was reclining on a lounge; on a small table close to her hand lay a long pipe and a number of dark pellets that Korrogly suspected to be opium. There was a clouded look to her eyes, and though she was still lovely, the marks of dissipation had eroded the fine edge of her good looks; a black curl was plastered to her sweaty cheek, and there was an unhealthy shine to her skin.

‘It’s wonderful to see you,’ she said lazily, indicating that he should take a chair beside her.

‘Is it?’ he said, feeling the rise of old longings, old bitternesses. God, he thought, I still love her, despite everything; she could commit any excess, any vileness, and I would love her.

‘Of course.’ She let out a fey laugh. ‘I doubt you’ll believe me, but I was quite fond of you.’

‘Fond!’ He made the word into an epithet.

‘I told you I couldn’t love you.’

‘You told me you’d try.’

She shrugged; her hand twitched toward the pipe. ‘Things didn’t work out.’

‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’ He gestured at the luxurious surround. ‘Things have worked out quite well for you.’

‘And for you,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard you’ve become a great success. All the ladies want you for their . . .’ A giggle. ‘Their solicitor.’

A large wave broke on the shore beneath the verandah, spreading a lace of foam halfway up the beach; the sound appeared to make Mirielle sleepy; her lids fluttered down, and she gave a long sigh that caused her robe to slip partway off one pale, poppling breast.

‘I tried to be honest with you,’ she said. ‘And I was. As honest as I knew how to be.’

‘Then why didn’t you tell me about your mother and Zemaille?’

Her eyes blinked open. ‘What?’

‘You heard me.’ She sat up, pulling her robe closed, and regarded him with a mixture of confusion and displeasure.

‘Why have you come here?’

‘For answers. I need answers.’

‘Answers!’ She laughed again. ‘You’re more a fool than I thought.’

Stung by that, he said, ‘Maybe I’m a fool, but I’m no whore.’

‘A lawyer who thinks he’s not a whore! Will wonders never cease!’

‘Tell me,’ he demanded. ‘Nothing can happen to you now, your father can’t be tried again. It was you, wasn’t it? This was all a scheme, a plot to kill Zemaille and avenge your mother. I don’t know how you pulled it off, but . . .’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Mirielle,’ he said. ‘I need to know. I won’t hurt you, I promise. I could never hurt you. It almost killed me to have to do what I did to you in court.’

She met his eyes for a long moment. ‘It was easy,’ she said at last. ‘You were easy. That’s why we picked you . . . because you were so lonely, so naive. We just kept you spinning. With love, with fear, with misdirection. And finally with drugs. Before I
– or rather Janice – took you to the temple, I slipped a drug into your drink. It made you highly suggestible.’

‘That’s what made me hallucinate?’

She looked perplexed.

‘The hidey hole behind the bed. The snakes, the . . .’

‘No, that was Mardo’s illusion. It was real enough. The drug only made you believe what I wanted you to – that we were in danger, being pursued. All that.’

‘What about the scale?’

‘The scale?’

‘Yes, the image of the dead wizard in the scale above Zemaille’s bed. Archiochus, I guess it was.’

Her brow wrinkled. ‘You were so frightened, you must have been seeing things.’

She got to her feet, swayed, righted herself by catching hold of the verandah railing. He thought he saw a softening in her face, the trace of a longing equal to his own, and he also thought he saw her madness, her instability. She would have had to be insane to do what she had, to be in love and not in love at the same time, to inhabit those roles fully, to lie and deceive with such compulsive thoroughness.

‘If we’d presented our evidence in a straightforward way,’ she said, ‘Daddy still might have been convicted. We needed to orchestrate the trial, to manipulate the jury. So we chose you to be the conductor. And you were wonderful! You believed everything we handed you.’ She turned, let her robe drop to expose her perfect back and said in a northern accent, ‘I’ve no great love for dragons.’

It was Janice’s voice.

He gazed at her, uncomprehending. ‘But she fell,’ he said. ‘I saw it.’

‘A net,’ she said. ‘Rigged just below the bluff.’ This she said in a fluting voice, the voice of the old woman, Kirin.

‘My God!’ he said.

‘A little make-up can do miracles,’ she said. ‘And I’ve always been good at doing voices. We planned for years and years.’

‘I still don’t understand. There were so many variables. How
could you control them all? The nine witnesses, for example. How could you know they would run?’

She gave him a pitying look.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Right. There were no witnesses, were there?’

‘Only Mardo and I. And of course Daddy didn’t throw the stone. We couldn’t take a chance on him missing. We overpowered Mardo, and then he smashed in his skull with it. Then I took drugs to make it look as if I’d been laid out on the altar. The cult had already disbanded, you see. They were all afraid of the great work. It was already in process of breaking up when I joined. That was the heart of the plan. Isolating Mardo. I spent hours encouraging him in the great work; I knew the others would abandon him if they thought he actually might complete it. They were more afraid of Griaule than of him.’

‘Then that part of it was the truth?’

She nodded. ‘Mardo was obsessed with killing Griaule. He was mad!’

‘What about the knife, the hooded figure?’

She bowed. ‘I didn’t intend to injure your hand, merely to frighten you. I was so worried because I’d hurt you. I had to run around to the rear of the shop and climb the back stairs in order to make you think I’d been in the apartment, and I almost decided to forget about the plan, just to run to you and take care of you. I’m sorry.’

‘You’re sorry! God!’

‘You haven’t got anything to complain about! Your life’s better than it’s ever been. And like you said, Mardo’s death was no great loss to anyone. He was evil.’

‘I don’t even know what that word means anymore.’

Looking back, he could see now the clues he should have seen long before, the similarities in nervous gesture between her and Kirin, her overwrought reaction when he had tried to talk about her mother, all the little inconsistencies, the too-pat connections. What an idiot he had been!

‘Poor Adam.’ She walked over to him, stroked his hair. ‘You expect the world to be so simple, and it is . . . just not in the way you want it to be.’

Her smell of heated oranges aroused him, and he pulled her
onto his lap, both angry and lustful. With half his mind he tried to reject her, because to want her would ratify all the duplicity in which he had played a part and further weaken his fraying moral fiber; but the stronger half needed her, and he kissed her mouth, tasting the smoky sweetness of the opium. His lips moved along the curve of her neck to the slopes of her breasts. She responded sluggishly at first, then with abandon, whispering, ‘I’ve missed you so much, I love you, I really do,’ and it seemed she was as she once had been, open and giving and soft. It startled him to see this, to realize that the vulnerability underlying her dissipation was no act, for he had come to doubt everything about her. He kissed her mouth again, and he might have taken her then and there, but a man’s voice interrupted them, saying, ‘I wish you’d be more discreet, darling.’

Korrogly jumped up, dumping Mirielle onto the floor.

Lemos was standing in the doorway, a smile touching the corners of his lips. He looked prosperous, content, a far cry from the gray failure whom Korrogly had defended. His clothes were expensive, rings adorned his hands, and there was about him such an air of health and well-being, it seemed an obscenity, like the ruddy complexion of a sated vampire. Mirielle scrambled up and went to him; he draped an arm about her shoulders.

‘I’m surprised to find you here, Mister Korrogly,’ said Lemos. ‘But I don’t suppose I should be. My daughter is alluring, is she not?’

‘I told him, Daddy,’ Mirielle said in a sugary, babyish voice. ‘About Mardo.’

‘Did you now?’

To his horror, Korrogly saw that Lemos was fondling his daughter’s breast beneath the beige silk; she arched her back to meet the pressure of his hand, but he thought he detected tension in her expression.

Lemos, apparently registering Korrogly’s revulsion, said, ‘But you didn’t tell him everything, did you?’

‘Not about Mama. He thinks . . .’

‘I can imagine what he thinks.’

Lemos’ smile was unwavering, but behind it, in those gray
eyes, was something cold and implacable that made Korrogly afraid.

‘You look disturbed,’ Lemos said. ‘Surely a man of your experience can imagine how love might spring up between a man and his daughter. It’s frowned upon, true. But society’s condemnation of such a relationship need not diminish it. In our case, it only made us desperate.’

The final pieces were beginning to fall into place for Korrogly. ‘It wasn’t Zemaille who killed your wife, was it?’

Lemos smiled.

‘It was you . . . you killed her!’

‘You’d play hell proving it. But let’s say for the sake of argument that you’re right. Let’s say that in order to . . . to enjoy one another fully, Mirielle and I needed privacy, something that Patricia prevented us from having. What better villain to use as our foil than Mardo Zemaille? The temple was at that time always open to the curious. It would have been easy for someone, someone like myself, to convince Patricia that it might be fun to pay the place a visit one night.’