The Devil in Detail, page 8
“You never sleep?” I queried, instead.
“Never,” he confirmed.
“You and God both, then,” I remarked, assuming that all his arguments for his own existence would also apply to the thesis whose antithesis he was.
“Technically, yes,” he agreed, “but I don’t have His capacity for prolonged inattention, so it might be argued that I’m more awake than He is.” I admired the way in which he emphasized the pronouns, to make their reference unmistakable.
“Indeed?” I queried. “But all the Biblical and apocryphal imagery related to the two of you is just fantasy, right?”
“Not all of it,” he said.
“You really did get thrown out of heaven for the sin of pride, then, and condemned to supervise punishments in Hell?”
“Not exactly,” he said. “There was a slight but inevitable philosophical dispute between the two of us, which did result in accusations of pride being thrown around, but there is no Hell of eternal punishments.”
“That’s a relief,” I said, although it wasn’t an anxiety I’d ever seriously entertained, so I really couldn’t have expected any Devil summoned up from the depths of my mind by a psychotropic intervention to endorse the notion. “You’re not here to make a pact with me, then?”
“Of course I am,” he replied, serenely, and took a sip of wine before adding: “Why else would I be here?”
“You’re actually here to bargain for my soul?” I said, incredulously.
“Oh, no,” he said, in a voice that might have been intended to sound reassuring rather than contemptuous, although, after another sip of Pinot Noir, he went on to add, serenely: “You know as well as I do how little that’s worth.”
“I’ve read my Edgar Allan Poe,” I told him. “I’m certainly not going to bet you my head.”
He looked at me slightly askance, then, and said: “What is it, then, that you think you’re doing?”
I was taken slightly aback, but I decided to treat it as a serious question, because it was, I realized, quite an important one. What did I think I was doing? Or, at least, what did I think was happening to me?
“I think I’m hallucinating,” I told him.
“And?” he prompted, inviting me to recognize the inadequacy of the answer.
“And…I’m not exactly certain yet. I guess there’s a sense in which I must be debating with myself, reflecting my own anxieties, momentary and existential, and that I’ve produced you as a kind of foil so that I can hold a discussion with myself, perhaps encouraged by the fact that I’ve just been invited to make contact with your counterpart, although the experimenter calls him the Cosmic Mind rather than God.”
“I don’t call Him that either,” he observed.
“And given all that,” I said, continuing my open train of thought, for the benefit of clarification, “for all your claims to a more secure and elaborate existence than I have, you’re just a fragment of my identity. You aren’t an independent individual genuinely capable of striking bargains. You can’t actually offer me anything, or take anything from me in exchange, can you?”
“Yes I can,” he said, simply. “I do have something to offer and I do want something in exchange.”
“What?” I snapped back.
I was expecting him to say: “What do you want?” because I thought that was the point of the hallucinatory discussion we were having. I thought that I had to be interrogating myself in some sense, trying to ask myself difficult questions and recruiting the Devil to do it because he was slightly easier to entertain than Him, alias the Cosmic Mind.
For the moment, though, he wasn’t prepared to be that blunt. If that was really what he was all about, if that was really why I’d summoned him—assuming that, in some sense, I had summoned him, albeit without being consciously aware of it—he wanted to work up to it by a roundabout route.
What he actually said was: “May I tell you a story?”
Perhaps I should have expected that. I’m a writer, after all, and at that point in time I was a writer in temporary difficulties, what else could I ask of the Devil more urgently than that he tell me a story?
“Please do,” I said.
So he did.
“Let me say right away,” he said, “that I had nothing whatsoever to do with the death of Toby Dammit. If people want to see something of the ‘irony of fate’ in the fact that he lost his head after declaring his wager, that’s up to them, but it was really just one of those things: an accident with a hint of ironic coincidence. There is no fate. Things are not ‘meant to be,’ ironically or otherwise. They just are. Anyway, people bet me their heads all the time, albeit more often tacitly than explicitly, and I always leave their heads on their shoulders when I win, where they can be of some use to me. I would never dream, in a million years, of collecting on such a bet by means of crude mortal violence. That’s not my style.
“You can take my word for that. I always tell the truth. That’s why addicts of deceptive faith call me the Father of Lies, and cynics the Imp of the Perverse.
“If you want my advice, in fact—and you really should, because there’s no one better qualified to offer it—you’ll keep on betting me your head, tacitly if not explicitly. That’s what a head is for. If you aren’t willing to wager your intellect on questions of good and evil, by making real and hypothetical awkward moral judgments, what kind of pathetic excuse for a human being are you? You should always bet the Devil your head, and I’m perfectly sincere in wishing you the best of luck, because I’m a sportsman, and I know how heavily the house percentage is weighed in my favor.
“What you really shouldn’t do, of course, if you value your soul, is bet the Devil your heart. That really is foolish, because that kind of bet, you really can’t win. I’d take no pleasure in the inevitability of your losing, not merely because there’s no pleasure in facile triumph, but because I don’t have the capacity to feel it, even though I have a heart myself. I’m a bad person, I know—by definition—but I couldn’t be half as bad as I am if I didn’t have a heart. I’ve bet my own heart and lost, so I know what it feels like. I know the measure of tragedy, albeit only intellectually, better than anyone.
“But enough boring philosophical commentary; I’m supposed to be telling you a story.
“It happened in New Orleans, back in the early nineteenth century. It was my favorite haunt in the Americas in those days, although not a patch on Paris. I appreciated the tombs, carefully erected above the water table, which filled the entire city with the reek of decay and the phosphorescence of putrescence. I appreciated the city’s eccentric Mardi Gras celebrations—although not as much as Venice’s, obviously—and I appreciated Voudun, which was in the early days of it development then. And I appreciated the decadence—the decadence, perhaps, most of all. That’s the way my esthetic sensibilities are orientated.
“I was staying with a local planter named Jacques Lacroix, to whom I’d obtained a letter of introduction from one of his factors in Marseilles. At least, ‘Jacques Lacroix’ was what he called himself in America; he’d had a different name when he lived in France, and had ended up in the Conciergerie under the Convention and was fortunate to be released by the Directoire. He’d been lucky to escape the guillotine. He was one of the rare immigrants who really had made his fortune in the colonies, rising from humble origins to be the owner of a large estate, a fine house and more than three hundred slaves. Like most slave-owners who’d been little better than a slave himself at one time, he wasn’t a gentle master, but he wasn’t the worst either. He understood that it was good idea to keep the people on whom his fortune depended in good health, and reasonable comfort.
“If there really were a Hell, it would probably have a special circle for slave-owners—obviously, if there had ever been a Hell it would have had to expand its accommodations vastly since Dante’s day—and another for slaves; the former would presumably not be glad of the fact, but the latter probably would, even if some of them were disappointed about not getting into Heaven. They wouldn’t be disappointed if they knew the truth, of course, but they don’t, and they wouldn’t believe me if I told them.
“Lacroix had two other guests staying with him at the time. One of them was an old friend—or an old acquaintance, at least, who made his living, when he wasn’t spending his ill-gotten gains, as a pirate—although he preferred the term ‘corsair.’ His name had once been Jean Dupré, but he naturally preferred to be known in Louisiana as Dupree, and liked to style himself ‘Dancing Jack’ Dupree, because every pirate named Jean, John or Johan liked to style himself ‘Dancing Jack.’ Pirates tend to copy one another relentlessly, because it’s the only way they know how to go about being a pirate; there isn’t a guide-book. When he laid low he usually dropped anchor the secret inlets of the Mississippi delta rather than joining the gang in Tortuga, because he had too many enemies among his own kind.
“Dupree wasn’t really a corsair, of course, in the sense that he’d ever obtained a warrant from Napoléon to harass English shipping—he attacked anyone at all, provided that they were unlikely to fight back—but he liked the idea of being a Romantic figure rather than treacherous brute. Ashore, he posed as a dandy, and was relentless in his pursuit of women. He’d probably committed more rapes than Lacroix, although I don’t have any exact account-books to hand. That’s just the way of the world, of course, but it has to be admitted that Dupree had also slept with more willing women than Lacroix, and I don’t just mean whores. When he was on song, the dandy act sometimes paid off.
“The third guest at the Lacroix House that season was a young Northerner named Abraham Cardingly. He was in the South to do business, representing a manufacturer of agricultural equipment, but the reason he’d been given the job was that he had relatives in the region, albeit distant ones. He was second cousin to Lacroix’s wife, and although they hadn’t ever met before he’d struck up a relationship of sorts by mail, which had proved adequate to save him from the kind of hotel-based existence to which most commercial representatives from the North were condemned.
“Lacroix liked playing the host; he felt that it gave him status and prestige, as well as relieving the boredom. He was one of those men who’d been all energy and ambition while striving to make his fortune, but who didn’t quite know what to do with himself once he’d got it, and liked to have guests in order to have witnesses to assure him that the struggle had been worthwhile and the prize worth winning. In fact, he liked playing host so much that he might have knowingly offered hospitality to the Devil himself, although I’m too polite ever to ask that of a man, no matter how many favors he might owe me. I was making that particular trip under the pseudonym of Savinien de Monfort, although I was careful to disclaim close relationship with the other branches of the family. I represented myself as a traveler for pleasure and education, which was partly true, from Paris, which was also partly true in the sense that I know the city well and have always thought of it as a kind of spiritual home—far more so, at any rate, than any imaginary Pandemonium.
“Naturally, Jacques Lacroix had a beautiful daughter named Lucile. I say naturally, because there wouldn’t be a story if there weren’t a beautiful daughter—not, at least, a story told under the rubric of ‘Never Bet the Devil Your Heart,’ which, if I forgot to mention it, is the title of this one. Equally naturally, she caught the eye of both Abraham Cardingly and Jack Dupree, albeit in somewhat different ways. Cardingly was a Northerner of Puritan descent, if not Puritan inclinations, and his intentions, vague as they were while he wallowed in youthful confusion, were entirely honorable. Jack Dupree’s were not.
“I don’t mean to suggest that Dupree would ever have considered raping Lucile; he wasn’t an honorable man, by any stretch of the imagination, but he knew the value of hospitality, especially to a pirate. Raping a white girl might have closed the entirety of New Orleans to him forever. Seduction, however, was another matter; if he succeeded, Jacque Lacroix wouldn’t like it a bit, and he’d never be invited back to that particular residence—but everyone else would find it rather amusing, and it would only add to his reputation as ‘Dancing Jack.’
“Again, let me say that I’m not responsible for that is any way whatsoever. Things are the way they are. It’s not my fault. I have a role to play, that’s all. I didn’t cast lustful eyes at Lucile Lacroix myself. It would be ludicrous to deny that I’m a seducer of sorts—I have my role to play—but I’m not the kind of seducer that Jack Dupree was ambitious to be, and in which capacity he had some success. Lust isn’t one of my deadly sins.
“Having said that, though, I do take a pride in my appearance when I put on mortal flesh. I’m always handsome. You’ve probably heard different, but most of that is just Church propaganda. When it comes to politics, the Church always goes negative and is never content with half-measures. You really shouldn’t believe the things they say about me, any more than you should believe what they say about Hell, but I must admit that I don’t fight back on that score. For one thing, it’s beneath my dignity, and for another, it actually makes it easier to play my role if people are loaded down with silly and slanderous preconceptions. I don’t say I’ve never manifested myself with hooves, horns and a tail, but I’ve only ever done it to put the wind up Churchmen, in a spirit of good humor. For all normal purposes, I’m handsome. I suppose, in my way, I’m a bit of a dandy—but not like Jack Dupree, or even Lord Byron.
“Now there’s a man who bet me his heart, with disastrous consequences—but that’s another story.
“The nub of this story is that it really wasn’t my fault that Lucile Lacroix took it into her head to fall in love with me and not with Abraham Cardingly or Jack Dupree. I did nothing to encourage her, and had the situation been simpler, I might have been able to let her down gently and courteously, with no harm done. It wasn’t my fault, either, that Jacques Lacroix took it into his head to agree wholeheartedly with his daughter’s ‘choice’ and make his sympathy known to her largely because he didn’t want Dupree or Cardingly turning her head.
“Had I not been there, I suspect that one of the others might have turned her head, because they were certainly trying hard. Cardingly had a romanticized view of the South and its legendary belles, and he thought that he had some kind of claim on Lucile because she was a distant cousin. He didn’t know the details of Jack Dupree’s career, but he didn’t need any help from local gossip to judge what kind of man the pirate was, and that doubtless made him doubly anxious to ‘save’ Lucile from the danger of seduction by such an out-and-out scoundrel. He had nothing against me, of course but he seemed to think that because I was Dupree’s fellow-guest, we must be birds of a feather, and my prepossessing exterior only made him more suspicious of my presumed deceptiveness.
“Not unnaturally, Dupree’s awareness of Cardingly’s interest only added spice to his own; the opportunity to give an honest Northerner a poke in the eye as well as have his wicked way with an innocent virgin whose hormones had only just started to rage was a truly juicy prize in his eyes. Dupree was under no delusions about the similarity of his plumage to mine, but he didn’t quite know what to make of me. He was well aware of Lucile’s interest in me, but as soon as he had observed that it was unreciprocated, he dismissed me as a significant rival, and judged me irrelevant to his own quest—at least initially.
“As I said, none of that was my fault. Nor was it my fault that as time wore on and the days of our residence at the Lacroix House turned into weeks, the combination of circumstances just described gradually filled Cardingly and Dupree with two different varieties of bitter disappointment, tending towards two different varieties of angry desperation. Neither of them made any headway, and both perceived that they were unlikely to make any while I was in the picture, in spite of my diffidence, which only seemed to inflame Lucile’s infatuation with me, and her father’s approval of it.
“To tell the truth, I wasn’t tempted to bring my planned departure forward in order to ease the situation, not just because I still had business to do in the city but because there was a certain amusement in watching my two fellow guests become increasingly fretful, angry with themselves as well as everyone else. I really didn’t think that the matter would come so swiftly to a head; I can’t foresee the future, although my judgments of its likelihood are inevitably more reliable than most. I knew that such rivalries have a synergy that increases their toxicity, but, being calm and rational person myself, I sometimes underestimate the foolish lengths to which humans can be driven by frustrated passion.
“Not unnaturally, it was Jack Dupree who came up with the idea that if he could somehow put me out of the picture, Cardingly wouldn’t be likely to put up sufficient competition to stop him reaching his goal. He would gladly have shot me in the back, of course, and dumped my body in the swamp—much good it would have done him!—but he still had enough presence of mind to know that it would be better by far approach the problem in a different way. He mulled it over for a while, and then came up with a plan of sorts. My relatively modest habits had convinced him that I wasn’t a rich man, and might well be vulnerable to financial disaster.
“With that thought in mind, Dupree suggested a card game, intending to cheat—intending to cheat me, that is; he had no intention of dishonestly taking money off his host, and had no particular designs in Cardingly, because he knew that it would look suspicious if he pauperized us both.
“Cardingly didn’t want to play; he wasn’t a gambler by nature. He was, however, a stranger in a strange land, and he wasn’t entirely sure what the etiquette of such situations was, and Dupree was careful to insinuate, with all the subtlety of which he was capable, that it wouldn’t be polite for him to refuse, and might well be seen as a failure of courage, especially by Mademoiselle Lacroix.
