French Kiss, page 57
“What is it you want from me?” Chris asked. “I cannot absolve you of your sins. I am not a priest.”
“Forgiveness from a man is all I ask,” M. Vosges said.
Chris thought a long time before he said. “I’m sorry. I cannot give it.”
M. Vosges looked for an instant quite stricken. He quickly recovered, even gave Chris a hint of a rueful smile. “It’s all right.”
Chris, looking out the window, saw a taxi pull up outside and a familiar figure get out.
“Jesus,” he said, “Seve’s here, after all.”
“What? Seve Guarda, the American policeman?” M. Vosges walked to the window to look down, but Seve was already inside. He looked at Chris. “Are you sure? It’s very dark.”
“I’m sure.”
M. Vosges’s face was white. “He’s discovered that I’m not dead, he knows who I am. He’s come for me. I was always more afraid of Guarda than of your brother. Guarda’s spirit was like iron, even back when he was working with the DEA in Burma.”
“Do you really think that’s why he’s come when he said he wouldn’t?”
“What other reason could there be?” M. Vosges said. He was clearly terrified.
“That,” Chris told him, “is something I’m going to find out.” He went out into the hallway, M. Vosges right behind him.
Seve went down a flight of steep stone stairs worn into concave shapes by time and use. For a moment he stood very still. His nostrils flared, and he almost coughed. And he was hurtling back twenty years. The air seemed laden with the same agglomeration of spices—lemon grass, chilies, fresh mint—and decomposition-blood, pus, fecal matter—that he associated with the war.
He went forward, bent in the crouch, half defensive, half aggressive, he had learned to employ in the steaming jungles, the soupy paddies.
“Dancer?”
Seve stopped.
“Is that you?”
Seve did not want to give his position away by speaking. War was in the air.
“Are you afraid,” Trangh’s voice whispered like the wind through the trees, “to reveal yourself? Are you afraid of me? Don’t worry. I know where you are.”
Seve began to sweat. A combination of the tension and the drugs the doctor had administered were working against him. His head throbbed, and an unpleasant lassitude gripped him. He felt his own adrenaline, pumped into his system by fear and excitement, trying to counteract it. There was a war going on inside him, too. He began to move, around pipes hissing with steam, conduits of wires like ganglia ripped open by trauma.
“Don’t be afraid, Dancer.” Trangh’s voice wavered, a ghost in the darkness, reminding Seve of the seductive calls of the VC hidden in the jungle. “I know you seek the Magician. He’s dead. I killed him in the most beautiful fashion, glass and light and sculptured metal pierced him in many ways. There was a great deal of blood.”
Seve, moving still through the man-made jungle of the buildings bowels, considered whether Trangh was mad. Perhaps he had always been mad.
“It was you,” he said at length, “who was working for the North.”
“I was in harness,” Trangh said, “to the South, and to the North. In my time I answered to both, and to none. Because, in the end, they are the same. There is no difference when avarice and fear pollute political ideals. Everything turns to poison, and no one is strong enough to stand against that hideous tide.”
What he said, of course, made sense. But Seve realized that he did not care. He didn’t give a shit what Trangh had done during the war, or for what reasons. He only knew that Trangh had murdered Dom, had taken his disgusting war fan and had sliced the crenellated blade through Dom’s neck, severing flesh, muscle, arteries, and spinal column. Trangh had to be punished for that.
“You killed my brother.” Scuttling forward, bent between steaming pipes, moving silently over stanchions, around plastic-wrapped cables. “I’m coming for you.”
“I have already sinned too greatly; I do not wish to kill you,” Trangh said from out of the darkness. “But I cannot die. Not yet.” He wanted to say so much more, to tell the Dancer of his epiphany while holding the Forest of Swords, his revelation of white light inside the wrecked BMW, but he seemed inarticulate, as if his memory not of English words but of English concepts had deserted him. So he began to speak in Vietnamese. But his native tongue, so little used or heard by him, caused him to weep, to see sheets of oily flame, the conflagration that had been his ultimate undoing. With an audible snap he shut his mouth.
When Chris and M. Vosges reached the entryway, it was deserted.
“Perhaps he is in the garden,” M. Vosges said.
But by that time Chris had seen the bloody sign on the wooden door.
“What is this?”
M. Vosges, coming up beside him, said, “It is a phung hoang, a Vietnamese phoenix. A sacred mythical creature said to be immortal.”
“Trangh,” Chris said, and opened the door.
They, too, descended into the darkness.
The smell of grease and rust stained the air. It was as close and fetid down there as a crypt. They reached the bottom of the stairs, and Chris, almost decapitating himself on a sharp metal outcropping that intruded into the space at head height, ducked and signaled M. Vosges to do the same.
“I know Trangh,” M. Vosges said at the foot of the stone stairway. “Let me handle him.”
“We know he no longer works for you,” Chris said. “Perhaps he never did. He’s already betrayed you once.”
“Nevertheless,” M. Vosges said, “he is Vietnamese. I know what is in his mind, what is important to him.”
“Stay back.”
Chris recognized Seve’s voice.
“What are you doing here?” Chris asked. “Soutane said—“
“You shouldn’t have to ask,” Seve said. “You know why I’m here.”
“It looks as if Guarda has already found Trangh,” M. Vosges said under his breath.
“Seve, we must take Trangh alive,” Chris said. “He’s our only lead to the Magician.”
“I’m surprised to hear you talking like that,” Seve said. “Trangh killed your brother. He almost killed Alix.” Chris heard something odd in Seve’s voice, a guttural slur that made him sound almost feral.
“He’ll pay for that, Seve,” Chris said. He was sweating profusely. He was getting an inkling of Seve’s thought processes. “Come on.”
“I’m warning you,” Seve said. “Stay back. Trangh’s mine. He killed Dom. Now he’s gonna have to pay.”
Tried one last time. “For Christ’s sake, Seve, you’re a cop. You can’t—“
“Stay out of this, dammit! You haven’t the stomach for it.”
“Come on!” Chris whispered urgently to M. Vosges. “We’ve got to move quickly now.”
“Nothing can be done quickly down here,” M. Vosges pointed out. “It’s a maze of pipes and wire clusters. Even with the lights on, we’d have difficulty seeing where they are. We’d need a twelve-foot ladder to get above the networks for that.”
They used their ears, instead, letting the sounds guide them, their hands flat out in front of them to warn them of the low-hanging tangle of pipes and wire bundles.
“Hurry!” Chris said. “He’ll kill Trangh if he can.”
“Or Trangh will kill him.”
“It does not matter that you no longer love him,” Morphée said. “I will love him enough for the two of us.”
Soutane, standing near the door of a suite down the hall from where they had been, said, “I don’t think I ever really learned to love him.” In rich pools of light cast by lamps scattered about the room, she was studying Morphée as if the other woman was some kind of creature thought to be long extinct. “What I can’t understand is, knowing what you do about him, how you can care for him at all?”
Morphée smiled in that way which people who did not know her took to be subservient. On the contrary, it was fecund with the inner peace she maintained. “Unlike you,” she said, “I understand that human nature is both flawed and frail. If life has taught me one thing, it is that our struggle is not in seeking perfection, but in correcting our mistakes.”
Without quite being aware of it, Soutane had moved as far away from Morphée as she could. In this far dark corner of the room she could see past the open door to the hallway, but she felt only marginally safer. She had an urge to take a drink, but there was no liquor in evidence, and she did not want to show that kind of weakness by asking Morphée to get her one.
“This is a whorehouse,” Soutane said. “What does that make you?”
“I know what I am,” Morphée said, moving through the lamplight like a wraith in a moonlit forest glade. “But it is important how you see me.” Her voice was soft with no trace of anger or recrimination.
“Why?” On the other hand, Soutane’s parts in this exchange were fairly barked out.
“I would have thought that obvious,” Morphée said. “You are his daughter.”
“Funny, I don’t feel like his daughter.”
“Ah, well, that is of course the tragedy of all this.”
“Is that why you brought me in here? Did you think that you could change my mind?”
“I took you away from where you did not want to be,” Morphée said, moving from darkness to light. “That is all.”
“I don’t believe you.” Feeling cornered now, as Morphée came closer. “You think that you can somehow make me love my father.”
That smile again. “Soutane, why can you not see what is so evident? You cannot learn something that is instinctual. It seems to me that though you say that you never loved your father, quite the opposite is true. I think you have always loved him. Over the years you merely learned to hate him.”
“No, I—“
When Soutane saw Chris and her father hurrying past in the hallway outside, she was already moving. She had by that time taken flight.
“I see him!”
Chris turned his head. “Which one? Seve?”
But M. Vosges was already moving. I can make it happen, he thought. I can put an end to this madness. I can perhaps atone for what I’ve done.
“Monsieur Mabuse,” he whispered as he moved among the pipes and rods in the semidarkness. “Listen closely to me. I have come to save you. Believe me when I tell you that I forgive you for everyth—“
M. Vosges jerked up off the floor, tried to scream, but there was a hand clamping his throat. He could not speak; neither could he breathe. He stared into M. Mabuse’s face. It was strained and pinched; a tiny blue vein bisecting his forehead pulsed as if with a malignant life of its own.
“Tu … me… pardonnes?” You forgive me? It was squeezed out with the highly aspirated syllables that came from incredulity. Trangh slammed M. Vosges so hard against a cluster of rusted pipes that his entire body danced like a marionette.
“Mon Dieu,” M. Vosges managed to gasp before Trangh dropped him in a heap upon the oil- and grease-smeared concrete floor.
Trangh crouched over him, panting like an animal at bay. His eyes were wide and staring, and through his mind like a bright river of molten metal ran the words, Sometimes I feel like a motherless child… a long, long way from my home…
“It is not for you to forgive me.” As before, each word was squeezed out of his constricted larynx like poisoned bullets. “It is, rather, for me to forgive you. But forgiveness presupposes mercy.” He reached out. “And I have none left inside me.” Until his fingertips touched M. Vosges’s chest just above his heart. “Your people burned all mercy out of my heart.”
The fingers stiffened as M. Vosges watched with a kind of morbid fascination the formation of his own death. “You erased the memory of what mercy means from my soul.” The nails, sharp as daggers, ripped M. Vosges’s sweat-soaked shirt, pierced his skin.
“Now, after all you and your kind have done to us, in your supreme arrogance you expect me to be grateful for your forgiveness.” Red rivulets running hot and sticky down his bony chest, dripped from the round bowl of his belly. “It is worthless.” M. Vosges, paralyzed by something more than fear, no doubt the last vestiges of kebatinan that was all that was left Trangh. He felt the pain as one hears the whistle of a train, still far-off but approaching with such speed that one cannot comprehend its method of motion.
“Worse, it is part of the cancer that has eaten us alive ever since you French set foot in my country.” Trangh’s stiffened fingers, all the weapon he required, plunged in a juru inward with a ferocity that matched the set of his face, his lips pulled back, baring his yellow teeth. “The only way to get rid of a cancer is to expunge it forever.” Snapped by the force of the blow, M. Vosges’s ribs broke, their ragged ends rending him like arrows shot from a bow. He arched up as blood fountained, running up Trangh’s ridged wrist in a violent expiration of life.
Feeling neither satisfaction nor remorse, Trangh rose, felt simultaneously the Dancer’s swift approach hard upon him, and instantly regretted his single-minded act of hollow vengeance because in those precious moments when he was concentrating on M. Vosges’s demise he had lost track of the Dancer, and now he knew that there was no way to avoid their terminal confrontation.
His sadness lasted long after the bulk of the Dancer crashed into him, sending them both hurtling along the wall, past groups of steaming iron pipes and massive elbowed stanchions. Soon it was joined by his closest companion, despair. And it was the despair alone which allowed him to break away and stumble headlong into the looming darkness.
“Oh, Jesus,” Chris breathed. Blood covered him as he knelt over M. Vosges. Not knowing where Trangh was or whether he would like a demon unexpectedly return, he pulled on M. Vosges, hooking his hands beneath the Frenchman’s armpits, dragging him behind a cluster of scabrous metal switch boxes. It seemed to take a very long time. He could hear the thick raling of M. Vosges’s breathing. Then he heard another noise, and tensed. Trangh!
“Chris?”
He caught a glimpse of Soutane poking her head this way and that, trying to find a way to get to him.
“Stay where you are,” he called softly. “Trangh is near.”
“Is my father with you?”
He looked down at M. Vosges. There was so much blood it was difficult to believe that he was still alive. But his eyes were open, looking up into Chris’s face.
“Forgive me, Christopher, for I have sinned,” he sighed.
Chris lifted his head off the floor.
“For nineteen years I have not had Confession. For nineteen years I have turned my eyes away from the sight of God. I would not have been able to bear his gaze because of what I did, out of passion, out of jealousy and rage. I murdered my wife, Celeste.” His sigh turned into a racking cough. “There. Now I have said it. Am I absolved, Christopher?”
“I—“
“Chris?” Soutane called. “Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“And my father?”
“He’s with me.”
He heard her coming, opened his mouth to tell her again to stay where she was, but knew it was useless. In a moment she was through the latticelike wall of the boxes and beside him. Her fearful eyes went from him to her father’s prostrate form.
“Dear God! What happened?”
“Your father thought he could still control Trangh. He was wrong.” He could feel her warmth; he longed to take her in his arms and hold her.
She looked down upon M. Vosges’s face. “Can you be a stranger,” she said, “and still be my father?” Of whom was she asking the question? Chris wondered.
He saw M. Vosges smile. “Father,” he said distantly. “That’s all I wanted.”
It was a lie, of course, Chris thought. His whole life gave evidence of that. Or perhaps at the end it was not a lie at all. Perhaps he had undergone a conversion, not of faith but of substance. All his life M. Vosges had trusted in God to show him the way. In so doing, he had trusted in human beings, and had been betrayed by their baser nature. It had made him disillusioned with people, so that he had come solely to use them, even his wife and his daughter. If he had seen that at the end, surely that was a kind of redemption.
“He’s gone, Soutane,” he said, closing M. Vosges’s eyes.
“And Trangh?”
“Somewhere in this maze. God alone knows where.”
“That’s right,” Seve said, “keep quiet now. Quiet as a fucking mouse.” He saw an image of Sugar, her thin body frozen on the filthy mattress, her insides withered from the ravages of the war. “But your stillness won’t save you, and neither will your words. If you feel remorse for what you’ve done, or if you don’t, it’s all the same to me.” Creeping along amid a slush of oil and water and sweat. “You can’t escape except by going through me, Trangh.” Rats, squealing, fleeing from his progress. “Bastard. Fucking sonuvabitch. You killed Dom. A priest. A man of God, who never wished ill of anyone. You could pray for forgiveness from now till doomsday and it wouldn’t mean jackshit. Do you understand me?”
“I think I do. Yes. I have seen you in the jungle. You are relentless. The Magician feared you almost as much as he feared Terry Haye.”
“It just proves,” Seve said, making his way around a massive crusted metal elbow joint, “how wrong you can be. Terry’s dead, and I’m still here.”
“I beg you to reconsider,” Trangh said.
From the resonance of his voice Seve calculated how close they were: not more than two arm’s lengths. Seve moving ever toward the source of the voice, thought of a phrase from ‘Nam, “unknown and hostile,” which described the VC night raids into American territory that his SLAM unit had been formed to exterminate. He could see how the term more or less applied to himself now.
Seve’s mind had ceased to recall Dominic in any fashion other than as a disembodied head lying in a bower in New Canaan. The first moment of recognition when, being led outside the Holy Trinity Church, past the dense privet, already smelling strongly of growth and renewal, he had come upon the head of his brother, was akin to seeing the sun at midnight. His skin had crawled, and he had begun to hyperventilate. And then he had stifled an almost overwhelming urge to weep uncontrollably.
