Darconville's Cat (97 page)

  Darconville followed him with his eyes.

  “Don’t hesitate. Don’t think. God may forgive her,
but you never can. The law for her is the law for you—tell me, what
most resembles a roast gander?

  “Why,” cried Crucifer, bounding up, “a roast goose!
And, O, what an infinite variety of retaliation awaits us! In the
Dantean underworld she’ll be whipped by devils as a panderer, for
her hypocrisy draped in a leaded mantle, for her simony stood
upsidedown in a hole—but first we must get her there! Let it go,”
he winked, “under the soft name of
satisfaction
. Now,” he
continued, sticking the photograph as a reminder into a corner of
the Chinese screen, “propositions of all sorts must have occurred
to you—what, countenance her deceit that by your magnanimity she
come to acknowledge her mistake with despair? Ignore her crime that
she fatally form the habit of acquitting herself of obligation and
die friendless? Refuse her the nobility of suffering by which
otherwise she piously seek a martyrdom?” Crucifer drew himself up
like a bat, his ears almost growing points. “The trouble with this
is it’s all insipid pacifistic bilge—and leaves her to make your
back her footstool, the spawn’s lugs, and to force you to live sick
as muck for the remainder of your days meeting circumferences, not
angles, not corners, not rest. She
wants
to forget. But
opposites—
contraria con-trariis curantur
—are cured by
opposites. There’ll never be a forgetting! And you’ll never be at
rest! The Palace of Revenge contains every delight but the power of
leaving it. Revenge a hundred years old”—he bent over Darconville
and siffled under his breath—-”still has milk teeth! No, put her to
the squeak,” he goaded. “A piece of churchyard fits everybody! But
be thorough—a little wind kindles, much puts out the fire: she must
learn in pain exactly what she’s lent.”

  “Then we agree,” said Darconville, surprising
himself with the remark as well as Grucifer, who almost squealed
from joy. He quickly slipped off his jade ring and placed it on
Darconville’s finger.

  “As coins to Hebrews!”

  But the singlemindedness, he thought, was yet to be
confirmed, predisposing conditions yet to be, the mood as given not
effectively received until.

  “What to do now? Be cunning,” warned Crucifer,
walking with his finger in the air, “for if motion is necessary
because of the oppositions which evoke each other, motion must be
subtle. Intervene as but a shadow. What I mean is, a lamprey is not
killed with a cudgel but a cane, do you get me? Better pull a
steady thirty-six than a jerky forty —the old Harvard motto,
yes?”

  He continued pacing the room restlessly, an
uneasiness reduced to the simplest terms of cold reflection,
deliberating in an anxious conviction that sifted and tested what
he soliloquized within himself of war and cruelty and torment. He
stopped suddenly at his desk.

  “Stay,” he said, “I feel a sudden alteration—ah,
lovely girl, trust no longer to your bloom; the white privets fall,
the dark hyacinths are culled.” He wiggled his dimpled fingers.
“Let her paint herself an inch thick, Darconville, to this
favor”—he slowly picked up the air pistol— “she must come.”

  He turned.

  “And him.”

  Darconville followed his pointing finger to the
photograph.

  “How can you put a hundred pounds of trash into two
sacks so that each sack”—Crucifer’s hand began to scribble fast in
the air—”contains a hundred pounds? By putting,” he gleeped, “one
sack inside the other!
Figurez-vous
? Go after them both!”
He leaned forward in animated receptivity. “Have I not said that
when you are lank again, seek the narrow chink where, when lank,
you entered? Here.” He waved the gun. Darconville stepped back
anxiously. “This is a Feinwerkbau E-12 Deluxe, caliber 177,
recoilless operation with double piston construction, side-cocking
lever, and a fixed barrel set with a micrometer peepsight. It’s a
classic! The pellets”—he turned his head sideways and smiled
crazily—”have been treated. Never put off ‘til tomorrow what you
can wear tonight. She can be bleeding six bottles of alicant by
dusk. Take it.”

  He seemed to turn positively insane.

  “Kill her!” cried Crucifer, impatiently. His
fanaticism leapt forth like a sword drawn from its scabbard at any
thought now of contradiction. “Where there are no guns, diplomacy
must make not butter but time, not true? Too true. Too true,
indeed. But here’s a gun! Shoot her and leave her until maggots are
singing in her wounds! Not a record kill—only a good one-shot kill
at twenty yards through her bedroom window!”

  He fired without warning into the photograph:
twaaaang
!

  “Kill the Dutchman—the receiver is as bad as the
thief—and send him back feet first to the Straits of Ballambangjang
or wherever it was he came from.” He aimed and blew a quarter of
the photo away.

  “Kill their children, if they should have any!
There’s to be no pity: nits will be lice!”

  He shot off the face.

  “Kill her parents—a murder of total elimination—for
the soul of the offspring, say the Traducians, originates by
transmission. Nothing exceeds like excess! Send them to Azrail, the
angel of death, and let Munkar and Nakeer inquisition them in
hell.” He fired:
twiiiiing
! And again:
twoooong
!
Howling, he emptied the entire gun into the screen.

  “
Kill them all
!” he screamed, biting the
air in the fullness of his malice. “
Kill them all
!”

  XCII

  Revenge! Revenge!

  For Rage now rules the reynes:

  Revenge, revenge, my Muse, Defiance trumpet
blow—

  Threaten what may be done, yet do more than

    you threaten.

        —Sir PHILIP
SIDNEY, “Fifth Song”

  “R-R-REVENGE!” cried Dr. Crucifer, his voice
resembling the tearing of a strip of calico. He was almost unable
to pronounce the word from happiness as he pressed the pistol into
Darconville’s hands. “It is a wonderful witty word much disliked by
those to whom the thing signified by it is nevertheless dear.
Harden your heart. What good is kindness now? All delight comes to
an end, hence the chief pleasure in the next beginning: spill the
thing’s blood and water a mandrake! It’s only justice! White, to
use the parlance of chess, is always morally justified in
attacking, so let black see to black—remember, in describing a
capture only the capturing and captured pieces are mentioned, never
slyness of method or means. Say nothing and you won’t have to
repeat it. But be chaos: fast in action, dirigible in absence. She
doesn’t have the right to own the area she’s in.

  “Come, do you hesitate?” Crucifer looked wounded.
“Didn’t Alexander destroy the oldest cities on earth without a
qualm—Tyre, Cyprus, Gaza, Boeotia, and a thousand more? Or
Ferdinand Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alba, did he shrink from
answering with fire and sword the question of Dutch perfidy? And
had Louis XIII any doubts about the justice of fitting out
Protestant Huguenots as blackbirds and shooting them just for the
sport of it as they leaped about and exploded in puffs of feathers?
I mean, if you have a problem, and you know the answer to it, isn’t
the problem immediately eliminated?

  “The comfortablest revenge is when you can kill to
pardon.” He winked. “There’s sugar in salt, I tell you. But, here,
don’t hoard your grief—you have someone to divide it with! It’s as
easy as witches bottling air! You can summon demons from the
hell-light pale! You can appeal to Fornax, god of ovens! You can
even pray for it, for in several secret chapels in North Wales you
can actually make supplication to vengeance and, with one
carnaficial kiss, offer up your enemy to Sts. Llan Elian in
Anglesea and Chynog in Carnarvonshire! But you must act! Intense
device! Superflux of pain! Nothing is worse for the soul than
struggling not to give play to feelings it cannot control. Revenge
is a dish best served up cold—have at her swiftly before she tries
to make amends! Do it now! Kill her! A promise to do so in the past
was not redeemed, Darconville—the thought, I daresay, having too
much play in the expression of it.

  “All that’s real,” hissed Crucifer, sitting down
heavily on the sofa, “is
rational
! Black magic, with all
its grim theatricals, is all very fine and large yet nothing more
than exploiting lost angels with impunity. You must not simply cut
off from your agony all that is superfluous but necessarily impart
a shape to what is left: be avenged here,” he pointed, “in
this
life. Scupper her right there in her stained and
mousy sheets, rank with twice-dyed blood! Or do you prefer, tell
me, other than a pistol?” he asked, taking it and setting it aside.
“Are there no longer racks, wheels, strappadoes? Bilboes, feral
engines, iron collars? Or pikes, the tyrants of the wat’ry plain?”
His face turned the color of craft paper. “I mean, precisely what
are
the other ways to skin a cat?”

  Dr. Crucifer’s soul seemed to come waveringly
forward, like a grey vapor, out of his eye-sockets, until it formed
itself into a shadowy double of a person.

  “Poleax her! Bang her on the toenails with dowels
and mallets as they do to Indian elephants!
Sfregia la
?”
he giggled, drawing a finger along his throat. “Death has a
thousand doors to let out life!” He threw out a series of short
paratactic suggestions. “Scorch her with ultraviolet light! Truss
her up in ropes and thraw her jerking in all directions! Slip her a
funny-tasting pie! Pick any of the three swords of Mohammed: Medham
the Keen or Hatef the Deadly or al Battar the Trenchant! In
Iceland”—he clapped his hands—”they beat codfish into powder for
bread. Or shall it come as it did for Adonibezec, King of Bezek,
who had his thumbs and big toes amputated? How about eserine?
Physostigmine? Ovabain?
Bouillon d’onze heures
?

  “The quickest poison is the barbiturate thiopentone:
one choice in-tracardiac shot”—Crucifer blew a kiss—”and
cheery-bye! Or you might consider aconitine or digitalin, which
can’t be detected. A more colorful alternative? Try 1000 cc’s of
scoline, not only swift but the state of horror and intense fear
before excruciating suffocation is indescribable. The Borgias
adored white hellebore, thorn-apple, and Christmas-rose. Then
there’s always our old friend curare, which relaxes the abdominal
muscles to the point where breathing will just simply stop and, as
it’s soluble, if the body were then immersed in water—have they
bathtubs in Fawx’s Mt.?—all traces will disappear. But what? Raw
rice, pounded glass, ribstone pippin, Bean of St. Ignatius, fool’s
parsley, Godfrey’s cordial, sesquisulphuret of arsenic—it’s God’s
plenty! Paralysis from buttercups, stupor from buckeye seeds, agony
from mistletoe berries! All natural, all nice. In irritant
poisoning, the pain usually comes on gradually, and slowly increase
in severity. Neurotic poisons, whether spinal, narcotic, or
cerebrospinal, of course rarely leave any well-marked traces in the
stomach or bowels, and any pretenders to minute analytical accuracy
will invariably apply their tests in vain. I personally favor
anything, for elegance, that addresses the spinal marrow.”
Crucifer, smiling, crossed his legs and pick-a-backed his hands.
“But I love them all.

  “The poisoner is, I must confess, of all others the
genius. He must have the confidence of the person he is killing; he
must appear amiable; he must be willing to give from his own hand
those drops that mean death. And yet all the while,” smiled
Crucifer, “the victim sits as helpless as an egg about to be
tapped! But it doesn’t matter how, does it? Death conjugates all
tenses. It matters
why
, first of all. Then, it matters
when.” He paused. “I am an Arab, you forget. Revenge is almost a
religious principle among us.” He leaned toward Darconville. “The
only point is: when you bite, make your teeth meet.”

  The silence that followed indicated a pause that
seemed too much like moral deliberation. Couchant immediately
became rampant: Dr. Crucifer fought up off the sofa and, as if his
delight in caricature sprang from his own unfortunate condition,
played out not only with fists and faces but in terrible detail the
rest of his indoctrination.

  “There is a various plenty in slaying of constants
and parameters. Proficient? Freeze her to death, then thaw her
out—the perfect murder. Ingenius? Perform a transabdominal
laparohysterosalpingo-oôphorectomy on her,
unsuccessfully
!
Historical? Double her up like a small compass in the ‘Scavenger’s
Daughter.’ Slow? Try the Thousand Piece Execution: the idea of this
is to cut out from her body one tiny square bit the size of a cough
lozenge, say, every few minutes or so until bit by bit—all of them
selected with discrimination so as to have her live to the
nine-hundred-ninety-ninth piece—her whole body has been removed.
Amusing? Tickle her to death with the tassels of her wedding card.
Suitable? Brank her like a shrew by padlocking a sack over her
head—the virtue here being that, unlike a cucking, the tongue is
not given liberty ‘twixt dips—and dunk her in a gum-stool until she
drowns to death. Ethical? Place a lethal snake in one corner of her
house and
at the same time
place the exact amount of
antitoxin to cure the bite in another—then walk away. Patriotic?
Smother her to death in the Virginia state flag. Metaphysical?
Dream her to death in a mind-war and watch her combust in a nasty
puff of smoke. Colorful? The Chinese
dai sh’pin
comes to
mind, a particular treat where you feed her bits of paper pulp—it’s
nutritional, briefly—which, absorbing moisture, sit humectant in
the digestive tract, making it increasingly more difficult to
defecate as each day passes, and in the process renders vain any
attempt on her part to try to stick her fingers up her anus to pry
out the dry lumps.” Crucifer glinked sideways. “Are these yet too
elaborate? Too venturesome? Inapposite? Overcon-ceptualized?
Explicit? Jeopardous?” He touched a finger to his brow in a pose of
self-consultation. “Mmmmm, sad. Then why don’t you—”