Phantom (28 page)

"Oh, please say you will show me some magic before you leave!"

Erik glanced briefly, questioningly, toward me and I gave him a sad, helpless shrug.

"I would be delighted to," he said kindly, "and for you, Reza, there shall be something very special… something no human ear has heard before or shall hear again… no, not even the shah himself."

I saw the spellbound look on my son's face as he raised his hands instinctively toward the source of that extraordinary voice.

"Will you show me now, sir?"

"Tomorrow," Erik demurred. "I'm afraid it will have to be tomorrow. Can you be very patient and wait till then?"

"Reza, you are forgetting your manners!" Discomfited by the strange communion that I sensed between them, I spoke more sharply than I had intended. "Return to your quarters now and I will come to you later."

"Yes, Father." I heard the hurt surprise in my child's voice as he permitted his attendant to lead him away.

A tense silence descended on the veranda in his absence. Erik returned to the white wicker chair and examined the dregs of his coffee cup with odd intensity.

"How long has the boy's sight been failing?" he demanded abruptly.

"Perhaps eighteen months."

"And the weakness of the muscles came later?"

"Yes." I swallowed my own coffee with difficulty. "I am told it is a childish malady which he will grow out of in time."

Erik sighed as he set the cup down on the table.

"This is a progressive and degenerative sickness, Daroga."

I stared at him. "Then… you do not think he will regain his sight after all?"

"I do not think it is a thing you should hope for," he said evasively. "And now I have work to attend to… Perhaps you would be good enough to excuse me from supper tonight."

I inclined my head and was left alone to brood upon his words.

My servants told me that lights burned in his room all night and that when he eventually emerged from the apartment next day he was carrying a curious doll-like figure.

Sometime later I saw the figure for myself in Reza's quarters. It was not a doll, but an automaton, dressed in the robes of a Russian peasant, bearing a fiddle in one hand and a bow in the other. As I watched it bend stiffly from the waist and place the fiddle beneath its chin, I smiled involuntarily and waited for the simple gesture to be repeated. I had not seen such fluid refinement in a clockwork mechanism before.

"That's very clever—" I started to say, but Reza clutched at my arm urgently.

"Wait, Father, it's not finished yet… listen!"

When the figure began to play, swaying gently to the rhythm of its own melody, I was intrigued, but not yet dumbfounded. I told myself that I was listening to an intricate musical box—an ingenious, but scarcely world-shattering, invention.

When the tune ended Reza told me to applaud.

"It won't play again until we do," he insisted gravely.

I hid a smile.
Erik
, I thought with quiet amusement,
what an incorrigible showman you are
! And I clapped politely to humor the child.

When the figure did not move, I assumed its clockwork mechanism had run down.

"You must clap with enthusiasm to satisfy an artist's insatiable vanity," said Reza severely. "That is what Erik told me."

Puzzled, I put my hands together with greater vigor.

"Louder!" said Reza with a touch of imperiousness in his voice that I had never heard before. "Louder, Father!"

The palms of my hands began to sting, but just as I was thinking I had had enough of this childish nonsense, the Gypsy figure bowed with condescension, replaced the fiddle beneath its chin, and began to play a different tune.

Three times I repeated the prescribed procedure and each time the music was different. I thought I recognized the same melody, but the sequencing altered subtly on each occasion so that it was virtually impossible to determine which was the original phrase and which the cunning variation. The more I struggled to pin the illusion down, the more confused and frustrated I became at my inability to govern my scattering senses.

But at least there was one simple hoax I would expose. Erik had evidently built some kind of delay into the mechanism. All I had to do was wait, without applauding, and the cunning little device would betray itself by playing again. I was so determined to place the invention within the realm of my comprehension that I gave no thought to the needless disappointment I might cause my son in revealing the secret of this trick.

"Don't clap," I ordered suddenly. "Let us see what happens."

We stood and waited in the resounding silence. Without applause the curious little automaton remained mutely aloof, and I fancied it was staring at me with some of its maker's .contempt.

"I told you it wouldn't work!" said Reza sullenly. "I told you what Erik said."

"I don't want to hear what Erik said!" I shouted, suddenly furious at the boy's slavish parroting of that name. "Give me the key and I will wind it up again."

"There is no key."

"Don't be absurd, child, of course there must be a key!"

I snatched up the figure and began to examine it angrily, but it was just as he said. I could find no way of controlling this automaton, and I was suddenly overwhelmed by a fierce, mindless urge to smash it against the wall in fury.

"Stop shaking it," sobbed Reza. "You'll break it… Please, Father! Please give it back to me!"

Slowly I came to my senses and relinquished my maniacal grip upon the figure. Allah! What had come over me to make me act like a demented, petulant child?

"Reza…" I hurried across the room to the floor cushions where the boy had crawled to take refuge with his precious toy. "Reza…"

He turned his face away from me into the satin pillows and shrugged off my hand.

I was stunned by the unexpected rejection and appalled to realize how thoroughly I had deserved it.

I crept from the room in shame and leaned against the door, trying to regain my composure. After a moment I heard the child clapping frantically.

And then those slow, strangely maddening notes began to play all over again…

Late that evening I found Erik sitting on the edge of the fountain in the courtyard garden, lazily trailing his long fingers in the spray. I wanted to ask him how the automaton worked, but the memory of my intensely irrational behavior that afternoon held me silent.

Mosquitoes buzzed irritatingly around us as he accepted the bowl of sherbet that I offered.

"Your wife has been dead for some time," he said unexpectedly. "Since it is not customary for those of your faith to confine themselves in a monogamous manner, I must assume that you loved her very much."

I looked up, outraged by the impertinence of this remark, and was silenced by the extraordinary compassion in the eyes behind the mask. His pitying glance took my breath as effectively as a blow to the spleen and filled me once more with that terrible sense of ill omen. I became aware that I had started to tremble.

"Does the child resemble her?" he persisted with sadness.

"Yes." My voice was a thin, reedy whisper; suddenly all I wanted to do was run from this.

"I am very sorry," he said.

And replacing the untouched sherbet on the wicker table, he disappeared through the full-length windows on the garden wall of the house.

I sat very still, staring at the smooth olive-skinned hands which lay limply on my lap. If the shah's personal physician had told me my son was dying, 1 would have refused to believe him; I would have gone on clinging stubbornly to the last straws of hope like a drowning man.

But I could not close my mind to the meaning of Erik's carefully veiled insinuation; I could not deny his mystical inner knowledge of things beyond my simple understanding.

My son was dying. And this strange masked man—who killed without a qualm of conscience and seemed untroubled by morality of any kind—was moved to generous pity for my plight.

He was still ruthless, dangerous, and shockingly amoral.

But I found that I no longer thought of him as a cold and heartless monster.

We lingered at Ashraf many days longer than had been my original intent, for I was sunk in a despair that no longer admitted to the urgency of the shah's displeasure. What did it matter now whether I kept my post, my favor, my petty position in society; what did anything matter anymore? Soon I would have lost everything that made life dear to me.

My resentful bitterness resolving itself at length into fierce need of a woman, I sent for a girl who had served me well in the past and lost myself eagerly in the soft welcoming curves of her body. It meant nothing, but it brought physical relief; a few moments of delirious pleasure and blessed forgetfulness that permitted me to function as the man Allah had created. I pitied any man who was denied the slaking of such simple healthy need in the form of a wife, a concubine, even a prostitute. But when I thought of such a man, my mind instinctively shied away, unwilling to contemplate vicarious pain on behalf of another. I did not wish to think of what that face must inevitably have denied to Erik—for now, I had quite enough pain of my own.

Reza spent those few days almost entirely in the company of a magician whose voice and astonishing skills held him utterly mesmerized. For hours at a time he would sit at Erik's feet, like a young addict in an opium den, begging shamelessly for another story, another song, and I marveled at the tireless good humor of a man scarcely notable for equanimity and patience. Sometimes he would teach the boy a few simple tricks, guiding the child's hands with all the unseen skill of a clever puppeteer.

"That's good… that's very much better, Reza… You may show your father now…"

Their voices drifted past me, echoing through the distant chambers of my wretchedness, until at last I roused myself sufficiently from this stupor of inactivity to announce our departure.

I was unprepared for the violence of Reza's reaction.

"Why must he go so soon? Why can't he stay a little longer?"

"Reza, the shah has commanded his presence at court. You know that."

"But you don't have to go
now
, not straightaway…"

"The shah—"

"I hate the shah!" shouted Reza passionately. "I hate him!"

I had never seen my son behave like this before, and I was alarmed by his outburst. Erik stood staring out the window, with both arms crossed beneath his cloak, and I sensed that for once he was truly discomfited by what he had precipitated.

I signaled to a hovering servant and told him to take the child to his apartments at once, but as soon as the man laid hold of his shoulder Reza flung himself down on the floor and began to pummel the blue tiles in a frenzy of rage. My son, that quiet, well-behaved child, had without any warning become a savage, mindless little beast; and I was bitterly aware that I was going to be powerless to control him without resorting to undignified physical force.

"Reza!"

The voice from the window was immeasurably soft, hardly more than a whispered breath; yet it made itself heard above the ugly noise of the child's hysteria, and immediately there was silence in the sunny, white-walled chamber.

"Come to me."

Into the gentle, mellifluous tone there had crept an irresistible note of command. As I watched, Erik stretched out one hand and seemed to draw the child across the room to his side with a single gesture that pulsed with terrifying force.

I became aware that I was holding my breath with a sort of dull horror. The same voice which was manipulating my child's mind was holding me in a frozen impotence that utterly denied all power of intervention; I felt as though I had been drugged by a massive dose of poppy syrup.

Reza was perfectly calm now, though the tears still stood gleaming on his flushed cheeks.

"Will you come back?" he whispered tremulously.

Erik placed one skeletal finger beneath the boy's chin and tilted his face upward into the light.

"I will return as soon as my court duties permit. But if you cry when I leave, your father will forbid me to come here. You have behaved very badly in his presence… Go to him now and ask for his forgiveness."

The child came to me like an automaton, with all the humility and deference that his master had commanded, and I forgave him graciously, in a mindless response to that superior unspoken will.

I
felt
the precise moment that Erik chose to release us from his hold; it was like the cutting off of some unseen electrical current.

Even had I not already known him for a ruthless murderer, I should still have acknowledged him that day as the most dangerous man in the world.

We left for Tehran the following morning, taking the old caravan road from the Caspian through the entrancing glens and ravines of the Elburz Mountains. Huge vines had woven themselves like tapestry threads through the tangle of tree stems that clustered together in this thickly forested area. We made camp on a floor carpeted with wild strawberry plants, and at night, as we listened to the distant roar of a tiger, we saw the eyes of a leopard winking just beyond the firelight.

There was snow on the top of the Demavend volcano, which is the highest peak in Persia, and though the mountain pass was not yet prey to the blizzards and treacherous avalanches that would be commonplace in winter, a cruel wind knifed through our wannest garments and made us bow our heads against the storm. My servants did their best under difficult circumstances and we dined nightly on mutton ragout, kabobs, and pilaf; but by now I was heartily weary of the road. When we finally approached Tehran, the sight of the city's ugly mud wall, circular towers, and forty-foot moat was one which gladdened my heart. If I had ended a pilgrimage to Mecca, I could have not felt more relief. My task was almost completed, and soon I would be free of my strange, disquieting companion.

As we passed beneath a gate adorned with glazed tiles and were admitted to the city's interior, I heard Erik exclaim in disgust at the sight of the narrow, filthy streets and the uncovered drains.