The Crystal World (4 page)

"They're expecting a physicist from the university," she said. "A Dr. Tatlin, I think, though it's difficult to check from here. To begin with, I thought you might be Tatlin."

"A physicist-? That doesn't make sense. According to the police captain, these affected areas of the forest are suffering from a new virus disease. Have you been trying to get to Mont Royal all week?"

"Not exactly. I came here with another man from the bureau, an American called Anderson. When we left the boat he went off to Mont Royal in a hired car to take photographs. I was to wait here so I could get a story out quickly."

"Did he see anything?"

"Well, four days ago I spoke to him on the telephone, but the line was bad, I could hardly hear a thing. All he said was something about the forest being full of jewels, but it was meant as a joke, you know-" She gestured in the air.

"A figure of speech?"

"Exactly. If he had seen a new diamond field, he would have said so definitely. Anyway, the next day the telephone line was broken, and they're still trying to repair it-even the police can't get through."

Dr. Sanders ordered two brandies. Accepting a cigarette from Louise, he looked out through the window at the jetties along the river. The last of the cargo was being loaded aboard the steamer, and the passengers stood at the rail or sat passively on their luggage, looking down at the deck.

"It's difficult to know how seriously to take this," Sanders said. "Obviously something is going on, but it could be anything under the sun."

"Then what about the police and the army convoys? And the customs men out there this morning?"

Dr. Sanders shrugged. "Officialdom-if the telephone lines are down they probably know as little as we do. What I can't understand is why you and this American came here in the first place. By all accounts Mont Royal is even more dead than Port Matarre."

" Anderson had a tip that there was some kind of trouble near the mines-he wouldn't tell me what, it was really his story, you see-but we knew the army had sent in reserves. Tell me, Doctor, are you still going to Mont Royal? To your friends?"

"If I can. There must be some way. After all, it's only fifty miles, at a pinch one could walk it."

Louise laughed. "Not me." Just then a black-garbed figure strode past the window, heading off toward the market. "Father Balthus," Louise said. "His mission is near Mont Royal -I checked up on him too. There's a traveling companion for you."

"I doubt it." Dr. Sanders watched the priest walk briskly away from them, his thin face lifted as he crossed the road. His head and shoulders were held stiffly, but behind him his hands moved and twisted with a life of their own. "Father Balthus is not one to make a penitential progress-I think he has other problems on his mind." Dr. Sanders stood up, finishing his brandy. "However, it's a point. I think I'll have a word with the good Father. I'll see you back at the hotel-perhaps we can have dinner together?"

"Of course." She waved to him as he went out and then sat back against the window, her face motionless and without expression.

A hundred yards away, Dr. Sanders caught sight of the priest. Balthus had reached the outskirts of the native market and was moving among the first of the stalls, turning from left to right as if looking for someone. Dr. Sanders followed at a distance. The market was almost empty and he decided to keep the priest under observation for a few minutes before approaching him. Now and then, when Father Balthus glanced about, Sanders saw his lean face, the thin nose raised critically as he peered above the heads of the native women.

Dr. Sanders glanced down at the stalls, pausing to examine the carved statuettes and curios. The small local industry had made full use of the waste products of the mines at Mont Royal, and many of the teak and ivory carvings were decorated with fragments of calcite and fluorspar picked from the refuse heaps, ingeniously worked into the statuettes to form miniature crowns and necklaces. Many of the carvings were made from lumps of impure jade and amber, and the sculptors had abandoned all pretense to Christian imagery and produced squatting idols with pendulous abdomens and grimacing faces.

Still keeping Father Balthus under scrutiny, Dr. Sanders examined a large statuette of a native deity in which two crystals of calcium fluoride formed the eyes, the mineral phosphorescing in the sunlight. Nodding to the stall holder, he complimented her on the piece. Making the most of her opportunity, she gave him a wide smile and then drew back a strip of faded calico that covered the rear of the stall.

"My, that is a beauty!" Dr. Sanders reached forward to take the ornament she had exposed, but the woman held back his hands. Glittering below her in the sunlight was what appeared to be an immense crystalline orchid carved from some quartzlike mineral. The entire structure of the flower had been reproduced and then embedded within the crystal base, almost as if a living specimen had been conjured into the center of a huge cut-glass pendant. The internal faces of the quartz had been cut with remarkable skill, so that a dozen images of the orchid were refracted, one upon the other, as if seen through a maze of prisms. As Dr. Sanders moved his head, a continuous font of light poured from the jewel.

Dr. Sanders reached into his pocket for his wallet, and the woman smiled again and drew the cover back to expose several more of the ornaments. Next to the orchid was a spray of leaves attached to a twig, carved from a translucent jadeike stone. Each of the leaves had been reproduced with exquisite craftsmanship, the veins forming a pale lattice beneath the crystal. The spray of seven leaves, faithfully rendered down to the axillary buds and the faint warping of the twig, seemed characteristic more of some medieval Japanese jeweler's art than of the crude massive sculpture of Africa.

Next to the spray was an even more bizarre piece, a carved tree fungus that resembled a huge jeweled sponge. Both this and the spray of leaves shone with a dozen images of themselves refracted through the faces of the surrounding mount. Bending forward, Dr. Sanders placed himself between the ornaments and the sun, but the light within them sparkled as if coming from some interior source.

Before he could open his wallet there was a shout in the distance. A disturbance had broken Out near one of the stalls. The stall holders ran about in all directions, and a woman's voice cried out. In the center of this scene stood Father Balthus, arms raised above his head as he held something in his hands, black robes lifted like the wings of a revenging bird.

"Wait for me!" Sanders called over his shoulder to the stall owner, but she had covered up her display, sliding the tray out of sight among the stacks of palm leaves and baskets of cocoa meal at the back of the stall.

Leaving her, Dr. Sanders ran through the crowd toward Father Balthus. The priest now stood alone, surrounded by a circle of onlookers, holding in his upraised hands a large native carving of a crucifix. Brandishing it like a sword over his head, he waved it from left to right as if semaphoring to some distant peak. Every few seconds he stopped and lowered the carving to inspect it, his thin face tense and perspiring.

The statuette, a cruder cousin of the jeweled orchid Dr. Sanders had seen, was carved from a pale-yellow gem-stone similar to chrysolite, the outstretched figure of the Christ embedded in a sheath of prismlike quartz. As the priest waved the statuette in the air, shaking it in a paroxysm of anger, the crystals seemed to deliquesce, the light pouring from them as from a burning taper.

"Balthus-!"

Dr. Sanders pushed through the crowd watching the priest. The faces were half averted, keeping an eye open for the police, as if the people were aware of their own complicity in whatever act of _lese-majeste_ Father Balthus was now punishing. The priest ignored them and continued to shake the carving, then lowered it from the air and felt the crystalline surface.

"Balthus, what on earth-?" Sanders began, but the priest shouldered him aside. Whirling the crucifix like a propeller, he watched its light flashing away, intent only on exorcising whatever powers it held for him.

There was a shout from one of the stall holders, and Dr. Sanders saw a native police sergeant approaching cautiously in the distance. Immediately the crowd began to scatter. Panting from his efforts, Father Balthus let one end of the crucifix fall to the ground. Still holding it like a blunted sword, he looked down at its dull surface. The crystalline sheath had vanished into the air.

"Obscene, obscene-!" he muttered to Dr. Sanders, as the latter took his arm and propelled him through the stalls. Sanders paused to toss the carving onto the blue sheet covering the owner's stall. The shaft, fashioned from some kind of polished wood, felt like a stick of ice. He pulled a five-franc note from his wallet and stuffed it into the stall owner's hands, then pushed Father Balthus in front of him. The priest was staring up at the sky and at the distant forest beyond the market. Deep within the great boughs the leaves flickered with the same hard light that had flared from the cross.

"Balthus, can't you see-?" Sanders took the priest's hand in a firm grip when they reached the wharf. The pale hand was as cold as the crucifix. "It was meant as a compliment. There was nothing obscene there-you've seen a thousand jeweled crosses."

The priest at last seemed to recognize him. His narrow face stared sharply at the doctor. He pulled his hand away. "You obviously don't understand, Doctor! That cross was not _jeweled!_"

Dr. Sanders watched him stride off, head and shoulders held stiffly with a fierce self-sufficient pride, the slim hands behind his back twisting and fretting like nervous serpents.

Later that day, as he and Louise Peret had dinner together in the deserted hotel, Dr. Sanders said: "I don't know what the good Father's motives are, but I'm certain his bishop wouldn't approve of them."

"You think he may have-changed sides?" Louise asked.

Laughing at this, Sanders replied: "That may be putting it too strongly, but I suspect that, professionally speaking, he was trying to confirm his doubts rather than allay them. That cross in the market drove him into a frenzy-he was literally trying to shake it to death."

"But why? I've seen those native carvings, they're beautiful but just ordinary pieces of jewelry."

"No, Louise. That's the point. As Balthus knew, they're not ordinary by any means. There's something about the light they give out-I didn't get a chance to examine one closely-but it seems to come from inside them, not from the sun. A hard, intense light, you can see it all over Port Matarre."

"I know." Louise's hand strayed to the sunglasses that lay beside her plate, safely within reach like some potent talisman. At intervals she automatically opened and closed them. "When you first arrive here everything seems dark, but then you look at the forest and see the stars burning in the leaves." She tapped the glasses. "That's why I wear these, Doctor."

"Is it?" Sanders picked up the glasses and held them in the air. One of the largest pairs he had seen, their frames were almost three inches deep. "Where did you get them? They're huge, Louise, they divide your face into two halves."

Louise shrugged. She lit a cigarette with a nervous flourish. "It's March 21, Doctor, the day of the equinox."

"The equinox? Yes, of course-when the sun crosses the equator, and day and night are the same length-" Sanders pondered this. These divisions into dark and light seemed everywhere around them in Port Matarre, in the contrasts between Ventress's white suit and Balthus's dark soutane, in the white arcades with their shadowed in-fills, and even in his thoughts of Suzanne Clair, the somber twin of the young woman watching him across the table with her frank eyes.

"At least you can choose, Doctor, that's one thing. Nothing is blurred or gray now." She leaned forward. "Why did you come to Port Matarre? These friends, are you really looking for them?"

Sanders turned away from her level gaze. "It's too difficult to explain, I-" He debated whether to confide in her, and then with an effort pulled himself together. Sitting up, he touched her hand. "Look, tomorrow we must try to hire a car or a boat. If we share expenses it will give us longer in Mont Royal."

"I'll gladly come with you. But do you think it's safe?"

"For the time being. Whatever the police think, I'm sure it's not a virus growth." He felt the emerald in the gilt ring on Louise's finger, and added: "In a small way I'm something of an expert in these matters."

Without moving her hand from his touch, Louise said quietly: "I'm sure you are, Doctor. I spoke briefly this afternoon to the steward on the steamer." She added: "My aunt's cook is now a patient at your _leproserie_."

Sanders hesitated. "Louise, it's not my _leproserie_. Don't think I'm committed to it. As you say, perhaps we have a firm choice now."

They had finished their coffee. Sanders stood up and took Louise's arm. Perhaps because of her resemblance to Suzanne, he seemed to understand her movements as her hips and shoulders touching his own, as if familiar intimacies were already beginning to repeat themselves. Louise avoided his eyes, but her body remained close to him as they moved between the tables.

They walked out into the empty lobby. The desk clerk sat asleep with his head leaning against the small switchboard. To their left the brass rails of the staircase shone in the damp light, the limp fronds of the potted palms trailing onto the worn marble steps. Still holding Louise's arm, and feeling her fingers take his hand, Sanders glanced out through the entrance. In the shadows of the arcade he caught a glimpse of the shoes and trousers of a man leaning against a column.

"It's too late to go out," Louise said.

Sanders looked down at her, aware that for once all the inertia of sexual conventions, and his own reluctance to involve himself intimately with others, had slipped away. In addition he felt that the past day at Port Matarre, the ambivalent atmosphere of the deserted town, in some way placed them at a pivotal point below the dark and white shadows of the equinox. At these moments of balance any act was possible.