The Secrets of a Fire King (34 page)

Rat Stories

225

“I know, I know,” Inez lamented. “I certainly should be. But it gets no better. I find myself worse each time. I can’t stand the thought of them running over my feet.”

“Never mind, Inez,” Steve said. His voice was deep, soft, comforting. He wore a batik shirt, darkly printed, and the dying sun cast his tanned arms in gold. Claire gazed at him, remembering nights all over the world—in Nepal and the Sudan, in Laos and once in Myanmar—when he had spoken that way to her. It had not happened for a long time now. The last sunlight slanted across the balcony, illuminating Steve’s face, the play of light and shadows making his features seem both strong and even. He offered Inez a smile that Claire herself had not seen in weeks, then reached over to top up her glass with tonic. “I’m sure that particular rat was a complete aberration,” he lied. “I’m sure we’ve seen the last rat of the evening.”

“You are always so calm, Steve,” Inez said. “It is a very reassur-ing quality, you know.” She smiled up at him, but she still didn’t put her feet on the fl oor.

Just as well, Claire thought, remembering the nest they had discovered just that morning, after days of mysterious tracks and rustlings, and whiffs of the telltale vile odor, like damp, rotting fur.

Now I understand,
Steve had said, stepping back from the tangled nest, stuffed with bits of cloth and vegetation, the dark, wiry rodent hair.
Now I know where that phrase comes from, “I smell a rat.”
Paul put his glass on the table and cleared his throat. He had been silent all evening, polite but mysterious, and now everyone glanced in his direction. He was attractive, Claire thought, his thick gray hair falling in waves against his tan face, like the sea against sand. He looked like a hero out of the Ramayana, sitting here on her veranda. She leaned forward to hear what he had to say, wanting not to like him, wanting to think Inez unhappy.

“They used to eat rats,” Paul said evenly, “at the place I was staying in South America.”

“Don’t tell me about it,” Inez insisted. She waved one long hand in the air and shook her head. “Please!” Paul smiled. His teeth were white and perfectly even. “I will, though,” he said. Claire studied him closely, wondering if it was
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courage or just ignorance that made him push on this way. People who worked for Inez generally did whatever necessary to keep her happy. “I think you need some shock therapy, Inez. Maybe what we really need to do is trap a rat and let you touch it.”

“We could oblige,” Claire put in, drawing a dark look from Steve, feeling as free and giddy as if she were standing at the edge of a precipice. Inez’s face was now so taut that two small lines had deepened on either side of her mouth. “Our maid bought these traps, like little cages. Once the rats are caught, she smacks them on the head and tosses them out into the street. You’ve seen them everywhere, I’m sure, dead rats slowly becoming part of the road.” Paul chuckled, Raoul shook his head, amused, and Inez choked slightly on her gin.

“Claire,” Steve said. The anger in his voice was like ground glass, glittering, so seductive and so fine that only she could feel its sharpness. “Darling. See how you are distressing Inez.” He smiled and gestured to the cut-glass dish, nearly empty, on the table.

“We’re almost out of cashews here,” he said. “Don’t we have any more?”

He was so polite! Such a wonderful man, Inez must be thinking, and so handsome with that dark beard, those vivid blue eyes.

Only Claire heard the thick weave of anger cushioning his every word. She gave him a dazzling smile. “I don’t know,” she said.

“Why don’t you go and see?”

The cashews were in the freezer, carefully sealed away from rodents. They both knew it. Steve hesitated, then put down his glass and maneuvered past Inez. When he brushed Claire’s shoulder his animosity reached her like a cold breeze, and anger bloomed darkly in her own heart. Steve was worried, she could tell, that she would mess up his funding, though he should know better. After all these years, of course she would be a proper hostess. For the sake of the funding, she would keep the rest of her rat stories to herself. But she saw with satisfaction that Paul and Raoul had already become engrossed in the topic.

“I’m serious,” Paul said. He put down his drink and leaned back in his chair, running his hands through his thick hair and clasping them behind his head. “If you want to conquer your fear,
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Inez, you must first face up to it. It worked for me. I was in the Seychelles for a while, doing an engineering project. And I always noticed that the workers had lost a few layers of skin on their fi ngertips and their toes. I thought no more of it until this happened to me, once or twice, that I had this funny reaction with my skin.

At first I thought it was some kind of disease. I even looked up the symptoms of leprosy. One day I became concerned enough to ask a doctor. He was an Indian doctor, a Sikh. He wore a pure white turban on his head. He took one look at my fingertips and laughed.

‘Oh, Mr. Paul,’ he said. ‘I see you are being bothered by our cunning rats. They come in the night, don’t you know, and numb the fingertips with their breath. Then they can nibble at the fi rst few layers of skin undetected.’ ”

Claire smiled. Inez’s long face had twisted into an expression of near pain. “Thank you very much, Paul,” Inez said. “I shall never sleep again.”

Paul shook his head with some impatience. He held up his fi ngers, which were long and square tipped. For a moment everyone was quiet, gazing at Paul’s unblemished hands. “My point is not to disgust you, Inez. I’m trying to explain. Just think of how I felt, with those rat marks on my fingertips already. I went out and bought all the rolls of wire I could find, and I rigged up a veritable fortress in my room. My skin healed, but I still didn’t sleep well. I kept thinking of the little rat teeth, white, like the points of knives.

I woke up in cold sweats, dreaming of them. Finally, I decided if I could touch a rat, in a controlled situation, that is, then I might be able to move beyond the fear. And so I trapped one, at night, in a cage like Claire described. My God, it was a big one too, and black.

But I made myself touch it, and it wasn’t so different than, say, touching a cat. I poisoned it, soon after. It wasn’t pleasant, but the dreams stopped, and since then I haven’t worried at all about rats.” Inez, listening, had drained her drink. “Well, I admire you, Paul,” she said, putting her sweaty glass down on the table. “But I couldn’t possibly touch a rat. With me it is a genuine phobia. I’m not scared of any other animal. For instance—here’s a real story for you—I was living out in the countryside in Indonesia in this lovely little villa. It was next to a river, perfectly marvelous, with
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the coconut trees swaying overhead and all sorts of wildlife. Moni-tor lizards as long as you are tall, Paul, and once I even saw an alli-gator slide off the banks into the water. I used to like it all well enough, watching it from the balcony on the second story.

“Well, one day I came home from work early. It was one of those steamy hot days you get in the interior, and I was drenched with sweat. Shrugged out of my clothes right away, grabbed my sarong, and padded off for a bath. The tub was on the left side of the room, the sink directly to the right, and I went for the sink fi rst because I wanted to brush my teeth. So imagine this, now. I was standing there at the sink, my mouth all frothy with toothpaste, when in the glass of the mirror I saw something dark move in the tub. A lizard, I thought first, though I knew instinctively that it was not. I froze right there, with the toothbrush in my mouth, and watched in the mirror as a cobra rose up against the white porcelain of the bath.”

Steve had stopped in the doorway with the crystal bowl full of cashews, and Inez paused in her story to smile and wave him to his chair. She was flushed, two bright spots of color on her pale cheeks, and her long fingers moved like narrow shafts of light. Raoul and Paul, who had both drawn forward in their chairs, took advantage of the pause to replenish their drinks. Claire studied Steve as he placed the nuts in the middle of the table. He was smiling, but a muscle twitched in his lean face. So much of life turned out to be a matter of luck, good or bad, Claire thought, reaching for a cashew. This party, for instance, was something they had planned quite carefully for weeks, and yet it had nearly been ruined. Everything had been ready, the marble floors polished, the windows sparkling, the roast in the oven, when the vilest smell in the world had begun to permeate the house. Wordless, she and Steve had met in the kitchen, setting aside their dust rags and their animosity. Steve turned off the gas and yanked the oven away from the wall, and together they had tilted it forward to look into the space behind.

The stench—baked urine, singed hair—had sharpened, and with the stove balanced between them they had heard frantic movement.

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And then, as if in sudden consensus, the rats had begun to leap from their nest in the stove. One after another, thick black rats followed by their smaller babies. Like Inez, Claire had wanted to scream and run, but because she and Steve were balancing the heavy stove between them, there was nothing to do but wait for the rats to leave. One of them had slid right down her arm. Even now, hours later, Claire could feel the wiry rat claws on the skin. She shivered, shaking off the sensation, then spoke to Inez.

“How vulnerable you must have felt,” she said.

“Oh, I was terrified.” Inez had been gazing pensively into the foliage, but now she looked up and grew animated again. “I just froze. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a cobra, outside of pictures, I mean. Well, they are
evil
looking. Black and swaying, with that decorated cowl. I held perfectly still for an instant, and watched it sway and hiss at me in the mirror. There were several yards between us. I had to decide if it was close enough to strike. Finally, I bolted and ran like hell out of the bathroom, screaming bloody murder for the maid and the gardener.”

“Thank the heavens,” Raoul said as Inez paused, “for maids and gardeners.”

Inez shook her head. “So you’d think. But they were more terrified than I was. The gardener gave me a forked stick about four meters long and explained how to use it, but he refused to even go upstairs. So I had a drink and then I went up by myself. The snake was gone, so I sat down on the toilet and waited. Sure enough, after an hour it came back, stuck its head up from the drain and slithered out. I pinned it with the stick and cut off its head with a machete the gardener had given me. The blood—oh, it was
awful.

But my point is, it didn’t bother me a bit to touch that snake, not once it was dead. But I’m still quite sure that I could never bring myself to touch a rat, even one that was very, very dead.”

“Inez,” Steve said, raising his glass in a toast. “That’s an amazing story. I’d like to make a toast to you. High points for bravery.” Claire raised her glass along with the others, and even smiled, though she thought that Steve had gone too far, was sliding over the edge into obsequious behavior.

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“Yes,” Raoul said, clinking his glass against Steve’s. “Well. Perhaps you ought to acquire a python, Inez, to eat your rats. I saw one devour a cat once, and it was quite effective.” They all laughed and stood up. The darkness had descended with tropical suddenness. Frangipani blossoms glowed faintly all around them, their heavy scent drifting through the air. Steve, deferential as a footman, took Inez’s elbow, and Claire turned away abruptly, leaving the nuts and dirty glasses to the rats that lurked behind them in the dark leaves.

The original dinner, which had begun to bake with the rats in the oven, had been thrown away, and Claire had rushed to the nearest restaurant for an order of biryani rice and curried chicken.

Now the maid served it up in steaming bowls, as if it had been concocted in their own kitchen. The three guests ate heartily.

Lovely curry, Raoul murmured, helping himself to more of the golden rice. Extraordinary biryani! Even Inez ate with gusto, as if she were filling up all the long narrow hollows of her limbs. Only Steve and Claire, the scent of baking rats still vividly with them, ate sparingly. Nevertheless, the dinner conversation was polite and lively. At the end of it, after a dessert of fresh mangoes and dark coffee, Inez sat back and answered the unspoken question that had shaped the evening.

“Steve,” she said. “Claire. What a lovely dinner party. And I think we both agree,” she added, nodding toward Raoul, “that you are doing good work here. I feel sure your funding will be extended. It is what I will recommend.”

“That’s splendid,” Steve said, and Claire heard the relief rushing through his voice. “I’m just delighted.”

“It
is
wonderful,” Claire agreed. Already the worry was easing from Steve’s face, and she thought yes, good, now we will get our lives back once again.

They stayed for a second cup of coffee, and Claire had her earlier suspicions confirmed when Paul excused himself, pleading an early morning, and Inez, her eyes lingering on him as he left, got up a moment later. She smiled languidly as she rose, stretching her long arms. “My wrap,” she murmured. “I have an early morning, too. Did I leave it on the veranda?”

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“I’ll look,” Steve said, standing up immediately, and Claire knew he was thinking of the rats. “You wait here.”

“Nonsense,” Inez said. “I’m coming with you. Otherwise, you won’t know where to look. Besides, I want to finalize a detail or two with you.”

Steve shot a look at Claire, who shrugged. Inez had already announced her decision; what harm could rats do now? She watched them walk through the living room, Inez trailing a sweet perfume, her white dress luminous in the darkness.

Raoul put his hand on her arm. “Delightful, Claire,” he said.