Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [72]
But why he had had that intuition was still unclear to him. If he tried to reconstruct it, he had to admit it amounted to some inborn distrust of Stella’s faithfulness, though she had given him no particular cause for alarm in that respect. It was true that she disappeared all day long to rehearse and perform at the Trilby Temple. But she had explained to him that it was high-precision work, with no mistakes allowed, and so required painstaking practice, and he had no reason not to believe her.
He had not gone to see the show, though she had invited him, because he simply did not want to. From what he imagined, a magician’s assistant was a half-clad doll, offered to foreign, inquisitive looks and subjected to all kinds of sadistic outrages. She would be paraded, manipulated, locked up in tight boxes, sawed in half, decapitated, and the Devil knew what else. He simply did not wish to see his love treated that way in public.
However, something nagged at him: the fact that he had met her in the hospital the day of the Drug’n’Drone Dragnet, as it was now called in the local lore, and precisely when he’d been on his way to find Phoebe, so that, in a sense, Stella had prevented him from seeing and possibly rescuing the damsel in distress. The way she had presented herself could have been spontaneous, but could also have been calculated. After all, as a trap, it would have been a rather simple and infallible one.
The fact that she was employed precisely where Phoebe was now exploited and under the command of a magician who was also a hypnotist—like the one, if not the same one, whom he had faced in the hospital (and who had voiced, if he remembered correctly, his interest in Phoebe)—did little to dispel his doubts. He hated himself for suspecting her, but as a man whose past week had been nothing but set-ups and persecutions, he could be excused for a tendency to see patterns and plots in mere coincidences. As to why the Ingersarvik had sprung to his mind, he could not really tell. Maybe it was his way of bracing himself for the worst.
The taxsleigh had given up shortly before Boreas Bridge, as weather conditions permitted no further advance. Gabriel regretfully paid the sumptuous fare he had himself promised and trudged for the rest of the way, sometimes sinking up to his calves in the fresh powder snow.
The blizzard seemed to be dying down, and it was now possible to enjoy the sight of the buildings and embankments and bridges smothered in the diamond-dusted whiteness. There’s always something soothing in the snow, thought Gabriel, a promise of happiness and absolution, of a new start on a clean sheet. Snow redesigned the streets with hints of another architecture, even more magnificent, more fanciful than it already was, all spires and pinnacles on pale palaces of pearl and opal. All that New Venice should have been reappeared through its partial disappearance. It was as if the city were dreaming about itself and crystallizing both that dream and the ethereal unreality of it. He wallowed in the impression, badly needing it right now, knowing it would not last as he hobbled nearer to his destination.
Only second to the Bower of Bliss, that miragenous bordello on the Ladies’ Mile, the Ingersarvik (the word meant something like “Humping Spot”) was one of the most famous places in Venustown, where “famous” mostly meant “infamous.” For the layman, however, it was impossible to find, as no signs indicated it. But Gabriel knew where it was and even knew it too well: down an almost invisible steep flight of stairs, in a chink between two buildings. A heavy door with a ringing bell opened, after too long a while, on a ticket booth staffed by a rather sulky Inuk girl. For singles, the entrance fee was expensive. Gabriel’s money was melting faster than the snow promised to do, and what was worse, he expected little pleasure in exchange as he entered, ducking his head to pass down the low, narrow tunnel to the main “igloo.”
If there ever was something about Eskimo