The Stranger - Max Frei [149]
I went down to the living room, entered the dark restaurant, and poured myself a full glass of the contents of the first bottle I grabbed. I couldn’t make out the name of the drink in the darkness, but the taste wasn’t too bad. Then I stuffed my pipe with tobacco. The taste of the local tobacco didn’t matter at all—under the circumstances, it was better than nothing.
I sat alone at the bar in the light cast by the dim orange nimbus of the streetlight, sipping the anonymous drink, and smoked. This simple ritual was enough to restore some semblance of order to my thoughts. I realized there was no need to bother Melifaro, and especially not Sir Juffin. Let them catch up on their sleep. I’m not such a moron that I can’t handle these routine matters. It’s my job, after all.
Having resolved my moral deliberations, I went back to the bedroom. The tantalizing smell again seemed familiar to me. Where could I have smelled it before? Not in the Glutton Bunba, that’s for sure. The smell in the Glutton is unique: sharper and spicier. Certainly not in the Sated Skeleton, which delivered my breakfast every morning. And not . . . it remained just out of reach. It didn’t smell like my grandmother’s kitchen. Although . . . I finally went completely astray, as so often happens when you try to fish out a single kernel in the rice pudding of your memories.
Abandoning this olfactory wild-goose chase, I dug into my pockets for the dagger. The gauge mounted on the handle showed evidence of magic of the second degree. This was not only officially permitted, but also absolutely logical, since I was in the presence of the remains of a restaurant proprietor. And who is more adept at practicing permissible Black Magic than a chef? This modest degree of conjuration, in my humble opinion, was nowhere near potent enough to transform a human being into something like what I saw before me. Fine, we’d deal with that question later. Now I had to remove the body to the House by the Bridge, I reasoned, because that was the proper procedure. Further, I couldn’t bear thinking of that abomination in the marital bower. Sooner or later the sweet Lady Tanita would return. What an incompetent figure I’d cut if she had to see that gruesome piece of meat again!
It wasn’t that I felt sorry for this woman, nor could what I experienced have been called pity. It was just that everything that had happened to her seemed to be happening to me, as well. Lady Tanita’s sorrows washed over me like the sound of a television blaring in the next room. It wasn’t inside me, but I couldn’t escape it. In short, I experienced in the flesh the literal meaning of “empathy.”
There is nothing simpler than carrying out the impossible. You just have to imagine what you must do, and turn your mind off completely. When you come to your senses, everything is already behind you.
I swear by the World that when I was wrapping the piece of meat in the blanket, I felt not a shred of emotion. I didn’t feel anything later, either, when I was enacting my favorite trick, as a result of which the disgusting mummy fit between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand. And while I was walking through the empty city to the House by the Bridge, my feelings were dormant, as though some part of myself, tender and vulnerable, had been put into cold storage until better times.
When I reached the Ministry, I wondered where I should unload my burden. Perhaps in the small, dark chamber, thoroughly insulated from the rest of the world, where material evidence was stored? Or in one of the chilly, spacious basement rooms that served as the morgue and were nearly always empty? I was so perplexed about this dilemma that I decided to consult Kurush.
“If you’re sure that this was once a person, it can only be a corpse,” said the wise bird.
I felt relieved. Here was some degree of certainty, in any case.
Only after the aromatic corpse was on the stone floor did I allow myself to become a bundle of nerves again.
I went to wash my hands. I washed them for a full half hour, scraping away at