glanced down the hall apprehensively, saw Anna carefully sliding one
foot after another along the ledge while clinging to the parapet with
both hands. Her hair blew in the wind. Then she was out of his line of
sight.
He had to distract Chardin, keep him from noticing Anna’s appearance at
his window. He had to keep Chardin’s attention.
“What is it you want from me?” came Chardin’s voice. His tone seemed
neutral now. He was listening; that was the first step.
“Monsieur Chardin, we have information that could be invaluable to you.
We know a great deal about Sigma, about the inheritors, the new
generation that has seized control. The only protection for either of
us is in knowledge.”
“There is no protection against them, you fool!”
Ben raised his voice. “Goddamn it! Your rationality was once
legendary. If you’ve lost that, Chardin, then they’ve won anyway! Can’t
you see how unreasonable you’re being?” In a gentler tone, he added,
“If you send us away, you’ll always wonder what you might have learned.
Or perhaps you’ll never have the opportunity ”
Suddenly there was the sound of glass breaking from inside the
apartment, followed immediately by a loud crash and a clatter.
Had Anna made it through a window into Chardin’s apartment safely? A
few seconds later he heard Anna’s voice, loud and clear. “I’ve got his
shotgun! And it’s trained on him now.” She obviously spoke for
Chardin’s benefit as well as Ben’s.
Ben strode toward the open door and entered the still-darkened room. It
was hard to see anything but shapes; when his eyes adjusted, after a few
seconds, he made out Anna, dimly outlined against a thick curtain,
holding the long-barreled gun.
And a man in a peculiar, heavy robe with a cowl rose slowly, shakily to
his feet. He did not appear to be a vigorous man; he was indeed a
shut-in.
It was plain what had happened. Anna, plunging through the window, had
leaped onto the long, ungainly shotgun, pinioning it to the floor; the
impact must have knocked him over.
For a few moments, all three of them stood in silence. Chardin’s
breathing was audible heavy, nearly agonal, his face shadowed within his
cowl.
Watching carefully to make sure Chardin didn’t have another weapon
concealed in the folds of his monk like garment, Ben fumbled for a light
switch. When the lights went on, Chardin abruptly turned away from them
both, facing the wall. Was Chardin reaching for another gun?
“Freeze!” Anna shouted.
“Use your vaunted powers of reason, Chardin,” Ben said. “If we wanted
to kill you, you’d already be dead. That’s obviously not why we’re
here!”
“Turn and face us,” Anna commanded.
Chardin was silent for a moment. “Be careful of what you ask for,” he
rasped.
“Now, dammit!”
Moving as if in slow motion, Chardin complied and when Ben’s mind
grasped the reality of what he saw, his stomach heaved and he nearly
retched. Nor could Anna disguise her shocked intake of breath. It was
a horror beyond imagining.
They were staring into an almost featureless mass of scar tissue, wildly
various in texture. In areas it appeared crenellated, almost scalloped;
in other areas, the proud flesh was smooth and nearly shiny, as if
lacquered or covered in plastic wrap. Naked capillaries made the oval
that had once been his face an angry, beefy red, except where
varicosities yielded coils of dark purple. The staring, filmy gray eyes
looked startlingly out of place two large marbles left on a slick
blacktop by a careless child.
Ben averted his gaze, and then, wrenchingly, forced himself to look
again. More details were visible. Embedded in a horribly webbed and
wrinkled central concavity were two nasal openings, higher than the
nostrils would once have been. Below, he made out a mouth that was
little more than a gash, a wound within a wound.
“Oh, dear God.” Ben slowly breathed the words.
“You are surprised?” Chardin said, the words scarcely appearing to come
from his wound-like mouth. It was if he were a ventriloquist’s dummy,
one designed by a deranged sadist. A cough-laugh. “The reports of my
death were quite accurate, all except for the assertion of death itself.
“Burned beyond recognition’ yes, indeed I was. I should have perished
in the blaze. Often I wish that I had. My survival was a freak
accident. An enormity. The worst fate a human being can have.”
“They tried to kill you,” Anna whispered. “And they failed.”
“Oh no. I think that in most respects they quite succeeded,” Chardin
said, and winced: a twitch of dark red muscle around one of his
eyeballs. It was apparent that the simple act of talking was painful to
him. He was enunciating with exaggerated precision, but the damage
meant that certain consonants remained blurry. “A close confidant of
mine had suspicions that they might try to eliminate me. Talk had
already begun about dispatching the angeli re belli He came by my
country estate too late. There were ashes, and blackened timber, and
charred ruins everywhere. And my body, what was left of it, was as
black as any of it. He thought he could detect a pulse, my friend did.
He brought me to a tiny provincial hospital, thirty kilometers away,
told them a tale about an overturned kerosene lamp, gave them a false
name. He was canny. He understood that if my enemies knew I had
survived, they would try again. Months passed in that tiny clinic. I
had burns over ninety-five percent of my body. I was not expected to
live.” He spoke haltingly but hypnotically: a tale never before spoken.
And then he sat down in a tall-backed wooden chair, seemingly depleted.
“But you survived,” Ben said.
“I did not have the strength to force myself to stop breathing,” Chardin
said. He paused again, the memory of pain imposing further pain. “They
wanted to move me to a metropolitan hospital, but of course I would not
permit it. I was beyond help anyway. Can you imagine what it is like
when consciousness itself is nothing other than the consciousness of
pain?”
“And yet you survived,” Ben repeated.
“The agony was beyond anything our species was meant to endure. Wound
dressings were an ordeal beyond imagining. The stench of necrotic flesh
was overpowering even to me, and more than one orderly would routinely
vomit upon entering my room. Then, after the granulation tissue formed,
a new horror was in store for me–contracture. The scars would shrink
and the agony would be rekindled all over again. Even today, the pain I
live with every moment of every day is of a degree I never experienced
in the whole of my preceding life. When I had a life. You cannot look
at me, can you? No one can. But then I cannot look at myself, either.”
Anna spoke, clearly knowing that human contact had to be reestablished.
“The strength you must have had–it’s extraordinary. No medical
textbook could ever account for it. The instinct for survival. You
emerged from that blaze. You were saved. Something inside you fought
for life. It had to be for a reason!”
Chardin spoke quietly. “A poet was once asked, If his house were on
fire, what would he save? And he said, I would save the fire. Without
fire, nothing is possible.” ” His laughter was a low, disconcerting
rumble. “Fire is after all what made civilization possible: but it can
equally be an instrument of barbarity.”
Anna returned the shotgun to Chardin after removing a last shell from
the chamber. “We need your help,” she said urgently.
“Do I look like I am in a position to help anyone, I who cannot help
myself?”
“If you want to call your enemies to account, we may be your best bet,”
Ben said somberly.
“There is no revenge for something like this. I did not survive by
drinking the gall of rage.” He withdrew a small plastic atomizer from
the folds of his robes, and directed a spray of moisture toward his
eyes.
“For years, you were at the helm of a major petrochemical corporation,
Trianon,” Ben prompted. He needed to show Chardin that they had puzzled
out the basic situation, needed to enlist him. “An industry leader, it
was and remains. You were Emil Menard’s lieutenant, the brains behind
Trianon’s mid century restructuring. He was a founder of Sigma. And in
time you must have become a principal as well.”
“Sigma,” he repeated in a quavering voice. “Where it all begins.”
“And no doubt your genius in accounting helped in the great undertaking
of spiriting assets out of the Third Reich.”
“Eh? Do you think that was the great project? That was nothing, a
negligible exercise. The grand project… fe grand projet…” He
trailed off. “That was something of an entirely different order. And
nothing you are equipped to comprehend.”
“Try me,” Ben said.
“And divulge the secrets I have spent my life protecting?”