The last time she’d seen this tableau she’d been behind Mamoulian’s eyes, a soldier in a snow-spattered yard, awaiting the blow that would cancel his young life. A blow that had never come; or rather had been deferred until now. Had the executioner waited so long, living in one body only to discard it for another, trailing Mamoulian through decade upon decade until at last fate assembled the pieces of a reunion? Or was this all the European’s doing? Had his will summoned Breer to finish a story accidentally interrupted generations before?
She would never know. The act, begun a second time, was not to be postponed again. The weapon sliced down, almost dividing head from neck in one blow. A few tenacious sinews kept it rocking-nose to chest-from the trunk for two succeeding blows before it departed, rolling down between the European’s legs and coming to rest at Tom’s feet. The boy kicked it away.
Mamoulian had made no sound; but now, headless, his torso gave vent: Noise came from the wound with the blood; complaints sounded, it seemed, from every pore. And with the sound came smoky ghosts of unmade pictures, rising from him like steam. Bitter things appeared and fled; dreams, perhaps, or fragments of the past. It was all one now. Always had been, in fact. He had come from rumor; he the legendary, he the unfixable, he whose very name was a lie. Could it matter if now his biography, fleeing into nothingness, was taken as fiction?
Breer, unassuaged, began to berate the open wound of the corpse’s neck with the machete, slicing first down then sideways in an effort to cleave the enemy into smaller and yet smaller pieces. An arm was summarily lopped off; he picked it up to sever hand from wrist, forearm from upper arm. In moments the room, which had been almost serene as the execution took place, became an abattoir.
Marty stumbled to the door in time to see Breer strike off Mamoulian’s other arm.
“Look at him go!” said the American boy, toasting the bloodbath with Whitehead’s vodka.
Marty watched the carnage, unblenched. It was all over. The European was a dead man. His head lay on its side under the window; it looked small; vestigial.
Carys, flattened against the wall beside the door, caught Marty’s hand. “Papa?” she said. “What about Papa.”
As she spoke Mamoulian’s corpse pitched forward from its kneeling position. The ghosts and the din it had spilled had stopped. Now there was only dark blood splashing from it. Breer bent to further butchery, opening the abdomen with two slashes. Urine fountained from the punctured bladder.
Carys, revolted by the attacks, slipped out of the room. Marty lingered a while longer. The last sight he caught as he followed Carys was the Razor-Eater picking up the head by the hair, like some exotic fruit, and delivering a lateral cut to it.
In the hallway Carys was crouching at her father’s side; Marty joined her. She stroked the old man’s cheek. “Papa?” she said. He wasn’t dead, but neither was he truly alive. There was a flicker in his pulse, no more. His eyes were closed.
“No use . . .” Marty said as she shook the old man’s shoulder, “he’s as good as gone.”
In the gaming room Chad, had begun to shriek with laughter. Apparently the slaughterhouse scenes were reaching new heights of absurdist brio.
“I don’t want to be here when he gets bored,” Marty said. Carys made no move. “There’s nothing we can do for the old man,” he said.
She looked at him, bewildered by the dilemma.
“He’s gone, Carys. And we should go too.”
A silence had started in the abattoir. It was worse, in its way, than the laughter, or the sound of Breer’s labors.
“We can’t wait around,” Marty said. He roughly pulled Carys to her feet and propelled her toward the front door of the penthouse. She made only faint objection.
As they slipped away downstairs, somewhere up above them the blond American began to applaud again.
72
The dead man worked at his work for a good time. Long after the domestic traffic on the highway had dwindled to a trickle, leaving only the long-distance freight drivers to roar their way north. Breer heard none of it. His ears had long since given out, and his eyesight, once so sharp, could barely make sense of the carnage that now lay on every side of him. But when his sight failed completely, he still had the rudiments of touch. This he used to finish his commission, dividing and subdividing the flesh of the European until it was impossible to tell apart the piece that spoke and the piece that pissed.