Dagger Key and Other Stories

I hastened to serve her, also pouring Vid a glass, which he downed in a gulp, and the four of us began talking about Diamante, the only subject with which Giacinta seemed conversant. The town’s many murals, she told us, were the result of a contest held each year—artists were invited from all over the world to paint a wall and the best of their work became part of Diamante’s permanent exhibition.

Next to arrive was Elaine, also a brunette, more slender than Jenay, her perfume more subtle, with darker hair and piercing blue eyes, her pale, classical features rendered saintly by a cowled evening gown of a shimmering beige fabric. She had in tow a leather-jacketed street hustler named Daniele, his chiseled chin inked with stubble, who challenged me with a stare and otherwise exhibited a cool indifference that doubtless accorded with the personal style of some cinematic tough guy. Both Jenay and I took the position that Daniele was far too handsome and self-assured. Elaine defended her choice by saying that his pathos was inherent to his fate, which was so precisely demarked as to be obvious, but Jenay reminded her that, pitiful though Daniele was, our contest was judged on appearances and behavior, not potential.

“What do you expect?” said Elaine. “I only had a few hours to find someone.”

“You could have arrived sooner,” said Jenay. “Everything is always so last-minute with you.”

Elaine made a dismissive noise.

“No, really,” said Jenay. “It’s tiresome. You’ve never taken your responsibility seriously.”

“This hardly qualifies as a responsibility.” Elaine pushed back her cowl and I saw that she had left a white streak in her hair. “This is a pig party. It cheapens us. Though I must say…” Coquettishly, she touched my chest. “Yours is wonderful! Where you did find her?”

“She found me,” I said. “She more-or-less fell into my lap.”

Elaine smiled. “Repeatedly, no doubt.”

I had grown weary of Lucan’s dramatic entrances, as had we all, this mostly a reaction to his overabundant personality, which was redolent of a gay maitre de; yet I must confess that I also anticipated them. Music preceded him, piped in over hidden speakers: Verdi’s March from Aida. Next came Professor Rappenglueck, Lucan’s lover for a term, now reduced to a familiar, and a guest at our dinners for nearly thirty years: a diminutive man, once handsome, his looks severely diminished by age and a slovenliness attributable to mental deterioration. He shuffled forward, gray and shrunken, like a piece of fruit left too long in the icebox, mumbling as he came, absently stroking his beard, and stood at the end of the dinner table, his voice increasing in volume and waxing lectoral, addressing the empty chairs as if they were a vast assembly, holding forth in an erratic fashion on the subject of Cro-Magnon sky maps in the caves of El Castillo.

“…the Northern Crown,” he was saying. “Remarkable in its accuracy. Of course, these maps are not the greatest…the greatest secret of El Castillo.”

The professor fell silent in mid-ramble, and Lucan stepped into the doorway, his white hair combed back from his face and glowing like a flame, lending him a leonine aspect. He swirled his opera cape with a magician’s flair, as if making himself reappear after an occult disappearance, then bowed to each of us in turn, reached into the corridor and drew forth not a rabbit, but a rabbity, stoop-shouldered girl. Liliana (so Lucan introduced her) was at least six feet tall, no older than eighteen or nineteen, with dark circles under her eyes, possessed of a morose expression and a flat chest that seemed hollowed due to her posture and loose-fitting blouse. Everything about her testified that here was a girl who had contemplated (and perhaps attempted) suicide more than once, and was likely to do so again, possibly before the evening was over. A distinct threat to Giacinta in our competition, but one I was confident that she would withstand, for although Liliana’s presentation offered a complex palette of disaster, she was long of limb and doe-eyed, and neither bad skin nor poor posture nor the attrition caused her flesh by the poisons of depression hid the fact that she was a real beauty who, but for the indifference of chance, might have been walking a runway in Milan. Lucan, who had not spoken a word other than her name, presented her to Giacinta with an ornate gesture, and Liliana put out her hand.

“We’ve met,” Giacinta said, and turned away, ostensibly to select an appetizer from the table; but the insult was clear.

Liliana snatched back her hand and held it clenched at her waist, looking crushed. I suspected, if given the opportunity, she would brood over this slight the rest of the evening and later memorialize it with a cutting or some other form of self-punishment.

Lucan winked at me and said, “I’ll bet those two become a lot friendlier before the night is done.”

“If you say so.”