Ivoria, Tanith Lee [popular ebook readers .TXT] 📗

lot had taken their time, if it had been them. But almost decidedly it had been them. After all. Who else?

So she had achieved her whim, there.

When she put down the poison she had not met Nick. She had known simply that she would meet and mess him about, as she had messed Serena about, and had meant to mess about Laurence before she learned what he was to her.

They could have killed Nick. Maybe they meant to and got it wrong. Would Qirri have liked it better if they had?

(God knew what had been done to Jasmina. Qirri did not bother to check Jasmina’s site to see if she had survived. Jasmina was unimportant.)

Qirri enjoys thinking about the stabbing. In a funny, back-to-front way it has almost joined in her sexual fantasies, her time with Nick and the former time with Amir in the luxurious hotel bedroom, every move mingling with the understanding of violence to come.

Maybe one day she will tell Laurence. When they are back together, and Joss is dead, and any money has come to Qirri, as Joss has already intimated it will, since his elder son, Laurence, is deceased - all this was discussed before the circling webs of dementia began to cluster close on Joss’s awareness. Of course, it may not happen, the money. But then, she has her own. The one thing Claudia did for Qirri. Apart from allowing her to live.

When the idiotic painters’ dinner is over, about midnight, and the Heineborgs and the French bitches and that shit the Czech have left, Qirri goes up to her rooms and has another shower.

The night, seen from her balcony and on this side of the island, seems timeless and ancient, speckled with bats, and higher up with stars. The summer wind is scything along the hill-sides, spiteful, clawing at things. Qirri does not mind the clawed wind.

She opens a drawer, and looks at the Augusta pin, the fake ivory which had held the Secops tracking device, as she now knows.

Next to the pin, the other thing lies. The small, ivory-coloured, unmarked square that Laurence gave her that last night in London, as he had said because he forgot to bring the pin. Now helpful stupid Nick has delivered the pin too. It is worthless, but might be sellable in an ignorant market. From where though had the ivory square been dug up?

Qirri picks the square out and holds it against the light of an electric lamp turned low. The light glows through. Is it ivory? What is it?

She kept it because Laurence had held it, and given it to her in one of their games. As he later gave her the golden ring that she wears, for now, on a chain around her neck. Soon she will see Laurence. A flood of excitement surges in her, dies unwillingly away. She must ask him then about the ivory square.

During the moments she is considering this, Laurence is lying far off, asleep and dreaming of a fearful face, inhumanly long and wreathed in a white smoke of moonlit breath, out of which glare two green neon eyes, and above which rise two towering bare trees of antler. He wakes howling. And Crang is not there to pat his shoulder.

But now, anyway, Qirri drops the unidentified square back into the drawer and pushes it shut.

The Venetian replica of the house is silent. Presumably asleep, all the people who inhabit it, letting go and drifting, no longer quite real.

The blackness of the night spills over the sky and the world. Out to sea, a little herd of fishing boats tries for a nocturnal catch. The thin moon rose long ago, and now is almost gone. Itself a flake of ivory, or a shaving off a human bone, it lies embedded in the shadow of the west. The spiteful wind spits across the island. But what does any of it mean?

Afterword

The room in Paris is hot.

The air-conditioning has failed again. They may fix it, or they may not bother.

It is over a month since Nick left Athens.

There has been some monetary muddle Nick was advised of, stocks, shares, the state of the economy, the prolonged episode they now call the Credit Crunch. But all that bores him, and he has put off contacting his accountants again. Nevertheless, it does mean he is in this hotel, in the back streets below and behind Sacre Coeur.

Nick stands at the long glass windows inside the black wrought-iron rail. Baked grey, the buildings march away on either side. The early evening sky is gunmetal blue. Down the street a pink-grey church and some dark grey-green trees.

There are a number of things he supposes he should do, even excluding talking to the accountants. But he does nothing much. It has become, has it?, a pattern.

In a quarter of an hour the sun will tilt towards the west. Then the moon will come up and gradually do the same. Life is like this, arising, moving on a predestined course, sinking down. Over and over.

Now and then Nick wonders abstractedly about the flat in London. He assumes the gang have made their offer, and that eventually he will be informed by the estate agents, doubtless angry at the low amount. Or had he decided they, (the gang), might not, due to all the publicity caused by the attack on him? He cannot recollect.

This morning Nick bought le Figaro, (he finds he can read French better than he can speak it), and also a couple of English papers. On the second page of one of these he had found that a woman called Angela Hazel Gloria Lewis had committed suicide, (the usual method, tranquilisers and alcohol) following the tragic sudden death last year of her husband, the well-known writer, archaeologist and TV personality, Laurence Lewis. Nick had read this item without, for a short while, quite realising who any of these people were.

He finds he is still rather puzzled by the notion of