Grand Menteur Read online

  There is one rule in Serge and Virma’s household and one rule alone, and that is to never go near the codex, which is housed in a fire-resistant vault, entry to which is accessed via a spiral staircase, a gift of design made to us by Alan Fletcher. The codex in the wrong hands will send vibrations along a fault line of the past; it will rewrite our perfect future, and send us back to that broken universe of indigence and scandal-mongering. So beware, fellow-travellers of the self. The codex has that power, that rebarbative aptitude for realization. It can predict your destinies as much as it can ensnare unsuspecting readers to its torments. This is why it is kept in our possession for safekeeping. The Sous want their oracle back. They want to claim for themselves what is rightfully ours. But we can see them coming. And we should continue to see them coming from any and all directions, every and all times.

  I never consult the codex in this suture of a future coming quarrelsomely undone though – the codex which was to preserve the harmony of an eldritch perfection. So much for happiness then. Maybe the codex has come up against other competing codices that outline the Derwish or Green’s overlapping narratives against ours; I don’t know if it will cling on to the meaning formerly betrothed to it, or settle for becoming a wish-book of pipe dreams and a dramaturgy of unfulfilled potential held close to the breast where it can work its insuperably benign magic. I never was a dab hand at thinking ahead.

  The latter I can live with because I am known to respect privacy with a withdrawing secrecy. No good reason to violate the sacred charge with which Malbar entrusted me or wished to answer the questions I first posed him about Serge. If the book is a fabrication, worked out by Sergent’s hand to tide me over, the conscious self of supressed memory, limited possibility, and the strictures of the real world does not show immediate signs of acknowledging the idea. It serves a better purpose, as a best-case scenario, to regard the codex as the only act of unadulterated compassion ever made to my person without an expectation of return, and as a queer sort of talisman as a worst case. Bully for me and for history then! Time still shunts forward like Crisco sliding down the caruncles of a Grand Menaceur . . .

  7.

  The Kadadac Bar, North End, Hamilton, Canada, 1974

  I KICKED THE STONE along the pavement for as long as I could, moving at a cross-purposes to the way leading over to Marjorie’s. After having been pelted in the head with it by fleeing vagrants, I was in no mood to receive her tinny, ninny-braying again. Damn the ogre-woman and her crumbling dosshouse for the strange and neglected. I was out of sorts before I even found myself at her front step, littered with its windswept rubbish and gnarled weeds growing through cracks in the pavestones, because I could not remember what I had been thinking about prior to the welt growing at the base of my skull. I looked over my shoulder before going through the front door.

  There was a muddy splendour of shoes; no doubt we had unexpected company. I heard the bottom-weighted sound of a bottle snapping sharply over the countertop, the scuttling of footsteps following after it. Marjorie poised herself between the entranceway separating the drawing room from the cloakroom. I could make out the fuzzing indistinctness of a shadow by the inglenook, but could not place exactly who was standing there.

  “We expected you at noon,” said Marjorie.

  “Expect on expecting on then. Who said I was staying?”

  Marjorie clicked her tongue unimpressedly before swivelling around and looking into the direction of the person hidden from view. Her face seemed to say, “You have a go then.” I walked through the doorway and saw the Bowling Green fidgeting with a herringbone cap in his hands. He was both shoeless and sockless, airing the travels out of his toes. That man: his tousled hair looked like an elephant’s graveyard in monsoon season, which was half-combed for half of appearance’s sake.

  “Hullo, cookie,” he cooed softly. “Give us a kiss?”

  I assented. I gave him a peck on both his cheeks. He received me in an unlecherous fashion, if such a thing existed in mankind. He was totally unversed in the matters of the flesh. He always looked as if he was waiting for you to call him to the head of class for recitation.

  “Why don’t you get ready for work?” Green said. “There’ll be a surprise waiting for you.”

  Not even two weeks had passed at Marjorie’s before I was raring to go – to get out I mean. Now, it had been years since Serge had told me to pack it in as his daughter and to have a go at my lonesome, so I thought to myself that he had squared everything that was worth squaring between the Derwish and him, and maybe my father could reenter my life if his nomadic travels came to an end – bit strange in any event, that for someone who excelled in his affairs, he could fail so extraordinarily in evading a sentence of endless smuggling that proved so disagreeable for all concerned (even considering the rough-patched funk of enervation he fell into in the Sixties, letting someone hold so much over his head was bizarre and out of step). Finally, I thought, I could leave Marjorie’s smelly, crammed-in manse.

  I raced out of Green’s arms and into the kitchen, expecting to see Serge’s gorilla hands at the icebox. I ignored the sign on the door and pushed past the entrance forcefully; it wheezed on its hinges like a smoker’s cough plugged up with bile. The door knocked a few pots off their hooks on its way back to the starting point.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, trying to mask my biblically proportioned disappointment.

  Cherelle sat on a short stool filing her nails. She put out a hand for me.

  “What can I say? I’m a glutton for mistreatment. No tricks this time?”

  I took her hand stiffly to make a sign that I would make a decent go of it this time.

  “We’ll get on as far as getting on’s possible.”

  “Scout’s honour?”

  “Something like that. Well then, how have you been?”

  “Same difference. Here, take one?”

  She handed me a long-stemmed, spongey, deracinated stick of sick.

  “What the hell are you eating?”

  “It’s a dried placenta. It’ll even you out, believe me. Go on, have one.”

  “Where did y . . . Never mind. You’re disgusting. That’s foul in four different area codes. Who would have it off with you?”

  “Don’t you want to have kids someday? This will have caramel coming out your tits, not to mention improve your chances. It can’t hurt you none.”

  I would have taken this the wrong way, but I sensed in Cherelle an overweening desire to please. I felt like I owed it to appease her. It couldn’t have been any easier being the Derwish’s monkey than Serge’s.

  “Coming close only counts for hand grenades then,” I said, munching on the chewy assortment of bits. “I’ll have you answer for my chances then if I come up short in about forty years.”

  “Don’t be so sure about that. I’ll leave the bag with you and you can take more whenever you get hungry.”

  Marjorie poked her head in the kitchen.

  “No roughhouse, girls!” Marjorie rasped, responding to the noise earlier. “You’ve got regulars. Are you here or aren’t you?”

  “I’m here, I’m here!” I grumbled. “What’s she doing here?”

  “Because you can’t mix a drink worth a damn.”

  “Yadda yadda yadda. Keep your knickers on. Oh I forget, tarts don’t wear any!”

  A few moments later, Cherelle and I shuffled out of the kitchen each carrying a tray of cutlery for behind the quartz-covered bar. Green was sitting on one of the stools, chewing on a toothpick and talking something over with Marjorie, who had locked eyes with him. There were a few other patrons at tables, but none that I recognized. The bar was closed off except for Green and another man. When we were halfway ready to go, Cherelle addressed the Green; she was a natural, like she’d been mixing drinks for the Derwish and uncle Greenie since the dawn of exploitation.

  “I’ll have a grasshopper to start, then a shandygaff with Stoney if you have it.”

  We obeyed, as was
our custom, to the letter when possible. Green knocked back both drinks with gusto.

  “Have another?” Cherelle asked timorously.

  “I’m alright, dear. We’re here on business, so it’s Act of the Apostles for us.”

  I didn’t know what he meant, but at a quarter after the hour, the front door opened rather brusquely, and in walked the morosest-looking fellow you ever laid your sorry eyes on, assisted in his movements by two four-pronged walking sticks in each hand. He was youngish, but his features had a worn-out, if dignified quality. There was no truckle bed for the head on those shoulders. He spun little half-moon crescents with his sticks each time he put a hand and foot forward, his rugby ball of a head looking like it was being pinched by both sides between invisible thighs. He also carried in his teeth the handle of a large and unwieldy portfolio case. He hobbled around the foyer for a spell, intent on settling at the bar, but still made a show of taking slow stock of the windows and paintings on the wall. There were portraits of Guillaume Dufresne d’Arsel, Ramgoolam, Paul Bérenger, and other Mauritian politicians scattered around the Kadadac. “What is this, the National Portrait Gallery?” his furrowed brow was sort of implying. The Roundman spat at the sight of Bérenger, miraculously through the handle hanging out from his jaw, before making his way to the bar in his tumble-dry fashion.

  “Pour commencer, j’aimerai avoir six napolitaines, trois cotelettes de poulet,” the Roundman started, addressing everyone behind the bar. “Et vous pouvez laisser la bouteille de vinaigre et du sirop d’érable.”

  “To pu mange tout sa la?” Cherelle asked.

  “Hmmph. Zot pas apprane Francais ici dans Canada?”

  “She don’t speak French so good as you, shit-for-bones,” Green said. “She’s just trying to be friendly. No reason to get shirty. Play nicely, then.”

  The Roundman rotated his stool to face Green. The incommoded body threatened confrontation: his spine was propped as high as it would go and his knuckles faced out on the bar and over one of his sticks. He was the cruciform version of put-up-your-dukes, what good it would do him. At the sight of the Green, he flushed in his face and relaxed his body into a torpid mass of flesh that sunk down into his sides and shoes.

  “B-bowling Green,” he gibbered to himself.

  “Michel, right? We spoke on the phone. What line of work did you say you were in again? Speak English by the way, if you don’t want them to understand you,” Green warned, his eyes passing over Cherelle, Marjorie, and myself, but resting on me especially with implicit design in his expression.

  The Roundman was having trouble catching his breath, and between gasps of air, he fitfully managed outbursts of adulation and worship. The Green took it in stride – where else would he get that kind of attention? – sneering with his toothpick, which was looking more and more like a conductor’s baton orchestrating a menhir arrangement from the unenthused space between his front teeth. I was cutting my fingernails with Cherelle’s clipper, my head bent down low, but I nevertheless kept watch of the two men. The ears and the corners of my eyes had some of the best seats in the house.

  “I’m a solicitor. A-acquisitions and conveyancing primarily. The matter at hand?”

  “Wait a minute. You don’t mind, do you?”

  Cherelle came around the bar and patted the man down, inspecting the walking sticks. When given the all clear, the Roundman produced his brown portfolio for all to see. He opened the cover and began to turn its pages delicately with a pair of tweezers, which revealed a trove of Mauritian souvenirs produced by the Sous, the likes of which were likely never to have been seen outside of official Sous functions. There were clippings, drawings, advertisements, posters to Sous events, Sous stamps torn off of envelopes, schematics for light and sound machines, and other rarefied memorabilia. The case was a gushing rainbow of memories from the gutter, glittering on their way to the raised relief of our minds.

  “Interesting,” began the Green. “You even have copies of the Soustyricon, our local newspaper. We are very particular about who has access to this, Michel. You can’t exactly run to the corner to get them.”

  “Y-yes, procuring those items,” the Roundman stammered. “Very tricky.”

  “Darlo? Come here a moment. You won’t mind if my associate verifies the probenance of these papers? You never can be too sure.”

  The man had gone virtually unnoticed at the opposite end of the bar until the Green beckoned him. He had the kind of face you wanted to forget soon after seeing it, it seemed to signify so comprehensively absolutely nothing at all. Like a head composed of wet sand (or a mutilated potato might be more for it), it was blank and expressionless. He pushed his glass away and approached the two men with a stalking kind of gait. Though middle-aged, he was something of a peak specimen as far as primed human action was concerned – a force to be reckoned with if only given the occasion.

  “So where did you say you got them?” Darlo thrummed.

  “Most of it there, some of it here.”

  The Green and Darlo darted hurt looks at Marjorie.

  “Not here, in the Kadadac. I meant Canada, generally.”

  “Of course, of course,” said the Green, sounding a bit reassured and toneless at the same time.

  “There’s a lot of the Menteur’s things here,” observed Darlo, though when he had an opportunity to survey the case’s contents was anybody’s guess, as he had not moved his trained eyes from the Roundman’s face. His hands crinkled a few papers and artifacts blindly.

  “He is undoubtedly the most interesting of your group, no offense to present company. Violence and the threat of violence, it doesn’t require a lot of subtlety – it’s a mug’s game. What the Menteur does, it’s . . . it’s like the breath of a hurricane. It’s a force of nature.”

  The Green let out a chuckle as I handed out some food. I scrawled on a napkin the words,

  AND HE CAN BLOW LIFE INTO DEAD CHICKENS TOO

  so that only the Green could see. He took out a pen and made some notes in a leather-bound book that he had with him.

  I was so fully engaged with the conversation before me that I just barely noticed the little shots of electricity I started feeling being pulled out from my extremities. I recall now the feeling of having swallowed a pencil in the right side of my throat, as if someone were sitting on my back. Cherelle was the same with regard to her engaged attention, minus the bit about her body turning in on itself, which I couldn’t be sure of one way or another. I never actually did see her consume any of those beastly looking things. In any case, the placenta was clearly not agreeing with me, giving me brief spells of nausea. I entertained the thought that Cherelle had poisoned me, or that it was some kind of blamed food allergy, but soon ignored it, pushing through the new sensations. I was desperate for any news of my father’s whereabouts and had good reason to suspect he would come up as a topic of conversation sooner or later.

  “He’d like that, Michel, he really would. Okay, nitty gritty: what are you asking for the lot?”

  “Oh I think you misunderstand me, Green. I’m –”

  “Please. Sylvan. The name is Sylvan.”

  “Sylvan. A pleasure. As I was saying, you misunderstand me. I’m not here to sell any of these items. I could hardly bring myself to take them along with me here today if not for the uh, auspiciousness of the gathering.”

  “I don’t understand. If you’re not here to sell them, then what are we meeting for?”

  “I wanted to learn about the items in detail, fill in some of the lacunae. Where this photo of you and Pourri was taken, for example. And whether this is an authenticated square of the Sous mattress, if my transcriptions of the Sous anthem are correct, going by ear. So many questions that need answering. It would be an honour.”

  “Let us see what you have for us here then.”

  Darlo was now pantomiming behind the Roundman, trying to figure out if he would be up to the task of dragging the body to the backroom. His hands were full-nelsoning the space a few f
eet behind the Roundman, the breadth of his arms getting wider and wider each time he took a step forward. In the course of these measurements, whenever Darlo tilted his head back and closed one eye like an urban planner for the devil’s geography, he looked more the fool. All he was missing was a T-square slung out of his pocket.

  “Look at his fizzog, he’s right pleased with himself!” Darlo mused aloud, resuming his original position at the bar before the Roundman could catch on.

  “You’ve almost got this bit right, Michel,” Green said, looking at the relevant document from the Roundman’s dragon horde of memorabilia. “The anthem goes ‘Aka aka boule caca, not ‘Aka aka roule caca.’ The difference mattered to Serge, anyway.”

  “Much obliged, Sylvan,” the Roundman purred.

  “Now, you’ll tell me how you were in a position to hear this in the first place. We’ll continue along this manner if you wish to learn more.”

  “Sounds more than fair. I used to hear it at Destaing and l’église Street. Hear it humming out from the Champ de Mars.”

  “That’s Serge’s handiwork again. A page out of his louse book if I recall correctly.”

  “I didn’t piece the connection that it had anything to do with the Sous until I saw children singing it in the street playing jeu du loup. Those same children would sell me my guavas.”

  I began to have one of my daydreams at the mention of the guavas. There was no bridge, however, to my life with my parents and the Royal Academy of Famous Sods and Actors in Knebsalla. My thoughts slid into uncharted waters. Vivified before me instead was my father bubbling out of the gouache brushstrokes depicting Ramgoolam’s stolid forbearance – were they the same person? The flat finish took on a gauzy shimmering, like particles in asphalt coming alive with light; in this way, it was as if a flame were erupting out of his eyes and nostrils, depending on what angle I looked at it. The visage took on the qualities of stained glass, bursting with movement.