Balthazar (1958) Part III Chapter 2

It was already dark when I dismissed my taxi at Mohammed Ali Square and set out to walk to the sub-department of the Prefecture where Nimrod’s office was. I was still dazed by the turn events had taken, and weighed down by the dispiriting possibilities they had raised in my mind — the warnings and threatenings of the last few months during which I had lived only for one person — Justine. I burned with impatience to see her again. The shops were already lit up and the money-changers’ counters were crowded with French sailors turning their francs into food and wine, silks, women, boys or opium — every kind of understandable forgetfulness. Nimrod’s office was at the back of a grey old-fashioned building set back at an angle to the road. It seemed deserted now, full of empty corridors and open offices. All the clerks had gone off duty at six. My lagging footfalls echoed past the empty porter’s lodge and the open doors. It seemed strange to walk about so freely in a Police building unchallenged. At the end of the third long corridor I came to Nimrod’s own door and knocked. There were voices inside. His office was a large, indeed rather grandiose room befitting his rank, whose windows gave out on to a bare courtyard where some chickens clucked and picked all day in the dried mud floor. A single tattered palm stood in the middle offering some summer shade. There was no sign from within the room so I opened the door and stepped in — only to stop short; for the brilliant light and darkness suggested that a cinema-show was taking place. But it was only the huge epidiascope which threw upon the farther wall the blazing and magnified images of the photographs which Nimrod himself was feeding into it one by one from an envelope. Dazzled, I stepped forward and identified Balthazar and Keats in that phosphorescent penumbra around the machine, their profiles magnetically lighted by the powerful bulb. ‘Good’ said Nimrod, half-turning, and ‘sit you down’ as he abstractedly pushed out a chair for me. Keats smiled at me, full of a mysterious self-satisfaction and excitement. The photographs which they were studying with such care were his own flashlight pictures of the Cervoni ball. At such magnification they looked like grotesque frescoes materializing and vanishing again upon the white wall. ‘See if you can help on identification’ said Nimrod, and I sat down and obediently turned my face to the blaze in which sprawled the silhouettes of a dozen demented monks dancing together. ‘Not that one’ said Keats. The white light of the magnesium had set fire to the outlines of the robed figures. Blown up to such enormous size the pictures suggested a new art-form, more macabre than anything a Goya could imagine. This was a new iconography — painted in smoke and lightning flashes. Nimrod changed them slowly, dwelling upon each one. ‘No comment?’ he would ask before passing another bloated facsimile of real life before our eyes. ‘No comment?’ For identification purposes they were quite useless. There were eight in all — each a fearful simulacrum of a death-feast celebrated by satyr-monks in some medieval crypt, each imagined by Sade! ‘There’s the one with the ring’ said Balthazar as the fifth picture came up and hovered before us on the wall. A group of hooded figures, frenziedly swaying with linked arms, wallowed before us, expressionless as cuttlefish, or those other grotesque monsters one sometimes sees lurking in the glooms of aquaria. Their eyes were slits devoid of meaning, their gaiety a travesty of everything human. So this is how Inquisitors behave when they are off duty! Keats sighed in despair. One of the figures had a hand upon another’s black-robed arm. The hand bore a just recognizable dash of white to indicate Justine’s unlucky ring. Nimrod described it all carefully to himself with the air of a man reading a gauge. ‘Five maskers … somewhere near the buffet, you can see the corner…. But the hand. Is it de Brunel’s? What do you think?’ I stared at it. ‘I think it must be’ I said. ‘Justine wears the ring on another finger.’ Nimrod said ‘Hah’ triumphantly and added ‘A good point there.’ Yes, but who were the other figures, snatched thus fortuitously out of nothingness by the flash-bulb? We stared at them and they stared expressionlessly back at us through their velvet slits like snipers. ‘No good’ said Balthazar at last with a sigh, and Nimrod switched off the humming machine. After an instant’s darkness the ordinary electric light came up in the room. His desk was stacked up with typed papers for signature — the procès-verbal I had no doubt. On a square of grey silk lay several objects with a direct relationship to our brimming thoughts — the great hatpin with its ugly blue stone head, and the eburnine ring of my lover which I could not see even now without a pang. ‘Sign up’ said Nimrod, indicating the paper ‘when you’ve read your copy, will you?’ He coughed behind his hand and added in a lower tone ‘And you can take the ring.’ Balthazar handed it to me. It felt cold, and it was faintly dusted with fingerprint powder. I cleaned it on my tie and put it in my fob-pocket. ‘Thank you’ I said, and took a seat at the desk to read through the Police formula, while the others lit cigarettes and talked in low voices. Beside the typewritten papers lay another, written in the nervous shallow hand of General Cervoni. It was the invitation list to the carnival ball, still echoing with the majestic poetry of the names which had come to mean so much to me, the names of the Alexandrians. Listen: Pia dei Tolomei, Benedict Dangeau, Dante Borromeo, Colonel Neguib, Toto de Brunel, Wilmot Pierrefeu, Mehmet Adm, Pozzo di Borgo, Ahmed Hassan Pacha, Delphine de Francueil, Djamboulat Bey, Athena Trasha, Haddad Fahmy Amin, Gaston Phipps, Pierre Balbz, Jacques de Guéry, Count Banubula, Onouphrios Papas, Dmitri Randidi, Paul Capodistria, Claude Amaril, Nessim Hosnani, Tony Umbada, Baldassaro Trivizani, Gilda Ambron…. I murmured the names as I read through the list, mentally adding the word ‘murderer’ after each, simply to see whether it sounded appropriate. Only when I reached the name of Nessim did I pause and raise my eyes to the dark wall — to throw his mental image there and study it as we had studied the pictures. I still saw the expression on his face as I had helped to tuck him into the great car — an expression of curious impish serenity, as of someone resting after a great expenditure of energy.