Blameless in Abaddon Read Free Page B

suits. During one of my boom periods, from 1937 through 1945, I produced 4,328,713 yellow stars inscribed with the word
Jude.
    I am the Father of Lies. Over the years, my children have done me proud. I shouldn’t play favorites, but I am especially pleased with “The meek shall inherit the earth.” Likewise, I shall always retain a soft spot in my heart for “Every cloud has a silver lining.” As for “Time heals all wounds” and “Whenever God closes a door, He opens a window”—they, too, make me gloat unconscionably.
    But enough about me. Whatever my shortcomings, vanity is not among them. You came to learn about the awful events that befell the upright magistrate of Abaddon. For the nonce I shall hold my tongue.
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    Given Corinne’s worldview, Martin reacted with astonishment when, during a visit to the Chestnut Grove Flea Market, she insisted on buying a moldering pantherskin rug. She was acquiring it, she explained, in homage to an idol of hers, the Italian ballerina Marie Taglioni. According to Corinne, on a moonlit winter’s night in 1835 Taglioni’s carriage was halted by a Russian highwayman who then commanded her to dance for him, an audience of one, on a panther’s pelt spread across the snowy ground. In the years that followed, it became Taglioni’s custom to place chunks of ice in her jewel box and watch them melt amid the sparkling gems. Thus did she preserve her memory of that magical encounter: the highwayman, the black pelt, the starspeckled sky glittering above the frozen forest.
    At first Martin maintained that forty-five dollars was far too much to have spent on a scruffy hunk of fur. But then one frigid January evening he awoke to realize Corinne no longer lay beside him. Acting on instinct, he went downstairs, donned a ski jacket over his pajamas, and hurried toward the catnip patch. Shimmering in the moonlight, a steady stream of snowflakes floated down, slowly, softly, the sort of generous crystals that, during childhood, he’d loved catching on his tongue. As he opened his mouth that night, he remembered his mother telling him no two snowflakes were alike. To the ten-year-old Martin there seemed something momentous in this fact—an entrée into the mind of God—but he’d never managed to fathom it.
    An extravagantly beautiful voice reached his ears, one of Corinne’s favorite performances: Loreena McKennitt singing her original musical setting for Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott.”
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For ere she reach’d upon the tide
The first house by the water-side,
Singing in her song she died,
The Lady of Shalott.
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    And then he saw her: Corinne, improvising a sinuous ballet atop her panther pelt, her white Lycra bodysuit giving her buxom form the appearance of a snow sculpture by Praxiteles. The sight transfixed him. He forgot to breathe.
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Out upon the wharfs they came,
Knight and burgher, lord and dame
,
And round the prow they read her name
,
The Lady of Shalott.
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    The song ascended, pouring from her battery-powered tape recorder. As the snow collected on his face, Corinne danced toward him and pressed her lips against his cheeks and brow, kissing each crystal into oblivion.
    The animal lover who danced on an animal’s hide—the contradiction charmed him. Inevitably he thought of a remark made by a character in
The Brothers Karamazov
, a novel he’d read in Mr. Gianassio’s twelfth-grade honors English class: “If everything on Earth were rational, nothing would happen.” Thus did one of Martin’s most intense experiences with cosmic benevolence reach its climax, with Corinne’s lips and Dostoyevsky’s epigram.
    Two days later he had the first in a series of intense experiences with cosmic evil.
    It happened while he was on the job, marrying Demetrius Mitsakos and Gina Fontecchio, high-school dropouts who could barely afford the low end of his sliding