Fata Morgana by William Kotzwinkle Read Free Book Online

nail Lazare.
    He paused before a crêpe seller’s stand, thought better of it, moved on toward the Café Orient. If one sampled too much street food an unpleasant rash could develop. His face had swollen like an overripe tomato while following Cajetan Seveck, the white slaver.
    He was like you, Monsieur Lazare, with great dreams of conquest. Wanted to rule the Empire. You can compare notes with him, over a tin plate in the penitentiary.
    The glass doors of the Café Orient had yellow dragons painted on them, yellow with hollow eyes, illuminated by lights from within the café. Here is Lazare’s secret, whispered the dragons as he pushed through the swinging glass, moving its dragons aside.
    He took a table on its glass-enclosed terrace, glanced around at the array of thieves, smugglers, and pimps who sat in the flickering candlelight. He hoped that someone in the café of bad company would prove annoying, so that he might knock a few heads together—and so he was left alone, steeping in the atmosphere of tobacco, sauerkraut, and stolen goods. The brazier glowed, casting a dancing light on the terrace, where the voices remained low, and the dancing light made the underworld faces still more menacing, like denizens of fire. He thought of others he’d known from this quarter, St. Gervais, the bodyguard of David Orleans, who could break a six-inch board with his head, Abdul the Bird, ruler of the rooftops of Paris. These, and others, haunted the grillwork of the brazier, played amongst the coals. He’d gone against them and they were dead, reduced to phantom memories, to ashes.
    And now Lazare. But how to take him—no good sniffing around his salon, he’s in complete control there. Speak with his guests, perhaps, those with whom he’s had financial dealings. But if he’s blackmailing them, they aren’t going to speak out.
    Face it, Picard, you want to take a jaunt to Vienna, see some sights, recuperate a bit in the country, expenses paid by the Prefecture, and pick up Lazare’s threads along the way. Much better than talking to a bunch of idiots so dumb they’ve let him swindle them. Speak to the Viennese police, pin the bastard down the sure way, right through his velvet wings.
    He sat back in his chair, drumming his fingers in anticipation of the journey. A young woman, alone at the end of night, saw his restlessness and moved in. She was a brunette in mauve, her eyelids painted with some dark witchery, and she slipped into the seat beside him, already smiling, for she knew she’d hooked him perfectly.
    He nodded slowly. The firelight played upon her face, her coiled chignon; I’ll take it down, remove the pins and see it spread upon her pillow.
    He reached out, touched the tiny bell earrings which descended from the smooth swaths of her hair.
    “Do you wish something?” she asked, at the ringing of the bells.
    “I do.”
    She smiled again, and looked down at her shiny black boots, one dangling above the other, her legs crossed and revealing only the slightest bit of pale-blue stocking.
    “Shall we go then?” said Picard, standing. She stood with him, and slipped her arm into his as they left the café. Her black satin jacket became one with the dark street for a moment, until they stepped beneath the lamppost, and she was radiant again, her jacket sewn with a pale thread that caught the light, revealing a faint diamond-shaped pattern—which suddenly became the hundred gleaming eyes of a Hindoo sorcerer.
    “Are you unwell?” she asked, for he’d paused in the street, a feeling of suffocation upon him.
    “It’s nothing,” he said. “I had some wine...”
    “The wine of the Café Orient isn’t fit to wash one’s feet in.”
    They walked along Pigalle, and she stopped at a tenement not unlike his own, where no questions were asked, and where the stairs were similarly teetering and filthy. She carefully raised the hem of her gown, above the garbage and broken bottles on the second landing. Perhaps