Jonathan Levi - Septimania

“Sit down,” the man said. Malory sat. The bed was soft and warm from the morning’s heat. It was covered with a quilt that broadcast an America of film and history to Malory’s untrained vision. But his fingers picked up another personality from the cotton squares, a familiar, downy heat that reminded him of the woman he had seen less than twenty-four hours before across a nearby pond. This was the room beneath the peaked gable he had seen from outside, the room he had wished to see. There was a bed, a dresser, and on top of the dresser, a television set.

“Here,” the man said, flicking on the TV. “Why don’t you look at this while you’re waiting? It’ll be an education.”

All afternoon and into the night, Malory sat on the bed and watched the TV. He watched the day rewind, replay. He watched the planes turn and return, the towers, the dust, the flames and bodies go in then out, down then up. After an hour he turned off the sound. But the images repeated themselves like the loop of Couperin’s Chaconne in a dance that accumulated force and power with each repetition. And each repetition brought an added understanding. Because of this, his plane was turned back at the airport. Because of E. Power Biggs, he hadn’t heard the news on the radio. Because of the walk to the pond, the talk with the policeman, the drive over to The Gables, he hadn’t seen the collapse, heard the name Osama, or seen the first tentative photos of the suspects. The hand that clutched the steering wheel — or whatever it was they had on airplanes — had, only a few hours earlier, left an impression on the gun Malory held by the pond of TiborTina. I danced with the man who danced with the girl who bombed the Prince …

And more. In between the videos, in between the lines of the newsreaders and the speeches of the experts and the disbelief of the witnesses, their chins lifted up to a sky that was raining the B-movies of their darkest imaginings, Malory heard the word caliph . It came in the middle of what sounded like a meaningless incantation, “the return of the Caliphate … restore the Caliph of all Islam.” But Malory felt its force. What if Ottavia were right? What if Aldana had borne a son of this Caliph-in-disguise? What if I am descended from Haroun al Rashid? What if all this destruction is to restore me to yet again another throne I never dreamed of, never desired? If there is one rule that explains everything, is there also one ruler to blame? Is this all my fault?

As the light of September 12 began to sift through the lace curtains of the upstairs room, Malory stood. Unable to turn off the image, he pulled the plug from the wall and held its prongs in his right hand as he pushed the curtain aside with his left. There were two men below, smoking in the near dawn by the gate. Even with the TV unplugged, the sun continued to rise. Without untying his shoes, without removing his jacket, Malory let the plug drop and gravity carry him towards the bed and a comforter that smelled of time before.

Although he slept, and his dreams were free of Tibor, he found himself walking across the desert of the Maghreb, hand in hand with Judar and the Moorish brothers he had thrown into the pond. And he wondered whether that was Louiza’s hand behind him like Eurydice’s, and whether that was the hijacker’s fingerprints leading him on in front, and whether there really was a treasure at the end of the journey. Or simply a punishment for all he was, for all he stood for — Holy Roman Emperor, King of the Jews, Caliph of Islam.

When Malory awoke, it was to Bach, the music of Bach, the theme to the Goldberg Variations. Malory stood up from the bed, walked out into the hallway and down the stairs. The music was coming from the parlor, the baby grand. Another man was sitting at the piano, a broad expanse of tweed, the back of a head gone gray with only the memory of red in thick, polished staves running down to the back of his neck. The man was much larger than the man who had sat across the table from him asking questions the afternoon before. There was a walking stick propped up against the bass end of the keyboard. Malory had seen the man before, at TiborTina, climbing up towards the pond behind a man with a brush cut.

“I only play the Aria,” the man said without turning, without stopping. “Never bothered to practice enough to learn the variations.” The notes came out in measured doses. Measured, Malory thought, watching the hair on the man’s knuckles rise and fall in the morning shadows of the bay window, but not music. What the man was playing was Bach but was not music. It was a study for music, the notes leached of color as thoroughly as the cushions on the sofa. Nevertheless, the man played through, played through to the end of the Aria before he turned to Malory and stated his theme.

“Louiza,” the man said. “Shall we talk about Louiza?”

Malory washed quickly in the bathroom off the corridor and joined the man on the veranda. Another cup of tea, another scone. Malory was too keen on talking about Louiza to wonder whether these men had a greater variety of culinary information on him.

“My name is MacPhearson,” the man said. He was sitting back in his own wicker chair, his red knuckles wrapped around a mug of coffee. He made no attempt to rise, to shake Malory’s hand, or even to look at him, but Malory recognized the gift for what it was — a name he could attach to memories that dated back several decades. “You may remember meeting me on several occasions in the past. Cambridge, Rome.”

“Of course,” Malory said, trying to match MacPhearson’s professional coolness and masking his own eagerness with a bite of scone.

“As you are no doubt aware, I hired your friend Louiza straight out of Cambridge. She’s been working for me — doing excellent work, you can imagine — for all these years.”

“Twenty-three,” Malory said. “Nearly.”

“You’re also a numbers man,” MacPhearson said. Malory couldn’t tell whether MacPhearson was smiling beneath the mustache and beard, but he saw teeth stained with coffee and age.

“Yes,” Malory said, taking a sip, the tea too hot to say any more.

“The number of disasters your friend Louiza has prevented — do you have any idea how high it is?”

Malory set his cup down on the arm of his chair.

“But yesterday,” the man said, “she was on to something. Maybe she knew. When you saw her, maybe she was coming to tell you.”

“Tell me?” Malory said. “I hadn’t seen her in almost twenty-three years.”

“Maybe not. But she was looking for you. No question, case closed.”

“Are you certain?” Malory knew that his face was showing warmth and behind that warmth was pleasure, but he was incapable, at the moment, of discretion.

“The only thing we’re sure of,” MacPhearson said, “is that we don’t know where she is. When your friend Mr. Militaru shot himself …”

“Tibor,” Malory said.

“Tibor,” MacPhearson said. “When Tibor shot himself, all hell broke loose.”

“But wasn’t there a man with her? I saw someone chasing her, someone with you, with a brush cut?”

“A crew cut?” MacPhearson frowned.

“Yes!” Malory said, recognizing that his excitement was all about pleasing the red-headed man before him, even though this might be precisely the man who had been keeping him from Louiza for all these years. “The man with the crew cut. I saw him. I saw him with Louiza. At TiborTina, at Tibor’s house, just before.” Surely, Malory thought, this bit of information would buy him some reward. But Malory had spent the past quarter century studying physics and the internal workings of pipe organs and watching very few movies.

“I’m afraid that man is dead,” MacPhearson said, and took a sip of his coffee.