“What nonsense are you talking about?”
“Vailima. Reduced to ashes. There is something that suits me about that.”
“Stevenson’s manuscript. That is the mission. That alone.”
“You know I have done what I do for the common people who would otherwise be abused and excluded by the publishers. What we do—you and I—provides more access where there would be less. Men such as the two of us do what the ordinary person is not equipped to accomplish. I am the Prometheus, but instead of fire I hold creativity in my hand. If this is to be the last mission of our race of men, I should as soon leave nothing behind—just flames and bones, the past charred and punished. You and I are no different from those two warriors. We have done much, but the world will not let us leave any mark.”
“You can spout gibberish and high ideals about common people all you want, Belial. Remember, I know you. The only thing that makes your blood flow is power and the only thing that thrills you once you hold that power is destruction. What happened between you and the girl?”
Belial frowned in his lofty manner, blinking himself out from his vision. “You must know what it is that makes you want to protect the Samoan girl,” he said, with his typical way of presuming more knowledge about another person than that person. “Kitty. You see her in Vao! Not Kitten as you knew her, no, not that woman who enlisted you into this life as the price of winning her approval; but a different Kitty, one from long before, a poor girl from the outskirts of Paris without wiles, a Philistine at heart, craving a better life, when you could have steered her, possessed her, saved her, or so you imagine, if only time and place were different. Even when I first knew her, she had been an actress, spy, and a budding bookaneer. She was ruined before you met her.”
“Take care how you speak.”
Belial ignored his warning and continued to pontificate. “The young women of Samoa are just old women trapped into young bodies, waiting for age. But not Vao. She is different, not simply because of her pure beauty, which is even more irresistible to whites than to her own kind. Vao refuses to marry. She is fierce in determination to be different and better than those around her; she is content to be alone because of it, and aims to change—she is an actress, too, who could betray or love you just as easily. A seductress.”
“Are you saying Vao tried to seduce you before Mr. Fergins and I found you in that room?” Davenport asked with an angry laugh.
Belial shook his head slowly. “You see the most superficial part of the picture, and only that. Just as you did when you watched helplessly while indomitable Kitty left behind everything—left you behind—to chase down Mary Shelley’s nightmares.”
Had he been in possession of his usual steadiness, Davenport would have walked away. Here was the topic that could unmoor him. He knew that better than anyone. He felt his clothes soak through from the rain as his heart was careening to a dangerous tempo. “You know nothing about that.”
“I know it all,” said Belial, his tone free of any boast.
Davenport had to raise his usual chalky voice to speak over the pounding rain. “You were after the Shelley papers, too. She beat you to them, didn’t she? That is why you still resent her.”
“Wrong. True, she got them before I did. But those documents went straight from her hands and into mine.”
It was as though the earth had opened up below Davenport’s feet. Later, he would say it seemed an eternity passed before his mind would stop spinning long enough for him to speak again. “No. It was an anonymous collector who paid her. . . .” Davenport stopped.
“Anonymous,” Belial confirmed with a proud grin.
“You sent her after them. You paid her for them? Why would you do that?”
“Kitty was my greatest competition, and nothing I tried all those years slowed her down. She would not have stopped until she was considered the best bookaneer.”
“The more you speak the less I believe you. If your aim was to surpass her, then why let her have the rare glory of one of the great missions in our profession?”
“Because over time I came to realize there was one way to weaken her, and only one: turn her ambition against her. Let her have the highest achievement imaginable in her career. She was a woman who thrived on improving herself. Did you ever notice what happens to a person like that when they reach the summit of the mountain? When there is nowhere else to go but down the other side? They do not descend—they tumble and fall, or jump. I knew she would become bored, distracted, maybe wander into listlessness.”
“And opium.”
A twitch of regret narrowed Belial’s mouth. “No, I could not know that would happen.”
The question that had been plaguing Davenport for nine years came out. “Why did she go back to Geneva once the mission was already completed?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Belial asked, in his demeaning way of being deeply surprised at another’s lack of knowledge.
“She was looking for something else, something new. There had been another mission she came upon after the Shelley novelette, wasn’t there?”
“Don’t I make myself understood to you, Davenport? Nothing new was worthwhile to her anymore. The novelette would have been the ultimate mission for most bookaneers. I not only handed it to her; I made certain the whole thing would be rather easy. Once it was over, she could think of nothing else. Any other mission, any other spot on earth, was just a reminder, a kind of emptiness, because she knew she would never be close to that other feeling again. She wasn’t returning to Cologny looking for something new—quite wrong thinking, Davenport. She was clinging by a fingernail to the last great thing she had accomplished, the greatest thing she ever could reasonably expect to do.”