The Silenced Tale, стр. 119
Elgar is not sleeping. He is dead.
“Mr. Piper?” the detective asks, tugging my attention back in his direction. I blink hard, and realize that I am weeping, silently, gently. “Is this Elgar Erasmus Reed?”
I clear my throat once, twice, and finally croak, “Yes. Yes, he was.”
“Thank you,” the coroner says, and waits for me to step back before she replaces the sheet. She hands me the clipboard, and I sign an attestation to Elgar’s identity, and then my own.
“How long is this paperwork gonna stay in the system?” Khouri asks me, once we are back by the doors and within the realm of levity again.
“L-l-ong en-enough for it to mat-ter,” I tell him, truthfully. “Af-af-after th-th-at . . .” I shrug, wiping my face clean.
Khouri nods, understanding. “Appreciate that. And who should we inform?”
“Hmm?” I ask, puzzled.
“Who should we call regarding, ah, arrangements?”
“Oh,” I say, realizing what he means. “L-et me ju-just . . .” I fumble my phone out of my pocket. “His PA Hua-Juan will be th-the best-t-t. I c-c-can—”
“No, we’ll call Juan. I have his info already, so I can start there. I’m sure his agent had something in place, right?”
I nod, not trusting my tongue. I have no idea what sort of arrangements Elgar had made. We were never close enough for him to tell me that sort of thing, and I am struck with the sensation of a pit opening in my chest, hollow and unfillable. So many things that I never knew about him, that we never had the time to discuss, or share, or learn. And now, I will never know them. I will never be able to share them.
“One last thing,” Khouri says, waving me to stay by the door as he steps over to the coroner’s desk nearby. He retrieves a big, plastic ziplock bag and tumbles a length of fabric out into his hands. “We retrieved this with him. It’s beautiful, clearly handmade, and I wondered if . . . I’ve had it released from evidence, if you’d like to keep it.” He shakes out my Turn-russet sash, the golden thread glimmering in the low fluorescent light of the morgue. As far as I can see, there is no blood on it, no stains.
All the same, I say: “My mother made it.”
Khouri holds it out to me wordlessly. I fold my hands behind my back.
“No,” I say. “Ask Juan to bury him with it. He’d appreciate that.”
“What about Ahbni?” Pip asks me later that day, when Bevel has fallen asleep with his head pillowed on Kintyre’s arm. We are sitting squashed together in one of the narrow hospital chairs with the lights off, as reluctant to be parted from one another as Bevel and Kintyre.
“She was . . . collected with the other victims,” I say, tilting the screen of my smartphone so she can see that I am following the progress of those who had survived through the legal and medical system. And if I am giving some of them nudges to give them better care or quicker processing time, then what of it? We have all suffered, and it is within my power to make their suffering come to an end more quickly.
I owe them all that, if nothing else.
“It seems . . . cheap,” Pip says.
“Cheap?”
“Or maybe just . . . really stereotypical? The villain disposing of the traitor once they’re done using them.” Pip is quiet for a long moment, picking at her cuticles. “But she still died. She was a person, and this isn’t a book—people aren’t all bad, or all good. She could have . . . I could have—”
“Pip,” I interrupt gently. “Bao bei. You cannot hold yourself accountable for every evil of the world.”
“But was it my fault?” Pip asks quietly, voice barely audible above the hush broken only by Kintyre’s monitoring machines. “I mean, no intelligent, rational, passionate human being stabs someone whose values she disagreed with. And just a few hours before that, I was praising her for her passion and dedication to the cause, and . . . all right, so I’m a bit of a fool, a bit old-fashioned! So I’m not a perfect feminist; I’m not a perfect person. But I listen, don’t I? I listen, and I learn, and I try. I let others teach me!” she hisses. “So why couldn’t she . . . ?”
“Zealots are zealots, no matter their gender or creed,” I remind my wife. “And when someone twists and manipulates their values to spur them into violence, you cannot blame yourself for sharing those same values. The values are not the issue—the issue is how psychopathic narcissists weaponize them. The Viceroy was good at manipulating people. It is what he did. He did it his whole life. He worked his way up to the Viceroy of the King by it. Carvel Tarvers is not a bad man. He was duped. Everyone was duped. And we cannot blame the victims of a manipulator for being his victims.”
Pip sniffs and buries her face against my neck. “I liked her,” she says.
“I know,” I say. For what else is there to add?
In the end, it is Juan who handles all the funeral arrangements, on behalf of the family—well, us—if only because he is in Seattle already to sell his condominium. Elgar’s agent has requested that he lay in state long enough for his legions of fans to be able to pay their respects, and the funeral parlor agrees. The length of time is just enough, we hope, for Kintyre to wake and for us to attend the funeral. The doctors agreed that my brother should be kept in a medically induced coma for a few weeks at least, to allow the trauma in his abdomen to