The Moors Last Sigh

corruption, fanaticism, caste politics, cartoonists, lizards, crocodiles, playback music and, best of all, the Zogoiby family! Goodbye, Aurora the great and cruel – farewell, crooked, scornful Abe!’
    ‘Not exactly,’ I dissented. ‘For I see that you’ve tried – with, may I say, limited success – to build my mother’s imaginative world around you, to use it like a fig-leaf to hide your own inadequacies; and then, too, there is this remaining Zogoiby to face, and a little matter of some stolen pictures to resolve.’
    ‘They’re upstairs,’ said Vasco with a shrug. ‘You should be pleased I had them pinched. What a hit-fortune for them! You should go down on your knees and thank me. If not for my gang of professionals, they would be burnt toasts.’
    ‘I demand to see them at once,’ I said firmly. ‘And after that, perhaps Salvador Medina can do me a service. Perhaps we could send your housekeeper, Renegada, to call him, or even use the phone.’
    ‘By all means let us go upstairs and take a peek,’ said Vasco, looking unconcerned. ‘Do me the courtesy, however, of walking slowly, for I am fat. As to the rest, I am sure you really have no desire to go gilloping-galloping to the law. In your circs, which is better: incognito or outcognito? In-, I am sure. Besides, my beloved Renegada will never betray me. And – didn’t anybody tell you? – the telephone line has been cut off for years.’

    ‘ “My beloved Renegada”, did you say?’
    ‘And my beloved Felicitas, too. They would not hurt me for the world.’
    ‘Then these half-sisters have played a cruel game with me.’
    ‘They are not half-sisters, poor Moor. They are lovers.’
    ‘Each other’s lovers?’
    ‘For fifteen years. And, for fourteen, mine. How many years I had to hear you people spouting-shouting rubbish about unity in diversity and I don’t know what rot. But now I, Vasco, with my girls, have created that new society.’
    ‘I don’t care about your bedtime business. Let them bounce on you like a squashy mattress! What is it to me? It is your trickery that makes me mad.’
    ‘But we had to wait for the paintings, isn’t it? That was no trick. And then we had to get you in here without anybody knowing.’
    ‘For what purpose?’
    ‘Why, what do you suppose? To get rid of all the Zogoibys I can lay my hands on, four pictures and one person – the last of the whole accursed line, as it happens – with a boom-boom-badoom; or, to put it another way, five in a bite.’
    ‘A gun? Vasco, are you serious? A gun you’re pointing at me?’
    ‘Just a small fellow. But it is in my hand. Which is my great hit-fortune; and your mis-.’

    I had been warned. Vasco Miranda is an evil spirit, and these are his familiars. I have seen them metamorphose into bats .
    But I had been caught in his web from the start. How much of the village was in league with him, I wondered. Not Salvador Medina, that seemed clear. Gottfried Helsing? Right about the telephones, but otherwise obfuscatory. And the rest? Had they all conspired against me in this pantomime, doing Vasco’s imperious bidding? How much money changed hands? Were they all members of some occult, Masonic society – Opus Dei or the like? –And how far back did the conspiracy stretch? – To the taxi-driver Vivar, to the immigration officer, to the strange cabin-crew on the flight from Bombay? – Five in a bite , Vasco said. He said that. So did the tentacles of this event really reach as far back as a bombed villa in Bandra, and was this the victims’ revenge? I felt my reason slipping its moorings, and restrained my speculations, baseless and valueless as they were. The world was a mystery, unknowable. The present was a riddle to be solved.

    ‘So, the Lone Ranger and Tonto are in a dead-end valley encircled by hostile Indians,’ said Vasco Miranda, puffing his way up the stairs behind me. ‘And the Lone Ranger says, “It’s no use, Tonto. We’re surrounded.” And Tonto answers, “What do you mean we , white man?” ’
    High above us was the source of the screeching feedback-music I’d been hearing. It was an unearthly, tortured – or rather torturing – noise, sadistic, dispassionate, aloof. I had complained about it at the beginning of our climb and Vasco had brushed my objections aside. ‘In some parts of the Far East,’ he informed me, ‘such music is considered highly erotic.’ As we climbed, Vasco had to speak louder to make himself heard. My