Noblesse Oblige

I said that they put paper bags on my hands.

Yeah, but why?

probably to trace for powde burns, make sure I didn't shoot myself and then hide the gun.

Why'd you do that? I mean, why would you?

I don't know.  Insurance, despair, need for attention?  it was procedure okay?  They had to do it, it's their job.

Touchy touchy.  Alright! But you didn't pull the trigger, did you?  The angle was all wrong.

Of course not, and as you say, the angle was wrong.  I'd be dead if I'd shot myself with that calibre. But all that proves is that I didn't fire the shot, not that i had nothing to do with it.

That's ridiculous!  Why would you?

I smiled.  Oh, you know.  Insurance.  Despair.  A desperate need for attention, even by someone else's hand.

You wouldn't do that!  You get plenty of attentiion.  And you don't even have renter's insurance, don't you?

No, but I wish I did.  And casualty, as well.  when I was a courier, my stepmother always told me I should have some kind of disability or casualty insurance in case I got struck by a car and couldn't work for a while, or ever. Of course, I never listened to her.

Yeah, yeah.  So, you don't have that insurance.  Wah, wah, wah.  What really happened then?

I laughed,  I almost laughed aloud, but choked it down with a cough. Some people don't have any time for the frivolities.  But this wasn't exactly a frivolous occasion.  Nathalie wasn't going to let me get away with any holes in my story.

Okay, remember when I went to Spain last year?

Of course.  Nearly a year go, right?

Right.  So, there's a day unaccounted for in my journals and photograph taking, simply because it's too bizarre, and also because I'd left my camera in the locker at the youth hostel where I was staying.  a real shame, because I wish i'd gotten a picture of the chess board in the stable.

What stable?

The stable at the tower.  In Minorca.

Is that near Barcelona?

Sort of.  It's one of the Balearic Islands off the catalan coast.  A ferry runs out and back daily.  I'd just finishedmy conference the day before and though it had been raining  the three days before, my first day of no work dawned with no rain and the potential for idylls I'd not enjoyed since I found about my visa being shut off because i'd used it unsuccessfully at an atm the day I arrived.  That being straightened out, I hopped a ferry for the Belearics and disembarked at Minorca, thinking it would be less crowded, which it was.

I skipped most of the touristy stuff in town, and headed towards a tower I saw atop the hill behind the town. It looked like a Norman fort, which makes sense when you think of the frankish nature of the Catalan culture at the time.

Right.  So get on with it.  What happened there?

I get to the Fort by midday, having arrived in town at nine thirty in the morning.  It really was a long and serpentine path up the hill and I was winded.  When I got to the visitor's center and found it closed and locked, I found enough energy to swear loudly and sit down against the wall.  That's when Forsythe St. John walked up to me and offered his services as a guide.  I told him I hadn't gotten any cash yet -- the bank had straightened out the visa part of my card, but I was still unable to pull cash from an atm. I told him I hadn't gotten a chance yet. No problem, this plummy gentleman responded, I take visa, too.

I raised an eyebrow, but handed him my visa.  He pulled open a laptop and plugged in a wireless card.  I expressed surprise there was signal this far up, and he said he kept a repeater in a cottage where he manages the grounds, that the visitor's center was closed because he was rebooting the router in his living room.  Anyway, with me shoulder surfing, he opened a browser to an ssl-enabled page --

--less techie talk, just tell me the story.

Okay.  He ran my card and emailed me a receipt. There was no record of the transaction, but I figured myself lucky.  Ha ha ha.  Lucky, indeed. In light of recent --

The STORY!  get back to the story.

Right.  He shows me around the grounds, explaining this was where the Italian Count Gesualdo came after his tumultuous murder of his wife and her lover.  He didn't come straight away -- he lingered long enough to butcher their bodies savagely, carry them to the public square in the town of Gesualdo, and come back to murder his firstborn son, whose paternity he had come to doubt.  It wasn't until the murdered the father of his wife's lover.  The father had come to Gesualdo, looking for revenge.  It seems that the father was a figure of some social significance and his murder would be sure to have repercussions.  According to St. John, the police constable tipped him off and recommended this island.  The constable had a Catalan mother, and he had grown up on the island before entering the local militia in Italy.  

Anyway, Gesualdo hied himself to Minorca and basically purchases the tower, abandoned and in disrepair, and makes himself at home.  In very little time, however, he makes himself persona non grata.  Whether he had a personality disorder or had gone mad with the strain of the murders on his conscience, St. John told me nobody knew, but his behavior grew so bizarre the nobleman who had jurisdiction over the island bought the tower at an incredible loss in an effort to get him to leave all the more quickly.  When fifteen people disappeared over onenight and about thirty more over the next two months, the Prince -- a descendant of Queen Isabel by the name of Don Filipo -- put his foot down and gave Gesualdo an ultimatum -- take an outlandish sum for the property and leave, or be tried and imprisoned on suspicion of ritual sacrifice and witchcraft.  Gesualdo might have been barking mad, but he wasn't stupid, and port logs indicate he sailed the next day.

How did they disappear?

I was HOPING you'd ask that!  

Nathalie rolled her eyes, but I pressed on.

An educated man, Gesualdo was a nut for games and mathematical variations -- perhaps one reason why his madrigals have such tonal complexity.  Anyway, he ripped out the enclosures in the stables and had squares blocked out and painted in the turf so he could play draughts and chess.

Draughts?

Yeah, another name for checkers -- St. John explained it to me as a more rule-bound and complex version of checkers.  Anyway, he used villagers as participants and those that got struck off the board got..well, struck off.  Not content to play the simple versionof chess we know, he started inventing variations like The King of Siam in which the king's piece has wild card attributes which cobined all the queen's moves, as well as the knight's peculiar hop.  St. John demonstrated it to me -- he said that gesualdo left extensive drawings in the castle wine cellars -- and we played a rudimentary version.  I figured out the gambit and pointed out how I'd have mated in five moves, and he was peeved.  So he walked me through a few variations like The Lions of Parthia and Last Stand at Kabul, all of which rely on highly stylized means of cheating.  But they were so obvious, I came to doubt that Gesualdo ever invented them.  I called St. John out on this and asked to see the Tower proper.  I'm thinking, I want to see how Gesualdo protected his instruments on a moody and weather worn island -- harpsichords and lutes are hard enough to keep tuned and safe from warp in the best of climates, which the Balearics do NOT see year round.  He hemmed and hawed until I got him to admit he hadn't the keys.

I began to doubt his veracity as a tour guide and visitor's official and accused him of being a fraud.  At this point, he smiled and says, you've seen through me. But nobody wins.  Nobody really beat Gesualdo, ever -- he says Don Filipo's galleon sank off the coast of napoli in an effort to catch up with Gesualdo and collect restitution for the missing villagers.  Don Filipo drowned with the ship.  I demanded a refund, and he laughted, declaring that "quite out of the question, sorry to say."  He suggested I run off and tell the authorities, but I should watch out, because nobody crosses Don Gesualdo and lives to tell about it.

Well, infuriated about the fifty euros I'd squandered, I slip-slide down to the seaside town, where I sated myself on some sea-food paella, some calamari and aiolli, and good crusty bread.  then i hope the first ferry, figuring that with the story material, I had not been truly ripped off.  I did resolve to look up Gesualdo's life and verify as much as I could. I figured I'd gotten a good story out of it and nearly forgot the whole thing in light of my trip to Granada over the next couple days.  The Alhambra was so spectacular and I DID get a lot of photos, even if I didn't get a lot of story material --

That's nice, but what's this got to do with the shooting.

Okay.  I woke up at 4:44 am to the noise of the lock on my front door jiggling and voices cursing outside.  I've always been afraid of this --

This?  what?  St. John returning?

OH NO!  I never dreamed of seeing HIM again.  No, I meant someone breaking through the glass to get what they wanted.  One night I was sitting at my computer and I'd forgotten to lock the door.  Well, this impeccably dressed stranger walks into my apartment and looks around, before settling on me.  I asked him if I could help him, and he said, "You're not Deborah" and he left.  But for the four years I lived there, I always wondered if some crackhead would kick in the glass and kill me in my sleep.  You can imagine when someone finally DID break in, my adrenaline was pumping on overdrive.

Before I could get up and hide or get something defensive, they staved in the glass pane in the door with a rifle and trudged through. There were three of them, I eventually saw -- two Catalan thugs and St. John.  One had a rifle, the other a sack.  St. John grabbed the rifle and stood leaning against a wall while he smoked a pipe.  No point telling him my lease forbid smking inside the unit, eh?  Well, they took my laptop, my indian and japanese prints, and kicked my cat.  hard.  Then St. John laughed and told me, "See I told you.  Nobody beats Gesualdo. Fucking tosser. 

Then he shot me in the head and I heard the two catalans laughing as they all left booty in their burlap sack.  My booty.

How much did you tell the police?

Just that I had met him in Spain and that he tried to defraud me out of fifty euros while pretending to be a tour guide.  When I did the research on Gesualdo, I also checked my bank records.  It happened the visa charge hit my account a few days after I got back, right when I went into overdrawn status.  So he never got paid.  I bet he was pissed!

Apparently. Did the police find him? 

No.  They act like they don't believe me.  They did say the shot couldn't be fired by my hand, but that doesn't mean I didn't get a buddy to fire it from across the room to collect the insurance.  You can tell they think this St. John came from my addled brain.  

I shrugged.

Maybe he did.  I don't think so -- I remember that climb and the chess board, as well as his very posh accent and diction, and I will to my dying day.  which almost was yesterday.  They ran out and split up, and my landlord came downstairs and called 911.  That;s that, as far as I know.

Do you think they'll catch him?

Not unless he gets sloppy and stupid.  He certainly wasn't too hot a historian -- there's no record of Gesualdo EVER setting foot outside  Italy, let alone being a chess fan or much else St. John told me.  Don Filipo never existed.