The Hermaphrodite's Curse Ch. 17

PART THREE - PARIS

- 2 -

The Palace of the Louvre is a grand and imposing building. The former official residence of France's royal family, there are parts of the building from almost every century in the last five hundred years. Most recently, in the last thirty years, a great pyramid has been constructed from 673 panes of glass right in the centre between the building's wings. This piece of perfect modernist beauty wonderfully offsets the 17th century architecture behind it. It is a sight that greats increasingly many visitors from far and wide, all of whom travel beneath the glass pyramid to witness one of the finest art collections in the world.

Many are drawn to the museum's famous paintings, hoping that they will be the one to decode the mysteries of the Mona Lisa's famous smile. Gabe and Saphy, however, had their minds on a different mystery when they passed beneath the Louvre pyramid in search of the museum's incredible displays of classical sculpture.

Upstairs, a huge crowd was gathered around a statue, tall, elegant and beautiful, a woman with her pointed breasts bared. The cloth draping over her body seemed to be caught just at the moment when it slipped from her, with part of her buttocks tantalisingly exposed. Her left arm was missing from the shoulder and her right arm from just above the elbow, but otherwise she was perfect.

"The Venus de Milo," Saphy explained, "For the last two hundred years, she's been the most famous image of our goddess in classical art."

Her mingled grief and anger had abated somewhat since they were on the train. The incident with her passport photo, much as it had brought out her aggressive side, had served to distract her from the much more serious issues on her mind and she had gradually lightened up as they got closer to Paris. On entering the museum, Saphy seemed in her element. Gabe watched impressed as she appreciated the beautiful statues and sculptures of gods and mythical figures, of all of whom she knew the story.

"Come on," she said, "We need to be downstairs."

She walked ahead with purpose, leaving Gabe with little choice but to follow her lead. She seemed to know better than him where to go and what to do. He had to admit that he liked seeing this side to her, only briefly glimpsed before in the cab to Cambridge and Professor Cavendish's office. Gabe was beginning to see how much Saphy enjoyed being amongst beautiful art and being able to understand and explain it. He saw how she appreciated his presence at those times. Even while she was conveying how uninformed she found him, she appeared to enjoy being the one to inform him.

She led Gabe into a long white room filled with antique sculpture. The walls were lined with columns that grew to form a row of arches along the ceiling. At the far end, four tall female figures stood two on either side of a doorway. White marble figures stood on a red and white diamond patterned floor, giving the whole place a sort of ghostly feel. As they walked between the figures, Gabe could not help feeling an eerie sense as if they had all been real people turned to stone by a vengeful woman cursed by the gods.

As they walked down the room toward the four giant figures at the opposite end, Gabe studied the statues they passed. Many of them showed Venus, the goddess that always lurked at the back of his mind. There she was crouched on her knees, her arm covering her breasts almost protectively and here she was turned away, as if somewhat bashful, grasping her drapery around her topless body. Another goddess stood proudly in the middle of the room, one hand resting on a stag, the other pulling an arrow from the quiver on her back. Seeing that arrow was an unpleasant reminder for Gabe of what he had witnessed the last time he was in a museum, but he tried to push the thought away.

Then he saw it. Watched over by the four imposing figures around the door, lounging on a mattress that looked so textured that Gabe would have been surprised to touch the marble and not find it as soft as lamb's wool, was Hermaphroditus. He had seen the photo in Professor Cavendish's book, but it did not do justice to the beauty of the figure, the curve of his hip, the soft round flesh of his buttocks, and that little penis nestled between the feminine body and the soft mattress. Gabe could well see how this image had captivated minds four hundred years earlier. His arms were folded on the soft pillow and his serene face looked out from there, just as it looked out from the mirror in Velazquez's painting.

"Wow," Gabe said, and then, after a moment, thinking back to the words Saphy had said when they had been back in Cambridge, "How did that poem go?"

"'Lift up thy lips, turn round, look back for love,

Blind love that comes by night and casts out rest;

Of all things tired thy lips look weariest,

Save the long smile that they are wearied of.

Ah sweet, albeit no love be sweet enough,

Choose of two loves and cleave unto the best;

Two loves at either blossom of thy breast

Strive until one be under and one above.'" Saphy quoted, "It's a very tragic poem really. It's all about the impossibility of someone so lovely and yet neither man nor woman ever finding love when men only desire women and women, men. He is something strange, wonderful and unique."

"Not completely unique, though," Gabe said, "Surely the waters of the fountain could have turned others into creatures like him."

"I don't know what you're thinking we're going to discover, Gabe, but I think it's pretty unlikely, if not impossible, that there actually are waters that can turn a man feminine," Saphy replied.

"But, surely if all these people are desperate to discover the fountain, if they're willing to kill for it...?" Gabe asked, leaving the end of his question hanging.

"That just means that they believe it, not that it's true," Saphy told him, "Think of all the wars that have been fought over religion. They can't all be right and yet they're all willing to kill for what they believe. Look, I just want to find whatever it is that they're looking for so we can uncover just what is behind these murders. I don't expect to witness some kind of supernatural wonders."

"Right," Gabe agreed, but his heart sank a little at her very rational argument, telling him that he had raised his hopes unreasonably, "So, I guess we need to examine the sculpture. How are we going to do that?"

There was a barrier running around the statue that prevented the two of them from getting up close enough to examine it properly. Looking around, Gabe noticed that they were being watched not only by the four female statues beside the door, but by a flesh and blood guard, wandering between the statues, eyeing up anyone who looked a little suspicious until they turned and walked away.

"We're never going to be able to look closely with him around," Gabe said.

"Don't worry, I've got an idea," Saphy said.

Gabe stood beside the statue as he watched the girl with the bright purple hair, standing out as an anomaly amongst the white marble statues even more than she had in the National Gallery in London, as she walked straight over and started talking to the guard in rapid and expressive French. Gabe had not realised that his companion knew the language at all, but she was clearly managing to speak pretty fluently and being completely understood by the guard. Saphy was pointing to him a lot and both looked over at one point to see Gabe smiling back awkwardly.

After a few minutes of this, they both came over towards Gabe. The guard's previously frowning expression was a happier one now. He shook Gabe by the hand in a surprisingly friendly fashion and then drew the barrier aside to allow Gabe and Saphy through to see the Hermaphroditus up close. Gabe took out his camera and began to photograph the statue, looking over it for any signs of something out of the ordinary. While he did this, he carried out a conversation with Saphy in hushed whispers.

"What did you say to him?" he asked.

"I told him that you were Professor Robert White from Cambridge University and I was your translator," Saphy smirked, "And that you had come to examine the Hermaphroditus as part of your research."

"Why am I the professor?" Gabe asked, "Surely if he has any questions then you're then one with all the knowledge."

"Do I look like a professor?" she replied, "And anyway, it doesn't matter what you say to me in English, I'll just translate it into my own brilliant ideas in French!"

"And he accepted me as Robert White? And that I'd be here without any other authorisation?"

"Well, we know that White has obviously been here before, so I figured the name would be familiar to him," Saphy explained, "This building is so vast that you could easily have not managed to find your way to the right place to report yourself and who you were visiting, that must happen with academic visitors quite often. Besides, I told him that Louis Philippe had allowed it."

"Who?"

"The curator," Saphy explained.

"How do you know that?"

"I looked it up before we left. I thought it was the kind of knowledge that might prove useful. You can get into most places in life just by seeming to know what you're doing, having a confident attitude and knowing the name of someone on the inside," she told him, impressing Gabe with her level of sneaky forethought, "Now, as long as you don't do anything stupid and continue to behave like a professor studying the statue, he shouldn't suspect anything. It's more than his job's worth to bother stopping us if we don't mess with the statue at all."

For the next two hours, Gabe and Saphy studied the statue closely from every angle, exploring, examining and photographing every inch of the marble curves, looking for any imperfections, any slight signs that could set them off onto their next clue. All this searching, however, was in vain. The statue was perfect. There was nothing about it to suggest anything more than could be seen on the surface. Finally, they had to admit defeat. If there was anything special about this statue, it was not something that the two of them could find.

"Let's find a hotel," Saphy suggested at last, "We're going to have to re-think our plans. There's six more museums on White's list, I guess we're going to have to think which of them will be our next best option."

As they were leaving the gallery, Saphy decided she needed to use the bathroom, no great surprise after spending a couple of hours studying the statue, and told Gabe to wait for her there. Gabe stood amongst the blank eyes of the marble statues, feeling uncomfortably like he was being watched. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a flash of white material and suddenly was reminded once more of the day of the first murder. He had been convinced that he had seen a similar wisp of material rapidly disappearing a moment after the arrow struck the unfortunate victim. He had seen nothing to confirm that impression in any of his photos and had gradually forgotten ever seeing it. Now, however, all those impressions came flooding back.

He looked anxiously around. He was all alone. Even the guard was nowhere to be seen. There was nothing but antique statues, gods, goddesses and heroes all stuck in complete stillness. Only, something was wrong, something was different. There was a figure he had not noticed before. He looked towards the statue of the huntress with a deer and a quiver full of arrows and saw a similar woman beside her. She was also dressed in a simple white tunic, carrying a quiver full of arrows. In her hand she had a bow, however, drawn with one of the arrows on the string, pointed straight at Gabe. It took Gabe this moment to realise why she looked wrong. This was no marble statue but a flesh and blood woman, standing as still as a statue but with peachy skin and jet black curls of hair.

"Do not seek our fallen sister," the archer woman said in heavily accented English, still pointing her arrow directly at Gabe's heart. He could see the white feathers of the arrow's fletching were just the same as the ones he had seen sticking out of the dead woman's neck a few days before.

"What?" he asked, "I don't understand."

"I am Atalanta, a naiad of Diana, and I come to warn you," the strange woman replied, "Do not seek for the secret of Salmacis. I and my sisters are the guardians of this secret, sworn to keep Salmacis' shame from the world. If you attempt to discover and to reveal Salmacis' shame then the naiads will silence you as we have done since time immemorial."

At that moment, Gabe heard other footsteps coming into the gallery. He turned his head to see the unmistakable shock of purple hair that told him Saphy was on her way over. He turned back to Atalanta, so many questions still on the end of his tongue, and saw nothing but the statue of the huntress and the deer. Once again, as in the National Gallery, all he could see was a wisp of white fabric, fluttering quickly out of view.