Page 94 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

raged through his body and vexed his brain. “This is where we really live,

Giacomo, here in a basement with a door you say you cannot find.”
—

THEN ARKADY turned his back on Leporello’s growling and Giacomo’s sobs as he
tried to snatch the key back from the grate. He fell asleep with the intention of
kidnapping Eirini the Fair in the morning. The palace watchwords hadn’t
changed; he had checked. He would be glib and swift and resolute and have the

girl at his mercy before she or anyone grasped the situation. He would demand
that the tyrant take his damn foot off the nation’s neck and let everybody
breathe. Money too, he’d ask for a lot of that. Enough for medicine and
wholesome meat broth and a proper bed and all the sea breeze his friends could
wish for.

—

HE DREAMED of the key writhing in the fire, and he dreamed of faces coughing
out smoke amidst the flames, each face opening up into another like the petals of
a many-layered sunflower, and he was woken by police officers. They shone
light into his eyes and pummeled him and ordered him to confess now while
they were still being nice. Confess to what? The officers laughed at his

confusion. Confess to what, he was asking, when the building he’d been evicted
from had burned to the ground overnight and he’d been the one who’d set the
fire. Almost half the inhabitants had been out working their night jobs, but
everybody else had been at home, and there were nine who hadn’t escaped in
time. So there were nine deaths on his head. Arkady maintained that he’d set no
fire, that he hadn’t killed anybody, but he knew that he’d been full to the brim

with ill will and still was, and he thought of the burning key and he wasn’t
sure . . . he believed he would have remembered going out to the edge of the
city, and yet he wasn’t sure . . . he asked who had seen him set the fire, but
nobody would tell him. Giacomo and Leporello were so quiet that Arkady feared
the worst, but when he got a chance to look at them he saw that one of the
policemen had somehow got a muzzle and leash on Leporello and was making
gestures that indicated all would be well as long as Giacomo stayed where he

was. After a few more denials from Arkady his friends were removed from the
room: Giacomo asked why and was told that his friend had killed people and
wouldn’t admit it, so he was going to have to be talked to until he admitted it. At
this Giacomo turned to Arkady and asked: “But how could Arkady do this, when