Leper Tango Read Online Free PDF

following tripartite proposition. Point One. Virtually all men cannot see what is right in front of their eyes. Point Two. What is right there to be seen is not very pleasant. Point Three. If you can see it, you are best to keep your silence anyways.”
    We nodded agreement. It was the drink, but it also sounded true, and perhaps the loss of the world is that perfect strangers cannot meet anymore and say what is in front of their eyes. That the world is an absurd, hypocritical lie, and that the thing they call love is the biggest lie of all.
    The soup arrived in wide, brown soupe à l ’oignon ceramic bowls, emitting a thick stench of parsley, sage, thyme, garlic, tomatoes. Tranh sucked its vapours into his nostrils.
    â€œThis soup, gentlemen, was created in honour of the Franco-English victory over the Turkish-Egyptian fleet in 1827, during the Greek war of Independence. There are evenings like this which must be seized upon, evenings like this when I feel that our tales must be told, that we must get to the bottom of things! And, just the three of us, burrowed into the sewers of Paris, with nothing to do but tell our tales. I am telling you, Egmond, this is fate.”
    Tranh poured out the wine.
    â€œAt the age of six, I was caught in a rocket attack launched by the Americans in Vietnam. The attack killed my mother. I lost my memory for a week, and the blast deafened me for four years. For that period, I was in a state similar to autism, but my condition had not affected one ability, that of playing chess. It also gave me an intensity which unsettled all of my opponents.
    My mere glance was enough to defeat many. At the 1966 Leiden invitational, at the age of 16, I came up against the rising star of the Asian chess world, Ivan Sakharov.
    A Russian, of course. It was a game held in the AULA in Amsterdam, a 15 th century auditorium constructed during the golden era.
    â€œSakharov was my only true rival. Being my father’s son, I set out not only to beat Sakharov, but to destroy him. He was pumped up with pride, came from a bourgeois family of St-Petersburg. He was intelligent, but he lacked imagination. His openings were considered to be novel, but invariably, he fell back into a classical midgame, played out from the Queen’s side, almost without fail. After allowing him to win the first game in order to test my theory, I responded to an opening: an East Indian gambit as I recall, and then announced that I would write down his next eight moves. Impossible, he responded. Nevertheless, I shall do it, I said. What will you wager on it. Anything you like. Then it shall be your life against mine...
    â€œThis boy pronounced me insane after my proposition, but his vanity and greed were elements I knew I could count on. I laid it out for him. If I am wrong, I shall end my life, and no one will stand between you and ultimate glory. And, if I lose , he responded, showing his fear. And, if you lose, I stated, deliberately off hand, you shall know me the superior player, and your life will no longer have any meaning.”
    It was a good story, and it might even have been true. Also, I felt free to tell my little tale and, for the first time I could remember, I started thinking back on where I came from, and how I had ended up in a Paris bar with murder on my mind, a price on my head, and still some things to be played out. It was a form of luck, in a way. It would end badly, but, within it all, there was luck, to be here with two other men who understood the way things really are.
    The marquee attraction the following evening at Le Tambour — “Rhanya and Gaston sing Piaf and Montand” — was announced on a chalkboard on the sidewalk outside the café. Upon entry, we spotted a robust Arab woman, stumbling around in a paisley smock on a makeshift stage near the rear of the bistro. She cursed loudly at a microphone, eventually tossed it to the floor and stamped on it once or twice. A