The Marbled Swarm Read Online Free PDF Page A

in the chateau known to locals as the weird one.
    Several Kir Royales later, the woozy gentleman confided that the chateau’s prior inhabitant had offered him a tour in return for oral sex when he was younger, a tit for tat he’d only agreed to since he was reading and enjoying a novel by Jean Genet at the time.
    The secret passages this gentleman described were, first of all, too infinite and city-like to hide within the chateau’s modest structure, and, second, had been faded by his years of heavy drinking, leaving lots of creepy talk but not the vaguest hint of how this alleged kingdom might be entered.
    It had taken a wary but bewitched Jean-Paul several months to find a strangely fulsome wall crack, then, using the old credit card trick popular with movie burglars, swipe an unassuming kitchen cabinet into a creaking, abstruse entrance.
    It was then my iPhone pinged, and I excused myself, taking several steps into the basement. When I saw my driver’s number, I nearly slipped the phone into my pocket, but, perhaps hoping to enjoy a few more seconds to myself, I dutifully clicked “Read.”
    “Some boy . . .” his text began, had asked to hide out in my car and return with us to Paris—a bad idea, he thought, but one the boy claimed had my preapproval.
    Based on what you’ve read thus far, you must think Pavlov’s dog could have texted him my answer. While your assumption is correct, I’ll instruct you once again that jumping to nefarious conclusions won’t flatter you much longer.
    For the record, I authenticated Serge’s lies and suggested that my driver fold him up inside the trunk.
    I would have offered Jean-Paul my hand in parting had he not seen it coming and insisted that, before it clasped his, we share a single drink upstairs and dot the i on one or two outstanding matters, as he put it.
    After using the official staircase as a shortcut, Jean-Paul ducked into the chateau’s pantry and retrieved an uncorked Sauternes and two glasses before leading me outside and onto what I believe is called a veranda.
    It held a single café table and two painted, sun-grilled metal chairs that would have roasted us, but, before I could suggest a walk instead, Jean-Paul dragged the ensemble beneath an ivy-strewn overhang.
    First we sipped, gazing at the acreage that was just a signature away from being infamously mine. I weighed a grassy alcove between two gingko trees and then a flower bed boxed inside a waist-high hedge as likely candidates for Serge’s grave site, while a grim and staring Jean-Paul seemed to mourn the property itself.
    “The truth is . . .” he said. “It was I who murdered Claude.”
    His eyes were swooping in accordance with a vast flock of birds that circled high over the backyard at that very moment for its own and fractured reasons.
    “Some months ago,” he continued, “Serge confessed or lied to me that Claude had been raping him for years. The shock was . . . well, calling it a shock will surely do. You can’t imagine how profoundly these alleged, covert acts attracted me since I have no ideas in that regard myself.
    “Serge is gay, you must agree, and you . . . well, you’re whatever style of predator you are, but my perversions don’t explain it. No, there was something else. I knew Serge was fabricating, or I knew he had to be. I would have seen them through the peepholes, and, if I’d seen them, I would have called in the police like any father.
    “I’ve watched my sons masturbate a hundred times, and those flares of unseen skin and stiffened penises never engineered even the least tingling of sensations. No, it was the idea, the concept, the product of Claude sodomizing Serge I was obsessed with. It seemed so cataclysmic next to what I had been seeing.
    “I told my family I was writing a novel—a strange premise, perhaps, but I had written one when younger, imitative of Robbe-Grillet and unpublished, of course. Thus, I would be locked inside my study for lengthy