“Funny, maybe. Hilarious, not. I am myself.” She turned to Darcourt. “That Raven woman has been calling me again. I had to be strong with her. ‘You know Baudelaire?’ I said. She said: ‘You insult me. I am a professor of comparative literature. Of course I know Baudelaire.’ ‘Well then, chew on this,’ I said: ‘Baudelaire says that the unique and supreme pleasure of love lies in the certainty of doing evil; both men and women know from birth that in evil every pleasure can be found. Didn’t you know that from birth? Or did you have a bad birth? A seven-months child, perhaps?’ She put down her phone with a loud bang.”

“Do you do evil in love?” said Mamusia.

“Good and evil are not my thing. I leave that to the professionals, like Simon here. I do what I do. I do not ask the world to judge it, or make it legal or give it a special place in the world or any of that. Listen, Madame; when I was quite a young girl I met the great Jean Cocteau and he said to me: ‘Whatever the public blames you for, cultivate it, because it is yourself.’ And that is what I have done. I am Gunilla Dahl-Soot, and that is all I can manage. It is enough.”

“Only very great people can say that,” said Yerko. “It is what I always say myself.”

“Don’t appeal to me as a moralist,” said Darcourt. “I gave up moralizing years ago. It never worked twice in the same way.” The champagne was getting to him, and also the cigar smoke. Good cigars are not accessible to shop-lifters, even those of Mamusia’s talent. The cigars Yerko circulated were more than merely odious: they caught at the throat, like a bonfire of noxious weeds. Darcourt got rid of his as soon as he decently could, but the others were puffing happily.

“Madame,” he said, for his biography was much on his mind. “You had some intuitions when you laid out the cards. ‘You have awakened the Little Man,’ you said, ‘and you must be ready for what follows.’ I think I know now who the Little Man is.”

“And you are going to tell us?” said Mamusia.

“Not now. If I am right, the whole world will know in plenty of time.”

“Good! Good, Father Simon. You bring me a mystery and that is a wonderful thing. People come to me for mysteries, but I need a few for myself. I am glad you remember the Little Man.”

“Mysteries,” said the Doctor, who had grown owlish and philosophical. “They are the blood of life. It is all one huge mystery. The champagne is all gone, I see. Where is the cognac? Simon, we brought cognac, didn’t we? No, no, we don’t need new glasses, Yerko. These tumblers will do very well.” The Doctor poured hearty slops of cognac into all the glasses. “Here’s to the mystery of life, eh? You’ll drink with me?”

“To mystery,” said Mamusia. “Everybody wants everything explained, and that is nonsense. The people that come to me with their mysteries! Mostly about love. You remember that stupid song—

They think the mystery must be love, and they think love is snuggling up to something warm, and that’s the end of everything. Bullshit! I say it again. Bullshit! Mystery is everywhere, and if it is explained, where’s your mystery then? Better not to know the answer.”

“The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it,” said Darcourt. “That’s what mystery is.”

“Mystery is the sugar in the cup,” said the Doctor. She picked up the container of white crystals the delicatessen had included in the picnic basket and poured a large dollop into her cognac.

“I don’t think I’d do that, Gunilla,” said Darcourt.

“Nobody wants you to do it, Simon. I am doing it, and that’s enough. That is the curse of life—when people want everybody to do the same wise, stupid thing. Listen: Do you want to know what life is? I’ll tell you. Life is a drama.”

“Shakespeare was ahead of you, Gunilla,” said Darcourt. “ ‘All the world’s a stage,’ “ he declaimed.

“Shakespeare had the mind of a grocer,” said Gunilla. “A poet, yes, but the soul of a grocer. He wanted to please people.”

“That was his trade,” said Darcourt. “And it’s yours, too. Don’t you want this opera to please people?”

“Yes, I do. But that is not philosophy. Hoffmann was no philosopher. Now be quiet, everybody, and listen, because this is very important. Life is a drama. I know. I am a student of the divine Goethe, not that grocer Shakespeare. Life is a drama. But it is a drama we have never understood and most of us are very poor actors. That is why our lives seem to lack meaning and we look for meaning in toys—money, love, fame. Our lives seem to lack meaning but”—the Doctor raised a finger to emphasize her great revelation—”they don’t, you know.” She seemed to be having some difficulty in sitting upright, and her natural pallor had become ashen.

“You’re off the track, Nilla,” said Darcourt. “I think we all have a personal myth. Maybe not much of a myth, but anyhow a myth that has its shape and its pattern somewhere outside our daily world.”

“This is all too deep for me,” said Yerko. “I am glad I am a Gypsy and do not have to have a philosophy and an explanation for everything. Madame, are you not well?”

Too plainly the Doctor was not well. Yerko, an old hand at this kind of illness, lifted her to her feet and gently, but quickly, took her to the door—the door to the outside parking lot. There were terrible sounds of whooping, retching, gagging, and pitiful cries in a language which must have been Swedish. When at last he brought a greatly diminished Gunilla back to the feast, he thought it best to prop her, in a seated position, against the wall. At once she sank sideways to the floor.

“That sugar was really salt,” said Darcourt. “I knew it, but she wouldn’t listen. Her part in the great drama now seems to call for a long silence.”

“When she comes back to life I shall give her a shot of my personal plum brandy,” said Yerko. “Will you have one now, Priest Simon?”

“Thanks, Yerko, I don’t think I will. I shall have to get the great philosopher back to her home and her pupil.”

“Is that the girl who is doing the opera?” said Mamusia.

“The same. Present appearances to the contrary, I think the Doctor is doing her a lot of good.”

“Now she is out of the way, what about this baby?” said Mamusia.

“Well, what about it? It’s a fact.”

“Yes, but a queer fact. It’s not her husband’s.”

“If I may ask, how do you know that?”

“He can’t make babies. I could see it as soon as he came home from the hospital. There is a look. This actor who haunts their house made the baby.”

“How do you know?”

“Wally Crottel says so.”

“Mamusia, Wally Crottel is an enemy to Maria, and to Arthur, and you mustn’t trust him or listen to him. He wants to destroy them.”

“Oh, you don’t need to warn me against Wally. I have read his palm. A little good-for-nothing, but one can find out things from such people. Don’t worry about Wally. I saw an accident in his palm. Yerko is maybe taking care of the accident.”

“My God, Yerko! You’re not going to rub him out?”

“Priest Simon, that would be criminal! But if he is to have an accident, it had better be the right one. Leave it to me.”

“This baby,” said Mamusia. “Maria wants a baby more than anything. Deep down she is a real Gypsy girl and she wants a baby at the breast. Now she has a baby and she would be happy if Arthur would be happy too.”

“It’s rather a lot to expect, wouldn’t you say?”

“In these queer days people hire women to have babies when the wife can’t do it. Why not hire a father? Doesn’t this fellow Powell work for them?”

“I don’t suppose they thought he would work for them in quite this way.”

“That Powell is not an ordinary man. I think he is the Lover in the spread. You know how that card looks. A young man between two people and the one on the right is a woman, but who is that on the left? Some people say it is another woman, but is it? They say it is a woman because it has no beard, but what is a man without a beard? Not a man in every way, but still important enough to rule the beautiful woman. That figure wears a crown. A king, of course. Every spread is personal. Maybe in this spread that figure is King Arthur, and he looks as if he is pushing the young man toward the beautiful woman. And the beautiful woman is pointing to the lover as if she is saying, ‘Is it this one?’ And over their heads is the god of love and he is shooting an arrow right into the heart of the beautiful woman.”