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something, I can go out and get a …”
    “The whiskey is there,” said Somoza, slowly removing his hands from the statue. “I shall not drink, I must fast before the sacrifice.”
    “Pity,” Morand said, looking for the bottle. “I hate to drink alone. What sacrifice?”
    He poured a whiskey up to the brim of the glass.
    “That of the union, to use your words. Don’t you hear them? The double flute, like the one on the statuette we saw in the Athens Museum. The sound of life on the left, and that of discord on the right. Discord is also life for Haghesa, but when the sacrifice is completed, the flutists cease to blow into the pipe on the right and one will hear only the piping of the new life that drinks the spilt blood. And the flutists will fill their mouths with blood and blow on the left pipe, and I shall anoint her face with blood, you see, like this, and the eyes shall appear and the mouth beneath the blood.”
    “Stop talking nonsense,” Morand said, taking a good slug of the whiskey. “Blood would not go very well with our marble doll. Yeah, it’s hot.”
    Somoza had taken off his smock with a leisurely and deliberate movement. When he saw that he was unbuttoning his trousers, Morand told himself that he had been wrong to let him get excited, in consenting to this explosion of his mania. Austere and brown, Somoza drew himself up erect and naked under the light of the reflector and seemed to lose himself in contemplation of a point in space. From a corner of his half-open mouth there fell a thread of spittle and Morand, setting the glass down quickly on the floor, figured that to get to the door he had to trick him in some way. He never found out where thestone hatchet had come from which was swinging in Somoza’s hand. He understood.
    “That was thoughtful,” he said backing away slowly. “The pact with Haghesa, eh? And poor Morand’s going to donate the blood, you’re sure of that?”
    Without looking at him, Somoza began to move toward him delineating an arc of a circle, as if he were following a precharted course.
    “If you really want to kill me,” Morand shouted at him, backing into the darkened area, “why this big scene? Both of us know perfectly well it’s over Teresa. But what good’s it going to do you, she’s never loved you and she’ll never love you!”
    The naked body was already moving out of the circle illuminated by the reflector. Hidden in the shadows of the corner, Morand stepped on the wet rags on the floor and figured he couldn’t go further back. He saw the hatchet lifted and he jumped as Nagashi had taught him at the gym in the place des Ternes. Somoza caught the toe-kick in the center of his thigh and the nishi hack on the left side of his neck. The hatchet came down on a diagonal, too far out, and Morand resiliently heaved back the torso which toppled against him, and caught the defenseless wrist. Somoza was still a muffled, dull yell when the cutting edge of the hatchet caught him in the center of his forehead.
    Before turning to look at him, Morand vomited in the corner of the loft, all over the dirty rags. He felt emptied, and vomiting made him feel better. He picked the glass up off the floor and drank what was left of the whiskey, thinking Teresa was going to arrive any minute and that he had to do something, call the police, make some explanation. While he was dragging Somoza’s body back into the full light of the reflector, he was thinking that it should not be difficult to show that he had acted in self-defense.Somoza’s eccentricities, his seclusion from the world, his evident madness. Crouching down, he soaked his hands in the blood running from the face and scalp of the dead man, checking his wrist watch at the same time, twenty of eight. Teresa would not be long now, better to go out and wait for her in the garden or in the street, to spare her the sight of the idol with its face dripping with blood, the tiny red threads that glided past the neck,