L'Affaire Rizaveta - Part I

This story begins on a tranquil Midgard evening some two summers ago. It was one of many that I had entirely to myself, on account of being gloriously unemployed, and had spent in a day of wholesome entertainment beginning with sleeping on the couch in the morning, followed up by sleeping on the floor in the afternoon, and would have topped it off by sleeping in an armchair in the evening, had that fiery red-head Ariel not gotten wind of the fact that I was free for the evening and invited herself to a dinner date. So, the stroke of ten at night found the two of us seated facing each other at an upscale eatery in the suburbs, bringing the collective force of our combined intellects to bear on the all-important question of who should have the last piece of crispy golden-brown prawn.

“I haven’t eaten anything since lunch!” I pointed out, putting the merits of my case, as I thought, beyond any rational rebuttal.

“Yes you have, I saw you eating a slice of cake while you were waiting for me in the car and then you ate at the beach and then you had an ice-cream at the coffee-shop! I am a very pretty girl, and I should get the last piece because pretty girls are always supposed to win.”

“It was only the slightest piece of cake!” I protested, “And I only had the ice cream because the food at the beach tasted so terrible I had to eat something else to get the taste out of my mouth! The two practically negate each other!”

“If you’d only stop eating so much, we might actually make a nice-looking couple. Then we could avoid those sniggering ‘beauty-and-the-beast’ remarks that people keep passing. I’m really doing you a favour, you know.”

“Well I wasn’t fat before I met you! You’ve made me feel all good about myself and changed my life for the better and so on and so forth. It tells, you know. No one asked you to, I mean. Besides, you take such good care of your diet normally. Why this sudden urge to violate it? You always preen and gloat about having the most fabulous figure this side of Kylie Minogue. Why risk losing it? I tell you, one crispy golden-brown prawn leads to another, and before you know it, you’ll look like young Harry Potter’s Aunt Marge. Trust me, old thing; I’d be doing you a favour.”

We would, no doubt, have continued in this strain for some time, but at this point we were rudely interrupted by the ringing of that bane of modern society, the cellular phone. After cursing for a whole minute on the horrible natures of people who did not switch off their ringers in polite company, Ariel kicked my shin under the table to indicate that it was my own that was making the horrible racket.

I fumbled around with the buttons for a while before locating the right one and then put it to my ear, mouthing a cheery “Hallo” into the thing.

What greeted me was a blast of vocabulary that one does not usually hear outside of the locker rooms of the football teams of C-grade colleges in Midgard. Beginning with vague, unfounded allegations regarding my sexuality, the voice at the other end proceeded to dissect my relations with various members of my extended serpentine family, and then hung up.

Nonplussed, not to mention puzzled and shocked, I put the phone back into my pocket.

“Who was that?” asked Ariel, delicately wiping the remnants of what had been the last crispy golden-brown prawn from her divine lips.

“Someone giving me the most awful curses, my dear,” I replied, “absolutely unprovoked and unfathomable.”

“Any idea who? Surely the number showed up on the phone.”

“Nobody I know,” I assured her, as the waiter turned up with the dessert menu, which I deftly returned to him before Ariel had a chance to demand the most expensive item on that as well, “in fact it was a rather strange number. Definitely not a Midgard network.”

“Hmm, let me see,” Ariel said, holding out her hand. I gave her my phone obediently.

“Why are your last six calls to Desdemona?” she asked icily.

“We are…err…working on a project together,” I clarified.

“She, and working? You’ve got to be joking. Come now, tell me the truth.”

“It IS the truth,” I said sullenly, “we’re doing a certain part of the thing together.”

“And keeping your hands to yourself on those late group meetings I hope. I see most of these calls are after dark. Why is this one…1am! Hey, you were with ME that night. What the hell are you doing calling Desdemona when you should only be thinking about…”

“SHE called ME!” I protested, “that’s an incoming call!”

“Oh yes! I remember now! You told me it was from the Queen Tigress! Liar!”

“That’s so NOT the point,” I protested, “you keep raking up dead horses!”

“I don’t see where horses come into it,” she said, “whoever mentioned horses?”

“I wasn’t talking about horses.”

“You were! You mentioned dead horses. You said I kept raking them up. I don’t see why I would rake up dead horses. I don’t even like horses.”

“I was using the horses metaphorically!”

“Are you implying I look like a horse? You are one horrible boyfriend!”

“I never said…oh for God’s sake, I give up. And I can’t help being a horrible boyfriend! I warned you I would be!”

She burst into peals of laughter, obviously enjoying my discomfort. Her warm smile broke through eventually and she patted my hand affectionately.

“Well, now, don’t get all depressive on me. Let’s see….this number is from…California.”

“California?”

“That’s what I said.”

“You must be mistaken, old thing, why would anyone call me from California?”

“Oh I know I’m right – Papa used to go to California pretty often. That’s Irvine County, or I’m much mistaken.”

“Irvine County? I don’t think I know anyone in Irvine county,” I said, nonplussed.

“Someone from your murky past?” she suggested, frowning rather cutely at a noisy baby who had just found voice at an adjoining table.

I gave the matter some thought. For some reason, the name “Irvine County” was not as unfamiliar as it ought to have been. I had heard it somewhere. Then it hit me where I had heard it – old Korchell Jorkell had gone there some three years earlier to get himself educated, or laid, or both. We hadn’t kept in touch much after he’d left, barely communicating more than a few times.

“Korchell Jorkell!” I exclaimed accordingly.

“Bless you!” said Ariel, “when did you pick up that cold?”

“I wasn’t sneezing, it’s a name. Chap I knew in college, I believe he was doing some sort of business degree in California. Can’t be anyone else. Though why he would expend his “vocabulary of obscene words in vernacular languages” on me is a mystery to me.”

“You haven’t mentioned him before. Were you two good friends?”

“Probably not bosom pals,” I said, getting up and moving towards the door, “but we did hang out with the same set of people. He had a thing for Rizaveta, you know.”

“That’s interesting. Nice girl, Rizaveta. I don’t think she’s ever mentioned him either.”

“For a very good reason, old thing, he never mustered up the nerve to speak to her.”

Ariel laughed, opening the car door and ushering me in, “Oh one of those affairs. And I was going to ask whether all this was before she met Sid or after. I assume your friend’s hopeless love for Rizaveta happened while she was seeing her man?”

“Yes, something like that. He was rather scared of her, if anything.”

“Scared of little Riz?” laughed Ariel, “now that’s rich.”

We moved on to other topics as the night went on, driving around Midgard for a few hours, stopping for ice-cream and finally ended the night with her dropping me off at Elver Castle and moving on to do whatever it was she did when I wasn’t with her.

The episode set me thinking though. The call from Korchell had come like a blast from the past and brought back memories of college and my rather feeble attempts to learn something about commerce as a subject. There were very few people from that set I was still in touch with. There was Rizaveta, of course – she and her bloke Sid had double-dated with Ariel and I on a few occasions. There was Fatty Lombard, the rich day trader. But the other people involved in L’Affaire Rizaveta had long since been shrouded in the mists of time.