“Because,” White said, “I suspect the moral of that particular story will explain why you’re so eager to kill.”

Lucy appeared to think about this for some time, then she nodded, as if to herself. “A week or so after I arrived in the bayous, a man found me down the road from one of the bars I was hanging out in at night. He had so much hair on his face I could barely see his features. I wasn’t interested in him, and I told him so. He only grinned like a moron—grinned because at that moment two of his friends came up behind me and grabbed my arms. When I struggled, the hairy man punched me in the jaw. I stopped after that. I was crying so hard I had no strength left, anyway.”

She paused, staring down at her drink, as if trying to find her reflection there. “They carried me, as if I were a sack of grain. I had a flash of the church, the triangle with its curled little pig’s tail painted on the side. Inside someone had made it into a living thing, a sculpture in rusted iron. In front of it was—well, a kind of altar, I guess. They stripped me to the bare skin, and raped me.”

She coughed, and for a moment White felt certain she was going to be violently ill, but then she caught hold of herself, or perhaps he was wrong altogether.

In any event, she went on, but seemingly in a different vein: “Albin, do you know what a chimera is?”

He nodded. “Nowadays, the word is used to define a terrible vision, but I believe it’s a mythological beast of some sort.”

“When I was little, my uncle Felix used to read to me from Homer. The Odyssey, can you imagine?” She gave a little snort. “He started with The Iliad, but I couldn’t bear it—all that blood shed for the stupidest of reasons.” She sipped her mezcal, seeming to have calmed a bit. “So The Odyssey. Man, I loved those strange creatures and people, you know? So, anyway, it was Homer who first described the chimera and, if you can believe it, I remember the passage. Let me think now, oh yes, ‘a thing of immortal make, not human, lion-fronted and snake behind, a goat in the middle, and snorting out the breath of the terrible flame of bright fire.’”

She looked up from her mezcal, and White was startled to see that her eyes were enlarged with tears. “They raped me, Albin, one at a time. Then they poured liquor all over me, and all three took me together, like a three-headed monster, like chimera: snake, lion, goat.”