reMix

Chapter Thirty-Three Shanghai Surprise

There were a number of things that Lady Clare Fabio expected to happen after she cut her deal with Lazlo. That Lazlo would send his goons after her anyway; that her beautiful Ile St-Louis house would soon be washed away by flood water; and that — deal or not — she’d probably still die without ever knowing if Lazlo had lied about LizAlec.

What she wasn’t expecting was to find a Chinese general in her study, sitting at her escritoire, flipping though a leather-bound Mercurier atlas of Europe, her leather-bound Mercurier atlas of Europe. A book so valuable that Lady Clare kept it locked behind glass in a cupboard.

Lady Clare glanced across at the cupboard and was shocked to discover that the General had forced its tiny brass lock. Not crudely enough to damage the door’s ivory inlay, but forced it all the same.

“That was Florentine,” Lady Clare protested, nodding towards the cupboard.

“Milanese,” the man corrected her, picking up a lit candelabra and walking over to look at the forced-open door. “A post-Risorgimento copy, but not a bad one...”

For once in her life, Lady Clare was speechless. So General Que used the brief silence to introduce himself as Anchee’s father. He took it for granted that she would already know him as a major industrialist. Standing in front of Lady Clare and bowing slightly before putting out his manicured hand, the man announced that he’d briefly been a warlord but was now a private citizen from Shanghai.

Lady Clare met his surprisingly gentle handshake and then sat quickly in her chair, before he had time to reclaim it. The General smiled.

“Are you hungry?”

It was such a stupid question that all Lady Clare could manage was a blank stare. Of course she was hungry. Everyone in Paris was starving, even the Prince Imperial. People didn’t eat grass or tree bark unless there was no alternative. “What do you think?”

“Then let’s eat,” suggested the General. He took a packet of hard tack from the pocket of his trench coat and tore open the foil. “Old rations,” he apologized, “but they have a high protein/carbohydrate mix, plus six minerals and four vitamins. I designed the formula myself.”

The General took a biscuit and bit into it, catching the falling crumbs neatly in his upturned hand. Given the mildew that stained the wet floor, Lady Clare was surprised he bothered. But then, from the creases in his cavalry-twill trousers, she imagined the General was as meticulous about his table manners as he was about his dress. Old-fashioned, her own father would have called it. Though she was intelligent enough to accept that, even back then, others had regarded such behaviour as outdated, even obsessive or neurotic.

There was a time she’d been like that: it just seemed so long ago.

“Take one,” the General said, offering Lady Clare the packet.

She did. It was salt rather than sweet and crumbled against the roof of her mouth. The taste was good but the biscuit was still difficult to get down.

“Water,” suggested the General, dipping his hand into a poacher’s pocket inside his coat and pulling out a plastic flask of Canadian Spring. After two months of making do with grime-flecked rain collected from her roof, Lady Clare was shocked at how clear the water looked.

By the time Lady Clare had drunk half the bottle and finished a second biscuit she felt exhausted.

“Long-term hunger does that,” said the General. “Strips away the essential you. Not just your capacity to make decisions. Everything. Strength and alertness... your nerve. Why else are prisoners starved?” He spoke from experience, but she didn’t know that.

When Lady Clare had eventually eaten a third biscuit and drunk all the water, she sat back in her Napoleon III desk chair and rested her elbows on its green-leather arms. For someone who’d spent more than half a lifetime intentionally trying to starve herself, Lady Clare found it ironic that getting three dry biscuits could make such a difference to her life. And then she realized the General’s biscuits contained more than just minerals and vitamins. Something in there was neuronal, chosen to cause hyperpolarization of her post-synaptic neurons. All across her skull, carefully selected neurons weren’t firing...

But she didn’t have a problem with that.

“You flew in?”

The general nodded. “Came in on the back of the storm. Sikorsky, full-stealth mode. Piloted it myself...” He was pleased with himself and tired enough to let it show.

“Which means you can’t get out again,” said Lady Clare, sounding thoughtful.

Both knew it was true. Once inside the viral spread you couldn’t get out again, not safely. There was a three-hour window once you hit the edge of viral airspace. Getting into trouble was never the problem, it was getting out again safely — same as it ever was. The man in front of Lady Clare didn’t look like a risk taker, not to her — more Tao Mo than Kau Tze — and Lady Clare prided herself on her ability to sum up a person’s character with one glance.

Prejudice, LizAlec called it.

The shrug he gave was almost embarrassed. “Getting in was very easy. How I get out depends on you. Actually...” the General shrugged again, “it’s interesting how things happen.”

His voice was so quiet Lady Clare had to strain to hear him over the hammering of rain on glass and wooden window shutters. “You once met the auditor-general,” said the man. “Or so I believe?”

“Volublilis?” Lady Clare nodded. “He was a friend, for a while.”

“A close friend?” The Church of Christ Geneticist might be celibate, but there was no doubting what the General meant.

“Not like that,” said Lady Clare firmly. “We played chess, nothing more.” Without intending to she glanced towards ivory figures laid out on a small table. Even buried under their patina of dust, the carved chess pieces were still obviously of museum quality. Almost everything in her study was.

“A clever man,” said the General. It was meant as a statement, not a question, but Lady Clare nodded anyway. “And an excellent negotiator,” added the General. “You know the UN Pax Force almost stormed San Lorenzo?”

She didn’t. Lady Clare looked so shocked the General almost laughed. “It seems some idiot at the UN decided the Geneticists had developed a ‘dote. Of course, they hadn’t.”

The man didn’t say I had, but he thought it all the same. “They were going to fight their way into the complex...”

“So Volublilis negotiated a third-party inspection,” Lady Clare said. “With someone neutral like the Mufti of M’Dina. Got the Mufti to sign a rock-solid confidentiality clause, with exceptionally punitive financial penalties for disclosure of any information not directly related to the Azerbaijani virus or its ‘dote. The Mufti indemnified the auditor-general, the UN indemnified the Mufti, everyone saved face.”

It was the General’s turn to looked surprised.

“He plays good chess,” said Lady Clare. “And besides, that’s exactly what I’d have done.”

“I know,” said the General. “I’ve been reading up on you.” He dropped his hand back into the poacher-pocket of his trench coat and produced not the hardcopy print of her life that Lady Clare had been half expecting, but a small Kodak tri-D that he put face down on the desk.

Poker, thought Lady Clare. The General was a natural poker player. He thought of it as a strength, but she’d never yet met a man whose strengths couldn’t be turned into a weakness. Lady Clare didn’t give General Que the satisfaction of reaching for the photograph since she guessed he wouldn’t let her look at the Kodak, at least not yet. Never weaken your own hand, went the old motto. Though its corollary was, it’s not necessary when there are always people around to do it for you.

Instead, Lady Clare sat back at her desk and waited. Strange generals didn’t fly halfway round the planet because they wanted to deliver you biscuits. Somehow, somewhere she had something he wanted badly enough to compel him to leave home. And whatever it was, the General believed he had something to offer her in return. With food lining her gut and a litre of spring water now filtering through her overworked kidneys, she could afford to wait. Playing the long term had always been something she was good at, practised too.

The General smiled, sat back in his own chair. His brown eyes, thin lips, even the set of his narrow jaw gave nothing away at all. But Lady Clare didn’t mind: just his being there gave her too much to think about as it was.

What did France have that could interest a Shanghai industrialist? A few ruined cities, a countryside stripped of crops and what little livestock there’d been. The freeways rubble, the ferroconcrete bridges collapsed in on themselves. And by next week, even Paris might not be hers to sell.

“My father ate his boots,” the General said suddenly. “In Tibet, in the middle of a winter that took one of his feet and all of his fingers. He shot men for eating their dead comrades, but he ate his own boots while he still had hands to hold them.”

The man had been looking at her Dumas novels, Lady Clare realized, and had seen the one with its leather cover ripped off. He’d known it for a sign of what it was. In that study she had five oil paintings, including one by Louis David, and a hundred times over in the last week she’d have swapped the lot, even the small Rodin bronze in the corner, for a scrap of bread and a glass of clean water.

She waited, watching him wait too. And then the General leant forward and took the tri-D from her desk. “It’s time we talked,” he said, turning the Kodak over so Lady Clare could finally see it.

LizAlec. Dressed in a white cotton smock and with her hair cropped down to her skull. She was still scowling.

“Two questions,” said the General. “Do you know this girl?”

Lady Clare nodded. “What’s the other question?”

The General shrugged, almost apologetically. “Do you want her back?”