The Gone-Away World

Chapter Fourteen

THE PLAIN WHITE,” Libby Lloyd says definitively. She flicks her hair. Libby Lloyd’s shop is in the glitzy part of Haviland, which is all of it except the bits which most Havilanders don’t think of as the city proper, like the slums and the outer metropolitan area. It wasn’t hard to find. I ditched Annabelle at a truck stop after the drive and took a bus into the centre, then asked the nearest tourist where the best shops were. She consulted a little guidebook and said that the good deals were over to the west of the square. I thanked her and went east. Andromas pottered along behind me for a while, then ducked into a doorway to look at glittering rows of rings and necklaces. I expected him to pop up again, but he didn’t. Perhaps he’s invisible, or perhaps he has a short attention span. In either case, he’s not bothering me. I look back at Libby Lloyd.

“I like the stripes.”

“The stripes are very popular among the senior executives.” Subtext: surely you aren’t one.

“Ideal,” I tell her briskly. Subtext: then why on Earth are you showing me this other crap?

Libby Lloyd reassesses. She does not know me, so she has assumed that I am not important. On the other hand, I’m in her insane little shop in Haviland Square buying unpleasantly tight sports gear. More, I’m buying top of the line, and I’m not scared of the Big Dogs. A new customer. A new executive. Possibly unmarried. She tosses her head. It’s a full-service effort. One hand goes to her fringe, catches it lightly. The other rests on her stomach, emphasising its flatness and drawing attention to the elegant curve of her bust. She twists her neck sharply. Blonde hair spreads like a parachute and spins around her, light and feathery and infinitely strokable. It falls around her in a haze, and she fires a smouldering look at me for just a heartbeat before smoothing it into something professional and cool; you’d swear you hadn’t seen it. Libby Lloyd makes more money in a week than I have ever seen in one place. Money is not the issue. The issue is access. Running the most exclusive sports boutique in Haviland is still being a shopkeeper. It’s not being part of the System, and Libby Lloyd wants In. I know this because in Haviland everybody who isn’t In wants In, and everybody who is In wants to keep them Out. Pencilneck Heaven. A brief conversation via the electric telephone with K (the original and still the best) filled in my sketchy understanding of life here. Essentially, K said, the more ludicrously you behave, the more they will assume you have the right to.

I pay cash. Subtext: your pathetic bill means nothing to me! Bwahahaha! Libby Lloyd flutters. It’s a large bill; if this is just walkingaround money where I come from, then she really does need to know me better. I hesitate going out of the door. Libby Lloyd preens. This is where I ask her if she’s busy later, because I’m going to this party and I don’t know anyone in town.

“I wonder,” I say brightly.

“Yes?” Subtext: anything at all.

“Who makes the best suits in Haviland these days?”

Disappointment tempered by patience. Subtext: you will be mine.

“Royce Allen,” she says firmly. “He’s just across the street. Come in and see me when you pick it up.” She smiles and bats her lashes at me. I swear I feel a breeze.

THE BAG FROM Libby Lloyd’s is a passport to greatness. It has a gold colophon on a shiny white background, and with it under my arm scruffy clothes are simply not an issue. I have already bought. I am spending. I have money. Respectable clothing is what I will come out of Royce Allen’s with, not what I need going in. The door across the road opens before I can knock.

I spend five minutes pottering around admiring Royce Allen’s off-the-peg stuff while his nervous assistant follows me to and fro, nodding when I make little noises of discontent and explaining that (while everything I see is of the highest quality in all respects) the bespoke work is vastly superior. I try on a shirt. It makes me look like a god. I suggest that it’s a little tight under the arms. Yes. Definitely pulling . . . what sort of thread does Royce Allen use in his seams? It feels coarse. The assistant assures me that the thread is the finest baby hair and angora rabbit, the softest known to man. I sigh. It must be the fabric then. A pity. No, no, the fabric is a cotton picked by child slave labourers who wash and moisturise their hands every hour so as to prevent their fingers from roughing the fibres. They bleed, of course, but their blood contains chemicals (owing to a strictly controlled diet) which actually add to the luxuriant mellowness of the weave. The blood is as a matter of course hygenically bleached out with a mineral cleaning agent made from crushed diamond and virgin’s saliva, which adds lustre and radiance, and also gives the finished shirt the toughness of ballistic nylon.

I explain sorrowfully that all this discussion has left me with a dry throat. It is now my intention to return later, or possibly next week, having refreshed my mucous membranes. I am politely disinclined to discuss the matter further. I am so polite as to be almost rude. I cough gently, to remind Royce Allen’s assistant that the absolute last thing I want is further chat, because—possibly owing to the amount of time I spend on the phone firing people and arranging the fate of millions—my larynx is in such terrible agony. He summons a minion (Royce Allen’s shop is awash with minions coming and going clutching swatches and fabrics, and occasionally, from the fitting rooms, there comes the voice of the great man himself: “Freddie! Get the blue flannel for Mr. Custer-Price, please, he needs to see it against the checks,” and Freddie—or Tom, or Phylis, or Betsy, or someone—scurries over and looks the other way so that Mr. Custer-Price is not embarrassed in his partial nudity) and the minion brings a tray of drinks. I hover over the expensive Scotch and then the Armagnac, but finally settle on a glass of rich red claret. I put it near my nose and nearly pass out. It smells of old houses and aged wood and dark secrets, but also of hard, hot sunshine through ancient shutters and long, wicked afternoons in a four-poster bed. It’s not a wine, it’s a life, right there in the glass. I sip it. Fire and fruit wash over my tongue.

“Oh, that’s actually not bad.” Calumny. I sit. The assistant relaxes a little and asks if I would mind waiting while he fetches Mr. Royce Allen, in person. I decide that I wouldn’t. I sip again. I really wouldn’t.

Royce Allen is a hearty fellow with sausage fingers and the obligatory tape measure around his neck. He is not so much unctuous as balsamic. He eels out of the fitting rooms and gladhands me and confides that he’s been hoping I’d come by ever since he heard I was coming to Haviland. He was concerned that I’d been seduced by that clothbutcher, Daniel Prang. I swear that the false glamour of Prang never appealed even for a second, and he adjudges me not just a powerful man but also—and this is rare, sir, very rare—a man of taste. Daniel Prang (confides Royce Allen) began as a very excellent cobbler; had he stuck to gentlemen’s shoes and boots, all would have been well. The original Prang shoe was a splendid thing, a brogue with fine slim lines and a steel and silver slash across the back of the heel, with a unique crest designed for each customer so that a gentleman’s footprints were instantly recognisable to his friends. Sadly, after a few months, the cleats tended to come loose, and one was forever stopping to examine one’s sole (ahaha, just my little joke, sir, but you see, yes, well of course you do).

In those good old days Royce Allen himself bought shoes at Prang’s, and his crest was a camel passing through the eye of the needle, very droll indeed. Alas, Mr. Prang has upset the natural balance of things by venturing to make gentlemen’s clothing, and it is not a task for which life has equipped him. Royce Allen is delighted that I have the natural acuity and good sense to reject the Prang suit with its modern lines, and determines that I shall have only his best work. He thus dispenses with all the moderate fabrics (read: cheap) and whisks me straight to the last table by his den where he keeps the ones which empty banks and consume the wealth of nations. I ponder, he measures. I cannot decide between the alpaca and cuttlefish (honestly) and the Mylar-silk (very good in summertime), and—since I’m never going to wear them—I order one of each. Royce Allen licks his lips and applauds my boldness. The first fitting will be in three weeks. Royce Allen’s assistant brings me another glass of the red lest my throat should again be giving me trouble after this exertion, and hovers with the bottle in case I need to make any more difficult choices regarding shirts. While we’re in the mood, I toss a couple of the superb off-the-peg jackets on the pile (for casual wear, Mr. Allen) along with some At Work By Allen jeans and some slacks and a pair of Foot By Allen shoes. Royce Allen is so delighted that he throws in a pair of socks. I give him my entirely fictitious address in the nice part of the city and ask if I can pop back in later to pick up the off-the-peg stuff. I’ve got squash in an hour at the Club (I don’t know which club yet, but everyone else obviously does, they nod and bob reverently) and Royce Allen says of course. We shake hands, for which I put down the glass on the sales counter, and the assistant moves forward to grasp it before it can become a hazard. Alas, alack, how do these things happen? I have stepped back into the space he was intending to occupy. Silly me. Perhaps I am clumsy, or supremely confident, or drunk. Certainly, I couldn’t have intended this outcome: the remainder of the bottle (I will linger in the oenophile’s Hell of Corked Vintages for a thousand years) glugs massively over my shirt and down my back.

There is absolute silence. I worry for a moment that the assistant has actually died or gone mad; he’s frozen in place. Then he straightens, murmurs “I’m most terribly sorry” and walks into the back room to gather his things. He does not wait to be told that he’s fired. I hope it’s a drill. I hope he’s going to go and sit in a bar until Royce Allen calls him and tells him to come back to work, the client is gone. I doubt it.

Royce Allen sighs.

“What a muddle,” he says. “Going to the Brandon Club, you said?”

“Yes,” I tell him sadly, “I was.”

“Well, you can’t go like that,” says Royce Allen. He shrugs. “Take the casual now,” he says. “You can pay for it when you come for the first fitting. If you don’t like it, we’ll shove it on the dummy and you can call it a loan, all right?”

I couldn’t possibly, but you must, no, Mr. Allen, sir, I insist, blah blah. We out-polite one another for a while until he puts his foot down and I walk out of his shop wearing a fortune and carrying a change of clothes, and with two glasses of his wine inside me. I’d feel guilty, but he’ll be fine, and he’ll make an extra 5 per cent this year just telling the story to gentlemen in the fitting room. How I Was Took by a Felon, by Royce Allen, and I’d do it again, sir, because that’s how we are in this shop. Oh, no, sir, to be honest, I think we’ll have to go up a grade, that fabric doesn’t do you justice.

I get in a taxi, and tell the driver to take me to the Brandon Club.

BUDDY KEENE lends me a racquet. He has five, in a thick sack, and he uses a different one depending on mood. His name (Bartholomew Keene) is printed in gold on the bag. Tom Link and Roy Massaman put me on to him by the water fountain: Buddy has too many damn racquets, man he’ll set you up. And he will, because Royce Allen’s craft is all over me, and that’s as much a passport as Libby Lloyd’s whites. The stripes cause a bit of a murmur when they come out.

I stand in the gallery and watch, and chat. The Brandon Club gallery, overlooking the courts, has ferns and fig trees in little pots at inconvenient intervals, and supremely uncomfortable chairs made from bamboo. Anyone spending any significant amount of time here will develop expensive back pain, and the club has a health spa which is particularly good at dealing with injuries sustained from sitting all day in a lounger. The walls are painted off-white (because true white makes the guests look ill) and there’s a great deal of glass. The point appears to be that you could only possibly pay what you pay to be a member here if you are very rich, because anyone with less money would demand better service at the price.

From Buddy and his friends—who rotate on and off the court, so that one of them is always talking to me in a somewhat wheezy voice and mopping his underarms—I learn that Haviland City is filled with excellent bars; that it is (like ancient Rome) constructed on a string of hills, the precise number of which no one can quite recall. I learn that the market (this being the stock market, not the local produce market, although in fact the produce market is of course a subset of the other) is low at the moment owing to a string of vanishings and the recent fire on the Pipe (Old J.P.), but that certain people confidently expect it to rise shortly when these matters are resolved. (Resolved how? Just resolved.) I learn that Haviland City is now the centre of operations for Jorgmund, although the old head office remains out along the Pipe (the Silver) a way, where it all began. These things are moderately interesting, but not what I came here for. I wait. Sooner or later, they have to ask me to join the game. And they do. Buddy Keene, red from the neck up and dripping sweat from his earlobe, gets down on one knee. Would I like a shot at the title? I give Buddy a bit of polite surprise. Oh no. No, I’m waiting for Someone. Buddy catches hold of the capital S. His eyes light up. Is it a babe? Babes who play Brandon Racquets (the club’s own variant, which has few or no rules about physical contact) are hot. They are hot racquet babes. They get physical. Yeah!

“No,” I murmur, infinitely bored, “I’m here to see Richard.”

“Richard?”

“Washburn.”

“You mean Dick?”

“I call him Richard.”

“He prefers Dick.”

“How ambitious.”

This is easy. No one here is telling the truth. Every single one of them is living for every other. They do things because they must be seen to do them. These are type D or even type E pencilnecks vying for an upgrade. They’re here to lose a bit of identity, to become more the Right Kind of Guy. The rules they know are their own rules, and someone who breaks them without fear must be playing on the next level up.

I look at my watch. It’s not expensive. They stare. I tap it.

“Piece of crap. Won it off a guy.”

“You bet for that?”

“That . . . and his job.” They all suck air sharply, and Roy Massaman takes a little step back.

Yes, tiny men. I eat what I kill.

“Anyone know where Richard is? I’m due on a call at five. I’ll see him later.”

“He’s going to the party this evening.”

“Good. I’ll see him there. Is that the board thing?”

“Uh, no. There’s a board thing?”

“If there isn’t, I’ve come a long way for nothing. So where’s Richard going to be?”

And of course they tell me. Anything to help a fellow out. Particularly if you suspect he may be your next boss. Buddy Keene is looking at me, little wheels turning in his head. Think, Buddy. Take a risk. Grift.

I toss Buddy his racquet. We’ll do drinks, okay? And yes, they all say happily, we’ll do drinks. I step out into the corridor, and I walk away. He might not come. He might not have anything to offer. And then, heavy footsteps, the flat clatter of someone trying to lose speed in training shoes.

“Hey,” says Buddy Keene. “Wait up.”

Goodness me, whatever can it be?

“You’re coming to our office? Here in Haviland?”

“Seems that way.”

“Well . . .” Buddy Keene smiles an ingratiating smile. “There’s a meeting of the Planning Horizons Committee in an hour. Would you like to sit in, unofficially?”

Yes, Buddy. That would be just ideal.

JORGMUND has the big building on the left, with the annexe. The big building on the right belongs to the mayoralty. It is not as big as the big building on the left, which is topped with the circular snake logo, and has a couple of extra floors to drive the point home. The mayoralty had permission to go taller, but since Jorgmund was doing the construction, they somehow never got around to asking for those extra levels.

We are on one of the middle floors, and Buddy Keene has explained to everyone that I am absolutely not here, and given them to understand that I am a bigwig from back along the Silver. He says this with the absolute conviction of someone who wants to be first in line for promotion when I ascend, and his avarice is incredibly persuasive.

Buddy Keene, with a smile on his lips, opens his first red folder and slaps it down on the table in front of him. “Right,” he says. “Let’s rule the world.” Everyone grins. I assume that he is joking. A few minutes later I realise that he is not, or not entirely. They aren’t actually ruling the world, but they’re planning for Haviland City, and what goes for Haviland goes everywhere else in Jorgmund’s domain, which is everywhere.

Everything in Jorgmund is governed by the Core. The Core is the final authority, the yes or the no. Naturally, everyone wants to get into the Core. This is made more difficult by the fact that no one knows who else is in it. (Buddy Keene is almost 100 per cent certain that Humbert Pestle is in the Core. That means Dick Washburn has the ear of the Core—if such a thing can be said to exist—and hence that I am going around telling everyone that I’m one better than the guy who knows the guy who is almost certainly one of The Guys.)

Between us in this room and them in whatever corporate Olympus they occupy, there is the Senior Board. The Senior Board is composed of people who would very much like to be in the Core, and who therefore go out of their way to demonstrate how ruthless and commercially minded and efficient they are by going through the proposals of the Planning Horizons Committee and kicking out the weak, kittenish ideas and retaining only the fanged, pitbull ideas. Everyone here (except me) can name the Senior Board, list their hobbies and their weaknesses, knows how they like to be called and what their favourite drink is. Dick Washburn is tipped as surefire Senior Board material, as long as the Lubitsch Project comes out well.

“That was a bold initiative,” I murmur, and there’s a great deal of nodding and harrumphing. “Did anyone see the projections?”

“They’re huge,” says Buddy Keene.

“Really major,” says a woman named Mae Milton.

They look at me to see if they’ve said the right thing. I realise they have no idea what it is.

The Lubitsch Project. I turn the words over in my head. I don’t like them. I don’t like the fact that it has a name rather than an incident number or a nickname, or that they’ve heard about it in a place with the word “planning” in the title. I don’t like it that the name attached is Gonzo’s, in particular. This wasn’t about the Free Company. It wasn’t about Jim Hepsobah and his expertise, or Sally Culpepper and her negotiator gong fu. It was and is about Gonzo, in person. You were set up. Yes, Ronnie, we were. And yes, indeed. Who profits?

Buddy Keene is talking about house prices. Apparently, they’re on the rise, and many employees are asking for higher salaries to cope with the difference. Buddy Keene suggests that Jorgmund encourage them to move to the fringes of town where property is cheaper. This will entail new construction ( Jorgmund has a large construction arm) and better transport (supplied by Jorgmund Rail & Road). The longer commute will take a chunk out of employees’ days, of course, but this will leave them with more disposable income during their remaining leisure time. The alternative is to pay them more, have them live in a more expensive neighbourhood and feel underpaid, beginning a cycle of disaffection which can only be bad for the company. Additionally, people who spend more time with their families develop attachments and retire early, sometimes have children, and require day care and leave, whereas people who work long hours do not develop such strong outside attachments; they swim in the company water and think it’s the whole world. Day care and recruitment are expensive, and thus to be avoided. Since it is the major real-estate owner in Haviland City, Jorgmund could lower rents and sale prices, but this would mean taking a loss in a sector which is at present growing well. That kind of option is available to the Senior Board, but not to Planning Horizons.

Buddy Keene minutes the recommendations from the committee and puts them in an orange envelope. He sets the orange envelope in a tray marked “Action Up” and moves on to sanitation and water. This is, if anything, more problematic than housing. I nod my way through it and wish I hadn’t come. The Lubitsch Project. Damn, damn, damn.

“How was it for you?” Buddy Keene asks, when it’s over and I can stop nodding.

“Fascinating, Buddy,” I tell him warmly. “Really great. I owe you.” And this is the right thing to say. Buddy Keene nods back. Service rendered, debt accepted, between guys who want to be Guys. The members of the committee make polite goodbyes and wish they’d seen me first.

I am shaking hands with Mae Milton when I hear a rustling behind me. An old man in a maroon V-neck is collecting the Action Up tray and putting an empty one in its place. I did not see him come in, and I realise now that there is a low concealed door, like a servant’s entrance in a country house, just behind the chairman’s place at the top of the table. Over his heart there is a narrow metal badge: “Robert Crabtree.”

“Hey,” says Mae Milton, “it’s the boss man!” She grins.

I look at him. Clearly, she’s making with the funny. Milton holds up a warning hand.

“Don’t be deceived. Mr. Crabtree is our secret master, right, Robert?”

Dark eyes rise slowly from his cart and peer at me from beneath heavy, folded lids.

“I just move the paper,” he says firmly. In the world of Mr. Crabtree, moving the paper is a trust. You don’t make jokes about the paper. On the other hand, Mae Milton is moderately charming, and even Robert Crabtree is not immune. She offers him a broad, genuine smile. It occurs to me that Mae Milton will not last long as a pencilneck if this is how she carries on.

“Mmph,” says Robert Crabtree. He moves the corners of his mouth a bit to indicate that he’s seen the smile, and wheels the cart around me. Mr. Crabtree has seen a hundred of my kind come and go. He is not impressed. By next year I will be promoted or fired. I will be erased or eulogised, and the only memory of my presence on this floor will be my initials carved into the back of a cubicle door in the executive women’s washroom. Fair enough. But Robert Crabtree is important. I don’t know how, but Mae Milton has shown me something significant, if I have the wit to grasp it.

I wave to her and wander after him. He makes no objection. I watch him walk the halls of Jorgmund with his cart, piling up orange envelopes. No one speaks to him. No one even really looks at him. He’s just there, cog in the machine. Finally he walks into a big round room with an expensive table in it. Some ferns (what is it with ferns?) make his passage to the head of the table more difficult, and he’s almost blocked by a display case with some high-echelon bric-a-brac inside.

“Senior Board room,” says Mr. Crabtree. He looks around as if seeing it for the first time. More likely it’s just the first time today. He sneers a bit at the bric-a-brac. Mr. Crabtree does not approve of fripperies. They get in the way of the paper. He dumps the whole cartload on the table, and lines the envelopes up so that they’re in piles, ready to go. Waiting for him is a smaller stack of yellow envelopes stamped “Forward to Core.” He takes them, and moves off down the corridor again. Maps and charts, Ronnie Cheung said in the dark outside K’s circus. Know your enemy. Follow the paper. I follow. Mr. Crabtree is my guide in a strange land. So, Robert, where are the maps and charts? Just curious, don’t want to be a bother.

“Pleased to meet you,” Robert Crabtree says, without looking up. I glance around. He is talking to me. He is saying goodbye.

We are coming to the edge of the building. At the end of this corridor there is a window looking out over Haviland City and a small, halfsize construction clinging to the side of the Jorgmund office. Robert Crabtree pushes his cart into a small service lift and turns to face me. There is only room for him.

“Core,” says Robert Crabtree flatly. The doors close.

I listen to the lift. It goes down a long way. Probably, it goes to the top floor of the other building, the one nudging up against Jorgmund. It might go to an office in this building which looks out over their roof. I stand at the end of the corridor, gazing out at the city, hoping no one sees me and thinks to ask why I am here. Ten minutes later the lift doors open again. Robert Crabtree emerges. His cart is covered in green envelopes marked “Execute.” He looks at me for a moment, wondering what the hell I am doing waiting around for him. He decides he doesn’t care.

“If you’re going to follow me like a bloody baa-lamb,” Robert Crabtree says abruptly, “you can put your hand on the front there, because otherwise the buggers fall off and get creased and there’s no end of bother.”

I hesitate. He takes my hand in his clumsy arthritic grasp, angry already, and settles it painfully hard on the front of the trolley. He wraps my fingers around the sharp-edged envelopes using his palm, because his own fingers don’t bend that well, and we make his round. We deliver thirty executive decisions. We are messengers of God, invisible, inevitable, ignored.

When we’re done, I go to the party to find Dick.

PINEMARTIN HILL is long and green. It is a genuine hill, quite a steep one, although the road runs along the side of it. Presumably part of the charm is having a view which tumbles away at your feet. The street lights are old-fashioned. There’s a big modern house on the left full of happy people having fun—a stilt house. My car pulls up by the topiary. It isn’t really my car; it was booked for someone else, but I stole it and its impassive chauffeur, and if the person it was booked for figures out what happened, he or she will almost certainly invite me to use it until I get settled in. The Brandon Club were so delighted to have my patronage that they gave me a free room for the night and a spa treatment, so I went to sleep for an hour while a matronly woman exfoliated me and talked about her family. Dressing, I chose the second shirt, the one softened in the mouth of a trained and perfumed albino hippopotamus and made entirely of pigeon’s wool, because it goes better with the shoes than the one stitched with baby hair. The cuffs gave me some trouble until I remembered that the button isn’t supposed to wrap your arm like an ordinary shirt, but to clasp the two parts of the sleeve together like a cuf link. Smooth.

The door to number one five four is open, and a lot of people are shrugging out of coats and shedding scarves. Jorgmund’s children—or maybe its myrmidons—do themselves well enough for clothes and rocks. I go in. The hallway curves round into a wide open living room with an alpine vibe, and, sure enough, beyond the garden terrace there’s a long drop to the ground. The decor features muted colours with lush, unmatched furniture, and low tables occupied by little bits and bobs of stuff like armadillo shells—used as olive bowls—or pufferfish skins with gilded spines, which have no discernible purpose and are very sharp. It’s a model of a home.

In any given situation there are myriad forms of attack. (Actually, there aren’t. A myriad is ten thousand in the Greek arithmetical system, which was based on their alphabet and made Archimedes’ life impossibly difficult. If he’d had decimals, he might have done remarkable things, and we’d all be driving flying cars and heating our bathwater with home fusion, or perhaps speaking Latin and living in the ashes of the Graeco-Roman Nuclear Winter; in any case, there are usually several ways of dealing with any given situation.) I could walk up to Dick Washburn and stick out my hand. Buddy Keene and Roy Massaman and Tom Link would all be there, and Dick would almost certainly have to take it. But I have worked hard to make Buddy & Co. think of me as a big fish, even a man-eating shark, and I might still need that. If I let them see me right next to Dick—if I walk up to him and shake his hand, Gonzo-style—reality will assert itself. I will be in direct conflict with Dick’s dominance, and he’s had longer to bruit it about and can actually back it up by firing people and buying expensive things. In a direct, mano-a-mano hard-form conflict, I will lose. By the criteria of Haviland City, Dick Washburn is infinitely bigger and meaner than I am.

I could seek an introduction, but since I’ve given the impression that I already know Dick Washburn, that might confuse people and lead to the same unfortunate awakenings as option one. Fortunately, I am devious. The problem of how to say hi to a powerful, confident executive you have never met but whom you are supposed to know is a very difficult one. I have considered from all angles and decided that there is almost no way to do it which doesn’t make you look smaller than he does. Having this problem both sucks and blows. Thus, I have arranged for it to be Dick Washburn’s problem.

This is the room, from above. It is irregular but roughly oval. It is lined with tables and chairs for receiving. Later tonight it will be cool and dark, and smell of cigars and spilled mojitos. The carpet will hold the marks of a hundred pairs of elegant shoes, and the lead crystal glasses will carry traces of designer lipstick and executive DNA. The writing desk, pressed into service by the entrance to the breakfast room, will still have perfume on it, because the woman with the penetrating laugh is leaning all the way forward to adjust her interlocutor’s tie and (her mother taught her this when she was seventeen) she sprays scent into her cleavage before she goes out. Right now, though, the room is bustling and alive. If you speeded it up, you would see twisting patterns like clouds and pressure lines, and at the very centre of the biggest one is Richard Washburn, Esquire. His presence defines the play of forces in the room; the flutter of his wings causes tremors by the bar and tidal waves at the chaise longue in front of the patio doors. On most nights Richard Washburn is the eye of the storm. But today he is not alone. There is something wrong, a perturbation in the smooth carriage of his life. Another weather centre, a zone of high pressure, small but very hot, is moving across the shag-pile floor. Perhaps it’s a tornado. Perhaps it’s the beginning of a hurricane. Will it bounce off him, or swallow him up? Most likely it will swell his power, increase his domain, but it just might be a danger to him. Whatever, he cannot ignore it. Which is why he is, even now, moving through the throng towards me. He sticks out his hand and prepares to say hi in a big, dominant way.

And then Dick Washburn’s eyes widen. I can feel the change too; I know roughly what’s happened before I turn round. If my presence here is like a tropical storm closing in on Dick’s island paradise of warm weather and regular rainfall, this is like the arrival of Moses at the Red Sea. The flow of wind and water slows, then stops altogether. A momentous thing has happened. And behind me there is a strange, familiar noise. It is the sound of shoes with little metal cleats tapping on the wood boards of the hallway.

“Hi, Humbert,” Dickwash says a bit squeakily. “So glad you could come.” I wonder if Humbert Pestle has ever shown up to one of these soirées before. I wonder why he is here now. Maybe Dickwash is up for promotion. Maybe Humbert’s about to eat him alive.

“Richard,” Humbert Pestle says jovially, “I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds. But I’m taking you away from your guest.” Not guests, plural, just me. Humbert Pestle sticks out a muscular hand. The other one (the possible prosthetic) is tucked, genial old-fart style, into his trouser pocket. This makes him uneven and a bit rumpled, but his clothes are so perfect (no doubt Royce Allen cut and stitched every bit himself, from the purest milk-washed brontosaurus foreskin) that he just looks terribly relaxed. Which he is.

“I’m Pestle, call me Humbert—”

I recognise the line from his briefing at Harrisburg, and give him the next bit: “Pestle like mortar . . .”

He stares for a moment then says, “Mortar like in a wall—”

“And ain’t that ever a regrettable name?”

Now I have Humbert Pestle’s full attention, and the power of his gaze, when he switches it on, is like a weight on my chest. There is absolute quiet, except for someone, somewhere in the room, who chooses this moment to finish a sentence with the words “ludicrous cocksucker!” and then goes very quiet and hides behind an urn. I’d feel sympathetic, but I’m busy exuding bonhomie and harmless, cheeky, up-and-coming pencilneckhood.

Dick Washburn changes colour a few times, and looks as if he may faint. I remember belatedly that Humbert Pestle is an Übermann, a major player. He probably doesn’t hear his own material parroted back at him, ever. Probably the last guy who did that is now a janitor, with only one eye, and speaks in a series of burps because Pestle-call-me-Humbert tore out his larynx. Breathe. Check the exits. Too much mouth too soon, and now it’s over. But Humbert Pestle lets out a huge bark of laughter and claps me on the back. “You’re damn right,” he says. “You are absolutely right.” His craggy eyes peer at me, sparkling.

“I need a drink, young Richard, so why don’t you show me to the bar? And then I need a proper introduction to this gentleman because he reminds me of a kid I used to know—with an awful name.” Still chuckling, he leads the pencilneck away as if this were his house and his party, and when he reaches the bar, with its tiled surround, his shoes make that weird little tink, tonk, which I take to mean Daniel Prang’s signature footware has shed its cleat, as Royce Allen told me it would.

“Balls of steel, man,” says Tom Link.

“Epic,” agrees Roy Massaman. They make that annoying sun-god worship gesture you used to see in movies about California, hands up in the air, bowing at the belly. I look away, hoping to see something I can pretend to find interesting and thus leave them behind. I am looking clear across into the garden, where Dick Washburn’s swimming pool is lit with dark pink underwater lights. I have never seen that before. Granted, I haven’t seen a private pool in twenty years either, but somehow I just assumed it was a natural law: pool lighting is plain, or blueish. The pool has deep purple shadows and looks like a venue for insane flirting and trysting rather than actual swimming. Doing your laps in it would be a bit prim, sort of like wearing an anorak to a toga party. The garden doors are—for the moment—closed, but there’s enough steam coming off the water that it’s apparently at a pretty good heat, and there are those elongated metal mushrooms with gas burners in them making it warm out there, so sooner or later, when the drink is flowing, the daring and the beautiful will presumably strip down and jump in. And at the very edge of the pool, on the far side from the house, is the ghostly figure of Dr. Andromas, sitting cross-legged on the diving board.

Just discovering him like that, in plain sight, scares the shit out of me. There’s nothing supernatural about his being here. He has come in over the wall. Presumably he has followed me here. And he’s on my side (or I’m on his, perhaps) but still, Dr. Andromas is just wrong. He is the most unnatural man I have ever met. Also, if he chooses to come in here and advertise our previous acquaintance, my best-laid plans will look a bit like chopped liver. No one else has noticed him yet (I can tell because there is no screaming) but the moment Sippy Roehunter decides it’s time to show the board members what she’s got, or Dan deLine gets a hankering to bare his musculature for the benefit of the Jorgmund Ladies’ Lacrosse Team, it will be hard for anyone to ignore a top-hatted H. G. Wells–looking lunatic sitting in the lotus position on the edge of Dick Washburn’s giant pink sex pool. I will him to disappear. It doesn’t work. I grind my teeth. This doesn’t help either.

“You okay?” Tom Link is concerned.

“I’m fine. New bite plate. Leaves me a bit rocky in the evenings.” Cosmetic dentistry excuse, all men together. Link nods. Damn those orthodontic torturers and their perfect smiles. Andromas appears to be fishing for imaginary fish. Or maybe real ones, who knows? But he’s using an imaginary rod.

Wallop. Something hits me between the shoulder blades. It’s about the size of a human hand, but it seems to be made of rock, and it is powered by some kind of pneumatic press. It doesn’t hurt, but it shocks me, and my muscles all freeze up.

“Hey there, stranger! Let’s talk turkey!” Humbert Pestle. I hope he really does want to talk turkey. If we’re going to roister now, if he’s got some line-up of corporate houris we need to check out while drinking some faux-frontiersman drink he got to like back in the day, he’s going to kill me. He’s about twice my weight and he spends way too much time in the executive gym. On the other hand, if he’s going to fall into the mystery of who is this bright young executive and why haven’t I seen his file, I may be able to find out where he and Dick Washburn fit into the screw-up which has become my life, and maybe what he intends for Gonzo, my idiot brother, progenitor, pal and would-be murderer.

“Let’s walk the parapet,” Humbert Pestle says, and then glances at Dick Washburn. “You do have a parapet, don’t you?”

“Only the terrace,” says Dick. And he points out to the pool, and Dr. Andromas. Everyone looks.

“Now that is a pool, Richard,” says Humbert Pestle after a moment. “Pink as hell.” I open one eye (apparently I had shut both at some point) and find that Andromas has gone. Of course. “Can we have the terrace a moment, Richard?” And Dick Washburn says of course, and it turns out there’s a magic button which makes the glass opaque. Very space age. Humbert Pestle makes a noise which might be “I haveta git me some o’ those fer mah own place” or it might be “Boys and their toys” and then points me out onto the terrace. We walk out. It’s cool, but warmer than I expected because the steam from the pool is hanging over the terrace.

“You made me laugh back there,” murmurs Humbert Pestle gently, “and that is a rare, rare thing. Now maybe that’s because I rule too much with a rod of iron or maybe it’s just I have a low sense of humour and so do you. But I don’t know your face, young sir, and so I have to ask you where you heard me say that before we get to the meat.”

Direct, of course. Naturally he is direct. Look at him. He’s got a big cigar in his free hand and shoulders like a door. This is a man who believes in frontal assault. All right then. Answer the question, but dodge the truth.

“At a briefing, few months back.”

“What briefing?”

“On the Lubitsch thing.”

“Oh,” says Humbert Pestle, nodding. “That briefing. Yeah. I figured.” And I realise that I have made a very large mistake. I realise this because I am not a total idiot, despite how it might occasionally appear, and because Humbert Pestle hits me like water from a fire hose. I fly backwards. I don’t know where he hit me. It doesn’t matter. If it’s broken, I will find out. If it’s not, I can worry about it later. I roll. He’s fast, though. He catches me just as I’m coming up. I slip the punch, but the kick gets me and I go into the air again.

There are fights, and there are fights. The first kind is dialogue: boxing matches, sparring, even rhinos’ mating fights. It’s all dialogue. Am I better? Am I faster? The second kind—and it’s not that the first kind can’t go this way if someone doesn’t like the way a point is expressed—the second kind is about erasure. It is the urge behind the gun with which Gonzo shot me, and behind the Go Away Bomb. It is the desire that the enemy not be a consideration any more, ever, that the world no longer contain them. Humbert Pestle is fighting this kind of fight right now, and he will kill me very thoroughly if I don’t stop him. The thing is, I don’t know how.

Pestle fires off a few jabs at me with his good hand. He has the other one wrapped around his body now, tucked behind his back. Warning: that means he has a weapon. He came prepared. He intends to surprise me with it. Or alternatively he wants me to believe that, to pay undue attention to the missing hand. It’s easy to get knocked unconscious because the other guy is waving a broken bottle, and the sharp edges are hypnotic with the promise of laceration, and then the other hand is just a blur of one, two, three, good night. So, I don’t get distracted. I don’t assume. Move. Evade. The enemy attacks in arcs and straight lines. Your body has joints. Use them. I rock, bend, twist. My arms stop moving like windmills and start to make themselves useful. I do not try to block directly. Ronnie Cheung might be able to do that. Gonzo might. I can’t. I guide the heavy hand past me, step so that the attacks are in the wrong place. Move. Step. Brush. Twist. Yes. He cannot touch me. I remember this. One opponent is not hard. He has limited options. And he’s still hiding that hand.

But Humbert Pestle is watching. He is watching with a kind of anticipation. And as I get the better of his one-armed attack, he starts to pay more attention. He watches my feet. I chop and change my evasions, looking for the best one: Nine Palace Shuffle; Five Element Foot; Walk Like Elvis. Walk Like Elvis. He breathes out faster, as if he’s hungry. Walk Like Elvis. His face twists in a little sneer, or maybe a smile. Humbert Pestle meets my eyes and now he is definitely grinning. He is not smiling at me. We are not friends. We are un-friends. He is smiling at my Walk Like Elvis as if it is the last kitten in a litter he was intending to drown. He recognises it. And like a nightmare, he gets bigger and badder just as I’m on top.

His left hand comes around out from behind his back, and it’s not a prosthetic at all. It’s just that it’s made almost entirely of knotted bone. It’s like a club. Ronnie Cheung’s hands were big and solid. They were as strong as you could possibly need, and obviously they maintained some utility as tools for eating and carrying stuff. More important, Ronnie had made a choice about how far down the road of becoming a human killing machine he was prepared to go, and allowing his training to warp his body to the point where he was in some measure only suited to that task was exactly where he drew the line. Ronnie was all in favour of necessary violence, but he was as a consequence particularly venomous about the other kind. I do not train ninjas, he told Riley Tench, and it was a statement of his creed. But you heard stories. One of those stories concerned the Iron Skin Meditation.

The idea is that you forge your whole body into a weapon. For example, you take an ordinary hand and you use it to hit stuff. You start with sackcloth filled with wool, then with sawdust, then with wire wool, then iron filings. Then you just use a wooden board. Then a stone. You just keep hitting. When you can do that, you heat the stone until you can cook an egg on it. And you keep hitting. You do this until pain becomes a thing of memory and your hand is broken and remade and finally it is a solid weapon with which you might punch your way out of a bank vault or splinter someone’s ribs with a single blow. There are various ways of describing this kind of behaviour. One would be “single-minded.” Another would be “stark raving mad.” “Single-minded” is quite revealing, actually, because to do this to yourself requires a negation of everything else it is to be human. It’s about becoming a thing with a single purpose, whereas people are usually a bit more generalised—hence Ronnie never bothered, or wanted to, or really considered it. Also, Ronnie was not stark raving mad.

Humbert Pestle has engaged in some variant of the Iron Skin Meditation. And he is about to hit me with the consequence.

He doesn’t. He suckers me with his other hand. I even saw it coming. And now he comes after me with his left. Of course he’s left-handed. The object (can’t think of it as a hand, somehow it’s too alien) comes towards my head. I duck, guide the punch past me and, since the opportunity is there, I hit him back. It gets even less result than I was hoping for, and all I was hoping for was a breathing space. It hurts me more than him. Like Ronnie, he has been struck so many times there’s not much left in the way of capillaries to break.

I feel the breeze of his monster fist go past my face. Then it comes back, a sort of bear hug, or maybe a lobster’s claw. It ruffles my hair and makes a kind of dizzy thunk noise where it grazes my skull. I see stars and hear Tweety Birds. I tap him in the eye, which he doesn’t like. Can’t Iron Skin your eyeballs, so it fills with tears. Why is he doing this? Who is he, that he can? And—hell. I as good as told him who I was, if he knows about Gonzo, and almost everyone tries to kill me once they know that. An enemy plan implies an enemy planner, Bumhole, or had this not occurred to you? Humbert Pestle moves rapidly to the top of my list of suspects. Now if I can just stop him from murdering me . . .

We fight.

It’s uneven, because all I’m trying to do is stay alive and maybe get back to the party, where he may not feel able to pursue his present line of argument, and all he’s trying to do is open my skull like a grizzly with a honeycomb. At some point he hits me properly with the Iron Skin hand. I don’t know when. I assume the fight has lasted about an hour by this point, but realistically it must be about three minutes. He hits me at less than full force, and not in the head. Nothing actually breaks, but I feel my ribs bend inward, spring out, and my lung protests and I can’t breathe. Cramp? Serious damage? Work through or die. I retreat, choking. I know nothing to beat him. I am faster, but he’s tireless. I can’t lock his arms—can’t afford to grapple at all, when even a passing strike with that hand could knock me out. He’s a fortress. Master Wu should have taught us the Ghost Palm. If Pestle’s using the Iron Skin, I should have my own special magic power. Where are my laser eye beams? Concentrate.

I lash out with my fist, and when he blocks (scythes his forearm across as if he can smash my hand off; maybe he could) I roll my arm and step inside his guard. My elbow catches him in the face. I keep going, and my hip and shoulder hit him too. It’s like walking into a wall. I skip out, try to deaden his leg, and he leans into the blow, nearly catches my foot. Just to rub it in, he extends that same leg into my shoulder like a piston, curls it back down to the ground. I dodge around him, suppressing the urge to rub the arm. He doesn’t move his feet, just follows me with his head, wraps himself up like a spring. Or a snake. He uncoils, and his hand—the bad hand—strikes me somewhere on the torso. Insane wisdom, counter-intuitive, sends me forward into the blow. It saves my life. The power is expended too soon, there isn’t the snap to make it a punch, it’s more like a push. My feet leave the ground.

Pestle’s expression of interest has gone, which can’t be good. His face is below me, dwindling rapidly. My chest hurts. Shouldn’t I be touching down? I think of Master Wu’s fountain, long ago. Will I land in the pool this time? That might not be so bad. Perhaps people would come out and see what was happening. Pestle is following me, rather slowly. He knows something I do not. Again. Perhaps I am headed for the shallow end or the edge of the pool (nasty domestic accident waiting to happen there). I look down to check on it, and I see the bad thing. Beneath me there is only air and darkness. I have flown over the edge of the parapet. A body continues in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line unless acted upon by a net external force. I fall away from Humbert Pestle, which somehow surprises me: he is so big and dense, he ought to have his own gravity. I see his empty, bored face looking down and I know I have dropped out of the light and into the shadow. I have been erased. And now I am going to hit the ground very, very hard.

Something catches my foot and pulls me in towards the concrete stanchions of the terrace. Marvellous. I will not hit the ground after all, I will slam sideways into the wall. Perhaps I will lose only half of my brain, but with whatever I left behind in Gonzo’s head that will be only a quarter, which seems unlikely to be enough.

Fire in my leg. Why do people always set me on fire from the ankle? Cheats. But I have not hit the wall. Fingers like wire-cord rope have clamped around my foot, and while my head swings perilously near the concrete, I do not touch. My knee hurts. My chest hurts. But I am not dead—again.

With a grunt of effort, Dr. Andromas reels me in. He is suspended in a cat’s cradle of rope and pitons. He is presently, like me, upside down. Once he has stabilised the situation, he does something to a small box thingummy and we unwind slowly to the ground, whereupon Dr. Andromas grabs me by the lapel and says “You idiot !” with some heat, and rips off his aviator goggles and his moustache, and kisses me hard on the mouth. And it is only now, after all this time, that I realise that Dr. Andromas is a girl, and more specifically, that Hesperus is Phosphorus and Clark Kent is Superman, and Dr. Andromas is Elisabeth Soames, late of Cricklewood Cove.

She pulls back from the kiss, swears like a fishwife and half carries me down the hill to the Magic of Andromas, which is parked under a tree. I fall into the passenger side, and she speeds us on our way. She looks at me.

“Idiot,” she says again, exasperated. But she says it almost as if I have done something right.

THE MAGIC OF ANDROMAS is neither fast nor inconspicuous, but it appears that no one is looking for us. Humbert Pestle has thrown me from the parapet and gone inside to drink and be merry, and no one at the party will miss me except maybe Buddy Keene. Elisabeth Soames weaves us through Haviland’s night-time streets. She has, for the sake of form, put her (now that I think about it, abjectly unpersuasive) false moustache back on, and her hat, and I am hunkered down trying to look like a stage prop. This would be uncomfortable even if someone hadn’t just tried to kill me with his Improbable Iron Fist of Death. At last she ducks us around a corner into an underground garage, and leads me by the hand through what appears to be a service door into a damp tunnel and up some stairs to the roof, where a string of pigeon coops have been transformed into some manner of dwelling place. From all of which I deduce that in the matter of Elisabeth Soames, as in so much else, there is some missing history to be discussed.

“Yes,” Elisabeth says. “There is.” And then she doesn’t. She leans back against the wall of the pigeon coop (this is coop number three, which makes up her living room: a couple of futons and some throw cushions, a two-bar electric fire fed from a cable spliced into the mains feed under our feet and a few pictures hanging on the wall) and stares at me.

“I have gone mad,” she says at last. “I have come to the end of my tether. You are not you. But you are.” Well, yes. I know that feeling. She shakes her head a bit, and rolls half forward and draws me across the room to sit next to her, and clings to me like the last bit of driftwood after the wreck. I stroke her between the shoulder blades. I scratch her back. She squirms so that a particular bit of spine can be attended to, and then we stop moving because everything is in its perfect place, for however long that lasts. The memory of a clock makes a noise like tock tick.

“I’ve missed you,” she says quite sensibly into my chest. I don’t know quite how to take this, because while I know her, I don’t really see how she can know me. Perhaps she has mistaken me for another person, some cousin of Gonzo’s she happens to know, and my plunge from the jaws of death to the slender, delicious lips of rescue was a sort of benign error. It’s a mistake anyone could have made. She shouldn’t feel bad about it, but it might be as well to get the confusion sorted out before anything untowards happens, such as more kissing of me by her, or other actions which might complicate an already-Byzantine situation. I suggest this tentatively, and she stares at me.

“Yes,” she says at last, “it really is you.” And she begins her story.

Elisabeth Soames was born to Assumption and Evander John Soames in the Chinese Year of the Rat (I already knew this, but before I can object, some small part of me realises that much of what I have believed I knew turned out to be untrue, and that if I start complaining I may not get the story in full and indeed may not get hugged any more, and the hugging is very nice, in part because it seems to be as important to her as it is to me) and was an only child. She enjoyed skipping and making sandcastles, but rarely visited the sandpit in the children’s enclosure of her local park as Evander Soames was very much against violence of any kind, and one of the other children played an involved war game in the sandpit, a strange, sprawling, constantly evolving fantasy instigated by his older brother. Evander Soames petitioned the local authorities to have this practice banned in the code of conduct for the playground, but was outvoted, and therefore directed his energies inward. A total ban on the playground was enforced on his daughter until he died. His lady wife found ways to give Elisabeth access to other sands (at the beach and at friends’ houses) and social interaction (which would in any case have been somewhat tempered by her position as headmistress at the Soames School for the Children of Townsfolk, a burden for her daughter roughly equivalent to being the offspring of a plague carrier).

In consequence of her father’s diktat against the sandpit, Elisabeth came to question his wisdom as it emerged from his mouth and concluded that, although Evander Soames was a very intelligent man, he was not always forthcoming with balanced argument, but rather preferred to deploy his intellect in pursuit of his own goals (she expressed this at the time as “Daddy makes things up which are true but not how he says they are,” which is as accurate a summation of academic hairsplitting as you could wish for). When he expired in his own bed from a variant brain disease most usually associated with unconventional cuisine, Elisabeth mourned him as young children mourn: deeply, sporadically and without the awful sense of her own mortality which such death implies to adults. She also took herself straightaway to a nearby house inhabited by an elderly gentleman of Chinese extraction and demanded that he instruct her in the full range of violences and counter-violences which his extensive experience could offer. Wu Shenyang initially refused this request, but Elisabeth had considerably more experience with getting around old men than Wu Shenyang did of denying small girls, and she shortly ensconced herself in his living room and was immersed in the Way of the Voiceless Dragon. Her studies were facilitated by her mother’s grief, which took the form of community service (however backhanded) and which found the sight of her only child a powerful reminder of the infuriating, beloved dead. Mutual loss and mutual affection kept them orbiting one another at a precise distance which only great upset could overcome, and if this seems like a small madness drawing fuel from pain, it kept them from far larger ones and allowed them to be together for short periods of comfort and reflection without becoming maudlin, vengeful, jealous or any of the other irrational things which sorrow can enforce quite unfairly on those who love one another very much.

One great upset was the young man who was her first love, a bewildering muddle of brashness and familiar grief who stole her heart without ever bothering to check his pockets, used her wisdom but not—to her enduring fury—her body and then ran away to war and fell in love with a nurse. (Here Elisabeth pauses to look at me sharply. Her face is set in the expression I used to associate with a dressing-down, but which, looking at it with twenty years’ worth of human experience, I recognise as fear. I squeeze her lightly. This was apparently the right thing to do, at least as far as she is concerned, although it is, like everything else, painful. Humbert Pestle’s fingerprints are on my bones. I squeak. Elisabeth stares for a second, and then wordlessly draws back, and demands that I remove my shirt. From coop number two she retrieves a small package filled with ointments and cotton wool, and she begins to dab at me.)

On hearing of the engagement, Elisabeth Soames, from a grim hotel room, sobbed vile words and gut-wrenching envies to her mother, and Assumption averred that things might yet turn out well, and in any case the boy was simply too mixed-up to be worth the full measure of regret. With this observation Elisabeth was reluctantly forced to agree: he never finished anything, never concentrated on anything, he wanted everything and the introspective aspect of him she admired contrasted unfavourably with a brassiness, even an arrogance, which she found deeply unattractive. (She pours something on my ribs which is very cold and smells dreadful. If there are any pigeons in here, they’re getting treated to a very fine selection of noises of alarm and discomfort. Her hands smooth this stuff into my skin, and my aches start to go away. I feel warm and prickly. I try not to; it’s producing moderately inappropriate physical reactions. I haven’t been hugged or touched in this way for some time—or perhaps ever, depending on how you look at it—and I’ve just escaped death. These things cause untold amounts of what can only be described as horn. Elisabeth either doesn’t notice or doesn’t mind. Her fingers slide around my side, where it hurts most. They are very gentle, so I don’t faint.)

In any case, she has more important things on her mind. Shortly after she went away to study, Wu Shenyang—never a surrogate father, but a person whose suppleness of mind made a true friendship possible across decades of impossibly different experience—was killed by fire and treachery. He had as much as warned her such a thing was possible. Elisabeth, knowing better but steeped in the culture of feuding schools which is the cinematic heritage of gong fu, expected his senior students to leap from the woodwork and snatch her up to join the cause of rooting out his enemies. Nothing happened. Offended, she determined to do the job herself, or at the very least locate the missing seniors and ask them why they weren’t pursuing due revenges. She realigned her studies towards this goal, and obtained qualifications as a journalist to allow her to travel and investigate. The moderate support available to her from Evander Soames’s estate allowed her a certain leeway in filing stories. She roamed, and searched, and heard whispers: there was a man called Smith. He had asked about Wu Shenyang. He had enquired in many places. The tone of his enquiry had left most people eager to forget him. Smith was sinister. He frightened you, and he allowed you to know that this pleased him. He had a way of seeing where to apply pressure, how to bring you to heel. Smith could be friendly, but never nice. Smith was a hard man, and he had chosen his alias because he didn’t care if people knew it wasn’t his real name; he just wanted to be sure he left no trace. If anyone knew anything about the death of Wu Shenyang, it was this wicked, terrible Smith. Elisabeth set out to find him.

Smith was elusive for such a big man. She would find his tracks, follow him to a hotel or a bar, to a private house or a shop, and she would hurry there to find him gone. Smith could walk into a lobster pot and leave by the back door. He knew the back alleys of the worst part of every country on Earth. Elisabeth got to know them, too. She drank pale beers in a cellar in Phuket and sipped fermented mare’s milk in a town in Mongolia. She paid small amounts to border guards—for your son’s schooling, mon Capitaine, because I hear he is a most excellent boy, no, please, I will wait in line . . . well, but if you insist . . . no, no, let there be no debts between us, we are family, your wife taught me to shop for melon—and smiled with cherry lips at gullible men. She went to baby showers in Idaho and played darts with working men in working men’s clubs, and she asked questions in quiet corners and pauses in conversation, and most often she had to claim she’d been misheard. Most often, no one had heard of the Voiceless Dragon, or believed in ninjas (which is a word which can be confused with: ginger, injured, fringes, hinges and many others which might crop up in a casual conversation) and so Elisabeth went on her way smiling, and was not seen again. But every now and again, in quite unlikely places, she would be drawn aside or shushed—I don’t talk about that; I know him; what would a girl like you . . . promise me you won’t say I said.

She was following Smith through the conflicted, dangerous maze of Addeh Katir when the Go Away War broke out and the world was changed for ever. She hid and fought and stayed alive, until her meandering brought her into contact with the Pipe at a town called Borristry. She worked as a cook, a cleaner, a fruit picker and a magician’s assistant, and finally fell in with a group of travelling mime artists of dubious reputation and curious skills led by a chortling troublemaker named Ike Thermite. Under Ike’s mangy wing and in the guise of Dr. Andromas—she had no desire to bring down destruction on the Matahuxee Mime Combine—she continued her quest.

Finally, in Conradinburg, in a yellowing pinewood absinthe den amid the ice, she heard a tale from a whimpering old man with no family and nothing left to lose. His name, when he remembered it, was Frey, and long ago he’d been a servant of the Clockwork Hand. Frey wore fingerless gloves, smoked with his left and ate with his right. He wore a fur coat against the cold, and it smelled even worse than he did because the furrier and the tanner between them had failed to get the stink of rot out of it before it was stitched. Elisabeth breathed through her mouth and drank vodka in small sips to ward off the reek, and Frey gave up a most secret history in exchange for another round and a tin of shag.

She came home, and finally ran across Smith again in a place called Harrisburg, only to find him looking to acquire the services of one G. William Lubitsch. Alarmed, she broke a lifetime rule and sent Gonzo a message: Don’t take the job, but of course the warning made no difference at all. Since Smith had—she was now reasonably sure—engineered the demise of the Voiceless Dragon, and since Gonzo was—sometimes—a part of the school, she followed the Free Company to Station 9 to keep an eye on him. So she saw the ninja, and the moment of my creation, and later the moment of my assassination as well.

“That was bad,” Elisabeth Soames says meditatively. Watching your first love attempt to murder part of himself and toss the wreckage from a moving truck. Yes. I suppose it was. Good old Comrade Cow.

She is looking at me with a kind of intensity. The moustache is gone again, thank God, vile little rat-fur thing that it is, and her face is very pretty. Dr. Andromas’s costume, once you know it is occupied by a woman, is quite fetching, and a little bit daring. The shirt is a narrow, deep V. White skin and dark eyes. If I breathe through my nose, I can smell liniment. If I breathe through my mouth, I can taste her, somehow, still on my lips. I choose my mouth. We do not speak. It’s one of those moments when things could go in any direction. I have missed a few of these in my life, always through ignorance or indecision. I don’t know how this one will go. I don’t know how I want it to go.

“There is an old tradition,” says Elisabeth Soames at last, “regarding rescues of this kind.” She leans towards me until her face is all I can see. The electric fire is very hot on my bare left side, so that her body makes a heat shadow, a cool place. On my chest—still tender, still prickly—I can feel the cotton of Dr. Andromas’s shirt, and beneath that I can feel Elisabeth Soames. She is slight, feathery, and the resilience of her body commands attention. She continues.

“The rescue-er and the rescue-ee are recovering from their ordeal, you see, and the rescueee goes all weak at the knees and says something like ‘But how can I ever repay you?’ and the rescueer jumps on the rescue-ee and doinks him lustfully and with great attention to detail. It is taken as non-binding owing to the stressful circumstances of the initial lunge, but certain liens and possibilities are established with a view to more thoughtful and long-lasting consummation at a future time, when the present danger is abated. I am wondering,” she says, “whether you intend to honour this fine old—” But exactly what “fine old” it is she does not get to say, because I grab her and stop her mouth with mine, and her hands are busy and avid. She wraps herself around me, strong, long limbs, and if any pigeons remain within earshot after my earlier noises of agony, they take off and hide on the next rooftop until we are done.

This is quite some time.

And later, when we are covered in a medley of blankets and rugs and drinking hot chocolate heated over the two-bar fire, Elisabeth looks at my arm and says “Huh.”

“Hm?”

“You’ve got a mark.”

“Where?”

She shows me. There is indeed a strange shape on my shoulder, the bruise made by Humbert Pestle’s shoe. And in the centre there is a pattern, almost a brand: the imprint left by the engraved crest which forms his heel. From this angle it looks like a new moon, or a bowl of soup with a spoon in it. I have seen it before. It is a pestle sticking up out of a mortar.

Glinting in the sad light of Drowned Cross as we raced across the main square: not a cuff link or an earring or a key fob. Humbert Pestle’s missing cleat.

He was there. And more than that. Monsters do not make day trips.

“Who is he?” I ask. “Humbert Pestle?”

“I don’t know, exactly,” she says. “I know who he’s been.”

“Who?”

“Smith,” Elisabeth says.

Smith. Smith is Pestle and Smith is the enemy of Master Wu. Pestle is Smith and Pestle can walk through me as if I am nothing. Sifu Smith then. Sifu Humbert. Master of the ninjas, also sometimes called the Clockwork Hand Society. Plotter. Enemy planner. The man who sends ninjas out to do his bidding, to kill Gonzo’s parents, to attack him during world-shaking blazes. Saboteur. Murderer. Cui bono no longer. Now, the question is why?

“Tell me about him.”

She does.

IMAGINE A HOUSE with a white front and high, arched windows. It has three floors and is covered in wisteria and grapes, like a house in a French storybook. It is an old house, a house built when such houses were merely respectable, rather than staggering, and the family who own it now owned it then. They are still only respectable, so they own no other houses, no jets and no yachts (unless you count the inflatable dinghy resting on its side in the garden shed). The house itself is in need of some minor repairs—the west wall could do with some fresh whitewash and the guttering leaks in wet weather, showering the kitchen garden with great gouts of water, flattening the tomatoes. It hardly matters. The sound does not penetrate the thick walls, and the tomatoes are immune to such indignities.

Once upon a time, a boy lived here, in this splendid house, a boy with a most unfortunate name. He kept his things in a great oaken trunk he had from his mother, bound up with iron bands. When he went to school—which was seldom—he emptied the trunk of some of his treasures and left them in safe places around the house, in nooks and corners and on shelves, and a very few under the floorboard in the back of his cupboard. When he came home again, he went around each room and gathered up his things, and put them all back in the trunk so that he would know he had them.

On the occasion of his ninth birthday, the trunk contained: a paper crown; a calico cat; an Aston Martin car like the one James Bond had, with a red button on the bottom which made a metal plate shoot up at the back to deflect bullets (he had never seen the film and couldn’t understand how James Bond got out of the car and pushed the button when he was driving, but grown-ups were forever making their own lives difficult and so he didn’t worry very much about that); an old book in a language he could not read; a fossilised frog; a plastic soldier some ten inches high, complete with full pack and cyborg eye (through which, if you opened the panel in his skull, you could descry things a very long way off—they were supposed to look closer, though they tended to look smudged owing to a quantity of jam on the lens); drawings of dragons and animals seen at the zoo; a compass in metal and glass given him just that morning by his father; and a vast collection of invisible goods which he alone could describe or enumerate, but whose values exceeded the tangible items by an order of magnitude.

The house itself was no less wondrous. Through the wide wooden door, each room was a separate mystery wherein a young man might discover strange countries. The living room had a vaulted ceiling where—in the dusk—gargoyles could be seen flying from roost to roost. The den, used by both his father and his mother in the winter months for long, whiskied evenings in front of the black-tiled fireplace, was populated with gnomish metalworkers making legendary swords and lethal pikes. If he was good and quiet, and nimble when required, they had no objection to the tiny human child watching and learning as long as he swore (with hand on heart and one foot on an iron peg) never to reveal their ways. In the kitchen, between bags of taters and onions on a string, the stove whispered to his older self surprisingly accurate advice on romance, winning him willing compliance from a certain girl and surprising sensations hitherto unknown. This was a house of marvels.

In the third of the long, hot summers which the world endured around that time, the boy with the unfortunate name (his father was old Caspian Pestle, of Tennessee, and his mother a stick-like woman from the East, so far in that direction as to be near enough west, instead) came to man’s estate, and went out of his home town to make his way. He toiled as a soldier in a far-off jungle (this being the custom of his nation and his father’s people, and a noted part of the process of making a child into an adult fit to vote; sadly, it also stripped Humbert Pestle of a number of society’s preconceived notions of morality, as war is apt to do) and then as a student in a place of learning (this being a new necessity in the world just then). On returning, he found that his father had evicted his mother from the house on the grounds of his desire to install a newer replacement, and they fought. He informed his father that this was the action of a weasel, a phoney and a cheat. Caspian Pestle received this information without argument, even going as far as to add to the list the descriptions debaucher, Lothario and libertine. This recognition—coupled with an aggressive lack of repentance—drove Humbert into a fury. He discovered a moment later that he had struck Caspian Pestle backhanded. He did not recall doing so, but he found himself not unhappy with the decision. Leaning on the sofa which the child Humbert had envisaged as a pirate vessel, Caspian invited his son to depart. He did.

Humbert Pestle travelled, and joined a reputable firm, and worked to forget his irksome paternity. He found that while the old man faded rapidly from his mind, the house remained very much alive within him, and dreaming of it caused him considerable pain. He aged somewhat, and was promoted, fell in lust and out of it, fought in dojos and occasionally in bars and alleyways to assuage his anger, and grew bored and disenchanted with everything he had. And then, on a Monday in October—while I was struggling with university admissions—he chanced to encounter his mother’s brother, Mr. Eliard Rusth.

Mr. Rusth (to rhyme with must) was a small, densely constructed person with a bald head. He wore a long jacket and a short collar, and his eyes regarded the world through circular glasses. These gave him the look which snowmen acquire the day after their construction, of being partly dissolved and cavernous. He asked Humbert whether he wished to be a man of small consequence or whether he would care instead to play upon the grand stage, and Humbert Pestle replied that if he had a choice, his preference would be for the latter. Eliard Rusth said that he wasn’t here to talk about preferences. If preferences were all Humbert could offer, Eliard Rusth was in the wrong place and would now remove himself.

Humbert Pestle rephrased his reply in stronger terms.

Greatness, Eliard Rusth said, was not achieved by acting on one’s own account. Fortunes could be made that way; professions could be conquered. But greatness required that one set aside one’s own desires and become the instrument of destiny. And this, he explained, was the purpose of the Society of the Clockwork Hand. To be the instrument of destiny. The Clockwork Hand was a mechanism: once set in motion, it could not be stopped, not by time or force of arms or diplomacy. Members obeyed their instructions without question, whatever they might be, and the Master of the Hand, freed from all mundane considerations, listened in silence for the music of the great wheels of destiny.

A year later Humbert Pestle went by train and car to his father’s home, the house of marvels where he grew up, and burned it to the ground. As it transpired, the house was occupied, which Humbert Pestle, watching from the great lawn, came to realise only when he spied a figure limned in fire at one of the upper windows. (Opening a window in a burning building is inadvisable. This was immediately demonstrated quite practically, and the figure—male, elderly but still strong—was consumed entirely in a wreath of fire and fell from view.) Humbert Pestle, watching these events, had expected to find in himself a great tearing and commotion. Instead, he found that all his commotions were stilled. This was a thing so huge that it implied a hidden meaning. It was too vast to be anything but part of a huge and remarkable pattern. And as Humbert Pestle stared at the flames, he believed he could see the edges of that pattern. He could hear it moving. The sound was a measured beat, an endless whirring. It was not yet a piece of music, but he knew it would be in time.

In consequence of this enlightenment, Eliard Rusth shared with Humbert Pestle the Iron Skin Meditation and the more conventional gong fu of the Clockwork Hand (whose name itself derived from the perfect progress of the universe as if steered by a mechanical armature) so that his student’s experience as a commando was overlayed with a subtlety of technique and a terrifying endurance which allowed him, over the course of time, to advance within the Clockwork Hand to the position of Sigung, the most exalted of equals.

The ascent of Humbert Pestle to the leadership of the Clockwork Hand would not have been a catastrophe—save for a particular hereditary enemy of the Hand now eking out a living as a small-time instructor of the risible Voiceless Dragon style (whose tenets included a starkly discordant insistence on the value of a single human life) in a town almost too small for the name—had not the world suddenly collapsed upon itself in a great spasm and the lazy ascent towards unity come fundamentally unstuck.

The Go Away War and the Reification were a great chaos which brought an end to everything we knew. By accident or subconscious design, we destroyed the pattern of our lives, reduced our species to tiny pockets of survival and engendered a world whose very fabric responded to our thoughts. Humbert Pestle, silver at the temples and tough like a yew tree, survived the cataclysm but was appalled by the havoc that it wrought. Seeing in his mind the cogs of the great progress scattered willy-nilly all about, Pestle longed to put them back in the clockwork and make it run again. Nor was he alone. We all of us looked at the turmoil around and were afraid, and instead of going out to meet it and sniff it like good mammals, good primates, we got cold feet and fell back upon our cold blood; like lizards on a cloudy day, we wished ourselves back in the comfort of our holes; we wanted our finite horizons of predictable problems and predictable joys.

Humbert Pestle wandered through the chaos in despair. Discord was everywhere. The sense of destiny he had acquired in the Clockwork Hand was broken. And then one day he witnessed something which filled him with hope, something great and terrible, and Humbert Pestle looked at it and heard the first notes of the music he had been searching for. With that music sounding in his mind, he set about the creation of something great, around the remainder of the old financial system and the Society of the Clockwork Hand. He called it Jorgmund, and it would circle the world in its grip. The blood of Jorgmund was a thing called FOX, which could usher out the new and restore the old.

ELISABETH SOAMES coughs. She has been speaking for a long time. I pass her some water from the plastic bucket in the corner. She has wrapped the bucket in blankets because it is a dreadful colour, a sort of chartreuse. The result looks a lot like something you would find in a Bedouin hut if the Bedu shopped at Ikea. She sips at the water and presses closer to me.

“What did he see?” I ask.

“I don’t know.”

It is the heart of all of this. It is the engine in Humbert’s machine, his enemy plan. Jorgmund. FOX. Gonzo. All of a piece. Find the connections. Find out why. What does Jorgmund want with Gonzo? Old questions: What is this thing called Jorgmund? What does it want? What is my place in the pattern?

“I need to see the Core,” I tell Elisabeth Soames. She does not say “Are you up to it?” or “If they catch you . . .” (which would be another rhetorical ellipsis, of course, and thus far, far beneath her). She seems to review everything which has happened, and herself and me, and weigh it all, and in that light she opens her eyes again, and she nods once, sharply.

“Okay.”