The Gone-Away World

Chapter Fifteen

UNTIL RECENTLY, the great Empire of Sartoria—the continent of style whence come all manner of dinner suits, morning coats, Edwards, Ascots, Lichfields, smokings and casuals—was marked on my personal map as a small island just to windward of the Useless Archipelago. It was populated with skilled but pointless individuals disconnected from the ebb and flow of living. An hour spent with Royce Allen has disabused me of that notion. Tailors are vital. Royce Allen is a receiving and transmitting station for news and storm warnings of various kinds, and a voice of stark truth to those whose importance is such that they generally hear none. Men of his profession have been quietly saving the world for years.

“No, sir, the chartreuse is a disaster. It makes you look like the Wampyr. As in the Undead. Yes. A cartoonist’s dream, sir. No, not pale and aristocratic, I fear, though one can see how you might imagine that, but more on the deliquescent side of things. On the whole, sir, the pink. If you absolutely must, sir, then the russet, but it has to my mind a hint of the dung heap about it. Yes. Oh, and regarding the economy, sir? Parlous. Yes, I am aware of your new proposals, sir. They are, if you will forgive me, worse than that burlap sack your missus was wearing on the telly last night. Yes. Mass unemployment in days, I should imagine. Well, might I propose that you just leave bloody well alone, sir—let the housing market settle and the banks get over their alarm, and pop in in a week for another fitting? Very good. Now, as to footwear—might I venture that you’ve been taking advice on this topic from the defence secretary, sir? Only these would appear to be Cuban heels.”

The items I am currently wearing come from a different stable. The same expertise has been applied to their making, the same exacting standards, but the intent behind their construction is less benign. The trousers are double lined: the inner layer is a sheer silk which instantly clings to the leg; the outer one is coarser, and slides over the silk without catching or making a noise. The final layer of fabric is not strictly black, but mottled midnight-on-anthracite—night-time camouflage. The jacket is the same. It tugs a little over the shoulders because I am an inch or so larger about the torso than the previous occupant. This is a suit intended to facilitate mayhem and violence in silence.

I’m wearing a ninja outfit. When I put it on there was a single, enormous bee corpse in the crotch. I didn’t scream because I am a man of action and a serious person engaged in serious business. Also because Elisabeth Soames was watching. I did, however, pick it up by one huge wing and drop it with a sardonic smile into the wastepaper basket in pigeon coop number one. And my whole nether region went cold as ice. This was probably a good thing. Until then I had been watching Elisabeth Soames wriggle into her own ninja gear (at some point one of them has run afoul of her and been denuded; I don’t know whether this was post-mortem and I don’t necessarily want to) and thinking that maybe this could wait until I’d taken her back to bed. It’s time to concentrate. I long to contemplate her in a vastly more tactile and rewarding fashion, and this would be a bad idea. Bad, bad, bad. I growl out loud. She turns round.

I drag my eyes upward, and find her face. She is looking patient. It does not look like the kind of patience which comes naturally, but the kind you adopt by choice. I mumble something. She kisses me chastely on each cheek, looks into my eyes.

“Ready?”

“Yes.”

And we go out into the early dark.

Elisabeth’s rooftop is only a few storeys high, and there’s an iron fire escape hanging down from the building above. She has at some point tied a rope to the bottom; she drags it down, and we climb. It’s a long way—this place has fifteen or more floors. We climb past windows and kitchens and feuding families; we eavesdrop on lovers and catch fragments of television shows. We climb. I begin to realise how she maintains that greyhound physique. When we get to the top, she leads me over an obstacle course, made all the more exciting by the fact that it is ever ascending, until we are at least twenty storeys up. And then her movements change, she grows cautious and I know that we are close.

This new roof is slippery, canted slightly towards a distant drop. The ninja shoes had little crampons for this kind of thing, but my donor had small feet. Girly feet. I hope he was a man. I don’t want to be wearing a dead girl’s clothes. At the far end of the rooftop there is another wall, and this one is vast. It goes up and up, maybe seventy floors above us. Fortunately, there is a lift, like a window cleaner’s hoist. We take it all the way. The little electric motors whine and complain, and the wind blows us all over the place. In movies people have fights on these things. You just wouldn’t. You’d sit there politely, talk about your favourite place to eat in the city below, maybe exchange names. You’d wait until you got to the top or the bottom and get off, then either fight in the knowledge that you had the ground under you and you’d die of violence rather than gravity, or reckon to resolve your differences over a coffee and a sandwich in the fortieth-floor bar. That model City of Lights down there is only a few seconds away by the direct route. These planks are strong enough to stand on, to sit on. But they flex when you walk. There are cracks. The planks are screwed into the frame, but one of the screws has worked loose and another is broken. Window cleaners have nerves of steel.

The roof of the Jorgmund Company, their neon logo shuddering in the wind above us. It’s freezing up here. Elisabeth puts on Dr. Andromas’s goggles to protect her eyes. I don’t have any goggles so I put up the ninja’s hood and squint. It doesn’t help very much. The wind is a kind of localised hurricane, a circling snarl created by all the buildings. In daytime it would be scary. In the dark it is disorientating, misleading. You could press against it to get away from the edge, and walk clear off the other lip thinking you were still right up against the first one. Elisabeth knows the way; if you traced it on a graph, it would be a curve or part of a spiral. Up here, right now, it’s a straight line across the roof to the other side. We pass under the signage and I can hear it creak. The torsion on the bolts must be tremendous. I wonder how often they have to come up here and change them, or check them for sheering. And then she clips a couple of bits of nylon around my chest and hooks us together, and we jump off.

I am acquiring a profound dislike of falling. Even in the arms of Elisabeth Soames, with her sweat still on my skin; even with the shriek of the little winch paying out a line; even knowing that we will never hit the ground, that everything is taken care of, I hate the lurch in my stomach and the wicked clawing of the air. Air should be a soft thing, a coddling thing, a breeze which wakes you in the morning, ruffles your hair and wafts the scent of summer in your face. It should bring tea. It should not rip like an angry dog at your clothes and graze your face with abrasive claws. We fall. Just enough time for a chat with my invisible life coach.

So, Bumhole, how are we in our little self ?

Bit busy, Ronnie.

So one observes. Pneumatic bit of crumpet too.

Please never, ever say that again.

Are we in any danger of finding out the Why behind all this, Bumhole? Because those of us in the gallery are developing a profound desire to break some heads.

I tried that. He’s too strong.

Might be too strong for you, Bumhole. Might or might not be too strong for me. However, that’s not the point, is it? You aren’t supposed to be stronger. You’re supposed to be cleverer. Old Wu’s gong fu is beloved of smartarses the world over. Use your noggin.

How?

My thinking? Shoot the fucker in his Iron Brain. Absolutely guaranteed to mess up his day. But then, I’m a practical sort.

Would that count?

Well, Bumhole, he’d be dead, wouldn’t he? And you’d be alive. Which is definitely a species of victory, especially if you are directly responsible for the variance.

I think . . . I think that’s not what Master Wu would do.

Ah. Now, there, Bumhole, you have me. Predicting the old fart was a game we used to play endlessly and without success. If you can do that, you’ll have passed me by. Now, may I suggest, relax your legs, stiffen your core muscles and place your tray-tables in the upright position for landing. And move your head so you don’t hit that limber bit of totty in her elegantly formed nose. You have arrived at your destination.

Bye, Ronnie.

The winch slows us, and we touch down almost without a sound. Elisabeth Soames is pleased: she has estimated the distance and the weight to a fine margin. Geek fu is strong in this one. She looks at me curiously.

“Were you talking to yourself back there?”

“Taking advice from an old friend.”

She smiles.

“I do that. I talk to Master Wu and my mother and . . .” She hesitates. “Well, you, actually, now that I think about it. Or mostly you. Hm.” She frowns, then brushes this little oddness away like a cobweb. “Come on.” She slips away, soft-footed and sure. She has done this before.

Elisabeth leads the way to a curious dome or pagoda, and next to it a very ordinary door set into an equally ordinary concrete box. A rooftop door. It is padlocked. Elisabeth Soames taps the hinge sharply, and the pin falls out into her hand. She lifts the door against the catch. It opens just enough for us to slip through. She slips it back and pockets the hinge pin. I wipe away the water in my eyes and look around.

We are on a gantry, a floating walkway. There is a network of them, metal grilles suspended above insulation, fibrous tiles, cables and hoses. There’s even an emergency mini-Pipe system. This is the gut of the building, the gasworksish bit which doesn’t mesh with the idea that everything just happens, smoothly, at will and on demand. All this is hidden so as to convey perfection without achieving it. The gantries are here to allow access when imperfection becomes too obvious to ignore. Elisabeth sets off at a swift, smooth pace. We follow the gantry for thirty metres, then it curves away left and we go right and over to a bright spot, where light filters up from the room below. More gantries converge here. If you mapped them, this place would be a node, a multiple crossroads where weary plumbers meet tilers and gaffers, drink stale tea from vacuum flasks and exchange sandwich quarters and oilyrag gossip. I look around. Yes. At the juncture of our gantry and the next there is a smooth spot, worn shiny by years of arses settling, wrapping legs around the stanchions—and there, underneath the railing, someone has scratched an obscene graffito, a ludicrously long male sexual organ chasing a pair of rudimentary breasts. It looks to have been done with a screwdriver, too big for the task. There are scratches where the artist lost traction and the tool skidded away, taking a narrow slice of plastic paint and ruining the integrity of the image. Below us there is a single piece of grillework. A vent.

Elisabeth lies on her stomach and slips her fingers slowly through the holes in the vent. She breathes in, heaves and makes a noise like “uhh-hhhhp,” very soft. The vent comes away in her hands. So now, technically, it’s an aperture: a hatchway. Elisabeth mouths: Down here. She doesn’t tell me to be careful. She knows me.

She braces against the gantry, and lowers me through the hatch.

I AM standing in a lounge sort of thing, with sofas. The lights are on. My remaining Royce Allen jacket drops beside me. I look up. Elisabeth smiles slightly, encouraging, as if I’m taking baby steps. She points to herself (Do I imagine that she is very specific about pointing to the left side of her chest, where the heart is? Or is that just because she’s twisted around to hang out over the hole and see me?) and mouths: I’ll be watching.

She hoists herself up and out of the way, so I can’t see her face any more, just her shoes. She wiggles a leg at me: Get going, or perhaps Move it, you sexy beast! which would be very gratifying. In either case, I obey. I remove the ninja hood. It’s all very well being invisible, but it also takes away your hearing and makes you just a little bit less sensitive to noises and feelings. I put on the jacket. Now I’m not a scary ninja guy. I’m just a bloke in the office on an all-nighter. I hope.

I bend, touch my front teeth to the door handle. (Vibration in a corridor means footsteps; faint vibration is most easily felt with your teeth against metal; closest metal to reach with your mouth is a door handle; ludicrous but effective. Don’t believe me? Try it.)

My incisors have nothing to report. I listen, just in case. Silence. I open the door and step through into the corridor. Above me I hear a soft sound of cloth on metal. Elisabeth is following.

It’s dark, but not completely. Exit lights glimmer every five doors. I’m about midway along a windowless corridor. The way to my right is slightly lighter. Someone home, perhaps. I head in that direction, softly softly. I walk the way Gonzo used to on patrol, not on tiptoe, but putting the front outer side of the foot down, rolling back onto the heel. It’s almost as fast as ordinary walking, but quiet. My ribs complain. Of course they do. Ribs are whiners. I tell them so. There’s a noise now, a cranky, creaky noise, small rubber wheels. Mr. Crabtree, right on time, regular as . . . (don’t say “clockwork,” not here, not now: to name the Devil is to call him . . . Humbert Pestle. Shhh! Humbert! Pestle! . . . I go back to my simile) regular as a German train. If Crabtree sees me, he may sound the alarm. On the other hand, Robert Crabtree is a very specific sort of person. His job is not security, it is paper. He may reason that if I am here, I must be meant to be here. He may show me wonders. Risk and reward.

Follow the paper. Not Ronnie’s voice. Not anyone’s but mine.

All right. I stand and wait. Mr. Crabtree slouches into view. He stops. He looks at me.

“Unh,” says Mr. Crabtree.

He looks down.

“You’re in the way,” he says irritably. I should know better. I am halfway to being a paper man myself. I have walked the paper path with him already today. I hasten to make space for the cart. He rolls past. I follow.

Mr. Crabtree shuffles along the corridor and through into a conference room. Bottles of water sit on the table, notepads and glasses at each place. Pencils have been sharpened, ready.

“Core Committee,” Crabtree says. The lack of unnecessary furniture meets with his approval, or at least it means that there are no objects to get in his way and arouse his ire. He shuffles forward.

The chair at the head of the table is bigger than all the others, and there are two trays in front of it. The green approved tray is empty. The yellow tray is full. They must be meeting tomorrow.

Robert Crabtree tuts. He walks to the head of the table and puts the new tray down, shifting the other one inward. Then he bends slowly, reproachfully, to the lower shelf on the paper cart, and fetches up a bundle of green envelopes. He takes the older set of yellow envelopes and opens them, transfers their contents to the green envelopes from his cart. Then he puts the green envelopes in the approved tray and puts them back on the cart. The proposals and recommendations from the Senior Board (in the yellow envelopes) have become actions and policies, as if by magic.

“What are you looking at?” says Mr. Crabtree. I become aware that I am staring.

“Is that . . .,” I begin. Robert Crabtree stiffens. He knows what is in my mind. This is a short circuit; it must be a mistake. But it is Robert Crabtree’s job—his vocation. It is everything he is. His life.

“Standing order,” he says. He scowls. I have suggested he doesn’t know his job. Worse, I have implied he might interfere with the paper in an inappropriate way. He might tamper. I have genuinely, deeply offended him. I took his manner to be low-level irritation, and perhaps it is. It might just be chronic pain from his withered hands. Now, though, he moves sharply, jaggedly, and his jaw is set. He has a slight underbite which makes him look like a boxer. Beneath his folded eyelids his pupils are very small. I have called his identity into question, slandered his good name.

Robert Crabtree slams the last recommendation into an execute envelope and tosses it onto the cart. Our friendship is over. He barges past me. I follow him back to the sorting room, and he turns on the threshold and glowers at me. I open my mouth to apologise, although there’s really nothing I can say: it is as if I had casually accused a priest of spitting in the communion wine. He shuts the door in my face.

Well. I am in the belly of the beast. Not the moment to regret.

I move on, into the next corridor. I am thinking about Humbert Pestle, about how a man like that could run a company which was effectively running itself. He could do anything he wanted. Use it for anything he wanted. So what does he want? Destiny, of course, but that covers a lot of ground. Greatness. Likewise.

A murmur—conversation? Prayer? Humans. I slow, move closer. There is a door ahead, light visible around the edges. I press my face to the hinge. The door is a good fit, but not perfect. I look through into the room beyond.

Ninjas, like lethal kindergartners, kneeling on the floor.

They sit in rows, maybe a hundred of them. They are quiet. At the front a whipcord-thin man is murmuring a formula, and the congregation is repeating it. Ninja om, maybe, or their version of the paternoster—Our Father, who kills in silence. On the wall there are pictures. Photos and paintings. Ninja heroes. The newest one is familiar, a huge-shouldered man brandishing a club-like fist. His stomach is covered in fat, but beneath the rolls vast abdominal muscles flex. Humbert Pestle.

The guy at the front shouts, and two ninjas from the front row leap up and attack him. He punches one, very fast, and intercepts the other’s attack and breaks his arm. It makes a noise like gristle. The injured men bow and sit down again. I feel ill. I consider setting the building on fire—a bright, scouring blaze to clean this place to the stones and put its occupants out of my misery, and then I remember Master Wu and I feel guilty for considering it. It’s not me. Not that I can’t think those thoughts (demonstrably) but the other way around: choosing not to accept that kind of idea as an actual option is what defines me as distinct from them.

Pestle is Smith is Sifu Humbert. Ninjas are crazy. I knew these things already. I leave the ninjas alone—perhaps they will hospitalise one another. I debate internally whether hoping that each of them suffers a catastrophic groin strain or bruised testicle during the course of normal business is a them sort of thought, and decide that it’s not. I spend a moment dreaming of ninja hernias.

The corridor splits, at right angles. (Is Elisabeth still above me? Or above and to the side? The gantries are unpredictable. Perhaps she is a room away, or squinting down from the junction, willing me to move one way or the other.) To the left, I would be heading back along the wall of the ninja temple; to the right, to the main body of the building and the Jorgmund offices. No doubt there are secrets there too, but they are not my secrets. They are secrets like the Colonel’s Secret Blend of herbs and spices and the one true recipe for Coca-Cola (now that there’s no actual cocaine in it); how to make a lightbulb which lasts for a hundred years or a white cloth which never stains or frays. Secrets, but not dark ones.

I go left. The left-hand path is also the sinister path. The cannibal’s road. In my heels I can feel the occasional boompf from the temple beside and, a few steps later, behind me. In my toes I can feel nothing. This end of the building is quiet.

Quiet, but not calm, and not restful. There’s nothing different about the way it looks, but it feels different. Sixty steps back that way, this building is the kind of place a guy like Buddy Keene has his office in ten years’ time—vapid, flashy, with a desk made for after-hours sex, and a lamp which gives a decent source of illumination as he leans over the intern to look down her dress. Up here it’s cold. There’s no lust in these walls. Maybe it’s the orientation of the building. During the day one side of a skyscraper soaks up more heat energy than the other. If you’re in the northern hemisphere that’s the south side, which is why an apartment with a south prospect is more expensive. This is the night side, then, grey and cold. Except that I know that isn’t it. This corridor is . . . watchful. I tell myself that yes, of course, Elisabeth is watching. But this is not her attention I feel. It is not kindly.

The hairs on the back of my neck are prickling. I keep checking my dead zone, the space directly behind you where an attacker is in a prime position to strike and there’s almost nothing you can do about it. I wave my hand through it, step slightly off-axis. Shadows twist at the far end of the corridor, little beads of darkness crawl over one another. Stare into the dark for long enough, and you see shapes. Good old human eye—if we were squid, it probably wouldn’t happen. (Squid have better eyes than we do; there’s no blind spot. I wonder briefly whether this means they have no need for image retention and therefore would be immune to television. Thousands of squid families, sitting at home at night watching a single bright spark zing across a black screen, wondering what all the fuss is about.)

The ceiling creaks above me. Elisabeth? Or someone else. Although, if Elisabeth has been caught, it was done in absolute silence. Ninja style. Really good ninja style. Do they have someone like that? Someone who is to stealth what Humbert Pestle is to combat? A ghost. Maybe the ghost is standing behind me. Maybe that’s why I feel so naked. He’s behind me right now.

I turn fast, scythe my fingers through the air, flow sideways, kick, step away to the wall. Nothing happens except that I feel like an idiot. The shadows at the end of the corridor continue to boil.

All right then. That’s where I’m going.

It’s probably my nose doing this to me. Your nose can do all kinds of clever things; the trouble is, we’re so unused to accepting olfactory assistance that we tend to misinterpret it. Assumption Soames told me that she could smell something wrong on Dr. Evander John when he came home from Cricklewood Fen; she assumed it was a stinky swamp plant or something the dog had rolled in. It faded away after a few days. When the good doctor got kuru and died, she realised she’d been smelling his recent diet in his sweat. So I pay close attention: what am I smelling?

Faint perfume. Faint cologne. Cigars, a while ago. Human smells—skin, sweat. All old. Beneath them industrial cleaner. Polish. Bleach. Blood, very faint—the ninjas’ first aid station, maybe, back by the temple. Rubber, iron, fresh paint. Something else, old and familiar, out of place.

Ahead of me is a doorway. More than a doorway. A double door, framed in lustre and marble.

It looks like a boardroom door. On the other hand, the Core Committee Room is back that way. This is something else. I go in.

No, I don’t. I start to take a step but I can’t. In my head alarms are screaming, dive klaxons are whooping. My right foot peels itself halfway off the floor and stops, then slowly falls back. My body locks in place, retreats with painful caution. My head looks at the carpet. It is predictably unpleasant and hard-wearing. Office carpet. And yet it looks very clean. Everywhere else there are trolley tracks: a hundred days of Robert Crabtree, to and fro. Not here. My body stares. Then (without asking me for permission) it gets down low to the ground and stares fixedly ahead at . . . not quite nothing. Something. I smell dried flowers and carpet and that out-of-place note which I can’t place. Yes, place. Exactly. It’s too cool and too urban here. That smell belongs in forests and mountains. My body allows me back into the driving seat, but not without misgivings. Pay attention.

In front of me there is a fine, silver thread, like a cobweb. I don’t touch it. I sniff. Yes. That scent, like almond and playdough and solvent. I used to smell it from time to time in Addeh Katir, when the combat engineers were coming in. And before that, in the armoury at Project Albumen. With just my eyes, I follow the thread to the wall. It’s stuck to the plaster with a minute drop of clear glue. So. I follow it the other way. It vanishes into a vase of pussy willow. Very authentic, except that spiders don’t carry adhesive around in a little tube, they make their own. I peer a little closer. Yes. There is a shape in the pussy willow, like one of those mean, two-pronged signs in upmarket parks which say PLEASE KEEP OFF THE GRASS. This one does not say PLEASE KEEP OFF THE GRASS. It says instead FRONT TOWARDS ENEMY. The letters are embossed or moulded onto the grey-green metal casing, along with (I know this, though I cannot see it) a similar piece of wisdom on the back which reads: REAR—OTHER SIDE FRONT. If the gossamer line is broken, a switch trips inside the device, and it explodes. The casing turns into shrapnel, and anyone inside its radius turns into something which looks like jambalaya, except that the head parts sometimes look like shrimp. Every time I see one of these things, I think of how it must be to have one of them go off nearby, to have those idiotic words fly towards you and then through you; to be killed by Times New Roman font.

Somewhere there is a keyhole into which you can put a key and disarm the thing. I do not have a key. On the other hand: a landmine in an office block. I’m in the right place.

I look at the line. It is very slender. It is alone. I peer at the carpet. No pressure pad. So. Deep breath. In, out. I step over the thread. I don’t die. I go through the door.

The room beyond is not a boardroom. Or not only a boardroom. Boardrooms are rooms to show how important you are. This is an operations room. It is a place where you do important things. This room is lined with maps, papered with graphs. Item the first, old business: a family tree of the Jorgmund Company. At the top, the Core, in its own bubble. Depending from the bubble, the Senior Board and its sub-committees; the Executive Branch with its various teams and specialists, and on the far left, the Clockwork Hand Society, co-equal, separate except for a small area of overlap marked H.P. Below the Clockwork Hand there’s nothing. It is self-contained. All around the family tree are displays showing that all of these various committees are vital to the continued good health of the firm (and hence the world) and run by terribly competent people who are essentially irreplaceable. (Apparently the ninjas don’t really feel the need to submit reports. It’s reasonable. If you can kill a man with a paper clip and inflict horrible pain using only your finger, the corporate hierarchy is pretty much prepared to assume no one else could do your job.)

The charts are fresh and laminated. They have been amended with markers, adjusted to show even more spectacular profits and accomplishments. Pins have been shoved heedlessly through into the soft wood behind. Ribbons stretch across charts—predicted and actual profit, objectives, needs, acquisitions, outlays.

And enemies.

On a glass gallery-stand in the middle of the room, enemies. Master Wu, in a grainy picture. He is holding tea in one hand, and he looks old and sad. His other hand is out of frame, but I suspect it holds apple cake. Someone has scraped an X in red felt-tip across his face. They have started at the top right, above his ear, and stabbed down hard to his chin, pressing over his eyes and nose. The pen was held left-handed. The second stroke starts top left, and drives bottom right. It is angry, vindictive. The place where they cross is almost black. The end of the second stroke has a little tail, as if the author was shaking. Or as if his hand was clumsy. Or both.

On the board with Master Wu are other pictures. One small one looks like a blurred image of Dr. Andromas; next to it there is a clearer, but much older, picture of Elisabeth. On the other side, Zaher Bey. Someone dislikes the Bey intensely, because there are quite a lot of photos of him. There is a new picture of me, taken by some sort of security camera at Station 9. I look surprised and a bit fatter than I would like. And finally there is Gonzo, looking moody. I don’t recognise the picture. Perhaps they took it while he was here. He is an enemy, but at the same time not. There is red ink down one edge of his picture, but it’s a wiggly line, ever so slightly smug. A Latin teacher’s correction: not agricola, but agricolam. From the picture emerges a red, greasy slash, a problem-solving arrow. A Go Away arrow. It points from Gonzo’s upper right canine to the Bey’s left eye. It is, in the grand old phrase, a line of death. Fear this line and what it may mean.

Beyond the stand there is a table, and on the table there is a file. It has all manner of stamps on it meaning that no one should read it, ever, and if they do they should do so only after putting out their eyes. I look around at the room. I sit down and start to read.

HUMBERT PESTLE, friend to all mankind; I suspect he was avuncular or even headmasterly. Gonzo the hellraiser has always had a sneaking respect for headmasters, as long as they were someone else’s. And remember, this was a new Gonzo, naked in the world, his cynicism and his second thoughts embodied in me, asleep in K’s Airstream and presumed dead, all those miles away. His psyche must have looked like a diver after a moderately bad shark attack. He had survived, but you could see the bones. His brain was limping and his ego hurt like hell. More, he was filled with a secret terror, a 3 a.m. anguish, confided to Leah at the last minute and from her to me as an earnest of trust and a demand for help: he feared he had somehow lost part of his capacity to love his wife. The hero could feel passion but not domestic bliss. He was terrified that he might lose her too, that she would hate him, that she must already be disgusted. He needed to act, to regain his self-respect and wash away this taint.

Gonzo was suggestible. This was anticipated. The plan anticipated everything—except me.

It’s all in the file.

The room in which Humbert Pestle seduced Gonzo to the Dark Side was dressed for the occasion.

Humbert Pestle: Mr. Lubitsch.

Gonzo: Mr. Pestle.

(Handshake, mighty muscles straining, mutuality of testicular steeliness tested and acknowledged.)

H.P.: We’re not children in this room.

Gonzo: I should say not.

H.P.: I hope you’re well.

Gonzo: (who clearly isn’t) Yes, sir. Tip top.

H.P.: Only I have a problem, Mr. Lubitsch, and it’s a big one. It’s more your kind of problem than mine, these days. It’s a young man’s problem, and I am an old fart.

Gonzo: I wouldn’t say that.

H.P.: Fercrissakes, Mr. Lubitsch, I am an old fart. I am powerful and dangerous and sexually potent. I do not have a problem with my old-fartness. Let’s not get into how I am in the prime of my life. I know I am in the prime of my life. I am also an old fart. Okay?

(Beat)

Gonzo: What can I do for you, Mr. Pestle?

H.P.: I would like you to look around this room and tell me what you see.

(Gonzo looks. What he sees is a forest of maps and pictures. Drowned Cross. Miserichord. Horrisham. Templeton. He is looking at the Vanishings. He has never seen them laid out like this before. They seem to make a sort of pattern around the Pipe.)

H.P.: What do you see, son?

Gonzo: I’m not sure. The Vanishings.

H.P.: Let me help you out.

(Humbert Pestle turns on an overhead projector. It is an old one, with sheets of transparent plastic and wipe-clean pens. It is the kind Ms. Poynter used to sketch the erogenous zones in biology, a moment Gonzo remembers with burning intensity as he has had frequent cause to recall it since. Humbert Pestle knows this, because he has done his homework, or rather someone has done it for him. He knows that Gonzo likes this particular model of OHP, that it makes a hum he finds, without realising it, reassuring and just a little bit sexy. Ms. Poynter was a babe and reputedly also a serious love machine, and Gonzo once, during a particularly vexing test, found her leaning down to study his answers, and caught a glimpse of what he could only assume was a breast. This projector is inextricably bound up with Gonzo’s early orgasms. Today, though, Humbert Pestle projects not erogenous zones but something quite the opposite. He shows Gonzo that the Vanishings could be taken as a fence, a scar around the Pipe and the people who live within its benevolent fog.)

Gonzo: I don’t—quite—understand.

H.P.: Well, Mr. Lubitsch, it’s like this. We have encircled the Earth, and we have created a little area of civilisation and safety and good commerce. But all around us there is a wild place of monsters. You are personally well aware of this. There are things that look human, and things which don’t, and they want to eat us all up. Our house is made of bricks, so they can’t just huff and puff us into the open. But they can chisel away. They can strangle us. And that is what they are doing. Every finger we put outside a certain distance from the Pipe, they cut off. And that distance is shrinking, Mr. Lubitsch. It takes less time to make a town vanish than it does to build one. We are encircled. We are under siege. And we are losing.

(Humbert Pestle is a better orator than Dick Washburn. He does not attempt the rhetorical ellipsis overtly. He does not trail off, awed by the awfulness of the awesome thing he is trying to convey. His ellipsis is tacit. He does not say “And if we lose . . .” He knows Gonzo will say that to himself, and your own ellipses are infinitely more persuasive than someone else’s.)

Gonzo: That is—well—that is quite a problem, Mr. Pestle.

H.P.: Yes, Mr. Lubitsch. That is quite a problem. It is a real problem in the real world. A grown-up problem. This is why I asked—because I know damn well that the answer is yes—if we were all adults here. Because we’re in a very adult place right now. We have no time for niceties.

(Beat)

H.P.: May I ask you a question?

Gonzo: Of course.

H.P.: If you could do something about it—something only you had a really good shot at—would you do it?

Gonzo: Yes, I would.

H.P.: Even if it was basically a bad thing? A wrong thing?

Gonzo: How wrong?

H.P.: Wrong. A bad thing. But . . . effective. One bad thing to stop more bad things from happening.

Gonzo: (he considers) Sometimes you have to do those things.

H.P.: Sometimes you do.

(Beat)

H.P.: But not always, of course.

(Humbert Pestle removes from a folder an image of Zaher Bey and places it on the table between them.)

H.P.: I believe you know Zaher Bey. He has made his life with the monsters.

(Gonzo nods.)

H.P.: The Found Thousand, Mr. Lubitsch. The unreal people. They want our world. They want our lives.

(And Gonzo, of course, knows first-hand that this is true. Because I tried to take his wife.)

H.P.: I need to have a talk with this good gentleman. I need him to come to me to discuss this situation. I need to have a free hand at those discussions.

Gonzo: I see.

H.P.: Now, the Bey won’t come out to play. But I have reason to believe that if you went and asked him, he might reconsider. You knew him in the Reification, I gather.

Gonzo: Yes, I did.

H.P.: He trusts your word, Mr. Lubitsch. If he has your assurance of his safety, I believe he would come.

Gonzo: And then you would talk to him.

H.P.: You would not be required to be part of the conversation, Mr. Lubitsch. Only to bring him to me.

(And Gonzo knows, really, that he is being invited to weasel. His responsibility is sharply bounded. Get the Bey. Bring him to the place. That is all he will have done. This is the seduction of Humbert Pestle’s proposition: the idea of limited consequence. The dark deeds which will be done after Gonzo hands over his trusting companion will be someone else’s burden. He cannot know, not really, that they will take place. Humbert Pestle—a very respectable man—is requesting a specific task of him, a noble task. He has no reason to doubt. And even if these dark deeds are done, would that be so bad? Certain prices must be paid, after all. We’re all grown-ups here.)

Gonzo: All right, then.

Because this was always the plan. Humbert Pestle sent Moustache the ninja to set the Pipe on fire, dispatched Dick Washburn to hire the Free Company to put it out. He had Moustache wait and try to kill us, knowing the ninja could not possibly succeed. He sent men to kill Gonzo’s parents and Leah. All to destabilise Gonzo, to make him so angry that Pestle could throw the blame at Zaher Bey and let fear and panic make it stick. The Found Thousand are coming! The enemy is at the gate! Fight them! Kill them! Hesitation is death to those you love. And then offer this grimy solution, a sordid, appealing little deal to take away the fear. Leave it all to Humbert.

Pestle must have been thrilled when he heard about me. The ideal whip to drive Gonzo with. The perfect cat’s paw. They want our lives.

Gonzo will bring the Bey, and Humbert Pestle will kill him. I cannot allow it. It will damn Gonzo, of course. He will not recover from having lent himself to such a thing. He will become, gradually, a pencilneck, and he will lend himself to more and more until finally he is no one I know. But more, I cannot allow it because the Bey is not really trusting Gonzo. He is trusting the portable Gonzo he carries in his head, the image of the person who brought him to Caucus and hung on his every word; of the castaway who washed up on his shore with a broken hand and confessed his part in the Go Away War, and who became part of the Bey’s extended family in Shangri-La. And that person is not Gonzo Lubitsch. It is me. If Gonzo delivers Zaher Bey to Humbert Pestle, he will do it in my colours.

That is the least awful thing I read in Humbert Pestle’s secret file.

I AM in the corridor again, and I have not been blown up. I am walking back the way I came. I do not remember leaving the room. I know that I wanted to. I also wanted to be sick, but I think—I hope—that I managed not to do that. I am full of answers, but I don’t understand them. I still don’t know the why. And I no longer know where to look. I have seen the Core. I have seen the file. I just don’t get it.

Maybe I’m ignoring the obvious. Perhaps Pestle is insane. He seems to be: set the Pipe on fire to recruit Gonzo; risk the entire world for a chance to kill the Bey. And somewhere in there cause the Vanishings as well, if his cleat is anything to go by. The scales are not balanced, but maybe Pestle just hates Zaher Bey so much (and why? again) that he doesn’t care.

I have gone the wrong way somewhere. Elisabeth is tapping on the ceiling, tra-tratratra. This way.

I don’t go that way. I have seen something. In for a penny. One more room. The door is half-open, and there’s a soft light coming out, maybe a television screen or a computer. I look in.

The man sitting at the desk is huge. I do not immediately recognise him because he is so still. He is lit from a single monitor screen, a pale blueish luminescence which casts long shadows over his face. Always before when I have seen him, he has been speaking with his whole body, using his physicality for all it’s worth. Now he sits, slack, in this chair in this featureless box. His eyes are open, and he is looking straight ahead. It seems at first that he is dead. If so, he has gone into rigor in place; they will never be able to get him out of the chair without bolt cutters (the dirty secret of undertakers). On the other hand, with the muscle he has, I’d expect him to be more contorted. He should be all wrapped around himself, like a spider in the rain. He is not. If anything, he’s like a sleeper. If I lean my head, I can see his chest move slowly, in and out. Humbert Pestle is not dead. He has been put away. This is how he is when he is not the Boss. When he has no purpose. Humbert Pestle is a type A pencilneck, and this is what he is when there is no work to be done.

I think of Robert Crabtree and of the maps and graphs in the operations room, of the secret file and Humbert Pestle’s vacant eyes, and now I do understand. At last, in the cold light of the screen, I see the face of my enemy.