Thirteen
I
SHE HAD SEEN TWO people where he’d painted one. Not a he, a she, or an it, but they. She’d looked at the image and seen past his conscious intention to a buried purpose, one he’d hidden even from himself. Now he went back to the canvas and looked at it again, with borrowed eyes, and there they were, the two she’d seen. In his passion to capture some impression of Pie ‘oh’ pah, he had painted the assassin stepping from shadow (or back into it), a stream of darkness running down the middle of his face and torso. It divided the figure from top to bottom, and its outer edges, ragged and lush, described the reciprocative forms of profiles, etched in white from the halves of what he’d intended to be a single face. They stared at each other like lovers, eyes looking forward in the Egyptian manner, the backs of their heads folded into shadow. The question was: Who were these two? What had he been trying to express, setting these faces thus, nose to nose?
He interrogated the painting for several minutes after she’d gone, preparing as he did so to attack the canvas again. But when it came to doing so, he lacked the strength. His hands were trembling, his palms clammy; his eyes could only focus upon the image indifferently well. He retreated from the picture, afraid to touch it in this weakened state for fear he’d undo what little he’d already achieved. A painting could escape so quickly. A few inept strokes and a likeness (to a face, to another painter’s work) could flee the canvas and never be recaptured. Better to leave it alone tonight. To rest, and hope he was strong tomorrow.
He dreamed of sickness. Of lying in his bed, naked beneath a thin white sheet, shivering so hard his teeth chattered. Snow fell from the ceiling intermittently and didn’t melt when it touched his flesh, because he was colder than the snow. There were visitors in his sickroom, and he tried to tell them how cold he was, but he had no power in his voice, and the words came out as gasps, as though he were struggling for his last breath. He began to fear that this dream condition was fatal; that snow and breathlessness would bury him. He had to act. Rise up from the hard bed and prove these mourners premature.
With painful slowness, he moved his hands to the edge of the mattress in the hope of pulling himself upright, but the sheets were slick with his final sweat, and he couldn’t get a firm hold. Fear turned to panic, despair bringing on a new round of gasps, more desperate than the last. He struggled to make his situation plain, but the door of his sickroom stood wide, now, and all the mourners had disappeared through it. He could hear them in another room, talking and laughing. There was a patch of sun on the threshold, he saw. Next door it was summer. Here, there was only the heart-stopping cold, taking a firmer grip on him by the moment. He gave up attempting Lazarus and instead let his palms lie flat on the sheets and his eyes flutter closed. The sound of voices from the next room softened to a murmur. The noise of his heart dwindled. New sounds rose to replace it, however. A wind was gusting outside, and branches thrashed at the windows. Somebody’s voice rose in prayer; another simply sobbed. Whatgrief was this? Not his passing, surely. He was too minor to earn such lamentation. He opened his eyes again. The bed had gone; so had the snow. Lightning threw into silhouette a man who stood watching the storm.
“Can you make me forget?” Gentle heard himself saying. “Do you have the trick of that?”
“Of course,” came the soft reply. “But you don’t want it.”
“No, what I want’s death, but I’m too afraid of that tonight. That’s the real sickness: fear of death. But I can live with forgetfulness, give me that.”
“For how long?”
“Until the end of the world.”
Another lightning flash burned out the figure in front of him, and then the whole scene. Gone; forgotten. Gentle blinked the afterimage of window and silhouette out of his eyes and, in doing so, passed between sleep and waking.
The room was cold, but not as icy as his deathbed. He sat upright, staring first at his unclean hands, then at the window. It was still night, but he could hear the sound of vehicles on the Edgware Road, their murmur reassuring. Already—distracted by sound and sight—the nightmare was fading. He was happy to lose it.
He shrugged off the bedclothes and went to the kitchen to find himself something to drink. There was a carton of milk in the refrigerator. He downed its contents—though the milk was ready to turn—aware that his churned system would probably reject it in short order. Quenched, he wiped his mouth and chin and went through to look at the painting again, but the intensity of the dream from which he’d just woken made a mockery of his efforts. He would not conjure the assassin by this crude magic. He could paint a dozen canvases, a hundred, and still not capture the ambiguities of Pie ‘oh’ pah. He belched, bringing the taste of bad milk back up into his mouth. What was he to do? Lock himself away and let this sickness in him—put there by the sight of the assassin—consume him? Or bathe, sweeten himself, and go out to find some faces to put between him and the memory? Both vain endeavors. Which left a third, distressing route. To find Pie ‘oh’ pah in the flesh: to facehim, question him, have his fill of him, until every ambiguity was scoured away.
He went on staring at the painting while he turned this option over. What would it take to find the assassin? An interrogation of Estabrook, for one. That wouldn’t be too onerous a duty. Then a search of the city, to find the place Estabrook had claimed he couldn’t recall. Again, no great hardship. Better than sour milk and sourer dreams.
Knowing that in the light of morning he might lose his present clarity of mind, and he was best to close off at least one route of retreat, he went to the paints, squeezed onto his palm a fat worm of cadmium yellow, and worked it into the still-wet canvas. It obliterated the lovers immediately, but he wasn’t satisfied until he’d covered the canvas from edge to edge. The color fought for its brilliance, but it soon deteriorated, tainted by the darkness it was trying to obscure. By the time he’d finished, it was as if his attempt to capture Pie ‘oh’ pah had never been made.
Satisfied, he stood back and belched again. The nausea had gone from him. He felt strangely buoyant. Maybe sour milk suited him.
II
Pie ‘oh’ pah sat on the step of his trailer and stared up at the night sky. In their beds behind him, his adopted wife and children slept. In the heavens above him, the stars were burning behind a blanket of sodium-tinted cloud. He had seldom felt more alone in his long life than now. Since returning from New York he had been in a state of constant anticipation. Something was going to happen to him and his world, but he didn’t know what. His ignorance pained him, not simply because he was helpless in the face of this imminent event, but because his inability to grasp its nature was testament to how his skills had deteriorated. The days when he could read futurities off the air had gone. He was more and more a prisoner of the here and now. That here, the body he occupied, was also less than its former glory. It was so long since he’d corresponded the way he had with Gentle, taking the will of another as the gospel of his flesh, that he’d almost lost the trick of it. But Gentle’sdesire had been potent enough to remind him, and his body still reverberated with echoes of their time together. Though it had ended badly he didn’t regret snatching those minutes. Another such encounter might never come.
He wandered from his trailer towards the perimeter of the encampment. The first light of dawn was beginning to eat at the murk. One of the camp mongrels, back from a night of adventuring, squeezed between two sheets of corrugated iron and came wagging to his side. He stroked the dog’s snout and tickled behind its battle-ravaged ears, wishing he could find his way back to his home and master so easily.
III
It was the oft-stated belief of Esmond Bloom Godolphin, the late father of Oscar and Charles, that a man could never have too many bolt holes, and of E.B.G.’s countless saws this was the only one Oscar had been significantly influenced by. He had not less than four places of occupation in London. The house in Primrose Hill was his chief residence, but there was also a pied-à-terre in Maid
a Vale, a smallish flat in Notting Hill, and the location he was presently occupying: a windowless warehouse concealed in a maze of derelict and near-derelict properties near the river.
It was not a place he was particularly happy to frequent, especially not on the day after Christmas, but over the years it had proved a secure haven for Dowd’s two associates, the voiders, and it now served as a Chapel of Rest for Dowd himself. His naked corpse lay beneath a shroud on the cold concrete, with aromatic herbs, picked and dried on the slopes of the Jokalaylau, smoldering in bowls at his head and feet, after the rituals proscribed in that region. The voiders had shown little interest in the arrival of their leader’s body. They were functionaries, incapable of anything but the most rudimentary thought processes. They had no physical appetites: no desire, no hunger or thirst, no ambition. They simply sat out the days and nights in the darkness of the warehouse and waited for Dowd to instruct them. Oscar was less than comfortable in their company, but could not bring himself to leave until this business was finished. He’d brought a book to read: a cricket almanac that he found soothingto peruse. Every now and then he’d get up and refuel the bowls. Otherwise there was little to do but wait.
It had already been a day and a half since he’d made such a show of taking Dowd’s life: a performance of which he was justly proud. But the casualty that lay before him was a real loss. Dowd had been passed down the line of Godolphins for two centuries, bound to them until the end of time or of Joshua’s line, whichever came first. And he had been a fine manservant. Who else could mix a whisky and soda so well? Who else knew to dry and powder between Oscar’s toes with special care, because he was prone to fungal infections there? Dowd was irreplaceable, and it had pained Oscar considerably to take the brutal measures circumstance had demanded. But he’d done so knowing that while there was a slim possibility that he would lose his servant forever, an entity such as Dowd could survive a disemboweling as long as the rituals of Resurrection were readily and precisely followed. Oscar was not in ignorance of those rituals. He’d spent many lazy Yzordderrexian evenings on the roof ofPeccable’s house, watching the tail of the comet disappear behind the towers of the Autarch’s palace, talking about the theory and practice of Imajical feits, writs, pneumas, uredos, and the rest. He knew the oils to pour into Dowd’s carcass, and what blossoms to burn around the body. He even had in his treasure room a phonetic version of the ritual, set down by Peccable himself, in case Dowd was ever harmed. He had no idea how long the process would take, but he knew better than to peer beneath the sheet to see if the bread of life was rising. He could only bide his time and hope he’d done all that was necessary.
At four minutes past four, he had proof of his precision. A choking breath was drawn beneath the sheet, and a second later Dowd sat up. The motion was so sudden, and—after such a time—so unexpected, Oscar panicked, his chair tipping over as he rose, the almanac flying from his hand. He’d seen much in his time that the people of the Fifth would call miraculous, but not in a dismal room like this, with the commonplace world grinding on its way outside the door. Composing himself, he searched for a word of welcome, but his mouth was so dry he could have blotted a letter with his tongue. He simply stared, gaping and amazed.
Dowd had pulled the sheet off his face and was studying the hand with which he’d done so, his face as empty as the eyes of the voiders sitting against the opposite wall.
I’ve made a terrible error, Oscar thought. I’ve brought back the body, but the soul’s gone out of him: Oh, Christ, what now?
Dowd stared on, blankly. Then, like a puppet into which a hand has been inserted, bringing the illusion of life and independent purpose to senseless stuff, he raised his head, and his face filled with expression. It was all anger. He narrowed his eyes and bared his teeth as he spoke.
“You did me a great wrong,” he said. “A terrible wrong.”
Oscar worked up some spittle, thick as mud. “I did what I deemed necessary,” he replied, determined not to be cowed by the creature. It had been bound by Joshua never to do a Godolphin harm, much as it might presently wish to.
“What have I ever done to you that you humiliate me that way?” Dowd said.
“I had to prove my allegiance to the Tabula Rasa. You understand why.”
“And must I continue to be humiliated?” he said. “Can I not at least have something to wear?”
“Your suit’s stained.”
“It’s better than nothing,” Dowd replied.
The garments lay on the floor a few feet from where Dowd sat, but he made no move to pick them up. Aware that Dowd was testing the limits of his master’s remorse, but willing to play the game for a while at least, Oscar picked up the clothes and laid them within Dowd’s reach.
“I knew a knife wasn’t going to kill you,” he said.
“It’s more than I did,” Dowd replied. “But that’s not the point. I would have entered the game with you if that’s what you’d wanted. Happily; slavishly. Entered and died for you.” His tone was that of a man deeply and inconsolably affronted. “Instead, you conspire against me. You make me suffer like a common criminal.”
“I couldn’t afford for it to look like a charade. If they’d suspected it was stage-managed—”
“Oh, I see,” Dowd replied. Unwittingly Oscar had caused even greater offense with this justification. “You didn’t trust my actorly instincts. I’ve played every lead Quexos wrote: comedy, tragedy, farce. And you didn’t trust me to carry off a petty little death scene!”
“All right, I was mistaken.”
“I thought the knife stung badly enough. But this—”
“Please, accept my apologies. It was crude and hurtful. What can I do to heal the harm, eh? Name it, Dowdy. I feel I’ve violated the trust between us and I have to make good. Whatever you want, just name it.”
Dowd shook his head. “It’s not as easy as that.”
“I know. But it’s a start. Name it.”
Dowd considered the offer for a full minute, staring not at Oscar but the blank wall. Finally, he said, “I’ll start with the assassin, Pie ‘oh’ pah.”
“What do you want with a mystif?”
“I want to torment it. I want to humiliate it. And finally, I want to kill it.”
“Why?”
“You offered me whatever I wanted. Name it, you said. I’ve named it.”
“Then you have carte blanche to do whatever you wish,” Oscar said. “Is that all?”
“For now,” Dowd said. “I’m sure something more will occur. Death’s put some strange ideas in my head. But I’ll name them as time goes by.”
Fourteen
I
WHILE IT WAS TO prove difficult for Gentle to prize from Estabrook the details of the night journey that had taken him to Pie ‘oh’ pah, it was not as difficult as getting in to see the man in the first place. He went to the house around noon, to find the curtains at all the windows meticulously drawn. He knocked and rang the bell for several minutes, but there was no reply. Assuming Estabrook had gone out for a constitutional, he left off his attempt and went to find something to put into his stomach, which after being so thoroughly scorned the night before was echoing with its own emptiness. It was Boxing Day, of course, and there was no café or restaurant open, but he located a small supermarket managed by a family of Pakistanis, who were doing a fine trade supplying Christians with stale bread to break. Though the stock had disappeared from many of the shelves, the store still had a tempting parade of tooth decayers, and Gentle left with chocolate, biscuits, and cake to satisfy his sweet tooth.He found a bench and sat down to subdue his hunger. The cake was too moist and heavy for his taste, so he broke it up into pieces and threw it to the pigeons his meal had attracted. The news soon spread that there was sustenance to be had, and what had been an intimate picnic quickly turned into a squabbling match. In lieu of loaves and fishes to subdue the mob, Gentle tossed the rest of his biscuits into the midst of the feasters and returned to Estabrook’s house c
ontent with his chocolate. As he approached he saw a motion at one of the upper windows. He didn’t bother to ring and knock this time, but simply called up at the window.
“I want a word, Charlie! I know you’re in there. Open up!”
When there was no sign of Estabrook obliging, he let his voice ring out a little louder. There was very little competition from traffic, this being a holiday. His call was a clarion.
“Come on, Charlie, open up, unless you want me to tell the neighbors about our little deal.”
The curtain was drawn aside this time, and Gentle had his first sight of Estabrook. A glimpse only, for the curtain was dropped back into place a moment later. Gentle waited, and just as he was about to start his haranguing afresh heard the front door being unbolted. Estabrook appeared, barefoot and bald. The latter was a shock. Gentle hadn’t known the man wore a toupée. Without it his face was as round and white as a plate, his features set upon it like a child’s breakfast. Eggs for eyes, a tomato nose, sausage lips: all swimming in a grease of fear.
“It’s time we talked,” Gentle said and, without waiting for an invitation, stepped inside.
He pulled no punches in his interrogation, making it plain from the outset that this was no social call. He needed to know where to find Pie ‘oh’ pah, and he wasn’t going to be fobbed off with excuses. To aid Estabrook’s memory he’d brought a battered street map of London. He set it down on the table between them.
“Now,” he said. “We sit here until you’ve told where you went that night. And if you lie to me I swear I’m going to come back and break your neck.”
Estabrook didn’t attempt any obfuscation. His manner was that of a man who had passed many days in terror of a sound upon his step and was relieved, now that it had come, that his caller was merely human. His egg eyes were perpetually on the verge of breaking, and his hands trembled as he flipped the pages of the gazetteer, murmuring as he did so that he was sure of nothing but he would try to remember. Gentle didn’t press too hard, but let the man make the journey again in memory, running his finger back and forth over the map as he did so.