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.)