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 d
evice, 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.