Then we reach a door, and a red rope has been drawn across it, barring us access, and a sign proclaims, CLOSED FOR SPECIAL OCCASION, and a single security guard, radio clipped to her belt, wears the look of one who long ago ceased to be impressed by anything.
“Kepler…” Coyle wants to say something more, hesitates. “You never told me your name.”
“No. You never told me yours. Does it matter?”
A hesitation, a half-shake of the head, and then, unexpected, beautiful, the smallest smile. “Good luck.”
Then the woman called Pam appears from the circle-shaped doorway behind the guard and simply says, “They’re with me.”
The guard leaves.
We follow Pam inside.
Chapter 86
It was a Chinese tea garden.
Through a round door and then a square, a walkway covered with ceramic tiles ran around the edge of a courtyard, in which bamboo swayed, water dribbled into a pool of orange and white mottled carp, and twisted volcanic rocks like the trapped scream of a frozen monster writhed around the wall.
In the centre of it all a small wooden table had been laid, and on the table were a blue porcelain teapot, three porcelain cups and a silver stand of tiny cakes. A man sat, his back to the door, a grey scarf wound around his neck, black jacket and silver hair. He did not look up, did not cease his slow sipping as we approached, but rather Pam, her face still obscured by the grey veil she had worn when last we met, a gun tucked with no discretion at all in the pocket of her beige overcoat, stood between us and him, and even with her mouth and nose covered her eyes were grim.
“Stop,” she barked at Coyle. “Tell me something I want to know.”
“Elijah. My call sign is Elijah.”
Her gaze turned to me. “Is this her?”
“This is Kepler,” Coyle replied before I could speak.
She didn’t answer, but with the little finger of one hand gestured me away from the table, towards the whitewashed wall. “You come within three metres of me, or anyone in this room, and I’ll put you down,” she breathed. “So I shall.”
I raised my hands, let her guide me towards the nearest wall.
“Stop. Face the wall.”
Hands still raised, I faced the whiteness of the wall.
Feet behind me, keeping their distance, keeping safe.
Coyle: She’s not a threat.
Pam: That’s a dumb thing to say.
“She came here knowing the risks.”
“Then she’s dumb as well as ugly.” Pam’s voice, high and out of tune.
Then a third voice, older than the rest, tired – the voice of the silver-haired man with the grey scarf – said, “You didn’t ask me here to enjoy a lovers’ spat, did you?”
There was
familiarity
in that voice.
Staring at a whitewashed wall, a gun at my back, fat carp swimming by my side, several thousand dollars’ worth of jewels and clothes on my gently dying body.
I am Kepler, and I know who the sponsor is.
Then the voice spoke again. “Mr Coyle, may I offer you some tea?” The pouring of hot water into a white bone cup. “I understand you wanted to see me urgently. Normally I wouldn’t be amenable to these encounters – particularly with one who appears to be as compromised as yourself – but Pamela raised some interesting points that I would like to discuss. Please. Sit.”
A creaking of a chair, the tinkle of plate and cup.
“I am the sponsor,” the voice went on after a suitable pause for the sipping of tea. “You should understand that I have very little day-to-day interest in the running of your organisation. Its activities are entirely of its own deciding. I merely… afford it some resources. As, indeed, I do for this museum. My interests are eclectic.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“For what?”
“For… the tea.”
“You are most welcome.”
“And for seeing me.”
“There you are perhaps less welcome, especially considering the company you keep.”
“Kepler has been… helpful.”
“Mr Coyle, let me say right now that any statements you may make in support or sympathy towards the entity you have brought into this place will only serve to compromise you in my eyes. I would urge you to focus only on the single statement that aroused my and Pamela’s interest in this affair.”
“Galileo.”
I flinched as Coyle said the word and imagined that perhaps he winced too, though at what recollection I could only guess.
“Indeed,” murmured the sponsor. “Galileo. Pamela was kind enough to take me through the file last night. I had looked at it before, of course, though not with such a… critical eye. You allege that the entity Galileo has somehow entered your organisation?”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
“Because Kepler says so?”
“Yes, sir, and for other reasons.”
I stared at a white wall, my hands by my head, and wondered if this was how it felt to be a host. The world moves, and I am still, actions beyond my control turning, unseen, in the background. I am a woman who sells her body for medicines she cannot afford, and around me conspiracies were unravelled and tales told, and I stared at a wall and waited.
“Such as?”
“Frankfurt.”
“Yes, the medical trials. What of them?”
“They were designed to create a vaccine against ghosts. I think Galileo subverted them instead, to gather data not on the destruction but the creation of creatures like him.”
“Because?”
“I think Galileo murdered the researchers in Frankfurt.”
“In itself not proof of anything.”
“Kepler was blamed and her host too. I was ordered to kill them both. Why was I ordered to kill the host?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re the sponsor.”
“And as I’ve said, my interests are varied, my tastes eclectic, and I do not make operational decisions. But now you work with the very entity that you sought to kill. Why?”
“Galileo.”
A sigh, a shifting of weight. Perhaps now a cake was consumed; perhaps sugar was added to some gently cooling tea. I imagined delicate fingertips holding a French fancy by the edges, unwilling to damage the icing. The thought made me smile.
“Galileo.” The sponsor’s sigh, deep and old. “We always seem to come back to Galileo.”
The fountain dribbled, the carp swam. Beyond the moon door a thousand people ebbed and flowed, their eyes turned to the wonders of the past.
Then the sponsor said, “Kepler.”
I lifted my head at my name, didn’t turn from the wall. Bodies moved in chairs behind me. “Kepler, look at me.”
I turned, keeping my hands raised, looked into the eyes of the silver-haired man. His face was grey, stained with yellow spots beneath the sagging hollows of his eyes. His neck hung with skin like the soft fins of a seal; his eyes were deep dark and looked on me without hatred, without recognition, and I knew his name.
He cleared his throat and, one hand scratching irritably at the vest underneath his ironed white shirt, said, “Why are you here?”
“I share Coyle’s interest in Galileo.”
“Why?”
“It seems… right. Maybe that’s not even it. We’ve… shared hosts. I wore her flesh; he wore mine. At first you could say we were competitors. Then it was retribution. I betrayed Galileo, and Galileo took revenge.”
“What kind of revenge?”
“He wore someone I loved, and I killed him. He was… beautiful. I didn’t have the heart to put a bullet in his brain. That was in Miami. And then in Berlin… I went to a friend for help, and Galileo burned him alive. He did it so that I might see. He said, ‘Do you like what you see?’ We always like what we see, people like us. We always see how something else could be better than what we have. Perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps this face, perhaps these hands, perhaps… perhaps I will
be better. Perhaps no one will care for the things I did when last I was someone else. Perhaps someone will love me. Perhaps they will love me. Perhaps if I love them enough, they’ll have no choice but to love me in return. Do you like what you see? we ask, and the answer is yes, of course. I love it. I love it. If I am it, will you love me?
“That Galileo is a monstrosity is an evident truth. That he has penetrated your organisation, torn it to pieces, is again obvious. Galileo has ripped you apart. That Galileo is perhaps attempting, through research and violence, to create more of himself, to create children, if you will, a something, someone that will last – well, that is debatable. I doubt Galileo himself would be able to give you a fair assessment either way.”
Again the sponsor scratched at his vest, rubbing across his chest, and I wondered what manner of surgical scars might lurk beneath, digging their way through the body of this stooped old man.
“You are the first —” He stopped and smiled at a joke only he could know. “You are nearly the first,” he corrected, “creature of your kind I have spoken to. You do a better impression of human than I expected. I congratulate you. That Galileo may have… compromised us in ways we do not know, well, the matter is rather too repugnant to speak of, yet we must speak of it. You… suggest that orders have been given, and operatives have acted on them?”
“Yes.”
“Orders given by Galileo?”
“By Galileo, through another’s voice.”
“We have protocols in place, of course, to prevent this.”
“Your protocols are only as good as the people who created them. Galileo has been around for a long time. Perhaps when you agreed a code word with a friend, you agreed it with someone else entirely?”
“I find that difficult to believe.”
“People always find difficult truths harder than easy lies.”
His breath caught in his throat, as his hand scratched scratched scratched at his shirt. “And we should believe you: a murderer, a slaver, a —”
“Sir!” Coyle was on his feet.
“Whatever Coyle may say,” his voice rose, cutting Coyle off, “do not think that your pretence of humanity begins to redeem the harm you have done!”
Pam was stepping clear of the table, out of Coyle’s reach, and now the gun was in her hands.
“No, sir…”
“Michael Peter Morgan!” My voice, high and hot, sliced through the air, knocked the sponsor back on his seat, a shudder running through his cold withered hands. “How old are you now? Your body must be far advanced into its declining years, but you – twenties, thirties? At least thirty years younger than the flesh you are prisoner to. Tell me, when they killed Janus did you know that it was yourself you ordered dead? It was you they gunned down in that house in Saint-Guillaume; it was the hand that held your wife, the heart that loved your children, flesh of your flesh but soul of his soul. You lost so much time: you lost your youth; you blinked and it was gone, a brief nap, and when you wake you are this. A man of eclectic tastes, and who are you? I don’t think you even know.”
The old man, cramped and curled around his own pain, one hand hugging the edge of the table, the other pressed against his chest, raised gummy eyes to my face and hissed, “How do you know me?”
“I knew Janus. I knew the person you were in your real life.” He opened his mouth to speak, but the corners curled in; no sound emerged. “Mr Morgan,” I said, “have you been losing time?”
Silence.
Not-silence.
This is the silence of air moving through our lips.
This is the silence of muscles tight, blood running, hearts racing.
This is the silence of a whole world turning outside the door.
This is the roaring not-silence of minds that dare not think out loud.
“Mr Morgan,” I breathed, “you studied economics at Harvard. You did tae kwon do, had terrible taste in clothes. Both parents dead by the time you were twenty-five, you were still a virgin when Janus took your flesh. You blinked, and when you opened your eyes your wife was crying by your side, and your daughters, Elsa and Amber, they didn’t understand what had happened to their father. They thought he’d died. Death of the mind, not the body. I know this because I knew you, Mr Morgan. I shared a drink with you in the junior common room in Princeton in 1961, when I was… someone else. Just doing my job. And since then you’ve hunted us for all you’re worth with all the wealth that Janus left behind, but you’re old now and all alone, and so I have to ask – have you been losing time?”
Silence.
The sponsor, breathing fast, ragged breath, head down, hands tight across his chest.
“Nathan,” I murmured “step away from him.”
Slowly he stepped back.
I advanced. Pam was moving now, watching me, her back to the wall, gun levelled at my chest, keeping her distance from everyone else in the room. I knelt down in front of him, seeing ancient liver-spotted hands that had been so young the last time they’d been his. I reached up slowly, palms open, fingers flexed, whispered, “I need to touch you, Mr Morgan. I need to know that you are who you say you are.”
His head shaking, tears in his eyes, he couldn’t speak, didn’t stop me, could barely breathe. Coyle whispered, “Kepler…” A question, a warning, but he wasn’t going to stop me, not now, and before anyone could change their mind I grabbed Morgan’s hands, held them tight, squeezed his fingers between my own and felt
nothing.
Only skin.
Just skin.
I let go, Morgan shaking now, the tears running through canyons on his face. He was young; he was so very young.
“Kepler?” Nathan’s voice, high and urgent.
“He’s not Galileo.” I eased myself up, backing away from Morgan, giving myself a little space, room to breathe. My gaze swept the room: the ancient man not yet grown up, the injured killer, the woman in grey. “Nathan, when we came in here, you said ‘Elijah’. What was Pamela’s part of the recognition code?”
He opened his mouth to answer, then closed it again, turning to look into her eyes.
She giggled, pressing three fingers to her lower lip behind the veil. “Whoops,” she said and fired.
Who she intended to fire at, clearly she couldn’t decide, for there was a second in which her gun swung between Coyle and myself, before finally, almost with a shrug, she settled on me and pulled the trigger. By then I was already moving, which was why the bullet shattered my left arm, splitting bone in two with a crack I could feel in the hollows of my ears, but Coyle caught her by both wrists, and as she pulled the gun round he pushed her down, slamming his knee into her face, blood blooming across her scarf. I landed on the floor in a screaming haze of bewildered pain and blood, even as Pam
not-Pam
she-who-was-not-herself
she-who-was-Galileo
twisted round and drove her elbow into Coyle’s throat. I heard two shots, the glass shattering in the ceiling overhead, a rainfall of shards, then three more shots that sang over my head and slammed into the wall, then the click-click-click of the pin on nothing at all, and Galileo, the scarf pulled back from her head to reveal golden hair and a soft blood-smeared face twisted with effort, slammed her open palm against Coyle’s throat,
and it occurred to me
rather late in the day
that she wasn’t wearing gloves.
Then the security guard, she with the face of stern rebuttal from the door, was inside the courtyard, radio in hand, shouting, stop, everyone, stop, and it was not Pamela who ran, but Coyle, blood pouring from his nose, bare hands outstretched for the woman’s face.
From the floor I grabbed the guard’s ankle, my fingers closing an instant before Galileo’s, and I
jumped,
slamming my radio up into the flesh below Coyle’s chin.
He staggered back, one arm sweeping a great smear of blood and nasal liquid across his face, over the side of his cheek and lips. I looked into my
face
into Coyle’s face
into the face that was Galileo
shook my head, thought about begging, thought about kneeling at his feet
but he drew his fist back to strike, and I dug my radio into the wound on his shoulder, twisting the butt as hard as I dared, and Coyle
not-Coyle
screamed, the animal scream of a beast caught in barbed wire, and slammed his fist into the side of my face hard enough to knock my teeth together inside my jaw. I tasted salt and blood and loose fillings as I fell. Coyle ran by me, heading for the door, staggered through the red rope that guarded the entrance and out into the crowds of the museum.
I crawled up on to my hands and knees and looked back.
Pamela, struggling to her feet, the gun useless in her hand.
My unnamed, abandoned host in beautiful new clothes, slowly going to ruin as blood seeped from her flesh. Morgan, still sitting on his chair, his eyes turned upwards at nothing at all, his hands loose by his side. Five shots Galileo had fired as she struggled for the gun; one of them had found their home in the sponsor’s chest.
Pam’s eyes turned slowly and settled on her master, the beginning of a choke that might become a sob rising from her throat, and there was no time, no time at all as I staggered on to my feet, picked up my radio and ran into the museum.
Chapter 87
At its busiest the Metropolitan Museum of Art can handle fifty thousand visitors a day.
This was not its busiest; there were probably only two or three thousand souls wandering through its halls.
I found Coyle gasping for breath at the top of the stairs, a small crowd of people tactfully trying not to stare. I slammed my knee into his chest, my elbow into his throat, pushing him back against the cold floor, and roared, “Who are you?!”
“Coyle!” he squeaked. “You know me as Coyle!”
“Who was I the night Marigare fired?” He didn’t answer so I dug my elbow a little deeper, his eyes rolling, tongue flopping against his lips. “Who was I?!”
“Nurse! You were… Samir! Samir Chayet!”
“Who drove you to Lyon?”
“Irena. You. Irena!” The sound barely escaped past the weight of security guard pressing down on to him, the tips of his ears bright crimson.