ALSO BY JIM CRACE
Continent
The Gift of Stones
Arcadia
Signals of Distress
Quarantine
Being Dead
The Devil’s Larder
Genesis
The Pesthouse
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
—BERTRAND RUSSELL
1
THE HAIR IS UNMISTAKABLE: old-fashioned Russian hair, swept back from the forehead, thickly and unusually abundant. Leonard stands on the rug a meter from the television screen to see more closely. The video footage is grainy and unsteady, purposefully amateur. The man reading the prepared statement in the curtained room does not mean to be recognized. Indeed, he has masked his face to the bridge of the nose with what appears to be a child’s scarf. His voice, crudely distorted on the sound track, is childlike too. He wears sunglasses, defiantly unfashionable E-clips, ten years old at least. The light beam from the camera is lasered at his chest and the lower half of his scarf, so that what little of the face can be seen—the ears, the eyebrows, and the forehead—is underlit and ghostly. But still the hair is unmistakable.
Leonard sits. He stands to find the remote console. Sits again. He is breathless, and it is with a shaking hand that he clicks open an on-screen toolbar, pastes a password, enters “Personal Briefcase,” selects Menu, Archive, Album, Austin, and waits for the file of photographs to download. A hundred or so chattering thumbnails peel out of the icon and tile across the desktop. It is easy to spot the group of images he wants. They are indoor shots, flash bright, and the only ones without an intense sapphire sky. Those days in Texas were almost cloudless. He highlights a single photograph with an archive date of 10-27-06 and expands it. And there they are, the three of them, posing side by side in Gruber’s Old Time BBQ, meat spread out across the table on butcher’s paper, with polystyrene tubs of pinto beans and coleslaw, and a line of bottles—Shiner Bocks. The room is blue with smoke and, he remembers, blue with swearing. He zooms in on the man to the left in the photograph and drags the expanded image up the screen so that it is parked next to the newscast box. It is only a few minutes before the video segment is repeated, and only a few seconds after it begins Leonard is able to freeze an image of the masked face. Now he can compare. He cannot tell exactly what he hopes to find.
On the left, photographed without much care or interest eighteen years previously by the girl who cleared tables at Gruber’s, is Maxie, the big-smiled American son of Russian immigrants. That much is certain. His black mustache and beard were sparse and adolescent in those days. His hair, long on top, parted slightly to the right, was swept back over his ears, with just a few loose strands. He looked like the teenage Stalin in that famous early photograph that became the poster for the biopic in the early 2020s, Young Steel, unfeasibly handsome and intense. And on the right, snatched from the newscast, is the masked man, guarding his identity and filmed by whom? A comrade, colleague, accomplice? Neither of the images is well defined—a frozen, hazy video clip and an overexpanded photo detail, a mosaic of pixels. The evidence is blurry at best. But Leonard is convinced. These two images, separated by almost eighteen years, are of the same man: the same swept-tundra look, the same wind-sculpted brow, the same off-center widow’s peak. No sign of balding yet, or gray. It’s Maxie, then. Maxie Lermon. Maxim Lermontov. On active service, evidently. His head at least has aged extremely well. His head has aged much better than Leonard’s own. Leonard’s hair is gray, a little prematurely. It is not abundant. As (almost) ever, Maxie has the edge on him.
Now Francine has come home. He hears her keys, the two sentinel notes of the house alarm, the impact of her bags on the hall floor, the clatter of her shoes, the squeak and whine of the lavatory door and the air extractor. He listens while she urinates, flushes, rinses her hands, squeaks the door once more. Should he say anything about his disquieting discovery? he wonders, deciding no. But her not kissing him when she comes into the room, her not even pretending a smile, and him so disappointed, seeing her so pretty, makes him speak.
“See this,” he says.
“See what?”
Again he banks the images and places Maxie-masked and Maxie-young next to each other on the screen. “What do you think? Are they the same man?”
“Probably.” She chin-tucks. Her Chinese teacup face, he calls it. The corners of her mouth are down. It means she is impatient, wants to get to bed. “Who is he, anyway?”
“This is the one”—he points—“who’s got those hostages. You haven’t seen the news?” She doesn’t even shake her head. What does he think a teacher does all day? “This one … well, he’s someone I used to know. In America.” Again he chatters thumbnails across the screen. “See, look, that’s me. In Austin. Almost twenty years ago.”
“You eating meat?”
“Pretending to.”
“Boy, I should say. What is that place, an abattoir?”
Maxie is still talking to the camera, though after Francine has gone upstairs to bed the telescreen is muted to a whisper. He is repeating his demands and suggesting a way—some government concessions, some troop withdrawals, safe transit to an airport, a flight to somewhere he won’t specify—for “finishing this without mishap,” a word so much more menacing than bloodshed, say, or death, especially when spoken behind a mask and dark glasses, especially when deliberately mispronounced and with the slightly comic Yiddish inflection that Maxie is using to disguise his voice. Leonard shapes his hands ten centimeters from his stomach, miming his saxophone, and blows a pair of notes, three times, at the screen: Misch-app. Misch-app. Blood-sched.
The same reporter, accumulating coats and scarves as the evening gets chillier, updates every half hour, standing in the street fifty meters from the house of hostages. The “suspects,” who took refuge “randomly” when fleeing through the gardens after what the police are calling “a bungled incident,” have at least one handgun that has already been “discharged at officers.” They might have more, she says. The broadcast helicopter shows a suburb darkening, the whirring siren lights of police, ambulance, and fire brigade, and the orange glow of curtained houses. The garden trees and sheds and greenhouses become more formless as the night wears on. The hostages—no details for the moment—are being baby-sat by Maxie Lermon, as yet unrecognized, as yet unnamed.
Leonard flattens the futon and fetches the guest duvet from the cupboard. He will not go upstairs tonight. Francine will already be asleep. Any noise he might—he’s bound to—make (he’s a slightly lumbering left-hander) will irritate her: the light switches, the bathroom taps, the floorboards and the mattress, the intricate percussion of getting into bed in a modern wooden house with its muttering, living materials. She needs more sleep than he does because she’s never quite asleep. She’s waiting for the phone to go, waiting to be woken by the phone, dreaming of it so persuasively that many times she has sat up abruptly in bed and reached out for the handset in an almost silent room. She lifts it, even, and only hears the dial tone and her own somersaulting heart.
Leonard could pick up the telephone at any time to offer information to the police. He knows he should. Identify the unidentified. Supply a name. Provide intelligence. But it is already late and Leonard is still trembling. It has been a tense and shocking day, and he is too tired and troubled for anything except retreat. It has gone midnight. Everybody will be sleeping now, or trying to. The police, the comrades, the hostages. Leonard will be sleeping soon, still dressed, on his futon, so frequently his bed these days, the television flickering, Francine unreachable upstairs. Tomorrow he should phone. He will phone. He will never phone. He does his best to sleep.
> 2
LEONARD LESSING DOES NOT DREAM of Gruber’s BBQ or Maxim Lermontov. His dreams belong to Francine yet again—not her in person exactly, not as far as he can recall, but her in mood. His has been an apprehensive night, and when he wakes too early, disturbed by the muted, active telescreen, its erratic light hoisting and flattening into the tightly blinded room, and by the closed community of garden birds crying off a jay without success, he knows that if he does not rise at once, get on, attend to Francine’s current and persistent misery, do what he needs to do, then he will steep like unattended tea, growing darker by the moment. Leonard has been a morning man for many years. It is not difficult, once he is standing, to feel genuinely … well, not elated. Optimistically agitated, perhaps. Every dawn renews his hope and courage, briefly, he has found. This is the day, is what he always thinks. He will not disappoint himself today. He will not fail again today.
For once he does his morning exercises, not just the stretches to improve what elasticity remains in his right shoulder, but also the routine of bends and sit-ups that he observed fairly regularly before his illness or injury or accident or whatever it was that caused his rotator cuff to lock and hurt in the first place. He has been lazy recently. Pain is his excuse, and boredom. He cannot work if simple acts like putting on a shirt and tying his laces cause such lasting discomfort. How can he lift a music stand or put his back into a saxophone? On his doctor’s advice, he has awarded himself a sabbatical, an unsolicited but welcome break from studios and concerts, and even—imprudently—from practicing. He is less thrilled by music and performance than he used to be; he has fallen out of love with gigging, not only the bragging company of musicians, their often self-destructive lives, but mostly the endless tours, the exhausting and precarious nights away from Francine. He has become a man who seeks the tranquillity and shelter of home. His current well-being is dependent on having the house, with its modern, regulated lack of clutter and its old-style reclusion, to himself for much of the week, especially during the day, when the natural light is at its most flattering and consoling and every room and landing is nuanced with blocks of tapered radiance and shadow that can seem as physical as furniture. He’d rather be at home than anywhere. “You’ve turned into a dormouse. Or do I mean a tortoise?” Francine says. Either way, it is not flattering. But Leonard does not doubt he deserves this prescribed hiatus, this chance to hibernate. His patrons and audiences can wait six months or so. Likewise the bank. Likewise the garden. Likewise the household maintenance and repairs. Likewise his social life. His knotty frozen joint postpones everything. He hoped to celebrate his fiftieth birthday feeling youthful, fit, and heroic. Instead, with only two days of his forties left, he has become gimpy and irascible. Today his right arm will not reach in front of him much farther than the elbow of his left. With effort, he can touch his waist. He cannot reach his back with it at all. But still he perseveres with his routine. It gives him time to plan his journey. A short trip away from home will do him good, he thinks. To drive is better than to phone.
He washes at the downstairs sink and, naked in their long, wedge-shaped kitchen (or the trapezium, as the architect has called it), turns on the panel television and lays a tray for Francine’s breakfast. An autumn-term weekday, with an early start for her, and so it’s coffee, muesli, yogurt, fruit. He makes a thermos for himself—green tea, lime juice, and honey. He’s trying to stay young and fit through diet. Nevertheless, he has put on weight; he has a drummer’s paunch. His muscles are becoming spongy.
The Rise-Time television show on the little kitchen screen has no new angle on the hostage house. The same reporter as last evening, this time wrapped in a green shawl, her hair tied back, says that she has nothing fresh to say. The night was quiet and uneventful. The police are happy to be patient. The hostages have been identified by relatives and neighbors: an unnamed family of five. Three generations, evidently. Leonard listens for their street vicinity and writes it down: Alderbeech. Two trees where probably no woods or orchards have survived. He knows at once what kind of upright suburb it will be. He can get there in an hour or so if he uses Routeway points and takes the motorway. Then what? He can’t be sure what he might do, or should. Being there, he thinks, will help him to decide.
Francine is not sleeping. Her reading light is on. Leonard hesitates outside, holding her tray unsteadily in his good hand. He can’t settle on what lie to tell. He’ll keep it simple, he decides: tell her that he’s going walking. She won’t be pleased to hear that. She’ll be working, after all, plagued by toddlers and curriculums, while she imagines he is having fun on what promises—incorrectly, as it turns out—to be a dry and pretty day. October at its best.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” she says, when finally he backs open the door and steps round the bed to place the breakfast tray across her lap.
“Do what?”
“Walk about with nothing on. Before breakfast.”
“You used to like it once. More than once, even.”
“Well, that was then.” She’s smiling, though.
“Curtains?”
“Please.”
He has his back to her as he pulls aside the heavy Spanish prints until the sunlight slants and corrugates across the bed. “I might go up into the forests today. See some trees. Some autumn color. I need the exercise. I’m getting portly.” He pinches the flesh at his waist and stretches it out a few centimeters. She cannot see his face, though he can see her in the window glass, sitting up in bed and staring squarely at the skelfwood cupboards opposite.
“Yes, go,” she says. “Enjoy yourself”—not meaning it but wanting to.
HE DRIVES THE GIGMOBILE, his aged liquid-fuel camper van, taking his time. He has all day. He is not even sure if he will complete the journey. He does not take the motorway after all. Making it circuitous and slow, on minor routes, not only saves him Routeway points but allows him greater opportunity to change his mind and flee back home. At first he does his best to concentrate on Maxie Lermon, listening to rolling news on the radio, playing out the conversation he might have with the police officers, and even rehearsing an interview on television with the woman in the shawl: “Yes, we were friends.” But Francine’s odd remark troubles him. “Well, that was then.” What does she mean by then? Before what? Before he became the tortoise with the paunch? He shakes his head. He’s worrying too much, as usual. But certainly he felt foolish and disappointed when she said, “Well, that was then.” He hoped to be attractive to her, naked, one-armed, with the tray. Once, many years ago, when they first met, she called him “Waiter” as he walked round the room with nothing on, and the breakfast he brought her went cold while they made love.
So music, then. To cheer himself, he will listen to himself. Most of his own recordings as well as cover versions of his compositions are stored on the van’s system. He does not like to play them at home. He is by nature both modest and secretive. But when he is alone and driving, who is there to care? He scrolls through the menu and selects Live at the Factory. This session, which was broadcast on the radio to hardly anyone as part of the “Approaching Midnight” series of new work, was judged too obdurate and odd at the time (a raging winter evening, almost ten years ago) to be issued by his recording company. This is Leonard’s own download. It is not perfect. But he is fond of it. He truly stretched himself that night—and was rewarded for the stretching in life-changing ways. “In an unexpected adjustment to this evening’s jazz recital,” the announcer explains, as the van heads south through suburbs and doughnut estates into the managed countryside and its network of preservation highways, “composer and saxophonist Lennie Less will play unaccompanied. Owing to the severe weather, his quartet has not been able to reach Brighton.” There is laughter and applause, and someone shouts out “Less is more,” as someone nearly always does when Leonard’s in the lineup. Then the concert host, reduced to cliché by the pressure of live radio and the panic of a green on-air light, overloads the microphone with “Ladies an
d gentlemen, let’s welcome to the Factory tonight … on tenor” and then steps a pace too far away, reproved by his own feedback, to offer, not audibly enough, “Mister. Lennie. Less.” (“It rhymes with penniless, as befits a jazzman,” his agent said when they agreed on this stage name instead of plain, unexciting Leonard Lessing.)
LEONARD STILL REMEMBERS—and relives—the panic he felt that evening. His colleagues, turned back by blizzards, abandoned vehicles, and debris on the motorway just ten kilometers out of London, warn him only twenty minutes before the gig that he will be alone. All those fresh pieces they rehearsed and that are promised in the program will have to wait for the next night’s venue, Birmingham’s New Drum, weather permitting. The lead sheets and pages of chord patterns in his music case are useless now. Leonard will have no sidemen, then, to share the blame; no rhythm section to provide depth and camouflage, or any stout string bass to anchor the bottom line for him; no call and response from familiar colleagues, feeding him their hooks and cues; no points of rest; no nodding in another soloist at the end of a progression and stepping out, side-stage, to rest his mouth and hands for sixteen measures or so, or to empty his spit valve, adjust his reed, or sip a little water. Here he will be the solitary player, the nightlong soloist, the only face onstage. There can be no hiding place. What to play? When he first hears the news about the snowbound quartet, he thinks that unless someone at the Factory can magic up a Real Book full of comforting standards within the next few minutes, he has no choice but to offer a program of lollipops and show tunes—undemanding numbers he can reproduce entirely from memory.
But by the time the sound engineer appears at the door of the eerily empty green room to finger-five that the concert is about to start, Leonard has accepted the inevitable: for this radio concert he must not take the easy option. Everybody is expecting more. Lennie Less does not play show tunes or unembellished standards, no matter what. Lennie Less plays only taxing jazz. He’ll start cautiously, he decides finally, with his tenor version of a Coltrane classic solo, “My Favorite Things.” He’s played it, duplicated its patterns and glissandos, many times before—as an encore, something obvious that even the shallowest of aficionados can recognize. He knows it is a bit of a hot lick, begging for predictable but unwarranted applause—the enthusiasts will be clapping themselves, their own tuned ears—but applause is always a welcome boost at the start of any show. It is an agitating prospect, though, and frightening. Live audience, live radio, no band—and some evidence, from what he’s spotted through the stage curtains, that the concert hall is papered with free tickets. Every seat is taken, and that is suspicious for a contemporary music event. There are more frocks and ties than usual, and many more women. He’ll be playing not only for the usual pack of devotees, in other words, but for jazz virgins and jazz innocents as well. They could be restless, wary, bored, and certainly irritated. And the venue itself is off-putting: unraked plastic seating, poor sight lines, overhead industrial plumbing, and deadening acoustics—curtains, for heaven’s sake! The Factory is devoid of what jazzmen call the climate. Even now Leonard sweats at the memory: the trembling apprehension of that long wait before the Brighton broadcast begins, how shakily he adjusts his mouthpiece and the tuning slide, how he runs the keys and rods of his tenor so anxiously that his knuckles begin to clack, how he fusses over his jacket sleeves and his belt, unable to get comfortable or stay cool, how he practices his embouchure and lolly-sucks the reed until his lips are tense and dry.