I shall write it all down, like Marie Curie! Not just numbers. I shall tell the truth. It does not have to be this way, Edie. It does not! We do not have to be small, and stupid, and weak. I shall make a book unlike any you have seen. A book of wonders… A book of the Hakote, and you shall read it and see it and still you shall not believe what I have done!
Frankie’s handwriting was so bad that most of the words were single letters followed by long wiggly lines. Edie brought her tea and wrapped arms around her, and Frankie allowed herself to be held. A month later they were sharing the flat, Edie’s small number of belongings swamped by Frankie’s accumulated books and devices. In the evenings they huddled together under a quilt, and Edie did crosswords while Frankie wrote.
It was winter, and it stayed that way until 1948.
Shem Shem Tsien had not died in Addeh Sikkim.
Edie had known this, peripherally. She had been aware of him quitting the field, leaving his soldiers to burn where they fought. She had seen him take a moment to kill the crucified bishop, slicing across his gut so that the man would die painfully rather than quickly. She had known, too, that the subsequent explosion regrettably failed to claim the Khan—Abel Jasmine had shown her the reports, so that she would not be surprised into betraying herself if ever she met him again. Edie had assumed that Shem Shem Tsien would be occupied with rebuilding his citadel, licking his wounds and looking for another genius.
He did nothing of the kind. Before he had been Khaygul of Addeh Sikkim, she realised, he had been the Opium Khan, master of the heroin trade in Europe and Asia. The nation he had usurped had been little more than an amusement park for him; his own personal Brighton Pier. He had killed his family because they were in the way not of some great unfulfilled desire, but of a whim. He had no need to be ruler of an actual country. His power was in himself, and in the men who served him, and ultimately in the extremity of his vision. A prince of horrors is no less a prince if the land he holds lies in ruins.
All the same, it seemed his hate for James Banister was surpassed only by his rage against Dotty Catty. To hurt her, the report said, he had evolved a system for the torture of elephants, and the outlaw hills where he kept his fortresses howled and bellowed with their agony and the markets of Asia were filled with his bloody ivory and the contorted heads of his victims. Moreover, he had let it be known: Frankie Fossoyeur was his. The man who brought him his genius should be exalted above all others. He should be rewarded with wealth and concubines and whatever else he wished, so long as she was compos mentis, and could work.
Abel Jasmine supplied guards for Frankie, and Edie made her practise escape and evasion. She taught her how to do a flat bolt: how to drop everything and leave a country without stopping at your bank or getting a change of clothes; how to find someone who would supply you with a passport; how to vanish from view in a city and in the countryside. Frankie thought it all a nonsense. She barely listened, and yet by the end she was suggesting improvements and refinements and Edie was wondering how long it would take her to understand the tricks of invisibility better than Edie herself.
But if Frankie was learning to be a spy or some variation thereof, she was learning with the smallest necessary aspect of her mind, as if she sent Frankie-the-stenographer to pay attention so that some other, inner Frankie could do the real work. The Apprehension Engine was in her heart, and its defining numbers were scrawled in chalk on a blackboard in her study. She no longer found herself distracted by things. Brother Denis, visiting from the Ruskinite mother-house, worried that she was alarmingly focused.
“There’s nothing wrong,” Edie said discouragingly.
“Well, you don’t have to tell me,” Denis told her. “But you bloody better not kid yourself about it. She’s not the same. She’s got a look.”
“What look?”
“Vision,” Denis said. “Monomania. I don’t know. But it’s not her.”
“Maybe it is,” Edie said. “Maybe this is how she is when she cares about something.” Someone, she was saying. This is how she is when she loves someone. Me. And she only needs one big project and me to fill her attention. Denis had the good, unmonkish sense to leave well enough alone.
The following day Frankie went out, and three thugs in a black sedan jumped on her in front of a shop called Cadwallader’s which sold soap, but Songbird and a few others, now notionally part of a civilian service, sent the would-be kidnappers to Paddington Green for a sharp discussion about British law. A week later, Shem Shem Tsien sank a British warship in the North Sea and a Russian one in port at Helsinki and tried to start a war, and while the eyes of Whitehall were fixed on that little disaster, two more hoods tried to steal Frankie from a symposium in Cambridge where she was meeting Erdös and von Neumann.
Edie Banister glued on her moustache and flew to Tallinn, and found Shem Shem Tsien posing as a Russian prince. He even carried a purse full of Romanov gold and swore Romanov-style, in French. He was surrounded by secretaries, men writing in books. A photographer bustled around him. There was even a cameraman with a Bolex.
“So, Commander Banister. You look well,” Shem Shem Tsien murmured across the card table at the Kolyvan Casino. “I myself do not. I am well aware.” He was craggy and drawn, and there was a newly healed scar on his neck, but his film-star eyes were glittering and cold. He gestured at the secretaries. “Forgive my affectation—I am preserving my journey for posterity. My pathway to transcendence is noteworthy. I suppose that makes these good men my apostles. My gospellers. ‘If I have the mind of Napoleon…’” He smiled at the nearest one, then leaned closer. “You stole my scientist, Commander Banister. I want her back.”
“She’s her own woman, old boy.”
“No, she is not. Everything that is, is mine by divine right. It is used by others on sufferance, and by my leave.”
“Well, I suppose I ain’t a believer.”
“No,” Shem Shem Tsien said, without irony. “But you will be.” Abruptly, he changed the subject. “I understand Frankie is writing a book. Fiction, no doubt.”
Edie shrugged, but James Banister’s face gave her away. Shem Shem Tsien smiled.
“Oh. Not fiction. Surely not mathematics? My mathematics?” He leaned across the table. “I will have it all back from her, Commander. Her brain is not yours to plunder. Oh, but I have a gift for you.” He smiled, and slid a small wet thing across the table. “My mother’s tongue. It’s quite fresh, I assure you. I kept her alive for some time to watch the deaths of her elephants, but eventually I tired of her. I did keep her head, for a memento. I feel inclined to share.”
Commander Banister stared at the tongue, and wondered whether it was better that it should be Dotty Catty’s, or that Shem Shem Tsien should have ripped it out of someone else’s mouth purely for effect.
Edie couldn’t think of anything clever to say, so she just smiled James Banister’s most irritating patrician smile, and saw Shem Shem Tsien stiffen in fury. Later, they tried to kill each other in a frigid dockyard among giant shipping crates. The gospellers did not intervene. They simply watched everything, and recorded it.
James Banister and the Opium Khan lost their guns in the first exchanges, emptying the magazines and discarding them as useless junk, and then it was hand-to-hand. Shem Shem Tsien moved with a weird, loping step, spine slightly bent, and Edie realised he had scars on his back and could not straighten it. The fire, she thought, or the elephant. It did not change his speed, or his lethality. Remembering him in Addeh Sikkim, she judged it likely she would lose, and therefore die.