Oh yes I did, but I didn’t say so.
‘Not many of us did, and we certainly didn’t know where they held their rites — the Lord knows what would have happened to anyone who penetrated them, which is why the whole set-up remained so mysterious. It’s mysterious enough still, but not so much.’
‘Come now Magda,’ Azzam interrupted, ‘we know no more about the Perfects now than we did then. I bet you even old Porvic doesn’t know who they are, Jan, and he’s one of their own bigwigs.’
‘That’s true enough, but at least we know where the Séance Hall used to be in those days, and that’s where we’re taking you now.’
It wasn’t far. The streets of new Hav are as confusing in their way as the old ones were. The old ones were endlessly muddling in their intricate alleys and courtyards, the new ones blur the mind with their monotony — each one looking so like the next that it is difficult to keep track on a course through them. Except for the big motorways most of them are pedestrianized, but for me this makes it hard to judge any distance. The only building I thought I recognized as we walked was a mosque protruding above the rooftops: it looked to me like a reconstructed version of the old Grand Mosque. But it certainly wasn’t far to the sacred site.
‘Voilà!’ said Magda, slightly ironically, when we reached a very small clearing in the middle of a cluster of housing blocks, with a narrow arcade around it. ‘There’s our sacred site. It was here that the Cathars used to hold their fateful séances, in a secret hall in an old Arab house that used to stand here. You would never have noticed it — nobody did. But inside it, or underneath it perhaps, on this very spot, all that has happened to Hav in our time was plotted and decreed.’
‘That is so,’ said Azzam. ‘Like it or not, this is the crucible of our present.’
I wandered off by myself, thinking. Was it really here that I had, all those years before, been hurried up those steep dark steps to spy upon the Cathars below? Was it here that I had half-imagined, half-dreamed the identities of the red-cloaked Perfects, and promised never to reveal where I had been or what I had seen? I felt a pang of guilt about what I had written in the event, written in ignorance as it was, and wondered if that was why my book had been banned — evidently the Sustenance people, at least, had never read it.
In the centre of the little clearing there was a raised oblong platform of marble, with an inscribed plate of bronze on top of it. Step-ladders were placed nearby for the convenience of visitors, and while Magda, Azzam and Henri watched me from the arcade I climbed up one and bent over to read its inscription. It was in five languages, Havian, Arabic, Turkish, Chinese and English, and this is what it said:
I stood up there for a moment or two, wondering what it meant, until Magda came over and asked if I was all right. Still bemused, I clambered down the ladder, and she said: ‘I know just what you’re feeling. I felt it, the first time. Remember what? — that’s you’re thinking, aren’t you? Or remember who? That’s the sacredness of it, that we none of us have the faintest notion what it’s all about, and probably never will. I saw your old friend Porvic standing here once in tears, and I bet you anything he didn’t know what he was crying about.
‘Come on, Jan, blow your nose; we’ll have a last cup of tea before we trundle you off on your buggy to the delights of Lazaretto.’
‘Did you ever know a lady named Fatima Yeğen?’ I asked them when we went to the café for our tea. ‘She was something to do with the railway.’
Magda and Henri looked blank, but Azzam said he thought he’d read something about her in Myrmidon Mirror, the more gossipy, he said, of the city’s two newspapers. ‘I think you’ll find she’s running the old station hotel.’
‘L’Auberge Impériale,’ I cried in delight. ‘D’you mean to say it still exists?’
‘Only in name really, only what’s left of it. The station was completely destroyed, of course, and the railway itself never reopened. But I rather think the Yeğen family had some official connection with it — wasn’t there somebody called the Tunnel Pilot in those days?’
Indeed there was, I told him. In my time the Pilot was Fatima Yeğen’s cousin Rudolph, and if she was still alive and letting rooms I wouldn’t take a Lazaretto buggy, I’d find my way to L’Auberge Impériale instead.
‘Well don’t expect too much,’ said Azzam. ‘I’ve only seen it from the outside, but I wouldn’t fancy it myself, and alas the three of us have to be back at the League for a Sustenance discussion. Can you find your way there by yourself?’
‘She’s a grown woman, Azzam. It’s easy, Jan. Go back to the Fondaco Quay, and after the warehouses, before you turn the corner to the Carlotto, you’ll see a big motorway running away from the harbour. That’s August 17 Street. Walk up it for a few hundred yards and you’ll find Centrum Square. That’s where the station used to be and you can’t miss what’s left of the hotel. We’d come with you, but we just haven’t got time. You must continue your investigations all alone.’
So we parted, and I walked alone in the evening through the streets of the city — streets and quays of ghosts they were to me — thinking of all I had seen there once, fancying the lights of the old British Residence across the water, imagining the little Electric Ferry bustling to and fro across the water, hearing the voices of old friends, smelling the lost scents of Hav, treading the pavements I might once have trodden until —
‘Can I help you, dirleddy?’ asked a smiling lady in black, sitting in a kiosk of glass and gilded ironwork.
She was much older — of course she was; her hair was white and her figure was less ample, but it was undoubtedy Miss Fatima Yeğen, the Tunnel Pilot’s cousin. Out she came from her kiosk to embrace me, and of course she had a room for me, and of course we must have supper together, and there was so much to talk about wasn’t there? and oh! the things that had happened to Hav since I went away, wasn’t it a shame about the beautiful old tiled hotel sign? hadn’t I noticed? mind the step, if I needed anything I had only to ring the bell, and how lovely it all was, and she’d be seeing me later, and she’d turned the geyser on to let me have a nice hot bath.
Azzam was, I have to admit, right. The Impériale was no great shakes, as dear Dr Porvic would have put it. It was a bum joint, as Henri might have said (in Hav all foreign slang is out of date). About half the size of the original, I suppose, it had been salvaged from the ruins of Hav Centrum, and was apparently still shored up with temporary girders and scaffolding. On one external wall, seen from the old station square outside, there still showed the fireplaces and blocked up doors of grander times.
Here and there inside, too, as I explored the yellow-painted corridors, I found reminders of the past: here a decidedly Russian-style landscape (muffled ladies in long skirts snowballing with preternaturally rosy children), here a chipped and rusted enamel advertisement (TAKE THE TRAIN! MEDITERRANEAN EXPRESS DIRECT TO MOSCOW, with a fanciful representation of onion domes and Cossacks), and standing in a dark corner cold and unpolished, a fine old samovar surmounted by a Russian imperial eagle. But they were no more than hints, really, rather than relics of what had once been there.
‘Oh dear me no, Miss Morris, the Impériale is not what it was,’ said Miss Yeğen, when we settled down in her cosy sitting-room for, as she put it, ‘a little light something before bed’.