“The re-enactments have to stop,” Trevellian was saying, keeping his voice beneath his breath.
“Out of the question,” Naz was answering in the same tone.
“But they’re clearly exacerbating his condition!” Trevellian insisted, his voice rising.
“Still out of the question,” I heard Naz say. His voice was still level, calm. “Besides, that’s beyond your remit.”
“Curing him’s beyond my remit?” Trevellian’s voice was a snarl now.
“Telling him what to do and what not to do is,” Naz said, calm as ever. “He decides that. You, like me, have been hired to ensure he can continue to pursue his projects.”
“If he’s dead he won’t be able to,” Trevellian snarled again.
“Is there a danger of that?” Naz asked.
Trevellian said nothing, but after a few seconds I heard him snort and throw an instrument into his case.
“We shall expect you here,” Naz said, “at the same time tomorrow.”
Despite the state that I was in, I knew then that Naz was completely onside. More than onside: he was as involved in the whole game as I was-but for entirely different reasons. I understood this more fully two days later, during a lucid patch. Naz was sitting with me in my living room, going over the logistics for the re-enactment of the moment during the shooting re-enactment, the moment when I’d told the two men where to stand. He was fine-tuning the details-who needed to do what, when, the varying amounts of information different participants needed to know, where the real back-up people should stand as their original places were taken by the back-up re-enactors and so on. He had these notes and lists and diagrams laid out in front of him across the coffee table-but for the last five minutes he hadn’t been looking at these at all. He’d just been staring straight ahead, into space. He looked vague, kind of drunk; for a moment I thought that he was about to slip off into a trance.
“Naz?” I asked him.
He didn’t answer at first. His eyes had glazed over while the thing behind them processed. I’d seen them do that before, several times; only now the processing seemed to have stepped up a gear-several gears, gone into overdrive, become almost unbearably intense. It amazed me that his head didn’t explode from the sheer fury of it all. I could almost hear the whirring: the whirring of his computations and of all his ancestry, of rows and rows of clerks and scribes and actuaries, their typewriters and ledgers and adding machines all converging inside his skull into giant systems hungry to execute ever larger commands. Eventually the whirring slowed down, the eyes became alive again, Naz turned his face to me and told me:
“Thank you.”
“Thank you?” I repeated. “For what?”
“For the…” he began, then paused. “Just for the…” He stopped again.
“For the what?” I asked.
“I’ve never managed so much information before,” he eventually replied.
His eyes were sparkling now. Yes, Naz was a zealot-but his zealotry wasn’t religious: it was bureaucratic. And he was drunk: infected, driven onwards, on towards a kind of ecstasy just by the possibilities of information management my projects were opening up for him, each one more complex, more extreme. My executor.
One day I came out of a trance to find myself lying on my sofa. At the same moment that I became aware of where I was I also understood that there was someone else in the room. I looked up and thought I saw Doctor Trevellian. Doctor Trevellian was a short man, as I mentioned earlier, with a moustache and a battered leather briefcase which was always by his side. This short man was standing in my living room, but this time there was no briefcase, and no moustache either. He was short, but he wasn’t Doctor Trevellian, or anyone else I knew-although I thought I recognized him vaguely. He had a notebook in his hand, with the top page flipped open. He was looking at the notebook, then at me, then at the notebook again. He stood like that for some time; then, eventually, he spoke.
“So,” he said. “This is the man who is re-staging the deaths of local gangsters who have met with violent ends.”
I could place him now: he’d been at the re-enactment of the first shooting-the man I’d seen standing behind the waiting BMW when I’d first arrived. He looked semi-officiaclass="underline" smartish but a little ragged round the edges. Off-smart. He had a graphite-coloured jacket on and grey streaks in his hair. He must have been forty-odd.
“Are you a policeman?” I asked him.
“No,” he said. He glanced at his notebook again, then continued: “This is also the man who has had set up a building in which certain mundane and, on the surface, meaningless moments are repeated and prolonged until they assume an almost sacred aspect.”
His voice had a slightly Scottish edge. It was quite dry. He spoke in the kind of tone a lawyer might use to address a jury, or a serious professor of history his students. I lay there, listening to him.
“He has, moreover, had the most trivial of incidents-a spillage that occurred during a visit to a tyre repair shop-played and replayed like a stuck record for the last three weeks, residual.”
“I’d forgotten about that,” I said.
“Forgotten about that, he says?” His tone rose slightly as he uttered this rhetorical question, then dipped again as he ploughed on. “No less than one hundred and twenty actors have been used. Five hundred and eleven props-tyres, signs, tins, tools, all in working condition-have been assembled and deployed. And that’s just for the tyre shop scene. The number of people who have been employed in some capacity or other over the course of all five re-enactments must be closer to one thousand.” He paused again and let the figure sink in, then continued: “All these actions, into which so much energy has been invested, so many man-hours, so much money-all, taken as a whole, confront us with the question: for what purpose?”
He paused and looked at me intently.
“Does he, perhaps,” he started again suddenly, “consider himself to be some kind of artist?”
He was still looking intently at me, as though calling on me to give an answer.
“Who, me?” I said.
His eyes mockingly scoured the empty room, then came to rest on me again.
“No,” I told him. “I was never any good at art. In school.”
“In school, he wasn’t any good at art,” he repeated, then struck off on another tack: “In that case, could it rather be that he sees these acts as a kind of voodoo? Magic? As shamanic performances?”
“What’s shamanic?” I asked.
Naz walked in just then. He seemed to know this man: he nodded at him, then started tapping at his mobile.
“Who is this?” I asked him.
“A borough councillor,” Naz said. “He kept us posted on the shooting and found us our police mole. Don’t worry: he’s sound.”
I wasn’t worried. I felt quite at ease just lying there, passive, being talked about. The piano music spilled up from downstairs.
“He’s listening to Shostakovich,” the short councillor said.
“It’s Rachmaninov,” Naz told him.
“Ah, Rachmaninov. And there’s a smell, a kind of…is it cordite?”
“Yes!” I tried to shout to him, but my voice came out weak. “Yes: finally! It is cordite! I knew it!”
Naz’s phone beeped. He read from its screen:
“Of or pertaining to a priest-doctor of the Ural-Altaic peoples of Siberia. From the Tungusian saman.”
“Cordite! Didn’t I say, right from the beginning…” I began, but then slipped off into a trance again.