A slush-spattered cream-colored Land Cruiser draws level with where I stand. Before I can feel miffed at having to walk around it, the mirrored window of the driver’s door slides down, and I assume it’ll be a tourist after directions. But, no, I’m wrong. I know this stocky, swarthy driver in a fisherman’s sweater. “G’day, Hugo. You look like a man with a song in his heart.”
His New Zealand accent gives it away. “Elijah D’Arnoq, king of the Cambridge Sharpshooters.” There’s somebody else in the back of the car, but I’m not introduced.
“Your lack of surprise,” I tell D’Arnoq, “suggests this isn’t a chance encounter.”
“Bang on. Miss Constantin sends you her regards.”
I understand. I get to choose between two metamorphoses. One is labeled “Holly Sykes” while the other is … What, exactly?
Elijah D’Arnoq slaps the side of the Land Cruiser. “Hop aboard. Find out what this is all about, or die wondering. Now or never.”
Past the patisserie, down the alley, I can see the crocodile pub sign hanging over Gьnter’s bar. Fifty paces away? “Get the girl!” counsels the love-drunk, reformed-Scrooge Me. “Imagine her face as you walk in!” The soberer Me folds his arms and looks at D’Arnoq and wonders, “What then?” Well, we’ll eat breakfast; I’ll help Holly clean up the bar; lie low in her place until my fellow Humberites have flown home; we’ll hump like rabbits until we can hardly walk; and while our breaths are coming hard and fast, I’ll blurt out “I love you” and mean it and she’ll blurt out “I love you too, Hugo” and mean it just as much, right then, right there. Then what? I’ll phone the registrar at Humber College to say I’ve suffered a minor breakdown and would like to put my final year on hold. I’ll tell my family—something, no idea what, but I’ll think of something—and buy Holly a telescope. Then what? I find I’m no longer thinking about her every waking moment. Her way of saying “Sort of” or “This is true” begins to grate, and the day comes when we understand that “All You Need Is Love” is rather less than the whole truth. Then what? By now Detective Sheila Young has tracked me down, and her colleagues in Switzerland interview me at the station and only allow me back to Holly’s flat if I surrender my passport. “What’s this about, Poshboy?” Then I’ll have to confess either to stealing an Alzheimer victim’s valuable stamp collection, or luring a fellow student at Humber so deeply into debt that he drove himself off a cliff. Or possibly both, it hardly matters, because Holly will give me back the telescope and get the locks changed. Then what? Agree to go back to London to be interviewed but pick up Marcus Anyder’s passport and book a cheap flight to the Far East or Central America? Such narrative arcs make good movies but shitty existences. Then what? Eke out Anyder’s money until I succumb to the inevitable, open a bar for gap-year kids and turn into Gьnter. I notice a silver parka on the passenger seat next to D’Arnoq. “Can I just ask for an outline—”
“Doesn’t work like that. You need a leap of faith to leave your old life behind. True metamorphosis doesn’t come with flowcharts.”
All around us life goes on, oblivious to my quandary.
“But I’ll tell you this,” says the New Zealander. “We’ve all been headhunted, except for our founder.” D’Arnoq jerks with his head to the unseen man in the compartment behind. “So I know what you’re feeling right now, Hugo. That space there, between the curb and this car, it’s a chasm. But you’ve been vetted and profiled, and if you cross that chasm, you’ll thrive here. You’ll matter. Whatever you want, now and always, you’ll get.”
I ask him, “Would you make the same choice again?”
“Knowing what I now know, I’d killto get into this car, if I had to. I’d kill. What you’ve seen Miss Constantin do—that pause button of time at King’s College, or the puppeteering of the homeless guy—that’s just the prelude to lesson one. There’s so much more, Hugo.”
I remember holding Holly in my arms, earlier.
But it’s the feelingof love that we love, not the person.
It’s that giddy exhilaration I just experienced, just now.
The feeling of being chosen and desired and cared about.
It’s pretty pathetic when you examine it clearheadedly.
So. This is a real, live Faustian pact I’m being offered.
I almost smile. Fausttends not to have happy endings.
But a happy ending like whose? Like Brigadier Philby’s?
He passed away peacefully, surrounded by family.
If that’s a happy ending, they’re fucking welcome to it.
When push comes to shove, what’s Faust without his pact?
Nothing. No one. We’d never have heard of him. Quinn.
Dominic Fitzsimmons. Yet another clever postgrad.
Another gray commuter, swaying on the District Line.
The Land Cruiser’s rear door clunks open an inch.
THE MAN—THE FOUNDER—IN the rear of the car acts as if I’m not there, and D’Arnoq says nothing as he drives us away from the town square, so I sit quietly examining my fellow passenger via his reflection in the glass: midforties, frameless glasses, thick if frosted hair; chin cleft, clean-shaven, and a scar over his jawbone, which surely has a story to tell. He has a lean, tough physique. Mittel Europe ex-military? His clothes offer no clues: sturdy ankle-length boots, black moleskin trousers, a leather jacket, once black but battered grayish. If you noticed him in a crowd you might think “architect” or “philosophy lecturer”; but you probably wouldn’t notice him.
There are only two roads out of La Fontaine Sainte-Agnиs. One climbs up to the hamlet of La Gouille, but D’Arnoq takes the other, heading down the valley towards Euseigne. We pass a turning for Chetwynd-Pitt’s chalet, and I wonder if the boys are worried about my safety or just pissed off that I abandoned them to their hookers’ pimp. I wonder, but I don’t care. A minute later we’ve passed the town boundary. The road is banked by rising, falling walls of snow, and D’Arnoq drives with caution—the car has snow tires and the road’s been salted, but this is still Switzerland in January. I unzip my coat and think of Holly looking at the clock above the bar, but regret is for the Normals.
“We lost you last night,” states my fellow passenger, in a cultured European accent. “The blizzard hid you from us.”
Now I study him directly. “Yes, I had a disagreement with my host. I’m sorry if it caused you any trouble … sir.”
“Call me Mr. Pfenninger, Mr. Anyder. ‘Anyder.’ A well-chosen name. The principal river on the island of Utopia.” The man watches the monochrome world of valley walls, snow-buried fields, and farm buildings. A river rushes alongside the road, black and very fast.