“Madame d’Ortolan?” the good lord enquires. A servant wafts to our side and dispenses weak-looking tea into an almost transparent porcelain cup. I resist the urge to swivel the cup so that the handle points directly towards me.
“She sends her regards,” I tell him, even though she did no such thing.
Lord Harmyle sucks in his already hollow cheeks and looks as though somebody has laced his tea with arsenic. “And how is that… lady?”
“She is well.”
“Hmm.” Lord Harmyle’s fingers hover thinly, like the claw of a predatory skeleton, over some crustless cucumber sandwiches. “And you. Do you bring a message?” The claw retreats and lifts a small biscuit instead. There are seven of the small, anaemic-looking sandwiches on one plate and eleven biscuits on the other. Both primes. Added together, eighteen. Which is not a prime, obviously. And making nine, the throwaway number. Really, this sort of thing could be both distressing and distracting, over time.
“Yes.” I take out the little ormolu sweetener case and shake free a tiny white pill. It disappears into the tea, which I stir. I lift the cup to my lips. Lord Harmyle appears undisturbed.
“One is supposed to lift the saucer and cup together to one’s mouth,” Lord Harmyle observes distastefully as I drink my tea.
“Is one?” I ask. I replace the teacup on the saucer. “I do beg your pardon.” I lift both saucer and cup this time. The tea tastes diffident, whatever flavours it might possess holding back as though ashamed of expressing themselves.
“Well?” Harmyle asks, frowning.
“Well?” I repeat, permitting myself a look of polite puzzlement.
“What’s the message you bear, sir?”
I hope I shall never lose my sincere admiration for those able to invest the word “sir” – on the face of it a genuine honorific – with the level of brusque contempt that the good lord has just achieved.
“Ah.” I put cup and saucer down. “I understand you may have expressed some doubts regarding the direction the Central Council might be taking.” I smile. “Concerns, even.”
Harmyle’s already pallid complexion appears to lose whatever blood it previously contained. Which is rather impressive, really, given that all this is basically an act. He sits back, glances around. He puts his own cup and saucer down, rattled. “What on earth are you talking about?”
I smile, raise one hand. “Firstly, sir, have no fear. I am here to ensure your safety, not threaten it.”
“Are you indeed?” The good lord looks dubious.
“Absolutely. I am, as I have always been, attached, inter alia, to the Protection Department.” (This is actually true.)
“Never heard of it.”
“One is not supposed to, unless one has need to call upon its services.” I smile. “Nevertheless, it exists. You may have been right to feel threatened. That is why I am here.”
Harmyle looks troubled, and possibly confused. “I understood that the lady in Paris was unflinchingly loyal to the current regime,” he observes. (At which I look mildly surprised.) “Indeed, I was under the impression she herself formed a significant part of that regime, at its highest level.”
“Really?” I say. I ought to explain: in terms of Central Council politics, Lord H is a one-time waverer who is now a d’Ortolan loyalist but who has been instructed by Madame d’Ortolan to seem to grow remote from her and her cabal, to speak out against her and, by so gaining their confidence, try to draw out the others on the Central Council who would oppose the good lady. She would have a spy in their midst. However, Lord H has been conspicuously unsuccessful in this endeavour and so fears he is caught between two very slippery stepping stones and is in some danger of skidding and falling no matter which way he tries to go a-leaping.
“Yes, really. I’d have thought,” he continues cautiously, still glancing around the quiet, high-ceilinged, wood-panelled room, “that if she heard I was – that I had any doubts regarding our… prevailing strategies… that she would have been my implacable opponent, not my concerned protector.”
I spread my hands. (For a moment, my brain chooses to interpret this movement as one hand diverging into two different realities. I have to perform the internal equivalent of a mind-clearing shake of the head to dispel this sensation. My mind is in at least two different places at the moment, which – even with the rare gift I have and the highly specialised training I’ve benefited from – requires a deal of concentration.) “Oh, she is quite placable,” I hear myself say. “The good lady’s loyalties are not entirely as you might have assumed.”
Lord Harmyle looks at me curiously, perhaps not sure how good my English is and whether he is somehow being made fun of.
I pat my pockets, appear distracted (I am distracted, but I’m holding it together). “I say, d’you think I might borrow a handkerchief? I think I feel a sneeze coming on.”
Harmyle frowns. His gaze shifts fractionally towards his breast pocket, where a white triangle of handkerchief protrudes. “I’ll ask a waiter,” he says, half turning in his seat.
The half-turn is all that I need. I rise quickly, take one step forward and while he is still swivelling back to look at me – his eyes just beginning to widen in fear – slash his throat pretty much from ear to ear with the glass stillete I have been concealing up my right sleeve. (A pretty Venetian thing, Murano, I believe, bought on Bund Street not ten minutes ago.)
The good lord’s earlier alabaster appearance deceived; in fact, he held quite a lot of blood. I ram the stillete into him directly underneath his sternum, just for good measure.
I have not lied, I feel I must point out. As I have already stated, I am indeed attached to the Protection Department (though I may have just constructively dismissed myself, I admit) – it is simply that said Department is concerned with the protection of the Concern’s security, not the protection of individuals. These distinctions matter. Though possibly not here.
Stepping delicately away as Lord Harmyle tries with absolute and indeed near-comical ineffectiveness to staunch the bright blushes of blood pulsing and squirting from his severed arteries, while at the same time seemingly attempting to wheeze a last few bubbling breaths or – who knows? – words through his ruptured windpipe (he doesn’t seem to have noticed there’s a pencil-thin knife protruding from his chest, though perhaps he is just prioritising), I sneeze suddenly and loudly, as though allergic to the scent of blood.
Now that really would be a handicap, in my line of work.
4
A small bird came and sat on my window ledge this morning. I heard it first, then opened my eyes and saw it. It is a fine, clear day in late spring and the air smells of last night’s rain on new leaves. The bird was smaller than my hand, beak to tail; mostly a speckle of two-tone brown with a yellow beak, black legs and white flashes along the leading edges of its wings. It landed facing me, then jumped and turned so that it was facing outwards again, ready to fly off. It rotated and dipped its tiny head to observe me with one black sparkling eye.
Somebody passed the open door of my room, shuffling down the corridor, and the bird flew away. It fell initially, disappearing, then reappeared, performing a series of shallow bounces through the air, fluttering energetically for a few seconds to buoy itself up, then bringing its wings tight into its body so that it resembled a tiny feathery bullet, dipping down like some falling shell on an earth-bound trajectory before deploying its wings again and fluttering busily to gain height once more. I lost sight of it against the bright green shimmer of the trees.
We live in an infinity of infinities, and we reshape our lives with every passing thought and each unconscious action, threading an ever-changing course through the myriad possibilities of existence. I lie here and ponder the events and decisions that led me to this point, the precise sequence of thoughts and actions that ended – for now – with me having nothing more constructive or urgent to do than think about those very eventualities. I’ve never had so much time to think. The bed, the room, the clinic, its setting: all are highly conducive to thinking. They impose a sense of calmness, of things remaining unchanged and yet being reliably maintained, without decay or obvious entropy. I am free to think, not abandoned to rot.
In Detroit I played pinball, in Yokohama pachinko, in Tashkent bagatelle. I found all three games enthralling, fascinated by the randomness that emerged from such highly structured, precisely set-up machinery knocking shining spheres of steel from place to place within a setting where, in the end, gravity always won. The comparison with our own lives is almost too obvious, yet still it gives us an inkling into our fates and what drives us to them. It is only an inkling, because we are submerged within a vastly more complicated environment than the clicking, bouncing steel balls and the pins and bands and buffers and walls they collide with – our course is more like that of a particle within a smoke chamber, subject to Brownian motion, and we are at least nominally possessed of free will – but by reducing, simplifying, it allows us a grasp of something otherwise too great for us to comprehend in the raw.
I was a traveller, a fixer for the Concern. That is what I was, what I made myself into, what I was groomed for and made into by others, what life made me. Across the many worlds I roamed, surfing that blast-front of ever-changing, ever-branching existence, dancing through the spectra of plausible/implausible, hermetic/connected, banal/bizarre, kind/cruel and so on; all the ways that we’d worked out a world or deck of worlds could be judged, evaluated and ranked. (This world, here, is plausible, hermetic, banal, kind. Yours is the same except closer to the cruel end of the relevant spectrum. Quite a lot closer. You had the misfortune to have a singular ancestral Eve and I guess she just wasn’t a very nice person. Blame volcanoes or something.)
Of course, I cannot tell anybody here this, though I have thought to. I could talk to them in my own first language, or even English or French, which were my adopted tongues and operational languages and the chances are high that nobody here would understand a solitary word I said, but that would be foolish. It would be an indulgence, and I am not sure that I can afford even so modest a one. I have even been reluctant to think about my past life until this point, which is now starting to seem almost a superstition.
At some point I suppose I will have to.
I wish the little bird would come back.