“There there, dearest,” Mrs Siankung said, patting her arm. She glanced back at Madame d’Ortolan.
“Noo,” Bisquitine intoned in her deep, masculine-sounding voice. “But quate appy to use this poor damaged creatchah for your own dimmed ignoble ends, midim. Ain’t dat de trute!”
“Bisq, shh!”
“Poor damaged creatchah, poor damaged creatchah…”
They had climbed almost to the summit of the Rialto, the crowds growing ever thicker and more chaotic. Madame d’Ortolan grasped Mrs Siankung’s arm. “Is he here?”
Bisquitine stopped suddenly, did a little dance and with one arm straight out pointing said triumphantly, “Bingo! Bandits ahoy, chumlets! Thar she blows!”
So I’m standing here at the very top of the very middle bit of the Rialto in Venice, feeling like a bit of a muppet and wondering what the chances are that this is some gigantic long-winded, long-game wind-up. (Except it can’t be, can it? All that monthis as standard instruction ey over the years was real enough, and the box Mrs M sent and Fred asked me to bring didn’t show up in my hand luggage when I went through Heathrow security, did it? Sailed past.) But anyway, that isn’t stopping me from getting that What-the-fuck-am-I-doing-here? feeling, even though, yes, it’s all very lovely in a sunny, chocolate-boxy, can’t-move-for-bleedin-tourists kind of a way, and here I go having to step away from the very top of the very centre bit yet again because yet another group of Japanese or Chinese or whatever tourists want to take a photograph of one of them standing at exactly that point, when this little bunch of frankly not very well dressed people come marching up the steps from the opposite direction I arrived from.
There’s a mousy bint in a white dressing gown in the middle of them, hair straggling everywhere, muttering to herself. Proper nutter. Then she sees me and sort of jogs on the spot and points and blabbers something, just as I feel a hand on my elbow, cupping it like a brandy glass but I don’t know which way to look because this lot with the lady in white at their centre are all fucking looking at me now and starting up the slope towards me while the person behind me holding my elbow says quietly, “Adrian? I’m Fred.”
Adrian turns to me and his expression and body language changes instantly. “Tem, my darling man,” he says.
I stare at him, then look beyond him to where the others are, the small group intermittently visible through the swirl of people coming and going and chattering and laughing on the bridge. This group includes Madame d’Ortolan, Professore Loscelles and the frightening weirdness of the presence that has been blocking my new-found abilities for the last half-hour. Except she isn’t blocking them any more. Not since the instant that somebody different stepped into Adrian ’s shoes.
The approaching group is six or seven metres away, hurrying raggedly towards us.
“Tem, my love,” Adrian says. “I believe you’re free to do something now. I think you’d better do it. Leave Madame d’O. I need to talk to her.”
I can’t approach the girl’s mind. The rest – the people who attend her, the Prof, the muscle boys and the specialist adepts, including a guy called Kleist who’s hurrying towards the group from the street behind – them I can work with. They all become convinced they really are tourists and just wander off to look at the lovely views. I work the same trick with the rest of the intervention teams, all of whom had been ordered to about-turn and are in the process of converging on the Rialto. The group in the launch – currently exceeding the speed limit back up the Grand Canal to a wavelike chorus of shouts and horns, and almost at the Rialto – unanimously decide to visit Burano for ice creams, though they’ll be pulled over by a police launch near the railway station a few minutes later anyway.
Meanwhile, all l’Expédience people who were carrying weapons have picked them out of their pockets with looks of puzzled distaste and, holding them by thumb and finger, disposed of them. Four Tasers and six handguns have splashed into canals, to join all the other secrets the waves have hidden over the centuries. The whole fragre of the locality relaxes distinctly.
For a few moments, Madame d’Ortolan is left bewildered. Then she starts shouting furiously at her people as they saunter away wide-eyed, smiling, ignoring her. “Mr Kleist! Loscelles! Mr Kleist!”
Only Bisquitine remains unaffected, looking bemused as the people around her disperse. “Rum to-do,” she muses, and picks her nose. “Business elsewhere, Mr Rumblebunk, I’ll be bound.”
So I have time to ask Adrian, “Mrs M?”
She makes Adrian bow. “Indeed. Hello, Tem. Glad you jumped the way you did. Welcome aboard.”
“You can do this? Flit to somebody who’s already been transitioned?”
She spreads Adrian ’s arms, “Patently. Well, when it was me who popped their transitioning cherry, anyway. Good trick, eh? I’ve been developing my talents. So have you, obviously. Congratulations.”
“The people on the list?”
“Safe. I got to all of them first.” She winks at me. “It’ll cost ya.”
“And what now?”
“I’m afraid you have to go, my love.” She feels inside the jacket, pulls out the box that Adrian brought from London and gives it to me. “Take this and get well away, Tem. I mean, well away, untraceably distant.” She glances round to see Madame d’Ortolan looking undecided, then, with a word and a nod to the girl in the white robe, start towards us again. She turns back. “No matter what happens here, you need to disappear. Whoever controls the Concern, even if it’s the good guys, chances are they’ll want to find you and take your mind to bits to find out how you can flit without septus. Or they’ll just kill you.” She smiles, nods at the box. “Soon you won’t need that.” Again, she glances briefly towards Madame d’Ortolan, who is having to push a party of laughing Chinese girls out of the way to get to us. “Now go,” she says, closing my fingers round the box. “You’ve done all you can. This is my show now. I hope I see you again. Go.” She places a finger briefly on my lips, then turns away to face Madame d’Ortolan.
The angry-looking woman in the orange velour jumpsuit walks up to the man in the tan jacket, ignoring the jostling crowds and the wash of humanity pressing in from all sides. The girl in the white towelling robe trails vaguely after her, still digging into her nose with the one remaining fingernail she hasn’t broken or cracked in the hours since she found herself in this body. She sighs. “Still hungry,” she mutters. She finds something up her nose and eats it. Success! Chewy and salty.
Madame d’Ortolan stands in front of Mrs Mulverhill, close enough for the veloured breasts and belly of her current incarnation to touch Adrian ’s shirt, open jacket, jeans. She stares into the grey-green eyes.
“Hello, Theodora,” Mrs Mulverhill says, in Adrian ’s pleasantly deep voice. “How’s tricks?” Madame d’Ortolan tries to take Adrian ’s wrists in her hands but finds her own wrists grasped. “I don’t think so, Theodora. Let’s stay here and discuss this like civilised people, shall we?”
“What in the holy fuck are you, Mulverhill?”
“Just a concerned citizen of the Concern, Theodora.” Mrs Mulverhill uses Adrian ’s face to smile over Madame d’Ortolan at the girl in the white robe.
Bisquitine waves back with one finger. “Sui amazaro. Climb ev’ry woman. Ah belong to you, Underground.”
“You hypocritical bitch.”
“Oh, now, Theodora, I’m not the one trying to murder my way to absolute power within the Central Council. You might have noticed your loyalists have gone unharmed.”