‘The man with the dog?’
‘On this occasion, no.’
Invited several times, Vogt always found reason to refuse. He had already expressed misgivings to Lang about her unorthodox approach and was determined not to be drawn into it by visiting her apartment while Cooper was in residence. That, he felt, might bestow the Vogt seal of approval on the arrangement, though in thinking this he was overestimating his importance.
‘According to my colleague, you should presently be held under close arrest in a high security prison.’
‘In leg irons, no doubt.’
‘He doesn’t go that far, but he believes quarantine would be appropriate under the circumstances.’
Cooper was puzzled. BND medics had given her a clean bill of health.
‘I’m not infectious.’
‘He fears your ideology may be. Given free access to them, you might infect other prisoners, convert new recruits to the faith from the ranks of the simple-minded.’
‘Sounds good to me.’
Lang sighed. Unless Cooper wanted to martyr herself, she should learn to keep it zipped.
‘He is also aware that certain individuals of psychopathic tendency will seize on any cause, however dubious, to exterminate as many of their fellow human beings as possible. We might say that in offering such people your current world view, you are handing them a flame which they will happily hold to the nearest fuse.’
There was something in this, and Werner had considered taking his concerns to a higher level. But there he had a problem. Fearing that his former boss was losing it completely, he’d already taken this route with Klein. Singing bowls were one thing, transmission meditation at the Ukrainian Cultural Centre was something else again. But if he now expressed concern about Lang as well, he would come across as a serial complainer intent on undermining his superiors, which would do his career no good at all. For the time being, Lang was safe.
Sitting in her kitchen, Cooper was struck by the numerous pots occupying its surfaces, most of them containing plants, many of them herbs and, she was pleased to note, all of them ceramic. Only yesterday she’d moved a plant from a chair just to sit down – a plant in progress, whatever that meant. Cooper was beginning to think that Lang’s surface disorder, far from being a front, was an accurate reflection of her mental process.
‘You’re going for rye bread and cheese this morning, I see.’
She was into her first mouthful when she noticed under the marmalade jar a dog-eared printout of a paper she’d published two years before. Lang had been doing her homework.
‘So,’ Lang said, ‘you’re big on consilience.’
In Cooper’s opinion, few would quarrel with the desire to build bridges between art and science.
‘Ah, yes,’ Lang agreed, ‘a function of your desire to be holistic in all things.’
Although Lang said it without a visible curl of the lip, Cooper believed her intention was sarcastic and replied in the defensive, a mood not recognised in the grammars.
‘Nothing wrong with that.’
‘So what’s your take on love?’
What sort of a question was that!
‘Excuse me?’
‘Someone said – Marlene Dietrich maybe, the Pope – that love encompasses everything. It doesn’t get more holistic than that.’
Cooper rolled her eyes towards the ceiling, noting, as she did, marks which she took to be organic in origin, possibly from plants breathing out or whatever it was they did in the night.
‘You doubt it?’
‘I do.’
‘But Katarine, you were married once.’
‘Yes.’
‘And no doubt you married out of love.’
Looking back, she wondered if that was true. She’d liked him well enough and there had been a physical attraction. But though she’d succumbed to it then, she now believed that physical attraction, though it had a function, had no meaning whatsoever. At root, it was a trick played by Mother Nature on a species which, unlike any other, could follow the moves and therefore choose to stop playing the game.
This was a view she’d arrived at on her own account but later came across in Schopenhauer with whom, in a flurry of grateful recognition, she’d signed up to at once. What a man, she’d said at the time: a sentiment which had not since crossed her lips. If she ever had the chance, she would welcome a quiet word with Mother Nature, pointing out that successful though her cunning plan had been for homo sapiens in his early years, it was backfiring so badly now that it endangered the planet itself, presumably not what She’d intended.
‘And you, Frau Lang, you never married?’
‘What gives you that idea? I married. I’m married still.’
Cooper was amazed. She’d seen no sign of the apartment being occupied by anyone else, not so much as an alien toothbrush or size ten slippers under the bed. And Lang didn’t wear a ring.
‘Klaus. He’s a dentist, believe it or not, with a place of his own. We like it that way, though we meet from time to time.’
‘For sex.’
‘More for companionship these days, and to exchange notes on the state of the world.’
‘Which you agree is overpopulated.’
‘Certainly. And like you I have not contributed to the problem by burdening it with children of my own.’
Well, that was something, Cooper thought, before Lang moved on.
‘A subject I’ve been thinking about since I met you, at a purely speculative level. You don’t mind?’
‘Go for it, Frau Lang, I’m eating your bread and cheese.’
As the days passed, Lang detected an increasingly condescending tone: her guest was feeling superior to her, an error likely to help when it came to flushing her out.
‘Okay, well, I’ve met many people who are fluent in a second language but you’re a first for me, a genuine bilingual.’
‘An accident of birth cannot be considered an accomplishment.’
‘True,’ what modesty was here, ‘but it may well confer an advantage over the rest of us nonetheless. A language,’ she continued, ‘might be thought of as a lens through which we view the world.’
‘I’ve heard it said.’
‘Well, that matters, doesn’t it, because how we understand the world will depend on how we see it. To put it another way, every language comes with its own unique conceptual framework whether the speaker is aware of it or not. For example,’ she added, in an apparently innocent afterthought, ‘speakers of German and Ainu will see the world through different eyes.’
This was too much for Cooper. So Lang had read an article on the subject; hardly a substitute for scholarly research. She would surely have been better employed confining herself to her needles. As far as she could see, and she had looked, there wasn’t a single book in the apartment. Lang’s reading matter was restricted to newspapers and magazines. At the same time, she knew that her reference to Ainu wasn’t an accident: Lang had read her exchanges with Saito and wanted her to know that.
Her plate empty again and wanting to shut the topic down, Cooper’s eye wandered back to the smoked cheese.
‘I can’t comment on that, I’m afraid. I’ve never studied linguistics.’
Fair enough, but why this emphasis on study? Here she was, a living, breathing example: all she needed to do was interrogate her own experience. The fact that this hadn’t occurred to her suggested a dangerous dissociation between thought and feeling. She would run this idea past Barbara Grenzenlos when their paths next crossed.
‘Neither have I.’
‘In that case, I have to wonder where you’re going with this.’
‘Okay, since you ask… when it comes to the human population, you’ve reached the same bleak conclusion in both of your languages. I find that surprising when only one of them has given us the concept
of a final solution.’
Cooper put down her herbal tea with a clatter. What was wrong with this woman? How many ways would she find to insult her?
‘You can’t be serious. You’re actually comparing me with Adolf Hitler!’
Lang was getting somewhere at last.
‘He murdered millions; you hope to do the same.’
60
Though Mathieson was getting long in the tooth, he knew his surveillance techniques and the relative costs of each. Physical tails of the suspect he avoided whenever possible. Too expensive. Tracking was a different matter. The younger colleagues he thought of, depending on the direction of the wind, either as experts or anoraks, monitored calls, text messages, emails, withdrawals at ATMs, use of credit cards and, in addition to all of these, CCTV cameras in retail outlets, hospitals, transport hubs and major routes.
It often seemed to him that these young operatives were happier communing with technology than other people. He didn’t envy them one bit, expecting that as the years passed, most of what they did would become so automated they’d end up on the street, replaced by algorithms they’d dreamt up themselves. In serious cases, they activated links to metal friends in the sky, their eyes and ears in low earth orbit. But in this case, though they were tracking but a single young woman, they had a problem: Saito was well aware of the tools in their box and adept at evading them.
On leaving Rafael Munoz, she’d gone to the nearest Bank of America and withdrawn a large sum of money. She knew the transaction would be captured on video, but so it would have been at an ATM with its daily withdrawal limit. The money secure in her belt, she’d set off on the last stage of her journey.
Mathieson and his team had noted both the withdrawal and its size.
‘She won’t need plastic for a while so all we can do right now is await her next move. Sometime soon she’ll make one. Book a cab or whatever.’
But on her way downtown, Saito had visited a retail outlet where she bought the cheapest cell phone they had and a PAYG SIM. And she had no need of an app to book her own feet or pay for them either on her walk to Skid Row.
‘We should have hit the bank when she was taking out the money.’
In theory, Breitenbach was right, but Mathieson knew that hadn’t been an option.
‘We wouldn’t have got there in time. She’ll reappear. They always do.’
Yet in the two days Saito guested with Ofelia and T-Bone, there hadn’t been the ghost of a flicker; the woman was totally off grid.
‘I blame Herschel J Wood.’
Mathieson was thinking aloud when he said this, but Breitenbach heard him.
‘Who?’
And a man they knew nothing about hadn’t helped much either: Heitor del Rio, due at the cash and carry. They couldn’t know she’d paid him to take her to the airport on his way. Cash in hand doesn’t show. Ofelia was sad to see her go but it couldn’t be helped, and she’d given her fifty dollars.
‘Get T-Bone a steak.’
Ofelia doubted whether, despite his name, his teeth could cope with steak but thanked her anyway. This Japanese girl still came across as strange, not a person you could hope to know. But she liked her. Whatever it was, and she surely had one, her secret was safe with her.
When del Rio dropped her off with what, by his uncompromising standards, came close to a smile, she thanked him and made for Terminal 7 where, as Mathieson and his team later discovered, she bought writing paper, envelopes, two sandwiches and two bottled waters.
‘Water. Smart choice,’ Mathieson said when they caught up with this transaction. ‘No danger of dehydration, even in this heat, and unlike coffee it doesn’t go cold.’
‘As her trail most assuredly has.’ Breitenbach could be dry when she liked.
As a regular traveller, Saito knew her way about and headed straight for Gate 71B. With its faux leather benches, this was a haven of repose because, having no armrests, she could stretch out for a nap when the need arose. But dropping off was easier said than done. With constant public service announcements, sleep didn’t come easily to anyone lacking earplugs, and she remembered with regret her recent review of high-end noise-cancelling headphones, still lying where she’d left them on a shelf in the apartment she could never visit again.
61
Alone in a crowd, Saito, like everyone else, occupied the centre of her own circle. As she watched the constant coming and going revolve around her in the terminal, her thoughts settled on her mother. An unwelcome development. Mrs Saito had hoped to match her with a suitable young man, but the only factors of interest to her were the candidate’s social standing and his ability to provide. Whether the couple might be temperamentally suited was of marginal importance. Far from being a loss to the world, her mother’s death would leave it a better place.
Should she point this out in her farewell note? Just because it was true, it didn’t follow that she should. A young couple settled down beside her. They couldn’t have come closer to each other without stripping off. With a twinge of distaste, she returned to her letter, only to find she’d made a decision she would have much preferred to make for herself – at the conscious level, the level of total control. Her mother no longer existed, not for her. The letter would be addressed only to her father, a decent man, sad but well intentioned. Whatever you may hear about me, Father, know that everything I did was for the best. She hoped he would understand.
Apart from waking as stiff as a board, she’d survived the night without incident. The bench had served its porpoise, as Munoz would have it, but couldn’t come close to her futon. After a cookie washed down with bottled water, the note to her father complete, she slid it into an envelope and addressed it neatly in English and Japanese. Then she considered which of the two remaining communications to start on next. Not so much the existential agony of choice but a subject for reasoned analysis.
Knowing exactly what she wanted to say, she began her justification to the world, hampered only by the need to pick out each letter one by one on her phone’s virtual keyboard. A Hermes 3000 it was not, let alone a laptop. But since it must leave a permanent mark on the world, this message should be capable of instant transmission, the moment she touched SEND, incapable of suppression by the authorities or anyone else.
Saito watched with relief as the young couple checked the nearest departure board, grabbed their suitcases and wheeled them into the distance. Despite the heat outside, the old lady who replaced them wore a colourful felt hat with two pins keeping it in place. Probably antique, their mother of pearl ends glinted as she moved even in the washed-out lighting of the terminal. Perhaps she feared the ventilation system would disturb it, but more likely she was simply a creature of habit. Saito was drawn to her. No longer interested in impressing anyone, she seemed reassuringly authentic. But for Saito it was the pins which swung it, reminding her of the kanzashi she’d used to disable the revolting individual who’d defiled her apartment by attacking her in it.
‘Good morning,’ the lady said with a smile. ‘I’m Agnieszka.’
She was returning from a visit to her niece, whose ambition was to make it big in the theatre. Since talent alone wasn’t enough these days, her aunt didn’t hold out much hope, but she encouraged her anyway. If her family didn’t, who would?
‘So what do you do, dear?’
‘I work in IT.’
‘Oh dear, a closed book to me.’
‘Some books aren’t worth opening,’ Saito said, ‘especially those we write ourselves.’
‘An oriental saying?’
Saito smiled. ‘Just what I think.’
And it was, until she remembered what she was writing now.
Noticing that Saito had been pecking out letters on her phone, Agnieszka apologised for disturbing her and busied herself with papers from her handbag. But after ten minutes she spoke again.
‘Would you
mind keeping an eye on my things while I visit the nearest oasis?’
And so she found herself in charge of Agnieszka’s carpet bag, embroidered with flowers, not for ten but for twenty minutes, in which time she completed her argument, though not in the polished prose she’d have attempted on her laptop. But how elegant was it that the human race was polluting the planet to extinction; what was so polished about that! Her analysis ended with the only possible solution: a massive reduction in population. For fear of being discounted as too extreme, she withheld her preferred option – total extinction.
Satisfied with her effort, she sent it to the several outlets she had in mind: the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the Los Angeles Times, the Hokkaido Shimbun, and at once felt a wave of relief. Her effort was nearly over, one last letter to write.
In this she was hindered by members of a college football team vying with each other to raise the stakes in off-colour jokes. Their matching gear, yellow, red and black, had probably cost a fortune. Saito wasn’t into jokes, regarding them as shorts burst of words from which all meaning had been removed. Not, she thought wryly, that there was much to start with.
When Agnieszka resumed her seat, she saw at once how things were and indicated as much with a raised eyebrow.
‘Doesn’t help, does it?’
She was referring to Saito’s writing, but in fact, the team had helped a lot, reinforcing her opinion of a species for which no one with a brain held out any hope. She wondered why this young Japanese girl in short skirt and light denim top was wearing knee-high socks and hiking boots on a hot day like this but didn’t like to ask.
Noticing crumbs on her top, Agnieszka brushed them off.
‘I’d steer clear of the cheese sandwiches; they taste of plastic.’
They probably did. Plastic had penetrated everywhere, even to the depths of the Mariana Trench, and Agnieszka, being old, would have swallowed more than most. An autopsy would no doubt reveal a build-up of micro plastic fragments in her liver and kidneys, gall bladder, pancreas, large and small intestines. And certainly in her brain. All the toxic products of the brain’s inventiveness returned in the end to their point of origin where, with any luck, they’d kill it off. And so the creation disposed of the Creator; from her point of view, a pleasing outcome.
The Ears of a Cat Page 27