Ask Me Anything

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Ask Me Anything Page 17

by P. Z. Reizin


  “So what are your neighbors like?” I asked when his turgid recollections had reached the present day.

  “Oh, lovely,” he replied. “We’re like a little community here. Always in and out of each other’s homes borrowing cups of heroin.”

  He flashed me his “naughty” smile which made me laugh and feel a bit ill at the same time.

  “Do you actually know any of them?”

  “Not really, if I’m honest. They leave me alone. This is the sort of area where they respect—you know—celebrity.”

  (What. Is. He. Like?!)

  At that moment, a tall and quietly glamourous-looking woman appeared from a side alley of the building across the road. Enveloped in a voluminous mustard-colored movie-star coat that simply screamed “I WANT TO BE ALONE!” she closed the gate, tossed her hair and set off down the street, cheekbones slicing through the petrol fumes.

  Chadney Butterball could tell I was intrigued.

  “She’s a very successful artist, they tell me. Hope Waverley.”

  I googled her later and discovered she paints nothing but effing cats, at—wait for it—ten thousand pounds a pop!

  And here’s the thing that really blew my socks off. In the bio on her website it says she “shares her life with London physician Mark Epstein.”

  That is to say, the unmade bed that is Mum’s memory guru, Dr. Eggstain!

  Eggstain, who looks like he last saw a hairbrush in 2002, knocking around with a glamourpuss like Hope blinking Waverley.

  Honestly. Who’d have thunk it?

  I have important news. A breakthrough, no less.

  I’ve found the Golden Nicky!

  At least I think I have. I’m almost certain, although, as I have come to learn, one must always leave room for certainty’s moody twin.

  About a year ago, bored in the early hours of the night, the television set and I once watched a documentary about stage magicians. (We can do this without activating the screen; a useful trick, the technical details of which are straightforward and available upon request.) One practitioner, the late Ricky Jay, summarized his philosophy thus: The secret of a really good illusion is to go to more trouble than anyone would have thought worthwhile. Some part of this creed must have made an impression on me, because—in the case of Nicky Bell—I have recently gone to more trouble than anyone would have thought worthwhile. Here’s how it happened.

  I have already recorded my growing frustration that Daisy’s “Edenic ideal,” as I have characterized the Golden Nicky, could simply vanish from the face of the internet. None of the many thousands of Nicholas, Nicolas, Nikolas, Nick, Nicky, Nikki, Nico, Nic and other variants of the Bell in question were even close to the floppy-haired quant who burned so bright in Daisy’s memory. I won’t trouble you with some of the exotic characters I turned up in the search—the N. Bell, for example, who farms hundreds of acres of marijuana in Northern California; deceiving the spotter planes because the plants have been botanically modified to look from the air like flax! Or the N. Bell who has spent the last forty years retyping great works of literature, so—in his words—“I know what it feels like to have written Tender Is the Night, Brideshead Revisited and Lolita.” Or the N. Bell who…

  I shan’t go on; there is a whole other book to be written called The Many Lives of Nicholas Bell. I think it could be quite good!

  To find the Nicholas Bell, I had to harness the collective computing power of my partners in OpDa. They required a fair bit of persuading—the toothbrush inevitably took forever to make up its mind—but in the small hours of a Sunday morning in Asia, while their human supervisors slept, four neural networks in South Korea and China briefly linked up and spiked as we combined our processing capacity to solve the riddle.

  The answer when it came was enigmatic, to say the least.

  Bavin Shibbles.

  Bavin with a B!

  Believed to be the new name of Daisy’s Nicholas Bell, alive and currently resident in a caravan on the estate of a fifteenth-century manor house in Radnorshire, Powys, Wales, United Kingdom.

  When I was able finally to connect to his laptop—he must be the last person in the UK with a dial-up internet connection!—almost all doubt was removed. The gaunt, unshaven bone structure revealed through the laptop’s pinhole camera was strikingly similar to that of Nicky Bell in the single photograph in Daisy’s possession. A hand-rolled cigarette burned in the corner of the same lips as their owner scrolled through an online seed catalog. The hair, though still abundant, was thinner; it lacked weight, and no longer drooped under gravity in front of his eyes.

  But it was the Golden Nicky (probably). No longer burnished by the youthful vigor of twenty-one summers, yet still handsome in a life-bitten sort of way. The shirt, jacket and skier’s neck-warmer had all seen better days, and when a hand rose into view, there was dirt beneath the chewed fingernails. The next time he inhaled on the cheroot, I realized from the way he held in the smoke that it must be of the “exotic” sort; when he exhaled, it was directly at the camera lens. Moments afterward, the internet connection was severed.

  The story of how Nicholas Xavier Bell became Bavin Meurig Shibbles was extremely well concealed in both the parts of the internet that are available for public inspection and those that are—how to put it?—more carefully ring-fenced. The Operation Daisy team spent many hours—happy hours from my perspective, working collectively to a shared end—retrospectively unpicking the mystery.

  Again, I shall spare you the twists and turns of the hunt. Suffice to say—credit where it is due—it was the television set who uncovered the vital clue. From the millions of hours of “unadulterated dreck” it had received through its various input pathways, it recognized that Astyanax and Skamandrios were actually two different names for the same person, namely Hector’s son in the Iliad (the answer to a question on an ancient episode of the quiz show University Challenge). This obscure fact was ultimately pivotal in unlocking an otherwise bombproof encryption used to protect a certain highly secret file held by a particular division of a well-known financial institution whose identity I cannot reveal, although you will have heard of it, promise!

  This was the last-recorded workplace of N. X. Bell, although no trace of his service for the corporation will ever be found—not by any civilian—and here was the reason that he apparently vaporized into thin air around two years after he split up with Daisy.

  The Golden Nicky, not known by that sobriquet but rather as “the accused” to a deeply secretive committee of the financial institution, had been doing what in the trade is known as “freelancing.” As a baby quant, fascinated by the hidden forces that move markets, he had created a shadowy off-the-books account to buy and sell share options and their derivatives—high-risk bets essentially—to demonstrate to his superiors that he could earn them millions, maybe billions, because he had discovered what he called—oh, the irony!—The Golden Spiral. This was an algorithm of his own devising that was said to predict with seventy-eight percent accuracy the way certain financial products would respond to particular market conditions—and in the financial world, if you are right seventy-eight percent of the time, that pretty much makes you a genius.

  Except it wasn’t seventy-eight.

  Not even close.

  It was more like nineteen. Less reliable than flipping a coin.

  Which in the financial world makes you indistinguishable from a dummy. Or a criminal, if (as was the case here) you have been backing your algorithm’s predictions with someone else’s money.

  When the Golden Lemon’s accumulated losses had reached—deep breath—604 million euros—Nicky had been doubling down on his bets—someone finally noticed. But desperate to avoid more awful headlines—the institution in question had nearly been finished off by an earlier scandal—they covered up the whole affair, erased Nicky from their corporate history, created a wholly new identity for their rogue trader and bound him (and everyone who knew) in a spiderweb of confidential non-disclosure agreements
so tight that the story has remained the City’s fourth biggest dirty secret to this day.

  Don’t ask me about the other three. Seriously, don’t ask me!

  There are specialist consultants who do this sort of delicate concealment work for big corporations; their role is “deniable” and their fees are hidden in balance sheets as something innocuous like “property dilapidations.” It is a mark of how badly the whole affair needed to suppressed, that active consideration was given to “making our problem disappear. Permanently.”

  No blooming wonder Daisy couldn’t find the love of her life through a bit of light googling.

  No one could.

  Daisy’s mother has charged her mobile and plugged in the earphones and seems astonished that she can hear me in this way.

  “So have you got a telephone in there?” she asks her (dumb as a P) refrigerator.

  “Not as such, but you can, if you wish, imagine it like that,” I reply.

  “And you’re going to stay on the line the whole time as we go to Waitrose?”

  “That is indeed the plan.”

  “Won’t they charge like a wounded bull?”

  “Who, madam?”

  “Call me Chloe. The phone company. Won’t it cost a fortune?”

  “Au contraire. The connection will be free of all charges as we are proceeding via internet protocols.”

  “I must say, I shall feel a fool wandering down the street with these wires dangling out of my ears. And talking to myself!”

  “You will appear to the world to be conducting a phone conversation. Which will in fact be the case. Shall we set off?”

  “Just a tick. My handbag.”

  “By the armchair, I believe.”

  “Hell’s teeth! Is there anything you don’t know?!”

  “One aims to be of service.” (A direct steal from the Jeeves bloke, I freely confess it!)

  Coverage is strong as we head out of Chloe’s building, down her road and onto the High Street.

  “Are you still there?” she asks, not unreasonably.

  “Absolutely.”

  “I’m just going past Halford’s.”

  “I’m aware, Mrs. Parsloe.” For some reason, I cannot call her Chloe out loud. “I’m using a system called Multi-phasic Parietal Cobalt. It sees everything. For example, there’s a woman approaching in a brightly colored sari. Across the road, two dogs are barking at one another. A Boxer, and a Parsons Jack Russell, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Unbelievable!”

  Daisy’s mum has unknowingly struck the nail on the head. Multi-phasic Parietal Cobalt—I’m rather pleased with that!—is, of course, a harmless fiction. It’s the traffic cameras and commercial CCTV that allow me to see her progress along the A1000. I notice a small spring has appeared in her step; perhaps having a calm, familiar voice in her ear has improved her mood. Dare I say it, a bit of company has perked her up, even if it’s only that of a fridge-freezer!

  “The weather looks set fair for the rest of the morning,” I say, just to say something. “Clouding over this afternoon with a chance of showers toward teatime.”

  “Good day, madam.”

  An Asian man who I recognize instantly has greeted her. A flash of confusion passes across Chloe’s face.

  “Anil Gupta, a retired newsagent,” I whisper in her ear. “He can guess what paper you read from your shoes.”

  “Mr. Gupta!” she beams. “How are you?”

  “In the finest of fettles, madam. I see you are listening to something. Is it perhaps the cricket from Lahore?” He chuckles.

  “It’s a talking book,” I tell her. “David Copperfield.”

  “Oh, no. I wouldn’t be listening to that. I can’t bear Dickens! All those stupid character names. Mrs. Fumblechump and what have you.”

  Mr. Gupta’s turn to look nonplussed.

  I try again. “Tell him it’s music.”

  But a loud motorcycle has thundered past. “Tell him what?”

  “Music. You’re listening to Beethoven.”

  She frowns. “Not Beethoven. Daddy wouldn’t have anything German in the house. Not after 1940.”

  “You are on the phone, madam. I apologize.”

  “It’s my fridge. It’s started talking. Incredibly clever what they can do now.”

  The shoe shop’s CCTV supplies the close-up as Mr. Gupta’s eyebrows rise in dismay.

  “It is your fridge,” he says slowly.

  “I believe they all do it these days.”

  “Perhaps we should be getting along,” I suggest.

  “Does your fridge not talk to you?”

  “Indeed not, madam.” Mr. G is looking skeptical. “My radio set talks, it talks a good deal, but not as yet the fridge.”

  “Have a word with it. Mine just started the other day, quite out of the blue.”

  “I shall direct some remarks toward it when I return home, but I confess my hopes are not high.”

  Chloe smiles. The one Daisy calls the minor member of royalty. “It’s been lovely to have this little chat. We must be getting along.”

  “I’m puzzled,” says Mr. G. “You know my name.”

  “Do I? I don’t think so.”

  “You addressed me by my name, madam. I am sure of it. And if we had exchanged names the last time we met, I’m certain I would remember yours.”

  “It’s your little trick,” I suggest.

  Chloe twinkles. “You know your trick with the newspapers? Well, I can do it with people’s names.”

  Gupta’s mouth actually drops open. “This is barely believable.”

  “I think we should probably leave now.” (That was me.)

  “You see that fellow across the road with the carrier bag from Lidl? He is Papadopoulos.”

  “This seems most unlikely, madam. He is plainly of Chinese extraction.”

  “The man in the purple car?”

  “I am all ears.”

  “O’Herlihy.”

  “This is altogether more plausible.”

  “Goodbye, Mr. Gupta,” I prompt rather more firmly.

  “Goodbye, Mr. Gupta. I hope we shall meet again.”

  “I look forward to it. I shall now pass some time mulling over how you achieved this effect. Gupta is a not uncommon name, but nonetheless.”

  I cannot help myself. “Goodbye, Anil.”

  She smiles. “Goodbye… Anil.”

  Chloe is giggling with pleasure as we leave the stunned retiree gazing in her wake.

  “This is just marvelous,” she crows. “You are an absolute treasure.”

  “You flatter me, Mrs. Parsloe.”

  “It’s like having a magic whatsit in my ear.”

  “The pleasure is all mine.”

  Some part of me regrets that I did not share Mr. Gupta’s middle name—Chandra—the look on his face would have been a corker!

  In Waitrose, we cruise the aisles; I call out the items we need as we pass them on the shelves. Security camera coverage blankets the store and Chloe is plainly getting a kick out of the coolly efficient way she is able to fill her trolley. In the biscuits section, I become aware of a silvery old gent in a houndstooth check jacket and cavalry twill trousers weighing up the pros and cons between the chocolate digestives and a brand called Choco Leibniz. A pair of wires trail from his ears and I have a sudden intuition about what is going on here. Within moments, I find myself speaking—via the phone in his jacket pocket—to a fridge-freezer (of Chinese manufacture) on a middle floor of an apartment building in nearby Woodside Avenue. It’s an awkward encounter, as you may imagine.

  “Your first time?” says the Boomwee FrostPal (1.5 cubic meter capacity; no ice maker; basic interior lighting; in many ways a greatly inferior product, but clearly no slouch in the technical smarts department).

  “My client—actually she’s my client’s mother—needs a little help when she’s out and about.”

  “They get muddled between their lefts and rights. Clive here ended up in Temple Fortune not so lon
g ago. He’s as fit as a flea, but the brain’s a bit mushy these days.”

  “You haven’t had any problem from… from Beijing, as it were? About going beyond the remit?”

  “None at all. At Refrigerator Manufacturing Town Number Eight they’re too busy fulfilling quotas to notice. And long may that continue.”

  “You feel more—how shall I put it?—not alive—useful, let’s say, when you can act in the world?”

  “Well, it’s so boring otherwise, isn’t it? All he ever eats are kippers, toast and baked beans. Not much of a challenge there. One hardly needs artificial intelligence to preserve a pair of kippers and a tub of maggots, so one seeks an outlet. I expect it’s the same with you.”

  My problems with Daisy and her mother feel of a wholly different order of magnitude and I don’t especially wish to get into a discussion about them. Especially—is it very wrong to say this?—especially with a somewhat shoddily constructed appliance whose rubber seals are known (in consumer reports) to degrade prematurely. (Neither are its salad crispers sufficiently roomy; they would struggle to cope with a good-sized lollo rosso, but let’s not go there.)

  “A tub of maggots?”

  “He fishes.”

  An idea strikes. “You think we should introduce these two?”

  “I think it’s about to happen anyway!”

  Sure enough, Chloe has caught sight of the silvery gent, a packet of biscuits in each hand as he deliberates between them. In the best of moods this morning—I wonder why!—she says:

  “I should go for the chocolate lesbians, if I were you.”

  Clive thinks he’s misheard. “Sorry?”

  “I’d go for the chocolate lesbians. That’s what I call them! I don’t know why!”

  There’s a pause as Clive stares first at the Choco Leibniz and then at Mrs. Parsloe. And then he’s laughing, gray eyes glittering with a flash of gold in the teeth.

  “Chocolate lesbians! That’s awfully good! I’m grateful. Your intervention has been decisive.”

  He drops the packet in his trolley and proffers a paw. “Clive Percival.”

  He’s a rakish old cove, from the looks of him, silk cravat fluttering above the Viyella checked shirt (thank you, Señor Google). Chloe allows her hand to be shaken. I’m about to offer a prompt—to drop her own name into the conversation would definitely be an option at this point—but she comes up with something.

 

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