Magic

by Audrey Niffenegger

  Rakely was there, ready for us, on Monday morning. He looked good; rested, serious and attentive. He was wearing, it seemed to me, a better suit than usual. He met with me, Jeffers and the PM, and we chatted about stuff, just this and that. We all knew it was a job interview. It was the PM’s way of doing it. We went back and forth on Health, and Europe, and kept coming back to the Freight Tariff Act.

  Rakely suddenly asked if the PM had fully considered the effect of union support on the vote. The PM was surprised. The unions was not an angle we usually looked at with any real enthusiasm. If nothing else, the composition of our party was not determined by direct union interests the way the opposition’s was.

  It looked like a terrible mis-step. It made Rakely seem a little naive even to bring it up and waste everybody’s time. But he began to stress that we were, as usual perhaps, ignoring the possibility of finding friends where none usually existed. He delicately mentioned the unmentionable, which was that we were in a very dark place, with the polls at an all-time low, and that we really needed a strong result to take the sun out of our eyes. Then he mentioned the union interest in certain aspects of the Health Bill, aspects that, in the grand scheme of things, would be painless sacrifices to make.

  He got the PM’s interest. Damn it, he got my interest. What he was proposing, informally, was that the Transport and General Workers Union, Collatera (which had been the TBFGU), and the Manufacturer’s Union would all come across if we offered them concessions on Health when it came up. They couldn’t directly affect the Commons vote, of course, but they could make it very plain to Her Majesty’s Opposition how much the withdrawal of their support over the Tariff Act would hurt in the months to come.

  I don’t think we really believed it. So he took us into a side office. He had them waiting on Skype: Murray from the Transport and General, Richardson from Collatera, Patanjali from the MDMU, and even Colin Babcock from the IGMT. It was done and done in about five minutes.

  We took the vote, of course. A huge climb down for the Opposition. A rout. The Freight Tariff Act went straight through the House. I have never seen so many stunned and unhappy faces sitting across from me.

  But even before the vote, the PM took me to one side. He said to me, “Charles, it’s Rakely. Do what you need to do.”

  So I did. We switched Forster to Health at the last minute, put McKenzie out to Northern Island, and made room for Rakely by securing for Bob Thomas a very prestigious position with the European Commission. Which, in those days, was as good as saying he was going to spend more time with his family.

  Rakely didn’t disappoint. He led the charge on Health, got it through on the second reading, then took the lead on Fiscal Policy and the fall-out from the Pepper Report. It was a joy to watch, I have to admit. Suddenly, we weren’t so much thinking about Home Secretary by Christmas, we were thinking Deputy Leader by the time the Party Conference came round.

  Forster took it badly, as you might imagine. He’d waited so patiently for his moment to come, and now it had been snatched from him. He was sour. We tried to make something of Health, but the big job there was already done, and besides, his heart wasn’t in it. He made noises about the Treasury, which I suppose might have been a reasonable consolation, but we didn’t want to rock the boat. Things were turning, but it was still choppy. The scandals were still rumbling around the red tops.

  Rakely they liked though. He sort of won them over a little, enough so they could tease him but seem affectionate. I also remember a cartoon appearing in the FT around that time, one by Pax, which showed a triumphant Rakely dressed as Aleister bloody Crowley or something, sacrificing a buxom virgin in Parliament Square in exchange for Faustian advancement. In the background, there was Forster as an alley cat, sniffing around some bins marked ‘Cabinet scraps’.

  I must say I really admired the way Rakely grew into the job. He developed a really deft, light touch with things that I had imagined him incapable of. He just mixed well, and in return, he got results. He played an absolute blinder in support of the PM at the G8 towards the end of that year, and then surpassed himself on both the Amenities Bill and the Public Access Commission. He also proved pretty much indispensable when the Bradbury Report went to committee. Everybody, of course, remembers his speech to the 1922 Committee, which was so hilariously funny, and which left Godbridge spitting feathers, and they still, to this day, replay that segment on Newsnight when he patiently pointed out all the factual errors in that Peston fellow’s analysis of the Banking Regulation Policy. The PM started to refer to him as his ‘spin bowler’.

  It was a little while after Hardiman’s funeral in March the following year that I received the book in the post. It came to my office. It was the paperback of a work called The White Cockerel, published by some American university. It was really rather an ugly thing, with poor typography and an awful cover. I gave it a look, and realised it was an annotated, academic edition of what was, allegedly, an Italian text from about 1625. It was part political treatise, and part grimoire. I mean, it was absurd stuff. The package was unmarked, but it wasn’t hard to work out where it had come from, especially because of the copy of that Pax cartoon tucked inside the cover. It was, all-in-all, a fairly childish exercise.

  I wanted to ignore it, simply leave it alone, but Forster was growing increasingly erratic, and the last thing the party needed was a time bomb like him holing us below the waterline in front of the Interest Rate debate. So I went to see him, for a quiet chat, to set him straight and get him back on-side. The man was clearly so afflicted by bitterness he was making poor choices. I had to calm him down. There were still some prizes for him to win, in time, provided he didn’t make an utter embarrassment of himself.

  He was in a poor mood, positively whiney. I found it all a bit awkward, to be plain about it. He wouldn’t let it go, not at all. He kept on about Rakely. The resentment was palpable. He’d lost that statesman-like gloss entirely. I began to wonder what we’d ever seen in him. He blamed me for his woes. He blamed everyone.

  He blamed Rakely.

  I asked him what he’d been playing at with the stupid book. He looked at me blankly, as though I hadn’t understood. He started to tell me about it, in all seriousness.

  “That’s not the real thing, Charles,” he said. “Obviously it isn’t. I couldn’t get my hands on that, not even a copy. That’s just some shitty college edition, entirely bowdlerised and full of fundamental errors. I was just trying to show you what I meant.”

  “And what did you mean, Andrew?” I asked him.

  “Obviously, that’s how he’s doing it. That’s how he’s doing it all.”

  “Doing what?”

  I think he realised that I wasn’t playing ball. He started to tell me about The White Cockerel. He said it had been written by an Italian courtier, called Lucci, at the Dieci Di Liberta e Pace. He’d been the man who pulled Machiavelli’s strings.

  “No one pulled Machiavelli’s strings,” I said to that.

  “That’s the point,” Forster replied. “That’s how good Lucci was. No one ever saw him behind the curtain.”

  “Andrew, I really don’t think you understand who Machiavelli was,” I said.

  He banged on regardless, and then claimed that the book, and Lucci, had also been a guiding influence behind the rise of some of Henry VIII’s key appointments, and had played a significant power-broking role during the Stuart Succession. I finally had to call time on the whole conversation.

  “For God’s sake, Andrew,” I said.

  “It’s all there, in the book,” he declared. “Of course, the commentary in that edition fudges the details a little, especially the specific content and language of the ritual practices. I mean, the rites are the really potent stuff, the stuff that actually influences situations and the course of events. But it’s all the basic facts.”

  “Oh Christ,” I said. “These aren’t facts at all, Andrew. This is some kind of sub-Dan Brown bullshit. This is, what? A spell book for securin
g political advancement? How to achieve power through magic?”

  “Don’t make it sound so ridiculous!” he protested.

  “I don’t have to. Oh, Andrew, please. Please. Devil worship and black magic? Satanic pacts–”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Whatever. If you’re trying to start a rumour that Rakely only got where he did thanks to magical rites, then you’re the one who’s going to look pretty bloody daft. Come on, this is all bullshit.”

  “What if it isn’t?”

  “Okay, quite apart from the various geographical issues involved, don’t you think it’s unlikely one man could have coordinated the careers of... what was it again? Wolsey, Cromwell, and James 1st and... and... Machiavelli? This Lucci chap would have had to be a very old man.”

  “He wasn’t always called Lucci,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I mean, he went on and on. He was different people,” said Forster, but his voice was dropping and he sounded less convinced. “He used different names. Wore faces. I think the rites allowed him to live several lives–”

  “You’re making yourself look ludicrous, Andrew, you really are. A senior cabinet minister can’t be seen to be thinking like this. Maybe you need a break. A rest. Perhaps we can move things around a little after the recess.”

  He glared at me, as if I’d thrown him over, but I think he knew how foolish he looked.

  “You should ask about Jenny Carr,” he said, then stopped.

  I asked him what he meant, but he refused to be drawn, so I said a few encouraging words, expressed a keen desire to see him keep a lid on it, and told him to come to me the moment he felt he couldn’t.

  He said he would. I left it at that. The next time I saw the PM, I casually mentioned we might have to think about getting someone new at Health. He told me he’d already been thinking the same thing.

  And I assumed that was that.

  Over the summer, Julia Strachan from Welfare got in touch and said that she’d taken a few odd questions from a journalist at some event, and did I know anything. She said it felt like someone might be briefing against Rakely. I told her I’d look into it, but before I got a chance Ben Worden from the Times came to me. I liked Ben. He could be an absolute stinker, but he had a very nice habit of checking sources. He didn’t like to run something if it was going to cause a mess for no reason. He said he’d been given a story, and he wanted to sound me out before he went anywhere with it. He said it was about a girl called Jenny Carr. I asked him where he’d got the story from, and he politely declined to tell me, but I knew full well it was bloody Andrew Forster. I thanked Ben for having the courtesy to come to me, and told him I’d look at it and get back to him, but I warned him it was probably an awful lot of smoke damage and zero flammable content. I said I could guess who his un-named source was, and if I was right we were talking about a man who was becoming a liability because of his desperation to grind axes.

  Ben nodded. He’d imagined it was something like that. He left it with me.

  I gave it all a look. Within about two hours, I have to say, it had given me a little wobble. I was astonished that something like this could have remained essentially invisible for nearly three years. I went to see Rakely about it. I wanted to get it straight.

  “I want you to tell me about Jenny Carr,” I said to him. He he had this funny thing he did with his upper lip when he was slightly uncomfortable, sort of folding it in under his bottom lip for a second. I knew the moment I saw him do that I’d got hold of something. But he kept his cool.

  Jenny Carr had been his PA the first time he ran for Parliament. A nice, efficient girl. She’d lived in St John’s Wood. She’d pretty much been with him from his selection all the way to the by-election.

  She’d died about a month before he’d made his maiden speech. She’d been killed at her flat. The police had suspected a burglary gone wrong. Someone had broken in, not expecting to find her there, and then stabbed her eight times with a knife or possibly a sharpened screwdriver. Her body had been discovered in the living room of her home by a friend. No one had ever been arrested in connection with the murder.

  It was awful, and clearly he didn’t want to talk about it. But there were odd things about it. According to the police report, which Ben Worden had given me a copy of, there had been no evidence of a break-in or a struggle. The front door of the flat was unlocked, as if she’d let someone in, someone she knew, someone she hadn’t had any reason to be wary of. Nothing had been taken. The alternative theory, that it wasn’t a burglary but in fact a sexually motivated crime, was undermined by a lack of forensic evidence. There was no sign of sexual contact at all, not even any removal or adjustment of clothing or a pose that might suggest some sexual motivation or behaviour. The coroner’s report went so far as to say she was virgo intacta, in a prim fashion that seemed to suggest it was far more unlikely for an attractive twenty-four-year-old woman to be a virgin than it was for her to be murdered.

  Strangest of all, as I said to Rakely, was the fact that we didn’t know anything at all about it.

  He was very frank in his reply. He told me that the whole thing had been kept quiet for the sake of the girl’s parents, who were, understandably, devastated, and had simply refused to allow the memory of their beloved daughter to become a sordid item in the news cycle. Though he’d keenly supported the police investigation, he’d gone along with the parents’ wishes. He freely admitted to me that there had been a significant element of self-interest. No matter what, his association with a murdered young woman would have probably crippled his political career right from the get-go. The alternative, which he described as being even more distasteful, would have been to deal with it openly, and risk being seen as trying to make political capital out of her death. The sympathy vote, he said. He didn’t want that. He hadn’t wanted that to be her legacy.

  He’d just wanted it all to stay off the front page, and for her family to be left in peace. He’d had nothing whatsoever to do with her death, but they had gone out, briefly, when they’d first met, and he knew the press would take hold of anything and turn it into something lurid.

  “Well, now someone’s got it,” I said. I told him who, and I told him how. I said I’d have a word with Ben Worden. I told him I couldn’t stop Worden running with it, but that I’d try to appeal to his better judgement and get him to see it was a non-story that could only, irresponsibly, do damage to the government and the country. You have to remember, the party was in fine form just then, pretty much due to Rakely’s amazing run, and we were going into an election year.

  Before I left, on a whim really, I asked Rakely if he knew anything about a book called The White Cockerel.

  “I don’t know, Charles,” he said. “What’s that?”

  I said never mind. But I noticed he did the thing with his lip again.

  I spoke to Ben Worden, and he told me he’d probably drop it anyway. After that, we really just yanked and cranked towards the election. The PM’s health issues came out, which was a total shock. There’d been no record of Alzheimer’s in his family. We accelerated the process of elevating Rakely. We wanted to go into the election with a leader who would win it convincingly.

  And we did, in the end, as it turned out.

  The plane crash was just awful. Of course it was. It was a terrible blow that I didn’t think the party would survive, but I have to say I think we scored a little bit of that ghastly sympathy vote in the end. The PM even offered to stay on, but we had his exit strategy in place, and besides, the public already knew he was ill.

  That crash though. I mean, really. Just a routine flight back from the Strasbourg Summit. Rakely, Doug Barney and Eileen Clemmens, plus their aides and several members of the press. Including, and I always remark on this, Ben Worden. The Civil Aviation Authority never did work out what happened to those engines.

  After the election, the landslide, I went to see the PM. The new PM, I should say. He was in very fine form. I’l
l freely admit it. He’d turned things around in the most spectacular way. It was admirable. Hats off to him. He’d really stepped up in our hour of need.

  Anyway, we were having a quiet chat over a good malt, and he said this thing to me. I remember it very clearly.

  He said, “Charles, sometimes you can only get so far. You have to clear the slate. Just clear everything aside. Sometimes things go past a point where they’re useful, and you have to brush them away and start again.”

  It was a very singular thing to say. I felt he was referring to something that only I might know about.

  In a way, he was right. He must have known.

  I looked him straight in the eye, and I said, “By the by, Andrew, I wrote to the librarian at Merton about six weeks ago. I asked her if the college had ever had a book called The White Cockerel in its collection.”

  “Did you indeed?” He laughed, as though I’d brought up some embarrassing gaffe from the past to rag him with.

  “It took about a fortnight, but she rang me back in the end,” I said. “She told me the index suggested that there had been a manuscript of that name in the college library. Seventeenth Century Italian, very fragile. The notes said it was an Italian translation of an earlier Aramaic text, which itself was believed to be a translation of an even earlier work. The manuscript had been in the library at Merton until 1992, at which point it had vanished. She said, sadly, that books were taken from time to time, especially by undergraduates who fancied making a little money on the antiquarian market.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Never mind, Charles. Looks like we don’t actually need it now.”

  Which was an amusing remark, of course.

  “Rakely was up at Merton,” I said. “1991 to 1993.”

  The PM nodded.

  “What do you think of that, Andrew?” I asked.

  He shrugged, and did a funny little thing with his upper lip.