by Greg Chivers
31.
Silas
The question is how much he knows. Glassberg’s expression gives nothing away as he takes a seat behind the viewing gallery’s plain wooden table. A one-way mirror behind him shows the three interrogations of my would-be murderers happening in parallel. It’s an interesting choice of setting; the prisoners’ faces are a triptych of neon-lit misery. In anyone else I would take it as a ploy to unsettle me, confronting me with the assassins, but Glassberg knows me better than that. There will be some other agenda at play here. He sits still, very upright, waiting for me to speak.
‘Well, this is a surprise.’
‘Is it, Silas? For the time being at least, I am still Justice Minister, and this is a police station.’
‘Yes, of course, but this is all a little beneath your pay grade, isn’t it?’
‘I disagree. These men are accused of trying to kill you, a minister of state. The investigation is my number-one priority, and will remain so until its resolution. I assume you’re here to check on progress.’ He looks away from me to study the faces on the other side of the mirror. The accused glass-fitters all look sick, sallow skin sinking into the institutional green of the walls. The officers facing them are deadpan, emotions invisible behind a mask of professional cool, except for one who fidgets, aware of being watched.
‘Actually, no. As you rightly point out, election or no, we still have our day jobs, and I’m chasing up a missing antiquity.’
‘And the trail leads you here?’
He asks the question in the neutral lawyer’s tone he uses in court, but there is no mistaking the intent. I have to be careful now. I can’t evade direct questions; neither can I bluster. He knows something, or he wouldn’t be here. I have to guess how much, and feed it back to him without giving anything away.
‘I’m not sure where it leads ultimately. A name came up in the investigation: Levi Peres. He’s a known criminal, but his regular associates say he’s been missing a couple of days. One of them thought they recognized his jacket in the picture of the bodies in the Gethsemane tunnels.’
His eyebrows rise. ‘Recognized a jacket? That sounds like a long shot.’
I shrug. We both know he’s fishing, but even to acknowledge it would be to give him a small victory. ‘It is, but it’s the only live lead we have in the disappearance of the artefact.’
‘Is this the one with the missing curator? I’d have thought he was your obvious suspect.’
The smile stays on my face in defiance of the irritation coursing through me. He was always going to make the connection, but the timing is inconvenient to say the least. I didn’t want any of this coming out before the election, but of course Sibyl’s thoroughness compelled her to file that damned missing person’s report! The only option now is to lie and hope he doesn’t know enough to spot the inconsistencies.
‘You would think so, wouldn’t you? Unfortunately not. He went missing before we lost the Antikythera Mechanism. He may be involved, but he can’t be directly responsible.’
‘So you think this Peres character is the thief?’
‘As I said, he’s a lead.’
‘Yes, you did, didn’t you? Well, I’ve been here all morning. I’ve not been made aware of any prisoners coming in from Gethsemane, and I think someone would have mentioned it. Have you checked the arrest record?’
‘He’s not on it.’
He takes a deep breath and lets it out in a show of exasperation. ‘Well, I can only suggest you try the morgue. Sorry if that’s unwelcome news. I appreciate it must be awkward for you, having valuable city property disappear, what with the election looming and all. What did you call the thing again?’
‘The Antikythera Mechanism.’
‘That’s a mouthful! Greek, is it?’
‘I believe so.’
Another sigh deflates him. Something about Glassberg is different today. He wears a crooked smile I have never seen, either in his courtroom or out. This talkativeness is unlike him – Amos Glassberg doesn’t do charm. If it’s an attempt to catch me off guard, it’s a clumsy one. No, it must be something else. He turns away from me to look at the tableau framed by the one-way mirror: three innocent men suffering in silence.
‘Here, I don’t want you to have slogged all the way into town for nothing. You should listen in. The questioning’s just getting interesting.’
‘Actually, I was planning to …’
He thumbs one of the buttons on the table slate, and a detective’s voice crackles through the speaker in the wall.
‘How did you know where the Minister for Antiquities would be standing?’
Glassberg raises his eyebrows at the reference to me. The implication is clear. The single question encapsulates the absurdity of the case. A sheet of glass falling from a roof is a haphazard tool for murder, and yet it passes as the culmination of a sophisticated conspiracy to kill a minister of state. Detectives in pressing need of an arrest might usually ignore a little gap in logic, but Glassberg’s presence rules out taking short cuts. Still, I don’t understand why he’s showing me this. It’s uncomfortable, but also reassuring. If this is all he has, well, it amounts to nothing.
The man under interrogation in the centre room shakes his head in response to another question. Perhaps wisely, the accused glass-fitters have all so far chosen the course of silence, but it will be interpreted as fanatical contempt for authority. The doomed men play their parts without even knowing they’ve been scripted.
Shit. They’re not the only ones.
Glassberg looks over and smiles like he heard me thinking. The old bastard is playing for time, covering for something. The weird expressions, the pointless fishing expedition – he was out of his comfort zone but it worked. I must have wasted ten minutes trying to figure out his angle instead of doing what I came here to do.
‘Well, Amos, this has been fascinating. Reassuring to see your men are pulling out all the stops, but I really must go.’
‘Really, I think we’re reaching a critical juncture. You should stay …’ His smile slips. He knows the game’s up.
‘Glad to hear it, but I’m sure you understand, work won’t wait. Best of luck, old chap.’
Chipped paint flakes from the door as it slams behind me. A gaggle of officials cluck around me the instant I leave the room, pestering me with questions, doubtless set on me by Glassberg. It takes a full five minutes to reach the privacy of my limousine. Sybil accepts the connection immediately, but waits for me to speak.
‘Peres was here!’
‘Have you got him?’
‘No. Glassberg was waiting for me.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know, but he was definitely stalling me – the fucking Justice Minister! If he’d tried small talk I’d have rumbled him, but he went straight for the jugular – missing artefacts, inconsistencies in the assassination. He must’ve been buying time for someone else to get Peres out of the building.’
‘Are you sure? That doesn’t sound like Glassberg.’
‘No, but it just happened. Find out who, and tell me where they’re taking him.’
A sharp hiss is the sound of Sybil inhaling. ‘That could be difficult. I’m bringing up the CCTV feeds for the streets surrounding the precinct house now, but cross-referencing to track specific vehicles could take hours when we don’t know what we’re looking for.’
‘We don’t have hours. Get it fucking done or I’ll—’
‘Aha!’
‘What is it? Tell me you’ve found something.’
‘I may have spoken too soon. Precisely four minutes after you entered the precinct house, a distinctive vehicle pulled out of the parking lot and headed west towards Binyanei.’
‘A distinctive vehicle? What do you mean?’
A rectangle of light flashes into existence as the limo’s seat projector activates. Footage from a security camera starts playing. It’s a high angle looking down on the entrance to the precinct house parking lot. A small van nudge
s into the flow of traffic without waiting for a gap. The sides are wholly covered with giant pictures of vegetables.
‘Is that what I think it is? Nobody’s that amateur.’
‘Forgive me, sir, but amateurs generally are. CCTV also shows robed women walking into the precinct house. I don’t think they were attempting to be covert. Shall I send a team to pick them up?’
‘Yes … Wait! No, not yet. This could be politically useful. We do this through official channels. Give an anonymous tip-off to someone friendly who can authorize a police raid on the Mission.’
‘That’ll take time. I thought we were in a hurry?’
‘We know where the thing is now, and think of the story! The Mission will be in the frame for the theft of the Antikythera Mechanism as well as the assassination! We get votes, and we clear ourselves of any lingering suspicion in one fell swoop.’
‘If you say so.’
She cuts the connection, immersing herself in data as she pulls the necessary strings to make my plan happen. I sit back and allow the comfort of the car to swallow me. Amos Glassberg no doubt imagines he has achieved some small victory over me. He won’t know better until he sees the headlines. The religious fanatics who’ve been tearing the city apart, who’ve tried to assassinate a minister of state, have now also stolen a priceless piece of Jerusalem’s heritage. The joy of it is that their involvement in my larceny provides a much better motive for my assassination than anything I could have dreamt up – what could be more obvious than thieves wishing to kill the guardian of the city’s treasures?
Of course, Glassberg will know the truth, but it will all have played out in the media by the time the trial reaches his courtroom. The Missionaries’ innocence will be irrelevant. He can buy them time, request higher standards of proof, clarifications, but he cannot change facts. If he strays into the role of defence counsel, if he openly defies the will of the mob howling for a conviction, he delivers their votes to me. His only other choice is to sacrifice everything he stands for, and convict three innocent men. It’s just possible he would do it if he believed it would save the city from me. And then, of course, he would lose anyway.
32.
Clementine
Levi lies still, exactly where we put him down, in Hilda’s thin, hard bed. He spent a couple of minutes looking around, made some shapes with his mouth but no noise, then he put himself to sleep, clutching a pillow like a toddler. The policeman left without saying anything. He looked like he was scared of something. Ludmila was staring at Hilda, angry or ashamed: I couldn’t tell which; perhaps both. So much of what happens here is still strange to me.
Levi’s chest rises almost imperceptibly, a sign of physical life that reveals nothing of his mental state. Is there anything in there? Does memory of me still exist within that biological matter? How much of you survived?
I have an accelerated lifetime’s experience separating consciousness from physical self. I had somewhere to go when the thing from within the Mechanism invaded me, overwhelming my physical senses and seizing control of my motor functions. For me it was terrifying. What must it be like for a normal human to be exposed to that? He can have no analogue for such experience, no internal refuge from the dark presence that consumes all it touches.
Hilda mostly leaves me to watch him. I don’t know where she sleeps now. She warned me not to touch him because she’s worried the thing could still be inside him. She calls it a demon. I don’t know what it is. Perhaps it is not itself evil, but merely spreads to fill the available space, like a weed colonizing the earth around it, choking rival growth without thought. From the Antikythera device it has spread to Levi, those dead men Ludmila told me about, and even a part of me. It doesn’t leave once it has entered. It doesn’t even care if you’re dead. I don’t know how I know this. Within me I feel its ongoing presence as an absence, a gap in self, a pico-second’s delay when I attempt reflexive thought. For now, it seems cowed by the torrent of electricity Hilda used to shock me back to consciousness. Or perhaps it’s permanently crippled by the assault, a withered offshoot of its parent within the Antikythera device? Another thing I don’t know.
Levi turns and mumbles something in his sleep, a more com-forting sound than anything he uttered while awake. I fight the urge to lay a hand on his forehead – the comfort of human contact seems such an obvious thing to offer, but Hilda’s caution forbids it, and I would not defy her. As Levi rolls onto his back, his thick eyelids start to flutter and he moans like a child trapped in a nightmare. An errant hand strays towards his shoulder and then stops. Instead it hovers, uncertain, next to my mouth, the instinct to comfort unfulfilled. The sensation of teeth on a nail makes me suddenly aware I have started chewing. The keratin snaps satisfyingly beneath the pressure of an incisor and I bite again.
Powerless. I am powerless even to help Levi. In this counterfeit body I seem only to lurch from one uncertainty to the next. Is this what drives the insanity of the Machine Cult, of all the strange human faiths that came before it?
The black despair becomes a dull pain behind my eyes and they close. For a moment the world disappears and I see the tamed darkness within me stir, blossoming around the bars of its cage, excited at the scent of hopelessness.
Pain at a fingertip drags me from the reverie. I have bitten all the nails of one hand down to the quick. In search of distraction I turn to Hilda’s bookshelf, and the bitten hand falls upon the middle row. Worn bindings bear titles in ancient scripts, so my fingers settle on something recognizably German. I suppose that must be where she is from, although I never asked, and the varied collection makes my conclusion far from certain. An imprint of patchy, golden gothic font declares my volume to be The Book of Maccabees.
The book seems to fall open at a page heavily annotated in barely legible pencil markings. As I begin to read, my voice echoes like a stranger’s in the quiet room, but the sounds seem to soothe Levi. He rolls onto his side and the moans fade, then stop. After a few minutes, the muscles in his back and shoulders loosen and he starts to look more asleep than immobile. The story is hard to make out; there are so many words I don’t recognize. There’s something about a great king, Saul, who disobeys the prophet Samuel and consorts with a witch called Endor. As far as I can tell, he loses a battle as a result of his blasphemy and the victors take his body, or perhaps just his head, to the temple of their deity, Dagon. Dagon, a god of the deeps, is greatly pleased with the sacrifice of a king, and lends his strength to the Philistines’ warriors, rendering them invincible in battle. The great temple in Jerusalem is desecrated and a darkness falls upon the land. The passage ends with the words: And when the beloved of Dagon speak his name, he shall rise from the seas.
Before I came here, I read what I could of the history of this land. It was hard to tell where the myths ended and the factual record began; so much of it was based on religious texts, so much more lost in the data wars. From the little I know, this book seems to touch upon the real history of the fall of Jerusalem’s First Temple, but it’s so wrapped in culturally specific allegory it’s hard to know what any of it means. I think the story is expressed in something that might have been poetry in the original Hebrew, but any trace of metre or rhyme has been lost in the German translation. Still, it does not seem to matter to Levi. By the time the story ends, he’s breathing steadily enough to risk leaving him for a drink.
In the kitchen, Hilda is half hidden behind an open cupboard door. She closes it at the sound of my entry and smiles tiredly.
‘How is he?’ She twists the knob of the tap and water gushes noisily into the spout of a hemispherical kettle. She places it carefully in the wireless power stream, and a clouded light on the side glows blue.
‘He looks better. Looks like he’s actually sleeping now instead of lying still after getting hit in the head with a brick.’
She smiles at that. ‘Well done. It’s amazing what simply having someone at the bedside can do. It’s one of those little miracles that makes faith easier.�
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‘All I did was read to him.’
Her smile cracks for a moment before reappearing. ‘You should be careful with those old books, Clementine, some of them are falling apart.’ She spoons dark granules of Zanzibar coffee into mugs still stained by their previous contents. They dissolve with a faint hiss.
‘Yes, of course, I’ll try to be. Did you lose many in the fire?’
Something like suspicion clouds her eyes then vanishes before she speaks. ‘We lost some we were storing in the roof-space, but the most precious volumes are all in my room. The collection is the work of decades, so I like to have them close.’ A breath out dispels the steam rising from the mug before she takes a hesitant sip, grimacing at the heat.
‘I still don’t understand why they’re important, not really.’
‘I know our religions are strange to you, Clementine, after everything you’ve been through, but these stories are rooted in our most ancient memories. They are part of what makes us human, but so many of the stories are lost, and the knowledge of what we were, what we are, is gone.’
‘Then why are you the only ones preserving them? How could such precious things be lost?’
‘The wars, partly, but mostly through human arrogance, although you could argue they’re the same thing. The holy texts we have now – the Bible, the Talmud – are just a fraction of what was written. There are the books we know as the Apocrypha, still preserved by a few minor sects, but there were dozens more discarded by the compilers of the Talmud and the Bible for ideological reasons. Some they condemned outright as heresy.’
The black coffee is bitter on my tongue. ‘Heresy’: it is one of those strange, all-too human words I can define but never truly understand. Hilda’s utterance of it conveys at once both the excitement and toxicity, but even her emotion cannot render it anything more than an abstract to me. Perhaps it will come in time. I can hope.