Evensong

by Love, John

  “A better fashion accessory. Similar shape and similar eye colour.”

  She said nothing, which was what she should have done the first time.

  Fuck you the ginger cat meaowed again.

  Zaitsev’s suite, like Anwar’s, was on the floor below. Zaitsev’s security people were there constantly, in shifts. Anwar’s temporary identity would have made it plausible for him to be visiting her bedroom; her reputation for coming on to any male within reach of her pheromones was well known. But Anwar, after the brush with Zaitsev and his minders at the reception, preferred not to be seen there.

  He didn’t like her bedroom. The untidiness. And the dark voluptuous colours, which he liked on her dresses, but which were overpowering and intrusive as decor. He’d come to like the customary silver and white, and this was the only interior on the New West Pier—at least the only New Anglican interior―that didn’t have those colours.

  He watched her sleeping. As usual, when she’d finished with sex or when (as he now knew) she had nobody else in bed with her, she fell asleep quickly and slept soundly. Her appetite for sleep, like her appetites for food and sex, came on suddenly and overwhelmingly, to the exclusion of everything else.

  She isn’t real, he thought bitterly. Her appetites. Her mood swings. Her initial failure to notice him. Then she did. Then she wanted an involvement but maybe didn’t, then she didn’t but maybe did.

  He wasn’t real either. His motives changed in response to hers, always the opposite and (like hers) maybe secretly containing the reverse of the opposite. Containers and contents. But his motives, he could explain. They were the products of his obsessiveness and self-absorption, which in turn were the products of his occupation. How could he explain hers? He couldn’t. She wasn’t real.

  7

  The summit droned on. It was the second day, October 16. The proceedings should have belonged in an atmosphere of dark wood and dust motes, not in this huge white-and-silver space with curving pearlescent walls and cool citrus air and perfect acoustics. It really was a very good venue. It got cooler and fresher and more pleasant as the proceedings got more contentious.

  Olivia stayed to the first coffee break, then discreetly left. So did Anwar. She went across the Garden, into the Cathedral, and up to the Boardroom where she attended a series of routine meetings. So did Anwar.

  The meetings in the Boardroom were beginning to drag, and Anwar made a decision.

  Olivia was surrounded by colleagues and her normal guard of three trusted people in addition to Anwar. Proskar—who,at last, Anwar had learnt could also be trusted—had entered, not as a guard but as a participant in the meeting.

  Anwar made eye contact, mouthed, “Thirty minutes,” and raised an eyebrow. She nodded.

  He went back to the Conference Centre. The summit didn’t sound like it was going any better than when he’d last been there, but he wasn’t presently concerned with the summit. He managed to sidle through the main auditorium relatively unnoticed and mounted the staircase to the mezzanine. He walked along it, trailing his arm along the balcony rail, until he came to the Signing Room doors, which he opened and entered.

  There were three of Gaetano’s staff, a woman and two men. They were heavily armed. They were sufficiently awake to train their weapons quickly and easily on the opening doors, though they’d probably been hours doing absolutely nothing. The Signing Room was pristine and undisturbed. The fake wall panelling looked as out of place, against the original curving silver and white walls, as it always did. But nothing had happened; no disturbances, no intrusions.

  Their conversation with Anwar was lively and polite. Such monotonous duties, even in shifts, might have made them casual or resentful or careless, but they were none of these things. Anwar had never seen any traditional Meatslab tendencies among Gaetano’s people. They were never sloppy.

  It was the second day of the summit. Anwar had visited the Signing Room on the first day, and planned to visit it on the third and fourth and beyond, at least once a day. It meant he’d be leaving her for a few minutes, but he’d have to do it. The Signing Room had a special resonance for him. Although, the way the summit was going, it might not be needed.

  Six thousand miles and seven hours away, Arden Bierce was about to call Anwar and ask for another eidetic account of his questioning of Carne. She didn’t. Not because he wouldn’t be able to do it, but because she wouldn’t learn any more. There was nothing he’d left out the first time. It wasn’t a matter of finding something he’d overlooked. Anwar remembered everything and overlooked nothing: that was how he’d been made. This was about interpreting what he’d remembered, and that was her territory, and she’d have to go over it again and again. Until then, she couldn’t go to Anwar. Not during the summit.

  She tutted irritably; not something she did often. Keep looking for it, she told herself, until it finds you.

  8

  The summit moved on to its third day, October 17. Olivia only attended the morning session for a few minutes, and so, consequently, did Anwar.

  It was descending into chaos. The breakout sessions for mediation weren’t working. Members were adopting extreme >positions. Nobody was prepared to take a decisive first step until everybody else was. The usual standoff, which he’d heard Olivia describe contemptuously as, “I won’t put anything right until you put everything else right.” It struck a chord with him. It was the same attitude he’d often heard Rafiq describe in equally contemptuous terms. They both stood for its opposite: making some things better while you can.

  The detail of it was something Anwar would normally have found absorbing, but he blanked it out. He’d also have found the delegates absorbing, but he blanked them out too. Africans, Asians, Latin Americans, Eastern Europeans. All at a strange economic and political cusp which in time would make America and Europe irrelevant. Maybe even China and India.

  But the delegates weren’t within his compass. They weren’t what he was looking for. Or guarding her from. If they were, Gaetano would have found out and would have told him. He had to trust Gaetano to watch the known people, all checked and double-checked, and Gaetano had to trust him to look for the others, either unknown, or known but with something inside them that hadn’t been seen before.

  There were hundreds of faces and names, each with a profile detailing individual history, background, and minutiae of behaviour. He carried them all in his memory. Nothing, so far. He was used to analysing microscopic deviations from normality, and hadn’t seen any yet. It was beginning to worry him. Days were piling up, with no sign of any move against her. He had the abilities (maybe) to stop it when it came, but not the temperament to wait when it didn’t come. He didn’t like things so open-ended.

  He was pleased when she left and returned to the Boardroom, allowing him to follow her out discreetly.

  Back in the Boardroom she took a succession of internal meetings on the Outreach Foundation. This time Anwar, who’d parked himself in one of the adjoining rooms—the one where he’d questioned Carne—did listen. He found it absorbing. It proceeded smoothly and efficiently, closing point after point, steadily building a whole corporate edifice. The senior New Anglican officials impressed Anwar almost as much as Olivia herself. Even her Finance Director, whose unwise attempt to slip something past her he still remembered, was smart and well-prepared. They all were.

  He’d long ago ceased wondering whether the New Anglicans were a Church, a corporation, a political movement, a gangland syndicate, or a mix of all four. Today the answer was obvious. Today, they were in full corporate mode. It contrasted starkly to the summit, just across the Garden.

  The Outreach Foundation was rapidly taking on life and shape. And all because I made that remark to her in Brighton.

  Olivia visited the auditorium briefly on the afternoon of October 17, and Anwar managed to check the Signing Room, where he found everything in order. The summit was anything but in order. The impasse had gone on all morning and threatened to go on all afternoon. />
  Zaitsev tried desperately to bring it back on line. The reception for that evening was moved to the following day, and replaced with an all-night session. It broke up at 4:00a.m. without any significant progress. Two members were on the verge of walkin gout, and Zaitsev managed—just—to persuade them to stay. But he was looking and sounding ragged, and the atmosphere was foul.

  October 18, day four of the summit, was no better. After the failed all-night session, the atmosphere hadn’t improved. It was in stark contrast to what was going on all around the Conference Centre.

  The New West Pier had been deliberately kept open to the public and to normal business. There were sightseers in the Garden, worshippers in the Cathedral, people coming and going in the business quarter, coffees and meals being served in restaurants in the piazzas. And everywhere there were media. The contrast between the summit and the rest of the New West Pier, where there was business as usual, was not lost on them. After the bright opening ceremony, the Troubled Summit phrase began to resurface.

  Zaitsev was clearly floundering and the media, like their oceanic counterparts, detected him thrashing around and zeroed in. Some of them, perhaps rather spitefully, recalled the collapse of his attempt to get a vote of no confidence in Rafiq at the General Assembly, and compared it to the imminent collapse of the summit. Zaitsev, they were saying, was the new slang for Collapse.

  But if most of the negative media comment was centred on Zaitsev, Olivia wasn’t immune either. Although there was praise for the New Anglicans’ venue and facilities and organisation, there was renewed speculation about her position. Especially after her puzzling and ambiguous Evensong sermon.

  Anwar looked around the auditorium. The usual three people were covering her, but the angles and distances weren’t ideal for him to leave her while he checked the Signing Room. So he suggested she should go with him.

  “I must check with Gaetano,” she said. “He told me not to go there until the Signing.”

  “He’s busy. And,” Anwar added drily, “I think he’d give you special dispensation this time.”

  A couple of days ago he would have worried about being seen so much around her, but it didn’t matter now. Zaitsev’s security had already noticed and had raised it with Gaetano, whose explanation—ironically—was No, he isn’t security, he’s just her current sexual partner. They’d probably check, but it didn’t matter. The end time was approaching.

  They entered the Signing Room. She greeted the three security people there—two women and a man this time—and looked around her.

  “I really don’t like the two styles together,” she said.

  “Neither do I.”

  “It’s spotless now. It was full of dust and muck for five days, they told me. And you were here all that time.”

  He glanced at her.

  “Can we,” she said, “move over to the far end?” (It was the end where he’d kept his bucket, but he didn’t tell her.)

  “Of course. Why?”

  “There’s something I need to say to you privately. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.”

  He felt a stirring, which died abruptly at what she said next.

  “If I really felt anything for you, I’d let you go now and give you a chance to survive. In fact, I do feel something—guilt at dragging you into this. So, you can go if you want.”

  “You’re speaking to the gallery. You know I won’t go.” He added, “All the things you fight for are things I believe in. I should be proud to protect you, but I’m not. Not particularly. That may be you or me, or both of us, I don’t know.”

  She said nothing.

  “But I won’t walk away.”

  On the evening of October 18, the social function postponed from the previous night took place. Like the eve-of-summit reception, it was held in the Conference Centre. This time, however, the media were allowed in.

  The music was a compilation of old African recordings: mostly Congolese Rumba, with artists like Awilo Longomba and Koffi Olomide. The style was Big Band, with jazz and Cuban influences: trumpets, saxophones, drums (Western and African), keyboards, and guitars. Joyous, affirming music, upbeat and foot-tapping and infectious.

  But it was out of place with the mood of the evening. The summit was collapsing.

  Tucked into the middle of the compilation was a song called Ebale Ya Zaire, written by Simaro Lutumba. There was the same big band lineup, but this time it alternated with a solo voice and a single guitar. The singer was Sam Mangwana. His voice was distinctive and wistful. Anwar spoke several languages fluently, but had only a working knowledge of Lingala—enough, however, to identify the words.

  The deep river changes its course with the seasons...

  Anwar almost laughed out loud. Someone with a sense of irony had put this compilation together. Water rights disputes often arose because one state dammed or diverted a river, stopping water from reaching states downriver. They would claim that they weren’t deliberately diverting the river, that it changed course naturally with the changing seasons. And more irony—this song wasn’t about just any river, but the deepest in the world, and one of the largest: the River Zaire.

  And, later in the song, two other lines:

  The one you reject, is the one who ends up loving you the most.

  The one you run away from, chases after you the most...

  Love. It probably didn’t exist, but if it did, it came and went with a deliberate perversity of timing. Like a lighthouse beam switching on and off. On when ships weren’t in danger of being wrecked, off when they were.

  Anwar didn’t laugh at that.

  Olivia was there, circulating. A few people came on to her. She wasn’t interested. One of them, a tall grey-haired man in elegant robes, was more persistent than the others. When she didn’t respond, he made small talk for a few minutes and then took his leave courteously.

  “Who was that?” Anwar asked her.

  “The Foreign Minister of the United Federation of Congo and Kinshasa.”

  United Federation of Congo and Kinshasa. In Lingala it made perfect sense, but in French, the old colonial language, the initials were unfortunate.

  “You should introduce him to the President of Vietnam. The Heart of Darkness meets Apocalypse Now.”

  “I don’t understand...Oh, your old books again.”

  9

  Arden was working late at Fallingwater. The rest of Rafiq’s staff had gone. Rafiq came out of his inner office and walked over to her.

  “You’re working too late to be effective,” he told her.“Give it a rest.”

  “I can’t. I have until October 23, maybe less, to find whatever it is. I have to find it. It might be something Anwar needs.”

  By unspoken agreement neither of them had mentioned, or would mention, what took place between them until after the summit. Rafiq paused before he spoke next.

  “You have a lot less than that. The summit will finish early.”

  “Yes. The Troubled Summit. It’s already collapsing.” “No, it’ll finish early because it will succeed.Unexpectedly.

  There will be a breakthrough.”

  She glanced up at him sharply. “What are you up to, Laurens?”

  “What I’m usually up to. What I get paid for. You’ve got maybe three or four days. Arden.”

  Olivia attended the summit’s morning session on its fifth day, October 19. Anwar was there too, at a discreet distance. The proceedings were only a few minutes old and the previous days’ hostilities were already being fully resumed. The atmosphere was rancid.

  Then something strange happened.

  Olivia and Anwar were sitting in the auditorium, with the main body of delegates and participants. Zaitsev as usual was at the top table on the stage, chairing the morning’s proceedings along with the members of the committee who had drafted the now increasingly beleaguered Agenda. Zaitsev’s security people were placed at strategic points—all the obvious ones Anwar would think of looking for—around the stage and auditor
ium. Suddenly one of them strode quickly onto the stage and towards Zaitsev. He wasn’t the one with whom Anwar had exchanged words at the reception. This one was bigger.

  For a moment Anwar had a surreal feeling that Zaitsev was about to be assassinated by one of his own people. But the Meatslab walked rapidly over, went to whisper something in Zaitsev’s ear, thought better of it in view of the mikes and cameras trained on the stage from all angles, and used hand gestures—more like semaphore, given his size—to ask to borrow his pen. Zaitsev passed it to him, but he couldn’t make it open. Patiently, Zaitsev indicated the button on the side of the pen’s barrel, and did sign language with his thumb to demonstrate how to open it. Then he had to ask Zaitsev for some paper, and the dumb show was in danger of repeating itself until one of the others at the top table passed him a notebook. He scribbled something and handed it to Zaitsev. Zaitsev stared at it for what seemed like a long time, then got up and announced he had to leave for a few minutes. He got one of the others on the top table to chair the proceedings while he was away, and then walked rapidly off the stage and out of the auditorium.

  He returned an hour later. He looked shockingly different. Either devastated or exultant, but obviously consumed by something that wasn’t consuming him when he left. He waved away requests for him to resume the Chair, and sat silent and rigid while the fractious proceedings continued to get more fractious. He was actually trembling.

  What was that about? Anwar asked himself. Even he couldn’t read Zaitsev’s body language or voice inflections reliably. One of the very few occasions when he couldn’t. But he knew one person who might know.

  “It was a call from Rafiq,” Gaetano told him. Olivia had left the summit, with Anwar in tow, to attend another Outreach meeting in the Boardroom. Anwar had got her to stop in the piazza in front of the Conference Centre so he could call Gaetano.