Written in Dead Wax

by Andrew Cartmel

  Still no sign of the speakers, though. I scanned the room as I returned to my chair. Mr Hibiki smiled at me politely. “Is there anything you’d like to hear?”

  “Everything,” I said, and we both laughed.

  “Well, perhaps later,” he said. “But now let’s listen to this.” He picked up Easy Come, Easy Go and handed the album to Atsushi who took it and went over to the turntable. He took the record out of the sleeve with the skill of a man who had done it before.

  As he cued the LP up on the turntable, I was still searching the room with my gaze. Where were the bloody speakers?

  “So you’ve had a chance to listen to it?” said Mr Hibiki.

  “Yes, sorry, but I had to.”

  “No, that’s fine. I understand.” He sipped his coffee and set the cup down again. “So how did it sound?”

  “Absolutely mint. High-quality vinyl with no noise, no pressing flaws. Just perfect.”

  Atsushi switched the turntable on and lowered the tone arm onto the record. It began to play.

  The noise that came out was the most grotesque, shrieking cacophony imaginable. It sounded like someone had gone over the playing surface with a professional sander, obliterating the microgrooves.

  We all stared at each other.

  The din continued. Sizzling distortion. A galaxy of white noise.

  Atsushi had quickly stepped back from the turntable as though it was an animal that might bite him. I got to my feet and went over to the turntable and lifted the arm off the record. Silence. They were both staring at me. I could distinctly feel the force of their gaze, at the nape of my neck, between my sweating shoulder blades.

  I bent down and inspected the tone arm.

  As I had suspected, there on the tip of the stylus was a tiny ball of grey fluff that had accumulated from playing dozens of records over a period of weeks. I put my mouth near and blew gently. The puff of air carried the dust ball floating serenely away. I lifted the tone arm again and lowered it onto the run-in groove.

  First, smooth silence as the stylus rode inwards, and then music filled the room. Warm, rich, beautiful music.

  Mr Hibiki was staring at Atsushi who was looking distinctly seasick.

  I sensed a restructuring of the chain of command some time soon.

  The music sounded wonderful. As I sat down I realised it was coming from above. I looked up and finally I got it. The graceful curving panels of wood rising upwards from the walls formed an enclosure for a horn-loaded speaker. The whole ceiling was a speaker.

  In fact the whole room was one.

  Ask not where the speaker is. You’re sitting in it.

  Perhaps at some signal from his boss, Atsushi made himself scarce. Now it was just Mr Hibiki and I sitting in the room, listening. I could see him relaxing, enjoying the music. When it reached the end of the side I went to the turntable and turned it over.

  “This is very good,” he said, watching me. “In fact, it could hardly be improved.”

  “There is one anomaly.” I thought I’d better bring it up before we got there. “On the last track on this side, the vocal by Rita Mae Pollini. There’s a tiny rogue… noise.” He was watching me politely, attentively, taking it all in. “But it’s a noise from the original session. Not damage or any kind of pressing flaw.” He nodded.

  “I think it’s a music stand falling over,” I lied.

  We listened as it arrived and he nodded again. “It’s definitely on the master tape,” he said. “I believe you’re right. A music stand falling.” He smiled at me. “If anything, it adds to the charm of the recording. As if we’re there during the date.”

  “I’m glad you like it,” I said. The record ended and Mr Hibiki got up and switched the turntable off. He put the LP back in the sleeve and went over to one of the shelves of records. I’d noticed earlier there was a thin strip of paper sticking out here. He removed this marker slip and slid the record into its correct place on the shelf to join the complete run of Hathor recordings, all thirteen of them. Fourteen now.

  As he did so, an odd thing happened. I could see his whole body visibly relax, his shoulders sagging luxuriously in relief. He sighed, a long, low, quiet sigh, and a strange wild smile spread over his face. It was my first glimpse of the unguarded Mr Hibiki, and I could see the child inside the man. It was gone in an instant, but I’d never forget that smile, a mad savage smile of victory.

  With Easy Come, Easy Go, he had the complete set. A collector’s dream come true.

  I wondered when—or if—he’d ever play it again.

  He sat down and nodded affably. “Well done. Thank you.” Atsushi came back into the room holding an iPhone. He gave it to me. The website for the money transfer had been set up ready. I typed in my bank details and accessed my account. Then I passed the phone to Atsushi who gave it to Mr Hibiki.

  Mr Hibiki entered his own details and then got up and handed the phone to me, bypassing Atsushi, who was looking more and more unhappy. I studied the screen. The transfer was in progress. Quite rapidly a message appeared, indicating that the transaction was complete. I stared at it. The total was given there on the screen.

  My head swam. I couldn’t absorb the figure. I had to put my fingertip down on the screen to cover up two zeros, then move it along and cover up two more zeros, and slowly count them in this way.

  When I finally had the number straight in my head I went to a currency conversion website and with a push of a button I converted the sum from yen into dollars.

  It came to just over a million.

  I pushed a few more buttons and converted it into the sterling equivalent. Then I left the browser and used the phone as a phone. I called Tinkler’s number, including the international dialling code for England. It only rang twice, sounding hollow and distant, before he answered.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Okay,” said Tinkler. “I’m ready. Right. Right. Yup. I’m ready.”

  I waited patiently. He was lying in his hospital bed with my phone, his own phone and a crib sheet giving him all the information he needed to access my bank account. I waited while he made the call, hearing his nervous voice responding to the security questions from the bank. Basically, he had to pretend to be me.

  Finally he finished the other call and came back on the line. “The money’s come through,” he said. “My god, there’s a lot of it isn’t there? Even the girl at the call centre was impressed. I’m in love with her, by the way.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “Right,” said Tinkler. “Now I’m going to use all that information you gave me to access your account and siphon off every penny and steal it for myself. Steal it, do you hear me?” He laughed maniacally, then added, “I hope that’s all right.”

  “Good luck with all that.”

  “Right. Okay. You take care.” He hung up.

  I switched the phone off. My palms were damp. I looked at Mr Hibiki, who was watching me with polite interest. “Sorry about that,” I said.

  “No problem. It’s perfectly all right.”

  I handed the phone to Atsushi, who took it and left. I breathed deeply and relaxed. On one level the whole thing had been a complete farce, of course. If they’d actually wanted to rob me, they could have just taken the record and hit me with a baseball bat. I was alone in this house, in an unknown part of an unknown country.

  “Would you like something to eat?” he said.

  I shook my head. “They fed me pretty well on the plane, and I imagine they’re going to feed me pretty well going back.”

  He checked his watch. “There’s plenty of time. But it’s quite a long drive back to the airport. If you’re like me, you may want to get there early.” He smiled. I’d been dismissed. I stood up. We shook hands again. I turned and looked at the shelf where the record now stood. I experienced a sudden strange, painful pang of loss.

  I felt like I’d gone to the vet and left a beloved pet there to be put down. I steeled myself and turned away
. Perhaps he read something in my face because he said, “You should stop in the Zen garden on your way out. It will make you feel better. There’s plenty of time.” He patted me on the arm. “Goodbye.”

  Atsushi was waiting for me in the doorway. He escorted me out.

  Now it was over I felt a tremendous let down. It was weird. Even getting paid turned out to be a disappointment. As I walked away from that small room where Hibiki sat, all I had was a frustrating sense of things unresolved. Questions unanswered.

  Questions that would never be answered now.

  First there was the matter of the money. The amount of it. No piece of vinyl, in and of itself, was worth what he’d paid me. Yet he’d paid it happily. If anything, he had the air of a man getting a bargain. What he’d received from me was clearly vastly more valuable than what I’d just received from him.

  Why?

  I wanted to know. I needed to know. I had a sense of huge, tumultuous events going on around me, but just beyond the edge of my vision, just out of range of my hearing.

  Some matter of enormity was transpiring, brushing past me, close enough to touch. Like an invisible ship sailing by on a silent sea. Vast and ghostly. And I had no idea what it was. And now I was never likely to.

  Plus there was that small matter of the “session anomaly”, the rogue noise that haunted side two.

  Music stand falling over, my ass.

  It was now very clear in my mind that it was a gunshot.

  We went down the stone staircase, through the wide hall that spanned the house, into the corridor beyond. Here on the right was the glass wall looking out into the Zen garden.

  There was a young woman standing in the garden. A woman with short black hair in a black dress. For one aching second I thought she looked just like Nevada.

  Then she turned.

  It was Nevada.

  19. ZEN GARDEN

  What had appeared to be floor-to-ceiling windows were actually a series of sliding doors. I slid one of them open and stepped into the garden. The air was cool and damp. A faint, fine mist hung in the air as if a phantom rain was falling. She looked at me through the mist. Then she came over and touched my lapel. “You’re wearing your suit. The one I got you. It looks good on you.”

  I pulled her towards me and put my arms around her and squeezed for dear life. She was warm. She was real. She was hugging me back. I was breathing in her perfume. It was all true. My heart was beating so fast I thought I might be having a medical emergency. But a good one.

  I pushed her back so I could look at her. I said, “You were wearing a vest. When they shot you. A bulletproof vest.”

  She shook her head. “Nothing that complicated. I saw the muzzle flash in the dark. I guess it must have been Heinz. Because Heidi was running away from us. He was firing towards us, towards me. But he had to be careful not to hit her. So when he started shooting I had time to get out of the way before he could range in on me. When I saw the muzzle flash, what I actually tried to do was gracefully duck out of the line of fire, but I’d forgotten that I was running beside that ditch. That fucking ditch. The anti-rat ditch. And I fell into it.”

  I was beginning to put it together in my head. “And you climbed out of it before the…”

  “Before the torrent of flaming oil flowed into it. Ouch. Yes, luckily I scrambled out before that.”

  “You climbed out on the other side of the greenhouse. That’s why I didn’t see you.”

  “That’s right.” She nodded towards the house. “What happened to old Atsushi?” I looked through the window and saw that my escort had disappeared. “He was looking quite sick.”

  “He forgot to blow the fluff off his boss’s needle,” I said.

  “I’m not even going to begin to ask what that might mean.”

  This garden was a strange place. Neither indoors nor outdoors, it was a cube in the centre of the house, walled in by glass on all sides but with the roof open to the elements. It was heated just like being inside the house, though. Which is why she could stand there in that dress, not shivering and no gooseflesh on her smooth skin. But beneath the rounded white pebbles underfoot I suspected there was a man-made floor. At the centre, the water feature was a little pile of flat black stones with a trickle of water flowing through them, emanating from an unseen source and vanishing to some unknown destination, also presumably in that floor.

  I looked at the cherry tree. That at least was planted in a bed of real earth. But it was surreal to see it in blossom in the middle of winter. Yet the little leaves were vivid and pink. Perhaps wealth could buy you even that.

  I said, “And you’ve been here ever since?”

  “Pretty much,” said Nevada. “How could I stay away from good old Nakadakemachi? Once you’ve learned to pronounce it, you just can’t stay away.”

  “Yes, because you’ve invested so much time and energy in it,” I said.

  “Exactly.” A petal fell onto my shoulder and she brushed it off. “Who’s looking after the girls while you’re over here?”

  “Maggie promised to look in and feed them while I’m gone.”

  “Tinkler’s sister?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how is old Tinkler?”

  A petal fell into her hair. Pink on black. I didn’t touch it. It was perfect. “He’ll be pleased to hear about this,” I said.

  She took a step towards me.

  I took a step back from her.

  “Listen,” she said.

  “How could you not tell me?” I said.

  “Listen.” She put her hands on my shoulders. I shook them off.

  “How could you let me think you were dead?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry? Do you know what it felt like? How could you not tell me?”

  She shook her head. The petal floated to the ground. “It wasn’t like that.”

  “What was it like?”

  “At first, all was confusion. I was chasing the Aryan Twins. I heard the fuel tank collapse and I heard the fire. But I had to be sure that they, and their Aryan guns, were gone. So I followed them as they made their retreat. They were parked in the road outside. In the good old silver SUV. They drove off and by that time I heard sirens in the distance. So I hurried back into the factory yard, or should I say the great cannabis greenhouse conflagration and I saw…”

  “You saw that the record had been destroyed.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And I saw that you’d driven off.”

  “What?”

  She said, “You were in a bit of a hurry, weren’t you?”

  “Hughie told me you were dead. He said he saw you lying there dead.”

  “Lying is right.”

  “And then he told me you’d been buried. That your body had been buried.”

  “Good old Hughie. The Scottish Welshman. Still, he’s raised a nice daughter so he must be doing something right.” She glanced at me. “How is Boo?”

  “Like the rest of us. She’ll be relieved to hear that you’re not dead.”

  “Look, I’m sorry.”

  “How could you not tell me you were alive?”

  “I’m telling you now, aren’t I?”

  “Yes, because I’m here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m only here because I found the record.”

  “Yes,” she said. “That was amazing, wasn’t it? I can’t get over you just finding it like that, in your house. I mean, having it all along.” She looked at me through the mist. “It’s just like that dreadful Coelho novel.”

  And the surface of my brain rippled with the sensation of déjà vu.

  “I thought it was sort of okay,” I said. “That book.”

  “Really? Anyway, it was a good job I brought back the fragments of good old Easy Come, Easy Go. What was left of it, that is, after the great cannabis conflagration.”

  “That was you?”

  “Yes, there wasn’t much left of the sleeve, and the record was just this melted blob
. But enough survived to authenticate the find. Luckily for me.” She looked at me. “Because Mr Hibiki might otherwise have been tempted to think that you and I were in league.”

  “To do what?” I said.

  “To fake the record being destroyed and then you pretending to find another copy. And getting all the money for it.”

  “But we’re not in league,” I said.

  “No we’re not,” she said, gazing at me as if she was searching for something in my face. I suppose she didn’t find it, because then she said, “You’re not looking at this in the most positive light.”

  I stared at the cherry tree. On second thought, maybe it wasn’t real, either.

  I said, “Let me tell you what I think. I think that once you confirmed that the record was destroyed, you didn’t think there was any point in getting back in touch with me. I’d outlasted my usefulness. Because the project was over. So you just came back here to give Mr Hibiki your report. And that was the end of that. If I hadn’t found the record and ended up flying out here, you would never even have told me you were alive.”

  She looked at me. There were tears in her eyes. She said, “When I didn’t tell you right away, it just got harder and harder, the longer I waited.”

  “If I hadn’t found the record, I’d still think you were dead.” I looked at her. “You would have let me think that.”

  I turned my back on her and walked away. Back through the sliding glass and down the corridor. Atsushi was waiting impatiently by the front door. He drove me to catch my flight.

  All the way back to London I could smell her perfume.

  SIDE TWO

  20. CALL ME REE

  I jerked awake so abruptly that Fanny jumped off the bed with a little cry of protest. My heart was slamming in my chest.

  The noise that had woken me was still ringing in my ears.

  I lay there listening for it to come again. I was still disoriented with the jet lag of my flights to and from Japan. All I could hear was the early-morning chatter of birds outside. Fanny paused casually in the middle of the floor to wash herself, just to demonstrate that she hadn’t really been spooked. What was it that had woken me? A sudden, violent sound. Whatever it was, it had scared the hell out of me. I was soaked with sweat.