by Claire North
“I… we went to the airport and—”
“What did you do before going to the airport?”
“I was attacked…”
“And?”
“You attacked me?”
“Yes. To escape the knives, if you’re wondering.”
“How did you…”
“I hid. In the warehouse.”
“But we…” His voice trailed off. “We burned it. We burned the warehouse down.” Cold in his voice, cold on the waters, the growl of a bus as it rumbled by, grey skies overhead wanting to snow. “You were still inside.”
“Yes. You forgot.”
“That fast? In Tokyo, I remember coming too late to prevent your robbery. You’d left traps, explosives, tear gas, but you were gone. But I’ve seen camera footage that shows I came on time.”
“In Tokyo I could have killed you. Do you remember what I said?”
“No. But I remember trying to remember. I wrote a word, over and over again until I remembered the act of writing it. Your name is Hope.”
“And only by what you remember can you judge me.”
“No,” he snapped, sharp, turning where he stood, scanning the street. “By the consequences of your actions,” glancing back at his phone again, trying to force the image of my face into his memory, “we can judge you by those.”
“Can you? Do you have that right?”
I thought I heard a smile; hard to tell through binoculars. “Maybe,” he mused, softer. “You stole Perfection; you are a thief.”
“And now I am making good. Tell Rafe that if I was Byron, I would look at the 206 Club and I would rejoice to know that here, at last, is a chance to paint a picture soaked in blood. Tell him to pull the treatments; tell him to cancel the event.”
“And if he won’t listen?”
“Then you must ask yourself what you consider right, what is worthy.”
Turning, turning, he was still turning, and now he stopped, and looked straight at me, and looked at his phone, and looked again across the water, a tiny figure without the binoculars, no way he could clearly see me, but then, “Are you on the water?”
“Yes.”
“I think I can see you.”
“Yep. Guess so.”
Luca, following Gauguin’s stare, has also found me. He pulls a little sight from his pocket, a ×10 magnification telescope, no longer than his extended middle finger, and for a moment, he looks at me, and I look at him, our faces obscured by optics.
“Did Byron tell you why she is doing this?” murmured Gauguin, watching still.
“Yes. She said that Perfection was obscene.”
“Do you agree?”
“Totally. Perfection is derived by a consensus of society. Perfect – to perfectly fit the mould. Fuck that shit. My code, my honour, my… righteousness. I will help you bring down Byron, and I will find my own solution to my own problems, and maybe Perfection is obscene, the end of the world, and maybe it isn’t, but I’ll decide my own way, for my own reasons.”
“I’m not sure if that’s the sentiment of a hero or a sociopath.”
“Judge me by my actions,” I replied with a shrug, “if that’s all you’ve got going for you.”
“Hotel Madellena…” he began, a note of caution in his voice.
“Shut it down.”
“I may not be able to.”
“Then Byron will come. She will destroy everything.”
“Perhaps I want her to try; perhaps the 206 can serve as bait?”
“She’s smarter than you, don’t try and make this into a stupid bloody trap, Jesus that’d be dumb. Cancel the event. Stop the treatments. I’m helping you now; I don’t have to be co-operative.”
“You’re threatening me?”
“My code, my honour, my deeds, my actions,” I snapped. “Filipa said that Perfection was the end of the world, and she was right. Sociopath or hero, I just don’t care.”
I hung up, and threw my phone into the lagoon before he could call back.
Chapter 85
I gave Gauguin everything I’d promised. Meredith Earwood, Agustin Carrazza, Berkeley, the hydroponic clinic, photographs of her passports, snapped from a hotel room in Korea, copies of her journal written in San Francisco. He replied through the darknet, politely thanking me for my information. He even activated his old name: mugurski71, and I replied as _why, all things returning to where we had begun, back to Dubai, back to Reina, the summer sun and a bunch of stolen diamonds. It all seemed a long way away, now.
The occasional question comes in from Gauguin. Describe Byron’s current appearance. Describe her eating habits. Does she exercise? How was her Spanish? Did she express any views on politics or popular culture? Did she admit to the murder of Matheus Pereyra-Conroy? Did she say anything about me?
She spoke with regret, I replied, but I don’t think it went as far as remorse.
Gauguin asked nothing more.
Talk to us, said mugurski71 one day. Come in and talk to us in person. Let us record you. You won’t be harmed.
Memories of Tokyo, Luca Evard, you won’t be harmed.
A present tense, a memory that is like the present tense, he said before, you won’t be harmed, and now he says it again, and Gauguin is mugurski71 again and I am _why, time has changed nothing, regret changes nothing, hope changes nothing there is only now, and now, and now, this moment, this decision as I say
no.
Running through Venice, past the Hotel Madellena. Every day I buy the loyalties of a housekeeper by the name of Yanna, slipping her a hundred euros in exchange for an answer to the question – is the 206 Club coming here?
“Oh yes,” she says, “it’s all such a fuss.”
The glamour mags, excited, celebrity this, sensational that, is she pregnant, is he having an affair, the 206 coming to strut their perfect, beautiful stuff, so wonderful, we could all be like that one day…
Why is this still happening?! I demand.
There is no proof that Byron will be there, Gauguin replies.
If I could email you a fucking nosebleed you pillock!!
Five days before the party, Rafe Pereyra-Conroy arrived, a beautiful woman I had never seen before on his arm, all legs and hair and teeth and dress. His sister walked behind.
Filipa looked… something in how she stood, perhaps. Something in how she dressed. Lace panelling across her back, down to the coccyx, all suggestive of other things. I’d never spotted before how slim she was, not skinny, but slim, a word which meant better things. If you cared about words.
I am forgettable! I screamed down the data highways and the network links, the secret cables and waiting satellites, roaring it over the darknet at Gauguin.
I will call the police, tell them there’s a bomb. I will rob every journalist blind, I will put poison into your party treats, I will destroy it before it ever has a chance to begin, I will stop this thing if you don’t stop it now!!
Mr Pereyra-Conroy has decided to go ahead with the event, replied Gauguin, he does not feel the risk is significant.
The risk is significant, you coward! You idiot, she will destroy everything and people will die!!
Mr Pereyra-Conroy feels that even if Byron were to attack the 206, this is an opportunity to catch his father’s killer. We are monitoring trains, cars, boats – there are only so many ways in and off this island, if Byron comes near the venue she will…
She is smarter than you all. You are walking to your own damnation and she will destroy you!
I’m sorry, _why. The event will proceed, and if Byron comes, we will apprehend her.
I threw the laptop across the room with a gasp of rage, and sat on the bed, shaking, sweating. Where is your knowledge now, thief, where is your stillness, where your honour, your worth, your code, you nothing, forgettable nothing, having a temper tantrum in your room, little girl, cross that desert. The desert will eat you whole, hey, hey hey, hey Macarena!
Need a friend to talk to, need Luca, need Filipa, need t
o clear my head, go for a run, go to a bar and pick up a guy, tell him everything, and he’ll nod and smile and say, “Wow, that’s so deep” and we’ll fuck and he’ll forget and it’ll be fine, it won’t mean anything but it’ll be good, it’ll be great, it’ll be me, my power, me, in control, me, using the world to steal, to speak, to live, to survive to live fuck you, fuck you all!
On the balcony, shaking with rage, tears in my eyes.
A boat on the small canal outside, struggling to find a place to park. It’s going to rain soon, smell of it on the air, the cobbles are slippery, difficult to run.
I am the rain.
I am the cold.
I am my breath.
I pick my laptop up from the floor. It’s still working, hanging on in there, sorry about the sulk. I look up “need a friend”.
Need a friend? Choose your option:
1. Talk NOW to a therapist, $50 for the hour online (pay as you go).
2. Talk NOW to a stranger (free!) and find your way through your problems through our online chat.
3. Talk NOW to our online community (free!) and post your questions, anxieties and stories in our online subscription-based community forum.
I try to talk, but no one listens.
I just want to be judged for who I am.
No one ever seems interested.
I went to close the laptop, but before I did, another message, from mugurski71.
This is Luca, it said. This is my number.
Chapter 86
Venice in the rain. The tourists flee, the canals hiss like an angry goose, towers vanish into blurred-out grey, veils of water slipping off the bridges. Hawkers, hair glued to their faces, wheel their tarpaulin-covered wares through narrow metal doors in the basements of undecorated houses given over to the storage of a thousand papier-mâché masks.
Hard to use an umbrella, too many others competing to get through the narrow spaces; those shops that were smart enough to stock brollies now cash in, thirty euros a go. Better off with an anorak, head down, concentrating on placing your feet one before another, the sun gone, dizzying, north-south-east-west, Calle del Magazen, Calle Arco, Calle de la Pietà, Calle Crosera, turn left, turn right and you’re back at the Grand Canal though you could have sworn you were heading in the opposite direction.
I held a new mobile phone in my hand, only Luca Evard’s number saved, and walked.
Come to Accademia, I texted, breaking the lock into the tower of Chiesa di San Vidal as the message sent. He came to Accademia, arriving twenty minutes later, hatless, water dripping off the end of his nose.
I watched him from the tower and texted, Campo Sant’Angelo.
He received the message, looked around, started walking, hands buried in his pockets, a thin attempt at staying warm, towards Campo Sant’Angelo, passing me by, unseen in my perch. A baroque quartet was warming up as I descended the tower, cat-gut strings and horse-hair bows. A lone vendor was left in Campo Santa Stefano selling masks: the Bauta (good for eating in); the Columbina; the plague doctor and the Moretta, Arlecchino, Harlequin and Pantalone; the Volto, the most famous of the Venetian masks, stark white face around which colour bursts, gold and silver, bright greens and polished bronze, have I told you about
focus
Focus.
I passed him at Sant’Angelo, moved a few streets on, took refuge in a café selling pancakes filled with fruit and melted chocolate, ordered one and, as I waited, texted, Campo Manin.
A few moments later, he went by, elbowing his way through the crowd, and I let him pass, and looked for followers, obvious signs of protection or security, and didn’t see any.
Rialto, I said and followed fifty yards behind him, hood over my head, eating my pancake from its paper bag, stopping in doorways only twice, as he looked back.
He walked to the middle of Rialto and stopped at the peak of the stairs, looking down to both ends of the bridge. Rialto Bridge, completed 1591, not the first bridge on the site, at least four wooden predecessors collapsed beforehand and ruin was predicted for the final evolution but here it is hulking above the waters
here we are
hulk: the main part of an object i.e. ship which is no longer used. One that is bulky or unwieldy; to move ponderously; to loom
together at last
hulk: big green monster with stretchy pants and rage issues and here
now
Can’t put it off, could just go, walk away, but he texted me, he contacted me, I am in his awareness he will remember that I didn’t show or will he?
Will he not in fact remember that he went to Rialto Bridge and perhaps we met and perhaps we spoke and perhaps it was wonderful and he forgot so really I could go now, and maybe his fantasy will be better than the reality what did anyone expect and
he turned, standing at the top of the bridge, and saw me, and recognised me.
Not, perhaps, me.
Words that described me. Black is the colour of my true love’s hair, her lips are like some roses fair…
If he didn’t guess who I was before, he knows now, I am staring at him and can’t look away, and he sees the truth of it, and doesn’t move, and neither do I, both deciding perhaps if we’re gonna bolt
a moveable bar or rod
a part of the lock
a sudden dash
flight
escape
desertion
a length of woven goods from the loom
woven goods, , a bolt of cloth, measure word, Chinese uses measure words whenever counting, most commonly also shitty shit what the fuck am I doing here
I can’t move, feet frozen in place, so he comes down to me.
“Hello,” says Luca Evard. “You must be Hope.”
Chapter 87
A café near Hotel Madellena.
He’s already paying by the time I notice.
No, I say, no, I’ll get it.
Too late, he’s bought the drinks, but thank you. He has never had a thief offer to buy him a cup of coffee before.
We sit. Checked red and white tablecloth. Luca put a packet of brown sugar in his coffee, stirred, anti-clockwise, four times, tapped the spoon twice, held the cup by its little handle, sipped, almost slurped, head rolling back, put the cup down, the liquid drained.
I watched all this, as a supplicant might watch a priest, then looked slowly from the prophetic grains of coffee left behind in the cup to Luca’s more eloquent face.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello.”
Silence a while.
Then at last, “I have a Dictaphone.”
“That’s fine.”
“Good. I’m… good.”
He laid the recorder on the table, digital, a single red light to show that you were winning, a USB portal at the back.
Silence.
At last, a laugh, a shake of his head. “I am being a bad policeman,” he said, “but now that we’re here, I’m really not sure what I want to say.”
I shrugged, and then to fill the silence chose bad words. “I heard you left Interpol.”
His head rose like a dog starting at the sound of a gun, and his bottom lip curled in and out before saying, quiet, “Sacked. Not left. Though the time was coming, I suppose.”
“Was it me?”
“Yes. You were part of it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Are you?”
“Yes. I didn’t mean… sorry.”
Confusion; now that we’re here, nothing is what he imagined. Then leaning forward, hands palm-down on the table, pushing into it as if the world might drop away beneath him, holding on for dear life. “Did I ever arrest you?”
“Yes, once, in Vienna.”
He slapped the table top hard, leant back in his chair, shaking his head. “I knew it! All the notes, the paperwork, your fingerprints! We had it all but no one could remember – I thought it was a clerical error but the error was so big, it was all so neat, so perfect, in the end we let it go because thinking about how it
had happened was more awkward than ignoring it, I told them, I said that we… how did I do it? How did I catch you?”
“You pretended to be a potential buyer.”
“I tried that several times, but it never…”
“It did. In Vienna I fell for it.”
“And how did you…?” He gestured feebly, looking for a word.
“You left me alone in the interview room. I waited for a while, then demanded to be released. Since the duty officer couldn’t remember who I was, he assumed I was what I claimed to be and let me go. Like you said, it’s sometimes more awkward to deal with a thing than to pretend it doesn’t exist.”
“So you just walked out of there.”
“Yeah.”
He let out of a puff of breath, a smile on his face, an injured man vindicated at last, justice, your honour, justice to the wronged.
“And any other time? Did I catch you in Brazil, or Oman?”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
“What about Hong Kong? The file, the information I received…”
“Yes, that was me.”
“Why?” The question burns, he shakes with the releasing of it, so many years, and now, the Dictaphone between us, his fingers white where they press into the table top.
I shrugged. “My buyer betrayed me, tried to have me killed. It seemed like a kind of… justice, I guess. And I wanted you to come to Hong Kong. I wanted you to be near me, You seemed like a good man. Sounds daft now.” A half truth, a half sentence, stopping myself short, frightened of everything the truth might mean, the truth of me, I am Hope, I am thief, I am stalker, I am the stranger you can’t remember kissing.
He leant back in his chair, fingers clinging now to the edge of the table, a climber just holding on. “In Hong Kong… no,” he stopped himself. “That’s not the order of things. A year ago I was contacted by the man you call Gauguin. He’d pulled some strings, seen the Vienna file, matched fingerprints he had from Dubai to your file. He said, ‘Look, you have her fingerprints, the paperwork from her arrest, you arrested this woman and now you can’t remember her.’ He was very persuasive. And I thought back through your crimes, and I thought back to São Paulo, Hong Kong, places where I’d followed you and where things had seemed… strange. In Hong Kong there was a night when I woke and there was lipstick on my neck. I hadn’t… but there it was and I thought… it was madness of course, but I checked the CCTV, saw… and there you were. I had to put your photo on the computer screen, tape it on to compare your face, but I knew, because I couldn’t remember you. We went into the elevator together. You were limping, I assume…”