by John Brunner
‘I already passed my judgement,’ he said. ‘Before you set forth those facts. Because there is one additional fact you seem not to have heard.’
‘Tell me, then!’
‘This man is not married. He is widowed.’
Mustapha tensed. ‘Explain, explain! How do you know?’
‘The moment you returned, on the basis of what you were able to mumble through your pain, I initiated an inquiry – discreetly, by roundabout routes, but rapidly too. It was not a difficult task. News of an inquest is come by very simply.’
‘But you can’t be implying that he killed his wife?’
‘Indeed, no. The news runs that his wife killed herself as a result of some insult or affront he gave her.’
‘Ay-ay-ay!’ Mustapha clenched his hands into knobbly soft fists. ‘And there is to be an inquest?’
‘Tomorrow at 10 a.m. local in the Valletta coroner’s court.’
‘He is obliged to attend?’
‘Yes indeed; he is the only witness to the facts.’
‘Oh, but this is a disaster!’ Mustapha cried. ‘For him not to appear: that will create a planetary hue and cry! But if he does appear, he may let slip something which … Yes, it would be fatally easy for him to lose track of his complicated lies.’
‘We must eliminate him,’ Ali grunted. ‘We can catch him when he arrives to attend the court – ’
‘Out of the question. He has secret files to be opened in the event of his death, recording his expeditions with me, and while he pledged that he would not include any hint of my identity, he may now have gone back on his word.’ Mustapha shook his head. ‘No, I see only one possibility. We must track him down and persuade him it is still to his advantage to keep our secret. All being well, the threat of a bracelet will fetter his mind more securely than the ropes he used on me!’ Mustapha rubbed his chafed wrists and ankles. ‘Sometimes, you know, I feel that those with sight overestimate the advantages they derive from it. One would never have believed that anybody in his right mind could do such a sloppy job of lashing a man’s arms and legs. In pain, giddy, frightened, I released myself from his amateurish bonds in – oh – perhaps two or three minutes. He left slack on both my wrists, as though he conceived them to be circular instead of twice as thick one way as the other … Muley, detach a hundred apprentices and juniors, preferably active and intelligent youths, and assign them to me for instructions. It should not be very hard to pre-guess someone like Hans Dykstra, gripped by fear that prevents him thinking clearly. There are only half a dozen places apart from the Valletta court where we stand a chance of catching him; we should be able to cover all those skelters.’
‘We should ambush him at the house in Sweden,’ Ali said.
‘If there is time – No, I can’t imagine that he will have taken until now to discover that I’ve made my escape. Upon which, if I read his personality aright, he’ll smash or burn the place. Not that I’m certain. He’s disintegrating. He has now lost both the things that justified his existence in his own eyes, marked him out as more than a member of a mob. He will no longer dare to indulge his illegal hobby, which he engaged in more from bravado than from love of knowledge, and equally he has lost that rare prize, a wife, just at the time when he believed he was about to do what scarcely a man alive today has been able to do – get rid of her in favor of another younger and far more beautiful … He has been to a high place and seen the kingdoms of the world. It was all a cheat. He must be losing his mind more from frustration than any other single cause.’
He folded his hands with an air of finality, but the servants made no move to depart.
‘Is something still more amiss than you’ve told me already?’
‘There is the matter of Dr Satamori,’ Ali said. ‘He is still here. Asleep, fortunately … but when he wakes he will no doubt wish to express his thanks for your help.’
‘Then he must have the chance to do so. But make it clear when he does wake and asks to speak with me that I would far prefer to be at work on a new poem.’
The air in the Eriksson house felt as stiff as glass. When Hans contrived to take a pace forward from the skelter he half-expected to find it crashing down on him, like a shattered dome.
It was still very dark here, but that same log which had flared to reveal Mustapha last time he arrived was conserving a bright glow, and – perhaps fanned by the air which had accompanied his emergence – now transmitted flame to a sort of snake-like object lying in the hearth.
Rope. No doubt the rope Mustapha had been bound with.
Who – who – could have come and set the captive free? Had Mustapha guessed he’d be attacked? Had he told one of his many servants, ‘If I don’t return after such a time, I can be found at such a code and I’ll be in trouble’?
Hans put his hands giddily to his temples. Never in all his life had he foreseen he might wind up in a plight like this. It was infinitely worse than the nightmares which he had sometimes experienced as a result of remembering how dangerous his illegal hobby was. Even if he had been braced for it, he had always deep down imagined that there would be people who paradoxically respected him as a martyr. The people he had met at Aleuker’s, above all, might have exhibited that response. Surely someone like Boris Pech, who had asked to have a particular item searched out among the garbage of Europe in much the same way as Karl Bonetti, surely he and those he regarded as friends would be tolerant of a selfless infringement of an arbitrarily absolute rule …
But he wasn’t dealing with Pech, Satamori or Castelnuovo. He was dealing with Mustapha Sharif: an unpredictable man, an emotional man, and as much of a stranger as when he and Hans first became acquainted.
In sum: a man whose motives defied scrutiny as completely as if he were insane.
After only a few seconds of struggle, Hans realized that it was useless to try and reason his way out of yet another crisis before he slept. His day had been stretched to more than double its normal length; he was shaking more from weariness than fear – after all, he had produced inspired solutions already to several seemingly insoluble problems – and in a few hours he must really have all his wits about him. Checking his watch, he was appalled to see just how little time did remain before he was required to report for Dany’s inquest.
Nonetheless he felt a need as deep as hunger to do something, at once. It was as though the sort of fury which wrenches the power to act from the head down to the guts had been grafted on to his conscious mind; he felt a blending of naked anger with dazzling insight.
‘It will teach him a lesson!’ he said to the air. ‘It will show him I’m not to be trifled with, even though I am a lowly recuperator and not a world-famous public figure!’
He strode forward across the floor, suddenly released from his moment of subjective paralysis.
By the bed where Anneliese had slept, the candle he had set ready, and the matches. He lit the candle and carried it back into the living-zone, trailing also the duvet, the big feather-stuffed coverlet, under which the girl had lain and which was – he fancied – a little scented with her body.
He went into the kitchen, and there opened the cock on the side of the oil-tank serving the central heating system. He soaked the duvet, then dragged it across the floor after him so that there was a thick line of oil on the floor, thick enough to catch light and feed flame back to the puddle accumulating alongside the tank. Once the candle was touched to it, the whole lot would go up in a great smoky bonfire.
At the last moment, instead of simply tossing the candle at the duvet and stepping into the skelter, he checked. He had never heard of a means to inactivate a skelter by remote control … but suppose Mustapha had arranged things so that he was meant to be trapped here? Suppose the elderly skelter had been sabotaged? He could burn to death in his own fire!
He thought about that for a while, with a very clear and detached attitude, weighing the pros and cons. Eventually he balanced the candle on a candlestick, about eight or nine centimeters high, and
leaned the duvet against it and used a folded shred of paper as a sort of fuse, certain to catch within five minutes but no sooner.
Candle burns down while paper soaks up a little oil – paper burns and falls on duvet – duvet blazes up and the tank explodes … Right.
He entered the skelter. It worked perfectly. He was at home. With a sigh of relief he half-expected to make the walls shake, he rushed into his own bedroom – that had been shared with Dany – set his alarm, and collapsed into sleep without bothering to undress.
INTERFACE P
O my friend you have come a long way
from your home in the next town north –
sit and take refreshment.
O my enemy you have come no distance
from your home the other side of Earth –
speak and at once be gone.
– MUSTAPHA SHARIF
Chapter 16
The building where the coroner’s inquest was to be held had been a hotel during the period when Malta was a popular tourist resort. It had been damaged in a riot and patched in an extraordinary fashion, by an architect who was a devoted Maltese nationalist and felt it insulting to have ‘modern’ buildings on this island. Even before its floors and windows had been mended, even before they fixed the damage due to fire-bombs and bullets, he had insisted they disguise its frontage with more ‘traditional’ decoration. So, where there had been balconies of plain concrete and precast iron rails, there were now rain-worn plaster copies of the kind of molding seen on ancient churches, some threatening to break loose and needing to be lashed in place with bits of wire.
But after the Blowup most people had kept their heads even less well than that architect.
Hans’s mouth was dry, and his eyes were blurred because despite setting his alarm he had overslept and left home in such a hurry he had forgotten to bring his dark glasses. It was a bright sunny day.
At least, however, what had haunted him during his short sleep and filled his dream with images of distilled terror had not come to pass. They were not making a grand scandal out of the death of this married woman, even though the circumstances were scandalous. There were newspapers here, because the TV was under-funded and unreliable, and in the ancient manner they were sold on the streets by people who could find no better employment: notably by bracees.
On the placards held by those he passed as he walked to the court, however, he read the day’s headlines, and all were concerned with the tragedy at Aleuker’s party; there had been arrests in the local Maori community, and some whites had been accused of complicity, and enough really important, really famous people had been killed to make that the chief topic of discussion the world around.
Call it a fringe benefit. Time was when an event like Dany’s suicide, because of its local connections, would have displaced whatever happened half a world away, up to and possibly including the scale of an outbreak of war. Thanks to (thanks to …! ) influenza-M, Alaskan croup and a particularly virulent strain of cholera, the Maltese population had been slashed by seventy per cent, had become too small to run the islands properly, had had to be topped up by bribed immigration. The device had been used before, and came readily to mind.
So this morning he had only a minor ordeal to face. He would testify in exactly the same terms as he had employed when confronted by Vanzetti, he would benefit from the sympathy of the court because he had lost that precious and all-too-often irreplaceable asset, his wife, and that would be that. By lunchtime or thereabout he’d be able to head for the Balinese refuge, collect Anneliese (before she was over-exposed to the ideals of the Way of Life, a sniggering demon remarked from the corner of his mind – but that was untrue and irrelevant anyhow!), and ask her where on the planet she would most like to live. Ah, a great idea. Invoke her opinion from the very start, that was the ticket. Make sure she was emotionally committed to everything from this day forward. In next to no time she would be taking it for granted that he and she did everything together, including choosing a home. So the right course would be to indent for compassionate leave from his job, which of course would be granted without demur, and spend the next week or two getting well acquainted and exploring some of the likeliest locations for their new home, and –
He had just realized that he was humming cheerfully, and that was wholly wrong for a man whose wife had died under such circumstances, when he rounded the last corner on the way to the building where the court was to meet for the inquest.
And stopped dead.
He had only been that one time to Mustapha’s palace at Luxor. But he remembered with the clarity of a hallucinogen dream the features of the chief scribe, Muley Hassan, who had shown him over the scriptorium.
He was here. In ordinary European clothing instead of his regular Egyptian garb – not that that would have excited comment in Valletta, there being a very high proportion of Arabs in the modern Maltese population – with dark glasses on his nose … but unmistakable as he glanced at his watch as though confirming the time of arrival of a friend with whom he had a long-standing appointment.
Hans stepped back as though he had been physically pushed. A person behind – he wasn’t paying enough attention to his surroundings to tell if it was a man or woman, but he did recognize: very fat and wheezing – complained in a volley of curses, mixed English-Arabic-Maltese with a crowning splotch of obscene German.
‘But I mustn’t miss the inquest!’ Hans breathed to the uncaring crowds about him.
So … what about a back entry? Perhaps one where he could contact one of the helpful policemen he’d had such sympathy from?
He thought very hard about the layout of this district, and concluded that there was a back route which would cost only a few minutes, and – oh, miracle! Glimpsed through a door about to slam shut, perhaps a service door when this was a hotel, that same sergeant who had first appeared in his skelter and recorded the deposition about permitting the police to enter his home!
He rushed forward shouting, and the man responded by holding the door ajar.
‘Mr Dykstra! You ought to be in court by now!’ he exclaimed.
‘I know, I know, and I’m trying to get there.’ Lies flowed from Hans’s tongue more smoothly than oil; the habit was becoming compulsive. ‘But I’m trying to avoid somebody who knew Dany and – and I guess thinks it was my fault and I’m scared!’
The sergeant looked grim. ‘Ah. I know just what you mean. We’ve had half a dozen cases like that. You’re talking about the sort of person who thinks every time a woman dies the race is in greater danger than it was yesterday?’
It was the first time Hans had heard of people who held such opinions, but they jibed magnificently with the spur-of-the-moment invention he’d contrived. He nodded.
‘Right. Come with me. I’ll have a word with Chief Vanzetti. If we have to, we can always clear the court.’
‘Oh, I hope that won’t be necessary,’ Hans said, and could hear how sanctimonious his voice had become. ‘Although I guess it might be a good idea … ’
The judge was convinced it was a good idea immediately. He was a testy man oozing perspiration like pork oozing fat as it turns on a spit.
‘I will not tolerate the slightest risk of a disturbance in my court!’ he barked. ‘If this unfortunate Mr Dykstra is liable to be hounded by lunatics …! Is there any doubt that we have a simple suicide?’
Vanzetti shook his head. ‘According to our forensic people it all hangs together perfectly.’
‘In camera, then!’ the judge said. ‘I know the press won’t like it, but they may go jump in the sea for all I care. I’m overworked and underpaid and I wish I had time to pursue crackpot notions too!’
The whole inquest, in the near-silence of a large and almost empty room which must originally have been a banquet-hall, lasted under half an hour, and closed with the judge expressing his condolences.
Leaving the room in company with Vanzetti, Hans said diffidently, ‘Chief Inspector, you’ve been tremendously kind,
but I wonder if I might impose on your good will just a little longer …?’
‘What? Oh, by all means, I’ll do what I can for you. Do you want help in re-registering your domicile or something? I recall your saying you were afraid of becoming a stuck if you had to keep coming back to the same place where your wife died, and I must admit if something like that happened to me I’d be equally upset.’
‘Uh … well, more or less,’ Hans said with a swift change of mental gears. ‘I’m not sure where I want to move to yet, but I do know I’d like to stay out of sight of certain – ah – fanatics.’
‘Do you know how you attracted their attention?’
‘Uh – no. Unless,’ he added quickly as inspiration dawned, ‘it has something to do with my making it to Aleuker’s party. Perhaps somebody who was cheated of the chance … ’
‘And doesn’t realize how lucky he or she was,’ Vanzetti grunted. ‘You heard the death toll is up to fourteen? Two more of the guests died and they have little hope of saving another two.’
‘Shameful! Shameful!’
‘Yes, one would have expected mankind to learn a lesson from the Blowup, only … ’ Vanzetti shrugged. ‘Well, it isn’t my job to re-design humanity, thanks be. You want access to an official skelter, is that it? Under escort, so nobody can get at you?’
‘Yes, please. I’ll get my home – my old home – recoded so it can be offered for sale, but until then I think it might be sensible for me to intrude on the hospitality of various friends … Will you be needing me again?’
‘You heard the verdict. Suicide while of unsound mind. The case is closed.’ Vanzetti hesitated. ‘I must admit, Mr Dykstra – ’
‘You’re going to say,’ Hans interrupted, ‘that I could have been a little kinder to my wife. Yes, I guess so. But you know about her mental instability, and Dr Bonetti was kind enough to send that affidavit, and – I did my best. I promise you, my absolute best. It wasn’t enough.’
‘That’s a tough admission for any man to make,’ Vanzetti said. ‘I think I rather admire you for being able to say it. So often one runs across people who are determined to deny their own inadequacy … No, change that to shortcomings. It’s more tactful.’