by Iain Banks
'Well, good for you, but you should still try to make up.'
'I suppose I should. Yes, you are right. I will see her tomorrow. If she will see me.'
'Well, I'd send her my regards, but I don't think it would be a good idea for you to mention that.'
'I think it would be politic not to.' I heard him sigh. 'Kathryn, I must go.'
'Okay, Suvinder. You look after yourself. All right?'
'I will. You too.'
I clicked the phone off. I sat there, tapping its little warm black body against my other hand, looking out at the mountains and thinking.
* * *
Château d'Oex is, as I've said, the closest thing we have to a world HQ. The compound starts just above the town itself, on the far side of the railroad tracks. It doesn't look like much, considering: a big old château that looks like it can't decide whether it really is a château or a Schloss, lots of grounds — the sort of grounds that get bigger the longer you look at them, following walls and fences that are as discreetly concealed as possible — and a mountainside scattered with smaller buildings and houses. Blysecrag is a far more impressive sight.
The bit above ground, however, is not even half the story. Some people have tried to nickname the place the Iceberg, because so much of it is hidden under the surface.
In the dusk, Château d'Oex the town looked rich and neat and tidy as ever. It had snowed recently and the place looked quite picturesque, in a neat and tidy way. I swear they clean the slush. The road to the compound swept over the railway and up to a tall set of gates and a designer guardhouse. One of the three guards recognised me and nodded, but they checked my passport anyway.
The gates hummed open with an inertia-rich deliberation that would make you wary of taking anything flimsier than a main battle tank through them uninvited. The 7-series purred upwards past the trees and the crisply white lawns and pastures, its way lit by ornamental light clusters with three softly glowing white globes apiece, and — on about every fifth or sixth lamp — a little CCTV camera.
The château swung into view, tastefully floodlit and looking chocolate-box pretty against the black and white of the wooded mountainside beyond. Above it, necklaces of white road lights wiggled on up the slope to higher buildings.
The mostly male staff at the château went gliding around, white-jacketed, efficient, seeming to do the old Miss Heggies trick of materialising and dematerialising at will. I was welcomed with nods and clicked heels, my bags disappeared apparently of their own volition, my coat slipped silently and almost unnoticed from my shoulders and I was escorted through the baroque and glowing foyer towards the gleaming elevators in the dreamlike state that usually afflicted me here. I nodded to people I knew, exchanged travel pleasantries with the white-jacketed guy carrying my briefcase, but it all seemed dissociated from reality. If you'd asked me when I got to my room and was settling in which language I'd been talking to the guy in the white jacket, I couldn't have told you for sure.
My room looked down the slope of the mountainside towards the town. The mountains across the valley were the colour of the moon. The room was large: the sort of space hotels tend to call a mini suite. It had antique furniture, two balconies, a bigger bed than usual, and a bathroom with a separate shower stall. Flowers, chocolates and newspapers had been delivered, and a half-bottle of champagne. You become very sensitised to the minutiae of Business perks and privileges over the years, and the precise level of luxury that greets you at Château d'Oex is entirely the most accurate guide to how you're doing within your current status in the hierarchy.
This was up to Level Two standards. The champagne was only a half-bottle but, then, I was by myself and it doesn't do to encourage one's guests to get too sozzled before dinner. And it was vintage; big plus. The phone rang and the general manager of the château welcomed me and apologised for not being able to greet me in person. I assured him everything was fine and to my taste.
I took Dulsung's little artificial flower and stuck it in a glass on the bedside table. It looked tiny and forlorn there, even cheap. What if the staff threw it out? I picked it up and put it back on my jacket, in the button-hole, but it didn't look right there either, so I stuck it inside, bending the stalk through the button-hole in the single internal pocket so that it was secure.
Dinner was promptly at eight in the main dining room; there were maybe a hundred or so staffers. I gossiped with the best of them, before, during and after. The château is, usually, the place to find out what's going on in the Business. Mostly people wanted to find out what was going on in Thulahn from me. The quality of the questions they asked indicated the accuracy of the rumours they'd heard, and corresponded pretty accurately to their level in the company.
Had I just come back from Fenua Ua? (No.) Was there some back-up deal being arranged in Thulahn in case Fenua Ua went belly-up at the last moment? (I couldn't say.) Was I going to be president of Fenua Ua? (Unlikely.) Was the deal done yet or not? (I really couldn't say.) Had the Prince really proposed to me? (Yes.) Had I accepted? (No.) So I answered a lot of questions, but I was able to ask a lot in return, and people were happier than they might have been otherwise to share all they knew or felt about a whole host of subjects. At the end of that evening, even if only for a short time, I probably knew as much about the Business as a whole as anybody did, regardless of level. Madame Tchassot, who kept a house in the grounds, was present at the meal and after it; the only Level One. We talked for a few minutes over brandy in the drawing room and she seemed quite friendly. She would be spending the next few days at her own place, near Lucerne.
'Adrian tells me you're meeting him tomorrow, Kathryn.'
'That's right. I wanted to talk to him.' I smiled. 'He seems very proud of his new car. 355, I think he said. Sounds nice.'
She smiled thinly. 'Red is not his colour, but he insisted.'
'Well, it is a Ferrari. I think it's almost compulsory.'
'You are meeting for lunch?'
'Yes, in a place near the Grimsel Pass. He recommended it.'
She looked uncertain. 'You will take good care of him, yes?'
'Of course,' I said. What was she talking about? She was staring intently at her glass. She didn't think I had any designs on his tumid butt, did she?
'Thank you. He is…important to me. Very dear.'
'Of course, I understand. I'll try to make sure he leaves me in one piece.' I laughed lightly. 'Why? He's not a bad driver, is he? I was thinking of asking for a drive in the Ferrari.'
'No, no, he is a perfectly fine driver, I think.'
'Well, that's a relief.' I raised my glass. 'To careful drivers.'
'Indeed.'
In my dream, I was in a great house in the mountains. There was bright moonlight and starlight, but the stars were wrong and I remember thinking I must be in New Zealand. The great house was built on a vast rumpled landscape of spired and crevassed ice tipped between two mountain ranges. It didn't seem in the least strange to me that the building had been constructed on a glacier, though the whole place creaked and trembled as it moved with the rest of our immediate landscape down the vast slow river of ice. With each rumble and creak beneath us, a host of diamond chandeliers tinkled, mirrors flexed and distorted, and cracks appeared in the ceilings and walls, sprinkling white dust. White-overalled servants rushed to repair the fissures, clattering up ladders and shinning up skinny poles to slap fresh plaster across the faults, raining white damp dots. This happened a lot. We held umbrellas above us as we walked through the huge, echoing rooms. Marble statues were real people who had stood too long in one place under the drizzle of plaster.
Teams of yaks moved through constantly branching tunnels in the ice beneath us, only surfacing at the great house, where their smiling, round-faced minders thanked us for soup and their beds in the many tents scattered across the icy scenery.
A masked man I knew not to trust was doing a complicated trick with cups and hats and my little netsuke monkey, shifting them around the table
while people placed bets and laughed. The masked man's mouth was visible and he was missing lots of teeth, but they weren't really missing at all: some had been blacked out as though he was an actor.
I woke up, wondering where I was again. Thulahn? Not cold enough. But, then, I'd been moved to a more hotel-like room. But still not Thulahn. I remembered the smell of the Heavenly Luck Tea House. Yorkshire? No. London? No, Château d'Oex. Ah yes. Nice room. Valley view. Alone. Nobody here. I felt groggily across the bed. No, no one here. Monkey gone. This monkey's gone to heaven — wasn't that a Pixies' song? Dulsung. Why hadn't she been in my dream? And who's this 'we' anyway, white man? Na, nothing. Sleep again.
There was time to kill at the Grimsel Pass. I sat in the 7-series waiting for Poudenhaut, reading the Herald Tribune. The phone rang and it was, at last, Stephen.
'Kathryn? Hi. Sorry for the delay. Daniella was running a serious temperature and Emma was away at one of her friend's so I had to do the hospital thing. She's okay now but, well, hence the delay.'
'That's all right. It's good to hear you.'
'What was it you wanted to talk about? Nothing too urgent, I hope.'
'Hold on.' I got out of the car, only just beating Happy Hans, my white-haired chauffeur, to the draw: he had his cap on, he was out of his door and reaching for the outside handle of my door while I was still pushing. He drew the door fully open as I got out into the chill air of the early afternoon. The car park was gravel, uneven. I nodded to Hans and let him put my coat over my shoulders before I walked off, heading away from the quaintly painted old wooden inn and the other cars and coaches.
'Kathryn?'
I stopped at the low wall, looking down the valley at the road winding into Italy.
'Still here, Stephen,' I said. 'Listen, what I have to tell you is pretty bad news.'
'Oh, yeah?' He sounded only a little wary at first. 'What? How bad?'
I took a deep breath. The air was cold; I could feel its raw, numbing touch in my nostrils and at the back of my throat and could sense it filling my lungs. 'It's about Emma.'
I told him. He was silent, mostly. I told him all of it: about the DVD, Hazleton's involvement, the dates and places and the obligation that Hazleton expected of me. He was so quiet. I wondered if perhaps none of this was coming as a great shock at all. Maybe, I thought, they had an open relationship that he'd never wanted to tell me about in case it encouraged me. Maybe Hazleton had been upset that I'd told him I'd made my mind up but that I wasn't going to tell him what my decision was yet, and he had told Stephen.
But no. Stephen was just stunned. He hadn't really started to guess, or if he had entertained any suspicions whatsoever they had been the sort that occur to you unbidden, as purely theoretical constructs, the sort of thing that an imaginative mind throws up as a matter of course, but which the moral self dismisses as preposterous, and even feels shameful to be associated with.
He said, 'Yes,' once or twice, and, 'I see,' and, 'Right.'
'Stephen, I'm sorry.' Silence. 'That's hopelessly inadequate, I know.' More silence. 'I just hope you…Stephen, I've thought about this for a long time. Two weeks. I didn't know what to do. I still don't know that I'm doing the right thing. I think it's all pretty horrible, including Hazleton's part in it, and making me have anything to do with it, too. I want you to know I'm not enjoying this. I'm trying to be straight with you, trying to be honest. I could have got Hazleton to let you know without me being —'
'All right! ' he said loudly, almost shouting. Then, 'Sorry. All right, Kathryn. I take the point. I guess you did the right thing.'
I looked up at the blue, blue sky. 'You're going to hate me for this, aren't you?'
'I don't know what I'm going to feel, Kathryn. I feel…I don't know. Winded. Yeah, sort of winded, like when you fall on your back and can't breathe, but…hey, a lot worse, you know?'
'Yeah, I know. Stephen, I'm so sorry.'
'Oh. Well. I guess it had to be done. Jeez.' He sounded like he might be about to laugh or cry. Breath whistled out of him. 'Some start to the day.'
'Is Emma there?'
'No, still away…Well, just coming back today. God, the bitch.'
'You take it easy, okay?'
'Huh? Yeah, sure. Sure. Ah, and thanks. I guess.'
'Look, call me whenever, all right? Get your breath back. But keep in touch. Call me later. Will you?'
'Ah, yeah. Yeah, right. I'll… Goodbye, Kathryn. Goodbye.'
'Good — ' The phone clicked off. ' — bye,' I said.
I closed my eyes. Somewhere down the road, in Italy, I could hear the muted rasp of a high-performance engine, coming closer.
Lunch was a disappointment. Poudenhaut couldn't stop talking about his car, a shiny red 355 soft-top with a black hood. He'd driven me here in it, keeping the revs below five thousand because even though the engine was meant to have been run-in on the bench he just wanted to be sure. Hans and the BMW would appear here later to take me back to the château. We were in a modern glass and steel restaurant in the trees above an archetypically twee village that looked like it was composed of scaled-up cuckoo clocks: on the hour you expected a door under the eaves to flap open and Heidi to bounce out at the end of a giant spring.
We both drank spring water. The food was Swiss-German, not my favourite cuisine, so it was easy to save plenty of space for a pudding, which was satisfyingly rich and chocolaty.
Poudenhaut tore his gaze away from the Ferrari again (he'd insisted on a table with a view of the car park). 'Yes, why did you want to see me?'
Nettle-grasping time again. 'I wanted to ask you what you were doing at the Silex plant the other day.'
His big, puffy face stared at me over our gently steaming coffee. He blinked a few times. I wondered which way he'd jump. 'Silex?' he said. He frowned and concentrated on stirring some sugar into his espresso.
'You know, the chip plant in Scotland. What took you up there, Adrian?'
I watched him decide. He wasn't going for total denial. Something closer to the truth. 'I was looking into something.'
'What was that?'
'Well, I can't say.'
'Was this for Mr Hazleton?'
He stirred his coffee slowly, then brought the little cup to his lips. 'Mm-hmm,' he said, and sipped.
'I see,' I said. 'I take it he had his suspicions too, then.'
'Suspicions?'
'About what was going on in there.'
He put on a serious face. 'Hmm.' His gaze flickered all over me.
'Come to any conclusions?'
He shrugged. 'How about you?'
I sat closer, leaning into the fragrant vapours rising from my coffee. 'There was something hidden in there.'
'In the plant?'
'Yes. Ideal place, when you think about it. Chip factories have brilliant security anyway. You know how much chips are worth: more than their weight in gold. So the places are really well guarded. Then there's the whole prophylactic rigmarole you have to go through to get into the production facilities; all that changing and delay. Impossible to just charge in. Giving people inside time to hide stuff, if you know somebody who might ask awkward questions is coming in. Plus there are all those deeply noxious chemicals they use, the etching fluids, the solvents and washes; really nasty chemical-warfare stuff any rational person would keep well away from. So as well as all the usual security paraphernalia, the guards and walls and cameras and so on, and the sheer difficulty of accessing the place quickly, you've got a serious health disincentive to go there in the first place. It's perfect, the ideal place to hide whatever. I took a look round three or four weeks ago, but I couldn't find anything.'
Poudenhaut was nodding thoughtfully. 'Yes, well, that's what occurred to us, too. So, what do you think it was? Or is?'
'Oh, it's gone now, but I think they had another assembly line going in there.'
He blinked. 'Chips?'
'What else would you build in a chip plant?'
'Hmm,' he said, smiling briefly. 'I
see.' He pursed his lips and nodded, staring at the table where the bill had just appeared.
'I'll get this,' I said, picking up the check.
He reached out too late. 'No, please. This is mine.'
'That's okay, I got it.' I reached down for my handbag.
He snatched the bill out of my fingers. 'Male prerogative,' he said, grinning. I hid behind my best chilly smile and thought, Suddenly you're far too full of beans, my lad. He fished his company card out of his wallet. 'So, who do you think was cheating on us, who was behind it? The management at the plant? Ligence? They're our partners there, right?'
'That's right. Obviously the upper management must have known: you couldn't do it without them. But I think it was somebody in the Business.'
He looked alarmed. 'Really? Oh dear. That's bad. Any ideas? What level?'
'Your level, Adrian.'
He paused, blinking again, his card poised half-way to the plate the check had arrived on. 'My level?'
'Level Two,' I said reasonably, spreading my hands.
'Oh, yes.' The plate was taken away again.
'So, did you find out anything? Does Mr Hazleton have any ideas?'
He made a clicking noise with his mouth. 'We have our suspicions, but it would be wrong to say anything at this point in time, Kathryn.'
I waited until he was signing the card slip before I said, 'Of course, it could be a Level One conspiracy. Somebody at Mr Hazleton's level.'
His Mont Blanc hesitated over the tip line. He added a round number that was a little on the mean side and signed. 'Mr Hazleton has considered that possibility,' he said smoothly. He nodded at the maître d' and stood. 'Shall we?'
'Grips like nothing else. Just listen to that engine. Isn't that wonderful? I think you hear it better in a cabriolet, even with the top up.'
'Mm-hmm,' I said. I'd been reading the handbook; I put it back in the glove-box with the spare set of keys and the purchase paperwork.
Poudenhaut was a poor driver; even allowing for the fact that he was trying to be kind to the engine, he changed up too early and still didn't seem entirely to have the hang of the car's open gate. His cornering was awful, too, and the fact the car was right-hand-drive was no excuse either: he seemed to think hitting the apex meant driving into the depths of the bend then jerking the wheel round in roughly the correct direction, seeing where he was heading now, then making any necessary corrections (repeat as required until the road straightens). We zoomed and dived along some wonderfully winding, empty mountain roads in one of the best sports cars in the world, but I was getting heartily sick of the experience. He wouldn't even put the top down because clouds had moved in from the west and there had been a few flakes of snow.