She closed her binder. Her thumbs tapped, slowly, contentedly. ‘Thank you very much, Mr. Chow.’
* * *
ON CUE, a heavy hand fell on my shoulder. I stood up as bracelets were clipped onto my wrists. We stood there for two minutes like actors waiting for a cue until the door opened and another man stepped in, smiling genially. He was about my height, which was too bad for him, but he radiated a confidence that made him seem to be looking down on the policeman he was looking up at. ‘That will do, Harris,’ he said. ‘Take his cuffs off.’
‘Mr. Chow,’ he gushed, when we could finally shake hands properly, ‘I love your writing and I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. My name is Ram Gupta. I’m leading this investigation, and there’s a friendly discussion I’m hoping you can join.’
‘Can I see my wife?’ I asked, halfheartedly, expecting a refusal.
‘I thought you’d never ask.’
He turned away, and I followed him next door into a larger, better-appointed, room. A yellow light from the ceiling lent a sulphuric tint to the silent glares that welcomed me from Grace, Lynn, Phil, and Malcolm Frisbee.
By then it was pretty clear that my arrest had nothing to do with the death of Yan Chow. I was in deeper trouble than mere murder.
The room was blandly furnished. Prints of Mona Lisa, The Scream, and Dancing in the Rain reinforced the tedium of beige walls. A suite of cream sofas lounged. Two potted palms and four policemen—who seemed chosen from an American mall for their bulk—were planted around the room. I got the uncanny feeling that I was on a TV set for a special production of the Jerry Springer Show—such was the apprehension of violence in the air. Savouring my circumscribed freedom, I kissed Grace Meadows’s cold cheek gingerly and lurched into an empty chair.
Ram Gupta panned his cheerful smile around the room. ‘I’m glad you could all join us for this friendly conversation—’
‘Thirty-five years,’ began Malcolm Frisbee, ‘nine hundred and sixty writers, five continents, seventeen countries, and I have never, never—’
‘Let me start with you, Humphrey Chow,’ said Gupta hurriedly, slipping behind a desk whose surface bristled with pink Post-it Notes. His hand hovered as he selected one, which he stuck onto his steaming mug. ‘Somebody has insisted that in fact you did know Dalminda Roco, long before you wrote “Reluctant Bomber.” Is this true, Humphrey Chow?’
I came to the edge of my seat, propelled by a mixture of fear and fury. ‘False! And if I may add, whoever said so is a bloody liar.’
‘You’re calling me a liar?’ Grace asked coldly.
‘You?’ I was shaken. ‘Grace?’
Gupta folded his hands smugly and sat back.
‘Don’t take that tone with me, Humf, you know you talk in your sleep.’
‘That was years and years ago!’
‘We haven’t been married for years and years!’
‘And then again, how would you know? We don’t even sleep in the same room anymore!’
‘Any why did I change rooms? Wasn’t it to get a good night’s sleep?’
‘—And I mentioned Dalminda in my sleep? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘Dalminda, Estelle, Padre . . . it was always crowded in your bed, Humf!’
‘I mentioned Dalminda? I?’
‘The subconscious mind can be very talkative,’ said Gupta smoothly. The door opened then, and a young policeman brought in a green Post-it Note for his mug. We watched apprehensively as the investigator studied his new intelligence. ‘Here’s the real question I need help with,’ he said as the door closed quietly. ‘Why would you go all the way to Scotland for a fortnight, if it was not to rendezvous with the secretive Dalminda Roco?’
‘It was a writing retreat . . .’
There was a snort from Phil Begg’s general direction, but I had a twelve-story-contract with the editor, the first story of which had thrilled critics across Britain, so it probably came from the policeman behind him.
‘The housekeeper remembers clearing two breakfast places on the day you checked out,’ said Gupta.
‘I was very hungry.’
‘In your story, there’s talk about dumping the bomb in the sea . . . is that what happened?’
‘No.’
He leaned forward. ‘Where’s the bomb, Mr. Chow? Is it still live and dangerous? Bear in mind that concealment of terrorist materials is a serious offence.’
‘It was just a story!’
Gupta gave me a sly look, ‘You quarrelled with Dalminda, didn’t you? You were hard up, your bank confirms this, you were trying to blackmail Roco and he didn’t bite so you exposed the most secretive terrorist in Western Europe in your story. Is that what happened, Mr. Chow?’
I shook my head helplessly.
Gupta glared at me. ‘This group of yours, this . . .’ he pulled up a note, ‘Radical Suicide Society of Global Warming Justice Phenomena, I looked it up on the Internet and—’
‘—of course you won’t find it. It’s fiction!’
‘Precisely. What’s their real name?’
I was silent. With hindsight, I saw that Grace’s dog-walker job advert had been an act of love.
‘I must say I’m getting no cooperation from this conspiracy,’ said Gupta, glaring around the room. ‘You all conspired to give comfort to a dangerous terrorist. Then you outed him publicly, thereby increasing the risk of a preemptive strike. Our intelligence suggests that an attack is imminent. Unless we make immediate arrests, there will be casualties. And guess who’s heading for the dock on terrorism charges.’
‘Tell them what they need to know, Humfy dear,’ pleaded Grace tearfully. ‘They have these deals they can offer, don’t you, Mr. Gupta?’
Ram Gupta kept his lips sealed, and his powder dry.
‘If there is a real-life Dalminda,’ suggested Lynn in the first helpful comment of the day, ‘maybe it’s just a horrible coincidence. It’s happened before, you know, writers create characters and somewhere in the world there’s somebody going exactly by that name. I remember—’
‘What are the chances that the only two Dalminda Rocos in the known universe are both ex–law students, dangerous terrorists, and personally known to Mr. Chow?’ asked Gupta.
‘Nil,’ said Malcolm Frisbee poisonously. ‘Clearly “Reluctant Bomber” is not fiction but faction, a well-known literary genre, a conflation of jejune truth and fecund imagination, with the line between blurred, in this case, by psychosis—’
‘I want answers, not theories,’ snapped Gupta. He looked at me. ‘You have a twelve-tale contract with Balding Wolf, don’t you?’
‘I do.’
The policeman behind Phil Begg appeared to snort again. I began to worry about my twelve-tale deal.
‘Have you written the second story?’
‘No.’
‘So, what other escapades will Dalminda get up to,’ he asked delicately, ‘over the next eleven issues?’
I realised that my mouth was open. ‘I don’t know that I am going to write about him anymore. The character is rather clapped out . . .’
‘Was he taken out? Do I have your assurance that he’s dead?’
There was a longish silence, then he began to lay out a multiple-choice scenario. ‘Did he die in a solo suicide? Was he terminated by your cell leadership? Were you romantically involved . . . was this a crime of passion?’
‘No! I’m talking about a fictional Dalminda! Look, I’ll probably just use new characters for the other stories.’
Gupta reached swiftly for a blank slab of Post-it Notes. He nodded encouragingly, pen poised. ‘Go on.’
‘Go on with what?’
‘Your new characters.’
My coffee, tepid before, was now cold. I sipped it slowly. I knew I ought to shut up and get a good lawyer. ‘I tell you, it’s fiction. I create the characters.’
‘The way you created Dalminda Roco?’
‘Exactly!’ I thought he was beginning to understand.
‘That
’s fine with me,’ said Ram Gupta, drawing a line down the middle of his blank note block. ‘Go on, create me a character.’
I shrugged. This was crazy. Lynn cast me a warning look, her lazy left eye toeing the party line, but I had gone on and said, ‘Okay. Damien Higram.’
‘Spell,’ said Gupta, and I obliged. Lynn’s eyes were closed, and she was twirling her wedding ring in a gesture I knew too well. Gupta was on cocaine or something, hyperactive with excitement, talking into a radio and a telephone at the same time. ‘I have a name: Damien Higram, not Ingram, Higram, H-I-G-R-A-M. Read that back. Super. Move. Move . . .’ His eyes dilated and he seemed to remember us. He swivelled to the wall, spilling a file to the ground heedlessly. His voice dropped into a warble of excitement, indistinct but for words like ‘CIA files’ and ‘Mossad.’ I considered speaking up with a caveat, but his momentum was pretty scary. Another minute of this passed and he put phone and radio against his chest and turned to me, hopefully. ‘Do you have an address for me?’
My heart was pounding.
‘Fictional, of course,’ he conceded with a wink. Lynn was humming “Three Blind Mice.”
‘This is the address,’ I said tautly.
‘Sorry?’
I pointed at the policeman to his right. ‘That’s Damien.’ I pointed at the policeman to his left. ‘That’s Higram.’ I had combined the first names on their badges to create a character. ‘Look, this joke has got to stop right now—’
‘—this joke?’ roared Ram Gupta, leaping to his feet. He slammed phone and radio down and raged, ‘This joke? Does five hundred thousand pounds strike you like a joke? Does thousands of overtime hours, leave cancellations, transatlantic plane trips . . . do they sound to you like a joke?’
‘Maybe it’s the quality of the investigation that you need to improve,’ said Phil Begg, walking to the water dispenser. ‘I read “Reluctant Bomber” and realised that my readers would like it, as they have. But it was also clearly a cry for psychiatric attention—’
‘There’s another thing,’ said Gupta, reaching for another Post-it Note. His hand was trembling. ‘How’s your psychoanalysis going?’
‘I am not under psychoanalysis,’ I said sharply.
They stared at me.
Malcolm Frisbee lumbered to his feet. ‘Where’s the goddamned loo?’ he asked, and a policeman held open a door for him.
‘You saw Dr. George on Wednesday,’ said Phil, ‘he told me so, and it’s there in our contract.’
‘I play golf with Dr. George Maida every Wednesday,’ I said loftily, ‘and as for the conversation that passes between us, I might as well have been playing golf with my window cleaner.’
‘That’s a breach of contract: the twelve-story deal is dead!’
‘Hallelujah,’ I muttered, bravely.
Malcolm bounded back into the room. ‘You can’t take legal action based on anything you learn here!’
‘I don’t get my legal advice from you,’ replied Phil. ‘My God, I should never have allowed myself to be blackmailed into publishing this claptrap.’
Gupta pricked up his ears. ‘Blackmailed? What—’
‘You keep out of this,’ snapped Frisbee. ‘This is a business matter.’
‘Phil,’ said Lynn, quietly.
‘Blackmailed?’ asked Malcolm Frisbee derisively, walking over to Phil, ‘Somebody jog my medium-term memory here—who blackmailed you? Who left that prostrate message with my PA asking for my personal commitment on “Reluctant Bomber?” That story is the only thing worthy of review in your . . . your flaccid rag!’
‘See who’s talking!’ shouted Phil, rising to his feet. ‘No wonder you couldn’t get out the word! The only reason I read that mad hodgepodge was because I thought it was a Jenny Ely story. It was a hodgepodge. A hodgepodge!’
‘Calm down, everyone,’ said Gupta.
‘What’s he saying, Lynn?’ Frisbee demanded.
‘On the day I . . .’ began Phil.
‘You keep out of this,’ snapped Frisbee. ‘This is a company matter.’
Lynn shrugged. ‘Well, maybe he did start reading the Bible thinking it was the Quran . . . but it should have dawned on him at some point—’
‘You were out of line,’ snarled Phil. ‘It was thoroughly unethical. And as I recall, the contract that I signed had a psycho clause . . . which he has obviously breached!’
‘Humphrey Chow,’ said Gupta, cutting to the chase, ‘will you submit to a psychiatric evaluation?’
Phil opened his hands and looked upwards in mock thanksgiving.
‘Never,’ I said, categorically.
TOBIN RANI
Kantai | 3rd April, 2005
We walked slowly through the ruins. Here and there, we found waist-high remains of adobe homes enclosed in swathes of grass. Slabs of red clay in a sea of green, a scrubland cropped with dwarf trees. In the distance, we could just make out the black ribbon of a trunk road. A grey duiker surprised us, springing from cover and breaking across our path as we turned towards the expedition vehicle where it stood under a tree, up to its axles in grass.
On the tailboard of the truck sat the Mata, lost in thought as he stared up into the Jinn Hills where he had once lived.
‘This is it?’ David asked eventually. ‘Kantai?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The Menai lived here seventy-two years. In 1920, Mata Nimito led our migration from here to Kreektown. He was born here, and he was in his twenties when we set out.’ I turned and looked north. ‘It gets interesting now: from here we head out into the desert, on a path he has never seen, trusting in the accuracy of our historysongs.’
‘We’re being romantic here, aren’t we?’ David said genially. ‘The desert is featureless. How can you map a journey across the Sahara and then lock it up over hundreds of years in the ethnic memory of . . . songs?’
‘The songs are written. He knows them by heart, but there’s a written text.’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ He said absently. His eyes were far away, fixed on the distant road, ‘We could have come here faster on the trunk road. The GPS could have brought us here a day earlier.’
‘There were no roads when we left Kantai, David, and we have no coordinates for these locations. The Mata’s maps are mostly in the sky. He can tell us how to get there, not where they are. Do you know what a starmap is?’
‘No.’
‘It’s like a map of the night sky. The matas were cloudcasters and astronomers.’ I paused and glanced at the last of the matas where he sat, and thought that they were also philosophers, and priests, and historians, and living libraries . . . I turned back to the professor. ‘When we migrated from Kantai to Kreektown the route was encoded in a songline that combined star patterns with geographical features like rivers and cliffs, encoding travel directions that can survive centuries. The desert is not “featureless,” David. That was how the Mata brought us here.’
‘And that is how he plans to take us to the Field of Stones?’
‘Precisely.’ I looked around slowly. In one of these ruins lay my grandfather’s grave. It was one thing to hear it in Mata Nimito’s songs. It was another to actually stand here. ‘Each migration has a songline. Our migration was meant to be temporary, so accurate route maps were critical. The Mata can recite all eight songlines from our historysongs.’
‘But we don’t need to go to all eight settlements, right?
‘Of course not . . . what are you thinking?’
‘We can plot the next songline from here to the next settlement on a map. If we do that for all eight place-names, we’ll end up with the “X” that marks the Field of Stones. Then we can drive there as the crow flies.’
‘That will probably save weeks and tanks of fuel . . . worth a shot!’
‘You bet.’ David sighed. ‘We could also save tons more fuel by turning back now. Um . . . run this by me again: why aren’t we looking for a premium plot in a nice cemetery?’
‘You can’t really get how big a deal this is. There’s an O
riginal Sin in the history of the Menai that must be rested—’
‘I’ll just steer clear of the religion, if you don’t mind.’
‘Okay, it’s a crazy journey, David. A ninety-eight percent chance of failure—’
‘Make that ninety-nine point nine.’
‘Fine! And I’ll possibly die on the trail as well. You don’t have to come along. Thanks for the loan of the truck and all . . .’
‘I’m in. I’m just surprised you gave yourself a two percent chance of success.’
I stopped and looked at him. At times like this the professor was difficult to read. He was hiding something; what it was, I had no clue. ‘So what’s in this for you? You’re not risking your life out of gratitude that I identified your singateya.’
‘Dunno. Research, I guess. Maybe I smell another book coming. With you here, it’s a chance to interview the Mata . . .’
‘You have to be alive to write a book. Listen, we may never find the Field of Stones. I may just have to dig a grave for him in the desert. Go home. If it’s all about your damned research, I’ll phone you when I find the Field of Stones and you can fly into the nearest town or something.’
‘Sometimes the journey there is the most important part of the trip.’
I grinned. ‘Then quit bitching.’
ZANDA ATTURK
Limbe | 4th April, 2005
I called one of Adevo’s numbers, and he gave me the unexpected news of Ma’Calico’s arrest. It was a fluke: one of the policemen from Elue’s Kreektown raid had recognised her in a bus at a checkpoint. Unfortunately, her relatives had now looked for her at every police station in Ubesia without luck. She seemed to have disappeared into thin air.
I was speechless, imagining Amana’s state of mind.
He sucked his teeth morosely. ‘Remember what I did once I heard that Elue had arrested you?’
‘You moved your tent?’
‘Is good you also move your tent now,’ he said. ‘Everything Ma’Calico knows about you should be a lie. I’m sending Amana tomorrow.’
* * *
AMANA ARRIVED unexpectedly in place of another bale. That night, when the brothers came back from the drop, they took me halfway across the market to another stall, where she had been installed. It was neither the reunion I had looked forward to nor the woman I remembered. She had arrived less her effervescence—and it was not just the seasickness.
The Extinction of Menai Page 20