Louis shrugged, and while he fiddled with his tie his thoughts flashed to a sudden despairing vision: book clubs. Groups of women drinking tea and discussing the relative symbolism of Secrets Of A Chambermaid, dissecting everything that was said or thought, compartmentalizing each character over and over again, the scene repeating itself millions of times throughout the mega-city every Tuesday night. “It’s just another tragic love story,” he said. “So what?”
“There’s something else. I haven’t quite finished.” The Master and Frank O’Lynn shared a look that said we might as well tell him everything. Then she said, “From all accounts, The Boss approved of the story from the very beginning. Incurable despair, the reality of everyday hopelessness; exactly the message he wanted to send to his citizens. The problem was, to those who knew Miles N. Boon, the ending didn’t fit. Unfortunately, he disappeared just after the first edition was published. No one can say for certain, but the story should have climaxed with the lovers’ reunion in the After Life. The book was not supposed to have been about hopelessness. It was supposed to have been about the saving grace of love and hope. The Boss couldn’t allow that – as a symbol of power, the mayor couldn’t be seen to have been duped – so he had the last chapter edited out to reflect the futility in resisting authority and privilege.”
Is that what he had been brought here to listen to, Louis sighed, a goddamn conspiracy theory? Was nobody immune from believing what they wanted to believe, even The Master? It was that line from Simon & Garfunkel, wasn’t it? A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest. Had truer words ever been sung? “How can you know for sure?” he said. “It’s just hearsay passed down over thousands and thousands of years. You’ll never know the truth because the author disappeared, no matter what anyone else says.”
Again, The Master had that I know something you don’t glint in her eyes. She motioned toward the book once more. “That’s why Miles N. Boon wrote the poem in the first edition, to tell us the truth.” She paused to let him weight the facts. “It’s also no coincidence that he wrote it in Tongues, to avoid misinterpretation.”
All well and good, Louis mused, but what the hell did it have to do with him? “Okay, I’ve listened to your ancient poem and your conspiracy theories, and they may or may not have any factual basis to them, I don’t know, and I don’t really care; but quite frankly I’ve yet to hear the slightest goddamn bit of information that has any relevance to me. Excuse me for sounding a touch paranoid, but why the hell have you dragged me into this?”
Behind her, Frank O’Lynn reddened and pretended to scratch an itch on the tip of his snout. Without the slightest flinch of embarrassment or discomfort herself, The Master said, “Not I, Mr. DeVille. The White Rabbit has brought you here. Your coming was prophesized by Miles N. Boon.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
The Prophecy
LOUIS had heard some horseshit in his day – alien abductions, the Holy Grail, weeping statues of the Blessed Mary – but this just about topped the lot. A prophecy! Him! Surprisingly, he felt no anger, just a stirring rumble in his belly, which escaped as a low reverberating chuckle that wobbled his shoulders and bounced his head until he felt like a doll being shaken by an irate toddler.
The Master waited for him to finish, unaffected by the outburst. Frank O’Lynn, on the contrary, went redder, and the sight of him glowing like a priest who had just been caught leaving the premises of a brothel sent Louis into another fit of laughter. Eventually, he managed to get himself under some sort of control (best goddamn laugh he’d had since arriving in LeMont, he reckoned). “Of course,” he said, wiping a tear from his eye with the back of his paw. “I should have known the poem was about me. I’m the goddamn messiah come to save everyone. How could I not see it?”
“We laugh at what we don’t understand,” The Master said. “Ridicule is the easiest way to dismiss something that challenges our perceptions of who and what we are. Just another cheap way to feel good about our self, is it not?”
Louis wiped another tear from his eye. Frank O’Lynn’s redness, he saw, had surely peaked. “So it’s me against you two, is it?”
“On the contrary, it’s you against yourself. We could have turned you over to the secret police if that was our intent. What more do we need to do to prove that we’re on your side?”
Louis scanned the poem that had been translated into English. Nowhere did it mention his name. No Louis (not even a Lewis), no DeVille, he was goddamn sure of it. “You could start by proving your ridiculous claim,” he said.
Before she could answer, a distant rumbling began to shake the room. It seemed to come from far beneath the floor, muted and threatening, then louder and louder as it grumbled toward the surface. From the kitchen cupboards, Louis could hear the rattle of china plates and saucers. Closer, the figurines on the piano wobbled, at first just one or two, then the whole lot, disco dancers grooving to the beat of the latest Number One hit on the LeMont Top Forty countdown (Top Of The World, for a record sixty millionth week in a row!). At the quake’s peak, the coffee table was vibrating so violently Louis feared the priceless copy of Miles N. Boon was going to fall apart. One of the porcelain ducks even fell off the wall and snapped a wing, but remarkably The Master didn’t flinch. Even the guinea pig was unaffected, his redness waning as the rumbling moved onto another part of the city.
“The middle lines,” she said, nodding toward the poem. “Six and seven. Your name’s there in bold letters.”
Louis skipped down the first five lines to read:
Return with him who’s lived,
And he’ll break with song, “Lo’ thou art a dance.”
It wasn’t obvious, that was for goddamn sure; his name wasn’t even in normal text, let alone jumping out at him in glaring bold letters. These had been the lines that were disjointed and blurry when he first read them in Tongues. It had to be some sort of code; and although he had never been one for secret messages and smart-ass wordplays (leave that for the bored housewives of the world), he did make a perfunctory effort to try and crack the verse. “Assuming him is referring to me,” he said, “then return with him who’s lived could mean absolutely anybody who has ever been born. There’s nothing specific to me.”
The Master seemed more moved with his attempt than she had with the quake a few minutes before. “You’re on the right track. Are you familiar with cryptic crosswords?”
Familiar, yes, but could he actually solve the goddamn things, no. Lady Di, though, had been a regular addict. She had heard once on TV that there were three things she could do as an elderly citizen to ward off the symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease – learn a new language; learn a new musical instrument; and do lots of crosswords – so on the eve of her sixtieth birthday she made a resolution to follow the TV lady’s advice; and that she did, with a vengeance, littering the bedroom and study with god knows how many self-learning cassettes and do-it-yourself manuals. He was forever tripping over them: Teach Yourself French In Three Months. Learn To Play The Guitar Like A Professional. Cryptic Crosswords For Dummies. Though she never did manage to conquer the challenges of the Gallic vernacular (her merci never got past mercy), nor did she ever threaten to topple the genius of Beethoven or Bach with her musical brilliance, he did have to admit that she became more than a competent puzzler. He often saw every square of the Times crossword completed before he even had a chance to glance at the headlines. She also had more than her fair share of success with crossword competitions, twice winning an overseas trip for two, once to London and once to Paris (both times electing to take her sister), which, to his perpetual irritation, she always reminded him of whenever he thought she had done something stupid.
“Can’t say I’ve ever been interested in puzzles,” he said. “Don’t even like Scrabble.”
“Then let me help.” The Master directed his attention to the fifth line of the poem. Frank O’Lynn kept silent behind her. “You were almost there when you said ‘Go back’. The word ‘Return’
in a cryptic puzzle not only implies the literal interpretation to follow; it also refers to a word written backwards in the verse. The trick is knowing which one it’s referring to. And he gives you a clue.”
Return with him who’s lived, Louis read. “A clue within a clue?”
“Precisely.”
Was he blind, or just goddamn stupid? “I still can’t see it.”
“He tells you, quite literally, when he writes: him who’s lived. Meaning, not only him who has lived, but also: him who is lived. In cryptic puzzles, grammar is used as a tool to hide the true meaning, like a magician’s sleight of hand.”
“But lived returned spells devil. You’re not for one minute suggesting we follow…”
“Of course not. We haven’t finished. The And of the seventh line is meant as a conjunction, a follow on from the previous word. Ignore the period mark at the end of the sixth line; that’s just there to confuse anyone not belonging to the Freedom Fighters who might have stumbled upon the poem. Leave them thinking as you’ve just done, that it’s referring to the devil. You’ve got to give Miles N. Boon credit for that.”
Louis still wasn’t convinced. He scanned the seventh line: And he’ll break with song, “Lo’ thou art a dance.”
“The clues are immediate,” The Master said, and Louis read the line again, this time aloud, though something in his voice told The Master he was having more than his fair share of trouble catching on. “Break, here, is referring to the word he’ll, not the rest of the line.”
Up until that moment, his mind had felt like a TV set that couldn’t tune into the proper channel, kind of like the fuzzy snow at the end of station transmission. Now, The Master had given him a verbal bang to the side of his head and the picture momentarily flickered into focus: all he had to do was “break” the apostrophe from the word he’ll. “The line really means devil and hell. Is that right?”
The Master nodded. “Remember, with cryptic puzzles there is the immediate literal meaning, and the true, hidden meaning. As with the mysteries of life, there are different layers of truth that are only apparent to whoever has prepared them self to understand the depths of those truths.” She paused while Louis tried to retune, but when it appeared he was still somewhat fuzzy, she said, “First you must return the word he’ll because the conjunction And implies that you must, which leaves you with the nonsense word ll’eh. Then you can literally ‘break’ the ends off the word and tell me what you get.”
Louis scratched his temple. “L and E.”
“Now attach them to the end of line six and spell it out for me.”
Louis deliberately took his time. “D… E… V… I… L… L… E.”
The instant he said the final letter, he went back to the lines to make sure he hadn’t been taken for a ride: Return with him who’s lived and he’ll break… It couldn’t be, could it? Return lived is devil. He’ll break is el, which also must be returned, leaving devil and le – DeVille.
He kept staring at the cryptic sentence for another few seconds, then said, “I’ll grant you, it’s an extraordinary coincidence. But…”
“But where is the rest of your name?” The Master said for him. “Where is Louis?”
“Yes, and not Lewis, either. It has to be spelled L.O.U.I.S before I’ll even remotely accept the possibility that the prophecy might be genuine.”
Louis didn’t fancy the expression on The Master’s face. Like cryptic crosswords and Scrabble, he had never been interested in chess, or any other board game for that matter, except Monopoly of course (show me somebody who doesn’t enjoy bankrupting their opponents when they land on one of their hotels and I’ll show you a goddamn fake), but now he had a sinking feeling in his gut that he was about to experience his very first checkmate.
“Lo’ thou art a dance,” The Master said, as if it were self-evident.
It still meant nothing; and more annoyingly, Frank O’Lynn was now grinning over her shoulder like he had just backed the Derby winner. God, he loathed smugness.
“The words with song tell us to expect a title to follow, which it surely does.”
His mind once more fuzzy with TV snow, Louis felt like banging his temples to help him retune (But there’s only one goddamn channel in this hell hole, isn’t there, Louis my boy?) He reread the conclusion to the seventh line, almost hating himself for what he was about to say. “You’ve got me. I give in.”
The Master then said, “Sometimes surrendering is the only way out of an impossible situation.” She paused briefly, then went on. “Miles N. Boon tells us that the name of the next prophet is mixed in with the letters of the line, Lo’ thou art. ‘A dance’ implies just that. To shuffle them about, to stir them up.”
The first thing Louis did was to make a tally. “My name has only five letters. There’s nine there.”
To his disappointment, the grin that had spread across Frank O’Lynn’s pointy face didn’t waver. “Thou is Old English for what?” The Master asked.
Knowing that he had missed out on something obvious, Louis replied, “You.”
“Exactly, and in the language of cryptic puzzles it also represents the letter U.”
Like SMS messaging, he thought. Are is R, to is 2, and you is U. It wasn’t rocket science. “I presume art is Old English for are?” he said, to which The Master and Frank O’Lynn nodded in unison. He went on quickly, now with a faint glimmer of hope that he could finally lay to rest their inane conspiracy theory. “And if are is R, then the letters still don’t spell my name. L… O… U… R.” He nearly added, Q... E… D, but their unwavering grins told him he was a little premature in thinking he could escape the trap. That sinking feeling was back. Checkmate was now just one move away.
“Art has a dual meaning,” The Master said. “It’s both plural and singular, which means it also represents the word…”
“Is,” Louis said, now shattered. Realization hadn’t just dawned, it had landed in a UFO and abducted him to an alien planet in the outer quadrants of the goddamn universe, far away from safe familiarities of his home world. His name was there all right, as she had said, in bold goddamn letters. L… O… U… I… S.
He tried dismissing it to the realms of the ridiculous, but no matter how hard he tried, the letters kept flashing on and off in front of his eyes like a damn Burger Boss sign. This was either a massive elaborate hoax (Louis DeVille, this is your After Life!) designed to lure him into the fold of the White Rabbit Freedom Fighters, or he had to accept the prophecy was real and swallow the whole unpalatable truth that there were things he couldn’t explain or were beyond his control. But there had to be another explanation. There just had to be.
Admit it, Louis dear, he heard the voice of Lady Di through the hazy snow in his head. This is checkmate. Take it like a man and admit you’ve been beaten. As the good mouse said, sometimes surrendering is the only way out of an impossible situation.
He wasn’t ready to tip his king over yet, he told the voice. He still had one last piece to move. Okay, it was a pawn, not a queen, and he didn’t fancy his chances, but it was at least something. “I guess my name is spelt in every translation of the original verse?” he said, and as he suspected, The Master nodded in confirmation. He closed his eyes and sighed. Checkmate. “Then tell me,” he said, “what the hell is a prophet supposed to do?”
When she smiled, he sensed a boulder-like weight lifting off her petit shoulders. Behind her, Frank O’Lynn drew a deep breath. “I never thought you’d ask,” she said.
Later, when all was done and dusted, he wished he never had.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The Grand Plan
PERCHED on the stool with her ramrod-straight back, her head held aloft, and her paws on her lap, The Master wasted no time in detailing the plan the White Rabbit Freedom Fighters had devised to escape from LeMont International Enterprises, a plan millions of years in the preparation. Louis shifted on the plastic sheeting, wondering if she realized how goddamn ludicrous it sounded to someone on the
outside. To think, he had thought he was suffering from an attack of the crazies. Post Traumatic Death Syndrome eat ya heart out baby. You got noth’n on this gal.
“Let me get this straight,” he said. “You want to tunnel beneath The Tower so that it will collapse and bring down the sky-vault? I understand you correctly, don’t I? This isn’t a cryptic puzzle or anything I need a PhD to get my head around, is it?”
“It’s the only way to achieve our goal,” she said. “The Boss won’t relinquish his power over us, so we have to wrench it from him ourselves.”
Frank O’Lynn had returned to eroding a path on the other side of the coffee table. Pivoting at the door to commence his short return to the piano, he nodded in silent agreement, scratching his chin.
“By creating mayhem and chaos? Killing thousands of innocent victims?” Louis said.
“No one will die. We’re all dead anyway.”
Louis shifted again, distinctly uncomfortable. Whatever rationalization she used to keep her pretty self on the straight and narrow, it still didn’t negate the manner with which she was trying to achieve her aim. “It’s still terrorism, no matter how good your intentions are. You’re trying to manipulate the masses through fear. I’m not sure I can be a part of that, prophecy or not.”
“You’ve been a part of it all your life. What do you call marketing, if not manipulating the masses through fear? Your morals didn’t stop you when your company preyed on society’s aversion to infirmity and death to market its pharmaceuticals.”
Goddamn it, she was out of order. He had done everything he possibly could to make sure his company had thrived in the cutthroat world of business, and he had been damned good at what he did. Sure, he might have bent the rules a little, stepped over the line of corporate responsibility once or twice (what CEO didn’t for the good of the shareholders?), but to throw him in the same basket with every goddamn terrorist that had actually killed and maimed innocent victims was more than he could stomach.
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