Privately, I thought Rowland would be lucky if he saw Christmas. My own continued health was by no means assured yet.
“Could you sort out these pillows?” she asked, squirming uncomfortably.
I got up. “Lean forward a second.” I plumped and rearranged the pillows behind her. “How’s that?”
She settled back and smiled. “Better. Thanks.”
I went over to the window. Her room had a nice view out across Dartmouth Park and westward across London into a misty uncertain distance.
I said, “I’m sorry you got hurt.”
She smiled. “That’s all right, Tommy. Defence of the Realm and all that. Did they buy it?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m an anomaly, something they weren’t expecting. They’re curious enough to want to know more.”
“You be careful,” she said.
I went over to the bed and we hugged awkwardly. “Tell Baines I’ll be in touch when I can.”
“Just take care,” she said. “You’re a nice man, but you’ve got a temper. I can see it in your eyes sometimes. You need to watch that.”
I chuckled. “You can talk.”
She held me at arms’ length and looked at my face for a while. “Godspeed, Tommy,” she said. “Let me know how it all turns out, if you can.”
I STOOD OUTSIDE the hospital for a while, smoking a cigarette and listening to the traffic toiling up Highgate Hill. Lionel had given me this one day of grace, to see Alison, say my goodbyes, but it was foolish to assume that I wasn’t being watched.
I finished my cigarette and walked down Highgate Hill towards Archway. It was a nice, fresh, breezy day, but not too cold.
At Archway, I got on a 134 bus. It wasn’t very busy, but just south of Kentish Town Station a lot of people got on.
As we moved spasmodically through the Camden traffic, a broad Mummerset accent said behind me, “How’s Ms Shand, Mister Potter?”
I didn’t bother to turn round. “She’s getting better.”
“Well,” said the voice, “let’s make sure she continues to get better, eh?”
“That would be nice.”
The voice chuckled. “Get off the bus at the next stop,” it said. “There will be a car waiting for you. I’ll see you later.”
I reached up to ring the bell. The bus stopped and I got off. As it pulled away I looked in the windows, but I couldn’t see whoever had spoken to me. A black car was parked just before the bus stop. A tall woman was standing beside it.
I walked towards them.
1
THE COUREUR WAS not impressed.
“No,” he said. “Absolutely not.”
“Why not?” asked Eleanor.
“Because it’s insane and it’s offensive and it’s suicide, frankly.”
We were sitting in the restaurant of a motorway service station outside a city named Leiden. I couldn’t remember ever seeing so much food in one place before. Eleanor had bought me what was described as an ‘open sandwich,’ which consisted of two slices of bread thickly spread with pâté and topped with various salad items which I could not recognise. She had contented herself with a cup of coffee. Charles had told me that Coureurs were smugglers, people traffickers, criminals expert in crossing Europe’s constantly-reconfiguring borders. He had made them sound rather romantic, but this one, who called himself Leo, seemed rather ordinary and workaday. He had a steak with fried potatoes, and a side salad that was wilting untouched in its bowl beside his plate.
“You’ll be well-paid,” Eleanor told him. “You know that.”
“For Dresden? Pft.” He was a short, stout, bearded man who appeared to be permanently cross. “I’ve been in this game a long time, actually, and there isn’t enough money in the world that would make me consider a Situation in Dresden.”
She sat back and looked across the table at him. “I was told Coureurs would take on any job.”
“I don’t know what prick told you that,” Leo said, tucking into his steak again. “We’re not crazy.”
Eleanor tipped her head to one side, a gesture I had come to recognise with a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach. “Has anyone ever had a Situation in Dresden?” she asked sweetly.
Leo waved his fork dismissively. “In the early days. When the wall was still going up and people inside started having second thoughts.” He sighed and looked at her. “Listen. The place is impregnable; there are only three ways in or out, and one of those involves helicopters. Everyone inside wantsto be inside; it’s probably one of the wealthiest polities in Europe, why would they want to leave?”
“And yet someone managed to get a letter out,” Eleanor reminded him. “Without resorting to Les Coureurs.”
“Then maybe you should get him to jump you in.” He put his knife and fork down and pointed a blunt finger at her. “Jesus Christ, missy, I’d have to be out of my mind to try and jump someone out of there, let alone jump someone in and then out. Have you any idea?”
Leo had only just met Eleanor, so he was unfamiliar with her body language, but there was a thing she did when she was very, very angry. She became quite still and she smiled an odd little smile that you might almost think was sad, if you didn’t know her. She did both these things now, roughly around the point at which he called her ‘missy.’
“Is there, perhaps, any way in which you could find out how this person got a letter out of Dresden?” she asked calmly. “The fact that it exists at all suggests that someone entered and then left the city again.”
“You’ve seen this letter?” he asked.
“I have,” she said. “It doesn’t say how the correspondent was planning to contact my news agency, only that he had a story for us.”
Leo looked at her for a long time. “Okay,” he said finally. “Okay. I’ll try to find this out for you. But none of us is going in there. I want that understood right now.”
“That’s all we ask of you,” she told him. “Find out how the letter got out, and then we’re done.”
He nodded. “Okay, then.” He looked at me. “Don’t you talk?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“There’s a motel here,” Eleanor said. “We’ll book into a room and wait to hear from you.”
Leo looked doubtful. “This could take a while,” he mused.
She shrugged. “Then it takes a while.”
“And I might not even be able to find out. I’ve got contacts, but I’m not exactly State Security.”
“All we ask is that you try,” she told him. “You’ll be well rewarded.”
He thought about it for a few seconds, then nodded. “Okay. Give me three days. A week at most.”
“Thank you,” she said. “You have my phone number. Call me when you have something.”
“Okay.” He pushed his chair back and stood up. “Thank you for lunch.” And he walked away.
I watched him navigating his way across the crowded restaurant until he reached the doors, and when he had gone I said, “Are you going to kill him too?”
Eleanor nodded. “Eventually,” she said.
2
THEY HAD A house in Highgate – not the one they had taken me and Alison to – and they kept me prisoner there for sixteen days while I was interrogated. There was never any pretence that, should I fail to convince them, I would leave there alive.
Initially, I saw three of them. There was a middle-aged man who called himself Charles, and a younger man named Simon. And then there was Eleanor, who I quickly came to understand was the most dangerous person I had ever met.
At our first session, she strode across to where I was sitting, struck me backhanded across the face with such force that I almost blacked out, and yelled, “Liar!”
She was tall and willowy, her long auburn hair pinned up in a bun at the back of her head, and she didn’t look capable of any kind of violence, which made it all the more shocking when she hit me again. This time I actually greyed-out for a moment.
“I’m not lying,” I mumbled through lips which
were swollen, if not actually split.
“Fuck you!” she screamed, and hit me a third time. I tasted blood in my mouth. The most frightening thing was that her expression had never changed. She looked completely calm and in control of herself.
She turned and walked away towards the big windows at the end of the drawing room where my interrogations took place. Beyond the windows, I could see the gardens of the house dappled with afternoon sunlight, as inaccessible to me as the heart of the Galaxy.
“Tell me,” she said, without looking round.
“I’ve told Charles and Simon,” I said, wiping my lips and looking stupidly at the blood on my hand.
“You haven’t told me,” she said. “You have to tell me, or I’ll hit you again.”
I said, “I came here voluntarily.”
“And that makes you suspicious,” she said in that calm voice. “Just appearing out of nowhere and coming here voluntarily.”
The man who called himself Baines had given me a story to tell. What he called a legend. It was the story of a man of roughly the same age as me, who had been born and brought up in the Campus and had worked for the Old Board in some moderate capacity. Baines and I had called this man ‘Tommy Potter,’ a lowlife Doctor of Intelligence I had had the pleasure of arresting after the Fall. I was able to fill in bits of the legend, and together Baines and I had come up with something which we hoped would convince the émigré group working in London. It had seemed a reasonably watertight story to me, sitting in my room in the clinic, but now it felt fatally thin.
I said, “When the Rebels took over –”
She snorted. “If you’d been doing your job the Rebels wouldn’t have taken over.”
I shook my head, trying to clear it. “Do you want to hear this story or not?”
And that was when I discovered that it was a mistake to try and joke with Eleanor.
IT WENT ON. Charles was avuncular and Simon was a bit dim and overenthusiastic and needed things explaining to him several times, and we all understood that these were roles we were playing. Eleanor, though, wasn’t playing. Eleanor hit me. I couldn’t understand how she didn’t break her hands on my face. She had beautiful hands, so hard they might have been carved from wood. I had a suspicion that she was the one who was responsible for blowing up the flat in Kentish Town.
We went over and over Tommy Potter’s life and background, his career with the Intelligence Faculty. This was all fairly straightforward; I remembered enough details from the case file I’d prepared on him, and I could add bits of generic background where necessary. Tommy had been one of the stupidest men I’d ever met; he’d thought that by telling us everything he knew he’d somehow win himself a pardon, and we’d let him carry on thinking that.
When it came to events after the Fall, Baines and I had had to become inventive. It wasn’t much of a stretch to say that Tommy had managed to escape and hidden out somewhere in the Campus, but his subsequent escape was a bit more tricky. Tommy wasn’t the sort of person who would have been privy to the true nature of the Campus, or a map showing how to reach Nottingham.
“It was chaos,” I said for the umpteenth time that morning. “The Rebels took what they wanted and burned everything else. I had to keep moving. I spent a night in the Geography Faculty and there were all these maps.”
Eleanor was sitting calmly in the armchair opposite me. She had only hit me twice so far today, and I didn’t know whether that was a good or a bad thing. She said, “Maps.”
“Someone had tried to open one of the safes and when they saw it was just full of maps they must have given up,” I said.
“Maps,” she said again.
“Maps of the Campus. One of them had this route marked on the River. I thought it was a route to some hiding place for the Board, somewhere the Rebels wouldn’t find us. Somewhere we could regroup.”
“So you found a canoe and just paddled away.”
“Yes. How many more times?” I was exhausted. They kept waking me up at random hours of the night and calling me into the drawing room to ask the same questions over and over again. One of my eyelids was twitching all the time and it was driving me mad. “I found a canoe and just paddled away and then I wasn’t in the Campus anymore.”
“And the book was in the safe too.”
“Yes.”
She stretched her legs and clasped her hands across her stomach. “Where To Go In Wartime,” she said. “Why did you take it?”
“I don’t know. I took a few of the maps and the book was with them.”
This was the most dangerous bit, the most unbelievable bit. There was no way the real Tommy would have been able to look at the maps of the Campus and the Community and Tustin’s guidebook and somehow produce a synthesis of the nature of his world. I wasn’t bright enough to do that. The trick was convincing these people that I was, that I had worked out what was going on and then decided to use the book as bait to make contact with any of my people who were here. It was, frankly, utterly unbelievable. And that, Baines had told me, was why they would believe it. Which had sounded all well and good sitting in the garden of the clinic.
“And we just happened to be looking for the book,” she said. She had gone all quiet and still again, and she was smiling sadly.
“I needed to make some money somehow,” I said. “I did some labouring on a building site, lived with these Poles. Ten to a room in a flat in Kilburn, sleeping in shifts. Then I met Alison and I moved into her flat.” This was all true, in case they checked. My recent stomach wound was explained by police reports of a mugging and hospital records of my treatment, all faked and inserted into the relevant places in London’s bureaucracy. It was, Baines had told me, as watertight as it was going to get, which wasn’t terribly heartening. “I met a man in a pub who knew Rowland. He said he was looking for someone to travel around the country tracking down rare books. All expenses paid and a reasonable commission.”
“We will find him, eventually, you know,” she said. “Rowland.”
“Good,” I said. “He’ll back me up. One day he gave me a list of books he wanted, and one was the Tustin and I knew it was you. Someone from the Community, or someone who knew about it anyway. The book was just a curiosity otherwise.”
“What did you do with the maps?”
“Burned them. Memorised them and burned them.”
She laughed. It was the first time I’d heard her laugh, and it was so startling that it made me jump. “Memorised them,” she said. “Very good.”
“I drew one for Simon,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I saw that. It was awful.”
“I’m a Doctor of Intelligence,” I said, “not of Geography. Do you want me to draw you one too? I’ll try harder this time.”
That morning, she managed to break two of my teeth.
“WELL,” SAID CHARLES. “And here we are.”
It was the afternoon of the sixteenth day of my incarceration, as far as I could judge. The previous day I had been taken to a private dentist, who had not batted an eyelid at the bruising on my face but had extracted the remains of my broken teeth and then done a number of mysterious things in the region of my mouth which he insisted would enable him to replace them.
“You tell an interesting story,” Charles said.
“Thank you,” I said. My mouth was still an unknown country and I was lisping quite badly.
“Frankly, you tell a very believable story,” he went on.
“That’s because it’s true.”
“Hm.” He looked down at the sheaf of notes in his lap. He was sturdy and fit-looking, his brown hair starting to recede in a rather fetching widows’ peak. He was wearing an immaculately-tailored suit. “Bit too believable, really.”
“Perhaps I should have made some of it up, then.”
He looked at me and nibbled the end of his pen. “It’s the book, you see.”
“Oh, Charles...”
“No, no, let me finish. The book makes no sense at a
ll, really, until you explain it. And then it’s completely believable.”
“I have no idea what you mean.”
“Well, for example, I can believe you taking the book along with the maps – it’s one of those irrational little things people do sometimes. And I can believe you making contact with Rowland Forsythe. And I can believe that we engaged him to find the book – I facilitated that, actually, so I know it’s true. And it all makes perfect sense when you describe it. But it’s all very unlikely, don’t you think?”
“What I think, Charles, is that I’m beginning to regret ever trying to find you. Actually, I started to regret that the first time I met Eleanor.”
He chuckled. “Don’t let her hear you say that. Her feelings are easily hurt.”
“I’m glad something is.”
“All the bits make sense,” he went on. “You did this because of that. You did something else. I can’t find any fault in it anywhere. It’s when the whole thing is bolted together that it seems rather... rickety.”
“Life is rickety. I was on the run.”
“You seem to have coped very well here, though. You found a job; there are people who’ve lived here their whole lives who can’t manage to do that.”
I shrugged.
“Anyway,” he said. “It’s been decided by wiser heads than mine that we’re to give you the benefit of the doubt for the moment.”
I said, “I’m not sure I even want it anymore.”
He smiled. “I know we’ve been rough with you, and I regret that. But it was necessary, I promise.” He shuffled the notes into order and positively beamed at me. “I’d like to welcome you to our brave little band, Tommy. We’re going to fix your teeth and get you some documents, and then I think there’s a little job coming up in a few weeks which you might rather enjoy.”
3
THE ROOM WAS awful. The furniture was upholstered in various shades of brown, the walls were painted a hideous shade of blue, the bed was lumpy. The windows looked out across a corner of the car park to a view of the traffic endlessly streaming along the motorway.
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