Square Wave

by Mark de Silva

  But he also believed he was part of a family enterprise. He drew no line between his own fortune, his father’s, and his father’s father’s, and felt more than a little duty to keep it in good health. And a fortune, a business, an empire that wasn’t growing could never be in good health. So he’d done his part and expanded it, overseas, in America, in partnership with other developers like Celano.

  It was true that the Jenko empire wasn’t pretty from all angles. It hadn’t been in the beginning either, when it was just in London. There were girls then too. But it had to be said, Jenko thought, that until the state might be remolded to provide decently for these sex laborers, he was giving them a livelihood, as well as protection. There was something stark about the arrangement, of course, nothing like ideal, but this was what Celano didn’t understand: the world that is has a claim on us that the world that might be must settle before it can come into being.

  Anyway, on the broader issue, Celano must have felt the same duty toward his own father’s business concerns, to keep things growing. He was just lucky they were cleaner, purely in construction and real estate, or at least seemed to be. There were things Celano, his dear friend, must be keeping from him, after all. What exactly was he doing in Spain now, for instance, so soon after the museum defacement? The unannounced trip had left Jenko to answer most of the police inquiries into the attack alone.

  But really he didn’t mind that he didn’t know. No man can reconcile all the facts about himself, for another or for himself. No man should be asked to. What Jenko needed to rely on Celano for, in construction and in politics, he could, and vice versa. That was enough.

  Aaron pointed at the lean man in rolled French cuffs on the wall-mounted screen, viewable from anywhere in the now partitionless hall. The place gleamed. The virgin felt was as rich as green could be, and the wood of the tables was an oily reddish brown: matched rosewood, bought from black-market stock and inlaid with ebony. The bar itself had doubled in size since everything had been burned.

  The image of Lewis on the screen was not very new. It had been collected from the cameras of several strip clubs and bars Jenko had a stake in. The tapes couldn’t have been turned over to the police, even though Jenko would have liked nothing better than having the police solve this problem for him, protect his investment, his girls. They carried too much self-incriminating evidence for that.

  They wouldn’t have been enough anyway. Lewis hadn’t been singled out by footage alone. It took the pooled capacities of a community of traders in contraband, sex most of all, steered by some of Jenko’s higher ups, to detect him. None of this data could be passed on to the police, for the same reasons the tapes couldn’t. The clubs would have been seized the next day and Jenko would have found himself a new home, in prison.

  So he’d ordered his own investigation. Jenko’s men were all given simple instructions: whoever they talked to in the streets and clubs, whoever seemed like a candidate for the crimes, nudge things toward the dark, toward hookers and violence especially, and see what appeared. This came naturally to most of the men; the innuendo involved wasn’t so different from, say, selling drugs or girls. What made it even easier was that they shared in Lewis’s violent fantasies. Grittier versions, if anything.

  The men could almost be themselves, then, so much so that sometimes they would forget that they were acting on orders at all. The difference was mainly one of restraint, namely, letting their own war stories be bested by the targets’. They had to let them emerge as the victors in recklessness, in contempt. This was more difficult than it sounded. They were used to winning that game. They were also told to convey a willingness to collude in whatever schemes the targets floated. This came much easier to them. Looking for an angle, that was just life.

  They talked to dozens of false leads, men who seemed to have done plenty wrong, but not the particular wrong their boss was interested in: the beatings. Finally a promising incident occurred. One of Jenko’s men, Terry, got a strange reply to a standard question in a local dive. He tried to sell a bleary-eyed regular he recognized from the tapes on a hooker for the night. But the man didn’t just accept or decline. Instead he said he’d had his share of girls, and he couldn’t be less interested now. In whores? Terry asked him. Whores, yes, but more than that, the whole thing disgusted him now, sex itself. Which you really don’t hear.

  “And what did Terry tell him?” Jenko asked.

  “He let him rant for a while,” Aaron said, “about sex, money, porno. They got drunker. Eventually Terry got his name. So we checked him out.”

  “Well?” Jenko ask.

  “He rented a cargo van from our little fleet, out of Boston though, just a few months back. We had the girls look at that particular van, and Erin said, yeah, it had the same little dent in the door she remembered. Then we showed her the footage and said he looked right, though he’d had sunglasses and a baseball cap on then. She couldn’t be sure. But the other girls confirmed it was him.”

  “So what will we do?” Jenko asked himself aloud.

  “This is the thing. Terry kept encouraging him that night, about what he wished would happen to all those ‘disgusting’ people. Lewis started saying some strange stuff… He talked about wanting to give.”

  Jenko laughed. “Give?”

  “Give, yeah.”

  Jenko peered at the image on screen, Lewis caught mid-stride, a leg hanging in the air. “He does have the look of money. Money hard done. His name, his father.”

  “Leo, the trader.”

  “I kept money with him at one time,” Jenko said. “He did well for me. Twenty-five percent, year on year. But I don’t think he or his son has anything much to give now. Everyone pulled out of that fund. Trust is everything—and Leo couldn’t be trusted anymore.”

  “A half million is what he said.”

  “That sounds like drunk talk to me. Bragging.”

  “That’s not what we think.”

  “Well, I suppose things could have improved for Leo. Sure. It’s possible. So then, how will the son ‘give’?”

  “He didn’t know exactly,” Aaron said. “He kept talking about these porno awards—”

  “In Vegas.”

  “Yeah—”

  “What about them?”

  “He wished he could give those people something.”

  “Not the money, I guess.”

  “He wants them—I mean, the way he put it, he wants them to get some air.”

  “Is that a joke? If it is, I don’t think I get it.”

  “This is nuts, but Terry thinks he meant, like, halothane or BZ. Gas. At the ceremony. For the half mil.”

  “Ah.” Jenko smiled and tapped the table twice with his middle and ring fingers. “You believe this.”

  “Not to hurt anyone is what he said. Only to make them ‘see things.’”

  “And exactly how gone was he when he said this? Or how gone was Terry, that’s what we should be asking.”

  “I mean, it’s true, he did look like he hadn’t slept in a while.”

  “The fantasies we have.”

  “But he also sounded like he could mean what he said. Terry wouldn’t have bothered me with this otherwise.”

  “And Terry’s very bright?”

  “Look, we already know he kicked the shit out of all these whores. Isn’t that fucking crazy too? Why couldn’t he mean it?”

  The two of them held a long look.

  “So what did Terry say to him, after hearing all this?” Jenko asked finally.

  “Nothing, of course. He just listened. Lewis had no idea he was basically talking to you. But we can get back to him. It’ll be easy to find him now, see if he’s really game to go through with this. And if it’s all bullshit, we’ll know. Nothing’s lost.”

  “Five hundred thousand is actually not enough to fill an auditorium with an airborne agent, even just an incapacitator. There are the usual risks for us. Every incident, every event, brings another risk with it. And this one would be very lar
ge. The logistics, getting to all the vents without detection. But then, it is a life sentence for Lewis.”

  “Probably.”

  “And if you add the beatings, that’s more than life.”

  “But we don’t want to touch those, right. A bunch of those whores are ours. It could lead them here.”

  “Can you please stop calling them whores?”

  “Girls, I mean.”

  “Better. So then there’s the gas. Let’s talk to Leo’s little boy and check his nerve. Terry can handle it, if you feed him the information?”

  “And if he’s looking for some time off.”

  “Otherwise someone else. Somebody’s always looking.”

  “So, halothane, BZ, what?”

  “Do we actually need it? To make this work for us? If we have everything else set up and call in the anonymous tip just before, we could probably just pretend about the agent itself.”

  “Oh. Well, I guess—”

  “But check the labs. Talk to him first, of course, make sure this is real. And then, sure, we can think about doing exactly what we say this time. It would be easier to bury Lewis in a trial with everything being authentic. Trust, you know.”

  29

  Four tall steps and stagg was up on the dais, a maroon folio tied with raw leather string in his hand. Kames clasped Stagg’s shoulder and gave him a single deep nod as they passed each other near the lectern.

  It surprised Stagg to see the auditorium as full as it was—at least three quarters—not just because of the arcane topic, or his lack of visibility in the field, but because of the tension surrounding the Institute lately, one he assumed would keep a crowd away. Maybe the turnout meant the full measure of that tension, great as it was, could only be felt by those with special knowledge. How many that was, he couldn’t tell.

  A good portion of the audience looked about his age, and of the same background. Some of them must have undertaken watch-work themselves, for reasons like his own. They would know bits and pieces of the tale, even how some of those bits and pieces fit together, just as he did. Some might well know more.

  It was a condition of getting the work, of course, that one concealed the fact, though some confidences would inevitably be made to intimates. And in fact these were calculated for by the agency. But most of the people here were, overtly at least, only intellectual colleagues, or would-be colleagues, and information of that kind, which would have shown them to be colleagues twice over, would not be exchanged, not least for the implication that one was reinforcing the very political order being worried, from all angles, by the Institute.

  Kames’s introduction had been kind and Stagg was about to falsify it. His essays were not critiques, not in any clear sense, even to him. Or if they were, they transcended his intentions, not only his past ones, but the ones he had now, which seemed to extend no further than reading out the pages he’d brought with him.

  Worse, these pages were ones Kames hadn’t reviewed. Stagg was taking a detour. Renna was right, the future of the Institute was uncertain now in ways deeper than its director could know. Deeper even than Stagg knew, probably. What he’d reported back to Penerin, of his last conversation with Kames, in the garden, had made his Second Watch supervisor cagey about his own plans in a way that was new to Stagg. Penerin probably had other information by then as well, perhaps from Ravan. Not that he was going to share all of it with Stagg. In truth, their dealings were only partly above board. Penerin told him only as much as he wanted to. Just like Kames. When matters got complicated, both his bosses turned elliptical.

  The thing that was certain now was that a shift had occurred. By the time the elections came and went, there might well be no possibility of a Wintry fellowship left. Penerin’s evasions suggested as much. Their ambiguities had turned his words, like Kames’s, into a cryptic—or better, encrypted—poetry.

  Now it was Stagg’s turn. Instead of the main essays, he’d brought only scattered appendices with him, bits that captured the tiniest flashes of light and no more. If the earlier pieces were shards, these were specks. But wasn’t it possible, he thought, that they reflected more, like a dust of diamonds? They felt realer to Stagg in their discreteness than the longer tableaus he’d assembled with such pain. Perhaps they managed to say more, in their compression, about him and his several selves, his family, and about history, than the rest of what he’d written, even if he was less sure he could fully survey their meaning. That was the problem, the virtue, of poetry. It outran you.

  They might also achieve what any one of the essays could not. In the space of one lecture, the only one there might be now, he could still suggest a whole narrative, a destiny, this way. Because even dust could be shaped into a trail. What mattered was arrangement, order.

  In fact he would be telling two stories at once, one about the past and another about the future. If he was betraying Kames in not delivering the more lucid lecture they’d agreed on, the one centered on the monk, he was also showing him a kindness. The trail would be an arrow. It would tell what Stagg knew about the circumstances, the tension, but without telling. The same way Kames liked to tell. From there, it would be up to him.

  Though he wasn’t close to Kames, and didn’t especially trust him, he owed him something for giving him the chance to speak. More than that, there was kinship. Kames wasn’t wrong in thinking the country had reached a liminal moment in its history. Penerin and his kind wanted to deny this. They said everything could be recovered. But there were such things as faits accomplis. A world built around seducing the man in the street had managed to turn all the world out into that street. Now, almost everyone found the free world unlivable, chaotic, coarse. The invisible hand, Kames liked to say, turned out to have a very strong grip. It finally had all of them by the neck now, it seemed. Maybe he was right. It was time to lop it off.

  Stagg unknotted the leather and pulled the small sheaf from the case. Tapping the pages on the edge of the lectern, he caught Kames’s eye, far in back and with his face already made up in a furrowed expression of concentration. He might have other things pressing on him just now. Stagg thought to say something that would suggest the change of plan. He thought to thank Kames. But no, both ideas might only corrupt the simple intention he had left, to read.

  ■■■

  I.

  Around that great table they sit in silence. Rajasingha’s attendants, noblemen in their own right, look on from a smaller table nearer the lake as the king takes his daily meal. So as not to contaminate the great man’s food, each wears a mask, sewn from the sun-bleached fibers of the coconut.

  In all there are twenty dishes set out this afternoon: sambhur of the Highlands stewed in a thin, turmeric-laced gravy that is almost a broth; breadfruit garnished with cinnamon and lychees; river fish in a chili and cardamom curry; steamed pittu flecked with cashews, served with a tamarind sambal; fritters of rice-flour and jaggery; and fifteen besides. He will eat of only four or five of these.

  The king makes a faint gesture toward the pot of boiled jack-fruit and lime. The nobleman closest ladles it onto a corner of the banana leaf from which the king is eating slowly, methodically, alone. Today’s meal is unusual only in that it is taken by Lake Kilara, at the royal retreat, the pleasure house. He’s here three or four times a year, usually for a few days only. The makeshift palace in newly royal Digligy, and in fact his very grip on the country, is under muted and perpetual threat. A populist rebellion forced him from the palace in Nillemby, westward into the mountains. And the Dutch have been making incursions eastward into the heart of the island, from Colombo, ever since making landfall on the southwestern coast four decades ago, around 1640. The twin forces have made Digligy his home and Lake Kilara his refuge.

  The king finishes his meal and dismisses the others, who make their way beneath the overhanging lattice from the gazebo to the main complex. The noble servants, unmasked now, as the king has finished, take away the dishes. This will be their meal. He steps from the gazebo to the b
anks, thinking of the evening’s return to the palace. The sun has made a mirror of the lake. Dressed in a white tunic embroidered in red, his scabbard once again at his side, he begins to circle the lake, turning over the options.

  Van Holten had said the Dutch forces stationed near Colombo were mounting a fresh campaign to capture the Highlands and the kingdom, that their flatteries, of defending His shores from the Portuguese, had always been hollow, from the time they’d arrived. The possibility now occurs to the king of making the Dutch, after all these years, finally mean what they say, by bringing them into a more profound conflict than they intend with their European brethren, the Portuguese, the kind that might weaken each enough to flush them both from the island.

  The information had not been offered up of Van Holten’s will exactly. The king had first seen the soldier chained and starved outside the royal court, alongside other European captives. He’d been left behind by a retreating Dutch squad led by one Commander Haas. Only after weeks of being kept like this, exposed alternately to withering heat and violent rain, was Van Holten brought before Rajasingha. He was offered a peasant’s meal and some shade and that was the end of it. He told what he knew.

  The king completes his circle of the lake. He’s decided to host the latest set of Dutch envoys offering a false peace. Back in the pleasure house proper, he sends his messenger down to the coast to invite their leadership to the royal court as guests of honor.

  II.

  Rutland walked in late to find Knox sitting on a stool, drinking palm whiskey in the living room. Before Knox could comment on the hour, Rutland set the Bible down over the brass rivets of the trunk, which had been pulled from the Ann, their captured frigate, twenty years ago by the Sinhalese. The spoils had spoiled, though. The rations were rancid and the clothing, stored in a separate compartment, had rotted not much differently from the meat. The Sinhalese had lost interest in the shrunken, sea-sodden box, and it was left to the two of them, Rutland and Knox, to discover its only remaining value, as furniture.