Dark Matter (14 page)

This might all sound esoteric for a man of
my, clearly,
operational
gifts, but I needed to know which questions
would put me beyond the pale in drawing rooms, which beneath bridges. Besides,
I am an artist, and Art is handmaiden to Philosophy.

And Technology is the cannon of Science. As
my education continued, I was besotted by one technology: the cell phone, which
enabled instant communication between two people located on opposite sides of
the globe. Marvellous!

To put that achievement in perspective, I recall
my grandfather’s story of Reuters filling an eighty-mile gap in the telegraph
line connecting Paris to Berlin with carrier pigeons. Those pigeons carried
stock prices. Today Reuters keeps gate on the world’s news. And for the cream,
make the cell phone carrier of the Internet. This is the apogee of technology—
inorganic
technology, at least.

I wanted to leave New York. Not that I had
a concrete plan. I felt uneasy. Perhaps it was something to do with having been
freighted there while asleep, my rest interrupted. Perhaps that was why I slept
so very long.

In my fertile mind, prospects opened like
the petals of a flower, vast and multi-hued. Again I had to impose the military
discipline of priority. At the top of my list were what I thought to be two distinct
items, which time proved to be one: my brother, and
The Imago
. You
yourself were instrumental in me realising that. Doesn’t life weave a funny
web?

Before I left New York I visited the
museum. I was curious to know what its staff had made of my disappearance, but
more so, what had happened to my
dweoming
mate, my brother. Dead or
alive, he was unfinished business.

I cornered an attractive young archivist
and plied the stolen charm of my upstate New Yorker. She had jet black hair
with a gloss like lacquer, and the most creamy skin stretched over the tendons
forming the hollow at the base of her throat. From the hitch in her breath, and
the way she feigned not hearing me to lean close, I knew she was mine if I
wanted her. Mine like the truffle I’d eaten that afternoon at San Domenico.

She took me back into the archival rooms, which
were dark and dry, and much like tombs. We passed shelves of Near Eastern
pottery and coins and she told me well-worn anecdotes. While I listened to her,
I rehearsed her form in my mind, in case her identity accrued value; I was
always driving myself to become the perfect chameleon.

When I judged the time ripe, I enquired of
the “stolen piece”.

“Stolen?” she said.

“Yes, only weeks ago. A terrible loss, by
all accounts.”

The first hint of suspicion crept into her
eyes as she said, “Whose accounts? Our insurance provider has a four week
embargo on press about any theft while it conducts initial investigations.”

That was a new one on me. It forced me to
think a little harder.

“Ms Rawley,” I said, “I was part of the
team that rediscovered that artefact. Would
you
not keep a close eye on
your baby?” And I proceeded to tell her what I had already learned of how ‘the
artefact’ came to be transported across the Atlantic some sixty years prior on
a US Army Liberty ship returning from the Second World War, to be dumped and
forgotten in a warehouse of the Pennsylvania State Museum, then rediscovered in
the new millennium, donated to the Metropolitan Museum, and promptly
re-forgotten and left to rot in one of its many archival rooms.

The explanation seemed to satisfy her.

She showed me the shreds of part-petrified
flesh I had torn from myself on waking. My memory of the pain was like a ghost
in the room. The rags of desiccated flesh had already been re-archived in a
plastic box, to await a scholar’s opinion—decreasing in priority in proportion
to their diminished mass.

The museum had lost the artefact without
ever having taken the trouble to determine what on earth it was.

She gave me her theory about the stolen
artefact: an aborted mummification. I had been so inconsequential, apparently,
they had not even bothered to carbon date me. She lamented the vandalism and
theft. Her emotion moved me. I was tempted to tell her the secret, that there
before her in the flesh I was—me!—not some object clouded by time and subject
only to the groping speculation of archaeologists, but the best of man, a
divine object.

Thinking of my brother I asked if the other
artefact had also been ‘stolen’ or simply moved. But my question met with
confusion. I left the museum, too pre-occupied to take up her unspoken
invitation.

I learned later that my brother perished
when the Allies made it into the Alps, as far as the ancestral home of the
Schürmanns. Bombardment breached an aquifer that then emptied into the castle’s
basement, where we lay side by side in stillness. My butler managed to save me
only. My brother drowned in his slumber mere feet from me. I wonder if he
dreamed of water.

Deep down I think I knew he was dead. Had
known since I’d awoken days before, in pain and confusion. But the news still
came as a shock. I dropped my guard. That was when I got my fingers burnt the
first time.

I was rotating through my guises for
security, and returned to my favourite den, an apartment on Fifth Ave opposite
Central Park. I was peeling off a collared shirt, longing to soak in the
apartment’s colossal bath, when in the bedroom I stumbled on the scene of a
murder.

The man whose identity I now wore had owned
a beagle. To be honest, it was the dog that had inclined me to him. He wasn’t
that near a resemblance, and it cost me noticeably more to shift to him than
any of the others. It was the beagle I found splayed in vivisection on the bed
atop a two-foot rose of blood. Its still-slick jaws were clamped on a note.

It read:
Wilkommen.
Welcome back.

No doubt the dog had been butchered by a
nobody. I was angry about that. I also knew the method was par for the Imago.
Their chains of communication have layers of cut-outs. I vowed to slaughter the
next
dog
they sent across my path. Not that the messenger would have any
idea of what the message meant. But then, neither had the beagle.

How did they know I had awoken? Perhaps
they had posted a watch on the museums, a sixty-year watch. Quite an
investment. That would explain not only how they knew I’d returned, but that I
had assumed the power of shape-shifter.

What was still dark to me—and the thing I
feared—was that they might have discovered I had not only known what I would
become, but had actively
effected
it. That ranks with the most expensive
secrets the world has ever known. The Imago don’t like secrets they don’t own.

So that left me with a dead dog and a
blood-stained sheet. My fingers were burnt. I had two choices: flee the fire,
or put it out.

You can’t run from the Imago.

So I left for Newark Airport that night,
stopping only at an apartment block on Staten Island to locate and assume a new
identity. From there I headed for Europe and its story-saturated soil.

PURITANS

Knots occur in unlikely places, from
the feet-thick ropes that moor super-tankers with bulges like giant ganglions,
to the microscopic, sub-cellular tangles of DNA strands.

Knots can snap a man’s neck on the gallows
and stifle the blood in an umbilical cord, or tether a space-walker against the
sucking infinitude of space.

Knots can mean life or death.

Rasputin was seated, bent over his knees,
peering at a stubborn knot in his shoelace. He had merely meant to undo it,
shake a pebble loose, and retie the knot. But he had yanked the wrong bulge,
become angry, pulled harder, and made it worse. How was it possible to
obfuscate so simple a structure?

He twisted to retrieve his knife from his
jeans pocket. He hefted it a few times. It was heavy and cool, its handle
inlaid with a pearlescent white substance. He had never fancied himself a
pocket-knife carrier, but had picked it up on reflex with his keys.

He flicked it open, and dug the knife’s
point under a tight loop of shoelace, half-hoping it sliced the lace in two.
The Gordian solution had a brutal elegance.

Instead, the knot came loose. He levered
his shoe off, shook the pebble free, and retied the knot.

He leaned back into the bench and took a
draught of the view. A swath of grass sloped down to the foreshore, and beyond
it an ebb-tide was dragging the river seaward. The gumtrees overhead were
silent in the pre-dawn lull. The sun was beginning to leach the deep-purple to
orange above the buildings silhouetted on the far bank.

He watched a flight of pelicans as they
sailed like avian cruise liners and disappeared beneath Shelley bridge. Beneath
it fishermen plied the dark water and perhaps the pelicans were after their
rubbish fish.

With a sigh, Rasputin returned his gaze to
the water lapping near his feet. He folded the knife blade until it snapped
shut and put it back in his pocket. From the same pocket he retrieved a piece
of paper and gently unfolded it. The sun shone through it like a candle, and
suffused the portrait he had sketched on a Melbourne balcony with a warm glow.
He propped his elbows on his knees and stared at the girl’s face, allowing his
awareness to sink inward.

The memory came like a crate bobbing in the
sea, legacy of an old shipwreck, stained from years adrift, and sealed.

He pried its lid.

An azure sky teemed with gulls, wheeling
and crying like a market of lunatic hawkers. Laughter drew his attention, and
he saw
her
.

She ran past him, and he turned on stubby
three-year-old legs to watch her pass. She glanced over her shoulder and
smiled. He had seen it before. Groundhog day. It still punched a hole through
his heart.

Then she spoke—a crack opened.
There is
more here.

“Come on, Tintin.”

Tintin: her name for him. Something utterly
new, something always known.

Hope flared and sent him scrabbling after
this new scrap, yearning for more. He clutched at the memory, and it wriggled
from his fingers as if scared of the pressure, a slippery fish.

The world began to spin around him,
Rasputin the pivot. A scream tore the air, but he was already backing out of
the memory, letting it fade, knowing he would get nothing more.

A zephyr caressed his cheek and he awoke
fully to the world. The portrait still lay in his lap. The pretty face gazed
back at him.

“She called me Tintin.”

“She’s beautiful. Who is she?”

Rasputin didn’t start. Perhaps as Dee had
come near he had sensed the breeze curl around her.

He folded the portrait and slipped it back
into his pocket, beneath the knife. He stood and stretched at the band of
tightness running down his back.

“I make it 7:32,” he said.

“You missed your follow-up with Thorpe
yesterday,” she said.

He shrugged.

“He called me,” she said.

He waited for her to go on, and when she
didn’t, he lifted his cane and began to stump toward the bridge. Rush hour
traffic hummed like the mingling crash of breaking ocean swells, without being
relaxing. Cars thumped on the bridge’s expansion plates like distant artillery.

They walked without speaking while he
fancied her mind made a dozen false starts, until at last:

“If it’s the money—” she began but stopped.

It piqued his interest. Dee was disturbed,
and it went beyond the M word.

“If it’s the money,” she said, “he asked me—begged
me—to tell you he’ll waive it. He promised to handle your debt too.”

He stopped and squared up to her. “Why
would he do that?”

“Why are you being so pig-headed?”

Anger, finally.

“This is serious, Monk. Look at you.” Her
eyebrows drew down and he felt the weight of her gaze. She didn’t even look at
his cane.

He decided he didn’t want to know what had
her worked up, but had to ask. “Okay. I’ll play. What’s the catch?”

“Catch?” she said. Then, quietly, “You’re
the catch.”

She stepped into the gloom beneath the
bridge. He followed her. Without verbal agreement, they halted near the first
fisherman.

She continued in a whisper, “He didn’t say
it, exactly, but he’s interested in your case, in you. He wants to study you.”

“What does that mean, precisely?”

He saw her shrug in the gloom.

“But he’ll take care of the money? All of
it?” he said.

She nodded.

He stumped down the bank toward the angler,
leaving Dee to merge with the darkness. The tide had left a lip of sand, which
crumbled under his foot. He staggered and caught himself on his cane. The man
turned at the sound and gave him a curt nod.

Rasputin peered into the bucket by the man’s
tackle box. Three small whiting floated in an inch of bloody water.