Evensong (22 page)

He would
, Anwar thought.
Not like me, I was made. He has to work at it
. And he’d work with quiet persistence and thoroughness. With near-obsessiveness. He’d make a good Consultant. In fact, maybe he was. Another labyrynthine move of Rafiq’s? A secret twentieth Consultant, unknown to the others?
No, now a secret nineteenth. No, eighteenth.

He turned away from the window and faced her. “You said you’d answer my question about that final detail.”

“You started this. You shouldn’t have said that to me in Brighton. If Rafiq had sent someone else, I’d never have heard it.”

“Answer my question.”

“And you should go and get cleaned up. And I must go, too. I have an organisation to run, and a summit in seven days. And I need to eat.” She looked at him. “Alone.”

“My question.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t answer it.”

“You
said
...”

“I can’t. But if we survive this, you’ll know why I can’t.”

He walked through the early evening, across the Garden from the Cathedral to the New Grand. He walked through the lobby and up to his suite. He shaved, cleaned his teeth, took a long shower, and changed his clothes. It took him over an hour to clean off the last five days, particularly the last hour of the fifth day.

His book, the replica of the Chalmers-Bridgewater edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, was on his bed where he’d left it. He picked it up and held it in his hands. He thought,
I’ve only really known two women, and in the space of five days I’ve refused them both. I had to. One’s a colleague, and the other’s an obscenity. And a threat.

Relationships could kill you, he knew, or at least rape you. Being that close to someone was a kind of violation. They’d suck you dry, or touch parts of you nobody else should be all owed to touch. But he wished he hadn’t laughed out loud at her. What she’d said was embarrassing, but laughing out loud was worse.

He looked at the book for a moment longer, then did something he’d normally have thought impossible: he tore out a page.

It was the page with Sonnet 116. He ringed the first four lines, and wrote
I want you to have this. A.
His handwriting was a neat italic, done with an old-fashioned fountain pen. Hers, he remembered from random documents where he’d glimpsed her annotations, was large and untidy, with strong loops and vertical downstrokes, done with any old pen which happened to be at hand.

He’d often thought that getting to know someone’s handwriting was one of the opening stages of intimacy. But that was appropriate only for simple sexual relationships or complicated loving ones, or perhaps for close friendships. He sensed that the first had ended and knew that the other two would never begin.

He went up to the next floor. He walked past the door leading to her apartments, nodding politely to the guard (not Proskar this time), and on to Gaetano’s office.

Gaetano looked tired, but stood as he entered and greeted him courteously. The office was tidy as always, but in the last five days it had become crowded. Several monitor screens had been added, some free-standing and some fixed to the walls. They showed readouts and status reports for various aspects of the summit preparations. The first members of the delegations would start arriving tomorrow—not VIPs but support staff, and not in New Grand suites but in smaller hotels in Brighton. Anwar recalled the exhaustive and painstaking description Gaetano had given him of his, Gaetano’s, involvement in the security for the summit: a huge edifice, for which he was solely responsible.
Meatslab or not, he’s there by his own efforts. Me, I was just made. Enough. I must stop telling myself that. It’s his problem, and he knows what he’s doing. I’ve got other concerns.

“I’m sorry,” he said to Gaetano, “what did you say?”

“I said something changed tonight between you and her. I didn’t like it.”

“Neither did I.” But neither of them felt disposed to elaborate. After a brief but uncomfortable silence, Anwar went on. “And what was all that about, speaking to me through you, and calling me It? Has she ever done that before?”

“No. I didn’t like that either. And when you made that play of striking at her...”

“Yes, I’m sorry about that.”

“I couldn’t see any other way you could shut her up. You seemed to know what you were doing.”

Thanks,
Anwar thought, but didn’t say. It would have sounded like over-egging the pudding. His working relationship with Gaetano was satisfactory, but not exactly comfortable, and delicately balanced.

Another silence ensued, which Gaetano broke. “What’s that bit of paper you’re holding?”

“Something I want to her to see. Will you take me to her apartments?”

“She won’t be there, she’s in meetings.”

“I know. I’d like to leave it for her. On her bed.”

“On her
bed?
”

“I’ll explain when we get there. Will you take me?”

Never look surprised, was one of the maxims from his training.When he saw her bedroom for the first time he managed to mask his surprise, but only just. The one interior, on the whole of the New West Pier, that wasn’t pearlescent white and silver. And what it was, was even more surprising than what it wasn’t.

It was like the bedroom of an upmarket whore: deep-pile carpet and shot-silk wallhangings, deep-buttoned velvet upholstery and satin sheets, all in voluptuous dark purples and blues and reds, the colours of her dresses. And her untidiness was daubed over it like slogans: an unmade bed, clothes left over chairs and on the floor, chocolate wrappers strewn everywhere, and scraps of paper with notes scribbled in her large handwriting with its loops and downstrokes.

Her ginger cat was there too, fixing him with a baleful amber glare and hissing furiously. “Yes,” he agreed, “and Fuck You too.”

They’d walked through some of her other rooms—reception, library, office, sitting room, dining room—to get here, and all were exactly like rooms everywhere else on the New West Pier. It was as though this was her last personal refuge. He felt like he shouldn’t have seen it.

Anwar gave the page to Gaetano, who read it and handed it back. Carefully, Anwar put it on her bed; then, in case it got lost amid the tumble of unmade bedclothes, he put it on her pillow.

“I don’t like this, it’s wrong,” Gaetano said.

“It’s only a gesture.”

“I warned you before: don’t read too much into how she behaves with you.”

“I’m not. Particularly after tonight.”

“I think you are. That Shakespeare quote is hardly ambiguous.”

“Ambiguous is exactly what it is.”

“Then I’ve got another quote, just for you. ‘The verb To Love is hard to conjugate. The past isn’t simple, the present isn’t indicative, the future is very conditional.’ I read books too.”

Or perhaps just quotation dictionaries
. “Yes, Cocteau knew he was being clever when he wrote that, but in this case it’s irrelevant. I’ve got another quote too: Velvet Bag of Shit. That’s what I think of her, Gaetano, that and nothing else. I’ll protect her because it’s what my mission says and I don’t walk away from missions, but otherwise...”

“Then why,” Gaetano asked, “put
that
on her bed?”

“Because it might remind her of something I said in Brighton, just before I showed her that page in my book and watched her read those lines.”

“You’ve torn a page out of a
book
for her?”

“Yes.”

When he’d recovered from what seemed like genuine surprise, Gaetano said, “I’ll warn you again, don’t imagine things she didn’t intend. She’s no good at relationships.”

“Neither am I.”

“So what did you say to her in Brighton?”

“Something about hating people less and understanding them more. It’s one of the few times she’s actually noticed me.”

“Is that where she got this idea for an Outreach Foundation?”

“Yes. I was talking about how she treats her political and religious enemies, but she widened it into building relationships...Relax, I don’t mean those kinds of relationships, and I don’t mean with me.” He gave Gaetano only her fallback position; not her primary one, which he’d laughed into nonexistence. “Relationships generally. She said she wants to start noticing people and valuing them. God knows, I had no idea that what I said would lead to that.”

“I don’t like it. If you harm her...”

“I know. You said all that before. I haven’t forgotten.”

Early evening in Brighton was early morning in Kuala Lumpur; the beginning of the following day. Arden Bierce had been working through the night.

She’d been reading and re-reading transcripts: of Anwar’s questioning of Carne and Hines, of her own questioning of the five others like Carne and Hines, of Anwar’s conversations with Olivia and Gaetano, and of her report to Rafiq given from Opatija as she stood over Asika’s remains. Something was in there, hiding in plain sight.

In the villa at Opatija, she’d hoped that Asika had been killed by a swarm of opponents and not a single opponent. But a single opponent was what she sensed then and still felt now.

Even Levin couldn’t have done that to Asika without suffering damage himself. In fact Levin couldn’t have done it at all, because Asika was better. And it was academic anyway, because Levin was as dead as Asika. Carne and Hines had told Anwar, and five others like Carne and Hines had told her: Levin died first, then Asika. But what they’d done to Levin was worse. There wasn’t even enough of him left to make a corpse. And they all remembered his face, when he realised he couldn’t defend himself.
So what have they got that kills Consultants? How and where did they make it, or create it?

She had originally joined UN Intelligence as a field officer. She proved effective, not because she was particularly ruthless but because she understood people instinctively, whether colleagues or opponents. With colleagues, she established good working relationships and sensed what they needed from her. With opponents, she sensed what made them tick and how they’d act or react.

UN Intelligence was a source from which Rafiq drew many of his personal staff, and she was quickly promoted. She was the obvious choice for her present role, as the staff member with responsibility for The Dead. Only she could instinctively know what made
them
tick. Or Rafiq, who was even more impenetrable.

But after the meeting with Anwar, she wasn’t so sure about Rafiq. The meeting still worried her. Rafiq had told her beforehand how he would play it, how he would try to tease ideas out of Anwar by pretending to be struggling to understand these new opponents. She was unconvinced then, and remained unconvinced now, about how much he was acting. She sensed something in him which, in anyone else, might almost have amounted to uncertainty.

She’d never met Olivia del Sarto, or spoken to her directly, but she knew all about her. Why weren’t she and Rafiq closer? They stood for similar things. They should be natural allies. She was about to park that question for later, but then thought,
Didn’t Anwar ask him that too?

Anwar. She rarely made errors of judgement, but her near-offer to him after the meeting was an error. Not a crucial one, but she wished she hadn’t made it. Or maybe it wasn’t an error, and her instincts were correct. It had made Anwar tell her, by the strength of his denial, how Olivia was sucking him into herself.

She normally ran relationships with Consultants by giving them space, by not crowding them. She always felt that she needed to find Anwar some extra space, for the way he worried about his lack of ability compared to some of the others. And for his obsessiveness, his insularity (he was solitary but not lonely), and his need for routine and a comfort zone, all of which were now being torn to pieces by this mission as it got more complicated and far-reaching than even Rafiq had suspected.

Or maybe Rafiq was still holding something back. It wouldn’t be the first time. Surely he’d have picked someone other than Anwar, if he’d known how this mission would turn out.
Unless he knew something else about it. And Rafiq knows everything. Doesn’t he?

Anwar had told Rafiq of a detail that he sensed and that bothered him, a final detail that might overturn everything. She had also felt something, first at Opatija and again more recently, when it almost surfaced in Anwar’s questioning of Carne and Hines, and her own questioning of the others like them. She didn’t yet know what it was, or even if it was the same thing Anwar had sensed. But she felt that it, too, might overturn everything, and she would work until she found it.

Her style of work was careful and reflective and thorough, like that of Anwar. But she had something he’d never had: her empathy, her instinctive feeling for people. Though she suspected, because of how this mission was turning on him, that he might acquire it.

Or it might acquire him.

Anwar left the New Grand and walked back across the Garden to the Cathedral. Early evening was turning into night, and the night air carried the astringent scent of witch hazel to counterpoint the smells of damp earth and grass.

He entered the Cathedral. It was almost empty, with just a few worshippers in the pews. He only needed a glance, and an assessment of their positions and postures, to confirm that they were worshippers and nothing more. The Cathedral air was cool and still, with the usual hint of citrus.

He walked to the front of the pews, in the space before the altar where he’d fought Bayard and Proskar and six others and where she’d ridiculed him. He looked up at the silver cross on the altar. Like all New Anglican crosses it was plain and unadorned, with no figure of Jesus nailed to it. A cross, not a crucifix.

He felt a movement in the air, and ramped up his senses. He knew, before he turned around, that she had entered and was walking towards him. The air she displaced was her shape.

He didn’t know how to greet her after what had happened between them. But she solved it for him, to the surprise of the few worshippers.

“Fucking autistic retard.”

“Velvet bag of shit,” he replied.

They sounded like he and Levin had once sounded, greeting each other.
Muslim filth. Jewish scum.