Evensong (23 page)

“About what you left for me,” she said. “I liked reading it again. But you tore a page out of a
book.
”

“Yes.”

“Nobody’s ever done something like that for me, except maybe Gaetano.”

“Tell me, why do the New Anglicans only have plain crosses and not crucifixes?”

He was steering her away from what happened in the Boardroom by getting her to talk about what she knew best. That suited her, too.

“We don’t do guilt and pain and misery, that’s for the Catholics. We do affirmation and aspiration. We don’t deny that they nailed Jesus to a cross, but we don’t need to wallow in it.”

“But you do have images of him. I’ve seen them.”

“Yes. Replicas of the statues in Lisbon and Rio, Cristo Rei and Cristo Redentor. Jesus with arms outstretched, offering benediction. Not only benediction, but encouragement. Even urging.
Be all you can be, for me.
Those are my words,” she added proudly. “I wrote them.”

“Yes, I can hear your voice in them. Even more than His.”

If his remark had any subsurface meaning she didn’t notice it, and she continued the direction of their conversation. It kept them on surer ground.

“I’m proud of the New Anglicans. We’re rich and powerful and assertive. As much a corporation as a church, but a properly-run corporation. We pay all our taxes. We declare all our salaries. We declare all our investments.”

“And,” he said, remembering their dinner, “you declare all your costs. Have your finance people given you an amended operating statement yet?”

She didn’t hear his question. She was in full flow. “You know, Archbishop was a title I inherited five years ago, but it doesn’t sound right now. In a few years, when the New Anglicans are a finished product, I might change my title. To CEO. Or—” she glanced at him “—Controller-General.”

Or,
he thought,
Archbitch.
The word was already in his store of privately-invented names, like Meatslabs and Lucifer’s Lesbian and Levin’s Levities. They were all rather anal-retentive: a reflection of how much time he spent alone, adding building-blocks to his interior world. A world that was ordered and comfortable, and about to collapse.

“You know,” she said, “you’ve made yourself ridiculous here. No one would ever say so, not to your face, but they’re laughing behind your back.”

“You mean because I shut myself in the Signing Room?”

“Yes.”

“But you know why I did that.” This was more safe ground, and it suited him. Operational detail. “We’ve made sure there’s nothing of theirs in there. The signing ceremony is scheduled for October 23. So if that was their preferred option, it’s gone.”

“So it could be any time.”

“Yes. But you said they wanted it live and in public at the summit. So any time during the nine days commencing October 15.” When she didn’t reply, he hurriedly added, “But it was their
preferred
option. This one will be...”

“Less preferred. But earlier. Look, I was wrong, let’s not waste those few days. Let’s go back to how it was.”

“Do you mean that?”

“Yes. Let’s go back to just fucking each other senseless,and each of us takes what we want from it.” She watched him as he visibly lightened. It was as though a weight was slipping off him. She added, “I mean it. No relationships, just relations.”

“I’d like nothing more,” he said, then added, as the relief spread through him, “but not here in front of the altar?”

“I can find somewhere better.”

Later, in her bedroom, they went back to how it was. This time she raised her bottom slightly to assist him in pulling down her underwear. He didn’t seem to notice consciously, though he was aware that his preliminaries worked a little better. She knew how he liked her passive during this part, so he could enjoy doing his part slowly and artistically.

It was a minor embellishment which might, indirectly, help her. Just a detail, and later she’d add others. Build empathy in careful penny pieces. Not all in one lump, as she’d tried so clumsily and embarrassingly before. The next detail— the thought came to her quite suddenly—could be to find a replacement for his book.

“Retard,” she murmured afterwards.

“Bag of shit,” he replied, and they went again.

How many times have we gone tonight?
she thought.
He’s like a pistol. As one chamber’s spent the next one comes around. And keeps coming.

She was learning empathy, though her version of it, unlike Arden’s, didn’t come naturally. And—because of who she was— there was something oblique and sinuous about it. Starting a relationship with him by accommodating his embarrassment at the idea of a relationship. Sharing with him his wish not to treat sex as something to be shared.

She would work at it, carefully and quietly. Not her usual style of working, but it was worth it. He was obsessive and strange, potent and vulnerable, but he was the only one with a chance of protecting her. That, at least, was the obvious reason to draw her to him, but that—she told herself over and over until she almost believed it—wasn’t the only one. There was something else.

Empathy had found her, and it would find him. And—the admission frightened her—she wanted it to find him. Nobody else would do.

The delegations for the summit started to arrive on October 7. They were minor officials and support staff, put up in hotels all over Brighton. The VIPs—political leaders and senior staff— would not arrive until two or three days before the summit. The most important would be put up in the New Grand, the others in the more prestigious hotels along Marine Parade. Their suites were being made ready.

Yuri Zaitsev, the UN Secretary-General, would also be taking a suite in the New Grand. He was due to arrive on the evening of October 14, when he and Olivia would co-host a reception to mark the opening of the summit.

The first administrative and housekeeping matters had begun. They were the first of a multitude: agenda headings, translations, dietary requirements, transport, media relations, religious observance. The New Anglicans’ staff had foreseen them and prepared for them, and addressed them with their usual efficiency.

As well as the host of security issues associated with the summit, Gaetano was attending to something else.

Proskar had gone.

“Do you know anything about that?” he asked Anwar.

Aware that Gaetano was not likely to ask questions to which he didn’t have answers, Anwar said, “Yes. I told him in the Signing Room that I couldn’t be sure his resemblance to Marek was only on the surface...”

“You’ve been through that again and again, with me and with Kuala Lumpur.”

“...and that he should go.”

Gaetano seemed about to erupt, to shout obvious things like
He reports to me, not you!
But he controlled it, and when he eventually spoke, his voice was quiet. “I’m glad at least that you gave me a straight answer, because he left a note. It says that after what you told him, he wouldn’t be coming back.”

“Sounds rather theatrical.”

“Not theatrical. I’ve known him for five years, and I hav ea bad feeling. I don’t think I’ll see him again.”

Anwar shrugged, but didn’t answer.

“His early life,” Gaetano went on, trying to ignore Anwar’s manner, “was chaotic. Like mine. He always said that when he joined us he found...”

“A comfort zone?”

“Do you know what you’ve done?”

“Removed an uncertainty.”

“Removed my closest colleague, and my deputy. I needed him for the summit, and you’ve driven him away!”

“You’re overstating.”

“You’ve done one thing that seemed right since you’ve been back from UNEX, or at least one thing that
she
half-admitted might be right, but it gives you no licence to talk like that. Listen to yourself. You and I have to work together.”

“You’re still overstating.”

“I’ll have him found and brought back.”

“Then,” said Anwar over his shoulder as he left Gaetano’s office, “you and I might have to have an accounting.”

“Yes,” Gaetano whispered at the closing door,“we might.”

Olivia knew the four lines by heart, but still preferred to read them rather than recite them.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

Each time she read them, the lines turned themselves inside out and presented another face to her. One of the faces was uncomfortably close to The Detail. Maybe Anwar already suspected it, when he tore that page out of his book for her. Maybe Shakespeare did too.
Always ambiguous and multilayered, Shakespeare. Like the bastard of Rafiq and a Consultant.

She could have got her staff to search for a replacement book, but she didn’t. She searched personally, through dozens of antiquarian book dealers’ websites. One of the websites might even have been Anwar’s. She’d never know; most small business proprietors retained anonymity, and she had no idea of Anwar’s trading name.

She remembered exactly what he’d told her about his book, though: a replica of the Chalmers-Bridgewater edition of the Sonnets. Odd, because she hadn’t always noticed what he was saying. Then she remembered that that would have been after he’d said that thing to her in Brighton. She’d started to notice him a bit more after that.

Eventually she found a copy, ordered it, and had it express-couriered to her. It arrived in hours. On the inside title page she added an inscription
You mistimed. O.
Her writing wasn’t like Anwar’s, but large and upright with flourishes. She’d written it with a cheap marker pen that happened to be the first one within reach. The ink started to bleed into the weave of the paper almost before she’d finished writing, and she thought,
Fuck, I should’ve got a proper pen
; then it stopped, and what she’d written remained legible.

She’d go to his suite, on the floor below her apartments, and leave it on his pillow. No, that was too obvious. She’d give it to him personally. No, that was even more obvious. She’d ask Gaetano to give it to him. There was always Gaetano.
Fuck
, she thought again,
these details. Why does everything have to be just so?
While he’d been doing decisive things and made her mock him about almost turning into her, she was getting obsessive and almost turning into him.

Maybe literally
, she thought sourly.
He’s already pumped enough of himself inside me
.

Anwar started to feel worse and worse about Proskar. He rehearsed uncomfortably to himself how he might try admitting to Gaetano that he’d behaved hastily and gone for an easy target; but Gaetano had already said as much, and admitting it to him wouldn’t do much practical good. The only thing that would, would be to find him. He could do something about that: he’d ask Arden to put UN Intelligence on it. But then, he thought,
What if I was right about him, against all the odds, and I actually
invited
Marek back?
Rather apt that Marek came from Croatia: vampires’ victims, it was said, had to
invite
them in.

But he knew he hadn’t done himself any credit in the last exchange with Gaetano, whereas Gaetano had; he’d shown control and restraint. And the next time they met, the following day, Gaetano showed exactly the same qualities and behaved as though nothing had happened between them. Anwar remarked on it, saying he was glad they could put other differences aside.

“We have to,” Gaetano said. “The summit’s getting closer. The preparations are mounting and I can’t afford to have baggage between us. But that isn’t why I asked to see you.” He handed Anwar the book. “She wanted me to give you this.”

Anwar looked at it, saw the title and the spine and the cover and the binding, and went cold.
She could have left it on my pillow, or given it to me personally, but that would give away what she intended. I know what she intended.

She’d have had to trawl through innumerable dealers to find this. He knew, because he’d had to, to find his copy. And here she was, taking time to think of something that mattered to him, taking time—her own time—to get it. To get a toe in the door. To establish something they’d share. She’d thought to start a relationship, and he thought he’d laughed the idea out of existence, but she wasn’t afraid of his laughter. She wasn’t afraid of anything, and she’d never back down and never give up.

She’d just come back, again and again, each time more oblique and sinuous than the last. He should have remembered that about her.

Relationship.
He spoke the word to himself, stressing the second syllable, and it tasted like copper in his mouth. His life was turning inside out. There was a rushing in his ears, which he remembered reading somewhere was what you heard when you started to die.

Relationship.
He knew she was working on him. Sucking him into her. It would overturn his life, but his life was half overturned already. He half wanted it to continue, but sensed that she’d be worse, for him, than whatever they’d send for her.

Then he saw her inscription, and smiled without humour.

Several large corporations had a presence on the Cathedral Complex of the New West Pier—usually a boardroom and adjoining CEO suite. It was prestigious to have Board meetings, or to do entertaining or lobbying, at one of Europe’s premier business addresses. As a matter of course, Gaetano had had the companies on the New West Pier checked—maybe some of them were part of, or had links to, the founders or The Cell. He’d found nothing, but he got Anwar to ask Arden to do a deeper check. She called back with there sults, but first he briefed her on the events of the last few days.

From the wall of his suite, her projected image registered not only surprise, but genuine shock. “You tore a page out of a
book
for her?”

“Yes. And what about the results of your checks?”

Arden had found that years earlier Proskar did some freelance security work for a subsidiary of one of the Pier companies; neither that company nor its associates showed any traceable links to the Cell or the founders, and the security work was low-grade and short-lived. He’d been dismissed. His life really was chaotic then.