Transition (8 page)

I smile, raise one hand. “Firstly, sir, have no fear. I am here to ensure your safety, not threaten it.”

“Are you indeed?” The good lord looks dubious.

“Absolutely. I am, as I have always been, attached,
inter alia
, to the Protection Department.” (This is actually true.)

“Never heard of it.”

“One is not supposed to, unless one has need to call upon its services.” I smile. “Nevertheless, it exists. You may have been
right to feel threatened. That is why I am here.”

Harmyle looks troubled, and possibly confused. “I understood that the lady in Paris was unflinchingly loyal to the current
regime,” he observes. (At which I look mildly surprised.) “Indeed, I was under the impression she herself formed a significant
part of that regime, at its highest level.”

“Really?” I say. I ought to explain: in terms of Central Council politics, Lord H is a one-time waverer who is now a d’Ortolan
loyalist but who has been instructed by Madame d’Ortolan to seem to grow remote from her and her cabal, to speak out against
her and, by so gaining their confidence, try to draw out the others on the Central Council who would oppose the good lady.
She would have a spy in their midst. However, Lord H has been conspicuously unsuccessful in this endeavour and so fears he
is caught between two very slippery stepping stones and is in some danger of skidding and falling no matter which way he tries
to go a-leaping.

“Yes, really. I’d have thought,” he continues cautiously, still glancing around the quiet, high-ceilinged, wood-panelled room,
“that if she heard I was – that I had any doubts regarding our… prevailing strategies… that she would have been my implacable
opponent, not my concerned protector.”

I spread my hands. (For a moment, my brain chooses to interpret this movement as one hand diverging into two different realities.
I have to perform the internal equivalent of a mind-clearing shake of the head to dispel this sensation. My mind is in at
least two different places at the moment, which – even with the rare gift I have and the highly specialised training I’ve benefited
from – requires a deal of concentration.) “Oh, she is quite placable,” I hear myself say. “The good lady’s loyalties are not
entirely as you might have assumed.”

Lord Harmyle looks at me curiously, perhaps not sure how good my English is and whether he is somehow being made fun of.

I pat my pockets, appear distracted (I
am
distracted, but I’m holding it together). “I say, d’you think I might borrow a handkerchief? I think I feel a sneeze coming
on.”

Harmyle frowns. His gaze shifts fractionally towards his breast pocket, where a white triangle of handkerchief protrudes.
“I’ll ask a waiter,” he says, half turning in his seat.

The half-turn is all that I need. I rise quickly, take one step forward and while he is still swivelling back to look at me – his
eyes just beginning to widen in fear – slash his throat pretty much from ear to ear with the glass stillete I have been concealing
up my right sleeve. (A pretty Venetian thing, Murano, I believe, bought on Bund Street not ten minutes ago.)

The good lord’s earlier alabaster appearance deceived; in fact, he held quite a lot of blood. I ram the stillete into him
directly underneath his sternum, just for good measure.

I have not lied, I feel I must point out. As I have already stated, I am indeed attached to the Protection Department (though
I may have just constructively dismissed myself, I admit) – it is simply that said Department is concerned with the protection
of the Concern’s security, not the protection of individuals. These distinctions matter. Though possibly not here.

Stepping delicately away as Lord Harmyle tries with absolute and indeed near-comical ineffectiveness to staunch the bright
blushes of blood pulsing and squirting from his severed arteries, while at the same time seemingly attempting to wheeze a
last few bubbling breaths or – who knows? – words through his ruptured windpipe (he doesn’t seem to have noticed there’s a pencil-thin
knife protruding from his chest, though perhaps he is just prioritising), I sneeze suddenly and loudly, as though allergic
to the scent of blood.

Now that really would be a handicap, in my line of work.

Patient 8262

A
small bird came and sat on my window ledge this morning. I heard it first, then opened my eyes and saw it. It is a fine,
clear day in late spring and the air smells of last night’s rain on new leaves. The bird was smaller than my hand, beak to
tail; mostly a speckle of two-tone brown with a yellow beak, black legs and white flashes along the leading edges of its wings.
It landed facing me, then jumped and turned so that it was facing outwards again, ready to fly off. It rotated and dipped
its tiny head to observe me with one black sparkling eye.

Somebody passed the open door of my room, shuffling down the corridor, and the bird flew away. It fell initially, disappearing,
then reappeared, performing a series of shallow bounces through the air, fluttering energetically for a few seconds to buoy
itself up, then bringing its wings tight into its body so that it resembled a tiny feathery bullet, dipping down like some
falling shell on an earth-bound trajectory before deploying its wings again and fluttering busily to gain height once more.
I lost sight of it against the bright green shimmer of the trees.

We live in an infinity of infinities, and we reshape our lives with every passing thought and each unconscious action, threading
an ever-changing course through the myriad possibilities of existence. I lie here and ponder the events and decisions that
led me to this point, the precise sequence of thoughts and actions that ended – for now – with me having nothing more constructive
or urgent to do than think about those very eventualities. I’ve never had so much time to think. The bed, the room, the clinic,
its setting: all are highly conducive to thinking. They impose a sense of calmness, of things remaining unchanged and yet
being reliably maintained, without decay or obvious entropy. I am free to think, not abandoned to rot.

In Detroit I played pinball, in Yokohama pachinko, in Tashkent bagatelle. I found all three games enthralling, fascinated
by the randomness that emerged from such highly structured, precisely set-up machinery knocking shining spheres of steel from
place to place within a setting where, in the end, gravity always won. The comparison with our own lives is almost too obvious,
yet still it gives us an inkling into our fates and what drives us to them. It is only an inkling, because we are submerged
within a vastly more complicated environment than the clicking, bouncing steel balls and the pins and bands and buffers and
walls they collide with – our course is more like that of a particle within a smoke chamber, subject to Brownian motion, and
we are at least nominally possessed of free will – but by reducing, simplifying, it allows us a grasp of something otherwise
too great for us to comprehend in the raw.

I was a traveller, a fixer for the Concern. That is what I was, what I made myself into, what I was groomed for and made into
by others, what life made me. Across the many worlds I roamed, surfing that blast-front of ever-changing, ever-branching existence,
dancing through the spectra of plausible/implausible, hermetic/connected, banal/bizarre, kind/cruel and so on; all the ways
that we’d worked out a world or deck of worlds could be judged, evaluated and ranked. (This world, here, is plausible, hermetic,
banal, kind. Yours is the same except closer to the cruel end of the relevant spectrum. Quite a lot closer. You had the misfortune
to have a singular ancestral Eve and I guess she just wasn’t a very nice person. Blame volcanoes or something.)

Of course, I cannot tell anybody here this, though I have thought to. I could talk to them in my own first language, or even
English or French, which were my adopted tongues and operational languages and the chances are high that nobody here would
understand a solitary word I said, but that would be foolish. It would be an indulgence, and I am not sure that I can afford
even so modest a one. I have even been reluctant to think about my past life until this point, which is now starting to seem
almost a superstition.

At some point I suppose I will have to.

I wish the little bird would come back.

Adrian

I suppose Mr Noyce was a sort of father figure to me. He was a decent bloke, what can I say? Old money, which made him unusual
among the City people I knew at the time. Come to think of it, so did the being-decent bit, too.

I’d supplied his son Barney with enough dust to sink a cruiser, though I’m not sure Mr N ever knew this. I mean, he certainly
knew Barney did toot by the sackful, or he must have guessed, because he was sharp, nobody’s fool, that’s for sure, but I
don’t think Barney ever told him he’d got so much of it through me. Getting introduced properly to Barney’s dad was one of
the favours I called in when I decided to make the transition to relative respectability. Barney owed me money and instead
of taking it in folding I suggested that he might like to invite me to the Noyce family pile for a weekend in the country.
I’d thought Barney might resist this idea but he jumped at it. Made me think I’d priced the deal far too low, but there you
are.

“Sure, sure, there’s a bunch of people coming down next weekend. Come down then. Yeah, why not.”

We were glugging Bolly in a newly opened champagne bar in Limehouse, all glitzy chrome and distressed leather, both of us
coked to the eyeballs, jittery and voluble. Much drumming of fingers and over-quick nodding and all that sort of shit. I’d
taken a lot less than he had but I’ve always had this thing where I start behaving like the people I’m with even though I’m
technically not in the same state they are. I’ve been a designated driver once or twice and drunk nothing stronger than fizzy
mineral water all night – with no drugs at all – and people have taken one look at me and tried to take the car keys off me because
I’m slurring my words and have gone all giggly and smiley.

Same with the white stuff. I would take a little with clients just to be chummy while they got stuck in up to their eyebrows
but I’d end up just as high and wired and frenetic as them. Thing is, I can always snap out of it pronto, know what I mean?
I’d be sober the instant after somebody accused me of slipping vodkas into my Perrier, which, once they’d realised I was straight,
meant they were happy to let me drive, but that came with its own problems cos you look like an actor, like you’re taking
the piss, just pretending to be drunk, know what I mean? People resent that. Especially drunks, of course. Caused a few arguments.
I never was taking the piss, though. It wasn’t something I did deliberately, it was just something that happened. Anyway,
I learned to tone down this getting drunk/whatever on the atmosphere effect, but it still came into play.

“What sort of people?” I asked, suspicious.

“I don’t know,” Barney said, looking round. He smiled at a table with three girls. There was a fair amount of talent in the
place. Barney was tall and blond to my average and dark. He worked out, but there was a sort of pudginess to his face that
made you think he’d be a bloater if he ever stopped gyming every day. Or gave up toot. I’ve been called wiry. “Just people.”
He frowned at me, trying to smile at the same time. He waved one arm. “People. You know; people.”

“Sorry, mate,” I said, “I don’t fink I can cope with this level of detail. Can you be a bit more vague?” I was doing the barrow-boy
bit then, which was why I said “fink.”

Barney struggled. “Just, I don’t know…”

“Tramps? Kings?” I suggested, annoyed that we still weren’t getting anywhere.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Barney said. “People. I can’t say. People like me, people like you. Well, maybe not like you, but people.”
He sounded frustrated and glanced at the door to the Gents. It was only about fifteen minutes since his last toot but I sensed
he was getting ready for more.

“People,” I said.

“People,” Barney agreed. He patted the pocket where his wrap of gear was and nodded emphatically.

Barney never was very good on specifics. It was one of the things that made him not very good as a trader. That and the over-fondness
for the coke.

“This weekend?” I asked.

“This weekend.”

“Sure there’ll be room?”

He snorted. “Course there’ll be fucking room.”

There was lots of room cos it was a fucking mansion, wasn’t it? Spetley Hall’s in Suffolk, near Bury St Edmunds. One of those
places where you pass a nice but deserted-looking gatehouse like something out of a fairy story and start off down the drive
and begin to wonder if it’s all a giant wind-up cos the gentle rolling parkland and distant vistas of follies and herds of
deer just seem to go on for ever with no actual dwelling in sight.

Then this cliff of stonework dotted with statues and urns and tall windows with ornate surrounds and looking like a barely
miniaturised version of Buckingham Palace heaves into view over the horizon and you suspect you’re finally nearing the gaff.
Still didn’t get greeted by no butler or footmen or anything, though. Had to park me own car, didn’t I? Though actually there
was a servant of some description who did help me with my bags once I’d tramped up the steps to the front doors. He even apologised
for not being there to greet me, just taken some other guests to their room.

It was all the wife’s, Mrs Noyce’s, really. She was something double-barrelled and a proper Lady with a capital L and had
married Mr N and they’d inherited the place. There were at least twenty guests that weekend. I’m still not sure I saw all
of them all together in the one place at any one time. Mrs N was a lovely old grey-haired girl, not stuck-up but seriously
posh and she tried to get everybody to dinner and breakfast at the same time but what with one couple needing to stay the
Friday night in London, somebody having a cold, a couple of children to be got ready for bed early and all that sort of stuff,
I don’t think we were ever totally quorate, know what I mean?