Web of Everywhere (16 page)

To his dismay Anneliese cast a single glance at what he had found and shook her head, wrapping her quilt more tightly around her than ever.

‘That is for a man,’ she said flatly.

‘What? But I don’t understand.’

‘Perhaps you would not have thought of it. I know many women do go around in trousers. But I have always been taught that it is sinful for women to wear men’s clothes, or men to wear women’s.’

‘My dear girl, surely –!’

‘Hans, I’m sorry, but I want my dress. It is decently long and it’s proper women’s clothing. Surely if we have to wait a little while longer, until it’s completely dry, that won’t matter very much?’

Defeated, Hans turned away. ‘I’ll see if I can find something else,’ he muttered.

‘It’s not very likely.’

‘What?’

‘I have been looking through the window.’ She blushed brilliant red as she spoke. ‘I’ve seen people walking about as shameless as animals! I shall never do that – never, never!’

Her jaw set stubbornly. For a long moment he gazed at her in disbelief, and then he went out.

Another search of the refuge’s clothing store proved even more fruitless than the first; as the young man explained apologetically, lightweight clothing was ordinarily converted into cleaning rags or bandages, while what winter wear was kept – shut at present in closets with branches of pennyroyal and other herbs to discourage moth – would run foul of Anneliese’s prejudice against trousers. What more sensible garb, though, for one traveling to a colder climate?

‘Is the girl unwell in her mind?’ the monk asked at length.

‘You might say so,’ Hans snapped, and explained about
her upbringing. The young man’s mouth rounded in amazement.

‘I have heard of that. Now I see it, I realize it is even sadder than I was told. Well, we shall just have to find a quick means to dry her dress, if she will put on nothing else and won’t go about naked. Perhaps in the kitchens. I shall take care of it.’

Hans muttered a mechanical word of thanks and wandered fretfully away, intending to rejoin Anneliese and see if he could cajole her into a more reasonable attitude.

As he rounded the corner of the corridor leading to her room, however, he heard his name called. Turning, he found the elderly nun whom he had met before hurrying toward him.

‘There is friend to see you,’ she said, beaming.

‘What?’

‘At the skelter. All monks and nuns try finding you in all places since half-hour. Has message for you, he say, from mostly famous poet Mustapha Sharif! And is own name of Muley Hassan.’

For an instant the world spun crazily around Hans; then he heard his voice cry, ‘He’s lying! I don’t know anybody called that!’

The nun stared at him, puzzled.

‘Is strange, then. He ask by name for you, also for girl. Is – ah –
An-nah-li-zah,
true? An-nah-li-zah Sen-keh!’ She looked pleased at having produced the European name in recognizable form.

‘Send him away!’

‘But he ask by name and – ’

‘Send him away! Or get me and Anneliese away! Anything so long as you don’t tell him where I am!’

‘But why, brother? Why this man so make you fear?’

Hans drew a deep breath, and appealed to the one argument he was fairly sure might provoke results.

‘Do you wish a man to be murdered here at this refuge? If you don’t, you’ll do as I say!’

‘Murder!’ The nun’s eyes grew wide in horror. ‘He is come to kill you? Oh, then you
must
be sent away!’

INTERFACE R

Once I met a man

who every day

went around the planet counterclockwise.

He said by this means

he gained a day

and would therefore live for ever.

Unluckily for him

Death measures time

otherwise than with clocks and watches.

– M
USTAPHA
S
HARIF

‘Hans, what in the world –?’

‘Here’s your dress! Put it on, since you won’t wear anything else!
Hurry!
Someone’s followed us here and we’ve got to get away!’

He threw the still-damp garment at her; she caught it and clutched it to her bosom, staring wide-eyed not only at him but at the monk and nun who had also come to the door of her room, looking much disturbed at the fact of having to lie. Muley Hassan had been sent to the farthest corner of the refuge on the pretext that Hans had last been reported there; a few precious minutes had been gained, but only Hans’s intense assurance that his life was at stake had won that reprieve. It was a cardinal tenet of the Way of Life always to believe that everybody told the truth. Prince Knud had laid that down, at the very beginning, because he said – and with much justice – that the doom of the old world was inherent in its habit of hypocrisy, clear through from bluff in international relations to hard-sell exaggeration in advertising. And because his teachings were so much akin to oriental tradition, they had taken deep root among people like these, on the fringes of the greatest disaster in all of
history, who were still even now hunting for clues to help them understand why the population crash called the Blowup had occurred.

Hence the existence of Way of Life refuges like this one all over Asia and Africa and the Pacific … and their absence in Europe and North America, places where not only was there no need to explain the causes of the Blowup, but so much damage had been done to the minds of the survivors that the notion of having strangers wander at will among them was untenable.

Praise be for the childlike naïveté of that attitude. Without it …

‘Do as I say!’ Hans roared at Anneliese, and she flinched.

‘I am to get dressed with so many people staring?’

No, no, it simply couldn’t be possible. It couldn’t be that he, Hans Dykstra, was condemned because a stupid girl was ashamed to show her nipples and her crotch … But he gathered his wits and without a word rushed the others from the room, catching them by the hands. Over his shoulder he cried, ‘Hurry! Hurry!’

And she didn’t. Time leaked away while he and the monk and the nun stood irresolute in the corridor, and then another monk came into sight and called something in which Hans was able to detect the name of Muley Hassan, and his patience would endure no longer. He again flung wide the door of Anneliese’s room and found her red-faced and struggling to fasten her long drab dress.

‘What are you
playing
at?’ he demanded.

She exclaimed in horror at having him intrude when she was incompletely covered. Over her bosom, the front-closing zipper was jammed at a height which most girls would regard as excessively modest, but she by contrast covered with both hands.

‘It’s shrunk and I can’t do it up!’

The world turned red, like the fire he had set at the Eriksson house and never seen but could imagine. He seized her by the arm and literally dragged her from the room in disregard of her shrieks of protest. The nun and the two monks tried to interfere, and he brushed them aside and physically carried Anneliese the last few meters to the skelter – and
shoved her into it – and punched the first remote code that came to his mind, in Panama.

To the girl, very close to her ear, he said between his teeth, ‘You would rather be beaten up, maybe killed, maybe
raped,
than let me see a patch of your chest? Are you insane?’

She fought him for another few seconds, and then wilted against his shoulder, weeping as he pushed her out of the skelter. Here, as almost everywhere, the concourse around the skelter outlets was full of stucks and bracees, making shift to earn their living as touts and shills and guides.

‘I don’t understand your world!’ Anneliese was moaning. ‘I hate it – and it makes me terrified!’

Alertly dozens of the watchers reacted, and closed in.

‘Ah, sir!’ the first said, choosing English – he was a boy of no more than fifteen, but muscular and agile as an eel so that he slipped through the throng. ‘You want private place finish raping virgin girl, yes? I got good place cheap, I – ’

Hans cuffed him aside with the flat of his hand and looked desperately for a way past the others, but failed to find one. The universe seemed to be full of greedy outstretched hands, shouting mouths, the glint of light on those bracelets which forbade entrance to the skelter system …

‘Hey, you!’

A booming voice that overrode the clamor from the touts and shills, and a ring of authority that caused them to fall back and give passage to the speaker: a heavy-set man in his early forties, well-dressed, clean-shaven, cast from a different mold. He carried in his left hand a white card that might have been a photograph because he glanced at it before continuing to Hans.

‘Aren’t you Hans Dykstra? I have a message for you from – ’

But already Hans’s fevered mind had completed the sentence, by way of an instantaneous detour that posed the question: how did Mustapha manage to ensure that one of his agents was here, in Panama the place I chose at random?

‘Quick!’ he forced out, and taking Anneliese by the arm again dragged her back into the skelter and punched for …

Spitzbergen. (How many more codes can I think of before I
have to consult a directory? Before I start accidentally using ones which belong to friends, colleagues at work? Oh, if there were a God I’d pray, I’d pray but there’s only the impersonal force that evolved us from the slime …!)

‘Hans, Hans, let me go!’ Anneliese was shrieking, trying to pummel him with her free hand.

The cry attracted attention. Here, in an Arctic winter, the concourse was nearly deserted; those whom chance had stranded this far north spent the time of sunlessness, or so he had been told, adapting the ancient Eskimo practice of wife-swapping to the tenets of the Way of Life. But a fat ugly woman wearing some sort of police-like uniform jumped up from a bench and came toward them, grinning from ear to ear.

‘Hey, you’re Dykstra, aren’t you? I never expected you to – ’

And back into the skelter, straight away. Code: Victoria, Vancouver Island, on that western fringe of Canada which had escaped the worst of the fallout from the Blowup.

It was as though Mustapha had multiplied himself, become a sort of all-knowing deity, able to see the entire planet at a single glance.

And again at Victoria …! How –
how
– could that devil Mustapha have planted his agents at every public skelter outlet? There were thousands, and even if he were to send every last member of his retinue to keep watch surely there couldn’t be enough to cover every one!

But yet once more a stranger rose and approached with a smile and uttered his name and he fled as before. Where to this time? Somewhere isolated in the middle of an ocean: Tahiti, the Seychelles …

He settled for the latter and they emerged at another Victoria, on the island of Mahé, and here nobody was waiting for them. Almost unable to believe it was true, Hans emerged cautiously on to a near-deserted concourse, seeing broken windows around him, much litter blowing in a breeze, a dark man asleep beside a refreshment stand. Nobody else.

He heaved a vast sigh, and let go Anneliese’s arm.

‘I’m sorry. I’m most terribly sorry, I really am. But you
saw what happened everywhere else we’ve been until now, didn’t you?’

Rubbing the spot where his fingers had clamped, vise-tight, she said, ‘All I saw was that a lot of people recognized you and said they wanted to give you a message. I don’t know why you have to run away from them. I wish I’d never said I’d come with you. You seem to be treating me more like – like baggage than a person!’

‘But the only people I can think of who might want to hound me are criminals, like the one who burgled my home and then burnt it down!’ Hans felt perspiration spring from every inch of his skin.

‘You have criminal gangs who can be ready and waiting any place you go, ambushing innocent people even though they can go right round the world in next to no time? Then modern life is even more abominable than I already thought it was!’

She gave him a defiant glare, her chin jutted at a sullen angle. His heart sank. Searching for some fragment of consolation, he could find nothing better than the fact that for the moment at least she had forgotten about her stuck zipper.

He soothed her by degrees, until she relaxed enough to agree to accompany him from the concourse and find a place to lodge, The sound of their altercation had awakened the man at the refreshment stand, and he stood up, rubbing sleep from his eyes, and offered his wares: stale-looking pasties and flyblown fruit, old bottles refilled with sickly-looking soft drinks colored repulsively bright red, green and purple.

Hans refused, but asked if there were a hotel to be found … without much hope.

The man shook his head. ‘No, sir. Is not hotels here any more. But is a lodging-house I know, good cheap clean. Is my sister-in-law who runs it. I write address and give directions too.’

He seized a stub of pencil and tore the corner off a yellow sheet of newspaper, and in slow awkward capitals wrote two hard-to-decipher lines. After going through the data with him, Hans thanked him and was about to take Anneliese’s arm again when he realized that the man was holding out his palm with a look of annoyance.

Oh. Of course, a tip. He felt in his pocket and produced
a couple of coins, suddenly remembering with a wrenching sensation that he had almost no money on him. He had forgotten to pick up his spare cash when he last called by at home.

So he’d have to go back yet one more time, and if there was one place where Mustapha would beyond doubt have planted his agents, it would be at Valletta. It wouldn’t be possible for him to get past the privateer and Hans’s own skelter, but of course the house still had ordinary doors and windows … No, wait a second; hadn’t Vanzetti promised that the police would keep a watch on his home? So it would probably be safe to go there after all. And if it proved to be otherwise, then there were alternatives: he could for example go to Recuperation Service headquarters and draw some money there, payment in advance for the compassionate leave he’d applied for. He breathed a little more easily as he led Anneliese out of the concourse building, along a littered street past shabby houses, to another even shabbier one which was obviously the ‘good cheap clean’ lodging house.