We went over and over Tommy Potter’s life and background, his career with the Intelligence Faculty. This was all fairly straightforward; I remembered enough details from the case file I’d prepared on him, and I could add bits of generic background where necessary. Tommy had been one of the stupidest men I’d ever met; he’d thought that by telling us everything he knew he’d somehow win himself a pardon, and we’d let him carry on thinking that.
When it came to events after the Fall, Baines and I had had to become inventive. It wasn’t much of a stretch to say that Tommy had managed to escape and hidden out somewhere in the Campus, but his subsequent escape was a bit more tricky. Tommy wasn’t the sort of person who would have been privy to the true nature of the Campus, or a map showing how to reach Nottingham.
“It was chaos,” I said for the umpteenth time that morning. “The Rebels took what they wanted and burned everything else. I had to keep moving. I spent a night in the Geography Faculty and there were all these maps.”
Eleanor was sitting calmly in the armchair opposite me. She had only hit me twice so far today, and I didn’t know whether that was a good or a bad thing. She said, “Maps.”
“Someone had tried to open one of the safes and when they saw it was just full of maps they must have given up,” I said.
“Maps,” she said again.
“Maps of the Campus. One of them had this route marked on the River. I thought it was a route to some hiding place for the Board, somewhere the Rebels wouldn’t find us. Somewhere we could regroup.”
“So you found a canoe and just paddled away.”
“Yes. How many more times?” I was exhausted. They kept waking me up at random hours of the night and calling me into the drawing room to ask the same questions over and over again. One of my eyelids was twitching all the time and it was driving me mad. “I found a canoe and just paddled away and then I wasn’t in the Campus anymore.”
“And the book was in the safe too.”
“Yes.”
She stretched her legs and clasped her hands across her stomach. “
Where To Go In Wartime,
” she said. “Why did you take it?”
“I don’t know. I took a few of the maps and the book was with them.”
This was the most dangerous bit, the most unbelievable bit. There was no way the real Tommy would have been able to look at the maps of the Campus and the Community and Tustin’s guidebook and somehow produce a synthesis of the nature of his world.
I
wasn’t bright enough to do that. The trick was convincing these people that I was, that I had worked out what was going on and then decided to use the book as bait to make contact with any of my people who were here. It was, frankly, utterly unbelievable. And that, Baines had told me, was why they would believe it. Which had sounded all well and good sitting in the garden of the clinic.
“And we just
happened
to be looking for the book,” she said. She had gone all quiet and still again, and she was smiling sadly.
“I needed to make some money somehow,” I said. “I did some labouring on a building site, lived with these Poles. Ten to a room in a flat in Kilburn, sleeping in shifts. Then I met Alison and I moved into her flat.” This was all true, in case they checked. My recent stomach wound was explained by police reports of a mugging and hospital records of my treatment, all faked and inserted into the relevant places in London’s bureaucracy. It was, Baines had told me, as watertight as it was going to get, which wasn’t terribly heartening. “I met a man in a pub who knew Rowland. He said he was looking for someone to travel around the country tracking down rare books. All expenses paid and a reasonable commission.”
“We will find him, eventually, you know,” she said. “
Rowland
.”
“Good,” I said. “He’ll back me up. One day he gave me a list of books he wanted, and one was the Tustin and I knew it was you. Someone from the Community, or someone who knew about it anyway. The book was just a curiosity otherwise.”
“What did you do with the maps?”
“Burned them. Memorised them and burned them.”
She laughed. It was the first time I’d heard her laugh, and it was so startling that it made me jump. “Memorised them,” she said. “Very good.”
“I drew one for Simon,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I saw that. It was awful.”
“I’m a Doctor of Intelligence,” I said, “not of Geography. Do you want me to draw you one too? I’ll try harder this time.”
That morning, she managed to break two of my teeth.
“W
ELL,
”
SAID
C
HARLES.
“And here we are.”
It was the afternoon of the sixteenth day of my incarceration, as far as I could judge. The previous day I had been taken to a private dentist, who had not batted an eyelid at the bruising on my face but had extracted the remains of my broken teeth and then done a number of mysterious things in the region of my mouth which he insisted would enable him to replace them.
“You tell an interesting story,” Charles said.
“Thank you,” I said. My mouth was still an unknown country and I was lisping quite badly.
“Frankly, you tell a very believable story,” he went on.
“That’s because it’s true.”
“Hm.” He looked down at the sheaf of notes in his lap. He was sturdy and fit-looking, his brown hair starting to recede in a rather fetching widows’ peak. He was wearing an immaculately-tailored suit. “Bit
too
believable, really.”
“Perhaps I should have made some of it up, then.”
He looked at me and nibbled the end of his pen. “It’s the
book
, you see.”
“Oh, Charles...”
“No, no, let me finish. The book makes no sense at all, really, until you explain it. And then it’s completely believable.”
“I have no idea what you mean.”
“Well, for example, I can believe you taking the book along with the maps – it’s one of those irrational little things people do sometimes. And I can believe you making contact with Rowland Forsythe. And I can believe that we engaged him to find the book – I facilitated that, actually, so I know it’s true. And it all makes perfect sense when you describe it. But it’s all very
unlikely
, don’t you think?”
“What I
think
, Charles, is that I’m beginning to regret ever trying to find you. Actually, I started to regret that the first time I met Eleanor.”
He chuckled. “Don’t let
her
hear you say that. Her feelings are easily hurt.”
“I’m glad something is.”
“All the
bits
make sense,” he went on. “You did this because of that. You did something else. I can’t find any fault in it anywhere. It’s when the whole thing is bolted together that it seems rather...
rickety
.”
“Life is
rickety
. I was on the run.”
“You seem to have coped very well here, though. You found a job; there are people who’ve lived here their whole lives who can’t manage to do
that
.”
I shrugged.
“Anyway,” he said. “It’s been decided by wiser heads than mine that we’re to give you the benefit of the doubt for the moment.”
I said, “I’m not sure I even want it anymore.”
He smiled. “I know we’ve been rough with you, and I regret that. But it was necessary, I promise.” He shuffled the notes into order and positively beamed at me. “I’d like to welcome you to our brave little band, Tommy. We’re going to fix your teeth and get you some documents, and then I think there’s a little job coming up in a few weeks which you might rather enjoy.”
3
T
HE ROOM WAS
awful. The furniture was upholstered in various shades of brown, the walls were painted a hideous shade of blue, the bed was lumpy. The windows looked out across a corner of the car park to a view of the traffic endlessly streaming along the motorway.
The bed was no problem. Eleanor claimed that and I slept on the floor in a nest of sheets and duvets and pillows. Fire regulations meant that while the door could be locked from the inside, it could also be opened from the inside, so when she used the room’s bathroom she handcuffed me to the bed.
The first time she did this, I said, “I thought I was a member of your brave band now.”
“Your membership’s still pending, Tommy,” she replied. “At least as far as I’m concerned.”
The rest of the time, she wouldn’t let me out of her sight unless I was using the lavatory, and even then I had to leave the bathroom door open while she sat outside. We ate together in the motel’s restaurant, went for walks together in the scruffy little park behind the motel complex, went for excursions in the car together. Motor cars still scared the living daylights out of me, although I had become used to the aeroplanes arriving and leaving at nearby Leiden Airport surprisingly quickly. Eleanor drove the car as if she was continually and only barely suppressing the urge to crash it into other road users. Although, to be fair, that seemed to be more or less how everyone else drove as well.
Charles had described this as ‘a quiet little trip to Greater Germany; a milk run,’ but Leo’s reaction seemed to suggest it was anything but. Quite why I was being trusted enough to take part in it was anyone’s guess. I strongly suspected that it was a kind of test, and that Eleanor would have been much happier doing it alone. All I knew was that a letter had either been sent to Charles or had fallen into his hands somehow. Someone in Dresden wanted to talk to someone about something, and they were not able to leave the city in order to do it.
Among Eleanor’s luggage was a beige ovoid about the size of a hiking boot. I had seen her open it once to check its contents, and asked what it was.
“Cronenberg pistol,” she said after pondering whether to answer. She put her hand into the ovoid. “The French call them ‘pork guns.’” And she brought her hand out holding something wet and shiny and pink and roughly pistol-shaped. “It’s a terrorist weapon,” she said. “Undetectable on scanners. Fires a single bullet made of bone. They grow them in vats.”
I looked at the meat gun. “It doesn’t seem very practical,” I said.
“You have to keep them in a nutrient solution otherwise they die and they’re useless,” she said. “But in certain situations they’re the best thing possible.”
Again, quite how this absurd piece of weaponry fitted in with a ‘milk run’ of a job was not immediately clear to me, but I found it disturbing in a number of ways.
We had been waiting at the motel for four days when Eleanor’s mobile phone emitted a cheerful little tune. She spoke quickly into it in a language I didn’t recognise, then switched it off and looked at me.
“Leo has found our man,” she said.
4
H
IS NAME WAS
Rolf Müller, and for the past forty years he had worked for the Dresden Sanitation Department, rising to the position of Superintendent, one of the most expert sewer engineers the city had.
“A collapse,” he told us at his large, neat flat on the outskirts of the city. “All that building.”
“Haven’t they got their own sewer engineers?” Leo asked.
“I’ve told you all this before,” Müller said. For the purposes of this interview, Leo was carrying the identification of German Intelligence, and had introduced Eleanor and me as English colleagues. In deference to us, we were all speaking English.
“Well, we’re just going over the same ground, Herr Müller,” Leo said patiently. “I don’t know why. Nobody tells us why. Well, nobody tells me, anyway.” He looked at me, and I shrugged as if nobody told me either.
Müller looked at us a moment longer, then he said, “Built their nasty little town without thinking about what was under the ground. All that demolition and building, it’s a wonder they didn’t have more collapses.”
“The main sewer,” Leo said.
Müller shook his head. He was a tall, painfully-thin man in his early sixties, his white hair cropped close to his scalp. “One of the big branches. They were doing some building up above and they weakened it so much that they managed to collapse the roof. Pretty soon, lots of toilets flushing in the wrong direction!” He pinched his nose and pulled a face and laughed, and I laughed too.
“So they asked the Bundesrepublik for help?” Eleanor asked. “That doesn’t sound like the Neustadters.”
“It’s all very well being a good Neustadter when your toilet works properly, I suppose,” Müller said philosophically.
“I can’t believe they don’t have someone of their own who can advise in a situation like that,” Leo said.
Müller smiled. “It’s like this, sonny. Noah is building his Ark, you see, and he has this list of animals that he has to get two of. So he gets two of every animal, and it starts to rain and he starts loading the animals aboard, and he’s almost finished when fuck! he slaps his forehead and cries –”
“I almost forgot about the chickens!” Leo finished, and the two men fell to laughing and congratulating each other while Eleanor and I sat nonplussed.
“You see,” Leo said when he and Müller had more or less finished being older and more worldly-wise, “when you make any kind of list you’ll always forget something. It’s axiomatic.”
“And usually you don’t notice you’ve missed it until you need it,” Müller finished.
Eleanor looked from Müller to Leo and back again. “Are you trying to tell me the Neustadters forgot about the sewers?”
“That’s my reading of the situation, yes,” Müller said, and he and Leo started to laugh again.
“How do you forget something like that?” I said.
“Because nobody knows about it,” Müller said, becoming more serious. “All your life you’ve been able to flush your toilet or drain your bath or walk down your street without walking ankle-deep in rainwater. How many times have you thought about that?”
I shrugged.
“So the maniacs in the Neustadt thought about walls and guards and defence and rebuilding, and they thought the sewers would take care of themselves,” Müller said.
“But they must have gone down into the sewers to make sure nobody tried to sneak into the polity that way,” Leo said.