What Lot's Wife Saw (39 page)

I slapped my face to pull myself together. It was unacceptable for a Private Secretary, who was steeped in the tricks of the Seventy-Five, to succumb to them like a clueless colonist. The Consortium always ensnares us in the chains of our own phobias. I knew this well! Why couldn’t I resist? The fault lay with the appearance of the Black Ship, which had assaulted rather than tried my logical brain to the point of capitulation.

I wandered aimlessly along the dark streets. I was weak, defenceless and violated. I needed to be surrounded by people so my healthy contempt of them could cleanse me and restore my balance. I found a respectable establishment in my quarter – there weren’t many – and entered.

It was my first foray into a bar and I tried to figure out the ground rules. An empty table beckoned me. I never drank alcohol but I shrank from ordering water, seeing that everyone was holding glasses of beer. I pointed to one of the bottles and the waitress nodded that my order had been lodged.

I made sure that the seat was in position for me to alight (I never had had such worries before). I was alarmed at how my self-confidence had been destroyed by the Black Ship because if I couldn’t trust my senses, what was left? At least if the Black Ship was real and wasn’t a figment of my imagination, I’d feel far more secure and to hell with the submerged keel, to hell with the lack of a crew, and to hell with everything else. I wouldn’t mind at all if it sailed upside down, sails dragging in the water, keel facing the sky, as long as I could feel it with my hands. If I could knock on its timbers and listen to their sound, smell the cold steel of the anchor and thus confirm that all my sensory inputs supported each other rather than that my sight was pitted against the others, then I would recover. The Black Ship was tearing me apart.

The noise from the neighbouring tables was preventing me from concentrating. The clients were feverishly discussing the salt fleeing across the desert, whispering incantations under their breath as they sat huddled close to each other, gulping great quantities of beer. The Consortium had evidently decided to open the northern gate because the cost of maintaining the deception had become too high to bear so, suddenly, the desert could be crossed. This Governor was confident that he could control a Colony with two gates wide open – very daring. Now air would start blowing through the Colony through the opposing openings and we might get oxygen poisoning in place of our default asphyxiation. We would need time to adjust but the Governor reckoned he could handle anything. And I was beginning to believe that he could. If I hadn’t seen the Black Ship, I might have believed that he was the ideal ruler. He was forcing us to grow up.

My beer arrived. I took out my chequebook, wrote, but at the last minute, remembered that I should add a tip, so I corrected the amount, tore the cheque out and placed it in the tray. The girl gave me a bright smile and gave it back. What had I done wrong? I checked that the sum was legible, everything seemed in order to me.

“Your beer is courtesy of those gentlemen,” she said, and pointed towards the bar.

Bateau and Montenegro were sitting there, raising their glasses in my direction. I glared at them. Unfortunately, it did not have the desired result. They weaved their way over and pulled up chairs uninvited. Arrogant behaviour goes with the bearing of Stars, the term Star Bearers has acquired all the wrong connotations. They choose to forget that they are but officials who do not participate in decision-making, which is tantamount to describing them as overpaid lackeys.

They made a spectacle of greeting me and I got a coughing fit from being whacked on my back. I growled that I hadn’t expected two Hesperides’ jewels tarnishing their shoe soles in the western quarters.

The Judge clinked his glass and shouted, “Siccouane, you have crawled out of your hole after twenty years. I would have thought that you’d need a map to find a bar, but here you are. The occasion calls for a celebration – so we’re buying the beer.”

“Let’s see if you’ll drink it,” added the Priest, and pushed the glass nearer.

I smiled without enthusiasm, lifted the glass and tasted a sip. Its bitter-sour taste revolted me, but I preferred not to spit it out so I swallowed bravely. I wiped a fleck off my lips. The Judge and the Priest were ecstatic.

“Do you see, Father? The Secretary knows the regulations so well that he has learnt how to swallow bitter pills.”

“I am impressed, Bateau, because I have only seen him drink once before, and that was on the night he was dismembering his Governor’s body.” He leant in my direction. “Are you celebrating dismembering anyone today?”

I begged them not to remind me of that horrible night when we’d butchered Bera’s body to fit it into the oven. I still couldn’t believe that we’d done that. I couldn’t recognise myself in the images that haunt me, my elbows soaked in blood, the exposed sternum that couldn’t be cut, the bloody faces around me, the saws doing their grisly work, the spitting of the fire. The less we talk about it, the sooner we’ll forget it.

Montenegro whispered in my ear that my hopes were futile and that I’d never forget. The memory of sawing Bera’s trunk would accompany me to my grave, just as he’d never extirpate severing the head from the neck. That fateful night has formed a lasting bond between us six. Relatives by blood, so to speak, in the literal sense. Bera, who’d set us at each other’s throats in life, had united us in death.

It was annoyingly obvious that these two wanted something from me but I couldn’t yet guess what. I decided to give them more time to come out with it and, meanwhile, grudgingly cultivated my acquaintance with beer’s disgusting taste. The Priest, employing all his eloquence, claimed that Bera’s blood had banded us together but he needn’t have bothered, as I was impervious to his arguments. These blood bonds are very fragile, as anyone who has done time knows. Endless stories have been exchanged behind bars that relationships aren’t forged above corpses. Not a bad plot for a novel, but not applicable to real life. Horror is unbearable, secrecy is oppressive, memory is merciless. Corpses breed more corpses rather than gestating a single friendship. So the Priest has either never been inside or it hasn’t taught him anything.

When their touching attempt at bonding ground to a halt both of them started opening up to me. It was plain that they wanted to extract some information and they were trying to make me forthcoming. With an impressive accompaniment of expressions and gestures, as if they were sharing a terrible secret with me, they told me that Drake’s caravan had returned and wasn’t it amazing that the Suez Mamelukes had been nowhere to be seen. The whole Colony was buzzing with this very conversation, so its trade value as secret inside information was minimal. I could give in exchange an equally insignificant snippet of information.

“Tomorrow, they will place the bags in an ‘L’ shape,” I offered.

“What bags?”

“At the end of the seven kilometres, the caravan reaches a plateau of sand on which they stack the bags of salt in a predetermined shape. Today it was a ‘B’, tomorrow it will be an ‘L’ instead.”

They looked at me, impressed. “How do you know, Siccouane?”

I flicked a mote of dust off my cap. “Suffice to say that my information is exact and crosschecked.”

Earlier the pirate had given me a sealed envelope to hand to Drake at the Infirmary, containing orders about the next day’s expedition. Naturally, I’d opened it and read it before delivering it, just as I’ve read everything that’s passed through the Governor’s office no matter how well sealed. Green Box aside, there was no drawer, folder or file that I hadn’t opened and resealed without leaving a trace. These were the perks that brightened up a Personal Secretary’s life and permitted him to wear the redingote with pride. No reason to let them in on where I’d obtained the information, so I just assured them that it was accurate.

The Priest triumphantly produced that Bible from his pocket and called the waitress to please bring him a pencil. Judge Bateau slammed his hand down on the table, announcing that we were finally getting somewhere – once letters had appeared, then soon words, phrases and enlightenment would follow!

They really had no clue what they were talking about, but I suppose it wasn’t their fault if they got excited. A Personal Secretary knows, alas, that since the information about the Bs and the Ls was gleaned from a document, then it could have no value. The Seventy-Five didn’t put their trust in documents because they might get lost, fall into the wrong hands or get altered. Important directives, secret instructions and essential orders are only passed on verbally, preferably in whispers. The whole administrative system floated on thin air, relying on delicate unwritten psychological balances, invisible, like a Masonic lodge, where only those initiated could properly decipher the directives. So what was written on paper was, by definition, unimportant, although it sometimes served a different purpose from the one suggested by reading it. I couldn’t imagine any other major company treating the written word so contemptuously, as if they considered it the most primitive and insecure method of communication. If the documents originating from the Palace had any real value, I rather think that they wouldn’t have risked employing an accomplished master forger like me as Personal Secretary, but they obviously couldn’t care less. In all likelihood when the Governor gave me the envelope for Drake, he had intended the contents (which he knew I’d read and wanted me to leak) to be misleading as well as unimportant.

The young Governor has only demanded that we kept his presence secret – he has placed no other restrictions. He never told us what to say or what not to say. Indeed, the leaking of information has increased as no one can stand keeping their mouths shut, and the Colony has become a hotbed of fact and conjecture that flows freely throughout the quarters, certainly with less restraint than during the previous Bera’s tenure. Colonists are continuously caught off-balance by the odd directives emanating from the shuttered Palace, where they imagine the Bera they knew was still lurking with wild and worrisome intentions. If the laws of the universe continue to be flouted, many will believe that the end of the world must be approaching. It astounded me that the Seventy-Five might have adopted such a risky and revolutionary policy.

The Priest was manically scribbling Bs and Ls in his Bible and I was almost jealous of him. He clung to his diagrams and his arcane equations like a castaway would a plank of wood or, perhaps like Bateau would a bottle. I, naked in my logic, had no such props to comfort and protect me from the lash of the thought of the Black Ship which shattered my bones. It amazed me that the Priest and the Judge had got swamped by other considerations and ignored the most blatant threat to normality: the mysterious vessel. I was just about to subject myself to another sip of the horrible brew when either Lucifer took pity on me or my mind finally derailed from its one-track train of thought and a monumental revelation struck me: the ship had been sailing diagonally!

Phileas Book hastily wiped his tears, pretending to rub his eyes, which supposedly had been irritated by the harsh light in the lounge. He surreptitiously glanced across the room to check if the bald man was looking at him. Thankfully, he seemed absorbed by his newspaper.

It was almost four in the morning and his head throbbed from fatigue and stress. The headache was exacerbated by the sudden Parisian storm that was pelting the windowpanes and by the feeling that he was being watched. He pretended to leaf through some papers so that he could sneak a glance at his unwelcome visitor who was keeping tabs on him as he pretended to read the journal – Book had noticed early on that he hadn’t seen him turn a page.

The commissioned crossword was slowly progressing but it was his meandros that most occupied his mind. It was stuck through lack of a diagonal, like a carriage mired in mud. That silent presence in the lounge oppressed him and he was still afraid to reveal his thoughts.

It was the fourth time that they had changed their methodology and Book concluded that the rules of this interrogation were very complicated. He had no doubt that he was being interrogated. Even if he hadn’t realised it from the start, the conclusion was obvious once he had read his own name in the letters. The Seventy-Five interrogate you with gloves on. They might not have the right to arrest you but they can “hire” you. So they had given him a supposed job, trained some spotlights on him and watched him as he worked, expecting his guard to drop as he became absorbed in his task. Very clever. He irritatedly pushed the letters away.

“Can I ask a question, sir? Where are these six people now?”

He was expecting to hear the stock answer of “I ask the questions and you answer, Mr Book, not the other way around,” so he was surprised when he saw the newspaper folding, revealing the smiling face of the man. “Finally, Mr Book, I hear a normal question from your lips. I was beginning to believe that you lacked even basic curiosity – anyone else would have asked that from the very beginning. For a start there are seven, not six, including Bianca Bateau, and they are here, on the far side of this floor. We had them brought from the Colony last week for … er, observation.”

Interrogation, he meant. A shiver went through Book as he contemplated the thought that only a few rooms separated him from the six letter writers. Their interrogation would be much harsher than his.

“Not that it really interests me, that is …” he turned back to his reams of papers.

The man couldn’t hold back his laughter.

“Mr Book, you are a very bad liar.” He unfolded his newspaper again as he added indifferently, “Since I’m here I can answer another question, if you wish.”

Book noted that his interrogation had indeed entered a new phase. In the beginning the man had refused even to introduce himself, whereas now he was willing to answer questions. The Consortium had shifted their methods too quickly for Book to cope with since his brain was already overloaded as he tried to concoct the fake crossword as well as solve the real Epistleword in his mind.