She again remembered the note. One character no longer in search of an author.
“They know so much about us. You think this might be Zaitsev? Or some other part of the old UN in New York?”
Rafiq almost laughed. “No, they don’t have the imagination. Maybe there sources, but not the imagination. No, this is an attack on the whole UN, mine and Zaitsev’s. And it comes from outside.”
After she’d gone, Rafiq thought,Only part of that is right, and I’m not sure which part. For once, maybe I don’t know everything.
4
The interruption was Gaetano, carrying a large folder.
“Sorry, Archbishop, but you asked to see this as soon as it was ready.”
She turned to Anwar. “It’s our year-end financial statement. I need to check it now.”
“Should I leave?”
“No, this is just the first draft, it won’t take long.”
Gaetano stood silently by her side as she studied the documents. She took only a couple of minutes to absorb them (something which, like Rafiq, she did without enhancements).
She glanced up at Gaetano. “See what they’ve tried to do?”
“Yes. Notes 19 and 36 on the non-recurring and below-the-line items. I told them you’d never agree.”
“So why did they do it?”
“To hide the real cost of some of the Room For God projects. They think that if the media find out what a Church is spending on campaigns against Creationism and blasphemy laws…”
“Why do they keep doing that? Thinking? Why is it that my head of security knows more about proper financial reporting than my Finance Director and his three Deputies? We had this last year, when they…”
“When they tried to hide the cost of commissioning independent research into the Bible conclaves. I reminded them of that.”
“Alright, Gaetano, remind them of this: those items are our core business. I will not have them hidden. I want them where they belong, in the main Income and Expenditure accounts. I’m throwing out their draft. And remind them not to try this again.”
“You could also,” Gaetano suggested drily, “tell me to remind them about their appraisals.”
“Yes, they’re due in four weeks, aren’t they? If I’m alive by then…Just checking you’re still awake,” she told Anwar, as both he and Gaetano looked at her sharply.
This is like her Room For God broadcast, Anwar thought. Everyday she fights real battles. More than I’ve done in seven years.
“As the Archbishop,” she explained to Anwar, after Gaetano left, “I’m a mix of Chairman and Chief Executive. Like,” she looked sideways at him, “the UN Secretary-General and Controller-General rolled together into one.”
Anwar thought of Yuri Zaitsev, the jowly and heavyset Secretary-General, and Rafiq. The idea of them rolling together into one was not something he could easily imagine.
“Back to who’s threatening you. Why not fundamentalists? Your Batoth’Daa?”
This time, she laughed in his face. “Never! They don’t have the imagination, or the intellect. Their religion sucks it out of them. Makes them turn unanswerable questions into unquestionable answers…That’s not original. Someone else said it, I can’t remember who.”
“It was an Art Gecko slogan.”
“What? Oh, of course. You and your old books.”
“It wasn’t a book…” he began, then left it. She’d already forgotten, and was busy pouring herself some wine.
“No thanks,” he said as she started to pour a glass for him.
“I don’t drink alcohol.”
“Oh, your name…Are you a Muslim?” “No. Worse.”
“Atheist?”
“Worse still. Agnostic.”
“A lapsed atheist. Do you also bet each way at Brighton Racecourse?”
“I like to think it’s rational,” he said, rather pompously.
She scented blood and went for him. “Having blind faith in reason is not the same as being rational.”
“You’re a walking dictionary of one-liners.”
“One-liners are useful for religious leaders. Martin Luther had ninety-five of them. His Ninety-Five Theses were good. But if he’d nailed the Ninety-Five Faeces to the Church door at Wittenburg…”
Anwar laughed out loud, something he rarely did. But she didn’t notice. She was already busy clearing the table.
Later they stood at the window looking out at the lights of Brighton’s shoreline and seafront. They were naked. They hadn’t been naked while on the table. Fully clothed, like the first time, she’d said. It’s better when you act like it’s spontaneous.
Normally Anwar preferred the feel of a woman’s naked body against his. But he was getting to like it her way. Disarranging her clothes was like unwrapping a gift. Seeing what was inside. And, if he still had to satisfy his obsession not to make tidy things untidy, he found he could disarrange her clothes carefully and slowly. She didn’t seem to mind.
She’d taken him into herself even more greedily than last time. I’m almost wiping her kidneys, he thought incredulously, amid the swelter. They went again and again. Her greed, for food and for sex. It’s unbelievable. Where does she put all that food? And all that sperm?
They kept stealing looks at each other. Naked, she was exactly as he’d imagined when he’d seen her for the first time: lithe, slender, and toned. He wasn’t quite as she’d imagined. His musculature was impressive and defined, but somehow not entirely right. On Brighton beach, a few people might have looked twice at him.
It was modelled on the musculature of big cats. All cats had a higher ratio of muscle to body-weight than other mammals, and so did Anwar. He wasn’t a cyborg or robot, but a living thing, with enhancements replicating other living things, in specific areas where they were better than human.
She didn’t know that, but she knew the Dead were somehow made. His muscles didn’t bulge unnaturally like those of a bodybuilder, but they rippled. Everywhere. She’d felt them moving, under his skin and under the touch of her greedy grabbing hands. They were living tissue. Not mechanical or metallic or electronic.
But still not entirely right. As if he’d been taken apart and somehow put back together according to slightly different principles. Which was, she realised, probably the case: millions must have been put into him. Tens of millions. She thought, Can he protect me from what they’ll send?
As in the Boardroom, there was an easy silence between them: fitting for the simple slaking of simple lust. Literally in and out, he thought, with no baggage. Tidy and self- contained. Even better than the best prostitutes. And he could afford the best.
They looked out at the i-360 Tower on the seafront two miles away, at the bright lights of its main structure and the illuminated observation pod, a large ring-doughnut going up and down the Tower’s shaft.