“Gaetano told me all that yesterday, and his account was almost exactly the same as yours. He practices—” she hurried over the word “—eidetic techniques. He works very hard at it.”
He would, Anwar thought. Not like me, I was made. He has to work at it. And he’d work with quiet persistence and thoroughness. With near-obsessiveness. He’d make a good Consultant. In fact, maybe he was. Another labyrynthine move of Rafiq’s? A secret twentieth Consultant, unknown to the others? No, now a secret nineteenth. No, eighteenth.
He turned away from the window and faced her. “You said you’d answer my question about that final detail.”
“You started this. You shouldn’t have said that to me in Brighton. If Rafiq had sent someone else, I’d never have heard it.”
“Answer my question.”
“And you should go and get cleaned up. And I must go, too. I have an organisation to run, and a summit in seven days. And I need to eat.” She looked at him. “Alone.”
“My question.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t answer it.”
“You said...”
“I can’t. But if we survive this, you’ll know why I can’t.”
2
He walked through the early evening, across the Garden from the Cathedral to the New Grand. He walked through the lobby and up to his suite. He shaved, cleaned his teeth, took a long shower, and changed his clothes. It took him over an hour to clean off the last five days, particularly the last hour of the fifth day.
His book, the replica of the Chalmers-Bridgewater edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, was on his bed where he’d left it. He picked it up and held it in his hands. He thought, I’ve only really known two women, and in the space of five days I’ve refused them both. I had to. One’s a colleague, and the other’s an obscenity. And a threat.
Relationships could kill you, he knew, or at least rape you. Being that close to someone was a kind of violation. They’d suck you dry, or touch parts of you nobody else should be all owed to touch. But he wished he hadn’t laughed out loud at her. What she’d said was embarrassing, but laughing out loud was worse.
He looked at the book for a moment longer, then did something he’d normally have thought impossible: he tore out a page.
It was the page with Sonnet 116. He ringed the first four lines, and wrote I want you to have this. A. His handwriting was a neat italic, done with an old-fashioned fountain pen. Hers, he remembered from random documents where he’d glimpsed her annotations, was large and untidy, with strong loops and vertical downstrokes, done with any old pen which happened to be at hand.
He’d often thought that getting to know someone’s handwriting was one of the opening stages of intimacy. But that was appropriate only for simple sexual relationships or complicated loving ones, or perhaps for close friendships. He sensed that the first had ended and knew that the other two would never begin.
He went up to the next floor. He walked past the door leading to her apartments, nodding politely to the guard (not Proskar this time), and on to Gaetano’s office.
Gaetano looked tired, but stood as he entered and greeted him courteously. The office was tidy as always, but in the last five days it had become crowded. Several monitor screens had been added, some free-standing and some fixed to the walls. They showed readouts and status reports for various aspects of the summit preparations. The first members of the delegations would start arriving tomorrow—not VIPs but support staff, and not in New Grand suites but in smaller hotels in Brighton. Anwar recalled the exhaustive and painstaking description Gaetano had given him of his, Gaetano’s, involvement in the security for the summit: a huge edifice, for which he was solely responsible. Meatslab or not, he’s there by his own efforts. Me, I was just made. Enough. I must stop telling myself that. It’s his problem, and he knows what he’s doing. I’ve got other concerns.
“I’m sorry,” he said to Gaetano, “what did you say?”
“I said something changed tonight between you and her. I didn’t like it.”
“Neither did I.” But neither of them felt disposed to elaborate. After a brief but uncomfortable silence, Anwar went on. “And what was all that about, speaking to me through you, and calling me It? Has she ever done that before?”
“No. I didn’t like that either. And when you made that play of striking at her...”
“Yes, I’m sorry about that.”
“I couldn’t see any other way you could shut her up. You seemed to know what you were doing.”
Thanks, Anwar thought, but didn’t say. It would have sounded like over-egging the pudding. His working relationship with Gaetano was satisfactory, but not exactly comfortable, and delicately balanced.
Another silence ensued, which Gaetano broke. “What’s that bit of paper you’re holding?”
“Something I want to her to see. Will you take me to her apartments?”
“She won’t be there, she’s in meetings.”
“I know. I’d like to leave it for her. On her bed.”
“On her bed?”
“I’ll explain when we get there. Will you take me?”
Never look surprised, was one of the maxims from his training.When he saw her bedroom for the first time he managed to mask his surprise, but only just. The one interior, on the whole of the New West Pier, that wasn’t pearlescent white and silver. And what it was, was even more surprising than what it wasn’t.
It was like the bedroom of an upmarket whore: deep-pile carpet and shot-silk wallhangings, deep-buttoned velvet upholstery and satin sheets, all in voluptuous dark purples and blues and reds, the colours of her dresses. And her untidiness was daubed over it like slogans: an unmade bed, clothes left over chairs and on the floor, chocolate wrappers strewn everywhere, and scraps of paper with notes scribbled in her large handwriting with its loops and downstrokes.
Her ginger cat was there too, fixing him with a baleful amber glare and hissing furiously. “Yes,” he agreed, “and Fuck You too.”
They’d walked through some of her other rooms—reception, library, office, sitting room, dining room—to get here, and all were exactly like rooms everywhere else on the New West Pier. It was as though this was her last personal refuge. He felt like he shouldn’t have seen it.
Anwar gave the page to Gaetano, who read it and handed it back. Carefully, Anwar put it on her bed; then, in case it got lost amid the tumble of unmade bedclothes, he put it on her pillow.
“I don’t like this, it’s wrong,” Gaetano said.
“It’s only a gesture.”
“I warned you before: don’t read too much into how she behaves with you.”
“I’m not. Particularly after tonight.”
“I think you are. That Shakespeare quote is hardly ambiguous.”
“Ambiguous is exactly what it is.”
“Then I’ve got another quote, just for you. ‘The verb To Love is hard to conjugate. The past isn’t simple, the present isn’t indicative, the future is very conditional.’ I read books too.”
Or perhaps just quotation dictionaries. “Yes, Cocteau knew he was being clever when he wrote that, but in this case it’s irrelevant. I’ve got another quote too: Velvet Bag of Shit. That’s what I think of her, Gaetano, that and nothing else. I’ll protect her because it’s what my mission says and I don’t walk away from missions, but otherwise...”
“Then why,” Gaetano asked, “put that on her bed?”
“Because it might remind her of something I said in Brighton, just before I showed her that page in my book and watched her read those lines.”