Near here, I said.
At the next crossing stood a policeman. Lorna had mentioned Geoff’s party over my Glasgow phone when, on the verge of my lookout dream, I had found myself between her and some northwest passage which on my cartogramic variant of Gerardus Mercator’s flat map curved an unheard-of new great arc remarkably between two seemingly contiguous virtually congruent parallels through Callanish to fields of people compassed by their secrets from each other. I would chance Lorna’s being at Geoff’s party. I had no key to the new lock at home.
What if we aimed for that cop? said Mike. This cab’s got pickup.
That would be the end of one callow revolutionary, I said.
But you’d be stuck in England for years, said Mike.
I’ll call in a good lawyer; at least I’m within the law.
The lawyer Mary’s been talking to?
Why not?
The New York State Bar doesn’t cover London. What was his business with Allott?
Maya business, I said (and did not add “undoubtedly,” for I knew on some cooperative current of instinct that this was the lawyer Dudley had consulted on international divorce, having been in touch with him first about Catherwood’s New York holocaust).
I needn’t shoot you, I said, you don’t have working papers unless Len got you some, and I think we’d find something at the dispatching end of your two-way radio, which by the way may be on, that would be at least as interesting in its connection to Paul Flint as you are yourself, maybe Bob, maybe Nash if he’s back from Savvy’s party.
Well Mike came around in his seat so suddenly I almost shot. Then, too calmly, he asked if I knew where he could find Bob.
I haven’t seen him since Stonehenge, I said.
I was on the pavement, my hand on the roof.
Why was Mary a dividend?
Her brother sent us a touring archaeologist from Alabama.
At Stonehenge, said Mike.
For comic relief when more important things were happening.
Like a film, Mike murmured.
People threatening to appear, I said, or rumored missing. The Alabama academic replying with coy caution, I’d rather not say, really — as if he’d been asked if Mary Napier had actually got her hands on the Montrose heart.
Mary’s crazy, said Mike.
On the contrary.
On the contrary, eh?
You didn’t hear when Mary described Montrose’s dismemberment the night Marie’s blond costarletto of our fortress footage was mad at her for being with the dark-haired local in the guitar bar. Mary’s brother put the Alabama archaeologist on to us. A good courier.
The policeman was looking.
I knew I would have to fly to New York. Mike slid suddenly along his seat to the left-hand window, but then did not say anything, then said, You’re wrong about Sherman; he’s not in New York. I would know.
I shrugged, I deeply did not care, I turned away — and beyond the street lamp that lighted the policeman who now moved off I nearly saw Ned Noble (on a Brooklyn stoop) from whom I also turned away on the singular occasion of his last departure — as also I turned away from the crystal set he’d promised and broken — toward something I could not see in front that I swore would replace it.
Mike’s cab came alongside like a perpendicular coordinate to his violent sideways slide along his seat when I linked Mary’s brother to our Stonehenge. And I held Chad’s gun at arm’s length toward the window, a headless pedestrian. What else have you in your jacket? said Mike’s voice, and I told him I had good reason to know they would kill to keep the lid on.
In that case (said the voice from the far side) think about Reid because you’re right he’s in New York; and even if you’re planning something yourself and you know like day by day where Paul Flint’s been since Stonehenge-night-at-the-film-festival, it doesn’t matter, Reid’s in New York, you know who’s with him; you know what she tried to do, and you know that as of right now she doesn’t have to have done anything, she’s Cartwright’s daughter.
A loch to look at, a cross to bear, a memory to bring back. Now she was in America, I in England. Nonetheless, by some oscilant continuity I was still on the American trip with its many centers, the second tenor bidding my Highgate wife goodbye, the three against the fortress wall, the stabbing, the escalator plunge, the sullen death of Ned Noble in Brooklyn Hospital in ’45, the portals of Stonehenge with their emulsified night, the cruder stones of Calanish where Jenny hid my words and whose widow’s face has Indian) ones (or as the insular English with their lurid distinctions say, red Indian).
And the Kansas City Indian last seen at Stonehenge I had first seen the night Paul scampered from the grove in Wales.
Which Jan seemed to comprehend now not by receiving but only by in response demanding if I’d done violence to her jaguar — bored a hole maybe.
To house a bomb? To bomb a house — a structure, say, like an inveterate dream-plan where a dark watchman tries to wake and I a lookout on double watch (the squad within, the threat without) may have to cosh him so he stays coshed. Certainly I have not inserted anything in her jaguar, I’ve barely touched it since I took it two nights ago and, traveling under true colors shortly after leaving Alba put less confusion than evidence into Mike, to wit (which then seemed true as I said it) that I’d taken the red jaguar because it made me think of Nash’s nosebleeds.
But there is someone whom I make see red, I learn from Jan.
Oh who is that?
But Jan’s answering that it is not Paul (for Paul has found in stones and stars a calm beyond revolutionary purpose, beyond even peace and contemplation, that she wishes he could pass on) turns my words back to me to the hearsay tale Sunday night told by the splendid woman who left as soon as I came: the nod she gave me: her face like Lorna’s, her name something like Lana: her tale diffused in her absence into a terminal colloquium on violence guess where: but her tale: the man cartridged backwards of so many long pages: a committee of one to undermine a network of violent exiles by sowing confusion among them: is that man me?
If all this is in fact my lookout dream at last and has been since Glasgow (where in that case I am still and where a hotel bed once holding a map now holds me), then I find myself not simply defending the squad inside the target building nor yet excluded from the squad of approaching pursuers: but am instead some crystal semiconductor whose designed impurity draws the two together.
The two? The more than two. As one who once entering Paul’s hut in his absence assumed Paul’s one-time alias, Paul Wheeler, to deal with brothers Jack and Gene who were in the presence of my daughter’s present from me containing a copy of my words that are parallel to the film that was Jan’s idea, I at once now three days later reminded Jan that Paul had indeed been able to pass on to others something of the genius she felt in him.
Witness the deserter Jim and what he found. He came down from Norway and the Faeroes to the Western Isles, the outer and northern parts, and he could have stayed, he said; the low, leaning peatland where a dilettante geologist who owns a small red car put Jim ashore is like the endless Sundays of the crofters’ faith, the dense tablets of fuel dug and handled slow as that Calvinist gravity they were dried to warm; and Jim, next heard of south at Paul’s hut on the slopes of prickly damp Clisham, could just have stayed there: for Paul’s power seemed to Jim to draw an imaginary space where before there had been none so there was now no need to pass on along the line of ostracism from one center of exile altogether by finding an elsewhere in between—
Oh I see, I see what you mean, said Jan.
Which was why Bob his mentor-to-be tried to make Jim’s potentially incendiary words mean something else, for Paul who on our sound track of the Unplaced Room was never named was powerful enough to seem to Jim to change Jim’s life, which is what Jan seemed to hope could be done for someone she was thinking of before — as indeed Paul changed Claire’s life—