No: even more, I wanted to ask Paul Flint — for even if the moustache and the shoulder-blades that were hunched as if they’d been jammed into a vise have not told you what you would have known all too soon in a film for having already glimpsed him in Tessa’s grip framed by a Stone Age trilothon, you have me and my ordinary probabilities and you might hence have guessed this to be Paul Flint, though as for me (between blind coghood and that sinister hint of godhead or godbody in me issuing from my place in a field of multiple impingements) I was amazed but could not ask — What did you mean when from the darkness behind a Stonehenge stone and echoing the bank clerk’s claim that Stonehenge meant simply the distance and the work in moving those stones, you said, it comes to that and that alone.
But my life was in danger. I was hungry. If my parka with Chad’s gun and Krish’s ten-inch blade had been found under the bed in Monty’s basement, no telling where the red jaguar was by now. Or the three sound-track tapes I had taken from Dagger’s cabinet.
We ran a light to keep up with John’s cab.
Ahead at our next fight, cars were crossing and we would have to stop. I could not stop. I’d said to Mary in the Son des Guitares (but not in the diary pages Jenny typed), Suppose I’ve got the Montrose heart, what would it go for? And Mike heard me, and our last morning at the école (bowls of café-au-lait, a dish of apricot jam, three big American girls in yellow curlers and cut-off jean shorts) he was confirmed in his contempt and suspicion when Marie appeared and took him outside the dining hall and must have told him Incremona had said I was dangerous and Mike mentioned the famous heart spirited into the moving hand of an American merchant-adventurer named Cartwright, and Marie relayed this to Len urging him quite possibly in the same breath not to order coffee and croissants at the port café but to eat some local yogurt laced with the granola she’d brought from London or an orange she produced from her bag which instead made him think of the open market at the bottom of the Cours Napoléon with slabs of tuna dark almost as whale flesh, though in reality there at the port café Len was staring across the hot cobbles to the plongeur van and its entrepreneur the tough brown bawdy half-naked Neptune as bald as Incremona but a happy man, a Paris watchmaker half the year, the other half down here in Corsica on his own southern time with his dials strapped to his wrists and his yellow air-tank on his back taking the tourists diving where weightless they could move in any direction at will, sighting an ashtray’s glint below or the endless translucent green cushion far above.
Information theory? I had none. Only these circuits of addition two by two — Marie and Mike — Nash and Incremona — false labor or no, had Alba truly phoned Dagger in Ajaccio that last morning? And now Jack Flint’s investigation: how could it turn up me and liquid crystals without Red Whitehead’s help?
Information, and the prospect of more dragged me toward some final grid no grander than this one here and stuck to it the regular driver’s two signs declaring a man’s cab is his cab and he would move it any distance for a price: a final grid like this protective mesh that had changed the New York taxi not to a London cab’s class-comforted hackney carriage but to a squad car’s compartmented coop: the wipers now slowly swinging against a film of rain.
Monty Graf never learned about those Tuesday right angles; he moved one track at a time, by the numbers: which Frenchman? (And was I trailing Jenny or Jan? Did Reid have a key to the house in King Street?) Yet there was no time to broach with him the Other — the rule of cartographic deformation, and which way those two right angles had survived — from sphere to flat map, or from flat to sphere — and I would have liked to broach this with him, for Monty is a humane man, not just out for a buck or a slow killing, and apart from the loud mechanics of a mysterious action that seemed to have shifted to New York, Monty and I might have emptied many a dram and had a good long talk between these two imagined poles of globe and map, family and fortune, the friendly chill of London rain and the coordinates of American danger; he might even have known why Incremona and the Frenchman had called at the florist’s Wednesday morning.
The shtip of my Māyā proverb might have to be its own reward. It seemed to have less than nothing to do with macrobiotic diets ordained by Andsworth for his community in South London or urged by Marie upon Incremona.
Why not find Jenny and take her back to Highgate to Will and to Lorna even if I found Lorna with that young second tenor? But what if Jenny would not go? She believed Reid had followed her to King Street because he needed her.
I abandon the burly white-cropped Frenchman and by an indirect route along Charlton south of King I catch Jenny at the corner of King and Hudson where she keeps a lookout for a boy she admits to me now dismissed her that day in the South Ken tunnel as if he didn’t like her any more and she dragged on home to Highgate to type Hawaiian Hippie (or most of it) and my Suitcase Slowly Packed (including the moccasins just like the ones she had been shown in Jan’s case opened in the Underground and held by Dudley). But now on a Tuesday in October when the diary recedes I tell her she must stay away from Jan’s son Jerry with the long hair who is in Monty’s house at this moment, and she says, But why? — with that defiant gentleness of her generation, to which I say, He will do you violence.
But why? says Jenny.
His mother, I say.
But, says Jenny, she’s stopped running after Reid.
I ask my daughter how many other times Reid ditched her. She says, It was a funny day, he’d said he had to meet a couple of blokes in the South Ken Underground and he wouldn’t mind introducing them to me and when we got there I said Oh my father and I used to come through here when we went to the museums. And at that moment I saw Jane and her father and I said Oh there are two friends of mine — and Reid seemed to look beyond them and then said he’d split and go home; but it was too late, Jane had seen us.
I’ve distracted Jenny from her post. How did you find me? she says. You think I’m here because of you, she says. That is the mood she’s in. I spotted your hat, I say. She’s back at the edge of a building where she can see most of King Street. Maybe she has missed him.
Merely helping would be dangerous.
I raise my voice in hope, in gratitude: I got the message on the diary.
You know the woman, she says. I was afraid of Reid. But I’ve changed.
This must mean she wants Reid. What do I know of Reid? Wears a bush hat. Friend of Sherman’s. Roofed a dome with his parents’ LP’s. Tried street theater in South London which I was invited to see but couldn’t make.
She isn’t herself. There’s something odd in what she said. She’s back at the edge of the building watching Monty’s house and hoping I will go, I can see it in the settled way she lays a khaki sleeve along a black iron fence, two parallel chevrons, corporal, U.S. Army.
She comes back. She says, I would have been in it anyway.
I don’t believe her, there’s something wrong in what she’s said. Come on, there’s a Mexican place a few blocks up, I’m probably staying at Sub’s if she wants to bunk in tourist there, surely she remembers the Bach sweatshirt, the man with the two kids?
I fall flat.
He may have to go into hospital tomorrow for tests.
She doesn’t know what to say, but she does not smile.
Look, I say, it’s not fair to me: and this makes her look toward her lookout post seeing Reid’s face with its premature lines from the corners of his mouth up to his wide nostrils: or did she hear me? Her silence refutes me better than Dagger’s words in the domestic scene my words call up when she and he had been out to the hardware-housewear shop where I bought Andsworth’s French vegetable slicer run by (if not owned by) the white girl and the man from Ghana who always closed for a long lunch even on Saturday so Dagger and Jenny came back without the wine glasses Lorna had sent them out for and in response to Dagger’s later toast to not taking Jenny seriously she downed a whole old-fashioned glass of Liebfraii-milch Dagger had got us a case of cheap, but the toast arose from Dagger saying fairness was the great empty virtue, Jenny saying fairness was one reason he stayed in England, Dagger answering with his mouth full of veal and rice that fairness was like loyalty, Jenny saying he didn’t take her seriously, Dagger choking on rice and laughter, reaching for his almost empty glass.