How did your source know Jenny was out here — if she is out here?
I believe my source was informed by Monty Graf. I myself saw him, but not to speak to.
Where?
In London of course. I do not believe in leaving London.
When?
Yesterday afternoon after I phoned Glasgow BEA.
Dawn would come late here. My watch said four but what time that was I couldn’t tell.
I asked what he had in his left pocket and he said I could easily guess.
Oh here was the gentle Indian from overpopulated India the hope of the moral world I had once begun to think.
Our talk drops somewhere in the gaps of the Callanish circuit, and yields its sound; gains instead imagination or a dispersion of probabilities. But as soon as I think, looking through Krish to an avenue or an antenna, that a miracle won’t be needed against him, my body gets heavy and uncoordinated the way it did one day near the end when I had a fight with Ned Noble, my muscle against the indifferent play of his mind.
Krish advised me to tell him at once where the Bonfire had been cached, why I’d come here rather than somewhere else, why I’d given the alias to Andsworth’s housekeeper, and why I’d only pretended to phone Dagger DiGorro from Andsworth’s. When I said oh indeed I had said to Dagger on the Druid’s phone just what I’d wanted to say, Krish replied that after Andsworth had phoned he’d called Dagger himself and had almost missed him for he was leaving for a base where he had some business, but Dagger had said of course Cartwright hadn’t phoned him, Cartwright was in New York.
I asked if Krish would trust Dagger before he would me; Krish said no, but Andsworth had had a feeling about the connection, how I’d held the phone too tight to my ear and jaw for real connection to be credible and hadn’t looked far enough or vaguely enough away.
I said the Bonfire sequence was ruined as far as I knew, and when Krish said did I then not know, I said I really didn’t except on Dagger’s say-so, and by the way how did Krish know I wasn’t Gene and Paul’s brother Jack from America with a beard. Krish’s hand stirred in the dangerous pocket and a breeze of rain came so light it seemed to have stopped above our heads and let go inertially the thinnest field of mist. Krish asked why Claire who had been so close to Dagger had said the Bonfire footage was extant — but Don’t answer, said Krish, you know possibly less than anyone in this and are instigating a method by which we will all know less.
I asked to whom Claire had said the Bonfire had been saved and Krish, with a bored glance a third of the way round the circle of stones which would have scared me if I’d not regained my levity, shrugged and asked after all which of the brothers she could have said it to, and when I said Jack is here, Krish at once said, But as you know he was in New York two days ago but I assure you you will not get to him tomorrow.
Through these words I now believed that whoever had broken into Dagger’s place twice and whatever was Krish’s relation to Aut or Jan Aut through the Knightsbridge gallery, Krish was in fact working with Jack; and with the luck of his seeming acknowledgment of this, I took a chance: I said I began to see beyond the messages left here at Callanish an explosive — yes, explosive — equation I only half comprehended now but knew to be much more important than Jan Graf Aut’s adopting here with Paul an alias which coupled her husband’s beautiful assistant’s given name with my old college friend Jim’s surname. And the equation paired Callanish and the words of my film diary opposite Stonehenge and the film.
Krish spoke fast, to stop whatever was happening around him. OK. So Jim Wheeler, so what — our Stonehenge was dead, don’t talk about explosive, likewise the absurd so-called Suitcase Slowly Packed with its photo of Paul (yes, Cartwright?) and the asinine baseball game in the park (which in any case lacked sound — right, Cartwright?) and the folly of spying in Corsica — and now, he said, answer please in one hell of a hurry the questions posed: Where is the Bonfire and why did you call yourself Jack? And where is the original of the diary?
I said the widow knew where I was and what I was doing right now, and so Krish had better watch it. I said I’d called myself Jack because I foresaw Krish would be working for me soon.
My mention of the widow may have encouraged him because with his right hand he reached and grabbed my parka and pushed me back to one side of the Great Menhir and past it. Dying seemed less awful than a passive life. The moon came out again and the rain increased. The place was too much for anyone not able to feel it. I had made Krish think I stood between him and something, and maybe it was true; but he had come after me to put himself between me and something, doubtless Jack and the brothers. And I had thought of Krish on one side and an object on the other, and of myself defending one against the other. But now I was not sure I was between.
Krish’s left hand was in his tightly tailored trenchcoat pocket, his right was clutching my pack in front but not shaking me. I asked who said that in the Suitcase Slowly Packed it was a shot of Pauclass="underline" and Krish unhesitatingly with the deepest watchful satisfaction said, Your friend Dagger on the phone yesterday.
But Krish’s pleasure did not relieve him, and when I said, but Cosmo talks more than Dagger, Krish replied like an automaton: Wheeler was incompetent, he does not matter.
And so though I could not ask what talking Krish thought Cosmo had done, I knew I would handle Krish here. I felt at liberty in this wet earth and with these high stones, and I said, What would you know about Stonehenge? — and as for Callanish, I came here with much less information than, thanks to you, I now have, I came here because of a circle on a map and I came here really to find out why I came.
The Dravidians from South India! he cried or stuttered—they are the ones who built Stonehenge!
His fury seemed to shrink Krish.
Or was this my renewed sense of his left pocket as if far below?
For it transmitted itself through his arm to my chest.
I knocked his arm away with one hand and with the other pulled the pistol, and this so startled him — he being unable to assimilate any of my power — that he leapt backward, hit his head against the Great Menhir, and caroming on fell eastward half into the sepulcher.
His head and shoulders were over the edge. He was on his back but his head was turned so blood came down from his nose. But when I hauled him onto the ground blood welled from inside his brown ear. I could not tell if I had his pulse or mine. The head was bad but not bleeding as badly as one would have expected from the scalp area. He’d hit the stone as hard as if he’d been trying to. He might be dead. The eyes were half open, and the nose bleeding brought back the Softball Game when Cosmo had tossed off a remark about blowing up the subway (and, diary aside, Krish would have been glad we had no sound track that Sunday), and the guy standing off first whom Cosmo had said it to had sprung a nosebleed and then with potential ferocity. The name was Nash. That footage could bear another look. But the map came first, and Paul’s hut, and a discreet sleep at the widow’s.