“But you are disenchanted.” Her eyes sparkled and she touched his arm. “Because of Kiki? I enjoy calling him that. He becomes so foolish when he has been in a cafe too long.” Her eyes grew round as an owl’s and her mouth became toothless. “Oh, he looks, so—comme un hibou, tu sais? —like the night bird with the big ears, and then he speaks amazingly. I am made nervous, and I joke with him a little, and he says it does not matter what I call him. A name is nothing, he says. Nothing is unique. But he does not like it, entirely, when I call him Kiki and say I do not think anyone else ever called him that before.” She touched Michaelmas’s arm again. “I tease too much.” She looked contrite, but her eyes were not totally solemn. “It is a forgiveable trait, isn’t it so, if we are friends again?”
“Yes, of course.” He patted her hand. “In the main, I’m simply tired.”
“Ah, then I shall let you rest,” she said lightly. But she folded her arms and watched him closely as she settled back into her corner.
The way to do it, Michaelmas was thinking, would be to get pieces of other people’s footage on stories Horse had also covered. A scan of the running figures in the mob, or the people advancing in front of the camera, would turn up many instances over the years of Watson identifiably taking positions ahead of other people who’d thought they were as close to the action as possible. If you didn’t embarrass your sources by naming them, Domino could find a lot of usable stuff in a hurry. You could splice that together into quite a montage.
Now, you’d open with a talking head shot of Watson tagging off: “And that’s how it is right now in Venezuela,” he’d be saying, and then you’d go to voice-over. Your opening line would be something like: “That was Melvin Watson. They called him Horse,” and then go to your action montage. You’d rhythm it up with drop-ins of, say, Watson slugging the Albanian riot cop, Watson in soup-and-fish taking an award at a banquet, Watson with his sleeves rolled up as a guest teacher at Medill Journalism School, Watson’s home movies of his wedding and his kids graduating. You’d dynamite your way through that in no more than 120 seconds, including one short relevant quote from the J class that would leave you only 90 for the rest of it, going in with Michaelmas shots of Watson at Maracaibo.
You’d close with a reprise of the opening, but you’d edit-on the tags from as many locations as would give you good effects to go out on: “And that’s how it is right now in Venezuela…” and then a slight shift in the picture to older, grimier, leaner, younger, neck-tied, cleaner, open-shirted versions of that head and shoulders over the years… “in Kinshasa… on board the Kosmgorod station… in Athens… in Joplin, Missouri… in Dacca…” And then you’d cut, fast, to footage from the helicopter that had followed Watson into the mountains: blackened wounds on the face of the mountain and in the snow, wild sound of the wind moaning, and Michaelmas on voice-over saying “and that’s how it is right now.”
The little hairs were rising on Michaelmas’s forearms. It would play all right. It was a nice piece of work.
“We are nearly there, Laurent. Will I see you again?”
“Ah? What? Oh. Yes. I’m sure you have good directorial talent, and I know you have excellent qualities. There’ll certainly be future opportunities.”
“Thank you. If you get a chance to review the footage, I think you will find it was good. Crisp, documentary, and with no betrayals that the event was essentially a farce.”
“How do you mean?” he asked quickly.
“There are obvious things missing. As if UNAC and Limberg each had very different things they wanted made known, and they compromised on cutting all points of disagreement, leaving little. They were all very nice to each other on camera, yet I think it may have been different behind closed doors. And why did Sakal leave without so much as a public exchange of toasts with Limberg? But I was not talking business, Laurent. I was suggesting perhaps dinner.”
That, it seemed to him, was just a little bit much. What would they talk about? Would they discuss why, if Clementine Gervaise had been able to see something, hadn’t the great Laurent Michaelmas delved into it on camera? What might a man’s motives be in such a case? All of that so she could wheedle him around into some damaging half-admission or other and then run tell her Kiki about it?
He smiled and said: “That would be an excellent idea. But I expect to be leaving before dinner time, and I also have some things I must do first. Another time, it would be a very pleasant thing.”
“Dommage,” Clementine said. Then she smiled. “Well, it will be very nice when it happens, don’t you think so?”
“Of course.” He smiled. Smiling, they reached the front of the Excelsior and he thanked her and got out. As the car drew away, she turned to wave to him a little through the rear window, and he waved back. “Very nice,” Domino said in his ear. “Very sophisticated, you two.”
“I will speak to you in the suite,” Michaelmas sub-vocalized, smiling to the doorman, passing through the lobby, waiting for the elevator, holding up his eyelids by force of the need to never show frailty.
In the cool suite, Michaelmas took off his suitcoat with slow care and meticulously hung it on the back of a chair beside the drawing-room table. He put the terminal down and sat, toeing off his shoes and tugging at the knot of his tie. He rested his elbows on the table and undid his cufflinks, pausing to rub gently at either side of his nose. “All right,” he said, his eyes unfocused. “Speak to me.”
“Yes. We’re still secure here,” Domino said. “Nothing’s tapping at us.”
Michaelmas’s face turned involuntarily towards the terminal. “Is that suddenly another problem to consider? I’ve always thought I’d arranged you to handle that sort of thing automatically.”
There was a longish pause. “Something peculiar happened at the sanatorium.”
Michaelmas tented his fingertips. “I’d gathered that. Please explain.”
Domino said slowly: “I’m not sure I can.”
Michaelmas sighed. “Domino, I realize you’ve had some sort of difficult experience. Please don’t hesitate to share it with me.”
“You’re being commendably patient with me, aren’t you?”
Michaelmas said: “If asked, I would say so. Let’s proceed.”
“Very well. At the sanatorium, I was maintaining excellent linkages via the various commercial facilities available. I had a good world scan, I was monitoring the comm circuits at your terminal, and I was running action programmes on the ordinary management problems we’d discussed earlier. I was also giving detail attention to Cikoumas et Cie, Hanrassy, UNAC, the Soviet spaceflight command, Papashvilly, the Watson crash, and so forth. I have reports ready for you on a number of these topics. I. really haven’t been idle since cutting away from your terminal.”
“And specifically what happened to make you shift out?”
There was a perceptible diminution in volume. “Something.”
Michaelmas raised an eyebrow. He reached forward gently and touched the terminal. “Stop mumbling and digging your toe in the sand, Domino,” he said. “We’ve all filled our pants on occasion.”
“I’m not frightened.”
“None of us are ever frightened. Now and then, we’d just like more time to plan our responses. Go on.”
“Spare me your aphorisms. Something happened when I next attempted to deploy into Limberg’s facilities and see what there was to learn. I learned nothing. There was an anomaly.”
“Anomaly.”
“Yes. There is something going on there. I linked into about as many kinds of conventional systems as you’d expect, and there was no problem; he has the usual assortment of telephones, open lines to investment services and the medical network, and so forth. But there was something—something began to happen to the ground underfoot.”