It was easy to find. Not a news outlet in the world hadn’t picked up on the story and run with it. Explanations abounded — environmental catastrophe being the most favoured — but mass hysteria, terrorism, a virus, and at last, and most pooh-poohed, brainwashing, were all suggested to explain the images that were being pumped out to the world, streamed across YouTube and Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
Images not merely of the dead; images of the killing too.
Here: the CEO of a TV manufacturing company smashing his wife’s head into the wall, and she wasn’t resisting, resigned almost it seemed to her fate, dropping silently to the floor when his work was done. There: a weather woman calmly drinking the blood of the man whose throat she has just slashed with her nail file. She sits on her haunches, then looks up suddenly, startled, like a fox caught prowling by a wolf, sees the camera, doesn’t perceive it as a threat, and slowly goes back to feasting.
Here: a TV pundit, famed for his comical yet racist views on immigrants, women and homosexuality, a man who specialised in dismissing people and ideas with the immortal argument “Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?”, winner of last year’s “sexiest man on entertainment TV” award, quite happily beating a waitress to death with a chair. The padded seat fell out after the first few strikes, but he carries on with the frame regardless, long after she stopped moving.
Facts and figures.
Of the three hundred and twenty-nine people caught up in the events at the Hotel Madellena, only ninety-eight were confirmed dead, with a further forty-two in critical condition. A surprisingly low number, really; but that that is the difficulty of trying to physically kill someone with your bare hands.
Of the remaining victims/suspects (the line was blurred), fifteen were in custody, one hundred and eleven were receiving treatment for various non-critical injuries and the remaining sixty-three had escaped unharmed and were being interviewed by the police, when not being interviewed by the media.
Quoth the head of reception: They just went mad. They went mad. All of them: they just went mad.
I looked for Rafe Pereyra-Conroy, and there was a picture of a body being taken to the morgue.
I looked for Filipa Pereyra-Conroy, and there was no information. Nothing. Not merely a media blackout, but a silence on the internet, a dead space where her name should have been, only Google cache recalling the faintest trace of articles that had been, stories which might once have carried her name.
That was interesting. That implied she was still alive.
A statement from Prometheus:
deep regrets
losses
profound condolences
full investigation
criminal acts
etc., etc., etc.
Words that had no meaning.
I looked away from the phone, and the woman who I’d stolen it from was awake, watching in silence.
I stood up.
Hobbled across to her bed.
Put it back where it had come from.
Went back to my own berth.
Climbed beneath the sheets.
Rolled over.
Closed my eyes.
She said nothing, and no one came.
Chapter 95
In the morning, Dr Dino came round around, saw my chart, said it was a disgrace, that I would be within my rights to cry neglect, and being so senior, people mustered at his command, and in the drama of the moment a cannula was removed, a dressing checked, while he stood glowering at all who obeyed before finally, the information now before him, declared that I was doing very well and I needed to speak to my insurance provider as soon as possible.
So saying, he left, and I interrogated one of his juniors, who had flawless English, about how to treat myself, once I was released from hospital.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “We’ll give you all that information when discharged.”
“Indulge me,” I replied, “so I don’t feel neglected.”
She blanched at little at that, and answered all my questions without further complaint.
At midday, three policemen arrived, but they didn’t go to my bed, but to the room next door, and I shuffled in my tight white socks into the ward to eavesdrop, standing with my back against the door while they talked to a woman, a fashion designer, who’d been at the Hotel Madellena when the world went mad, and had broken her leg falling down some stairs as she fled the scene.
No, she hadn’t seen much.
Yes, it had been terrible.
No, she didn’t know how it had started.
Yes, she’d help with enquiries, if she had to.
No, she just wanted to go home.
No, she wasn’t one of the 206. She’d just been there to help a client with her clothes and make-up. She had a tie-in with Perfection. It worked well — she’d got some incredible clients, and made them beautiful.
That seemed to make the cops happy. I wondered what they’d have done if she had admitted to having Perfection herself.
In the early afternoon, Byron came.
She was dressed as an old woman, playing an old woman, shuffling in with the rest of the families come to visit their loved ones, leaning on a walking stick she didn’t need, sporting a slouch she didn’t have, holding a photo of my face, which she checked carefully, now, and now, and now.
She must have visited half a dozen wards before finding me, and on finding me, bent to check her photo again, smiling to herself like a dear old gran who’s no bother to no one, a brilliant performer, a consummate liar, I had to admire her, and seeing my face in her hand, and then seeing my face staring at her from the bed, she smiled again, and hobbled to my side.
A few paces away, I raised my hand and said in Arabic, “If you come one step nearer, I will scream.”
She replied in the same language, with a slight Syrian accent, “I’m not here to hurt you.”
“You fucking stabbed me, you crazy mass-murdering bitch.” I wasn’t shouting, wasn’t even angry, the words came and they were true, and that was all there really was to it.
Others, looking at us. They’d forgotten me, but they’d remember her, the little old lady in the hospital speaking Arabic, though she looked about as Syrian as a broccoli. The recollection endangered her more than me, I realised, and I smiled and added, “Your limp is beautiful, but I can make you memorable.”
“May I sit?” she asked.
“No.”
“I called the ambulance for you, at the hotel. They wouldn’t have found you otherwise.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I have photos — you were upstairs, behind a closed door, in a place where no one should have been. I’d paid off security; they weren’t coming back. Beautiful, important people were dead or dying in the room below you. You would have bled out long before anyone saw you, if I hadn’t made the call.”
“Thanks, great, next time someone stabs me I hope they have the same instinct.”
“I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“Fuck that.”
“You were going to stop me. You understand I couldn’t permit that to happen.”
“Fat lot of good it did. Why are you here?”
“I wanted to find you, to make sure you were alive. I looked in the Paolo in Venice, but they were overflowing, so I came here. I wanted to apologise for having to injure you in the execution of my mission.”
“I might scream,” I replied. “I might just scream just to see what happens. See how long it takes Gauguin to come, you can have a competition, just the two of you. How fast can you get out of a straitjacket? How quickly can he pull a trigger?”