‘I’ll let all the decent folk go about their business. It’s quite legal, Clive. We talked to Frear Munroe.’
‘Oh Christ,’ said Clive Baarder. ‘Peggy, you are not well. You really must deal with your own past.’
‘When you say past …’
‘I mean past.’
‘No, no, you’re talking code. You mean I want to do this because I was raped? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘No.’
‘No? Good. Because I can run a clean Ghostdorp and I can run this city. I can have the parks safe all night long. I can have the streets tidy and neat. The grass in the park will be cut. It is so very simple. People will come from all over the world once again. We will be a great nation once again.’
‘This is not your idea.’
‘This bit is mine,’ she said.
‘And how would you make the streets safe exactly?’
‘I wouldn’t let unsavoury types walk on them.’
Clive Baarder nodded his head slowly. Then, for the first time since the meeting began, he turned and looked at me.
‘Do you hate Voorstand?’ he asked me.
‘He loves Voorstand. Leave him alone.’
‘He is an Ootlander,’ he said to Peggy Kram. ‘He uses Ootland words. Now he’s trying to deprive us of our freedom.’
In answer to this charge, Bruder Mouse said not a word. He slipped out of his chrome and leather chair and walked in that rolling sailor’s walk towards the longest wall of windows. Despite the comic nature of this walk, despite the broken tooth and the spangled blue waistcoat with the button missing, anyone could see this was a powerful figure. He stood and faced Clive Baarder. Behind his back was all of Saarlim, all its territories and municipalities, roads, Steegs, platzes, freeways, overpasses, intersections, public bridges, all glowing pink and dusty in the late summer light.
Such was the intensity of this moment for each of the three people in the trothaus boardroom that, when Wendell Deveau’s pistol fired twenty feet away, they barely noticed it. A sort of phhht, that’s all.
54
Jacqui recognized that sound. She had heard it at the DoS in that long thin basement room on the Boulevard des Indiennes — the sound of a silenced Glock, like a fart.
‘Tristan!’ She ran across the glossy blue tiles, through the glass door, into the trothaus foyer. There, in that gloomy chapel-like space with its Neu Zwolfe triptych and big gilt-framed mirrors, she heard a peculiar drumming noise which she later knew was her old lover’s heels doing their death dance on the tiles.
They were lying together, the two men: Wendell on top, Wally Paccione underneath. The old man had his piano-wire garrotte around the agent’s throat.
As Jacqui knelt, Wendell’s great fleshy legs twitched. One foot had lost its shoe. The sock still had a gold stick-on label on its sole. His arm flopped out sideways. She jumped back, her hand to her mouth, as his Glock clattered to the floor.
‘Help him,’ Bill said.
But there was no one to help. Wendell had finally managed to shoot Wally Paccione through the rib cage — the bullet had passed upwards and sideways into his heart. Wally was dead. He was tied on to Wendell’s throat with a piece of grisly piano wire.
In their struggle, a chair had broken. A 200-year-old plaster statue of the Dog-headed Saint lay on the floor, his plaster crown in fragments on the floor.
I sat on the floor amongst the broken plaster. I looked at Wally’s dead, dead face, the hollow cheeks, the dried lips, the wide belligerent eyes, the arms that held the gory garrotte, all the tendons standing out like lines of cable underneath his skin.
I could see the line of small round white scars along his arms. Those arms and hands had bathed me, swaddled me, taught birds to dance, gripped his knees while he was the Human Ball, perhaps not in life, but always, forever, in my mind.
I whispered in the big old wattle of his ear. I was so close to him, the little white hairs, the freckles. I was full of my own poison. I told him that I had been wrong, that it was not his fault that we were robbed. I told him that I loved him. I could feel Peggy Kram pulling at my bulky suit. I felt so ill. My mask was full of my own foul air. I told him he had more love in his heart than any of us.
‘Don’t worry,’ Peggy said, trying to help me up. ‘I own five Sirkuses. I can promise you, there’ll be no trouble.’
‘Peggy …’ said Clive Baarder. ‘Please watch what you say.’
‘God damn,’ shrieked Peggy Kram, ‘this is family. I said we’d fix it, Clive. We’ll fix it. You get the damn Mayor on the phone.’
‘He’s in court.’
‘Get him out of damn court.’
‘They’re Ootlanders.’
I turned from Peggy Kram and caught sight of all our images in the great mirror. What a filthy frieze it was — that sweet old man and Bruder Mouse — a perverse Pietà. How I loathed the Bruder’s grinning face, those floppy ears. My stomach clenched and I knew I was going to be sick.
‘Bill, help me,’ but no one heard me.
‘This is murder, Peg,’ Clive Baarder said.
Now I was retching inside my suit. The contents of my stomach rose up inside the mask, were sucked down my nose.
Suffocating, I tried to pull the Binder’s head off, but Peggy Kram got her little hands around my wrists.
‘No,’ she cried, ‘no, please, I beg you.’
It was Jacqui who saved me. She was smaller, finer, lighter than Peggy Kram, but she yanked the produkter by her mane of hair and pulled her free. Then she placed her hands on either side of my Bruder head and dug her nails into the slit she had so diligently sewn up. And then she ripped, ripped my Mouse-head apart like it was orange peel. She tore the head off like a prawn.
In the mirror we all stood and stared at my true face. I turned, gagging, aching for breath.
Spare me, please, the memory of Peggy Kram’s face when she saw my true nature.
55
‘It’s OK,’ my father said. He was a well-dressed, handsome man, an actor. He was hearth folk. He came towards Peggy Kram, holding up his pale pink hands. ‘Peggy, please. It’s OK, really.’
But Peggy could no longer see him. She could see only the horrid creature that had put its red prong between her legs. She saw blood, snot, some ill-defined horror like a piece of meat, wrapped in plastic, left too long in the refrigerator.
‘It’s It,’ she cried, crossing herself in front of me. ‘It’s Marchosias. God save us. It’s the Hairy Man. God save us.’
If this was Efica we could have dismissed all this as ‘just religion’, but this was Voorstand and we were Ootlanders and my father therefore wrapped his strong body around mine. He lifted me into the air with his left arm. He held out his right hand to Jacqui Lorraine.
‘It’s Dagon,’ screamed Peggy Kram. ‘God save us.’
‘Goodbye old man,’ Bill said to Wally’s body.
‘It’s Red Saatanil,’ said Clive Baarder, and I swear he meant it. ‘God save us.’
‘God save us,’ hollered Peggy Kram, throwing herself on her knees before the triptych.
We left the dear old Human Ball. We had no choice. We left him grinning, stretched out with his victim. The elevator was rising towards us, but Bill, fearing it contained more assassins, led us through the fire door to the stairs.
Why did we flee? We had done nothing wrong. Why did we rush out the back way and abandon our belongings like criminals?