Proper, pukka coke is clean, sharp, accelerating, and like a smart drug, a precision munition you take exactly when you want it and need it and delivering for as long as you keep taking it. Of fucking course it’s the drug of choice of your masters of the universe, your financial wizards, your high-financiers. It’s like just-in-time exhilaration, isn’t it? A toot in both barrels and suddenly you’re a fucking genius and totally invincible. Just what you need when you’re juggling telephone numbers of money about and making bets with everybody else’s dosh. Not without its downsides, obviously, though for most people these days loss of appetite is brilliant. I mean, who wants to be fat? Collateral benefit, kind of. But the runny nose and paranoia and risking losing your septum and, so they say, having a heart attack, that’s all a bit toss. Still, no gain without pain and all that.
So it’s funny that I hardly ever took the stuff myself, given that I loved it, and still do, and I had access to the purest supplies at the best prices. Still do, too, through my contacts, of course. Just being cautious, basically. Also proving to myself who’s the boss, know what I mean? It’s called keeping things in proportion, keeping things balanced. I treat drink the same. I could guzzle vintage champagne and ancient cognac every day but that’d be giving in to that particular monkey, so that has to be rationed too. Same with the girlies.
I do love the ladies, but I wouldn’t want to be totally beholden to one of them, would I? True love and wanting kids and settling down and all that, it’s fine for most people and it makes the world go round and all like my old man said, but apart from the fact no it doesn’t, it’s gravity that does that, well, all right maybe it does make the world go round in the sense of creating the next generation, but it works just fine and dandy thanks as long as most people do it. Not all. Doesn’t need to be compulsory, doesn’t require every single person to take part, just most, just enough. What was that song, “Love Is The Drug”? Never a truer word, know what I mean? Just another temptation, another way of losing yourself. Making yourself vulnerable, that’s what it’s doing, giving in to all that romantic guff. Just putting your head on the chopping block, isn’t it?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not stupid and I know it can happen to anybody and maybe one day it’ll happen to me and I’ll be giving it all that It Just Feels Right and She’s The One and This Time It’s Different, and if it does then I just hope I don’t make a complete cunt of myself, excuse my language but you know what I mean. Even the mighty fall, they say. Nobody’s invulnerable, but you can at least show yourself the respect of holding out as long as possible, know what I mean?
Temudjin Oh, Mr Marquand Ys, Snr Marquan Dise, Dr Marquand Emesere, M. Marquan Demesere, Mark Cavan; Aiman Q’ands. I have been called many things and I have had many names and though they sometimes sound very various they tend to gyrate round a certain set of sounds, clustering about a limited repertoire of phonemes. My name changes each time I flit, never predictably. I don’t always know who I am myself. Not until I check.
I tap a tiny white pill into my espresso, rearrange the table condiments a little, drink my coffee in two gulps and sit back, waiting (another part of my mind isn’t waiting at all, it’s concentrating furiously, darting down a single filament of purpose within an infinitude of possibilities, a lightning strike zigzagging its way through a cloud, searching). I’m outside another pavement café, in the 4th, looking out across a branch of the Seine to the Ile St Louis, just entering the trance that will guide me to exactly the right place and person. Meanwhile, space to think, to review and evaluate.
My meeting with Madame d’Ortolan was most unsatisfactory. She was sitting asquint in the booth, and the tablecloth was off-centre, hanging down twice as far on one side as on the other. The only way I felt able to compensate was by jiggling one leg up and down, which was really no help at all. And then she treats me like an idiot! Self-satisfied salope.
“Plyte, Jésusdottir, Krijk, Heurtzloft-Beiderkern, Obliq, Mulverhill,” I find myself muttering, for these things must be fixed in the mind. A waiter, scooping change from the next table, turns and looks at me oddly. “Plyte, Jésusdottir, Krijk, Heurtzloft-Beiderkern, Obliq, Mulverhill,” I mutter at him, smiling. In theory a security failing, but so what? In this world, essentially, these are nonsense words. Meaningless to anybody who knows only this reality, or any single world for that matter.
The little aluminium tube lies inside my chest bag. Amongst other things it holds a tiny mechanical one-time reader; a metal device like two miniaturised measuring tapes joined by a short collar, a sort of slide with a glass window in it. One of the spools has a little pull-out handle on it. You deploy this, wind it up and let it go; it starts to pull the paper strip from the other spool past the little window. You need to watch this very carefully. You can read about a dozen letters at a time before they’re gone, into the other spool, where the specially treated paper comes into contact with the air and turns to dust, its message for ever unreadable. The clockwork mechanism, once started, cannot be stopped, so you need to pay continuous attention. If you miss any part of the message, well, you’re stuck. You will need to go and ask for another set of instructions. This does not go down well.
I read my orders in the toilet. It was a little dim so I used a torch. Taken with the highly irregular verbal changes to the instructions, it would seem that certain elisions, as we call them in the trade, are called for. I am to elide. Rather a lot of eliding required, in fact. Interesting.
A sneeze, and when I open my eyes again I am a dapper gent in a frock coat with a hat, cane and grey gloves. My skin is a little darker. A language check reveals Mandarin is back and Farsi is my third language after French and English. Then German, then a smattering of at least twenty others. A much-divided world. Paris has changed once more. There is a canal through the breadth of the Ile St Louis, the street is full of gaily dressed hussars on clopping, head-tossing horses being politely applauded by a few passers-by who have stopped to watch and everything smells of steam. I look up, hoping for airships. I always like it when there are airships, but I can’t see any.
I let the troop of horsemen pass, then hail a sleek-looking steam cab to take me to the Gare Waterloo and the TGV for England. “Plyte, Jésusdottir, Krijk, Heurtzloft-Beiderkern, Obliq, Mulverhill,” I mutter once more, and wink at the uncomprehending look of the cabbie. There is a mirror in the buttoned lining of the cab’s passenger compartment. I look at myself. I am well turned out, with a very neat haircut and an exquisitely trimmed little goatee, but I am otherwise undistinguished, as usual. The cab is number 9034. These numbers add up to 16, whose own numbers then add up to 7, which – as any fool knows – is by convention the luckiest of lucky numbers. I adjust the sleeves of my chemise where they protrude from my coat until they are exactly equal in length.
I allow myself a deep sigh as I settle into the plush of the cab’s seat, positioning myself as centrally as possible. Still with the OCD, then.
The Perineum Club sits on Vermyn Street, off Piccadilly. It is late afternoon by the time I arrive and Lord Harmyle is taking tea.
“Mister Demesere,” he says, holding my card as though it might be infected. “Oh well. How unexpected. I suppose you’d better join me.”
“Why, thank you.”
Lord Harmyle is a gaunt, spare figure with long white hair and a face that appears halfway to being bleached from his skull. His thin lips are pale purple and his small eyes rheumy. He looks ninety years old or more but is apparently only in his early fifties. The two schools of thought regarding this anomaly cite either predisposing familial genes or an especially outré addiction. He eyes me beadily from the far side of the table. The Perineum is as calm, reserved and sparsely occupied as the Café Atlantique was frenetic, rowdy and crowded. It smells of pipe smoke and leather.