I didn’t really expect to get to the end of this speech. I thought he’d appear out of the shadows and start laying into me. That he’s done no such thing may be a very good sign or a very bad one. I have no idea. I’ve somewhat gone off-piste here.
“Oh, Temudjin, you must have made that bit up yourself,” he says, sounding amused. My heart sinks. “Are you trying to get beaten to a pulp?” He gives a snorting laugh. “What in your past made you such a masochist?”
It may be time for a change of tack. I sigh, nod. “Hmm. I see your point. Serves me right for extemporising.”
“That’s another thing we’re going to be asking you about.”
“Extemporising?”
“Yes.”
“Ah ha.”
I have not been entirely open with you, I suppose. There should be a way out of this. A way that they don’t know about, a way that this faceless, unseen interrogator doesn’t know about. But I think it might have been taken from me. I have hardly dared to make sure until now, and it has not been as immediately obvious as it would have been had I not been punched so hard in the face. I put my head down again and move my tongue around in my mouth, probing.
There is a hole in my lower left jaw where a tooth has been removed. It feels gaping, and very fresh. That would be my last hope of escaping with a single bound, gone.
“Yes,” the man says. I suppose he saw some movement about my mouth or jaw. “We took that too. Thought we didn’t know about it, didn’t you?”
“So did you know about it?”
“We might have,” he says. “Or maybe we just found it.”
It was a partially hollowed-out tooth, the space within concealed beneath a tiny hinged ceramic crown. I kept one of my little transitioning pills in there; an emergency dose of septus in case I ever miscounted and ran out of them, or had the little ormolu box stolen, or it failed to make a transition with me. Or I found myself in a situation like this.
Well, so much for that.
I lift my head up. “Okay. So, what do you want to know?”
I had been here before, in a minor key. I hadn’t been tied to the chair with wire, and the light hadn’t been in my eyes but there had been a chair and a man asking me questions, something had certainly gone wrong and there had been at least one death.
“Didn’t you suspect?”
“Suspect what? That she might be one of us?”
“Yes.”
“It crossed my mind. I thought-”
“When did it cross your mind?”
“When we were standing in front of a map of the world in the Doge’s Palace. She said something about it being just the one world, and that being limiting.”
“What did you think then?”
“I thought she was one of the guests staying here, somebody from the Concern I just hadn’t happened to bump into; late arrival, maybe.” We were back in the Palazzo Chirezzia, the black and white palace overlooking the Grand Canal.
“You didn’t think to ask her this outright?”
“I could have been wrong. I might have misheard or misunderstood. Trying to discover whether she was Aware or not by just asking her would have been an unnecessary risk, don’t you think?”
“You were not intrigued?”
“I was very intrigued. Masked ball, mystery woman, the back alleys of Venice. I’m not sure how much more intriguing something can get.”
“Why did you leave the ball with her?”
I laughed. “Because I thought she might want to fuck me, of course.”
“There is no need for coarse language, Mr… Cavan.”
I sat back and put my hand over my eyes. “Oh for fuck’s sake,” I breathed.
I was talking to the man who had shot and killed my little pirate captain. He was called Ingrez and did not appear to have forgiven me for getting the better of him in the bar an hour or so earlier. He wore a neat bandage over his right wrist, where I’d punctured it with the pirate captain’s sword. He was no longer in the workman’s clothes. He’d changed into a black suit and grey polo neck. He certainly didn’t carry himself like a workman now. He looked like somebody used to giving rather than taking orders. He also had to be something of a specialist transitioner, a real adept, if he was able to take something as substantial as a gun between worlds with him; few of us could do that. I could, just, but it took a lot of effort. It was his effort, doing just that, that had been responsible for the hit of slew I’d experienced a second or two before he’d shot the girl. He had a broad, tanned, open-looking face with a lot of laughter lines that looked possessed, haunted by something much darker and without humour.
After I’d withdrawn the sword from his wrist and helped him to his feet there had barely been time for any explanations before two of Professore Loscelles’s larger servants had burst through the door of the bar, their right hands rather ostentatiously inside their jackets. They had looked like they were spoiling for a fight and seemed disappointed that they had arrived too late, having instead to act as nurses to the two injured members of the team. Ingrez got one of them to walk us to the canal a minute away where the launch that had brought them sat idling, its engine loud in the narrow spaces between the darkened buildings. It sat lightless, its driver wearing what looked like a pair of binoculars strapped to his head. It brought Ingrez and me back to the Palazzo Chirezzia, then sped away again. It kept its light on while it was on the Grand Canal.
I was asked to wait in a second-floor bedroom. There was a stout black grille over the window and the door was locked. No telephone. So that when I was escorted here, to the Professore’s study, I was still wearing my priestly fancy dress.
Ingrez cleared his throat. “Were there any other points at which you thought she might be Aware?” he asked.
“Just before you arrived,” I told him, “when she said something about not travelling, about me being off duty.”
“Any other points?”
“No,” I said. “She mentioned the word ‘emprise.’ Said it means a dangerous undertaking. Does that mean anything to you?”
“I know the word,” Ingrez admitted, after the tiniest of hesitations. “What does it mean to you?”
“I’d never heard it before. Now I’m not sure what it should mean. Is it important?”
“I couldn’t say. But she did not try to recruit you?”
“Into what?” I asked, mystified.
“She made you no offers?”
“Not even the one I was hoping she might make, Mr Ingrez.” I tried a regretful smile. I might have spared myself the effort.
“What offer would that have been?”
I sighed. “The one involving she and I having sex,” I said quietly, as one might explain something obvious to an idiot. I paused. “For fornication’s sake,” I added. Ingrez just sat looking blankly at me. “How did you know about all this?” I asked him. “Who was she? What was she doing? Why did she want to contact me in the first place? Why were you trying to stop her, or catch her or… what?”
He looked at me for a while longer. “I am unable to answer any of those questions at this moment in time,” he told me. It didn’t even sound like he was trying to keep the tone of satisfaction out of his voice.
Madame d’Ortolan and I walked amongst the tombs and tall cypresses crowding the walled cemetery isle of San Michele, in the Venetian lagoon. The bright blue sky was strewn with ragged clouds, in the south-west already turning pale red in the late-afternoon sunset.
“Her name is Mrs Mulverhill,” she told me.
I sensed her turning her head to look at me as she told me this. I kept my eyes on the path ahead between the rows of marble tombs and dark metal grilles. “She was one of my tutors,” I said. I tried to say it as matter-of-factly as I could. Inside, I was thinking, It was her! Something sang within me.