Imajica

‘We have reason to believe that this man Chant did not originate in this Dominion.’

‘I’m sorry?’ Dowd said, feigning confusion. ‘I don’t follow. Dominion?’

‘Spare us your discretion,’ Charlotte Feaver said. ‘You know what we’re talking about. Oscar hasn’t employed you for twenty-five years and kept his counsel.’

‘I know very little,’ Dowd protested.

‘But enough to know there’s an anniversary imminent,’ Shales said.

My, my, Dowd thought, they’re not as stupid as they look.

‘You mean the Reconciliation?’ he said.

That’s exactly what I mean. This coming midsummer - ‘

‘Do we have to spell it out?’ Bloxham said. ‘He already knows more than he should.’

Shales ignored the interruption, and was beginning again when a voice so far unheard, emanating from a bulky figure sitting beyond the reach of the light broke in. Dowd had been waiting for this man, Matthias McGann, to say his piece. If the Tabula Rasa had a leader, this was he.

‘Hubert?’ he said. ‘May I?’

Shales murmured: ‘Of course.’

‘Mr Dowd,’ said McGann, ‘I don’t doubt that Oscar has been indiscreet. We all have our weaknesses. You must be his. Nobody here blames you for listening. But this Society was created for a very specific purpose, and on occasion has been obliged to act with extreme severity in the pursuit of that purpose. I won’t go into details. As Giles says, you’re already wiser than any of us would like. But believe me, we will silence any and all who put this Dominion at risk.’

He leaned forward. His face announced a man of good humour, presently unhappy with his lot.

‘Hubert mentioned that an anniversary is imminent. So it is. And forces with an interest in subverting the sanity of this Dominion may be readying themselves to celebrate that anniversary. So far, this’ - he pointed to the newspaper - ‘is the only evidence we’d found of such preparations, but if there are others they will be swiftly terminated by this Society and its agents. Do you understand?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘This sort of thing is very dangerous,’ he went on. ‘People start to investigate. Academics. Esoterics. They start to question, and they start to dream.’

‘I could see how that would be dangerous,’ Dowd said.

‘Don’t smarm, you smug little bastard,’ Bloxham burst out. ‘We all know what you and Godolphin have been doing. Tell him, Hubert!’

‘I’ve traced some artifacts of … non-terrestrial origin … that came my way. The trail, as it were, leads back to Oscar Godolphin.’

‘We don’t know that,’ Lionel put in. These buggers lie.’

‘I’m satisfied Godolphin’s guilty,’ Alice Tyrwhitt said. ‘And this one with him.’

‘I protest,’ Dowd said.

‘You’ve been dealing in magic,’ Bloxham hollered. ‘Admit it!’ He rose and slammed the table. ‘Admit it!’

‘Sit down, Giles,’ McGann said.

‘Look at him,’ Bloxham went on, jabbing his thumb in Dowd’s direction. ‘He’s guilty as hell.’

‘I said sit down,’ McGann replied, raising his voice ever so slightly. Cowed, Bloxham sat. ‘You’re not on trial here,’ McGann said to Dowd. ‘It’s Godolphin we want.’

‘So find him,’ Feaver said.

‘And when you do,’ Shales said, ‘tell him I’ve got a few items he may recognize.’

The table fell silent. Several heads turned in Matthias McGann’s direction. ‘I think that’s it,’ he said. ‘Unless you have any remarks to make?’

‘I don’t believe so,’ Dowd replied.

‘Then you may go.’

Dowd took his leave without further exchange, escorted as far as the lift by Charlotte Feaver, and left to make the descent alone. They were better informed than he’d imagined, but they were some way from guessing the truth. He turned over passages of the interview as he drove back to Regent’s Park Road, committing them to memory for later recitation. Wakeman’s drunken irrelevancies; Shales’s indiscretion; McGann, smooth as a velvet scabbard. He’d repeat it all for Godolphin’s edification, especially the cross-questioning about the absentee’s whereabouts.

Somewhere in the East, Dowd had said. East Yzordderrex maybe, in the Kesparates built close to the harbour where Oscar liked to bargain for contraband brought back from Hakaridek or the Islands. Whether he was there or some other place Dowd had no way of fetching him back. He would come when he would come, and the Tabula Rasa would have to bide its time, though the longer he was away the more the likelihood grew of one of their number voicing the suspicion some of them surely nurtured: that Godolphin’s dealings in talismans and wantons were only the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps they even suspected he took trips.

He wasn’t the only Fifther who’d jaunted between Dominions, of course. There were many routes from Earth to the Reconciled Dominions, some safer than others, but all used at one time or another, and not always by magicians. Poets had found their way over (and sometimes back, to tell the tale); so had a good number of priests over the centuries, and hermits, meditating on their essence so hard the In Ovo enveloped them and spat them into another world. Any soul despairing or inspired enough could get access. But few in Dowd’s experience had made such a commonplace of it as Godolphin.

These were dangerous times for such jaunts, both here and there. The Reconciled Dominions had been under the control of Yzordderrex’s Autarch for over a century, and every time Godolphin returned from a trip he had new signs of unrest to report. From the margins of the First Dominion to Patashoqua and its satellite cities in the Fourth, voices were raised to stir rebellion. There was as yet no consensus on how best to overcome the Autarch’s tyranny. Only a simmering unrest which regularly erupted in riots or strikes, the leaders of such mutinies invariably found and executed. In fact on occasion the Autarch’s suppressions had been more draconian still. Entire communities had been destroyed in the name of the Yzordderrexian Engine. Tribes and small nations deprived of their gods, their lands and their right to procreate, others simply eradicated by pogroms the Autarch personally supervised. But none of these horrors had dissuaded Godolphin from travelling in the Reconciled Dominions. Perhaps tonight’s events would, however, at least until the Society’s suspicions had been allayed.

Tiresome as it was, Dowd knew he had no choice as to where he went tonight: to the Godolphin Estate and the folly in its deserted grounds which was Oscar’s departure place. There he would wait, like a dog grown lonely at its master’s absence, until Godolphin’s return. Oscar was not the only one who would have to muster some excuses in the near future: so would he. Killing Chant had seemed like a wise manoeuvre at the time - and, of course, an agreeable diversion on a night without a show to go to - but Dowd hadn’t predicted the furore it would cause. With hindsight, that had been naive. England loved murder, preferably with diagrams. And he’d been unlucky, what with the ubiquitous Mr Burke of the Somme and a low quota of political scandals conspiring to make Chant posthumously famous. He would have to be prepared for Godolphin’s wrath. But hopefully it would be subsumed in the larger anxiety of the Society’s suspicions. Godolphin would need Dowd to help him calm these suspicions, and a man who needed his dog knew not to kick it too hard.

CHAPTER SEVEN
1

Gentle called Klein from the airport, minutes before he caught his flight. He presented Chester with a severely edited version of the truth, making no mention of Estabrook’s murder plot, but explaining that Jude was ill and had requested his presence. Klein didn’t deliver the tirade that Gentle had anticipated. He simply observed, rather wearily, that if Gentle’s word was worth so little after all the effort he, Klein, had put into finding work for him, then it was perhaps best that they end their business relationship now. Gentle begged him to be a little more lenient, to which Klein said he’d call Gentle’s studio in two days’ time, and if he received no answer would assume their deal was no longer valid.

‘Your dick’ll be the death of you,’ he commented as he signed off.

The flight gave Gentle time to think about both that remark and the conversation on Kite Hill, the memory of which still vexed him. During the exchange itself he’d moved from suspicion to disbelief to disgust and finally to acceptance of Estabrook’s proposal. But despite the fact that the man had been as good as his word, providing ample funds for the trip, the more Gentle returned to the conversation in memory, the more that first response -suspicion - was reawoken. His doubts circled around two elements of Estabrook’s story: the assassin himself (this Mr Pie, hired out of nowhere) and more particularly, around the man who’d introduced Estabrook to his hired hand: Chant, whose death had been media fodder for the past several days.

The dead man’s letter was virtually incomprehensible, as Estabrook had warned, veering from pulpit rhetoric to opiate invention. The fact that Chant, knowing he was going to be murdered (that much was cogent), should have chosen to set these nonsenses down as vital information was proof of significant derangement. How much more deranged then was a man like Estabrook, who did business with this crazy? And by the same token was Gentle not crazier still, employed by the lunatic’s employer?

Amid all these fantasies and equivocations, however, there were two irreducible facts: death and Judith. The former had come to Chant in a derelict house in Clerkenwell; about that there was no ambiguity. The latter, innocent of her husband’s malice, was probably its next target. His task was simple. To come between the two.

He checked into his hotel at 52nd and Madison a little after five in the afternoon New York time. From his window on the fourteenth floor he had a view downtown, but the scene was far from welcoming. A gruel of rain, threatening to thicken into snow, had begun to fall as he journeyed in from Kennedy, and the weather reports promised cold and more cold. It suited him, however. The grey darkness, together with the horn and brake squeals rising from the intersection below, fitted his mood of dislocation. As with London, New York was a city in which he’d had friends once, but lost them. The only face he would seek out here was Judith’s

There was no purpose in delaying that search. He ordered coffee from Room Service, showered, drank, dressed in his thickest sweater, leather jacket, corduroys and heavy boots, and headed out. Cabs were hard to come by, and after ten minutes of waiting in line beneath the hotel canopy he decided to walk uptown a few blocks and catch a passing cab if he got lucky. If not, the cold would clear his head. By the time he’d reached 70th Street the sleet had become a drizzle, and there was a spring in his step. Ten blocks from here Judith was about some early evening occupation: bathing perhaps, or dressing for an evening on the town. Ten blocks, at a minute a block. Ten minutes until he was standing outside the place where she was.

2

Marlin had been as solicitous as an erring husband since the attack, calling her from his office every hour or so, and several times suggesting that she might want to talk with an analyst, or at very least with one of his many friends who’d been assaulted or mugged on the streets of Manhattan. She declined the offer. Physically she was quite well. Psychologically too. Though she’d heard that victims of attack often suffered from delayed repercussions - depression and sleeplessness amongst them -neither had struck her yet. It was the mystery of what had happened that kept her awake at night. Who was he, this man who knew her name, who got up from a collision that should have killed him outright, and still managed to outrun a healthy man? And why had she projected upon his face the likeness of John Zacharias? Twice she’d begun to tell Marlin about the meeting in and outside Bloomingdales; twice she’d re-channelled the conversation at the last moment, unable to face his benign condescension. This enigma was hers to unravel, and sharing it too soon, perhaps at all, might make the solving impossible.

In the meantime, Marlin’s apartment felt very secure. There were two doormen: Sergio by day and Freddy by night. Marlin had given them both a detailed description of the assailant, and instructions to let nobody up to the second floor without Ms Odell’s permission, and even then they were to accompany the visitor to the apartment door, and escort them out if his guest chose not to see them. Nothing could harm her as long as she stayed behind closed doors. Tonight, with Marlin working until nine and a late dinner planned, she’d decided to spend the early evening assigning and wrapping the presents she’d accumulated on her various Fifth Avenue sorties, sweetening her labours with wine and music. Marlin’s record collection was chiefly seduction songs of his sixties adolescence, which suited her fine. She played smoochy soul and sipped well-chilled Sauvignon as she pottered, more than content with her own company. Once in a while she’d get up from the chaos of ribbons and tissue, and go to the window to watch the cold. The glass was misting. She didn’t clear it. Let the world lose focus. She had no taste for it tonight.

There was a woman standing at one of the second-storey windows when Gentle reached the intersection, just gazing out at the street. He watched her for several seconds before the casual motion of a hand raised to the back of her neck and run up through her long hair identified the silhouette as Judith. She made no backward glance to signify the presence of anyone else in the room. She simply sipped from her glass and stroked her scalp and watched the murky night. He had thought it would be easy to approach her, but now, watching her remotely like this, he knew otherwise.

The first time he’d seen her - all those years ago - he’d felt something close to panic. His whole system had been stirred to nausea as he relinquished power to the sight of her. The seduction that had followed had been both a homage and a revenge; an attempt to control someone who exercised an authority over him that defied analysis. To this day he didn’t understand that authority. She was certainly a bewitching woman, but then he’d known others every bit as bewitching, and not been panicked by them. What was it about Judith that threw him into such confusion now, as then? He watched her until she left the window, then he watched the window where she’d been, but he wearied of that finally, and of the chill in his feet. He needed fortification: against the cold, against the woman. He left the corner and trekked a few blocks east until he found a bar, where he put two bourbons down his throat, and wished to his core that alcohol and not the opposite sex had been his addiction.

At the sound of the stranger’s voice Freddy, the night doorman, rose muttering from his seat in the nook beside the elevator. There was a shadowy figure visible through the ironwork filigree and bullet-proof glass of the front door. He couldn’t quite make out the face, but he was certain he didn’t know the caller, which was unusual. He’d worked in the building for five years, and knew the names of most of the occupants’ visitors. Grumbling, he crossed the mirrored lobby, sucking in his paunch as he caught sight of himself. Then, with chilled fingers, he unlocked the door. As he opened it he realized his mistake. Though a gust of icy wind made his eyes water, blurring the caller’s features, he knew them well enough. How could he not recognize his own brother? He’d been about to call him and find out what was going on in Brooklyn when he’d heard the voice and the rapping on the door.

‘What are you doing here, Fly?’

Fly smiled his missing-toothed smile. ‘Thought I’d just drop in,’ he said. ‘You got some problem?’

‘No, everything’s fine,’ Fly said. Despite all the evidence of his senses, Freddy was uneasy. The shadow on the step, the wind in his eye, the very fact that Fly was here when he never came into the city on weekdays: it all added up to something he couldn’t quite catch hold of.

‘What you want?’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’

‘Here I am, anyway,’ Fly said, stepping past Freddy into the foyer. ‘I thought you’d be pleased to see me.’

Freddy let the door swing closed, still wrestling with his thoughts. But they went from him the way they did in dreams. He couldn’t string Fly’s presence and his doubts together long enough to know what one had to do with the other.

‘I think I’ll take a look around,’ Fly was saying, heading towards the elevator. ‘Wait up! You can’t do that.’

‘What am I going to do? Set fire to the place?’

‘I said no!’ Freddy replied, and blurred vision notwithstanding, went after Fly, overtaking him to stand between his brother and the elevator. His motion dashed the tears from his eyes, and as he came to a halt he saw the visitor plainly.

‘You’re not Fly!’ he said.

He backed away towards the nook beside the elevator, where he kept his gun, but the stranger was too quick. He reached for Freddy, and with what seemed no more than a flick of his wrist pitched him across the foyer. Freddy let out a yell, but who was going to come and help? There was nobody to guard the guard. He was a dead man.

Across the street, sheltering as best he could from the blasts of wind down Park Avenue, Gentle - who’d returned to his station barely a minute before - caught sight of the doorman scrabbling on the foyer floor. He crossed the street, dodging the traffic, reaching the door in time to see a second figure stepping into the elevator. He slammed his fist on the door, yelling to stir the doorman from his stupor.

‘Let me in! For God’s sake! Let me in!’

Two floors above, Jude heard what she took to be a domestic argument, and not wanting somebody else’s marital strife to sour her fine mood, was crossing to turn up the soul song on the turntable when somebody knocked on the door.

‘Who’s there?’ she said.

The summons came again, not accompanied by any reply. She turned the volume down instead of up and went to the door, which she’d dutifully bolted and chained. But the wine in her system made her incautious; she fumbled with the chain, and was in the act of opening the door when doubt entered her head. Too late. The man on the other side took instant advantage. The door was slammed wide, and he came at her with the speed of the vehicle that should have killed him two nights before. There were only phantom traces of the lacerations that had made his face scarlet; and no hint in his motion of any bodily harm. He had healed miraculously. Only the expression bore an echo of that night. It was as pained and as lost - even now, as he came to kill her - as it had been when they’d faced each other in the street. His hands reached for her, silencing her scream behind his palm.

‘Please,’ he said.

If he was asking her to die quickly, he was out of luck. She raised her glass to break it against his face but he intercepted her, snatching it from her hand.

‘Judith!’ he said.

She stopped struggling at the sound of her name, and his hand dropped from her face.

‘How the fuck do you know who I am?’

‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ he said. His voice was downy; his breath orange-scented. The perversest desire came into her head, and she cast it out instantly. This man had tried to kill her, and this talk now was just an attempt to quiet her till he tried again.

‘Get away from me.’

‘I have to tell you - ‘

He didn’t step away, nor did he finish. She glimpsed a movement behind him, and he saw her look, turning his head in time to meet a blow. He stumbled but didn’t fall, turning his motion to attack with balletic ease, and coming back at the other man with tremendous force. It wasn’t Freddy, she saw. It was Gentle, of all people. The assassin’s blow threw him back against the wall, hitting it so hard he brought books tumbling from the shelves, but before the assassin’s fingers found his throat he delivered a punch to the man’s belly that must have touched some tender place, because the assault ceased, and the attacker let him go, his eyes fixed for the first time on Gentle’s face.

The expression of pain in his face became something else entirely: in some part horror, in some part awe, but in the greatest part some sentiment for which she knew no word. Gasping for breath, Gentle registered little or none of this, but pushed himself up from the wall to re-launch his attack. The assassin was quick, however. He was at the door and out through it before Gentle could lay hands on him. Gentle took a moment to ask if Judith was all right - which she was - then raced in pursuit.

The snow had come again, its veil dropping between Gentle and Pie. The assassin was fast, despite the hurt done him, but Gentle was determined not to let the bastard slip. He chased Pie over Park Avenue, and West on 80th, his heels sliding on the sleet-slickened ground. Twice his quarry threw him backward glances, and on the second occasion seemed to slow his pace, as if he might stop and attempt a truce, but then thought better of it and put on an extra turn of speed. It carried him over Madison towards Central Park. If he reached its sanctuary, Gentle knew, he’d be gone. Throwing every last ounce of energy into the pursuit, he came within snatching distance. But even as he reached for the man he lost his footing. He fell headlong, his arms flailing, and struck the street hard enough to lose consciousness for a few seconds. When he opened his eyes, the taste of blood sharp in his mouth, he expected to see the assassin disappearing into the shadows of the park, but the bizarre Mr Pie was standing at the kerb looking back at him. He continued to watch as Gentle got up, his face betraying a mournful empathy with Gentle’s bruising. Before the chase could begin again he spoke, his voice as soft and melting as the sleet.

‘Don’t follow me,’ he said.

‘You leave her … the fuck … alone,’ Gentle gasped. knowing even as he spoke he had no way of enforcing this edict in his present state.

But the man’s reply was affirmation.

‘I will,’ he said. ‘But please … I beg you … forget you ever set eyes on me.’

As he spoke he began to take a backward step, and for an instant Gentle’s dizzied brain almost thought it possible the man would retreat into nothingness; be proved spirit rather than substance.

‘Who are you?’ he found himself asking.

‘Pie’oh’pah,’ the man returned, his voice perfectly matched to the soft expellations of those syllables.

‘But who?’

‘Nobody and nothing,’ came the second reply, accompanied by a backward step.

He took another and another, each pace putting further layers of sleet between them. Gentle began to follow, but the fall had left him aching in every joint, and he knew the chase was lost before he’d hobbled three yards. He pushed himself on, however, reaching one side of Fifth Avenue as Pie’oh’pah made the other. The street between them was empty, but the assassin spoke across it as if across a raging river.

‘Go back,’ he said, ‘or if you come, be prepared

Absurd as it was, Gentle answered as if there were white waters between them:

‘Prepared for what?’ he shouted.

The man shook his head, and even across the street, with the sleet between them, Gentle could see how much despair and confusion there was on his face. He wasn’t certain why the expression made his stomach churn, but churn it did. He started to cross the street, plunging a foot into the imaginary flood. The expression on the assassin’s face changed: despair gave way to disbelief, and disbelief to a kind of terror, as though this fording was unthinkable, unbearable. With Gentle halfway across the street the man’s courage broke. The shaking of the head became a violent fit of denial, and he let out a strange sob, throwing back his head as he did so. Then he retreated, as he had before, stepping away from the object of his terror -Gentle - as though expecting to forfeit his visibility. If there was such magic in the world - and tonight Gentle could believe it - the assassin was not an adept. But his feet could do what magic could not. As Gentle reached the river’s other bank Pie’oh’pah turned and fled, throwing himself over the wall into the park without seeming to care what lay on the other side: anything to be out of Gentle’s sight.

There was no purpose in following any further. The cold was already making Gentle’s bruised bones ache fiercely, and in such a condition the two blocks back to Jude’s apartment would be a long and painful trek. By the time he made it the sleet had soaked through every layer of his clothing. With his teeth chattering, his mouth bleeding and his hair flattened to his skull he could not have looked less appealing as he presented himself at the front door. Jude was waiting in the lobby with the shame-faced doorman. She came to Gentle’s aid as soon as he appeared, the exchange between them short and functional: was he badly hurt? No. Did the man get away? Yes.

‘Come upstairs,’ she said. ‘You need some medical attention.’