A Philosophical Investigation: A Novel (26 page)

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Authors: Philip Kerr

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I think that I will make a few notes for a paper on this. I could provide her with a few examples. But wouldn’t her understanding have to be deeper than any examples I could give? Have I not got more than I could provide in any explanation? After all, can you really explain to another person what you yourself understand? Really she would have to guess what I intend. But still, I suppose it’s worth a try.
If I could put it into words, fill in the gaps, add some light and shade, colour things in, she would surely be in the picture. I am not saying that it would make things easier for her. After all, the certainty of mathematics is not based on the reliability of ink and paper. But in the same way that people generally agree in their judgments of colour, perhaps we could arrive at some sort of understanding.
I had started to tell you about how when I awoke this morning I had Shakespeare on my mind. I don’t know much Shakespeare. At least, I can’t quote very much. I’ve meant to do something about this, to brush up my Shakespeare as it were. Brush up my Shakespeare? Let me tell you, on this particular morning, I had something rather more lethal than that in mind.
I boarded a train to follow him from his home close by Wandsworth Common, to Victoria Station. From there he walked down Victoria Street and, to my surprise, went into the Brain Research Institute. This was as near as I had been to the place since my fateful discovery. It had never occurred to me that anyone would actually take up the offer of counselling from the Lombroso Program’s staff of psychotherapists.
I waited for him in the Chestnut Tree Café on the opposite side of the street where I had gone on the day of my own PET scan, and from where I had a clear view of the front door. I ordered a cup of tea and looked at my watch. It was three o’clock.
This was a preliminary surveillance. I didn’t plan on actually killing him that afternoon. All the same, I had brought my gun along, in case a suitable opportunity presented itself. After all, this was my day off and it would be several days before I could operate like this again.
While I sipped one cup of tea and then another, I looked at my A-Z, trying to see which routes might best suit me were I to snatch an assassination attempt. A walk through St James’s Park, perhaps. Or a stroll across Westminster Bridge. Those would do very well.
It was then that I caught sight of her coming out of the Institute: Policewoman. Taller than I had imagined, but then television does strange things to people. And of course now that she was wearing clothes, she seemed more formidable than the pliant, approximate reality of her I had been fucking earlier. I wondered what she would make of the photo-composites I had sent her and wished that I could have been a fly on the wall when she opened the envelope.
For a moment she stared across the street at the cafe, almost as if she had been looking straight at me. The door of her police BMW was open but she did not get into the car. Instead, her driver stepped out and they exchanged a few words. Then, to my horror, she started across the street, heading directly towards the café.
My first instinct was to make a run for it, but a second’s reflection told me that it was unlikely she had anything but a cup of tea on her mind. So it appeared best to stay where I was, to sit it out, examining my A-Z, and pretend to be a German tourist if I was challenged. But at the same time I kept thinking of the ComputaFit picture that Policewoman had issued to the press and, as I waited for her to come through the café door, it now seemed a better likeness of me than ever before. I was glad I was wearing a hat.
I had sat near the door in order to be ready to follow quickly after Shakespeare, and I kept my eyes down as she passed by me on her way to the counter, so close that she could have touched me, and near enough for me to catch her scent in my nostrils and suck it down into my throat. I was not prepared for that. The smell, I mean. Smell is not something that RA has yet managed to simulate. The fact is that she smelt delicious, like some rare and expensive dessert-wine. I heard myself vacuum the air she walked in down my nasal passages as if she had been made of pure cocaine. It was obscene the way it happened, and for a brief moment I felt quite disgusted at myself. Now I started to feel myself colour at the memory of what I had done to an approximation of her body and hoped that she would not find it remarkable that a complete stranger should look so obviously embarrassed at his proximity to her. For several seconds I felt so conspicuous that I even asked myself if, in resisting arrest, I was prepared to shoot her. But then shooting things, real or approximately real, has become second nature to me and so I had no doubt that if I had to, I would.
I heard her ask the café proprietor for a coffee to take away and twenty Nicofree. The next sound I heard was her dropping her change on the linoleum floor. Instinctively I bent down and grabbed a few of the coins before they rolled out of the door. It was done in a split second, without any thought at all, a Pavlovian response to a commonplace occurrence. Something automatic, unthinking, and very stupid.
‘Thank you,’ said Policewoman, rising from the floor where she had found the rest of her change, and holding out her hand in front of me.
Our skins made brushing contact as I dropped the coins into her outstretched palm, an approximation of which had earlier cupped my balls as she sucked me.
‘Do you need any assistance?’ she asked.
‘I’m sorry?’
She nodded at the A-Z open on the table in front of me.
I smiled with what I hoped looked like confidence. ‘No, it’s all right,’ I stammered, ‘I know where I’m going.’
Then she smiled, nodded once again, and walked out of the café.
When Policewoman was safely back across the street, I took out my handkerchief and mopped my face. For a moment I felt utterly exhausted, but almost immediately, seeing her car drive away, this gave way to a feeling of exhilaration and I found myself laughing out loud. The very next moment Shakespeare came out of the Institute and, still chuckling like a stream, I followed.
He returned to Victoria Station where I almost lost him in the crowd. But instead of boarding a train south back to Wandsworth Common, he took the Underground to Green Park and then walked east, along Piccadilly.
Shakespeare was an uncouth, greasy-looking fellow, tall, and swarthy like a Greek. So I was surprised when he paused in front of a bookshop and went inside. The strangest people seem to read books these days. One hardly expects a fellow like that to be literate. But he had no sooner entered the shop than he had left it again, crossed over onto the south side of Piccadilly and gone into St James’s Church. Was he, I wondered, interested in architecture perhaps? This was, after all, one of Sir Christopher Wren’s great designs. Or had he spotted his tail and was now cutting through the Jermyn Street exit in an effort to lose me? Leaving what instinct told me wasn’t a decent-enough interval between us, I went after him.
Through the heavy glass doors separating the main part of the church from its vestibule I could see him sitting in a pew close to the altar. But for him, the place was empty.
I walked inside and occupied a pew only a few rows behind Shakespeare. His head was bowed and he seemed to be praying. Perfect for my purpose. No place, indeed, should murder sanctuarize. Steeling myself with the thought that Charles Darwin had considered Shakespeare so dull as to make him feel nauseous, I reached inside my coat to get my gun. But before my hand was even on the handle, he was up and out of his pew and walking towards the door and then stopping beside my pew and then grabbing both lapels of my coat and hauling me onto my feet. He was a big man and extricating my hand from inside my coat, I struggled to prise his two meat-porter’s hands off me.
‘What’s your game, mate?’ he demanded. ‘You’ve been followin’ me all afternoon. Haven’t you? Haven’t you?’ With each repeated question he pushed his unshaven mug closer to mine, until I was close enough to taste the garlic on his breath. ‘Ever since I left Wandsworth.’ He nutted me gently on the bridge of my nose several times, as if indicating what was in store for me if I didn’t answer him to his satisfaction.
‘I’m a tourist,’ I said weakly, pointing to the A-Z on the church pew as if to confirm my story.
His bristly face turned several shades of red on the way to becoming something darker.
‘Shit,’ he snarled. ‘That’s just shit, mate.’
‘You’ve made a mistake,’ I protested, still trying to reclaim my coat’s lapels.
‘No, you’re the one who’s made a mistake,’ he said. ‘Wandsworth Town, Victoria, Green Park, and now here. You tryin’ to tell me that you lost your fuckin’ coach, or something?’ He nutted me again, only this time more deliberately. His head may have been deficient in the small matter of a ventro medial nucleus, but it lacked for nothing in solidity. ‘Come on, you bastard, or I’ll really give you a kiss. Why you followin’ me?’
I really don’t know what I would have told him. That I found him attractive perhaps? Who knows? But at that moment a couple of people carrying musical instruments came into the church, and my assailant, momentarily embarrassed, it seemed to me, unclamped his greasy paws from my coat. I needed no more articulate invitation to freedom and took to my heels.
‘Bastard,’ he yelled after me but, to my relief, he did not give chase. Even so, running out into Jermyn Street and down the hill to St James’s Square, I did not stop until I reached Pall Mall.
When finally I recovered my breath and then my nerve I found myself laughing once again. That was always what was so interesting about Shakespeare, I said to myself. Right until the very last minute you never knew if it was going to end in comedy or tragedy.
Still keeping an eye out for him, I walked across Trafalgar Square and into the bar on the corner of Charing Cross Road where I ordered a beer and tried to think how best I could salvage something of the day.
While tailing Shakespeare I had been giving some thought to Policewoman and the promise I had made to contact her. Perhaps if I had been concentrating more on following Shakespeare ... Now seemed to be as good a time as any to buy the equipment I needed to fulfil this undertaking. I already knew exactly what I wanted and where was the best place to get it. So I finished my beer and, via the nearest twenty-four-hour bank where I picked up some cash, I caught a bus up Tottenham Court Road.
TCR was much the same as always: dirty and disgusting, with rubbish strewn along the pavements from the piles of fastfood refuse sacks torn apart by the city’s many rats. Some of these, bigger than cats, lay dead in the gutters, poisoned with their warfarin takeaways, their bodies flattened by the passing traffic and dried like biltong in the early spring sun. About the only thing that swept TCR was the wind blowing south from the Euston Road to Oxford Street.
Stepping smartly into the shop I was met with the usual sea of brown faces. What is it about Indians and Pakistanis that so attracts them to the retailing of electrical goods? It’s the same the world over, from New York to Vienna. The Japs may have manufactured the equipment that now runs the world, but it’s the Asians who sell it. Is it that the profit margins are just so good? Or is it that they find something sexy in the obvious consumerism of all those switches, knobs, dials, and flashing lights? Or perhaps it is electricity itself that they so admire: Islam has always had a fascination for power.
‘Can I help you?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for a portable phone.’
‘Standard or video?’
‘Neither,’ I said, flatly. ‘I want a sat-phone.’
The man rippled his sovereign-ringed fingers nervously and then smiled a combination of apology and amusement. ‘These are illegal, sir,’ he announced. ‘We are not allowed to sell them.’
It was my turn to smile. I followed it with a hundred-dollar note.
‘Cash,’ I said. ‘And you can swear you never saw me before.’
He told me to wait and went to fetch the shop manager, a tubby, bumptious little man with thick glasses and as many gold necklaces around his fat, bhaji-coloured neck as his minion had rings.
‘The sort of phone you are requiring, sir, is not permitted,’ he said, still holding my C-note. ‘Please, what would happen to me if you were some fellow from the Home Office who was to catch me selling such a thing? I would be in court pretty damn quick and no mistake.’ He glanced around the shop, which was empty of any other customers, and moved closer to me.
‘What the hell are you wanting this kind of phone for anyway?’ he asked in lower tones. ‘If it’s the avoidance of a telephone bill you are requiring then I can sell you a black box dialer. You can use this anywhere and pay nothing for your call whether it is Bombay you are telephoning or merely Birmingham. And much cheaper than a satellite phone too.’
‘I’m going abroad,’ I said. ‘South America. Up the jungle, or what’s left of it. I want to be able to phone home.’
The Indian shook his head ruefully. ‘If this was me the last thing I should want to take would be a phone. What an opportunity you are having, to get away from the wife for a few weeks.’ He laughed.
‘Look,’ I said calmly. ‘I’m not Home Office. You can search me if you like. There’s no need to worry. I’ll give you a fair price, in cash.’ I retrieved my C-note from his podgy fingers. ‘Otherwise I can try somewhere else.’ I shrugged and started towards the open door.
‘Patience, sir,’ he said. ‘It is a virtue. I have just the equipment that you require. Only I must be careful. Come this way.’
He led me into the back of the shop which was stacked high with boxes of Nicam stereo televisions, discrecorders, portable karaoke players, and Reality Approximation equipment. Shifting several boxes out of the way, he said, ‘We don’t keep sat-phones in the front of the shop, for obvious reasons. You want a digital unit?’

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