King of Morning, Queen of Day (36 page)

“We create our own heavens and hells,” Enye says. “Each of us, each second during our lives, build those heavens or hells. If our lives are built generously, caringly, spiritually, in the pursuit of beauty, goodness, and harmony, then that is what we will receive. If our lives are spent selfishly, greedily, uglily, in the pursuit of wealth and self-aggrandisement, than that is what we will receive. Those who seek holiness will have holiness, forever. Those who seek themselves will have themselves, forever.”

“Not much room for a just God in your heaven and hell.”

“A just God would give each person what he wants most in the world. If that is God, he shall have God; if that is himself, then that is exactly what he shall receive. A sinner wouldn’t want what heaven has to offer.”

“Too iffy, too butty for me,” says Mr. Antrobus. “And I’m too old for philosophic casuistry. I need to know on which side to place my wager.”

“As I said, the wise money chooses God.”

“Yes, but will God choose me? Or will he say, at the very last,
Away from me, you old and vile sinner, into the place I have prepared for such as you?
After all those years I wasted, fearing Him, trying to live to please Him?”

The lamps have gone on in L’Esperanza Street. The yellow light is shattered by Mr. Antrobus’s blinds into narrow bands falling across the sleeping forms of the cats. The bottom half of Mr. Antrobus is illuminated, hands resting on chair arms, long shins, shoes; the upper half remains in shadow. In the room Enye feels the Mygmus shift, like magnetic particles reversing polarity to lie along new orientations.

“I brought you the Delius tape you asked about. Would you like to hear it?”

They sit and drink the tea and listen to the piano music coming from the radio-cassette recorder, each wrapped in their private heaven or hell. Night descends on L’Esperanza Street. The only light in the room comes from the yellow street lamps, the occasional flarings of collapsing coals on the fire, and the tiny glow of red and green LEDs on the radio-cassette. But Enye can smell Mr. Antrobus’s death.

The man from the garage had been almost awestruck. “How did you manage to burn out every electrical circuit?” he had asked, walking around the green bamboo and wicker pattern Citroen with the reverence of a pilgrim at the tomb of a saint. “You get hit by lightning?”

“Something like.”

“This is going to cost, you know.”

“Doesn’t it always?”

She had taken a taxi to Messrs. Ludlow, Allison, MacNab, whose junior partner, Mr. Saul Martland, was explaining his letter of the previous day.

As is the perennial lot of junior, junior partners, the more idiosyncratic cases tended to fall into his In tray, none more idiosyncratic than the Rooke bequest.

The late Dr. Hannibal Rooke had enjoyed a certain notoriety in the early decades of the century as a pioneer paranormal investigator, but in his later years had retired to a near-hermetic existence in his house on a headland overlooking the sea. He had died in unusual circumstances, which Mr. Saul Martland was not willing to disclose despite Mizz Enye MacColl’s interest, some three years before. The will had only recently been settled, due to a large number of expectant beneficiaries disappointed by their exclusion contesting the legality of a final testament on magnetic tape.

Enye envisioned a Danse Macabre Game Show with scantily clad hostesses stepping out of neon-lit, mink-lined coffins, and a gold-lamée-suited deceased cantering down a flight of silver steps from dry-ice-shrouded pearly gates to leap from prize item to prize item. “Mrs. Mary Kemohan of Sunnyside Villas, tonight is your lucky night; you have just won two hundred pounds’ worth of Marks and Spencers shares, a case of sterling silver dessert forks, and a foul-mouthed cockatiel in a Moorish bird cage on: Open! The! Box!”

“We established that you can write a will on the side of a buffalo in its own dung and it will be perfectly legal, provided it is witnessed and signed. Preferably not by the buffalo.”

She liked the way he said that. Solicitors do not talk about dung.

She liked a lot about Saul Martland—his generously cut double-breasted blue microstripe of the kind particular to just one shop in London. His jazz-coloured tie, fastened with a pin in the shape of a B-52 bomber. His hands: their jewellery-freeness. His desk: its executive affectation-in-the-shape-of-paperweights-brass-staplers-leather-bound-blotters-Newton’s-cradles-freeness. His name: its sonorous Biblicality, like tablets of stone. His reproduction
Views of Edo
prints which decorated the otherwise corporate stark-ness of his blacque-tech office. His eyes: how they could only hold hers for a moment before flicking away to his jewellery-free hands, his affectation-free desk, his
Views of Edo.

She smiled.

He liked the way she smiled.

She liked the way he smiled when he saw her smile.

This is how it develops—by small smiles.

“There were a few—ah—unorthodox codicils to the will,” said Mr. Saul Martland. “One of which was that a package be delivered by the executor of the will—that is, myself—to the eldest female descendant of Mrs. Jessica MacColl. That is yourself.”

“What is this… ah… package?”

“This is.”

A padded yellow envelope, stapled shut, addressed to Ludlow, Allison, MacNab, Solicitors. Contours suggested something the size and shape of a B-format paperback book. Or a videotape. It did rattle videotapishly when she shook it.

“Do you know what this is?”

“It could be half a kilo of Colombian White for all I know.”

She liked that, too.

“Why me?”

“All I know is that I was instructed to deliver the package to the eldest female descendant of Jessica MacColl. Who, I discovered after some poking in the public records office, to be you.”

And that, it seemed, was all the time the junior, junior partner of Ludlow, Allison, MacNab had assigned to her.

Not even an invitation to dinner.

In her apartment above L’Esperanza Street, Enye tore open the stapled yellow envelope.

As she had supposed, a videotape, unmarked, unlabelled, anonymous in every way, fell onto her welcome mat with the geese with bows around their necks. She brewed coffee as strong and black as witch’s piss and sipped it while the VCR clicked and whirred and flashed liquid crystal digits to itself.

The screen lit.

In a glass conservatory overlooking a blue, blue sea was an aged, aged man in a wheelchair. He was dressed in a white linen suit of the type that look so well on aged, aged men and so poorly on any others. In his buttonhole was a carnation. His brown-blotched hands rested lightly on a straw hat in his lap. His tie was fastened with a pin in the shape of a golden salamander.

The camera closed up on him, advancing silently through the climbing figs and geraniums in their terra-cotta pots.

The aged, aged man smiled.

“Good day to you, whoever you are, whatever your name is. My solicitors, the worthy Messrs. Ludlow, Allison, and MacNab, will have delivered this to you as per my instructions. I have my reasons for doing what I have done in the way I have done. Pray Jesus you will never need to understand why.

“Forgive me, though forgiveness is for the living and if you are viewing this, I am long past any human forgiveness. I was grossly remiss in not introducing myself. My name is Dr. Hannibal Rooke.” The aged, aged man leaned forward in his chair and beckoned the camera to close up. Enye felt drawn against her will into an intimacy of unfolding conspiracy. “My dear Mizz, forgive the use of the generic honorific, I am afraid I know very little about you, except that you are a MacColl, and, more significantly, a Desmond by blood. I am compelled to give you a warning. The female offspring of your bloodline possess, to a greater or lesser degree, a talent—yes, let us call it that; a talent it is, a gift, an
art
of a kind—that threatens to place you in very grave danger.

“It may have already done so.”

Dry ice crystals formed in the pith of her spirit. She knelt before the television, reached out to touch the screen. Prophecies from a dead man.

“If so, then I pray that there is still someone to watch this tape. I do not know, I cannot say. What I am doing is a stab in the dark, a bottle cast into the sea of time.”

The camera closed right in on the aged, aged face.

“You are in danger, mortal danger. From your own talent, and the talent of another. Until you are better informed, it would be wiser for me not to say more on the subject. Knowledge will arm you, and unarmed, you may not survive.

“I am the possessor of that knowledge, perhaps the sole possessor. I have made the purpose of this last half century of my life the accumulating of that knowledge. I know the value of that knowledge, and, as with any thing of value, there is danger. There are others, not amicably inclined toward my possessing this knowledge, or you. Therefore, I have been forced to take steps to safeguard this knowledge, and have arranged after my death for it to be removed to a place of safekeeping. My solicitors have instructions to reveal only this much to you upon proof your identity—please, do not tell them, or anyone, the nature of this knowledge. To involve others is to endanger them as well as yourself. Don’t worry, the rest will be revealed to you at the proper time.”

The camera had zoomed out to take in the beautiful, beautiful conservatory with the view over the incredible blue sea.

“Thank you for having listened so attentively. Please be assured, everything will be explained to you shortly, and please, do heed my warnings. They are not the ravings of a crazy old man. They are truth. You have enemies; they are cruel and powerful. But you have allies, also, where you last expect them.”

The next morning, while the frenetic corporate life of QHPSL gyred madly about the four glass walls of her workstation, she called Mr. Saul Martland of Ludlow, Allison, MacNab.

“Was that all there was?”

“That all what was?”

“The tape.”

“The tape?”

“There weren’t any files, or boxes, or documents?”

“I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage…”

“Would it be possible to see the house?”

“Whose house?”

“His house.”

“Oh, that house. Yes, I could arrange that. You would have to be accompanied by the keyholder, though.”

“And where can I get in touch with the keyholder?”

“I am the keyholder. I’ll pick you up after work.”

It was almost an invitation to dinner.

Mr. Saul Martland drove an anonymous German something car with Catcon. Enye ran her fingertips along the acrylic spines of his car cassette collection, slipped the Amsterdam Concertgebouw recording of the Mozart Flute and Harp Concerto into the stereo—several models up from hers, she noted—and immediately found herself worrying that she might be thought overly populist and insufficiently contemporary. Or, horror,
rockist.

They drove south in the German-something car, beside the catenary wires of the rapid transit system. The red and white striped twin stacks of the city’s main power station could be seen across the bay. They could be seen from just about anywhere in the city. If any feature could be said to typify the city, it was those red and white striped stacks. They drove past the terminal where the ferries to England took on French and Dutch articulated trucks, and past the Martello Tower where plump, stately Buck Mulligan shaved himself in the sacramental bowl. They drove to a district where white villas clung to the side of a wooded bill behind white walls and remote-control wrought-iron gates and monitored each other’s comings and goings through long-red video eyes.

Fire had utterly razed the house. The white walls were scarred with scorch marks that looked like human figures leaping in a furnace. The roofless rooms were clogged with a litter of chaired wooden beams, rotting plaster, and rain-soaked carpet. Weeds had taken root in the mouldering rubble.

The beautiful beautiful conservatory had survived untouched by the flames, though some of the wooden floorboards had been pulled up and discarded under the shelves that held the dead plants in their terra-cotta pots. The wicker furniture was covered in singed dust sheets.

“How did it happen?”

“The house burned three days after the death. Arson, without a doubt. They tried to pin it on the housekeeper, but it wouldn’t fit. Neighbours reported seeing figures escaping down the road just before the place burned.”

Enye looked through the filmy panes down the wooded hillside, with its secretive villas and narrow, winding avenues tumbling down to the long crescent of sand that swept up into a rock head as bare as the one from which she viewed was populated, and the incredibly blue sea.

“I thought there would be something here.”

“Something like?”

“I don’t know. The tape hinted at information. Files, notebooks, something. Knowledge, he said. Knowledge.”

“There’s nothing here, unless you want to rip up the remainder of those floorboards.”

She traced a finger track in the old dust. A man’s dust—the disintegrated fragments of his outer integument—remains after him. Windsurfers in macaw-bright rubber suits cut chords and arcs across the crescent bay.

“How did he die?”

“His housekeeper found him. He was in his wheelchair, just here, in this conservatory. He had been hacked to ribbons. In the night, someone had entered the house and murdered him. The police said it looked as if it had been done with a sharp blade of some kind—a sword, perhaps. There were signs of a break-in. Despite the evidence pointing to the fact that the old man knew who his killer was, they never got anyone for the killing.”

“Most murder victims know their murderers.”

“Strange thing—he didn’t put up a fight. Not that he could have done much, but he didn’t even make token resistance. Just sat in his chair as if he was expecting it. Pathologist said he’d never seen an expression quite like his. Like a saint, he said. Utter serenity.”

“He said in the tape he had enemies. Powerful and cruel enemies. I rather fear I may have made them my enemies, too.” Enye looked at the bright sails of the windsurfers on the incredible blue sea. “Can we go now? I’ve seen enough.”