The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (50 page)

Then, damn it, the elevator’s walls revealed themselves as glass, and I found myself levitated into the Saarlim sky. I closed my eyes. I tried to breathe. But the old Feu Follet panic settled on my frame, clutched my heart. I thought I would die of dizziness.

When the doors opened on the fifteenth floor, I rushed out.

Only after the doors had shut behind me did I realize that the boarding passengers were carpenters and that I was on a building site, alone.

And there I remained for a good half-hour, pressing the button, banging on the doors, until the same men returned with coffee mugs and paper bags.

As I reboarded the elevator car, all amorous fantasies had left me. I had no other desire than to return to earth, to go to my room, but when I pressed the button for Floor 1 the damn car shot upwards, six storeys higher in the sky.

I dared not face the abyss beyond the glass-walled car. When the elevator stopped again, I was equally afraid to face the boarding passenger.

The boarding passenger was more afraid of me. She turned away.

The doors closed. I pushed the button for Floor 1 but the damn thing kept on going up.

It stopped on Floor 23 – men and women with labels on their sixteen-button suits. Seeking to avoid their eyes, I pivoted my wheelchair, barked a woman’s shin. I would have apologized, but I did not wish her to hear my speech. I created a bad feeling. I could feel it in their silence.

Then I spied ‘Floor 31 – Consulate of the Republic of Efica’. Abandoning all thought of Jacqui, wishing nothing more than a refuge from foreigners, a respite from dizziness, I climbed up on my wheelchair and pressed the button for the thirty-first floor.

As I rolled out of the elevator I was, technically speaking, home.

On a still-luminous old Efican rag-rug, there were arranged three bronze and leather campaign settees of the type used by the French officers who accompanied the tin-tins to Efica at the beginning of settlement. It was, in some sense, home.

Perched uncomfortably on these settees I saw various persons, the Eficans amongst them identifiable by their absorption in the pink and yellow zines from home, the Voorstanders by their irritation with the uncomfortable settees. No one seemed to have noticed me arrive.

An electronic buzzer sounded. Then a door opened beside the receptionist’s desk, and three people walked out into the foyer.
One of them was Jacqui. The second was extraordinarily like Leona the facilitator. She had different hair than the Leona I had met – this hair was black, sleek, long. She had different clothes: stockings, a slick sixteen-button suit. She turned and walked right past me, click-clacking on her shining synthetic shoes.

‘Hi,’ I said.

She looked at me as if she’d never seen me before.

I looked back at Jacqui. Her gaze settled on my agitated face.

‘Tristan,’ she said coolly, ‘what are you doing here?’

What could I say? Now I imagined the whole room was looking at me. My face was hot. My monstrosity was vivid, slippery with sweat. My whole sense of myself came crashing, crushing down on me until I felt I could not breathe. I made myself wheel closer to the object of my affections.

‘This is Gabe,’ she said.

I did not want to look at him. I looked at her troubled face.

‘An old friend,’ she insisted.

An ‘old friend’ held out his hand. I had no choice but to take it. The hand was smooth and dry, not large, but square and strong.

‘Now living in Saarlim,’ she said.

He shook the hand up and down. He smiled – a fiftyish man with a pleasant grin which showed the edge of one slightly (only slightly) crooked tooth.

‘Gabe was just telling me there is a new Sirkus we have to see.’

I did not know he was a murderer. I thought he had been her lover. That is why I hated him so easily. I hated him for being normal, for being with her, for making dreck of all my fantasies.

‘Must see,’ he said.

‘I’m taking you and Wally,’ Jacqui said.

Gabe stared at me, not a little to the left or right, but straight at my eyes. He went right into me, like a gimlet, a corkscrew.

‘The walls of the tent are made from water,’ said Jacqui.

‘The Water Sirkus,’ Gabe explained, but I hardly heard what he was saying. I was realizing just how close to her he was standing, seeing the casual way he brushed his hand against her arm.

In the old days, Gabe Manzini would have automatically requested hard copies of the faxes which Tristan Smith was reported to have sent to the terrorist group. He would therefore have discovered Jacqui Lorraine’s treason before she was permitted to depart from Chemin Rouge.

Yet when the Efican DoS had requested these same hard copies he had told them no member of Zawba’a had been wire-tapped at the time of the transmission. This was not true. What was true was that my maman’s murderer had become a slightly pudgy man with a red-veined nose and a low-level clearance and this class of information was no longer available to him.

You may remember the
Scandale d’Orsay
– the case of the alleged VIA officer who was driven to the Paris airport in handcuffs, the beginning of that long rift between Paris and Saarlim. That alleged VIA officer was Gabe Manzini.

Once the French had uncovered him and deported him, the government of Voorstand, in attempting to mend fences with the French, found it diplomatically necessary to sentence their loyal servant to fifteen years in prison.

They had promised him a release in six months, but as relations with France remained both important and difficult, he was kept a prisoner for almost six years.

At the end of that time, they had made an angry and vengeful man of their loyal servant. He was difficult to place: too public a face ever to return to his old work, not academically or temperamentally suited to a senior post in the administration of the Agency.

Finally he was shunted off to head the small and unimportant Efican Department of the VIA, a bureaucratic position that would have been beneath his notice at the time when he was fiddling with the Efican elections. His lack of gratitude won him no friends.

The Efican Department was a sinecure. It came with a small tasteful office, a view of one of the better corners of the Bleskran, but no staff, no secretary – there was no need for them. For six years Gabe Manzini had had nothing much to do except quietly stoke his anger at those who had betrayed him. He played chess with his computer. He constructed complicated strategies of
revenge. Twice a year he flew out to Chemin Rouge to meet with the DoS.

In Efica, at least, he remained someone of importance, but in Saarlim he had the smell of anger about him and no one wished to talk to him. In Saarlim he put on weight, took to drinking a bottle of wine with his luncheon. He became chronically depressed.

But then Jacqui Lorraine came into his life, linking Tristan Smith to the hottest target in the world of Voorstand Intelligence. Gabe Manzini latched on to the case as to a life raft.

If he had alerted Internal Security (by requesting copies of the faxes, for instance) they would have thanked him very much – the bastards – and used the information to make themselves look good.

No way was he going to tip off Internal Security. Indeed, so anxious was he that Internal Security should not discover Tristan Smith that he sequestered Leona Fastanyna from the Morean Department and sent her all the way to Neu Zwolfe to pick him up and bring him safely to Saarlim.

He had stuff on the Morean Department. He could therefore trust Leona to keep her information about Tristan Smith out of the Mainframe.

Such was his distrust of Internal Security that he met Jacqui at the Efican Consulate rather than the State Buro. And if she was unlike any DoS operative he had ever met or worked with, he did not have room to suspect her. He was more suspicious of Leona than of Jacqui. Jacqui was an Efican, a good guy. She was his link back into the game, the big game at the VIA, and he therefore desired her.

She was going to be his – this woman dressed as a man. She was cute, he could not bear it. She had sweet little flat feet, no more than size five.

‘What you are going to do,’ he told her, ‘is wire him for sound. Have you ever wired anyone before?’

‘No,’ she said.

He hesitated.

‘Ever been wired yourself?’

‘I can do it.’

‘This is an aA345 I am thinking of. A button transmitter. You would have to sew it with copper wire.’

‘I can do it.’

‘First I have to get the transmitter.’

Fine.’

‘Could take a day or two,’ he said. ‘You have them in Efica?’

‘Some.’

‘Could they dispatch one to you?’

‘Wouldn’t it be faster to get it from here?’ she said.

But for Gabe Manzini to get his hands on an aA345 was not an easy matter. The wire-men he had known were gone, or dead, or unfriendly. In spite of which, he would get an aA345 somehow. Then they would wire the rabbit. Then they would let him go right down the hole.

If the rabbit got no information, nothing lost.

But if he did, Gabe Manzini was back in the centre. If he could get incriminating evidence of Zawba’a they would have to bring him back into the goddamn game. They would be furious, but they would have no choice, and then there were people whose ass he was going to kick from here to Neu Zwolfe.

As they left the meeting and returned to the foyer, he was enjoying these thoughts, thinking of the punishment, the pleasure of removing that big jacket from the young woman’s slender shoulders. Then he saw Tristan Smith, rolling through the foyer.

What a creature.

‘Leona, go! Quick!’

As the operative exited, Gabe Manzini watched Tristan Smith. When the very weird white eyes turned on him, he overcame his initial desire to turn away. He gazed into them, as into the eye of a squid. They were alarmed, passionate, electric.

There’s a great Sirkus on in town,’ he said to Jacqui.

He felt the creature’s hatred of him.

‘The Water Sirkus.’ He smiled at Tristan Smith as he folded his hands across his narrow chest.

You horrid little slug
, he thought,
you’re going to save my life.

When the lights came up in the Water Sirkus, the BUSINESS-GJENT was sitting on a chair. As he opened his zine, SPOOK-GANGER DROOL materialized behind him, softly, subtly, like smoke. So deftly did he materialize that I was sure he was a hologram image, but then the ghoulish Drool snickered and
produced a very solid rope. How this was done I do not know, but the audience of Saarlim connoisseurs all whooped and whistled their appreciation.

Spookganger Drool was such a clown. I had not appreciated that in Chemin Rouge, where his character was synonymous with fear.
^*
In Saarlim, he had the audience tittering even before he began to make the noose.

I sat in my seat, finally free from autograph hounds – hot, sweating, in pain, but also … well, she was beside me: my nurse, my partner, the inexplicable, unattainable woman with her little honey-coloured lolos hidden underneath three shirts. What sweet pain it was to sit beside her, to see her delicate profile as she lifted her eyes to the spectacle.

As the Dreadful Drool now looped the rope around the Gjent, as Wally cackled, Jacqui turned to me and smiled. Drool ran round and round until he had the man imprisoned. Using Drool-knots he bound the poor fellow’s upper arms against his chest. He knotted him to the chair, the seat, the back. The Gjent, it seemed, could not care less. He read his zine.

Drool slapped his hands together and slithered to one side of the stage where a toilet bowl suddenly appeared in the darkness. The spook unbuttoned. He peed. He rolled his eyes upwards in relief. Wally roared with laughter. This, surely, was better than the room in Gazette Street with its smell of fusty zines, all of them covered with words describing the great Sirkuses of Voorstand, the death-stalkers, posturers, contortionists, the ventriloquists, laser-dancers.

‘Oh my,’ he said, and wiped his head.

The Gjent in his chair tried to turn the page of his zine, and couldn’t.

Drool’s urine slowed, then surged. Every time he thought he had done, there was more to deliver. He continued this business on and on, until the smallest drip was enough to unleash a paroxysm of laughter from the audience.

When, at last, he was finished, he flushed the toilet. He looked into the bowl with interest. We heard the noise of torrents of water, babble, discord. Then water began to bubble up from the toilet bowl. Drool looked guilty. He put the lid down. He sat on it. He clung to the bowl, but the lid was lifted upwards, and he with it.

While the water gushed forth from beneath the rising lid, Drool hung on, his long protoplasmic arms stretching until they snapped like rubber bands and he was catapulted high into the air and left dangling from the catwalk beneath the lighting rig.

Now a fountain rose from the toilet, bringing with it, from deep inside the bowl, the brawling holographic figures of Bruder Duck and Bruder Dog. Round and round they fought, on top of the geyser, twenty feet above the stage floor, quacking, grunting.

The crowd roared and shouted.

The knotted Business-gjent remained absorbed in the problems of his newspaper. As the water rose in a sheer wall before our eyes it became clear that the stage was walled, not with glass, but with some new Voorstandish invention, something glass-like that did not refract or reflect any of the multitude of spots now focused on the tethered Gjent. The water covered his ankles, then his calves, then his knees.

Bruder Dog and Bruder Duck fell in the water with a splash.
^*
At first they fought, beneath the surface. And then as Bruder Dog began to flail and sink, Bruder Duck began to save him.