“I’m tempted but the fact remains I don’t know when I will be free. Things are . . . volatile at present.”
I could see he didn’t believe me. I couldn’t really tell him I was on the trail of a master criminal who could steal thoughts and project images at will; who was invisible on film and could murder and laugh as he did so. Landen sighed, dug out a calling card and placed it on the counter.
“Call me. Whenever you’re free. Promise?”
“Promise.”
He kissed me on the cheek, finished his drink, looked at me again and limped out of the bar. I was left looking at his calling card. I didn’t pick it up. I didn’t need to. The number was the one I remembered.
My room was exactly like all the other rooms in the hotel. The pictures were screwed to the walls and the drinks in the minibar had been opened, drunk, then resealed with water or cold tea by traveling reps too mean to pay for them. The room faced north; I could just see the airship field. A large forty-seater was moored on the mast, its silver flanks floodlit in the dark night. The small dirigible that had brought me in had continued onto Salisbury; I briefly thought about catching it again when it called on its return the day after tomorrow. I turned on the television just in time to catch Today in Parliament. The Crimean debate had been raging all day and wasn’t over yet. I emptied my pockets of loose change, took my automatic out of its shoulder holster and opened the bedside drawer. It was full. Apart from the Gideon’s Bible there were the teachings of Buddha and an English copy of the Koran. There was also a GSD volume of prayer and a Wesleyian pamphlet, two amulets from the Society for Christian Awareness, the thoughts of St. Zvlkx and the now mandatory Complete Works of William Shakespeare. I removed all the books, stuffed them in the cupboard and placed my automatic in the drawer instead. I unzipped my case and started to organize my room. I hadn’t rented out my apartment in London; I didn’t know if I was staying here or not. Oddly, the town had started to feel very comfortable and I wasn’t sure whether I liked that or not. I laid everything on my bed and then put it all carefully away. I placed a few books on the desk and the life-saving copy of Jane Eyre onto the bedside table. I picked up Landen’s photo and walked over to the bureau, thought for a moment and then placed it upside down in my knicker drawer. With the real thing around I had no need for an image. The TV droned on:
“. . . despite intervention by the French and a Russian guarantee of safe habitation for English settlers, it looks as though the English government will not be resuming its place around the table at Budapest. With England still adamant about an offensive using the new so-called Stonk plasma rifle, peace will not be descending on the Black Sea peninsula . . .”
The anchorman shuffled some papers.
“Home news now, and violence flared again in Chichester as a group of neosurrealists gathered to celebrate the fourth anniversary of the legalization of surrealism. On the spot for Toad News Network is Henry Grubb. Henry, how are things down there?”
A shaky live picture came onto the screen, and I stopped for a moment to watch. Behind Grubb was a car that had been overturned and set on fire, and several officers were in riot gear. Henry Grubb, who was in training for the job of Crimean correspondent and secretly hoped that the war wouldn’t end until he had had a chance to get out there, wore a navy blue flak jacket and spoke with the urgent, halting speech of a correspondent in a war zone.
“Things are a bit hot down here, Brian. I’m a hundred yards from the riot zone and I can see several cars overturned and on fire. The police have been trying to keep the factions apart all day, but the sheer weight of numbers has been against them. This evening several hundred Raphaelites surrounded the N’est pas une pipe public house where a hundred neosurrealists have barricaded themselves in. The demonstrators outside chanted Italian Renaissance slogans and then stones and missiles were thrown. The neosurrealists responded by charging the lines protected by large soft watches and seemed to be winning until the police moved in. Wait, I can just see a man arrested by the police. I’ll try and get an interview.”
I shook my head sadly and put some shoes in the bottom of the wardrobe. There was violence when surrealism was banned and there was violence as the same ban was lifted. Grubb continued his broadcast as he intercepted a policeman marching away a youth dressed in sixteenth-century garb with a faithful reproduction of the “Hand of God” from the Sistine chapel tattooed on his face.
“Excuse me, sir, how would you counter the criticism that you are an intolerant bunch with little respect for the value of change and experimentation in all aspects of art?”
The Renaissancite glanced at the camera with an angry scowl.
“People say we’re just Renaissancites causing trouble, but I’ve seen Baroque kids, Raphaelites, Romantics and Mannerists here tonight. It’s a massive show of classical artistic unity against these frivolous bastards who cower beneath the safety of the word ‘progress.’ It’s not just—”
The police officer intervened and dragged him away. Grubb ducked a flying brick and then wound up his report.
“This is Henry Grubb, reporting for Toad News Network, live from Chichester.”
I turned off the television with a remote that was chained to the bedside table. I sat on the bed and pulled out my hair tie, let my hair down and rubbed my scalp. I sniffed dubiously at my hair and decided against a shower. I had been harder than I intended with Landen. Even with our differences we still had more than enough in common to be good friends.
11.
Polly Flashes Upon the Inward Eye
I think Wordsworth was as surprised to see me as I was him. It can’t be usual to go to your favorite memory only to find someone already there, admiring the view ahead of you.
POLLY NEXT
—interviewed exclusively for The Owl on Sunday
AS I was dealing with Landen in my own clumsy way, my uncle and aunt were hard at work in Mycroft’s workshop. As I was to learn later, things seemed to be going quite well. To begin with, at any rate.
Mycroft was feeding his bookworms in the workshop when Polly entered; she had just completed some mathematical calculations of almost incomprehensible complexity for him.
“I have the answer you wanted, Crofty, my love,” she said, sucking the end of a well-worn pencil.
“And that is?” asked Mycroft, busily pouring prepositions ont
o the bookworms, who devoured the abstract food greedily.
“Nine.”
Mycroft mumbled something and jotted the figure down on a pad. He opened the large brass-reinforced book that I had not quite been introduced to the night before to reveal a cavity into which he placed a large-print copy of Wordsworth’s poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” To this he added the bookworms, who busily got to work. They slithered over the text, their small bodies and unfathomable collective id unconsciously examining every sentence, word, vowel sound and syllable. They probed deeply into the historical, biographical and geographical allusions, then they explored the inner meanings hidden within the meter and rhythm and juggled ingeniously with subtext, content and inflection. After that they made up a few verses of their own and converted the result into binary.