Communion Town (23 page)

‘“Not entirely wasted, Lazarus,” I said. I thought I knew the true reason for his visit. “I have learned a good deal about you.”

‘“I am aware of what you have … surmised,” he said, and for the first time he seemed amused. “I will allow that you have understood far more about my endeavours than any other detective – and although it will not help you, I am not unimpressed.”

‘“You are a puzzle, old friend,” I said.

‘This was the question that had nagged at me of late: why, all those years ago, when he stood on the threshold of a dazzling career in detection after graduating with a double first in Ratiocination and Criminology, had Lazarus turned aside and vanished into the city’s underworld to become the inversion of all he had worked for? Perhaps the worm had always been there, curled in the bud of his brilliance. Perhaps he had concluded that he would never prevail in his rivalry with me, and, rather than accept second place, preferred the role of nemesis. But perhaps, too, I now suspected, his fall was connected with the Art of Memory.

‘When I put this to him, Lazarus stared at me for a long time; then he gave me a cold-blooded smile, and I knew that my hypothesis was correct. He had never relinquished the idea of the memory city, despite what he had told Electra. After his disappearance, over the years in which I made my own reputation as a detective and could only wonder what had become of my friend, he had continued the research in secret, his obsession deepening as his expertise grew.

‘“I have accomplished feats of mnemotechnics such as have not been seen for five hundred years,” he told me, with a mixture of complacency and defiance. “I have equalled the greatest of the long-dead artificers of memory.”

‘“And what of the memory city you once imagined, Lazarus? What became of that wild notion?”

‘“Oh, the memory city exists. It exists so completely, so truly, that I wonder sometimes whether anything else exists, anywhere in creation.”

‘“It exists in your mind?”

‘“That is a tame way of expressing the reality, Peregrine. Say instead that my mind
is
the city. I have done nothing less than reconstruct my consciousness from the sewers to the slates, so that it matches in every detail the form of the city.”

‘My fancy about a doubleness in his gaze grew stronger; his eyes were fixed on my face, but they seemed not to see.

‘“These districts and streets,” he said, “from the fountains and brocaded sentries of the Palace Mile to the drab terraces of Salt Park, from the tower blocks of Sludd’s Liberty to the canal walkways of Thin Gardens, from the acquisitive scrum of Clothmarket to the miniature wilderness of Whitethorn Common, from the desolated industrial estates of Kinsayder Fields to the derricks swinging over Greywater Quays, from the rows of unsold, new-built villas out in Gorgonstown to the introverted ancestral residences of Rosamunda and Lizavet: this is the landscape of my brain.”

‘“But why, Lazarus? What does it mean?”

‘“What does it mean? It means that thoughts are no longer the vague, slippery things they once were. Memories, ideas and plans no longer drift and vanish like smoke, against my will; hopes, fantasies and dreads can no longer betray me. They are laid out in the city of my mind, in the form of houses and bridges, monuments and parks, as clear as a map and as solid as stone. You cannot imagine what richness it is for me to pursue the merest train of thought. I walk the appropriate route through the memory city, and, as I do so, every aspect of the matter I wish to consider unfolds around me: an explosion of instantaneous understanding, manifest in architecture. While the rest of you grope in darkness, a thought for me is space and light.”

‘Warming to the topic, he let me know that, moreover, he had discovered certain efficacious rituals. If he was preoccupied with some especially difficult question, he would make his way through his memory city to the statue of the Flâneur which stands incongruously in that small square off Grin Lane, behind the Strangers’ Market, and would whisper his query into its ear. Then, he had only to wait and watch for how the memory city would reveal its answer: perhaps there would be a traffic accident at False Cross or a slow shipwreck of a sunset over Cento Hill, or perhaps a leaf would fall from a tree in the Autumn Park and brush his shoulder. Whatever it was, Lazarus would read the sign and know what his city was telling him.

‘“When I sleep,” he said, “in my dreams I walk only in the city’s streets. There is nowhere else left.”

‘I knew that some of the more febrile memory-artists of ancient times had supposed that, if one could construct a perfect mental representation of the universe, sculpting the mind into a functional model of the whirling spheres and the mazelike earth at their centre, then by a form of sympathetic magic one would gain power over the universe itself, becoming not much less than a divinity. A mad fantasy, of course – but, if what he said was true, then no one in history had come closer to achieving it than Lazarus Glass.

‘“The memory city gives you the power of insight that you imagined, then,” I said. “But you have twisted it to a purpose far from what you first intended.”

‘“Oh yes,” said Lazarus. “I was an ignorant youth in those days, and could envisage no greater use for the memory city than aiding a detective’s chores. Indeed, soon after perfecting the system I tested its powers in that manner, by attempting to resolve the case of the Stolen Shadow. It had proved intractable for all the city’s detectives – even for you, Peregrine, if you recall – but a glance into the memory city revealed to me every significant detail of the forgers’ operation, from the location of their workshop in Low Glinder to the nature of the minuscule flaws that betrayed their creations as counterfeit. I saw, also, the fault lines of envy and mistrust among the criminals. Rather than report them to the authorities, I sent an anonymous note, a few words long and apparently quite innocuous, to one peripheral gang member, and watched as the repercussions of this intervention caused the entire scam to collapse in on itself. There was satisfaction in that.”

‘But, Lazarus explained to me, the capacities of the memory city went much further. Soon he found that he could manipulate events in the real city with impossible reach and prescience, so instinctively did he know its workings: and no sooner had he realised the extent of his powers than he was beguiled by their potential for evil.

‘“Spread before me,” he said, “I saw all the offices and infrastructures of the city – bureaucracy, politicians, lawyers, police, industry, financiers, unions, news media, utility companies, organised criminals, all of it – no more difficult to control than my own fingertips. The skilled puppeteer needs to give only the slightest twitches on the strings to make his dummies dance. Was it any wonder that I ceased to trouble myself with the constraints of the law?”

‘“No one can wield untrammelled power without paying some price,” I said quietly.

‘“You think so, Peregrine?” said Lazarus. “What an innocent you are. To whom should I pay a price, when nothing exists beyond my thoughts? Who in the city could compel me, when the city is my mind?”

‘Hearing this, I knew what had happened to Lazarus. The city inside his head had fused with the city outside until they were indistinguishable. He could close his eyes and visit his memory city, but when he opened them again, what was the difference? Even when he walked the streets in actuality, he moved in the sealed world of his own thoughts.

‘“My poor friend,” I said, “I am sorry. You are quite insane.”

‘“You understand nothing,” he replied. “True, I have gone beyond the flimsy pretence you call sanity, with its timid distinctions between what is real and what is imaginary. But never mistake me for some sad solipsist, locked up in my own skull. I am precisely the opposite: my mind is so distributed across the city that, for me, there is no difference between a thought and an action. Everything I do – murder and larceny, acquiring the building contract for the tramline, visiting you today, laying my hand on your mantelpiece like this – everything I do is a symbol soaked in significance, an adjustment to the pattern of the memory city.”

‘“Then this is why you wished to influence the development of the metro line?”

‘Anger showed in Lazarus’s eye.

‘“Do you still fail to comprehend me when I tell you that the city and my mind are one and the same? If Thorne had not obstructed me, then by exerting direct control over the creation of a new part of the infrastructure I could have opened who knows what fresh conceptual possibilities.

‘“Every action, however tiny, alters the meaning of the whole system. Why do you suppose the city quivers daily with my crimes? Any student of the
Rhetorica Ad Herennium
knows that we remember best if the images with which we populate our memory houses are vivid and violent, exceptionally beautiful or ugly, dressed in crowns and purples or disfigured and splashed with blood. Why do you suppose I keep you so well supplied with the bizarre mysteries and richly coloured atrocities to which you are addicted? None of you realise that when you walk through your crime-riddled city, you are moving among my thoughts.”

‘“And what of the citizens?” I asked. “Do you believe their lives have no value in themselves?”

‘Lazarus shrugged as though the question did not interest him. “They, too, are part of the pattern. All things are symbols, all have their place in the web of relations. What meaning would the city’s detectives have if there were no criminals for them to chase? Or take you and me. We were like twin brothers: we still are. Is our ancient rivalry not the axis of our lives? And does the life of the city, too, not turn on that axis, as I commit my crimes and you solve them, as you pursue me and I escape? You are the image by which I remember myself, Peregrine. Without you I would not be Lazarus Glass.”

‘He was silent for a time, standing there in my consulting room.

‘“My responsibilities weigh heavily,” he said. “But there is no other course for me now.”

‘As he left, neither of us offered a handshake. We exchanged only an ambiguous glance: an unspoken recollection of the past. That was the last time I saw him.’

Peregrine stood without moving, his head bowed to the shadow between the tramlines. The drizzle had stopped and the floodlights on the Palace were growing fainter as the rest of the scene came into view.

‘Revenge, then,’ said the inspector eventually. ‘Thorne stopped Glass from doing what he wanted with the metro, so Glass used the metro to murder him. The same as Professor Weill and Dr Cavendish-Peake: Lazarus Glass held a grudge against each of them because they’d got the better of him in the past, and so he killed them in some way that seemed appropriate to his sick mind. Revenge. That’s all there is to it?’

‘On the contrary,’ Peregrine said. ‘Tonight’s crimes amount to far more than revenge.’

For a long moment, he pressed his fingertips to his brows. When he raised his head again, towards the river and the plumes of dawn light leaking into the sky behind the roofline, he looked more tired than I had ever seen him.

‘It is time we returned to where we began.’

No enemy accosted us as we made our way back to the mews in Syme Gardens where Peregrine had his consulting rooms. The twilit streets and brightening sky might have been ours alone. Peregrine tolerated the inspector’s wish to climb the stairs first, and to ease his way into the rooms with his sidearm drawn; but all was undisturbed.

‘The full evidence is now at our disposal,’ said Peregrine as he settled himself on the Chesterfield. ‘It only remains to assimilate the meaning of what we have seen tonight, and draw our conclusions. Cassandra, here I turn to you. Your apprenticeship with me is approaching its close, and I find myself hoping very much that you will make this present conundrum into the first success of your own crime-solving career.’

‘I’ll try my best,’ I said, unsettled again by the peculiar cadence in Peregrine’s voice. ‘And I think I start to see a way of understanding what has taken place.’

‘I’m glad one of us does,’ said the inspector.

‘We have visited the scenes of three murders tonight,’ I began, ‘and we know the link between them. These fallen detectives were close on the trail of Lazarus Glass, and so we may fairly suppose that he wished to strike them down. But in the manner of the killings – each grotesque and excessive in its way – we find other reasons too. Each murder vengefully recalled some incident in which the detective concerned had foiled the arch-criminal. Glass seems determined to load his killings with private symbolism.’

Peregrine, reclining with his eyes closed, looked serene.

‘And in the history of Lazarus Glass’s intellectual development, we have found an explanation for this, in turn,’ I said. ‘His criminal career, we now know, is directed by his conviction that the city and his mind are identical. In his memory city, events such as the deaths of detectives must be dense with significance, and the particular manner of those deaths, too, must be all-important for his deranged purposes.

‘For Glass, the deaths of Hyperion Weill, Electra Cavendish-Peake and Brutus Thorne surely represent crucial changes in the pattern of the city that is his mind. One might say that, tonight, we have walked through the architecture of Lazarus Glass’s brain, and witnessed the lingering presence of three of his more vivid and memorable thoughts.’

‘This is a promising line of analysis,’ said Peregrine.

‘But what about you, Dr Fetch?’ asked the inspector. ‘If Glass wants to liquidate all the detectives hunting him, then he isn’t finished yet, and you’re not safe. You said yourself you were leading the chase. If I understand any of this, Glass is planning to kill you too, and we’re still no closer to finding him.’