Communion Town (24 page)

‘It is true that the night’s work is not finished,’ said Peregrine. ‘And true, too, that we do not know the whereabouts of Lazarus Glass. But that information is not necessary for us to defeat him. Cassandra: would you care to continue?’

‘Lazarus’s mental peculiarities, as you have described them, are extreme,’ I said. ‘And while they endow him with arcane capabilities, they would seem also to constrain him. For instance, if, as he said to you, he is convinced that detectives and criminals only have meaning by virtue of their interlocking struggle, then the massacre of his opponents tonight, while in one sense a victory, must in another way leave him greatly diminished: in a city lacking three such eminent investigators, the arch-criminal must himself be so much less significant.

‘And if that is so, how much more true it must be of his relationship with you, Dr Fetch. In spite of the famous hatred he nurses for you, his old friend, his rival, his adversary, his nemesis – indeed,
because
of that hatred, I hypothesise that you need not fear assassination at the hand of your former comrade. He cannot eliminate you without also eliminating himself: for he said that he would not be Lazarus Glass without you.’

‘You’re not forgetting that the man’s a lunatic, are you?’ said Inspector Nimrod. ‘You are bearing in mind that the city’s actually a
city
, not the inside of this psychopath’s head?’

‘Your bluff sanity is refreshing, inspector,’ said Peregrine, ‘but, I fear, irrelevant. The reality that pertains in this case is that of Lazarus Glass’s perceptions; the city we have explored tonight has indeed been the memory city of Lazarus Glass.’

‘Which brings me to my last point,’ I said. ‘Glass boasted that his memory city enabled him to influence events in reality. But if the relationship between city and mind is as perfect as he claims, if every one of his thoughts is manifested in the city, then the reverse must also be the case: he must experience everything that happens in the city as an event in his mind. He saw the memory city as his great invention, but it seems to me that his plight is terrible to contemplate. He is unable to think without committing a crime to represent that thought; and, more than this, anyone can deliberately interfere with the constitution of his mind, by creating or destroying the symbols, out in the city, that embody his ideas.

‘The theory then arises that Lazarus Glass was not in fact responsible for the murders tonight.’

I took a breath, and hesitated.

‘Go on, Cassandra,’ Peregrine said.

‘It is possible that some other person contrived the killings of the detectives, in order to impose a significant change on Glass’s consciousness. I have already suggested the nature of that change: he is diminished by the loss of his worthy enemies. As to the identity of this unknown killer, one possibility is compelling.’

I looked at my mentor where he lay with fingers laced and ankles crossed.

‘The probable culprit, Dr Fetch, is you.’

‘Good God,’ said the inspector.

‘Sound work, Cassandra,’ said Peregrine. He rose from the sofa and came towards me, his grey eyes fixed on mine. He reached out with both hands and squeezed my shoulders gently, before turning to the inspector and grasping his hand. Then he moved past us both to stand by the mantelpiece.

‘I have known for a long time now – ever since I understood the nature of the memory city – that the surest way to end the criminal career of Lazarus Glass would be to put an end to the detectives against whom he has always defined himself. For a number of years I hoped that it would be possible to find some other way around his defences; it has taken me until tonight to satisfy myself that no other way exists.

‘The deaths of Hyperion, Electra and Brutus were necessary to the negation of Lazarus. By usurping his role as killer, devising each quietus in a manner that belonged rightfully to him, I have robbed him forever of three potent symbols. He will feel their absence from his memory city as a numbing ablation of his powers. But he and I both know well that, so long as I hold my place as the city’s greatest detective, he will remain as my diabolical opposite, dreaming our city’s reality with his dreams of death and vice. For so long, and no longer.’

Peregrine opened the cigar box on the mantelpiece and took out the revolver.

‘I have worked too long in this memory city of Lazarus’s, with its maddening mesh of symbols. To leave it will be pleasant.’

He thumbed a catch on the weapon and checked its chambers.

‘The night’s work is nearly done. Thank you.’

He gestured towards the window.

‘If you look out at the city, you will observe its transformation. You will witness the defeat of Lazarus Glass,’ said Peregrine.

Beyond the window, the sky glowed in bands of pink and yellow, threaded with irregular silver ribbons. All across the rooftops, points of light gleamed off those tiles and slates that were angled towards the dawn. We heard the gunshot and the thump of a body falling, and then silence, but we did not turn around.

Outside the Days

When Stephen’s message came I had nearly forgotten him. Time passes, and on most days he never entered my thoughts, or if he did it was faintly and far off. But without warning now he wanted to see me again, and, although he didn’t say why, I could find no way not to agree. I found myself walking along Impasto Street on a dark afternoon in mid-December when some influence had sent people out into the city in large numbers, jostling to spend money, zealous and hard-faced, shouldering each other aside.

He caught me unawares, laying his hand on my arm so that I flinched. I’m on edge in crowds. It took me several moments to recognise him, but he gave me as long as I needed, holding his gaze steady. Then he squeezed my shoulder and led me across Clarinet Street, back the way I’d come. We dived down a lane towards a bar which I only glimpsed as a blot of red and yellow before we were inside. He bought two pints and we sat down in a corner.

I kneaded the cold out of my hands. The message had made it sound as though we still saw each other all the time. I was surprised he’d picked me out again, but then our friendship had always been unexpected. I had known from our first meeting that we were not equals. He still had a way of making me – what’s the word? Making me eager, perhaps. I was always too eager. After setting down my drink he didn’t say anything. He sipped his beer, studied me slowly, smiled. It was time for me to ask why he had wanted to meet; why he had waited so long. Instead I began to babble, spouting clumsy trivia and asking about irrelevant things, where he lived, what he was doing for work. I could tell he was faintly amused in the old manner.

The bar was filling up with students and workers from city centre offices, all a few years younger than us. I took a sip which went down wrong, and struggled not to cough. Stephen watched with his lips parted and his head angled tolerantly. Just as ever, he was curious about my embarrassment, interested in the effects of his presence. An expression which might have been fondness passed across his face; but the pause grew longer, and I saw he was not going to reveal why he had contacted me. In the old days it had been his habit to withhold what I was waiting for him to tell. My face was hot in a familiar way.

To my surprise, however, Stephen himself now looked puzzled, as though his intention in asking me to meet him had temporarily slipped his mind, or he had forgotten I was with him at all. His eyes slid towards the snug on the far side of the bar, but as far as I could tell he was distracted by no more than an unoccupied table under a green glass lampshade. Weeks later, when he decided to tell me the real story, I would remember this moment. A group of students crowed with laughter and fell silent.

We contemplated the remains of our pints and in the hiatus I stole a look at him. He had changed more than I’d realised at first. The dark hair was thick but it didn’t have its old shine, and his eyes were veined and watery from the cold. In his face I could discern the seams where the skin would slacken and fill. He had on the sort of scruffy old clothing he had always made effortlessly cool, but you might not immediately have known, now, that the untidiness was a matter of style. It struck me that his best time had been his youth.

Before I could find anything else to say, he rose from his seat, grabbing his jacket and leaving his drink unfinished. His eyes kept darting to the other side of the room. Not pausing to say goodbye, he disappeared up the stairs to the street, leaving me to gather up my belongings. I caught my train an hour earlier than I’d planned.

At university Stephen and I had read different subjects. We both had our first-year accommodation in the hall of residence on Juno Square, with rooms on the same corridor, but beyond this there had been no obvious reason for us to associate. From the beginning you could guess at the career he was going to have here and the sort of people he would mix with. On the first day I saw him talking easily to groups of the older students. The beautiful, the fine-looking, the immaculate, assured ones whom I dared not gape at – they had gravitated to him. It was nothing easy to define, but they recognised his suitability. He exuded a natural right; his flirtatious, ingenuous manner worked with men and women just the same.

I was bewildered, meanwhile, in spite of the jollying welcome activities that had clogged up the whole of Belltown. Stephen didn’t come to the clubs-and-societies fair, the pub crawls or the quizzes. While I was too timid to stray outside alone, he always had somewhere to be. When, carrying a mug and a slice of toast back to my room from the shared kitchen on the second or third night, I passed him on our staircase, he had combed his hair back and was wearing a dark suit which fitted him superbly. He twitched an eyebrow at me and disappeared out into the streets, and soft laughter moved past my door at six o’clock that morning.

And yet we became involved with each other. We became friends. Part of his trick was that he never calculated things, not consciously. It just happened that there was a sort of attractive chemistry between the two of us. He had an unsettling effect on me. When our hands brushed I got a jolt like a discharge of static. Once, in the union bar, he noticed it: he gasped stagily, fluttered his eyelashes, and breathed ‘we touched!’, mock-scandalised. I spent the rest of that evening angry with myself.

Does that get across the appeal we had for each other? It’s not that he was unkind. On the contrary, he took a fond interest, and he teased as if he knew I had a touch more potential in me than I was managing to show. I really think he would have been pleased if I had, one unforeseen day, struggled free of myself.

I knew that by one view of things I was only there to provide contrast. I was the one to whom life did not happen, admitted to Stephen’s world simply as audience to the spectacle of himself. I was the mark that measured the height of his ascent. Perhaps, but who’s to say that’s all there was to the story? I knew where I stood. Without the thrilling imbalance of unrequited admiration, it wouldn’t have been interesting. There would have been none of the singular intimacy that was understood between us, no matter that we never spoke about it, no matter that I would not see him for days or weeks at a time, often, or that when we passed in public he might or might not choose to notice me.

That was all part of our silent agreement. Much of the world he occupied must remain mysterious because, though he conveyed to me what he could, so much was predicated on my absence. He stood out brightly against me, and it was needful I should lack the knowledge even of what I was excluded from. What did he murmur into her translucent ear to make her laugh as I observed them across the dining hall? Where did he disappear to on the pale nights of the summer term, while I stayed awake until dawn, watching the street under my window for the shadow that never came slipping into Juno Square? I did not know but I cooperated with a will. It was fascination enough that, whatever he did, he was doing it, so to speak, in relation to me. What unknown and private spheres of experience I glimpsed. Or, I mean, I glimpsed nothing; it was purer than that. His experience began where mine ended, that much I knew.

Some things were clear enough. He favoured sullen, grungy, extremely good-looking girls, often with dreadlocks or lip-rings, long-bodied and slender, exquisitely dishevelled and taller than himself. These came and went on our staircase, and he never introduced them. I think they understood that they were passing through.

More opaque, as well as more lasting, was the clique with which he became involved. Now and then he would mention them by name and allude to what they did together, as if to mock the idea that I too was one of the group. Very occasionally, I would catch sight of him in their company out in the city. At least that’s what I thought I was seeing. I’d speculate about which names belonged to which of his associates, but I could never be sure, and of course I never approached. I was especially pleased with the time I spotted him lounging in the shadowy rear of a café along with a languid, scornful-looking, catlike young man and a near-identical girl. He had spoken about a pair of twins, Anna and Otto, and I was sure this must be them. For weeks afterwards I was plagued by the image of the three, leaning back together on the cushions, and often I thought I glimpsed the trio disappearing down a mews, or gaining admission at some unidentified entrance on the other side of a street; but always when the traffic cleared they were gone.

No doors were closed to him. If you were one of those who took him into the circle, if you saw yourself as an heir to the world, entitled by right of inheritance to the complex privileges, the sophisticated pleasures, the rich perversions reserved for the special children of this culture and its many centuries’ decadence; if you were one of those, you would look at Stephen and know that here was the youth equal to your requirements, a born member of your caste who would enter into all privilege, all extremity, without a flicker of discomposure and would keep the secrets which, if revealed, would surely have the small people, scandalised and choking with envy, hurling themselves at the throats of the great.

Is this unlikely? Is it improbable that among my contemporaries, in the very same streets and lecture theatres, some moved in a rare and secretive world? That they were on their way to the highest places, and were already delectating the rewards that were their due? I don’t know, but I’d be surprised if my imaginings have as much as rubbed the surface of what went on. I’d be more specific if I could. I can imagine more than I know how to put down in words, but what Stephen did when he was alone with his equals, what he saw and knew, I cannot begin to imagine.

We stopped seeing each other towards the end of our student days. I never understood quite why. With some people, shared experience drives you apart in the end; it teaches you that you don’t have so much in common after all, and the things you’ve said and done together become an embarrassment you don’t want to exacerbate. In any case, halfway through our final year he slipped out of focus for good. He became distracted and sour; he seemed disappointed. After our exams, we lost touch.

I stayed at the university and became a graduate student for a time, then found a job as an administrator in the department. Perhaps I stayed because I hadn’t finished with the place, or even, in truth, started with it. I was always waiting for the way to open up so that I could enter. Even good old Belltown, with its libraries and playing fields, its coffee shops and vegetarian restaurants, was a riddle I couldn’t quite solve. Crossing the park, I’d catch sight of the old bandstand as the rain was letting off. That was all it took to fill me with troubled desire. If I had been like Stephen I would have drained those years in a single draught, drained this whole city and skipped into the next escapade without a backward look, but instead I’ve stayed here at the edge of what I’ve never quite understood but which enthrals me the way it always did.

The city is a mystery when you notice it’s full of sunken side streets falling away from you beside river and canal, by yellow and pink brick terraces, in September for instance, under castles of foliage, in deep light. Someone approaches and you’re sure you recognise him, you’ve met just once, and not long ago, but he vanishes away down one of those streets and you miss him. You feel you owe an apology. And it only gets deeper, the riddle of it, as years go by and the special creatures stay exactly the same, just as they were when Stephen went with them. The modulation of names and faces makes no difference at all.

I didn’t expect to hear from Stephen again after that evening. I put the encounter down as another of his less than readable gestures, partly satiric, partly flattering, and not in the end for me to grasp. But then, one evening in late January, he turned up at my door.

I invited him into the flat and tripped over my own furniture as I followed him through. With him there I didn’t know where to stand. He waited for me to get around to offering him a cup of tea, then asked for coffee instead. He sat and watched while I got lost in my kitchen searching for the means to make it, and spilled the grounds across the counter.

But tonight there was an intermitted quality about him, a loose connection. One minute he was watching me, but the next he was gazing at his own linked hands on the kitchen table. I got the idea that he was ill at ease. I began to imagine that the surface of quick smiles and flirting glances had been hollowed out, and underneath was empty space, a vacuum tugging on his cheeks and eye-sockets. The lights were off in the living room next door, and the dark shapes of the furniture in there seemed to distract him. With this I noticed something else: it became clear that he had a reason for being here, as though we had agreed this meeting for some purpose so basic to us both that there was no need to go over it again. He hadn’t come to pass the time. He looked like someone who had stumbled, bedraggled and uninvited, into a birthday party to dismay the revellers.