Force Majeure (17 page)

‘I can talk to them?’

‘This time you can talk to them. Are you frowning under there?’

‘I’m not frowning.’

‘You are frowning. You should relax; you’re about to achieve something. Go on.’

She traced her steps back to the red room. The party conversations that had once been so voluble and unguarded were now careful whispers, and she barely caught words, let alone sense, as she walked. The guests weren’t moving far beyond their own little circles of influence, and that made her self-conscious. Before she went, the sun placed a hand on her mask’s forehead, patting her, reading her temperature, anointing her. She felt marked out. There were a few random guests in the passages and she set them on their way. This time, she wasn’t followed; there was yawning space at her back.

In the red room, the dragon loomed over another guest. They had been alone, and both drew away from the door as Kay entered. They kept talking in a low Candidan dialect that Kay would have struggled to follow, if she’d been so inclined. The dragon’s accomplice had cautious eyes that tracked Kay warily as she padded into the room. She was a moon, the moon as a verdant green dial. Spread around them on the tables, the plates and glasses of the party had been spent.

Kay approached the duo and explained Xan’s request. The moon nodded curtly. The dragon remained enormous and motionless until the moon took it by the hand and led it to the door. Kay waited for a minute, knocking back a last, half-full glass of champagne, before peering out into the corridor to make sure they had gone. The case was where Xan had promised, under the table. It was of a different design from the one he’d shown her earlier, but it was equally heavy. She didn’t open it. She imagined seven cases in seven rooms, one for each waitress. One-and-three-quarter million dollars, based on her initial guesstimate. That was only
close
; the total would be two, round numbers being important. A down-payment.

The champagne sparkled as it reached her stomach. She could still feel the impressed shape of the fox’s clumsy penis inside her and the splash of hot animal semen he’d left there. Her body was fuzzily warm and encouraged her to relax. She felt changed. She felt as though she had, at long last, made a choice and sealed a loyalty. The weight of the case now troubled her. She waited, she waited. She went back to the white room.

The curtains were drawn back and the doors opened onto the clubhouse’s concrete garden. Ushers were encouraging the late guests through, and outside, the sun, his voice reverberating through the metal mask, was mouthing rousing peptalk buzzwords at them. Even without his face, Xan knew how to hold a crowd, and his audience seemed to be responding, not with evangelical fervour but with an intense, complex longing that expressed itself in their bodies, in their postures, the way they held themselves as they looked at him. It was as much fear and scepticism and weary patience as desire or rapture; Kay recognised this from her childhood trips to church, where the adults always seemed to stand in an idiosyncratic C-of-E posture, like crooked plants craning towards the light.

Only Kay and the other waitresses seemed to feel the cold out on the slab. Their uniforms were identical, the poor light bleaching them into different shades of grey, with their legs exposed to the air. The others all had cases, as Kay had expected. The ushers led them past the crowd and had them stand facing in the opposite direction, lined along the lip of the cleaned and stripped steaming-pool. It was a ten foot drop at least, if she mis-stepped now, if the wind should happen to nudge too hard at her back. Broken legs for sure. The wind unsettled the hems of their skirts.

The skittering blue evening star shone overhead. It chittered like an insect.

‘Candida is not a city,’ Xan declaimed, though Kay sensed he was winding towards an ending, a crescendo. He paced round the edge of the pool, passing between the waitresses and the invisible party crowd at their backs. ‘Candida is a landlocked island. It sustains itself on the wreckage and flotsam that’s washed up on its shores. Tomorrow, this changes. Tomorrow, you officers will finally be the corps that Doctor Arkadin dreamed of before his city sank into decadence. Tomorrow, you displaced will be given back your proper places. Tomorrow, we wipe the rouge off the faces of the whores. From tomorrow, this city will be made fit and presentable to rejoin decent society. If you want to know what Prospero is, look around you. If you want to know what Candida will be, look around you.

‘We’ll change the name to something better and brighter, oh yeah.’

Kay, listening to the meagre sense not the voluminous sound, felt unmoved. In the dark, Xan had no body, only the golden fan of the sun sustained in darkness. The swelling star flared behind him. She saw the cold blue outline of his body, his arms flinging towards the heavens to call them down.

Kay was punched back by the force of air. The line of waitresses rippled.

The star dropped to earth, its wings roaring. Behind her, the crowd began to panic, began to billow backwards under the pressure of the descending wind. The air was whipped with shallow points of rain. Kay fought to stay upright and cling onto her case, but the line was already broken; some of her colleagues had dropped their bundles and were beating a retreat to the safety of the clubhouse eaves. She imagined the case locks breaking open, the paper money bursting out and vanishing on the whirlwind, but they held. Some in the crowd were screaming.

She stared Xan down, though he didn’t notice, his head craned up to watch the light descending.
Lights
, not one light; not a single star but a cluster. Its whine drowned the general panic. He wasn’t trying to scare them. He wanted them to see how insignificant their fear was. It was a display of his power and his confidence. She saw a car-dragon bursting through the still surface of the world and explode. She saw a frightened, writhing boy and smelt singed human flesh.

Uncloaked, the star had the silhouette of a helicopter, hidden under the blue arc of its spotlights. It came in close to land, on the far side of the grounds beyond the pool, behind Xan. The light washed back across its body, revealing drab olive paint and scrubbed white patches where the flags of nations long since obliterated had been washed out. It was a fat metal fist; it seemed impossible that it could stay in the air. It touched down daintily, and now even Xan began to tumble back from the noise and the storm.

Kay snatched a look around her. A few of the guests hadn’t joined the general retreat back into the safety of the building. Some of them had taken off their disguises. Some she thought were officers, their fleshy faces revealing a mix of admiration and fear that the masks would have hidden. Xan must have told them they were going to inherit the world.

Across the pool, the helicopter’s blades were chattering slowly. A hatch opened on its side and solid khaki men were climbing out, men with guns. The first dropped out almost tentatively, as if afraid his boots would break the soil.
Armstrong on the moon
, Kay thought. Xan pushed through the easing blade-winds to clasp his hand and thump his shoulder.

Kay’s arm was numb from holding up her case. She slung it aside. It thudded on concrete, dead weight.

‘What the bloody hell is going on?! What have you mixed me up in?’

‘Prospero. And you
knew
; don’t tell me you didn’t know.’

‘I knew
what
?! I knew we were opening up an untapped piece of real estate to the world. I knew
that
. I didn’t know you were planning a military coup.’

‘A coup against what? Against a man who’s been dead for 200 years, if he was ever alive? Against a pornocracy? There’s no
etat
to have a coup against. There’s no government to overthrow.’

‘Those bastards down there have machine guns!’

‘And what would we have done without them, with just the officers and the displaced and a few fat old shopkeepers behind us? Stand in the streets and recite poetry until the city changes shape to keep up?’

For a moment, she imagined that working.

‘Red, listen to me. Prospero isn’t going to let himself be absorbed like Arkadin was, like all the other failures and losers. We have to show that we have a greater force backing us up. They’re my Round Table, my A-Team, my Holy Templars. Those men out there are North Americans and South Africans, British, European, Arabs, Australians, Israelis, Chinese –’

‘Mercenaries.’

‘Yes, mercenaries, but they represent the world. And no-one is going to get hurt.’

‘There are men with guns. People get hurt when there are men with guns. That’s what men with guns do, that’s what they’re for.’

‘Only if the worst comes to the worst.’

‘Okay, okay, if I accept that – which I don’t – there are how many of them? Fewer than 20. That’s
not
a superior force in a city this size. So that’s the worst of both worlds – you’ve just made a stupid threat you can’t back up. I don’t believe this! Do you think I would have wanted to come here if I’d known it was going to lead to this?’

Xan removed his mask and tossed it down on the corridor floor. Smiling, he was smiling. He was soft-voiced: ‘There’s another half dozen helicopters arriving tomorrow. That should quell any resistance. Prospero is bigger than you. I warned you of that.’

‘And who’s paying for Prospero?’

‘Your people and their friends. It’s an investment to them. It’s not even that. There’s enough cheap military surplus on the market, ex-Soviet, ex-American, from all the fallen empires, and these soldiers are the ancient mariners of the modern world.’ He snatched a look behind him, but his Templar Knights hadn’t followed. They were lower and deeper in the clubhouse, being settled into quarters he’d set aside secretly for this purpose. ‘This is marvellous. When I was a boy, I wanted to go exploring and end up as the ruler of a magic kingdom in the middle of nowhere. This is a dream come true.’

‘I’m not going to sleep tonight,’ Kay said.

‘You’re not,’ Xan replied, certainly.

Kay still wore her immobile cat-face. Keeping herself hidden and her expressions private seemed sensible. It insulated Xan from her anger but also from her fear. The physical terror inspired by the helicopter had been small and uncomplicated; now events seemed to be running out of her control, and that was genuinely frightening. Xan reached out and tickled her fake fur under the chin.

‘I know you,’ she told him. They’d reached the door to his quarters. He didn’t answer her straight away but gestured her through. The lights came on after her. This room was gaslit and the scent reminded her of petrol. This room was a firetrap, a gas-leak risk; she didn’t like the odds of sleeping in this room. She didn’t expect that Xan would let her leave. He was, after all, prince of this world now, even if that world didn’t know it yet.

‘You know me?’ Xan’s smooth voice mocked her. ‘Who am I?’

A dragon’s head lay waiting for them on the bed. Xan picked it up curiously, weighing it in his hands as if he was pondering wearing it as a crown, but the permanent smile flicked into boredom and he discarded it. Kay moved it carefully into a corner, turning its eyes towards the wall so it couldn’t watch them. It was light, foam rubber with a lizard-flesh finish, designed to cover the whole head. She couldn’t see where the eyes went, or the air.

‘When I was a very young girl,’ she told him, ‘I saw a car crash in the woods near where I lived. Fatal, but you know that. I wasn’t hurt, but it made an impression on me.’

‘That’s surprising. Nothing ever gets through to you. They think you’re cold, the girls in the office. They think you’re a robot.’ Again he tickled her under the chin. His other hand circled her face, fingers stroking her hair and the line of exposed skin. ‘You’re not cold,’ he said. ‘Unflappable, maybe.’

She gave a brusque nod and resumed her story. He took her hands and led her to the bed. She didn’t resist. She wasn’t sure when she would
start
resisting, if at all. All his charm was working on her and all his passion. I’m a robot, she thought, I’m cold. ‘I don’t care what anyone else thinks about me. It was the first big thing ever to happen in my life. For a long time, I thought I was alone there, but I wasn’t.
You
were there.’

‘I was?’

‘You were. There was a boy. I didn’t know him, but he was there and he saw it all. And that was you.’

‘You can’t be sure of that. What if I said I didn’t remember?’

‘It doesn’t matter. I know. I remember you very clearly. I see him in you. The way he looked and moved, that’s you, that’s what you looked like back then. It’s you.’

‘I wasn’t there.’ He was still humouring her. He sat on the bed, her hands still tight in his, but he waited before pulling. He wanted her to join him.

‘That’s the strange thing. You weren’t. You’re there in all my memories, but I don’t think you were there at the time. And the funny thing is, you weren’t in those memories until I came to Candida.’

He snorted. ‘You’ve lost me,’ he said, and released her hands so he could stroke her stomach and thighs through the fabric of her dress. She was smiling under the mask, imitating him, his cruel amusement.

‘A friend of mine told me that dreams are true here. She has a funny way of putting things, but when I look at you, I think,
maybe that’s true
. Maybe I dreamed you, and because I dreamed you, Candida brought you to life. You’re everything I want and everything I want to be. You’re my fantasy. You’re me.’