Lookout Cartridge (53 page)

I saw, as I looked at Krish, that I’d been conscious only of his eyes.

I’d been the only one at the Callanish megaliths by day. I was with someone by night.

We passed the cottages, and then we were inside the gate and Krish set off to the left for the northeastern corner of the enclosure where the avenue—or, if you wish, the foot of the Celtic cross—ended a good hundred yards down the gradual grade from the circle; he motioned me to follow.

Instead, I kept walking toward the circle. The Great Menhir under the moonlight that seemed to breathe with the sighing of the rain looked as if it’s head had sunk beneath its neck. I turned. Krish had stopped and had his hands in the pockets of his coat. I called to him. I asked if he did or did not want to know what I had come to find here at Callanish.

I went on and presently I heard the hissing concussion of his steps on the wet grass behind me. The water on Loch Roag shone flat in pieces of spheres.

We walked into the circle through its north arc—that is, the side facing downhill toward the crofting village from which we had come. By day I’d seen that the thirteen huge slabs surrounding the Great Menhir are not equidistant from each other—also that the circle is in fact an oval, flattened to the east—which it now occurred to me (thinking what to say and do, and wondering if Krish was as dangerous as I felt) might be because of the entrance to the sepulcher which appeared to be through that very east side.

I wheeled about and looked toward Krish’s pockets.

So at last we meet, I said.

I had my back to the Great Menhir, and where he’d halted he was to the left of the cairn, his left and my left, but during our talk he moved to my right and his left so that at the point of peculiar violence at which our talk ended he stood between me and the cairn’s open tomb, though as I have said it was at best a shallow pit. The pistol from the workbench in John’s Mercer Street loft was in the left-hand slash pocket of my parka and my hand was on it; I hadn’t thought about it till last night in Glasgow and then there was no time to do more than estimate by feel that there was something in the magazine—it was a Smith & Wesson 9-mm. automatic—and also by a phone call in the morning that if the last shot had been fired the slide would have locked open. My left hand was free.

Krish’s hair glistened. I had about four inches on him but he looked quick and jumpy. His collar was up over the white neck of the heavy sweater he’d worn only a few mornings ago in Knightsbridge.

Your friend Dagger DiGorro, he said, must have a super hiding place for the two remaining pieces of your film because they were not found at his flat.

So Krish had been there again, but now with the knowledge that he’d missed the 8-mill. cartridge and the other reel which he no doubt thought was the Bonfire in Wales (but you who have me know was in reality the Softball Game in Hyde Park).

I said, You didn’t fly to Glasgow and Stornoway and hike out here just to ask me what I can’t tell you.

You are looking for your daughter.

Not now, I said, and looked around through the night at the high stones whose alignments shot off into bogs and lochs and to the west over the low resting backs of dim cattle in a field separated from this ancient area by a low stone wall—alignments that seemed at best unclear to me at this moment, while the stones themselves seemed more real than the dire mammoths fixed at Stonehenge on the clement plain of Salisbury. I voiced this feeling to Krish. He stood staring.

There is a link between this place and Stonehenge you think? he said.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve come, and why we’re standing at this point in the circle.

Krish’s hand expanded in his left pocket. He said, I don’t wish to do you an injury. I want two things. Information first, and second your presence though not your company on tomorrow’s Glasgow plane. That is, you fly home tomorrow. To wherever your home is.

You have broken into my home, I said. Don’t pretend you don’t know where it is.

I do not pretend, he said. I do not need to pretend I have not broken into your house because I in fact have not done so.

You’ve conveniently forgotten because you live in the present—Cosmo is quite informative.

Cosmo talks too much.

Will your boss pay my fare home?

What boss?

The one who is concerned about the Bonfire in Wales.

Many may be.

And for these things I will be saved from injury? Is that all?

Your daughter too.

From injury.

Insofar as it is in
my
power. I cannot speak for others.

Others hired to watch me.

Cosmo talks too much.

My daughter, I said, does not have the sole copy of my diary.

We know that, replied the Indian, but that will not save her.

A cool wrinkle of recollection soothed my brain, a neutral tremor of technical device, a moonlight rainbow in b & w running the spectrum of visible grays between black and white which outdoes the color spectrum between red and violet, 200 to 160. Dagger had not used color for the Bonfire; that I knew because I’d seen him load.

I raised my left hand in a casual gesture to go with my next words—and Krish stepped backward: Krish, if you want some information, you might like to know that Paul stayed here with your friend whose painting was desecrated in the gallery.

Krish smiled faintly.

I couldn’t tell what meaning I’d conveyed because I didn’t yet know if the painting was a self-portrait. On the physical appearance of Jan I should have drawn Monty out.

For a moment I forgot that the only extant copies of the full diary were the original taken by the Highgate burglar, and Jenny’s closet carbon with the Xerox she and Reid had picked up. What was the diary worth?

Did you know, Krish, that she was particularly interested in the shadow cast over the sepulcher behind you by the Great Menhir that stands behind me.

Ah, said Krish almost inaudibly, that was just Paul. I do not need that information. I have no use for it. I erase it herewith. I wish to know how in this crucial encounter you cannot pay the strictest attention.

For my eyes had lifted past him and around the circle northward. The rain was letting up. The rain god was nearby having a happy delayed-action dream of me thinking pleasantly of him many hours ago when I left my driver. The moon followed the rain into a cloud. I wanted to give thanks to the sun and moon and rolling moors and the mounds and hollows of peat forming and reforming in slow logics of energy down through the ancestors of the widow and her husband who had been a seaman and a crofter and the others here who came to church twice each Sunday, minister or no minister, for he moved from place to time dispersing his face and voice across the simple independences of their creed. I would not have wished to wake these living and dead ancestors from the nature of their past and present. I should have been afraid of this tense ungentle Indian who wore, and lived in, white.

I could not take him seriously. I reviewed with rapidity that should have astounded me Krish’s known connections. His loop included Reid and Cosmo, the red-haired woman and Aut and Aut’s wife and, hence, her brother Monty Graf (who might have heard from Claire and then told Krish I was headed for the Hebrides), and maybe Jerry who might be Jan Aut’s son, not to mention the Druid Andsworth.

I recovered myself and murmured that I was rechecking alignments from the afternoon.

There is nothing here, said Krish.

An alignment pointing toward Mount Clisham, I said, nodding right.

There is nothing here, said Krish. A historic dump.

Except me, I said. And I will give you information if you will reciprocate. First, for whom did you break into DiGorro’s flat and ruin our film? Second, how did you know I was in Glasgow? You didn’t get that from the Druid. Third, why did you wait till we got out here?

In
reverse
order, said Krish, I wanted to see what your behavior here was. I knew you were in Glasgow because I phoned the Allott residence and was told you’d phoned from Glasgow, and learning yesterday that your daughter was in the Hebrides, I phoned BEA, said I was you though mumbling the name and asked if I could make it two reservations; they said yes, and checked the name by spelling it out, for which I commended them; so I knew you were on the plane. I asked if I had left my hotel phone number; they obliged by naming the hotel. The Scots are straight. As for your third or first query, I did not break into the DiGorro flat or destroy his film, nor do I need to oblige you by asking who
did
destroy it.

How did your source know Jenny was out here—if she
is
out here?

I believe my source was informed by Monty Graf. I myself saw him, but not to speak to.

Where?

In London of course. I do not believe in leaving London.

When?

Yesterday afternoon after I phoned Glasgow BEA.

Dawn would come late here. My watch said four but what time that was I couldn’t tell.

I asked what he had in his left pocket and he said I could easily guess.

Oh here was the gentle Indian from overpopulated India the hope of the moral world I had once begun to think.

Our talk drops somewhere in the gaps of the Callanish circuit, and yields its sound; gains instead imagination or a dispersion of probabilities. But as soon as I think, looking through Krish to an avenue or an antenna, that a miracle won’t be needed against him, my body gets heavy and uncoordinated the way it did one day near the end when I had a fight with Ned Noble, my muscle against the indifferent play of his mind.

Krish advised me to tell him at once where the Bonfire had been cached, why I’d come here rather than somewhere else, why I’d given the alias to Andsworth’s housekeeper, and why I’d only pretended to phone Dagger DiGorro from Andsworth’s. When I said oh indeed I had said to Dagger on the Druid’s phone just what I’d wanted to say, Krish replied that after Andsworth had phoned he’d called Dagger himself and had almost missed him for he was leaving for a base where he had some business, but Dagger had said of course Cartwright hadn’t phoned him, Cartwright was in New York.

I asked if Krish would trust Dagger before he would me; Krish said no, but Andsworth had had a feeling about the connection, how I’d held the phone too tight to my ear and jaw for real connection to be credible and hadn’t looked far enough or vaguely enough away.

I said the Bonfire sequence was ruined as far as I knew, and when Krish said did I then
not
know, I said I really didn’t except on Dagger’s say-so, and by the way how did Krish know I
wasn’t
Gene and Paul’s brother Jack from America with a beard. Krish’s hand stirred in the dangerous pocket and a breeze of rain came so light it seemed to have stopped above our heads and let go inertially the thinnest field of mist. Krish asked why Claire who had been so close to Dagger had said the Bonfire footage was extant—but Don’t answer, said Krish, you know possibly less than anyone in this and are instigating a method by which we will all know less.

I asked to
whom
Claire had said the Bonfire had been saved and Krish, with a bored glance a third of the way round the circle of stones which would have scared me if I’d not regained my levity, shrugged and asked after all which of the brothers she
could
have said it to, and when I said Jack is
here
, Krish at once said, But as you know he was in New York two days ago but I assure you you will not get to him tomorrow.

Through these words I now believed that whoever had broken into Dagger’s place twice and whatever was Krish’s relation to Aut or Jan Aut through the Knightsbridge gallery, Krish was in fact working with Jack; and with the luck of his seeming acknowledgment of this, I took a chance: I said I began to see beyond the messages left here at Callanish an explosive—yes, explosive—equation I only half comprehended now but knew to be much more important than Jan Graf Aut’s adopting here with Paul an alias which coupled her husband’s beautiful assistant’s given name with my old college friend Jim’s surname. And the equation paired Callanish and the words of my film diary opposite Stonehenge and the film.

Krish spoke fast, to stop whatever was happening around him. OK. So Jim Wheeler, so what—our Stonehenge was dead, don’t talk about explosive, likewise the absurd so-called Suitcase Slowly Packed with its photo of Paul (yes, Cartwright?) and the asinine baseball game in the park (which in any case lacked sound—right, Cartwright?) and the folly of spying in Corsica—and now, he said, answer please in one hell of a hurry the questions posed: Where is the Bonfire and why did you call yourself Jack? And where is the original of the diary?

I said the widow knew where I was and what I was doing right now, and so Krish had better watch it. I said I’d called myself Jack because I foresaw Krish would be working for me soon.

My mention of the widow may have encouraged him because with his right hand he reached and grabbed my parka and pushed me back to one side of the Great Menhir and past it. Dying seemed less awful than a passive life. The moon came out again and the rain increased. The place was too much for anyone not able to feel it. I had made Krish think I stood between him and something, and maybe it was true; but he had come after me to put himself between
me
and something, doubtless Jack and the brothers. And I had thought of Krish on one side and an object on the other, and of myself defending one against the other. But now I was not sure I was between.

Krish’s left hand was in his tightly tailored trenchcoat pocket, his right was clutching my pack in front but not shaking me. I asked who said that in the Suitcase Slowly Packed it was a shot of Paul: and Krish unhesitatingly with the deepest watchful satisfaction said, Your friend Dagger on the phone yesterday.

But Krish’s pleasure did not relieve him, and when I said, but Cosmo talks more than Dagger, Krish replied like an automaton: Wheeler was incompetent, he does not matter.

And so though I could not ask what talking Krish thought Cosmo had done, I knew I would handle Krish here. I felt at liberty in this wet earth and with these high stones, and I said, What would
you
know about Stonehenge?—and as for Callanish, I came here with much less information than, thanks to you, I now have, I came here because of a circle on a map and I came here really to find out
why
I came.