The List Of Seven (48 page)

"Yes, Eileen."

Doyle removed his coat, took the vials of medicine concealed in the lining and the syringes from his boots, and stuffed them beneath the cushions of a davenport. Then he moved to the bath.

Arms folded across her breasts, eyes closed, Eileen lay back against the angled wall of the tub, which simulated the form of a brass dragon down to its four taloned claws. Her skin looked like alabaster. There was a fine glisten of moisture on her lip. Her hair was loosely piled on top of her head, but a few delicious strands dangled delicately down to the waterline. Doyle was instantly thrown into a reverie: the enduring fascination of a woman's hair. How did they know just exactly what to do with it in every conceivable situation? How did they move it around their heads in such graceful, effortless defiance of gravity?

"I'm in a kind of heaven," she said dreamily.

"Are you?"

"I assume I was given a drug of some kind."

"Yes, dear."

"It's difficult for me to think very clearly." She was taking great care to enunciate clearly. "My physical responses to things seem to be a bit ... overwhelming."

"Which we can attribute to the drug as well I think."

"So this feeling is going to go away soon."

"Yes."

"Hmm. Pity. I'm sorry, I'm not being very much help to you."

"You're safe. That's all that matters."

She rested an inviting hand on the edge of the tub. He took it, watching the water run off their entwined fingers.

"Mr. Jack Sparks did not come back?" she asked.

"No."

"That's very troubling."

"Yes."

"We're in quite a serious muggins, you and I."

"Yes, dear, I'm afraid we are."

"Then after I've had a few more minutes to soak," she said softly, "I would like you to take me to bed. Would that be all right with you, Arthur?"

"Yes, dear. Yes, it would."

She smiled and held his hand. He sat on the edge of the tub and waited.

Familiarity breeds a few feelings other than contempt, thought Doyle as he lay on the enveloping feather bed and by measured steps gave in to the round, full weight of his fatigue. Passion, for one. Whether as a result of the drug in her system or need inspired by the precariousness of their position, the urgency and abandon with which she had submitted herself to him fell significantly further outside his limited experience than their lovemaking of the night before. She lay curled in his arms now, smooth and soft, sound asleep, her jet hair an exotic stain fanning the milky linen. To his surprise, he had no difficulty reconciling these more tender feelings with the urgent, animalistic coupling they had shared only minutes before. No single act in his life had ever seemed more genuine. As he fell asleep, he remembered thinking he had never been as grateful to his mother for anything more than her failure to warn him against actresses.

Doyle woke with a start, his dreams fleeing like burglars. The light in the room was low, a shade of burnt orange, filtering at a sharp, perpendicular angle through the window. Someone's been in here while we slept, his instincts informed him. He sat up. His clothes gone from the floor where he had hastily discarded them, nowhere to be seen. Laid out on the opposite bed were a set of gentleman's evening wear and a woman's black velvet dress. Eileen lay asleep beside him. A sharp pang in his gut told him he was gnawingly, ravenously hungry.

Doyle found his watch lying neatly on the pocket of the dinner jacket and snapped it open: four o'clock. The day was almost gone! He pulled on the trousers, a perfect fit, and

slipped the braces over his shoulders as he padded to the window. The sun was fast approaching the western horizon. Ac-tivity in the courtyard continued, armed patrols on the walls still in force. Work had apparently ceased at the adjacent fac-tory, the stacks quiescent. But a thin line of smoke issued from one of the smaller buildings farther out on the moors. Feeling under the cushions of the sofa, Doyle determined the vials and syringes were in place where he'd stashed them, then he moved into the bath to attend to the body's necessities. A pitcher of hot water, a shaving mug, and razor sat beside a ceramic basin before the mirror, along with a shaker of astringent bay rum.

Freshly abluted, five minutes later Doyle reentered the bedroom. Eileen slumped on the edge of the bed, a sheet draped around her, the heel of a hand pressed to her forehead.

"Did you kick me in the head or just beat me with a truncheon?"

"You'll feel better once you're up and moving. They've left clothes for us, formal wear: Apparently, we're dressing for dinner."

"Food." The idea struck her as revelatory and seemed to ameliorate her discomfort. She looked up at him, to share the incredible thought. "Food."

"Not without its appeal," said Doyle, kissing her before moving to the other bed.

"I don't think I've eaten in months." "Take your time. I'm going to have a look about," said Doyle, as he quickly donned the rest of the clothes.

"I have vague memories of food," said Eileen, as she traipsed to the bath, trailing the sheet, "but I can't seem to recall ever having tasted any before."

Doyle knotted the bow tie, checked it in the mirror, plumped the handkerchief in his breast pocket, and moved to the door. The handle was unlocked.

Sedate chamber music wafted from somewhere in the house below. Two men rose from chairs in the hallway as Doyle exited the bedroom. Both appeared in their early fifties and were similarly attired in evening wear. Each held a drink; the shorter of the two, a dapper, fastidious man with thinning hair and a trim black beard, smoked a blunt cigar. The taller one bore the broad shoulders and upright carriage of a mili-

tary man, his white hair trimmed to a rough bristle, a full, white walrus mustache cutting across the length of his square, uncompromising face. He hung back a step as the shorter man moved immediately to Doyle with an extended hand.

"We were just discussing something—perhaps you can settle the question for us, Doctor," said the shorter man gregariously, in a flat, nearly American accent, beaming a gap-toothed smile. "My friend Drummond here insists that if the proper circulatory equipment were to be made available, a man's head could indefinitely be kept alive and functioning after separation from the body."

"Depends entirely upon which latitude the separation were to be effected," said Drummond, his upper-class voice as stiff with reserve as his spine. His eyes, drawn slightly too far apart for symmetry in the broad box of his face, stared perpetually down his nose.

"Whereas I continue to maintain that the body provides far too many essential elements that the brain requires in order to carry on," said the shorter man, as casually as if they were discussing the delivery of mail. "And leaving the issue of maintenance aside, it's my decided opinion that the trauma of cleaving head from torso to begin with proves far too injurious for any portion of the brain to survive."

"I will go one step further, John," said the General. "I submit that if the cut were made at a sufficiently low intersection, it would be possible for the head to retain the power of speech."

"You see, we disagree there as well: Where would the wind come from, Marcus?" argued Sir John Chandros, the owner of Ravenscar. "Even with the neck in all its unfettered glory, there's no bellows to move the air through the vocal cords. Come on, man! What expertise can you offer us, Doctor? From a purely medical perspective?"

"I'm afraid I've never given the matter much thought," said Doyle.

"But it is a most provocative subject, don't you agree?" asked Chandros, who apparently felt no further introductions necessary.

"A heady matter indeed," said Doyle.

Chandros laughed genuinely. "Yes. Heady. Very good. Heady: Do you like that, Marcus?"

Drummond snorted, Doyle assumed disapprovingly.

"Marcus has been in violent need of a good, solid belly laugh for the last thirty years," said Chandros. "And he needs it still."

Drummond snorted again, seeming to confirm the opinion.

"For an accredited cynic and somewhat notorious man of the world, my friend the General manages to retain a remarkable naivete." Chandros took Doyle's arm in his before he could respond and directed him down the corridor. "However, Doctor, apropos our prior discussion, regardless of its particular unlikelihood, I strongly believe that as a race of people we are on the verge of such a vast sea change of scientific discovery that it will transform forever life as we have known it."

Another snort from Drummond: There were apparently shadings and nuances to the man's use of the exclamation that would require months to interpret.

"Drummond will warn you that I am an inveterate disciple of the future. Guilty as charged. I happen to believe that if man is in need of hope, he need look no further for it than tomorrow. Yes, I've been to America, spent many years there: New York, Boston, Chicago, there's a city for you, powerful, tough, raw as the wind. Done a lot of business with them— they understand business, the Americans, second nature to them—and perhaps they've infected me with their optimism, but I still say if a man with the right idea meets a man with the right money, together they can change the world. Change it, hell: transform it. God gave man dominion over the earth; it's high time we took the bit between our teeth and pulled the plow with which the Lord provided us. Tried politics. Not for me. Too damn dependent on consensus to get anything done. Committees didn't build the Great Pyramids; Pharaoh did. My point is: The business of living is a business. Let me give you an example."

As they passed a banister looking down on the entrance hall, Doyle saw the long table was set for dinner. Well-attired guests mingled before the fire. With the baleful shadow of General Drummond trailing them, Chandros took Doyle past the overlook and through a door, out onto a high balcony. A vast panorama to the west, where the sun balanced perfectly on the lip of the horizon.

"What's man's greatest obstacle in life?" asked Chandros, puffing away on his cigar. "Himself. That's the rub. His own damn animal nature. Perpetually at war with the higher power inside. Can't surrender. There's a genius living cheek by jowl in the same bag of bones with this lower man, and let me tell you, sir, that lower man is nothing but a troglodyte, a half-wit chucklehead without the common sense to live. Worse still, this dumb clot thinks he's the long-lost son of a god; it's only a matter of time before the world puts him back on the throne where he belongs. In the meantime, he works like a dull ox and he drinks and he gambles and he whores and he pisses his life away and he dies crying out for this god that deserted him to save his pathetic, penny-ante soul. Let me ask you this: What everloving deity in its right mind would waste a moment's precious thought on a worthless wretch like that?"

"I'm sure I don't know," said Doyle, recoiling at the man's frigid assurance.

"I will tell you: no deity worth a tinker's dam." He folded his arms, leaned against the wall, and looked out over the land. "Now the Christians have had a good run. No question about it. One dead Jew with some neat tricks up his sleeve, promoted like hair tonic by a few fanatical followers, and one converted emperor later they've got themselves a Holy Empire to shame any in history. Going on two thousand years. How did they manage it? The secret of their success was simplicity: Concentrate your power. Wrap it in mystery. Hide it inside the biggest building in town. Lay down a few commandments to keep the peasants in line, get a regulatory grip on birth, death, and marriage, throw in the fear of damnation, some smoke, a little music—there's your first commandment: Put on a good show—and customers will come crawling on their knees for the stale crumbs of that Feast of Saints. Now that ... that was a business."

Drummond snorted again. Doyle wasn't certain if it was meant as affirmation or rebuttal.

Chandros puffed and chomped his cigar. His dazzling blue eyes sparkled with inspirational zeal. "So: How do you change man from a dim-witted, randy farm animal to a domesticated, productive tool ready to roll up his sleeves and pitch in for the greater good? There's the puzzle anybody that aspires to rule has to crack, be it religion, government, busi-

ness, what have you. And here was the plain genius of the Christians' solution: Convince your constituents of one big lie. We hold the key to the gates of heaven. You want to make the trip, brother, you'll have to do it through our aus-pices. Sure, advertising how dodgy the Other Place is helped

close the deal: Fear puts those poor ignorant sods down on t.heir knees lighting candles like there's no tomorrow. And let's be straight, Old Nick's always been their real matinee idol—the man you love to hate, he'll scare you so bad you piss in your union suit, but you still can't take your eyes off him. He's the one puts the ladies in a lather, not that simpering, doe-eyed Messiah. Throw the Devil in to spice up the soup, and you've got yourself a flawless formula for religion hegemony. Worked like a Swiss watch. Nothing came close.

"But the march of progress—and you know it moves independently of our measly concerns; there's mystery for you— the march of progress demands that those in power change right along with the times. We're at the big table now, boys, playing with a whole new deck of cards: heavy industry, mass production, international economies, weaponry like you never dreamed of. Pious homilies and weak cheese pulpit-pleading to the customer's spiritual virtue just don't cut the mustard anymore. The Christians, as they are fond of saying in Kentucky, are just about shit out of luck. Excuse my French."

As the sun sank below the horizon, its dying rays lit Chandros and the sandstone wall behind him with a fiery orange luster.

'"Look down there, Doctor," said Chandros, pointing toward an enclosure near the outer walls. "What do you see?"

A number of men in identical gray-striped pants and jackets of rough, nubbed material were filing into the compound through a gate leading toward the biscuit factory. The hair on their heads was cropped close to the skull. Armed guards supervised their movement, barking instructions, as the men fell into formation, their voices responding with cadenced chants that faintly reached the balcony.