Web of Everywhere (12 page)

‘I don’t think – I know. I saw him killed by a ricocheting slug. It tore him open and spilled his guts on the floor. Like ripping a paper sack of butcher’s meat!’

‘We have lost, then, a very precious man,’ Mustapha said heavily.

‘Oh, don’t strike poses!’ Satamori snapped. ‘I know you detested him as much as me! I know you were sure he was forever doing the absolutely wrong thing!’

‘No, that’s untrue,’ Mustapha said, feeling for and settling himself on a stool which he could draw close to the couch. ‘A man who had once seen the correct thing to do, and done it, must be regarded differently from those who never thought of anything new. At any moment he might have done something just as useful as inventing the privateer. Now that chance has vanished forever.’

‘I’m too sick and tired to bother with your doubletalk,’ Satamori sighed. ‘But – but thank you anyway, for taking me in.’

‘My friend, I am flattered that you came to me!’ Mustapha exclaimed. ‘Did you not have the chance to tell others they would be welcome here?’

‘Ah … no. No chance at all. There was panic. It started as soon as the Maoris attacked. In fact – oh, it’s ironical, in a way – the first person to arrive was the first to turn and run. I mean, apart from those who were invited to show up ahead of time, like Boris Pech and myself.’

‘Hmm! You mean you lost all benefit from this treasure-hunt party? You don’t know who it was who first unriddled your clues and found his way to Chaim’s house?’

‘Oh, no! It was a recuperator called Hans Dykstra, who lives in Valletta, I believe. I was lying flat on the floor along with everybody else because one of the first shots smashed a wall-high window and there was glass flying all over the room, but I turned my head away and that’s how I happened to see him rush for the skelter. And not by himself, either. Did you hear about this girl Chaim rescued a while ago from the wilds of Brazil? Dykstra was talking to her all by himself for most of the evening, and they were sitting right near the skelter, and he literally dragged her away with him. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so tragic.’

There followed a long silence during which the boy with the first-aid kit completed his task and left the room.

Eventually Mustapha said, ‘Rest now, Frederick. Stay and sleep where you are. Ali will make sure that someone
watches by you until you waken. After a rest you will certainly feel better.’

‘Thank you,’ Satamori mumbled, and rolled on his side and passed out almost on the instant.

It was not until he was safely clear of the Room of Flowers that Mustapha dared give way to the sense of terror which had exploded in his belly on hearing Satamori’s news.

Hans Dykstra! First to arrive at Aleuker’s party! Singled out as though he were the chance member of a crowd on whom a brilliant spotlight fell, the computer-chosen winner of a lottery!

Of all the billion people left on earth, no one more dangerous could have been successful in the treasure-hunt.

Worse yet, he had escaped – started the panic, if Satamori could be believed, and dragged along with him this girl nicknamed Barbara, and …

And something must be done at once, for security’s sake.

Would he have gone home? Logically, yes … but to a chilly welcome. Mustapha had met and evaluated Dany. Chatting with her once, for about ten minutes, had given him a complete picture of her personality. If her husband came back from a party held by somebody as famous as Chaim Aleuker, which she would doubtless have wanted to attend herself, and brought with him a girl in her teens, allegedly very pretty, then there would be hell and all its devils let loose.

So if he had any shred of his wits about him, Hans would not have gone back to Malta. Where else, then …?

Ah. Yes, quite conceivably. That code, after all, would have been at the forefront of his mind, ready to hand when the attack began. And on that skelter there was no privateer, and …

It would take only a few minutes to confirm his guess. Mustapha hastened up the staircase of his tallest minaret, entered the secret room containing his third skelter, put on his climatized clothing, and punched the code for the Eriksson house at Umeå.

Hans had been so sure – so absolutely certain – that there would be no one in the Swedish house apart from Anneliese,
that for the first several seconds after his return he thought only of trivia. The sun had gone down after the brief northern winter day, but it was warm, therefore the heating system must be working okay because the fire had died to embers. Beside it in the gloom a cloaked figure sat, logically Anneliese wrapped in a blanket, and he hoped she had not woken so long before he arrived that she was frightened and –

And the last chunk of a log slipped on the hearth and uttered a spirt of bright yellow flame. The light revealed that the person waiting for him was not Anneliese.

He exploded with mingled rage and terror.

‘Mustapha! What the hell are you doing here? You’ve broken our compact!’

‘It is not my custom to resort to the
tu quoque,’
Mustapha murmured. ‘If it were, I might well say that you not only broke it, but smashed it into fragments and trampled those fragments into dust. Must I remind you that I laid it down as a condition of supplying you with illegal codes that you should never under any circumstances bring another person to one of these abandoned homes?’

‘What other person am I supposed to have brought?’ Hans cried, knowing even as he voiced the words that they were futile.

Mustapha clucked with his tongue: tsk-tsk. ‘Though I’m blind I am not unaware of what goes on around me,’ he retorted. ‘You of all people should have realized that by now. I scented the girl the moment I left the skelter, over and through the smoke of the fire which doubtless you built for her. And, by the way, keep your voice down. She slept contentedly throughout my inspection of her, but she is near to waking and a loud noise may rouse her.’

‘Your – inspection?’ Hans forced out, advancing on Mustapha with fists clenched. ‘You’ve been
feeling
her?’

‘Oh, I was right! I sense jealousy!’ Mustapha said. ‘I was unaware that she had become your property …? I have no eyesight, man, but my fingertips – you saw – are delicate enough to stroke the full length of a spider-web and leave it unbroken. You think to touch a girl is to maul her, ravish her; I think of it as having to be lighter than a glance. She did not even turn over, let alone wake up … How old is she,
this girl whom Chaim retrieved from the Brazilian
sertão
? Seventeen? Eighteen?’

‘Who told you …?’ Hans’s voice failed him in mid-question.

‘I was right again,’ Mustapha said. ‘You imagined your departure with her from Aleuker’s home was unobserved. You are too commonplace, too
interchangeable
a person to sense that unique recognizes unique. I am not surprised that you found your way to Chaim’s party. I am surprised that Chaim and his friends imagined that people like you could save the world, frozen as you are into the mold of the past. You’re like a vampire, one of the undead, compelled to spend half his life in a coffin.’

Blood was roaring in Hans’s ears, and the room swayed and swirled. He said, ‘Okay, so someone saw me leave Aleuker’s with her, but I may well have saved her life by bringing her here and – ’

‘Here? Instead of Valletta? Most people in the grip of panic think at once of going home.’ Mustapha’s tone was gentle enough, but contempt rode the edge of his words as light may ride the sharpness of a knife-blade. ‘Not of course that you could have made it clear to your wife that your intention was simply to save the life of a poor friendless girl – ’

Grasping at a straw, Hans rapped, ‘Of course not! You’ve met her, you can imagine what a scene she’d have created!’

Mustapha shook his head. ‘Wrong reason, and dishonest with it.’

‘What?’

‘I can read you more clearly than you, with your good eyesight, can read one of the books I’ve sold you.’ Mustapha rose, reaching out one hand to the brick-built side of the chimney that swallowed the small remaining trace of smoke from the fire. ‘You could have convinced Dany you’d brought the girl home to save her life, if that had been the truth … but it was not. I can hear the processes of your imagination. I can put them into words, even into English words, though I would be more precise and crueller in Arabic. I see your whole plan laid out before me, like a map, like a carved stela from Luxor that my fingers have grown acquainted with. I say this is what you intend!’

He drew himself bolt upright, and his blind eyes seemed to shine dazzlingly into Hans’s.

‘I say your plan goes like this. You have by chance been brought together with a girl who is lost in the modern world. Aleuker, a busy man, with more friends, more women, more preoccupations than he could cope with, neglected her when he found her childhood conditioning had scarred her mind too deeply for her to be turned into a decent citizen of today’s world.

‘But you have the time, and the urge. Hating your wife, possessing her not as a person and a partner but as a trophy, a prize that all too many men these days can never aspire to, you suddenly realize there’s a chance for you to supplant her. What likelier target than a girl who’s lonely and miserable and frightened? In a few months, gratitude; in a year or so, divorce – Dany like any other woman can always find an eager youth wanting to share her bed – and after that marriage, legal binding marriage, with a teenage girl who’s been carefully prevented from involving herself with anybody except Hans Dykstra. It won’t be love, but you never understood what love is. You want to buy this child, as though she were a slave, and bind her to you with intangible chains.’

The diagnosis was too terribly accurate for Hans to answer at once. He gulped air, swayed, blinked, at last found his voice again.

‘You dare to say that to me? You, who’ve done the same and worse to kids from all over the world? Spent your time and money hunting for orphans, boys as well as girls so long as they’re pretty and bright, seduced them into your bed and imprisoned them in your home and taught them just those jobs they can’t make use of anywhere else if they do decide to try and escape from you? What do you pay for the children
you
enslave?’

‘I pay what you can’t because you never had any,’ Mustapha said, and the words quavered unexpectedly. A glint from the fire showed, bewilderingly, that tears had gathered in his sightless eyes, and now of a sudden they spilled over and ran down his face.

‘What? What?’

‘I pay love.’ The poet gathered himself again, brushed
at his itching cheeks. ‘I have never fettered any of my protégés. Of either sex. I have kissed and embraced and comforted those who never before in their lives were touched by another person except to be punched or slapped. I have broken my heart so many times it is held together with rivets like a shattered porcelain bowl, because I have always let go those I loved with the depths of my being when they said it was time for them to become themselves, to be individuals and not to depend on me any more. Compared to what you plan to make of this girl – a bunch of reflexes, a machine whose buttons you can press at will – I am sinless and without reproach.’

The world turned red around Hans. Without volition he snatched at a poker lying on the side of the hearth, hot but not too hot to grasp, and used it to silence that accusing tongue.

INTERFACE N

Proverbially

‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder’

– Or so said they who are no longer with us.

Likewise however

‘To be out of sight is to be out of mind’

– I never knew which proverb to believe.

You whom I love

Stepped through the skelter yesterday.

– Now I have had proof that both are true.

– M
USTAPHA
S
HARIF

‘Who –? Hans! What –? Oh,
God
…!’

An incredible confusion of slump, cry, run, exclaim, moan. It all happened in a time when he was out of touch with the universe; it sandwiched together, compressed, declined to be separated again.

But that was a moment ago. This moment: Anneliese at the door of the room where she had been sleeping, staring at what the wan firelight showed, petrified by horror. Her dress was crumpled, and in a sense so was her face, for she had been lying on a fold in the pillows and a deep dent marked her left cheek like a sort of brand.

Nobody, no matter how dull-witted, could have failed to add together a scene like this: prone by the hearth, a stranger unconscious, dark blood trickling out of his hair, and Hans still clutching the poker he had struck out with.

He remained in a daze until she managed to utter the all-important question: ‘Have you –
killed
him?’

‘No, no!’ Hans’s mind seemed to rush back into normal operation; he could think again, discovered a cluster of excuses full-blown and ready for use.

‘Who is he?’

‘I’ve no idea. But I know what he is.’

She advanced a pace toward him, hands clenched, jaw-muscles lumping as though to restrain a scream, and waited for him to elaborate.

Now I’ve got to pile yet another untruth atop the crazy pyramid I’ve already erected. Why? Why? How did I get tangled in this lunatic mess? I lost my temper, that’s all – first with Dany, then with Mustapha, both times with complete justification. And all of a sudden it turns out I’m snarled up as though I’ve been wrapped in barbed wire!

Was I to know so many people would notice me leaving Aleuker’s that Mustapha would get to hear in a matter of hours?

Oh, maybe I should have guessed. After all, I bought notoriety, didn’t I? By being the person who won Boris Pech his bet …

I’m not myself. It’s all happened too fast. I claim to follow the Way of Life and I just used frenzied violence against a fellow human being. That’s not like me. It isn’t – I’m sure it isn’t in my real nature to do that!

So I’ll be justified if I put the best possible light on things. I’ll atone later. When I’ve straightened matters out. After the inquest on Dany. After finding somewhere to live a long, long way away from Malta. I can just disappear from the awareness of my friends. My colleagues at work must be informed, naturally … but I can lose the people who knew me with Dany, I can start over somehow, I can –