What Lot's Wife Saw (26 page)

“I repeat, ladies and gentlemen, that tomorrow, Sunday, you’ll all attend Mass at the Hesperides Metropolis. At two o’clock, I’ll expect you all here for the meal. You may go.”

We crowded out of the exit and went out into the street looking for some tall building with a good view of the harbour. The nearest one was the Guardhouse. We ran all the way there and climbed up three floors, then scrambled up the spiral staircase of the tower until we reached the observation platform. We strained our eyes in all directions but couldn’t see any sign of a Black Ship. The extraordinary vessel could no longer be seen. The guard on duty, I think his name was Batourim, was startled by the commotion on the platform and thought it best to give Drake a smart salute, but Drake grabbed him by his uniform as his hand sailed upwards.

“Did you see the Black Ship, Batourim? Where is it? Where did it disappear to? Speak!”

The guard’s jaw dropped. “I’ve the honour to report … er, I don’t understand the question, Captain.”

“You were asleep again, you fool. Either that or you were spying into the Hesperides windows! Three weeks without leave! Now give me those binoculars!”

The binoculars didn’t add anything despite Drake’s persistence. Perhaps it had crossed the basin and had been lost to our view. That possibility seemed rather unlikely if it had maintained the same speed which would preclude it passing the tip of the bay and it should still be in the environs of the southern shores. Montenegro knitted his fingers together and cupped them to give Drake a hand up. Drake placed his other foot on the railing and lifted himself up to improve his range of vision still more. The rest of us held him around the waist to steady him. He strained to see farther in the direction in which we’d last seen the ship but he leant too far and nearly toppled over. Montenegro immediately spread his hands and the arms around his middle pulled him back. He fell against the cement floor of the platform and hit his head against the railings. He cursed the Consortium architects that’d made the tower so short and unsuitable for proper observation. In truth, the platform didn’t give a clear view of the entire port so perhaps Batourim could be justified in swearing that he hadn’t seen a Black Ship, although I wished that he’d stop clicking his heels every time he spoke. He listened to our descriptions with a gaping mouth and the only moment he cracked an imperceptible smile was when Drake crashed to the floor.

“We can’t see from here. Let’s go to the port and ask the harbourmaster!” Regina shouted.

We ran down the stairs and into the street. Fabrizio stood in the middle of the road with his hands raised, forcing a passenger berlinga to stop. He shouted that the berlinga was requisitioned and that the passengers had to get off immediately. The Chief Treasurer of the Bank was amongst the passengers and he demanded to be shown the requisition papers. Fabrizio tried to pull him off but he clung tightly to the handholds, accusing us of being responsible for stopping him from getting to work on time, for which he’d be fined. That’s why he’d demanded to see documents signed by the Governor proving that this specific berlinga had been requisitioned and withdrawn from its scheduled route. He muttered that he’d take this further and submit a written complaint about the Doctor’s indecent behaviour. Fabrizio threw him out into the street, demanding that he lodge his complaint immediately since the Secretary was present and would register it. In fact, the Judge who would throw it out was also present and so was the Captain of the Guards who’d shoot him and the Priest that’d read him his last rites. Siccouane told him drily that he shouldn’t bother filing a complaint because he would see to it personally that it’d be buried so deep in the paperwork that his great-grandchildren wouldn’t be able to unearth it. We all clambered onto the berlinga and told the cyclists where to take us, exhorting them to peddle as fast as they could.

The berlinga gathered speed and turned off the avenue to go via a shortcut, leaving the regular passengers, who were waiting at the next stops, gesticulating and pointing at their watches. The cyclists pedalled down to the port and stopped at the end of the road. We forced them with curses and threats to go into the dock and continue along the whole length of the quay. This was illegal as only cargo berlingas could enter and so dock workers looked at us in amazement as we rushed by them and two or three took their hats off to fan their faces. The harbourmaster, standing next to his hut, bolted when he saw the passenger berlinga heading in his direction since he thought that, being on the quay, it was out of control.

We climbed off the berlinga, surrounded him and started to all talk at the same time, firing descriptions, explanations and questions at him while wildly waving our hands in support of the verbal barrage. The harbourmaster, when he’d sufficiently gathered his wits after such a concentrated attack, swore that he hadn’t a clue what we were talking about. He patiently explained to us, as if we were idiots, that the water here doesn’t allow keels to sink into it and that the bay is constantly patrolled by boatmen and they would’ve informed him at once if anything odd had occurred. Finally, he said that he’d had his eyes trained on the sea for the last six hours but he’d seen no Black Ship and, in fact, no sail of any colour. Then he grew more guarded and asked us whether we had a signed permit that gave us the right to use a passenger berlinga and disrupt the smooth flow of cargo in the port.

Fabrizio strode desperately towards a boatman and shouted that his boat was commandeered and he must take us to the bay’s southern end. He was about to board when Montenegro stopped him. “Something’s not at all right with this situation, Fabrizio. Isn’t it obvious that no one apart from us has seen the ghost ship?”

Siccouane looked around him and saw the boatmen hiding grins as they sat on the sacks and the coiled ropes. His face grew red as he said that we’d made total fools of ourselves and we must have fallen foul of a hundred regulations in the process. Fabrizio was still insisting that we should jump in the boat to hunt down the pirate ship, which was either hiding near the southern shores or had sailed away from the Colony so would be visible on the horizon in either case, if we were rowed to a vantage point in the south.

Judging from the faces of the dock workers around us, it’d become obvious that Montenegro was right. The Black Ship had escaped everyone’s notice. Drake absent-mindedly twirled his handlebar moustache and, feeling the amused curiosity around him, scuffed the tip of his left boot with his right foot. The Priest brought out his Bible and reviewed his equations. I dusted down the harbourmaster’s jacket, which I had unconsciously been gripping tightly, and advised him to return to his hut. He’d passed the readiness drill we’d conducted with flying colours. We left almost faster than we’d arrived, before he thought of asking us to see the Governor’s orders for the drill.

We climbed up the slope towards Hesperides in silence, each of us lost in thought. Dr Fabrizio, as was his wont, quickly managed to bury his confusion and fear in a display of anger and accused the Priest and myself of having misled him with our lies. We’d hypnotised him and he’d seen something that hadn’t existed. We didn’t have the energy even to tell him where to get off.

As we approached the Palace, Regina started to slowly unbutton her suit, she opened her jacket, and revealed her breasts. Montenegro reached out and gripped it back shut but she fought him off and proceeded to unzip her skirt and allowed it to fall. We immediately arrayed ourselves in a circle around her to protect her from the eyes of the passers-by, some of whom had been trying to follow events as they unfolded behind the human shield.

“Even these clothes don’t belong to me. Bera bought them for me,” Regina said deliriously.

Montenegro forced her to get her clothes back on. He shook her to snap her out of it.

“I’m certain that there’s a logical explanation, Regina, and we’re going to find it. All this is the pirate’s fault, he’s the one behind everything that’s happening but, for the life of me, I can’t tell how! Perhaps the bastard spiked the wine with a hallucinogenic and we’re dreaming standing up. Did you notice that he didn’t have a drop of wine, nor did he allow Bianca even a glass?”

Siccouane immediately thought that the Priest was right. He reminded us that the pirate hadn’t commented on our incessant coming and going to the terrace and to think that he himself, lacking any experience of the medal wearers’ bush telegraph and having no knowledge of the repertoire of excuses that they’d developed, had quickly realised that something very odd was happening when, one after another, we’d left and come back as if we’d seen a ghost. The young Governor has shown himself to be too astute to allow such obvious activity to pass unnoticed.

“The fact that he didn’t comment seems no longer strange,” the Priest said. “If he’d said something he’d have stepped off that all-important path of his. I’m on to him; his pattern dictates that he must never comment on anything that definitely diverges from normality. The question is, why did he invite us to the Palace today? Could any of you tell from what we discussed in there?”

We all agreed that we’d never before heard such boring platitudes than those uttered by the Governor. The whole meal seemed to have been totally pointless. We had blethered on about well-known problems to which he’d added nothing nor suggested a new approach and hadn’t expected anything from us either. It was as if he’d planned to keep us gathered around him, but not to use us in any way. Had he actually wanted to keep us far away from the port, stuck in the Palace, so that we wouldn’t see the Black Ship sail across the bay? Perhaps the Black Ship was actually real but, through a combination of chance and circumstance, had escaped the colonists’ notice?

“Could it be, Father, that the whole Colony is trapped in that same pattern and fails to see anything out of the ordinary?” Fabrizio asked sarcastically.

The Priest swiped him on the back of his head and told him to stop being a smartass. We hadn’t asked the whole Colony to check whether anyone else had seen it. Perhaps others had seen it and were in a similar state of disbelief as we were. Perhaps they too were not daring to say a word about it in case their eyes had been playing tricks on them.

Siccouane, getting angry, clenched his fists and said that the real reason why the Governor had gathered us together had been to drug us so that we’d be maddened, go back out into the Colony and make fools of ourselves. The Treasurer of the Bank, the passengers of the requisitioned berlinga, the dock workers, the harbourmaster, have all been supplied with some fascinating gossip to regale their friends with. Tomorrow, the Colony will be buzzing with the news that the five medal bearers and the Personal Secretary went mad, or at least breached the law. Did the youth think that he could push us towards resigning in this fashion?

“I handed him my Star but he didn’t take it,” Drake reminded us.

“Well then, is it that he just wanted to make complete fools of us, to break our morale, so that we lose any initiative and fall apart?”

“What would he stand to gain by that?”

“So that, once broken, he can mould us to his requirements and transform us from the trusted advisors of his predecessor, into his own dedicated supporters. He’s training us. Didn’t the old Bera, God rest his soul, play such games until we didn’t know if we were coming or going?”

The truth was that the young pirate was reminding us more and more of the late Bera. Totally different, but very reminiscent. Another, but the same. I began to wonder whether by the Colony’s anniversary they’d have grown so alike that we wouldn’t even be able to see the gold earring.

The sound of the latch turning, slight though it was, was enough to make Phileas Book jump since his hearing was particularly acute at that moment. He turned towards the door, clutching his heart. An employee was coming into the room, announcing himself, “Pierre Galois, steward of this floor. I am bringing you your dinner, Mr Book.”

The statement might have been addressed to the trolley he was dragging rather than to Book since he hadn’t bothered even to lift his head to look at him. He rolled the trolley over the plush carpet and brought it to the small round table next to the window a few metres from where Book was sitting. He unfolded the tablecloth he’d draped over his arm and laid it on the table. From the covered plates on the trolley a mixture of aromas was wafting, suggesting a large variety of dishes – meat, pasta, fruit, sweets – which had been made to tempt someone who’d not been asked what he wanted to eat.

Book tried to calm the residual flutters his alarm had caused him. He concentrated on the rectangular table with the glass top and the metal legs on which he’d been working for hours. This table, which had been set up for Book in the middle of the brightly lit lounge, was solid and spacious but it caused him to appreciate that his narrow office in the attic of the camping goods shop offered him a better working environment. The papers he’d spread on this enormous glass surface continuously seemed to be inconveniently placed; no matter how often he shuffled their relevant positions, he just couldn’t get organised on it. The glass top distracted him as well since each time he looked down either the pattern of the carpet or the sight of his muddy shoes invaded his field of vision. On the top itself, a cornucopia of pens, pencils, magnifying glasses, rulers and rubbers addled him. Knuckling under their pressure he’d tried nearly every one of them and after a considerable waste of time he rejected them and ended up feeling nostalgic for his own humble pencil drawer. The six letters he’d been given were very lengthy and he resolved to get the best ergonomic use out of the vast space available. He sorted out the pages into groups and formed six long rows, which he arranged along the whole length of the table. At the end of each row he stuck labels: “Regina Bera”, “Judge Bateau”, “Father Montenegro”, “Captain Drake”, “Dr Fabrizio”, “Secretary Siccouane”.

The table was also encumbered with a whole pile of other items, like maps, dictionaries and a calculator that the Consortium had provided in case it might prove useful. A calculator, for heaven’s sake! These people seemed totally ignorant about Epistlewords, unless it was only a pretence.
Be careful, Phileas, be careful
. He gathered up all the superfluous supplies, stalked over to the armchair and ceremoniously dumped them there to clear table space.