To Indigo, Tanith Lee [best ereader for comics .TXT] 📗

in Venice. Anyway. We got on, shared some champagne – Look, Roy, would you do me a completely priceless favour?”

“Why not?” I said, smiling.

“You’re a diamond. Jan is a bit suspicious. Don’t know why. She never used to bother. Her age, maybe, she’s coming up for the big four nine this year. Tonight I’m going up west, and my plane from Spain friend and I – well, you can guess, I have no doubt. Doesn’t need one of your sleuths to solve it, does it? But Jan’s due back tomorrow and I may not make the airport to collect her. Not that she needs me. If she left her car in London that’s her look-out and she’s perfectly well able to call a taxi. But you know what they’re like. Could you back me up if it comes to it? That is, you and I had dinner tonight, it got late so I kipped in your spare room – you do have one, don’t you?”

Kip. His word – Sej’s word had been the more modern crash. Kip or crash. Crash…

“I’ve got a spare bed. Yes. I can say that, Harris. If you want.”

Rather than feel any fleeting gladness that Janette was to be deceived, or that I’d been involved in it, I felt a strange rush of oblique anger at him. Not because he wanted to involve me. It was far less logical. I was remembering how his brief flare of panic and distress during our last lunch had unsettled me, and sent me ultimately into the pub in the Strand. Where Sej had found me. Was found the right word? Dreadfully, maybe it was.

“That is so kind, Roy. I don’t want to upset Jan, you see. I mean this thing is just a passing – fancy. She’s too young for me, this chick off the plane from Spain.”

Chick.

Was Harris becoming his father? Is that how we fill the niches where the dead once dwelled, not like the ancients with their sacred bones or carved semblances, but by transforming ourselves into their image?

He downed his drink then.

“Well, it’s been good to see you. You look really good, Roy. I like the punk style. You ought to get some new publicity shots. I know a really splendid guy. I’ll send you his name and email. I can just imagine some tasty ladies in their forties really liking the look of you.”

Forty-five-year-olds, no doubt, the poor collapsed old cows.

I smiled.

We went out to his car.

“Why are the curtains drawn in there?” he asked me. “I meant to say before.”

He had indicated the front room.

“Some decorators painting it. It’s a mess at the moment. Stinks of paint too.”

“I know what you mean. Veronica – ah, pardon me, Vero – was having the villa painted. I’ve seldom seen a white so green. You know, I long for the good old days when you could hire a witch to cast a juicy curse.”

I smiled.

We shook hands.

“And you’re OK,” he said, “about that little thing with tonight?”

“Yes, Harris.”

He got into the Morris, careless of the whisky. He waved, and drove off down the road.

The only reason he had come to see me, evidently, was to establish his alibi. But whether I upheld it was really down to me. Doubtless I would. He was still partly my agent, after all.

XVIII

(‘Untitled’: Page 319)

CANDLELIGHT had revealed the face of Reiner.

He had survived the river. He was alive.

Having been dragged, about midday, into the Chamber of Revelation, Vilmos stood on legs that did not belong to him, made of strong stone like the supports of the Flavel Bridge. Planted in life’s rushing black water, they never shook.

Vilmos’s upper body too seemed to have its own physical if quiescent strength. He stood straight, his head held up, his arms and hands motionless at his sides. It was not either that he had been frozen and was too cold to move. It was that his body itself had decided it would not want to.

There was feeling in every limb, and in his torso and head, but though striped by severe flagellation and bruised by blows, pain was not all-consuming. He had no headache, had not had it, he thought, for more than twenty days – which was unusual. Awareness only was paramount. His mind worked intelligently and quickly.

Sometimes he did turn his head a little, for his head permitted him to do this. His eyes allowed him to move them freely. He had noted, his heart-beat was uncongested if rather slow, his breathing regular and deep.

Thus, seeing Reiner who might have been dead, slipping here and there through the crowd of men in the Chamber, Vilmos knew at once that Reiner had simply swum to shore.

Such an idea amused Vilmos. He felt for Reiner unfettered contempt. To survive now seemed, in some innate, inchoate sense, more slavish and conventionally drab than to have given in and drowned.

The import of the revelation did not strike Vilmos for a while, during which he continued to peruse the robed gathering of the Order of the Indian Mystery, as he stood upright in the centre of the room within a great new circle representing the Wheel. It had been made about him, its execution beginning in the late afternoon and proceeding through several hours. Those who had seen to this task had frequently grown exhausted. Some swooned and had to be replaced. Vilmos on his stony supportive limbs, his spine a reliable column, remained tall among them, watching the ones to the front and a little to either side, listening to those who worked behind him, since his head did not intend to let him to look over his shoulders, just as all the rest of him did not countenance the act of his fully turning round.

They had drawn the Wheel on the floor with the spilled blood of creatures brought in cages, from salt and liquefied silver, from ordure, which had been dried to powder and did not stink, or not greatly,