‘I don’t believe so,’ Dowd replied.
‘Then you may go.’
Dowd took his leave without further exchange, escorted as far as the lift by Charlotte Feaver, and left to make the descent alone. They were better informed than he’d imagined, but they were some way from guessing the truth. He turned over passages of the interview as he drove back to Regent’s Park Road, committing them to memory for later recitation. Wakeman’s drunken irrelevancies; Shales’s indiscretion; McGann, smooth as a velvet scabbard. He’d repeat it all for Godolphin’s edification, especially the cross-questioning about the absentee’s whereabouts.
Somewhere in the East, Dowd had said. East Yzordderrex maybe, in the Kesparates built close to the harbour where Oscar liked to bargain for contraband brought back from Hakaridek or the Islands. Whether he was there or some other place Dowd had no way of fetching him back. He would come when he would come, and the Tabula Rasa would have to bide its time, though the longer he was away the more the likelihood grew of one of their number voicing the suspicion some of them surely nurtured: that Godolphin’s dealings in talismans and wantons were only the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps they even suspected he took trips.
He wasn’t the only Fifther who’d jaunted between Dominions, of course. There were many routes from Earth to the Reconciled Dominions, some safer than others, but all used at one time or another, and not always by magicians. Poets had found their way over (and sometimes back, to tell the tale); so had a good number of priests over the centuries, and hermits, meditating on their essence so hard the In Ovo enveloped them and spat them into another world. Any soul despairing or inspired enough could get access. But few in Dowd’s experience had made such a commonplace of it as Godolphin.
These were dangerous times for such jaunts, both here and there. The Reconciled Dominions had been under the control of Yzordderrex’s Autarch for over a century, and every time Godolphin returned from a trip he had new signs of unrest to report. From the margins of the First Dominion to Patashoqua and its satellite cities in the Fourth, voices were raised to stir rebellion. There was as yet no consensus on how best to overcome the Autarch’s tyranny. Only a simmering unrest which regularly erupted in riots or strikes, the leaders of such mutinies invariably found and executed. In fact on occasion the Autarch’s suppressions had been more draconian still. Entire communities had been destroyed in the name of the Yzordderrexian Engine. Tribes and small nations deprived of their gods, their lands and their right to procreate, others simply eradicated by pogroms the Autarch personally supervised. But none of these horrors had dissuaded Godolphin from travelling in the Reconciled Dominions. Perhaps tonight’s events would, however, at least until the Society’s suspicions had been allayed.
Tiresome as it was, Dowd knew he had no choice as to where he went tonight: to the Godolphin Estate and the folly in its deserted grounds which was Oscar’s departure place. There he would wait, like a dog grown lonely at its master’s absence, until Godolphin’s return. Oscar was not the only one who would have to muster some excuses in the near future: so would he. Killing Chant had seemed like a wise manoeuvre at the time - and, of course, an agreeable diversion on a night without a show to go to - but Dowd hadn’t predicted the furore it would cause. With hindsight, that had been naive. England loved murder, preferably with diagrams. And he’d been unlucky, what with the ubiquitous Mr Burke of the Somme and a low quota of political scandals conspiring to make Chant posthumously famous. He would have to be prepared for Godolphin’s wrath. But hopefully it would be subsumed in the larger anxiety of the Society’s suspicions. Godolphin would need Dowd to help him calm these suspicions, and a man who needed his dog knew not to kick it too hard.
1
Gentle called Klein from the airport, minutes before he caught his flight. He presented Chester with a severely edited version of the truth, making no mention of Estabrook’s murder plot, but explaining that Jude was ill and had requested his presence. Klein didn’t deliver the tirade that Gentle had anticipated. He simply observed, rather wearily, that if Gentle’s word was worth so little after all the effort he, Klein, had put into finding work for him, then it was perhaps best that they end their business relationship now. Gentle begged him to be a little more lenient, to which Klein said he’d call Gentle’s studio in two days’ time, and if he received no answer would assume their deal was no longer valid.
‘Your dick’ll be the death of you,’ he commented as he signed off.
The flight gave Gentle time to think about both that remark and the conversation on Kite Hill, the memory of which still vexed him. During the exchange itself he’d moved from suspicion to disbelief to disgust and finally to acceptance of Estabrook’s proposal. But despite the fact that the man had been as good as his word, providing ample funds for the trip, the more Gentle returned to the conversation in memory, the more that first response -suspicion - was reawoken. His doubts circled around two elements of Estabrook’s story: the assassin himself (this Mr Pie, hired out of nowhere) and more particularly, around the man who’d introduced Estabrook to his hired hand: Chant, whose death had been media fodder for the past several days.
The dead man’s letter was virtually incomprehensible, as Estabrook had warned, veering from pulpit rhetoric to opiate invention. The fact that Chant, knowing he was going to be murdered (that much was cogent), should have chosen to set these nonsenses down as vital information was proof of significant derangement. How much more deranged then was a man like Estabrook, who did business with this crazy? And by the same token was Gentle not crazier still, employed by the lunatic’s employer?
Amid all these fantasies and equivocations, however, there were two irreducible facts: death and Judith. The former had come to Chant in a derelict house in Clerkenwell; about that there was no ambiguity. The latter, innocent of her husband’s malice, was probably its next target. His task was simple. To come between the two.
He checked into his hotel at 52nd and Madison a little after five in the afternoon New York time. From his window on the fourteenth floor he had a view downtown, but the scene was far from welcoming. A gruel of rain, threatening to thicken into snow, had begun to fall as he journeyed in from Kennedy, and the weather reports promised cold and more cold. It suited him, however. The grey darkness, together with the horn and brake squeals rising from the intersection below, fitted his mood of dislocation. As with London, New York was a city in which he’d had friends once, but lost them. The only face he would seek out here was Judith’s
There was no purpose in delaying that search. He ordered coffee from Room Service, showered, drank, dressed in his thickest sweater, leather jacket, corduroys and heavy boots, and headed out. Cabs were hard to come by, and after ten minutes of waiting in line beneath the hotel canopy he decided to walk uptown a few blocks and catch a passing cab if he got lucky. If not, the cold would clear his head. By the time he’d reached 70th Street the sleet had become a drizzle, and there was a spring in his step. Ten blocks from here Judith was about some early evening occupation: bathing perhaps, or dressing for an evening on the town. Ten blocks, at a minute a block. Ten minutes until he was standing outside the place where she was.
2
Marlin had been as solicitous as an erring husband since the attack, calling her from his office every hour or so, and several times suggesting that she might want to talk with an analyst, or at very least with one of his many friends who’d been assaulted or mugged on the streets of Manhattan. She declined the offer. Physically she was quite well. Psychologically too. Though she’d heard that victims of attack often suffered from delayed repercussions - depression and sleeplessness amongst them -neither had struck her yet. It was the mystery of what had happened that kept her awake at night. Who was he, this man who knew her name, who got up from a collision that should have killed him outright, and still managed to outrun a healthy man? And why had she projected upon his face the likeness