‘Clean it off,’ he said.
The voiders were at his feet in moments, dutifully removing the scraps of matter from Dowd’s hand-made shoes.
‘What does this mean?’ Dowd murmured again. There was surely synchronicity in this turn of events. In a little over half a year’s time, the anniversary of the Reconciliation would be upon the Imajica. Two hundred years would have passed since the Maestro Sartori had attempted, and failed, to perform the greatest act of magic known to this or any other Dominion. The plans for that ceremony had been laid here, at number twenty-eight Gamut Street, and the mystif, amongst others, had been there to witness the preparations.
The ambition of those heady days had ended in tragedy, of course. Rites intended to heal the rift in the Imajica, and reconcile the Fifth Dominion with the other four, had gone disastrously awry. Many great theurgists, shamans and theologians had been killed. Determined that such a calamity never be repeated, several of the survivors had banded together in order to cleanse the Fifth of all magical knowledge. But however much they scrubbed to erase the past, the slate could never be entirely cleansed. Traces of what had been dreamed and hoped for remained; fragments of poems to Union, written by men whose names had been systematically removed from all record. And as long as such scraps remained, the spirit of the Reconciliation would survive.
But spirit was not enough. A Maestro was needed; a magician arrogant enough to believe that he could succeed where Christos and innumerable other sorcerers, most lost to history, had failed. Though these were bliss-less times, Dowd didn’t discount the possibility of such a soul appearing. He still encountered in his daily life a few who looked past the empty gaud that distracted lesser minds and longed for a revelation that would burn the tinsel away, an Apocalypse that would show the Fifth the glories it yearned for in its sleep.
If a Maestro was going to appear, however, he would need to be swift. Another attempt at Reconciliation couldn’t be planned overnight, and if the next midsummer went unused, the Imajica would pass another two centuries divided. Time enough for the Fifth Dominion to destroy itself out of boredom or frustration, and prevent the Reconciliation from ever taking place.
Dowd perused his newly polished shoes.
‘Perfect,’ he said. ‘Which is more than I can say for the rest of this wretched world.’
He crossed to the door. The voiders lingered by the body, however, bright enough to know that they still had some duty to perform with it. But Dowd called them away.
‘We’ll leave it here,’ he said. ‘Who knows? It may stir a few ghosts.’
1
Two days after the pre-dawn call from Judith - days in which the water heater in the studio had failed, leaving Gentle the option of bathing in polar waters or not at all (he chose the latter) - Klein summoned him to the house. He had good news. He’d heard of a buyer with a hunger that was not being satisfied through conventional markets, and Klein had allowed it to be known that he might be able to lay his hands on something attractive. Gentle had successfully recreated one Gauguin previously, a small picture which had gone on to the open market and been consumed without any questions being asked. Could he do it again? Gentle replied that he would make a Gauguin so fine the artist himself would have wept to see it. Klein advanced Gentle five hundred pounds to pay the rent on the studio, and left him to it, remarking only that Gentle was looking a good deal better than he’d looked previously, though he smelt a good deal worse.
Gentle didn’t much care. Not bathing for two days was no great inconvenience when he only had himself for company; not shaving suited him fine when there was no woman to complain of beard burns. And he’d rediscovered the old, private erotics: spit, palm and fantasy. It sufficed. A man might get used to living this way; might get to like his gut a little ample, his armpits sweaty, his balls the same. It wasn’t until the weekend that he started to pine for some entertainment other than the sight of himself in the bathroom mirror. There hadn’t been a Friday or Saturday in the last year which hadn’t been occupied by some social gathering, where he’d mingled with Vanessa’s friends. Their numbers were still listed in his address book, just a phone call away, but he felt squeamish about making contact. However much he may have charmed them, they were her friends not his, and they’d have inevitably sided with her in this fiasco.
As for his own peers - the friends he’d had before Vanessa - most had faded. They were a part of his past, and like so many other memories, slippery. While people like Klein recalled events thirty years old in crystalline detail, Gentle had difficulty remembering where he was and with whom even ten years before. Earlier than that still, and his memory banks were empty. It was as though his mind was disposed only to preserve enough details of his history to make the present plausible. The rest it disregarded. He kept this strange fallibility from almost everybody he knew, concocting details if he was pressed hard. It didn’t much bother him. Not knowing what it meant to have a past, he didn’t miss it. And he construed from exchanges with others that though they might talk confidently about their childhood and adolescence, much of it was rumour and conjecture; some of it pure fabrication.
Nor was he alone in his ignorance. Judith had once confided that she too had an uncertain grasp of the past, though she’d been drunk at the time, and had denied it vehemently when he’d raised the subject again. So, between friends lost and friends forgotten, he was very much alone this Saturday night, and picked up the phone when it rang with some gratitude.
‘Furie here,’ he said. He felt like a Furie tonight. The line was alive, but there was no answer. ‘Who’s there?’ he said. Still, silence. Irritated, he put down the receiver. Seconds later, the phone rang again. ‘Who the hell is this?’ he demanded, and this time an impeccably spoken man replied, albeit with another question.
‘Am I speaking to John Zacharias?’
Gentle didn’t hear himself called that too often.
‘Who is this?’ he said again.
‘We’ve only met once. You probably don’t remember me. Charles Estabrook?’
Some people lingered longer in the memory than others. Estabrook was one. The man who’d caught Jude when she’d dropped from the high-wire. A classic inbred Englishman, member of minor aristocracy, pompous, condescending and -
‘I’d like very much to meet with you, if that’s possible.’
‘I don’t think we’ve got anything to say to each other.’
‘It’s about Judith, Mr Zacharias. A matter I’m obliged to keep in the strictest confidence, but it is, I cannot stress too strongly, of the profoundest importance.’
The tortured syntax made Gentle blunt. ‘Spit it out, then,’ he said.
‘Not on the telephone. I realize this request comes without warning, but I beg you to consider it.’
‘I have. And no. I’m not interested in meeting you.’
‘Even to gloat?’
‘Over what?’
‘Over the fact that I’ve lost her,’ Estabrook said. ‘She left me, Mr Zacharias, just as she left you. Thirty-three days ago.’ The precision of that spoke volumes. Was he counting the hours as well as the days. Perhaps the minutes too. ‘You needn’t come to the house if you don’t wish to. In fact, to be honest, I’d be happier if you didn’t.’
He was speaking as if Gentle would agree to the rendezvous, which, though he hadn’t said so yet, he would.
2
It was cruel, of course, to bring someone of Estabrook’s age out on a cold day, and make him climb a hill, but Gentle knew from