He won’t shed the leash – because it’s not just his job, but his craft, that he excels at like no one else.
He can be anybody – that is his becoming. He creates worlds – through himself, lives in artificial reality, pulling others into it – like a real Poet.
Alexandra watched his long lashes tremble, his chest rise and fall under the corner of the blanket she covered him with when he fell asleep.
Now, the world under the name Richard North was in danger – and whatever it was, she would find it. Whether to destroy it or not was up to Richard.
6. The World
Richard woke up when the sun was down. He was alone in the hotel room, covered with a blanket, the lights of Tokyo glittered outside from the height of the skyscraper. Pain shot through his side at an awkward movement, he was wincing as he sat upright on the bed.
Next to him, on the empty half of the bed, lay a tarot card. The World – from the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, with a half-naked woman in the center, surrounded by four characters: a youth, a bird of prey, a lion, and a bull.
Alexandra had left him a message – and is most likely walking around the evening city or having dinner somewhere … Richard wouldn’t mind a meal himself, he couldn’t remember the last time he ate, on the plane he couldn’t eat a morsel.
He would know the approaching footsteps from a thousand, when the door of the room opened he was still sitting on the bed, with a card in his hand and the corner of the blanket on his hips.
There was a container in Alexandra’s hands.
“Soup?” she declared right from the threshold.
Richard wanted to smile, but grew even more pensive and simply nodded.
“We’ll brainstorm later,” she went on. “You’ll tell me who these people are.”
“I can tell you now,” Richard replied. “About everyone except the lion.”
Instead of soup, Alexandra handed him the water bottle from the bedside drawer. Richard put the card on the bed and began to guzzle. She stopped him halfway through the bottle.
He was looking up into her eyes, sitting on the bed, he didn’t close the bottle.
“That’s you in the center,” he started. “The man in the menagerie is me.”
“I think it’s the opposite,” Alexandra chuckled. “At the very least, because you’re naked, at most – because you’re the main character of the story.”
Richard frowned, vertical lines on his nose bridge deepened even more.
“Possibly.”
“What are you doing?”
“Dancing.”
He remembered that the less he thought about it, the more accurate the interpretation would be.
“With two wands.”
“I have two of something – for balance,” Richard said. “Two of something.”
The dialogue sounded strange, but they understood each other perfectly well. Richard smiled weakly.
“The eagle, hawk, falcon, whatever the hell it is – the Circus …” he mused. “Because Falcon is chief of the Circus.”
Wordplay, symbolically meaningful surnames – and coincidences.
“The bull is Rote Stier.”
“Interesting,” Alexandra said as she sat down on the edge of the bed.
Richard drank water again, she didn’t take her eyes off him until he finished the bottle.
His full bladder was already making its presence felt, but he stubbornly refused to get up from the bed, unwilling to leave the conversation halfway through.
“What’s left is to figure out who the lion is.”
“What is a lion to you?”
She always asked that way, as if she knew the answer – and he, like an indolent student, was slow on the mark. She never gave him a ready solution – she made him think on his own, search for answers in his own system of symbols.
“The proud king of beasts, self-centered,” Richard recounted, “he surrounds himself with material benefits, chasing renown. Someone from the elite.”
He had no ideas about who it might be … Throughout various missions, he was always surrounded by the rich and the power-hungry, spoiled hypocrites who he had to pretend to be friends with. He was presented to them at the negotiation table, planted in their bed – so he would find out their secrets and draw closer to the control room.
He had too many enemies from the past. The one intending to spook him, threatening him with exposure, could be anybody.
“You said he called you by name.”
“The man in Rote Stier attire was a mercenary, he said what he was told to say. He was faceless, and it’s impossible to trace it back to the client through him.”
“He called you Richard North.”
“I’ve been thinking about that. On one hand, it could be one of your acquaintances,” Richard smirked, Alexandra maintained a neutral expression. “Someone who saw us together – while we were together: at your events, on the street, in Moscow, in London.”
“On the other hand,” she continued his line of thought, “someone could have seen you in the news and on social media, an old acquaintance could have seen you – and recognized you. That’s why he called you Richard North, with the public name – and not something else.”
“Fair.”
Richard sighed, ahead of him lay remembering all the lions – which were many. Lions, lionesses … Alexandra knew almost all of them – indirectly, through reading his dossier – that he gave to her when he travelled to Dante’s Hell – left it on the threshold, like hope. He didn’t fill her in on the details of the mission with the Rote Stier racing team – but she knew that he had spent these months working as a mechanic, travelling from one city to another across Formula One facilities.
“He said I was a dead man. This could be important, too.”
It was Alexandra’s turn to sigh.
“What does a dead man mean?”
He looked up at her – before that, he was looking at her hands with long white nails, folded on her knees.
“That he’s going to kill me. Or wishes for my death or—”
“That Richard North doesn’t exist,” they said in unison.
“It means that he is threatening to expose me,” Richard winced. “He knows I’m undercover.”
“But you have several covers.”
“And he learned the one that’s known to many – and he definitely recognized me by my face.”
“But why in Singapore specifically?”
“No idea,” he huffed, throwing the blanket aside and preparing to get up. “Maybe it’s a coincidence. Both days, I was racking my brain for what the connection between the Bulls and the Poets could be, but I can’t come up with anything except a personal vendetta. There’s nothing tying Richard Bateman and Richard North – except myself.”
He