Field of Reeds








A novel by Andrew Starling

Available from www.foxglove.co.uk
May be redistributed, but not for profit.











"St Peter at the gates of heaven and hell. He's a busy man. Dead Christians popping up in front of him at six a minute. So his judgements have to be fast. I think he goes on clothes.
"There's a backlog. Millions waiting to be judged. I see it as a great sports hall up there with bare concrete walls, no windows, something from the sixties. Half of them are singing - hymns, tribal chants, salsa. Dancing. Hell of a commotion. St Peter's in his chair, trying to do his best. They line up to stand in front of him. He looks at the next one for a few seconds, says, 'Nice suit, right hand door'."


The Professor








1  Foxglove, Kite and Balloons

It was Spencer's turn. The bishop seemed the best piece to move, not for any great strategic reason but because of the shape of its hat. He lifted the bishop from its square, moved it diagonally a couple of spaces through the air like a real chess player might do, and inserted it in his left nostril. It fitted nicely. When he took his hand away it stayed there. As an afterthought he took the second black bishop from the board and used it to plug his right nostril. This one stayed in place too. Perhaps it had something to do with those grooves on the bishops' hats.
"'S that how you feel about religion?" slurred the Professor. Their quart of Jack Daniel's was almost empty. An average nine year old could have beaten them both at chess, but happily they were finding it difficult to beat each other. They were sitting in their favourite chess-playing spot in the middle of the biggest disused lot in the city, ten acres of raw earth and rubble half a mile from the bay. The moon was close to new and still feeble. A few bright stars were beating the city glare.
"Agnostic defence." Spencer's voice sounded very strange inside his head, very nasal and  disembodied. He liked the sound of it. Well-distanced from reality.
"Hundreds of years old, this game is," said the Professor. "It's easy to forget that. Two empires fighting each other. The king, his consort, his castles, knights and clerics, all at war."
The chess pieces belonged to the Professor, but if he disapproved of Spencer's unorthodox move, it didn't show. His eyes were open wide, as innocent as a child's. A change in the light caught his bulging cheeks, veins like scarecrow's hands clutching the cheekbones beneath the skin. His coat was open, showing off the single baby-pin that secured his fly. Apart from the ruined cheeks and trousers he looked like an ageing cherub. How strange, thought Spencer, that I can see your face and you can see mine, yet we rarely see our own. Even when they shaved it was usually blind. It wasn't as hard as mirror-people might imagine.
Behind the Professor was the contractors' yellow machinery, a big conference of hydraulic arms and dozer blades, a Japanese army resting from its daily battle with the soil. They were all Komatsu's and Hitachi's. Whatever happened to good old Caterpillar? Spencer had a brief vision of himself patrolling the fence around that Japanese compound, in uniform, with his flashlight and sidearm. A vision that would go back to a comfortable apartment in the small hours when the shift was over and snuggle up with an adorable girlfriend for the overlap hours, until she rose complainingly for work. 
All history now. Can't change history. And it had never been his compound to guard.
He took the bishops from his nose and wiped them on his coat. Instead of putting them on their squares he put them to one side, on the red plastic crate the board was resting on, signifying that the game was a draw under rule 142C, the excess Jack Daniel's rule. If the Professor was right, and this was a war of empires, these two had just declared a ceasefire.
The Professor's description intrigued him. Two warring empires. A curious thought, except that wasn't the way wars were fought these days. Modern wars were fought by multinational companies for the hearts and wallets of the world's consumers, for dollars rather than land. Maybe it was time to bring the game up to date, invent a new set of pieces. The pawns as Mexicans and Chinese stooped over sweatshop tables. The bishops in advertising, with TVs for heads and passing out magazines. The knights as company accountants with tall stacks of cash, but taking it in rather than handing it out. The rooks as company attorneys, holding writs. The queen as chief executive officer in a high-backed chair. And the king? The king nothing more than a squiggly line on a chart - that most crucial yet vulnerable element of any company, its stock market share price.
A stronger flash of light caught the Professor's face. Spencer turned to see where it had come from. A raised freeway passed a dozen yards behind him, its concrete stilts holding the twin decks too high for the cars and trucks to be seen. Only their ghosts were visible; headlights turning the night air white or reflecting off the bottom of the upper deck, casting shadows circling behind the pieces on the board. But the light hadn't come from there. A white limousine was crawling down the contractors' track through the centre of the lot, between the broken concrete and banks of earth, its twin white eyes rising and falling with the bumps. Spencer didn't feel much one way or the other about its approach, except that it was an intrusion. Some half-lost memory told him it was a car he vaguely knew. 
It came to a standstill a few yards from where they were sitting, engine off, looking faintly ridiculous amongst all the raw earth and rubble. The big rear door clicked and opened wide, showing the backside of a pair of jeans, which reversed out awkwardly. The figure stood upright and turned, smiling.
Spencer groaned and looked away.
The Professor stared. "You're George Stiles. I've seen you in the papers." He said it quietly. A secret thought accidentally said out loud.
"You must read the business pages, then." George shut the limousine door with a nudge of his bum. One hand was holding a folding mahogany chair, the other clutched a limousine-bar decanter. A small cut-glass spirit tumbler, upside down, rolled around the stopper. "And who are you?" he asked, amiably.
The Professor collected himself. "I'm the Professor." He motioned at Spencer. "And this gentleman is Gent." His voice was much clearer than it had been a few minutes ago. Spencer guessed he wasn't the only one sobered up by the arrival of the car.
"Is that what you call him?" George walked across to join them. He shook the chair gently. It opened gracefully like a folding umbrella. "Is that what you call him?" he repeated. "Gent and I already know each other, don't we, Spen?"
Spencer self-consciously toyed with the knot of his tie. It felt cool and silky to the touch. So did his suit, especially at the seat and elbows, even from the inside. From a distance he looked half-way respectable, but not close up. He looked at the sky rather than at George.
George sat down. The decanter and glass clinked as he poured himself a drink. "Armagnac. Forty years old. I don't think a drink's mature unless it's  a little older than me. Maybe I'll have to change my mind when I'm seventy. Would you like some, Professor?"
The Professor grasped the decanter. He was eager to take it but didn't know what to do with it next. He held it but didn't raise it to his lips.
"Come on, it's not formal-night. You can drink straight from the bottle. Nobody cares." George ran his free hand through his fair hair. "Or do you want a glass from the car?"
God, I wish I hated you, thought Spencer. It would be so much easier if I hated you. But you're such a goddamn charmer.
George sprawled on his chair, looking very relaxed. He'd barely changed since Spencer had last seen him - what was it? - two years ago. He had that round, boyish kind of face that doesn't age, just melts a little as time passes. He was still slim, nearing forty yet not pregnant with approaching middle-age. That posture across the chair was typical George. It was hard to remember ever seeing him sat upright. The check shirt and jeans were trademarks too. He always wore casual clothes, even for business. When you were as rich and powerful as George you didn't have to live by the normal rules.
The Professor drank from the decanter and offered it to Spencer, who took it gratefully.
"Gent mentioned you a couple of times," the Professor told George as Spencer drank. "Said he knew you." He glanced at Spencer, looking for clues on how to deal with this cold reunion. "I guess I believed him."
"We went to high-school together. Spencer worked for Foxglove for a long time. What would it be, Spen, ten years?"
Spencer decided it was time to end his silence. He put on a smile. It probably looked false but it was the best he could do. He gave the decanter back to George. The armagnac was fine if you could live with the flavour. It was a sipping drink. In big gulps it tasted thick and raisiny. "How's the battle for control of the Universe?"
"I'm winning," came the standard reply.
This had always been their opening exchange as teenagers, when George had bought his first humble computer and started selling programs to change the screen display. There was a certain sharpness to it. Even all those years ago Spencer had recognised George's ambition. Given the difference in their circumstances now, it was doubly acidic. Yet Spencer wondered if he'd said it to re-establish a withered bond.
"That where you worked on security, isn't it?" the Professor asked Spencer. "Foxglove."
"Until George fired me."
George sipped his drink from the perfect glass. The security lights of the contractors' compound crawled around it, reflected from fifty yards away. Spencer started putting the chess pieces back in their tattered plastic bag.
"I'm not here to open old wounds," said George, gently.
"You think they've closed, then, do you?" Spencer sucked his lip. That was more than he'd wanted to say.
A heavy silence followed, weighed down by the unsaid, but George had never been one to stay silent for long. "Do you ever think about your old colleagues? You knew some of them a long time, must wonder what they're up to these days."
Spencer didn't respond. Like anybody who'd worked with a group of people for many years, he was curious. The answer was yes, but he didn't want to say it.
"Sammy's got another grandchild." George laughed. "Little family of rabbits he produced there."
Spencer had a soft spot for Sammy. He'd worked on security too. It couldn't be more than a few months before he was due to retire, thought Spencer, but still he said nothing. He concentrated on putting the chess pieces away.
"Ever wonder about Bry? She's still at Foxglove, still thinks about you from time to time. I know."
Spencer's hands stopped moving. That really hurt. If George hadn't fired him he might never have lost Bry.
George's tone became more serious, more demanding. "I'd like you to come back and work for me, Spencer. What do you say?"
Spencer snorted. "A drunk as security chief? Yeah, really."
"Not on security, no. I have something else in mind."
"No way." Spencer went back to clearing the chess pieces again. Only three to go. He wanted there to be more.
"A Foxglove employee has gone missing. A very important one. Raymond  Kite came to work for me on a project called Balloons. We haven't seen him for more than a month. He stopped coming into work. The lease lapsed on his apartment. He's disappeared."
"Then call the police, put an advert in the paper, hire a detective agency. No. Why don't you just buy one? You can afford it." 
As founder of Foxglove - now the largest software company in the world following the sudden collapse of Microsoft - George Stiles could afford an agency or two. The Wall Street Journal put his fortune at seven billion dollars. Yet Spencer could remember him as a young man with nothing but debts to his name, a garage-electronics freak with no garage. George's first PC, second-hand of course, had sat on top of his parents' washing machine in the utility room. There was nowhere else for it to go. On spin cycle the keyboard couldn't be used and the screen was a blur. They'd had a good laugh about that, back in the days before George had to be taken seriously. His big break had come with the Magic Ear, a piece of software that finally allowed everybody to talk to their computers direct without going through the irritating middleman of a keyboard. And it worked, without close-up microphones or any of the other limitations the competition was still saddled with. It learned the user's voice and after a few weeks became more accurate than a typist. It came as standard now with almost every new personal computer, and every Magic Ear sold added roughly fifty dollars to George's personal wealth. A few detective agencies would cost him little more than his spare change.
"You knew some of the same people Raymond knew," replied George. "Anyway, I need somebody I can trust."
The chess bag was full. Spencer drew the strings at the top and gave it to the Professor. A plane was coming in over the bay, murmuring, its engines cut back low. Spencer looked into George's grey eyes. Did he really mean what he'd just said? For a moment he wished he was truly sober so he could tell. It passed. A pointless thought. He'd never been able to tell.
"A thousand dollars a day," said George. "A thousand dollars a day and all expenses. And I mean all - clothes, car, hotel, the works. 'Course you'll have to get off the bottle first. I've lined up a detox centre. Should only take a few days."
"No way." Spencer shook his head. "No way, no way, no way." It wasn't even worth thinking about. There were so many reasons why he shouldn't go back. Like... and if they'd just give him a minute he'd think of them. Suddenly he felt very drunk. 
George sipped his drink, saying nothing more. Waiting. 
God, he could be so irritatingly cool when he wanted to be. The patient fox. Foxglove. A fox wearing boxing gloves, or kid gloves, or gauntlets. A whole goddamn drawer full. They'd been together when George had come up with the name. They were both twenty-one. George earned two thousand dollars a year from selling display-modifiers, before anybody had even thought of the expression "screen-saver", and was up to his still-freckled brows in debt, but he knew he was going to be big, that he needed a company name. He'd come up with it through reading a piece in Reader's Digest that said a drug was extracted from foxglove flowers, a drug called digitalis. Digital is. A cute little connection for a computer company.
Spencer abandoned his disordered thoughts and looked up at the freeway, at the phantom cars that couldn't be seen. He turned to the limousine, dirt-streaked and motionless - the driver, another crazy bastard, switched off along with the engine. Loyal employee. 
No. He wasn't going to give in. Not this time.
"Nice sky," said George. He caught Spencer's startled look and laughed. "I've mellowed a little."
Spencer raised his eyes heavenward. Yes, it was nice up there. He could see Orion. A satellite was passing through it, blinking on and off as satellites appear to do, like mechanical fireflies. Fireflies advertising for mates. Maybe it would find a mate up there, something exotic - Russian or French - or a space-shuttle to dock with. Good old sexy American technology.
"What do you say, Spen?"
"Definitely not. No way. Not a chance."
He could hear George inhale. A satisfied breath. Bastard. The one giveaway sign in his whole unreadable personality, the loud breath he always made when he closed a deal. He was so sure of himself, so confident in his powers of persuasion, in his manipulative words, that he'd already decided he'd be able to turn Spencer round. 
But Spencer wasn't going to give in. He was sure of that. He wasn't going to fall for the Stile charm yet again. No, not this time. This time George had got it wrong.








2  Michael's eyes

The top floor of the Merchant Building was very plush, all dark wood panelling and high ceilings. Two dickie-bowed waiters in red waistcoats stood by the elevator doors offering champagne. Others burrowed through the crowd carrying drinks on silver trays: chardonnay, mineral water, orange juice. None appeared to be taller than five foot two. Presumably this was supposed to make the guests feel comfortably superior but Spencer found it freakish and distracting. 
Though not distracting enough. He wanted them to perform cartwheels, juggle five full glasses at a time, spin trays on the tips of their outstretched toes like a true circus act of caterers. Sober life was leaving a gap in his mind where alcohol had once been. It needed filling with something diverting.
 How George had persuaded him to come back to reality and look for Raymond Kite was still a mystery. He put it down to the uneven battle between a manipulative captain of industry and a drunken bum. It was something he didn't want to think about too hard, along with his week in detox, that literally sickening transition from intoxication to sobriety. As a drunk he'd spent most of his time trying to block out the awfulness of the past, and now, as a regular sober member of society, here he  was doing exactly the same. Inevitably the memories would come back, it wasn't so easy without the drug. At least it was only the past few days he was trying to block out, rather than months or years. And he could live with the present. That made a change. He could smell his armpits without thinking Pepperoni, stroke his chin without hurting his hand, feel machine-conditioned air on his teeth and catch himself in the mirrors on the wood-panelled walls without questioning their quality.
There were too many people in the room for him to snatch more than a glimpse of himself here, but back at the hotel he hadn't spared the mirror. It had surprised him when he'd moved and the face in the mirror moved too. He found that he actually quite liked what he saw, even if it did seem to belong to a stranger. It was like discovering in the attic some fondly remembered and battered old school satchel.
 He'd excused himself from potential vanity by wearing the most striking suit in the closet, a suit that simply had to be checked out for suitability. It was intended to be some odd form of camouflage amongst the eccentric types he expected to be at the exhibition, an Armani cotton number in a muted shade of turquoise that proclaimed: now here's a difficult colour, and didn't we manage to bring it off well? Strangely, it was a colour that Spencer felt he'd worn before, though he couldn't remember when, or why. And it was a colour that demanded a why.
When he'd arrived at his room in the Ana Hotel, fresh from detox, clothes had been waiting for him in the closet. Some anonymous Foxglove employee had done their job exceptionally well. Everything fitted exactly. Not only that, but the styles were right. They were precisely him. He never wore jeans. Chinos were as casual as he got. Nor did he like teeshirts. He felt more comfortable in slightly smarter clothes, somewhere  on the crossover line between work and play. He couldn't remember when he'd first started to dress this way, or why. Perhaps it was a side-effect of having to wear a uniform or just part of the psychological quirkiness that had turned him towards security work in the first place. He'd be the last person able to answer that question. Even as a drunk he'd been relatively well-dressed. Filthy most of the time, and higher than a frightened skunk, but not casual. Twice he'd found suits in the dumpsters and worn them till they'd fallen apart. That was how he'd got his street-name: Gent, short for gentleman.
George, no doubt, would be attending the show in his usual workshirt and denims. It was a peculiar place for him to have chosen to meet, an exhibition and sale of the works of Michael Sorden, the photographer. Spencer hadn't heard of Michael Sorden before, but then photography had never been a passion. Nor had it been for George, as far as he could remember.
George was being very secretive about the search for Raymond Kite. He didn't want it to look too obvious that Spencer was working for him or that he wanted Raymond found. He'd arranged for them to come across each other as if by accident at the exhibition, like a pair of ridiculous cold war spies. He'd said nothing more about Raymond. Everything would be explained at the show, that was George's line. And he could take whatever line he liked since he was paying the bills.
Spencer couldn't decide whether he liked the venue or not. The jump from streetlife to elegant culture was extreme. Maybe it was the kind of immersion in deep water that he needed, but right now the shock wasn't doing much for the balance of his mind. Even when his life had run at its most regular he'd never felt truly comfortable at this type of event.  
 He stood quite still for a while, an organic statue to be ignored, a chameleon in bright cotton clothing. The suit was the perfect choice for blending in with the delicate petals of the punters on the top floor. A few bland businessmen had slipped in, their greys and whites now as stark as neon, and plenty of electronics industry people from the valley attempting to mix business-style with cool, but all were easily out-numbered and out-hipped by the peculiarly-dressed arty crowd with its pony-tails and Indian beads and fringed shirts and other determinedly unique items of clothing. The place was ridiculously busy. The elevator had been packed to capacity and now, here in the ante-room before he'd even reached Michael Sorden's pictures, there were scores of people milling around. In fact such a forest of bodies that he didn't see Bry until she was standing right next to him. 
He jumped like he'd been jabbed with a pin.
"Spen. You're looking well."
Blank, thought Spencer. I'm feeling blank and thinking blank and surely I must be looking it too. Seeing God appear on television would have been less of a shock than finding his ex-girlfriend by his side.
"I, er." He had absolutely no idea what to say. 
"You've even got a tan." She seemed very calm in comparison.
"Unhealthy outdoor living," he muttered.
She looked lovely, as always. She was wearing a lime green dress in high-necked oriental style, modest in a sense but also very tight-fitting. Her dark hair was gathered in a studiedly-ineffective bun, leaving wisps and trails around her face and neck. Spencer had always found her beautiful. Not the beauty seen within half a second of looking at a pin-up girl, but the slower beauty that creeps up on you as you notice more and more exquisite details. The eyelashes, the earlobes, the crook of an arm, a perfectly-placed dimple on the bottom. He'd spent over four years getting to know those details, shared an apartment with them, shared a bed, hopes and dreams. Too many memories. He couldn't talk to her right now. He'd have to make his excuses and look for her later when he'd recovered, when the debris had cleared.
"Have you seen George?" he asked. "I'm supposed to meet him here." It was the obvious escape route, with the added advantage of being true.
"He's in Germany."
"What?"
"Or at least on his way. He flew there this afternoon. I'm standing in for him." She seemed amused by the idea. 
"Oh." So much for pre-arranged plans. So much for the grand diversion of searching for Raymond Kite. What was he supposed to do now? 
The whole aim of coming to the show was to meet George and get a proper briefing. All he knew about Raymond so far was a vague physical description - a fairly tall, skinny man with blond straggly hair. Hardly the fat dossier from which to mount a manhunt. George hadn't even supplied a photograph.
Spencer wondered if he should ask Bry about Raymond, and decided against it. She was head of public relations for Foxglove; that's how they'd met. He couldn't imagine she was involved in the search, not when George was trying to keep it hidden. 
"Did George tell you why I was coming?"
Bry gave him a puzzled look. "Yes, of course. To meet Michael Sorden."
"Right." A definite underhand play from grandmaster Stiles. But where was it going to lead? It was very frustrating for George not to be there, and seemed odd that he should have chosen Bry as his replacement, given their history. For the moment, Spencer decided to ride with it, if only to find out why he was supposed to meet the photographer. He didn't have any other plans for the evening.
"Still playing the clarinet?" All that history, and all he could come up with was small-talk. He still wasn't sure how he felt about being with her. All those mixed emotions an old partner brings on. Regrets, sentimentality, confusion, the residue of love. Even fear, wondering if somebody who knows enough to hurt can still be trusted with all that intimate knowledge. 
"When I get time to practise."
"Still eating your food raw?"
"Like an animal. How about you? Still tidier than a talkshow toupee?"
It wasn't the best line she'd ever come up with but Spencer laughed anyway. It was true, he'd always been obsessively tidy. And she'd always made fun of it. Wit was one of her charms he'd fallen for. Yet behind it a very complicated and not always happy person was hiding. It had taken him a year to discover that dark interior. Intimate knowledge worked both ways.
"How's Teresa?" Bry's sister suffered from multiple sclerosis. An attack had left her bedridden just before their relationship ended.
"In remission. Still no feeling in her left foot, but otherwise walking around normally."
Spencer plucked a glass from the silver tray of a passing dwarf, a glass of mineral water. Alcohol did not appeal. Bry took a glass of chardonnay. He realised that they hadn't made physical contact, hadn't shaken hands or pecked cheeks, as ex-lovers ought to do. As cold as you always were - she'd be saying to herself. But it was too late to correct that now.
"Nice suit," said Bry. "I love the colour." So that was why it was so familiar. It was Bry's favourite. "I got the size right too. I wasn't sure I could remember. Is the other stuff OK?"
"You bought the clothes in my room?" Very curious. 
"George asked me to." 
"They're fine. No. More than fine. They're perfect." It would have been Bry who left the brown envelope on the desk too. Five hundred dollars and a Foxglove Amex card. It wouldn't have been hard for her to guess the contents.
"I wish I could get George to smarten up sometimes. I get bored with his denims and workshirts. I buy him decent things but he won't wear them. It took me two months to persuade him to wear a suit for a single day. One day. Can you believe that? He would have married me in jeans if I'd let him."
An enormous landslide. Boulders falling in slow motion into place above Spencer's head in a dry-stone jigsaw, a cracked prison ceiling. People opening their mouths all around but no sound coming out. Miming nonsense. 
The dust settled. A wave of idle chatter returned to his ears. He could see the ring on her finger now. Why hadn't he looked before?
"He didn't tell you?"
Spencer shook his head.
Bry frowned. The frown changed to a questioning, sympathetic look. Her voice softened, truly sincere. "Oh, Spen, I'm so sorry. I thought you already knew. That was a dreadful way to find out. I can't believe he didn't tell you."
"Nice catch," said Spencer, emptily. Already his mind was busy with its reconciliations. Hardening. You should have been mine but I drank and you bitched. Too late. Can't change history.
"A compliment for a fisherwoman," said Bry, unamused. The soft tone had gone.
"Sorry."  She was right. That hadn't been a nice thing to say. The surprise had caught him off guard. But he was dealing with it now. Coping, just.
Ha, George. At this moment he just had to be sprawled across the first class seat of a plane somewhere over the Atlantic, glass of armagnac in one hand, looking at his watch and sniggering to himself, the wily bastard.
"How long?"
"A year last Monday."
"Do you like being married? Is it good?"
"Shall we go through and meet Michael? It might take a while to find him." 
Obviously not good for Bry's hearing.
*
Stationed by the doorway from the ante-room into the main viewing chamber was an oyster bar - wild oysters,  rock oysters, two labels of champagne - which Bry completely ignored. Spencer remembered that she didn't like oysters or champagne. Champagne gave her a headache. They walked past it at speed and into the display area, where he came to an immediate standstill.
Michael Sorden's pictures were extraordinary. They were all of eyes. Human eyes. Sometimes photographed in pairs but more often individually, and enormous, anything up to six foot by four for a single eye. Browns, blues, greens, hazels, all displayed on a maze of poster-panels. Roughly thirty of them were staring at Spencer right now. The mass of people, the hundreds of viewers, seemed insignificant beneath their gaze.
Bry, who always walked like she'd left her purse somewhere and was heading back to retrieve it, had to retrace her steps to join him.
"Curious, aren't they?" she said, seeing his expression.
"Really. But would you want one in your lounge?"
"We tried to find a place for one at Carmetta." Carmetta was George's mansion south of Quartz Valley. "But it dominated every room we put it in. Eventually George hung it in his study. I think he's taken it down now."
"Very beautiful. Does he sell enough to make a living?"
Bry shook her head.
Spencer looked around the room, at its elaborate high ceiling, at its tall windows and velvet drapes, at the dark wood panelling with two fireplaces set into it, flames decadently dancing in the hearths on this warm and pleasant evening. A trace of artifice, certainly, but more than a trace of money too. "It must cost a fortune to hire this place."
"It's a sponsored show."
Spencer was curious that he hadn't seen any signs. "Who's the sponsor?" Whoever they were, they believed in low-key publicity.
"Foxglove. Didn't George tell you?"
Spencer sighed resignedly. "No."
They moved further into the room and stopped in front of the first picture. The detail, the resolution, was astonishing. Veins stood out like forks of lightning. And the iris, hazel-coloured and more fibrous than a fan of hair, seemed to carry on behind the print as if there were some kind of dome back there to accommodate it.
"Brilliant," said Spencer. "Weird but brilliant. I wonder why nobody's done it before?"
"Probably because they couldn't afford to. The photography equipment costs a fortune, so I'm told."
"Do you do the publicity for him, for Michael Sorden?" If Foxglove was sponsoring the show then it seemed likely that Bry would be involved.
"I delegate most of it. It's not exactly core business."
"No," agreed Spencer. 
He was tempted to ask her how work was going, but decided against it. Put to anybody else, the question would have seemed perfectly decent and sociable, but to Bry it was likely to appear unkind. Bry's attitude to work was at best ambivalent. When they'd lived together, almost every weekday morning she'd mooched around for the first twenty minutes as if she had a funeral to attend. She described work as pimping time for money. She'd never come to terms with it, with the waste of her life she felt it represented. Spencer occasionally felt the same way too, but had never been able to understand the profound depth of her despair until his own job had gone so drastically wrong. The paradox was, in her day to day work none of this showed. She was invariably witty and charming, very popular with everybody she did business with, including all those tungsten-nosed journalists - the wolf-pack as she called them, privately. She did a fine job. That's why George had moved her to the top of the ladder in less than two years. The greatest tribute to her skills was that her more experienced colleagues, the ones she'd leapfrogged to reach this high position, bore almost no resentment towards her. They'd seen the inevitability of it even before it was apparent to George.
"Work's still the same," said Bry quietly. She had a habit of doing that, of hearing things he hadn't said. "Shall we carry on looking for Michael?" she added, more cheerfully.
*
They found Michael Sorden almost in the centre of the gallery, chatting to a conservatively-dressed woman in her early thirties. Bry introduced Spencer to them both. The woman's name was Jill, Dr Jill Freedy, director of the Institute of Movement. It was an enigmatic name for an organisation but Spencer didn't pursue it. He didn't have much interest in her. She was wearing a tweed two-piece that somehow seemed to reach out to the walls and blend in with the wood panelling. She wasn't slim, yet her movements were appealingly delicate. Spencer decided she had an elegance that some men might find attractive, but he wasn't one of them.
He felt he ought to say something intelligent to Michael Sorden about the pictures. He didn't want to simply say - I think your pictures are wonderful. So instead he said: "Tell me, what do you do about pupil size? People find big pupils attractive, don't they?"
Michael appreciated the thoughtful introduction. "Yes. That's true. So the more naturally attractive the eye is, the smaller I make the pupil - using more light. And with the plainer eyes I use dim lighting to dilate the pupil. That way there's always a conflict in the way you perceive the final picture."
He talked quickly but seemed more self-aware than other artistic types Spencer had met; casually very smart in his white linen suit and blue turtle-neck. His hair was sparse and wavy and swept back from his forehead. Its colour was so extravagant that Spencer felt it had to be natural. Straw blond at the front, muted orange in the middle and almost black at the rear. Surely nobody would have their hair dyed that way. His face was ruddy with bushy eyebrows and bright blue eyes. There was something furtively mystical about them, like they'd witnessed the secrets of the occult but didn't want it to show, at least not here in polite society.
"Otherwise," Michael continued, "everybody would buy the prints with large pupils and I'd be left with a permanent collection of the small ones." He smiled at his own witticism.
Spencer nodded. "But what about the colour? Some colours must be more popular than others."
"Capricorn," replied Michael, obscurely. "There's a certain coloration that's green, amber and hazel all at the same time. Amber near the centre, green towards the outside. It's found mostly in Capricorns, in Capricorn women. That sells with almost no pupil at all. I brought three tonight. They've all been spotted."
So far Spencer had only seen two prints with the little red spot in the corner that signified a sale.
"And what's your favourite?" Bry asked Jill. She was doing her PR lady facilitator-of-the-conversation bit.
"There's an orange-brown with black streaks." Jill turned to Michael. "Where is it?"
"Ah. Karen Riscarti's eye. I'm not sure." He gestured over the heads of the crowd towards the corner furthest from the door. "Over there, I think."
"It gives the impression of movement," Jill continued. "I don't know why."
"Nor do I," said Michael, chuckling to himself.
In his peripheral vision, Spencer could see Bry adjusting her hair. She had a habit of doing this when she was with other people but thought they weren't looking, like a peculiar version of hide and seek. He wondered if he might be next to be asked about his favourite picture, so he began studying the dozen or so he could see with the intention of choosing one, but at that moment the proceedings were interrupted by the arrival of Pierre - an outsize Frenchman with a huge moustache that completely hid both his lips. The luxuriant back-brushed growth on top of his head was a perfect match for it.
"Hi," said Pierre, to the company in general. He turned to Spencer and shook his hand warmly. "Spencer. It's good to see you again." He had the most beautiful French voice. A voice that could sell perfume or mesmerise wolves. Spencer had once suggested to him that he could make a fortune doing radio commercials or maybe even TV, but he seemed content to work for Foxglove, to live by his expert ears rather than his excellent vocal chords. "Are you back in the city for long?"
"A while," said Spencer, which was as honest as he could be.
Although Pierre was behaving as if Spencer hadn't totally lost the plot two years ago and disappeared like an errant genie into a bottle of tequila, he was also scrutinising him thoroughly, as if checking the sober ghost were real. 
"How's the farm?" asked Spencer.
"Better than living in the city. The grapes last year were perfect. Finally I managed to make wine that is drinkable, though I don't think it will win prizes."
He was an interesting mixture, Pierre. A beautiful voice, a full English vocabulary, yet phrasing too close to text-book formal. He was the only Frenchman Spencer had met who adored junk food, as his flying-boat stomach testified, yet he couldn't abide the city and lived a two hour drive away in a farmhouse surrounded by vines. He also wasn't a fan of big social occasions. The showing must have been important for him to come. 
"And the farmhouse - still big enough for your CDs?"
Pierre sighed wistfully. "I've always preferred the purity of gramophone records." He shrugged. "But what can you do? The world is run by commercial Philistines."
"You could always transfer them to vinyl. You still have the arcade machine?" 
The question was barely necessary. The vinyl disc recorder was Pierre's most treasured possession. Once it might have earned its living in a nickel recording booth, probably on an amusement pier, now it had retired to Pierre's lounge. The red vinyl discs it recorded lasted just three minutes, so the idea of transferring CDs to them was a joke. Pierre smiled and nodded appropriately. 
Spencer decided they were getting on well enough for him to push a little. "It would be nice to see it again." Carefully he avoided looking at Bry. 
Pierre glanced at her briefly, then looked at Spencer for what seemed an embarrassingly long time before answering. "Yes, of course. Why don't you drop by?"
"Tomorrow afternoon?"
Pierre nodded but didn't say anything. 
The other members of the group had waited patiently for this little private conversation to come to an end, and now Bry stepped in as facilitator again. "Do you know what FOTI means?" she asked Pierre. If  she felt upset by Spencer's insensitivity, it didn't show.
"Flypaper Of The Iris," replied Pierre, without hesitation.
"What's that?" asked Spencer.
"It's what Michael calls his photos," explained Bry. "Fotis. Clever, isn't it?"
Spencer wasn't sure whether it was clever or a little contrived. And maybe Bry thought so too, but she was in PR mode so it was impossible to tell.
Michael wanted to expand. He touched Spencer on the arm and turned him to inspect the closest picture. The colour of the iris was grey. Almost, though not quite, monochrome. Strangely this enhanced the texture and detail of the eye, in the same way that a black and white photograph is sometimes more revealing than a colour one.
Michael ran his fingers along the radii of the iris, from the pupil towards the outer white. "The eye of Mr David Ludlow. You see these lines? Like the fibres of a fruit with a stone in the middle, or, for the more scientific, the vanes of a turbine. No two eyes are the same. An iridologist can read these lines and tell you if you were seriously ill as a teenager, or whether you once broke your left leg. It sounds incredible but it's true. Everything that happens to you can be seen in your eyes. Your life history is there."
He glanced at Spencer to check that he was paying attention, then turned back to the picture. "I see it like this: these hairs, as they seem, these radial hairs that fan out from the pupil - some of them appearing to be deep inside, as if the eye were a cavern - I think they're sticky, like a spider's web, or like flypaper. And everything that comes into the eye, all those beams of light, all the things the eye sees, some of them stick to the flypaper and stay there. Kitchen stools, lovers' bodies, mothers' smiles, broken cars, apricots, stars. And when you look into an eye you can see what that eye has seen. Whether it's seen good things or bad. Nice sunsets or wicked actions. Not literally of course. But in a sense. You can see."
Michael stopped. He was waiting for a reaction.
Spencer, though a little bewildered, gave him an honest one. "I think that's a nice idea." He turned to the others, whom he guessed had both seen this presentation before. They were looking at him rather than at Michael. "That's neat, isn't it? Flypaper of the iris. I like that." Behind Jill he could see a dark green eye. He'd noticed it before, but now he was looking at it in a different perspective. Suddenly it seemed very sad. "It's almost like you can look into a person's eye and see their soul."
It wasn't supposed to be a comment of great perception but it appeared to stop Pierre and Jill dead in their tracks. They were perfectly still for a moment, as if on freeze-frame, not even breathing. Then, just as suddenly, they re-animated and carried on as if nothing had happened. Bry hadn't been affected. Spencer wondered if his imagination had been playing tricks on him. After all, he'd been sober for less than a week.
Bry certainly noticed the hiatus. "Has anybody seen that new exhibit at the modern art museum? It's quite peculiar. Cheap household fixtures - plastic door handles, gilt faucets, fluorescent light fittings - laid out in the shape of a huge pistol on a gallery floor. You have to walk over a raised gangway to view it." It was supposed to be a smooth and lubricating introduction into a new topic of conversation and, as usual for Bry, it worked. 
"I think it looks very tacky," said Jill. "Which is hardly surprising when you consider what it's made from."
"I haven't seen it," said Pierre. "But I read about it in the local paper. I think that's as close as I need to get."
Michael took an entirely different view, and for the next few minutes held forth about it being a grand metaphor for the negative effect of modern surroundings on the mind.
Spencer had no informed opinion to give but was quite happy to watch and listen as his companions carried on talking. He felt pleasantly detached. It was such an archetypal conversation for the educated, moneyed classes to be holding. So classic it was amusing. He hadn't come across this kind of thing for two years. The panhandlers on Bourse Street were more interested in the quality of the garbage behind the Giant Eagle store on Dixon, or the parentage of the bum who'd got to that big stoagie on the sidewalk before them.
He'd noticed that the gallery of eyes and the fact that they'd been discussing eyes in some detail had made him self-conscious about eye-contact. He wondered whether other people around the room were suffering from the same problem. It seemed likely that they were. An entire room full of people thinking too hard about eye-contact with strangers.
Michael, Pierre and Jill didn't seem to be having any difficulties, at least when talking between themselves. Clearly they knew each other well. Bry was more of an outsider, and although she was professionally good at hiding it, Spencer could see she was having to work harder on her eye-contact with Jill, and to a lesser extent with Michael. Pierre wasn't an issue. She'd known Pierre through work for a long time, and of course there'd been those visits to the farm together.
He couldn't help trying to fathom what it was she saw in George, why she'd married him. It had been troubling him ever since he'd heard the ridiculous news. There was the money, of course, the security, but that had never been high on her list. She liked depth. George had a little of that, but not a lot. He was a charmer, admittedly, and playful sometimes. Maybe that was enough. And he'd caught her on the rebound.
George's absence was still frustrating.
Jill announced she had to leave for the airport. She'd been looking at her watch ever since Spencer's comment about souls. When she'd gone, there was a moment's awkward silence, soon tackled, as always, by Bry.
"What's your favourite eye colour, Pierre?"
"Green. I find green eyes fascinate me, and they look so unworldly."
"Spencer?" prompted Bry.
Don't you remember? - thought Spencer. Hazel, the colour of yours. But she might find this embarrassing if he said it in company. So instead he said: "Blue. Good old Californian beach-bum blue."
"I like brown," said Michael. "I think it's the most difficult colour to read and that makes it the most interesting, especially in the blow-ups. But if you like blue then you must see these." Abruptly he walked away, leaving Pierre and Bry and Spencer to follow his trail.
He stopped by a pair of the wildest ice-blue eyes that Spencer had ever seen. Two irises full of electricity, two fairytale mosaics on the bottom of a sunny swimming pool floor, the eyes of an individual who walked on the edge of the sane world and who might be a genius or could just as easily be in psychiatric care.
"What do you think?" asked Michael.
"Unbelievable," said Spencer. "I think they're male, though I don't know why."
"Correct."
"Do you know the person?"
"I have that pleasure."
"Is he - how shall I put this - well-balanced?"
"He makes the rest of us seem only marginally sane."
Michael had given names to go with other eyes, so Spencer felt free to ask: "And what's his name?"
"Raymond." Michael hesitated, then felt obliged to carry on. "Raymond Kite."








3  The voice

The elusive Mr Kite. Missing for five weeks and not a word. 
For all Spencer knew, he could be looking for somebody who'd already gone to the Professor's great sports hall in the sky. Yet he couldn't help feeling happy about Raymond's disappearance. It was a stroke of good fortune, at least from his own point of view. A week ago he'd been destitute and now he was part of the Foxglove empire again. The company Amex, that lovely membership card for the adult sweetshop, sat snugly in his new jacket. He was driving a hired Trooper down the freeway on a beautiful afternoon. He hadn't driven for two years and was enjoying it. He would have whistled to himself if he'd been the whistling kind.
Yesterday's exhibition had gone far better than he'd hoped. Michael Sorden's mention of Raymond was a perfect lead. A lead that he'd been able to purchase too. Nobody else's red spot was on the picture, so Spencer had attached one of his own. At three thousand dollars he wasn't sure he'd go through with the sale, even with George's money, but it was a great way to find out more from Michael about Raymond. He'd follow that up tomorrow when Michael had finished dismantling the show. Today he was going to concentrate on Pierre. He hadn't forced the invitation to the farm for purely social reasons. Raymond was a project leader at Foxglove, and Pierre, with his extraordinary audio skills, worked across most of Foxglove's projects. Pierre would almost certainly know something about Raymond.  
Spencer found it strange to be driving to the farm alone. He must have done the journey dozens of times with Bry all those years ago, but couldn't recall ever going by himself. It was also strange to be going with a business-reason in mind, to find out about Raymond Kite, however well that reason might be disguised. The visits before had always been purely social, dominated by Pierre's two passions in life.- music and wine.
On all the various formats combined, Pierre claimed to have five versions of the complete works of Mahler, plus at least three each of Wagner and Verdi. He had Mozart concertos and Bach fugues that hadn't been re-recorded since 1910. He could tell the mood of a flautist by the timbre of the instrument, by the way the changeable human airways affected its final tone.
As a hobby he collected old gramophones. Three of them stood in his lounge, their big polished trumpets snaking into the air like oversize cobras and turning the place into an antiques showroom. Spencer assumed they would still be there. He couldn't see Pierre parting with them. Everything at the farm had an air of permanence. That was part of its appeal. The vinyl disc recorder would be there too. It looked innocuous enough, a slim up-ended trunk, nothing like as pretty as the gramophones, but Pierre had a devious habit of brushing past it and switching it on without anybody noticing so it recorded three minutes of inane conversation. Then he'd wait half an hour and play it back on one of the gramophones, much to Bry's amusement, since it was usually Spencer who got caught out saying the stupidest things. Invariably they were drunk at the time. When Pierre decided to have a serious drink he launched into it with such gusto that even Spencer felt intimidated. Then, when the evening drew to a close, Spencer and Bry would stagger to the guest bedroom and laugh in bed and possibly even try to make love if they hadn't been too outrageous with the brandy and the wine.
Fond memories. Innocent times. 
Spencer took a wistful breath and put them to one side.
He passed over the Silver Stile bridge. Already the fog was sweeping into the bay beneath its massive span, like a smoke-screened invading armada. But overhead the sun was shining, lighting up the hills and what was left of the blue bay water. It was a nice day for a drive.
The one issue that was still bothering him was the lack of contact with George. He'd tried phoning George's PA, Valerie, to get a number in Germany, but hadn't got very far. It made no difference that she remembered Spencer from his years at Foxglove. George, she said, had described his excursion as a Richter-seven trip. If the big one hit California while he was away, he wouldn't expect to be disturbed by a phone call for anything less than a seven. She took Spencer's number and said she'd pass it on to George when he rang in. Spencer had to leave it at that. He didn't want to make her suspicious. Under the terms of his secretive arrangement with George he wasn't supposed to phone Foxglove at all
Valerie's reaction had been a disappointment but no great surprise. His expectations had been modest because when he'd asked Bry a similar question at the show, her answer had been very droll. "Yes. That would be useful. If you find out where he's staying, do let me know."
Schubert's Ninth played on the car radio. Spencer was listening to CLASSFM in an attempt to get into Pierre's classical frame of mind. He gave up and switched to RAMXFM. Steely Dan played Rikki Don't Lose That Number. Pierre would approve of Steely Dan too. 
*
The farm was some way off the main Sanoosa valley and relatively isolated. The big winemakers hadn't thought Pierre's plot was worth buying and most of his wine proved them right. Usually he sold his grapes cheap for bulking, but in a drought year he could produce something drinkable and then the process quite excited him, like an astronomer fascinated only by the visits of a five-yearly comet. 
Perhaps the big winemakers were also put off by the state of the farm. It was a rambling, inefficient-looking place, which was just the way Pierre liked it. There were three tumbledown outbuildings and a Mediterranean-style villa with large decks at front and rear. The whole farm had a French feel about it, a little corner of France transported to north-west America. Many of the vines were old and the rows had developed dog-legs, as if they'd managed to transform the stoop of age into something horizontal. Pierre liked that too.
Spencer was a big fan of the farm's irregular charm and quirks. As it came into view he felt uplifted, like a traveller arriving home after a difficult journey. He parked the Trooper in front of Pierre's Cherokee and walked along the chalk track past the villa and slightly uphill to the outbuildings. There was a small garden between two of them, partly devoted to flowers and partly to vegetables - eggplant, capsicum, ladies fingers, tomatoes. Here he stopped in the sunlight and stared at the plants for a while. This was his favourite place on the farm. It had a timeless, soothing air about it, an air of primitive cultivation, mankind tilling the land to produce food. The smell was gorgeous too; thick and verdant. As he stood there in silent contemplation, a spider the size of a beer-coaster crawled slowly from one green lattice to the next. He walked back to the villa and let himself in. The door was unlocked, as always.
"Pierre?"
No response. Pierre probably had his headphones on. He had a large sound-studio on the farm and often said he could accomplish more work there than in Foxglove's laboratories. Apart from the vines there were no distractions.
Spencer walked through the country-style kitchen to the lounge. The three gramophones greeted him like wide-mouthed dogs rising to welcome an old friend. The pier machine was still there. He carried on through into the studio and was surprised to find no Pierre. He checked the bedrooms, the bathroom and finally walked out on to both the big decks and yelled out to the fields. But no sign of Pierre.
This was puzzling. He looked at his watch. Ten past two. Pierre had been expecting him at two. He walked back into the kitchen, took a Coke from the fridge, then went back to the lounge and waited.
This was the room where they'd spent their pleasant evenings. It was beautifully cluttered. The three big gramophones were on separate tables carefully positioned around the bare wooden floor, along with the free-standing pier machine. Three easy chairs and a large brown sofa - markedly upright yet very comfortable - were arranged in the space remaining. Fortunately the room was large enough to absorb all this without anything having to touch the walls, which were packed from floor to ceiling with shelves of vinyl albums and tapes and CDs and stacks of sheet music. On the chimney breast was a grand old picture of Pierre's parents, grey-haired and smiling against the backdrop of a golden cornfield somewhere near Toulouse. Elsewhere on the wall were two enormous speakers. By the patio window were two more, and facing into the disused fireplace was a bass woofer in the shape of a deep sea Nautilus. Spencer felt something had changed, something small but significant. He couldn't identify it yet he knew he didn't like it. 
Sliding doors separated the lounge from the studio. Right now these were wide open. In the evening Pierre would close them, symbolically shutting off work for the day. The studio looked relatively businesslike. Its central feature was a thirty-two track mixing desk. There were no windows and the heaving shelves of tapes, CDs and papers filled every inch of wall without exception. In theory the clutter here was all work-related. Pierre attempted a strict separation of work material in the studio and non-work material in the lounge, but inevitably the two became mixed up, diffusing into each other's territories like sea and fresh water in an estuary. Curiously, what really distinguished the studio from the lounge was the lack of colour there. The mixing desk and most of the tape and CD covers were monochrome, grey and white, whereas the lounge had many colours on its walls and an overall golden glow from the patio window lighting up the wood of the floor and the gramophones.
Finally Spencer realised what was troubling him about the appearance of the rooms. The rows of tapes and CDs on the shelves were ragged and disorderly. That was very unusual for Pierre. Spencer tried to tell himself that it was of no consequence, but the thought wasn't convincing. He wanted to tidy them, for distraction apart from anything else, but resisted the temptation. Instead he leafed through the rock albums in Pierre's collection. There were some cherished first pressings: Abbey Road, Blond on Blond, Led Zeppelin I, The Joker. He also fingered through the row of small red vinyl discs from the amusement-arcade machine. The first group was blank - Pierre had commissioned a batch of four hundred so he wouldn't run out - the rest had the date and participants diligently written on their covers. Spencer found one of the later recordings of himself and Bry and would have listened to it if he could have got Pierre's absence off his mind.
After fifteen minutes he abandoned waiting and went to check the outbuildings. Pierre's bicycle, the one he used to roam the vineyards, was still there; an old vineyard tractor, a spraying attachment, more gramophones in various stages of repair, but no sign of Pierre. Eventually he went back to the lounge. Feeling restless, he picked out the little red disc again and started winding up one of the gramophones. Pierre always left them unwound. It was supposed to be better for their springs.
He couldn't say why, but when he'd finished winding he had the urge to look inside the pier machine itself, perhaps because it was the source of what he was about to listen to, or simply for sentimental reasons. There was a disc on the turntable and it wasn't a blank, he could tell by the uneven reflections on its surface. This too was strange because Pierre always left a blank ready on the turntable. It was part of his catch-you-unawares game. In fact it was so out of character that Spencer knew he had to listen to the disc on the turntable rather than the one from the shelves. So he moved it from the recording machine to the wound-up gramophone, flicked off the little felt pad brake, and lowered the needle.
*
"What are you doing Pierre? Please don't walk around in your condition. Sit down. You're making Alex nervous." This was an exceptional voice. Cold, authoritative. Spencer had never heard it before. He couldn't place the accent, it was too neutral, but there was a touch of Boston haughtiness in there. The crackling of the recording added to its old-world pretensions.
"Not as nervous as he's making me." That was Pierre, and the way he talked left Spencer mortified. It was dreadful. There was something badly wrong. Pierre's normally calm and beautiful tone was missing. His French accent was far stronger than normal and there was a waver there, so strong it sounded like a recording fault. But it wasn't. Pierre was petrified and he was hurting. 
"Ah," exclaimed the cold voice, "the early Deutsche recording of Haydn's 101. A little slow for my liking. I never liked the Berlin Philharmonic in that era. Too pedestrian." No music was playing in the background. Spencer assumed the man was looking through the shelves.
"For God's sake," said Pierre. Still the same awful tone, but a  little more defiant. "How can you injure me and then pretend you are a man of culture, Mr - how did you call yourself? - Kohl."
A sickened feeling had developed in Spencer's stomach. An immobilising fear. He'd caught it from Pierre through the record, like a sound-transmissible disease.
"Please don't blaspheme, Pierre," said Kohl, icily calm. "It isn't polite. And in answer to your question, many cultured people have been involved in wars. There is a long history of that. Also I didn't shoot you, I asked Diamond to. For a scientist you are negligent with the facts."
There was a pause. Spencer could hear the clatter of plastic cases - tapes or CDs. And he could hear Pierre's breathing. It was unnaturally  heavy. 
"Diamond," said Kohl, "pass Pierre a sanitary towel. He's bleeding."
"Keep away from me," muttered Pierre. "I don't need your help."
Another pause, then Kohl again. His voice was quieter, he'd moved elsewhere in the room. "Please concentrate, Pierre. I asked you three questions. Your answers to all three have been unsatisfactory. You have one minute to provide satisfactory answers or Diamond will shoot you again."
"You are a sadist," said Pierre. Spencer had to admire his courage. "An ordinary sadist. You think you are special but really you are a sick man. You need help."
"I think not," said Kohl, unmoved. "A sadist would always go for the eyes or genitals. Think about that, Pierre. We are not sadists. We shoot to show we are serious, not for the pain. You are the sick man here."
There was something about Kohl's voice, about its confidence, about his logic, that made him more intimidating than any thoughtless lunatic could be.
"I don't know where Raymond is, so I can't tell you." Pierre sounded fearful again rather than defiant. Perhaps he was being threatened directly with a gun. Perhaps he'd realised he didn't have much of his minute left. "I haven't seen him for almost six weeks now. I can't tell you something I don't know."
"Balloons," prompted Kohl.
"There are only three of us with any knowledge of Balloons. There's no fourth man on the project, unless you include George. If you're looking for a fourth man, it must be George."
"I don't think that's true, Pierre."
"And yes, I have a recording of Raymond's voice, but it's at Foxglove."
"That's also difficult to believe."
"You're not even looking in the right place, Kohl." A stronger tone again. "Recordings for work are kept in the studio, not here in the lounge."
Kohl didn't comment on this, nor did he bring up the one minute deadline. The noise from the  plastic cases continued in the background. Spencer wondered where Pierre had been sitting. It was probably the sofa. There were no bloodstains. Looking at the sofa he could almost see the outline of Pierre sitting there, like a ghost, with his lips curled in anguish but still hidden beneath his thick moustache. Recorded voices and silent visions. No other reality.
"Do you like Oldsmobiles?" asked Pierre. 
It was such a ridiculous question that Spencer caught himself about to smile.
"I just wondered if you'd chosen it or if it had been chosen for you,"  continued Pierre, apparently rambling now in his fear. "A black Oldsmobile is a fairly ordinary car."
Still no response. If one came it would have to be from Kohl. Spencer realised the other two hadn't said a single word.
"Half past one on a Tuesday and a black Oldsmobile arrives," muttered Pierre, "delivering Kohl, Alex, Diamond and their guns."
Spencer looked at his watch. About an hour ago. Then it suddenly struck him that Pierre was talking to him, not to Kohl but to him, through the medium of the recording machine. Pierre appeared to be ranting, unhinged by fear, even deranged, but that was cheap pantomime. He was leaving clues on the recording. That was the whole point of brushing past the machine with a bullet in his body and switching it on. He'd wanted Spencer to discover it, to listen to it, to find out what had happened to him. 
"I can't work out if you're Mafia or agency," said Pierre. Surely he was pushing his luck. "I don't think you're Mafia because you would have a better car."
And still no answer from Kohl.
"But then if you were agency there would be no need for all this. Foxglove has a good relationship with the agency. We have nothing to hide."
"I fear you have," said Kohl. "Something very unpleasant to hide. Ah! And not just this." Finally a change of tone. Kohl was obviously pleased. "R. Kite. Very properly labelled, but hidden amongst the Vivaldi." A cassette case clattered in the background. "You said you didn't have a copy at home, Pierre."
"I didn't say that, exactly."
"But you were being deceptive."
"Did you expect a guided tour?"
"I have to wonder about your responses to my other questions."
No more words for a while. Pierre didn't attempt to justify his answers. It was impossible to guess what was going through his mind at this time. All that could be heard was his breathing.
Kohl snorted. It was clear on the recording. "Diamond."
"Merde!" Pierre's voice. Anguished. "This is crazy. You..."
A shot rang out. It was distorted but it was a crack rather than a boom. Small calibre. Spencer stood with his mouth open.
Pierre yelped and screamed something in French that Spencer couldn't understand. But at the end of it he added the word Fuck, as if it belonged there. Then in English: "For God's sake!"
"Yes," said Kohl. "Foxglove isn't very open about the project, Pierre.  But we know what you're doing. Do you feel like God?"
Spencer was having difficulty standing. It wasn't just the shooting, or Pierre's pain - he was breathing so heavily it dominated the recording like a drum-beat - it was Kohl's voice. So uninvolved, so sure of itself. The voice of a surgeon explaining an operation, a judge talking to a man he'd already condemned. It was impossible to deal with.
"What are you talking about?" Pierre was immensely distressed now. His voice quite the opposite of Kohl's; forced, uneven, high.
"Where would Raymond Kite hide, Pierre?"
"I have no idea. If I knew, I would have found him."
"Difficult to get on with the Devil's work when you're missing a key demon?" Suddenly Kohl sounded much louder. He must have been standing right next to the machine, nearly touching it.
"Raymond is no demon. He's..." Pierre tailed off. He was almost whimpering.
"Go on. He's... no angel."
"Fuck you."
Spencer closed his eyes, though it didn't help. Pierre knew he was going  to die. Beneath the anguish, his voice had changed. He was giving up with the flattery of living.
"Did you think you could do your experiments without anybody noticing?  What use are human bodies for electronics research, Pierre?" Kohl had moved away from the machine. Spencer could imagine him standing over Pierre, his face emotionless, sallow. Only a fleshless face could belong to a voice that austere.
"That's not my area."
"But it is Raymond's. And you worked very closely with Raymond."
"Everything is legal."
"But not always moral. Do you feel tainted?"
"You're insane."
"No. The world is insane. Full of scientists playing God. I represent order."
"Jesus!" Too much nonsense. Too much pain. Pierre wasn't listening any more. He was groaning with every breath. 
"Who died for your sins," said Kohl, quietly. 
The words came to a stop. All that Spencer could hear was the rasp of Pierre's tormented breathing. It was impossible to bear. Spencer's teeth were clenched and his eyes shut tight in sympathetic agony. He wanted to be there. He wanted to stop it. He wanted to turn back time and arrive early, take Pierre away from here, take him anywhere.
He jumped. There was a second, muffled shot. Then silence. The silence of death, of relief from living.
Kohl broke it once, so casually the words sounded obscene. "Check for stains."
The record carried on broadcasting mild noises of movement. Then it reached the end of the groove and clicked and clicked and clicked until the spring wound down and the clicking slowed to a torturous slow beat and there was one final muted tick and then nothing. Spencer stood perfectly still. Quite paralysed. 
He came to life slowly, like a sleeper awakening, opening first one eye and then the other. Abruptly he made a dash for the bathroom to empty the contents of his stomach into the toilet bowl in a violent, gushing vomit that never came. He stood there expectantly for a while and then knelt down, wondering whether hearing a murder yet not seeing one should leave him with only half a reaction. Was this how he should feel? Nauseous but not sick at the death of a friend. Had alcohol numbed him or detox or... things that had happened before? For one dreadful moment, soon pushed aside, he could see a part of himself in Kohl. And hated it.
It was ridiculous, but kneeling on the floor with his hands on the toilet bowl he couldn't help remembering the last time he'd been in this position. A week ago, in detox. He laughed. Sharp. Hysterical. Then found himself and began cleaning things; wiping the bowl, bleaching it, flushing it, walking round the house with tissue paper cleaning the doorhandles, walking out to the outbuildings and cleaning their handles too, going back to wipe the gramophone handle, its switch, the pier machine, his Coke can, the fridge door, his fingers. He caught himself wiping his fingers. Did he expect to wipe the prints off those too?
The lounge was empty. Recently there had been four people in it. Then three and a body. Strange that it should seem so peaceful now. The small red disc had taken him into a different world, a little window of violence opening inside the bigger window of a sunny, ramshackle vineyard day. He recalled the tape amongst the Vivaldi and checked the shelves. There was a gap. It had been taken.
There was something else - something that he didn't want to do but had to be done. Slowly he walked back to the gramophone and with tissued fingers lifted the red disc from the turntable and put it in his jacket pocket. Then walked out to the car.
There he sat for a full minute, remembering how to drive. 









4  Weather in the head

On a small table beneath a spotlight is a bottle of Cuervo Gold tequila. On another small table stands a bottle of Evian water. Between the two sits a monk wearing a brown habit. The monk has a grey verge of hair, otherwise he's bald. A spotlight shines off his crown, which is round and smooth and looks like an art deco teapot. There are two more monks in the dim background, watching. They make Spencer feel like he's the heretic up before the Grand Inquisition.
The monk under the light says something to him, but Spencer needs a drink before he can listen. A pair of woodpeckers tap at his temples. He has a big chuchaqui to shift. Only a decent shot of liquor can do this. He makes a move on the tequila but the monk grabs his arm. His grip is very firm. He sits Spencer down in a chair facing him.
"Heaven or hell, Spencer?" he says. He has an accent and although Spencer knows he should be able to place it, he can't. "I want you to think about this choice. Heaven?" The monk points to the Evian. "Or hell?" He points to the tequila.
"Hell," says Spencer, laughing. But he's wondering what the fuck's going on. He has an accent himself and it's very easy to place. He's talking in the voice of Pierre.
He reaches for the tequila again and to his surprise the monk doesn't stop him. Spencer unscrews the cap, lifts the bottle and pours four fingers down his throat in a frog-serenade of gulping. He grins at all three monks, takes another hit and sets the bottle on his knee. The monks grin back at him. Grin like hell. "Nice suit," says the monk with the art-deco skull.
Chuchaqui is one of the Professor's words. "I've got a grand chuchaqui to shift," the Professor would say. It means hangover in some South American Indian language. Quechuan, if Spencer remembers correctly. The Professor has a stock of strange foreign words and myths from around the world. That's one of the reasons Spencer likes his company.
An hour after he first twists the cap, in a pristine toilet Spencer throws up the entire bottle of tequila; kneeling on the floor, arms embracing the porcelain. The violence of his vomit appals him. Kneeling by the white enamel, he feels like he's wringing himself out, twisting his body from feet to forehead to force out every drop of moisture. He wipes his fingers across his mouth, dirtying them on a sick-sodden moustache that he's never grown. 
*
A cold sweat covered Spencer when he awoke at the Ana Hotel. His unsettled mind had mixed real memories of his week in detox with a judgement scene starring Pierre. Two bad memories rolled into a single bad dream. His damp clothes disgusted his skin.
The curtains were closed and the lamps were off but a mute TV illuminated the room with its shot-sequence version of lightning. A pretty woman in a leotard was silently fighting a curious V-shaped exerciser with round handles, something like a cross between a shooting stick and pair of shears. All the colours seemed to be there on screen, yet the outcome in the room was blue. Blue walls that should have been magnolia; the fallen blue obelisk of the desk, ridiculously long; two blue armchairs, pleasant in full light then turning into squatting headless gorillas, hands on knees, as the TV passed through a phase of darkness; the angular dark cube of the mini-bar.  
When he'd got back from Pierre's, Spencer had laid on the bed and hopped through the fifty-seven channels looking for a Bogart movie or a Vietnam classic, hoping it might improve his mood, and finished up on the shopping channel because it was so awful that God-help-us it was even funny for a while. Somehow he'd drifted off amongst the golf-carts, gruesome jewellery and bizarre kitchenware.
He got off the bed and with disdainful fingers peeled away his damp clothes. His watch, on the bedside table, showed five thirty p.m. He'd been asleep for less than an hour and felt worse now than when he'd come in, too many thoughts going through his mind for any of them to make sense, like an overloaded Foxglove computer array. Some strong emotion in there but too much confusion to know what. Grief, irritation, self-pity? Bad weather in the head, that was the way the monks had described it.
They were Irish. He could remember that easily now he was awake. The three of them had run the detox centre with Spencer as their single patient - attention only George's money could buy. Father Kenneth was the eldest, the one with the verge of hair and the strong grip that left warning bruises on Spencer's arm. The two in the dream's background were Father Dougal and Father Liam. Father Dougal played perpetually with the tassels of the cord around his habit. His hands were truly enormous. They made Spencer think of elephants' feet. Father Liam was the youngest. His hair was full and dark and almost, but not quite, cut in a fashionable flat-top. All three had impressive physiques. When the sleeve of Father Liam's habit rode up it revealed the blue of a tattoo on his muscular forearm.
The concept of weather in the head had been introduced by Father Kenneth, the one with the rim of hair, on the first day of Spencer's detoxification. Feverish with the DTs, Spencer hadn't been sure whether it was Father Kenneth himself standing next to the bed, or a red devil with steaming skin carrying a tray of waffles and maple syrup and speaking in the voice of Father Kenneth. 
"How are you feeling?"
"What do you think I feel like, asshole? Where the hell am I?"
"In detox. The first few days are the worst. Try to think of it as bad weather in the head. Sometimes you're confused by the thunder and wind. Depression is a day of grey drizzle. Then one day you're up and the sun is shining."
"Fuck off."
Father Kenneth placed the tray by the bed and left as requested.
It was Father Kenneth, too, who had defined the weather in Spencer's head right now. The description had come much later during Spencer's stay, when the DTs were less troublesome but sobriety was beginning to present its own set of problems, like not being able to find his balance in the real world.
"How's the weather today?" asked Father Kenneth.
Spencer was staring out of the big window of his detox centre bedroom. It looked on to a pleasant garden with shrubs and beyond to a low ridge. No roads, never any people. It was sunny outside, as it had been every day since he'd arrived. But that wasn't what Father Kenneth was asking.
"What kind of weather would you call it, Father, when you feel wound-up, restless, on the brink of some big emotion, but you're not sure what it is?"
Father Kenneth thought about it. "I would say, an occluded front. Yes, that's what I would say."
Spencer turned away from the window. "Then that's how I feel. Occluded."
Not pleasant memories. 
On TV a gardener smiled for the camera as he demonstrated a combined rake and hoe, rolling the shaft in his hand to switch from one head to the other. Spencer sat nude on the edge of the bed, staring at the dark cube of the mini-bar. 
He shook his head, picked up the telephone and dialled George's number at Foxglove. Valerie, George's PA, answered. For some reason, perhaps because the curtains were closed, he hadn't been expecting her. For once in his life he'd wanted voicemail. Was it worth staying on the line? Should he put the phone down and turn into an anonymous statistic? Valerie was far too strong to be disturbed by silence. She would shrug it off. He sat there for many seconds, as mute as the TV.
"Hello?" said Valerie, for the second time.
"Hi." His lungs had to pump themselves up. It took effort to get the word out. "It's Spencer again. Did George call in?"
"He did."
"Did you ask him to ring me?"
"I passed on your message, yes." Valerie clipped her words in mild rebuke.
"Thank you. I'll wait for his call."
"Goodbye." 
The dialling tone came back before he'd moved the phone more than a few inches from his ear.
Damn the man. Why the hell hadn't he called? There were so many questions that George should be answering. Raymond's project was clearly far from ordinary. Why was Kohl so opposed to it? Who was he working for? What of the bodies that Kohl had mentioned? Pandora's box had been broken into and the contents would have to be explained.
Spencer so desperately needed to tell somebody about Pierre's death. That was the real reason he wanted to talk to George. The awful knowledge was eating him up, as unshared secrets do. The good citizen in him had wanted to pick up the phone in Pierre's lounge and tell the police, but he knew how suspicious they'd be. It wouldn't take them long to discover that for the last two years he'd been a bum, a derelict, a wino, a disreputable member of society who deserved to be locked up at the first sign of trouble. That's why he'd put so much effort into wiping his visit away.
He caught himself staring at the mini-bar again. Five thirty-five. He must make another call.
He brightened with confidence from an era gone by. There were things he could find out about Raymond Kite even without George's assistance. From time to time he'd had to investigate employees before, as Foxglove's Head of Security. Suspected expenses fraud was the usual reason, though sometimes it was dubious CV details and once there'd been a full-scale case of embezzlement. There was a very simple, though admittedly illegal, way to find out about people. He'd used a crooked credit agency, Hatrim and Son - No Longer Trading. He'd been using the place for eight years and for all that time the No Longer Trading sign had been hanging in the dirty front window as a deterrent against straight, genuine clients accidentally wandering in and asking for something legal. Neither old man Hatrim or his son had operating licences, which saved them a lot of worry over having them withdrawn.
Spencer picked up the handset again and phoned old man Hatrim. He asked for the credit card histories, medical records and social security details of Foxglove's Raymond Kite. The old man grunted something and asked Spencer to hold the line. He came back a minute later to ask if the work should be debited to Spencer's new Foxglove Amex card. Spencer said yes, thanks, and rang off. He knew he didn't have to give the card number.
That goddamn mini-bar. Why the hell did the thing have to be so close to the telephone?
If he didn't keep using the phone, he'd drink. He picked it up again. Actually it was quite fun making calls in the nude. He hadn't done it for a long time. There was a thrill involved, the thrill of minor deception. If only he could stay up with the thrill and not come down again.
There was one more person he could call about Raymond, though he wasn't sure that he should, and that was Michael Sorden, the photographer. He was due to visit Michael Sorden at his studio in Beaumont tomorrow morning and hand over the money for the picture he'd red-spotted. Right now, tomorrow seemed too far away. He took out Michael's business card and phoned the number.
Michael sounded like the phone call had woken him. It took him a while to remember who Spencer was. "Ah, yes. The picture of...er, the blue eyes." 
Spencer could imagine him brushing his hand through his ridiculous multi-coloured hair as he came to wakefulness. It was the ideal time to catch somebody. "I have to say, I've been wondering if I made the right choice."
"The price, is it? I'm sure I could come down a little."
"Partly."
"How about two thousand?"
Rather a big jump, thought Spencer, three to two in the space of a few sleepy seconds. Michael had seemed very keen to sell the picture the night before. Unnaturally keen, as if he couldn't wait to get rid of it.
"Can you tell me more about the subject?"
Michael didn't answer.
"You've got to admit he looks a little strange. I just want to know a bit more about him if he's going to be staring at me every day."
 The response at the other end was a tremendous noise, like thunder arriving slowly. In combination with the lightning of the TV Spencer found it very unsettling. Eventually he recognised the rhythmic rattle of a train. The studio had to be right next to the tracks, if not actually on them.
"One of the penalties of low rent," said Michael, when the noise had passed. "You get used to it, even get worried when they're late." Thankfully, during the pause he'd obviously decided to be more forthcoming. "Raymond Kite is a genius. A charismatic genius. There aren't many of those." 
"What kind of genius?"
"Electronics. The neural-computer interface."
"Connecting computers to brains," translated Spencer. What was George trying to do? Get a direct line? Think, and thy computer shall perform? "Could he do that - make connections?"
"About ten years ago a Naval research institute laid the groundwork. It's possible to do on tissue, but not on a live person. Too invasive..." Michael suddenly stopped.
"You seem to know a lot about it."
No response from Michael.
"When did you last see him?"
After a few seconds, Michael said: "You worked for Foxglove, didn't you?"
"I did."
"On security?"
"And you work for Foxglove too. We have that in common."
"How did you know?"
"It's not hard to guess. You knew Raymond. George is no patron of the arts. He wouldn't have supported your show if it wasn't business."
"He's a lot better than you think. Quite a mellow man these days. He even got married."
"I know."
Michael paused. Another sound arrived down the line. This one Spencer recognised immediately. To anybody else it would have sounded gentler than the train. It was the delicate rattle of ice in a tumbler.
God no, thought Spencer. I can't believe you've done that to me. He turned to the TV. An inanely grinning man in a college boy blazer was hawking a combination lampshade-base and cocktail-shaker.
"If you want to know more about Raymond, then you should ask George," decided Michael.
Spencer let the subject drop. He'd not lost a battle, he'd just lost two.
"Are you still coming tomorrow morning?" asked Michael.
Michael clearly wasn't going to tell him more about Raymond. What the hell could he get out of this? There was just one possibility. A wild one. He sighed down the line. "I've got car problems. I guess that's my real reason for calling. Any chance you can bring the picture to my hotel? It's the Ana, downtown."
Michael deliberated. "OK. If that's the way it is. But not tomorrow morning. Too much traffic. How about seven this evening?"
No. Seven was too early for monkey-business. "Can you make it nine? Room 2316."
"Hold on. I'll write that down." There was a clink as the tumbler reached a table. Spencer just knew it contained alcohol. A bourbon and Coke, maybe. That sounded about right for Michael. 
"What's that again?"
"The Ana. 2316."
Excellent. A man who needs to write things down. 
"Fine. I'll see you at nine." 
As Spencer rang off, his eyes inevitably came back to the mini-bar. Taking a drink to celebrate a devious plan would be quite different to using alcohol to block out confusion. Any fool could see that. He squatted down and opened the door.
The light came on, illuminating his nudity. Bright little bottles fluttered their eyelashes and winked at him, reflecting the flickering TV, rows of enticing Michael Sorden miniatures. His own eyes gazed back with sadness and desire, a kind of cross between a Mexican stand-off and a come-on. Need, mixed with memories of detoxification.
The three monks had run the most peculiar detox centre imaginable. The tequila and nausea of the dream had been real too. They'd allowed him to drink whatever he wanted, yet every time he drank he got sick. Brutally sick. This was a puzzle because he was never sick on alcohol. He was a drunk, not a bulimic. Alcoholism and bulimia are impractical to combine.
It was Father Dougal who'd solved the riddle of his sickness, on the morning of the third day in detox, when he'd come into Spencer's bedroom to change the sheets.
"I'm fine," said Spencer to Father Dougal.
Father Dougal had a large, wide face to match his hands. Spencer couldn't take his eyes off them. They made the clean sheet he was putting on the bed look like a big handkerchief.
"Really, I'm fine. I'm not seeing pink elephants. I haven't got the shakes. Look. See? The craving's gone. You can let me go now."
"Maybe in a few days," said dour Father Dougal.
"No. Now. Please?" This wasn't going to work. He could see this wasn't going to work. "Your hands are like a transvestite's."
Father Dougal stopped fitting the sheet and looked quizzically at Spencer.
"Transvestites have big hands," explained Spencer. "It's like... there's a third sex, more male than male, and you've had a sex-change from double-male to male."
"Sure, a few more days," said Father Dougal, nodding to himself and carrying on with the bedding.
"You're poisoning me," mumbled Spencer.
"Yes, we are," agreed Father Dougal.
That had Spencer stumped. He hadn't been expecting an admission.
"We're poisoning you to stop you poisoning yourself."
"You bastards."
Father Dougal waved his double-male hand at the corner of the room, at the stack of plastic bottles: Tanqueray, Chivas Regal, Quervo, Woods Dark, Becks, Molson, Chablis, Burgundy; enough to stock a neighbourhood bar. "All that drink over there, Spencer, it's all adulterated. A touch of the juice of a mushroom we grow back at the monastery in Ireland. Shaggy cap, fine on its own but not good for the stomach with alcohol." Father Dougal's hand returned to the sheet to clear it of ripples. "Do you remember being a youth, Spencer, and getting so drunk that next day you were sick enough for the world to end? What would it be now? Whiskey, Thunderbird wine?"
Spencer thought back. Mary Macintyr's party, aged sixteen. "Gin."
"And how long was it before you could drink gin again?"
Almost a year, but Spencer wasn't going to answer. He was beginning to understand, and he didn't like it. 
"So now you know why we let you have any drop of the devil you like."
"Then you're a fucking idiot for telling me, aren't you? Because now I'm not going to touch a single bottle and your system's fucked!"
Father Dougal had finished with the bedding. He held the dirty sheet in his paw. He cocked his large head to one side. "Ah, but that's not the nature of addiction, now, is it? You already know what's doing you harm, but you take it anyway. When I've left the room, you'll run over to a bottle in the corner there, crack the cap, drink your drink and be as sick as a cat on the moult. Isn't that the truth, now, Spencer?"
It was true. Spencer felt like crying with the stupidity of it. "Maybe I'll fight my way out."
Father Dougal was big enough to pick Spencer up and bounce him round the room like a basketball, yet he managed to look unintimidating. He grinned. "You're not the violent kind, Spencer, I know. When you came here, sure, you were drunk as a skunk and as playful as a puppy. If a man so full of fuel is as gentle as the angels then he's never a trouble sober."
All this passed through Spencer's mind as he held his staring competition with the miniatures in the mini-bar. By the time he'd reached the end of his memoirs the bottles had got bored and looked away. He closed the door again. The battle had been won with remarkable ease. He had the monks to thank for that, he knew.
He moved away from the mini-bar to the bathroom and began his mildly obsessive ablutions: the little bead of toothpaste, shampooed pubes, running the towel between his wet toes like a fluffy white felling-saw. Feeling clean and slightly heroic after his won battle, he put on fresh clothes and went back to lie on the bed again. He set the alarm on his watch for eight o'clock, just in case.
The weather in his head was better. More cool and misty than occluded. Less ups and downs. That battle with the mini-bar must have been on his mind even though he hadn't seen it coming. Unfortunately, now it was over he was able to think more clearly about Pierre. 
As he closed his eyes his brain took to replaying the record from the farm, adding vision too, imagining Pierre wounded on the sofa with Alex and Diamond slouched nearby on easy chairs; Kohl intrusively fingering through the plastic cases on the shelves. A three minute video replaying over and over again in his head, repeating the horror of his friend's death.
Listening to the recording had been so traumatic that he could remember almost every word from beginning to end. But as he replayed them in his mind, the significance of the words changed. There was a section where Pierre mentioned the agency, just after he'd brought up the Oldsmobile, and although Spencer had ignored this at first, the more he thought about it the more significant it seemed.
Agency involvement was a definite possibility. The CIA had close connections with the electronics industry. He'd had to deal with them himself as Foxglove's head of security. Nothing major, just their requests for information about employees, or, conversely, for him to stop digging so hard into somebody's background - an acknowledgement that he was about to unearth a place-man, a part-time agency informer within the company.
George always liked to know who these informers were, but he tolerated them. The CIA was generally viewed as a friend, as an ally in the commercial war of the world - Consumer World War Three, as George described it - fought with money and technology but few guns.
Post cold-war, the CIA had recognised this changeover from arms to commerce, and a proportion of its resources was now devoted to direct support for US industry, especially electronics. The Germans and Japanese had won the consumer car war, the Japanese stood victorious in the theatre of cameras and hi-fi. But America dominated the PC battlefield with its processors and software and the CIA wanted it to stay that way.
In its new role the agency was very well behaved; quietly it gathered electronics industry intelligence, assessed competitors and watched for anti-American activity, with barely a cloak or a dagger creeping into play from its dusty cold-war armoury, which made Spencer wonder if he was being stupid even to think about agency involvement in Pierre's death. Was he seeing a conspiracy where there was none to be found? Kohl was a ruthless operator, a compassionless killer. Surely the agency wouldn't let him loose on the domestic electronics scene. He was too much of a maniac.
And yet, in its other manifestations this was the same agency that forced coups and backed terrorists and deposed presidents in foreign lands; that had been implicated in drug smuggling and the excesses of tyrants around the world - though admittedly only tyrants with a firm belief in the free market system - an agency that employed drug-smugglers, arms-runners, insurgents and third-world dictators, yes. But maniacs?
Hold on there.
Spencer's busy mind began to run in circles on the question of mania and what level was acceptable to the CIA. Which was good, because it was a very intense and ultimately boring thing to think about and without him realising it he was transported into a less rational, dreamy world, where the shade of a man's shirt gave away his degree of lunacy. This made the character assessments of espionage so much easier. Dictators, he noticed, always wore pink or yellow - the darker the shade, the more despotic. Drug-smugglers wore green. Arms-runners were in bold red and white stripes, and battalions of insurgents with beards and berets wore children's cream pyjamas spotted with teddy-bears, like they were waiting en-masse to be put to bed. 
Kohl's sallow face, an imagined face, appeared to him and saluted, but in dim light so it wasn't clear what he was wearing. Something dark. There was the sense of a dark shirt, maybe blue. Then the vision faded away.









5  On impulse

He reached blindly for the bedside lamp, wondering what had woken him so suddenly. A knock on the door, presumably, because there it was again. And even in the first muddles of consciousness he knew exactly who was doing the knocking, whose signature tune that was. It was the one person who could get him off the bed to answer the door.
"Spen."
"Bry."
"I'm sorry, I should have called. Did I wake you?"
Spencer rubbed the corners of his eyes, wondering which part of his anatomy gave away the fact that he'd been sleeping; his ruffled hair, his puffy eyes or his wrinkled clothes.
Bry was looking wonderful, as always. She was wearing a cherry-red business two-piece with a hip-hugging skirt. Her hair was half up and half down, as if she couldn't decide. Usually this meant she had something on her mind. Spencer wasn't sure if he could deal with this right now. Without waiting to be asked, she walked inside and settled herself in the easy chair between the bed and the mini-bar.
"Been sleeping on the job, have we?" she teased.
"Sleeping it off, more like." Careful, thought Spencer. Nothing's happened, remember.
"Nice room," said Bry.
Spencer closed the door. "I thought you didn't like rooms like this. Didn't you always say hotel rooms were too anonymous, too sanitised?" Their apartment together had been full of wall-hangings and South American tapestries. The bathroom fittings were antiques. The carpets belonged in a Turkish bazaar. Bry wanted the furniture to say something, to tell a story. He wondered how George was dealing with that now. With George's money the furniture could be recounting an epic.
"Just making small talk," complained Bry, frowning.
"Sorry." Spencer was still in a daze, unclear on social conventions but aware enough to sense that he might have broken one. 
He walked across the room and began opening the curtains, then realised that it was dark outside and he must look really stupid. He turned round and smiled sheepishly. Bry was grinning. She was about to say something, probably something about their time together, something about seeing him like this before, but then she changed her mind. He turned and began to  pull the curtains closed again.
"No," said Bry. "Open them. You're right, the room is boring, but the view's good. Leave them open."
Spencer hesitated for a moment, then did as he was asked. It was true, the night-time view was probably the best feature of the room. They were on the twenty-third floor and from here most of the city's urban towers were visible; a bar-chart of white dots on a black background, some with raggedly tapered tops, like mini-charts capping a single bar, and over to the right the rebellious curving statistical spike of the Pan-Am building. 
He moved back to sit on the bed close to Bry's chair, even though there were two more chairs in the room.
"Is George still in Germany?"
Bry nodded. "Back tomorrow morning." She gazed through the window with a far-away look and fiddled distractedly with her left ear. "I didn't figure you for an art collector."
"Uh?"
"The picture. You bought a picture last night, or at least reserved one."
"Oh, that. Well I said I liked them. That one especially. It was extraordinary."
"All you need to do now is buy a wall to hang it on."
Spencer didn't like the position he was in. He didn't feel he could tell her the truth, certainly not at this stage, but nor did he want to lie to her. When they'd lived together he hadn't been in the habit of deceiving her and he wouldn't be comfortable doing so now. It was also risky. She could be uncannily perceptive.
Her voice was firm. "What are you up to, Spen?"
"I'm not supposed to talk about it." Immediately he disliked the way that sounded. It was the answer according to the gospel of George, and a murder had surely invalidated that. Out of everybody in the world, surely she was somebody that both he and George could trust. He sat upright, suddenly much more awake.
"Have you met Raymond Kite?" he asked.
Bry's chin rose very slowly. A sign of comprehension. "I've met him. Yes."
"Recently?"
"No. He went missing, a few weeks back."
"So now you know what I'm doing."
A full nod from Bry, and a hand moving up to correct the hair it displaced. "Is that why you went to the showing? To buy the picture of his eyes?"
"Kind of." Though he hadn't known it at the time. "What do you know about him?"
Bry crossed her legs. Spencer watched. It was a nervous movement, he could see that, but sensual too. She couldn't do it any other way. 
"Not a lot. George's always kept him away from the bright light of publicity. I'm not sure why. He's very likeable. A bit weird, I suppose. A touch of the mad scientist, but there's an innocent, childish side too. I always want to comb his hair for him. It's such a mess."
"How much time have you spent with him?"
She leaned forward, resting her chin on her hand, her elbow on her knee. "Probably no more than ten or fifteen minutes. As I say, George's quite protective with him. Anyway, Raymond's not the social occasion type."
"And what do you know about Balloons?"
"Not much. I know it's tied in with Michael Sorden's pictures and plenty of electronics are needed to take them. That's how George got involved with Michael."
This was going to be tricky but it had to be asked. "What about Pierre? He works on Balloons, and he only does voices, sounds."
"I wondered about that too," said Bry, thoughtfully. "Maybe you should ask him - whenever he reappears. He seems to have gone away for a few days."
Spencer avoided her eye. Time to move away from the subject of Pierre. "And about the bodies, too. Why would they need human bodies for a picture project?"
It was intended to shock, and it worked. Bry looked very startled for a few seconds, then annoyed. "That's ludicrous, Spen. Where on earth did you hear that?"
Good point. From a homicidal maniac. But Spencer couldn't say that.  He tried to get away with no response at all, and Bry allowed it, perhaps because she hadn't quite finished telling him off.
"That sounded like work, Spen. It's the kind of silly question journalists put to me as head of PR, just to see what reaction they get."
Spencer looked at her. Contradicting her sternness, she smiled warmly at him. He still couldn't work out her mood. He was out of practice, that was the problem. Nor was he sure why she was here. He realised that he should be offering her a drink, but he couldn't face the prospect of watching her sip a vodka and tonic when he needed one himself, so remained the bad host. "Who else works on the project?"
"I'm not sure. It isn't my area." 
"Do you ever get to see any of the results?"
Bry shook her head. "I only deal with results we publicise."
"Do you think the project is what it claims to be?"
"It doesn't claim to be anything."
"You know what I mean. Is it really about pictures, or are they trying to do something else? Maybe make artificial eyes, get a direct line to the brain. Something like that?"
"Spencer," complained Bry, "it's like you're interrogating me. Why don't you ask George these questions?"
It wasn't going to be the right thing to say, but he was going to say it anyway. "Why don't you?"
Bry pursed her lips. She was mad. He wondered if she were going to get up and walk out. But she didn't. "Why on Earth should I? Why are you being so insensitive? Have you had a really bad time today or is there some kind of jealousy thing going on here?"
What? What was that outburst all about? Spencer tried to think about what she'd just said but for some reason he couldn't grasp it.
Bry watched him struggle. Her face softened. "No. I don't." 
"You don't what?"
"I don't think it's what it claims to be." Bry stretched out her crossed legs, wiggled her feet and leaned back in her chair. "I don't think it's about pictures. I did think at one stage it might be about iris recognition. You know an iris is like a fingerprint, no two are the same, so they can be used for identification, for security. That would explain Pierre's involvement. He's got a lot of experience differentiating voice-prints."
"Sounds good to me."
"Do you think George is the same person he was two years ago?"
Spencer rubbed his chin. This seemed to be a completely new direction for the conversation to go. He tried to stay with it. "Not quite. He's mellowed a little."
Bry nodded. "He went down to the Balloons project one afternoon and came back a different man."
"Go on."
"More sensitive. More philosophical. It was a good thing, I suppose,  but eerie." She uncrossed her legs and brushed something invisible from her skirt. "I don't think iris recognition would have done that to him."
Spencer had to be careful how he phrased this. "Have you thought about asking him what happened?"
Bry shifted in her seat but didn't hesitate to answer. "No, we don't talk about things like that. A lot of couples don't."
"Oh," grunted Spencer. Was there a trace of bitterness there, or was that his imagination? He could recall many hours of listening to Bry talk about myths and beliefs and what people thought they were living for. Sometimes angrily, because she was feeling aimless, and other times in almost serene contemplation. He couldn't quite match her for depth but liked to listen and join in. She'd clearly enjoyed this kind of discussion and must be missing it now.
"Sorry," he said.
Bry rose from her chair and walked towards the window. She stood with her hands clasped behind her back, contemplating the city. The pose was peculiarly feminine. Spencer's eyes moved from her hips to the bar-chart blocks of high-rise  window lights beyond the glass. They were like stars in a way. Man-made stars. It was a long time since he'd had this kind of view; the side of the sky from on high. For the last two years, when he'd looked at the sky it had been its underside he'd seen, its belly, but this wasn't so easy to view from inside a building. Now he was looking at the sky's ragged edge. He'd swapped Orion and the scattered constellations for man-made blocks of regularised stars; pretty in their own way too, but much more conformist.
Bry wasn't quite standing still. Her feet kept moving. Spencer caught her watching him in the reflection of the glass. He lowered his eyes to break the contact and plumped the pillow on the bed, which still showed the depression his head had left. "So what's it like, being rich?" he asked.
Bry thought before she answered. "Better than being poor."
"That's not much of an answer," complained Spencer.
"It wasn't much of a question, was it?" Bry turned, facing him but with her eyes closed, one hand on her brow. "Shall we change the subject? We've been discussing work and George or his money since I got here." She walked back to the chair, elegantly seated herself, placed her forearms on the armrests and smiled at him expectantly.
"How are the trivia-monsters? Still functioning?" he asked.
Bry liked that. She laughed. "Yes, they are." Trivia monsters was her pet name for her parents. Just as she and Spencer had started their relationship, her parents had retired to a Cape Cod style clapboard house in Virginia. Over the next two years, what little remained of their sense of reality had slowly disappeared. The last time Spencer had seen them, the old man was obsessed by the quality of the yellow colour on TV pictures, claiming a grand conspiracy by Japanese industry to have yellow muted. In the last year he'd bought six different TVs. Meanwhile Bry's mother raised minks in a refrigerated shed, intending to grow her own fur coat, but instead populating the surrounding countryside with escapees. And these were the more accessible points of their characters. Bry said not only had they lost their sense of values within the world, but even within their lounge.
"Functioning is exactly the right word for it. Pa's suing the mail service. He's decided the local mailman moonlights as a cat-burglar." She shook her head. "Do you remember that time we visited and mother wouldn't let us bring anything metal into the house. What was all that about?" She laughed again.
Spencer leaned forward from the edge of the bed. He placed his hand just above Bry's knee, leaned forward more and kissed her full on the lips. She let his tongue into her mouth. His kiss was passionate. But brief. After a few seconds he realised, to his horror, that in every aspect she was utterly motionless.
He withdrew. She glared at him. 
"Why?" she asked, very quietly.
Spencer was confused. Embarrassed too. "I just got the impression that..."
"That what?"
"That... there was still something going for us."
"Did I give you that impression?"
"I think," Spencer squirmed on the bed, "generally..."
"But specifically? Can you give me an example?"
Well of course. He thought about it. Thought about it for a long time. Damn. She'd always been a sexy woman, just in her everyday actions. Why had he foolishly thought she was fanning the old flame? "Sorry," he mumbled, feeling terrible. What a misjudgement.
"I am married." 
It would have been much easier if she'd been angry with him. But she wasn't. She was upset; it was obvious in her voice. He couldn't cope with that. "Bry, I..."
"I don't know why I came." She fixed his eyes with hers. "I think I made a mistake." She got up and moved to the door. Spencer left the bed.
"I shouldn't have come," she said. "George doesn't know I'm here. I never came." Her hand was on the door-handle.
"I'm really sorry. I just... I didn't think you were happy with George."
"That's pretty presumptuous of you, wouldn't you say?"
Unbelievable. He'd just made things worse. "Stop, stop," pleaded Spencer. He was confused. Everything should have been fine, but it wasn't, and he couldn't explain himself properly. Whatever happened, he mustn't let her leave like this. He had to make some kind of amends. He wanted to give her something, but there was nothing to give. He wanted to show her... what? Trust?
And then he thought of something to give. Pure impulse. Something valuable and a reminder of good times spent together. Yet also bizarre. He opened the closet, reached into his jacket pocket and brought out the red vinyl disc. "Give this to George, will you? As soon as he gets back. It's very important."
She looked at him quizzically. "It's one of Pierre's."
"I know."
Bry put the disc in her purse without further thought and opened the door. "I came to..." Whatever she wanted to say, it was a struggle. She was mumbling. "I came to... I can't believe I'm saying this after what just happened, but I wasn't very happy with the way our relationship ended. I don't think I dealt with it very well."
She didn't look at him. She closed the door behind her and was gone.
Spencer was still for a moment, perplexed. He had no idea she was going to say that. No idea at all. He went back to lie on the bed.
What a strange woman she could be. He'd made a fool of himself and she'd doubly confused him by being the one to make the final apology.
Their parting two years ago, the circumstances, their behaviour at the time; he'd blocked all that out, swept it into a cave and filled the mouth with a boulder, and now she'd opened the tomb.
It was true, their relationship had ended very badly. After his incident at the fence she'd transformed into a dragon. No, a dragoness. It had taken a couple of weeks but eventually the chrysalis had fallen away and a fire-breather had emerged. He'd been sacked, most of his colleagues had turned against him and finally so had his girlfriend. She'd lost her twelve or fifteen thousand dollars along with everybody else at Foxglove but she hadn't cared so much about that and he hadn't expected her to. What had bugged her were the extra hours in the office, the extra days, the seven-day weeks of slavery when she was already pissed-off with being a five-day slave. Teresa, her sister, had suffered her first attack of multiple sclerosis the week before and lay in hospital, her left leg numb and immobile, her vision and future unclear. The timing couldn't have been worse. More than anything, Bry resented being unable to comfort her sister, not having the time. And all because of Spencer's little disaster at the fence. She couldn't handle that. That too was true.
Disaster? Wrong word. Her word. Not disaster, incident at the fence.
Bry's joining the mass-hysteria had been the final straw. He'd picked up the bottle again, it seemed the only thing to do, the only solution. And he wasn't even a terrible drunk. Not maudlin, not aggressive. Even that hadn't satisfied Bry. At the end of their final fight, after she'd been working twenty twelve-hour days in a row and was utterly live-wired, connected by a wet string to the thunderous skies, after she'd raved and screamed and finally slapped him on the face as he lay there on the sofa and its West African tribal knit cover, and he'd meekly accepted the blow and done nothing in return, she'd said, very quietly: "You can't even be a proper fucking drunk, can you?" And he'd known it was time to leave.
All history now. Can't change history. And she'd come with an apology on her mind and he'd made a complete idiot of himself by making a pass at her. What a fool.
He laughed. Ha! And he'd given her the stupid disc. What a ridiculous thing to do. It wasn't even a gift for her, but something to pass on to George. Elevating her status to trusted messenger. What a joke. Here, I trust you, be involved.
She hadn't even told George she was visiting him. So how would she explain receiving the disk? By lying, of course. By lying to her husband. That was some twisted game he'd got her involved in.
"Jesus!" Spencer shot upright and glared at his beeping watch. Eight o'clock. Michael Sorden was due in an hour. He'd have to get moving.









6  Michael's indulgence

A few minutes later he was in the hired Trooper speeding towards the derelict lot where he'd been plucked from drunken life by George Stiles. There was no guarantee that the Professor would be there, but the chances were good. The Professor didn't run with the regular panhandling crowd. He couldn't stand the squabbling, couldn't get on with all those Vietnam veterans. He liked poetry, wrote a lot himself, and he loved his chess. He'd be out on the deserted lot playing solo rather than sit with a crowd of  uncultured bums.
The night was clear and the moon was close to full. On the way, Spencer stopped off at Art's Liquor Mart on 17th and Eden to buy a bottle of Wild Turkey and at a gas station for two flashlights. When he reached the entrance to the lot the moonlight was bright enough for him to make out a familiar figure sitting on a hard-standing a few hundred yards away, between the raised freeway and the contractors' compound. A figure that looked very solitary. Spencer manoeuvred the Trooper down the dirt track through the lot, coming to a stop next to the raised foundation of concrete, just as George's limo had done.
"Hi, Prof."
"Gent!"
Spencer climbed out of the car, abruptly conscious of his clean clothes and decent transport. It hadn't crossed his mind that he might feel distanced from the Professor, he'd been so much looking forward to seeing him again. Yet what a difference George's money had created; Spencer looking like a regular moneyed member of society and the Professor still in his dumpster clothes. It made him suddenly aware that a similar imbalance existed between himself and George Stiles. Different values, expectations, lifestyles. The awareness of who can pay and who cannot. A steep slope for a relationship; the poorer person at the bottom, a proud receiver, and the richer at the top, grasping his giant bean-bag of wealth with its leaky corner, smiling but aware of the stream of beans spilling down. How much easier when the slope is shallow. Millionaires keeping the company of other millionaires. Derelicts in a huddle elsewhere.
No, not distanced in a week.
He pulled up a crate and with practised ease sat gently on a corner. The Professor hunched close to his feeble fire, even though he was wearing a long coat and the evening wasn't cold. Spencer regarded the fire respectfully, recognising it as his replacement in a way, in terms of the Professor's social arrangements. Then it brought to mind the two fires on the fifteenth floor of the Merchant Building - an association he didn't like. He opened the whiskey and passed it to the Professor, who raised it straight to his lips and drank.
"Thanks," said the Professor when he'd fully refuelled. "Always the man with the bottle, Gent. Praise you." He wiped his mouth gently with the back of two middle fingers and offered the bottle back to Spencer.
Spencer shook his head. "The detox worked. I've gone straight, Prof, at least for the moment."
The Professor smiled broadly and set the bottle on the ground. "Good man. I always thought you had it in you." Only the Professor would say that, bless him. Most vagrants resented a successful attempt to stop drinking, on the grounds that there's nothing worse than somebody trying to act superior. 
"Thought you'd had a good bath, a good night's sleep." The Professor was mildly drunk, but not gone. His voice had the harsh crackle of anybody who spends the winter careering from one respiratory disease to another. Spencer hadn't recognised that before, but he could hear it now. The cherubic face was tempered brown, with purple-veined alcoholic highlights behind the mild savannah of stubble. Sometimes he appeared to have a big set of yellow teeth and sometimes none, as if they were retractable.
"Been watching television?"
Spencer nodded.
"Getting yourself programmed. Think this, think that."
"I'm trying to be careful," promised Spencer.
"Buy this. Buy that." The Prof spat copiously into the little fire, half-killing it. "Buy a house. Buy a car. Get married. Have kids. Die."
This wasn't personal. It was the Professor's recurring crusade against society in general. He himself had said that he would never be able to cope with the real world because he could never block out the bad parts of it, like normal people did, like Spencer sometimes managed to do and sometimes didn't. Alcohol could block them out. That was a problem too.
"I saw a billboard yesterday," continued the Professor. "It said, Vote For Jim. That's the governor's election, I guess. But what a message, eh? Vote For Jim."
Spencer nodded sympathetically.
"I mean, what does that say to you? What does it tell you about Jim, about his policies? The fuck, nothing. But they spend millions on billboards like that, because they work. People see Vote For Jim and they vote for Jim. That's democracy for you. There's something worth fighting for."
The tirade was now part-way through. Spencer had heard it all before. There was still Vietnam to go. The monologue wouldn't be finished until Vietnam had been dealt with. Spencer could see it coming and although he was in a hurry he allowed space for it to arrive.
"Used to teach students back in the sixties; bright boys from northern California and Washington State. Meanwhile the fellas from Michigan and West Virginia weren't in class. They'd been sent out the room to drop napalm on Vietnamese villagers. Not pens and books, mind you, like they should have, but thousand-pounders and machine gun bullets. Couldn't deal with a system like that; educated half its youth and sent the rest to the other side of the world to kill foreigners who didn't follow market forces. Shit and garbage. That's what that was. World gone mad."
There. Vietnam all done. The irony was, the Professor now often found himself in the company of bitter Vietnam vets on the streets. There were so many in the city it was impossible to avoid them. Some of them sympathised with the Professor's anti-war views, others felt he made their sacrifices seem more meaningless than they already appeared. None could accept the idea that Vietnam had turned him into an alcoholic without him ever having to go there.
Spencer waited in case there was an epilogue to follow, but the voice was silent. Traffic on the raised freeway hummed by, not revealing itself. Two planes were coming in over the bay, distant gliding gulls. Looking into the fire, Spencer might have imagined objects, people, or seen memories, but instead he sensed something far more abstract. Impermanence. Time passing. It was definitely an abstract fire, no knowledge of language required. He could have been a caveman with a mind full of grunts and the fire would still have been the same.
He was tempted to stay and enjoy the tranquillity of his flame-gazing, but there was work to be done. "Prof, I need to get inside a building, a studio."
It seemed ridiculous that here he was sitting with a man of great learning, an ex-academic, a one-time teacher of history, myth and culture throughout the world, and all he wanted from him was his house-breaking skills. But the fact was, the Professor was extremely good at it.
Spencer had watched him in action over the past two years. The Professor had been his streetlife mentor. Together they'd clambered through the timber frames behind the stage-set facade of society, through the soup-kitchens, flophouses, culverts and abandoned lots of the world behind the painted screens. Each day they'd parted company to hustle dollars for the bottles and met up later to drink the spoils. When it rained or was too cold to sleep outdoors, the Professor would casually run his eye across a row of buildings, choose one, walk up to it, and let himself in. He did it with ludicrous ease. He could stand two hundred yards from a building, dead drunk, glance at it and identify the single fatal flaw in its security. Pure intuition. 
Spencer, as an ex security guard, had first been appalled, then amused by the irony. He'd learned more from the Professor about security in two months than he had at Foxglove in ten years. But still he didn't have the Professor's intuition.
The Professor's angry mood had entirely gone, fully relieved by the diatribe. He looked at Spencer quizzically. "'Thought you'd have a hotel room?"
"I do. And the man whose studio I want to break into is on his way there right now." Spencer produced the two flashlights.
The Professor's eyebrows rose a fraction. "Do we have to go in your car?"
Spencer nodded.
"But Gent, I haven't been in a car for years."
*
While Spencer drove, the Professor fiddled with the car radio and electric window, making up for lost time. When he'd finished he took a long draught of Wild Turkey to celebrate. "Suppose you'll be using your real name now. Always known you as Gent. What did the man call you?"
"Spen or Spencer." It came out nasally at first. Spencer had been clenching the muscles behind his nose and breathing through his mouth. The Professor's smell was fine in the open air, but here in the car it was taking some getting used to. 
"I remember. Spencer de Gresseur. French, isn't it? French family?"
Spencer shook his head. He was sure they'd discussed this before. Many days on the streets there'd been nothing to do but talk. Clearly he'd been more sober than the Professor when they'd discussed his name. "No. Never was. About three generations ago somebody in the family decided they wanted a French-sounding name, so they chose Degresseur - single word. My father learned to speak French and found out what it means."
"De-greaser," remembered the Professor. "The stuff you clean engines with."
 "And now the French use the same word for the greysuits who go into companies and fire people so the owners can make a profit. They're de-greasers too. An even worse connection. So my father had it changed to de Gresseur, two words, and a few letters further down the phone book." He looked at his watch. Quarter to nine. Beaumont was twenty minutes away. They weren't doing badly for time.
"Sounds the same."
Spencer shook his head again. "The English pronunciation does. But not the French. To the French we now come from a town called Gresseur, or an aristocratic family of Gresseurs. I can deal with that."
"Your father still around?"
Spencer paused. He hadn't been expecting this question, although he had a vague memory of the Professor asking it once before. He couldn't recall how he'd dealt with it then. Probably by silence. It was very close to an area he couldn't deal with, at least not well. At length, he said, "No."
"Mother?"
"No." It was a conversation that usually stopped there. Most people were sensitive enough not to continue after two abrupt replies. But on this occasion it was Spencer who kept the subject alive. What the hell. It was the Prof, and he was in the mood for talking, for unburdening himself. Maybe he should have told the Professor a long time ago. Strange that sobriety should make him more open.
"My folks both died when I was twenty. I was at college in Boston. They flew east to see me and stopped off at Washington DC to do the sights and go to the theatre - A Midsummer Night's Dream, of all things." He could hear his own voice turning uneven, as it invariably did when he told the tale. It must have been years since he last recounted it. "When the show finished they went back to the parking lot to pick up the car and somebody shot them as they unlocked it. Took their valuables, stole the car and left them to die on the concrete. My sister too. Mandy. She was seventeen."
"Christ, that's awful," said the Professor, very quietly.
"It was." 
Awful in a way that was hard to describe. Like having your heart extracted with a sharpened coal-scuttle. Like waking up to a world of perpetual night where the people are all ghosts and you're waiting for a tidal wave of mud to hit the darkened madhouse you're living in. Everybody screaming, mouths wide open, unable to form words. He'd loved his parents dearly and his sister too. Even now it was impossible to talk about it without a vacuum forming inside. More than a decade had passed, almost two. When would it be easy?
"I flunked college." He had to keep talking. "I started drinking. That was the first time. I wanted to become a cop, for all the wrong reasons. But of course they wouldn't have me. They could see how much was going on in my head. Then George came along, George Stiles, and asked me to do security for Foxglove. I took it. It was close to being a cop. After a while I straightened out."
"Christ," repeated the Professor, reaching for the bottle. "I feel pathetic."
Spencer stared at the road ahead. The highway was real again. The pain had passed through him like wind through a tunnel, leaving emptiness. He shook his head and said softly, as if to himself, "I think part of me went with them, and never came back."
The Professor alternately drank and looked repeatedly at Spencer, as if wondering whether the conversation could be carried on. Eventually he decided that it could. 
"Do you have any beliefs?"
"You mean, do I think my parents are in heaven?" Spencer was feeling better now, almost back in equilibrium.
The Professor nodded a little too vigorously. A rare lapse into the actions of a drunk.
"I think they live on in my genes," answered Spencer. "In my memories. In other people's memories."
"But not as souls in heaven?"
Spencer thought about it. He'd thought about it before. It was just too seductive, too easy, a pleasant dream that people wanted to be true because it made death less awful. Unprovable. But then not provable either way. "That's an unknown. Isn't it?"
The Professor nodded again, appreciating the answer. "Always will be."
*
Beaumont was a run-down industrial area where the buildings were big and old and too close together. The industrialists had moved out many years ago and the artists had moved into the workshops they'd left behind - but not quite enough of them to create an atmosphere. For a long time the area had lived on the borderline of taking off as a chic cultural centre and being demolished for redevelopment. Many of the old warehouses were empty. Grasses and flowers were recolonising the gaps in the cracked concrete and brickwork. Tarmac on the streets had worn away revealing patches of cobblestone.  
Michael's studio had clearly been built for commercial use rather than anything artistic. It was big and it wasn't pretty. A multitude of windows lined up in orderly rows. A long piece of steel had escaped into the street from the disused factory opposite and lay in the gutter, bent and useless. 
Although the sky was now clear, at some point earlier in the evening it must have rained here. The street was still damp. The few antique streetlights that Beaumont possessed had wide circular canopies attached to buildings. They shone off the wet tarmac and cobblestones but barely reflected from the dirty windows. Somewhere behind Michael's studio was a modern industrial lot with halogen lamps on tall pylons, lighting up the tops of buildings and making the streetlamps seem even more feeble in comparison, like props in an arc-lit stage play.
There were no people in sight and only one car, an old Ford station-wagon parked right outside the studio entrance. Spencer pulled up behind it, wondering if it was Michael's. Maybe Michael was wiser than he looked. Maybe somebody had tried to pull this trick on him before. 
"Better try the door-buzzer," suggested the Professor, clearly suspicious too.
"How's the building look?"
He was expecting a caustic response, something along the lines of it hardly being worth the trip, but instead the Professor said, "Wrong." 
Spencer got out of the car and walked to the studio door. The Professor followed. They could hear the buzzer ringing but nobody answered. Spencer listened hard but heard no movement inside; in fact, very little sound of any kind. No traffic noise. The only thing that could be heard was a single foghorn in the distant bay, bleating almost continuously like a lost baritone lamb. An eerie, mournful sound.
"Seems OK," said Spencer.
"Not really."
Spencer looked at the solid door, at its two keyholes. "Come on maestro. Do your magic."
The Professor grasped the doorhandle and opened the door. It was unlocked. For a while they looked at each other. The Professor frowned. He shook his head.
"I'll go in alone," said Spencer. "You stay in the car."
"I don't stay in cars, Gent. Too claustrophobic."
"You were OK on the way here."
"There's a good reason to be in a moving car. It takes you places. A parked one's useless."
Spencer puzzled over the logic. He handed the Professor a flashlight and walked inside. Two people work faster than one, and the Professor had plenty of experience exploring strange buildings. The lights inside were off. Spencer didn't switch them on, instead he lit his flashlight. The Professor followed behind, holding his torch in one hand and whiskey in the other.
The first room was a forlorn-looking reception area with two old leather sofas and bare walls. A strange contrast to the plush exhibition. At the far side of the room was a door that led through into the studio itself. This took up most of the building. All the floors had been knocked through to leave a huge rectangular space. It might have looked better if the final ceiling had gone too - breaking up the squareness inside with the peak of a roof - but unfortunately it was still there. The strong security lights from the nearby lot shafted in through the multitude of windows, creating the impression of a cathedral, but all monochrome, mainly blue, a cathedral lit by a blue moon. Spencer played his flashlight around the room.
"Whaooa!" The Professor had just seen his first eye picture. By torchlight they were more intimidating than ever. An eye in a small bright circle, shafts of blue behind. 
Spencer put his finger to his lips, then, apparently contradicting himself, shouted loudly for Michael.
No answer.
Eyes were neatly stacked against the walls like so many finished industrial products, but there were enough mounted on stands to bring back that you're-being-watched feeling of the gallery. It was much stronger here. A creepy sensation.
"Michael?"
Again, no reply. 
"Wild pics," said the Professor, respectfully.
Both torch beams danced around the studio. The Professor's seemed drawn, as if by magnetic attraction, to the eyes, and flitted unceasingly from one to another. Spencer's light was more workmanlike, investigating dark corners and walls. Looking back, above the reception area he could see a mezzanine floor, separated from the studio only by its height and a meagre wooden banister. The walls there were panelled and decorated with a single band of conventional pictures. At each end was an assortment of old filing cabinets, exactly what he was looking for, and in the centre an elaborate standard lamp surrounded by a selection of easy-chairs. It looked far cosier than elsewhere in the building. A homely lounge for a resting artist.
He led the way up the steep wooden stairs. At the top he checked the carefully arranged furniture with his flashlight and headed for the filing cabinets to his left. The Professor followed behind. Still the Professor's flashlight seemed drawn to pictures, this time to the band around the panelled walls. Spencer opened the top drawer. It wasn't locked. Names were listed alphabetically. T for Tassinski. In Tassins