Читать книгу Only Forward - Michael Marshall Smith - Страница 11

At 4.45 a.m. I woke up, instantly alive and alert. I turned over and tried to get back to sleep, but it wasn’t going to happen. I still had Jahavan running wild round my bloodstream, shouting, carrying on, waking up all the cells. I got up, had a shower, went into the kitchen and threw the coffee away. I don’t need that kind of shit from a beverage.

I made a cup of Debe, which is similar to coffee except it has no natural products in it and doesn’t taste much like it either, and sat by the wall in the living room, waiting for dawn to break. An amazingly, ridiculously large spider ran across the floor in front of me. I stared at it for a while, wondering how the hell it had got in. My apartment is on the fourth floor: I couldn’t believe the thing had scaled a hundred feet of wall just to hang out with me. It had to have a lair in the apartment somewhere, though I couldn’t imagine where. I found it hard to believe that there could be a crevice in there big enough to hold an animal that size. More likely it just sat around in the open all day, cunningly disguised as a piece of furniture, waiting for night to fall so it could go zipping round the floor in that way they enjoy so much. I might have sat on it without knowing, or rested a drink on it. Hell, I could have stretched out and gone to sleep on it.

Halfway across the floor the spider stopped, skittered round, and sat and looked at me. I looked back at the spider. It was a tense moment.

I take shit as and when necessary, but not from things as far down the evolutionary ladder as spiders. I think it sensed this. After a long moment it pointed itself in a different direction and slowly and many-leggedly ambled towards the door. Then, probably realising this was the last chance it was going to get tonight to do any zipping about, it suddenly accelerated to warp speed and zoomed out into the hall, taking the corner on two legs.

Unlike a lot of Neighbourhoods, Colour is open to the sky, and by 5.30 the black outside my window was tinged with a hint of pinky blue. It didn’t help much but it looked nice. They always have nice skies in Colour: I think they fiddle about with them in some way.

It was still too early to do anything useful, so I went shopping instead.

Early afternoon found me back in the apartment, sitting crosslegged on the ceiling of the living room, finishing a massive lunch.

For long stretches I can’t be bothered with shopping, especially for food. I try, but by the time I get to the stores either I’m bored with the whole idea or I get choice anxiety and it all gets too much for me. Today, though, I’d gone through with it. I’d really shopped. Food, batteries for the Gravbenda™, food, Normal Strength coffee, food and food. I’d made the fridge really happy. Finally it had something to get its teeth into again, lots of stuff it could keep nicely cold and fresh. Not all of the food was for me: one of the things I had on my list of things to do was to get in touch with my cat, Spangle, and see if he wanted to come and stay for a while.

First, though, I had some calls to make. I made them. I called all of the reliable contacts I have in Neighbourhoods around the Centre, and some of the unreliable ones too.

Nothing. Whoever had snatched Alkland had done a truly tremendous job, secrecy-wise. It was looking more and more as if it had to be a gang from Turn Neighbourhood, which was very bad news. I do this kind of thing, the normal things, largely for something to do. I have to fill my time somehow, now that it’s all I have: but I’d rather it didn’t get too serious. I’ve calmed a bit in the last few years. Taking on a bunch of well-organised psychopaths doesn’t appeal as much as it would have done once.

I ate some more food. Things were not going particularly well yet, but that’s the way it always works. The City is a hell of a big place, split into hundreds of places that have no idea what’s going on in all the other places. There’s no point just skipping blithely round, hoping you’ll run into what you’re looking for on a street corner. You don’t get handed a job complete with a little box full of clues and helpful pointers. I don’t, anyway. There’s a lot of waiting involved in the initial stages. I’d put out feelers, registered an interest, and that was all I could do.

Suddenly there was a loud pharping noise from the message tray. Unfortunately the tray is fixed to the wall near the floor, and I couldn’t reach it from where I was sitting, i.e. on the ceiling. I flicked the switch on the Gravbenda™ to return things to normal.

It’s not just the batteries on that thing, you know, I think the unit’s completely dysfunctional. Instead of gradually reorientating the room it just switched over instantaneously, dumping me and the remains of my lunch in a large and messy pile in the middle of the floor. I made a mental note to go stand outside my ex-client’s apartment sometime and shout, ‘Be wary if this gentleman asks to pay you in kind, lest the consumer goods he offers are faulty in significant ways,’ or something equally cutting, and then crawled painfully through the debris towards the message tray. I hadn’t actually cleared up the mess from the last Gravbenda™ disaster before turning it on again, and you haven’t seen untidiness until you’ve seen a room where the gravity has failed twice in different directions.

The message was from Ji. He was going to kick the shit out of an enclave in the Hu sub-section of Red, and would I like to come along? I knew Ji well enough to realise that this was not purely a social invitation. He was on to something.

I quickly changed into attire suitable for gang warfare likely to stop only just short of the deployment of nuclear weapons. Long black coat, black jacket, black trousers, black shirt. On impulse I ran the CloazValet™ over the shirt first: it stayed black, but gained a very intricate, almost fractal pattern in very dark blues, purples and greens. I found my gun and shoulder-holstered it.

It’s always difficult to predict how long these things will go on, so I put a call through to Zenda to warn her I might be a little late calling in. This is me in full action mode, you see: dynamic, vibrant but considerate too. Royn answered the vidiphone.

‘Hi, Stark. Like the shirt.’

‘Thanks. Is Zenda available?’

‘Sorry, Stark, she’s too busy to talk to you right now. Way, way too busy.’

‘She’s always busy.’

‘Yeah, but she’s busy to the max at this time. She’s too busy to talk to the people she’s doing business with, let alone anyone else. Can I give her a message?’

‘Just that I may be a little late checking in: I’m going to a gang war.’

‘Oh wow. Well, have a good time. I’ll let her know.’

I looked for the Furt, but couldn’t see any sign of it in all the mess. The food had all disappeared – it’s set to do that, an hour after cooking – but there was furniture, books, all kinds of crap all over the place, and the Furt is a small weapon. My apartment is equipped with a Search function: you have a little unit into which you type what you’re looking for, and it electronically searches the place and tells you where it is. Unfortunately I’ve lost the unit, so I’m pretty well fucked. Where I was going one little Furt wasn’t going to make much of a difference, so I forgot about it and ran for the mono instead.

I told you things would start happening.

Two of Ji’s bodyguards met me at Fuck Station Zero, dressed in formal evening wear with black tie. They were very polite and deferential. Being a personal friend of a ganglord is kind of cool.

We walked quickly to BarJi, a hulk on either side of me. The street life got out of the way very rapidly when they saw us coming. One of the things you learn quickly in Red is that if you see men dressed mainly in black heading down the street you get the hell out of the way, before extreme violence breaks out all around you.

Ji was also in black tie, and seemed calm and collected.

‘We’re going to have to be quick,’ he muttered, ‘word is that the fuckers have heard we’re coming.’

I found this worrying, and voiced my concern.

‘So they’re going to be waiting for us?’ I said, wondering if my afternoon might be better spent tidying up the apartment.

‘No, so they’re getting the hell out. There’s going to be no one left to kill if we don’t get a fucking move on.’

In tight formation we strode out of the bar. The armoured cars outside took the signal and wheelspun away, thundering down the street in front of us towards Hu. Ji and I walked down the street behind them, flanked by bodyguards, two more cars rolling along behind us. Like the strippers, the bodyguards in Red are bred specifically for what they do: they’re all over seven feet tall and built to withstand a direct hit by a meteor. In particular they’re selected for the size of their torsos. Ji, of course, had the very best, and the six guards around us all had upper bodies that were about two feet thick. A top bodyguard reckons on being able to shield his owner from about thirty bullets or two small shells. I’m only six feet tall and couldn’t see where the hell we were going, but I felt pretty safe.

Red is closed to the sky, and it’s always night-time there. The streets were dark but studded on all sides by the neon glare of lights in the Dopaz bars and Fuckshops. The pavements we passed were deserted, but lots of faces peered out at us through the windows. A couple of the bars had hand-made signs saying, ‘Go for it, sir,’ strung outside.

A derelict staggered into sight from round a corner and I winced in anticipation. Ji has no time for derelicts. It’s not just that they aren’t consumers and so they’re no good to him, it’s mainly that he can’t stand people with no drive. I’ve often thought that Ji would make a pretty fearsome Actioneer, though the Centre would have to massively expand its ideas of what were acceptable Things To Be Doing. Sure enough, without breaking his stride Ji squeezed off a shot and the derelict’s head found itself spread along ten feet of wall. There was a small cheer from one of the bars.

Hu is a small sub-section pretty much at the centre of Red, bordering on the West side of Ji’s territory. It’s one of the oldest parts of Red Neighbourhood, and bad as Red is in general, Hu is worse. Hu is where the really bad things happen. You never see anyone on the streets in Hu, and there are no bars. There’s no commercial interest in Hu, because in Hu everyone stays indoors. Hu is where you go if you’re a serial killer and you want somewhere to slice up your victims in peace. Hu is where you go to worship the devil properly without being bothered by sane people. Hu is the very end of the line. If you’re in Hu you’re either dead, about to be dead, or squatting in a dark abandoned building, chewing on the bodies.

‘What’s the interest here, Ji?’ I asked, slightly breathless after five minutes’ solid striding. ‘Hu is no use to you.’

Ji rolled his head on his shoulders, limbering up. ‘I put the word around last night. No one knew anything about your friend, but I heard a whisper of a new gang holed up in Hu. Maybe they’re your people, maybe not. Either way I don’t want the fuckers near me.’

Up ahead of us the armoured cars were slowing down. We were nearing the edge of Ji’s territory. The transition zones in Red are the worst. Everybody hates everybody there. Suddenly a shot rang out from a third-floor window on the right and one of the bodyguards twitched, a small red circle appearing on the spotless white of his dress shirt.

‘Good work, Fyd,’ said Ji, clapping him on the shoulder. ’You okay?’

‘Feeling good, Ji,’ the guard grunted, using a biro to dig the bullet out. He was pretty tough, I decided. One of the armoured cars swivelled and fired: the third floor of the building in question disappeared. We trotted forward to the other car, the guards maintaining a perfect shield around us. The door opened and Ji and I ducked in, followed by three of the guards.

‘Lone sniper, sir,’ said the driver, ‘but there’s more activity up ahead.’

‘Okay,’ said Ji, settling comfortably into the gunner’s seat. ‘Here’s the plan. We go in there and kill everybody.’

‘Works for me,’ the driver grinned, and floored the accelerator.

Basically it took ten minutes. The four cars screamed into Hu, machine guns sending out a 360° spray of energy bullets and gunners pumping shells into anything that moved, or looked like it might. Shots and shells poured back down at the cars from windows and shop fronts, but you can’t argue with a man like Ji. Shooting at him just makes him more angry.

As whole floors of buildings exploded around us the hostile fire began to thin out, and the cars concentrated on wasting the men who began appearing in the streets, running like hell away from us. One lunatic jumped onto our car from a second-floor window and tried to fire his rocket launcher through the window. Fyd, who’d finished calmly digging the bullet out of his chest, punched his fist through the one-inch glass and the man’s body flew gracefully into the wall of the building we were screeching past. Most, but not all, of it then fell to the ground.

‘Okay,’ said Ji calmly, ‘tell car four to turn around and head back out, in case anyone’s running that direction. Tell one and three to drop back in formation to flank us.’

The three cars pelted down the street into the heart of Hu, mowing down anything in their way. I would have hated to have been on the other side. To be running through hell on earth, half deafened by the sound of three pursuing armoured cars owned by the most dangerous man in Red, that can’t be much fun. That must be a dismal feeling. Luckily, the feeling would have been of short duration as they were all put out of their misery very quickly.

‘Stop,’ said Ji quietly, and the cars halted instantaneously. There was a moment of quiet as Ji cocked his head and listened to whatever jungle instinct it is that men like him have. Around us the streets were empty but for pieces of dead people and blazing rubble, the stonework red with blood and the flickering of burning debris. ‘Okay,’ he said finally, satisfied, ‘let’s go.’

Fyd dealt out the weapons. He offered me a Crunt Launcher but I patted my holster, and he shrugged. When everyone was armament positive another guard opened the door and we got out. The other three guards were already waiting for us, and Ji and I stepped into their shadow. Ji took a quick look around, then nodded at a building to our left.

‘There,’ he said.

We walked slowly towards the building, the guards behind us facing backwards, Crunt Launchers cocked. Just before we reached the door of the building there was a belt of noise from one of the launchers, and the sound of a scream mingled with an explosion on the other side of the street.

‘Nice one, Bij,’ said Ji, without even turning round.

‘Thank you, sir.’

There was a small fire in the ground floor of the building, but it didn’t look like it was going to get out of hand. There was nothing to burn. Just stone walls, anything movable stolen decades ago. It looked like it must have been an office block a hundred years ago, back when people lived around here. There was kind of a weird smell about the place, but otherwise it didn’t look that special. But Ji knows these things: I don’t know how, he just does.

We headed for the stairs and moved slowly up them, still in formation. The second floor was deserted. The smell was worse here and I raised my eyebrows at Ji.

‘Think we’ve found somebody’s store cupboard,’ he said.

He was right. On the third floor the steps stopped, and we had to cross the floor to get up any further. We walked quietly into the first office area, and suddenly the guards moved with one mind and we were crouched into a knot behind the door, Ji and I surrounded on all sides. Then slowly the guards straightened.

‘Sorry about that, sir,’ Fyd said. ‘False alarm.’

We looked around the office. It was dark, the only light coming from the fires still raging outside. The floor was covered with human shapes, and the smell was terrible.

‘That’s okay,’ said Ji. ‘Nice moving, anyway.’

Forced to proceed in single file, we threaded our way across the floor. Something combustible caught outside and the fire flared up, throwing red and orange light across the room.

On the floor there were about forty bodies, mainly adults, though there were a few babies too. Many were missing their clothes, and each body had its face cut off to reveal dry bone below. Most were made up distinctively, with blue lipstick smeared across the remains of the gums, and green eyeshadow around the decaying eyeballs. All the women had screwdrivers sticking out of their abdomens, and all the men had their hands power-stapled together.

I thought at first the babies had been set on fire, but as we neared the other side of the room I noticed a change in the general condition of the bodies. They got older and more rotted, and also more obviously chewed. This particular human being was storing his kills and eating the oldest ones first, the babies cooked, the adults raw and seething with maggots. I wondered where he was now: out in Red somewhere, trawling for more, stocking up for the winter. I’m a broadminded guy, but honestly, some people.

We made it to the steps and went up to the fourth floor. All was quiet. Just before we stepped onto the fifth Ji froze and listened.

‘Okay,’ he whispered. ‘End game.’

Bij and another guard stepped out first. A rocket shell zipped between their heads and straight through the wall behind them. Rather than flinch, they sublimated their irritation into blasting the shit out of the room with Crunts. When they judged it clean we joined them.

What was left of the office showed signs of habitation, and of preparations for an assault. Empty gun cases lay piled around the room, bits of food, clothing. A dim light shone from the office beyond, and Ji strode towards the door, leaving us behind. There was a tiny sound from behind some crates in one corner of the room and acting purely instinctively I threw myself into a roll and came up just in front of Ji, gun pointing into the darkness. The flicker of a laser sight appeared on Ji’s chest and I fired five bullets into the shadows. The last gang member toppled slowly out onto the floor. Ji looked down at me and nodded.

With the guards behind us we kicked the door open. The office was empty apart from an armchair, with a table beside it supporting a lamp that cast a pool of luminous light. Someone was sitting in the chair.

‘Hello, Ji,’ said a voice I recognised. ‘Hi, Stark. Hey, nice shirt.’

‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ bellowed Ji, as we stepped closer to the chair. I peered at the bulky figure lounging aggressively in it, observing its air of incipient violence and the green numbers on its forehead.

‘Jesus fucking Christ!’ I shouted. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

‘Jesus fucking Christ, Snedd!’ yelled Ji, slightly more calmly. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re playing at?’

‘Well,’ said Snedd, clicking his fingers, ‘that’s sort of a greeting, I guess. Drinks?’

‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ I said again. It was the only thing which seemed appropriate. I might have gone on saying it for days if Ji hadn’t changed the subject. Abruptly he grinned, and shook his brother’s hand.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Alcohol. And you better have a good explanation for this.’

A small and very frightened-looking man of about seventy appeared from out of the shadows, bearing a tray with a pitcher of alcohol and several glasses on it. He set it down soundlessly on the table and disappeared again.

‘Snedd,’ I said as Fyd poured the drinks, ‘you could have killed us all.’

‘Oh crap,’ said Snedd. ‘They weren’t supposed to be fighting you at all. As soon as I heard who was coming I told everyone to run for their own safety. I only know one person more dangerous than me, and that’s Ji. Thanks very much, by the way: I spent two weeks building up that gang and you’ve wiped them out in five minutes. Cheers.’

‘Cheers yourself, bastard,’ said Ji, and we drank.

A word of explanation is probably in order here. Snedd is Ji’s younger brother. Apart from the fact that he swears slightly less and has green numbers on his forehead, they are almost exactly alike. I know Snedd from my time in Turn, when Ji and I were working together. I hadn’t seen him in eight years, and hadn’t expected to ever again.

Snedd has numbers on his forehead because he was condemned to death. Largely for the hell of it one night he broke into Stable Neighbourhood, and unfortunately he was caught. Stable is one of the Neighbourhoods that maintains an absolute blockade on the outside world. Nobody is allowed in, and nobody is allowed out. All information on the outside world is blocked, and the inhabitants have no idea what exists outside their world.

The authorities in Stable don’t mess around. The penalty for incursion into their Neighbourhood is death by DNA expiration. The culprit’s DNA is altered so that the body dies exactly one year from the date of sentence: every physical function just stops and the chemicals that make up the body fall apart. It’s quite a common method of execution in civilised Neighbourhoods, and a few go the whole hog and graft display tissue onto the foreheads of executed criminals in the shape of digital numbers, to give a read-out of how many days the guy has left. Some people think this is unnecessarily bloody-minded, but the Foreheaders don’t mind too much. Often it gets them served quicker in restaurants because the staff can see the guy doesn’t have much time to waste. Especially in the last week, when the numbers flash on and off in bright red.

Also, you can work out what the time is by looking in the mirror, which is kind of useful if you don’t like to wear a watch.

‘Shouldn’t you have been dead for quite a while now?’ I asked Snedd.

‘Yeah,’ he laughed. ‘But you know me. I work things out. I found out how to get the clock to recycle, so at the end of each year I get another year. It’s always kind of a tense moment when the read-out gets down to 00:00:00:01, but it’s worked so far.’

‘Did Ji know you were still alive?’

‘Yeah,’ muttered Ji, ‘but I was trying to forget. What the fuck are you doing here, Snedd? And what the fuck are you doing building up a gang?’

‘I got bored,’ he replied. ‘Thought I’d come into business with you for a while.’

‘With me?’

‘Yeah. I didn’t want to just tag along: thought I’d bring something of my own to the party. And now you’ve killed them all.’

‘Snedd,’ I asked, ‘was it just the gang you were bringing, or did you have anything else?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Stark’s looking for someone,’ said Ji, helping himself to more alcohol. The old man circulated, passing out nibbles to the bodyguards.

‘An Actioneer called Alkland has been stolen,’ I said, looking Snedd in the eyes. ‘ACIA think the gang might be holed up in Red somewhere.’

‘No,’ said Snedd, shaking his head. ‘For a start, it isn’t me. Also, I did a lot of digging in the last couple of weeks, trying to find an angle on this Neighbourhood, something to build on. I cased everybody out, learnt where the power lay. The only gang here that could have a halfway decent stab at a stunt like that belongs to my brother.’

‘There’s no one here from Turn?’ I said, puzzled.

‘Only us two.’

‘Shit. He isn’t here then.’

‘No. But I did hear something that might interest you.’

‘What?’

Snedd looked at his brother.

‘Tell him whatever you know,’ Ji nodded. ‘We can’t do anything with this. This is Stark’s kind of problem.’

‘Okay.’ Snedd took a piece of spicy chicken from the plate the old man was handing round. I passed on that, but took another turn at the avocado dip. ‘It’s virtually nothing, anyway. I heard that someone from the Centre came through here a couple of days ago. I don’t know who had him: there was no word on that.’

‘How could you have found that out?’ Ji asked irritably. ‘I put the word round and there was nothing.’

‘Ah, but that’s just it,’ said Snedd smugly. ‘I didn’t put the word out. The word came to me. Whoever had him was looking for me. They tried in Turn first, then somehow traced me here.’

Ji laughed. ‘Why the fuck would they want you?’

‘Well, that’s what I wondered. If they wanted the hardest man around, they’d go straight for you. The most organised, straight for you. So that’s not what they wanted. They wanted something I might be able to give them, that you couldn’t.’

‘And what’s that?’ I asked, beginning to suspect the answer.

‘I think they wanted to know how to get into Stable Neighbourhood.’

Pretty soon afterwards we relocated to BarJi, and the après-fight party was in full swing when I left. It’s rare that the leaders of both gangs are involved, so the atmosphere was unusually good. Once the news gets out that there are now two of those lunatics, the other gang leaders in Red are going to get very nervous indeed. Fyd shook my hand at the door, which, though it nearly broke my fingers, was kind of nice. Being on the right side of him struck me as a good place to be.

I reached the Department of Doing Things Especially Quickly just before 9.00 p.m. The elevator was now reciting the history of the Department the way it was supposed to, which made me glum until I realised it was making up all of the dates.

‘Way to go,’ I whispered to it as I got out. ‘Fight ’em from within.’

‘Right on,’ it whispered back.

Zenda’s office was empty, so I hung around for a while. Royn popped her head in briefly, and said that she was on her way, but could be late. I frowned to myself. Zenda is never late, not even for me. That’s another of the things I like about her.

She arrived at 9.03. In the Centre that was like turning up after everyone else had died of old age, and I let her get a drink before I said a word. She sat heavily in her chair and stared straight ahead for a moment, and then looked up at me.

‘Trouble?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said, but she was lying. After a pause she stabbed the button on her intercom and barked out an instruction to someone about a meeting in four days’ time. ‘Okay,’ she sighed, ‘what do you have?’

‘Alkland is not in Red,’ I said.

‘Shit.’

‘But I think I know where he might be.’

Zenda brightened considerably at this, and shone a smile at me.

‘Good man. Where?’

‘It’s not very good news, I’m afraid. I think he might have been taken into Stable.’

‘Stable? What the hell are you talking about?’

‘Think about it, Zenda. Whoever snatched Alkland is alarmingly together. Where’s the cleverest place in the area to hide someone?’

‘Somewhere where no one can go. Shit.’ She drummed her fingers on the table for a moment. ‘I’m going to have to go higher on this.’

She picked up the phone. After a moment she spoke to someone, telling them she needed to speak with C as soon as possible. She nodded at the reply, and replaced the phone.

‘I can’t authorise an incursion into a forbidden Neighbourhood. Shit, shit, shit.’

‘Zenda,’ I asked gently, ‘what is going on?’

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Nothing.’ She looked at me, and I looked at her and could see she was troubled, and she could see that I saw. Professional relationships are difficult, especially if you knew the person before. The better you know someone the wider the gap becomes between what you know and what you can say. There are some things you just can’t discuss in an office, not even huddled round the kettle in the kitchen area.

The intercom buzzed.

‘Impromptu Meeting time minus twenty seconds and counting,’ it barked. ‘Your participants are on their way, Ms Renn.’

Zenda stood to be ready to greet them, and then turned to me.

‘Of course, I didn’t ask if you’d be willing to try,’ she said, looking contrite. I smiled at her, trying to say something with my eyes. I think it got across, because she smiled back.

‘Thank you.’

The door banged open and C glided in, with Darv in close attendance.

The meeting didn’t last very long. I told C what I’d found out, and he agreed with my conclusions. The fact that I was still in one piece after two visits to Red and being in the front line of a gang war between two Turn psychopaths was not lost on Darv, and though he was no more polite, he seemed to accept that I was indeed the man for the job.

The job being, of course, risking almost certain execution and/ or instant death, melodramatic though that sounds. There was no question but that the job was going to go ahead, and that made me think a little. Forbidden Neighbourhoods, particularly Stable, are very, very protective of their privacy, and the Centre is supposed to respect that. If I was going to get top level go-ahead for an incursion, something pretty major was at stake. I was beginning to wonder if I knew everything I ought to, if this was just going to be a normal job after all.

‘Well,’ said C, leaning back in his chair. ‘There does appear to be only one option. Ms Renn suggested you for this job, Mr Stark. She said that not only were you the best at what you did, but also that you had never turned your back on anything once you’d started. Does this set a precedent?’

‘No,’ I said, gazing levelly at him and saying what he expected to hear, ‘and I take it this conversation never took place.’

He smiled gently, and nodded.

‘Ms Renn is a good judge of character.’

He stood and left the room without another word. Darv, grunt that he was, took the time to spell out exactly how disinterested the Centre was going to be in any trouble I got myself into, and then he left also. As I watched him go I felt unreal for a moment, was aware of the world around me. It passed. It always does.

Zenda saw me to the door.

‘Be careful, Stark,’ she said.

‘I will,’ I said, kissing her hand, feeling for once a fragile pool of intimacy in the administrative desert. ‘And if there’s anything I can do, should whatever it is that isn’t wrong get any worse, call me.’

She nodded quickly twice, and I left.