The rush of thought had to break off. Anneliese was staring at him, still waiting for the reply to her last question.
He fumbled for the proper words.
‘I’m dreadfully sorry about this. But I imagine you’ve been told there are still criminals in our modern world?’
‘Y-yes … ’ Her voice was as faint as autumn wind.
‘This is one. Of the worst kind. What we call a code-breaker. A person who figures out how to use a private skelter, and sneaks in to rob people’s homes, and if he’s caught to kill the person who catches him.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Do you think I’d use this’ – brandishing the poker – ‘if I weren’t?’
‘I thought I heard you talking together,’ she ventured.
‘Well – well, of course! I wouldn’t have knocked him down on sight, would I? But when he couldn’t give a satisfactory account of his presence … Well, there was only one sensible course of action.’
‘I … ’ She shook her head. ‘I must have misunderstood. I believed that because of something Chaim invented, this didn’t happen anymore. Didn’t he devise what they call a privateer?’
Hans cursed silently. Ignorant this girl might be; she was in no sense stupid.
‘Yes, but I’m talking about the sort of burglar who can get around a privateer. What one man can invent, another can evade. It’s very rare, but it does happen now and then.’
‘I–I see.’
‘There are always flaws in the best of systems. You get transmission errors, for example, like the one which – ’ He interrupted himself, momentarily experiencing a renewal of his former panic. The less often Anneliese was reminded about the ‘anonymous’ dead woman, the better.
‘But I’ve got to get you out of here.’
‘What? Why?’
‘Because where one code-breaker gets in, another may follow. Very often they work in gangs. If this one doesn’t report back in half an hour or so, his confederates may very likely come to see what’s happened … You poor girl! It must be absolutely terrible to have seen so much of what’s bad in today’s world, and so little of what’s good. I do promise you, it is possible to be happy and enjoy yourself and make plans for the future and see them fulfilled. I want to give you that. You deserve it.’
In memory, an echo of Mustapha’s accusations … but he stifled it.
‘Where will you take me, then?’
‘A safe place. Just for long enough to sort this out. I shall have to tell the police, of course, and then I’ll have to have the skelter re-coded. It takes a few hours. I’m so sorry, I really am! Because what I most want to be doing
is help you. You – ah – you don’t mind my wanting to help you?’
All the color drained from her cheeks.
‘Hans, where would I be if there wasn’t somebody to help me? I could be dead! Couldn’t I?’
Marvelous! Oh,
marvelous!
Hans opened his arms just in time as she rushed at him and buried her face in his shoulder and convulsed into sobs.
There followed an unmeasured period during which she wept and he caressed her back through one thin layer of cloth and dreamed of the time when the cloth would no longer be there. How long would it take to persuade her, by slow degrees, that it was okay for her to strip in his presence?
Too soon. Too soon! Keep your head, Hans Dykstra, and don’t push your luck.
Eventually he drew back from her and murmured something about having to hurry. She nodded pliantly.
‘Just to be on the safe side,’ he said, ‘I guess I’d better tie this villain up so he can’t get away before the police collect him – ’
‘You will not send for them at once? They could be waiting here when his confederates come, couldn’t they?’
Once more Hans chided himself for underestimating this girl’s native wit. How to get around that little problem –?
Ah.
‘But suppose the police and the other code-breakers arrive together! You could be involved in another gunfight! You just escaped from one at Aleuker’s – surely you don’t want to risk another? Just do as I say, and everything will work out fine!’
She raised no more objections, and within another five minutes they entered the skelter together and he pressed the code for a Way of Life refuge he had once visited in Bali. Anneliese might be disturbed at finding herself among committed heathens; still, the place had three great advantages. They took in anybody, gave help and never asked too many questions; they were always extremely busy and maintained no records, preferring to get on with their real work and forget about what happened yesterday; and very few
people there spoke more than a smattering of English, let alone Flemish or
Plattdütsh
.
They were received at the skelter door by a smiling, thirtyish woman garlanded with flowers; flowers were also braided into her black hair. Apart from that, she wore only a sort of kilt secured with a belt of woven leather from which dangled a small pouch. Anneliese’s fingers cramped painfully on Hans’s arm as she realized that by her standards the woman was shamelessly unclad.
He murmured reassuringly, ‘You probably find this hard to believe … but you’re looking at a nun.’
She turned wide disbelieving eyes to him. ‘A – a
nun
?’ she repeated.
‘What else do you call someone who has decided to dedicate her existence to helping others because of what she believes?’
‘I … ’ Anneliese’s voice failed her. Just as well; it would have complicated matters beyond bearing to try and fill in the details. A somewhat more exact term than ‘nun’ might have been ‘temple prostitute’ – but it would still have been wide of the mark. The concepts of the Way of Life were as subtle as any evolved by previous religions, and required a very open mind.
By then, however, the woman was making them welcome with smiles, and for each of them a posy of fresh-picked flowers – which went a long way to assuaging Anneliese’s alarm – and inviting them with gestures to leave the small room in which the skelter was located and follow her down a quiet corridor walled with stone and lit at intervals with lamps set behind translucent paintings, all of various living organisms, from naked athletes to lowly bacteria shown magnified thousands of times.
‘It is the belief of these people that no harm should ever be done to any evolved creature,’ Hans whispered. ‘With one exception: if a superior creature may be saved from suffering thereby. They are willing to cure diseases even though it means killing germs – you follow me? – provided a human life can be made better because of it. You’ll find them very kind and very generous. This is a refuge which they keep open for anybody who wants to
come to it: people for whom life is too much of a problem, who need to rest and relax and think things out, or people who are ill and have no friends or relatives to look after them … You don’t have to believe what they believe. They give what they can and leave it at that.’
‘I – I see,’ Anneliese answered. ‘Once I read a book about monks at the Pass of St Bernard in Switzerland, who had to help everybody lost in the snow. Is it like that?’
‘Yes, very like. Except you should say: people lost in the world.’
He was infinitely relieved to find her so open-minded. Doubtless she would also be favorably impressed when she learned that no meat was ever eaten here because no follower of the Way of Life could kill an animal – he himself had never become a convert to total vegetarianism, but he had often had qualms of conscience about it. When it came to some of the rituals glorifying sensuality, on the other hand, Anneliese might well be completely repelled … but with luck she would have to stay here so short a time, she wouldn’t even hear rumors about that side of it.
To an elderly, likewise nearly naked, woman of perhaps sixty who had retained an astonishingly attractive figure even though her face was wrinkled like an old apple – but wrinkled for the right reason, because she had talked and smiled and laughed a great deal all her life – he explained slowly in English the reason why he had brought Anneliese here. He referred to her parents’ fate, and then to the attack at Aleuker’s, and then to the burglar at his home where he’d taken her for safety, and the elderly woman nod-nodded every time she got the picture through the barrier of a half-comprehended language.
‘We shall help and take care,’ she said firmly. ‘Is a badness, so much hate and hurt. Will here be safe!’
He asked Anneliese, ‘Do you think you can stand it here for a while, as long as it takes me to sort everything out?’
She bit her lip.
‘I think so,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand why these people do what they do, but it must always be good to help people in trouble, I think. I don’t really understand why you’re helping me, either, but I am very grateful to you.’
That encouraged him to embrace her on parting, and even
to plant a chaste kiss on her lips: light, very brotherly, most out of keeping with the practices of the Way of Life … but luckily Anneliese didn’t notice the look of astonished disapproval that crossed the face of the old nun.
He was humming as he stepped back through the skelter in Sweden, rehearsing the terms of the bargain he was going to strike with Mustapha: leave me alone, and I won’t report you for selling illegal codes. Fair?
It would have been. Would have
had
to be.
But Mustapha had disappeared.
INTERFACE O
The great courtesans
Reported by old scandalmongers
Notched up their respectable collections
Of noblemen and servants and friends
But never managed
Because they could not manage
What girls of the most respectable descent
Take for granted in modern times –
That they should sleep
In seven beds on seven continents
Incontinently in any given week….
– M
USTAPHA
S
HARIF
In the other of the two rooms of his home where nobody except his closest and most intimate servants entered – the first being the room with his secret skelter, the second
not
being his bedroom which had been shared over the years with an amazing range of partners – Mustapha Sharif waved aside with thanks that same boy who had tended Satamori’s wounds and pronounced himself capable of thinking clearly again.
Ali and Feisal, his body-servants, and Muley the chief scribe who was the third of his right hands – he had created that conceit for a poem, long ago – stood about him, exuding anxiety so fiercely he did not need eyes to read their expressions.
‘It must be done as it was done before,’ Muley said in a sententious voice.
‘No.’ Mustapha rubbed his forehead; his head still ached, but a cold compress and a salve and a glass of sweet mint tea with a pain-killing drug dissolved in it had brought his body’s agony under control. He said again, ‘No, not in any detail the way it was done before. Instead of dealing solely with a conscious criminal, we now have to take steps to
ensure the safety of an innocent girl, barely more than a child, for whom this – this
person
has conceived a fate worse than imprisonment. He plans to put shackles on her mind, cripple her in a way which no bodily restraint could match. He is moreover unaware of what evil he is hatching … Muley, I trust you as I trust myself, and sometimes more so. Judge in accordance with what you believe a man who is married, who chose a woman older than himself, not altogether intelligent, confined her to him by legal bonds, made her so miserable that she learned how to hate him and herself too, and on the basis of a spur-of-the-moment encounter, attained by sheer chance, decided he was going to abandon her – knowing, admittedly, that any woman still capable of standing, sitting, lying and spreading her legs is instantly desirable nowadays – but regardless of that reservation is
capable
of discarding her because he has a chance of deluding an ignorant teenage girl into the misconception that she must depend on him and him alone in order to keep afloat in a world she doesn’t understand … Well?’
Muley plucked at his large lower lip; he was a portly man, full-jowled, pot-bellied, soft … because when he was a very small boy he had trodden on an inefficient anti-personnel mine, which did not kill him but did reduce him to a condition that in other ages had been more deliberately created. He also limped on his left leg.
‘I already passed my judgement,’ he said. ‘Before you set forth those facts. Because there is one additional fact you seem not to have heard.’
‘Tell me, then!’
‘This man is not married. He is widowed.’
Mustapha tensed. ‘Explain, explain! How do you know?’
‘The moment you returned, on the basis of what you were able to mumble through your pain, I initiated an inquiry – discreetly, by roundabout routes, but rapidly too. It was not a difficult task. News of an inquest is come by very simply.’
‘But you can’t be implying that he killed his wife?’
‘Indeed, no. The news runs that his wife killed herself as a result of some insult or affront he gave her.’
‘Ay-ay-ay!’ Mustapha clenched his hands into knobbly soft fists. ‘And there is to be an inquest?’
‘Tomorrow at 10 a.m. local in the Valletta coroner’s court.’
‘He is obliged to attend?’
‘Yes indeed; he is the only witness to the facts.’
‘Oh, but this is a disaster!’ Mustapha cried. ‘For him not to appear: that will create a planetary hue and cry! But if he does appear, he may let slip something which … Yes, it would be fatally easy for him to lose track of his complicated lies.’
‘We must eliminate him,’ Ali grunted. ‘We can catch him when he arrives to attend the court – ’
‘Out of the question. He has secret files to be opened in the event of his death, recording his expeditions with me, and while he pledged that he would not include any hint of my identity, he may now have gone back on his word.’ Mustapha shook his head. ‘No, I see only one possibility. We must track him down and persuade him it is still to his advantage to keep our secret. All being well, the threat of a bracelet will fetter his mind more securely than the ropes he used on me!’ Mustapha rubbed his chafed wrists and ankles. ‘Sometimes, you know, I feel that those with sight overestimate the advantages they derive from it. One would never have believed that anybody in his right mind could do such a sloppy job of lashing a man’s arms and legs. In pain, giddy, frightened, I released myself from his amateurish bonds in – oh – perhaps two or three minutes. He left slack on both my wrists, as though he conceived them to be circular instead of twice as thick one way as the other … Muley, detach a hundred apprentices and juniors, preferably active and intelligent youths, and assign them to me for instructions. It should not be very hard to pre-guess someone like Hans Dykstra, gripped by fear that prevents him thinking clearly. There are only half a dozen places apart from the Valletta court where we stand a chance of catching him; we should be able to cover all those skelters.’