The woman who came to answer Hans’s knock at the rickety front door smiled and bobbed and escorted them indoors, explaining that yes, very luckily there was room for someone else because one of the long-term lodgers had just died and nobody had yet rented the room again. She showed them into an ill-furnished cramped room with a double bed, a wash-stand so ancient that had he come on it in the course of his work Hans would have thought it worth recuperating and selling as an antique, and a big wardrobe standing lopsided against the wall because one of its legs was missing.
Anneliese stared about her in dismay. Thinking that it was because of the state of the room, Hans began apologetically to explain about the collapse of the hotel business the world over, so that in most places one could find nothing better than this sort of squalid accommodation, used by stucks and bracees and other poverty-stricken social débris … but that wasn’t what was on her mind.
‘There must be two rooms!’ she ordered. ‘Find a place where there are two rooms! I will not accept this – we are not married!’
And before he could conjure up an answer she was storming at him, a flood of unleashed words that battered his ears until his skull seemed to be ringing like a bell.
‘Every man I have met since I came from Brazil is the same, and you too when I thought you were more honest, more
moral!
I was a fool to believe your lies, and I should have known better! All you can think of is your filthy sinful lust, and any way you can cheat a girl, deceive her, force her into a corner she can’t escape from, that’s what you do! I said I’d come with you because you promised to show me the beautiful side of the modern world, places where people are happy and kind and life is sweet, and what have I seen? What have you brought me to? A horrible shabby filthy
stinking
townful of slums, that’s what! Get me away from here
this minute,
and this time
show me what you promised
!’
INTERFACE S
Many people sit at home
gnawing their nails,
unable to decide where to go.
An ass – claimed Buridan –
starved to death
equidistant between bales of hay.
Buridan however was human.
Other creatures
aren’t really as stupid as mankind.
– M
USTAPHA
S
HARIF
All his castles in the air were collapsing around Hans now. He could barely believe that so short a time had transformed Anneliese from the shy, seemingly affectionate child who had been so delighted to find someone at Aleuker’s whom she could talk to – albeit slowly and with many verbal footnotes – in her own language. Now she seemed to have turned into a thoroughgoing virago, tongue-lashing him with more imagination and more sheer anger than Dany had ever achieved.
Could this be the fruit of the ideals to which she had been raised? It seemed incredible. How could people get on with one another if they thought this attitude the right and proper one?
And then he remembered sickly: they hadn’t got on with one another. They had been so crazy, they had invented weapons capable of wiping out whole cities-f of people at a blow, and they had used the skelter first of all to commit theft, murder and sabotage.
Dazed, there was nothing he could do except comply with Anneliese’s demands. Walking back to the skelter concourse,
to the accompaniment of her sniffs and snorts of contempt at the state of this run-down dirty little town which were impervious to all his attempts to interrupt, he searched his mind for somewhere else he might risk taking her.
Tahiti had crossed his mind a little while ago, he recalled. Would that be tolerable by her standards …? Very likely not, because it was a clean smart place patronized by skelter-tourists, people taking long vacations with plenty of money in their pockets. If Anneliese had been horrified to see people going about at the Balinese refuge clad only in kilts and baldrics, even though the costume was practical and they were carrying out their daily tasks, how much more offended would she be at the sight of women and gay men sprawling naked on the beach out of narcissism and the hope that they would attract partners for the night?
He didn’t know. He literally had no idea. He couldn’t get hold of these lunatic standards which she lived by.
Was there any skelter-using community, anywhere on the planet, conservative enough to satisfy her? Well, if there were it would have to be in Australia. It wasn’t that no one at all nowadays adhered to the same sort of principles; it was that those communities where they were in force were disdainful of the skelter, or terrified of it, and he’d never been to any of them apart from making a brief tour of the town near Mustapha’s home … during which so many people had made signs at him to ward off the Evil Eye, or spat at the prints he left in the dust, that he’d lost count in a few minutes.
Did he know the code for any place in Australia? The answer was no. He’d have to consult a directory, and pick somewhere at random.
There were a few more people in the concourse now, half a dozen altogether including a couple of curious children buying soft drinks at the refreshment stand. He waited until they had been served, then asked about a directory. Recognizing him, the salesman’s face fell.
‘You did not like the home of my sister-in-law?’
‘She – she had only one room, and we wanted two!’
A pause, during which the salesman looked him over with mingled amazement and contempt: if a man can persuade a girl so pretty to travel with him, how can he not share her
bed? A good question … But he moved at last, pointing toward a booth which Hans had not noticed on the far side of the concourse, and said there was a directory there.
He expected Anneliese to come with him; she declined, and sat down firmly on a vacant bench.
‘You make me walk too much! My feet hurt! And this is the world where they told me you never need to walk because you have the skelter!’
So Hans went to the directory booth alone, and leafed through a tattered out-of-date volume with many pages missing. The purpose they had been put to was plain from the stench that arose from a corner of the booth; the floor had subsided, there was a hole in it, and people had used it as an impromptu latrine.
Half-deafened by the buzz of flies that circled that spot, Hans eventually located and memorized the code for the public skelter outlet in Alice Springs, Australia, which – so he seemed to remember – was currently flourishing and certainly must be as conservative as most of the subcontinent. He headed, sighing, back toward the bench where he had left Anneliese … and realized with a shock of horror that she wasn’t there.
Staring frantically around, he spotted her approaching the skelters, talking animatedly to a man in neatly tailored clothes who certainly had not been on the concourse a few minutes ago.
He shouted at her. Glancing fearfully at him, she clutched her new companion’s arm and whispered something that impelled him to hurry her into the nearest booth. Before Hans could catch up, a wash of bright blue light signaled their departure.
To anywhere.
For a long while Hans simply stood there cursing, his hands clenched so tight he fancied blood would run from the tips of his nails. The children regarded him in amazement, sucking their soft drinks noisely through straws; also the other people present gazed at him.
At long last he managed to gather his wits, and said to the air, ‘He’s not going to get away with it! I’ll see him in hell first!’
He strode to the same skelter by which Anneliese and the unknown man had traveled, and punched a code he had only used once before but remembered almost better than his own.
It belonged to Mustapha Sharif.
‘He has come, effendi,’ said Ali, and stood aside from the doorway of the Room of Leopards so that Hans could pass him, shouting wildly.
‘What have you done with her, damn you?’
Mustapha, seated cross-legged on a pile of soft cushions, raised the brow over one sightless eye: what do you mean?
‘Hans, good day to you,’ he murmured. ‘I have been half-expecting you … Be seated, and let Ali serve you some refreshment.’
‘I want to know what you’ve done with Anneliese!’ Hans bellowed.
‘You have become separated from her?’ Mustapha countered.
‘Lost her, as you damned well know!’
‘To be strictly accurate, I didn’t know. But I’m glad. That is as it ought to be.’
‘You … ’ Hans’s voice failed him; he recovered it with a tremendous effort. ‘You have the gall to sit there and say she didn’t go off with one of your agents?’
‘My dear fellow, am I a miracle-worker?’
Bewildered, Hans wondered if he were losing his sanity. Had he not himself found it hard to believe that Mustapha could have his servants ready and waiting at every public skelter on earth? And yet –
‘You’re not denying you sent your chief scribe Muley in search of me?’
‘Indeed not, and in fact he’s on his way to join us. I just heard the scuffle of his shoes at the end of the corridor. He almost caught up with you, twice I believe, and I’m very puzzled, not to say offended, at the fact that you decided to avoid him. You made things even worse, I gather, by lying in order to persuade the monks and nuns at the Balinese Way of Life refuge to lie too. Ever since our first meeting you’ve claimed to follow that Way. It is sad to
realize that a friend of long standing has been telling you untruths, isn’t it?’
Giddy, Hans had to sit down; the alert Ali made sure that a stool was ready behind his legs.
‘But if Anneliese didn’t go off with someone you sent after us … ’
Muley entered silently; Mustapha acknowledged his bow with a brief nod.
‘Explain the circumstances,’ he invited Hans. And, having heard Hans’s broken summary, had to chuckle.
‘Oh, Hans, Hans, I suppose I should feel flattered because you thought all that was my doing!’
‘Whose, then?’ Hans demanded furiously.
‘Who but a senior official of the Skelter Authority could ensure that watch was being kept, world-wide, for a single man? Frederick Satamori was here, recovering from the injuries he suffered at Chaim Aleuker’s, during the very time when you and I were talking at the house in Sweden: that conversation which you ended in such an unceremonious fashion.’ Mustapha had discarded his bandage, but now he raised one hand to part his hair and display a piece of bright pink sticking-plaster covering his scalp-wound from the poker.
‘But … but Anneliese wouldn’t have gone off with a total stranger, even if he is an employee of the Skelter Authority!’
‘What grounds do you have to say that she would not?’ Mustapha retorted. ‘During the few brief hours of your acquaintance at Aleuker’s party, had you become such old intimate friends …? No, on the contrary: I say you have one hundred per cent evidence that that’s exactly what she would do. Have you not realized, even now, that she is deranged?’
‘I – ’ Hans’s jaw dropped.
‘I discern that you had begun to suspect, and were denying the truth to yourself.’
With renewed fury: ‘So you told Satamori to find me and Anneliese! Is he pimping for you now? You want her for yourself, is that it? Well, I can tell you – ’
‘Never in my entire life, and I’m no longer a young man,’ Mustapha said thinly, ‘have I been so mortally insulted.
And I am not the only one to take offense. Look at my servants. Can you not read in their faces that they would cheerfully seize you and drag you screaming up my tallest minaret and pitch you to your death on the flagstones below? It is as gentle a fate as you deserve. But you are yourself insane now. Possibly you always have been. In that case I am myself to blame for having befriended you. So I will answer with fair words. No, I did not set Satamori on your trail. Owing to the loss of Chaim and other crucial people, he was eager to track down those who had solved the treasure-hunt clues and you were the first person to do so and he wanted to get in touch with you and offer you a better job, more responsible, better paid. Instead, you let yourself become obsessed with a mentally-disturbed girl, barely more than a child; you let your wife sacrifice herself and gave perjured evidence about her death; you – ’
‘Lies, lies!’ Hans shrieked.
‘Ali, serve our visitor a tranquilizing draught. It will soften his panic and enable him to think and talk more like his normal self.’
Prompt, Ali proffered an engraved brass cup. Hans swept it aside, crying, ‘Out to poison me now, are you?’
‘Ali, fill two cups; the strain is telling on me and I too would welcome some of that drink. If you choose which cup I should take, will that content you?’ Mustapha added to Hans.
Hans licked lips gone suddenly dry. Eventually he nodded.
‘Good. I might say: just as well. Because if I had to kill you, I would. I had your predecessor killed when he started pilfering things from the houses we visited together. I do not wish to wear a bracelet …
‘But I do wish to make several things clear to you, and when your mind is settled enough to take them in, I shall continue with my explanations. I would rather convince you than have your death on my conscience.’
INTERFACE T
I have noticed
how deep in litter is the world.
It is because
nobody cares about anywhere now.
I don’t live here!
– they say, and take the skelter.
But they do.
They do live here. This is Earth.
– M
USTAPHA
S
HARIF
Perhaps Mustapha was more accustomed to whatever was in the tranquilizing draught; at any rate, he seemed unaffected by it when he had drained his cupful. By contrast Hans was pervaded by sudden alarming detachment, as though his ego had separated from his body and now floated above his head, observing himself, controlling his movement and speech but from a distance, puppet-fashion.
He said, enunciating carefully, ‘Well – explanations! And I warn you: make them good ones … ’ A yawn unexpectedly stretched that last word, and he converted it into a gasp.