Luckily, in the course of his regular work he had gained access to garbage-disposal codes which ensured delivery straight to the hot heart of a furnace. Presumably when the Erikssons were killed such codes had not existed, or the intruder would have bundled up the bodies along with the blood-stained bedding and rugs, made the beds afresh and left the house looking as though the owners had dropped down to the tropics for a few days and might return at any moment. Exactly as he planned to do now.
He felt fortunate that he didn’t have to buy his garbage codes. They came expensive. They had to. They made it so easy to destroy the evidence of crime, especially murder.
He decided to attend to the chore right now instead of delaying it until his next visit. Used as he was to entering long-abandoned premises legitimately in the course of his profession – though never private homes, only factories and warehouses – and finding not two or three bodies but great piles of them, charred a little by pyres which other people had been too weak to keep alight until they themselves died, he found he hated the idea of coming back to this house that once must have been very beautiful and finding corpses in residence. It would make him feel too much like a trespasser.
He didn’t bother to rehearse any prayers as he consigned the bodies to the skelter. In Northern Europe these people would presumably have been either atheist – in which case they wouldn’t have cared – or Christian. As a moderately devout follower of the Way of Life he regarded Christianity with the same revulsion as black magic.
Let their evil Lord claim his own.
When the distasteful task was over he relaxed and spent a long while roaming from room to room in the house, everywhere finding new things to take pictures of, then disturb very delicately for fear time might have made them brittle, then, reassured, pick up and marvel at. To think
that this family, probably not exceptionally prosperous, had been able to buy and use, from new, objects that today would fetch a small fortune in the antiques market! He found a camera better and more costly than his own, a range of long-playing records in a well-sealed cabinet with a glass door any of which would attract bids from a hundred eager buyers, clothing of virtually imperishable synthetic fiber from which the dust fell away as he lifted it to reveal the brilliance of unfaded dyes, and more and still more whichever way he turned …
Abruptly he realized that his fingers and toes were growing numb despite his climatized garb, and his throat was stiffening, a sure sign of incipient frost-dehydration. There was, he remembered, a thermometer apparently in working order on the wall of the kitchen; when he consulted it, he discovered with alarm that he had been blithely wandering around at minus twenty Celsius.
Time for home. When he came back he must bring a heater.
INTERFACE C
This I am compelled to utter in another tongue
But it is a truth important enough to be spoken:
Some of those who call a journey-map a ‘route’
Pronounce it ‘root’ and cannot tell the two apart;
Others say ‘rout’ which means ‘to put to flight’
And oddly also ‘to pull up by the roots’ …
It is as though the genius of their language
Gave them warning in advance, which they ignored.
– M
USTAPHA
S
HARIF
To possess two private skelters: it was not unheard-of. To own three: that was remarkable, but certain successful persons, mostly working for the planetary authorities, had attained that goal and shuttled back and forth between three homes.
To own three sited all in the same building, even though the building was large and sprawled into many shady colonnades, white-glittering domes, towers of marble and courts where lizards darted at the feet of priceless statues … That was unique. And their unique proprietor was the man who, some declared, was the greatest living poet: Mustapha Sharif.
But if anybody said as much in his hearing, he would wryly observe that there was very little competition nowadays.
Possession of his third skelter, high in a minaret where five times daily an elderly and arthritic muezzin came to call to prayer those of the local people who had not been seduced into following the infidel creed, the Way of Life, was not an achievement he advertised. The world might assume the existence of the first skelter; so famous a man was bound to have one at least. The lucky ones might even,
by invitation, pass the privateer which guarded it and lavish on their host praise for the splendor of his home, which he could not see but always modestly said was worth maintaining for the pleasure it gave to others.
Equally, once having arrived whether by skelter or on foot or camel-back, visitors might guess at a second skelter. His estate was on rocky ill-favored ground, long unclaimed, but a skelter could and did bring in sweet water, delicate foods, relics salvaged from elsewhere on the planet.
But the third … Only two, out of all his many servants, were even aware that it was located behind that locked door on the last but one landing of a twisted staircase made of drab, worn tiles.
There was no light in the room, only a current of warm air from a high-set ventilator. He emerged into it, swiftly and deftly exchanged his climatized suit – necessary for the visit to Sweden – for his usual burnous and sandals, and after listening very carefully for the sound of footsteps unlocked the door, stepped out, re-locked it. The heat of Africa brushed him like fine wires, making his chill skin tingle.
On the point of turning downward on the staircase, he checked and changed his mind and instead took the last short flight up to the rooftop. He needed time to digest what he had learned.
There was a stool set out near the parapet. He felt for it, positioned it where he could lean comfortably forward, and faced the direction of ancient Luxor, which – so he had been told – was in line-of-sight from this tower. But he had scarcely begun to learn to think in pictures before he lost his vision. Instead he thought in terms of his other senses: the hot dry air bore him sounds that he readily identified, scents that he knew as intimately as his own hunger or thirst or fatigue. There were dates, camel-dung, humanity, cook-fires, growing crops, spices, wet cloth tentered on poles to bleach, and several other distinguishable aromas in the air today. The odors of life, not of death!
There was going to be another poem. He could feel the shy probing of its first tendrils at the back of his mind,
those tender early shoots which eventually would knot and crack flagstones into fragments.
He toyed with a phrase or two. The images were elusive. It was too soon yet. But the time would come.
Content to wait, preferring not to wonder whether eventually someone might read and understand his work rather than simply admire it, and draw a correct conclusion about his inspiration, he turned his mind to another matter: Hans Dykstra.
He had made a mistake in choosing that man to go with him to the nine lost homes. There had better not be a tenth.
In the beginning, it had seemed that Hans would be an ideal companion. There were others who might have been equally eager to buy illegal disused codes, but they were greedy, like his own former partner … whom he had been compelled to lose, regretfully but with small compunction, when he started to pilfer items rare enough to be valuable in such quantities that the authorities grew suspicious and clamped down. He was buried, conferring the life of his body on a field of corn.
To come upon somebody who wanted to leave, as a personal bequest to the whole of mankind, a series of documented samples of the past, one typical family home from each major culture of the pre-skelter period, but was content to store up his reports until he was safely dead – yes, that had seemed like a tremendous stroke of luck.
But Mustapha was wise to the ways in which a man could change. He knew beyond any possible doubt that the idea of being famous in his life time was eroding Hans’s original determination as surely as a river erodes the lip of a waterfall.
Sooner or later be would make a mistake. Sooner or later he would be tempted beyond endurance; he would carry home with him some precious object – more likely to be a tool, perhaps a camera, than a mere ornament – and it would be recognized by someone aware that Hans Dykstra was not entitled to possess it … There was a great deal left from the heyday of mankind’s inventiveness, but not so much that it was impossible to figure out such things.
And when that moment came, there would be trouble.
Dreadful trouble. Therefore the moment had better not arrive at all.
More content after having reached that decision, Mustapha relaxed into pure enjoyment of the sounds and scents that the breeze bore to him. He was glad he had chosen to settle here in Middle Egypt; it was a place of strong vivid stimuli, its wind alive with grit from the deserts to the west, its sunshine harsh and its night air cold, its water flavored with the essence of inner Africa, and many, many of its rocks chased with inscriptions left by long-dead hands.
It was about time he went back to the Luxor ruins and refreshed his fingertip acquaintance with the statues and the stelae.
Establishing himself here had not been easy. There was much history in the area, both ancient and modern, with a great gap in between the two. First, a community had flourished and faded in Pharaonic times. Then, for a long while, nothing much happened; the life of a small village repeated and repeated itself. And then they built the Aswan High Dam – not the first, which did little damage, but the second newer dam – and stole away the annual floods from the peasants lower down and rendered millions of hectares down-river infertile, sterile, useless. Starving, whole villages of people had trudged south seeking new homes, and an exhausted few had given up the journey here where it was possible to raise subsistence crops and pasture a small herd of goats.
Later, when Cairo and Alexandria were bombed, the Aswan High Dam was destroyed too. Another horde of refugees, this time much larger, straggled along the banks of Father Nile, and found that this was as far as they need travel in search of regular floods and revitalizing deposits of silt. In a year there was a huge new town: too big for a village, built of too many shabby hovels to be called a city.
At first they were jealous of their well-watered land, and declined to offer strangers any welcome. But they were growing slowly more tolerant. Indeed, they were becoming proud that their neighbor in the handsome mansion, though not Egyptian by birth, was admired the world around, and
was generous to the poor, and gave work to the deserving, and altogether behaved in a manner befitting those enjoying Allah’s favor … bar one thing. He had truck with that instrument of shaitan, the skelter. Even the most ignorant mud-grubbing
fellahin
were aware that the impiety of this invention had caused divine wrath to descend upon the world.
Their reservations, however, were being tempered by time. And by the judicious donation of good seed, new strong baby camels and donkeys, useful tools … Those could be cleansed of the smirch the skelter had left on them and put to honest use. Slowly he was winning the people over. Now, when he held open house on a feast-day and invited the local imams to preside at a night-long recitation of the Blessed Koran, many hundreds of the younger people came and sat in his courts.
A footstep on the stairs. Thinking he had mused so long, it was time for the muezzin to utter a prayer-call, he roused and turned.
But those soft slippers did not belong to the muezzin; here came Ali, his most trusted body-servant.
‘What is it?’ he demanded.
There were shushing sounds: the man was bowing.
‘It is to be hoped that the work will not suffer,’ he said in a tone of obsequious regret. ‘One attends below, however, who wishes urgently to speak with you. His name is Dr Frederick Satamori.’
Mustapha’s heart lurched halfway to his soles. The Deputy Director of the Skelter Authority! What could have brought him here, instead of putting in a phone call?
A myriad fearful images chased one another across his mind: memories of all the houses he had visited illegally, all the codes he had sold first to his former partner, then to Hans Dykstra who was so unconvincing in his rôle as a collector of finely-calligraphed books of Arabic poetry …
He gathered himself with an effort. ‘Request Dr Satamori to make himself comfortable in the Room of the Leopards,’ he directed. ‘Bring him refreshments. Inform him that I shall join him in a few minutes.’
‘The effendi’s will is done,’ Ali said, backing away with his sandals scraping the sand-dusted floor.
But it was more than a few minutes before Mustapha regained his normal composure and was able to find his way down the twisted staircase.
INTERFACE D
Time was when any lover, seeing his mistress
Was gone from the room, might call for her
And be assured that she would hear his cry.
O my beloved I do not treat you coldly.
Rather am I haunted by the knowledge
That one step may have put the world between us.
– M
USTAPHA
S
HARIF
Hans wondered absently: what had the woman of that house been like? Tall, from her skeleton propped up in bed (devoid of a visible wound like her husband’s but maybe she was stabbed in the throat or belly instead of shot) – but beautiful? Blonde? Blue-eyed?
Well, no doubt there would be pictures of her in an album or a drawer, and of her husband and child, even though none had been on display.
She must at all events have been better than that lazy greedy incompetent smug ungrateful …
Resentful thoughts in his resentful brain, he stepped out of the skelter into his own hallway – and Dany was rising from a chair to confront him.
He stopped, petrified. She had no business to be at home! She had told him she was off to a treasure-hunt party, a common and indeed a favorite gimmick in the circles she frequented, and he had relied on her solving the imbecilic clues, finding her way to the right place, staying at least several hours in the company of her friends.