The Cryptographer

by Tobias Hill

  ‘Oh, probably. But not really, no. Some criminally greedy share dealing, no blood spilled. Allegedly.’ Her cheeks are flushed with the heat of the room, the cold of the street. Anna looks back into her own shrewd eyes. ‘The kind of thing Andrew likes to talk about, as if he weren’t all talk. What are you having?’

  ‘The risotto.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘Why? I want it.’

  ‘I didn’t bring you here to eat risotto.’

  ‘You didn’t bring me here.’

  ‘Alright, please yourself,’ she says, frowning, and then smiles with affectionate malice, like a sibling. They could be eighteen and ten again, twelve and four, for all the difference it has made between them. Nothing in their lives has changed them so much that they are no longer themselves. ‘You can taste mine. White or red? Say red.’

  They drink red. Anna watches her eat, voraciously, as she always has, not pausing until her hunger has been blunted on medallions of truffled hare, black cabbage, white asparagus. When she leans back it is with a sigh almost of relief.

  ‘You look well,’ Anna says, and when her sister sighs again, ‘You do.’

  ‘I believed you more the first time. You look tired.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘It’s only the truth. The whole truth.’

  ‘If it is then you shouldn’t bring your work home with you.’

  ‘Funny.’ She smiles again, with less conviction. ‘Andrew says that too.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘He seems to be well.’ The candles are guttering. She dips her thumb into the wax. Lifts out the small boat of her print. ‘I don’t see him as much as I’d like. The markets are hard this year. He’s been busy, and so have I. What about you?’

  ‘I’ve had a difficult client.’

  ‘Violent?’

  ‘No.’ She has to laugh. ‘No, nothing like that.’

  ‘Then what?’ Their voices have fallen. The restaurant is emptying out into the streets above, the background noise thinning down to the fundamental clatter of the kitchens. Anna and her sister speak with their heads bent over the remnants of their meal, small talk between siblings.

  ‘His name’s John Law.’

  ‘Well, well.’ The wax has hardened to the consistency of dead skin. Martha sets it down upright by her glass, a pale coracle of lines and whorls. ‘John Law, the root of all evil. You are doing well, aren’t you? All Revenue eyes must be on you.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You know, I never liked the look of him. He must be impossibly arrogant.’

  ‘Not impossibly. Proud,’ she says. ‘Just proud.’

  ‘Like you?’

  ‘Oh ha ha. No, not like me. He deserves to be.’

  ‘Do you like him, then? I never thought you were one for hero worship.’

  ‘I didn’t say he was my hero.’

  ‘No, you didn’t,’ Martha says, the last of the candlelight dancing in her eyes. ‘Does he like you?’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘I’m not. I bet he does. But you’ve finished with him now?’

  ‘No,’ Anna says, more or less to herself. ‘I don’t think I have.’

  ‘Well,’ Martha says, straightening. ‘Anyway, I’m glad you came tonight. I’ve missed you. Are you glad you came too?’

  ‘Of course,’ Anna says, surprised, and she looks up at her sister, catching her by the eyes. There is something there still unspoken, Anna thinks, but before she can be sure of it her sister is already glancing away, raising her hand for the bill. Anna leans forward while her back is turned, picks up the wax imprint of her skin, presses it smooth and warm between her fingers.

  In certain ways she has always been unlucky. It isn’t the way Anna would describe herself – though she has always had a sneaking belief in fate – because in the time and place in which she lives everyone is potentially witness to every misery. A figure in the next tube seat, on the next webcam, the next news bulletin, under the next overpass. It could be worse, is what people always say, and it is always true, so unquestionably so as to be a particular kind of lie. A deception arising from meaninglessness.

  A Revenue salary will never make Anna rich, but neither is she poor. She has never had to see someone die, or lost a loved one ahead of time, at least not to death. She has been in love and has been loved more than once (though she knows a great deal about secrets and lies; more, on the whole, than her lovers would like). She is not unlucky in death or love. It is something subtler than that.

  She is unlucky in time. Too early. Too late. The younger sibling in a family not built to last, watching its decline and fall as long as she has had the faculties to do so. Always watching, and her parents always falling, or always about to fall, like woeful children themselves, or mismatched skaters on old ice. She is the younger sister of a brighter star, a louder, more talented, more beautiful sibling – so it has always been said – so that Anna has become to a degree the opposite of these things: slight, doubtful, wry. It is as if her character has grown to occupy her sister’s vacancies. She was the youngest in her educational year, endlessly smaller, never quite catching up, wanting to ask the question, never asking. She has never been in the right place at the right time. She was the most mature Revenue trainee, abruptly old, passed over for the fast-track. She was the student in love with her mentor.

  Too early, too late. But she doesn’t think of herself as unlucky. Now least of all.

  When she thinks of him – which is often – it is with a light heart. It is not the expectation of anything possible. It is only a sense of incipient lightness. It is the luck of it, the pairing of his name with hers, out of so many. Sheer serendipity. It is her heart lifting with something temporary, with desire, the hope of desire.

  Something of Law has brushed off on her, like scent or gold dust. It isn’t long before she notices. Almost overnight she has changed in the eyes of others. This is what it is like to be known, she thinks, to be thought of, not the watcher but the watched, and she feels a quickening of exhilaration.

  Mister Hermanubis, stalking through the internal corridors of the Revenue like some Inspectorial demon, straightens up attentively as he passes her. You can call me Sukhdev, he says to her one morning, Sukhdev, and she tries but never quite manages to do so. Over sweetmeats from Oulu and coffee from Tunis Janet Sullivan confides in her that she sees her children twice a month, entrusting worn photographs. (Three teenagers, all girls. Tall in the pictures, big in the bones.) The oldest waitress at Lawrence’s bar meets Anna’s eyes and inclines her head, as if she knows (and how can she know? Anna thinks. But there is her nod, just the same).

  She sees Carl more often, and whatever has brought them closer has made them closer. A stranger might even mistake them for friends. Once, after dark, he makes a pass at her, which she gently evades. She is too old for him, she thinks. Or (and she is slower to acknowledge this, kinder to others than she is to herself) he is too young, his talk too incessant, his ambitions repetitive as hungers. There is a look he occasionally gets which Anna dislikes; an expression of amusement, and behind that, and feeding it, a warm human callousness. But on the whole she enjoys his company. Part of her is flattered. Part of her likes his difference.

  He is talking now, as she drives. Soon they will be in a public place, a club Carl likes in Lower Marsh that extends under the Thames, bright vats of aquarium fish worlds away from the tonnage of river mud overhead, the crowd all backs and arms and body language. When Carl drinks too much he licks his lips, like a man busy licking his wounds. Until then she is still driving, and he is still talking.

  ‘She works in systems. She said, I analyse systems, I’m a systems analyst. I thought fuck it. She tells you what she does and you don’t know anything about her. What does it mean? It’s not like what we do. What we do is different. Hello, I’m a tax inspector. It’s not hiding anything, is it? It’s not exactly hiding your skeletons in the cupboards. You know where you are, with a tax in
spector.’

  The car is a confessional, Anna thinks. It is a professional observation, something to be remembered for later use. Partly it is the sense of closeness without facing. Partly it is the sense of being in transit, where nothing counts. In cars people will talk for the sake of it. Not that Carl needs any encouragement.

  ‘Anyway. You don’t want to hear all this, do you? And I want to hear about you. How’s your code man?’

  ‘He’s very well. Thanks for asking.’ Her eyes already narrowing with an edge of humour.

  ‘Well, because I didn’t expect to see you any more, that’s all. I thought you’d be long gone by now. Vice-President of Morse. Deputy Dot Dot Dot. That’s what I would have done. They’re saying you closed the case.’

  She shakes her head again. For a while neither of them says anything. It is Sunday, and the traffic eases them along almost of its own accord. They reach Waterloo Bridge and there are seagulls over the grey-green river, dozens of them. In the air they are elegant, balanced on nothing in the afternoon sky.

  ‘Vermin,’ says Carl. ‘Someone should get rid of them. There are viruses for that. It’s tax-deductable.’

  ‘I like them,’ Anna says. Two of the gulls fly up from the bridge, quarrelling in mid-air. Lithe and muscular as dancers.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They used to mean rain.’

  ‘And that’s good, is it? So what’s he like?’

  ‘Who?’ She glances at Carl in the mirror. He is watching her, his dark eyes always on the move, as if he is trying to see through her. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Come on, I’m not asking for the colour of his knickers, just tell me what he’s like.’

  She looks away from him, searching for directions. ‘I expect he’s your dream come true, Carl. He’s powerful. It’s as if there’s some residue of money on him all the time. He stands out in a crowd and I don’t think he minds it.’

  ‘Do you like him?’ He waits impatiently while she parks and sits back.

  ‘I don’t think he’s a bad man. He’s not immoral. I don’t know if he’s amoral. When I started at the Revenue I used to think that amorality was a necessary talent of the rich. Lawrence used to say that. I don’t believe that now. Do you remember Lawrence Hinde?’

  ‘Everyone remembers him. Stop avoiding the question, will you? It makes me feel like I’m with a client. Do you like him?’

  She gets out and locks the doors behind them. ‘Yes,’ she says, over the roof of the car, ‘I do.’ She expects him to leer, to crack a joke, but instead he just looks away, down Coral Street towards the Waterloo Road.

  ‘Why?’

  Because I know he’s lying, she thinks, and it doesn’t make him less desirable. She thinks, because I trust him. ‘Because he interests me,’ she says. ‘He’s like something from the past or future. A Roman emperor in the twenty-second century. A science-fiction merchant prince. Something like that. Is that what you wanted?’ And she looks up to find that Carl is no longer listening.

  He is watching a figure in an adjacent doorway. There are two people there, in fact, both squatting on the pavement, but only one is holding out its hands. Begging, Anna thinks. It is not something she has seen for a while. Soft Gold means there is less to beg for or to give, now, only the old concretes of food, alcohol, cigarettes. In America, she remembers being told, there are beggars with card machines, but this was said to her with a slow smile and heavy eyes, as if the burden of these things is never gone.

  It is a moment before she notices the hands themselves. The thumbs have been cut off. One has been severed at the base, the other near the knuckle. The amputations are healed but not yet smooth.

  ‘Look at that, will you.’

  ‘What –’ Anna begins, quietly, although the figure makes no sign of hearing and it is not clear to her whether it is a man at all. She can’t make out its features properly, its face is in the shadow of the doorway. Only the eyes are visible. They are watching her, unafraid.

  ‘He’s been fingered. That’s what happens now, that’s what they do. It started a few years ago. When they steal your card they take the print that goes with it. Sometimes they take both thumbs, to be sure. Fingering. Didn’t you know?’

  She does, of course. She has heard of it, seen it virtually, but never literally, like this, herself. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘What for?’ Carl says, his voice unsteady. ‘You haven’t cut his thumbs off, have you?’

  ‘For him, then,’ she says, and she is, but she is sorry for Carl too. For the anger and fear milling in him. She is sorry for herself.

  ‘Don’t be.’ Carl starts to walk. ‘He wouldn’t want you to.’

  She follows him without a word. They turn out of the confines of Coral Street, up the main street. The sky is clearing to a fine blue, lighter than at midday, an Indian noon.

  ‘I heard something,’ he says eventually. ‘About your merchant prince.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s not exactly moral.’

  ‘Carl.’

  ‘I don’t know if you’ll like it.’

  ‘You won’t know unless you tell me,’ she says, trying too hard to be playful, to bring out the playfulness she likes in him. He smiles as if by rote.

  ‘It’s about the flower code. The one he hid in flowers.’

  ‘Asphodel Nine?’

  ‘Whatever. I heard there was another one, something he came up with later. They say he sold it in thirty countries. It was along the same lines.’

  ‘What lines?’ she repeats; but already she almost knows. She is too familiar with the way people think, the uneasy stories they tell. The grotesque and gothic shadows cast by the rich and famous.

  ‘This one you don’t hide in flowers. You hide it in people.’ He stops, hawks into the gutter with practised precision, begins to walk again. ‘You could have bank numbers in your fingernails. I could have chemical formulas in my liver. Anything. You’d never know. Useful. I might not even know myself.’

  She laughs without conviction. ‘Carl, if you believe that –’

  ‘I didn’t say I believed it,’ he says, dogged now, ‘I’m saying it’s what people are saying.’

  ‘People say anything.’

  ‘And sometimes they’re right. Worse things happen. There’s more, too.’

  ‘Oh, spare me –’

  ‘No, listen,’ he says, fervent, pleading, almost, and she does, because everyone does; everyone wants to hear. Because after all, it might be true. It might be good. ‘This code, whatever he calls it. Twenty years on, and the people who carried it are all dying. Dropping like flies, all over the world. They get some kind of cancer.’

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘The rare kind, I don’t know. Cancer of the fingernails. I didn’t say it was true, I’m just saying. Personally it makes my skin crawl.’

  ‘It must be getting thin.’

  ‘What’s your problem? It’s not like they’ll lock him up, anyway. He’ll just pay compensation until one day everyone’s forgotten what he’s paying for.’

  Future tense. She blinks surprise. ‘He’s actually being charged?’

  ‘Not yet. I heard there’s a civil case being put together in Japan. Four deaths. The government lawyers have been on it for a couple of years. They’re keeping it quiet.’

  They reach the bar and stop outside. ‘What would happen,’ she says, ‘if it was true?’

  ‘Nothing, if he can live with it.’ Carl sneers admiringly. ‘Nothing, he’s got too much money to lose. He couldn’t go under if he tried, and they wouldn’t let him anyway, there’s too many people with their money on him. Of course, if the Japanese get in there there’ll be others wanting the same. All the lawyers on the planet must be sharpening their knives. He might have to sell a couple of islands. I thought it might help you to know, anyway, just in case. Just in the interests of your interests.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ she says. �
��You’re disgusting. Thank you.’

  ‘And that’s supposed to be a compliment, is it?’ He leers at last. ‘I need you, Anna. You’re my pacemaker. Always one step ahead of me, that’s how I like you, where I can see you. Your seagulls are wrong, by the way,’ he calls back from the club entrance. ‘You should listen to your uncle Carl.’

  She looks up, the late sun catching her eyes. The sky bright as magnesium. The gulls high, turning slow orbits, as if they have found the secret of perpetual motion.

  By nightfall it has already begun to rain, not hard but with a kind of steady patience, ominously English, that suggests it has settled in for days. Anna stands in the warmth of her own place, her four thoroughly mortgaged walls, the house she bought with the hope that it would be home for more than herself, letting her coat drop, taking off her damp clothes, her shoes, smoothing the moisture from her hair.

  She is thinking of her father as she stands there, her hands aloft. His nightwatchman’s uniform dark after rain. The sound of him coming home, ordinary and mysterious. In the mornings the girls surreptitious as mice, ingeniously quiet, hopelessly bumping into things, their whisperings.

  She remembers him as a loving but solitary man, always waking to his family with a faint look of surprise, and, Anna understands now, disappointment. His tiredness on long summer days, like a nocturnal animal in the zoo. His cheap books in English and Yiddish. The music he would try to explain, his voice already old when Anna was young. A woman’s grace is in her hair, he said, the time she turned fourteen and cut off its shoulder-length. She cried for three days.

  She wears it long again, now. Graceful, she likes to think, hopes, though it seems to her too that she has chosen a life largely without grace.

  In the end it was Anna’s mother who left, but it is her father who has gone out of her life. She doesn’t know where he is in the world, or what he is, alive or dead. She imagines him as a nightwatchman still, out in the November dark.

  Rain corrugates the windows. On the study desk a vase of Siberian iris, two days past their best. Shelves of books. Anna is known for them. You and your bloody freeware, Carl says. Her office is the same. Other inspectors put their clients at ease in other ways. Or not, depending on their inclinations.