The Sandpit

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  ‘How so?’

  Gilles contemplated him judicially. ‘I tell you this not because it interests you, which I know it doesn’t, but because it’s easy to find out.’

  In a voice which led its owner back to the boardroom, Gilles went on: ‘History does repeat itself. Why? Because we don’t evolve much. If you had discovered a revolutionary, super-efficient way of reducing the energy price to two pence per kilowatt and that could be put cheaply into production in, say, China, what would be the best way to play it? You’d short Brent Crude and WTI futures with a seven-day duration, and then you’d leak to a known industry source, let the ripple start impacting energy price volatility everywhere, and sit back and watch the wisdom of the crowd take over. Because as soon as this invention is out there, everyone will want to get in on it. Two plus two still equals four, Jean, even today. The tidal wave of panic would cause mayhem in energy securities as the hedgies unwound positions in conventional oil and gas. The leverage through futures alone could be way more than a hundred to one.’

  Gilles was right. This talk of money and power, it was a foreign currency to Dyer, like the notes on the Bookbinder’s ceiling. Marvar had probed the mystery of the depths, seen stars on the river bed. What had Gilles seen? Vaz de Caminha related how one Portuguese captain had listened patiently to a Tupi elder speaking ‘without anyone ever being able to understand him, or he us’. As so often when conversing with Gilles, Dyer felt much the same incomprehension.

  ‘What do you think of this shandy?’ he asked.

  Gilles surged on. He knew he was boring Dyer, but he wouldn’t be deflected. He was addressing an international audience of bankers and patent brokers, and not Dyer across a rickety teak table laid for a meal that neither of them intended to eat.

  ‘What I’d like to know from you, Jean, is this: has Marvar made such a discovery? If so, where is the proof? You see, I need proof. Concrete proof,’ his fingers tightening again around the salt cellar.

  ‘Mon cher Ralph is convinced that Marvar, being Iranian, will have given his information to Iran. But Ralph is CIA, as doubtless you have realised, and like many intelligence officers his understanding of human nature is, let us say, pas trop intelligent. You have only to speak to Marvar for two minutes to realise his hostile attitude to the Mullahs. He wears that big coat, hoping it covers up everything, what he’s thinking, his amazing leap forward, his anxieties, but he can’t help it! He is naked in his heart. A bit like you, Jean, eh?

  ‘Non. Contrary to what Ralph and those in your old profession might want us to think –’ tapping the newspaper that Dyer had laid on the table – ‘I have yet to be convinced that we should finger Iran for Marvar’s vanishing act. They have taken his wife and daughter, yes. Without doubt, the Mullahs would welcome Marvar’s information, and even go many lengths to secure this. Yet from what my contacts are saying – and my sources are the best, Jean, trust me, the very best – there is no more reason to believe the Iranians have kidnapped Marvar than have the Russians or the Israelis. And, yes, in case you are wondering – and after your unfortunate experience outside the Randolph, why wouldn’t you wonder, mon dieu? – the same holds true for the Saudis, the Chinese et comme ça.

  ‘But nor, on the other hand, do I have the strong impression that Marvar would willingly sell out to Iran’s enemies. This doesn’t suit his character either, from what I have been learning of him.

  ‘So, I ask myself, who does that leave?’

  He was thinking his own thoughts, swishing his tail. ‘If Marvar has voluntarily given his information to someone – and it’s not merely Ralph who thinks this, mind – then who could that person be? The kind of man Marvar is – or, if one has to be pessimistic, was – it stands to reason he would seek out an honest broker. I see him as clearly as I see you, Jean. He’s in danger, he’s afraid. He doesn’t trust his regime. He doesn’t trust the West. What he’s in search of – desperately – is someone he can trust. But who? I considered all the people he might approach, and one after another I dismissed them.’

  His brows came together and he looked at Dyer from far away, a hen harrier who had espied a little sparrow far below.

  ‘Then I kept thinking, for some reason, Jean, of you.’

  ‘Moi?’ said Dyer, taking another sip. They had been fencing. Time to stop parrying.

  ‘I said to myself: didn’t Marvar spend the night at Jean’s house before he disappeared? Then I heard something most peculiar. You were observed wearing Marvar’s coat soon afterwards. How very odd, I thought. And then I remembered that I had seen you both talking at the match against Horris Hill – and also, now it came back to me, one evening at the school sandpit, yes, the very sandpit where on Sunday I interrupted Marvar reading, or whatever he was doing before he leaped up in such a terrible hurry. I could see you sitting there as I ran past, heads together in conversation, like we are now, and I wondered if he might have spoken to you of his exciting development, what he was planning to do with it, given you something even?’

  Gilles made a motion with his lip, linked to a smile but not a smile.

  ‘Before you answer, I have a hunch – it is only a hunch, yet Silvi will tell you my hunches have a tiresome habit … I won’t go on … but this hunch is whispering in my ear that Marvar may indeed have given you something. You might not think it’s important, you might not understand it, you might not even realise what it is, that it means anything. It might be, as you like to say, pure gobbledygook, but as we know – it’s what the Phoenix teaches our children, mon dieu! – one person’s goobledygook can be the answer to somebody else’s prayers.’

  There was no mistaking the menace behind his words, or the iron look that followed, but he spoke in a sympathetic tone, as if he was offering Dyer not a hypothesis so much as a chance to save himself.

  Dyer refused to offer his neck to the blow. ‘I didn’t know you were religious, Gilles.’

  Opposite, Gilles’s face erupted into a smile.

  ‘Hey, Leandro! Over here.’

  Dyer turned, and uttered a parental sound.

  Leandro hovered in the doorway, looking for him. His eyes grew enormous when he saw Gilles.

  ‘Hi!’

  Gilles leaped to his feet, stood up, and shook Leandro’s hand like an adult. ‘Silvi and I really appreciated getting your letter.’

  ‘Thank you so much. I had an amazing time.’ At Dyer’s urging, Leandro had written to the Asselins following his sleepover. He had returned from their house in Ward Road in something of a daze. The gym, the games room, the TV screen, the double cheeseburgers, the photos of Gilles with his medals – were a far cry from lamb chops past their sell-by in a small rented kitchen in Jericho, and pictures of an absent mother on his bedroom wall.

  Gilles gave his shoulder a simulated punch. ‘Ring me and we’ll have lunch sometime.’ Then: ‘I hear you’ve been on the river.’

  Leandro told him about his trout – which Gilles asked to see, affecting incredulity when Leandro said that he had released it.

  ‘Now why would you do that? Isn’t that, what’s the word …’ flicking his fingers. His eyes glanced to Dyer and back. ‘Hey, what are your plans tomorrow? Do you guys want to see Chelsea play Arsenal? I’ve got a box. Come with Pierre and me.’

  Leandro gasped. Before he could reply, Dyer broke in to say that they were booked for one more day’s fishing.

  ‘Tant pis.’ But not to worry. Another time.

  Speaking in Portuguese, Dyer said to Leandro: ‘Darling, please go and wait for me in the dining room. I need to finish talking to Gilles.’

  ‘And I must be on my way soon,’ said Gilles, patting his trousers for his keys.

  He waited until Leandro had left the room, and sat down.

  ‘Lovely boy you’ve got there,’ tossing the keys from one hand to another. ‘He reminds me so much of Samir.’

  Dyer suddenly saw Gilles peering up from the depths, fanged. Perhaps it was his name. The only place to grab a pike without getting you
r fingers severed off was under the gill plate into the lower jaw.

  ‘Oh, I think he has more in common with Pierre. He’s a great fan of your son. He says Pierre could easily be goalie for the Oxford Schools team.’

  But Gilles wasn’t to be caught like that. He said with sinister emphasis: ‘I have been wondering if perhaps, Jean, you know more than I know.’

  ‘About Oxford Schools?’

  ‘About Rustum Marvar.’

  The only sound in the room, the portentous jingle of his keys.

  ‘Perhaps I do.’

  Gilles sat back, hands quiet, waiting to hear what Dyer had to say.

  Dyer raised his eyes. ‘I did in fact come into possession of a Ziploc sandwich bag of Marvar’s – but only for a short time. I lost it, unfortunately.’

  ‘What was in it?’

  ‘A post-it note.’

  He waited for his answer to sink in. It sounded so silly. But Gilles did not think so.

  ‘Just one?’ His voice was shrill with a businessman’s impatience.

  ‘That’s right.’ Dyer saw no need to mention the two extra blank notes. ‘With some kind of mathematical formula written on it.’

  ‘And before you lost it, you made a copy?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘You didn’t have time?’

  ‘Not that. It’s hard to explain, but I felt it wasn’t something Marvar would have wanted me to do. He told me he had very deliberately made one copy only, and this, I presumed, was it.’

  ‘Did you believe him?’

  Dyer chose his words with care, like biting off the right length of nylon for a fly. ‘I believe that he believed he had achieved something remarkable.’

  Gilles was looking at him as Katya had. ‘No, do you believe he only made one copy?’

  Dyer intuited that an awful amount depended upon his answer. Not only that, but none of his answers so far had come as a surprise to Gilles. The feeling overwhelmed him that Gilles was involved with the second break-in, and he had read the substitute post-it note inspired by Basil Bunting’s poem. Or if he hadn’t read it, then he was in contact with others who had, and was coming to the conclusion that it was the ravings of a madman. But first he needed to be convinced beyond doubt.

  ‘Yes, I do believe him,’ Dyer said.

  ‘This post-it note, can you remember what was written on it?’

  ‘God, no! It was an immensely long algorithm – ten, eleven lines of figures, covering both sides.’

  ‘Just figures?’

  ‘Plus some letters. Oh, and a quote from a German scientist.’

  Gilles was not interested in Otto Hahn. ‘Could Marvar have remembered the algorithm by heart?’

  ‘I doubt it. Or he wouldn’t have needed to write it down. As I said, it took up the whole post-it note. No one but a nuclear physicist would be able to make head or tail of it.’

  Gilles said with a bitter laugh: ‘Some things can’t be understood no matter how much one studies them.’

  Dyer paused before making his next cast. ‘A lot of poetry is like that.’

  ‘Not only poetry! I started reading your book …’

  It hadn’t been meant unkindly, and Dyer’s tone in response was light. ‘I bet you didn’t get any further into it than Marvar. Incidentally, I gave him my last copy.’

  ‘So I understand. With a most touching dedication.’

  ‘He may have been reading it when you saw him,’ said Dyer, wondering how Gilles knew this – from Updark? Crotty? Or was it Gilles himself who had handed in Dyer’s book to the headmaster?

  But Gilles’s mind seemed to be on what Marvar – not on what Dyer – had written. He was reassuring himself. Marvar was like every scientist who claimed to have discovered the St Graal of nuclear fusion. He would end his days, if they hadn’t been terminated already, like that German in Bariloche, a forgotten laughing stock with a changed name.

  He was playing with the ceramic container again. The sound of a man rapping the table to loosen the salt.

  ‘Jean, I know wealth means nothing to you, but if you do have information …’

  Dyer held his gaze. He made sure that what he said was so close to the truth that Gilles and whoever else had their skin in this wretched game would be certain to believe him – and then leave Dyer and Leandro alone. They had the room to themselves, but he spoke to Gilles as though addressing a boardroom crammed with every interested party that he could think of to summon: every hedge-fund manager, banker, spy, kidnapper, assassin, telecoms magnate, revolutionary, nuclear physicist, news reporter, father.

  ‘I swear I do not have anything of Marvar’s in my possession. Marvar left his overcoat – and I haven’t even got that. Someone broke into our house and stole it along with the sandwich bag.’

  Gilles smiles like a man who is shocked and sad to get what he asked for. ‘Another shandy? The ginger beer is very good here.’

  Chapter Thirty-three

  HE WAS LEFT WITH A cutlass, a knife, perhaps a matchlock and some pinches of powder in his sabretache. His few metal pieces had bewitched the Indians. These were his passport and his shield, regarded by the Tupi as creations from another world, totemic, beyond anything in their experience, like the chicken that had astonished two of them in Cabral’s cabin. For his modest collection of iron, Ribeiro was offered brazilwood, beautiful bows and arrows, his choice of woman, anything. A local chieftain took him in. He had a child with one of the chieftain’s daughters. He was feared, respected. How he lost his precious talismans is not known. But a legend passed from tribe to tribe, from visitor to visitor, how the Tupi had expelled him, indifferent to his presence once he was deprived of his iron, until one day a man stumbled into the campsite of some French timber merchants four hundred miles north, another exiled European, with the ribs of his midriff showing between two sections of his shirt pinned with one remaining button. He could babble a few words in Portuguese.

  The story of how a young Portuguese sailor survived in Brazil having been cast ashore on a beach south of Bahia was Dyer’s chief distraction on Tuesday, following his return from Lancashire.

  Tuesday was the deadline that Dyer had imposed on himself. Yet when he entered the Taylorian and his eyes once again saw Marvar’s post-it note folded inside Madrugada’s book, yellow as virgin sand, untouched, safe, he relaxed. Oxford with its red-brick houses and bus shelters stepped into the sunlight.

  Dyer’s relief lulled him into questioning his deadline. He looked around, savouring the silence. Unhurried as before, the couple in the painting went on with their private business undisturbed. The kneeling shepherd continued to hold tenderly in his palm the injured heel of the woman, who gazed down at him with dilated nostrils, swelling breasts, smiling. They looked as if they had all the time in the world to deal with a mere splinter or scratch. Why not take his cue from them, borrow the skills that fishing had taught, and which Dyer’s three days in Lancashire had refreshed. Be patient and still – wasn’t that the way?

  Am I being too hasty? Do I need to decide today? The deadline was artificial anyway.

  All his previous apprehensions seem suddenly ridiculous to him, like a fear of stone lions.

  This is what he is thinking when, hours later, he attempts to renew online the book featuring Afonso Ribeiro that he had started a fortnight before, and was near to finishing, and the library’s Solo system won’t let him.

  Puzzled, but with a stab of worry, he went and talked to the peroxide librarian. She consulted her screen. What she said next cramped his chest. ‘I see here someone has requested it.’

  The air in the room was unbreathable.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You know I can’t tell you that.’ The book would be collected from the stacks at 9 a.m. next day. ‘You may re-request it for yourself, and they can have it for one week. You’ll get it back on the morning of the eighth day.’

  His fingers clenched the red spine. Back in the domed reading room, he darted his eyes around. Not since its publicatio
n had another person requested Uma Nova Luz Num Litoral Antigo. Now out of the blue someone wanted to read it.

  A male assistant in a maroon cardigan pushed a loaded trolley across the carpet like a sleepwalker.

  The drumming in his heart. The heels of his pursuers. Whoever had ordered up the book, they were not interested in Madrugada’s scholarship – of this he was sure – but in Marvar’s scrap of paper that Dyer had reinserted, moments before, between pages 223 and 224.

  How quickly a man’s beard grows when he’s dead. Marvar’s algorithm was like that, it had taken on a supernatural life of its own. Dyer couldn’t leave it there.

  Heavy-hearted, he returns to his chair with the book. Unlike the couple in the painting, he has no time, he has to act now. His fingers shake as he takes out and starts to reread the figures and letters, in the hand that wrote ‘BOOMERANG’ on his fridge.

  Was any real purpose served by this yellow post-it note – beyond its use as a bookmark? Far simpler to rip it into a thousand pieces and scatter them on Port Meadow. It would remove the hazard of the note being found in his possession. Besides, who would know? He hadn’t admitted to anyone that he has this. And if he did remain under suspicion that he might be hiding something, it wouldn’t be for long; enough time would pass for everyone to forget about it. He would be free, safe.

  The temptation to obliterate, as Marvar had obliterated his marks in the sand, was fierce. But even as Dyer yielded to it, he remembered Marvar’s searching eyes. Those eyes had taken Dyer out of himself into a world where suddenly nothing seemed impossible if it was to be done for another person in trouble. Irrespective of whether he believed in Marvar’s abracadabra, Dyer was bound by his obtuse sense of duty to a man who for some reason had touched him.

  If Dyer was not to erase Marvar’s calculations, then the only alternative was to preserve them. He couldn’t risk putting the note back into his shoulder bag. Recent days had spelled out the very clear danger of having it on his person or in his house.