by Del Howison
“That could be it!” Solange exclaimed. “He used to work in Moose Jaw, or so he says. I’ll check with the cops there.”
The Count held up his hand. “I can understand wanting not to appear too much a part of the prosecution instead of an investigator, but this man Fisk has—”
“I know,” she interrupted. “Thanks for the observation. You have a point. I’ll look into it.” Drinking more wine, she had to resist the urge to call Baxter at once; instead she asked one of her queries on her mental list. “Do you think the murder has taken away any of the community benefits the Blood Center promises?”
“For some, no doubt it has,” said the Count. “But once the murders are solved and the guilty party brought to justice, then the Center will quickly show its value.”
“Aren’t you being a bit too optimistic?” She cut a little more duck. “This is very good. I’m sorry you can’t enjoy it.”
“That’s kind of you,” said the Count. “No, I don’t think my optimism is unrealistic. But time will tell, and time is often the test in these cases.”
“Then you’re thinking in the long run?” Solange asked.
“For a man in my position, it is the only perspective that makes sense,” he told her as she went on with her dinner.
* * *
Applause burst out in the city room as Solange sauntered in, twenty-six days after her first dinner with the Count. She went to her cubicle, but stood outside it to curtsy three times, smiling proudly. “Thank you, thank you. You’re all too kind.”
Baxter, who had hung back, now came up to her. “Don’t be modest, Barendis,” he advised. “Conroy says you were the linchpin in their investigation.”
“I’m not being modest,” she said. “I know how much luck had to do with catching the guy.”
“You put them on the scent, and you kept at the story,” Sung said from his office doorway. “You could have followed the rest, hassling the cops for not getting the guy, but you went after Fisk, asking about his reluctance to do anything to break the case. The thing about saying animal blood and human blood could not be separated enough for a valid DNA profile. Very good.”
“Thanks,” she repeated. “It seemed a good place to begin.”
“Did you think it was Fisk?” Hill, who covered building and expansion, made his question sharp.
“I didn’t know who it was,” said Solange, delighted she had accomplished so much. “I just thought it was odd that Fisk kept running down the evidence he himself was collecting. A crime-scene tech needs to be skeptical, but what Fisk was doing was well beyond skepticism and leaning toward subversion.”
“Well, you helped bring him to justice, and you’re a credit to the paper,” Baxter approved, then went on, “Everyone back to work. You don’t want to have to chase the paper tonight.”
The celebratory mood vanished at once, and the night staff of the Vancouver Print and Media News Corporation returned to their tasks.
“Management is preparing a bonus for you, Solange,” said Baxter, lingering in the opening of her cubicle.
“Thanks,” she said.
After a short silence, Baxter said, “So what are you looking at now?”
“I got a lead on a smuggling operation. Not drugs, but high-quality antiques,” she told him, unfamiliar hesitation in her response.
“What about the Count—the exile?” Baxter prompted. “The one with so much money in the Blood Center.”
Her smile was slow and had a sensuality to it that Baxter had never seen before. “He’s a gentleman of the old school—no real story there, except that he still exists.”
Baxter pounced on her remark. “Something going on there that I should know about?”
She shook her head. “Only dreams.”
“Those kind of dreams?” Baxter asked her.
“None of your business, boss,” said Solange.
Baxter chuckled. “So long as it doesn’t get in the way of your work, dream away.”
She contemplated his profile. “It was something the Count said that got me thinking about the smuggling scheme.”
“He fed you information?” Baxter seemed surprised.
“No; not even enough to qualify as an unnamed source—he mentioned something a week ago, about trouble his shipping business was having. I decided to ask around, to see if his problems were isolated.”
“And I gather they’re not,” said Baxter and slapped the side of her cubicle. “Well, keep me up to date on your project.” He started away from her cubicle.
“You can depend on me, boss,” she responded, and began to work on her new story, all the while anticipating the late-night supper she would have with the Count, three hours from now. Grinning inwardly, she promised herself she would have particularly delicious dreams tonight, as a reward for her tenacity, and the result of her rendezvous with the Count.
THE ANNOUNCEMENT
RAMSEY CAMPBELL
“THIS ISN’T ME.” As I sprint around the corner of the hotel I shout it louder, but the taxi is already at an intersection. It vanishes along the cross street while I’m sucking in another breath. Three girls find my antics worthy of a titter. I give them an expansive shrug that’s meant to be comical, but they’ve returned to watching half a dozen mute performances by a rock group in the window of a television shop. I’m trudging back to the lobby to ask for directions when a limousine draws up in front of the hotel.
So the taxi could have used that street despite the ban on traffic. Didn’t the driver think I merited the exemption? He begrudged me a receipt, as if he didn’t believe my journey deserved one or even a taxi. As I scowl at the limousine, a young woman in a severely grey suit climbs out and hurries to open the door for a puffed-up bantam the colour of rust in a T-shirt and jeans. “Mr Rigg won’t need you till tomorrow when he’s signing,” she tells the chauffeur.
I make for her charge as if his name has reeled me in. “Excuse me, are you Bill Rigg? Are you staying at this hotel?”
His crumpled T-shirt answers my first question. It’s printed with the cover of The Koran Encryption, his impossibly best-selling novel. He’s showing me his mottled face with its mouth pressed as straight as his frown when the limousine cruises away and his minder darts to intervene. “Mr Rigg has finished for today,” she informs me. “He’ll be reading from his book again tomorrow morning and signing them at Texts.”
“I know that.” In case I sounded interested I add “I’m a writer. I’ve been reading at the festival as well.”
Rigg unclenches his face to put on a quizzical look, but his features stay too close together. “Should we know you?”
“Joseph Nicholas Brady.” Since this earns no recognition, I name my novel. “The Absolutely True and Indisputably Verifiable Facts about the Universe.”
Rigg scratches his flat shaven pate. “Where’d you get those?”
That’s part of the point, as I tried to explain to my audience on the folding chairs in the barely coloured windowless room. The book is a satire on novels that claim to be based on secret history, and all the sources cited in the footnotes derive from my name: Harold Phelan, Jody Lane, Seb Holland, Sally Joiner, Leonard Parr, Neil Boole, Jeannie Charles, Ellen Spencer, Sephirah Hardy, Jess Loman, Phyllis Adler, Joan Bradley, Ned Sloane … Someone accused me of cynicism, and because she was clutching a copy of Rigg’s wretched thousand-pager I asked whether she would rather believe that all the Islamic elements in art are the code of a conspiracy that’s poised to rule the word. By then I’d lost my temper with the voice that had muttered throughout my reading. At first I’d thought it was one of my six listeners, and then I’d grasped that it was seeping through the wall. Now I realise that it sounded like Rigg’s voice. Before I can demand where he was performing, the young woman says “Shall we go inside? You don’t want to be mobbed by fans this late.”
Her advice isn’t directed at me, but I won’t have them knowing how I’ve been treated. I’ll sit in the bar until they go to their rooms. I’m ab
out to lead the way when Rigg’s small eyes peer at me. “Aren’t you in the Grand? Sounded like you weren’t expecting me to be.”
I won’t lie in my writing, and I shouldn’t even to him, but it costs me an effort to admit “I’m in the Rest.”
“The car took us there first by mistake,” the young woman laughs, then renders her grin sympathetic. “We’re picking up the bill. His publishers.”
Mine didn’t offer, nor did they provide any copies of my book. “You might want to keep an eye on his publicity this weekend,” I tell her, more to display my professionalism than because I care. “I don’t think the folk who are running this festival know what publicity means.”
While she appreciates my concern or pretends to, Rigg can’t be bothered. “Shouldn’t need it if you’re any good. Sold out tonight and I am tomorrow.”
His speech is as perfunctory as his prose. Comparing his carelessness to the pains I take to choose my words makes my head throb. I’m struggling to compose some witticism on the theme of not wanting to sell out when he turns his back. “I’m off to watch myself on telly,” he declares, striding at the automatic doors as though he’ll butt them if they don’t give way to him.
The young woman blinks at me. “Will you be all right now?”
“I don’t know where my hotel is from here.”
“It isn’t far. Shall I call a taxi for you?”
“Just tell me. I’ll endeavour not to get mobbed.”
She returns her phone to her gilded handbag and hastens to the corner of the building, where she points past the televisions. “Straight along for a few blocks. You’ll be ready for bed.”
For a moment I indulge in fancying she means this as an invitation, but she’s gazing at me to ensure I obey her directions. When I reach the window full of screens I glance back. She hasn’t lingered, and I suspect she’s bound for Rigg’s bed. I stare at the multiplication of yet another prancing rock group in case it’s ousted by his image. I wouldn’t be able to hear what he says, not that I want to. I almost succeed in thinking that he must be hard up for an audience if he has to watch himself.
As I tramp along the empty street the shopfronts dwindle and grow shabby. After ten minutes, most of them are shuttered with metal if they aren’t disused. On the block at the end of which I see a sign stuttering above my hotel, a betting shop nestles against an arcade of fruit machines between Sensuous Couples, whose grille has been adorned with a cartoon of an erupting penis, and a wine shop with returns in its doorway, not all of them smashed. Next to my accommodation a second-hand shop is called Hi Its Fi, a clump of words that makes me grind my teeth. Has someone left a television switched on behind the shutter? Can that be Rigg’s muffled voice? I’m close to resting my ear against the rusty weatherbeaten metal slats when I lurch away in a rage to my hotel.
The sign has lost the bulk of its first syllable. All that flickers whenever it manages to summon up the energy is T ELLER’S REST. The grimy splintered glass of the narrow awning blurs it as I push open the rather less than wholly transparent door, scraping the already ragged brownish carpet of the rudimentary lobby. The stained reception counter is unattended except for a vacuum cleaner slouching beneath the pigeonholes, one of which protrudes a message slip that looks aged yellow by the dim illumination leaking from under the cornices. A placard propped against the extravagantly scratched door of the solitary lift says OUt oF OARdER. So is the slogan, I’d comment if there was anyone to hear. Instead I make for the boxed-in stairs that are partly covered by a trampled blackened carpet and toil up to my room.
Though it’s only two floors distant, I’m sweating by the time I reach it. The impressions of landscapes that are presumably intended to relieve the monotony of the sombre corridor look half melted by the central heating that’s taking on the August mugginess. When I unlock my door, which is featurelessly pink except for a red 8 dangling from its lower screw, the stark room the colour of old bone seems to have stored up more than its share of the heat. The grubby gamboge curtains have drifted together on their sagging wire. I drag them apart, but the dwarfish double-glazed window opaque with condensation won’t budge. I snarl at it and at the room in general, especially the token furniture, which gives me the feeling that it was hurriedly assembled and then crammed into one corner of an attic along with me. I snarl loudest at the midget television perched on a bracket opposite my frayed pillow, because I’m unable to resist switching it on in search of Rigg.
It comes to life with an explosion of noise that makes me desperate to mute it. I poke several buttons on the remote control before I succeed in gagging the set, which is showing a film with dialogue in sentences apparently too short to find space for grammar. The next channel shows a rock group I’m happy to have hushed, and the third brings me Rigg in conversation with a literary critic who surely ought to know better. Perhaps she does. I may never find out, because I can’t restore the sound.
I do my best to fancy that his face is red not just with the raw colour but with shame, although his expression is insufferably smug. When I’ve finished bruising my thumb on the buttons I manage to refrain from flinging the control at him. I extinguish the television and strew the faded bedspread with my clothes on the way to the cupboard that does duty as a toilet and bathroom.
The shower curtain has ripped free of half its hooks. The water from the clogged shower head keeps faltering and spurting afresh, either much hotter or much colder. As I prance about the narrow bath to avoid the worst excesses of the shower I hear a muffled voice that I have to tell myself isn’t commenting on my antics. I flounder out of the bath and grab the single ragged towel from the precariously askew rail beside the cracked sink. As the water finishes giggling in the plughole, I realise that the mutter is in one of the adjoining rooms. While I can’t distinguish any of its words, I recognise Rigg’s voice.
I’m still wielding the meagre towel as I march into the bedroom. I kneel in the subsiding middle of the bed and press my ear against the damp wall, then squeeze between the wardrobe and the equally shaky dressing-table to listen over there. It must be tiredness that leaves me incapable of deciding which side is playing host to Rigg, unless both are. I stand in the cramped gap between the bed and the dressing-table, one drawer of which protrudes several stubborn inches, and shout “Can you turn that down, please” twice.
At first there’s no response. When I halve the request and double my volume, it earns me sleepy protests and thumps on both walls while Rigg’s harangue continues as incomprehensibly as ever. I snatch the phone from its hiding-place behind one curtain and poke the zero, which ought to call Reception as well as summing Rigg up. The phone is so dead that I could imagine I’m hearing his voice through the receiver.
I slam it back on the windowsill and struggle into my clammy clothes. Shoving the key on its cumbersome bludgeon into a hip pocket, I dash into the corridor, only for Rigg’s voice to disappear as if the thick gloom has engulfed it. I won’t be tricked. As soon as I stick my head inside the room I can hear him mumbling on. I bang the door shut and run along the humid corridor to the equally windowless stairs. “Hello?” I shout as I come in sight of the reception counter. “Is someone here, please?”
I’m about to summarise this more loudly when I grasp that Rigg’s voice is outside the hotel. Although its words stay indistinct, the timbre makes its source clear, not least because I saw one near the building where I gave my talk. It’s a speaker van. What is it saying? Rigg must be broadcasting his presence at the behest of the festival organisers or at least encouraged by them. More to the point, why is the van loitering outside the hotel? How late is it allowed to keep its racket up? I need my sleep. I drag the door over the scraped carpet and pounce out of the hotel.
The van isn’t as close as I thought, which is why its message stays unclear. It’s beyond a concrete flyover a hundred yards away in the opposite direction from the one that brought me here. As I strain my ears its engine starts with a protracted rasp that sounds insulting
, and the voice recedes. I head for the lobby, and then I halt as though I’ve been grabbed by the shoulders, which hunch up. I’m almost certain that Rigg said my name.
What comment has he recorded about me? Or is he in the vehicle, not watching television after all? Whatever he goes on to say, it’s as unintelligible as his previous spiel. I won’t be able to sleep while the van could be wandering the streets and undermining any reputation I may have. Perhaps I didn’t really hear my name, but I have to know. I step off the patch of light outside the hotel and run to the flyover.
It’s four lanes wide and supported by massive concrete pillars. They’re sprayed with crude letters that barely form words and with less than words—initials and drawings primitive enough for a cave. Beyond the pillars directly ahead, a street illuminated by fewer lights than there are lamps is packed with dilapidated shops boarded up for the night if not for longer. At the end of the first block I glimpse tail-lights swinging left and trailing Rigg’s blurred voice.
As I sprint from beneath the flyover I notice the street isn’t deserted. The shadows between those streetlamps that aren’t broken contain women, each of whom murmurs as I pass. I don’t need to catch their words to know what they’re offering, and I hurry past without responding. I’m nearly at the junction when a less circumspect woman dressed in a small amount of leather steps in front of me. “What are you after, love?”
“Them,” I pant, jabbing my hands in front of me. “I’m after them.”
She inflates her chest with a taut creak. She must think I had this in mind, because she says “Just these?”
“Not that. None of that,” I gasp as I stumble around her. “Him.”
“If you’re one of that bunch you’re up the wrong end.”
I gather she’s speculating about my sexual tastes, since her colleagues add their ribald thoughts. “I’m not talking about that,” I protest. “Can’t you hear?”
“We’ve been hearing you fine. You sound pretty desperate to me.”
