“I was filming a routine for French television.”
“But were you in the studio when Mermillod fell under a train? Or was he pushed by you?”
“Of course not. I’d never met him. Why should I want to kill a man I’d never met?”
“Why should Yenning want to have dinner with you?”
“We shared an interest in hyper-dimensional science. He enjoyed discussing it with me.”
“Are higher dimensions behind this, then? Something linking Venning’s research and your act? Are they what made it worth your while to pin four murders on me?”
“No. No, no. They’re just Slade glanced desperately at Harry, pleading for help, in words if not in actions. He was a professional performer an illusionist par excellence. But surely his gaping terror was beyond simulation. If there was a secret to be spilt, he would have spilt it now. Yet he could find nothing to say. Harry knew the feeling all too well.
“Just what, Adam?”
“Just a stunt. A trick. A come-on for the audience. You have to have something different to single you out from the card-sharps and spoon-benders. Higher dimensions are my… novelty, you could say. I don’t have any hyper-dimensional powers. Nobody does. It’s just… hocus-pocus.”
“Hocus-pocus? Then why should a brilliant mathematician be interested in them?”
“Because he thought my powers were real. Shit, that’s what I wanted him to think. Scientific backing would have got me a hell of a lot of publicity. I was trying to con him.”
“Like you’re trying to con me.”
“No. It’s the truth.”
“But you’re a trickster by trade. Truth is the last thing you’re capable of telling.”
“Say something, Barnett.” Slade’s eyes flashed imploringly at Harry. “Christ almighty, help me convince this guy, will you? I didn’t murder your son. I didn’t murder anyone.” In that instant, Harry was certain. Slade was just a publicity-hungry illusionist using a spurious scientific claim to promote his magic act. A con artist with an oversized ego but not a murderer.
“I believe him, Byron. I think you should too.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s just admitted his stage-show’s a fraud. Don’t you see? His higher powers are just … hot air. If they weren’t, he wouldn’t be at your mercy.”
“It has to be one or the other of you if it isn’t both.”
“It’s neither of us. We haven’t even tried to blame each other, have we? We haven’t lied to you.”
“Somebody has.”
“Not us.”
“Who, then?” Lazenby whipped the gun away from Slade and stepped back to face them. “Who?”
“Maybe no-one. Maybe they really were just… accidental deaths.”
That’s bullshit.”
“But this isn’t,” put in Slade, his voice sounding marginally calmer. “You’re ruined, but you’re not finished. Kill us and you will be. If there really is someone out there who engineered your downfall, they’ll have the last laugh then, won’t they? You’ll have let them have it.”
“You’re a free man,” said Harry. “You still have a chance of nailing your enemy. You still have a chance to rebuild your life.”
“Why blow it?” echoed Slade.
“Why not?” Lazenby glared at each of them in turn. He still held the gun firmly in his right hand, but his left was flexing and stretching, as if seeking some object to grip. The fingers slowly closed around an imaginary shape and crushed themselves into a fist. He raised it to his mouth and rubbed the back of his thumb across his lips. He was thinking hard and fast, weighing their lives against his desire to hit back at whoever had brought him down. “The tape did for me. And you stole the tape, Harry. I haven’t forgotten that.”
“Whatever Barnett did,” said Slade, “I had no hand in it.”
“Shut up.”
“What I’m trying to say is ‘
“Shut your mouth!” Lazenby’s arm jerked up. He pointed the gun straight at Slade and seemed to be struggling for a moment against a compelling instinct to shoot him. Then his expression lost some fraction of its intensity. His grip on the gun slackened. He lowered it to his side. “You’re not worth it. That’s the real joke. I’ve ended up chasing a spineless creep…” He glanced at Harry. “And somebody who’s been made almost as big a fool of as I have. Jesus Christ! I was so sure it had to be you. There was nobody else it could be. But there is, isn’t there? And I haven’t a clue who they are.”
“Byron,” Harry began. “Why don’t we ‘
“Shut up, Harry. Just don’t say a word. You too, Slade. Save your breath. It’s all right. I’m not going to harm you. Unless you provoke me. I advise you to do and say absolutely nothing. Now or later. I’m leaving. And I don’t expect to see or hear from either of you again. Contact the police and you’ll regret it, I promise. Then I really will have nothing to lose. For the moment, I have just enough at stake to save your necks. Be grateful. I’m sure as hell not.” He stepped past Harry to the doorway and through it into the hall. There he stopped and looked back at them. “If I ever find the trail and it leads to either of you, I’ll make you wish I’d finished it tonight. If you’re lying, I’ll find out and come after you.
I’ll dedicate my life to it. You have my word.” With that, he turned and strode away.
They heard the front door slam behind him and, a few seconds later, the sound of his car accelerating away down the mews. Slowly, Harry’s muscles relaxed. The tension drained out of him. It was over. He was going to stay alive. But there was a price to pay even for that. Like Lazenby, he was not going to learn the truth tonight. Or any other, it seemed.
FIFTY-EIGHT
Ten minutes had passed since Lazenby’s departure; nine and a half since Slade had blundered from the room; four or five since the sound of vomiting and coughing had ceased to carry to the lounge. Harry felt none of the magician’s nausea, merely a numb sense of defeat. There was to be no answer, no allocation of guilt, no pinning of blame. Some part of the truth remained always out of reach.
He was helping himself to a scotch from the glass-shelved drinks bay when Slade walked back in, tucking a turquoise dress-shirt into black evening dress trousers. The soap was gone from his chin, but the skin beneath was still unshaven, giving his face a sinister lop-sided shadow. The grimace of fear was also gone, but there was still a discernible tremor in his hands. His panic was ebbing, but his swaggering arrogance was not yet back in place.
“Haven’t you gone, Barnett? I thought you’d have crawled out of here by now.”
“I needed a drink. You don’t mind, do you?” Harry was careful to make it clear by his tone that he was not really asking for permission.
“Looks like it wouldn’t matter if I did. Pour me one too. A large one. With some ice.”
“Besides, I didn’t know if you’d want me to wait while you called the police.” He handed Slade a glass and drank from his own.
“Are you crazy? You heard what he said.”
“You believed him?”
“Yeh. I believed him. Apart from which … there is such a thing as bad publicity. Getting mixed up in the Globescope scandal is the kind of exposure I don’t need.”
“Because you might be forced to repeat your confession that your hyper-dimensional powers are pure eyewash?”
“No way. And if you’re thinking of broadcasting what I may or may not have said under extreme duress, let me warn you not to. I’ll deny it and sue you for every penny you’ve got.”
That won’t bring you in much.”
“Anyway, I had to tell him something of the sort. I was trying to talk him out of shooting me, for Christ’s sake.”
“Which is precisely why you told him the truth.”
“Back off, Barnett.” The whisky was beginning to restore Slade’s self-confidence. “As far as I’m concerned nothing happened here tonight. Except an uninvited visit from you. A visit that’s just ended. Finish your drink and go. OK?”
“What did you and David talk about at the Skyway Hotel?”
“Don’t you ever give up? It’s over. Let it lie.”
“You’re right. It is over. So you may as well tell me. After all, I did do my best to stop Lazenby killing you.”
“Huh!” Slade eyed himself in the mirror and rubbed the unshaven half of his chin. “Shit, I look rough. At this rate, I’m going to be late for the opera. I can’t go till I’ve finished shaving. And I can’t finish shaving till my hands have stopped shaking.” He looked round at Harry. “Why don’t you leave me alone?”
“Why don’t you tell me what you discussed with my son?”
“What do you think?” Slade slammed his glass down on the mantelpiece beneath the mirror and glared at Harry. “Higher fucking dimensions. He believed in them. In the possibility of accessing them. He almost believed I already had the secret. But I could never quite get him to give me a public vote of confidence. It was the same that night. Except… he seemed to think he was much closer to the answer than before. He seemed to think he was very nearly there.”
“Not depressed? Not suicidal?”
“No way. He was right at the other end of the scale. Elated. Excited. Eager. Like he knew something I didn’t know.” Slade paused to drain his glass. “I’ve never seen anyone like that before. It was as if … he could see right inside your head. As if he could reach through you if he wanted to. There was this… sensation of power. And… something really weird.”
“What?”
“I kept getting these… shocks. You know? Like static electricity. Off the furniture, the cutlery. Off David when I shook his hand. Like I was… charged up. Or he was.”
“Did he ever explain his theory to you?”
“Not in terms I could understand. He talked a lot of higher maths that night. And he talked so fast. So fluently. It was like watching another magician performing an act you don’t know. You don’t believe what you see, but you can’t see what the trick is either. I felt I understood while he was with me. I’ve had to familiarize myself with hyper-dimensional theory as part of my stage spiel, so it wasn’t all new to me. I even wrote down a summary of what he’d said, sitting in the car park, before I drove away. I thought I might be able to use it to put extra scientific gloss on my act.” He grunted. “Some hopes.”
“What was the problem?”
“When I read it in the morning, it was all… gobbledegook.”
“Still got it?”
The note? Yeh, probably. Somewhere.”
“Could I see it?”
“You? What the hell for?”
“Curiosity.”
Slade snorted derisively. “Be like giving an orangutan The Origin of Species for bedside reading.”
“Nevertheless…”
Slade stalked across to the drinks bay to refill his glass, then said: “Will handing over a page full of gibberish get you off my back, Barnett?”
Harry shrugged. “Yes.”
“Then you can take it with you.” He sniggered bitterly. “I won’t want it back.”
In a quiet corner of the first pub he came to after leaving Waverley Mews, Harry took several calming gulps of beer, lit a Karelia Sertika and unfolded the page Slade had plucked from his Filofax and handed over a touch too willingly for Harry’s peace of mind. As he scanned the page, covered in Slade’s small neat handwriting, one reason for that willingness was revealed. But it was about all that was revealed. The contents were impenetrable. Doggedly, Harry read the words. Without grasping more than the merest hint of their meaning.
Human mind most complex sophisticate organism so far discovered. Human consciousness straddles quantum mechanical classical physics. Unitary evolution of particles at quantum level posits simultaneous existence of identical objects in form of complex-number-weighted co-existence of alternatives. Real-number squared moduli of complex-number weightings act as relative probabilities. State-vector reduction functions as dimensional compression. Alternatives apply in humanly un observable dimensions. Leap to classical level illusory, because all alternatives are equally real, orthogonally superposed and reduced to one by macroscopic observation of quantum entanglement.
Fractal geometry of apparently chaotic natural phenomena reveals systems responsive to multi-dimensional attractors. Such systems exist fully only in multi-dimensional phase space, experienced by humans as 4-dimensional cross-sections of mental phase space. 4 conscious dimensions mirrored by minimum of 6 subconscious, through which topologically enfolded physical presence of 4-dimensionally un observable reality can theoretically be accessed. Consciousness and compactification .-. intimately related. Further refinement of hyper-dimensional complex maths will enable humanity to unlock enfolded matter as energy.
Slade had stopped there and driven away, while behind a closed hotel-room door, as the Heathrow jets climbed into the sky, infinity drew David Yenning down into its velvety grip. Where he was, all secrets were known, but none could be told. All were equally real and equally un observable
Harry sat for a long time, sipping beer and smoking cigarettes while he stared at the unyielding pageful of words. What did they mean? What in the name of God or whatever universal organizing principle the physicists had put in his place did they amount to? He looked at the smoke and the darkness and the dim lights around him. He looked at his face in the window and the figures moving at the bar behind him. He looked and looked -but he did not see.
He left the pub well before closing time and walked slowly back to Kensal Green through the amber-black London night. Several times he had the feeling there was something or someone just ahead or behind, lying in wait or closely following, no more than a curtain’s thickness from his side, barely a whisper away; as if, in the invisible wall of his world, there was a two-way mirror through which he could be seen, but could never see even so much as a reflection of himself.
It was an illusion, of course. Then, as on those other occasions when it had troubled him. An illusion, conjured up by his own anxieties. In the final analysis, there was nothing else he could allow himself to believe it might be. Reality, however bleak, was a cross-section of the world he could trust. And he was not about to desert it.
FIFTY-NINE
Harry woke early next morning, more exhausted by a succession of turbulent dreams than he was revived by sleep. Grateful to have a practical task to address himself to, he skipped breakfast and went straight down to clean up Mrs. Tandy’s sitting room. He swept up the brick, Bakelite and plaster fragments, vacuumed the carpet and peered into the crater in the wall in vain search of the bullet. Then he pondered the urgent problem of how to repair the damage before Mrs. Tandy returned from learning ton the following afternoon. He was neither an electrician nor a plasterer, but he reckoned the services of both would be required that very day if he wanted to avoid explaining why he had let an armed madman into the house.
A cigarette and a cup of strong black coffee goaded his mind into some kind of constructive thought. Surely Mike, a regular at the Stonemasons’, was an electrician, or at any rate an odd-job man who might be willing to cobble something together for him. He would phone Terry for his number when the hour was a little more godly. Better still, he would slide down there at opening time and ply him for the information face to face. Meanwhile, he supposed he ought to prise some tuna from a tin for Neptune. He plodded off towards the kitchen to summon the brute.
As he entered the hall, the post plopped through the letter-box. Assuming it would as usual be for Mrs. Tandy, he retrieved the single item from the mat. Only to find that it was for him: a hand-addressed airmail letter, postmarked New York, 23 December. He tore it open, made out Woodrow Hackensack’s jagged signature at the bottom looking like the electro-encepholograph of a disturbed brain and began to read.
Hi Harry,
Thought you’d like to know I’m well on the road to recovery and getting barrel-loads of sympathy by telling strangers my stiff leg’s a legacy of distinguished service in Vi
etnam. Should be a great Christmas.
Donna told me about David, so I guess yours isn’t going to be so great. What can I say? It’s tough. David was a good friend to me. I’m real sorry he’s gone. Anything I can do Well, I don’t need to say it. You know where I am.
The other reason for writing is I felt sufficiently mobile this week to take a train-ride to Philadelphia. Tracked down Isaac Rosenbaum and tapped him for recollections of our late and loony friend Carl Dobermann. Rosenbaum’s a tiny old guy with a face like a monkey and a memory that doesn’t set much store by chronology. We had to sift through one hell of a lot of chaff before we turned up any grain.
The long and short of it is that Rosenbaum does remember Dobermann, as a head-in-the-clouds Ph.D. student who suddenly went crazy in the fall of ‘58. Well, maybe not so sudden, because the kind of rumours David said were running around Hudson Valley the vanishing acts and second sight stuff had already stuck to Dobermann back then. Which proves David didn’t make them up. Static electricity was another thing. Dobermann was charged up worse than a nylon turtleneck. Rosenbaum claimed other students actually got shocks off this guy. A bright spark in more ways than one, seemingly.
Anyhow, the bottom line is Dobermann turned weirder and weirder, then went totally berserk one day. Wrecked a couple of laboratories. Had to be strait jacketed off to the asylum. A real men-in-white-suits job. Rosenbaum was put onto clearing up the mess afterwards. Reckoned the labs looked like a German panzer division had been through them. A one-man demolition team was our Carl. After he’d gone, the word was put out that the less said about him the better. Nothing official, but unofficially Dobermann became an off-limits subject.
That’s more or less it, bar one tantalizing detail.
Rosenbaum said the mathematics lecturer supervising Dobermann’s thesis left right after Carl, low-key and sudden. When he named the party, I realized it could be the connexion with David you’d been looking for. I remember David mentioning the same name when he talked about how he got hooked on higher math in the first place. Could mean nothing, but I thought you’d like to know. Athene Tilson. Ever heard of her?
Out of the Sun Page 29
