Sacrifice of Fools

by Ian McDonald

  ‘Got your note.’

  ‘Genro Ounserrat is not with you.’

  ‘She’s fighting a case with some of your South Side lawyers.’

  ‘She will be there some time. The Harridis are masters of obfuscation.’

  ‘You’re not there with them.’

  ‘No. My legal priorities have changed since our last meeting.’

  ‘So Ongserrang will answer my questions.’

  ‘Commensurate with his rights and interests.’

  ‘What do you need to tell me here that you can’t tell me back at South Side?’

  Ongserrang looks his lawyer a look that says I am trusting you on this. The doggy women throw sticks and whistle mutts and walk around the concentric rings of monastery wall while their spaniels squat and shit on the neat grass. None of them will come near the two Shian and the human. Ongserrang takes a disk out of the breast pocket of his floral print canvas jacket. Gillespie turns it over in his fingers. There’s nothing to identify it but his and Ounserrat’s names written on the label.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘The input log of number six matter processor for the twenty-eighth of February of this year,’ Ongserrang says. ‘I have transferred it to human disk technology. It records what was input as feedstock material on that day.’

  ‘It includes a 1998 Ford Transit van, registration UBZ 1875,’ Saipanang says. He’s holding his genro staff in a death grip, Gillespie notices. His fingers are shaking. ‘Also, the bodies of one Shian female adult and two children.’

  The hill of Nendrum is suddenly huge and high and cold and terrifying and Andy Gillespie naked and vertiginous, clinging to its grass roots with his fingertips.

  ‘I…’

  ‘The bodies were those of Sounsurresh Soulereya of the Not Afraid of the River Hold in Docklands, London, and her children Neneenhoun and Arroumsajang,’ Saipanang says. ‘They were found in the Ford Transit van on the morning of the twenty-eighth, having failed to return to the Hold after walking in to Whiterock village the previous evening to show the children the boats. We mounted a search and found the van parked in a gateway on a farm lane a mile from South Side of the Stone. The bodies were in the back of the van.’

  ‘How did they die?’ Gillespie asks. He knows what the answer will be, but he must hear it spoken.

  ‘Each had been killed with a single maser shot to the head. Sounsurresh’s body had been mutilated.’

  ‘Her, um, genitals?’

  ‘That’s correct. We brought the van back to South Side of the Stone…’

  Wait.

  ‘The twenty-eighth? Before the University Street killing.’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘Then this was the first, and it was covered up.’

  ‘That is why I was taken in by this Hold, Mr Gillespie,’ Ongserrang says. ‘To control the information.’

  ‘And the matter processor would take everything apart; there wouldn’t be any evidence.’

  ‘To the last atom, Mr Gillespie.’

  Beats bodies in the foundations. Complete annihilation. And reincarnation, in a hundred different forms. The fat guy in the Pringle sweater, does he know that his custom-golf clubs are made out of the body and soul of Sounsurresh Soulereya, London hyper-space-bay-bee, Step ’n’ Sweat? Hope you never get a good round with them, fat Pringle man. They’re haunted. He shivers. He’s cold. He’s always cold.

  There are ‘why’ questions coming. Why didn’t they call the police? Because they knew what they were seeing. Because they wanted to keep it secret. And so they could control what any of us should know?

  Because they know who’s doing it. The Shian don’t die for love, but they will kill without thinking to protect their children, Eamon Donnan had said. You’re a threat, he had said. Humans. Can you think of anywhere more human than this place? What were you telling me, Eamon? A Shian did this? To protect the children? That would fit with McIvor Kyle and his Nazi mouthings, but how is a model and her kids, how is a drop-in centre setting newcomers up with Holds a threat to a child?

  He’s always feared the ‘why’ word. Never an easy answer to it.

  The Outsiders are looking at him.

  ‘You have worked it out, Mr Gillespie?’

  ‘I don’t know. Some of it fits, some of it, I don’t know.’ He looks at the disk in his hand. ‘Why are you telling me this now? Last time, you wouldn’t give me a fucking thing. Why this, now?’

  ‘Sometimes the price of secrecy is too high,’ Saipanang says. ‘And before any loyalty to Hold or Nation, I am a genro.’

  ‘They’ve threatened your client?’

  ‘It is a possibility.’

  ‘And you too, then. But why bother? The police are involved, you can’t hope to keep it secret from them.’ And it’s another self-answering question. Unless… ‘Unless the Harridis reckon they can get to it first. Then they can keep it quiet. And then it’ll just be a few wee loose ends to tie up.’ His head is spinning, the circles of thousand-year-old masonry are orbiting around him. Too much too fast.

  ‘Precisely, Mr Gillespie.’

  ‘But why tell me? What am I supposed to do with this?’ The Judas disk is in his fingers again. He holds it up like an accusation. Exhibit A.

  ‘Insurance, Mr Gillespie. Give it to the police. It may help them solve the crimes. Then my client will be safe. It is the most I can do.’

  ‘Why don’t you just tell me who we’re up against? Who am I facing?’

  ‘Genro Ounserrat must have told you that the Shian law is practised at a price. Her price is that investigating too deeply into her client’s disappearance may put her in the same danger as myself and my client.’

  ‘She could be a target?’

  ‘She, and those associated with her, Mr Gillespie. I warn you, because my price is moral quandary. I am a Harridi, and I believe that it is in the best interests of my Nation and children that humans do not find out information about us that might jeopardize their future safety on this world. We are guests after all, and guests do not murder their hosts. However, gehenshuthra binds me to my client’s best interests, which would not be best served by the Harridis’ plan succeeding. My children, my client. Please understand my crisis of conscience, Mr Gillespie.’

  ‘Fuck your crisis of conscience!’ Gillespie shouts. The doggy women look around, scandalized by this interruption of nasty loud foul-mouthed maleness into their afternoons. ‘How many more is your fucking moral quandary going to kill?’

  Saipanang flares his nostrils and bares his teeth, just a glint. Just a gleam.

  ‘How much Hot Narha do you know, Mr Gillespie?’

  ‘I got some words from Ounserrat. Not much more.’

  ‘This can only be said in Hot Narha. Cool Narha does not have the words.’

  Saipanang closes his eyes. He does not speak for many seconds. When he does, it’s a low whisper: — Sacrifice of Fools.

  ‘What?’ Gillespie asks. The word strikes echoes from the surfaces of his mind. Distant voices, like neighbours behind thin walls. He can hear them but he can’t make out what they’re saying.

  ‘I have said all I may. We must go now. This meeting is terminated. I trust I have made the right decision for my client, and for my children.’

  Ongserrang is already heading down the hill. Saipanang turns to follow.

  ‘Where will you go?’ Gillespie shouts. ‘You can’t stay in South Side. Not now.’

  ‘I cannot leave, not now. When the season is ended there is always great unrest and movement between Holds. We are a moving people. Then I and my client shall disappear. The world is a big place, Mr Gillespie, even for Shian. We shall not meet again.’

  They drop below the brow of the hill. Andy Gillespie sits down on a flat piece of chapel wall and tries to make out what the voices want to tell him about Sacrifice of Fools, but there’s so much else stuffed into his head that he can only hear his own thoughts trying to fit his experience around the facts that Saipanang and his client gave him
. Too much. Way too much. He’s not a genro. He’s not a cop, nor a private eye. He’s not even Andy fucking Hero. He’s a grease-monkey from the Woodstock Road. He’s a cheap hood with bad friends; he’s a con who got given a present he wasn’t expecting. He’s an out-of-work translator with all the money he has in the world jingling in his back pocket.

  Dog-walking hour ends. Nendrum is left to the birds and the cows beyond the perimeter fence. Andy Gillespie sits on his stone and listens to the cows farting. A tractor chugs up a drumlin side across the bright water, drawing a line of wounded brown earth behind it. Birds bicker and flock in its soil wake.

  Yes, I’m all these things and I’m not all those things and I shouldn’t be here and I shouldn’t have anything more to do with this, but when did ‘should’ ever have anything to do with my life? I’m here, I’m in it, I can’t leave it. The only way out is through. You go where the ride takes you, so you might as well put your arms over your head and scream tough.

  After a time a front comes in from the west, covering the sun. Cold and still not able to make sense of either of the worlds he occupies, Andy Gillespie gets up and goes down to the hire car. By the time he reaches the causeway off Mahee Island it’s raining.

  She’s standing by the gate in the rain, leaning against the post inscribed with the Shian fourfold yin-yang. The rain’s soaked through more than her clothes. She’s drowned inside. Her genro staff is all that’s holding her up.

  The car stops in a crunch of wet gravel. Gillespie opens the door. She drips on the floor, the seat, the upholstery.

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘They fought me every step.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I could not get past them. They insist that the photographs are in error and that my client has not been at South Side of the Stone since February the twenty-second.’

  ‘Your client is dead,’ Andy Gillespie says, reversing the car and swinging it round on to the bridge. ‘She and her family were killed by the same person who killed the Harridis and McIvor Kyle. They used one of the processors to get rid of the bodies, and they hushed the thing up. This disk lists the inputs to the processor the day they were killed.’

  He sets it on the dash. Ounserrat isn’t looking at it. Her eyes are closed. Her teeth are bared.

  ‘You are in danger,’ Gillespie says. ‘You’re in danger, I’m in danger, everyone who has anything to do with this is danger, and I want to know what the hell is going on.’

  Her answer is not in words. The noise that comes out of her is so sudden and so unlike anything he’s ever heard before Gillespie almost drives the Ford off the causeway into the lough. If a liver or a lung had cancer and could voice how it felt to be consumed from within, it would sound like the long, piercing keening coming from Ounserrat Soulereya. He stops the car in the middle of the single-track road.

  ‘Jesus God, what are you at?’

  She doesn’t answer until she’s finished, and the noise takes a long time to finish.

  ‘You cannot understand what it is like for a genro to discover she has failed her client.’

  ‘Your client was dead before they sent you over from Docklands.’

  ‘Gehenshuthra exists outside time and death.’

  ‘Well that’s just fucking stupid,’ Gillespie says and regrets it the moment it’s off his lips. She’s only a kid, for God’s sake. Three years older than his own wee Stacey. This isn’t just law. She can’t take the money and walk away like human lawyers. It’s like that saying about football: it’s not a question of life or death, it’s more important than that. This is her first case and she has singularly failed to protect her client’s rights. Being made into a fucking golf club is a hell of a desecration of the dead. But he’s pissed off at her because of the sex thing, and for shutting him out of that legal farce at South Side, and he’s pissed off at her people for shutting him out of everything.

  Her nostrils are wide. She’s nakedly smiling.

  ‘Mr Gillespie…’

  ‘Hell, I’m sorry. It’s just — I am angry, right? I’ve been pissed about and fucked off and lied to and made to look like a fool and nobody will tell me what the hell is going on and I don’t know who to trust any more, and to tell you the truth, I’m not even sure I trust you. You’ve all got your wee hidden agendas, you’ve all got your games and teams, but nobody’s told Andy Gillespie the rules. Even you. You’ve got your Shian law game in your head, your personal soul-contract with your client, even though your client is dead, even though you never even properly had a client, you still owe her; you’d fuck me right up the ass if your fucking gehenshuthra told you it was in your client’s best interests. You’d shaft me and wouldn’t even feel bad about it.’

  ‘Mr Gillespie, this is not a good time to discuss this with me.’

  ‘I don’t care. I just want to know what is going on.’

  ‘You seem to know more than I.’

  ‘I don’t think so. That’s the evidence that I’ve been lied to.’ He nods at the disk, nestled against the demister vents.

  ‘I also have been lied to, Mr Gillespie.’

  ‘But you’re Shian.’ And he regrets that too, though he had to say it.

  ‘Have I ever lied to you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How can I prove to you that I am worthy of your trust?’

  ‘Tell me what Sacrifice of Fools means.’

  She hesitates. Just an instant, but it’s enough for Gillespie to know that her answer will not be the truth.

  ‘It is a story. A thing made up to frighten and entertain, like your vampires and beast-men. It is nothing real, nothing that can harm us.’

  ‘You’re lying.’ Andy Gillespie says very simply. ‘You are lying to me.’

  ‘Mr Gillespie…’

  ‘Mr Gillespie nothing. You are fucking lying to me; all of you; all you’ve ever done is lie to me. Fuck you! Fuck you to hell!’

  Ounserrat lays her hands flat on her thighs.

  ‘Then this partnership is dissolved,’ she says. She opens the door and gets out. ‘I shall make my own way home. Please have the car back at the depot by seventeen thirty.’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, it’s twenty miles and it’s pissing down. Have a bit of sense!’ But she’s already halfway to the main road. ‘I’m the one’s lied to and you get to storm off in anger!’ he shouts at her. ‘Jesus, you people!’ He starts the car and drives beside her. ‘Come on, will you?’ She does not acknowledge his presence. She breaks into a jog. Gillespie matches pace with her. Her clothes are clinging to her bones but she will not look at him. She can keep this hunter’s lope up for hours and miles.

  ‘OK then, we’re finished,’ Gillespie shouts and then shrieks the engine and spins the wheels like he’s a twentysomething in a Ford, and not a late thirty something, and drives off.

  Tuesday afternoon-Tuesday night

  FUCK HER. FUCK THEM all. Fuck them and their secrets and their lies and their law that says it’s better to deceive a friend than betray a client. Even a dead client. Fuck them and their sneaky creepy chemicals that get into your head and turn it all inside out so that a man doesn’t know what he is any more, let alone what he thinks he knows. Fuck them for having to come to this world, out of all the worlds around all the stars, as if it wasn’t complicated enough with just people on it. Fuck them for making everything we do look mean and crude and smelly and brutal and stupid. Fuck you, Ounserrat Soulereya.

  But he didn’t. And he wanted to. And he still wants to, and he almost turns the car around to go back for her, but only almost and that isn’t enough to put out his anger. So he turns on the radio instead and it’s that same bloody station that has to play a Tina Turner track every hour, and this is that track, and after it, the Mystery Record.

  ‘Bryan Adams,’ he says after just the intro. ‘ “Summer of Sixty Nine”.’

  Answer after four. By then he’s into the Belfast traffic. He sort of wonders where Ounserrat’s got to. Wet. They’re supposed to ha
te getting wet, like cats. Well, I’m really really surprised no one got the Mystery Record, the DJ says in his dumb Ulster-American accent, I’d’ve thought it was obvious: ‘Summer of Sixty Nine’, Bryan Adams. Gillespie could have won the Top Twenty CDs. He didn’t know they still had a Top Twenty. Of anything.

  He uses one of his last fifty pees on a meter and then does a thing that he’s never done before. He voluntarily goes into a police station.

  As the desk sergeant is in the back calling up DS Dunbar, Gillespie sees a figure he knows coming towards him along the corridor. His Sunday suit is crumpled, his jaw is shadowed, his hair is tousled, he looks like shit. Gavin Peterson sidesteps the sprinkler drip and in that moment sees and recognizes Gillespie.

  ‘Gavin.’

  ‘Gillespie.’

  ‘Looks like they’ve had you in the prime suspect suite.’

  ‘They think they can make a conspiracy charge stick. Do you know how many top-ranking policemen are members of the Dissenting Presbyterian Church?’

  ‘Conspiracy?’

  ‘Come on, Gillespie. The NIPS set you up with that Outsider bitch to break our leverage operation. I must be getting old; back then, I’d’ve seen through you like that.’

  He holds Gillespie’s gaze, snaps his fingers.

  ‘You won’t believe me, but I don’t have a fucking idea what you’re talking about, Gavin.’ Gillespie is not intimidated by Peterson’s smile.

  ‘You keep saying that, Gillespie. Keep saying that, and keep looking in mirrors, over your shoulder. You keep your eyes open. Someone will get to you with a little message from God.’ He forces a laugh. ‘I see someone already has. Just keep looking back, Gillespie. God is not mocked.’

  He brushes past towards the security door and the street.

  ‘Haven’t you heard, Gavin?’ Gillespie calls. ‘God is dead!’

  ‘His civil service is still working,’ Peterson says.

  He’s been threatened in a police station, but Gillespie feels pity for Gavin Peterson. Now God’s hard man understands what it’s like to lose the thing that gives your life goal and spirit. Gillespie’s still staring at the street door when Roisin Dunbar arrives. She looks greasy and tired and very very pissed off.