The Secret Knowledge (Dedalus Original Fiction in Paperback)

by Crumey, Andrew

  It sounds like a military operation. “What does he know about me?”

  “That doesn’t matter. Just play your best. Either he likes it or he doesn’t.”

  “What if he doesn’t?”

  Verrine’s chin juts forcefully as he walks. “Then we’ve wasted our time, haven’t we?”

  The college is large and modern, a slab of glass and steel that could be the façade of an international business. Verrine leads the way inside. Paige waits shyly while he speaks to the receptionist, acting as if he comes here all the time and everybody ought to know him. Perhaps they do, she thinks. He turns from the desk and tells Paige which room to go to. “Take the lift,” he suggests, indicating it with a casual wave of his arm.

  “You want me to go there now?”

  “Yes,” he says impatiently, “Hurry up.”

  She does as he says, feeling like a school kid sent to see the headmaster. Coming out of the lift she finds the room easily enough, a small studio with a piano, a couple of chairs and music stands, some recording equipment, the place sound-proofed and windowless except for a round pane on the thick door. She seats herself at the keyboard and adjusts the stool to the right height, feeling isolated and nervous. A few bars of Bach get her fingers working and let her hear what the instrument sounds like, this relaxes her a little. But she can’t help thinking that Verrine wants her to fail, she can’t understand why he behaved so dismissively towards her.

  She doesn’t play the Klauer, she wants to save it for when Morrow arrives. Instead she does random exercises, telling herself all will be fine. Yet the time drags, she expected to wait only a short while, ten minutes go by and she resorts to Schubert as a way of calming herself. She can’t think about the notes, only the door with its round porthole to the corridor and world beyond where everyone appears to have forgotten her. Impossible to enjoy the music this way, it feels more like punishment.

  She’s well through the Moments Musicaux when the circle of light fills with a face and she stops. Verrine pushes open the door, Paul Morrow follows him inside, wearing jeans and tee-shirt, not as rugged looking as the PR shot on his website that Paige has visited many times, and he’s had a haircut too, but it’s the same broad smile she recognises, and she rises from the keyboard to accept his handshake.

  “Hey, good to meet you,” he says. She feels both star-struck and suddenly at ease.

  “Paul, this is Paige. Paige, Paul Morrow.” Verrine has done the introductions, he excuses himself and departs.

  Paul sits down and when he crosses his legs Paige sees he’s wearing no socks, his light brown shoes look expensively casual. She returns to the piano stool.

  “You’re a pianist, then?” he says. “How long have you known Julian?”

  “Not long. And you?”

  “We met last year at Wimbledon.”

  “Oh.” She wants to ask more, imagining some sort of champagne reception for celebrities.

  Instead Paul says, “You’re going to play something?”

  She nods.

  “Go right ahead.”

  Here it is, then, her big moment, but it’s too sudden, doesn’t feel right. There should have been a build-up, a stage for her to walk on, not this cramped room where Paul slouches nonchalantly like a holidaymaker waiting to be brought a cocktail from the bar. This is not how she wanted it.

  “Can I ask you something?” she says.

  “Sure.”

  “What’s Julian told you about me?”

  His brow creases with puzzlement. “You mean…?”

  “My playing.”

  “Right. Your playing.” He weighs it up as if it were a difficult question. “Well. Nothing.”

  Like a bird hitting a window, she’s stunned. “Nothing?”

  “Should he have?”

  “But the meeting. While I’ve been waiting. What were you both talking about for all that time?”

  “I never knew we were holding you up, Paige, I’m so sorry. All I knew was that Julian wanted to talk about a possible sponsorship deal, maybe we chatted a little too long.”

  The truth of it: this is how Verrine managed to get her a hearing, smuggling her in on the back of more important business.

  “Hey, what’s up?” Paul can see her dejection, reaches towards her in a spontaneous gesture of friendship. Being nice to people comes naturally to him, she can tell. “Has there been a misunderstanding? I don’t want to rock any boats.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I’d like to hear you play.”

  She turns to the keys and readies herself, a little girl on a high board above a dark pool, frightened to jump. Her one real chance and it’s all gone wrong before she even begins. How can she possibly impress him now? Her joints are frozen, the silence is awkward. Paige puts a hand to her forehead. “I don’t know if I can do this.”

  “It’s all right,” he says gently, out of sight. “Pretend I’m not here.”

  He means well, but pretence is all she can think about, the falseness of the situation. Verrine lied to her, she lied to Conroy, everything’s a lie. Her head sinks. “I can’t do it.”

  “We all get nervous.” He thinks she’s a beginner, a frightened kid at a grade exam who’ll be fine if only someone can give her a nudge like a wind-up toy that won’t work. “Nerves are good, they make us want to do our best.”

  This well-meant pep talk isn’t helping. “Julian wanted me to play a piece by Pierre Klauer.”

  “Not a name I know.”

  “He thought it would impress you…” She buries her face in her hands, finds herself sobbing. A comforting hand touches her.

  “Don’t stress yourself, I hate to see this sort of thing. Look at me, Paige. Why do you play piano, what’s it for? Winning prizes? Beating some sort of world record? No, you do it because you love it, that’s why we all do it, anything else is bullshit.”

  “It’s no good, Paul, I should never have agreed.”

  “So, you and Julian. You’re like…? What’s with all this?”

  He still doesn’t understand. Paige explains.

  “I’m meant to say if you’re any good?” He laughs. “Who gives a fuck what I think?”

  “Everybody does,” she says, wiping her eyes.

  “Verrine’s a businessman, Paige, leave business to people like him. Are you feeling calmer now? I want to hear this piece you mentioned. Never mind about impressing me, I’ll say anything Julian wants me to, he’ll sign a cheque from his company and that’s fine. But we’re not commodities, Paige, we’re artists. Let’s forget this mark-out-of-ten crap, it’s not a contest. Play it for me.”

  He’s no longer the celebrity on her computer screen, now he feels like a genuine friend, actually the only true friend she can think of, waiting patiently to hear her performance. She’s ready to play, her fingers touch the keys and the air is moved by Pierre Klauer’s strange chords.

  The door is suddenly pushed open, Paul is first to see. “What the…?”

  Paige sees too. “Oh no.”

  It’s Conroy. He looks haggard and dishevelled, in need of a wash and shave, could even have been sleeping rough. He enters, surveying the room and its occupants with a reptilian gaze as the heavy door swings closed behind him.

  Paul is bemused. “Looking for someone, bro?”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  “Mr Conroy…”

  “I knew you’d do this to me, Paige.”

  Morrow registers the tension. “Mate, we’re in the middle of something and you ought to leave.”

  “I’m not your mate. You don’t even recognise me, do you?”

  “He was my teacher,” Paige tells Paul, her voice trembling.

  “I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing, crashing in like this…”

  “Paige, give me the score.”

  Straight away she reaches for her bag on the floor, brings out the photocopy and tosses it across the room to him. “How did you know I’d be here? Have you been following me?”

&n
bsp; “She gave you what you want, bro. Leave before this gets unpleasant.”

  A sudden movement makes it all very unpleasant. From his pocket Conroy brings a black pistol and Paige feels the air rush out of her lungs.

  “Shit, man, let’s not do anything stupid.”

  The dark barrel points at Paul Morrow, then towards her, it waves easily, intimidating different parts of the room in turn. It occurs to Paige that it can’t possibly be real, there’s no way he’d be able to get hold of such a thing, it looks like an old-fashioned revolver, a toy. But she can’t be sure.

  “What do you want?” she says, realising as the words struggle out of her that she’s shaking with fear.

  Conroy keeps his eye and aim on Paul Morrow as he stoops to lift the pages of music from the floor where they landed, but he speaks to her. “I want to fix everything, Paige.”

  “Please, Mr Conroy, just take it and go.”

  With his back against the door he keeps both of them in view. “Who put you up to this?”

  “Julian Verrine,” Paige says at once.

  “I’m guessing he’s with the Rosier Corporation, isn’t he?” He looks at Morrow. “What’s in it for you?”

  “Nothing,” Paul says weakly. “Sponsorship idea. Webcast concert.”

  “Anything particular on the programme?” Conroy looks at Paige. “Surely you can work it out. This guy Verrine doesn’t care about either of you, the music is all that matters, it has to be in the broadcast so he needs a pianist, doesn’t matter who, as long as it’s someone who can play the notes right.”

  Yes, Paige can work it out. Conroy has gone right over the edge, he’s lost touch with reality, but he’s determined to tell them both the details of his delusional fantasy.

  “Laura was onto them, that’s why they made her disappear. A new kind of network they’re developing, faster than ever but it fries people’s brains.”

  Morrow says, “Why don’t we all go and talk to someone about this?”

  The gun swings at him. “You think I’m fucking nuts? You think I don’t already know that none of it makes sense? When I see a world gone mental, what else am I supposed to do?”

  “Let’s find Julian Verrine, I could call him for you.” Morrow is about to reach for the phone in his jeans but the gun jabs towards him. It has to be a fake, Paige thinks. All of this is fake.

  Conroy clenches the pages of the score between his teeth and with his free hand finds a red plastic cigarette lighter from inside his jacket. With a flick he summons a flame, plays it on a corner of a page and a moment later is holding the smouldering bundle which he drops into the metal bin beside the door. Black smoke thickens, rises to the ceiling and drifts across it.

  “This is what Klauer would have wanted,” says Conroy. “This is what was always supposed to happen.”

  The three of them are jolted by the sudden wailing of a fire alarm.

  “We need to go,” Paul shouts.

  “Stay where you are.” Smoke is still issuing from the bin, catching their throats.

  “Everybody’ll be evacuating, you can get away now and we’ll forget this ever happened.”

  “Please, Mr Conroy.”

  He doesn’t move, instead he’s looking at Paige while the alarm blares, and in his eyes there’s something almost like tenderness. “I want you to be happy,” he says.

  “Then you should go.”

  “I know how much you must have wanted to come here, they made you think it mattered. You must have felt it was the happiest day of your life. Is that right, Paige?”

  She says nothing, she can see from the corner of her eye that Paul is preparing to make a move.

  “And you know, Paige, I’m sure that’s what Klauer thought too. I want to make this the happiest day of your life.”

  Conroy points the pistol at his temple, Paul leaps from where he sits, and above the screaming of the siren Paige hears another sound, she doesn’t know where it comes from or what it means, only that the door has been opened, Conroy is staggering as Verrine bursts in and she drops to the floor while the whole world becomes black, cracked by gunshot, but it isn’t Paige who’s been hit. She’s been saved, like the music she’ll still play, by the man who will become her husband.

  After

  In the park, in front of the canvas tent, stands a diminutive wooden figure. Ariel: The Extraordinary Flying Girl. The dummy’s pout is taunting, provocative, eternal. Pierre said he would be five minutes: how many have passed? Yvette walks towards the tent, sees beyond its flapping entrance the small crowd gathered inside in anticipation of the latest performance. She hears a voice behind her.

  “Yvette! Darling!”

  There he is, running to re-join her. The promise is fulfilled. Before she can say anything he embraces her in a way she has never known, like a grateful child, his kiss the sweetest wine.

  “Will you marry me?”

  “You asked me already when we rode on the wheel!”

  “I ask again. Will you be mine forever?”

  He’s been acting so strangely, but now there’s joy in his voice, a relief she shares. “Yes, Pierre, I’m yours. Only tell me the second thing you spoke of. What is it, this secret knowledge?”

  They walk hand in hand as he explains about his friends and their strange ideas of multiple worlds.

  “Nonsense!” Yvette laughs. She thought there must be another woman; all that threatens her is philosophy.

  “It’s real science,” he says earnestly. “One of them, a physicist, says it has to do with radioactivity, the way atoms break into fragments. Think of all that living energy, if only it could be released!”

  She’d rather hoped that when he came back from his brief absence he would have brought a bunch of flowers. He said it was a test, but it appears to have been a trial of nothing more than her patience. “I love your crazy notions, Pierre. I want you to keep dreaming. But you have to stop seeing these people.”

  “I shall.”

  His readiness is unexpected.

  “You won’t contact them again? What about your musical piece?”

  “I renounce it.”

  She brings out the key he gave her. “You’d better have this, then.”

  Pierre takes it, twirls the small, dull metal object in his fingers, then hurls it away onto the lawn beside them, its arc a gesture of triumph. “It’s over. All is well.”

  They reach a pavilion where drinks are being served and choose a shaded table; people chat while in a corner a photographer adjusts his camera on a tripod, ready to preserve the scene. A waiter takes their order, then after he has departed, Pierre says to her, “They wanted me… to do something. That was the test.”

  “And did you do it?”

  “I couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Yvette, they say a man who stakes his life on a game of chance must always arrive in a world where he survives, even if in another he leaves grieving friends.”

  “What madness!”

  “This is how they purify themselves, by constantly risking death, creating worlds where they’ve died, seeing only ones where they’re alive.”

  “My God, did they suggest you…?”

  “It goes further. They want to put innocent people to this insane test. Bombs detonated at random, trains derailed by the roll of a dice, chemicals that might be harmless or lethal, spread in food. They envisage a world filled only with the survivors of such outrages, and call it paradise.”

  “We have to tell the police.”

  “It’s too dangerous, these are powerful men. Their organisation is arranged like the alphabet, a sort of living lexicon. They call it Rosier’s Encyclopaedia. They want to find a way of transmitting their atrocities, perhaps using telephones or wireless telegraphy. They seek immortality through death. Their plan is global suicide.”

  She clasps his hands. “They’re lunatics.”

  “They speak of the Radiance, when all mankind will have been made to play the deadly game and a single world will survive whose rays shine back throug
h time upon all other outcomes, filling them with erasing Endness. A signal heard through every history, the unlocking of the Great Code. My music was meant to announce its arrival.”

  “Forget these lies.”

  He looks uneasy. “I still have the Book of Rules.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “An old bound manuscript, written in a language I don’t understand. They told me how to turn it into musical themes.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Carreau, Oeillet, Verrier, Verrine… not their real names, I’m sure, more like passwords that get carried from one generation to the next. Yvette, they don’t know I took it, but they’ll guess and come after me…”

  “Their only power comes from your own fear and imagination. None of this is real, Pierre. You’re free of them now.”

  The waiter brings their drinks; Yvette takes a sip of lemonade while music drifts on the warm air from a distant band. And for an instant she feels it, the tremor, the flash, a warning from the world’s far edge.

  “You’re right, Yvette, we shall live for the future, not the past. We shall rejoice forever in the contemplation of beauty and eternal love. You are my angel, my life, my immortal beloved.”

  But Yvette has seen the future. The days have passed, the children to be born are older than expired time. In this sepia moment we are already ghosts.

  Copyright

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