by Lavie Tidhar
He read through it. Unknown assailants fired shots outside the Red Lion pub in Soho earlier today, breaking glass and frightening customers. One woman was treated for minor cuts. There were no other casualties. ‘We are taking this very seriously,’ a spokesman for the police said, ‘and are following all available leads.’
No Mo. No mention of Joe lying there unconscious. Somehow, he hadn’t expected there to be.
Fuzzy Wuzzies, he thought. The word left a bad taste in his mouth. He thought — refugees. He wondered what leads the police had. Perhaps they were analysing samples of cigarette ash. He imagined them armed with round magnifying glasses, scattered around the city, backs hunched, searching for clues. He reached for his cigarettes, remembered you weren’t allowed to smoke in libraries. No clue for the police, then.
A different newspaper, this one a tabloid. The same story magnified, an opinion piece, an outraged tone, immigrants are to blame, government must increase control of remaining colonies, stronger powers of arrest demanded in the House of Commons. Lords against. How long can we let our children grow up in fear?
Joe looked around him. No one seemed afraid in the busy children’s section. They were drawing in crayons, leafing through bright-coloured books. He wondered what they were reading. He thought about Mike Longshott: the Osama Bin Laden Colouring Book. You could leave the beard page-white. Make the eyes sky-blue and empty.
Back to the broadsheet, the same news item reduced to page four in the next day’s morning issue. Look for it the next day too and it was gone, as if it had never happened. Goodbye Mo.
Even though he didn’t expect it in the paper, it riled him. Invisible people, he thought. Did someone, somewhere, mourn Mo’s passing? Did someone remember him, grieve for him, wish him back? Did he still exist, some parts of him, some fragments, his smell, his smile, the touch of his hand, his voice when he spoke, the way he cleaned his ears, did they still exist somewhere, secret inscriptions on somebody else’s mind?
He put down the paper. The desk before him was a mobile geography of off-blue ink and smudged paper. He had come to the library to find a body, and it wasn’t there. Nevertheless. He felt stubborn, like he had something to prove. A part of him was fighting it, telling him to leave. He didn’t. There was one place at least he knew he could still find Mo in.
The phone book.
an explorer in a silent film
——
When he approached again the Leicester Square tube station the crowds seemed to pull at him, and he had the irrational thought of fighting them. He pushed through the massed congregation instead and found himself at the entrance. Stairs led down underground. A beggar was sitting in the entranceway, slumped over a backpack, reading a paperback, a dog-food bowl by his feet with coins floating inside it. He raised his head when he felt Joe watching, and Joe got a glimpse of the book, and of course it was an Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante, the reading of choice for the homeless, and the beggar, a little more than a boy, Joe thought, said, ‘This is some heavy shit, bro.’
He had not felt the same way in Paris. Yet here, the thought of going underground was suffocating him. He tossed a coin into the beggar’s bowl. ‘Get some new reading material,’ he said. Then he went down the stairs.
He studied a map of the tube network, different coloured lines twisting and intersecting, and realised he had to take the line to King’s Cross and change. The picture on the map looked like spilled intestines. He bought a ticket and went through the barrier and descended again, deeper into the ground, and suddenly it was silent, and strangely peaceful. He waited for the train to arrive, watching the rats scuttling under the platform, in the tunnel. There were adverts on the walls for products he would never buy, or use. The train came and he boarded it. The doors closed with a soft whooshing sound, quite reassuring. He found a seat, occupied it. The walls of the tunnels as they passed were ghostly, the stations unexpected bursts of white light. At King’s Cross he got off and wandered through the station, a little lost, underground caverns opening above him: he had the sense of being an explorer in a silent film, wearing a pith helmet, breaking into a mummy’s tomb. Instead he got directions from a uniformed black woman who pointed him in the direction of the circle line, and he got on the train and counted stations.
At Edgware Road he got off. There were no escalators, and he climbed up the wide stairs and into sunlight, and he wondered if there was a curse on the pharaoh’s tomb and if so, when it might manifest itself. He walked down the station road a short while and then turned right on Edgware Road itself. He went under an overpass and the shops all seemed to change, and as he passed a couple of young people the man said, gesturing for the benefit of his blonde-haired girlfriend, ‘And this is what we call Little Cairo.’
Little Cairo. There were coffee shops where men sat and smoked sheesha pipes and food stalls where great columns of meat rotated slowly under flames, fat drizzling down their sides. There were veiled women walking kids down the road or pushing babies in their baby-chairs, and he could smell cinnamon and cumin and the men were playing backgammon, he could hear the constant sound of rolling dice, like thunder.
The blonde-haired girl said, ‘That is so romantic.’ The boy grinned and pulled her to him.
There were Mercedes cars in the street, black and polished, and men in kafeyehs, beards and moustaches, and there were shops selling toys, and clothes, and food, and many signs advertising many bargains. He was looking for Mo’s office, and as he turned for the road he found a street market in progress and smelled fish. He walked down the side of the road, avoiding the main thoroughfare of the market, and passed a bakery and a flower-shop and then stopped and retraced his steps and bought a rose, not quite sure why. The woman who sold it to him smiled as she handed it to him. ‘I hope she likes it,’ she said. Joe smiled, awkwardly. He continued on his way, the purple rose in his hand, passed a sign for Sachs & Levine, Solicitors, passed the straggling fish-tail of the market, crossed the road, and found the building.
There were some cars parked by the curb, none of them new. When he scanned the business names on the side of the door he found Mo’s, in chipped white paint, the words Private Inquiry Agent peeling. When he stepped through the door into the hallway it was dark and quiet and there was grime on the windows, dust on the floor, and it made him think again of entering a sort of sacred tomb, and he wished he had a pith helmet after all. Instead he climbed up the narrow stairs to the third floor and found the door, tried the handle.
It was unlocked. He pushed the door open and stepped inside.
loss hovering between the dust motes
——
There was no one in Mo’s office. There was a window overlooking the road Joe had just crossed, red-grey brick buildings with washing hanging from the windows. Few cars. There was a desk and a lamp and a box of cigars — he slid open the wooden lid and saw that only three remained inside, and their smell spread out from the box and into the room. Not Hamlets, at least. Romeo and Juliets, perhaps: the Cuban version of Shakespeare.
There was a large chair behind the desk and two smaller ones in front of it. A wastepaper basket, a metal filing cabinet, a shelf on the wall with some books on it. He didn’t have to look too close to know they were Osama paperbacks. It reminded Joe of his own office back in Vientiane. Bare and minimal, a cell more than an office. He began to search it.
He found no scotch, which was disappointing, because he suddenly craved a drink. There should have been a camera somewhere, and probably negatives, but he could find nothing: it was as if the place had been professionally cleaned, or else had never been occupied in the first place. He broke the lock of the filing cabinet but it was empty. In the bottom drawer of the desk, however, he struck lucky. The drawer was shorter, he discovered, than the ones above it. He took it out and inserted his hand in the gap and rooted there. There was something there. He managed to grab it, pulled it out. It was another cigar box, but heavy. He laid it on the desk and opened it.
Close, but no cigars.
There was a small but fat gun in there, a four-shot COP 357 Derringer, and Joe took it and slipped it in his pocket. There was an envelope with five one-hundred pound notes, which he put back. There was a drawing of a woman’s face, badly made. He wondered if it was Mo who drew it. Lines had been erased and retraced until the paper wore out. Joe wondered who she was, why Mo had no picture of her that he had to attempt drawing her, over and over. He left the money and the woman’s picture and put them back in the box and closed it, and returned it to its hiding place.
He took one last look around the office. The books. He went to the shelf and removed the paperbacks one by one. He scanned fly-leafs and endpapers and found nothing but hints of foxing. Next he leafed through them, shook them page-edges down, searching for anything hidden between the pages. He struck lucky, of sorts, on the fourth book he tried. A square piece of light-blue paper fluttered to the floor from within the pages of Sinai Bombings. He picked it up. It was a cloakroom receipt. He pocketed it and returned the book to its place on the shelf.
He took a last look at the room. It had a disused, abandoned air. He went back to the desk and closed the lid of the cigar box, gently. He was glad there was no mirror in the room. He did not want to look at it and see himself. He scanned the room again but Mo still wasn’t there. He saw loss hovering between the dust motes.
There were no sarcophagi in the room; no ancient jars, no decorations of jade and gold. There was not even a calendar.
He left the purple rose he bought in Little Cairo on the desk. Then he left the room.
a hill of beans
——
Something was wrong. He knew it, felt it, but he couldn’t place the feeling with any accuracy. Something to do with the books. He retraced his steps, without conscious thought. Back again through the bustling market, past bakeries and fishmongers and greengrocers’ carts, past cheap plastic toys spilling onto a blanket on the pavement, past loud music in a language he did not speak, past the smells of roasting coffees and roasting lamb kebabs, past men in jalabiyehs, a telephone booth with the handset off the hook, and he thought about cause and effects, and a kind of war that he didn’t understand.
The question that had been niggling away at him was too small and too big at once. It was why.
It had nothing to do with the real world and everything to do with the fictional one, Mike Longshott’s world, the world of The European Campaign and Sinai Bombings and Assignment: Africa. The world of World Trade Center, whatever that was. They were war books. But he did not understand the war, and the feeling that was pressing down on him from the inside, that made the bones of his fingers ache and not stand still, was that he should.
On Edgware Road he found a coffee shop and went inside and sat by the window. There were Middle Eastern men sitting around tables, drinking, talking to each other. Two were sharing a sheesha pipe. The proprietor came over and said, ‘What can I get you?’ and Joe said, ‘Coffee.’
The proprietor was portly and moustachioed with eyes like dark-green olives. He brought over a long-handled pot and a small china cup and then returned with a glass of water and a small plate holding two pieces of baklavah, fine layers of pastry overflowing with syrup.
‘Business is good?’ Joe said. The man shrugged. ‘Inshalla,’ he said. ‘One can’t complain.’
The coffee was bitter and Joe bit into a piece of baklavah and then drank again, the pastry sweetening the black-tar coffee. War, he thought. And then — was mass murder a crime, or was it a political act? And who decided?
There must be more in the Longshott books, he thought. He kept skimming through them, but there must have been something he was missing. For the first time, the books struck him as strangely unreal. He thought of all the attacks described. If you added all the wounded and the dead, he thought, they still wouldn’t amount to how many people died in a single month in car accidents in just one city. It was a war about fear, he thought, not figures on the ground. It was a war of narrative, a story of a war, and it grew in the telling. For some reason he thought of a hill of beans, which was a strange thing to think about. Lives in a hill of beans. He laughed. The sheesha in the next table was putting out thick clouds of cherry-flavoured smoke. And then he thought — if this was a war, how many dead were on the other side?
cuckoo-bird mother
——
‘More coffee?’ the proprietor asked. Joe shook his head, stood up. He paid and left, and stood for a while in the weak sunshine of Edgware Road, thinking. The receipt from Mo’s office was in his pocket. It was too late to follow his other leads. Or too early. What do people do in London? He wondered. And then he thought — of course.
He took a bus back into town. He sat on the top, in the front seat before the big windows, and looked out at the city streets as they passed by, slowly. They were grey and solid, like an accountant. There was something comforting about London, its small distinct neighbourhoods, its narrow lanes, congested roads. He watched another red double-decker bus go past from the opposite direction, looking like an Asian elephant driven by its mahout. Ahead of it were two black cabs, like beetles. He half expected them to open wings and buzz up into the sky. Something inside him felt lost. This was not the future he had expected. There were no flying cars, no silver suits, and the only aliens walking in the streets outside were human. There were Arabs and Indians and Chinese and Malay, Jews and Africans, a whole planet of refugees seeking shelter in the mothership that was London. From here wars had been launched, colonies conquered. From here, this great big sprawling administrative centre, an empire had been managed in triplicate. No wonder we come here, he thought. The city was a cuckoo-bird mother, taking children that did not belong to it, annexing them, bringing them up in a strange mix of missionary activity, trade exploitation and good intentions. When the time came and the children wanted their independence the mother was hurt, and they fought. And now some of the annexed children, who were not children at all, came back, because they had nowhere else to go.
He got out on Oxford Street and walked down the crowded avenue, past large bright stores selling cargo. The city was a hungry, insatiable being, demanding its tea and its medication, its food and its clothes and all the things that came from elsewhere. It was a city of cargo, its giant warehouses filled to the brim with the produce of a hundred different places. He knew where to go, and it was a short walk: down Oxford Street, across St. Giles’ Circus where corpses no longer sighed in the breeze, down New Oxford Street and into Bloomsbury.
There were vineyards there once, and wood for one hundred pigs. Now there were pubs and bookshops, but it was quite likely some of the books, at least, had been bound in pigskin — which said something about progress.
He turned right on Great Russell Street. It was quiet — no. It was peaceful. It was a feeling he had almost forgotten he knew. There were more bookshops here, and they specialised in what the British called the Far East, and the Middle East: there were old books in the windows with pictures of the pyramids on them, and the Forbidden City, once-grand possessions of the British Empire now reduced into the memoirs of soldiers and administrators. There were old looted coins in the windows and the busts of long-gone emperors, and the smell of dry leather and dust, and under his feet the grills of a sewage tunnel echoed as he passed.
What do you do in London, he thought: and the answer came easy, channelled into his mind in Mo’s voice: you go to a museum.
knives, corpses, vases and gods
——
There was a man selling hot dogs outside the gates of the British Museum and the smell of frying onions made Joe hungry. He stopped and bought one.
‘Enjoying London?’ the short man behind the cart said.
‘Having the time of my life,’ Joe said.
He chewed on the sausage in its soggy bun as he entered the courtyard. Eating it did not take long. He cleaned his hands as best he could with the thin napkin and felt grimy. His mouth tasted of onions
and cheap mustard. He balled the napkin and dumped it in a rubbish bin and climbed the stairs of the museum. It was then that he thought he saw a pair of familiar black shoes in the crowd, but when he turned they were gone. He had the receipt for the cloakroom but now he decided to be careful before checking it, and so he entered the building and found grand staircases rising on either side of him and another door that led into a large, dim-lighted space.
Up and down stairs he went, checking reflections in reflecting surfaces, examining less the exhibits than the people who came to see them. In the Egyptian collection he saw three thousand year old, giant statues of long-gone Pharaohs. Cat-headed deities seemed to watch him from above. He saw the black façade of the Rosetta Stone, and a fragment of the Sphinx’s beard, and he thought — if there had been enough room they would have dragged the entire Sphinx in, all the way from its sandy residence in Egypt. In one display case he found the mummified corpse of Cleopatra of Thebes. He stared at it for a long moment, then turned away. In another part he saw half of the Parthenon, transported from Greece by the Earl of Elgin. Marble figures, lightly clothed, that looked confused in the cold dimness of the British Museum.
There were statues, sculptures, bas-reliefs, manuscript tablets, paintings, coins, jewellery, knives, corpses, vases, Greek gods, Egyptian gods, Buddhas, books, the loot of an entire world hoarded, stored, collected and guarded. It came from China, from Iraq, from Tasmania and Benin and Egypt and Sudan, from India and Iran and Ethiopia. It was as if the British had gone out into the world, stripped it of its heritage, and returned, laden with their cargo, to decorate their city with it.
It was a terribly arrogant building, it seemed to him. Joe thought again about the books he’d read, about their secret war. Why did they fight? He thought, there at the peaceful museum, that he could see just a hint of that, the fingers of antiquity crawling into the present day and shaking it.
