by Clark, Mark
After an hour of conversation it was organised for Green and Dawson to talk the following night and then at regular intervals beyond. When the final ‘Over’ was ‘Over and out’, Elizabeth sat quietly for a moment and simply shook her head in disbelief.
‘Well I’ll be damned,’ she said eventually. This was the closest the two men had come to hearing Elizabeth curse. They looked at one another. Damien, who had regained his composure in the course of the hour, cast a wink and a smile in Leslie’s direction. But he lost some of that composure, and his cavalier attitude, when several seconds later Elizabeth grabbed Leslie, hugged him with all her might and planted an absolute scorcher of a kiss right on his lips. In fact, Damien was instantly consumed with jealousy.
‘Thank you,’ Elizabeth whispered to Leslie. ‘You’re a bloody genius.’ And she kissed him again, smack bang on the lips and this time, to his extreme surprise and delight, Leslie was certain that he felt the faintest touch of tongue.
Needless to say he was in a whirl. He was Biggles in a bi-plane with its tail shot off. He was in a vertical spin without a parachute. As the warmth of Elizabeth’s luscious lips pulled succulently back from his, drawing them ever so slightly away from his face as they retracted, Leslie Woodford, scientist, inventor, consul, was a pile of smoking ash crashed in between the trenches. When he opened his eyes, he found Elizabeth gathering her coat and Damien trying to help her put it on.
‘I’ll escort you home,’ he said as he helped her into the garment. He was trying to regain lost ground but the quest was futile for the moment. He must accept that this round had well and truly gone to his rival.
‘No, thank you,’ she replied. ‘I have much to think about. This changes everything.’
‘Can’t I help you?’ asked Leslie, who had rather hoped for more conversation and adulation after the satellite link.
She approached him and took his hand, ‘I think you’ve done more than enough for one night, consul. Goodnight and thank you again.’
And much to Damien’s chagrin and Leslie’s delight she kissed him once more, although this time in a less passionate manner.
And she left.
‘You prick,’ said Damien to Leslie.
‘A stiff prick,’ replied Leslie.
And the two men looked at one another for a moment before bursting into hilarious laughter. They hugged, and Damien even undertook the familiarity of a kiss on Leslie’s cheek. ‘You clever prick,’ he said. ‘Well done.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ Leslie replied breaking the embrace and moving towards the fridge. ‘And I have taken the liberty of purchasing some of the finest alcohol available in Corporate City to celebrate this occasion.’
With a theatrical flourish he opened the door of the fridge to reveal a variety of beverages. ‘And since the lady couldn’t stay, I say we make it secret men’s business.’
That sounded alright to Damien.
Needless to say the next morning very soon became the next afternoon at which time the two comrades arose with thumping brains and a great desire to do nothing.
*
Sebastian Levi, caretaker of the Fisher Library, was finishing his rounds for the day. He had been haunted all morning by a short novel he had read earlier that day. It was a simple but magnificent novel by a twentieth century author called John Steinbeck. It was the simplicity and the elegance of the novel that had haunted him for the past six or seven hours since he had read it. Sebastian had no idea what time it was. He had long since stopped wondering about that. It was, in fact, two fifteen in the morning when Sebastian had first stumbled upon Steinberg’s book and three twenty eight when he had finished it. The time mattered little to Sebastian. But by the time the sun was making its presence felt in the east, Sebastian was wandering, thinking deeply somewhere down in the dim quarters of the lower floors of the library he had been caretaker off for over a dozen years. The book haunted him. How could such a treasure destroy someone’s life so? And if he found such a treasure, what would he do?
As he cleared out and dusted yet another stack of old home and garden magazines, his eye was caught by something that didn’t fit. Sebastian didn’t know precisely why it didn’t fit, but he had been caretaker long enough to know that it didn’t.
He dived his hand deep into the pile within which it resided and he pulled it out. There it was. It was a green, hardcover book, way out of place here, among the magazines and paperbacks.
So unexpected was the find that he looked about from right to left involuntarily to check that none had seen his discovery. They hadn’t. In fact, no one had been down here in the bowels of the old library for years. He looked at the cover. There was no title. He flicked through the pages. It looked mainly technical. He looked around again and quietly began to read the script. At first he was perplexed and then he realised that this was a lost treasure – a pearl. He laughed at the coincidence, pocketed the manuscript and began to walk the long spiral stairway up through the stories, and stories, of the library above.
Sebastian was almost forty. He was a dark-haired, swarthy looking man who had a permanent five o’clock shadow and who had once been good looking. But the years had ignored Sebastian and any potential he might have possessed, kindled up there in that sharp mind of his. Instead, he was, if anything, a little hunched for those years. He was not hunched with age or disease, but with despondency. The world had shunned him and pretty well forgotten about him. Now he was a willing recluse, purposefully hidden from the world of men, alone and mainly silent in his silent world. Without parents in his memory, without friends to call upon, without love in his life, he had pursued a quiet life beneath Corporate City sifting through the detritus of a former age. No one visited. Very few borrowed. Few cared about such things as books any more, even though there was little other kind of entertainment. They still didn’t come. Occasionally he would find a stray interested person, but this was seldom. Why?
Sebastian had all the time in the world to consider such questions. The problem, as it appeared to him, was that though there were many books still in existence, these were an eclectic collection that provided no clearly defined path in any one discipline. The great destruction of books, that he suspected probably occurred either during or after the great nuclear war of the twenty first century, had removed the great flow of human knowledge. The consistency was gone. ‘Contiguity of written texts is civilisation,’ he muttered to himself as he pottered about. And that probably explained why there were no universities and places of higher learning; why there were no emerging great artists or scientists. As he saw it, he was living in another Dark Age. The intelligentsia had gone and had not returned. The scraper dwellers organised pleasure; the street dwellers organised survival; there was basic organised business and basic organised government and a noisy bunch of organised lobby groups – but no organised, institutionalised thinking. Everybody was waiting for someone or something to pull the city back into the light.
‘So what?’ he thought to himself. ‘If the city is wretched; if the whole planet is wretched, it’s not my concern. There’s nothing I can do about it. The city rejected me a long time ago.’
And so he thought and he wandered, as he always did, as he was now, up to his small apartment above the library, muttering incoherent bitterness to himself.
There he cleared his battered spectacles and began to read the small, green book.
*
EXT.MOUNTAIN CLEARING.DAY
A few families are gathered around a camp fire. They are dressed in rags and furs.
Out of the nearby woods a cavalry of mounted men suddenly appear.
With rifles and machetes the men, women and children are mercilessly slaughtered.
Chapter 6
It was a very excited Stefan who burst into Elizabeth’s office late afternoon the following day. He wore his perennial, crisply-ironed beige suit, but Elizabeth noticed with interest that he had several strands of hair marginally out of place, a definite giveaway that he was truly
excited.
‘I think . . . I’m pretty sure . . .’ he stammered as he sped towards her desk.
‘Yes?’ she asked.
‘We may have. I think we may have . . . In fact, I’m sure we have . . .’
‘Have what?’
‘Found it!’ he boomed.
‘The book?’ she queried, rising from her seat on the buoyancy of the wave.
Stefan nodded with an agonised grin, unable to speak with excitement.
‘Where?’ she entreated
‘The old library.’
‘Well, where is it? Can I have it?’ she asked, leaving her desk and approaching him.
‘No, no,’ Stefan replied, waving his hands about. ‘He’s got it.’
‘Who’s got it?’
‘Sebastian Levi.’
‘Who?’
‘The caretaker of the library.’
‘Why has he got it?’
‘I didn’t find it. He found it. He found the book. And all the time it was just down the road. To think . . .’
‘Alright,’ said Elizabeth, gently taking him by the elbow. ‘Calm down.’
Stefan clasped the hand upon his elbow in feminine embrace, ‘I’ve tried so hard to find it for you these past weeks and now . . .’
‘It’s alright,’ Elizabeth comforted him. ‘It’s alright.’
He nodded his head in a prelude to tears. She placed her hand on his for comfort. ‘You go and have a nice rest. You deserve it. Just take a deep breath and tell me. Where is he?’
‘Waiting for you in the library,’ replied Stefan, biting his lower lip with his upper teeth.
‘Good work, Stefan. A job well done.’
Stefan closed his eyes and pursed his lips together so that they almost disappeared. Then he nodded to indicate that he agreed with the praise accorded him.
Elizabeth raced out of the room and by the time she reached the library several minutes later, Stefan was still shaking, drinking a cup of water unsteadily, while three young office workers listened intently to his dramatic tale.
Elizabeth moved confidently into the dank, musty lobby, where one hundred years before Robert and his friends had been assailed and taken by force to meet Ferret for the first time. Her shoes echoed and clattered on the old stone floor. Eddies of spiralling dust erupted in her wake like mini-tornadoes.
‘Hello,’ she said, quietly at first, and then more loudly, ‘Hello!’ Her salutation bounced off the unadorned and eerie walls.
In the dimness ahead she saw a figure appear in silhouette. It emerged from the gloom through an internal doorway. It did not speak.
‘I’m looking for a Mister Levi,’ she stated. She took two paces towards the figure and stopped. Still it did not speak. ‘Would that be you, sir?’
‘Would that be me?’ repeated the figure. ‘Not if I had any choice in the matter, but as it turns out, yes it is me. And you are President Dawson.’ Sebastian shifted out into the shaft of light illuminating the central portion of the lobby.
It struck Elizabeth, as she watched the butterfly emerge form the cocoon, that this man had some charisma about him. His voice was educated, quiet and sonorous. When she saw him fully cast in the shifting afternoon sunlight he could have been a pirate from a romantic novel, or perhaps an errant knave, discarded by society and forced into incarceration in this silent and timeless world.
‘I believe that you have something that belongs to me?’ she said. She sounded confident but she approached him no closer.
But he moved towards her. ‘It is the property of the state, I think.’
‘I represent the state,’ she replied.
‘And what is the state?’ he asked her, moving into her personal space.
Uneasy, she stepped back half a pace. ‘It is what I represent,’ she replied.
‘Ah, I see. I see,’ he said, nodding his head. ‘It really is simple when you look at it like that, isn’t it?’
Elizabeth was beginning to feel decidedly uncomfortable. She was wishing that she had brought her retinue with her and not simply burst down Macquarie Street and recklessly entered the domain of this whispering and sinister man.
‘You have a book,’ she persevered. She raised her chin in defiance of this dark-eyed man who stared penetratingly at her over the rims of his glasses. He was far too close for her comfort.
‘I have many,’ he replied with a slow smile.
‘You have one in particular, I believe,’ she returned with a further nervous upturning of her chin.
For a moment there was silence. Elizabeth came close to turning on her heel and exiting the building, with the intention of returning later with an entourage of large men. But just before she did, Sebastian whispered, ‘Follow me.’
He disappeared through the doorway from whence he had appeared, leaving Elizabeth indecisive, considering her options and momentarily glued to the floor.
A few seconds later Sebastian’s head reappeared in silhouette in the doorway. ‘Come along,’ he said. ‘I shan’t bite you.’ And again he disappeared.
Elizabeth drew in her breath and followed. Down the spiral stairwell she trailed the man and into the bowels of the library. As she descended she assessed the folly of her action. The man uttered no more words throughout the long journey down.
Eventually they reached the lowest level of the library. They were now well below ground level and around about the same spot where Rueben had met Weena many years before. Sebastian reached a pile of magazines. He turned suddenly. Elizabeth pulled up quickly in response and her heels skidded. The walls echoed with the sound.
Out of the blue he shot a question at her. ‘What is the main perquisite of power do you think, President Dawson?’
‘Perquisite?’ she asked, trying desperately to retain her equanimity.
‘Yes. The main perquisite. The main perk.’
‘Oh,’ she said, brushing her dark tousled hair away from her emerald eyes in consideration of the question. ‘Well, there’s the ability to help others, of course.’
Sebastian said nothing.
‘And the joy that springs from having a sense of purpose and being able to realise that purpose on a grand scale.’
Sebastian still said nothing.
‘And, of course, there is a certain self satisfaction in achieving goals.’ She hesitated, ‘And, I can’t deny that there’s a benefit to one’s self and one’s family when one achieves great office.’
‘Aha,’ pronounced Sebastian with enough volume to make Elizabeth flinch. ‘Aha! Now we are getting closer to it. Self satisfaction. Satisfaction of the self. The joy you speak of is the joy the self feels from attaining and maintaining its power.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Elizabeth, entirely on her guard by now.
‘I mean,’ replied Sebastian very quietly and intensely, ‘that the driving force of power, the major perquisite of power, the main reason for power is . . . power. Those, like you who have it, Miss Dawson, only barely understand this because you have it. It is only when one is disempowered that one sees that anger is the expression of the impotent and the powerless.’
Sebastian’s voice had risen ever so slightly in volume and Elizabeth was looking upward towards the safety of the world above through the spiralling dust and the myriad books coating the walls. She began to imagine how quickly she could take off one her of her heels and smash this man in the eye with it, should that become necessary.
Sebastian, however, continued without falter, apparently oblivious to the fear his understated tone and volume was engendering.
‘You see, Miss Dawson, I have been thus disempowered. I have been angry and frustrated. I believe that I have ability far beyond my station. I believe that I have been overlooked. I believe . . .’
‘Stop!’ Elizabeth shouted. The word thundered up the walls and dissipated into the books above. ‘I’ve heard enough. I don’t care what you believe. I am president of this city and you have something that belongs to me and I want it back.’ She was assertin
g herself as the bloated lizard displays the fake armour of its gills.
‘Belongs to you?’ Sebastian echoed, completely undaunted. ‘You see. That’s my point. You see yourself as the state. You are the state. You are power and power is a means to its own end.’
‘That’s quite enough,’ she repeated. ‘Are you going to give me the book, or not?’
‘Oh the book’s not here,’ he replied. ‘It’s well hidden.’
‘Then why are we here?’ she said shakily, giving voice to the realisation of her vulnerability. President or no president, she had no power way down here right at this moment. She stared at the man before her. Silently, she began to slide off her long-heeled shoe.
‘There’s no need to be frightened,’ he said, watching the slow but purposeful retraction of her foot from its casing. ‘We’re here because I want to show you something. But first, before I do, I want a guarantee from you, as head of the state.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Elizabeth asked, halting momentarily the removal of her shoe.
‘I mean that I have made a great discovery – one that will have great consequences for you, for me, and for others. But,’ and he looked at her over the rim of his glasses, ‘I will not show you without an iron-clad promise that I shall be included in the bounty that this discovery will generate. You see,’ he moved closer to her and she did not budge, ‘I have been, as I told you, overlooked by the world. In fact it would be more accurate to say that I have been ostracised by it and this book is my opportunity to deal myself back into the game. What do you say?’
He waited for her response at an obscenely close distance from her face. She could smell his breath, but surprisingly, it was not unpleasant, merely unexpected.
