Someone caught his shoulder and just before he pulled his gun he saw it was an elderly Kirekuni in traditional robes, looking irritated and concerned. “The tarte flambée.” Mickey sneezed. “It’s done for me. I’ve always had a weak digestion—”
“I don’t suppose that’s tarte flambée coming off you in clouds, young man? You’ve been hiding in the old stairs, having a good cry: admit it.” The elderly Kirekuni shook his head. “Come, come, pull yourself together. It happens to everyone from time to time. Got to admit defeat, but not accept it—that’s the way to handle it.”
Mickey gaped for a moment and then realized the elderly man thought he was a trader. The sheer naivete of the assumption floored him. He managed to say between coughs, “Lost—everything—”
“Take the rest of the day off,” advised a younger Kirekuni, pausing. His tail was erect and florid with tattoos signifying a sterling pedigree. “If I were you, I’d visit my fiancee and be an absolute angel for about three hours. Don’t tell her; after all, everything will come right in time, won’t it? But just in case, you know. Hedge your bets.” He laughed. The older man joined in, and Mickey was about to try to fake it, when the sight of two Disciples approaching—deferentially, but nonetheless approaching—paralyzed him.
“Deepest apologies, honorable ones…” murmured one Disciple. “However…”
“Absolutely.” The elderly Kirekuni accepted the reprimand without missing a beat. Mickey wondered how a man of his prestige could cooperate without the words sticking in his throat. But once upon a time he, too, had taken Disciple authority for granted—before he learned the hard way that their rules were mostly arbitrary and their enforcement of them had more to do with sadistic self-indulgence than a sense of duty.
“See you on the floor, compadre, huh?” said the younger man. “Chin up. I’ll give you a tip: certain natives from the north—you know who I mean—are planning to sell out tomorrow. Be there.” He clapped Mickey’s shoulder, wrinkled his nose at the rising dust, and left.
Mickey angled a sickly smile at the Disciples and limped toward the exit. He was still struggling with the Kirekuni stockbrokers’ gratuitous compassion. He couldn’t quite take it in. He was more astonished than relieved to find himself outside in the brilliant sunlight. He halted on the steps, his spine prickling. No one had molested him. No one seemed to be about to. Perhaps his freeloading in the restaurant really had gone unnoticed. One of the sentries outside pointed at him, then all of them laughed. He tottered down the steps and slumped against the wall, out of their line of sight.
After a few moments he noticed he was leaning on the muscular stone ankle of a daemon that straddled the entrance of the Stock Exchange. He looked up. It was like an absentminded guardian oblivious to the invaders scuttling between its legs. This place was like one of those picture puzzles in black and white: at first it looks like an innocuous line drawing, but turn it another way and you see faces grinning between people’s backs, monsters in the foreground, dogs upside down in the sky.
At least he’d had something to eat.
On the far side of the honking autos, he glimpsed a Ferupian drunkard lying on the steps of the Comptroller’s Palace: a man possibly in his mid-thirties with a ravaged, tanned face. A veteran. Now and again he swigged from an earthen jar—the hair of the dog. Flunkies circled him without giving him a second glance. He might as well not have existed. Mickey got treated very differently. The ratio of passersby who stared at him to those who ignored him had narrowed to approximately one to one. He couldn’t imagine it would be much longer before someone made it their business to learn his business. He had another stab at brushing off the dust and then gave up. He was going to be an object of curiosity, no matter what, because he was a Kirekuni. This is probably one of the reasons Crispin went to Lamaroon, he thought. He should’ve stayed there.
I’ve got to do better than he did. I’ve got to go back to Okimachi.
A breeze swooped down, plucking at his lapels and necktie. He remembered spring in Okimachi: the warm, soft-edged days touched with fog that curled up off the Orange, wreathing the city mountain in mists that poets, gazing from afar, had described as bridal veils. The respite before the early-summer winds off the Chadou. And even those gales struck decisively, they didn’t pussyfoot around, they leapt through the streets like frolicking lions. A city bell close by struck one. The sun arrowed down between the palaces, bedazzling, ruthless. The light in northern Ferupe was purer than anywhere else in the world. It was giving Mickey a headache.
Fumie, Ashie, Rumika, Moshiko, Lassa, Joia—I’m a deserter—if any thing’s happened to them it’ll be my fault—
As the last couple of hours tumbled higgledy-piggledy through his memory, the risks he’d taken appeared in a new light. He saw his unprincipled behavior in the restaurant as Yoshitaro Achino, businessman, would see it. No man of his tattoos should have to risk his life for a square meal! Not even for filet du cochon aux champignons! Should he wait for Crispin, inform him of his decision? Yes, it was the compassionate thing to do. He couldn’t be less compassionate than two stockbrokers who’d taken time out to jolly up a stranger, could he?
Yet what if Crispin had already come out while he was in the library—or while he was on the stairs—or while he was fending off his countrymen’s fellow feeling?
(Nothing I’d have to face at home could be more humiliating—I never knew lying could be humiliating—!)
Should he venture into the palace and try to lie some more, lie his way up to the professor’s suite and see if Crispin was still there?
He tipped his head back against the warm stone. I’m a coward, he thought regretfully, longing to close his eyes and doze like the Ferupian layabout on the other side of the street, not daring to. The daemon steeples pricked high into the cerulean heavens. He noticed for the first time that someone had attached a Kirekuni flag to one of the upreaching hands. His mouth grew dry and a tiny hammerhead started knocking between his eyebrows, though he’d refused the wine the redheaded waitress offered him.
“I’m fond of music, and I respect composers more than anyone, so I look forward to accompanying D and talking with him.”
“All he thinks about these days is this thing in his head, and apparently that’s all he talks about!”
—Kenzaburo Oe
Who’s the Man with the Master Plan?
10 Main 1900 A.D. 12:45 P.M.
Ferupe (“New Kirekune”): Kingsburg
(“Ataramachi”): the Burg: the Comptroller’s Palace
Millsy had talked himself out—or else excavated his wisdom down to the bedrock of his present self: down to the things he couldn’t or wouldn’t speak of. He sat hunched and trembling, knees to nose, holding on to his teacup for dear life. A seraphically saccharine choral ode issued from the gramophone. Crispin had chosen it at random. The lyrics were in Latin, one of the languages he didn’t know, thank goodness. He was finding it hard enough to concentrate.
If his very presence forced Millsy to remember things that caused him pain, why had Millsy invited him here? Why had he instigated this dreadful scene?
Because the ghost of altruism had impelled him to share what he knew before he died?
Then why hadn’t he invited Crispin sooner? It made no sense.
Millsy hadn’t written to Saul until Aout of the previous year. In Sevambar, Ted Macpherson had died. For the rest of the year, the Minami murder trial had occupied Crispin’s days and he’d felt as if they were his last days, not the secretary of the interior’s. Yamauchi had insisted he go nowhere unaccompanied by bodyguards. He’d no longer been allowed to drive his own car or walk in the Yard alone. Yamauchi wanted him alive to testify. You didn’t throw a tool away until it was past its usefulness. Crispin was surprised Yamauchi even allowed him the privacy of his marriage bed; but there again, the Little Governor had a mole. The point was that in Aout, two and a half years had already passed since Millsy arrived in Kingsburg. Two and a half years, it seemed, of
isolation, regrets, and the anguish of watching his own pessimistic predictions come true one after another. Hadn’t Millsy known until last Aout that Crispin was still alive?
And who had told him? According to him, he saw no one, corresponded with no one. It didn’t compute.
Mr. Nakunatta’s fingers slid down the nape of Crispin’s neck, and he shivered—it’s his work; the arsonist is also the omniscient informer, the omnipresent mole. He searched Millsy’s face. Only by a stretch of the imagination could he transform this wizened, stubbed-out oracle into the circus performer he’d known. Millsy had been touched, burned over and over, until finally, like a daemon enslaved for years, he’d started identifying with his captor: the stigmata of his servility, the strain of being the arsonist’s confidant, showed on his aged face, in his incessant trembling. Crispin felt crippled by his exhaustively rationalized answers. The ghost knew the world inside and out.
“Leave!” Millsy said into his knees. “Go away. You disappoint me. You are not the same as you were. I should never have agreed.”
“Agreed to what?” Crispin said mistrustfully.
“They could have done nothing to me except kill me.” Millsy spoke in the complaining tones of the superannuated collaborator. “And what loss would that have been? Ah—I deceived myself many times over. And now I am to taste the bitter fruits of my self-deception.” He flapped his hands beside his knees like stunted wings. “Leave!”
But when it came to the point, Crispin didn’t believe that Mr. Nakunatta had told Millsy a thing. Concepts, however significantly name-tagged, didn’t traffic in gossip! Rigid with suspicion, he glanced swiftly at the door. He could hear nothing over the choral music, but he couldn’t risk turning it off, any more than he could risk interrogating Millsy as violently as he wanted to. He said gently, “I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed you. I don’t understand—”
Millsy’s face twisted as if he were going to spit. “You do not dream, do you? If you did, you would have already known most of what I told you. The archives—hah! Only half the puzzle is there.” He peered at Crispin, licking his lips, and said inquisitively, “Do you dream?”
“Of the war,” Crispin lied in sudden dread. “You know. Nightmares!”
“Unsurprising: many are similarly plagued. But that is not what I mean. And it is as well, I suppose. I would not wish dreams like mine on you.” He fell to trembling again, making small noises of anguish in his throat. “Perhaps, while you are in Kingsburg, you will have time to visit the archives at the university,” he said finally. “I have contributed a few of my own poor writings. Or perhaps I should say transcriptions.”
Crispin sorted through his confusion. He thought he knew what Millsy was getting at: Millsy suffered from the same type of visitations he did. And Millsy believed they came from daemonkind. But Millsy had to be wrong! Because for one thing, Crispin had first seen the flames long ago, before he became a trickster, and for another he was sure that his bouts of dubious prophecy had nothing to do with daemons. Unless—unless daemons were so omnipresent in his dreams, like light, like movement, that he hadn’t even noticed them—
—and in that case he knew more than Millsy: he could trace the chain of command back farther, through the occult, and back again to the applicable world-He regarded Millsy with awestruck contempt. With a few words, the old trickster had discredited himself: after all, he was only a mouthing, half-senile old bat stringing the tops and tails of stale revelations together! Even in his capacity as Mr. Nakunatta’s confidant he didn’t have the last word! Neither did Crispin, not by any means, not even now he’d reaped the proceeds of Millsy’s self-excavations, but he, not Millsy, was Mr. Nakunatta’s favorite. He bet Millsy’s nightmares couldn’t hold a candle to his—the disjunction effect, the black-and-white effect, the refractive effect—
—of course, that wasn’t a good thing—
—in fact it was probably the opposite—
He had nothing to lose now. He opened his mouth to ask Millsy who had told him he was still alive. Millsy’s crazed old eyes were fixed on him, the hands covered the mouth, and childish giggles spurted from between the fingers. The unchildish note of misery, even terror, in the laughter stopped Crispin from speaking. “So it is with me! So it is always! I could simply have put it all in the letter, and thus cheated them while accomplishing one of my own objectives. But I wanted to see you. I wanted to touch your skin and hair. I wanted you to help me remember. Really remember. And once again, my selfishness has been my own worst enemy—for I should have guessed, should I not, that after six years, seeing you could be nothing but a disappointment? And so the joke is on me!” His hands jerked up to cover his eyes as he began to snivel. Crispin reached out to him, but Millsy must have been peeking between his fingers, for he slapped Crispin’s hand away with surprising force. “Do not touch me!” It was half a scream, half a snarl. “If you knew—”
“If I knew what?” Crispin shoved back his chair and stood up. He glanced at the window. A pigeon darted past. Faintly, outside, a bell tolled once. “I was a fool to come here. A fool. I knew it.” No, I didn’t. I believed the danger lay behind me, not ahead. “I succumbed to temptation just as much as you did. Significance, the past is our worst enemy! Who told you?”
The hands dropped to reveal streaming eyes. “It was the basest of my follies,” Millsy moaned. “Go! Leave! I cannot bear to watch them glory in their triumph yet again! I cannot bear it!”
Crispin wanted to kill Millsy. He wanted to shoot him in the heart, but that would be too noisy and all the other ways were too messy, except strangulation, to which he’d never stooped and wasn’t about to. He turned at the door. “How long do I have?”
“I was to keep you until the bell struck one.” Millsy flapped his hands, not looking at him. “Go, go, there may still be a chance!”
Crispin let himself out into the hall. As he passed the coatstand, he grabbed his jacket. Behind him he heard Millsy calling faintly over the music, “Hikushi! Oh, Hikushi! My jewel, come here! Papa needs you! Hiku…”
Crispin burst out onto the landing. Hikushi sat with his back to the banisters, his jaw sagging vacantly. He tossed dice on the floor, gathered them up, and tossed them again, over and over. He seemed oblivious to the pathetic cries from within. Perhaps he had conditioned himself to ignore his pederastic employer unless the bell went. “If anyone comes looking for me, tell them I wasn’t here,” Crispin said, probably to no avail, and plunged down the stairs. His footsteps drowned out the rhythmic rattle of dice. The staircase zigzagged down inside the back of the monstrous daemon’s torso. When it became a windowless spiral, he knew he was inside one of the legs.
This betrayal put paid to the memories he and Millsy had held in mutual trust. Compared to Millsy, Saul—my father!—had stayed true as steel. Saul had stuck to the roving life through thick and through thin. He’d embraced shrikouto, and the Cypean nationalism that went with it, not with the intention of exploiting his audiences, but as a subversive expression of his own patriotism, his undying loyalty to a country that no longer existed and a monarch who was dead. He hadn’t enticed Crispin to visit for blatantly sentimental reasons; he’d sought him humbly, almost shyly, on the valid pretext of delivering the letter from Millsy. (He had, of course, no way of knowing the letter was his son’s death warrant. He’d probably thought it was an RSVP to the good life.) In the face of Crispin’s childish, misguided spite, he’d invited him to rejoin the circus. He’d even offered to return to Ferupe, to probable financial ruin, just so that Crispin could travel in safety, under the aegis of the big top. And Crispin had to give him credit for coming out, belatedly or not, with the truth. I saw in your baby face the reason we are all born, the reason we all die, and the reason we keep stupidly struggling…
In contrast to Millsy, who had said. You were such a beautiful baby! Such a pretty little boy! Ah, how I relished the rare occasions when you required me…
He played me false. He’s been playing me false eve
r since I was about a year old.
The truth burned like a headache in Crispin’s brain as he ran down the stairs as quickly and quietly as possible. He reached the bottom, covered the short hall inside the daemon’s foot in a heartbeat, and emerged into another, wider hall. The ceiling was peaked because it was under the roof. One side was all windows, the other all doors. His feet left marks in deep carpeting. The scent of new paint and wood glue seemed pleasant after the cosmetician’s stink of Millsy’s apartment. All Millsy’s furniture was old—not antique-old but rag-and-bone old: perhaps the potpourri wasn’t a madman’s neurosis, but simply a cover-up for the smell of mold and camphor. Perhaps Millsy wasn’t the vile, lusty creature Crispin imagined, but just a senile ancient, easily manipulated—
He betrayed me! I’ve got to stop making excuses for him!
His heart felt weirdly light as he started down the next staircase.
Only so long as Millsy retained moral credibility did Crispin have to take him into account. By proving himself false, the trickster had retroactively canceled out his impact on Crispin’s life. What price auguries of doom—or, for that matter, confessions of pederasty—from a self-admitted liar and traitor? What now obliged Crispin to take anything Millsy had ever said or done seriously?
A Trickster in the Ashes Page 36
