'Yes. What?'

I felt her hands fondle my ears. I could smell the flower, the musty dust on its stamen. I saw her wet cheeks and was filled with joy.

'We have to go,' she said. 'There's someone out there wants to kill you.'

45.

Wally woke to find Bill, Malide and Peggy Kram all camped on his dining-table bed and talking volubly as if the dinner party had never finished.

The old man had thought himself in a private place. He had gone to sleep with his trousers pressing underneath the mattress. His dentures were in public view. His dress shirt and bow tie were folded neatly on the bookcase at the head of the bed. Now, as he struggled to b.u.t.ton up the crumpled shirt, he was mortified to find his bare and withered chest displayed for all to see.

How this could happen in etiquette-obsessed Saarlim was as much a mystery to him as was the warmth being displayed by the hosts and their powerful guest towards each other.

Yet the implications of the visit were so clear to the Saarlimites that they did not feel they had to explain it, not even to a foreigner. If Mrs Kram was clambering over Wally's bed, it meant she had decided, for whatever reason, that Bill's apartment was hearth hearth and that Bill and Malide were and that Bill and Malide were hearth folk. hearth folk. In other words, Mrs Kram had derived value from the dinner party, and my father, to his barely concealed astonishment, found himself elevated, promoted, saved. In other words, Mrs Kram had derived value from the dinner party, and my father, to his barely concealed astonishment, found himself elevated, promoted, saved.

'I thought about it all night,' Mrs Kram said. 'I was so aired-up, I could not sleep.'

'We felt the same,' Malide lied. 'We went straight out for chocolate. We talked about you for hours and hours and then, coming back across the Platz, there you were.'

'And there you you were,' said Mrs Kram, who had not, in the entire dinner party, said so much as half a dozen words to Malide. were,' said Mrs Kram, who had not, in the entire dinner party, said so much as half a dozen words to Malide.

'We were talking about you,' Bill said.

'And there I was, my head full of you.' you.'

'We were saying, how could we live so close to you all that time and not hear that you were folk?' folk?'

They were, as you can see, in too much of a giddy state of insincerity to notice anything as ordinary as Wally's chest or dentures. If they sat on the bed, it was because this is what you do in a situation like this. They were in such a rush, were so loud and pleased to kick their shoes off at the door, were so happy to show how thrilled they were with each other's company. It took them nearly three minutes to realize that the nurse had changed s.e.x in their absence.

'Excuse me, young lady,' said Mrs Kram when Jacqui brought Wally's socks and shoes over to the bed. 'Did I drink too much, or were you a gjent last time we met?'

Bill and Malide echoed her laughter, but their eyes registered their own separate but discreet emotions: amus.e.m.e.nt and admiration in the man's case, serious alarm in the woman's that was her 1000-Guilder skirt swishing up and down the apartment.

Wally retrieved his trousers from beneath the mattress and drew them on beneath the covers. Then, as Kram wiped her eyes, he swung his legs out over the bed and smoothed down his wild eyebrows with his fingers.

'What time is it?' he said.

'OhmyG.o.d,' said Mrs Kram. 'OhmyG.o.d, this apartment is better than a cabaret. I should move in here. It's so amusing.'

If I had recited the speech which I was forming in my head it would have been a good deal more amusing, but Jacqui somehow intuited that I was about to show off my new voice.

'Forget that now.' To Wally she said, 'We've got to go.'

Wally stared at her, open-mouthed.

'Mr Paccione, we need to go.' need to go.'

'Then others want to use the bed?'

'OhmyG.o.d,' said Mrs Kram. 'This is Saarlim, hunning. No one sleeps in Saarlim.'

And straight away, without asking permission from Bill and Malide, the Kram began to phone up to her own apartment to tell her caterers that there would now be extra mouths to feed.

'For Christ's sake,' Jacqui said to me, 'let's go.'

'Do you like berries, Oncle?' Peggy Kram called to Wally. 'Do you like wild rice and chestnuts? Will you eat today, cuteling?' She beamed at me. 'Will Bruder Mouse come upstairs to see my little trothaus?'

I turned to Jacqui.

'That's it,' she said. 'Go with her. That's perfect.'

And that, of course, is how we made our escape from Wendell Deveau without even leaving the building. We rode the big gla.s.s elevator up to Mrs Kram's trothaus.

46.

My threatened a.s.sa.s.sination was much less in my mind than I might have expected. I do not mean that I was brave. You know I am not brave I hid from death for years on end inside the Feu Follet. I saw death, smelled it, let it invade me like a gas until it had occupied every corner of my empty soul.

But as I rose inside the gla.s.s elevator, I knew my life was about to change. I was about to become witty, s.e.xy. I was about to speak clearly for the first time in my life.

My only hesitation was what should I say? You try it think of a sentence, now, that will express all your genius and charm.

Hurry, hurry. You are on the tenth floor. Time is rushing.

It is better fourteenth floor fourteenth floor to keep it simple. to keep it simple.

Fifteenth floor.

Sixteenth floor.

You can see the gondels cl.u.s.tered at the steps on Demos Platz. You can see the pigeons on St Francis fountain. You don't know what floor Peggy Kram lives on and you are ready to settle on asking, 'Which floor?'

At the seventeenth this seems stupid.

Eighteenth floor.

At the nineteenth you see a chance to link life and art, to comment on the view. But 'Like a De Kok' is not accurate, and you cannot think of the name of the Saarlim painter whom the view recalls.

'Do it,' Jacqui said to me on the nineteenth floor. 'Just Caliban.'

'What Caliban?' said Kram, instantly alert, her blue eyes flicking between the pair of us. 'What's up?'

The doors slid open into a mirrored foyer. I saw myself reflected in a gilded frame a myth, a legend, a beautiful woman on either side of me, my entourage behind.

'What's up?' asked Kram.

There was nothing I could answer. Instead, I took the Kram's little hand inside my own. Then, with Jacqui walking behind in long black skirt and bright blue blouse, I walked in stiff, bow-legged majesty, head high to Mrs Kram's gold-belted waist. I left Wally and Malide and Bill to follow me into the splendour of our hostess's Saarlim life.

You have seen photographs, perhaps, of Peggy Kram's trothaus. On the page it is what you'd expect. In life, in my Efican life anyway, it was simply unbelievable: the elevator opening on to the marble lobby with a little dog-headed Saint inside an illuminated niche, and thence to the succeeding parlours, with their Dutch and Flemish Masters, on to the so-called Great Room with its high windows opening out on to a garden with trimmed hedges high, deep green topiary in the shape of 'The Least of G.o.d's Creatures', the Dog, the Duck, the Mouse, their soft and leafy forms silhouetted against the pale blue sky above the fabled city.

Someone wanted to kill me?

Let them try.

We stood in the sunshine above Demos Platz while Kram's 'Man' (an elderly Egyptian whose loose-fitting, dun-coloured clothing reinforced his status as a POW) emerged from the throng of earlier arrivals and offered drinks to those of us tall enough for him to notice. Peggy Kram excused herself.

'Don't hate me,' Jacqui said as soon as she was gone. 'I'm going to get you out of this.'

Her anxiety was delicious. I felt it, smelled it, a kind of aphrodisiac. She leaned out and touched my arm. I felt the contact in my neck, my toes.

'Don't hate me,' she said.

Hate her? All I heard in her voice was her remorse, concern.

'We're safe up here for the moment,' she said. 'Please say something to me,' she said. 'Please.'

The two-pin voice patch had cost her every Guilder she possessed, as much as a Neu Zwolfe crucifix or a first-century Bruder mask. Now she needed to see the power of the gift: she wanted to see it unwrapped.

I would have said something, but you should have seen her in the skirt, the line of her back, the erotic grief in her eyes. I feared my voice would boom out of me, too loud, too hot, and we were not the only visitors gathered on the terracotta tiles of Peggy's trothaus. Clive Baarder was there once more. Also Martel Difebaker. Dirk Juta, the Mayor of Saarlim, Frear Munroe the lawyer, the comedienne Elsbeth Trunk. You'd know the names, not personally perhaps, but from the zines. I heard the ascetic Martel Difebaker once again playing expert witness on my nature. But as it turned out, I was not the only curiosity.

The Mayor, Dirk Juta, being daily in the Bankruptcy Court, was also the subject of much attention, as was the celebrated lawyer, Frear Munroe.

This Frear Munroe was, as they liked to say in Saarlim, bigger than life. He had a broad chest, a deep voice, a slight Anglo accent, a ruddy complexion and fair hair which he parted to one side and which, with the daily application of pomade, had become slightly green in colour.

He stood over the Mayor who, unlike any Efican politician I had ever seen, was a dainty dainty man with thin brown wrists showing from his crisp white shirtsleeves. man with thin brown wrists showing from his crisp white shirtsleeves.

'So, Dirk,' Frear Munroe trumpeted.

The Mayor smiled sadly up at him.

'So, is our dear old Saarlim to be declared bankrupt or not? Will we have a police force next week? Or should we make some new Simi-cops and put them back on the streets instead?'

'I'm pleased this is amusing to you, Frear,' the Mayor said.

'You misunderstand me, Dirk I was not joking.' Frear smiled, pleased with himself. 'Perhaps this is a mythic moment don't you know your Badberg? The barbarians are not without without the gates. They are the gates. They are within. within. The G.o.d-fearing are being set upon by unimaginable odds. Rape and pillage is a daily occurrence. If we were true to the beliefs of our fathers ...' The G.o.d-fearing are being set upon by unimaginable odds. Rape and pillage is a daily occurrence. If we were true to the beliefs of our fathers ...'

He gestured to the Mouse, the sort of hammy gestures certain Saarlim advocaats like to make.

'One mo nothing,' he said in a rough dialect. 'Next mo, there was Bruder Mouse ...'

'In all his furry finery,' said Martel Difebaker.

'Solid as a miller's wheel,' said Frear Munroe.

'Leave him alone,' said Wally. 'Do me the favour.'

'Solid as a yellow oak on a Monday morning,' said Elsbeth Trunk, whose dialect was considerably better than Frear Munroe's.

'There are various similes,' the lawyer said. 'But perhaps this is, Elsbeth, don't you think, the mythic moment? Your honour' the lawyer turned to me, placing his veined square face very close to my snout-'oh, little being,' he declaimed.

The others laughed. Not Wally. He did up the b.u.t.ton of his now rather rumpled dinner suit. His eyes were closed to jailyard slits.

'Oh, small beast.' Frear Munroe knelt before me, mockingly, so close that I could smell his herring breath.

Wally tapped him on the shoulder. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I can't let you speak to him like that.'

Frear Munroe blinked at the stooped bald-headed man, but he was already in full flight and did not have time to ponder his significance.

'Oh Bruder Mouse,' he cried. 'Thebes is in such desperate plight that we have come to you, the least of all G.o.d's Creatures, that you might tell us what to do, oh little club-footed thing.' He stood, his face contorted with his own laughter. 'Oh dear,' Frear said, wiping his eyes and dusting off his striped black trousers. 'I don't know if those legs are mythic.'

As the offensive fellow turned his back Wally took two fast steps forward. 'Enough's enough,' he said in broadest Efican. Then he kicked Frear Munroe up the a.r.s.e.

The lawyer lurched. His gla.s.s flew from his hand and shattered.

Frear Munroe, although gone to fat on port and hunning cheese, was still a well-built fellow. Now, as Bill Millefleur hid his bowed head in his hands, the lawyer turned to raise his fist at Wally.

It was then that Wally lifted his stick to ward him off, then also that I made the twelve-word speech which, I discovered later, was to be quoted all over Saarlim for a week.

'One mo' step,' said Bruder Mouse. 'One mo' step and I'll tear your throat out.' 'One mo' step and I'll tear your throat out.'

47.

Jacqui had been waiting to protect me from the DoS. Now, as the lawyer raised his meaty fist above my head, it was no great stretch for her to pick one of Kram's small lead figurines from a niche in the garden wall. It was a statue of a mole, and when she closed her hand around the chunky little weapon, she felt her soul rushing towards the extremes of action that had attracted her all her life.

She took two fast paces forward before she had time to consider what she would do next. Frear Munroe was solid and slab-sided, much taller than the nurse. As Jacqui came behind him, he turned. His eyes were pale blue, small and lonely in that big red face.

It was something of a shock to see that he was afraid of Tristan Smith.

'Some Bruder,' he said, but when he tried to smile his lips were wobbly and misshapen.

It was such a moment, a beautiful moment, but there was no time to relish it for Peggy Kram came rushing out and ran right through it and ruined everything. She entered, her servant at her tail, all that golden hair shaking, laughing, a peach c.o.c.ktail splashing over her ringed hand. Jacqui felt a great shiver of dislike move through her slender frame.