Kram took the Mouse by its gloved hand. Jacqui watched her kiss it on the nose.

'OhmyG.o.d,' Kram said, 'you savage little thing.'

Her friends all laughed too loudly, but Jacqui could have slapped her face. She could not stand the proprietorial att.i.tude towards something she did not understand. But Mrs Kram now drew yours truly to one side and squatted down before me. Jacqui watched me bow. She saw Frear Munroe grin and turn away to find a listener for a story about his threatened throat.

Then she watched me appear and disappear amongst the creatures of the topiary. As I was taken from guest to guest, she heard the voice she had given me. She saw me shake the hand of the Mayor and she imagined me, Tristan Smith, inside the sweaty suit, stinking like over-ripe apricots.

Wendell might be in this very building by now, bribing yardveegs and deskmajoors, going through Bill Millefleur's apartment, reading through his appointment book. Wendell was not the sluggish person his gross body suggested. If he had said he would wipe out Tristan Smith there was every chance that he would do it.

In this field, Jacqui had no expertise. She stood with her slender back against the terracotta wall, facing the french doors of the Great Room, standing as she'd seen bodyguards in front of prime ministers and presidents, their hands loosely by their sides, their eyes always moving.

If they took my life, she saw she would have to kill herself. She screwed her face up as against a bright and painful light.

She had the statue of that smirking little mole you know as 'Singing Willie'.* She was now ready to use it against my a.s.sa.s.sins. When Wally Paccione approached her she could not spare him any more than her peripheral vision. He came slowly across the terrace, out of focus, black and white in his dress suit, tapping his cane, jutting out his unshaven chin. The aura of his own upset preceded him. She was now ready to use it against my a.s.sa.s.sins. When Wally Paccione approached her she could not spare him any more than her peripheral vision. He came slowly across the terrace, out of focus, black and white in his dress suit, tapping his cane, jutting out his unshaven chin. The aura of his own upset preceded him.

He positioned himself beside her, and began, immediately, to go through the elaborate ritual of rolling himself a cancerette. Jacqui could not look at him. She was staring into the dark of the Great Room where she could see figures moving in front of the paintings. A man in a sixteen-b.u.t.ton suit came out into the light. If he had been an operative, she would not have known.

Beside her, Wally finally lit his lumpy cigarette. He inhaled, exhaled. She felt him turn his grey eyes on her.

Finally he spoke. 'I don't know who you are or what you want.'

The man in the sixteen-b.u.t.ton suit was now talking to a woman in a blue-veiled hat. He accepted a gla.s.s of wine from the servant. This must mean that he was not an operative.

'You've lied to me,' Wally said. 'You jerked me around. You might think you're cute, but let me tell you, sweets you know what you've done to him ...'

'You've got no idea. Papa.'

'I've got every f.u.c.king idea,' Wally said, his voice rising. 'You think I'm blind?'

Jacqui scanned the party, the topiary, the waiters, the hazy skyline, she heard the Mouse's two-pin voice. ('I live on air,' it said. 'I suck it in, I spit out the pips.') Peggy Kram was laughing, shaking her head.

The old vulture edged himself closer to her. 'You think that's cute?' he said, nodding at the Kram.

'No.'

'You think this is good for his self-esteem?' self-esteem?' He stood beside her, whispering in her ear in that way of his which she had always found off-putting. He stood beside her, whispering in her ear in that way of his which she had always found off-putting.

'If I'd wanted to hire a woman,' he continued, 'I would have advertised for one. I grew him up,' he said. 'We had one female santamarie, never again. G.o.d d.a.m.n,' he said bitterly, looking Jacqui up and down, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, her legs, her face. 'He has feelings.'

'You think he's fallen in love with Peggy Kram?' Peggy Kram?' Jacqui turned to look him in the face for the first time. Jacqui turned to look him in the face for the first time.

'He's a young man, for G.o.d's sake. s.e.x is all he thinks about.'

'Is he flirting flirting with her?' with her?'

'You don't seem to understand this isn't funny.'

'Mr Paccione.' She turned and took his sleeve and held it. 'I am standing here because I am expecting a man with a gun who wants to shoot Tristan.'

She saw his mouth open, saw his coated tongue. She saw the eyes reacting like living things exposed to acid. Suddenly, he looked so old. He began to wipe his hand over his head. The colour drained from his cheeks. He was an old man from a little town, far, far, far away. There was a helplessness about him she had never seen before.

'He offended someone?'

'It's nothing he's done.'

'I hate this place,' the old man said. 'We should never have come. I put the idea into his head. We were happy where we were.'

'Mr Paccione, please, be calm. Listen to me: it's the DoS, the VIA as well.'

'Oh my G.o.d,' said Wally.

'They have an agent at the Marco Polo. I talked to him this morning.'

'We have POW numbers,' Wally said, his voice breaking. 'What does it matter if he wants to wear the stupid suit? Who is he harming?'

They stood together watching me. I was alight, aflame, drunk on celebrity and the smell of Peggy Kram's hair as it brushed the surface of my Simi-sh.e.l.l.

*Actually, Sinning Willie.

48.

Jacqui and Wally were ready, on that night, to risk their lives to get me out of Voorstand. I should have listened to them, but I was like a drunk around a bottle. My death hung over me, and I would not see it.

Wendell Deveau, his belly sticking out in front, his shirt hanging down at the back, was prowling round the Demos Platz. Leona the facilitator was bugging Wendell's room in the Marco Polo. And Gabe Manzini was sitting in a gondel off the Demos Platz tracing Wendell's progress on an electronic monitor.

Meneer, Madam my death did not disturb me. I barely noticed it. It was no more than the distant flutter of moths' wings before the roaring of my need. I was twenty-three years old, crazy for life, the smell of a woman's skin, the great bursting view through the topiary and down into the long shadows of Demos Park with its looping flights of red-winged pigeons.

I was standing in the place where Sirkuses are born, where the fabled city itself was either saved or d.a.m.ned. I was impressed. I was excited. Will the judges at the Guildcourt consider this when they attempt to determine my motive?

It is true I never revealed my true ident.i.ty to those I met at Mrs Kram's trothaus. But Kram herself never wished to name me. She said, I'd like you to meet a friend of mine, and gave their their names to me, never mine to them. This was not my deception. It was her respect. names to me, never mine to them. This was not my deception. It was her respect.* This is how you introduce kings, princes, and stars of only the most dangerous types of Sirkus. This is how you introduce kings, princes, and stars of only the most dangerous types of Sirkus.

And they liked me, Kram's friends. I listened to them. They listened to me. I quoted Seneca. I told them jokes in my two-pin voice, jokes I made up on the spot, and delivered with a physical technique the opposite of anything Stanislavsky would ever have thought possible.

I was Meneer, or Oncle, or Bruder, the last of these to Frear Munroe, who gave me his card and asked me to come and see him perform in court where he whispered this into the great dead prosthetic he imagined was my ear he would be called in to represent special interests in the case against the hapless Mayor, accused of many things, including selling public streets and parks to French and English corporations.

Did I like Frear Munroe? No. I did not like his smell, his bad-tempered face, the violence I saw brewing behind his eyes. But he had currency he told me things, in such a way, that I felt I had been beamed into the white-hot centre of existence.

So even though my bones were aching and my ligaments torn, even though I was faint with hunger and my skin was itching and aspirin was singing in my ears, I was with the Kram's long hair brushing across the wall of my face each time she leaned down to tell me something in some kind of wild heaven where I did not give a d.a.m.n for anything except how to get more of whatever it was I had.

I did not think the next move. I took it as it came. I spoke the words and learned to trust the patch. It strained my face most terribly. It is no easy business talking solely from the throat, but the result: the bliss of eloquence. Meneer, Madam, did you ever have dreams of flying?

Peggy Kram smelled of herbs and wild honey. It was her golden Dutch hair, her French shampoo, waving through the air in front of me. She had good skin, slightly golden, and clear blue eyes that stood in total contradiction to her Mersault.

Her hands were small, not perfect, indeed a little plump, but who am I to speak to you about perfection? She touched my 'ears', held my 'hand'. 'I'm going to keep him,' the Kram said to beaming Bill, repeatedly.

Of course she knew I was not a mythic beast. On two occasions she clearly communicated her wish to not know who I was. Why was this? She did not tell me. She is what is called in Efica a stoppered bottle, a private person. She lived alone, so Frear Munroe told me, had no lovers, had her corporation boardroom in this trothaus, and the only thing he knew about her was that she had been a Sirkus widow who made her money, like so many, when her husband fell from the St Catherine's Loop and crushed his head in front of a house of two thousand.

'I want him,' she said to Bill Millefleur, and thus produced a peculiar expression on my father's handsome face.

It was not unnatural that my father should feel uneasy. He needed her approval as much as anything, and yet I was his son. He was galloping forward while reining himself in. He was on the slack wire, eighty feet above the ring.

'Well, Peggy,' he said. 'This is not for me. I really think you have to discuss this with the Bruder himself.'

'I want you here,' Peggy Kram said to me, directly, frowning, and pushing her hair out of her eyes. 'I won't permit you to go home.'

You see my porpoise rise, you think you see where this is leading. That is your history, perhaps, not mine. In my history there can be no climax, no conclusion, no cry in the dark, no whispers on the pillow.

'My dear,' I said, and my voice was so intelligent, so clear, so d.a.m.n sophisticated. sophisticated. 'My dear Mrs Kram, you couldn't deal with me.' 'My dear Mrs Kram, you couldn't deal with me.'

'Oh, I could handle you,' she said.

I knew her, knew her imperious, self doubting little soul. I whacked her on the b.u.m, not gently either.

This made her face red, Bill's ashen.

'Is this how you act with Madam Mouse?' she asked me. Her eyes were wet and bright.

'Madam Mouse is dead,' I said.

'Dead?' she said, colouring more. There was a way she spoke, with the tip of her tongue always forward in her mouth. It gave a slight cloudiness to her diction but made her mouth, always, wonderful to watch.

'Quite dead,' I said to Mrs Kram, playfully elbowing my anxious father in the thigh.

'Mrs Kram,' said Malide to Wally, 'is asking, would Bruder Mouse here like to stay with her?'

'How did she die?' asked Peggy Kram.

'She was a.s.sa.s.sinated,' I said, 'by agents of a foreign power.'

There was a long, long silence on the roof. I saw Frear Munroe, standing by the parapet alone, turn his square head. 'They came and hanged her by her neck,' I said.

'Stay,' Wally said. 'It's too late to go.'

'He should definitely stay,' Jacqui said.

'Meneers, Madams,' I said, looking at them gathering around me, out to Frear Munroe and Elsbeth Trunk, 'do I not have voice to speak? Can I not speak on my own account?'

What I liked, what made me giddy, was the way not only my friends but six of the most powerful personages in Saarlim turned their heads, lifted their chins, parted their lips, how they listened, how they waited. I had no idea what I would say.

*Cf. Item 3 of the charges against Tristan Smith: '[that he did] wilfully, blasphemously, seditiously disguise his being and therefore lead others to believe he was Bruder Mouse ... '

49.

I had fallen asleep on the bed Kram's servant had, rather formally, introduced me to. I woke at two in the morning. I was stiff, hurting, hungry. I needed drugs: Sentaphene,* Butoxin, Butoxin, Attenaprin, Attenaprin, but they were all in my bag in Bill's apartment. but they were all in my bag in Bill's apartment.

The glowing thermostat beside my reading lamp was set at a cool 65 degrees, but it was stinking and steamy inside the suit.

As I tried to stretch my painful hamstrings I knocked an envelope on to the floor. It fell with a heavy thwack. Later I would discover it to be a letter from my father, but at the time I was too stiff to think of bending for it. I was more interested in anti-inflammatory drugs, a bath, disinfectant, a bed where I could feel sheets against my skin. I left the large tan envelope on the bedroom floor and shuffled to the bathroom where I used the zip Jacqui had expediently sewn in the previous morning.

That aside, I was imprisoned by the Mouse.

I went looking for someone to release me, but the layout of the trothaus was more complex than the blockhouse exterior of the Baan suggested. The pa.s.sageways were full of nooks, crannies, alcoves, reading rooms, small libraries of Sirkus art and so on. Twice I found dark rooms in which I heard the sound of breathing, but I did not know whose breathing it was. I retreated, and was soon lost again.

Finally, in the lobby by the elevator, in an austere straight-backed chair, in a lighted alcove which had previously accommodated the Dog-headed Saint, I discovered Wally Paccione. There he sat, like a Folkghost in white pyjamas, his eyes bright, his mouth dark and toothless, a piece of looped wire held in his ancient liver-spotted hands.

'Sssh.'

He jerked his head in the direction of the elevator. I could hear the car moving in its shaft. Together we watched the numbers light up above the door. They stopped at the fourth floor.

He held up the wire, grinning. The inside of his mouth was black, the sunken cheeks bright white. Now I know it was a garrotte which he had made from ivory chopsticks and piano wire. But at the time I misunderstood.

'The DoS piano,' he said. And I imagined it was a primitive musical instrument from Kram's collection.

The lift clunked and rose up to the fifth floor. 'Don't stand there. Get behind this screen.'

I did what he said. I moved away from the lift doors and pressed myself between a Neu Zwolfe triptych and the wall. From behind these dark, worm-eaten panels I could peer out across the roof garden and into the softly illuminated kitchen.

'Can you help me out of my suit?'

'Turn that stupid thing off,' Wally hissed. 'I can't bear you talking like that.'

'I can't turn it off.'

I heard him spit. 'You know what a mess she got us in, that spy?'

'Where is she?'

'How the f.u.c.k do I know? You sound like a rucking Voorstander. If she told you that sound was glamorous, she's working for the governor. I promise you, my son, we're getting out of here. As soon as I deal with this fellow, we're getting out. We're leaving all these spies behind. We're going home.'

'Which fellow?'

'Christ! Don't you pay attention to anything except your d.i.c.k? There is an Efican stooge coming to kill you. I'm going to kill him.' Don't you pay attention to anything except your d.i.c.k? There is an Efican stooge coming to kill you. I'm going to kill him.'

'No, Wally ...'

'You think I can't? You don't know anything about me.'