Angelmaker (50 page)

He did nothing of the kind. Before he had been Khaygul of Addeh Sikkim, she realised, he had been the Opium Khan, master of the heroin trade in Europe and Asia. The nation he had usurped had been little more than an amusement park for him; his own personal Brighton Pier. He had killed his family because they were in the way not of some great unfulfilled desire, but of a whim. He had no need to be ruler of an actual country. His power was in himself, and in the men who served him, and ultimately in the extremity of his vision. A prince of horrors is no less a prince if the land he holds lies in ruins.

All the same, it seemed his hate for James Banister was surpassed only by his rage against Dotty Catty. To hurt her, the report said, he had evolved a system for the torture of elephants, and the outlaw hills where he kept his fortresses howled and bellowed with their agony and the markets of Asia were filled with his bloody ivory and the contorted heads of his victims. Moreover, he had let it be known: Frankie Fossoyeur was his. The man who brought him his genius should be exalted above all others. He should be rewarded with wealth and concubines and whatever else he wished, so long as she was
compos mentis
, and could work.

Abel Jasmine supplied guards for Frankie, and Edie made her practise escape and evasion. She taught her how to do a flat bolt: how to drop everything and leave a country without stopping at your bank or getting a change of clothes; how to find someone who would supply you with a passport; how to vanish from view in a city and in the countryside. Frankie thought it all a nonsense. She barely listened, and yet by the end she was suggesting improvements and refinements and Edie was wondering how long it would take her to understand the tricks of invisibility better than Edie herself.

But if Frankie was learning to be a spy or some variation thereof, she was learning with the smallest necessary aspect of her mind, as if she sent Frankie-the-stenographer to pay attention so that some other,
inner Frankie could do the real work. The Apprehension Engine was in her heart, and its defining numbers were scrawled in chalk on a blackboard in her study. She no longer found herself distracted by things. Brother Denis, visiting from the Ruskinite mother-house, worried that she was alarmingly focused.

“There’s nothing wrong,” Edie said discouragingly.

“Well, you don’t have to tell me,” Denis told her. “But you bloody better not kid yourself about it. She’s not the same. She’s got a look.”

“What look?”

“Vision,” Denis said. “Monomania. I don’t know. But it’s not her.”

“Maybe it is,” Edie said. “Maybe this is how she is when she cares about something.”
Someone
, she was saying.
This is how she is when she loves someone. Me. And she only needs one big project and me to fill her attention
. Denis had the good, unmonkish sense to leave well enough alone.

The following day Frankie went out, and three thugs in a black sedan jumped on her in front of a shop called Cadwallader’s which sold soap, but Songbird and a few others, now notionally part of a civilian service, sent the would-be kidnappers to Paddington Green for a sharp discussion about British law. A week later, Shem Shem Tsien sank a British warship in the North Sea and a Russian one in port at Helsinki and tried to start a war, and while the eyes of Whitehall were fixed on that little disaster, two more hoods tried to steal Frankie from a symposium in Cambridge where she was meeting Erdös and von Neumann.

Edie Banister glued on her moustache and flew to Tallinn, and found Shem Shem Tsien posing as a Russian prince. He even carried a purse full of Romanov gold and swore Romanov-style, in French. He was surrounded by secretaries, men writing in books. A photographer bustled around him. There was even a cameraman with a Bolex.

“So, Commander Banister. You look well,” Shem Shem Tsien murmured across the card table at the Kolyvan Casino. “I myself do not. I am well aware.” He was craggy and drawn, and there was a newly healed scar on his neck, but his film-star eyes were glittering and cold. He gestured at the secretaries. “Forgive my affectation—I am preserving my journey for posterity. My pathway to transcendence is noteworthy. I suppose that makes these good men my apostles. My gospellers. ‘If I have the mind of Napoleon …’ ” He smiled at the nearest one, then leaned closer. “You stole my scientist, Commander Banister. I want her back.”

“She’s her own woman, old boy.”

“No, she is not. Everything that is, is mine by divine right. It is used by others on sufferance, and by my leave.”

“Well, I suppose I ain’t a believer.”

“No,” Shem Shem Tsien said, without irony. “But you will be.” Abruptly, he changed the subject. “I understand Frankie is writing a book. Fiction, no doubt.”

Edie shrugged, but James Banister’s face gave her away. Shem Shem Tsien smiled.

“Oh. Not fiction. Surely not mathematics? My mathematics?” He leaned across the table. “I will have it all back from her, Commander. Her brain is not yours to plunder. Oh, but I have a gift for you.” He smiled, and slid a small wet thing across the table. “My mother’s tongue. It’s quite fresh, I assure you. I kept her alive for some time to watch the deaths of her elephants, but eventually I tired of her. I did keep her head, for a memento. I feel inclined to share.”

Commander Banister stared at the tongue, and wondered whether it was better that it should be Dotty Catty’s, or that Shem Shem Tsien should have ripped it out of someone else’s mouth purely for effect.

Edie couldn’t think of anything clever to say, so she just smiled James Banister’s most irritating patrician smile, and saw Shem Shem Tsien stiffen in fury. Later, they tried to kill each other in a frigid dockyard among giant shipping crates. The gospellers did not intervene. They simply watched everything, and recorded it.

James Banister and the Opium Khan lost their guns in the first exchanges, emptying the magazines and discarding them as useless junk, and then it was hand-to-hand. Shem Shem Tsien moved with a weird, loping step, spine slightly bent, and Edie realised he had scars on his back and could not straighten it. The fire, she thought, or the elephant. It did not change his speed, or his lethality. Remembering him in Addeh Sikkim, she judged it likely she would lose, and therefore die.

On the other hand … Edie grinned tautly, recalling Mrs. Sekuni:
Cheat, Edie. Cheating is much better than skill. Great skill improves your chances. Great cheating guarantees victory, which is why it is called cheating. And some people are so horrified by it that it is an advantage in itself
.

“You’ve picked up a rummy habit,” James Banister said cordially as they approached one another. “Sort of a crouch. You look a bit … well, I’m sorry, but you look a bit Victor Hugo, if you catch my drift. Would you like to adjourn to a cathedral or something?”

“By all means, Commander, do amuse yourself while you can. I owe these scars to you, after all. You should get some satisfaction from them. Although I am depressed to see such a dear enemy giggling like a girl at a soldier’s wounds.”

Gotcha
, Edie thought.
Of course
.

“Shem Shem Tsien,” she told the Opium Khan in her own voice, “I laugh because I am tired of you. I cannot imagine that you aren’t bored with yourself. There’s very little about this which is clever or funny. With all that’s going on in the world, with all that is possible and wonderful, this is what you do. You’re a sideshow. A hack. A waste of time.” His eyes bulged in absolute, stunned fury. Edie unbuttoned her shirt and opened it, baring a proud—if slight and somewhat foxed—bosom to his view.

Shem Shem Tsien himself was silent with what Edie took to be actual amazement. When he spoke, it was with a genuine, unaffected truthfulness.
First real moment of communication we’ve ever had
, Edie thought.

“Oh,” the Opium Khan said. “I honestly had no idea.” Then he swung at her, not to kill but to erase, and they were back on familiar ground.

She taunted him, drew him out into the open, keeping the wind at her back. It cut through her jacket and made her shiver, but it was in his eyes, and the ice on the ground made the fight a matter of footwear as much as skill. Edie was wearing steel toe–capped boots with discreet metal studs, the better to emphasise her masculinity and conceal her relatively small feet, and also because she liked unfair advantages. The Opium Khan, fresh from the gambling tables, wore dinner shoes. She attacked, and he slid towards her with that familiar ghastly smoothness, then lost his grip, skittering and sliding on the frozen stones while he wrenched his upper body around to guard against her. She threw a rusted iron chain at him, then followed it to drive her forehead into his face and grapple with him as bluntly and brutally as she knew how. Shem Shem Tsien, with his nose squashed to one side and his fine moustache clogged with blood, looked quite amazed. Edie took advantage of his hesitation and applied Mrs. Sekuni’s sixth wrist-lock, a working man’s pugilism which lacked elegance but got the job done, and cut off one of his fingers with his own knife. He lost the fight, but she couldn’t bring him down, and he fled. Even so, Edie had the sense that Shem Shem Tsien was having fun. To her this was
work, and very hard. He was playing out his passage to godhood, and he enjoyed hurting people.

In April the North Atlantic Treaty was signed, and Moscow fumed. Abel Jasmine moved Frankie’s laboratory to the
Lovelace
and kept it moving, effectively making her disappear. Shem Shem Tsien faded away into Europe’s shadows, one more hateful little bastard in a forest of them. Edie could almost hear him shouting “You haven’t heard the last of me!” in the darkness of the winter sea.

And that much, at least, was certain. Nine years later, Edie stood on the lip of a chasm and stared downwards. She had battled with Shem Shem Tsien across the world, and it never changed or got any better. He did something awful, she went and tidied up; in Rome, in Kiev, in Havana. They fought on boats and in caves, on the roofs of houses and in alleyways. Sometimes one or other of them had an army, sometimes they were alone. It went on and on and it never settled anything. Shem Shem Tsien didn’t change, didn’t learn, did not accept that the new age had no space for him. Her body was a dictionary of woundings now, courtesy of his impossible speed, and she had learned to distract him, harry him, cheat him of her own death by guile. Once or twice, on good days, she had even survived him by skill. She tried not to think about how their addiction to this private, predictable conflict mirrored the ridiculous proxy wars the East and West were fighting with one another.

The wind brought the smell of sulphur and decay to her nostrils, and she gagged.

She was in Addeh Sikkim at the palace of the Opium Khan, except that the citadel was gone, replaced by a giant pit. The water which had powered Frankie’s machines roiled in a simmering lake heated by the Earth, and the whole place was walled and scaffolded in black iron. A pit of industry. A birthplace of monsters. Edie wrapped herself in a local shawl and coat and staggered down with the other women who went to work in the pit. The long circumference road was punctuated with heads on poles. Some were human. Others were elephants, the flesh long gone and the pikes bowed beneath the weight of bone.

At the bottom, Shem Shem Tsien had made a sort of factory and mine combined. Vast presses turned out metal sheets and slaves
worked them into parts for mechanical soldiers like the ones Frankie had made. In the very centre, beneath his tents, there was a ring where they were pitted against one another. They were clumsy and hopeless, the same awkward chessmen Edie had seen before, and when he wanted blood, the Opium Khan was obliged to hobble a prisoner or blind him so that the machines could get close enough to strike. And yet, they were improving. Fractionally, painfully, whatever pattern Frankie had created to guide them was refining itself, and when an automaton fell, the animating mechanism was recovered so that it would learn from defeat. Already, they followed his minions around like dogs, lunged at whatever the minion indicated. One day they would work, Edie thought, and hoped she never had to see it.

She took photographs and went to the embassy in Dhaka to report. She was walking to her hotel when Shem Shem Tsien’s car pulled up next to her and the Opium Khan shot her twice in the gut.

“So nice to see you, Commander Banister,” he drawled at her as she bled into the gutter. “I do hope your visit was satisfactory? Are you dying, do you think, or shall we meet again? I should miss our little chats.”

She honestly did not know, and when her vision went grey at the edges and she felt cold, she was terribly, terribly afraid and alone. Shem Shem Tsien got back into his car and drove away, apparently content to leave the decision to Edie. She had no recollection, later, of the long crawl to the ambassador’s residence which stripped the skin from her hands and knees.

Edie woke in a hospital bed, and the first thing she saw was Frankie. She thought Frankie was so beautiful, so perfect, that she started to cry. Frankie stroked her face and told her it was all going to be all right, and Edie wanted to say “I love you.” But she fell asleep.