Spin (5 page)

“
How do you think I got you that commission in the first
place?” he said. “Honor Clayden is the manager’s girlfriend. She
designed the place, the interior anyway. They don’t shell out top
dollar for just anyone. Think of it as greasing her palm.” He
smiled suggestively in a way that made Layla rigid with anger even
as she realised with horror that she was turned on by
it.

“
I’m not just anyone. Do you mean to say the manager knows
about this?”

“
Of course he knows. It’s how he keeps her. Old Nestor has
been past it for years.”

Her mind
reeled, trying to work out who Caribe was talking about then
realising that Nestor must be the real name of Steely Jurassic. In
a voice that seemed to come entirely from outside herself she asked
Caribe to leave. He threw out his hands in a gesture that could
have been annoyance or supplication then shrugged and pulled on his
jacket. It was an expensive jacket, made from white pigskin, and
soft as kid.

“
You honestly didn’t expect me to give up my life, did you?”
he said. “I can’t exist like that, Lay. I’d die of boredom in a
week.”

Then he was
gone. The sound of the closing door filled Layla with a kind of
dull exaltation but in the days that followed she was disturbed by
how much she missed him. Not so much Caribe himself as his body,
his defiant way of handling her, the release of sex. Sometimes she
would wake in the night, longing for him so savagely she found
herself chewing her knuckles to keep from crying.

She longed to
talk to someone but there was nobody she felt she could confide in.
The girls at the Minerva seemed to change boyfriends on a weekly
basis, emerging from each new breakup furious but apparently
unscathed. Layla could not bring herself to believe that they would
have any real insight into her feelings.

About a week
after it happened she called in sick and took the bus out to Tsokla
in search of the old woman. Even as she stood waiting at the bus
stop she knew the chances of finding her were all but non-existent,
that she had no reason to believe the old hag lived in Tsokla or
anywhere else. It was just a hunch she had, the belief that if Iona
was right about her mother’s family being from Tsokla then the old
woman also must have grown up thereabouts.

In any case,
it was all she had to go on and she was desperate. But it was a
sordid place, a rotting hive of crumbling tenements and boarded up
strip malls, and as she passed from one rubbish-strewn parking lot
to another she began to wonder what had possessed her in coming
here. She knew that ordinary people lived there, that many of the
dock workers and office cleaners, the women who worked in the
Premier canning factory and the Soyinka paper mill all came from
Tsokla, but in the middle of the day the place had a disused
quality, a sense of dusty abandonment that Layla felt as a nagging
unease that pricked at her sinuses and made it feel as if she had a
cold coming. She kept expecting something bad to happen and when
nothing did it was almost worse. She ended up back where she
started, at the bus stop on Elias Road outside a foreshortened
terrace of five-storey tenements. The last house in the row was a
ruin, its end wall fallen away almost entirely, though the lower
rooms were clearly still occupied. Washing fluttered from the
ground floor windows like the remnants of bunting from some
long-ago fiesta. There was a smell of guano and rotting timber.

The houses
opposite had once been grand, but the misfortunes that struck the
district had reduced them first to lodging houses and then to
bedsits, four to each floor. She wondered if her mother had grown
up in such a house, a slip of a girl with scabbed knees and coarse
dark hair as unruly as her own. She stared across at the houses,
able almost to convince herself that if she imagined it clearly
enough one of the doors would open and the girl would come out. She
didn’t, and the street remained empty. When the bus arrived Layla
boarded it quickly and did not look back. As they re-entered the
city proper she thought for a moment that she saw the old woman,
coming out of a grocery store just below the entrance to the bird
market, but when she looked more closely she saw it wasn’t the old
woman at all but a young girl, her closely cropped hair sprayed
silver and pushing a baby buggy.

Nonetheless
she had the feeling that the hag was watching her. She got off the
bus at the main depot, pushing her way through the crowds of early
shift workers to the exit. Her feet ached. She wanted only to
return to her studio and lie down. She thought of John Caribe,
prepared for the dull explosion of pain that normally accompanied
such mental probing, but her centre felt barren and still, like a
desert encampment after a sandstorm.

She made
coffee and checked her emails. There was a note from the marketing
manager of the Parnassus, confirming her advance for the
commission. For a moment Layla considered writing to cancel it but
quickly rejected the idea. When she looked at it dispassionately
she knew the Parnassus job was the most useful thing that could
have come out of her relationship with John Caribe. She wrote the
manager a polite acknowledgement instead. Then she fell asleep on
the bed. She was awakened some time later by a discreet knocking, a
series of soft taps on the door followed by a shuffling sound
outside, as if the person waiting was shifting from foot to
foot.

Her first
thought was of John Caribe but she quickly dismissed it. Caribe
would have made more noise and would never have knocked so timidly.
She smoothed down her hair with both hands and opened the door. The
woman on the other side was small and slight. At first glance she
might have been mistaken for a child, although on closer inspection
Layla supposed she was in her mid forties. She was wearing skinny
jeans, a knee-length smock, grass-stained trainers, the kind of
clothes that might have been worn by a woman half her age. The
effect was incongruous and vaguely upsetting. A mapping of fine
wrinkles spread out from the corners of each eye.

“
Hello,” Layla said. “Can I help you?” She thought the woman
was probably lost. She could see no other reason why she would be
here.

“
Are you alone?” the woman said. “Can I speak to you for a
moment?”

“
What’s this about?” said Layla. “Do I know you?”

The woman hung
back on the threshold, blinking rapidly in a way that for a moment
gave Layla the bizarre notion that the woman was not human at all
but some elaborately constructed mechanical dummy.

“
You are Layla Vargas?” she said. “I was told that you can
tell the future.”

“
I am Layla Vargas, yes. But I’m not a savant. I don’t know
who told you I was but it isn’t true.”

“
My name is Nashe Crawe. My husband is Demitris Xenakis, the
marksman. My son Alcander is very ill. The doctors won’t admit it
because they’re afraid of my husband but I know he’s dying. I want
you to recast his future.”

She held up a
bag, a small sewn pouch covered in the complex embroideries Layla
recognised as charm-locks. She guessed the bag was full of coins,
or credits.

“
This is nothing,” the woman said. “I can pay you twice this
amount.” She swung the bag to and fro on its strap. “It was Thanick
Acampos who told me where to find you. She said you can do it. She
said I should ask you straight out.”

“
I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Layla
said.

“
Thanick Acampos is a savant also, but she no longer
practises. She told me she knew you as a child.”

“
You’re talking about the old woman,” Layla said. She turned
away before Nashe Crawe could answer. She didn’t want the woman to
see her face, to read the amazement and relief she knew were
written there. She had found the old woman again at last, or at
least the old woman had found her. “You’d better come in. I’ll make
you some tea.” She swept discarded clothes and a length of backing
fabric off the single armchair and on to the floor. When she
touched Nashe Crawe briefly on the shoulder to indicate that she
should sit down she felt a heavy, low-level emanation that could
have been simple nervousness but felt more like fear. Nashe Crawe
sat, resting her bag of coins in her lap like some small humped
animal. She reached upwards, twisting the beads of her necklace, a
string of pale topaz. Layla thought it remarkable that a woman like
Nashe Crawe could possibly be afraid of her. She ran water into the
kettle.

“
I can’t do what you want me to do,” she said. “You have to
understand that. I don’t believe such things are possible. Not even
the sibyls could tell the future, not really. All art is prescient
to an extent – it’s in art’s nature to look forward – but art deals
with feelings, not facts. Great art shows you what you want to see
– that’s the greatness of it. But the future doesn’t exist until we
get there. You can’t change something that doesn’t
exist.”

“
There are people who would say your views are
blasphemous.”

“
There are others who would say they are the law.” Layla
turned away abruptly, pouring boiling water over the tea leaves.
She felt angry with Nashe Crawe for goading her into saying things
she didn’t believe. She had no respect for lawmen who put statutes
in place simply to uphold their own prejudices. It had been men
just like them who ordered the death of her mother. In Layla’s view
the clairvoyancy laws were despotic and ultimately illogical; you
might just as well try to outlaw insanity. But she felt Nashe Crawe
had backed her into a corner.

As she waited
for the tea to brew she thought about the old woman, Thanick
Acampos. Thanick was an odd name, foreign. Layla wondered what she
had meant by sending Nashe Crawe to her, Nashe Crawe with her dirty
trainers and expensive jewellery, her hackneyed belief in a
philosophy the old woman knew Layla despised. Perhaps it was simply
that Nashe Crawe was rich, and Thanick Acampos thought Layla could
probably do with the money.

She poured the
tea and tore open a packet of cookies. “I’m sorry about your son,”
she said. “I wish I could help, but I can’t.”

“
Would you just come and see him?” said Nashe Crawe. “Alcander
doesn’t get many visitors. Not now.” There was a pleading look in
her eyes, a kind of willed helplessness that filled Layla
simultaneously with rage and pity.

“
I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” she said. “I don’t
really have the time.”

“
I’ll pay you for your time, of course,” Nashe Crawe said
swiftly. “I mean, I’d like to commission something from you. I want
to order one of your tapestries.” She plucked at the cord of the
bag in her lap. The coins inside clinked together like wafers of
granite. “Could you come tomorrow?” She told Layla her address, a
street in a part of the city Layla had heard of but never visited,
a district of bulky mansions behind electrified railings, of narrow
cobbled cul-de-sacs and marble fountains. She had heard that a lot
of ex-militiamen lived there, high stakes gamblers, people with
security concerns.

Nashe Crawe
had said her husband was a marksman, which was really an admission
that he was a gun for hire. In spite of herself, Layla felt
curious. She asked Nashe Crawe if she would mind leaving the bag of
coins as a deposit on the commission. She thought such blatant talk
of money might put an end to the whole business, but to her
amazement the woman agreed without hesitation.

“
I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” she said. She handed
her the bag. Once Nashe Crawe had left, Layla tipped out the coins
and spread them across the floor. There were twenty in all, the
gold
amulettos
that
had stopped being official currency two centuries before but that
could be exchanged unofficially anywhere for five thousand drachmas
apiece.

Layla felt
faint. It was more money than she had ever seen in her life. She
felt an urge to run after Nashe Crawe, to pursue her down the
street and thrust the bag with its contents back into her hands.
She knew that her possession of the coins committed her to
something, that it tied her to Nashe Crawe and her son and to the
old woman Thanick Acampos in ways she did not yet understand. She
was not used to being tied to anything. It was tantamount to
selling her soul.

It was a lot
of money though. A sum like that would assure her of financial
freedom for many years.

She
picked up one of the coins, remembering the fake brass
amulettos
that had once been a collecting
craze among her schoolmates. It was from these that she recognised
the twin motifs: Idris and Seneca on one side, the double-headed
hydra of Atoll City on the other. Seneca had been one of the top
law-givers of his time; his wife Idris had been the daughter of one
of his consuls. The gold
amulettos
had been minted to commemorate their marriage; four years
later Idris was tried and executed for espionage. But that was all
ancient history. Layla hoped touching the coins might help her gain
insight into Nashe Crawe and her motives, but the bag and its
contents seemed as bare of her mysterious benefactor as if she had
never handled them.

They were not bare of
everything, though. As she slid the piece of gold from hand to hand
she had the uncanny sensation that someone was watching her. She
concentrated hard, and after some minutes she understood the coins
had been the property of the marksman Demitris Xenakis.

The house was more or less as she had imagined: a
facade
of rust-coloured stone behind an invisible
security barrier that emitted a warning hum as you approached it.
She spoke her name into the intercom and after a second or so the
air seemed to shimmer in front of her, indicating that the barrier
had been disengaged. She had expected Nashe Crawe to be there to
meet her, but there was no sign of her or of anyone, although Layla
knew from the spydrone that buzzed almost inaudibly overhead that
someone was watching everything she did.