Square Wave (40 page)

“This is nuts, but Terry thinks he meant, like, halothane or BZ. Gas. At the ceremony. For the half mil.”

“Ah.” Jenko smiled and tapped the table twice with his middle and ring fingers. “You believe this.”

“Not to hurt anyone is what he said. Only to make them ‘see things.’”

“And exactly how gone was he when he said this? Or how gone was Terry, that’s what we should be asking.”

“I mean, it’s true, he did look like he hadn’t slept in a while.”

“The fantasies we have.”

“But he also sounded like he could mean what he said. Terry wouldn’t have bothered me with this otherwise.”

“And Terry’s very bright?”

“Look, we already know he kicked the shit out of all these whores. Isn’t that fucking crazy too? Why couldn’t he mean it?”

The two of them held a long look.

“So what did Terry say to him, after hearing all this?” Jenko asked finally.

“Nothing, of course. He just listened. Lewis had no idea he was basically talking to you. But we can get back to him. It’ll be easy to find him now, see if he’s really game to go through with this. And if it’s all bullshit, we’ll know. Nothing’s lost.”

“Five hundred thousand is actually not enough to fill an auditorium with an airborne agent, even just an incapacitator. There are the usual risks for us. Every incident, every event, brings another risk with it. And this one would be very large. The logistics, getting to all the vents without detection. But then, it
is
a life sentence for Lewis.”

“Probably.”

“And if you add the beatings, that’s more than life.”

“But we don’t want to touch those, right. A bunch of those whores are ours. It could lead them here.”

“Can you
please
stop calling them whores?”

“Girls, I mean.”

“Better. So then there’s the gas. Let’s talk to Leo’s little boy and check his nerve. Terry can handle it, if you feed him the information?”

“And if he’s looking for some time off.”

“Otherwise someone else. Somebody’s always looking.”

“So, halothane, BZ, what?”

“Do we actually need it? To make this work for us? If we have everything else set up and call in the anonymous tip just before, we could probably just pretend about the agent itself.”

“Oh. Well, I guess—”

“But check the labs. Talk to him first, of course, make sure this is real. And then, sure, we can think about doing exactly what we say this time. It would be easier to bury Lewis in a trial with everything being authentic. Trust, you know.”

29

Four tall steps and stagg was up on the dais, a maroon folio tied with raw leather string in his hand. Kames clasped Stagg’s shoulder and gave him a single deep nod as they passed each other near the lectern.

It surprised Stagg to see the auditorium as full as it was—at least three quarters—not just because of the arcane topic, or his lack of visibility in the field, but because of the tension surrounding the Institute lately, one he assumed would keep a crowd away. Maybe the turnout meant the full measure of that tension, great as it was, could only be felt by those with special knowledge. How many that was, he couldn’t tell.

A good portion of the audience looked about his age, and of the same background. Some of them must have undertaken watch-work themselves, for reasons like his own. They would know bits and pieces of the tale, even how some of those bits and pieces fit together, just as he did. Some might well know more.

It was a condition of getting the work, of course, that one concealed the fact, though some confidences would inevitably be made to intimates. And in fact these were calculated for by the agency. But most of the people here were, overtly at least, only intellectual colleagues, or would-be colleagues, and information of that kind, which would have shown them to be colleagues twice over, would not be exchanged, not least for the implication that one was reinforcing the very political order being worried, from all angles, by the Institute.

Kames’s introduction had been kind and Stagg was about to falsify it. His essays were
not
critiques, not in any clear sense, even to him. Or if they were, they transcended his intentions, not only his past ones, but the ones he had now, which seemed to extend no further than reading out the pages he’d brought with him.

Worse, these pages were ones Kames hadn’t reviewed. Stagg was taking a detour. Renna was right, the future of the Institute was uncertain now in ways deeper than its director could know. Deeper even than Stagg knew, probably. What he’d reported back to Penerin, of his last conversation with Kames, in the garden, had made his Second Watch supervisor cagey about his own plans in a way that was new to Stagg. Penerin probably had other information by then as well, perhaps from Ravan. Not that he was going to share all of it with Stagg. In truth, their dealings were only partly above board. Penerin told him only as much as he wanted to. Just like Kames. When matters got complicated, both his bosses turned elliptical.

The thing that was certain now was that a shift had occurred. By the time the elections came and went, there might well be no possibility of a Wintry fellowship left. Penerin’s evasions suggested as much. Their ambiguities had turned his words, like Kames’s, into a cryptic—or better, encrypted—poetry.

Now it was Stagg’s turn. Instead of the main essays, he’d brought only scattered appendices with him, bits that captured the tiniest flashes of light and no more. If the earlier pieces were shards, these were specks. But wasn’t it possible, he thought, that they reflected more, like a dust of diamonds? They felt realer to Stagg in their discreteness than the longer tableaus he’d assembled with such pain. Perhaps they managed to say more, in their compression, about him and his several selves, his family, and about history, than the rest of what he’d written, even if he was less sure he could fully survey their meaning. That was the problem, the virtue, of poetry. It outran you.

They might also achieve what any one of the essays could not. In the space of one lecture, the only one there might be now, he could still suggest a whole narrative, a destiny, this way. Because even dust could be shaped into a trail. What mattered was arrangement, order.

In fact he would be telling two stories at once, one about the past and another about the future. If he was betraying Kames in not delivering the more lucid lecture they’d agreed on, the one centered on the monk, he was also showing him a kindness. The trail would be an arrow. It would tell what Stagg knew about the circumstances, the tension, but without telling. The same way Kames liked to tell. From there, it would be up to him.

Though he wasn’t close to Kames, and didn’t especially trust him, he owed him something for giving him the chance to speak. More than that, there was kinship. Kames wasn’t wrong in thinking the country had reached a liminal moment in its history. Penerin and his kind wanted to deny this. They said everything could be recovered. But there were such things as faits accomplis. A world built around seducing the man in the street had managed to turn all the world out into that street. Now, almost everyone found the free world unlivable, chaotic, coarse. The invisible hand, Kames liked to say, turned out to have a very strong grip. It finally had
all
of them by the neck now, it seemed. Maybe he was right. It was time to lop it off.

Stagg unknotted the leather and pulled the small sheaf from the case. Tapping the pages on the edge of the lectern, he caught Kames’s eye, far in back and with his face already made up in a furrowed expression of concentration. He might have other things pressing on him just now. Stagg thought to say something that would suggest the change of plan. He thought to thank Kames. But no, both ideas might only corrupt the simple intention he had left, to read.

■   ■   ■

I.

Around that great table they sit in silence. Rajasingha’s attendants, noblemen in their own right, look on from a smaller table nearer the lake as the king takes his daily meal. So as not to contaminate the great man’s food, each wears a mask, sewn from the sun-bleached fibers of the coconut.

In all there are twenty dishes set out this afternoon: sambhur of the Highlands stewed in a thin, turmeric-laced gravy that is almost a broth; breadfruit garnished with cinnamon and lychees; river fish in a chili and cardamom curry; steamed pittu flecked with cashews, served with a tamarind sambal; fritters of rice-flour and jaggery; and fifteen besides. He will eat of only four or five of these.

The king makes a faint gesture toward the pot of boiled jack-fruit and lime. The nobleman closest ladles it onto a corner of the banana leaf from which the king is eating slowly, methodically, alone. Today’s meal is unusual only in that it is taken by Lake Kilara, at the royal retreat, the pleasure house. He’s here three or four times a year, usually for a few days only. The makeshift palace in newly royal Digligy, and in fact his very grip on the country, is under muted and perpetual threat. A populist rebellion forced him from the palace in Nillemby, westward into the mountains. And the Dutch have been making incursions eastward into the heart of the island, from Colombo, ever since making landfall on the southwestern coast four decades ago, around 1640. The twin forces have made Digligy his home and Lake Kilara his refuge.

The king finishes his meal and dismisses the others, who make their way beneath the overhanging lattice from the gazebo to the main complex. The noble servants, unmasked now, as the king has finished, take away the dishes. This will be their meal. He steps from the gazebo to the banks, thinking of the evening’s return to the palace. The sun has made a mirror of the lake. Dressed in a white tunic embroidered in red, his scabbard once again at his side, he begins to circle the lake, turning over the options.

Van Holten had said the Dutch forces stationed near Colombo were mounting a fresh campaign to capture the Highlands and the kingdom, that their flatteries, of defending His shores from the Portuguese, had always been hollow, from the time they’d arrived. The possibility now occurs to the king of making the Dutch, after all these years, finally mean what they say, by bringing them into a more profound conflict than they intend with their European brethren, the Portuguese, the kind that might weaken each enough to flush them both from the island.

The information had not been offered up of Van Holten’s will exactly. The king had first seen the soldier chained and starved outside the royal court, alongside other European captives. He’d been left behind by a retreating Dutch squad led by one Commander Haas. Only after weeks of being kept like this, exposed alternately to withering heat and violent rain, was Van Holten brought before Rajasingha. He was offered a peasant’s meal and some shade and that was the end of it. He told what he knew.

The king completes his circle of the lake. He’s decided to host the latest set of Dutch envoys offering a false peace. Back in the pleasure house proper, he sends his messenger down to the coast to invite their leadership to the royal court as guests of honor.

II.

Rutland walked in late to find Knox sitting on a stool, drinking palm whiskey in the living room. Before Knox could comment on the hour, Rutland set the Bible down over the brass rivets of the trunk, which had been pulled from the
Ann
, their captured frigate, twenty years ago by the Sinhalese. The spoils had spoiled, though. The rations were rancid and the clothing, stored in a separate compartment, had rotted not much differently from the meat. The Sinhalese had lost interest in the shrunken, sea-sodden box, and it was left to the two of them, Rutland and Knox, to discover its only remaining value, as furniture.

Knox leafed through the pages and his shipmate wondered if he would go through the same stages he himself had, now almost fifteen years ago, when the monk had given him the book: whether the surge of awe and gratitude would be overtaken by a stubborn sense of smallness.

But Knox’s eyes never lost their wideness. Immediately Knox’s father came to Rutland’s mind, the fevered one, delirious in his last days, talking mostly in Biblical snatches to his son and his earthly keepers, the two Sinhalese. They seemed to be the last fully formed sentences he possessed, at least the last of any complexity. It was as if their syntactic force, or else the depth of their entrenchment, had equipped them to crowd all else out of his mind. To Rutland this seemed an elevation of the Book at a cost to the man’s psyche, or else just the reverse.

He could see that Knox was also thinking of him, the old man endlessly apologizing for bringing his son along on this unholy “mission of exchange.” They were exchangers, Knox Sr. had said.

Sitting on the floor across from Knox, Rutland undid his boots, the leather rough and cracked. Knox started reading out passages of the Bible, lines his father had fixed on, near death and long before, back in England; lines he wanted to deliver now to his dead father, to Rutland, to all three of them. Each page was a trigger. On seeing the first few words, or even just the arrangement of the page, taking it in with a sweep of his eyes, the rest of the passage would follow like a stream. He would intone the words he saw in his mind, his eyes floating up to the other end of the house, the wall, the door, or the window, but never to Rutland.

Then he would turn a few of the supple vellum sheets—what merchant was missing this now?—take in another page, the flow and frame, and light on another line. Rutland hadn’t been much moved on seeing many of these lines himself, but he was moved by the effect they had on his friend.

Knox set the book down on the trunk and sat in silence. The flask of arrack shone in the light of the candle. Rutland took it to his lips but only a trickle of spirit remained, just enough to numb his tongue. Knox excused himself with a half-hearted wave, taking the Book with him into his room, which left Rutland to watch the tallow burn.

III.

Scabbarded men stood along the edges of the main hall, facing its walls like dunces in a room with too few corners. They’d each slipped a stopper out, eye-level and wide as a face. Through these gaps in the wall they looked out into the torch-lit court. Along the thick outer-court walls, in the hollow spaces scattered throughout, another set of men positioned themselves the same way, facing out into the broader village, where conversations were had, trade was conducted, life was lived.