Streaking (20 page)

He was tempted to wind down on the Wednesday evening by dropping into Victoria Club or one of its rivals, but he knew that the intention to stay for an hour was likely to slide inexorably into a fierce determination to make a night of it, even if he started losing—as he feared that he might.

In any case, he still had reading material to keep him busy, even when he'd exhausted the revelations of Bob Stanley's report. He had also brought the typescript of Martin Ellison's unfinished book, which was something of a jigsaw puzzle in itself. There he could read deft clinical analyses of the psychology of the belief that good luck came in threes, or that lucky streaks had to be ridden while they were hot. There he could read explanations for the common delusion that so many losers maintained, not merely as a public performance but also in the privacy of their own skulls, that they were actually breaking even. There he could read scrupulously-deciphered accounts of the mythological imagery that persuaded male gamblers to perceive luck as a fickle and capricious female, as deadly as a female black widow spider, as exacting as any vampiric muse, and yet quite irresistible to anyone with balls.

Lissa Lo would doubtless have loved that particular chapter—and laughed contemptuously at the allegation that even female gamblers saw Lady Luck in much the same terms.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

On Thursday Canny finished early in the afternoon, without any further appointments or an engagement for dinner. He expected to feel relief, glad that he finally had some time to himself, but as soon as he was alone he realized that the time would not be easy to fill. While he had been forced to squeeze his reading and his thinking into the interstices of a riot of obligations their produce had seemed precious, but now that there was plenty of time available he found himself easily distracted and convinced of the uselessness of his own speculations. When his doorbell rang, therefore, he was by no means as annoyed by the unexpected interruption as he might have anticipated.

The voice that came over the intercom seemed to be muttering away incomprehensibly in some unknown language, but it was punctuated with the name of “Miss Lo”. Canny's heart leapt then. He had not by any means made up his mind what he wanted to do about Lissa Lo's interest in him, let alone her proposition, but the prospect of carrying the agenda further by action rather than reflection was suddenly irresistible.

“I'll come out,” he said.

He fetched a jacket from the wardrobe rather than put on the one he'd worn to his meetings. He paused by the mirror in the hallway to check that his hair was properly combed. When he finally went out into the street he found a black limousine insouciantly parked on the double yellow line in front of the building, with a chauffeur who might have been Malaysian or Filipino silently holding the door open for him.

He got in without an instant's hesitation, incapable of any other feeling than joyful anticipation.

The limousine joined the long queue crawling westwards along Marylebone Road heading for the Westway, then turned south along Wood Lane, heading towards Hammersmith in order to take the flyover leading to the M4. The vehicle's lack of success in avoiding traffic could hardly be deemed unlucky, given the inevitable density of the traffic, and the rear seat was exceedingly comfortable. Once the car had actually moved on to the M4, it gathered speed rapidly.

When Canny asked the driver where they were going, his only reply was a shake of the head, presumably intended to indicate that the man's English was insufficient to permit him to understand the question, let alone give an intelligible answer. Canny accepted his fate meekly. It did not matter where they were going; all he really wanted to know was how long it would take to get there.

They turned off the motorway at Slough and headed for Windsor, but not quite as far as the castle. On the edge of Old Windsor they turned south, skirting the Great Park before moving onto the A30. Ignoring Ascot and the M3, they went through Chobham but turned right before reaching Woking.

Canny had been to Bisley more than once, but he did not know the area at all well. As dusk fell he lost his bearings completely, but relaxed when the car turned off into a private road through a wood. He had seen dozens of similar roads, each of which led with the utmost discretion to one of the thousands of country houses that were neatly tucked away in the secret coverts of the home counties, as if located in some parallel world unapprehended by the peasantry and the middle class. It wasn't one that he had ever visited, so far as he could remember, but he didn't care what its name was. He only cared about who might be awaiting him there.

He was inside the house, and had actually been introduced into the drawing-room, before the slightest suspicion hit him that he had assumed too much—but a split second before he moved around the high-backed armchair to look at the woman who was sitting there his vision was blurred by a streak.

It was a dark streak, but if it was a warning, it had come too late. It occurred to him that if it really were
his
streak, and not merely something of which he was a passive observer, it might not have been able to manifest itself until he came within range of another energy-source.

Either way, his stomach lurched more vertiginously than the force of such a tangentially-visible streak could normally have contrived. An unexpected chill of pure terror momentarily startled his brain. He couldn't understand why. There didn't seem to be anything unduly threatening in the situation, now that the initial surprise was over.

He was staring at an older version of Lissa Lo—a version so much older, in spite of what he knew about her actual age, that he was reminded of the climax of the movie version of
Lost Horizon
. Had the girl in the story also been called Lo Chen? No, he remembered; the character in the book had been Lo-
Tsen
.

At any rate, it was as if he were looking at a Lissa Lo who had abruptly faded into antiquity when years that she had long defied had caught up with her in a precipitate rush.

“Won't you sit down, Lord Credesdale,” the old woman said. Bob Stanley's report had told him that she called herself Lo Chen nowadays, although she had worn other names in the past. Perhaps, he thought, the chauffeur had not intended to deceive him when he mumbled incoherently about “Miss Lo”—but if so, Canny had certainly taken the opportunity to deceive himself.

Canny let himself fall into the matching armchair on the far side of the hearth, trying to conceal the fact that his legs had become weak. The fireplace was open, but it looked as if no fire had been lit there for forty years and more. Unlike Credesdale House, this edifice was fitted with central heating and double glazing.

There was no conspicuous Oriental theme to the general decor, but Canny didn't know whether that made it more or less likely that the house actually belonged to Lissa or her mother.

“Are you not taking a risk, Madame Lo?” he asked, although he felt even as he said it that it was a horribly corny line.

“Madame is sufficient,” she told him. “It will avoid incongruity—so far as incongruity can any longer be avoided. To answer your question, as honestly I hope you will answer mine: yes, I am taking a risk that I would rather not take. We are both weaker than we have been in the past, I think, although you still have the hope of becoming strong again. That might reduce the chance of catastrophe, although the omen we both experienced a few moments ago does not bode well. Were your meetings with my daughter attended by similar ill-effects?”

“No,” Canny admitted, readily enough. “I had no sense of being in competition with Lissa, even when she told me that she knew what I was—and she, it seems, had no sense of being in competition with me, even when she revealed what she is. Consciously or unconsciously, you seem to feel differently—but it seems to me, now that I've recovered from the discomfort, that it was just a flash of anxiety, not a readjustment of the world's order. How did you find out that Lissa had approached me? Did she tell you?”

“I have not seen my daughter for some time,” Lo Chen told him. “She is avoiding me, for reasons you will doubtless understand. It was foolish of you to hire detectives to discover what you might have found out easily enough by yourself. Had I done likewise, you would probably have been alerted to my counter-investigation, but I found most of what I needed to know in Burke's
Peerage
and the data assiduously collected by the Church of Latter Day Saints. A wonderful toy, the Internet, do you not think?”

“It's changing the face of modern gambling,” Canny said, “but the Kilcannons are traditionalists. I've been very wary of it, although I'm thinking of setting up an on-line trading facility—my father could never have brought himself to disappoint the family stockbroker, but we live in an age when middlemen are fast becoming redundant. Did you really bring me here to discuss the Internet?”

“Your father lived a long time,” the not-so-old woman observed, as if it were a matter of little consequence, suitable for polite chitchat. “I shall not live nearly so long. There appears to be a significant difference between the balance of power within our families, Lord Credesdale. Between father and son, the father seems always to have the upper hand. Between mother and daughter...is that because we are female, do you suppose, or because we are from what you call the East?”

“It's pure guesswork,” Canny said, “but I'd go for the female line of descent being the more relevant variable. Kilcannon luck has never been overly concerned with handsome features, but Lissa's beauty is truly magical—as yours must once have been. The demands exacted of fortune by a daughter like Lissa must be powerful. I do understand, from my own experience, why she might feel disinclined to spend too much time in your company—and I think that her motives might be more intense than mine ever were, for good reasons.”

“I agree,” the old woman said. “Nor is the difference apparent only within the family.”

The point was a trifle understated, but Canny saw the implication immediately. “You think she has the upper hand over me, too. You think she intends to plunder my luck as avidly as she's recently plundered yours—and you think she'll succeed.”

“I believe that she will try.”

“Without wishing to be rude,” Canny said, “I'm not sure that I can understand why that prospect should disturb
you
. If she really could parasitize my luck, might that not release the pressure on yours?”

“I am a mother. Without wishing to be rude, I hope that you can understand that not all motives are purely or narrowly selfish.”

Canny nodded his head, conceding the point.

“Perhaps you cannot listen to reason, and are therefore forgivable,” Lo Chen continued. “She refuses to listen, which is quite a different thing. You know, I suppose, that she will take your child away, if you allow her to conceive it. You would probably never see it.”

“It seems very likely,” Canny admitted, “but I've dared to hope otherwise. Having had good luck all my life, it's difficult to suppress such hopes—as you must know. If you brought me here to try to talk me out of it, you couldn't have had more than a very frail hope of success—but if you planned something more forceful, you must have done so in the full awareness that however dangerous a peaceful meeting might be, attempted murder would be even more dangerous. Although not as effective as the birth of a son in the longer term, a direct threat to my life would probably reignite my power. So, at least, precedent suggests.” He felt a little foolish talking about attempted murder in such seemingly-civilized circumstances, but the dark streak was still worrying him; if it had been a warning, there must be some danger.

“Power?” she echoed, ignoring his clumsy accusation. “Do you really think of it as power?”

He hesitated before answering. “Yes,” he said, finally. “It's difficult to think of it as anything else. A few of my ancestors appear to have considered it as much a curse as a gift, but none ever denied that it's a kind of power.”

“Did my daughter tell you about her fascination with the uncertainty principle—the arcane mysteries of quantum mechanics?”

Canny was surprised by that particular twist in the conversation's wayward flow, but it seemed to be safer ground than debating the politics of murder. “Yes,” he said. “I'd had thoughts along the same lines myself, although I'm a biologist by training. Perhaps that
is
what we are: privileged observers, whose wishes, needs or appetites are slightly more powerful than those of our competitors. Perhaps we simply have more authority to shape the world than people who can't see as keenly.”

“To
shape
the world?” The woman's features were expressionless, but her eyes were sparkling, as if the empty grate were filled with blazing logs whose ardent light was reflected there. “Have you not considered the alternative perspective, in which the effect we have is purely disruptive?”

“What do you mean?” Canny parried.

“Suppose, for a moment, that we are not imposing our own preferred observations at all, but merely subverting or interrupting the influence which other observers have. In that case, it would not be the directive force of your desire that guides a ball into a particular slot on a roulette wheel, but merely an ability to spoil the diffuse forces of desire that might otherwise have guided it to a neighboring slot.”

“Isn't that a distinction without a difference?” Canny challenged her.

“Is it? Perhaps. But in the long run, the distribution of results always complies with that predicted by probability theory. You do not have the power to make the ball fall into a particular slot once in every ten spins of the wheel, or even once in every twenty.”

“No, but when my luck is running smoothly I can make reasonably sure that my bet is down when it does turn up there, once in every thirty-seven spins or so. The cosmic balance always comes out more-or-less even in the end, but you and I can establish ourselves among those who win more often than they lose. Is there any point to this hair-splitting?”

“If there is,” Lo Chen pointed out, “you have far more to gain or lose by its making than I have. A fuller understanding of our curse might work to your benefit for forty years—perhaps more, if modern medicine continues to make such strides.”

“So you
do
think it's a curse?” Canny said, warming to the game. “Isn't it mere pessimism to speak of it in those terms rather than calling it a gift or a power?” In the meantime, he took what comfort he could from her admission that she had little to gain or lose by this encounter, in purely personal terms.

Would that make her less likely to do something silly, because she had so little to gain, he wondered—or would it make her more likely to act recklessly, because she had so little to lose?

The room seemed rather dark, although the sun hadn't quite set—but that was because the lamps were inefficient. So, at least, he tried to assure himself. He couldn't put that puzzling dark streak, or the unreasoning flash of terror that had followed it, out of his mind. Nor could he avoid the awareness that no one knew where he was, and that if anything were to happen to him while he were here, he would have vanished without trace.