Streaking (9 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

In the short term, at least, where they went was deeper into matters philosophical and theoretical. Of numerous unsafe alternatives, that seemed the safest to Canny—and, apparently, to Lissa too.

“It all seems to make a certain sense, to my mother at least, in the context of what your bigoted father might disdainfully call Eastern Mysticism,” the model told him. “In her equally-bigoted view, it doesn't seem to make any sense at all in terms of what she derides as Western Materialism—but you and I have both grown up in a world whose scientific establishment is entranced by quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle, so we know better than either of our respective parents or any of our ancestors, where the opportunity for a proper explanation might lie. The hereditary aspect is puzzling, though. If there were a gene for good luck—passing over the question of how on Earth the biochemistry could work—surely it would give its possessors such a massive advantage that people like you and I would be far more common than we are.”

Lissa's beauty seemed even more mesmeric to Canny now, in the shaded lamplight, than it had aboard the neon-lit jet or the twilit ridge. He knew, though, that the ever-problematic possibility of sex had now become extremely problematic indeed.

She might still be lying
, Canny told himself, although he couldn't believe it and it was more deliberate distraction than serious proposition.
She might have been very thoroughly briefed by someone else—someone of my kind in a narrower sense. But if there is a male streaker involved, he's playing a dangerous game
....

“It's not be as simple as that,” he told her, trying hard to keep his tone relaxed and matter-of-fact. “There are some genes that are only advantageous if they're rare. Don't bother trying to come to terms with the paradoxes involved in groups of lucky people playing zero-sum games—just think about those harmless hoverflies which mimic dangerous wasps. The mimicry only protects the hoverflies if there are so many more wasps around that the predators are able to learn that black-and-yellow-stripes are associated with stings, so the mimetic coloration of the hoverflies can only be favored by natural selection along with genes that maintain their relative rarity by restricting their reproduction.

“Cuckoo-strategies might be a more relevant example. Cuckoos can only get away with laying their eggs in other birds' nests if they don't become too common. As their numbers increase, so does the pressure on their victims to develop the ability to detect and destroy their eggs, so the price they pay for getting other birds to raise their offspring is that they don't lay very many eggs. In their case, natural selection works in favor of a strict avoidance of reproductive excess. Sometimes, selfish genes have to be exceedingly prudent in order to maximize their own selfishness.”

“And you think it works the same way with us?” she said, apparently following the argument easily enough. “You think that the genes producing our luck, however they might accomplish it, have to be packaged with other genes that make it difficult for us to reproduce?”

“Without any supportive biochemistry it's just so much sociobiological flimflam,” Canny admitted, “but the logic seems sound enough. You're still young, but you've been around long enough to know how much hatred there is in the envy that people try so hard to hide whenever they smile at people they credit with the luck of the devil. Sometimes, I think people as lucky as us use up ninety per cent of their luck just keeping themselves alive, so that they can reap the full benefit of the other ten per cent. Their rarity is a precious asset.”

“Have you ever met another?” she asked. “Before me, I mean.”

“Maybe,” he admitted. “I've certainly thought so, more than once—but if there's one thing the journals are very clear about, it's the necessity of caution. The last thing a lucky Kilcannon wants to do is to come into conflict with someone who also has luck on his side—and you seem to have been given the same warning. The diaries record numerous anecdotal instances of things getting very freaky, usually with ruinous results—although the darkest warnings of all must be products of paranoia, because there's no way anyone could have survived to compile the records. If I'd thought that your interest in me might be generated by a similar talent, I might not have dared to set foot on your jet—and I'm astonished that you let me do it, given what you knew.”

“Mother would be horrified,” the model admitted. “But the world changes so quickly, doesn't it? My generation has so little respect for the wisdom of its ancestors.”

“I've been tempted too,” he admitted. “Throw discretion to the winds and challenge the gods to do their worst! After all, it can't really be magic, can it? Almost all of the so-called evidence of disasters befalling the foolishly bold is anecdotal hearsay—but on the other hand, there's hardly a portrait on the staircase that doesn't have one seriously weird tale hanging invisibly from its frame. Irresistible forces don't mix—and so far as I know, they've always been rare enough, and exercised so discreetly, that they've only had to demonstrate their immiscibility to my ancestors once or twice in every century.”

“That's what our tradition says,” she agreed. “If it were genetic, though, you'd have to look at the matter differently.”

“The Kilcannon women only have to be fertile, so far as I can judge,” Canny said. “They don't have to be carriers. The lucky ones only have one son apiece, of course—although there are some interesting accounts in the diaries of sons that weren't lucky...admitting cuckoos into the nest, one might say, if one were to extend the earlier metaphor. If you'd been a man, I probably wouldn't be talking to you like this—but I suppose the fact that you aren't raises possibilities I never had to consider before. Some temptations are hard to resist, as you must know very well.”

“I think I've met other females,” she said. “I was warned about not keeping close company with them—but I wasn't warned about men like you. Other kinds, of course, but never ones like you. That's very strange, don't you think? If the gift really has been handed down through hundreds of generations, there must have been other meetings like this one, not just same-sex encounters.”

We all came from Africa in the beginning
, Canny thought,
but we went our separate ways. If there are two different genes, they could have emerged independently, in the latter stages of the story, one in the East and one in the West. The female variant could be sex-limited in its expression. It's a cosmopolitan world now, but it hasn't been that way for long, and cuckoos have to be prudent to survive and thrive
.

“I suppose there must,” he said, aloud. “Maybe they didn't dare talk as freely as we have. Maybe they were blinded by their preconceptions, and couldn't even get this far without running for cover. Or maybe the multiplication of freakish possibilities really did cause some kind of a storm that wiped them out. Maybe we won't survive the night—the clouds could be mustering the black lightning even as we speak. You have been warned about world-shattering catastrophes, I suppose?”

“Deconstructed moments can't always be reconstructed,” she said, with a lightness that was probably feigned. “The illusion of Maya sometimes dissolves and expels that which has troubled its harmony. Things fall apart. That sort of thing?”

“That sort of thing,” he agreed. “It must have sounded far more ominous in the days before high explosives and modern seismology. Do you always get by on two hours sleep a night, or is it one of your...ritual privations?”

She smiled at that. “Tired or not, I ought not to stay any longer,” she said, with a mischievous smile, although her relaxed posture suggested that she was not yet in a hurry to leave. “My people will be missing me in York, and they know where I was bound even though they didn't come with me. I wouldn't put it past them to come looking for me—or even to phone mother, which would really whip up a storm of sorts. Do you think I dare come back another time, if the black lightning leaves me the choice?”

The way she said it implied that she'd already got what she had come back for: confirmation of his nature. She hadn't been sure, and she hadn't been able to bear the uncertainty, but she was absolutely sure now, in spite of his calculated flippancy. It was a different ball-game now, and they both had to take aboard the possibility, however slim, that there was a zero on the wheel that really might wipe them both out. Canny knew why he might be willing to take the risk, but he couldn't see what was in it for her. She was one of the most beautiful women in the world, but he was a very long way from being one of the ten sexiest men.

“Do you want to come back?” he riposted, wondering what answer he ought to hope for.

“Will you let me in if I do?” she parried.

Canny didn't want to answer that in case he over-committed himself. “All my ancestors thought it was magic,” he said, carefully. “They didn't have our oh-so-modern flexibility of mind, or the lesson of the uncertainty principle. But they did contrive to renew their lucky streak over and over again for at least thirty generations. How many other families had something like it, but lost it through carelessness? We don't know. You and I might be wiser to take what precautions we can, and stay in different hemispheres from now on.”

“I wasn't betting against you at the table in Monte Carlo, even before the last bet of all,” Lissa said. “That's the beauty of roulette—you can bet on possibilities that aren't mutually exclusive. If you hadn't decided to pull off that coup on the zero, I could have bet with you without being so obvious—by betting on the color of your chosen number, or whether it was odd or even. You could have been more discreet than you were.”

“True,” he admitted. “But I didn't know that there was a risk of tangling my streak up with someone's else's. You did, apparently.”

“I still couldn't be entirely sure,” she said, without specifying how long she'd been suspicious of him, “but I was sure enough not to bet against your zero. Twice running I let my chips stay where they were; the third time, I went with you. Would you have done any differently, in my situation?”

It was a genuine question, but it was one that Canny couldn't answer. “I'm not sure I'd have thought it was a good idea to offer you a lift in my private jet,” he said. “Even though we wouldn't be in any kind of competition....”

“Yes you would,” she said, confidently. “You wouldn't have been able to resist the temptation—and for once, I'm not talking about my face and figure. In view of everything you've told me tonight, I'd say we're now running even in the silly risk stakes.”

“In that case, it might be sensible to stop now,” Canny said, dryly.

He knew that he was the one who was in greater danger. His father was upstairs dying, and if history was any guide at all, his own streak would dwindle away with Daddy's frail flesh. Unless Lissa was much older than she looked, her mother was probably in perfectly good health, having only begun to lose her looks a couple of years ago. But he also knew that he didn't want Lissa Lo to walk out of his life forever, no matter what the risk might be.

Maybe, Canny thought, he should have gladdened his mother's ignorant heart by making sure that he had a potential bride waiting in the wings—a bride he could impregnate as soon as the ink was dry on Daddy's death certificate. Some of his more recent ancestors had been careful to do that, although others had loudly sung the praises of the education gained during the “doldrums phase.” Some of the ones who'd rushed into marriage—including, he supposed, his father—hadn't been as fortunate in their choice of brides as they ought to have been, if their lucky streaks had applied to all matters equally. But what difference could it have made to his present situation if he'd been engaged, or even in love? It was probable, Canny supposed, that Lissa Lo still thought of her discovery of his gift as one more stroke of her own good luck—but he had to bear in mind the potentially-ominous fact that neither of them had had any previous inkling of the possibility of any such meeting.

The model must have been doing her own share of thinking, because she said; “Maybe we'd simply neutralize one another if we entered into competition. Restored balance. Yin and yang. That's likely, I think. But if we were to work together...to lay the same bets....”

“We still don't know whether your presence added a twist to my streak,” Canny pointed out. “If it did, and if the mugging was part of the twist...betting together might not have the effects we'd expect. Synergy might work in mysterious ways.”

She smiled at him. “I really do have to go to Venezuela,” she told him. “The jet's ferrying me down to Heathrow tomorrow morning to pick up a 747. I have to go now—but I'm glad I came back. We will talk again, won't we?”

“I'll be tied up here for quite a while,” Canny countered. “I've got a father to bury—and a hell of a lot of reading to do, if I take his advice.”

“That's not an answer,” she pointed out. “But that's okay. I'll come back anyway, and take the risk of being turned away. I won't try to alter the odds in my favor—but I still can't believe that you can turn your back on me now.”

“If that's what you want,” he conceded, knowing that she held all the cards, and that she knew it—and also that she might be the better judge, if only because she were subject to the lesser temptation.

“It is,” she told him—and he couldn't help his heart quickening at the sound of the words, as if they were a promise of unsurpassable joy.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Canny went straight to bed, but couldn't sleep. Given that turning the pages of the old diary hadn't relaxed him, it was hardly surprising that his unexpected conversation with Lissa Lo had woken him up to the full extent of which he was still capable—and even though her departure had let him down again dramatically, he couldn't let go. The food for thought she had fed him had given him terrible mental indigestion, and he couldn't even begin to attempt its coherent organization, but he couldn't fall asleep. Eventually, he began to dream while he was still awake, and his dreams were hectic.

He didn't drag himself out of bed until eleven-thirty the next day. Bentley didn't call him for breakfast, and probably wouldn't have called him for lunch either if he hadn't made it on his own.

“How's Daddy?” was the first thing he asked of his mother, when he went into the living-room to read the morning paper.

“Asleep,” she said. “Everyone appears to be keeping strange hours now. Actually, he seems much better—or, at any rate, much calmer. I don't know what you said to him yesterday, but you obviously set his mind at rest. If only you could have....”

“Well, I couldn't,” Canny said, cutting her off. “It wasn't what I said so much as the timing. I'll have another chat with him later—and I'll try not to make things worse again.”

“You, on the other hand, look dreadful,” Lady Credesdale observed, by way of retaliation.

“Thanks,” he replied. “I'll try to pull myself together before I go up to see Daddy again. Are you at home for lunch?”

“Yes, but I have to go down to the village this afternoon. The servants pass on all the available gossip at light-speed, of course, but I'm the source of official news. Everyone waits on my reports—even Maurice Rawtenstall at the Mill and Father Quimper.”

Mercifully, it wasn't until his mother had left on her mission to inform that the telephone rang. Canny was still in the dining-room, lingering over a second cup of black coffee.

“Henri Meurdon,” Bentley reported to Canny, who was feeling slightly better now that lunch had revived him.

“Thanks,” Canny said, as he went into the drawing room and picked up the receiver. He waited for the butler to close the door behind him before saying: “Henri? You have some news?”

“Yes and no, Monsieur. The matter is more complicated than we thought.”

“What do you mean?”

“You have doubtless been distracted by the matter of your father's illness, Monsieur, or you would have realized yourself that there was no time for the robbery to be arranged
after
you won the forty-seven thousand Euros. The thieves must already have made careful arrangements for getting in and out of your hotel, and your room. This was not an opportunistic crime. You, not the money you won that night, were their intended target; we suspect that they had been stalking you for some time, before you even arrived in Monte Carlo.”

Canny understood immediately that Meurdon had to be right, As soon as the casino manager pointed it out, Canny realized that he had been distracted by other matters from giving any significant thought to the mugging; in effect, he had handed over all responsibility with a single phone-call, and had promptly banished it from his mind. Now that it had been stated forthrightly, it was obvious that the gunman in his hotel could not have got there from some distant point, identified his room and found a means of discreet intrusion within the interval that had elapsed between his winning the money and his arrival in the hotel.

“You mean they intended to rob me anyway, no matter how much or how little I came away with that night?” Canny said. “But if I'd left immediately after receiving the call from home, they'd only have got three thousand. It wouldn't have been worth the risk.”

“No, Monsieur Kilcannon—when I say that
you
must have been the target, that is what I mean. I suspect that they intended to kidnap you—but they changed their minds, and took the money instead. You were right about their having a man in the casino, who did indeed tell them that you were carrying the money—but he must also have told them what you said to the people at the roulette table as you left.”

For a moment, Canny couldn't remember having said anything at all—but then he did.
Daddy might not last the week
, he'd announced, trying to sound uncaring. That—and the prospect of a forty-seven thousand Euro consolation prize—might have been just enough to subvert a kidnap gang's scheme. Demanding a ransom from a man who was ill was one thing; attempting to demand a ransom from a man who might have died before the demand arrived was something else.

“Are you sure about this, Henri?” he asked, hesitantly.

“No, Monsieur—how can anyone be sure of such a thing? But we are not dealing with common fools, Monsieur. We are endeavoring to recover your money, and I think we might still succeed—but my associates do not normally operate as far afield as England, and you might like to make some enquiries of your own.”

“What? You mean the kidnap gang was
English
?”

“No, Monsieur. Eastern European, I believe. Since the collapse of communism, the Riviera has become the Wild West. But if you were a target, you must have been identified by something more than your reputation here. Someone in your own country—your own locality—might have given information as to your suitability. So it seems to me, at least. I cannot be sure...of anything. Kidnapping was a crime in danger of extinction in Europe only fifteen years ago, even in Sardinia, but things have changed. People in the old Soviet Republics watched too many bootleg American movies; they seem to model themselves on the worst sorts of imaginary gangsters. We shall do what we can, of course—but these are dangerous men, Monsieur Kilcannon. Perhaps you ought to take precautions of your own. I will call again if I have any further news—especially of your money.”

“Yes, of course,” Canny said. “Thank you, Henri. I appreciate your help—and your advice.”

When he had put the phone down he rang for Bentley. “This may seem like a stupid question, Bentley,” he said, “but does anyone in the village have any contacts in Eastern Europe? The former Soviet republics, in particular?”

“Yes sir,” the butler replied, promptly. “I believe some of the units in the Mill have extensive dealings with that part of the world. We have received trade delegations in the village, and our own representatives have visited such places as Kiev, Riga and Tbilisi. If you had paid more attention to....”

“You can forget the delicate criticism, Bentley. I take the point. Fast-changing world, fast-changing businesses. Daddy's been banging on at me for years to get involved at the Mill, so I'd be ready to take over when the time came, but the pressure only served to increase my native stubbornness...and now the chickens are coming home to roost. So what kind of business is it? Not money-laundering for the Russian mafia, I hope.”

“I doubt it, sir—although I dare say that if there were anything clandestine going on, I'd be the last to hear of it. I believe that the former Warsaw Pact countries and ex-Soviet republics have become a significant market for the plastics and polymers units.”

“Really? Well, I suppose that Cockayne has to move with the times, just like everywhere else. And I suppose that if you live in Uzbekistan or Albania, the whole EU is the new Wild West.”

“Has something happened, sir?”

“Nothing important, probably. During my recent farewell trip to the Mediterranean coast I appear to have been targeted by a gang of East European kidnappers. When they heard that Daddy was dying they became anxious about the viability of a ransom demand, and decided to settle for a forty-thousand Euro heist instead, just to cover expenses. It was lucky for me that I happened to come by the alternative—but it was a bad move on their part, because I got it from a casino that pays protection to the Union Corse, who are already royally pissed off by the way that vagrant aspirant mafias are casually muscling in on their traditional territory, and tend to get very resentful indeed of rivals operating on their actual premises. The trouble with being lucky is that it's a rare warm wind that blows no one any ill...and I guess that includes Daddy as well as the outlaws. Shit! Of all the times to discover that I'm living in interesting times....”

He trailed off, realizing that the most interesting aspect of his suddenly-interesting times was Lissa Lo, whose advent still did not seem at all unfortunate. Swings and roundabouts, as he had said to Bentley only yesterday...or yin and yang, as she might have put it. That multicolored streak he had seen in the casino had obviously sent ripples in every direction, stirring up all kinds of craziness.

“I thought the Union Corse was an insurance company, sir,” Bentley said, mildly.

“And I thought you knew what I meant,” Canny retorted. “They're the Riviera's most efficient racketeers—have been for a century and more, having settled in long before crime first got organized in America. They've never had total control, of course, but they've always considered themselves a cut above the gangs who followed
southern ways
. They're not really Corsican any more, in spite of their name, but they have a sense of tradition and they still define themselves partly in terms of rivalry with Sardinia, where the local bandits used to be much more heavily biased towards such practices as kidnapping. It's almost as complicated, in its way, as Yorkshire and Lancashire, and far more bizarre in its implications. The Union Corse will try to hunt down the people who stole my money because it's a matter of honor—they take their protection racketeering very seriously—and
pour encourager les autres
. By which I mean that they'll want to send a message to any other Eastern Europeans ambitious to muscle in.”

“I understand the Voltairean reference sir. A matter of hanging admirals, I believe. What you're trying to imply is that someone
here
must have given away information about your family—not just its wealth, but about its situation, Only son, father ailing, old-fashioned concern about the succession. If anyone did, sir, I'm sure they had no idea what they were doing. It's the sort of information that an unscrupulous inquirer could easily glean from casual gossip. The villagers are always proud to talk about Cockayne's unique circumstances, enthusiastic to explain them to new business-partners. I don't think you need assume that anyone you or I know was actually part of a plot to kidnap you. That seems very unlikely to me.”

“Unlikely,” Canny echoed. “Yes, you're right. People do talk, quite innocently. And people listen—sometimes anything but innocently. We live in a cosmopolitan world, where there's scope for all kinds of new commerce, and new misunderstanding. The spectrum of probability isn't something constant. Being lucky is a much more complicated business than it used to be.”

“Pardon me for saying so, sir, but are you sure that Monsieur Meurdon is a wholly reliable source of information?”

Canny laughed, briefly. “Of course I'm not sure,” he said. “He may run an honest casino, but he pays protection money to the Union Corse. His situation is complicated. He practically dared me to place the bet that won me the stolen money, and he's already investigated my betting patterns. Maybe he did set up the robbery, and made up all this stuff about Eastern European kidnappers as a cover story to distract me. I can't be
sure
of anything—and to tell you the truth, I don't give a damn about the forty-seven thousand Euros. I could do without any further complications and twists of fate, just for the time being.”

He knew as he said it that he was lying. What he really wanted was to pick and choose his complications, his twists of fate. He only wanted to hide from
some
essentially unlikely contingencies. Kidnap gangs and muggers he could do without; Lissa Lo was another matter. He wasn't sure, any longer, that he could do without her...and if there was a price to be paid in strange ripples of uncertainty and whatever they might stir up, it was a price that he might have to pay, for the sake of simple curiosity as well as not-so-simple lust.

Bentley probably knew that he wasn't telling the
whole
truth, but Bentley was used to that, and to being content with it.

“Your father is awake now,” the butler said, in a softer tone. “if you'd like to see him, I think you'd find him in a receptive frame of mind.”

“Yes, I would like to see him,” Canny said. “Thanks, Bentley. I appreciate what you're doing—all of it. You're a real tower of strength, and I don't know what Mummy and I would do without you. Sorry about the clichés—but they really do mean what I want to say.”

Bentley nodded his head, to signify that he understood.