The Manual of Darkness (20 page)

‘Hoffmann,’ Víctor muttered, ‘fucking Hoffmann.’ He bit his lip; now was perhaps not the time to ask this next question. But eventually, he looked Galván in the eye and said: ‘Mario … I’ve been working at La Llave for more than a month now.’

‘Very successfully, from what I hear.’

‘Yes. But you said that if I proved I was up to it, we could start doing real magic.’

‘We will start. Very seriously. But it will have to wait until tomorrow.’

Together they walked back to the front of La Scala. As soon as she saw him, the girl threw herself into Víctor’s arms, half overjoyed, half bewildered. As she hugged him, Víctor realised he hadn’t even said thank you to Galván. He glanced around, but the maestro had disappeared.

T
he first step is to accept the strict limitations of this ruined new world, the closed borders, the permanent curfew. To act accordingly. Make no grand plans. Or at least start with small steps. After all, when the future is as imminent as this, it requires little imagination to adapt to it. Can he do so? Is he capable of seeing himself – apologies for the tasteless use of that verb – as a blind man? Can he imagine living out this little life with dignity? Yes. In spite of everything, he can. And he must. He knows every square inch of his apartment like the back of his hand. He can now move around it with his eyes closed and without stumbling. He has lived here since he was born. He needs to hole himself up here, make the most of the few days he has left to buy everything he needs, make sure he has everything necessary to survive. Eat, sleep, shower, a fresh change of clothes every day.

What else. The world. Small, Víctor, think small. His local area, at least. Or smaller still: his block. Would he be able to make it around the block with his eyes closed? Probably not, but he can prepare himself. Prepare himself to be one hell of a blind man. And now would be as good a time to start as any. He jumps out of bed. He puts on the clothes he wore yesterday. He goes out, determined to circle the block, every sense on the alert, making a mental note of the details which, when he loses what little sight he has left in his right eye, will have to be enough for him to find his way around. Don’t think about it, Víctor. Do what Galván always taught you; don’t tell us what you are about to do: just do it.

He walks, trailing his left hand along the wall, but surreptitiously. He quickly passes the first shops and two houses. The last door before he comes to the corner is that of a bakery. He
stops as though simply curious, alert to every sense. It is a glass door, like any other. He closes his eyes and takes deep breaths through his nose, twice, three times. He should be able to smell bread. The place probably doesn’t even have its own oven any more; the bread is probably delivered from some factory first thing in the morning then the bakery simply sells it. It’s a sad day for a blind man, thinks Víctor, when the overriding smell in a baker’s doorway is that of dog piss rather than bread. Maybe he should have counted the number of steps from his own door. Some other day. He’s not going back now.

El Paqui. The good old corner shop. There’s an unmistakable fragrance. Open every day until 11 p.m., including Sundays and holidays. Everything you could ever need, just round the corner. Without realising it, Víctor quickens his pace. It would be ludicrous to say he feels euphoric, yet he blesses the benefits of this little world. Everything within easy reach. Everything easily memorisable. Who could ask for more? He moves away from the wall to step around a pile of dog shit and for an instant his imagination conjures a scatological vision of hell. There are lots of dogs in the area, Víctor. And lots of not very civic-minded dog-owners. Well, if necessary, he can always leave his shoes on the landing every time he returns home.

He speeds up, turns the second corner, makes a mental note of the smell of sawdust coming from the upholsterer’s, and a few steps on, the smell of wine from the barrels in the winery, and he begins to think: yes, he can do this, everything he needs is just round the corner; a corner he can turn without seeing, he could walk round the block with his eyes closed even now, and if he can navigate the block, he can navigate the area, the world, the universe, because it’s all fairly much alike, you can recognise anything if you’re prepared. He has just turned the third corner; for some time now he has not been looking or smelling or listening, for several metres he has been making no notes for his mental map of the future. Keep walking, Víctor. Keep going. And count the steps you take. Don’t stop to think how deceptive, how fragile, how short lived is the peace of those who have been vanquished.

W
hen he first saw a tank of compressed air in the cold light of day, it was proof that Peter Grouse had already stopped thinking like a thief and begun thinking like a magician. The metal cylinder was just like the one he had seen at the Egyptian Hall, though it looked thinner and appeared to be less heavy, although in fact two men were needed to carry it. Throwing caution to the wind, he went straight over and asked them what they were carrying. Compressed air was a recent innovation and although it had been used in factories for some years now, the idea of storing it in relatively small quantities for use in workshops and on building sites was only just taking off. When he found out what it was, he did not, for a moment, think about how much it might be worth if he could steal it. On the contrary, his first thought was about its practical applications in magic. More precisely, how it might be used to operate Psycho the automaton. Nor was it a particularly detailed deduction. He was simply struck by the words ‘Nothing more invisible than air’. He started to run.

He got back to his room, excited and out of breath, but before opening his copy of
Modern Magic
for the umpteenth time, he tried to calm himself a little. Eleven months had passed since his first visit to the Egyptian Hall but he still remembered the absurd joy he had felt that night when he got home and realised that the torn edge of the piece of paper he had stolen from Maskelyne matched the thin ragged strip where pages 537/538 had been ripped out of the book. He immediately sat down and began to read, convinced that in his hands he held the key to claiming Maskelyne’s £3,000. He was quickly, and brutally, disappointed. Having read the whole chapter, all he could do was agree with
Maskelyne’s scrawled note: Hoffmann has no idea. Worse still: Hoffmann masked his ignorance by larding his text with technical terms. Though he now knew the entire chapter by heart, Grouse still resented the convoluted prose, full of deceptions, insinuations and deliberate evasions.

That first night he had not been able to get a wink of sleep so he profited from his insomnia by making one of the most important resolutions of his life: whatever it took, he would reconstruct Hoffmann’s diagram in three dimensions. He knew from the text that he could not possibly replicate the way the automaton functioned and consequently he was a long way from being able to claim the magician’s £3,000, but he needed to see it. To see, to touch, to have something concrete, something tangible, which might act as a springboard for his imagination. Provided he succeeded, it did not matter to him how much he spent. Or, rather, what crimes he might have to commit, since as a matter of professional pride he did not pay for anything he could get free. His most spectacular crime had been breaking into a tailor’s shop at night and stealing a wooden dummy, a head and torso which were conveniently hollow. In just two days he had managed to lay his hands on dozens of tools, many of which he would not even need. With these, he had handmade most of the pieces. Others he had seized from poorly guarded bicycles which he had abandoned after he had done with them. For the more complex parts, he had had no option but to entrust his request to a blacksmith and pay for them. As the expenses began to eat into his earnings, he was obliged to extend his working hours. The few free hours he had left, he spent at the table in his room, assembling pieces which he then fitted into the dummy by the light of two candles.

It had taken him five months to build something that vaguely resembled Psycho. It was a poor copy and the movement lacked the precision of the original, but at least he had managed to get the arm to move. To do this, he had only to turn a crank set into the hollow body of the mannequin. Grouse was particularly proud of the way the gears meshed silently and he would frequently take them out and oil them again.

But he still did not have the most crucial piece of information;
the detail over which Hoffmann shamelessly equivocated: how to move the crank remotely. In the Egyptian Hall, no one had come within two metres of the automaton while it was working, a fact that Maskelyne had not only mentioned, but had rather pretentiously and theatrically demonstrated. Grouse spent night after night with the crank in one hand, spinning it in the air as the imaginary gears in his brain turned round and round.

He had his first success using a bicycle from which he had removed the wheels. He screwed the frame to the floor and attached the crank handle to the chain. This gave a distance of barely two feet. The arm of the automaton still moved, though the movements were more spasmodic and less precise than before. Next, he tried making the chain longer so as to increase the distance but, although he extended it by only a few inches, it didn’t work. Now that it was longer, the chain lost tension after the first turn of the pedals. It was logical, he thought; after all, bicycles otherwise would be fifteen feet long.

As the weeks passed, his room began to seem smaller and smaller. Every inch of space was covered with tools and spare parts which he went on collecting even if he had no specific use for them. By now, not even his bed, which was pushed back against the wall, was immune to the invasion. One night, stumbling into his room in the dark, he tripped over the bicycle chain and, in a rage, he lashed out, kicking and stamping. He didn’t quite manage to destroy the mannequin, but it was a close thing. When he finally calmed down, he was frightened. He was not accustomed to losing his head. Lying back on the bed, it took him only a few moments to work out what had caused this reaction: the closer he came to the solution, the more impossible it seemed. Even if he could find a way to extend the chain by several metres and keep it taut, he still had to deal with the most intractable problem of all: making it invisible. In the end, even allowing for a trapdoor and a space beneath the stage, which probably existed at the Egyptian Hall, the chain still had to connect with the body of the mannequin. Through a transparent cylinder. This phrase was carved in capital letters on his brain: A TRANSPARENT CYLINDER. He was as far from his goal as he had been the day he started.
There was no way to make a chain invisible. He had to start over again.

Something invisible, something invisible. These two words had been plaguing him for weeks. Determined not to squander any more time or money, he forbade himself to pick up another tool until he had worked out the theory. He would draw. That’s what he would do. Draw as many diagrams as he needed, make lists of every substance he was aware of until he came up with one that was invisible but still capable of moving the mechanism of the automaton. He was not stupid, he knew that, in this case, ‘invisible’ meant ‘transparent’. He continued to throw himself into the task, but the thrill of the first days was gone because he was faced with an insurmountable obstacle. He never forgot that his initial desire had been to see. To see something similar to the original so that he might use this as a springboard to imagine a solution. Now that he could see it, he had to imagine something invisible. He had to see something that was invisible.

Two months later, he was still turning the problem over in his mind, but now he no longer drew diagrams and, though it pained him to admit it, he was thinking about giving up. The
coup de grâce
, when it came, was not the result of long nights of mental gymnastics, but a complete accident, a piece of information he stumbled on while going about his ordinary business.

Grouse always kept in touch with various officers in the London courts. It was useful to know who had been locked up, what sort of sentences were being handed down for which crimes, which judges were harsh and which were lenient with those who worked the streets. All in all, information that was of secondary importance, but useful in making decisions with regard to his profession and which only entailed buying a pint of beer from time to time for clerks and junior officers of the court. It was during one such meeting that he discovered Maskelyne had been to court a few weeks earlier. And not as a plaintiff – something he frequently did if he felt someone was making use of one of his patents – but as the defendant. It seemed that someone had come up with, or thought they had come up with, the solution to how Psycho worked and had claimed the £3,000 reward. Maskelyne had refused to pay. The case had caused something of a stir among the
court officers because the plaintiff had brought his automaton into court. Maskelyne had not. He had nothing to prove and the judge accepted that forcing him to demonstrate how Psycho worked was tantamount to making his invention obsolete.

Since the hearing had been held
in camera
, Grouse’s informant did not know how the plaintiff’s automaton worked. What he did know was that the verdict had been decided on a linguistic nuance. During opening remarks, witnesses for both sides had agreed on Maskelyne’s exact words when he made the challenge: ‘A similar apparatus capable of playing cards that is genuinely automatic’. In other words, what was important was not that the competing automaton should look exactly like Psycho, nor even that it should function in the same way, but that it do so without any human intervention whatsoever. This, according to Maskelyne, and apparently to the judge, was the meaning of the word ‘genuinely’. It was not enough that someone should be able to operate the automaton secretly or remotely. In simple terms, the machine had to function by itself. The plaintiff therefore demanded that Maskelyne reveal how Psycho worked in order to prove that the challenge was possible. Or, if not, that he should publicly admit that he had been fooling his audience. The judge, however, poured scorn on this request, in words that quickly spread throughout the courts: ‘If I claimed that I had visited the moon and offered a reward for anyone capable of doing likewise, I would be insane. But nobody could insist that I prove it, still less that I pay up. And being insane, as far as I know, is not a crime.’