Uptown Local and Other Interventions (15 page)

            An empty street, noontime: no shadows to be seen: gabled houses, a milk-blue sky, everything preternaturally still; everything baking and warm, trees, houses, the dust of the street. No people…but again, that terrible peace.

           
Forgive me,
 the voice said.
Forgive me. I’ve been getting it wrong all the time. I didn’t know any better how to show what I wanted; I did the best I could; I didn’t realize what was happening. But I can’t go against my nature, I have to be how I am. It’s how I was made. I am a made thing too—

            He looked at the dark lady, filled with terrible surmise. She would not meet his eyes, for the moment;
 
just traced the grain of the wood in the tabletop. “Last one,” she said very softly. “The likeliest final outcome…”

            He reached out to that last card. The voice of all the artist’s other creation roared in his ear, a tortured unison. The card burned his hand with cold, so that he almost dropped it into its place at the top of the line of cards, and the voices all fell silent, breaths held, waiting.

            A rooming-house bed, a half-clad woman leaning on it, sitting on the floor, legs tucked under, slumped. Sleeping? Dead?

            Release from imprisonment, from punishment; release, if only something happens, the impossible thing, longed-for. All the glass around the diner stared at his back as if it had eyes, the transparency suddenly a terror; and the Hunched Man stared hardest, though he never moved a muscle, never looked up.

            And now, staring down at the card, he saw the answer. It washed up over him sudden and infuriating  as one of those rushes of water up the beach that comes up a lot further than you were anticipating, catches you unawares, and fills your pants cuffs full of sand.

            “Forgive him? Forgive
God?”
he said to her, furious, under his breath.. “Since when is that
my
job? After what he’s done to
me?!”

            “You’d be surprised,” she said. “Well?”

He stared at her.

“It’s all in your hands now,” she said. “This is the moment. Are you going to keep me sitting here waiting until he wakes up and works out what’s happening?
I
can always leave. Have
you
tried that trick lately?”

            He took her point. The glass was as impenetrable as any steel plate: the doors only opened inward. “You can get out, though,” he said, at a guess.

            “I can. I’m not subject to the rules you’re stuck with.
Make your choice!”

He stared at her again. The cards were silent now. In the silence he could only hear a  voice saying in ineluctable sorrow, “I may not be strictly human. All I want to paint is light on walls…”

            “You really don’t understand, do you?” he said, wanting to shout it and not daring, for fear the Hunched Man should turn around.
“He put me in hell!”

The dark lady looked oddly unmoved. “Damnation is a contract,” she said. “It takes two. One to say ‘To hell with you!’, and another to say ‘Okay.’”

            He drew a long breath to answer her back in fury…then stopped.
And which one am I?
he thought suddenly, frightened.

            Once again, she would not look at him, just sat there making little swirly designs with one forefinger in a wet spot on the tabletop.

            He sat there, shaking harder than ever. The air of the place had begun to sing with danger: not the danger of the Other, the Artist, but of something else that might happen. There was a way to find out, a way to decide. All the cards lost their imagery and went smokeshot, uncertainty trapped in glass, waiting. Waiting for
him
.

           
But I hate It. Him. He destroyed me. Why let him off the hook? If I have to suffer, why shouldn’t he? The hell with Him.

            Nooooo!
  cried all the other voices out of the paint, about to be damned with the It-thing. And the mild, unhappy voice, astonishingly helpless, was ready to say softly:
Okay—

            At that, he had to stop and think, finally frightened by the thought of what he might be about to do. Condemn this beyond-the-paint, tinhorn God to the hell he was himself inhabiting right now, and who knew
what
might happen?

           
And besides,
  said something angry and completely unexpected inside him, 
it’s not
right.
What if he didn’t mean it? What if he couldn’t help it?

            He looked at the dark lady. She would not raise her eyes: she was still lost in concentration on the wet spots on the tabletop.

           
To do right. No matter what. If it’s all the humanity I’ve got left --

            He was afraid, unsure. Desperate for a hint, he turned to look at the glass of the window. Slowly the other reflective surfaces in the place were all going milky; only the ones nearest to him still lay dark with the night leaning against them on their far side. In the dark window nearest, as he turned to it, he saw the reflection turn toward him…and was terrified to see the face in the window, not as his own, but as but another’s.

            Blinded, horrified, he found himself looking out of the Hunched Man’s eyes at the world he had made. And to his own horror, he  could have wept. The world in which It lived was bleak beyond anything he had experienced in here himself. To the Other, this was an
improvement
. In his own world, there was no love to be perceived, not even the illusion of it. There was light, but all of it was that cold brittle light, bright but loveless, a light that only exposed and did not illumine. The Other was just repeating what it saw, trying to tell the other human beings around it of the awful emptiness that seemed to underlie everything, to one whose heart was welded shut. Yet what it painted here at least had meaning: the outer worldview had a certain cold beauty, even if meaning was missing. He was doing the best he could, even in the face of that terrible, underlying emptiness… 

But, 
Everything is loopholes,
  she’d said.
We see walls instead of the emptiness they shut in. We see barriers instead of freedom.

What if I could let him see the freedom? The other side of the emptiness?....

He was shaking with uncertainty, and anger…and now fear, too.
Even if it is right—why do I have to be the one who saves us all?

Unless it just has to be that way sometimes, because it’s right. Because I’m part of what scares him. Maybe for him, I’m the It in the darkness—the thing that comes real, that comes alive without permission…and frightens God Himself inside His own creation…

He stood there on that brink, terrified.

What if it doesn’t work?

And what if it does?
said another voice that he finally recognized. Now he knew it was his own soul answering him, a sound he hadn’t heard in too long.

The Other’s eyes were still looking at him out of his own reflection; as frightened, as uncertain as he. And the look decided him. He glanced at the dark lady. He could see her watch his trembling: and he threw it all away.

           
All right,
  he thought.
I forgive you—for you knew not what you did— 

            He pushed himself up and away from the table, and prepared to do what he’d tried only once before, and had failed. This time, though, he didn’t refuse the gaze that had fixed on his before, from the glass; this time he locked onto the desperate poison-ice of the Other’s trapped gaze, though it burned down his bones. And though and though the Other tried to tear his gaze away, he wouldn’t allow it, grappling the Other with his own gaze, wrestling as with a cold and resistant angel—

            He walked toward the glass, didn’t stop: just kept walking. He didn’t dare close his eyes. Not even at the last moment, when more than anything else, he wanted to  flinched—

            He hit the glass. It shattered.

The Other’s gaze and his joined in that shattering, ran together, became the same thing. It was as if the whole world was one great crash of glass, the glass over a million art prints in the future breaking under the weight of a reality weightier than theirs, the glass of endless empty-eyed windows in the past and present of the artist’s mind breaking too; and behind the noise, heaven singing hosannas in shattered fragments, ringing in shining shards and splinters on the ballroom floor of the sky, as art becomes reality and breaks it, freeing the artist, even if only for a while—

            How long it took for the din and chime of falling glass to cease at last, he had no idea. But as it tapered away, like brittle bells crashing to nothing on the sidewalks of the world, he came to himself again, looking out the diner window, which now was nothing but razory unreflective fragments sticking out of the window frame. The street was still dark; but over the rooftops across the way, the faintest intimation of dawn was beginning to gather.

            He turned and looked back at the counter. The counter guy straightened up, looking surprised, and went down the length of the counter to get some more plates. The red-haired woman sat there, looking in astonishment from side to side, as if realizing that she had actually stopped talking.

            He stood there, breathing in, breathing out, tasting for what seemed the first time in forever the cold air coming in from outside. He looked over to the booth. The dark lady was still there. Her head was tilted a little to one side, and she was looking at him from under slightly lowered lids, a small and lazy smile on her face.

            “I broke it,” he said. “I broke everything…”

            She shook her head. “I wouldn’t bet on it,” she said. “Art’s tough. I wouldn’t linger. His perceptions may have changed radically…or he may just seal right over again. Don’t leave him anything but a memory of you to work with.”

            He looked at her. “Can I take—“

            “Forgiveness,” she said, “expands as far as you can make it go. Give it your best shot.”

            He met the red-haired woman’s eyes; she smiled at him. It was like the dawn that was coming up behind them: hesitant, but growing by the moment.

He began to head down to that end of the counter—then stopped. “Who
are
you really?” he said to the dark lady.

            Her look went thoughtful. “Even mortals,” she said, “can manifest briefly as wild cards. ‘Mel,’ one of my sisters says,  ‘there’s more than one joker in the deck.’  Maybe I’m the Other…in his sleep…hearing the cry from inside the painting, and doing something about it, where his artistic sensibilities won’t notice. I wouldn’t rub my nose in it, if I were you. I might wake up…”

            She grinned at him, but the grin was a little edged. “What are you waiting for?” she said. “Getoutahere.”

            He turned his back on her and made his way back up to the head of the counter. The light in the diner paled strangely in the growing light of dawn as he came up beside her.

            She gave him a sidewise look, a little hesitant, a little sly, and said nothing for a moment. When she did speak, at last, blessedly, it had nothing to do with furniture.

            “What do we do now?” she said.

            He was going to shake his head and say “I don’t know.” Then he shook his head for a different reason, because it wasn’t true. “Believe in me,” he said. “I know the way.”

            He held out a hand: she took it, got up off the stool.

            Together they stepped through the shattered window and stepped crunching out onto glass that later burst into a million shards of diamond light in the long-delayed dawn.

Though we pass through Zurich in this next one—because there’s nowhere else the specific action in question could happen—what mattes more is the Celtic connection. And here again, a previous theme repeats. (I’ve left the mid-nineties tech as it was when written: interestingly, according to the best information I have, it should still work.)

The Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich is a wide, pleasant street that stretches, as its name suggests, from the railroad station at its top to the lake at its bottom. The street is a bright one, the shifting light on the Zurchersee somehow lingering on the horizon and spreading right down the length of the avenue, into the parks and the cobbled plazas where the tram lines interlace, onto the glittering shopfronts and the cafes. The paving on the sidewalks under the linden trees, and (close to the station) right out into the street, is grey and white granite, highly polished. In wet weather it can be slippery: in bright weather it gleams. It gleamed today, for this was May, and the sun was out, and in front of the Hotel St.-Gotthard the “bleachers” had been put up. Tables and chairs were arranged on them, facing the street, one level above the other, so that no one’s view of the passersby would be obstructed. It being past noon, the chairs were already beginning to fill up with the usual customers: Japanese tourists hung with cameras, businessmen on their lunch break with beer in front of them and the
Neue Zurcher Zeitung
preserving their anonymity, prim little old ladies having coffee with hot milk and a pastry, and various other city people indulging the Swiss love of having “a little something” every two hours or so.

The two men stood on the corner of Beatengasse where it crosses the Bahnhofstrasse and looked across at the topmost row of bleachers. There, by himself, sat a small man in a dark suit, his hair quite close-cropped. From his face he looked to be in his mid-forties, though his hair argued the point: it was pepper-and-salt, much heavier on the salt. The man had a copy of the
Zeitung
in front of him, but it was folded, and his eyes were on the street; he wore a lazy, bored expression, not at all what you would expect from someone who was awaiting the kind of meeting they knew him to be awaiting.

“Doesn’t look like much,” one of the men said to the other, softly, in English.
 
He was a tall, slender man, fair, ruddy of face, who looked slightly uncomfortable in his suit.

“All the better,” said the second: a shorter man, dark-haired but with cool blue eyes, whose suit betrayed by its fit a more expensive tailor, and an owner who considered it clothing and not a costume. “Come on.”

They crossed the street and went up into the bleachers. The small man stood as he saw them coming, and hands were shaken, like a meeting of old friends, and there were courteous smiles all around: they sat down, and a white-aproned waiter hurried over. “Gentlemen?”

“What kind of beer have you got?”

The waiter rattled off about twenty names. The small Swiss man reached out and touched the first man lightly on the arm. The first man flinched very slightly: the small man gave no sign of having noticed it. “Try the Gurten: it’s local,” he said, and sat back.

The two men ordered the Gurten. The waiter went away. “Herr Falera,” said the second man, “our time here is somewhat limited, so I’ll get straight to it. How much have you been told about what we have in mind?”

The Swiss leaned back in his seat and looked thoughtfully out at the white-and-grey paving as one of the blue and white Zurich trams, the “holy cows”, came humming to a stop in front of them and discharged its passengers. It dinged, moved on again. “Mr. Smyth, I think the word used in my preliminary discussion with your contact here was ‘withdrawal’. From what facility? One of the big two?”

All their eyes flicked briefly up the length of the Bahnhofstrasse toward Paradeplatz. There the tram lines met, and around that triangle of cobbles were tastefully arranged the main offices of the two great Swiss banks, the SBG and the UBS. “Not either one specifically,” Mr. Smyth said. “There’s a facility that they share—”

Herr Falera glanced at the pavement again. The beer came: they spent a moment while the waiter set it out, and Herr Falera sipped his for a moment, looking at the grey and white stone, watching the pedestrians scurry along it, watching a tourist pause to take a picture of the bright scene, the light flooding down the length of the street from the lake, the new green leaves on the lindens burning translucent in it, like stained glass. The tourist moved on, and a breath of wind came down the lake and stirred all the blown-glass leaves so that their upper surfaces glittered, blinding.

What the tourist most likely did not know, as even some native Zurchers did not know, was that perhaps thirty feet below the grey and white paving, under the service ducts and the sewers and the utility companies’ cables, lay a series of buried vaults running the length of the Bahnhofstrasse, down the course of the small natural ravine that had been there in ancient times, the one the Romans had called “the frogs’ moat” because of the trickle of the old Sihl river tributary that ran down it. Now that pathway was reinforced with concrete and steel, a chain of huge silent rooms: and in those rooms, partitioned from one another by office dividers—for what need of cages down there?—the gold lay piled. Half the gold in Europe, some people said: half the Swiss gold reserves, anyway—in this massive storage to which the two great banks and various others had access via numerous underground tunnels, and to the upkeep and security of which they all contributed.

Herr Falera turned back to the two men, a slight smile on his face. “Times must be getting hard for you,” he said softly, in his odd soft English: it had a southern lilt about it, something hinting at one or another of the Romance languages, though not French as would have been most likely in Switzerland. “Libya backing away the way it has. Well, they have enough embarrassments at the moment: they can hardly afford to be associated with you. But I take it the pickings are not as easy for you as they used to be. You can’t just ransack the great houses out in the country any more...too many of the old Irish families have broken down and installed security systems at last. Not that those would be all that hard to crack, really. But with the quality of help you people find yourselves forced to work with—”

Smyth’s eyes narrowed. “This is hardly germane,” he said, just as softly.

Falera smiled just a touch more at the sound of the other’s milk accent briefly showing through the carefully assumed Home Counties English. “It is very much to the point,” Falera said. “The risks your people have been taking in permitting the opportunistic theft of artwork on the mere assumption that you will eventually find a buyer—these have been making the business uncomfortable for others with, shall we say, similar interests. Suddenly there is publicity, suddenly Interpol sits up and takes notice, and the EC starts a Community-wide stolen art database: suddenly the British, who had killed their art theft department at Scotland Yard for lack of funds, now sit up and revive it, because they know it’s
your
organization involved. All very bad. And the effect on the artwork itself—rolled up and wrapped in binbags and stuffed into some buried oildrum in Fermanagh, wasn’t it, that last Carraveggio? What collector is going to want such a thing after it’s been through something that would take a major museum restoration to put right? Very careless, very thoughtless, some of your people.”

Falera watched Smyth sit there, quiet. His face was smooth, but his eyes said plainly that he was not a man who normally kept silent while anyone whatever talked to him in such a tone. Yet he stayed quiet still.

“We have a buyer,” he said after a moment, and drank some of his beer. “A collector.”

“Mr. Smyth,” Falera said, “gold can be had anywhere. If your collector is looking for art down there—” he glanced at the pavement again— “he or she is going to be disappointed. Such things are kept in museums, or private vaults, and not even the vault managers know what they are.”

“It more or less depends on what you consider ‘art’,” said the second man.

Falera’s eyes went to him. “Mr. Harris, your precis as I understand it would hardly make it seem as if art is your chief concern. I had thought you were more in the line of—” He smiled. “Militaria, I suppose would be the most delicate way to put it.”

“It is,” Harris said. “The applied side of the arts, if you like.” His smile suddenly went purely nasty, but the look sealed itself over after a moment. “And some of what’s down there...is militaria.”

“Ahh,” Falera said. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“I’m gasping for one myself,” Harris said. They lit up: Smyth shook his head minutely when Falera offered him a Galoise Bleu.

“So,” Falera said. “Your principal will know, of course, that the recent investigations will have greatly complicated this matter. Additionally, even before the international task force began its investigations, people had been moving to, shall we say, regularize their holdings. Almost none of the gold your principal is interested in will have eagles and swastikas stamped all over it. Nearly all will have been recast and stamped with the usual house hallmarks and new assay brands.”

“Our principal knows that,” Smyth said, “and would prefer some of the material with the original hallmarks, if it can be found. Historical value, after all. “

“I suppose it has a certain cachet to people of such a turn of mind,” Herr Falera said.

Smyth made a don’t-care expression. “But rebranded material will do as well—gas chromatography can confirm the provenance of the gold from the specific percentages of the alloy metals present in the mix.” He sat back and sipped reflectively at his beer. “And of course it would be unfortunate for you and your assistants if, after the fact, it should be discovered that we had the wrong material—” He lifted his eyes to Falera’s.

Falera let the attempted menace of the look roll off him: his smile went gentle. “Mr. Smyth,” he said, “my ancestors were organized, well-armed mercenaries, and the terror of Europe, when yours were gabbling missionary monks practicing penmanship in St. Gallen and trying to teach the locals to clone Munster cheese. We fought our way to our freedom despite the interference of every empire on this continent, in the days when there were
empires,
not the waning power on which you’ve wasted eighty years of unfocused hostility and bungled revenge. We may look quiet and democratic these days, but it’s a thin veneer: threat brings out the worst in us. So don’t waste your time trying to frighten me as if my companions and I were the second-rate crooks you’re used to dealing with. Our word is our bond, here. Unlike that of some people.”

Their eyes rested in one another’s for a little while. Smyth would not look away, but the way the tension fell off told plainly enough that Falera’s point had been taken.

“Well,” Falera said, and signaled for another beer. “It can be discovered where such things are. But I hope you have explained to your principal that your acquisition is going to have to be a limited one.” He put up an amused eyebrow. “Less due to the nature of the security involved, than to the nature of the material to be withdrawn. I doubt the two of you could manage more than two bars apiece. You will want sturdy carriers: none of this softside luggage—the stuff will go right through it.”

The two men nodded. “Now, about payment—” Smyth said.

“I have an account at the Banca dalla Sutsilva in Samnaun,” Falera said.
 
“There should be a transfer of half a million francs from your bank here within forty-eight hours if you’re interested in proceeding any further.
 
If that’s the case, I’ll need to meet with you down in Chur within the week,” he said to Harris. “There’ll be some work in your specialty area to be done.”

Harris nodded.

“Then, gentlemen,” Falera said, “until next week.”

They looked at each other, blinked, as if unused to being so dismissed by anyone they dealt with. After a moment, Harris, then Smyth, got up and walked away, back down toward the station.

Falera watched them go, down the bright pavement, briskly, not looking back. It would normally have taken a lipreader at this distance to tell what Smyth was saying: but Falera had other methods. “Funny accent,” Smyth said to his partner. “Sounded like Basque, almost.”

Harris shrugged. “He doesn’t sound like he really knows who he’s dealing with.”

“Or knows and doesn’t care. In any case, I wouldn’t care to be used for anybody else’s agenda.”

“He came up clean in the check....”

“All the same, he might try to grass us after the fact. These bloody Swiss are too mercenary by half...he was right about that much. I think it would be wisest if he has some kind of accident afterwards.”

“You’ll have to check with Upstairs.”

“They’ll take our advice.”

The two passed out of Falera’s range, down the escalators that led into the shopping center underneath the railway station. Falera sighed and stretched his legs out under the table, then came up with his cellphone.

He dialed. The other end rang and rang, then picked up, and he heard a sound more a growl than a word.

“
Sali.
Did I wake you? Sorry. Well, they’re interested.—Yes, I agree, but they seem to be our best chance at the moment. The market has been slowing down of late.... Fine. Well, about another two weeks yet. They have to pay first, and then we have to get into the system and suborn it. It’ll take a little while.—No, of course no one will notice!  When has anyone ever?.... Right.—Yes, I’ll give you a shout next week. Fine.
Adio
....”

He hung up and looked at the marble pavement, shining in the sun, and drank his beer.

*

They saw each other next in Chur, on a day of sunshine and showers. Every so often dark clouds would come lumbering over the Calanda mountain and drop five minutes’ worth of rain on the cobbled, wet-gleaming streets; then they would roll on south, while everywhere else the sky burned blue and white with cumulus, muttering with desultory thunder.
 
It was through such weather that Harris ran, swearing under his breath, to the rendezvous at the outdoor café on Postplatz which Falera had designated. How they were supposed to have a meeting in a place like that, in such weather, Harris wasn’t sure: but he found the man there nonetheless, the only person sitting outside, snug and dry under a canvas canopy, working at a small personal computer.