When Rachel entered, the stifling heat of a gas fire and the smell of beer washed over her. The place was small and quiet, just a handful of tables and a large wireless set playing a German song, dog-themed paintings and posters on blue walls, a scuffed bar with brass taps. The landlord, an old man with a thick white moustache, looked up at her and then went back to polishing a pint glass.
She ordered half a pint of cider for herself and a pint of lager, peeled off her winter coat and sat down near the fireplace to wait. She had started to feel like she was fighting a cold and the warmth felt good. Fifteen minutes later, the bell above the door tinkled and Bloom walked in.
‘Peter. It is good to see you again. I bought you a drink.’
This was the first time Rachel had seen Bloom in the flesh since the Harrises’ soirée. As far as she could tell, he was wearing the same body as the last time, although he looked bearlike in his thick duffel coat and hat.
The barman frowned at Bloom and went on polishing his glassware. The New Dead were not welcome everywhere, especially not amongst German immigrants. The crushing defeat of Germany in the Great War and the role ectotechnology had played in it had left deep scars.
‘This weather makes me appreciate your fortitude during our first meeting,’ Peter said. ‘Thank you for coming at short notice.’
In the last two weeks, Rachel had taken several more steps towards treason. At Bloom’s request, she had jotted down notes on her co-workers. She found it cathartic, especially describing Miss Scaplehorn as a beak-nosed harpy. She chronicled rivalries between Section heads and affairs between junior agents and secretaries. She made most of them up, with enough half-truths to appear plausible.
She delivered her reports to Bloom via ectomail drops, which seemingly by accident established a reasonably secure covert communications protocol. They spoke briefly on the ectophone and went for a walk in Serpentine Park one Saturday, Rachel with the ectophone buds in her ears, Peter in spirit. There was little need to mask her emotions that time—she genuinely enjoyed his company. Like Joe, Bloom lacked the snobbishness that characterised many Court agents. He kept the conversation light, asking Rachel about India and relating a few amusing anecdotes about C.
This meeting, however, felt much more serious.
‘I did not expect to see you in the flesh again,’ Rachel said.
‘I was needed in Blenheim. Spain went pear-shaped so quickly it’s all hands on deck. The Army might end up having to fight British volunteers, would you believe it? It’s a mess. How we ended up in it is a textbook example of the problem we are trying to solve here, really—the lack of Winter and Summer collaboration. Your reports have been very helpful in gauging the temperature up here.’
He took off his mask but kept his hat on, and quickly donned a pair of tinted glasses that hid the medium’s blank eyes. His charter-body’s face was pale and rounded. He looked a little like a chubby boy wearing his father’s hat.
Not for the first time, Rachel wondered about Bloom. In her experience, a double agent was motivated by ideology, sex, money or ambition. Peter did not quite fit any of them. Maybe he was simply a better actor than most.
‘I’m glad to hear it. The Finance Section continues to be as exciting as always,’ she said. ‘Over time, I could even get used to it.’
‘I doubt that, Rachel. I really doubt it.’ Bloom sipped his beer and grimaced. ‘I’m afraid I don’t really like beer. Although this body appears to.’
She raised her cider glass. ‘One more sip, for good luck?’
They clinked glasses.
‘It is nice to meet like this,’ Rachel said. ‘The other times … well, I always felt sort of naked.’
‘Really?’
‘That came out wrong. But I knew you could see my thoughts.’
‘Not your thoughts. Just a glimpse of your emotions. Your aetheric shadow. It is unfair, I know.’
‘So, what did you see, Mr Bloom?’
Bloom sipped his pint and then stared at it. ‘You are very unhappy. Not just angry. Something happened to you. Did you lose someone? Not that it is any of my business.’
‘Yes. Yes, I did.’
‘It is hard, isn’t it?’ Bloom said. ‘Younger people do not even understand what death is anymore. We have all become like children that way. That is probably why people are happy to send soldiers into harm’s way in Spain. It’s not real to them.’
‘You lost someone, too,’ Rachel said.
‘My father. He never got a Ticket. He was too stubborn. I am not sure what happened to him. I expect he Faded quickly.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
Peter emptied half his pint with one gulp. ‘You know, this stuff is starting to grow on me. That happens a lot: the medium likes something and you start to like it, too. I now have a surprising fondness for orange marmalade, for example.’ He looked at Rachel, his medium’s blank eyes just visible behind the glasses. ‘I’m sorry. I am rambling.’
Rachel smiled in spite of herself. A person who liked orange marmalade could not be all bad.
‘No, no, it’s absolutely fine,’ she said. ‘I would love to know more about you.’
Peter stiffened and cradled his pint in his hands.
A mistake, Rachel thought. I went too far.
She finished her own drink and ordered two more. Max had warned her about this. He will share something. It will be calculated, not a lie but not the whole truth, either, designed to evoke sympathy.
Two could play that game.
‘I lost a child,’ Rachel said.
Bloom blinked. She lowered her voice.
‘Looking back, I think we decided to have a baby for the wrong reasons. My husband—he has some issues. He needed something to ground him. It felt like the right thing to do at the time.’
Joe would have been a good father, Rachel knew, especially for a boy, with stories from his rugby days and flying. Sharing them with his son might even have helped him to heal.
‘The pregnancy was fine, at first. Maybe it is a bit like being possessed by a spirit: a strange new being inside you, with its own desires. I can’t say that I was any fonder of orange marmalade than I am now, but at one point, I did find myself nibbling at pieces of lavatory paper.’ She laughed softly.
She had imagined a boy, someone with Joe’s eyes and her own complexion, a mirror to them both. The child had grown in her mind before it was even conceived and quickly became the centre around which things revolved. Although she remembered the moment of conception itself very well. Their lovemaking was infrequent at best even then, but that evening they had been to the Harrises’, were both a little drunk and Gertrude had the night off. Somehow Joe fumbling with the keys had transformed into Rachel kissing his neck and that led to shedding of clothes and a furious coupling in the drawing room where the groans of the old couch mixed with theirs.
Rachel smiled a little, lost in the memory, and then continued, ‘I was going to call him Edmund Angelo, after my uncle. In all honesty, it took a while for me to stop feeling that the child would be a distraction from my work. Then I realised that having someone to protect would make me more dedicated than ever to keeping England safe. In any case, we planned to have nannies, and Edmund would look forward to me coming home. We had a little nursery set up. Joe was happier than I had seen him, well, ever. I bought Edmund books and clothes. I imagined reading to him, all tucked under the covers, eyes closed, asking questions, drifting to sleep. When he was old enough, I was going to read him The Water-Babies, and The Velveteen Rabbit.’
There were a few happy weeks after she realised she was pregnant, and then she bled on the bathroom floor. Nine weeks from conception meant no soul, according to the theory, no electrical net of the brain to catch a soul-star falling from the Unseen.
‘It happened so quickly. I touched the thing that came out. It was so tiny, like a seed. And then—’ She covered her mouth with her hand.
Dizzy from the blood loss, she had imagined planting it in a po
t and growing Edmund like a flower.
Bloom took her hand. ‘Ssh. You can stop there.’
She looked at him, tried to ignore the blank eyes and the doll-like face. Suddenly, the beer smell made her feel sick.
‘It is quite all right,’ she said. ‘I did not lose anyone real.’
‘I think you did. Of course you did.’
When she recovered, she studied the literature and tried to understand how her body had betrayed her, interrogated it as if it was an imprisoned suspect, but to no avail. All that was left was a sense of failure and a memory of someone who had never existed.
‘Do you see now? Work was all I had left.’ She squeezed Bloom’s cold hand. ‘And then those bastards took it away. Give me something to do, please. Something that matters.’
‘Rachel. I understand. Believe me, I understand.’ He gripped her hand back and held it tight. It looked like he wanted to say something but could not quite bring himself to do so. This time, Rachel did not dare to push, and the moment passed.
Peter let go of Rachel’s hand and took a roll of papers from his coat pocket.
‘There is something I didn’t want to ask you, before. It is very important. I am running an operation in Spain and the Winter Court is not cooperating. I need a file I can’t get hold of through official channels.’
He handed the papers to Rachel. There was a Registry cover sheet and a budget, a long list of line items related to a project called CAMLANN.
‘There was a programme, ten years ago. I think someone who worked on it has been compromised by the Russians, but the full records were never aetherised. If I go through the official channels, the target will be spooked. But I need to know what they had access to.’
‘Well, I should still know a few people who maintain the original Registry,’ Rachel said. ‘I will look into it for you.’ She did not hide the eagerness in her voice.
‘It is very urgent,’ Bloom said apologetically. ‘And confidential, of course. Anything you can give me will be a huge help.’
‘I will need a couple of days.’
‘Of course. Just let me know through the usual channels and we can make arrangements to meet again.’
‘I would like that.’
Bloom removed his glasses and put his mask back on. ‘All right. I had better return this gentleman I am wearing to his home, and make my way back to the madhouse.’
Rachel smiled. ‘Travel safe, Peter.’
She watched him leave, waited for a while and then drank the rest of the cider to celebrate her victory.
It tasted flat, drinking alone in an empty pub.
Who would I even celebrate with? she wondered. An absent husband whose nightmares come alive? A dead spy who keeps snakes in his bathtub? A former secretary who wants another notch in his belt before he becomes a ghost?
She knew it was part of the game, but she had told Bloom things not even Joe knew, and he had listened, and understood. It made her feel better than she had in months.
It was hard to hate Bloom. He had his own wounds, it was clear. Was it worth destroying him just to show the old men at SIS what a mistake they had made? Was the story her ayah told her about a magic kingdom, the story she told herself, really worth it? Were Bloom’s beliefs any different from her own? What had Kulagin said? We are all comrades together, men and women, in the same shit.
At death’s door, with Kulagin’s hands around her throat, she had not really fought for England, but for her own freedom.
She looked at the papers on the beer-stained table and her stomach twisted with guilt. What was wrong with her? For a moment, it had felt right to give Bloom what he wanted, to turn her charade with him into something real. For all she knew, giving him CAMLANN would mean countless deaths.
Her hands shook. She needed to ground herself before it was too late. Suddenly, she missed Joe very badly. There was a time when talking to him had made the world make sense.
It was not fair to her husband to tell a Soviet spy things she would not tell him. It was not fair of him to try to keep his nightmares inside until they spilled out when they were in bed together, dreadful and poisonous.
Rachel gathered the papers into her purse and paid the barman. The wireless set coughed and wailed briefly, then resumed its song.
Catching Bloom could wait for one evening. She was going to have dinner with her husband, and they were going to have a conversation.
16
DAS DASEIN, 30TH NOVEMBER 1938
After meeting Rachel White, Peter Bloom dined at the Lyons Corner House, near Tottenham Court Road, a comfortably middle-class but well-decorated place with modern bowl-like lamps and mirrors cut in Modernist waves.
Two tables away from Peter, Otto and Nora talked animatedly. She laughed loud and often, whereas he smoked a cigarette thoughtfully, staring at his cup of coffee, nodding occasionally.
They had set up a new protocol for in-person meetings which involved surveillance avoidance before making contact. Peter had requested a meeting because the Special Committee had sent him to Blenheim to try to prepare a comprehensive report on what had gone wrong with the Dzhugashvili operation. His day had been full of debriefings with shocked operatives, followed by a drink with Rachel White. He was looking forward to speaking to someone he did not have to lie to.
He was supposed to be alert and ready to move, but his thoughts kept wandering back to Rachel White.
She had opened up in the same way as others before her, when a bridge of trust suddenly crossed the chasm between the asset and the handler. Her motivations were classic: a feeling of being underappreciated heightened by personal tragedy. She was competent and driven, and the task of retrieving the CAMLANN file was well within her capabilities.
It should have been easy to maintain detachment, but there was a moment when he wanted to tell her the whole truth. It had felt unfair not to share something after she revealed the seed of her pain. It was like closing himself off to Astrid, only worse. He only wished there was something he could have given her in return, some reflection of the clarity he had found in Unschlicht’s room in Cambridge years ago.
* * *
Unschlicht’s suitcase had contained a machine, which Peter later learned was a predecessor of the Fialka: a typewriter keyboard with both Cyrillic and English alphabets, wired rotors and a long roll of typewriter paper.
Unschlicht flipped a switch and the machine hummed to life. Peter brushed the keys and then snatched his hand back. The metal was so cold it almost hurt to touch it.
‘Go on,’ Unschlicht said. ‘Ask him anything.’
‘What is it supposed to do?’
The philosopher made a face. ‘Not it. Him. No doubt, with their usual imprecision, Doctor Morcom and his friend Turing would call him an oracle. A more accurate term is das Dasein—how do you say?—Ah yes, the Presence.’
Back then, Peter had no idea about the existence of the Soviet overmind; Lenin’s death and transformation had not been made public. For all the world knew, the great revolutionary was still alive, leading the Red Empire with inhuman efficiency.
‘What should I ask?’
Unschlicht threw his hands up in frustration. ‘Mr Bloom, it is utterly impossible for me to comprehend your interiority or, indeed, understand it even if I could access it. I can only state what I would ask, in identical circumstances: things which I would consider intractable to conventional reasoning. For example, is there a rhino in this room, right now? That is not something I can definitely, with human reasoning, refute.’
Peter stared at him. It would be very like Unschlicht to organise some kind of bizarre philosophical experiment, a teletype machine and a graduate student who provided answers.
Very well. He was going to put the experimenters to the test.
THE GREEK SAYS ALL GREEKS ARE LIARS, he typed. TRUE OR FALSE?
The keys were stiff and their chill stung his fingers. The machine made a moaning, otherworldly sound. Then it chattered and an answer appeared on the
roll of paper.
BOTH, it said.
Definitely a graduate student, thought Peter. Well, at least Unschlicht had managed to provide a diversion from his despair. Peter owed it to him to play along.
PROVE IT, he typed.
With lightning speed, the paper started filling with symbols of predicate calculus. Peter watched, perplexed, as in an impossibly concise yet perfectly lucid fashion, the Presence proved the most beautiful theorem he had ever seen.
It stated that self-referential paradoxes like the Liar were inevitable in mathematics. If you started with self-consistent assumptions, you were bound to find them eventually, no matter how rigorous your thinking. But there was a way out. Every paradox hid a leap of faith within. You had to assume that the Liar was either true or false and take it as a new axiom—thus creating a new system of thinking which, in turn, had its own Liars. And so on and so on, a tree of branching paradoxes, forever.
The Liar did not imply that mathematics was broken. It implied that mathematics was infinite.
And that was something true, not just in the world of the living or Summerland, but in all possible worlds.
Peter stared at the final line, transfixed. QUOD ERAT DEMONSTRANDUM, it said.
‘That’s impossible,’ he said.
‘Mr Bloom, I am not even going to dignify that statement with a remark.’
In The Science of Death, Mr West had speculated about the creation of artificial electric networks complex enough to bind luz stones as they fell from the Unseen, machines with souls. Was this one of them? If so, it was infinitely more advanced than the theoretical designs discussed in Dr Morcom’s lectures.
Later, he would learn how far away from the truth his notion was.
‘Tell me what this is,’ Peter said. ‘I will do anything. Please.’
Unschlicht looked at him, head in his curious bird-of-prey tilt.
‘Why, Mr Bloom, he is the Presence. The only way to know him is to become him. Now, am I to understand that this is the extent of your curiosity? How very disappointing.’