‘Listen to you! According to Calvin, they all deserve it! Besides, bwana. Are you not pleased? Population,’ she whispered in his ear.
‘One less is not many. But it is a start.’
‘He was a brilliant economist. Feeling a little tired?’ He gestured towards the room.
‘No,’ sulked Panga. ‘We go to your room. Buy some chang’aa. Play Bongo Man.’ She moved her hips in a circle.
‘If you don’t mind, Eleanor and I would prefer to be alone.’
‘Look at this!’ she sneered. ‘The happy couple.’ She slouched unwillingly through the door.
‘I liked him!’ cried Calvin after her, and there was a tenor to his voice that Eleanor had never heard before.
‘ Sentimental,’ she hissed from the dark.
He locked the door.
‘But she can walk through walls,’ Eleanor objected.
‘Not mine.’
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Calvin took a moment before drawing the curtains to gaze out on to San Francisco, now deep in a fog that suggested how the sharp lines of his world had blurred in an afternoon. With his inability to see to the next building went an inability to see to tomorrow night, back on a flight to Nairobi with one empty seat and the rest of QUIETUS awaiting his pursuit of a resolve that had suddenly clouded. For once the planet did not seem crowded but forsaken.
Calvin went about the room shutting windows, tugging curtains, and hitching blinds so they met the very sill, as if he were planning not simply to lie down but to develop film. Despite him, cracks shone under the door, through broken slats, in whose glint Eleanor could watch him fumble with slippery buttons. The shirt was sticky and thick, and clung to his chest as he peeled it off.
When he showered, steam billowed from the bath and filled the room—the fog had crept in. Mirrors condensed; his reflection went ghost-like.
‘I’m cold,’ he said, and buried into the blankets, all balled up with his hands between his legs.
Eleanor sat on the edge of the bed. ‘I’m frightened, Calvin. It’s not funny any more. Dissolve QUIETUS, disband the lab. Tell Wallace you quit.’
‘I’m cold,’ he repeated. ‘Come under the covers. I’m cold.’
She stripped quickly and crawled into bed, regretful that her body was so slight and likely to provide only a sliver of the warmth Calvin required.
When he pressed her against him it was the same as ever only worse. They were simply not close enough. Skin on skin, each could feel the cells not meeting. Forms that seem to touch, ask any physi-cist, do so imperfectly, and they could both sense the innumerable pinprick retractions of pores. The tough wet suit that separated their bodies on every occasion was stretched tauter than ever.
Eleanor knew she was not supposed to do this, but there was only way to help Calvin Piper this afternoon, so she reached down for the only part of him that could perforate the noxious rubber shield.
As he broke through, his body relaxed and lost its desperation. His breathing slowed and
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deepened like sleep—he took long, regular draughts of air like water.
You can breathe water. There was a time many years ago that Calvin dreamt of diving all the time, and in a recurring episode he went down without his regulator. After a moment of fear that he would drown, he always discovered that though he had been under for minutes he was right as rain. He could breathe fluid; in fact, it was richer by far than air, and in comparison to the sea the atmosphere was thin, like skim to cream.
Once again he remembered that moment in diving that is the most remarkable experience of the sport and which justifies all the expense and bother of equipment it entails. There you are, bobbling on the surface, lapped left and right, slapped by waves, entangled in tubes and gauges. The surface is loud and here the body is cumbersome.
It was at this unwieldy interface that Calvin had remained with Eleanor for months now, half in, half out, buffeted by the cold air of his life without her, swayed below the waist by currents he could not see. It is the surface that tires you, wrenches you between two worlds, and the only justification for suffering it at all is the blessed release when you give your partner the signal to submerge, dump air from the stab and watch the edge of the sky rise over your mask.
Suddenly your vista is green and infinite. Your body is light, your limbs graceful, and the only sound is bubbles popping from your mouth. To this liquid quietus Calvin finally returned again, swimming with Eleanor under the spread, with the cool rippling leak of water streaming into his wet suit and warming against his skin.
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18
An Elephant for Breakfast
While celibacy over short periods is frustrating or shameful, over long enough it becomes a source of superiority. Calvin had not made love to a woman for eleven years, and had been counting on twelve.
As he woke drenched in sweat, piled with blankets, Calvin kicked himself for having ruined an impeccable record in a single night.
His immediate impulse was to flee. Calvin hauled himself out of bed, no kisses, to step over the hard crumple of his blood-soaked clothes. He yearned to retreat to his study and steep in the blue-green of his computer screen instead of the unframed depths of Eleanor’s deep sea, but the machine was on the other side of the world. Anyway, the work which routinely saved him from the sordid grope and squabble of human relationships had yesterday gone horribly wrong, spattered with the hot, unseemly stains of exactly what he used it to escape from. For the first time Calvin glimpsed how untidy his own designs could become, even if they were drafted in the abstract vacuum of outer space. Why couldn’t demography be revised on paper? Wasn’t it true that he did not wish to be a murderer but a mad mathematician with an eraser?
Eleanor rose while he was shaving, and though he feared she would be clingy she was instead withdrawn, making no mention of their indiscretion. She packed efficiently. Instead of looking triumphant after nearly a year of lying chastely by his side, she seemed, if anything, forlorn.
The morning papers were full of the shooting at the AIDS conference. Many Act Up activists were held for questioning, 252
but the assassination had been professional, and the police had found no gun. Editorials decried how in the name of saving lives they could be taken, for the gays got the blame evidence or not. No one had a clue who Basengi was or by whom he was employed.
The clerk downstairs had spoken to the police about the state of Calvin’s suit. They were waiting for him at breakfast. Calvin claimed never to have met the Pakistani, and described the incident as an isolated trauma he would like to forget, which was accurate enough.
They took his testimony and let him go.
The plane trip home was interminable. Desultory, Eleanor and Calvin flipped in-flight magazines. At least the third empty seat gave Panga a place to sit other than the wing, but even Panga seemed listless. Their threesome, once so jocular, had gone awkward.
A flier himself, Calvin was often uncomfortable as a passenger; this journey he was complacent, blithely taken for a ride. For his life was on auto-pilot. He was no more than obedient automaton, and that the orders came from himself was a technicality. His past was his master. An entire life demanded repudiation, from two billion others, perhaps, whose requirements dwarfed before the consuming agenda of one—this life that had to be finished, rounded; its insistence overwhelmed him. Calvin overwhelmed himself. He could claim he was in the grip of an obsession, but it was stranger than that. The obsession was old and in some ways even over, but not quite, and that he was no longer that interested did not pertain because he did what he was told. He wondered if he no longer really cared about population growth but he used to and that was enough.
He followed through blindly and if it was folly from the start very well, for he felt to his marrow that the race itself was folly in the extreme, so that if he failed and was caught and jailed or killed it didn’t matter, and if he succeeded and it was a horror and backfired it didn’t matter, and if he succ
eeded and the reduction in human numbers was ever so beneficial in the long run that didn’t matter either.
Arriving at Kenyatta Airport, they de-planed grubby, wrinkled and furry-toothed, with that classic anticlimax of 253
arriving home: so much trouble simply to end up where you started.
Oppressively brown, Kenyatta had the atmosphere of a bus station.
Dawdling through immigration, Panga couldn’t find her passport and had to slip through the back wall.
Gratefully as Calvin might have returned to his beloved conspiracy, Nairobi seemed in the distant past though they had only been gone a week, and whenever his mind turned to the object of his fix-ation, it went brown like the airport, as last week’s newspapers will crêpe and ecru. How appalling that in matters affecting the future of the entire human race you could go rather off the idea; that enthusiasm for species salvation could come down to a question of mood.
His office seemed an appealing prospect: the sealed room where he was safe and the atrocity photographs were cosily familiar. But the actual material on screen did not exult him. Calvin wanted to listen to Elgar.
‘He didn’t do it himself, did he?’ asked Eleanor as they drove back to Karen, though neither had mentioned the shooting since the hotel.
‘Of course not.’
‘Is he dangerous? Physically?’
‘Most leaders are only lethal by extension—because of what they think and say and because they’re so persuasive. Only henchmen are literally dangerous. Charismatics tend to be lazy, on the ground, and their sensibilities are often—delicate.’
Out of the window, frazzled brush along Lang’ata recalled anaemic brochures for cut-rate safaris at Let’s Go. The buffalo lolling morosely at the edge of the game park was not faintly exciting—that was what Africa did to you, it shabbied your own love for it, since nothing could remain exotic if you saw it every day. California time was ten hours behind and the blare of sun was horrible. Given a choice, Calvin preferred the dark, and since it should be midnight he felt cheated, overexposed.
‘Might he have hit the wrong man?’
‘Too accurate. Basengi was, if messy, just another envelope in the mail.’
‘Why wasn’t a contract put out on you?’
‘Because then the game would be over. And he enjoys it.’
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Calvin’s voice, too, was faded, yellowed, his opinions pamphleted in a creaky wire rack and beginning to curl.
‘You said he took you seriously.’
‘Games are often serious.’
‘But you’re playing with an entire planet!’
‘Great games have great stakes. Why do you think anyone bothers to go to war?’
‘Personally,’ said Eleanor, ‘I haven’t got the foggiest notion.’
On the answering machine back home was a veiled but urgent message from Norman: ‘Pipe, it’s your lucky day. Elephantine news.
Swing by Pach, toute suite. Cheers.’
Though in an earlier era—that is, before two days ago—the message would have perked him up, this morning Calvin responded with a grunt.
‘What’s that about?’ asked Eleanor.
‘What do you think?’ he snapped.
It was Eleanor’s inspiration that they go to see Wallace Threadgill, though her reasons were weak: ‘To let him know you know who did it,’ when Wallace would be confident his envelope had been properly postmarked; ‘to tell him to stop’, when it was patently absurd to expect a man who had launched an assassination campaign to call it off because a family planning worker didn’t think it was nice; ‘to explain you’ve given up QUIETUS for good’, which was a lie. The very futility of the trip guaranteed Calvin would go that very afternoon because futility was apropos. One more pointless trudge to Wallace’s tent would match the insipid smily sun, the irrelevant animals nodding dully behind their fence, the newly arbitrary nature of night and day.
Wallace had returned from the conference early, skipping the final address, which he expected to be a bit eventful for the contemplative.
Scanning the suitcaseful of photocopies he’d lugged back from San Francisco, he ate a chocolate bar. Wallace was in good humour, which took him by surprise, because Wallace was happy all the time.
When Piper turned up with his cretinous sidekick late afternoon, although according to sources they’d been back in Nairobi a full six hours, Wallace was insulted at the delay.
Piper’s aura had shrunk. His suit was crumpled, his hair 255
lank. The woman looked sleepy, and subsequently said nothing for the whole exchange. Wallace supposed getting that contorted every day must take a lot out of you.
Calvin squared himself on to a three-legged stool and lit a cigarette. Wallace knew for a fact that Piper didn’t smoke, but had purchased a pack for the occasion. A tribute. The stale grey smell mingled with the demographer’s dishevelled demeanour.
‘Ordinarily you rather bore me, Threadgill,’ said Calvin at last.
‘But you’ve finally sparked my curiosity. Just how does a beneficent turn terrorist and still keep his puking sanctity intact?’
‘Terrorists are the most self-righteous people on earth.’ Wallace blew the rancid smoke back in Piper’s direction.
‘I’ve noticed that. How do they do it?’
‘Well, what are you?’
‘A terrorist. But I don’t think I’m a saint. You do.’
‘Human sacrifice is old as the hills, my child.’
The woman lay fatigued in her chair, fishing bits of crust from her eyes. Piper hadn’t carted along a particularly captive audience.
She aimlessly reset her watch. Her face was puffy and she looked ten years older.
‘That’s my line, human sacrifice,’ Piper objected. ‘I think we’re getting our parts confused. I’m having a hard time keeping track of who’s talking.’
Piper tossed the butt on the ground; Wallace extended a chubbly and crushed it. ‘So how did it feel? Not a statistic, but the genuine article?’
‘A bit tawdry. Ruined a good suit.’
‘Try multiplying that by two billion.’
‘Multiplied by two billion there would have been a point to it. I believe in population control, not petty vendetta.’
‘Why, bless my mother’s old boots! You’re incensed! When you’re after two billion and I take out one! Haven’t I joined your side?’
‘Quite. Hence my confusion.’
‘I told you months ago—’ Wallace bounced his cane gamily in his palm. ‘Goodness can be merciless.’
‘Mmm,’ Piper considered. ‘I don’t think so.’
Wallace smiled. ‘I enjoy luring you into debates on the 256
nature of virtue when you deny its existence. Why so shocked when your enemy turns your own weapons against you?’
‘I have never used a Barrett Light 50 in my life.’
‘Death is death. Scrolling through your files, I couldn’t understand why you were so fixated on its mechanics.’
‘I could have you arrested.’
‘You can’t imagine the miserable Asian is traceable to me. And you must admit,’ he added, ‘he really wasn’t a contented man.’
‘He was better off dead?’ asked Piper.
‘It’s instructive to hear one’s own opinions in someone else’s voice.
One is often tempted to disagree.’
Eleanor had invited Oracle to her lap and the little mutt was frantically licking her chin. She looked hungry for animal warmth, stroking the dog and muttering something like, I can’t believe this.
‘As for turning me over to Interpol,’ Wallace proceeded, ‘should you try any such mischief, I will blow you and your poisonous project sky high.’
Calvin mashed another cigarette. ‘ Why haven’t you already?’
‘In 1938,’ said Wallace, ‘two German diplomats went to Chamber-lain and warned of the imminent invasion of Poland. They were accused of being treasonous to their own country and sent packing.
/> All during the war, stragglers from camps tottered into Britain with stories so outlandish the government thought they were mad.’
‘So no one would believe you now.’
‘I do prefer to blow the whistle when I’ve got the goods. But if you force my hand, I will expose you now. You might not hang, but you’d have a poor time paying your phone bill.’
‘Threadgill—’ Piper leaned forward, and cast the rest of the pack in the fire. ‘Why didn’t you have me shot?’
‘Because,’ said Wallace, ‘I think that’s what you want.’
When Calvin returned from his flight to the lab the next evening, Eleanor noticed a blankness in his face right away. He said nothing, but unwrapped a package on the table—a stainless steel cylinder with a lot of clips and catches. It looked tightly sealed and all very high-tech, except for a sticker of Walt Disney’s Dumbo on top, and an ad from an old conser-257
vation campaign during a drought, ‘Buy an elephant a drink’ taped around one side. In the little comic touches Eleanor immediately recognized: Norman. Calvin took a gingerly step back.
‘What’s that?’ asked Eleanor.
‘Pachyderm.’
It took her a minute, but gradually the hairs on her neck rose. ‘No.’
Calvin made a sound of noncommittal confirmation in the back of his throat and sat down. He contemplated the object with his head cocked. ‘It’s not exactly a virus. A “prion”? A protein of some kind.
It’s tiny. Suspended in a solution hundreds of times more potent than botulism. Can be airborne or dissolved in water. Norman got word through his epidemiologist cronies of an AIDS vaccine that went wrong: some it immunized; others it destroyed overnight.’
‘What about the parameters?’
‘It strikes mostly children under five,’ Calvin continued, moderately interested, ‘about 60 per cent, and a progressively smaller percentage of older children and adults. The aged are susceptible—an economic plus.’
‘How does he know?’
‘Well, he was a bit apologetic—’ Calvin fished eight-by-tens from his briefcase. ‘—Since I didn’t give him the go-ahead. But he wanted to surprise me, and you know his position on a test.’