Филип Керр - The Second Angel

‘Yeah,’ laughed Gates. ‘Only first you gotta find yourself a rabbit.’

The large, starkly furnished room was dominated by a dolmen-sized fireplace where a tepee of logs big enough to have consumed Savonarola and all the vanities with him burned fiercely under the gaze of one who stared into the flames with an almost pyrolatrous enthusiasm.

‘Shit, Reinbek,’ exclaimed Gates, sniffing the air with relish. ‘Are those real logs?’

‘Yeah. I was just thinking what the world must have been like when there were lots of trees around. Can’t think why they cut ’em down. There’s not much heat in wood. But it’s better than holo-TV. You can see plenty of things in fire.’

‘Moses did,’ said Gates.

‘You should know, Rameses.’ Reinbek turned away from the fire to face the quartet of recent arrivals, and put his arm around the neck of a woman wearing an eyepatch who seemed to be his companion. ‘How are you, Gates?’

Gates nodded. ‘Not so bad.’

Reinbek stood up straight and smiled at Ronica.

‘What tribe are you?’ he asked her abruptly.

Ronica didn’t really think of herself as belonging to any tribe. No one would have asked her such a question in the Zone. But she knew what Reinbek meant and tried to humor him. ‘Originally, I’m Masai,’ she said.

‘And what’s the blood quantum on that?’ [85] Blood quantum. A quasi-genetical idea governing race qualification.

‘Qualification is set at quite a high level,’ she explained. ‘You have to show one-eighth pure Masai blood. As it happens, I’m a quarter-blood.’

Reinbek nodded. ‘Me,’ he said, ‘I’m from a little town near Hamburg.’

Tall and thin, with long gray-blond hair, a straggly beard, and dark shadows under his blue eyes, Reinbek reminded her of a painting she had once seen, a self-portrait of Albrecht Dürer. Or maybe it had been of some saint or maybe an angel. She couldn’t remember, which was a sure sign that the Connex drug was wearing off now. And there was certainly nothing saintly about what Reinbek did next. Suddenly he was behind her, with one arm across her chest and arms, and pressing the cold edge of a long thin blade against the side of her neck.

‘I’m half German,’ he breathed. ‘But as anyone will tell you, I’m a full-blooded sadist. Isn’t that right, Rameses?’

Gates spoke carefully. It was clear there was no point in trying to pull Ronica away from Reinbek. He would almost certainly have cut her throat just for the pleasure of it. ‘Let her go, Reinbek,’ he said. ‘She’s not done you any harm.’

‘What do you weigh, Miss Masai?’

‘Around one forty,’ she answered coolly.

‘Mmmm, that’s about eleven pints of RES Class One,’ Reinbek said thoughtfully. ‘More than enough to fix up my friend there.’ He nodded toward his female companion. ‘What do you say, Miss Masai? Shall I cut this artery and fetch a bucket?’

‘And risk spilling it?’ said Ronica. ‘Sounds like a waste of good blood to me.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t spill much. Only fifteen percent of your blood is in your arteries at any one time. Mostly the blood’s in your veins. They’ve got seventy percent of the load.’

‘C’mon, Reinbek. Stop fooling around,’ said Gates. ‘We’ve got some business to talk about.’

With a greasy thumb, Reinbek stretched the skin across Ronica’s carotid artery, as if he really might cut it with his blade. The pressure made Ronica feel momentarily faint, which only served to remind her of how the word ‘garrotte’ had the same Greek origin as ‘carotid.’ That, she told herself, was the last of the Connex working. What a night this was turning out to be. Somehow she was managing to keep her nerve, even when she found Reinbek’s hand underneath her dress and between her breasts, pressing hard against her sternum. He was searching for her heartbeat. It wasn’t difficult to find. She reckoned her aorta must have been receiving blood pumped from her left ventricle at the rate of over one hundred and forty beats a minute — twice her resting rate. She was even feeling a little out of breath.

‘I can hear your blood talking to me, Miss Masai,’ Reinbek said gleefully. ‘Lots of it, too. It’s a fine heart you have there, miss. What if I was to cut it out and eat it?’

In view of what Gates had said about Reinbek’s mental state, she tried to maintain the illusion of calm, though she was close to panic. Even Rimmer had not frightened her this much.

‘Then you’d be a cannibal,’ she said.

‘True,’ grinned Reinbek. ‘You know, maybe I should just sell your blood to the highest bidder. Eleven pints of the ice you’ve got in your veins ought to be worth a great deal.’

‘Eleven pints,’ sneered Gates. ‘That’s a pinprick compared to what we’re offering to sell.’

‘Much less than a pinprick,’ echoed Dallas. ‘It’s a single cell compared to what we’re offering.’

Reinbek released his hold on Ronica and smiled broadly at her.

‘I like you,’ he said, pocketing the knife, his mood pitching in the opposite direction now. ‘I do admire a girl who’s got real blood in her veins. Sangfroid, my dear. You’ve got it in spades. That’s what you’ve got. Yes indeed. Whole fridges full of the stuff. Yes, you’ll do very well, Miss Masai.’

Ronica rubbed her neck with relief and said, ‘Thanks for the vote of confidence.’

‘Don’t mention it.’ Reinbek lit up a large cigar and puffed it into action. ‘Now then, Rameses. What exactly are we talking about here?’

‘The opportunity of a lifetime. Lots of people’s lifetimes, I shouldn’t wonder. Mine included. We’re talking about the seat of the soul here, Reinbek. Life’s microcosm.’

‘Well I hear that, Rameses old friend. He hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the earth, [86] Acts 17:26. has he not? I do believe he has. What kind of blood are we talking about here, Rameses. And how much?’

‘Pure erythrocyte. The real McCoy. No substitute. And in the kind of quantities that Moses might use to drown an Egyptian army or two.’

‘I am metabolized by your information, Rameses. My humor improves. Black bile and phlegm give way to blood, as you might expect. Where exactly is this red sea of yours?’

‘I’ll only tell Kaplan.’

‘Then why do you need me?’

‘Everyone knows, you’re Kaplan’s liver. Such a heavy flow of blood must come through you first. You could fix a meeting.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Protection. Somewhere to sleep. Food.’

Reinbek glanced at Dallas as if judging the truth of Gates’s story.

‘The red sea, huh?’ he said.

‘That’s right.’ Gates nodded toward Dallas. ‘And with an angel promised as a guide.’

Time: Perhaps it is best understood in the way a story is told. Most stories seem to have a narrative flow, which is of course how most people would characterize time: as something that moves inexorably forward. But of course this is simply not so. Time is not a sequence of events, any more than a story needs to be told this way. That time seems to pass by is only a matter of perception, between what is now and what was then. The present exists only subjectively. We can look at one representation of the present and compare it with another representation of the present, and be forgiven for thinking that there is motion between these moments. There is not. No more than there is real motion between the way two writers will deal with a lapse of time. Just as one author will give you a summary of ten years in two pages, another will spend thirty pages to render a conversation lasting as many minutes.