Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

And there I remained for a good half-hour, pressing the button, banging on the doors, until the same men returned with coffee mugs and paper bags.

As I reboarded the elevator car, all amorous fantasies had left me. I had no other desire than to return to earth, to go to my room, but when I pressed the button for Floor 1 the damn car shot upwards, six storeys higher in the sky.

I dared not face the abyss beyond the glass-walled car. When the elevator stopped again, I was equally afraid to face the boarding passenger.

The boarding passenger was more afraid of me. She turned away.

The doors closed. I pushed the button for Floor 1 but the damn thing kept on going up.

It stopped on Floor 23 — men and women with labels on their sixteen-button suits. Seeking to avoid their eyes, I pivoted my wheelchair, barked a woman’s shin. I would have apologized, but I did not wish her to hear my speech. I created a bad feeling. I could feel it in their silence.

Then I spied ‘Floor 31 — Consulate of the Republic of Efica’. Abandoning all thought of Jacqui, wishing nothing more than a refuge from foreigners, a respite from dizziness, I climbed up on my wheelchair and pressed the button for the thirty-first floor.

As I rolled out of the elevator I was, technically speaking, home.

On a still-luminous old Efican rag-rug, there were arranged three bronze and leather campaign settees of the type used by the French officers who accompanied the tin-tins to Efica at the beginning of settlement. It was, in some sense, home.

Perched uncomfortably on these settees I saw various persons, the Eficans amongst them identifiable by their absorption in the pink and yellow zines from home, the Voorstanders by their irritation with the uncomfortable settees. No one seemed to have noticed me arrive.

An electronic buzzer sounded. Then a door opened beside the receptionist’s desk, and three people walked out into the foyer. One of them was Jacqui. The second was extraordinarily like Leona the facilitator. She had different hair than the Leona I had met — this hair was black, sleek, long. She had different clothes: stockings, a slick sixteen-button suit. She turned and walked right past me, click-clacking on her shining synthetic shoes.

‘Hi,’ I said.

She looked at me as if she’d never seen me before.

I looked back at Jacqui. Her gaze settled on my agitated face.

‘Tristan,’ she said coolly, ‘what are you doing here?’

What could I say? Now I imagined the whole room was looking at me. My face was hot. My monstrosity was vivid, slippery with sweat. My whole sense of myself came crashing, crushing down on me until I felt I could not breathe. I made myself wheel closer to the object of my affections.

‘This is Gabe,’ she said.

I did not want to look at him. I looked at her troubled face.

‘An old friend,’ she insisted.

An ‘old friend’ held out his hand. I had no choice but to take it. The hand was smooth and dry, not large, but square and strong.

‘Now living in Saarlim,’ she said.

He shook the hand up and down. He smiled — a fiftyish man with a pleasant grin which showed the edge of one slightly (only slightly) crooked tooth.

‘Gabe was just telling me there is a new Sirkus we have to see.’

I did not know he was a murderer. I thought he had been her lover. That is why I hated him so easily. I hated him for being normal, for being with her, for making dreck of all my fantasies.

‘Must see,’ he said.

‘I’m taking you and Wally,’ Jacqui said.

Gabe stared at me, not a little to the left or right, but straight at my eyes. He went right into me, like a gimlet, a corkscrew.

‘The walls of the tent are made from water,’ said Jacqui.

‘The Water Sirkus,’ Gabe explained, but I hardly heard what he was saying. I was realizing just how close to her he was standing, seeing the casual way he brushed his hand against her arm.

*

The polluted water table of Saarlim is cleansed by filtering through these elegant glass towers, which stand, on average, twenty feet in height and measure one or two feet in diameter. There is a famous ‘forest’ of filtreeders in the entertainment district but, more commonly, there is one filtreeder for each city block.

In the old days, Gabe Manzini would have automatically requested hard copies of the faxes which Tristan Smith was reported to have sent to the terrorist group. He would therefore have discovered Jacqui Lorraine’s treason before she was permitted to depart from Chemin Rouge.

Yet when the Efican DoS had requested these same hard copies he had told them no member of Zawba’a had been wire-tapped at the time of the transmission. This was not true. What was true was that my maman’s murderer had become a slightly pudgy man with a red-veined nose and a low-level clearance and this class of information was no longer available to him.

You may remember the Scandale d’Orsay — the case of the alleged VIA officer who was driven to the Paris airport in handcuffs, the beginning of that long rift between Paris and Saarlim. That alleged VIA officer was Gabe Manzini.

Once the French had uncovered him and deported him, the government of Voorstand, in attempting to mend fences with the French, found it diplomatically necessary to sentence their loyal servant to fifteen years in prison.

They had promised him a release in six months, but as relations with France remained both important and difficult, he was kept a prisoner for almost six years.

At the end of that time, they had made an angry and vengeful man of their loyal servant. He was difficult to place: too public a face ever to return to his old work, not academically or temperamentally suited to a senior post in the administration of the Agency.

Finally he was shunted off to head the small and unimportant Efican Department of the VIA, a bureaucratic position that would have been beneath his notice at the time when he was fiddling with the Efican elections. His lack of gratitude won him no friends.

The Efican Department was a sinecure. It came with a small tasteful office, a view of one of the better corners of the Bleskran, but no staff, no secretary — there was no need for them. For six years Gabe Manzini had had nothing much to do except quietly stoke his anger at those who had betrayed him. He played chess with his computer. He constructed complicated strategies of revenge. Twice a year he flew out to Chemin Rouge to meet with the DoS.

In Efica, at least, he remained someone of importance, but in Saarlim he had the smell of anger about him and no one wished to talk to him. In Saarlim he put on weight, took to drinking a bottle of wine with his luncheon. He became chronically depressed.

But then Jacqui Lorraine came into his life, linking Tristan Smith to the hottest target in the world of Voorstand Intelligence. Gabe Manzini latched on to the case as to a life raft.

If he had alerted Internal Security (by requesting copies of the faxes, for instance) they would have thanked him very much — the bastards — and used the information to make themselves look good.

No way was he going to tip off Internal Security. Indeed, so anxious was he that Internal Security should not discover Tristan Smith that he sequestered Leona Fastanyna from the Morean Department and sent her all the way to Neu Zwolfe to pick him up and bring him safely to Saarlim.

He had stuff on the Morean Department. He could therefore trust Leona to keep her information about Tristan Smith out of the Mainframe.

Such was his distrust of Internal Security that he met Jacqui at the Efican Consulate rather than the State Buro. And if she was unlike any DoS operative he had ever met or worked with, he did not have room to suspect her. He was more suspicious of Leona than of Jacqui. Jacqui was an Efican, a good guy. She was his link back into the game, the big game at the VIA, and he therefore desired her.