Iain Banks - Transition

I have much to think about, I think.

When Mr Kleist wakes up he is in some pain. His head hurts a lot. He feels drunk or hungover or both. He has a raging thirst. He can’t breathe very well. This is because he is gagged, with tape. Starting to panic, he looks round. He is in a cellar that he remembers from long ago. He is tied tightly to a central-heating unit.

A youthful figure in a woollen ski mask comes carefully down the stairs, holding a steaming kettle.

Mr Kleist starts trying to scream.

Madame d’Ortolan – forcibly removed, much reduced, quite marooned – on her way to watch the eclipse in Lhasa, on what she is sure will turn out to be another complete waste of time, looks out of the window to watch the crumpled grey, brown and green lands of Tibet slide by. She misses Mr Kleist. Though there was never anything sexual between them, still she misses him.

Her current assistant and bodyguard is asleep on the seat across from her, snoring. He is extremely well built and fit, but quite without an original thought or even observation in his pretty, thick-necked head.

She misses Christophe, the chauffeur, from the other Paris. That was entirely sexual. She breathes deeply, sucking oxygen from the little mask attached to the train’s supply.

She is still thinking of Christophe when the door suddenly flies open. The man is in the compartment and swinging round to face them – arms triangled out, fists closed round a long handgun – before her eyes have had time to fully widen or her mouth can fully open.

The sleeping bodyguard never even wakes up. The closest he gets is that his snoring stops. The last expression on his face is a mild frown. Then his brains are blown across his burly shoulder and onto the carriage window in a grey-red fan, the impact of his head breaking the internal pane of the double-glazed window, spreading cracks like shattered ice.

Madame d’Ortolan flinches back, horrified, screaming, as some of the blood and brains spatters over her. The gunman kicks the door shut, glances round the compartment.

Madame d’Ortolan cuts the scream off, turns to face him. She holds up one hand.

“Now just wait ! Temudjin, if that’s you, I still have considerable resources, much to offer. I-”

He doesn’t say anything. He was only waiting for her to confirm who she was, and she’s done that now.

In the last second before she dies, Madame d’Ortolan realises what is about to happen and stops saying what she was starting to say, instead carefully pronouncing just the one word: “Traitor.”

“Only to you, Theodora,” the gunman murmurs to herself, between the first and second head shots.

Mike Esteros is sitting at the bar of the Commodore Hotel, Venice Beach, after yet another unsuccessful pitch. Technically he doesn’t know it’s unsuccessful yet, but he’s developing a nose for these things and he’d put money on another rejection. It’s starting to get him down. He still believes in the idea and he’s still sure it’ll get made one day, plus he knows that attitude is everything in this business, he must remain positive – if he doesn’t believe in himself, why should anybody else? – but, well, all the same.

The bar is quiet. He wouldn’t normally drink at this time of day. Maybe he needs to adjust the plot, make it more family-oriented. Focus on the boy, on the father – son thing. Cute it up a little. A dusting of schmaltz. Never did any harm. Well, no real harm. Maybe he’s been believing too much in the basic idea, assuming that because it’s so obvious to him what a beautiful, elegant thing it is, it’ll be obvious to everybody else and they’ll be falling over themselves to green-light it and give him lots of money.

And don’t forget Goldman’s Law: nobody knows anything. Nobody knows what will work. That’s why they make so many remakes and Part Twos; what looks like lack of imagination is really down to too much, as paranoid execs visualise all the things that could go wrong with a brand new, untested idea. Going with something containing elements that definitely worked in the past removes some of the terrifying uncertainty.

What he’s got here is a radical, left-field idea. The central concept is almost too original for its own good. That’s why it needs a generous helping of conventionality slathered over it. He’ll rework it, again. It’s not a prospect that fills him with joy, frankly, but he guesses it has to be done and he has to struggle on. It’s worth it. He still believes in it. It’s just a dream, but it’s a dream that could be made real and this is the place where that happens. Your dreams, of your idea and your future self, your fortunes, get turned into reality here. He still loves this place, still believes in it, too.

A woman comes in and sits two seats away. She’s rangy and dark, dressed in jeans and shirt. She sees him looking and he says Hi, asks if he can buy her a drink. She thinks about it, looks at him in a frankly evaluatory way and says okay. A beer. He asks to join her and she says yes to that as well. She’s cute and friendly and smart, nice laugh. Just his type. A lawyer, on a day off, just relaxing. Connie. They get to talking, have another beer each then decide they’re wasting the sunny day and go for a walk along the boardwalk beneath the tall palms, watching the rollers rolling in, the skaters skating, the bladers blading, the cyclists cycling, the walkers walking and the surfers, way in the distance, surfing. They sit in a little café still within sight of the beach, then go for dinner in a little Vietnamese place a short walk away. He gives her the pitch because she’s genuinely interested. She thinks it’s a great idea. It actually seems to make her thoughtful.

Later they walk on the beach in the light of a half-moon, then sit, and there’s some kissing and a modest amount of fooling around, though she’s already told him she doesn’t go any further on a first date. Him too, he tells her, though strictly speaking that’s nonsense of course and he guesses that she guesses this but doesn’t seem to care.

She takes his hands in hers and says, “Michael, what if I said I had access to a lot of money. Money that I think you could use. Money I’d like you to use.”

He laughs. “I’d… think this was too good to be true. You come into a bar, we leave it together, then here we are kissing in the moonlight and now you’re telling me you’re rich?” He shakes his head. “I wouldn’t write this. I wouldn’t dare. You serious?”

“The money would not be for making your script into a film, however.”

“Oh? Well, I’m crushed. What, then?”

“It would be so that you could become a shadow chaser. It would be so that you can travel the world going to particular places on the tracks of eclipses and looking for people who seem a little overdressed, for RVs with dark windows, for rented villas where the locals haven’t seen the residents, for yachts where nobody appears on deck.”

He stares at her for a while. “Hell, girl. You serious about that ?”

“Also, you will need a new identity. There are people who would like to make you disappear. One of them was going to try to do this today. We passed her on the boardwalk earlier.”

He looks around. “Is this a joke? Where’s the camera?”

“No joke, Michael.” She puts her hands round his wrists, encircling them as near as she can. “Now, I am going to bring you back, but let me show how they would make you disappear.”

… “Holy shit.”

Adrian is left disoriented and slightly paranoid by it all. He gets back to dear old Blighty and, thoroughly rattled, begins to sell everything up. Handily, he manages to offload almost all he owns just days before Lehman Brothers collapses and the entirety of international finance falls flailing off the first of several cliffs. He immediately decides this is a sign of his invincible superiority and flawless luck. He also decides to live where his money is – with the Forth International Bank – so buys a villa on Grand Cayman in the Cayman Islands, south of Cuba.