William Boyd - The Blue Afternoon

'Wait here,' Pantaleon said. 'I'll show you.'

Carriscant waited while Pantaleon entered the barn and the sound of hammering ceased. He exhaled and closed his eyes, feeling his aches, feeling the tension in his limbs groan and tighten. His life was complicated enough, confused and disturbed enough, at the moment, he knew, without violent animosity breaking out between him and Cruz, but the uneasy neutrality that had existed since the war had ended in July was bound to founder eventually. Perhaps it was better this way, he tried to tell himself, it would at least take his mind off this impossible, obsessive infatuation he had developed… Put Cruz out to pasture with his dogs and monkeys, run the hospital in his way, according to his principles and advanced scientific method, sweep out the dead wood – 'Salvador, look.'

He opened his eyes. Pantaleon's flying machine was being wheeled out of the shed by a quartet of local carpenters. The thin tapered body rested on a carriage of four bicycle wheels, with a fifth, a smaller one, further back to provide stability. The Aero-mobile, as he remembered it was called, had two wings, one above the other, a dense network of slim bamboo struts and tensed wires between the two. Thrusting up from the rounded nose was a third shorter wing held out and aloft by cradling wooden arms. At the rear was the horizontal semicircular tail, and he noticed that both this and the small panel wing at the front were attached to wire pulley devices that led back to simple wooden levers mounted above the four-wheel carriage. Most of the body and wings were covered with near-transparent panels of silk. He reached out and touched the end of a wing: the material was hard and varnished, it reverberated beneath the tap of his fingernail like a drum.

'Extraordinary,' he said, genuinely amazed. 'And you're sure this thing will fly?'

'In theory. Far enough to win the prize, certainly.'

It looked, to his eyes, very frail and very ugly. Like a giant botched model of a dragonfly, crudely conceived, as if by someone who has only had a dragonfly described to him, rather than seen it with his own eyes, and been told to construct a simulacrum from basket weave, matchwood and paper. It looked front-heavy and impractical… And yet there was something touching and ethereal about its cackhandedness, its very inelegance. Like certain insects, certain ephemera, which look as if they were never designed by God to fly and yet somehow take to the wing to everyone's surprise. Perhaps Pantaleon's machine would be the same.

'What's missing are the propellers, two of them,' Pantaleon said, indicating a wooden mounting on the lower, leading wing. 'Screw propellers, based on the marine model but larger. The engine will be here in the nose, and we'll run chains out here to drive the propellers.'

Carriscant wandered around to the rear of the machine. He really had to congratulate Pantaleon: this idealistic dedication, this single-minded pursuit of a dream was rare in anyone, and now it produced a Pantaleon he hardly recognised. He felt sudden tears of emotion in his eyes and his gaze blurred with salty water. Tears of pride and admiration, tears of love for this lanky young friend of his.

Pantaleon was wiggling the large semicircular tail. It was mounted on a block that could turn, allowing the tail to rotate partially on its axis: one tip dropping two feet while the other rose, and vice versa.

'This is the crucial control,' Pantaleon was saying. 'It took me a year to develop, and long observation of gliding birds – hawks, buzzards. It's this ability to twist their tails-' he demonstrated with his spread fingers, waggling left and right, ' – that controls rolling in flight.' He smiled at Carriscant. 'Pitch, yaw and roll,' he said, 'that is what the aero-mobilist really has to conquer. Once we control these three devils then the air will become our new domain…' He walked over to Carriscant and put his arm round his shoulders. 'Please, Salvador, don't cry, there's no need.' Carriscant, wordless, moved, turned away and blew his nose into his handkerchief.

'I'm overwhelmed, Panta, overwhelmed.' He embraced him. 'After a day such as I've had you don't know what a tonic you are, my friend, what an inspiration.'

Carriscant supervised the installation of the ice chests in the new morgue himself. They were in fact used for the refrigerated transportation of perishable food at sea, first developed in Australia, Udo Leys had told him, when Carriscant had first described Cruz's arrangement. And it was Udo who had managed to procure these three second-hand examples for him, not quite as large as Cruz's, but capacious enough to hold two bodies very comfortably. He had had the interior lining cavity restuffed with new straw and had had the stencilled sign on the side, 'Oh Chung Lu, Meat amp; Fish Importers', painted over. Filled with ice, the chests (one containing Ward, whom he had rescued from the old morgue, one containing Braun) were pushed against three walls of the new morgue while in the middle of the room was an enamel-topped examination table with three tin basins beneath. There was already a sink against the fourth wall and the wooden floorboards had been covered with a waterproof cork carpet on his instructions. The morgue would function perfectly until he could secure Cruz's dismissal. It also provided him, he realised, with an ideal place for his own dissections and investigations, should he require it. There was no longer any need to visit the anatomy laboratory at San Lazaro hospital: everything necessary was now under his own roof.

He was standing in the new morgue at 6 o'clock the next evening, indecisive, wondering whether he should return home now the day's work was done, or whether he should make one further tour of his wards, when a porter knocked on the door with an envelope marked 'urgent and personal'. He tore it open and read the large rapid scrawl.

Dear Carriscant,

I need your help with the utmost urgency on a delicate medical matter. I would be most grateful if you could call on me this evening at my house, 5 Lagarda Street in San Miguel, at your earliest convenience, any time this evening. I count on your help and your confidentiality.

Yours faithfully,

Jepson Sieverance

Sieverance's house was one of five large newish villas built in the Antillean style not far from the Malacanan Palace, all occupied by members of the Governor's staff, that formed a small compound called the Calle Lagarda. There was even a marine on guard at the entrance to the cul de sac, sitting idly in a sentry box. He waved Carriscant's victoria through with barely a glance.

Carriscant was shown up to the living room on the first floor where Sieverance greeted him, clearly in a state of anxiety, his face drawn, and somehow sucked in, as if he had lost weight dramatically in the last twenty-four hours. He shook Carriscant's hand over-eagerly, almost abject in his gratitude.

'I can't thank you enough, Carriscant. I'm in your debt.'

'It's nothing, really. What's the trouble? You don't look at all well, I must say.'

'This way, please.'

He led Carriscant out of the living room and down a corridor towards, Carriscant imagined, a bedroom where he could be examined in privacy. He paused at a door and knocked gently on it.

'Delphine?' he said. 'May we come in?'

He knew at once, of course, immediately, with no doubts or second thoughts. He was vaguely aware of Sieverance opening the door, and of following him into the room. Oil lamps, turned down by a bedside. A gauzy tent of mosquito netting. The sway of the punkah fan on the ceiling, to and fro, to and fro…

He ordered his legs to carry him to the bedside as Sieverance gently folded back the netting. He held his face immobile, eyes still, as she turned from her doze to see who it was.