Imajica Read online

  The ambition of those heady days had ended in tragedy, of course. Rites intended to heal the rift in the Imajica, and reconcile the Fifth Dominion with the other four, had gone disastrously awry. Many great theurgists, shamans, and theologians had been killed. Determined that such a calamity never be repeated, several of the survivors had banded together in order to cleanse the Fifth of all magical knowledge. But however much they scrubbed to erase the past, the slate could never be entirely cleansed. Traces of what had been dreamed and hoped for remained; fragments of poems to Union, written by men whose names had been systematically removed from all record. And as long as such scraps remained, the spirit of the Reconciliation would survive.

  But spirit was not enough. A Maestro was needed, a magician arrogant enough to believe that he could succeed where Christos and innumerable other sorcerers, most lost to history, had failed. Though these were blissless times, Dowd didn’t discount the possibility of such a soul appearing. He still encountered in his daily life a few who looked past the empty gaud that distracted lesser minds and longed for a revelation that would burn the tinsel away, an Apocalypse that would show the Fifth the glories it yearned for in its sleep.

  If a Maestro was going to appear, however, he would need to be swift. Another attempt at Reconciliation couldn’t be planned overnight, and if the next midsummer went unused, the Imajica would pass another two centuries divided: time enough for the Fifth Dominion to destroy itself out of boredom or frustration and prevent the Reconciliation from ever taking place.

  Dowd perused his newly polished shoes. “Perfect,” he said. “Which is more than I can say for the rest of this wretched world.”

  He crossed to the door. The voiders lingered by the body, however, bright enough to know they still had some duty to perform with it. But Dowd called them away.

  “We’ll leave it here,” he said. “Who knows? It may stir a few ghosts.”

  I

  TWO DAYS AFTER THE predawn call from Judith—days in which the water heater in the studio had failed, leaving Gentle the option of bathing in polar waters or not at all (he chose the latter)—Klein summoned him to the house. He had good news. He’d heard of a buyer with a hunger that was not being satisfied through conventional markets, and Klein had allowed it to be known that he might be able to lay his hands on something attractive. Gentle had successfully re-created one Gauguin previously, a small picture which had gone onto the open market and been consumed without any questions being asked. Could he do it again? Gentle replied that he would make a Gauguin so fine the artist himself would have wept to see it. Klein advanced Gentle five hundred pounds to pay the rent on the studio and left him to it, remarking only that Gentle was looking a good deal better than he’d looked previously, though he smelled a good deal worse.

  Gentle didn’t much care. Not bathing for two days was no great inconvenience when he only had himself for company; not shaving suited him fine when there was no woman to complain of beard burns. And he’d rediscovered the old private erotics: spit, palm, and fantasy. It sufficed. A man might get used to living this way; might get to like his gut a little ample, his armpits sweaty, his balls the same. It wasn’t until the weekend that he started to pine for some entertainment other than the sight of himself in the bathroom mirror. There hadn’t been a Friday or Saturday in the last year which hadn’t been occupied by some social gathering, where he’d mingled with Vanessa’s friends. Their numbers were still listed in his address book, just a phone call away, but he felt squeamish about making contact. However much he may have charmed them, they were her friends, not his, and they’d have inevitably sided with her in this fiasco.

  As for his own peers—the friends he’d had before Vanessa—most had faded. They were a part of his past and, like so many other memories, slippery. While people like Klein recalled events thirty years old in crystalline detail, Gentle had difficulty remembering where he was and with whom even ten years before. Earlier than that still, and his memory banks were empty. It was as though his mind was disposed only to preserve enough details of his history to make the present plausible. The rest it disregarded. He kept this strange fallibility from almost everybody he knew, concocting details if pressed hard. It didn’t much bother him. Not knowing what it meant to have a past, he didn’t miss it. And he construed from exchanges with others that though they might talk confidentially about their childhood and adolescence, much of it was rumor and conjecture, some of it pure fabrication.

  Nor was he alone in his ignorance. Judith had once confided that she too had an uncertain grasp of the past, though she’d been drunk at the time and had denied it vehemently when he’d raised the subject again. So, between friends lost and friends forgotten, he was very much alone this Saturday night, and he picked up the phone when it rang with some gratitude.

  “Furie here,” he said. He felt like a Furie tonight. The line was live, but there was no answer. “Who’s there?” he said. Still, silence. Irritated, he put down the receiver. Seconds later, the phone rang again. “Who the hell is this?” he demanded, and this time an impeccably spoken man replied, albeit with another question.

  “Am I speaking to John Zacharias?”

  Gentle didn’t hear himself called that too often. “Who is this?” he said again.

  “We’ve only met once. You probably don’t remember me. Charles Estabrook?”

  Some people lingered longer in the memory than others. Estabrook was one. The man who’d caught Jude when she’d dropped from the high wire. A classic inbred Englishman, member of the minor aristocracy, pompous, condescending and—

  “I’d like very much to meet with you, if that’s possible.”

  “I don’t think we’ve got anything to say to each other.”

  “It’s about Judith, Mr. Zacharias. A matter I’m obliged to keep in the strictest confidence but is, I cannot stress too strongly, of the profoundest importance.”

  The tortured syntax made Gentle blunt. “Spit it out, then,” he said.

  “Not on the telephone. I realize this request comes without warning, but I beg you to consider it.”

  “I have. And no. I’m not interested in meeting you.”

  “Even to gloat?”

  “Over what?”

  “Over the fact that I’ve lost her,” Estabrook said. “She left me, Mr. Zacharias, just as she left you. Thirty-three days ago.” The precision of that spoke volumes. Was he counting the hours as well as the days? Perhaps the minutes too? “You needn’t come to the house if you don’t wish to. In fact, to be honest, I’d be happier if you didn’t.”

  He was speaking as if Gentle would agree to the rendezvous, which, though he hadn’t said so yet, he would.

  II

  It was cruel, of course, to bring someone of Estabrook’s age out on a cold day and make him climb a hill, but Gentle knew from experience you took whatever satisfactions you could along the way. And Parliament Hill had a fine view of London, even on a day of lowering cloud. The wind was brisk, and as usual on a Sunday the hill had a host of kite flyers on its back, their toys like multicolored candies suspended in the wintry sky. The hike made Estabrook breathless, but he seemed glad that Gentle had picked the spot.

  “I haven’t been up here in years. My first wife used to like coming here to see the kites.”

  He brought a brandy flask from his pocket, proffering it first to Gentle. Gentle declined.

  “The cold never leaves one’s marrow these days. One of the penalties of age. I’ve yet to discover the advantages. How old are you?”

  Rather than confess to not knowing, Gentle said, “Almost forty.”

  “You look younger. In fact, you’ve scarcely changed since we first met. Do you remember? At the auction? You were with her. I wasn’t. That was the world of difference between us. With; without. I envied you that day the way I’d never envied any other man, just for having her beside you. Later, of course, I saw the same look on other men’s faces—”

  “I didn’t come here to hear
this,” Gentle said.

  “No, I realize that. It’s just necessary for me to express how very precious she was to me. I count the years I had with her as the best of my life. But of course the best can’t go on forever, can they, or how are they the best?” He drank again. “You know, she never talked about you,” he said. “I tried to provoke her into doing so, but she said she’d put you out of her mind completely—she’d forgotten you, she said—which is nonsense, of course.”

  “I believe it.”

  “Don’t,” Estabrook said quickly. “You were her guilty secret.”

  “Why are you trying to flatter me?”

  “It’s the truth. She still loved you, all through the time she was with me. That’s why we’re talking now. Because I know it, and I think you do too.”

  Not once so far had they mentioned her by name, almost as though from some superstition. She was she, her, the woman: an absolute and invisible power. Her men seemed to have their feet on solid ground, but in truth they drifted like the kites, tethered to reality only by the memory of her.

  “I’ve done a terrible thing, John,” Estabrook said. The flask was at his lips again. He took several gulps before sealing it and pocketing it. “And I regret it bitterly.”

  “What?”

  “May we walk a little way?” Estabrook said, glancing towards the kite flyers, who were both too distant and too involved in their sport to be eavesdropping. But he was not comfortable with sharing his secret until he’d put twice the distance between his confession and their ears. When he had, he made it simply and plainly. “I don’t know what kind of madness overtook me,” he said, “but a little while ago I made a contract with somebody to have her killed.”

  “You did what?”

  “Does it appall you?”

  “What do you think? Of course it appalls me.”

  “It’s the highest form of devotion, you know, to want to end somebody’s existence rather than let them live on without you. It’s love of the highest order.”

  “It’s a fucking obscenity.”

  “Oh, yes, it’s that too. But I couldn’t bear . . . just couldn’t bear . . . the idea of her being alive and me not being with her. . . .” His delivery was now deteriorating, the words becoming tears. “She was so dear to me. . . .”

  Gentle’s thoughts were of his last exchange with Judith: the half-drowned telephone call from New York, which had ended with nothing said. Had she known then that her life was in jeopardy? If not, did she now? My God, was she even alive? He took hold of Estabrook’s lapel with the same force that the fear took hold of him.

  “You haven’t brought me here to tell me she’s dead.”

  “No. No,” he protested, making no attempt to disengage Gentle’s hold. “I hired this man, and I want to call him off.”

  “So do it,” Gentle said, letting the coat go.

  “I can’t.”

  Estabrook reached into his pocket and pulled out a sheet of paper. To judge by its crumpled state it had been thrown away, then reclaimed.

  “This came from the man who found me the assassin,” he went on. “It was delivered to my home two nights ago. He was obviously drunk or drugged when he wrote it, but it indicates that he expects to be dead by the time I read it. I’m assuming he’s correct. He hasn’t made contact. He was my only route to the assassin.”

  “Where did you meet this man?”

  “He found me.”

  “And the assassin?”

  “I met him somewhere south of the river, I don’t know where. It was dark. I was lost. Besides, he won’t be there. He’s gone after her.”

  “So warn her.”

  “I’ve tried. She won’t accept my calls. She’s got another lover now. He’s being covetous the way I was. My letters, my telegrams, they’re all sent back unopened. But he won’t be able to save her. This man I hired, his name’s Pie—”

  “What’s that, some kind of code?”

  “I don’t know,” Estabrook said. “I don’t know anything except I’ve done something unforgivable and you have to help me undo it. You have to. This man Pie is lethal.”

  “What makes you think she’ll see me when she won’t see you?”

  “There’s no guarantee. But you’re a younger, fitter man, and you’ve had some . . . experience of the criminal mind. You’ve a better chance of coming between her and Pie than I have. I’ll give you money for the assassin. You can pay him off. And I’ll pay whatever you ask. I’m rich. Just warn her, Zacharias, and get her to come home. I can’t have her death on my conscience.”

  “It’s a little late to think about that.”

  “I’m making what amends I can. Do we have a deal?” He took off his leather glove in preparation for shaking Gentle’s hand.

  “I’d like the letter from your contact,” Gentle said.

  “It barely makes any sense,” Estabrook said.

  “If he is dead, and she dies too, that letter’s evidence whether it makes sense or not. Hand it over, or no deal.”

  Estabrook reached into his inside pocket, as if to pull out the letter, but with his fingers upon it he hesitated. Despite all his talk about having a clear conscience, about Gentle being the man to save her, he was deeply reluctant to part with the letter.

  “I thought so,” Gentle said. “You want to make sure I look like the guilty party if anything goes wrong. Well, go fuck yourself.”

  He turned from Estabrook and started down the hill. Estabrook came after him, calling his name, but Gentle didn’t slow his pace. He let the man run.

  “All right!” he heard behind him. “All right, have it! Have it!”

  Gentle slowed but didn’t stop. Gray with exertion, Estabrook caught up with him.

  “The letter’s yours,” he said.

  Gentle took it, pocketing it without unfolding it. There’d be plenty of time to study it on the flight.

  I

  CHANT’S BODY WAS DISCOVERED the following day by ninety-three-year-old Albert Burke, who found it while looking for his errant mongrel, Kipper. The animal had sniffed from the street what its owner only began to nose as he climbed the stairs, whistling for his hound between curses: the rotting tissue at the top. In the autumn of 1916, Albert had fought for his country at the Somme, sharing trenches with dead companions for days at a time. The sights and smells of death didn’t much distress him. Indeed, his sanguine response to his discovery lent color to the story, when it reached the evening news, and assured it of greater coverage than it might otherwise have merited, that focus in turn bringing a penetrating eye to bear on the identity of the dead man. Within a day a portrait of the deceased as he might have looked in life had been produced, and by Wednesday a woman living on a council estate south of the river had identified him as her next-door neighbor, Mr. Chant.

  An examination of his flat turned up a second picture, not of Chant’s flesh, this time, but of his life. It was the conclusion of the police that the dead man was a practitioner of some obscure religion. It was reported that a small altar dominated his room, decorated with the withered heads of animals that forensics could not identify, its centerpiece an idol of so explicitly sexual a nature no newspaper dared publish a sketch of it, let alone a photograph. The gutter press particularly enjoyed the story, especially as the artifacts had belonged to a man now thought to have been murdered. They editorialized with barely concealed racism on the influx of perverted foreign religions. Between this and stories on Burke of the Somme, Chant’s death attracted a lot of column inches. That fact had several consequences. It brought a rash of right-wing attacks on mosques in greater London, it brought a call for the demolition of the estate where Chant had lived, and it brought Dowd up to a certain tower in Highgate,where he was summoned in lieu of his absentee master, Estabrook’s brother, Oscar Godolphin.

  II

  In the 1780s, when Highgate Hill was so steep and deeply rutted that carriages regularly failed to make the grade and the drive to town was sufficiently dangerous that a wise m
an went with pistols, a merchant called Thomas Roxborough had constructed a handsome house on Hornsey Lane, designed for him by one Henry Holland. At that time it had commanded fine views: south all the way to the river; north and west over the lush pastures of the region towards the tiny village of Hampstead. The former view was still available to the tourist, from the bridge that spanned the Archway Road, but Roxborough’s fine house had gone, replaced in the late thirties with an anonymous ten-story tower, set back from the street. There was a screen of well-tended trees between tower and road, not sufficiently thick to conceal the building entirely, but enough to render what was already an undistinguished building virtually invisible. The only mail that was delivered there was circulars and official paperwork of one kind or another.There were no tenants, either individuals or businesses. Yet Roxborough Tower was kept well by its owners, who once every month or so gathered in the single room which occupied the top floor of the building, in the name of the man who had owned this plot of land two hundred years before and who had left it to the society he founded. The men and women (eleven in all) who met here and talked for a few hours and went their unremarkable ways were the descendants of the impassioned few Roxborough had gathered around him in the dark days following the failure of the Reconciliation. There was no passion among them now, nor more than a vague comprehension of Roxborough’s purpose in forming what he’d called the Society of the Tabula Rasa, or the Clean Slate. But they met anyway, in part because in their early childhood one or other of their parents, usually but not always the father, had taken them aside and told them a great responsibility would fall to them—the carrying forward of a hermetically protectedfamily secret—and in part because the Society looked after its own. Roxborough had been a man of wealth and insight. He’d purchased considerable tracts of land during his lifetime, and the profits that accrued from that investment had ballooned as London grew. The sole recipient of those monies was the Society, though the funds were so ingeniously routed, through companies and agents who were unaware of their place in the system, that nobody who serviced the Society in any capacity whatsoever knew of its existence.