glass.
“I’m afraid it’s complicated,” I replied.
“You are a warlock, perhaps?”
“No, no, not really.”
“You are clearly a man of means.”
I laughed, despite myself. “No,” I said with a smile, “not that either.”
“May we conclude ‘capable’ then, as a suitable epithet?”
“‘Capable’ may have to cover it.”
“You understand, I cannot permit your current campaign against my business to continue. While trivial enough in itself, it is disruptive, and worst of all, bad for my reputation. Reputation, you see, in an industry such as mine, where so much has not been legislated for, is worth a hundred lawyers and all their gold watches.”
“I see.”
“With which in mind I will offer you a simple enough choice.”
“Which is?”
“Either I employ you, or I kill you.”
Surprise barely covered it. “Come again?”
“A man of your ability would be far more useful on my team than operating against me, and it would be a shame to bury your abilities entirely. If you have desires, now would be the time to name them.”
“Desires?”
“I can offer you wealth, property, money – these are, though, the simple things of a corporate role. I can offer more. Magic. Secrets. Revenge. Have you ever wished for a place by the river, the lights on the water at night, or for sharing the dreams of a child, sensing the skin of another sex, hearing all with the ears of a bat, seeing with the eyes of a hawk, smelling with the nose of a dog, your thoughts in unimagined brilliant colour, or dabbling in the visions of a heroin addict on the edge of death and seeing what he sees as he passes beyond, a glimpse of something more? We can put you on the same eyeline as God. I can offer you these things: visions, wonders, comfort, security. Whatever you desire.”
“Is this the standard employee package?” I asked.
“We are good to our people at Amiltech.”
“Health insurance?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“And who pays?”
“The company.”
“I meant who pays for the other things? Whose senses must I steal to have these powers, whose mind must I violate, whose house will I inhabit, whose wealth will I profit by, whose dreams will I dabble in, whose ideas will I skim for gold, who will I have to kill, who will I have to control?”
“Does it matter?”
I thought about it. “Yes,” I said. “It matters to me.”
“Is this your reason for coming here tonight?”
“It’s part of it.”
He sighed impatiently, ran one delicate finger round the rim of his champagne glass. It whined like a suffocating bat. “I think you are not interested in an amicable solution, no?”
“Not really,” I admitted. “But I appreciate the offer.”
“Well then, I offer you the alternative. Run, hide, magician. I’ve seen your face, I can recognise you now; wherever you go and whatever you do, my men can find you, follow you, track you by the prints from your fingers, and we will kill you,
I waited. There wasn’t any more so I said, “Tell you what, you come find me tonight, and we’ll sort out this whole shebang. Sound reasonable?”
He sipped his champagne. “Very reasonable.”
“Good!” I stood up, smiled at him, nodded at the two bodyguards, who also stood, and said, “I’ll just get running, then. See you later, Mr Khay.”
“Good evening, magician,” he replied, and sipped again, and didn’t move.
I smiled one last time, turned, and walked into the crowd. My heart was racing but it wasn’t fear – the crowd protected me, even San wouldn’t risk shooting me among that lot – it was excitement. The sense of a battle coming and, more to the point, a battle we knew we could win. I summoned the lift. When it came, I rode it to the bottom, stuck my foot into the door, and pressed every single button between the ground floor and the roof. I reasoned that while they either waited for the lift or used the stairs, I’d have the time I needed.
This done, I ran into the night, and the pigeons followed.
The place I had chosen for the night’s work was Paternoster Square. It was an unusual place: the new buildings, with their clean walls and big tinted windows, wouldn’t be out of place in a utopian science fiction movie; but like the best of such places, it had a darker bite to it. CCTV cameras were angled on every wall and, during the daytime at least, there were always security guards. Their presence made me suspect the existence of spies or gangsters in an office somewhere nearby, since I couldn’t think why else they’d be patrolling what was ostensibly just one more London square.
What took the square out of the realm of futuristic fantasy was its neighbour: St Paul’s Cathedral, half of it white from cleaning, the other still a sooty grey as the council tried to polish it up faster than the dirt could accumulate. It loomed over the mismatched shape of Paternoster Square (which had too many sides to deserve its name) like the last laugh of the past, mocking its descendants who still couldn’t build grander than the dome or the figures on the cathedral roof whose eroded features gazed down Ludgate Hill. It was a strange meeting point of past and present, and at this hour of the night, almost deserted. My footsteps were too loud, the pigeons too quiet, the lights too bright in the dark – huge white floodlights smiting the cathedral walls and every angle of Paternoster Square together with the smooth marble pillar at its centre – a baby version of the Monument, complete with golden ball of flame at its top, raised in memory of the Blitz.
In that place, that strange place where the sharp bite of racing magic met with the ponderous stones of the cathedral, sluggish with its own history, every shadow contained a ghost; and that night, with no one else around and the clouds busy overhead, the ghosts watched us. We brushed a toe along the bottom step of the cathedral’s west front, and we could hear the low murmuring of the priests’ incantations, the high singing of the choirboys in their red and white cassocks, the footsteps of heavy heels on the marble floor, the whispers of so many thousands, millions, of people around the gallery in the cathedral’s dome, feel the burning of the fire that had led to its reconstruction, taste the dust of its stones being slid into place, sense the bombs falling around it, hear the rattle of carts and carriages fade into the roar of car engines, the tones of the tourist guides in brisk Japanese, silken Italian, every language of the earth, see the shadows of so many people who’d passed through that place; you couldn’t be a magician, even a concussed idiot of a magician, and not know that those stones were buzzing with time, magic. We hadn’t seen any sign of a God in this world, but we could understand it if people went to that place to pray, if only to do honour to a past so magnificent.
Business called.
I blew the fuses without too much effort in every camera I could see. Then I walked round Paternoster Square, laying out my provisions. I opened all my bottles of ink and laid them out at intervals across the pavement. I cracked open the tubs of powdered dye, careful to keep my fingers out of their contents, which I sprinkled across the paving stones in long sweeps of scarlet, black, green and blue. This done, all I had to do was pace around to keep warm, coat buttoned up and hands buried in my pockets, and wait.
The bells of St Paul’s announced midnight – quarter past – half past. So much for San Khay’s efficiency. We nervously collected a fallen pigeon feather from the foot of a statue of Queen Anne, who looked frighteningly far too large under the fierce artificial lights, and shared the bird’s gaze for a few minutes, sweeping over the rooftops and through the alleys and the streets around the square, just to make sure that San hadn’t already found us, and wasn’t putting snipers into place as we waited like a fool. He would have been wise to do so; but we somehow felt it wasn’t right for what he wanted, and indeed, as we drifted on the air beneath us, and enjoyed the weight of our
