‘Who?’
He shook his head. ‘Left a message at hotel. “Your football tickets are at the box office.” That way I knew to get him at the arena.’
‘Which one was this?’
‘Simmons. I remember now, the one in the rain.., that was in Japan. Bridges. Name was Bridges. The jolly shipbuilder. Fat man. Got him coming out of a restaurant.’
‘Anyone else?’
‘I ... don’t remember...’
‘Danilov, how did you recognize Chameleon in Tokyo?’
‘I ... don’t remember.,.’
‘And you’ve never met Quill.’
‘Quill is a voice. Chameleon is a ghost. Midas is lost.’
‘Midas? Who is Midas?’
‘Midas...’
‘Is it a person? A place?’
‘I ... don’t remember...’
He looked up very suddenly, sat straight up in the chair with his hands on his knees, the umbrella at his side. ‘The teacher will now recite Pound. You can recite Pound, can’t you? What a strange name—Ezra. What a heavy burden to put on a son.,
‘Danilov...’
And then he fell to his knees and began a bizarre litany:
‘Nabikov, Ivan, a street in Paris, on his way to work. Gregori, Georg, London, right in front of Parliament. . .‘ and continued chanting the list of his victims.
‘You lost him, Sailor,’ said the Magician.
‘Damn!’
‘You got a lot.’
‘He knows a lot more.’
‘Not tonight. He’s gone back in his rabbit hole.’
Daniov looked at them, his alabaster eyes twinkling with madness again. And roaring like a forest beast, he grabbed the umbrella and jumped up and began slashing at the candlesticks.
‘He’s lost it, man. Let’s get the shit outta here.’
O’Hara and the Magician backed toward the door as the madman continued to smash out the candles. He charged through the darkness when they reached the door, the deadly umbrella held like a spear before him. They ducked out the door and slammed it shut.
‘Wow!’ said the Magician, ‘that was a cl—’
The umbrella came slashing through the window in the door, its tip brushing O’Hara’s hair. He fell sideways and slammed the bolt shut.
Daniov began to scream. He screamed as they made their way back through the serpentine passageways to the gate. He was still screaming as they were lowered, one by one, down from the pinnacle of hell.
‘Okay, so you broke Lavander’s code,’ said the Magician. ‘Let’s see what you got.’
Rested, showered and attended by fresh fruit and coffee, they hovered over Izzy as the Magician prepared to conjure information from its memory, his fingers poised over the computer’s keyboard as though it were a Steinway. He was humming ‘Body and Soul’ as he urged the computer to talk to him.
Eliza explained that she had run several combinations of sentences from the Lavander book through the computer, trying to break the code by trial and error. Then she began thinking about what the Magician had said: if it was not written down, it would have to be simple because nobody could remember twenty-six letter substitutions. Twenty-six. The alphabet. And she remembered from her childhood a sentence that contains every letter of the alphabet: ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.’
Her next step had been to experiment with the alphabet, running it forward and in reverse under the sentence, trying to decipher his alphabetic code. That didn’t work.
‘So,’ she said, ‘I left the sentence on the monitor, and then
I started running the alphabet under it, moving one letter to the
end of the alphabet each time. In other words, I started with
b as the first letter, then c. I got up to I and that was the
