loop of his belt. Then, with an oddly showmanlike sweep of his hand, he stepped aside.
Here, Loeser saw, was a strange cousin of the antique wooden chest in his own house, except that it less resembled a police evidence box than the collection of holy relics in some decrepit Black Sea chapel. Slate had installed six little wooden shelves inside the storage locker, and arranged carefully on those shelves were the same varieties of private female oddments that Loeser himself had been puzzling over for four years: knickers, stockings, garter belts, brassieres, hairclips, lipsticks, eyebrow pencils, nail files, perfume bottles, handkerchiefs, sleep masks. No jewellery, though.
‘Do these all belong to Adele?’ he said.
Slate nodded.
‘She puts them in the teleportation chamber, and then you climb down the ladder and steal them and bring them back here?’
Slate nodded.
‘Are you in love with her?’
Slate looked at his feet.
‘My sympathies,’ said Loeser. Leaving the janitor to his
‘Where’s the Professor?’ said Adele.
‘Gone,’ said Loeser. ‘Ziesel’s dead, but Bailey’s gone.’
‘How?’ said Dolores Mutton. ‘Was there another way out of that closet or whatever the hell it was?’
‘Not from the inside. But maybe from the outside.’ Part of Loeser was reluctant to say any more, but if Adele knew now that her beloved was a lunatic, it couldn’t do her all that much more harm to find out that her experiments with his Teleportation Device had never actually worked. ‘Slate — the janitor — he had a way.’
‘So Jascha got him after all,’ said Dolores Mutton.
‘What do you mean?’ said Loeser.
Dolores Mutton glanced at Adele, then beckoned Loeser out into the corridor where they couldn’t be heard. ‘Jascha was running out of time, remember?’ she said in a low voice. ‘Maybe tonight was his last chance. Maybe he knew that, whatever happened, he’d be gone by tomorrow. Either on his way back to Moscow with Bailey, or bundled into the trunk of a car by some NKVD agent and taken out to the desert for execution.’
‘But he was in the theatre with you.’
‘Yes. He was. But then you called your fire drill, and by the time we got outside, he’d vanished.’
‘How could he have known about Slate’s skylight?’
‘He probably has something on this Slate guy. Like he has something on everyone.’
Drabsfarben could have picked the padlock on the lavatory, thought Loeser, or just used a duplicate key, and then lowered the ladder so that Bailey could escape. After that, he could have replaced everything as it was. There would just about have been time during the search for a cutting torch. Perhaps Slate had even made sure to delay telling Loeser about toilet cubicle until Drabsfarben had made his escape with Bailey. Up and down through the trapdoor was always how the devil made his entrances and exits. ‘But if Drabsfarben’s gone,’ said Loeser, ‘that doesn’t prove he got anywhere near Bailey. Maybe the NKVD picked tonight to retire Drabsfarben. Maybe they had someone on campus. You told me he goes out in public less and less now. Maybe this was their best opportunity.’
‘In any other circumstances, if Jascha had just disappeared like this with no warning, that’s what I might have thought. But Bailey’s gone. You said he couldn’t have got out from the inside. So it must have been Jascha. There’s no other explanation. Jascha’s saved himself. The son of a bitch.’
‘I’m going to talk to Slate again.’ Loeser went back down to the basement, where the janitor now sat smoking on a bench, his body hunched tensely around the cigarette as if he thought it was only half dead and might still escape from him.
‘Are you you you you you going to tell Adele?’ said Slate.
‘I don’t know yet. But listen to me, Slate, did Jascha Drabsfarben know about your shrine? Did he blackmail you with it? Did he ask you questions about Bailey? Did you ever tell him about your secret trapdoor?’
Slate just looked at his feet.
‘Come on, Slate, answer me. Jascha Drabsfarben.’
‘I don’t know who who who who who that is.’
‘Tell me the truth. You didn’t have to show me your shrine. But I think you looked almost relieved afterwards. Was that because Drabsfarben can’t hold it over you any more now that he’s not the only one who knows?’
‘I don’t know who that is,’ repeated Slate. And Loeser couldn’t tell if this rare forbearance of his stammer was a sign that he was lying or a sign that he was telling the truth. He went back upstairs to room 11 and, as he entered, he heard a sound from the door of the teleportation chamber like a bolt slamming back.
‘What was that?’ said Dolores Mutton.
‘The ultramigration accumulator should have finished a basic cycle by now,’ said Adele, ‘so the time lock’s disengaged.’
Loeser pulled open the door of the teleportation chamber, and then took a step back as a gush of liquid ran out over the threshold. He hadn’t noticed before when he was looking down from the room above, but the whole chamber was puddled, as if someone had emptied out most of a bath full of water in there. Curious, he squatted down, wet his finger on the floor, and then licked it.
‘Egon, what are you doing?’ said Adele.
‘It tastes salty.’
‘That’s probably Dieter’s blood. You’re going to make me vomit.’
‘No, it’s more like … sea water.’
‘We’re twenty miles from the ocean. A pipe must have leaked or something.’
‘Why would there be salt water in the pipes here?’
‘Dr Carradine and his eels are upstairs, maybe it’s something to do with that.’ She glanced sideways at the open door of the teleportation chamber. ‘I can’t make myself believe it yet. About the Professor.’
‘I believe it about the Professor, but I don’t think I really believe it yet about Ziesel. When he shut that door he must have known he’d probably die in there.’
‘He did it to save you and me from the Professor. After all those years you bullied him … You should say something nice to Lornadette.’
‘Who?’
‘His wife.’
‘Oh. Yes.’ Loeser knew he never would.
Adele glanced at Dolores Mutton, then beckoned for Loeser to kneel down next to her so she could whisper in his ear. ‘Egon, do you really still want to fuck me?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘I’d probably let you, when I stop hurting, and when you’ve washed. You saved my life just as much as Ziesel did. But when you kissed me, earlier, it didn’t feel as if you really still wanted to fuck me. So do you?’
Did he? Loeser felt like a wrinkly and complacent Professor of Euclidian geometry who had consented to take a few questions after a lecture and had just been asked, for the first time in his entire career, how he could be absolutely sure that all right angles were equal to one another. He swayed at his lectern with a mixture of terror and joy. For nine years his desire for Adele had been the basic axiom from which all other truths could be inferred. If it were false, then everything might be false. He had to want to fuck her. He had to.
Which was, perhaps, exactly why he didn’t.
Loeser realised that he could no more arouse himself with the thought of Adele’s willing body than he could comfort himself with the thought of the equality of right angles. It had been so deep in him for so long that it almost didn’t mean anything any more. There was no music in the sound of your own heartbeat, no savour in the taste of your own mouth. There was no lust in an axiom.
‘I’m very confused,’ he said. And then, as if in sympathy, the whole room shook. He looked up at Dolores Mutton. ‘What the hell was that?’
‘Sounded like a bomb going off.’
Loeser ran outside, and saw what Bailey had wrought. The Gorge Auditorium looked as if it had been
