The Demon Code (60 page)
‘Guard her,’ Kuutma said.
Taria nodded. ‘Yes, Kuutma. What about the
rhaka
and the others? Should we—’
‘Do nothing,’ Kuutma said. ‘I wish to speak with Leo Tillman.’
Following Kuutma’s curt instructions, his Messengers overturned one of the plastic tubs, tipping out the thin paste at the bottom of it, and rolled it to a distant corner of the room, far from the others. Tillman was half-dragged and half-carried across and set down on the tub, where in due course Kuutma joined him.
Tillman was still in a great deal of pain, but Alus’s medical skills had once again been called into service. She had made up a cocktail of drugs designed to help him manage the pain and stay conscious. His fully dilated pupils and the morbid tension of his posture suggested that they were just starting to kick in.
Kuutma stared down at the Adamite, with the puzzled frown of a mathematician considering a problem in formal logic.
‘I had a plan,’ he said, ‘that included your death. Yours, and the woman’s.’
Tillman nodded.
‘It’s true that your death was only a detail,’ Kuutma continued. ‘It was a way of dealing with a situation that my predecessor had allowed to arise. The main thrust of the plan related to much clearer and more present dangers.’
He hesitated a moment, then sat beside the Adamite man. It enabled him to lower his voice a little further: all of the Messengers present had recently taken prodigious doses of kelalit, which enhances the senses, so there was a possibility, despite the discreet distance, that they were being overheard.
‘I wish,’ Kuutma said, ‘that I’d killed you first and found some different way to solve my remaining problems.’
Tillman laughed shortly – a single snort. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘well, that just sums you people up, it seems to me. You always over-think these things, and you always make the same mistake.’
Kuutma scowled, but kept his tone even and controlled. ‘And what mistake is that, Mr Tillman?’
Tillman ran a hand over his sweating face and blinked several times, rapidly. The drugs he’d been given were interfering with his perception, or his thought-processes, or both.
‘She’s pretty amazing, isn’t she?’
‘What?’ Kuutma asked, thrown.
‘My little girl. She’s a real piece of work. I’d hazard a guess that maybe that goes for all the women in her family. She reminds me a lot of my wife.’
‘Rebecca Beit Evrom was not your wife.’
‘No?’
‘No. The relationship between a
Kelim
woman and an Adamite out-father is not characterised as marriage, in our laws. What mistake is it that you think we make, Mr Tillman?’
Still blinking, Tillman turned his head to stare at Kuutma. ‘There’s a kind of a proverb. You must have heard of it. It says if you’ve only got a hammer in your toolbox, everything looks like a nail.’
‘I’m familiar with that observation.’
‘You’ve spent two thousand years killing anyone who gets onto you or gets too close to the truth about you. Playing ducks and drakes with history.’
‘We do what we have to do.’
‘No,’ Tillman said, his voice slurring a little. ‘You do what you already
know
how to do. You don’t change your repertoire, even when you can see that it’s not working.’
‘It’s worked well enough so far,’ Kuutma said.
Tillman laughed again. ‘Then why do you even exist? If it worked, Kuutma, if it had ever worked, they wouldn’t need you. Thousands of years of surreptitious murder, and every time, every damn time … as soon as you finish one operation it’s all got to be done again. Hundreds of
Elohim
with their ears to the ground, all across the world, trying to keep track of a whisper line with seven billion voices on it. Of course you’re going to make a pig’s breakfast out of it.’
‘You’re saying there’s a better way?’ Kuutma asked sardonically.
‘Yes.’
‘Teach me,
Tannanu
Tillman.’
‘Well, for starters,’ Tillman said, ‘you don’t squash the story. You shout it. Flood the world with rumours about the Judas People, about Ginat’Dania. Tell everyone about the secret book, the lost gospel. Tell them if they read it, pale men who weep blood will find them and kill them with knives that were last seen twenty centuries ago. Tell them about the beautiful women who’ll sleep with you and then disappear, leaving you to grow crazy with searching for them. Tell them about the underground city, and all the rest of it.’
‘Why?’ Kuutma demanded, mystified. ‘Why would we do these things?’
‘Because the world’s full of lies,’ Tillman said. ‘Full to the brim and slopping over. And when your story’s out there, it looks like one more lie. It has its hour, and then it’s stale, and then it’s dead, and everyone moves on to the next big thing. “You’re still trying to sell that Judas People bullshit? Seriously? There’s this new book says Jesus was a woman!” That’s what you need. That saturated, been-there, heard-it feeling. And it’s so easy to get. All you’ve got to do is face the same way everyone else is facing, so you get lost in the crowd. Whereas what you’re doing now is pushing against the grain the whole time. Not only is it a lot harder that way, but every time you move, every time you do anything, you make another trail that somebody could follow.’
The speech seemed to have used up all of Tillman’s remaining strength. He bowed his head onto his chest and closed his eyes.
Kuutma stood, and – after a moment’s irresolution – moved away.
‘Let me speak to her, one more time,’ Tillman said.
Kuutma paused. ‘Why?’
‘To say goodbye.’
‘She doesn’t need to say goodbye to you. She’s made her peace with your death.’
Tillman made a weary, broken gesture with his hand. ‘If you say so. I know you people can’t lie.’
No
, Kuutma thought, staring down at the wounded man,
we can’t.
Except to ourselves.
The flight back to London was funereal. And the fact that they were in business class just made it surreal, too.
Any time that Rush could think of anything to say, Kennedy replied with monosyllables. And he didn’t blame her, because the things that he could think of to say were all wrong. Small talk. Desperate verbal swerves, taking them away as far as possible from the one topic that they couldn’t discuss.
Why did we let them do that to him?
Why didn’t they do it to me?
The stewardess came by and offered them champagne. Kennedy didn’t even seem to hear. Rush shook his head emphatically.
‘We’re good,’ he lied. ‘We’re fine. Thanks.’
Kennedy didn’t phone ahead and tell Izzy that she was coming. The fact was that she was scared to. Scared of words more than anything, at this point, because the first thing she’d done when she finally touched down at Heathrow was to catch up on a whole week of Izzy’s texts.
She’d never been an archaeologist, but she’d met some. It felt like archaeology.
Unearthing the evidence of a vanished way of life.
Izzy’s tone going from chatty to bitter to resigned to valedictory.
And the dark ages, which was Tuesday and Wednesday and today, when there were no messages, no signs of life at all.
She took the train up to Leicester. She didn’t trust herself to drive. A taxi took her from the station to Knighton, the driver bending her ear about something or other the whole way, except that she didn’t hear a word, so technically her ears were unbent.
She told him to wait. She might not be here long.
Caroline answered on the third ring. She was surprised to see Kennedy, and judging from how thin the line of her lips got, it wasn’t the kind of surprise that makes you squeal for joy.
‘Hello, Heather.’
‘Hi, Caroline.’ Kennedy considered and abandoned various feeble conversational gambits. ‘Is Izzy there? I … I’d like to talk to her. Just for a minute.’
Caroline nodded and withdrew. Kennedy stood on the doorstep in a light summer drizzle, listening to footsteps echo through the big house, fainter and fainter.
She didn’t hear Izzy’s footsteps approaching, because Izzy was in her socks. She was just there, suddenly. The door was flung open and she was up in Kennedy’s face, in Kennedy’s arms, kissing her with a ferocity that was going to leave bruises.
They stayed like that for a long time. Caroline came into the hallway behind them and watched for a moment or two in stony-faced silence, like Lot’s wife looking back at the cities of the plain. Then she went away again.
‘I screwed up,’ Kennedy said, when Izzy finally allowed her the free use of her mouth. ‘But I love you, Iz. I can’t imagine not having you in my life. If you give me another chance, I’ll never push you away again.’
‘I knew it,’ Izzy murmured in Kennedy’s ear.
‘Knew what?’
‘That if I held out for long enough, you’d find some way that it was your fault I shagged that boy. You’re a genius, babe. That’s why I need you.’
They kissed some more, but then Izzy pulled her face away from the lip-lock to stare down the drive towards the street.
‘Have you got a taxi waiting?’
‘Oh,’ Kennedy said. ‘Yeah.’
‘Thank God. Let’s go.’
That the eyes should be red was licence, of a kind. It was a way of saying something that needed to be said, even if it wasn’t what she was seeing.
But there was a problem with the blacks, Diema decided.
Both of the women had such lustrous hair that she couldn’t catch the richness and the fullness of it with the pigments and the techniques she knew.
By way of a partial solution, she drew them in stylised form, their hair solid black with solid bars of white for the highlights, their muscles limned in feathered greys on the perfect whiteness of their skin.
‘I’ve got to move,’ Alus moaned. ‘My nose is itching.’
‘Your nose probably isn’t in the picture,’ Taria said. ‘The canvas isn’t that big.’
When she finally let them see the picture, they were baffled. ‘It looks like something a little kid would do,’ Taria said. ‘But … it works, somehow. It’s like the way you’d say something, and everyone would know you were exaggerating, but they’d see the truth underneath the exaggeration. It’s like that, but in a picture.’
Diema blushed. ‘In the Nations,’ she said, ‘they call a drawing in this style a cartoon.’
‘My two-year-old son paints just like this,’ Alus said. ‘You think I could call it a cartoon and sell it?’
Diema might have bridled at the insult, but she laughed and let it pass. She was still amazed that they had agreed to pose for her, and she was anxious not to do anything that might make them change their minds. Not only was she finally getting to paint them, as she’d wanted to do ever since she first met them, but they were also her only source of news about her father.
They talked about him now, as she prepared a meal of bread and olives for her two models, who were putting their clothes back on in a corner of the studio. It was a very large studio. Space wasn’t so much sought after down here in
het retoyet
, at the bottom of Ginat’Dania.
‘He’s going on about windows now,’ Alus said. ‘Why can’t he have any windows? It’s driving him crazy that he doesn’t have a view. He’s four hundred feet underground and he wants a view. So Kuutma, instead of telling him to shove it up his arse, says “What view would you like, Mr Tillman? What is it that you want to be looking at?” And Leo goes “I don’t know, maybe a lake or something.” And the next time I go in, Kuutma’s fixed up a live video feed from Lake Michigan. And you know what Leo says?’
‘He says, “There’s no sound!”’ Taria broke in, stepping on Alus’s punchline. ‘He says he likes the water, but it’s not real without the sound. So Kuutma turns around and says to Alus—’
‘Call Michigan. See if there’s any way they can put a microphone in.’
Both women were laughing uproariously. This was their favourite kind of story about Tillman – the kind where he did something outrageous or curmudgeonly or inexplicable. The kind where he was like an exotic pet, with exotic needs and neurotic, high-maintenance habits.
In Ginat’Dania at large, Diema knew, her father was seen very differently. He was the prisoner in the tower, the monster caged, the trophy that Kuutma had brought back after vanquishing Ber Lusim and saving the city. And more, he was the former enemy forced now to toil at the wheel, to labour for the People though it broke his proud heart and gravelled his spirit.
Tillman was the brilliant Adamite tactician who had once found Ginat’Dania and forced it to flee from him. But now his insights, squeezed out of him by Kuutma’s merciless interrogation, served Kuutma’s agenda and the People’s. They had been instrumental in switching the main thrust of
Elohim
activity from concealment to white noise and disinformation.
It was a new age, and Leo Tillman was a prized resource.
Within the
Elohim
, it was known that he was also a hostage for the good behaviour of the
rhaka
, Heather Kennedy. And for the killer of Ber Lusim, Benjamin Rush. These two had saved the city in its hour of greatest need and so were allowed to live out their lives among the Nations, as an act of sublime mercy on Kuutma’s part, on condition of profound and eternal silence. If they spoke a word of what they’d done, or what they’d seen, Tillman would die on the instant.
‘Over time,’ Kuutma told Diema, ‘we’ll adjust the emphasis, little by little. We’ll say that the light of truth, the power of the word, can pierce even a darkness as profound as Leo Tillman’s. We’ll say that he works for us willingly, seeing the value of what he builds and the error of his former ways. We’ll say he wants to be remembered for good, not for evil, and hopes to buy some small degree of redemption by serving something greater than himself.’
Diema understood the strategy, but was impatient of ever seeing it implemented. Kuutma moved so slowly, seeming content to defer the decision from month to month while he sounded the waters of public sentiment in an endless, open-ended process of triage. ‘When can I see him?’ she asked, on the occasion of each brief, inconclusive progress report.