The Teleportation Accident (48 page)

‘Loeser, if there really existed some trick that I could put into words, I’d . . . well, I suppose I’d write a manual or something. And get rich. Anyway, I never actually slept with Adele.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘After that party at the sewing machine factory or whatever it was. I left with her but she changed her mind.’

‘You’re serious?’

‘Yes. She said I reminded her too much of her father.’

‘Gott im Himmel
, if I’d known that, I might never have become so pathologically obsessed! I might never have gone to Paris. Or Los Angeles. Everything might have been different.’

‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous. You left Berlin because you hated Berlin. You would have gone either way. What happened to her in the end?’

‘Adele? She stayed in Los Angeles. Married Goatloft, that director. I hear she’s very happy. Meanwhile Brogmann’s just been appointed Minister of the Interior and Marlene’s just been made film critic for
Die Zeit
. Seems like everyone from those days did all right for themselves. Everyone that survived. You know, last month I was on Kurfürstendamm and I was almost certain I saw Drabsfarben walking a dog. It can’t have been, of course.’

Rackenham took out a packet of Sobranies and offered one to Loeser, who shook his head. ‘I’ve got some coke,’ he said as he lit a cigarette for himself.

‘What?’

‘I’ve got three grams of really good coke that I bought from my cameraman. If you’ll be in my documentary, you can have as much as you want, on top of the “expenses”. We can do some now if you like.’

‘I haven’t taken coke in thirty years,’ said Loeser.

‘Then it will be a wonderful, sentimental reunion. Come on, just repeat after me: “In 1938 I went to a cabaret and I saw an SS officer with an evil face slap his mistress for spilling a glass of champagne and then I knew the good times were over for ever.” An hour of that tomorrow afternoon. That’s all it will take.’

Loeser didn’t answer straight away, and for a while the two men sat watching each other in silence. Outside, the breeze changed, and
Berlin Alexanderplatz
slipped from the tree.

11

LOS ANGELES, 19310

The gondolier wore manatee-bone goggles, with pornographic engravings on the snout bridge, and when he cocked his head to the right in the Troodonian gesture signifying negation, the afternoon sun flashed in the smoked glass of the goggles’ lenses. ‘You don’t want to go to the temples.’

‘Why not?’ thought Mordechai.

‘Electric eels,’ thought the gondolier. ‘The biggest electric eels you’ve ever seen. They can shock you to ashes. May my slit close up if I lie.’ He chirruped the oath aloud for emphasis.

‘I can barter. I have manna.’

‘I don’t care. I’m not taking you into those waters. I value the life God gave me.’

So Mordechai knocked the gondolier unconscious and stole his boat.

As he paddled, he watched the turquoise surface of the lagoon, knowing that electric eels had an amateurish obligation to come up every so often to breathe. He’d licked the face of death more times than he could count as a soldier in the East, so he wasn’t afraid, but he didn’t want to be caught unawares. Every so often, to cool down, he flicked his tail through the water to douse his snout, then fluttered his dewlap feathers so they wouldn’t get too crusted with salt. In the distance, through their caul of heat shimmer, the viny white tops of the temples rose out of the water like a ribcage lying half submerged in a rock pool, and on his left were the rias of the mainland, their slopes fuzzy with groves of lychee trees. Many octaeterids ago, before Dagon-Ryujin’s half-fish came, when the Troodonians had still had the leisure to enquire into their world, archaeologists and playwrights had lived in villages on this coast, diving every day among the drowned conurbations of the apes. But now they were all gone, which was how the electric eels had begun to proliferate so menacingly in the lagoon, untroubled by hunters or trappers.

Like every Troodonian, except for a few thousand sickening heretics who had gone over to Dagon-Ryujin, Mordechai understood that all time was one instant, all space one point – that only God had the privilege of extension, and his creation was only the very tip of a claw – that any appearance to the contrary was just a sort of stereoscopic illusion. And so, like every Troodonian, he struggled with the paradox of how it could be that in the time of the half-fish, God wanted them to fight, and yet in the time of the apes, God had wanted them to humble themselves as shrunken quadrupeds, when the two periods were of course not only equivalent but simultaneous. Nonetheless, he knew that God did now want them to fight, and God did now want them to win. And that was why he, Mordechai, had abandoned his comrades and trudged across a continent to this lagoon. Whatever their clerisy might say, the Troodonians were losing the war, and if they ever hoped to drive the half-fish back into the sea, they would need either a direct intercession from God or some unimaginable new weapon. Since he did not dare rely on the former, Mordechai had come to these temples to look for the latter. The apes hadn’t understood much, but they’d understood fighting. There might be something here, forgotten in the ruins, an accidental legacy from an unmourned and intestate species. The chances were laughably slim. But he had to try, because no one else would. He was lost in these thoughts, and in the rhythm of his rowing, when his boat was flipped over like a dried peapod.

Smashed into the water, limbs flailing, bubbles streaming from his snout because he was too surprised to hold his breath, Mordechai stared for a moment into the eel’s monstrous right eye. Most of its gigantic body was dark grey, but its belly was a mottled orange not unlike the colour of his own intertarsal scales. He began a prayer that he knew he wouldn’t have time to finish.

Except that, somehow, he did finish. He opened his eyes and he wasn’t dead.

And then he realised that perhaps to this beast he was neither a threat nor a meal. The eel wouldn’t go to the trouble to fire its voltage organ just because it had bumped against something on its way up for air. Thank God he’d lost the oar when he went under, or he might have been stupid enough to try to use it as a weapon. He held as still as he could without sinking any further down, and just as the grinding of his empty lungs was becoming unendurable, the eel swam off into the cloudy water, its long anal fin rippling like shadow congealed into a dainty membrane. Mordechai’s knitted skullcap twirled in its wake and then was also lost to sight. Not since the half-fish themselves had he come across a creature that so obviously owed allegiance to Dagon-Ryujin as this long gullet with a face.

He floated, panting and retching, at the surface until he’d regained enough strength to right the stolen boat. The hull had sprung a small leak, he had nothing to row with, and he’d badly grazed his elbow climbing up over the side. But there wasn’t that much further to go until the temples. Cursing himself for coming here in such a puny craft, cursing the gondolier for being so correct, cursing the sun for being so plump, he began to paddle.

And that was when he saw it. The lone figure standing on the roof of the nearest temple on his right like a soliloquist on a raised stage. An animal that hadn’t walked God’s earth for more than eight times eight times eight generations.

An ape.

Mordechai began to paddle as fast as he could, his elbow stinging with every splash of brine. As he drew closer, he could make out the ape in more detail. It had a bald, pink, snoutless face, with sparse grey fur only on the top of its head, and like a Troodonian cantor it wore woven clothing that covered almost its entire body. The fabric of the clothing looked soaked through, but at low tide the lagoon here wasn’t nearly up to the level of the roof, so the ape must have ascended from some lower section of the temple. And instead of a left eye the ape had a meaty tunnel – although Mordechai had no way to be sure if that was a wound or just a characteristic of its species – a collateral sense organ or supplementary orifice.

The ape was barking loudly, and of course the noise itself meant nothing to Mordechai. But by the time the prow of his boat bumped up against the cracked and barnacled wall of the temple, he was close enough to hear the relict mammal in his own head.

‘I don’t know where I am,’ the ape was thinking. ‘I don’t know where I am. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know where I am.’