Wolves (21 page)

One bite and I’m flailing for the salep jug.

Ralf laughs. ‘You see?’

The salep, warm and creamy, gums round the fire in my throat like a retardant foam. My whole mouth sings. ‘What is this stuff?’

Ralf shrugs, pleased with himself for so surprising me. ‘It’s real
çig köfte
. There’s this spice in it called isot. A kind of black paprika.’

A minute later I’m recovered enough to dare another mouthful. And another. And another. I wish to God I hadn’t eaten earlier, this stuff is delicious. ‘How did you find this place?’

‘It’s one of Vaux’s haunts,’ Ralf says. ‘His local.’

‘Yes?’

‘He has a house near here.’

The menus come around again. I say, ‘They have a milk dessert on here called Chicken Breast. How does that work?’ It occurs to me that I have become Ralf.

Ralf pulls out his phone and checks the time. ‘We’d better settle up.’

The sun is low in the sky and, in the park, the young spring foliage shines like foil. The party is set up in the ornamental garden. Brick steps climb the hillside. Paths send out branches at precise, perpendicular angles. The effect is softened by all the planting wound round the trellises and gazebos: lilac and clematis, grapevine and rose. Come summer, there will be welcome shade here. This early in the year, it’s easy enough to find gaps in the screening foliage to enjoy the view. This evening the city, softened into butter by the sun, puddles around the blue paste jewel of the Middle.

Guests stand chatting in small, nervous groups among the stone seats, ornamental nooks, fountains and artful screens. Waiters in whites move among us with champagne and canapés.

‘Glasses on, people!’

And here he comes. Laughing. Glad-handing. Ralf turns and nudges me. I wince against the flashlight spraying and rippling through the leaves and through the crowd that gathers around us as people surge forward to grab their five-second shake-and-grin with our legendary host.

Sunlight catches in his shocked-white hair.

‘What’s the matter, Connie?’

His hair.

‘Bryon!’

Vaux knows Ralf’s voice. He turns.

There is something here I am missing. Something obvious and terrible.

‘Conrad’s here! You haven’t met. My business partner. Bryon!’

His face lights up, seeing Ralf among all these anonymous, uplifted faces. Photographers surround him, lighting him up like a poster. No army drab this time. A tux, and wrapround shades so shiny, featureless and deadly black, they might be a single piece of enamel.

Camera flash streaks across the big black lenses of his shades as he reaches out to shake my hand. A beat. ‘Conrad?’ He hesitates. Bryon Vaux. Producer of Michel’s
Shaman
franchise. Majority shareholder in Loophole.

‘Connie?’

The crowd carries him on. My hands hang limp and lifeless at my sides.

‘Conrad?’

I turn away to face the city, and pulling my wraprounds from my pocket, I let myself slip back into the game.

The city has been rendered down to a jumble of charcoal-grey plinths – stone footprints where building after building has been magicked away. At this distance only the biggest, most rectilinear footprints stand out. Most of the city is reduced to rubble. This is my home with its inner chaos exposed, no more now than a ghastly iteration of the same salt crystal. City as tumour. A spreading circle of dead tissue. City as leprosy. ‘Ralf. I’ve met him.’

‘What?’

‘Vaux. I’ve met him.’

‘Really? Where?’

I shake my head. I don’t want to talk about this, after all. Not here. ‘Doesn’t matter.’ Vaux is older now, of course. Much older. Nonetheless, wealth and the years have been kind to him. There can be no mistake.

Across the horizon, fires leap. Ash drifts in waves. The air shimmers with imagineered heat as bit by bit the city disappears under the pall of its annihilation.

This is the man who accosted me. This is the man who exposed himself to me. This is the man I left Mum standing near, the last day I saw her alive.

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since those days when Gabby used to turn up at our hotel on ‘delousing leave’. Whenever she returned from the protest camp for a few days’ R&R, you could spot her a mile off from her shag of rat-tailed hair. You could smell her. Nowadays she dresses conservatively, in linen suits and tailored white shirts. She lives abroad, pursuing an academic career. Behind her, fuzzy and foreshortened in the lens of her laptop’s camera, her office wall is a mass of sticky notes and dry-marker scribble. ‘Is this about your dad?’

When I lost touch with my father finally, in the weeks after the car accident, Gabby did what she could to trace his electronic signature for me. Her academic studies and radical politics have given her some insight into where and how information is actually structured, beneath the reassuring blandishments of clouds and commercial search engines. ‘Pretty much nothing is ever lost,’ she told me, confidently. But silence is silence, whichever way you cut it, and we never did find my dad.

‘Not exactly.’ I tell her, wishing I had my story straight. ‘It’s more to do with the hotel.’

‘I knew there’d be something you wanted.’

‘Poor Gabby. It’s the price you pay for actually knowing how to do stuff.’

‘“How are you, Gabriela?” “I’m fine, Conrad. How are you?”’

‘I’m crap at keeping in touch, I know.’

‘The price of this call is that you come and visit me here. I mean it.’

‘Okay.’

‘I mean it. Give me a date.’

Eventually she stops twisting my arm, and I can ask her, ‘Could our old hotel records still be any place?’

This turns out to be more likely than I expected. There’s a regulation says that guesthouses have to maintain their customer records for a couple of years. ‘No-one ever gets around to deleting the expired data. Why would they bother?’

This is the kind of digital silt Gabby’s undergraduates sieve through in their second semester, hunting for interesting mash-ups. ‘I might get one of my students to do the donkey work, so is there anything here we’re likely to turn up that should stay confidential?’

‘Possibly.’

‘Yes?’

I take a deep breath and tell her about Bryon Vaux. Some of it. The barest outline.

‘You’re kidding.’ She is impressed.

‘Dad knew him. Treated him. Taught him how to use a visual vest.’

‘Bryon Vaux stayed at your hotel? Would I have met him?’

‘Almost certainly.’

A pause while she thinks about this. Like most people who navigate data for a living – or who, as in her case, train the navigators – Gabby values her mental privacy, and wears neither wraprounds nor contact lenses. Her eyes are clear. Even over this not especially hi-def video link I can see her scepticism she tries to work out what my real motivation is here. ‘You think Vaux can help you find your dad?’

A smart guess, though wrong. ‘Possibly,’ I say, not wanting to discuss my real suspicions. For a start, they are far too incoherent to share. I can’t even convince myself that I’m on to anything important. All I know is – the sight of Bryon Vaux has put the fear in me.

‘Your dad never said anything about him?’

‘Why would he? To him, back then, Vaux would just have been another serviceman with burnt eyes—’

‘But you’re sure it’s him?’

‘I’m sure it’s him. I’m positive. Though I can’t see how it could be him, logically.’

‘Tell me what you need to know.’

‘If we can confirm Vaux was billeted at the hotel, I want to find out when and why he discharged himself. What?’

‘I thought you told me you were working for Vaux now?’

‘Loophole’s doing AR work for his production company. Why?’

Gabby folds her arms, examining me through her screen as if I were some particularly knotty firewall. ‘Conrad. I don’t mean to pry, but why can’t you just ask him these things yourself?’

‘I don’t know him.’ It’s all I can think of. I can hardly tell her about my mother. ‘He’s famous, and I don’t know him at all.’

In the end, and before I can buck up the courage to contact him myself, Bryon Vaux calls me.

Vaux’s production company is buying up immersive technologies. With them, he plans to smear movies across the real. This is where his current creative ambitions lie: in characters who’ll share your breakfast coffee. In plot beats played out on your journey to work, and confrontations staged in streets you already know. He imagines dreams woven through the real, and all the dreamers dreaming.

That Vaux now wants to buy Loophole outright comes as no surprise. If the purchase goes through he will almost certainly fold the company into his existing operation, dismantling it in order to get at its motive element. Ralf is Loophole’s golden goose, and Vaux is perfectly well aware of the fact. Were it anyone else’s commercial manoeuvre, I’d be cracking champagne along with the rest of the management team, glad of a profitable sale. Vaux will pay well for the company and we will all be winners.

But it is not anyone else. It is him. Bryon Vaux.

He invites me to his club. It’s very different from the one Ralf and I belong to, and not somewhere I would have associated with Vaux at all, recreating as it does the ambience of certain private schools. It caters to a clientele that has stepped from these schools to exclusive universities to remunerative jobs in the public arts like well-bred children stepping stones across a river. It occurs to me that the club has not been chosen with his comfort in mind at all, but mine.

‘How long have you known Michel, then?’

I expected the conversation to centre around Ralf. Our golden goose. Mention of Michel is an unexpected gambit – though of course Michel is the author of the
Shaman
series, source of Vaux’s wealth.

‘Michel told me about you.’

I’m surprised. ‘He did?’

Vaux smiles. ‘You grew up together, I understand. And it’s the strangest thing. I think I stayed at your hotel a while.’

I feel as though I am falling through a door I thought was locked.

‘Conrad, would you walk with me a while?’

A few minutes later, from the balustrade of an industrial museum overlooking the Forum, I weave my fingers before my eyes. The horse and rider rearing up at the centre of the square refuse to appear. They have entirely vanished. They might never have been. There isn’t the faintest visual stutter. My God, we’re good.

Vaux is sitting beside me on the bench, his hands resting on his knees, big and soft and furred as though they were a couple of pets drowsing on his lap. His feet are small, shod in pale leather handmades. It’s an effort for me to maintain my sense of distance, or, indeed, any cautious reflex at all. If it wasn’t for the steel sheen in his eyes – contact lenses over eyeballs that are already mostly plastic – I might, God help me, even be returning his smile by now.

Aside from a handful of brute physical details – his albino-white hair, his height, the cast of his face – little about Vaux meshes with my nightmares. I am finding it impossible to associate his bulk or his bigness with the brutality I remember. His hands, his boots.

‘I took Ralf out to dinner last night.’

‘Uh-huh.’

His eyes, like mine, are silver-lensed and hard to read. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

‘Of course I mind, Bryon. But I imagine you, being you, scared the living daylights out of him.’ I contemplate the Forum, its soapy white neo-classical columns, its shallow steps and elegant black street furniture and at its centre – an aching absence where its central monument should be. Already I am finding it difficult to remember what the horse and rider looked like. Now that my eyes have registered their absence, the statue is being scrubbed from my memory, washed away as swiftly as a dream.

Loophole’s development team, swimming in all the money and resources Vaux has thrown at it, has hit a serious snag. Now Vaux wants to see if I can spot it on my own.

‘Hang on.’ I study the gap where the monument once stood. ‘I think I see it.’

A family of tourists – mum, dad, two children with backpacks – are making their way in front of the arch on the south-eastern corner of the square. As they pass behind the absent column, they stutter and vanish. A second family appears, identical to the first. Mum, Dad and the kids walk across the road, clear the statue’s occlusion fan, and disappear, one by one. Another identical family appears, several yards in front of the group that’s just vanished. Christ. The glitch. The fault.

‘That took you about eight minutes.’ Vaux smiles. With silvered lenses in his eyes, the expression is predatory. ‘Not bad.’

Vaux has another meeting. I leave him at the mouth of the metro, and walk alone through the Ministries, trying to clear my head.

One by one we are transforming the spaces we have cleared. Here, for example, the ministry buildings have been replaced by paint-blue ponds where no birds swim. Lawns. Forests. We have entirely levelled a square mile south-west of the forum, filling the gap with potato fields that our great-grandparents’ generation would recognise. Hedgerows bend and sway.

Walking through this rusticated city, the air tastes fresher, though of course I know it’s just as muggy and polluted as always. With grass under my feet – albeit imaginary grass – I have become attuned to subtle gradients. I’ve learned to navigate, less by what I see, but more by the lie of the land under my feet. I can picture in my mind’s eye the organic shapes into which the city has been plugged, and which, after so many centuries, it has still not altogether erased. Little by little, and in unexpected ways, we are rubbing the city away to reveal the pattern of a forgotten land.

The mind juggles maps very poorly. Now that I am growing used to our clarified and minimal city – city as park, as field, as bucolic blank, like something out of one of Michel’s later, gentler post-apocalypse tales – I am finding it harder and harder to navigate the city as it really is. The truth is, I don’t like going out without my lenses now. An unaugmented walk through the stews of the city, hemmed in by its buildings, assaulted by its aniline palette, my concentration shattered by all its overlapping signage, leaves me feeling increasingly uncomfortable. My heart chatters. My breaths grow short and painful. I need a break.