A kid at the next table’s playing a 3D app: A kangaroo’s bouncing up a scrolling series of platforms. It’s off-putting. “The photo was taken last July,” I tell Holly. “It has not been altered.”
“So … Hugo Lamb found the fountain of eternal youth?”
A young waiter with Nestor’s heavyweight nose walks by with a T-bone steak sizzling on a hot plate. “Not a fountain, no. A place and a process. Hugo Lamb became an Anchorite of the Chapel of the Blind Cathar in 1992. Since his induction, he hasn’t aged.”
Holly takes this in and puffs out her cheeks. “Well, great. That’s that cleared up. My one-night fling is now … let’s say it, ‘immortal.’ ”
“Immortal with terms and conditions,” I equivocate. “Immortal only in the sense that he doesn’t age.”
Holly’s exasperated. “And nobody’s noticed, of course. Or does his family put it down to moisturizer and quinoa salad?”
“His family believe he drowned in a scuba-diving accident off Rabaul, near New Guinea, in 1996. Go ahead, call them.” I give Holly a card with the Lambs’ London number on it. “Or just shirabu one of his brothers, Alex or Nigel, and ask them.”
Holly stares. “Hugo Lamb faked his own death?”
I sip my tap water. It’s passed through many kidneys. “His new Anchorite friends arranged it. Obtaining a death certificate without a dead body is irksome, but they have years of experience.”
“Stop talking as if I believe you. Anyway, ‘Anchorites’? That’s something … medieval, isn’t it?”
I nod. “An Anchorite was a girl who lived like a hermit in a cell, but in the wall of a church. A living human sacrifice, in a way.”
Nestor drifts up. “One coffee. Say, is your friend hungry?”
“No, thank you,” says Holly. “I … I’ve got no appetite.”
“Come on,” I urge her, “you just walked from Columbus Circle.”
“I’ll bring a menu,” says Nestor. “You a veggie, like your friend?”
“She’s not my friend,” Holly fires back. “I mean, we just met.”
“Friend or not,” says the restaurateur, “a body’s got to eat.”
“I’ll be leaving soon,” declares Holly. “I have to rush.”
“Rush, rush, rush.” Nestor’s nasal hair streams in and out like seaweed. “Too busy to eat, too busy to breathe.” He turns away and turns back. “What’s next? Too busy to live?” Nestor’s gone.
Holly hisses: “Now you made me piss off an elderly Greek.”
“Order his moussaka, then. In my medical view, you don’t eat—”
“Since you’ve raised the subject of medical matters, ‘Dr. Fenby,’ I knew the name was familiar. I checked with Tom Ballantyne, my old GP. You came to my house in Rye when I was very nearly dying of cancer. I could have your medical license revoked.”
“If I was guilty of any malpractice, I would revoke it myself.”
She looks both outraged and baffled. “Why were you in my home?”
“Advising Tom Ballantyne. I was involved in trials of ADC-based drugs in Toronto, and Tom and I both thought your gall-bladder cancer might respond positively. It did.”
“You said you’re a psychiatrist, not an oncologist.”
“I’m a psychiatrist who owns a number of other hats.”
“So you’re claiming that I owe you my life now, are you?”
“Not at all. Or only partly. Cancer recovery is a holistic process, and while the ADCs contributed to your cancer’s remission, they weren’t the only curative agent, I suspect.”
“So … you got to know Tom Ballantyne beforemy diagnosis? Or … or … just how long have you been watching my life?”
“On and off, since your mother brought you into the consulting room in Gravesend Hospital in 1976.”
“Can you hear yourself? And it’s your actual job to curepeople of psychoses and delusions? Now for the last time, why did you send me a digitally jiggled image of a verybrief, veryex-boyfriend?”
“I want you to consider that the clause of life which reads ‘What lives must one day die’ can, in rare instances, be renegotiated.”
All the voices in the Santorini Cafй, all the gossiping, joking, cajoling, flirting, complaining, become, in my ears, a sonic waterfall.
Holly asks, “Dr. Fenby, are you a Scientologist?”
I try not to smile. “To believers in L. Ron Hubbard and the galactic Emperor Xenu, psychiatrists belong in septic tanks.”
“Immortality”—she lowers her voice—“isn’t—bloody—real.”
“But Atemporality, with terms and conditions applied, is.”
Holly looks around, and back. “This is deranged.”
“People said that about you after The Radio People.”
“If I could unwrite that wretched book, I would. Anyway, I don’t hear those voices any longer. Not since Crispin died. Not that that’s any of your goddamn business.”
“Precognition comes and goes,” I snowplow up some spilled sugar granules with my little finger, “mysteriously, like allergies or warts.”
“The big mystery to me is why I’m still sitting here.”
“Guess the name of Hugo Lamb’s mentor in the dark arts.”
“Sauron. Lord Voldemort. John Dee. Louis Cypher. Who?”
“An old friend of yours. Immaculйe Constantin.”
Holly rubs at a smear of lipstick on her coffee cup. “I never knew her first name. She’s only referred to as ‘Miss Constantin’ in the book. And in my head. So why are you inventing her first name?”
“I didn’t. It isher given name. Hugo Lamb’s one of her ablest pupils. He’s a superb groomer, and a formidable psychosoteric after only three decades following the Shaded Way.”
“Dr. Iris Marinus-Fenby, what bloody planet are you on?”
“The same one as you. Hugo Lamb now sources prey, just as Miss Constantin sourced you. And if she hadn’t scared you into reporting her so that Yu Leon Marinus was informed about and inoculated you, she would have abducted you and not Jacko.”
Chatter and clinking cutlery is loud and all around us.
Behind us, a girl is dumping her boyfriend in Egyptian Arabic.
“Now, I”—Holly pinches the bridge of her nose—“want to hit you. Reallyhard. What are, life-trespassing, fantasy-peddling … I—I—I have no words for you.”
“We’re truly sorry for the intrusion, Ms. Sykes. If there was any alternative at all, we wouldn’t be sitting here.”
“ ‘We’ being who, exactly?”
My back straightens a little. “We are Horology.”
Holly heaves a long, long sigh, meaning, Where do I start?
“Please.” I place a green key by her saucer. “Take this.”
She stares at it, then me. “What is it? And why would I?”
A couple of zombie-eyed junior doctors troop by, talking medical prognoses. “This key opens the door to the answers and proof you deserve and need. Once inside, go up the stairs to the roof garden. You’ll find me there with a friend or two.”
She finishes her coffee. “My flight home leaves at three P.M. tomorrow. I’ll be on it, heading home. Keep your key.”
“Holly,” I say gently, “I knowyou’ve met countless crazies thanks to The Radio People. I knowthe Jacko bait has been dangled at you before. But please. Take this key. Just in case I’m the real thing. It’s a thousand to one, I know, but I might be. Throw it away at the airport, by all means, but for now, take it. Where’s the harm?”
She holds my gaze for a few seconds, then pushes her empty cup and saucer away, stands, swipes up the key, and puts it into her handbag. She puts two dollars on the photo of Hugo Lamb. “That’s so I owe you nothing,” she mutters. “Don’t call me ‘Holly.’ Goodbye.”
April 5
IN THE SILT OF DREAMS, ill-wishers were cutting off my exits until the one way out was up. I can’t remember which self I am until I find my nightlight’s 05:09 imprinted on the overheated darkness. 119A. More than a mile away across Central Park on the ninth floor of the Empire Hotel, Arkady is preparing to dreamseed Holly Sykes with Фshima standing guard. I pray he won’t be needed. Staying here sticks in my craw, but if I went over to the Empire to help, I could end up triggering the very attack I so fear. Minutes limp by as I trawl New York’s nighttime tinnitus for meaning …