‘Only when I’m paid to.’

The man smiled and blew out smoke. Their coffee arrived, and he added one sugar and stirred it. ‘Bayer lost a part of their trademark rights on Heroin after the first world war,’ he said. ‘Incidentally.’

‘I see.’

‘Joe,’ the grey haired man said. ‘I want you to understand something. Opium and its derivatives are still, even after more than three thousand years in constant use, the best known pain relief medication known to science. Period. The opium poppy is the single most beneficial plant in the world.’

‘What do you want?’ Joe said. ‘I didn’t realise you came here to give me a lecture in Botany.’

The grey haired man shook his head. ‘There are a lot of things you don’t realise,’ he said. Joe let it pass.

‘In our own civil war,’ the grey haired man said, ‘opium was known as God’s own drug. Our combat medics still carry morphine packs to inject severely-wounded soldiers with. The United States of America is still the world’s largest consumer of opium-based prescription drugs.’

‘I guess you lot care a great deal about opium, then,’ Joe said. The man ignored him again. ‘The world, our world, is safe,’ he said. ‘Safe and healthy. Opium comes from Asia, is made into medicine by German and American and British firms, and eases suffering. The money earned is taxed, which aids governance. No one, Joe, is sponsoring wars with opium.’

‘I’m not sure I follow you,’ Joe said. The man said, ‘Yet it still, somewhat surprisingly, poses a problem for us.’

‘That’s too bad,’ Joe said. The man smiled, but there was nothing friendly anymore in that expression. He said, ‘Do you dream, Joe?’

The man kept surprising Joe. He thought about his black-filled nights; took a sip from his coffee; did not reply. ‘A theatre seemed suddenly opened and lighted up within my brain,’ the man said. ‘Which presented nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendour. The sense of space, and in the end the sense of time, were both powerfully affected. De Quincey.’

‘Friend of yours?’

‘Joe,’ the man said, ‘listen to me carefully, because I won’t say it again. What you want – what you would do – is open a door that we would, very much, like to keep closed. Keep tightly shut, in fact. You have to understand I am not unsympathetic. It is not easy, for refugees. But refugees must nevertheless respect the sanctity of their hosts. Do you understand?’

Joe didn’t. But he nodded. The man sighed. ‘Good,’ he said. And, ‘There is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind,’ he said. It had the same intonation of reading out aloud a memorised quote. ‘A thousand accidents may and will interpose a veil between our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions on the mind, but –’

‘Yes?’

‘The inscription remains for ever,’ the grey haired man said.

PART FOUR

IN CASABLANCA

the secret inscriptions 

on the mind

——

There was a Hamlet in full costume walking down Frith Street, declaiming a soliloquy as he passed. He was not, Joe thought, a very good Hamlet. As he passed Joe he was shouting, ‘To die, to sleep! To sleep, perchance to dream! Ay, there’s the rub!’ and Joe thought he had never heard Hamlet done with so many exclamation marks before. Hamlet spoiled it even further by sticking a question mark over the next line – ‘For in that sleep of death what dreams may come?’

Joe tossed him a coin. Hamlet turned, gave him a short bow, and continued on his way, changing his patter inexplicably to a rant about Ophelia.

Joe was back at the Castle. This time, he was watching the tradesmen entrance. He’d reached his quota of quotations for the day. He should have started earlier, but had been derailed by breakfast and the man from the CPD, and talk about opium that left him more confused than before. Was Longshott involved in pharmaceuticals in some way? He shook the thought from his mind. He knew the next visit from the grey haired man could prove fatal; and he didn’t intend, if he could possibly help it, for the fatality to be himself. He settled down to watch and wait instead.

At 09:45 there was a late employee arriving from the direction of Leicester Square, running and out of breath, and she disappeared inside the tradesmen door but Joe didn’t quite spot what opened the door – was it a key? Was she buzzed in?

At 10:03 there was a delivery truck, parking on the curb, burly men offloading crates of frozen foodstuff. A woman appeared at the door, vacated her place for more Castle employees who ferried the cargo inside. A camera then? And employees only inside the building – no tradesmen let through. Interesting.

He could actually keep an eye on the main entrance too, but it seemed to be a quiet morning. At 10:22, at last, something more interesting than frozen lobsters – a solitary figure strolling over, brown paper bag in hand – a boy who, unconcernedly, turned right at the Castle’s tradesmen entrance and paused briefly before the door. The door opened. The same woman stood in the entrance. A brief conference. When the boy left he was no longer holding the brown paper bag. The boy had the black hair and pale skin of a Han Chinese. The boy turned the way he had come. Joe followed him, at a distance.

He was still trying to fathom the grey haired man’s words to him. De Quincey’s words, really. There is no such thing as forgetting. Was memory, then, the secret inscription? And, what was the point in a secret inscription? He wondered if he was forgetting something, then wondered how he would know. What he did know was that he should be keeping an eye out for the CPD men. The others too, the ones who shot at him. Recently, it seemed, both parties had decided to talk to him instead. He couldn’t decide if that was an improvement. They didn’t strike him as people who liked to talk a great deal. Neither would probably bother again. Still, he had to give them full marks for effort.

He followed the boy a short distance, across Shaftesbury Avenue and onto Gerrard Street. Here was the heart of London’s Chinatown. The typeface advertising businesses was English made to look a little like Chinese characters. There were deep-red, roasted ducks hanging from hooks in the restaurant windows. Cleaver-wielding chefs stood behind the glass, hacking away at the carcasses of chickens and pigs. There was frying garlic smell everywhere, and that most exotic of ingredients for the British, the ginger. There were greengrocers selling tamarind and lychees and bok choi. There were travel agents advertising the wonders that could be had on a package tour to Kuomintang China. Pictures of Chiang Kai-shek hang everywhere. Even the red phone boxes were transformed into miniature Buddhist temples, but without so many stairs.

The boy turned left on Gerrard Street, and Joe followed. Into Newport Place, where several columns rose out of the ground, culminated in a decorated roof, and formed an open pagoda which took him by surprise. For a moment it was as if he were back in Vientiane, at his office overlooking the black stupa. Then it was gone, and it was merely a gaudy pagoda that looked like a bus shelter from the rain.

The shops in Newport Place were different. Joe knew that a small alleyway, Little Newport, joined it to Charing Cross Road, but here there were no books. The atmosphere was laden with a different kind of smoke than that of Gerrard Street: cooking, but not of ducks or noodles. The boy went past the pagoda and disappeared through an unmarked door. There was little advertising in Newport Place. There was one pub and its windows were grimy and the interior was dark and he could see no one inside. It was called the Edwin Drood and he thought of graffiti and felt suddenly cold.

He’d seen places like this before.