Actors?'

'Animals,' he said.

I looked at him sharply.

'I know about animals,' he said. His eyes were bright, aggressive. 'You can't have a circus without animals.'

'Wally ...'

'Shut up,' he said. 'You don't know s.h.i.t. We can open this theatre without your mother. You don't know s.h.i.t about all this stuff, so just listen to me. We've got to make a living. You can be in it, and Rox. We can have a good life here,' Wally said. 'That's what you've both got to reallze. We can make it out of what we have. She doesn't have to go outside. She doesn't need peac.o.c.ks.'

'What ... peac.o.c.ks?'

'Parks, peac.o.c.ks, all that c.r.a.p,' he said. 'She's going to see it's totally unnecessary.'

But someone opened the big door down on the street. It let in a draught which came all the way up the stairs, under the door, and shifted the dust around.

'What's that?' I was afraid.

'Mollo mollo.' Wally went to the door and unsnibbed the lock. He stood there for a moment with his head out.

'Your maman,' he said.

I began fiddling with my straps, unbuckling my Mouse mask. Wally ejected the vid of Irma and slipped it into his back pocket. I could hear the footsteps on the stair not one person, a crowd fast and purposeful, hard leather soles.

I rocketed towards the door, through a crowd of trousers and stockings and high-heeled shoes, my mask held in my hands.

'There ... was ... a ... crazy ... woman ... here,' I said, but my maman was anxious, did not hear me.

'Why are you up here?' she said, disentangling me. 'What happened?'

I tried to answer but Mother's team were pushing in around us, men in suits, women smelling of perfume and instant coffee. They had tiny computers, miniature telephones, French battery chargers with complicated adapters. Vincent was there too, pasty-skinned, pouchy-eyed, talking to someone on his telephone.

When he had finished he came and kissed me.

'A ... crazy ...' I began.

'Shush,' my mother said. 'Be quiet. Be calm.' She squatted on the floor beside me. 'My darling,' she said, 'your maman has to tell you something quite upsetting.'

I looked into her face and saw how the make-up sat on the surface of her skin and how the skin beneath was tired, how there were lines beside her eyes, beside her mouth, and how the eyes themselves seemed clouded.

'Roxanna?'

My mother shook her head. She opened her purse and took out a folded front page of Zinebleu. Zinebleu. On the front page there was a photograph of Vincent and my mother kissing. I had seen this photograph before, beside my mother's bed, pinned on to the moulding beside the very window where I now sat. It did not seem 'upsetting'. On the front page there was a photograph of Vincent and my mother kissing. I had seen this photograph before, beside my mother's bed, pinned on to the moulding beside the very window where I now sat. It did not seem 'upsetting'.

'Darling, there are things I must tell you. I can't tell you here.'

She held out her arms to me and I clung to her again. I buried my face in her neck, ashamed that everyone could see my ugly legs sticking out of my pyjamas. Then she carried me downstairs to the bathroom and sat me on the toilet. Then she carefully wiped my nose and turned on the taps, in the basin, in the bath.

Then she squatted beside me and put her mouth against my ear. I thought she was going to kiss me, but instead she spoke.

'You saw that picture in the paper?'

'Yes.'

She looked at me and blinked. She put her mouth back against my ear and started whispering fast. 'We are about to win this election, and now there are all these stories which are going to hurt your maman.'

She took the crumpled paper out from her purse again and held it up to me.

'They stole that from the house,' she whispered.

Steam swirled around the black ink picture.

'They broke into my house and stole stole it,' she hissed. 'Can you read it? They're saying I hurt Vincent's wife.' it,' she hissed. 'Can you read it? They're saying I hurt Vincent's wife.'

'How?'

'Sssh. Talk into my ear too. They say I took Vincent from her.'

This was nothing more than she had already told me.

'We think they have microphones in here, to listen to us.'

'Who?' I asked, looking up at the dripping yellow walls.

'The water stops them hearing what I say to you.' The steam was causing her make-up to run. 'For Chrissakes, listen to me. Please. They are going to start now in earnest. Some of it is already with the newspapers. They are going to say things about your mother that are not true. You must never believe what they say about me.'

'What ... will ... they ... say?'

'Whatever they think will hurt us the most. That I'm a thief, perhaps, that I tell lies, G.o.d knows what else. When we win, we close down their facilities. We send them home to Voorstand. The alliance is over, mo-chou. They thought it could never happen to them that's why it's all happening so late, but what is happening now is like their play they've written stories about me, Vincent too.'

'About ... me ... too?'

'No, sweets, not about you.'

Her arms were white, hard, stringy, her nose sharp, her skin hot and red with the steam.

'The Voorstanders are very bad,' she said. 'This is what I've always tried to tell you. I know Wally tells you other things, but Wally doesn't know some things, OK?'

'OK,' I said, but I held my mask tight in my lap, in case she tried to s.n.a.t.c.h it from me.

She wiped my face with Roxanna's towel. 'We are going to go upstairs now and we are going to hear people making plans we do not intend to follow. It's a performance do you understand?'

'Like ... a ... play.'

'Like a play, exactly. We think they listen to us, somehow. We don't know what they can know or how they really do it. Maybe they can hear all this. We don't know if they can hear or not. Tristan, darling, your maman doesn't know how to fight them when they're so unfair.'

All of this had its effect on me, of course, but not nearly as much as the news that she planned to trick her enemies by staying the night at the theatre. I hugged her and kissed her, and told her I would look after her.

She turned off the bath and the basin taps and mopped the condensation off the floor.

I wanted to put my mask on to face the crowd upstairs, but I could not wear it with my mother present. I went upstairs and faced them with a naked face, a rag mouth. Vincent came and brought me a sandwich and a gla.s.s of milk. He looked very old behind his beard. His eyes were bloodshot and his suit looked like it had been slept in.

'There ... was ... a ... crazy ... woman ... here,' I said.

56.

Gabe Manzini sat in a car in Gazette Street and watched the old Circus School. He had been awake all the night but his tanned skin was clean and taut. He felt light-footed, clear-headed, alive to the pleasures of the sunshine on his shoulders and the light salt breeze which ruffled the sleeve of his grey and white checked shirt.

The clarity of the Efican light was electric, dream-like. He enjoyed the bright, almost two-dimensional facade of the Feu Follet building, the extreme clarity of its rusting steel-framed windows, even the obvious warp and weft of the twelve tall Blue flags which floated gently in the cloudless sky, the bright, clean reflective surfaces of the red and silver taxi cabs parked in a chain along the street.

There was a way in which all of this was so much in keeping with his mood clean, cool, ordered so much in contrast to the murky, panicked mood presently prevailing in Saarlim where a.n.a.lysis had once again misread the Efican political climate.

It was the historical mission of a.n.a.lysis this was what he'd told his own guys at one o'clock this morning to screw things up and therefore make Operations look good. He said this to motivate them, but he also believed it. a.n.a.lysis thought Efica was already lost to the Alliance.

Gabe had been grateful to be given this task, nineteen days before polling day, and he enjoyed this feeling now, with just nine days to go, that he could save Efica without a single shot being fired, keep the Red Party in power with the sheer force of his will.

On the seat beside him were the newspapers, not just those from Chemin Rouge but from all over La Perouse, from the other islands, too Inkerman, Nez Noir, Baker, tiny islands like Shark that no one in Saarlim City ever heard of, all of them carrying the one story, his story, fresh, hand-made the suicide of the wife of the candidate's lover.

Before this happened, Smith had been ten points up in a vital seat. Now he sat in his car to watch her cop the bad tomatoes. The guys from Zinebleu Zinebleu were parked across the way, right in front of the steps. They were gutter hounds, pit-bull terriers. He had released her location to them, exclusive. You could rely on them. Their front-page photograph would make her look sleazy beyond belief. were parked across the way, right in front of the steps. They were gutter hounds, pit-bull terriers. He had released her location to them, exclusive. You could rely on them. Their front-page photograph would make her look sleazy beyond belief.

Of course, a.n.a.lysis would call this luck. What they never did appreciate was that things only fell together with a great deal of a.s.sistance. Operations had not induced the wife's mental state, but only an amateur would call the action lucky. It was the result of detailed knowledge, of discipline, and the ability to act swiftly, cleanly, without hesitation. Natalie Theroux was unstable. She had a gun. The gun now bore her prints. The bullet in her brain was from this gun.

You could not have this sort of 'luck' without happy, well-motivated people on the ground. Gabe had these people, not by accident, but because he personally selected them, trained them, and flew thirteen-hour flights in order to visit them regularly. They were a particular type active by nature, intelligent, but able to endure weeks of drudge work. They were more than this they were like this driver who sat beside him now, a Uzi strapped inside his coat, a man who picked a bag of apples from his own tree before he came to work at four a.m.

Now, as he waited for Smith and her campaign manager to emerge from the front door of the building, Gabe bit into one of these small pale yellow Efican apples. The skin had the golden translucency of a yellow plum, the flesh was very white, slightly tart.

'Good?'

'Good.'

'Best d.a.m.n apples in the world.'

He was not wrong, Gabe thought, washing down the white sweet apple with hot sugarless Efican coffee. This was also good, heavy, characteristically fragrant, slightly furry on the tongue, and he thought how much he always enjoyed what was particular about every country he had ever worked in.

He smiled and contracted his thigh muscles, recalling his three-hour R&R with Roxanna Wonder Wilkinson, her honey-salt taste, her adventurousness in bed, her soft baby tears and her easy need. He had thought about her all through the long night afterwards. She had lain there like a promise.

Indeed, he was thinking of Roxanna, gazing across at the building, listening to the flapping flags, admiring the way the sun seemed to glaze the chipped and flaking white wall of the Feu Follet, when he saw, framed perfectly in a window, a woman so exactly like her that he gasped.

He poked his close-cropped head a little out of the car, and squinted up towards her. The woman was rubbing her scalp and yawning. As she yawned, her eyes closed up, but as the yawn ended, the eyes opened. She saw him looking up at her. And he understood, not so much because of her appearance, which was clouded by the filthy window, but by the frozen guilty moment that came before she ducked her head, that it was Roxanna.

He shut his eyes and exhaled.

When he opened his eyes, a man and woman were walking out the front door of the theatre the woman was in a yellow dress, the man was bearded, all in black; it was Smith & Theroux. The boys from Zinebleu Zinebleu came in from the flank. Their flash gun was popping from fifteen feet away, but Gabe could no longer enjoy it. He opened the car door. came in from the flank. Their flash gun was popping from fifteen feet away, but Gabe could no longer enjoy it. He opened the car door.

'Tell Cantrell advise the CRTV,' he told the driver.

'Who?'

'Cantrell.' He was already heading for the theatre door. 'Hurry. There she goes.'

As he crossed the street, a terrible feeling took control of him. He had been set up by a woman. He could not believe something so humiliating was happening. He prayed, as he entered the rank foyer with its whining little notices pinned to the wall, as he ran three steps a time up the stairs, that he was somehow mistaken about what he had seen, that the woman at the window had just looked like Roxanna because he was thinking of her at that moment. But even while he prayed this he could see, in his mind's eye, the results of the residence check he had run, but barely looked at Gazette Street. G.o.d d.a.m.n.

On the second floor he discovered a line of deserted offices. He was light on his feet and he moved down the corridor with the careful grace of an athlete, but he felt ill-prepared, clumsy, like someone drunk called into combat. He had been sloppy, complacent, second-rate everything he despised. His only weapon was the box-cutter which he now transferred to the palm of his hand, still closed. He opened one door after the other not following procedure, but with a deliberate carelessness a challenge to fate to prove his fears unfounded.

The rooms whose doors he so casually opened all had that particular potent emptiness he equated with stake-outs, sniper posts. They were like sweaters with their labels torn out they taunted him with their lack of information.

In the last room he found three mattresses on the floor, a fug of blankets, sheets, socks. The door banged back when he kicked it. Two of the mattresses were empty but on the third he could see a small white wrist showing from beneath a pile of blankets. He wrinkled his nose and pa.s.sed his broad hand over his clipped hair.

'Roxanna?'

The blankets stirred, and then her tousled blonde head appeared, caped in a tartan blanket.

'Gabey?'

Even now, in extremis, a part of him was touched by her, moved by the white softness of her flesh. She was sleeping naked, and as she kneeled he could see the p.r.o.nounced curve of her belly, and he could imagine the smell of her warmth, the feel of it against his face.

'You stupid b.i.t.c.h,' he said.

'Gabey ...'

'What amateur trick is this?'

'No, Gabey,' she said. 'No trick.'

She pulled the blankets around her shoulders like a shawl. She squatted, frowning up at him. He could see her little foot, her ankle, her chipped toenails.

'I'm poor, that's all.'

He went to the window and looked down. Everyone had gone.

'I am respected, all over the world,' he said. 'Peru, Burma, China they know me in these places. They know I am the best. I write their f.u.c.king history books, Roxanna. People stand in my way, Rox, I kill them.'

'I don't understand what you're saying.'

'Read the paper, b.i.t.c.h. Look at the front page of today's paper.'

'Gabey, don't be angry. What's in the zines, honey?'

'You tell your people, Rox they're dead. They're f.u.c.king history.'

'What people, Gabe?'