Bluster, thought the Principal Backer. None was willing to look the others in the face. All feared seeing their own disquietude reflected.
‘Unfortunately,’ he said, ‘his efforts have not yet concluded. He’s now seeking the missing child.’
‘You’ve spoken with him?’ asked the crow-man.
‘Not directly, but he has made contact. He has requested our assistance – “request,” in this case, being something of a euphemism.’
Quayle operated largely in seclusion and solitude, a succession of female partners excepted. In times past he had enjoyed a more public profile, but no longer. Nevertheless he was a figure of influence, and one not to be denied.
‘What use would a man like Quayle have for a child?’ asked the other woman present. The Principal Backer thought he detected what might almost have been concern in her tone. She sat on the boards of a number of charities, including at least two that specialized in seeking cures for pediatric illnesses. Perhaps, he considered, her hypocrisy had become so ingrained that she was no longer even capable of perceiving it as such.
‘I don’t think he’s especially interested in the child itself,’ said the Principal Backer. ‘Although if he did want it, would you really care to know his reasons?’
The woman did not reply. Her silence was sufficient response.
‘Then why persist?’ asked the man who had laughed, his expression restored to its default smirk. The Principal Backer distrusted those who laughed too easily, perceiving in it a deeper inability to find anything funny at all.
‘The mother possessed something Quayle wants. He believes that this object now resides with whomever has the child.’
No one needed to ask why this asset was of interest to Quayle. The lawyer had only one purpose to his existence: the reconstruction of the Fractured Atlas, which would reorder the world in its image.
‘What kind of assistance does he require from us?’ asked the second woman.
‘Contacts: police, municipal government, whatever else may strike him.’
‘And we’re obliging?’
‘Naturally.’
‘While ensuring that we’re kept apprised of any developments?’
‘Where possible.’
The Principal Backer waited for their approval to subside. They were coming to the meat of it now.
‘Quayle believes he’s close,’ he said, ‘closer than he has ever been.’
‘But how close?’ said the crow-man. ‘We’ve heard all this before. My father listened to the same claims coming from Quayle’s mouth.’
Another bark of laughter: ‘Your grandfather, too. And mine.’
The Principal Backer waited for them to stop. They were of old blood, and old blood grew torpid.
‘The last of the missing pages,’ he said, ‘if Quayle is to be believed.’
The other four absorbed this information.
‘And then?’ asked the woman of charitable disposition.
‘If Quayle is right, the world will become a reflection of the Atlas. The Not-Gods will return, and the Old God will pass into nonbeing. All will be fed to the flames.’
No laughter now. These Backers, like those long gone before them, had predicated their existence on the belief that they could pass on the cost of their bargain to future generations. They would be dead before the consequences of their actions were made manifest; or perhaps this pact with an evil that had come into being with the birth of the universe, a covenant agreed centuries earlier, might ultimately be revealed as mere myth, so much sophistry to explain away good fortune. Their success would not come at a price. The Not-Gods did not exist. There was no Buried God lost deep beneath the dirt and rock of this world, waiting to be discovered, just as there was no Old God seeking adoration and remembrance. There was only this life, and then nothingness.
But no: they knew the truth. They had only hoped to be gone before it was revealed.
‘So,’ said the crow-man, ‘we must collude with Quayle in our own destruction, and the extinction of those we love?’
The crow-man had family: children, a grandchild. So did the others. Only the Principal Backer was without heirs.
‘We have always been in a state of collusion,’ said the Principal Backer. ‘The abstract now threatens to become concrete. But what did you expect?’
‘More time.’
‘It appears you may be denied it. Why do you think I booked L’Espalier for our meal?’
‘I believe,’ said the crow-man, ‘that I may have lost my appetite.’
The Principal Backer gripped him by the shoulder.
‘Then find it again,’ he said. ‘This could be our Last Supper.’
49
If the Principal Backer and his associates were ambivalent about the presence of the visitor, Quayle was no less eager to maintain his distance from these colonials. He regarded them as lacking purity: they acted largely out of self-interest, seeking to enrich themselves by subscribing to a doctrine in which they believed only half-heartedly, if they truly believed in it at all.
Only the leader of their little group was worthy of any respect. There were those who suspected the Principal Backer to be black as pitch to the depths of his being, although Quayle had no idea what might have bred in him such hatred for his fellow men that the Principal Backer should be content to see them reduced to ash, and himself along with them. Quayle wondered if the Buried God whispered to the Principal Backer in the night, calling to him in a tongue ancient and unwritten, its words unintelligible but their meaning clear. If so, it might have gone some way toward explaining the Principal Backer’s animus toward Quayle, who served the rest of the Obverse Trinity.
But Quayle had other doubts about the Principal Backer. Quayle possessed no evidence at which to point, no indications of irresolution or – whisper it – treachery on the part of the Principal Backer, only his knowledge of men and the depths of their self-interest. The Principal Backer was prosperous, and in good health. He was held in regard. He had authority.
He had no reason to bring all of it to an end.
Quayle, by contrast, was a soul in anguish, and wished only for that suffering to cease. If a way had existed to accomplish this other than through the restoration of the Atlas, Quayle might have embraced it without hesitation, or so he told himself. Quayle was a man convinced that he had lived for centuries, cursed – in an irony only a lawyer could properly appreciate – by a contract he should not have signed. He could recall moments of great import going back to the Reformation, intimate details of incidents and individuals about which he could not possibly have such knowledge. He was haunted by memories that seemed to belong both to him and to others, a succession of men who bore his name and likeness but could not be him.
Once again, as he did whenever he experienced doubt, he feared that these echoes were simply manifestations of mania, while the insight that permitted him to acknowledge his own lunacy represented a clarity that ebbed and flowed according to the patterns of his psychosis.
Lies within lies: like the Backers, he would find no consolation in them.
The Atlas was real.
The Old God was real.
The Buried God was real.
The Not-Gods to come were real.
And Quayle, in all his singularity, was real.
50
Parker spent part of the following morning in Augusta going through the relevant birth records for Piscataquis County. He managed to assemble a list of registrations from the period in question, but remained reluctant to go knocking on doors to ask about illegal burials and child abductions. Someone would shoot him.