I had made no promises, but I thought it best to nod.
His face was dark. In the low light, it almost matched his hair.
I said, “Your god isn’t contained.”
“That’s not the problem.”
“I’d say, whoever this guy is, he hasn’t got the know-how, or the gear. Either way, he’s dropped you in the shit.”
“That,” he said again, “is not the problem.”
I heard a clicking sound. It started slowly, then grew faster, like a hundred castanets all rattling away. The snooker balls were edging in a slow dance, shuddering across the tabletop, trembling together. Edward told me, “This is what I want from you. Listen now. I know you’re looking for him. All I ask is this: that when you find him, you call me. One phone call. Then you do whatever you want. Whatever. Have him shot, arrested, put in prison, I don’t care. But you call me first. You understand?”
I said nothing.
“Can you do that for me, Copeland?”
“I . . . might. If I know enough to trace him.”
He opened his mouth, raised his finger to me.
There were three whiskey glasses. Two were on the tall table; the third, Eddie’s, balanced on a chair arm on the far side of the room.
They broke. Simultaneously.
Cracked, shattered, tumbled into pieces, ice and liquid spilling round them, dripping on the carpet.
The bottle took a moment longer: broke with the slightest click, and dropped apart.
“Fuck.”
Edward swung about, looking this way and that, his fists clenched, his eyes blazing.
Without a word, he flung open the door and stormed off.
The buzzing died. The air grew quieter.
Eddie issued orders into his phone, summoning a cleanup. To me, he said, “Give him a minute. Then we’ll find out where he’s gone.”
I said, “It’s riding him.”
“Oh, something’s riding him, all right. Come on. Let’s go get another drink.”
Chapter 44
A Bright, Bright Light Upon Our Future
There was a power here, sharpening the air, putting a taste of metal in my mouth.
It felt like a retrieval site. Like an active god.
Yet just an hour before, and there’d been nothing.
A reader might have picked it up. But no human senses. If I’d had to guess, then I’d have sworn the place was clean.
It had escalated quickly.
That was worrying.
Now Eddie strolled around with all the ease of a protected child. He fetched another bottle from the cabinet. He chattered happily. He called out, “Dad-o! Dad-o!” and he grinned at me, beckoning me on. But for me, the place had changed. Even the fabric of it seemed in doubt. I didn’t trust the walls, I didn’t trust the furniture. Everything that once seemed solid, comfortable, now felt treacherous, uncertain. I wanted to test every floorboard, every stair, before I stepped on it. As if the house might all at once dissolve around me, one more fiction in a litany of madness.
“Dad-o! Where ya hiding, man?”
Temperatures were way too high. I heard the AC creaking, roaring, trying to keep up.
“These surges,” I said. “Are they regular? How often? More frequent now, or not?”
Eddie just spread his hands. “Relax,” he said. “It’s no big deal. Guy gets steamed up, twenty minutes later, and he’s calm again. Happens all the time.”
“And let me guess. Each time’s a wee bit worse, right?”
“Hey, I don’t keep score—”
“But it was different, say, a month back?”
“A month, yeah, sure. A month’s a long time.”
“And a week ago. I bet it’s worse than a week ago, too. Yeah?”
He didn’t answer that.
We finally found Dad-o on an upper floor, slumped down in an armchair, staring out across the grounds. A bottle and a glass stood on the table next to him. His carrot-colored hair was disarrayed, his belly sagged over his pants. He watched me sideways out of one eye, like a toad examining a fly.
“You know this country’s sin?” he said.
I took a breath.
“No, sir, I don’t.”
“No. No, you don’t.” He spoke slowly, with the measured rhythms of a drunk struggling to sound sober. “Our sin is wiped out of the history books. Turned upside down. Good is bad and bad is good. But deep inside—deep, deep, in here—” he pressed a fist against his chest, “I tell you: there is not one man, woman or child who doesn’t know the truth.”