Evensong

“Do you know anything about that?” he asked Anwar.

Aware that Gaetano was not likely to ask questions to which he didn’t have answers, Anwar said, “Yes. I told him in the Signing Room that I couldn’t be sure his resemblance to Marek was only on the surface...”

“You’ve been through that again and again, with me and with Kuala Lumpur.”

“...and that he should go.”

Gaetano seemed about to erupt, to shout obvious things like He reports to me, not you! But he controlled it, and when he eventually spoke, his voice was quiet. “I’m glad at least that you gave me a straight answer, because he left a note. It says that after what you told him, he wouldn’t be coming back.”

“Sounds rather theatrical.”

“Not theatrical. I’ve known him for five years, and I hav ea bad feeling. I don’t think I’ll see him again.”

Anwar shrugged, but didn’t answer.

“His early life,” Gaetano went on, trying to ignore Anwar’s manner, “was chaotic. Like mine. He always said that when he joined us he found...”

“A comfort zone?”

“Do you know what you’ve done?”

“Removed an uncertainty.”

“Removed my closest colleague, and my deputy. I needed him for the summit, and you’ve driven him away!”

“You’re overstating.”

“You’ve done one thing that seemed right since you’ve been back from UNEX, or at least one thing that she half-admitted might be right, but it gives you no licence to talk like that. Listen to yourself. You and I have to work together.”

“You’re still overstating.”

“I’ll have him found and brought back.”

“Then,” said Anwar over his shoulder as he left Gaetano’s office, “you and I might have to have an accounting.”

“Yes,” Gaetano whispered at the closing door,“we might.”

Olivia knew the four lines by heart, but still preferred to read them rather than recite them.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

Each time she read them, the lines turned themselves inside out and presented another face to her. One of the faces was uncomfortably close to The Detail. Maybe Anwar already suspected it, when he tore that page out of his book for her. Maybe Shakespeare did too. Always ambiguous and multilayered, Shakespeare. Like the bastard of Rafiq and a Consultant.

She could have got her staff to search for a replacement book, but she didn’t. She searched personally, through dozens of antiquarian book dealers’ websites. One of the websites might even have been Anwar’s. She’d never know; most small business proprietors retained anonymity, and she had no idea of Anwar’s trading name.

She remembered exactly what he’d told her about his book, though: a replica of the Chalmers-Bridgewater edition of the Sonnets. Odd, because she hadn’t always noticed what he was saying. Then she remembered that that would have been after he’d said that thing to her in Brighton. She’d started to notice him a bit more after that.

Eventually she found a copy, ordered it, and had it express-couriered to her. It arrived in hours. On the inside title page she added an inscription You mistimed. O. Her writing wasn’t like Anwar’s, but large and upright with flourishes. She’d written it with a cheap marker pen that happened to be the first one within reach. The ink started to bleed into the weave of the paper almost before she’d finished writing, and she thought, Fuck, I should’ve got a proper pen; then it stopped, and what she’d written remained legible.

She’d go to his suite, on the floor below her apartments, and leave it on his pillow. No, that was too obvious. She’d give it to him personally. No, that was even more obvious. She’d ask Gaetano to give it to him. There was always Gaetano. Fuck, she thought again, these details. Why does everything have to be just so? While he’d been doing decisive things and made her mock him about almost turning into her, she was getting obsessive and almost turning into him.

Maybe literally, she thought sourly. He’s already pumped enough of himself inside me.