Anansi Boys

Chapter Eleven

Fat Charlie looked down at his father’s grave. “Are you in there?” he said aloud. “If you are, come out. I need to talk to you.”

He walked over to the floral grave marker and looked down. He was not certain what he was expecting—a hand to push up through the soil, perhaps, punching up and grabbing his leg—but nothing of the kind seemed to be about to happen.

He had been so certain.

Fat Charlie walked back through the Garden of Rest feeling stupid, like a game show contestant who had just made the mistake of betting his million dollars on the Mississippi being a longer river than the Amazon. He should have known. His father was as dead as roadkill, and he had wasted Spider’s money on a wild goose chase. By the windmills of Babyland he sat down and wept, and the moldering toys seemed even sadder and lonelier than he remembered.

She was waiting for him in the parking lot, leaning against her car, smoking a cigarette. She looked uncomfortable.

“Hullo, Mrs. Bustamonte,” said Fat Charlie.

She took one final drag on the cigarette, then dropped it to the asphalt and ground it out beneath the sole of her flat shoe. She was wearing black. She looked tired. “Hello Charles.”

“I think if I’d expected to see anyone here, it would be Mrs. Higgler. Or Mrs. Dunwiddy.”

“Callyanne’s gone away. Mrs. Dunwiddy sent me. She wants to see you.”

It’s like the mafia, thought Fat Charlie. A postmenopausal mafia. “She’s going to make me an offer I can’t refuse?”

“I doubt it. She is not very well.”

“Oh.”

He climbed into his rental, followed Mrs. Bustamonte’s Camry along the Florida streets. He had been so certain about his father. Certain he’d find him alive. Sure that he’d help—

They parked outside Mrs. Dunwiddy’s house. Fat Charlie looked at the front yard, at the faded plastic flamingos and the gnomes and the red mirrored gazing ball sitting on a small concrete plinth like an enormous Christmas tree ornament. He walked over to the ball, just like the one he had broken when he was a boy, and saw himself distorted, staring back from it.

“What’s it for?” he said.

“It’s not for anything. She liked it.”

Inside the house the smell of violets hung thick and cloying. Fat Charlie’s Great-Aunt Alanna had kept a tube of parma violet candies in her handbag, but even as a chunky kid with a sweet tooth, Fat Charlie would eat them only if there wasn’t anything else. This house smelled like those sweets had tasted. Fat Charlie hadn’t thought of parma violets in twenty years. He wondered if they still made them. He wondered why anyone had ever made them in the first place—

“She’s at the end of the hall,” said Mrs. Bustamonte, and she stopped and she pointed. Fat Charlie went into Mrs. Dunwiddy’s bedroom.

It was not a big bed, but Mrs. Dunwiddy lay in it like an oversized doll. She wore her glasses, and above them something that Fat Charlie realized was the first nightcap he had ever seen, a yellowing tea-cosy-like affair, trimmed in lace. She was propped up on a mountain of pillows, her mouth open, and she was snoring gently as he walked in.

He coughed.

Mrs. Dunwiddy jerked her head up, opened her eyes, and stared at him. She pointed her finger to the nightstand beside the bed, and Fat Charlie picked up the glass of water sitting there and passed it to her. She took it with both hands, like a squirrel holding a nut, and she took a long sip before handing it back to him.

“My mouth get all dry,” she said. “You know how old I am?”

“Um.” There was, he decided, no right answer. “No.”

“Hunnert and four.”

“That’s amazing. You’re in such good shape. I mean, that’s quite marvelous—”

“Shut up, Fat Charlie.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t say ‘sorry’ like that neither, like a dog that get tell off for messin’ on the kitchen floor. Hold your head up. Look the world in the eye. You hear me?”

“Yes. Sorry. I mean, just yes.”

She sighed. “They want to take me to the hospital. I tell them, when you get to be hunnert and four, you earn the right to die in your own bed. I make babies in this bed long time back, and I birth babies in this bed, and damned if I going to die anywhere else. And another thing—” She stopped talking, closed her eyes, and took a slow, deep breath. Just as Fat Charlie was convinced she had fallen asleep, her eyes opened, and she said, “Fat Charlie, if someone ever ask if you want to live to be hunnert and four, say no. Everything hurt. Everything. I hurt in places nobody ain’t discover yet.”

“I’ll bear that in mind.”

“None of your back talk.”

Fat Charlie looked at the little woman in her white wooden bed. “Shall I say sorry?” he asked.

Mrs. Dunwiddy looked away, guiltily. “I do you wrong,” she said. “Long time ago, I do you wrong.”

“I know,” said Fat Charlie.

Mrs. Dunwiddy might have been dying, but she still shot Fat Charlie the kind of look that would have sent children under the age of five screaming for their mothers. “What you mean, you know?”

Fat Charlie said, “I figured it out. Probably not all of it, but some of it. I’m not stupid.”

She examined him coldly through the thick glass of her spectacles, then she said, “No. You not. True thing, that.”

She held out a gnarled hand. “Give me the water back. That’s better.” She sipped her water, dabbing at it with a small, purple tongue. “Is a good thing you’re here today. Tomorrow the whole house be fill with grievin’ grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all of them tryin’ to make me to die in the hospital, makin’ up to me so I give them things. They don’t know me. I outlive all my own children. Every one of them.”

Fat Charlie said, “Are you going to talk about the bad turn you did to me?”

“You should never have break my garden mirror ball.”

“I’m sure I shouldn’t.”

He remembered it, in the way you remember things from childhood, part memory, part memory of the memory: following the tennis ball into Mrs. Dunwiddy’s yard, and once he was there, experimentally picking up her mirrored ball to see his face in it, distorted and huge, feeling it tumble to the stone path, watching it smash into a thousand tiny shards of glass. He remembered the strong old fingers that grabbed him by the ear and dragged him out of her yard and into her house—

“You sent Spider away,” he said. “Didn’t you?”

Her jaw was set like a mechanical bulldog’s. She nodded. “I did a banishment,” she said. “Didn’t mean for it to go so. Everybody know a little magic back in those days. We didn’t have all them kinda DVDs and cell phones and microwaves, but still, we know a lot regardless. I only wanted to teach you a lesson. You were so full of yourself, all mischief and back talk and vinegar. So I pull Spider out of you, to teach you a lesson.”

Fat Charlie heard the words, but they made no sense. “You pulled him out?”

“I break him off from you. All the tricksiness. All the wickedness. All the devilry. All that.” She sighed. “My mistake. Nobody tell me that if you do magic around a, around people like your daddy’s bloodline, it magnify everything. Everything get bigger.” Another sip of the water. “Your mother never believe it. Not really. But that Spider, he worse than you. Your father never say nothing about it until I make Spider go away. Even then, all he tell me is if you can’t fix it you not no son of his.”

He wanted to argue with her, to tell her how this was nonsense, that Spider was not a part of him, no more than he, Fat Charlie, was part of the sea or of the darkness. Instead he said, “Where’s the feather?”

“What feather you talking about?”

“When I came back from that place. The place with the cliffs and the caves. I was holding a feather. What did you do with it?”

“I don’t remember,” she said. “I’m an old woman. I’m a hunnert and four.”

Fat Charlie said, “Where is it?”

“I forget.”

“Please tell me.”

“I ain’t got it.”

“Who does?”

“Callyanne.”

“Mrs. Higgler?”

She leaned in, confidentially. “The other two, they’re just girls. They’re flighty.”

“I called Mrs. Higgler before I came out. I stopped at her house before I went to the cemetery. Mrs. Bustamonte says she’s gone away.”

Mrs. Dunwiddy swayed gently from side to side in the bed, as if she were rocking herself to sleep. She said, “I not going to be here for much longer. I stop eating solid food after you leave the last time. I done. Only water. Some women say they love your father, but I know him long long before them. Back when I had my looks, he would take me dancing. He come pick me up and whirl me around. He was an old man even then, but he always make a girl feel special. You don’t feel—” She stopped, took another sip of water. Her hands were shaking. Fat Charlie took the empty glass from her. “Hunnert and four,” she said. “And never in my bed in the daytime except for confinements. And now I finish.”

“I’m sure you’ll reach a hundred and five,” said Fat Charlie, uneasily.

“Don’t you say that!” she said. She looked alarmed. “Don’t! Your family do enough trouble already. Don’t you go making things happen.”

“I’m not like my dad,” said Fat Charlie. “I’m not magic. Spider got all that side of the family, remember?”

She did not appear to be listening. She said, “When we would go dancing, way before the Second World War, your daddy would talk to the bandleader, and plenty times they call him up to sing with them. All the people laugh and cheer. Is so he make things happen. Singing.”

“Where is Mrs. Higgler?”

“Gone home.”

“Her house is empty. Her car isn’t there.”

“Gone home.”

“Er—you mean she’s dead?”

The old woman on the white sheets wheezed and gasped for breath. She seemed unable to speak any longer. She motioned to him.

Fat Charlie said, “Shall I get help?”

She nodded, and continued to gasp and choke and wheeze as he went out to find Mrs. Bustamonte. She was sitting in the kitchen, watching Oprah on a very small countertop television. “She wants you,” he said.

Mrs. Bustamonte went out. She came back holding the empty water jug. “What do you say to set her off like that?”

“Was she having an attack or something?”

Mrs. Bustamonte gave him a look. “No, Charles. She was laughing at you. She say you make her feel good.”

“Oh. She said Mrs. Higgler had gone home. I asked if she meant she was dead.”

Mrs. Bustamonte smiled then. “Saint Andrews,” she said. “Callyanne’s gone to Saint Andrews.” She refilled the jug in the sink.

Fat Charlie said, “When all this started I thought that it was me against Spider, and you four were on my side. And now Spider’s been taken, and it’s me against the four of you.”

She turned off the water and gazed at him sullenly.

“I don’t believe anyone anymore,” said Fat Charlie. “Mrs. Dunwiddy’s probably faking being ill. Probably as soon as I leave here she’ll be out of bed and doing the charleston around her bedroom.”

“She not eating. She say it makes her feel bad inside. Won’t take a thing to fill her belly. Just water.”

“Where in Saint Andrews is she?” asked Fat Charlie.

“Just go,” said Mrs. Bustamonte. “Your family, you done enough harm here.”

Fat Charlie looked as if he was about to say something, and then he didn’t, and he left without another word.

Mrs. Bustamonte took the jug of water in to Mrs. Dunwiddy, who lay quiet in the bed.

“Nancy’s son hates us,” said Mrs. Bustamonte. “What you tell him anyhow?”

Mrs. Dunwiddy said nothing. Mrs. Bustamonte listened, and when she was sure that the older woman was still breathing, she took off Mrs. Dunwiddy’s thick spectacles and put them down by the bed, then pulled up the sheet to cover Mrs. Dunwiddy’s shoulders.

After that, she simply waited for the end.

Fat Charlie drove off, not entirely certain where he was going. He had crossed the Atlantic for the third time in two weeks, and the money that Spider had given him was almost tapped out. He was alone in the car, and being alone, he hummed.

He passed a clutch of Jamaican restaurants when he noticed a sign in a storefront window: Cut Price to the Islands. He pulled up and went inside.

“We at A-One travel are here to serve all your travel needs,” said the travel agent, in the hushed and apologetic tone of voice doctors normally reserve for telling people that the limb in question is going to have to come off.

“Er. Yeah. Thanks. Er. What’s the cheapest way to get out to Saint Andrews?”

“Will you be going on vacation?”

“Not really. I just want to go out for a day. Maybe two days.”

“Leaving when?”

“This afternoon.”

“You are, I take it, joshing with me.”

“Not at all.”

A computer screen was gazed at, lugubriously. A keyboard was tapped. “It doesn’t look like there’s anything out there for less than twelve hundred dollars.”

“Oh.” Fat Charlie slumped.

More keyboard clicking. The man sniffed. “That can’t be right.” Then he said, “Hold on.” A phone call. “Is this rate still valid?” He jotted down some figures on a scratch pad. He looked up at Fat Charlie. “If you could go out for a week and stay at the Dolphin Hotel, I could get you a week’s vacation for five hundred dollars, with your meals at the hotel thrown in. The flight will only cost you airport tax.”

Fat Charlie blinked. “Is there a catch?”

“It’s an island tourism promotion. Something to do with the music festival. I didn’t think it was still going on. But then, you know what they say. You get what you pay for. And if you want to eat anywhere else it will cost you.”

Fat Charlie gave the man five crumpled hundred-dollar bills.

Daisy was starting to feel like the kind of cop you only ever see in movies: tough, hard-bitten, and perfectly ready to buck the system; the kind of cop who wants to know whether or not you feel lucky or if you’re interested in making his day, and particularly the kind of cop who says “I’m getting too old for this shit.” She was twenty-six years old, and she wanted to tell people she was too old for this shit. She was quite aware of how ridiculous this was, thank you very much.

At this moment, she was standing in Detective Superintendent Camberwell’s office and saying, “Yes, sir. Saint Andrews.”

“Went there on my holidays some years back, with the former Mrs. Camberwell. Very pleasant place. Rum cake.”

“That sounds like the place, sir. The closed-circuit footage from Gatwick is definitely him. Traveling under the name of Bronstein. Roger Bronstein flies to Miami, changes planes, and takes a connection to Saint Andrews.”

“You’re sure it’s him?”

“Sure.”

“Well,” said Camberwell. “That buggers us good and proper, doesn’t it? No extradition treaty.”

“There must be something we can do.”

“Mm. We can freeze his remaining accounts and grab his assets, and we will, and that’ll be as much use to us as a water-soluble umbrella, because he’ll have lots of cash sitting in places we can’t find it or touch it.”

Daisy said, “But that’s cheating.”

He looked up at her as if he wasn’t certain exactly what he was looking at. “It’s not a playground game of tag. If they kept the rules, they’d be on our side. If he comes back, then we arrest him.” He squashed a little Plasticine man into a Plasticine ball and began to mash it out into a flat sheet, pinching it between finger and thumb. “In the old days,” he said, “they could claim sanctuary in a church. If you stayed in the church the law couldn’t touch you. Even if you killed a man. Of course, it limited your social life. Right.”

He looked at her as if he expected her to leave now. She said, “He killed Maeve Livingstone. He’s been cheating his clients blind for years.”

“And?”

“We should be bringing him to justice.”

“Don’t let it get to you,” he said.

Daisy thought, I’m getting too old for this shit. She kept her mouth shut, and the words simply went round and round inside her head.

“Don’t let it get to you,” he repeated. He folded the Plasticine sheet into a rough cube, then squeezed it viciously between finger and thumb. “I don’t let any of it get to me. Think of it as if you were a traffic warden. Grahame Coats is just a car that parked on the double yellow lines but drove off before you were able to give him a ticket. Yes?”

“Sure,” said Daisy. “Of course. Sorry.”

“Right,” he said.

She went back to her desk, went to the Police internal Web site, and examined her options for several hours. Finally, she went home. Carol was sitting in front of Coronation Street, eating a microwavable chicken korma.

“I’m taking a break,” said Daisy. “I’m going on holiday.”

“You don’t have any holiday time left,” pointed out Carol reasonably.

“Too bad,” said Daisy. “I’m too old for this shit.”

“Oh. Where are you going?”

“I’m going to catch a crook,” said Daisy.

Fat Charlie liked Caribbeair. They might have been an international airline, but they felt like a local bus company. The flight attendant called him “darlin’” and told him jus’ to sit anywhere that struck his fancy.

He stretched out across three seats and went to sleep. In Fat Charlie’s dream he was walking beneath copper skies and the world was silent and still. He was walking toward a bird, vaster than cities, its eyes aflame, its beak agape, and Fat Charlie walked into the beak and down the creature’s throat.

Then, in the way of dreams, he was in a room, its walls covered with soft feathers and with eyes, round like the eyes of owls, which did not blink.

Spider was in the center of the room, his legs and arms extended. He was held up by chains made of bone, like the bones of a chicken’s neck, and they ran from each corner of the room, and held him tightly, like a fly in a web.

Oh, said Spider. It’s you.

Yes, said Fat Charlie in his dream.

The bone chains pulled and tugged at Spider’s flesh, and Fat Charlie could see the pain in his face.

Well, said Fat Charlie. I suppose it could be worse.

I don’t think this is it, said his brother. I think she has plans for me. Plans for us. I just don’t know what they are.

They’re only birds, said Fat Charlie. How bad could it be?

Ever heard of Prometheus?

Er—

Gave fire to man. Was punished by the gods by being chained to a rock. Every day an eagle would come down and tear out his liver.

Didn’t he ever run out of liver?

He grew a new one every day. It’s a god thing.

There was a pause. The two brothers stared at each other.

I’ll sort it out, said Fat Charlie. I’ll fix it.

Just like you fixed the rest of your life, I suppose? Spider grinned, without mirth.

I’m sorry.

No. I’m sorry. Spider sighed. So look, have you got a plan?

A plan?

I’ll take that as a no. Just do whatever you have to do. Get me out of here.

Are you in Hell?

I don’t know where I am. If it’s anywhere, this is the Hell of Birds. You have to get me out.

How?

You’re Dad’s son, aren’t you? You’re my brother. Come up with something. Just get me out of here.

Fat Charlie woke, shivering. The flight attendant brought him coffee, and he drank it gratefully. He was awake now, and he had no desire to go back to sleep, so he read the Caribbeair Magazine and learned many useful things about Saint Andrews.

He learned that Saint Andrews is not the smallest of the Caribbean Islands, but it tends to be one of the ones that people forget about when they make lists. It was discovered by the Spanish around 1500, an uninhabited volcanic hill teeming with animal life, not to mention a multiplicity of plants. It was said that anything that you planted in Saint Andrews would grow.

It belonged to the Spanish, and then to British, then to the Dutch, then to the British again, and then, for a short while after it was made independent in 1962, it belonged to Major F. E. Garrett, who took over the government, broke off diplomatic relations with all other countries except Albania and the Congo, and ruled the country with a rod of iron until his unfortunate death from falling out of bed several years later. He fell out of bed hard enough to break a number of bones, despite the presence in his bedroom of an entire squad of soldiers, who testified that they had all tried, but failed, to break Major Garrett’s fall, and despite their best efforts he was dead by the time that he arrived in the island’s sole hospital. Since then, Saint Andrews had been ruled by a beneficent and elected local government and was everybody’s friend.

It had miles of sandy beaches and an extremely small rainforest in the center of the island; it had bananas and sugarcane, a banking system that encouraged foreign investment and offshore corporate banking, and no extradition treaties with anybody at all, except possibly the Congo and Albania.

If Saint Andrews was known for anything, it was for its cuisine: the inhabitants claimed to have been jerking chickens before the Jamaicans, currying goats before the Trinidadians, frying flying fish before the Bajans.

There were two towns on Saint Andrews: Williamstown, on the southeast side of the island, and Newcastle, on the north. There were street markets in which anything that grew on the island could be bought, and several supermarkets, in which the same foodstuffs could be bought for twice the price. One day Saint Andrews would get a real international airport.

It was a matter of opinion whether the deep harbor of Williamstown was a good thing or not. It was indisputable that the deep harbor brought the cruise ships, though, floating islands filled with people, who were changing the economy and nature of Saint Andrews as they were changing the economy of many Caribbean islands. At high season there would be up to half a dozen cruise ships in Williamstown Bay, and thousands of people waiting to disembark, to stretch their legs, to buy things. And the people of Saint Andrews grumbled, but they welcomed the visitors ashore, they sold them things, they fed them until they could eat no more and then they sent them back to their ships—

The Caribbeair plane landed with a bump that made Fat Charlie drop his magazine. He put it back into the seat pocket in front of him, walked down the steps and across the tarmac.

It was late afternoon.

Fat Charlie took a taxi from the airport to his hotel. During the taxi ride, he learned a number of things that had not been mentioned in the Caribbeair magazine. For example, he learned that music, real music, proper music, was country and western music. On Saint Andrews, even the rastas knew it. Johnny Cash? He was a god. Willie Nelson? A demigod.

He learned that there was no reason ever to leave Saint Andrews. The taxi driver himself had seen no reason ever to leave Saint Andrews, and he had given it much thought. The island had a cave, and a mountain, and a rainforest. Hotels? It had twenty. Restaurants? Several dozen. It contained a city, three towns, and a scattering of villages. Food? Everything grew here. Oranges. Bananas. Nutmegs. It even, the taxi driver said, had limes.

Fat Charlie said “No!” at this, mostly in order to feel like he was taking part in the conversation, but the driver appeared to take it as a challenge to his honesty. He slammed on the taxi’s brakes, sending the car slewing over to the side of the road, got out of the car, reached over a fence, pulled something from a tree and walked back to the car.

“Look at this!” he said. “Nobody ever tell you that I is a liar. What it is?”

“A lime?” said Fat Charlie.

“Exactly.”

The taxi driver lurched the car back into the road. He told Fat Charlie that the Dolphin was an excellent hotel. Did Fat Charlie have family on the island? Did he know anyone here?

“Actually,” said Fat Charlie, “I’m here looking for someone. For a woman.”

The taxi driver thought this was a splendid idea, since Saint Andrews was a perfect place to come if you were looking for a woman. This was, he elaborated, because the women of Saint Andrews were curvier than the women of Jamaica, and less likely to give you grief and heartbreak than the Trinis. In addition, they were more beautiful than the women of Dominica, and they were better cooks than you would find anywhere on Earth. If Fat Charlie was looking for a woman, he had come to the right place.

“It’s not just any woman. It’s a specific woman,” said Fat Charlie.

The taxi driver told Fat Charlie that this was his lucky day, for the taxi driver prided himself on knowing everyone on the island. If you spend your life somewhere, he said, you can do that. He was willing to bet that Fat Charlie did not know by sight all the people in England, and Fat Charlie admitted that this was in fact the case.

“She’s a friend of the family,” said Fat Charlie. “Her name is Mrs. Higgler. Callyanne Higgler. You heard of her?”

The taxi driver was quiet for a while. He seemed to be thinking. Then he said that, no, he hadn’t ever heard of her. The taxi pulled up in front of the Dolphin Hotel, and Fat Charlie paid him.

Fat Charlie went inside. There was a young woman on reception. He showed her his passport and the reservation number. He put the lime down on the reservation desk.

“Do you have any luggage?”

“No,” said Fat Charlie, apologetically.

“Nothing?”

“Nothing. Just this lime.”

He filled out several forms, and she gave him a key and directions to his room.

Fat Charlie was in the bath when a knock came on the door. He wrapped a towel around his midriff. It was the bellman. “You left your lime in reception,” he said, and handed it to Fat Charlie.

“Thanks,” said Fat Charlie. He went back to his bath. Afterward, he went to bed, and dreamed uncomfortable dreams.

In his house on the cliff top, Grahame Coats was also having the strangest dreams, dark and unwelcome, if not actually unpleasant. He could not remember them properly when he woke, but he would open his eyes the next morning with a vague impression that he had spent the night stalking smaller creatures through the long grass, despatching them with a blow of his paw, rending their bodies with his teeth.

In his dreams, his teeth were weapons of destruction.

He woke from the dreams feeling disturbed, with the day slightly charged.

And, each morning, a new day would begin and here, only a week away from his old life, Grahame Coats was already experiencing the frustration of the fugitive. He had a swimming pool, true, and cocoa trees, and grapefruit and nutmeg trees; he had a full wine cellar and an empty meat cellar and media center. He had satellite television, a large DVD collection, not to mention art, thousands of dollars’ worth of art, all over the walls. He had a cook, who came in each day and cooked his meals, a housekeeper and a groundskeeper (a married couple who came in for a few hours each day). The food was excellent, the climate was—if you liked warm, sunny days—perfect, and none of these things made Grahame Coats as happy as he felt was his due.

He had not shaved since leaving England, which had not yet endowed him with a beard, merely given him a thin covering of the kind of facial hair that makes men look shifty. His eyes sat in panda-dark sockets, and the bags beneath his eyes were so dark as to appear to be bruises.

He swam in the pool once each day, in the morning, but otherwise avoided the sun; he had not, he told himself, amassed an ill-gotten fortune to lose it to skin cancer. Or to anything else at all.

He thought about London too much. In London, each of his favorite restaurants had a maitre d’ who called him by name and ensured he left happy. In London there were people who owed him favors, and there was never any difficulty in getting first-night tickets, and for that matter in London there were theaters to have first nights in. He had always thought he would make a fine exile; he was starting to suspect that he had been wrong.

Needing someone to blame, he came to the conclusion that the entire affair was Maeve Livingstone’s fault. She had led him on. She had attempted to rob him. She was a vixen, a minx, and a hussy. She had deserved everything she had coming to her. She had gotten off easily. Should he be interviewed on television, he could already hear the bruised innocence in his voice as he explained that he had been defending his property and his honor from a dangerous madwoman. Frankly, it was some kind of miracle that he’d made it out of that office alive—

And he had liked being Grahame Coats. He was now, as always while he was on the island, Basil Finnegan, and it irked him. He didn’t feel like a Basil. His Basilhood had been hard-won—the original Basil had died as an infant, and had a birth-date close to Grahame’s own. One copy of the birth certificate, along with a letter from an imaginary clergyman, later, and Grahame possessed a passport and an identity. He had kept the identity alive—Basil had a solid credit history, Basil traveled to exotic places, Basil had bought a luxury house on Saint Andrews without ever seeing it. But in Grahame’s mind, Basil had been working for him, and now the servant had become the master. Basil Finnegan had eaten him alive.

“If I stay here,” said Grahame Coats. “I shall go mad.”

“What you say?” asked the housekeeper, duster in hand, leaning in at the bedroom door.

“Nothing,” said Grahame Coats.

“Sound like you say if you stay in you go mad. You ought to go for a walk. Walking good for you.”

Grahame Coats did not go for walks; he had people to do that for him. But, he thought, perhaps Basil Finnegan went for walks. He put on a broad-brimmed hat and exchanged his sandals for walking shoes. He took his cell phone, instructed the groundskeeper to come and get him when he called, and set out from the house on the cliff edge, heading toward the nearest town.

It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it’s true, or true as far as it goes. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It’s not even coincidence. It’s just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or for propriety.

So it was that Grahame Coats walked into a small café on the road to Williamstown, in order to purchase a soft drink and to have somewhere to sit while he called his gardener to tell him that he should come and pick him up.

He ordered a Fanta and sat down at a table. The place was practically empty: two women, one young, one older, sat in the far corner, drinking coffee and writing postcards.

Grahame Coats gazed out, across the road at the beach. It was paradise, he thought. And it might behoove him to get more deeply involved with local politics—perhaps as a sponsor of the arts. He had already made several substantial donations to the island’s police force, and it might even become necessary to make sure that—

A voice from behind him, thrilled and tentative, said, “Mister Coats?” and his heart lurched. The younger of the women sat down beside him. She had the warmest smile.

“Fancy running into you here,” she said. “You on your holidays too?”

“Something like that.” He had no idea who this woman was.

“You remember me, don’t you? Rosie Noah. I used to go out with Fat, with Charlie Nancy. Yes?”

“Hello. Rosie. Yes, of course.”

“I’m on a cruise, with my mum. She’s still writing postcards home.”

Grahame Coats glanced back over his shoulder to the back of the little café, and something resembling a South American mummy in a floral dress glared back at him.

“Honestly,” continued Rosie, “I’m not really a cruise sort of person. Ten days of going from island to island. It’s nice to see a familiar face, isn’t it?”

“Absatively,” said Grahame Coats. “Should I take it that you and our Charles are no longer, well, an item?”

“Yes,” she said. “I suppose you should. I mean, we’re not.”

Grahame Coats smiled sympathetically on the outside. He picked up his Fanta and walked with Rosie to the table in the corner. Rosie’s mother radiated ill-will just as an old iron radiator can radiate chill into a room, but Grahame Coats was perfectly charming and entirely helpful, and he agreed with her on every point. It was indeed appalling what the cruise companies thought they could get away with these days; it was disgusting how sloppy the administration of the cruise ship had been allowed to get; it was shocking how little there was to do in the islands; and it was, in every respect, outrageous what passengers were expected to put up with: ten days without a bathtub, with only the tiniest of shower facilities. Shocking.

Rosie’s mother told him about the several quite impressive enmities she had managed to cultivate with certain American passengers whose main crime, as Grahame Coats understood it, was to overload their plates in the buffet line of the Squeak Attack, and to sunbathe in the spot by the aft deck pool that Rosie’s mother had decided, on the first day out, was undisputedly hers.

Grahame Coats nodded, and made sympathetic noises as the vitriol dripped over him, tching and agreeing and clucking until Rosie’s mother was prepared to overlook her dislike both of strangers and people connected in some way to Fat Charlie, and she talked, and she talked, and she talked. Grahame Coats was barely listening. Grahame Coats pondered.

It would be unfortunate, Grahame Coats was thinking, if someone was to return to London at this precise point in time and inform the authorities that Grahame Coats had been encountered in Saint Andrews. It was inevitable that he would be noticed one day, but still, the inevitable could, perhaps, be postponed.

“Let me,” said Grahame Coats, “suggest a solution to at least one of your problems. A little way up the road I have a holiday house. Rather a nice house I like to think. And if there’s one thing I have a surplus of, it’s baths. Would you care to come back and indulge yourselves?”

“No, thanks,” said Rosie. Had she agreed, it is to be expected that her mother would have pointed out that they were due back at the Williamstown Port for pickup later that afternoon, and would then have chided Rosie for accepting such invitations from virtual strangers. But Rosie said no.

“That is extremely kind of you,” said Rosie’s mother. “We would be delighted.”

The gardener pulled up outside soon after in a black Mercedes, and Grahame Coats opened the back door for Rosie and her mother. He assured them he would absatively have them back in the harbor well before the last boat back to their ship.

“Where to, Mister Finnegan?” asked the gardener.

“Home,” he said.

“Mister Finnegan?” asked Rosie.

“It’s an old family name,” said Grahame Coats, and he was sure it was. Somebody’s family anyway. He closed the back door and went around to the front.

Maeve Livingstone was lost. It had started out so well: she had wanted to be at home, in Pontefract, and there was a shimmer and a tremendous wind, and in one ectoplasmic gusting, she was home. She wandered around the house for one last time, then went out into the autumn day. She wanted to see her sister in Rye, and before she could think, there she was in the garden at Rye, watching her sister walking her springer spaniel.

It had seemed so easy.

That was the point she had decided that she wanted to see Grahame Coats, and that was where it had all gone wrong. She was, momentarily, back in the office in the Aldwych, and then in an empty house in Purley, which she remembered from a small dinner party Grahame Coats had hosted a decade back, and then—

Then she was lost. And everywhere she tried to go only made matters worse.

She had no idea where she was now. It seemed to be some kind of garden.

A brief downpour of rain drenched the place and left her untouched. Now the ground was steaming, and she knew she wasn’t in England. It was starting to get dark.

She sat down on the ground, and she started to sniffle.

Honestly, she told herself. Maeve Livingstone. Pull yourself together. But the sniffling just got worse.

“You want a tissue?” asked someone.

Maeve looked up. An elderly gentleman with a green hat and a pencil-thin moustache was offering her a tissue.

She nodded. Then she said, “It’s probably not any use, though. I won’t be able to touch it.”

He smiled sympathetically and passed her the tissue. It didn’t fall through her fingers, so she blew her nose with it and dabbed at her eyes. “Thank you. Sorry about that. It all got a bit much.”

“It happens,” said the man. He looked her up and down, appraisingly. “What are you? A duppy?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t think so—what’s a duppy?”

“A ghost,” he said. With his pencil moustache, he reminded her of Cab Calloway, perhaps, or Don Ameche, one of those stars who aged but never stopped being stars. Whoever the old man was, he was still a star.

“Oh. Right. Yes, I’m one of them. Um. You?”

“More or less,” he said. “I’m dead, anyway.”

“Oh. Would you mind if I asked where I was?”

“We’re in Florida.” he told her. “In the buryin’ ground. It’s good you caught me,” he added. “I was going for a walk. You want to come along?”

“Shouldn’t you be in a grave?” she asked, hesitantly.

“I was bored,” he told her. “I thought I could do with a walk. And maybe a spot of fishin’.”

She hesitated, then nodded. It was nice to have someone to talk to.

“You want to hear a story?” asked the old man.

“Not really,” she admitted.

He helped her to her feet, and they walked out of the Garden of Rest.

“Fair enough. Then I’ll keep it short. Not go too long. You know, I can tell one of these stories so it lasts for weeks. It’s all in the details—what you put in, what you don’t. I mean, you leave out the weather and what people are wearing, you can skip half the story. I once told a story—”

“Look,” she said, “if you’re going to tell a story, then just tell it to me, all right?” It was bad enough walking along the side of the road in the gathering dusk. She reminded herself that she wasn’t going to be hit by a passing car, but it did nothing to make her feel more at ease.

The old man started to talk in a gentle sing-song. “When I say ‘Tiger,’ ” he said, “You got to understand it’s not just the stripy cat, the India one. It’s just what people call big cats—the pumas and the bobcats and the jaguars and all of them. You got that?”

“Certainly.”

“Good. So—a long time ago,” he began, “Tiger had the stories. All the stories there ever were was Tiger stories, all the songs were Tiger songs, and I’d say that all the jokes were Tiger jokes, but there weren’t no jokes told back in the Tiger days. In Tiger stories all that matters is how strong your teeth are, how you hunt and how you kill. Ain’t no gentleness in Tiger stories, no tricksiness, and no peace.”

Maeve tried to imagine what kind of stories a big cat might tell. “So they were violent?”

“Sometimes. But mostly what they was, was bad. When all the stories and the songs were Tiger’s, that was a bad time for everyone. People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don’t have their own song. And in Tiger times all the songs were dark. They began in tears, and they’d end in blood, and they were the only stories that the people of this world knew.

“Then Anansi comes along. Now, I guess you know all about Anansi—”

“I don’t think so,” said Maeve.

“Well, if I started to tell you how clever and how handsome and how charming and how cunning Anansi was, I could start today and not finish until next Thursday,” began the old man.

“Then don’t,” said Maeve. “We’ll take it as said. And what did this Anansi do?”

“Well, Anansi won the stories—won them? No. He earned them. He took them from Tiger, and made it so Tiger couldn’t enter the real world no more. Not in the flesh. The stories people told became Anansi stories. This was, what, ten, fifteen thousand years back.

“Now, Anansi stories, they have wit and trickery and wisdom. Now, all over the world, all of the people they aren’t just thinking of hunting and being hunted anymore. Now they’re starting to think their way out of problems—sometimes thinking their way into worse problems. They still need to keep their bellies full, but now they’re trying to figure out how to do it without working—and that’s the point where people start using their heads. Some people think the first tools were weapons, but that’s all upside down. First of all, people figure out the tools. It’s the crutch before the club, every time. Because now people are telling Anansi stories, and they’re starting to think about how to get kissed, how to get something for nothing by being smarter or funnier. That’s when they start to make the world.”

“It’s just a folk story,” she said. “People made up the stories in the first place.”

“Does that change things?” asked the old man. “Maybe Anansi’s just some guy from a story, made up back in Africa in the dawn days of the world by some boy with blackfly on his leg, pushing his crutch in the dirt, making up some goofy story about a man made of tar. Does that change anything? People respond to the stories. They tell them themselves. The stories spread, and as people tell them, the stories change the tellers. Because now the folk who never had any thought in their head but how to run from lions and keep far enough away from rivers that the crocodiles don’t get an easy meal, now they’re starting to dream about a whole new place to live. The world may be the same, but the wallpaper’s changed. Yes? People still have the same story, the one where they get born and they do stuff and they die, but now the story means something different to what it meant before.”

“You’re telling me that before the Anansi stories the world was savage and bad?”

“Yeah. Pretty much.”

She digested this. “Well,” she said cheerily, “it’s certainly a good thing that the stories are now Anansi’s.”

The old man nodded.

And then she said, “Doesn’t Tiger want them back?”

He nodded. “He’s wanted them back for ten thousand years.”

“But he won’t get them, will he?”

The old man said nothing. He stared into the distance. Then he shrugged. “Be a bad thing if he did.”

“What about Anansi?”

“Anansi’s dead,” said the old man. “And there ain’t a lot a duppy can do.”

“As a duppy myself,” she said, “I resent that.”

“Well,” said the old man, “Duppies can’t touch the living. Remember?”

She pondered this a moment. “So what can I touch?” she asked.

The look that flickered across his elderly face was both wily and wicked. “Well,” he said. “You could touch me.”

“I’ll have you know,” she told him, pointedly, “that I’m a married woman.”

His smile only grew wider. It was a sweet smile and a gentle one, as heartwarming as it was dangerous. “Generally speaking, that kind of contract terminates in a till death us do part.”

Maeve was unimpressed.

“Thing is,” he told her, “you’re an immaterial girl. You can touch immaterial things. Like me. I mean, if you want, we could go dancing. There’s a place just down the street here. Won’t nobody notice a couple of duppies on their dance floor.”

Maeve thought about it. It had been a long time since she had gone dancing. “Are you a good dancer?” she asked.

“I’ve never had any complaints,” said the old man.

“I want to find a man—a living man—called Grahame Coats,” she said. “Can you help me find him?”

“I can certainly steer you in the right direction,” he said. “So, are you dancing?”

A smile crept about the edges of her lips. “You asking?” she said.

The chains that had kept Spider captive fell away. The pain, which had been searing and continuous like a bad toothache that occupied his entire body, began to pass.

Spider took a step forward.

In front of him was what appeared to be a rip in the sky, and he moved toward it.

Ahead of him he could see an island. He could see a small mountain in the center of the island. He could see a pure blue sky, and swaying palm trees, a white gull high in the sky. But even as he saw it the world seemed to be receding. It was as if he were looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope. It shrank and slipped from him, and the more he ran toward it the further away it seemed to get.

The island was a reflection in a puddle of water, and then it was nothing at all.

He was in a cave. The edges of things were crisp—crisper and sharper than anywhere that Spider had ever been before. This was a different kind of place.

She was standing in the mouth of the cave, between him and the open air. He knew her. She had stared into his face in a Greek restaurant in South London, and birds had come from her mouth.

“You know,” said Spider, “I have to say, you’ve got the strangest ideas about hospitality. You come to my world, I’d make you dinner, open a bottle of wine, put on some soft music, give you an evening you would never forget.”

Her face was impassive; carved from black rock it was. The wind tugged at the edges of her old brown coat. She spoke then, her voice high and lonely as the call of a distant gull.

“I took you,” she said. “Now, you will call him.”

“Call him? Call who?”

“You will bleat,” she said. “You will whimper. Your fear will excite him.”

“Spider does not bleat,” he said. He was not certain this was true.

Eyes as black and as shiny as chips of obsidian stared back into his. They were eyes like black holes, letting nothing out, not even information.

“If you kill me,” said Spider, “my curse will be upon you.” He wondered if he actually had a curse. He probably did; and if he didn’t, he was sure that he could fake it.

“It will not be I that kills you,” she said. She raised her hand, and it was not a hand but a raptor’s talon. She raked her talon down his face, down his chest, her cruel claws sinking into his flesh, tearing his skin.

It did not hurt, although Spider knew that it would hurt soon enough.

Beads of blood crimsoned his chest and dripped down his face. His eyes stung. His blood touched his lips. He could taste it and smell the iron scent of it.

“Now,” she said in the cries of distant birds. “Now your death begins.”

Spider said, “We’re both reasonable entities. Let me present you with a perhaps rather more feasible alternative scenario that might conceivably have benefits for both of us.” He said it with an easy smile. He said it convincingly.

“You talk too much,” she said, and shook her head. “No more talking.”

She reached into his mouth with her sharp talons, and with one wrenching movement she tore out his tongue.

“There,” she said. And then she seemed to take pity on him, for she touched Spider’s face in a way that was almost kindly, and she said, “Sleep.”

He slept.

Rosie’s mother, now bathed, reappeared refreshed, invigorated and positively glowing.

“Before I give you both a ride into Williamstown, can I give you a hasty guided tour of the house?” asked Grahame Coats.

“We do have to get back to the ship, thanks all the same,” said Rosie, who had not been able to convince herself that she wanted a bath in Grahame Coats’s house.

Her mother checked her watch. “We have ninety minutes,” she said. “It won’t take more than fifteen minutes to get back to the harbor. Don’t be ungracious, Rosie. We would love to see your house.”

So Grahame Coats showed them the sitting room, the study, the library, the television room, the dining room, the kitchen and the swimming pool. He opened a door beneath the kitchen stairs that looked as if it would lead to a broom cupboard, and walked his guests down the wooden steps into the rock-walled wine cellar. He showed them the wine, most of which had come with the house when he had bought it. He walked them to the far end of the wine cellar to the bare room that had, back in the days before refrigeration, been a meat storage locker. It was always chilly in the meat locker, where heavy chains came down from the ceiling, the empty hooks on the ends showing where once whole carcasses had hung long before. Grahame Coats held the heavy iron door open politely while both the women walked inside.

“You know,” he said, helpfully, “I’ve just realized. The light switch is back where we came in. Hold on.” And then he slammed the door behind the women, and he rammed closed the bolts.

He picked out a dusty-looking bottle of 1995 Chablis Premier Cru from a wine rack.

He went upstairs with a swing in his step and let his three employees know that he would be giving them the week off.

It seemed to him, as he walked up the stairs to his study, as if something were padding soundlessly behind him, but when he turned there was nothing there. Oddly, he found this comforting. He found a corkscrew, opened the bottle and poured himself a pale glass of wine. He drank it and, although he had never previously had much time for red wines, he found himself wishing that what he was drinking was richer and darker. It should be, he thought, the color of blood.

As he finished his second glass of Chablis, he realized that he had been blaming the wrong person for his plight. Maeve Livingstone was, he saw it now, merely a dupe. No, the person to blame, obviously and undeniably, was Fat Charlie. Without his meddling, without his criminal trespass into Grahame Coats’s office computer systems, Grahame Coats wouldn’t be here, an exile, like a blond Napoleon on a perfect, sunny Elba. He wouldn’t be in the unfortunate predicament of having two women imprisoned in his meat locker. If Fat Charlie was here, he thought, I would tear out his throat with my teeth, and the thought shocked him even as it excited him. You didn’t want to screw with Grahame Coats.

Evening came, and Grahame Coats watched the Squeak Attack from his window as it drifted past his house on the cliff and off into the sunset. He wondered how long it would take them to notice that two passengers were missing. He even waved.