wound on his hand. The Princess had packed a lot of muscle under that incredible ivory skin.
XF-169
The Lockheed performance data would make a useful bonus, Raissa reflected as she slipped her long legs into the stretch pants. The charge account at gum and the dacha in the Crimea were becoming a distinct possibility. The door opened behind her. Siphon in hand, Quimby stared at her half-naked figure. Without thinking, she put her hands over her breasts. For once his face registered an expression of surprising intelligence.
Yardley
Sir Giles helped himself to Statler’s after-shave lotion. He looked down at the Princess. Even allowing for her size, the quantity of expressed blood was unbelievable. His small face was puckered with embarrassment as he met her blank eyes staring up at the shower fitment. He listened to the distant sounds of traffic coming through the empty suite. He turned on the shower. As the drops spattered on the red skin the magnificence of her white body made his mind reel.
Zeitgeist
The great fans of the guardia civil Sikorsky beat the air over the apartment block. Quimby bent down and retrieved two of the cards from the tiled floor. Below, along the beach road, the Spanish speed cops were converging on the wreck of the Mercedes. Quimby sat back as the helicopter battered away through the darkness. All in all, everything had worked out. The face of Cordobés still regarded him from the backs of the cards. A full moon was coming up over the Sierra. In the Alicante supermarket the hips of the counter girls shook to Trini Lopez. In the bodega wine was only ten pesetas a litre, and the man with the deck still controlled the play.
1966
At Columbine Sept Heures it was always dusk. Here Halliday’s beautiful neighbour, Gabrielle Szabo, walked through the evening, her silk robe stirring the fine sand into cerise clouds. From the balcony of the empty hotel near the artists’ colony, Halliday would look out over the drained river at the unmoving shadows across the desert floor, the twilight of Africa, endless and unbroken, that beckoned to him with the promise of his lost dreams. The dark dunes, their crests touched by the spectral light, receded like the waves of a midnight sea.
Despite the almost static light, fixed at this unending dusk, the drained bed of the river seemed to flow with colours. As the sand spilled from the banks, uncovering the veins of quartz and the concrete caissons of the embankment, the evening would flare briefly, illuminated from within like a lava sea. Beyond the dunes the spires of old water towers and the half-completed apartment blocks near the Roman ruins at Leptis Magna emerged from the darkness. To the south, as Halliday followed the winding course of the river, the darkness gave way to the deep indigo tracts of the irrigation project, the lines of canals forming an exquisite bonelike gridwork.
This continuous transformation, whose colours were as strange as the bizarre paintings hung from the walls of his suite, seemed to Halliday to reveal the hidden perspectives of the landscape, and of the time whose hands were almost frozen on the dozen clocks standing on the mantelpiece and tables. The clocks, set to the imperceptible time of the forever day, he had brought with him to North Africa in the hope that here, in the psychic zero of the desert, they might somehow spring to life. The dead clocks that stared down from the municipal towers and hotels of the deserted towns were the unique flora of the desert, the unused keys that would turn the way into his dreams.
With this hope, three months earlier he had come to Columbine Sept Heures. The suffix, attached to the names of all cities and towns – there were London 6 p.m. and Saigon Midnight – indicated their positions on the Earth’s almost stationary perimeter, the time of the endless day where the no longer rotating planet had marooned them. For five years Halliday had been living in the international settlement at Trondheim in Norway, a zone of eternal snow and ice, of pine forests whose arbours, fed by the unsetting sun, rose even higher around the fringes of the towns, shutting them into their own isolation. This world of Nordic gloom had exposed all Halliday’s latent difficulties with time and with his dreams. The difficulty of sleeping, even in a darkened room, disturbed everyone – there was the sense of time wasted and yet time unpassed as the sun hung stationary in the sky – but Halliday in particular found himself obsessed by his broken dreams. Time and again he would wake with an image before his eyes of the moonlit squares and classical façades of an ancient Mediterranean town, and of a woman who walked through colonnades in a world without shadows.
This warm night world he could find only by moving south. Two hundred miles to the east of Trondheim the dusk line was a corridor of freezing wind and ice, stretching on into the Russian steppe, where abandoned cities lay under the glaciers like closed jewels. By contrast, in Africa the night air was still warm. On the west of the dusk line was the boiling desert of the Sahara, the sand seas fused into lakes of glass, but along the narrow band of the terminator a few people lived in the old tourist towns.
It was here, at Columbine Sept Heures, an abandoned town beside the drained river five miles from Leptis Magna, that he first saw Gabrielle Szabo walking towards him as if out of his dreams. Here, too, he met Leonora Sully, the fey unconcerned painter of bizarre fantasies, and Dr Richard Mallory, who tried to help Halliday and bring back his dreams to him.
Why Leonora was at Columbine Sept Heures Halliday could understand, but sometimes he suspected that Dr Mallory’s motives were as ambiguous as his own. The tall aloof physician, eyes forever hidden behind the dark glasses that seemed to emphasize his closed inner life, spent most of his time sitting in the white-domed auditorium of the School of Fine Arts, playing through the Bartok and Webern quartets left behind in the albums.
This music was the first sound Halliday heard when he arrived at the desert town. In the abandoned car park near the quay at Tripoli he found a new Peugeot left behind by a French refinery technician and set off south along the seven o’clock line, passing through the dusty towns and the half-buried silver skeletons of the refineries near the drained river. To the west the desert burned in a haze of gold under the unmoving sun. Rippled by the thermal waves, the metal vanes of the waterwheels by the empty irrigation systems seemed to revolve in the hot air, swerving toward him.
To the east the margins of the river were etched against the dark horizon, the ridges of exposed limestone like the forestage of the twilight world. Halliday turned toward the river, the light fading as he moved eastward, and followed the old metal road that ran near the bank. The centre of the channel, where white rocks jutted from the drifts of pebbles, lay like the spine of an ancient saurian.
A few miles from the coast he found Columbine Sept Heures. Four tourist hotels, their curtain walls like dead mirrors, stood among the dunes that drifted through the streets and overran the chalets and swimming pools near the Fine Arts School. The road disappeared from sight outside the Oasis Hotel. Halliday left the car and walked up the steps to the dust-filled lobby. The sand lay in lacelike patterns across the tiled floor, silting against the pastelcoloured elevator doors and the dead palms by the restaurant.
Halliday walked up the stairway to the mezzanine, and stood by the cracked plateglass window beyond the tables. Already half submerged by the sand, what remained of the town seemed displaced by the fractured glass into another set of dimensions, as if space itself were compensating for the landscape’s loss of time by forcing itself into this bizarre warp.
Already decided that he would stay in the hotel, Halliday went out to search for water and whatever food supplies had been left behind. The streets were deserted, choked with the sand
