Borderless Deceit Read Online Free

contain herself. “Indeed, she said, “not a finger lifted,” and raised hers to make a point. “I want to say that I haven’t heard here what I came for. Yes, I’ve heard a description of a problem. But, no, I haven’t had an explanation.”
    This unleashed hell itself, des Étoiles doing nothing to contain it. Snide digs from Ron Hunt; more biological concern from Abbie Macauley; reprimands, not entirely unfounded, from Claire Desmarais. Demands for damage assessment, claims about flimsy system design, laments about the catastrophic losses of sacred information, howls of pain over setbacks to global democratisation in accordance with the national vision; and above all…fear…fear that the Service would be ridiculed.
    This tearing of cloth and showering of ashes went on and on until Claire’s fleshless lips ended the discussion by bringing it full circle: “An explanation,” she said. “If it is beyond our capacity to find one, we should seek outside help.” Her admonishing index finger had once again ascended and she was wagging it, as if to signal that the end of God’s creation was near.
    Throughout the meeting, so the reconstruction went, Heywood fought the battle of his life. Sometimes he retreated nimbly. Then he’d stand his ground as if he held a pike. Occasionally he attacked. Once, loudly indignant, he metaphorically climbed up his banner, shouted out defiance, and said he’d stand by and for his troops. Afterwards he confided – not to Claude, but to Claude’s fresh assistant Jaime – how he survived. His jowls shook reliving it.
Experience counts
, heexplained.
You fall back on it. I tell you, Jaime, they were surrounding me. I know the macabre ritual, sabres out, first some prodding before the wild swinging begins. They want you to dance to your death. But I refused. I pitied them, you know. I sat and watched and shook my head
.
    Jaime didn’t know it then – how could she? – that Heywood had been confronting sabre-swinging ghosts long before the Transylvanian plague. It was later, when she and Heywood were meeting often – she to create and he to glorify their common cause, the one they esoterically called Zadokite Port – that he began to share his confidences with her. A troop of ghosts had been landing brutal blows on him for years. Irving’s wife Hannah, always a sunny woman, had become bedridden at home with cancer. She was recovering, or maybe not – it was too early to know. Their second son, after thirty-five years of roaming and seeking, had recently phoned from out west to say that he’d just married a cowboy and had found true happiness at last. The eldest son had a child with dyslexia, definitely not a Heywood gene. The third son had gone bankrupt four times as a book seller in western ski resorts. And the youngest one, wildly successful professionally, was living in deep poverty because he was in the middle of a third marriage, which too had hit the rocks. And then there were his little personal miseries: haemorrhoid attacks; an enlarged prostate making peeing a hassle; hip joints so stiff that some days he pined for a wheelchair. As for his mind, well, twice already he’d caught himself leaving the kitchen with the tap water still running.
Life, Jaime, is one endless fight
.
    â€œIrv,” Jaime had said, “The first hundred years are the toughest, so think of the good times ahead.”
    Heywood had sniffed. “My attitude exactly,” he had replied.
    That evening, inspired by Jaime’s youth and boundless energy, having returned to the family home on Ivy Crescent, a red brick house with a wooden porch from which the paint was peeling, he went upstairs to the bedroom to kiss his wife. He projected cheerfulness and hope. In a weak voice Hannah asked the same question that in earlier days had radiantly bubbled out:
How was it at the office, darling
?
    His