The Fire Gospel Page 7

  ‘Yes, please,’ said Theo. ‘I mean, yes, thank you.’ He laughed wearily as he stumbled along beside her through the airport lounge. He was beyond tired.

  ‘You are beyond tired, aren’t you?’ she said, steering him gently out of the path of a posse of Brazilian tourists pushing high-velocity luggage trolleys.

  ‘I could sleep for a week.’

  ‘One good night will probably do it,’ she said. ‘You’ll have a comfortable bed, I promise.’

  ‘Oh, so Jennifer told you about the nightmare hotel in Philadelphia?’

  The accommodation in Philly had been a second-floor room in an opulent, prestigious establishment, facing out onto the main street. A small group of protesters had stood underneath his window, serenading him with Christian songs and abuse. Jennifer’s attempts to distract him with carnal delights had failed, and he’d slunk off to his bookstore appearance in a wretched state. And when he’d returned to the hotel, Jennifer suddenly announced she had to take a late plane back to Baltimore (‘Something’s come up’) and that she would catch up with him in Boston, maybe. He’d lain in bed alone, in a litter of miniature booze bottles, staring up into a haze of his own smoke, listening to the protesters. Those religious people never knew when to quit.

  ‘Nightmare hotel?’ echoed Tomoko Steinberg.

  ‘It was . . . ah . . . kind of noisy.’

  ‘My authors don’t sleep in hotels when they come to New York,’ she assured him. ‘They sleep at our house.’

  By ‘our house’, she presumably meant the former Steinberg studio, which had been converted into the Manhattan office of Ocean Group, the multimedia company that was currently in the throes of a merger with Elysium.

  ‘I don’t want to cause any trouble.’

  She chuckled, revealing a gold tooth. ‘You gotta admit that’s funny,’ she said. ‘In the circumstances.’

  The Steinberg abode, although located in a stratospherically expensive part of Manhattan, was smaller and funkier than Theo expected. A friendly young intern called Heather let them in the door, with such unguarded casualness that the electronic sensors, massive steel lock and triple-thick glass didn’t seem especially fearsome or obstructive, but merely quaint eccentricities of the building that the residents had learned to humour.

  The ground floor, an open-plan hive of modest dimensions painted sky blue and decorated with avant-garde memorabilia, was buzzing with congenial activity, most of it centred around slimline computers and scanner/printers. A grainy black and white poster of a young Philip Glass playing electronic organ for a tiny audience at the Film Makers’ Cinematheque had pride of place near the window; the window-bars threw a neat pattern of shadows on it. Phones flashed constantly but were rarely answered; the prevailing noise was the musical hubbub of young people’s sotto voce conversation.

  ‘Coffee and stuff,’ Tomoko called over her shoulder as she motioned Theo into the elevator. ‘Please.’

  ‘I don’t know if I can go through with this,’ groaned Theo, sinking ever deeper into the couch which the illustrious Bill Steinberg had often sunk into and which, despite cigarette burns and epoxy spatters, had been allowed to remain.

  ‘Go through with what?’

  ‘Tonight.’

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ said Tomoko. She knelt on the plush Berber rug and began to tease her Pomeranian with a rolled-up magazine. ‘By tomorrow morning it will be a memory. And you’ve got a two-day break before Boston.’

  ‘I kept telling myself it was kind of fun,’ he reflected. ‘Until I got threatened with the gun.’

  ‘Poetry,’ she said, and snorted. ‘No, I’m sympathetic, truly. It must have been awful for you.’

  ‘Every reading I do, there seem to be more and more crazy people in the audience.’

  Mrs Steinberg was on her elbows and knees now, making eyes at the dog. ‘Well, it is a mindfuck of a book,’ she said, in between inarticulate noises of motherly affection. ‘You must have known that when you wrote it.’

  At this angle, Theo couldn’t see the expression on her face, only the gusset of her pantyhose. He looked wildly around the room, fighting back an attack of paranoia. Nothing could harm him here; he was among good-humoured, intelligent, supportive people, in a cosy loft where great art had once been made. He had a cup of perfectly brewed filter coffee in one hand and a cookie in the other. There were interesting expressionist paintings on the walls by talented youngsters, a few carved African statuettes, Japanese ornaments. The Pomeranian was cute and well behaved. All was calm, calm, calm.

  ‘The parts that freak people out are Malchus’s parts,’ he said. ‘I’m not responsible for those.’

  She turned to face him, letting her dog take possession of the prize. ‘You’re too modest,’ she said. ‘Malchus is brilliant. A totally brilliant creation.’

  There was a pause. The Pomeranian, whose name was Tipp-Ex, laid its soft little head on the rolled-up magazine and closed its eyes.

  ‘I didn’t make Malchus up,’ said Theo. ‘He’s real.’

  ‘That’s totally how it comes across,’ said Tomoko Steinberg admiringly.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ explained Theo. ‘I’m serious. I really did find those scrolls. I really did translate them from Aramaic into English. Malchus, Jesus, the crucifixion . . . it’s all true.’

  She stared at him, her lips slightly parted in bemusement. ‘Wow,’ she said, in dawning recognition of the hidden value of her company’s investment. ‘That makes it even better.’

  What might have been an awkward, even ugly scene between them was somewhat rescued by the urgent necessity of cooperating to pick up the shards of broken glass from the carpet. He’d thrown his coffee cup towards the nearest wall, and hit a drinks cabinet instead. Neither of them wanted to summon an Ocean employee upstairs to deal with this mess. So, without speaking, they crawled gingerly on their knees, inch by inch, fetching up the sharp fragments between their fingertips and transferring them into an empty ice bucket. For a long time there was no sound in the loft but their slow, regular breathing, the faster breathing of Tipp-Ex, and the soft clunk of glass against metal.

  The larger shards were soon collected, but a ridiculous number of tiny splinters still clung to the fibres of the Berber. Theo and Tomoko had to be careful not to slice open their fingertips on those. They were careful. Their mutual care was a kind of intimacy; it bonded them, sort of.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Theo.

  ‘Don’t mention it. I’ve seen worse. Believe me, whatever you can do, I’ve seen worse.’

  ‘From other authors?’

  ‘Yes. And from my husband. Saint Bill Steinberg, God’s gift to the plastic arts. Critics always said he attacked his sculptures rather than carved them, which was pretty accurate, but clay wasn’t the only thing he attacked.’

  ‘Thanks, that makes me feel just great.’

  She smiled indulgently. ‘Let’s concentrate on getting you through the next ten hours or so. Then you’ll be in bed. And tomorrow morning you’ll be a new person.’

  They’d reached the point where the remaining particles of glass were too small for fingers to retrieve.

  ‘Is there a vacuum cleaner?’ asked Theo.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘No vacuum cleaner, in a house like this?’

  ‘We have a cleaner,’ she said. ‘I mean a human cleaner. She comes every day at ten thirty for an hour. She brings her own equipment.’

  Tomoko took hold of the corners of the rug and gathered the whole thing into her arms. It looked like a dead goat. She walked over to the window, swung it open, and began to shake the rug out into the air.

  ‘Isn’t that dangerous, maybe, for anyone down below?’ asked Theo.

  ‘We’re three storeys up,’ she replied, unconcerned. ‘The wind will take care of it.’

  At the reading, there were as many people crowded into the bookstore as New York’s fire regulations permitted, plus two or three extra. It was the biggest crowd the staff had se
en since J.K. Rowling. Theo was hiding in the staffroom, staring into a glass of wine that he balanced on his lap. There were four or five people in the room with him; he wasn’t sure of the exact number because he was doing his best to keep his attention focused on his own lap, and he had already forgotten the names attached to the hands he’d shaken.

  He wondered if he was already experiencing the effects of the pill Tomoko had given him just before the taxi ride, or if he was merely going crazy. The pill had been small and orange, dispensed from an unmarked plastic pot. ‘It’s an herbal pick-me-up,’ she’d assured him, pronouncing ‘herbal’ in the American way, ‘erbil’. It had recalled to his mind a heated argument he’d once had with Meredith about the linguistic idiocy of the usage ‘an historical’. The recollection of the Theo/Meredith argument had filled his head, leaving no room for a considered decision as to the pros and cons of taking the pill. Even now, as he felt his insides straying out of his skin and wandering unsupervised around the room, all he could think of was another riposte to his long-gone girlfriend: ‘You wouldn’t say “an heated argument”, would you?’

  ‘Pher-naar-menal,’ said the event organiser, a sasquatch of a man in a Pixies T-shirt. ‘Pher-naar-menal.’

  This guy, whose name Theo kept forgetting, was a fount of information about the fame and success of The Fifth Gospel. This fount he kept pouring into Theo’s head, in order to pass the time until the scheduled start of the event.

  ‘You are on course to pass Gone With The Wind,’ he said.

  ‘Pass?’ echoed Theo.

  ‘Twenty-eight million copies out there.’

  ‘Out there?’

  The event organiser spread both hands, to indicate the marketplace in all its vastness.

  One of his colleagues was sceptical. ‘You are slightly full of shit, bro,’ he remarked. ‘No book sells more than two million in America in a year.’

  The Pixies guy rose to the bait. ‘I used the words “out there”, Matt. “Out there” does not mean books sold to customers, nor does it mean America alone. I’m talking worldwide and I’m including advance orders and I’m looking at how many copies will be in stock worldwide by the end of this year, in bookstores from Amsterdam to Zagreb.’

  ‘You can’t know that,’ said Matt. ‘It’s sheer guesswork.’ ‘Guesswork based on hard figures. OK, I know these are not firm sales. And there might be a ton of returns. I doubt it, though. I seriously doubt it.’

  Tomoko Steinberg, who appeared to know the organiser well, chipped in: ‘But the true picture is better than that. The Gone With The Wind figures represent the total number of copies sold, since original publication. And that book came out, like, whenever. Ancient times.’

  ‘The thirties,’ said the Pixies guy. ‘Sure, the figures are misleading. You think they underrate the performance of The Fifth Gospel; Matt thinks they overrate. Thing is, I’m trying to give Mr Grippin an idea of the ballpark. Like, another example, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Twenty-eight million also. And that came out in 1852. By the end of this year, or a couple years max, Mr Grippin, I estimate you will have sold what Harriet Beecher Stowe took a century and a half to sell. That’s what we’re dealing with here.’

  ‘Amazing,’ said Theo. There was a mote of dust in his wine, catching the light of the fluorescent bulb overhead. He agitated the glass slightly, to see the bright speck twirl in the red liquid.

  ‘We got a ways to go yet before we top Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings,’ said the Pixies guy. ‘I’m not suggesting we’ll ever do that. But I think we might top Code. Given time.’

  A female employee ducked back into the room, having had a peek at the assembled multitude.

  ‘A nice mix,’ she said. ‘All colours, all ages. Well, no kiddies. But this is not Harry Potter.’

  ‘It’s the work of Malchus, a man in the first century AD,’ said Theo, addressing his wine. ‘It’s not my book. It’s his. Let’s get that straight.’

  ‘You gave it to the world, Mr Grippin,’ said the young female. She was obviously a nice person. She wore a crisp white shirt and looked fresh and sincere. Before he could stop himself, Theo pictured her on her knees, sucking his dick with porn-star efficiency.

  ‘I’m starting to regret it,’ he said.

  ‘Relax,’ said Tomoko. ‘People like to be stirred by a book. They may act upset, but they love it really. It makes a change from all the forgettable, mindless entertainment that we consume the rest of the time.’

  ‘Hey, I just thought of the perfect comparison,’ the Pixies guy butted in, happily inspired. ‘Lord Of The Rings, Code, they’re not the same kind of exercise as The Fifth Gospel. They’re make-believe. What we got here is a true life account, more or less. Like Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called “It”. People think that book sold mega. It sold good, but it didn’t set the world on fire. You know how much that book sold, in paperback, in an average year? Not twenty-eight million. Not two point eight million. Under 700 thousand. Under 700 thousand. Just think about that, friends. True life account. Misery. Mass media interest. Author willing to tour his ass off. Seven hundred K.’

  ‘I thought A Child Called “It” was horseshit,’ said the fresh-faced female, puncturing the illusion of her innocence in Theo’s eyes. ‘I didn’t buy it.’

  ‘You got it for free,’ teased Matt.

  ‘No, I mean I thought his so-called life story was highly . . . uh . . . massaged. Whereas I don’t get that with Malchus.’

  Matt nodded. ‘Yeah, Malchus is in a class up from Dave Pelzer. He’s more . . . Anne Frank.’

  ‘Twenty-five million copies,’ said the Pixies guy without missing a beat. ‘Worldwide sales since 1947. Like Matt says: like for like. And we’re on course to leave Anne Frank way behind by the end of this year. What was your advance, Mr Grippin, if you don’t mind me asking?’

  ‘I forget,’ said Theo, hypnotised by the mote of dust, which he imagined as an infinitesimally small dolphin trapped in a stagnant inlet.

  ‘He was robbed, that’s all I’m at liberty to tell you,’ said Tomoko Steinberg. ‘If he’d come to Ocean first off, we would have done him proud.’

  ‘Hey, it just occurred to me,’ said Matt. ‘Mr Grippin?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘The scrolls. Where are they now?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Where are you keeping them? The original papyruses?’

  Theo lifted his wine to his mouth and took a deep swig. He would have to snap into focus soon, to face the public.

  ‘Papyri,’ he said. ‘And they’re in my apartment.’

  ‘Not in a secret bank vault?’

  Theo smiled wearily. ‘It’s only in Dan Brown novels and conspiracy theories that documents get stored in secret bank vaults. This is real life.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know, Mr Grippin, but in real life, in New York, if you had a bunch of amazingly valuable documents in your apartment and you went away on tour, sure as hell there’d be all sorts of people doing their best to break into your place and steal ‘em.’

  ‘Canada,’ said Theo. ‘I live in Canada.’

  ‘With all due respect, Mr Grippin, being Canadian is not a magic charm against anything bad that might happen to a person.’

  Just then, the Muzak that was piped through the store stopped in mid-song. The PA system broadcast the ambient noise of a large number of people murmuring, snuffling, shifting in their chairs, and generally being alive. A suave voice Theo couldn’t match up with any person he’d been introduced to yet said: ‘Thank you for being patient. Please make sure that your cellphones are switched off. This is indeed a momentous occasion. It’s not often in the history of publishing that a book can truly be said to have . . .’ and so on and so on. Theo listened to the rhetoric as though it was apropos of something unconnected to him, something he’d mistakenly imagined he might wish to check out.

  The Pixies man took a step closer to him, raising his sasquatch arm. Theo flinched, but the guy was only consulting a wristwatch.

 
‘Showtime,’ he said.

  Acts

  Let no one say our Saviour lacked courage when the time came for him to be crucified. For, to my sorrow, it has been said. Simon of Capernaum, formerly the most zealous of disciples, and now a whore-mongering drunkard, declares to all who will listen that Jesus died the same as any low wretch, the same as any craven criminal, the same indeed as any farmyard animal, without honour or nobility. How noble a death would Simon die, in the same circumstances, some might ask? But not I. Our Lord instructed us to love our enemies. And it is an unfortunate truth that Simon, who ought to have been a shining light of our group, has become our enemy, and would like nothing better than to see us snuffed into darkness.

  But no more of Simon. You asked me for an account of our Saviour’s final days, and instead I am wasting words on a man who spews cheap wine over his lap and consorts with whores. And not as our Lord consorted with whores, be it understood! I mean the behaviour of swine. But enough of Simon, and his vile aspersions on the courage of our Lord.

  Cowardice in the face of grave injury is not a simple matter. The spirit can be brave while the body is weak. Or rather, the body acts without thought of bravery or weakness; it merely acts. When the soldiers seized upon the wrists of our dear Jesus to lay them flat against the crossbeam, and the man with the mallet bent near, our Lord cried out and pulled his arms to his sides, in the manner of an infant tickled by its mother. This was not cowardice. This is how the flesh behaves under such provocation.