Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [25]
A middle-aged woman slid open the entrance door just widely enough to poke her head through and take a look at the visitor, who, deerstalker hat in hand, introduced himself with the utmost politeness. The woman disappeared for a while, and then reappeared, letting Brentford in with a bow.
He took off his rubbers, and after following the woman down a corridor was introduced into a space that was more Western than Japanese, and very disorderly. Around a solid desk, books were crammed everywhere, piled up in unstable rookeries, and the floor was littered with chessboards and go-ban, all frozen in mid or end game. The light was sparse, but though all Brentford could see of William was a flaky hand softly brushing a bald head, it was enough to make him realize that he had an aged man in front of him.
“Mr. William de la Whale?” asked Brentford.
“Plain William Whale will do,” said a slow, hissing voice that Brentford could barely understand. “These arcticocratic games are past their prime, aren’t they?” the voice kept on, slurring and dwindling into a crackle of slobbery static.
“I am Brentford Orsini,” he answered, feeling he should skip the ducal part. There was a pause.
“Visitors are rather rare here, Mr. Orsini. I suppose I should be grateful.”
The words fell slowly, as in some sort of Chinese saliva-drop torture. Brentford started to feel embarrassed by the hot, stifling atmosphere, and he remembered, but too late, the rumours that a lifetime of substance taking had taken its toll on William’s brain, causing his early retirement from public life.
“I do not know whether you should be grateful. But you can certainly be helpful.”
“I seem to remember you run the Greenhouse?”
“I do. Yes.”
A long silence ensued, mercifully interrupted when the woman re-entered the room and put a tray with a kettle and two cups on the edge of the desk, where it just fit. A sweet-scented steam arose when the woman filled the cups.
“This is my spouse, Kujira Etsuko.”
Brentford bowed as he received the burning cup. As the light fell upon her, he could see that her skin still had that yellowishorange hue typical of the “Greenhouse girls” who used to metabolize Pineapples and Plums from their sweat while dancing for Matball Players and Transpherees. Her love story with William was famous in New Venice. How Angry Ananias Andrew, then the Master of the Greenhouse, had taken her away from William so that he could secure his services as an addicted trainer for his Matball team was part of a lore that Brentford knew by heart. Eventually, or so the story went, William had shot Andrew Arkansky. Brentford felt moved to meet her in the flesh, a flesh whose secretions had produced the most powerful drug ever known to man—but then, wasn’t that the case in every love story? Etsuko retired, yet somehow lingered in the fruity tang of the tea.
“The Greenhouse …” William kept on like a slowed-down, scratched wax roll. “How it is these days?”
Brentford tried not to blunder.
“It is a rather uneventful place.”
William nodded his head, in and out of the dark.
“In what way can I be of help?”
“I have a code that I would very much like to subject to your perspicacity, Mr. Whale.”
He felt instantly that he had pushed the right button on that rather creaky mechanism. William turned toward Brentford and lit a desk lamp that made his face appear more distinctly. He had sagging cheeks, a small moustache, rings around his eyes, and pupils with a moist glint that was not quite reassuring.
“Oh, excellent. I like codes, Mr. Orsini. Human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve,” he said, baring his ravaged gums as he spoke. He had apparently retained his abilities and simply lost his teeth.
Brentford handed him the paper on which he had scribbled the code and watched him scrutinize it.
“It’s short. Which does not mean easier, as we have less material to rely on. Maybe a bit of context would not hurt.”