He turned his back on this horror and began to make his way around the edge of the encampment. The fence was being torn down to allow the hoses, which thronged the street like mating snakes, access to the fire. The engines pumped and roared, their reeling blue lights no competition for the fierce brightness of the fire itself. By that blaze he saw a substantial crowd had gathered to watch. They raised a cheer as the fence was toppled, sending plagues of fireflies up as it fell. He moved on as the firefighters advanced into the conflagration, bringing their hoses to bear on the heart of the fire. By the time he’d made a half circuit of the site and was standing opposite the breach they’d made, the flames were already in retreat in several places, smoke and steam replacing their fury. He watched them gain ground from his new vantage point, hoping for some glimpse of life, until the appearance of another two machines and a further group of firefighters drove him on around the perimeter, back to the place from which he’d emerged.
There was no sign of Pie ‘oh’ pah, either being carried from the blaze or standing among those few survivors who, like Gentle, had refused to be taken away to be tended. The smoke issuing from the fire’s steady defeat was thickening, and by the time he got back to the row of bodies on the pavement—the number of which had doubled—the whole scene was barely visible through the pall. He looked down at the shrouded forms. Was one of them Pie ‘oh’ pah? As he approached the nearest of them a hand was laid on his shoulder, and he turned to face a policeman whose features were those of a boy soprano, smooth and troubled.
“Aren’t you the one who brought out the kid?” he said.
“Yes. Is she all right?”
“I’m sorry, mate. I’m afraid she’s dead. Was she your kid?”
He shook his head. “There was somebody else. A black guy with long curly hair. He had blood on his face. Has he come out of there?”
Formal language now: “I haven’t seen anybody.of that description.”
Gentle looked back towards the bodies on the pavement.
“It’s no use looking there,” the policeman said. “They’re all black now, whatever color they started out.”
“I have to look,” Gentle said.
“I’m telling you it’s no use. You wouldn’t recognize them. Why don’t you let me put you in an ambulance? You need seeing to.”
“No. I have to keep looking,” Gentle said, and was about to move off when the policeman took hold of his arm.
“I think you’d be better away from the fence, sir,” he said. “There’s some danger of explosions.”
“But he could still be in there.”
“If he is, sir, I think he’s gone. There’s not much chance of anybody else coming out alive. Let me take you to the police line. You can watch from there.”
Gentle shook off the man’s hold.
“I’ll go,” he said. “I don’t need an escort.”
It took an hour for the fire to be finally brought under control, by which time it had little left to consume. During that hour all Gentle could do was wait behind the cordon and watch as the ambulances came and went, ferrying the last of the injured away and then taking the bodies. As the boy soprano had predicted, no further victims were brought out, dead or alive, though Gentle waited until all but a few late arrivals among the crowd had left, and the fire was almost completely doused. Only when the last of the firelighters emerged from the crematorium, and the hoses were turned off, did he give up hope. It was almost two in the morning. His limbs were burdened with exhaustion, but they were light beside the weight in his chest. To go heavyhearted was no poet’s conceit: it felt as though the pump had turned to lead and was bruising the plush meat of his innards.
As he wandered back to his car he heard the whistling again, the same tuneless sound floating on the dirty air. He stopped walking and turned to all compass points, looking for the source, but the whistler was already out of sight, and Gentle was too weary to give chase. Even if he had, he thought, even if he’d caught it by its lapels and threatened to break its burned bones, what purpose would that have served? Assuming it had been moved by his threat (and pain was probably meat and drink to a creature that whistled as it burned) he’d be no more able to comprehend its reply than interpret Chant’s letter: and for similar reasons. They were both escapees from the same unknown land, whose borders he’d grazed when he’d gone to New York; the same world that held the God Hapexamendios and had given birth to Pie ‘oh’ pah. Sooner or later he’d find a way to gain access to that state, and when he did all the mysteries would come clear: the whistler, the letter, the lover. He might even solve the mystery that he met most mornings in the shaving mirror: the face he thought he’d known well enough until recently, but whose code he now realized he’d forgotten and would not now remember without the help of the undiscovered God.