“Yes,” Chad told the man on Tom’s behalf. “It’s the heat. It gets hot in Memphis; but we’ve got air-conditioning.” He turned to Tom and put his hand on his companion’s shoulder. Tom let himself give in to weakness, and sat down. He felt a fluttering at the back of his neck, as though a hummingbird was hovering there, but he didn’t have the willpower to flick it away.
“You call yourselves agents?” the man said, almost under his breath. “I don’t think you know the meaning of the word.”
Chad was quick to their defense.
“The Reverend says-”
“The Reverend?” the man interrupted contemptuously. “Do you think he had the slightest idea of your value?”
This flummoxed Chad. Tom tried to tell his friend not to be flattered, but the words wouldn’t come. His tongue lay in his mouth like a dead fish. Whatever happens now, he thought, at least it’ll happen to us together. They’d been friends since first grade; they’d tasted pubescence and metaphysics together; Tom thought of them as inseparable. He hoped the man understood that where Chad went, Tom went too. The fluttering at his neck had stopped; a warm reassurance was creeping over his head. Things didn’t seem so bad after all.
“I need help from you young men.”
“To do what?” Chad asked.
“To begin the Deluge,” Mamoulian replied. A smile, uncertain at first but broadening as the idea caught his imagination, appeared on Chad’s face. His features, too often sober with zeal, ignited.
“Oh, yes,” he said. He glanced across at Tom. “Hear what this man’s telling us?”
Tom nodded.
“You hear, man?”
“I hear. I hear.”
All his blissful life Chad had waited for this invitation. For the first time he could picture the literal reality behind the destruction he’d threatened on a hundred doorsteps. In his mind waters-red, raging waters-mounted into foam-crested waves and bore down on this pagan city. We are as flotsam in the flood, he said, and the words brought images with them. Men and women-but mostly women-running naked before these curling tides. The water was hot; rains of it fell on their screaming faces, their gleaming, jiggling breasts. This was what the Reverend had promised all along; and here was this man asking them to help make it all possible, to bring this thrashing, foamy Day of Days to consummation. How could they refuse? He felt the urge to thank the man for considering them worthy. The thought fathered the action. His knees bent, and he fell to the floor at Mamoulian’s feet.
“Thank you,” he said to the man with the dark suit.
“You’ll help me, then?”
“Yes . . .” Chad replied; wasn’t this homage sign enough? “Of course.” Behind him, Tom murmured his own concession.
“Thank you,” Chad said. “Thank you.”
But when he looked up the man, apparently convinced by their devotion, had already left the room.
57
Marty and Carys slept together in his single bed: long, rewarding sleep. If the baby in the room below them cried in the night, they didn’t hear it. Nor did they hear the sirens on Kilburn High Road, police and fire engines going to a conflagration in Maida Vale. Dawn through the dirty window didn’t wake them either, though the curtains had not been drawn. But once, in the early hours, Marty turned in his sleep and his eyes flickered open to see the first light of day at the glass. Rather than turning away from it, he let it fall on his lids as they flickered down again.
They had half a day together in the flat before the need began; bathing themselves, drinking coffee, saying very little. Carys washed and bound the wound on Marty’s leg; they changed their clothes, ditching those they’d worn the previous night.
It wasn’t until the middle of the afternoon that they started to talk. The dialogue began quite calmly, but Carys’ nervousness escalated as she felt hungrier for a fix, and the talk rapidly became a desperate diversion from her jittering belly. She told Marty what life with the European had been like: the humiliations, the deceptions, the sense she had that he knew her father, and her too, better than she guessed. Marty in his turn attempted to paraphrase the story Whitehead had told him on that last night, but she was too distracted to concentrate properly. Her conversation became increasingly agitated.