Page 16 of The Society of Unknowable Objects
Am I touching something a wizard touched? A god?
“There are other ideas,” Magda continued, enjoying herself. “There is the idea that the items have always been here, created naturally by some force we don’t know. Then there is a variation on the ArtisanHypothesis, the idea that someone took preexisting ordinary objects and gave them magical qualities somehow. Then there is the God Hypothesis.” She placed the chess piece back into the nest of tissues, like laying a baby in a crib, and wrapped it up, recognising the tinge of sadness she felt once it was out of sight.
“The God Hypothesis?” James prompted. Magda glanced at him. He was watching as she carefully folded the tissue.
“Actually, several different ideas.” Magda paused for a moment as she considered what she was about to say. “Created by a god. Created by a devil to tempt man. The items are fragments of a deity that came to earth and died. Or there was one I liked particularly...” She narrowed her eyes for a moment, her hand resting on the tissue parcel as she tried to remember the tale that Frank had told her. “A god that wanted to experience what it was like to be human, so it transformed itself into a man. But the form of a man could not contain all the grandeur of a god. So the god parcelled off bits of its godliness into everyday items it would carry around. Like a ring or a coin or a pocketknife.”
“Or a chess piece,” James concluded, and again he was smiling, appreciating the story.
I love this. I love talking about these stories of magic with this man.
The moment stretched, silence expanding, and Magda felt the need to say something, to verbalise what she was feeling lest it dissipate into nothing. She opened her mouth, waiting for the perfect words to appear, and James watched her, his eyes on her lips, as if he too was waiting to see what would emerge.
Then the door at the far end of the room opened and a man pushed his head through as if searching for someone. The man was middle-aged, his eyes pale blue like faded denim and his face gaunt. It was the man Magda had seen through the window of the noodle shop.
Before she could react to that realisation, before she could say anything to James, the man stepped into the room and closed the door behind him.
He was average height but looked to Magda to have a compact sort of athleticism, the sort of person who could run five miles without breaking a sweat. He wore a black suit and black shirt open at the collar and in hisleft hand—which Magda noted was covered in a black glove—he was holding a folded piece of paper.
“Can I help you?” James asked, no concern in his voice.
Magda wanted to say something, to warn him, but she couldn’t find the right words to concisely convey everything she knew and suspected.
The man at the door smiled and reached his right hand—also gloved, Magda noted—inside his jacket to pull out a handgun with a long tube on the barrel. Magda stared, her blood jumping in her veins, and she heard a gasp escape her lips.
“What is this?” James asked, and to Magda he sounded genuinely puzzled, as if this man with a gun were no more than an honest mistake.
Magda wanted to explain that the man had been following them, that she had seen him at the restaurant. But how could he have followed them?
The man with the gun folded the piece of paper into a pocket inside his jacket as his eyes moved slowly across James and then Magda, finally coming to rest on the parcel of tissues on the table. “Give me that,” he said, flicking his chin to the item while keeping the barrel of the gun pointed in their direction. His accent was British, Magda thought, Welsh, even, but it seemed so incongruous to her that a Welshman was threatening her with a gun in Hong Kong.
Neither James nor Magda replied. Magda wanted to act, wanted to run or fight ordo something,but the shock of the man’s arrival, the shock of the gun in his hand, seemed to have disconnected her body from her brain.
The intruder took a few steps forward. “Give me the item,” he said, an order rather than a request. Magda saw his jaw muscles clench and she heard the leather of his gloves creaking as his grip tightened on the gun.
James moved around her, and to Magda he suddenly seemed so tall, so large, a barrier between her and the man with the gun. “No,” he said, firm like a teacher admonishing a misbehaving child. “This belongs to the bank. You can’t just take it.”
The man swung the gun to point it directly at James. “I disagree.”
“James,” Magda cautioned, worried for him, scared at what this man might do. James didn’t look at her, but stood solid, facing the intruder.“Who are you?” she asked the stranger, trying to pull his attention to her and away from James. “How did you know we were here? I saw you at the restaurant, on the street, didn’t I? How did you find us here?”
The man shook his head once. “This isn’t a conversation.”
“I’m not scared of you,” James said, taking a few brisk steps towards him. “I can remove you if I have to. You’re not going to shoot anyone, are you? You’d never get away. And the Hong Kong police are not kind to foreigners carrying guns.”
The gaunt-faced man didn’t blink as James stared at him, not backing down.
“James, I don’t think...” Magda started, but her words trailed off. She was watching something inevitable, something that would always happen no matter what she did.
“Have you already shot people?” James demanded. He sounded angry now, not fearful, as if he was so affronted by this man’s interruption that he wasn’t giving a moment’s thought to his own safety. “Because you might find the police shoot first and ask questions later.”
Magda wished that he would be quiet; she wished that he would leave her to handle the situation, even as a muffled thump punched the air out of the room. James’s head jerked backward against the window behind him and then he dropped to the floor with a thud.
It was so shocking, so impossible, that it took Magda a moment of stunned incomprehension before she responded, before she screamed James’s name.
“Stop,” the intruder barked, pivoting on his heel to point the gun at her before she could move to help.
James lay face down on the carpet, unmoving.
