Page 48 of The Society of Unknowable Objects
It was never mentioned again, and Dennis Wei had died the next evening, eaten up by liver disease. It seemed he really never did contact the man he had loved. But he had left his son, James, with gifts: knowledge of the Society in London and its work to find and protect magicalitems, and with a pill bottle and the never depleting supply of pills that it held, and its promise of a long and healthy life.
***
James had known that the pills were keeping him healthy, but until the day he had met Magda Sparks he hadn’t known that they could do so much more than that. He had faced down the man with the gun without any fear—not because he thought he could survive a bullet, but because he believed he had already lived so much more life than he had been entitled to. Magic had kept him alive long after he should have died, and he had no fear of death now. And he had wanted to protect Magda, the charismatic, clever woman who had travelled all the way from London to meet him. It felt as if it was part of his debt to Dr.Pinn and his friends, the debt his father had impressed upon him in his final days.
He hadn’t really believed that the man with the gun would shoot him—that was the stuff of movies, not reality—and he had thought he could chase the man away with the threat of security. But then he had been on the floor, the carpet in his face and a blank space in his memory about how he had got there.
He had listened to the man with the gun moving about and talking to himself, stepping over James and then leaving the room, opening and closing the door quietly.
James had waited a moment before standing up, ensuring he was alone. Then he had checked himself, feeling his forehead with tentative fingers, but finding no pain or sensitivity, no obvious mark.
“I am bulletproof,” he had reflected, quietly astonished.
He had spun on the spot, looking for Magda, an immediate fear flashing through his mind that he would see her body elsewhere in the room, but there was no sign of her. He had smoothed down his suit, pushed a hand through his hair, and then had followed the man out of the room and into the corridors of the office. He had crept after him, out towards the lifts, where he had spotted the man at the reception desk. The intruder spoke Magda’s name once, and then added: “Now I have your name, Magda Sparks from London.”
James had watched as the man tore a page from the visitor book before heading to the elevator. Once the elevator doors had closed James had darted out the security door and checked in the office behind the desk. Michael the receptionist was there, tied up and face down on the floor. James hurried to untie him.
“What happened?” he asked, even though he knew.
Michael was in shock, eyes bulging from a face drained of colour. “There was a man!” he blurted. “With a gun!” Then words seemed to fail him, and he succumbed to overwhelming shakes, his whole body trembling.
“I’ll call the police,” James had said.
He left Michael in the office and picked up the phone on the reception desk. He gave a vague story to the police about an intruder with a gun, and then hung up, wondering what to do. A thought sounded clearly in his mind: Magda had escaped, but the man was heading to London in pursuit.
“I have to find her,” James had decided. “I have to warn her.”
He had tried calling Magda as he hurried back to his office, but there had been no answer from her phone. “Damn!”
In his office he had taken his overnight bag from his bottom desk drawer—he was always ready to travel; the bank sometimes required it at short notice, and he never wanted to miss the opportunity of an expenses-paid trip—and had made his way out of the building, blue sirens stirring the night sky as the police approached. He didn’t wait for them, heading straight for the subway and the train to Hong Kong Airport. He had bought a ticket on the next available flight to London, a route that took him through Doha with a layover of several hours.
At one of the bookshops in the terminal he had picked up a novel by Miranda Hepworth—a thriller about spies in London. There was no author photo on the back, and the biography was bland to the point of being useless. He had bought the book and had started reading it on the flight, if for no other reason than to try to distract himself from his worry about what would happen if the man with the gun got to Magda before him.
The Book and the Letter
“So you came all the way to London?” Magda asked him, astonished.
James shrugged, but he was smiling. “I had to make sure you were alright.”
She stared at him in disbelief. She was still coming to terms with the fact that he wasn’t dead and now he was saying he had travelled halfway around the world to make sure she was safe.
Make another joke about him being a perfect man, go on.
They were in Accident and Emergency in St.Mary’s Hospital, surrounded by broken bodies and exhausted staff, the whole space lit by unforgiving fluorescent light.
“I left my phone in the room when you were shot,” she said, explaining why he couldn’t reach her. “You know... it slipped my mind with you being dead and everything.”
“Of course,” James said, grinning. “I can see how that would be distracting.”
“He must have taken my phone,” Magda realised then. “The man with the gun. The man who shot you. Shit.”
She dropped her head in her hands at the thought that the intruder from Hong Kong could possibly access her messages, her emails, all of her private information. “Oh no.” She was destroyed. She felt hollow andfragile like an eggshell. Nothing made sense anymore. She just wanted to go to bed and pull the covers over her head. She had done that as a child, when she been subject to bullying by two girls in her class for being short and dumpy and ginger. She’d spent a week pretending she was sick and hiding in her bed reading comics and books until her mum had forced her back to school to confront the bullies, telling her, “Bullies don’t just go away, Magda dear, you have to chase them off.”
Bullies didn’t have guns, though, did they? Not so easy to chase off a stranger with a gun who’s quite happy to use it.
A scream of pain shattered the silence, a sudden, shocking sound, and Magda lifted her face from her hands to glance around. The yelp had come from somewhere out of sight, a patient being tended to, but nobody else in the waiting area looked troubled by the noise, or looked up from their phones or stopped their conversations.
Frank had been wheeled into triage as soon as they had arrived almost an hour earlier and they had been waiting ever since. Magda and James were sitting on the hard plastic seats at the side of the waiting area, facing a wall of faded public information posters about diseases and injuries, and a window onto the entrance drive outside where ambulances arrived and departed in a continuous stream. Henrietta was by the door to the entrance, pacing back and forth and speaking into her phone.
