The man walks along its foot, looking for the door. Craters, broken things, wild dogs. Circular ruins where a hairy lunatic talks to a fire. Finally the man finds a wooden door. He stoops and knocks. No reply. He sees a tin can hanging from a piece of string vanishing into the masonry, and speaks into it. ‘Is anybody there?’ The subtitles are Japanese, the language is all hisses, slushes and cracks. ‘I am Dr Polonski. Warden Bentham is expecting me.’ He puts the can to his ear and hears drowning sailors. The door opens by itself on to a bleak forecourt. The doctor stoops through. A strange chanting echoes with the wind. ‘Toadling at your service, Doctor.’ A very short man unbows, and Dr Polonski jumps back. ‘This way, if you will.’ Snow is gravelly. Incantations whirl and die and rise again. Keys jangle on Toadling’s belt. Past card-playing guards, through a maze of cages. ‘Your destination,’ he croaks. The doctor gives a stiff bow, knocks, and enters a scruffy office.
‘Doctor!’ The warden is decrepit and drunk. ‘Take a seat, do.’
‘Thank you.’ Dr Polonski steps gingerly – the floors are not only bare, but half the floorboards have been removed. The doctor sits on a schoolchild’s chair. The warden is photographing a peanut in a tall glass of liquid. Warden Bentham explains. ‘I am penning a treatise on the behaviour of bar snacks in brandy soda.’
‘Indeed?’
The warden checks his stopwatch. ‘What’s your poison, Doc?’
‘Not while I’m on duty. Thank you.’
The warden empties the last drop from his brandy bottle into an eggcup and disposes of the bottle by dropping it between floorboards. A distant scream and tinkle. ‘Chin chin!’ The warden knocks back his eggcup. ‘Dear doctor, permit me to cut to the quack. The quick, I mean, the quick. Our own Dr Koenig died of consumption before Christmas, and what with the war in the East and whatnot we still have no replacement. Prisons are not priorities in wartime, except to house politicals. We had such high hopes. A Utopian prison, to raise the inmates’ mental faculties, to allow their imaginations to set them free. To—’
‘Mr Bentham,’ interrupts Dr Polonski. ‘The quick?’
Polonski shifts on his tiny chair, afraid of joining the brandy bottle. ‘Voorman is a prisoner here?’
‘Quite so, Doctor. Voorman is the prisoner who maintains he is God.’
‘God.’
‘Each to his own, I say, but he has persuaded the prison population to share his delusion. We isolated him, but to no avail. The singing you heard coming in? The psalm of Voorman. I fear disturbances, Doctor. Riots.’
‘I see you have a problem, but how—’
‘I am asking you to examine Voorman. Ascertain whether his madness is feigned, or whether his tapirs run amok. If you decide he is clinically insane, I can parcel him off to the asylum, and we can all go home for tea and fairy cakes.’
‘Of what crime was Voorman convicted?’
Warden Bentham shrugs. ‘We burned the files last winter for fuel.’
‘How do you know when to release the prisoners?’
The warden is flummoxed. ‘“Release”? “The prisoners”?’
Akiko Kato looks behind her. I duck down, in time, I think. At the end of the row a rat stands upright in a pool of silver screenlight. It looks at me before climbing into the upholstery. ‘I only hope,’ Akiko Kato’s companion speaks softly, ‘this is urgent.’
‘An apparition appeared in Tokyo yesterday.’
‘You summoned me from the defence department to tell me a ghost story?’
‘The ghost was your son, Congressman.’
My father is as thunderstruck as I am.
Akiko Kato flicks her hair. ‘And I assure you he is a ghost who is very much alive. In Tokyo and looking for you.’
My father says nothing for the longest time. ‘Does he want money?’
‘Blood.’ I opt to bide my time while Akiko Kato cuts more rope to hang herself later. ‘I can’t dress up what I have to say. Your son is a crack addict who vowed to me that he would kill you for his stolen childhood. I’ve come across many a damaged young man in my time, but I’m afraid your son is salivating psychosis on two legs. And it isn’t only you he wants. He says he wants to destroy your family first, to punish you for what happened to his sister.’
Voorman’s cell is a palace of filth. ‘So, Mr Voorman . . .’ Dr Polonski paces over faeces and flies. ‘How long have you believed yourself to be a god?’