Concierge. She wasn’t a concierge. This was not the sort of hotel that employed a concierge. She’d used his first name as well; she was flirting and dressed like she worked in a smoothie bar. And the room that he stood in now was not a salon, just a room at the top of the hotel with slanting ceilings and a round window like a porthole. When he thought of a salon he pictured a vast, plush-carpeted affair with ornate mirrors and chandeliers and high windows that overlooked a deer park. Evidently, the word meant something else for Kay. He left The Product on the bed and was now standing by the porthole. Snow thumped against the pane and half-obscured his view of the spires and gables and the lit-up buttresses of the city’s cathedral. He would have to stay here longer than he wanted. The appointment would impinge on his weekend. There was a woman he was supposed to meet tomorrow night. He wondered what was wrong with Kay’s eye. The snow reminded him of a piano tune he could no longer name, music that felt like falling down the stairs in slow motion, painlessly, without impact. He suspected he’d been sent here to fail. This mission was a pretext to get rid of him. That call could have been from Big Dump. This was cross-double-cross. Big Dump was setting him up. Perched on the bed, he took out his mobile phone and left a message on Lovestone’s ansamachine. Then he took The Product from the case. He’d bound it in a black silk wrap. He suspected that he might unravel it now to find half a paving slab in its place. That’s the sort of thing Big Dump would do, or at least it was the sort of thing he said he’d done in the past. But from under the silk emerged the white custom cloth slipcase. He used the drawstring to coax out the book and then, scared he’d drop it if he opened it on his lap, knelt with it resting on the bed. He’d memorized its vital statistics, its contents, its accumulated sales. Seventeen and half inches by thirteen and a half inches of jacket. Four point two inches thick. One thousand and eighty-eight pages and one thousand and forty six illustrated plates, all by the same celebrated hand and only published within these covers. A uniformologist’s delight, the Holy Grail of Napoleonic Buffdom, it had been much coveted since it first appeared in 1931. It had been reprinted only once, in the late 1980s. A mere two thousand were left. The American publisher had gone bust recently and Lovestone acquired the stock in the fire sale. It would never be reissued. La Roche’s Imperial Codex retailed at £799. This would seem a reasonable price to Mr Thule, Ansbro was sure of this. Everything he knew about Mr Thule came from Big Dump and Lovestone. Whenever Ansbro discussed sales with the old boss he would mutter ruefully about Ultima Thule. In the sixties and seventies both the shop and the mail order catalogue had sold thousands and thousands of Bastion Books. Lovestone would often pine as if some El Dorado or retail Atlantis still existed up here in the once-island city. He’d collapsed into a sweaty rapture when Ansbro confirmed that a meeting had been arranged. Ansbro was to sell the whole consignment of the Codex, play nice with Thule and suss out whether the shop or the list, or both were for sale. Ultima Thule was to be annexed to the Bastion Imperium. Elliot Ansbro was the outrider.
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