The Last Witness Read Online Free PDF Page A

this town got organised.
    * * *
    Well, it’s inevitable. When I consume the memory of the last surviving witness, I become the last surviving witness, and there’s nobody to clear out my head cleanly and humanely. You can’t blame them; I don’t. My set scale of fees includes a levy, to cover the inconvenience and mental trauma of monotonously regular attempts on my life.
    But I don’t hold it against my clients. I can’t afford to.
    When you’ve been inside someone’s head, you know him, intimately; what he looks like is substantially irrelevant and uninteresting. I turned him over with my foot. Age thirty-five (I already knew that), the big, hollow frame of an ex-soldier who hasn’t been eating too well lately. He had red hair and blue eyes. So what?
    I always reckon that you gain something from pretty well every experience, however bad it may be. From him (whoever he was) I took away a picture of dawn in the Claygess Mountains, a rapturous explosion of light, blue skies, green fir trees, and snow. Just thinking of it makes me feel clean. That and a move whereby, when someone’s behind you and strangling you, a slight rearrangement of the feet and shift of your centre of balance enables you to throw them over your shoulder like a sack of feathers. If he’d remembered it a trifle earlier, he’d probably have made it. Ah, well.
    * * *
    By a curious coincidence, the man who’d hired him to kill me was the man I was on my way to meet. He was surprised to see me.
    “You said you had a job for me,” I said.
    “Changed my mind.”
    “Ah.” I nodded slowly. “In that case, there’s just the matter of my consultancy fee.”
    He looked at me. Sometimes I think I’m not the only one who can see inside people’s heads. “Fine,” he said. “How much?”
    “Five hundred angels.”
    He licked his lips. “Five hundred.”
    “Yes.”
    “Draft? On the Gorgai brothers? I haven’t got that much in cash.”
    I know the Gorgai brothers better than they know themselves. “All right,” I said.
    I stood over him while he wrote, then thanked him politely and left. I felt happy; I was back in the money again. Happiness in this world is by definition a transitory state, and two small tumbling ivory cubes put me back where I’d started from twelve hours later, but at least I had the memory of being rich, for a little while. Only memory endures. I learned that the hard way.
    * * *
    Two days later I had another client, a genuine one who paid. It was a something-and-nothing job, really rather touching; he was fifty-six and rich and wanted to marry again, but there was this one memory of his dead wife that really broke him up, and could I help? Of course. To me, it was just an image of a moderately pretty girl in old-fashioned clothes arranging flowers, in a bay window in an old house in the country. When I’d finished he gave me that blank look;
I know who you are and why you’re here, but I have no idea why it was so important
.
It sort of offends me that when I do my best work, the customer hasn’t a clue how much I’ve done for him. It’s like painting a masterpiece for a blind patron.
    * * *
    I distinctly remember the next time I met the old man and his son.
    I was fast asleep, and then I hit the floor and woke up. The last time I fell out of bed, I was four (I remember it well).
    I opened my eyes, and saw a ring of faces looking down at me. Two of them I recognised. The old man said, “Get him up.”
    Two of the other faces grabbed my arms and hauled me upright. They were strong and not very gentle. I know half a dozen ways of dealing with a situation like that, but those memories came from men twice my weight, and besides, I wasn’t in the mood.
    “You betrayed us,” the old man said.
    I was stunned. “Me? God, no, I’d never do a thing like that. Never.”
    For that I got a fist like oak in my solar plexus. “Who did you tell?” the old man asked. Stupid; I couldn’t answer, because I had no breath in