He recalls his epiphany in the white room. Survival rests on an absolute lack of compunction. Martial artists achieve this through repetition: the decision to harm is taken in advance, the motion practised. The average person hesitates in order to judge what is necessary. Humanity requires the calculation: what to do, how far to escalate? Joe Spork is not escalating so much as he is erupting, straight up, from a deep well of anger at the world’s injustices, at his mother’s chill and his father’s ease, at Frankie’s abandonment of Daniel, at Daniel’s weak response. Joe need not hold back. He is fighting machines and monsters, and beyond that, he is not fighting. He is fixing something broken. The world having Shem Shem Tsien in it is a flaw, like rust in the cogs. He feels no compunction at all.
They hit him. Often, they hit him quite hard. He knows it’s happening, but pain is a register of inconvenience, and he has a great deal he wants to express to these people through the medium of crippling blows and wrenched limbs, and a little thing like knocking him over isn’t going to stop him. Injury is different, and he guards against it—but there’s a magic in forward momentum and molten rage: anyone wanting to injure him must come within reach. From the ground, he grabs a man leaning over him by the soft flesh under the arm, and heaves. The man screams, hauls back, and Joe Spork rides the movement upwards, regains his feet, reverses the position; softness underfoot. Shem Shem Tsien draws a line across Joe’s arm with the sword, and he feels ice and then blood running freely. He yells, and the Opium Khan grins, steps forward again, blade teasing, tapping Joe’s shoulders. Joe bellows, and tries to catch hold of him, plucks at his sleeve as Shem Shem Tsien steps lightly past him. The gun is in Shem’s other hand, but he shows no inclination to use it. He closes down Joe’s defences, whispers in his ear almost like a lover. Joe can smell brimstone on him, and realises he is breathing the shot which killed Edie. Hellfire, indeed. The Opium Khan’s breath is minty, and his fingers are like Daniel’s vise.
“You delight me, Mr. Spork. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I should have the privilege of killing Frankie Fossoyeur’s grandson in person. It’s too good of you.” The gun comes to rest under Joe’s ear.
And then a storm wind hurls them both across the room. Glass cases burst and papers whirl in a blizzard as Edie Banister’s last piece of exploding Tupperware goes off belatedly and fills the room with smoke and flame.
Joe spins around and around, imagining Shem Shem Tsien doing the same, then finds a wall and moves along it, looking for … he doesn’t know. He staggers to his feet, brushing himself down, preparing to go another round, knowing this time that he will not win. What does it take to beat him? How, how, how? Joe grinds his teeth. He will find out. He will.
Polly Cradle appears directly in front of him with Bastion, and it takes him a second to realise that she is real: an angel in faded jeans, ushering him out. In the corridor is Mercer.
“Move,” Mercer yells roughly. Then, into what appears to be not a cellphone but an actual satellite handset, “Bethany! It’s Mercer Cradle. The word is: ‘Passchendaele’. We’re crashing the shop, do you understand? We’ve been caught—you may be under direct threat. Burn the boxes, drop the shutters and turn the key. I say again, ‘Passchendaele’.”
Crashing the shop. Noblewhite Cradle’s last gasp, in the face of utter destruction: records gone, guilt erased, favours called in. Money takes flight to the Caymans, to Belize and the canton of Thun and the Bahamas. House of Cradle flees on predetermined routes. The company is born again abroad. The U.K. is considered scorched earth.
“Mercer,” Joe Spork says, “I’m sorry.”
“Get a move on!”
“Yes,” says another voice, “you had better do that.”
Shem Shem Tsien stands in the smoke. He has lost his gun, but he still has a sword, and he is flanked by two of the remaining Ruskinites.
Joe growls, feeling the heat in his chest again, the urge to tear something with his fingers, and then Bob Foalbury steps smartly past him and with comical precision presses a stud in the wallpaper.
A vast, clanking iron curtain falls into place between them, and then another, and water pours from the ceiling. Somewhere, an alarm klaxon sounds, like an old-fashioned air-raid siren. From behind the screen comes a howl of thwarted fury.
“Cop that, you murdering sod,” Bob Foalbury says, with feeling. And then, to Joe, “Fire and theft system, Baptiste Frères of Marseilles circa 1921.” He turns sharply, beats on the metal grille. “Come into my house? Threaten my wife? Call me an old man? Well, I beat you, didn’t I? My name is Bob Foalbury! With an F, you bastards!”
Cecily puts her hand on his arm, and he folds down onto her, relieved and afraid and tired.
“No time,” Mercer says.
Joe Spork follows the Cradles back to the street and into yet another anonymous car. His exhaustion feels like a great, dark lake on which he floats and which will shortly drown him. And yet, at the same time, as he slips gratefully into the back seat for a few minutes, for an hour, for however long until his next staging place, he hears a part of himself—aloud or not, he does not know—asking a question.
Why am I always the one running away?
In the semi-darkness of public street lights and twilight gloom, the safe house in Sunbury looks to Joe Spork like a giant, rejected, saliva-covered mint. It makes him feel slightly sick. On the other hand, it is anonymous, which ultimately must be the point. A safe house: a house which is safe. Bartered on the spur from a startled estate agent, and paid in cash. This day, this money, no discussion, no visitors. Are we clear? Oh, yes, sir, and thank you very much.
Joe finds that his anger has drained away and, with its departure, his sense of hope. He does not honestly believe anywhere is safe.
He will be on the run for ever. Or—more likely—he will die.
The giant mint has a small door-knocker in the shape of an animal’s head. It’s probably supposed to be a lion, but it looks more like a sheep. Mercer fusses with the key and lets the little gang of refugees inside.
“Harticle’s was prettier,” Mercer says moodily. Polly nods.
“Yes, it was,” she says. “But this is what we have.”
She turns to Joe, looks him over. She’s being careful. It’s nice when someone who cares about you is careful. It means that they care. He’s tired again, so tired he wonders if he can ever sleep enough. He wonders if he will dream of electric shocks. If he will keep her awake. If she will still want to share the bed if he cries in his sleep.
Mercer slips past them up the stairs. “I’ve got a change of clothes. You should shower, Joe, I don’t mean to be unkind, but you smell bad enough that people will notice and you don’t want to be noticed.”
Story of my life. Don’t make a fuss. You don’t want to be noticed. Pay on time, work to order, play by the rules. Don’t misbehave. Do as you’re told, and you’ll be all right.
Except I did, and I’m not.
Bastion slouches, jellied by grief, and whines very softly. Joe rocks him. The woven-gold bee, the one Ted Sholt gave Joe in Wistithiel, crawls out of Polly’s handbag and flies slowly around the room as if in mourning. After a moment, it alights on a plastic shelf.
“I’m sorry,” Mercer says a little briskly, reappearing with a pair of jeans and a shirt. “We did everything we could, but we just couldn’t find you. We tried everything, Joe. We did. I promise.” He nods to himself. “Anyway. What you need now is a way out of the country, a place to go, and all that bloody quickly. We can do that much, at least. You’ll also need a false identity for travel, and then another one to live in, and finally an emergency one or maybe two. You’ve got to disappear.”
Joe shrugs. Mercer hesitates, then: “You’re very wanted. Very. Do you understand?”
Joe finds himself unsurprised. “What have I done? Did I blow up parliament?” He’s not bitter. He’s always felt there was no point in taking things personally. It’s just a slack, empty curiosity. He has nowhere left to fall.
r /> “No,” Mercer says quietly. He slides a tabloid newspaper across the table. The front page is about the bees, a map showing their route around the world, the conflicts marked as little fires. Mercer sighs, and opens the paper. On pages four and five—just after Belinda from Carlisle in nothing but a pair of denim shorts—he finds SPORK: BLOOD WILL TELL! and LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON. Garish crime-scene photographs of places Joe has never seen, bodies draped. Old pictures, and new ones. A history of violence.
“This can’t be right!”
“I’m sorry, Joe, it is. The houseboat’s gone. The Watsons … It must have been the day after you borrowed the whaler. There was nothing you could have done. It’s not your fault.”
Joe feels the weight of it settle on his shoulders all the same. “What happened?”
“Someone set a fire. Abbie woke up just in time, she got the kids out, they’re fine. Griff … he’s in hospital. Smoke inhalation. He tried to save what they had. The police say you did it. Abbie called them to demand a full investigation and that little shit Patchkind told her this sort of thing was bound to happen if she made time with terrorists.”
“Terrorists? What the fuck does that mean?”
“That’s you, Joe, I’m sorry.”
“I’m a terrorist now?”
“You are a suspect in a terror investigation. Yes.”
“But I haven’t done anything wrong!”
It is a cry of agony, emerging from somewhere in his gut, and his voice climbs, stretches, and breaks on the last word into something animal, kicked and bewildered.
“They are fucking with you, Joe,” Polly Cradle says evenly into the silence which follows. “They are talking to you in the language of fucking. The message is: do as you’re told. Do what we say, when we say it, tell us what we want to know even if you don’t know it. The message is: don’t piss us about, sonny, or you’ll go the David Kelly road. The de Menezes road. Or whatever that poor bugger was called they topped at the G20 for walking with his hands in his pockets. This is the system coming down with all its might. The message is: this is what happens when you don’t behave yourself.” Her eyes are cold and flat, and there’s something prowling in their depths.
Mercer draws breath and carries on. “In the course of your terroristic activities, you were discovered by several people who are now missing or dead.”
“Who?”
“Billy, first of all. Then Joyce.”
“Well, she’ll say that’s not true. They weren’t going to be married. And she’s not dead, so that’s just ridiculous.” But they are both looking at him, and he realises he still has somehow not understood something fundamental.
Mercer carries on, inexorable. “And a girl named Therese Chandler, of Wistithiel, in Cornwall, who was found dead in her home early this morning. Apparently you met her in a pub.”
“Therese? Tess? She’s dead?”
“Yes, Joe. Joyce as well.”
“Joyce wasn’t even with Billy any more!”
“I know. This isn’t about that.”
“They killed her to get to me?”
“Or because they thought she might know something, however tiny. Yes. And now that I’ve met the enemy, I should think just for fun, wouldn’t you? I’m pretty sure he did for Billy in person. That seems about his style.”
Yes. It does. But it also seems impossible, even now, with the smell of Edie’s death still in his nostrils: blood and gunsmoke. “This is all wrong. It’s against the law. All that stuff.”
And somehow Mercer is angry, because he nearly shouts. “Yes, Joe! It is against the law! It always is! And yet it happens. Or did you think they only did this to taxi drivers from Karachi? They do it when they feel like it, when it’s expedient, when the situation demands it. And no one cares because it never happens to them!” Polly puts a restraining hand on her brother’s arm. “Sorry.”
In the paper, pictures of Tess and Joyce, alive. Descriptions of how they died. Descriptions so lurid you can’t help but wonder, unless you really know someone well, whether they might have done it, after all.
Almost everyone who trusts him that much is here, now.
Joe Spork stares at the dead faces, and the headline.
Every man’s hand is against him now.
Joe Spork stares into nothing and waits for his heart to break, or his mind. He waits for the impact of this appalling, impossible lie to cause everything he is to crumble and collapse. He looks up and sees Polly watching, and Mercer, and knows they are waiting too. Sorry, he thinks. I’m done. I don’t have anything left. He waits to hear his own mouth make nonsense sounds, for his body to curl up into a ball and just stay there, until they come for him.
Instead, a completely other thing happens which catches him quite by surprise. He comes to the end of himself and finds, at the last, a piece of solid ground and a hard wall to set his back against.
Sometime between the moment when his father’s heart went ba but not boom and the dropping of Mathew’s silver-chased casket into the earth, Joe Spork buried the part of himself which knew how to hustle, cheat, and rob in a coffin of its own, and in some indefinable way accepted that his was to be a life of inconsequence and hohummery. He studied with Daniel in an effort to turn back the clock to some previous point when Mathew was not just still alive but not yet criminal; he sought, in fact, to become the man his father might have been under other circumstances.
He stares into his own reflection in the double-glazed window, and tries to remember the man he could have been. Crown Prince of Crime. Worse than his dad ever was, and that’s God’s honest truth. Mad bastard, he is. Not afraid of nothing.
That person has never existed, and yet he has always been possible. He has never gone away. Now, finally, is the moment to make him real. And yet it seems to Joe a very long journey to that place in himself, a long, hard uphill struggle against years of accumulated obstacles and self-made fences.
He begins with the man he is now: Joe Spork, who did not murder his friend, but is accused of it, and of things more desperate and vile for reasons which are not his fault; who shares his bed with Polly Cradle, and means to make that matter.
He rolls his shoulders, sets his jaw, and goes on.
He is the man who was taken by monsters, and tortured, and is not dead.
He is the man who knows that innocence is not a shield, and that keeping your head down does not mean you will be safe.
He is the man who was set up by an old woman in the name of love and a better world, and who watched her die to save him.
He is the man who will look after her dog.
He is the man who charged a loaded gun and a sword with nothing more than his anger.
Oh, yes, and his father was trouble, too. And his grandmother before that.
A slow, satisfied grin moves across his face. Mad Dog Joe. White Knuckle Joe. Run-Amok Joe.
Crazy Joe.
All right, then. He looks at his reflection again. He judges the work good, but not finished: the new Joe should not slouch.
He breathes in and sticks out his chest, looks again. No, too much. Less is more. Solidity, not hot air. Strength, not bluster.
He straightens his back, flexes his arms, but the power is carried in the core, not the fists. The gangster doesn’t bluff, doesn’t threaten. He simply is, and you know the score.
The city belongs to me. The world. It is mine. Other men rule because I have more important things to do.
Good. Now, the hat. The gangster is perpetually wearing a hat. Even when he is not, he carries himself as if he is. The light falls across his face just so; one eye is in darkness, glinting. Piratical. A wolf eye on the edge of the firelight, a pirate captain in a storm. Defiance.
The coat, like armour. It needs to hang wide, open, to emphasise his scale. It casts its own shadow, hides him yet again. His hands are by his sides, so he might be armed … No, scratch that. One way or another, he is armed. Is it a baseball bat? Very American. Where would he get such a thin
g? A length of pipe. A gun. A boathook. Good. And in his pocket, some further surprise. Not a gun. Not a knife. Something more alarming. A Molotov cocktail, perhaps, or a grenade. He has heard that Russian mobsters use grenades. It seems like massive overkill. Ah. Yes. But that’s the point, isn’t it? Overkill. Bring a sledgehammer to a knife fight. Bring a tank to play chicken. It’s not about subtle or measured. Shem Shem Tsien is subtle, a crooked spider in the dark, a liar, a thief of hope, a killer of Watsons and Joyces. Murderer of old women and sorrower of dogs. I am not a subtle or a measured man. I am Crazy Joe Spork, and I will bring you down if I must topple the house around us.
Yes.
From the window surface stares back the man he must be from now on: one-eyed wanderer; battlefield ghost; stranger; titan; mobster; angel of destruction.
A man who might be able to win, after all.
“Your escape route goes through Ireland,” Mercer is saying. “Ferry, then a flight to Iceland, on to Canada. Canada’s great for disappearing. It’s very big and there’s nothing in it. If you leave in the next few hours we can get you out before the bees arrive. I don’t know if that will help, but it’s worth a try.”
Joe Spork doesn’t seem to hear. Mercer moves around him, waves. “Do I have your attention, Joe?”
“Station Y,” Joe says. Mercer raises his eyebrows. Joe nods. “Okay. Do that in a minute. Does anyone have the box from my mother?”
Mercer frowns.
“Yes,” Polly says.
“May I have it, please?”
She rummages in her bag, produces it. The key is taped to the bottom, in the fashion of nuns rather than gangsters. He opens it.