Joe glances at Polly Cradle. She takes his hand and nods.
“Yes,” they say together. There’s a faint click somewhere. B-side, perhaps.
Frankie—thirty years ago and more—cocks her head. “Bien. There are two things I must say, because I do not know what is happening,” the ghost of Frankie Fossoyeur says. “There is a prescription and a proscription. As Daniel would say, the stricture of the machine is hope, but in fact it possesses many virtues, many aspects, and one of them is the opposite of hope.
“The prescription is very simple. If it has not started, you must begin the process. Switch on the machine. The bees will fly. They will gather truth and sort it from lies, as they were rumoured to do when I was a child. Lies shall wither and a net improvement of nine per cent in the human condition will occur over time. Edie knows how to make it so.
“Understand that it will not be without pain. The world will reject the truth. It always has and it will again. There will be violence. But in the end, we will not be destroyed by it. There are enough good people that the foolish and the wicked will not drag us down. There will be a better world.
“The proscription is more serious. Very serious. It is like the one for nuclear material: do not push two subcritical pieces of uranium together at great speed. Only it is much more important!
“The wave that is the human soul is fragile. At Wistithiel I saw how fragile, and that was the barest beginning. Do you understand? If the Apprehension Engine is incorrectly calibrated, it exposes the mind to too much knowledge, and the mind in turn determines the world. In perfect perception of the underlying universe we find the end of uncertainty, of choice. Without choice, no consciousness. Without an uncertain future, no future at all. After a certain point, it is possible that this process would become self-perpetuating. What is possible would cease and be replaced by … immutable history. Ice instead of water. Life would become Newtonian. Clockwork.
“This is what Shem Shem Tsien desires from me. From the machine. He wishes a great, appalling determination. He will know the universe into a kind of extinction. His union with God will not be complete until he has ended what God began. Somehow, this catastrophe is what he most desires.
“He will, unless prevented, destroy everything, not just now, but for ever. Our universe will drift in the void, a solid, changeless block.
“If he is involved, in any way, you cannot trust him. No one can. If he has the Apprehension Engine, then what he intends is atrocious. You must stop him. You must.”
And the recording stops. The numinous ghost of Frankie Fossoyeur hangs in the air in front of them, pointing off to the side.
Joe leans one way, and then the other, gauging the angles. Then he lies down on his face and peers at the panelling, the floor, and then stands and taps gently at the polished ceiling. He takes a moment to reflect that this is the single largest and most beautiful mobile artwork he has ever seen. Ruskinite, he realises, from the days before Shem Shem Tsien. He could hate the man just for that, for the unmaking of the Order of John the Maker. If only there weren’t so many other things to hate him for.
There. Under his fingertips: a faint line. He follows it, up and down. A seal. Which implies a compartment. But how to open it? If Daniel made it, then it would be elegant. If Frankie designed it, it might be mathematical … no. No, she intended this for an ordinary mind. Ordinary, but familiar. So, how … oh. Of course. From his pocket he takes the car keys, moves them gently across the blank face of the panel. Yes, there—the keys twitch towards the wood, as if in a high wind. A magnet, this time on the inside, so that any metal will suffice to move the catch. There’s no pattern, though. How is he to know what movement will release the panel? He suspects a false step may have consequences greater than merely lost time. Frankie had learned caution by this point, of that much he is quite sure. He wonders if a decades-old booby trap will still work, and whether, if he doesn’t disarm it soon, it will blow him up just for being there. How long does he have? When will his grandmother’s ghost decide he is not her inheritor, but an enemy?
He drags his mind back to the job in hand.
No pattern. The line of the join? Like a number one? No. Meaningless. The square of the panel? It seems … too easy, and again, it means nothing. There is no way to be sure. Frankie was obsessed with certainty, for good or ill. With knowledge. And yet here, there is no pattern. A blank. No pattern where there should be a pattern.
He draws back, considering context, interrogating the puzzle.
What is the panel concealing?
A negation. Nothing where there was something, a very binary notion … Not a one, but a zero.
And there’s your answer.
All right, a zero. To be drawn in which direction? How does an ambidextrous French supergenius write her numbers?
Any way she likes.
“Which direction?” he mutters.
Polly Cradle kneels down beside him, kisses him on the forehead, like a blessing. She draws a circle with her finger, and he realises she has understood the same thing at the same time. Reassurance. Confirmation. He takes a moment to appreciate her presence, her amazing brain, sees it for a moment as a wonderful mechanical angel in her head.
“Clockwise,” she says. “Of course.”
Clockwise. A last message to Daniel. Do this, and all will be as it should be. Somehow.
Oh, Frankie.
He moves the keys in a circle, starting at twelve o’clock and moving around to the right. A moment later, the panel slides open. He peers in, and sees the small, solid knot of explosive. Had he moved the keys the wrong way … Well, he’s very pleased that he didn’t. He reaches in, and then abruptly he is holding a few pages of handwritten notes in his hands. He flicks through them, puts them away.
“What’s that?” Polly asks.
“The off switch,” Joe replies, and when she looks at him sternly, “Well, all right. Not a switch. A list of what to break in the right order so that the world doesn’t come to an end. A sabotage list.”
Bastion, from his place in Polly Cradle’s bag, snuffles through his tiny nose, and growls.
I am ready, horologist. Let us proceed.
Joe Spork looks at the dog.
“Simple as that, ey?”
On the way out, they close the doors and leave things exactly as they found them. At the railway station, Joe steals another car.
“Where now?” Polly asks.
Joe reaches into his pocket and passes her the Polaroid photo of Mathew and Tam. “Gentleman’s outfitter,” he says.
It takes longer to get to Uncle Tam’s place than Joe was expecting, because so many people are leaving London. The radio talk shows are twittering with concerned believers and contemptuous realists. Experts have been found and trotted out: catastrophe mathematicians, lawyers and comedians are all contributing to the mix. You couldn’t call it a panic, not yet. More a sort of jitter, like the rumour of a storm.
The house is at the end of a narrow road.
Knock, knock.
“Who’s there?”
“It’s me, Tam.”
With a recently pinched Mercedes and a girlfriend who looks like some sort of crime all by herself.
Tam shouts back through the door. “No, no, this is where you say ‘Oh, is it five in the bloody morning? I’m so sorry, I must be out of my fucking mind!’ ”
“Soot and sorrow, Tam. It’s Joe Spork.”
Uncle Tam—leaner and grizzlier, but verifiably the original—flings open the door and stares at him, meerkat eyes bright in a craggy face.
“Shit. I s’pose it was inevitable … Did I or did I not teach you, young Lochinvar—who is on the run and a plague to all men’s houses—that folk of the Market do not have names? We don’t say ‘I am,’ we say ‘I am called,’ and the reason for that is not so that fairies can’t take our teeth when we sleep with our mouths open on Midsummer’s Night, it is for perfectly simple deniability, so that old Tam does not have to fall back on ‘I am an old fart, offic
er, and too senile to recognise a wanted felon when I see one.’ Hullo,” he says, looking at Polly Cradle, “all right, I’ve changed my mind, you can come in. What’s my name?”
“I never heard it,” she replies smartly.
“You was raised proper,” Tam says approvingly, “not like Lochinvar. Always a troubled boy.”
“We came here in a stolen car, and he’s going to get me a bouncier one when we leave so we can screw like mink on the A303,” Polly informs him brightly.
Tam glares at her, then groans. “Christ,” he says, “I’m old.” He leaves the door open as he sinks despairingly back inside.
They follow him. Tam’s place is a bungalow, and he drags one foot. Joe, thinking of the great cat burglar of days gone by, feels a bit mournful.
The house is cramped and not very warm. It ought to have a kind of moth-eaten grandeur, but it doesn’t. It’s just lonely. There are books along the walls, old science fiction novels muddled with copies of the European Timetable and random magazines Tam hasn’t thrown away. One shelf is taken up entirely with ledgers of old shipping companies.
“I am a wanted man, Tam. And she’s a wanted woman, too, I suppose.”
Tam doesn’t answer Joe directly. He glances at Polly.
“I swear to God,” he mutters, “he does this to upset me. Oy,” he adds, turning to Joe, “if you don’t tell me I can’t know and I can’t be done for not calling the rozzers, now can I? I am assuming all this is woeful bravado from a boy with a proper job who wants to impress an old mate of his dad’s. You giant rollicking twerp. What do you want, Lochinvar? You and your girl with the naughty feet?”
“I need something, Tam. It’s not anything big.”
Tam glowers. “You’re just like him. He used to say that just before he said something like ‘Tam, old friend, it seems to me the Countess of Collywobble has too many diamonds and we have too few, so get your crampons, we’re off to scale the north face of Mount Collywobble Hall!’ and then before I knew it I was standing in front of the beak asking for clemency and pleading bloody stupid in mitigation. What are you looking for?”
“Whatever he left with you.”
Tam frowns. “Are you sure? Times have changed, Joe. No room for Mathew’s sort of living now.”
“I’m sure.”
Tam measures him, and nods. “Had to ask,” he says, “before I gave this over. Mathew left it for you. Said you’d never need it, left it anyway. He believed in planning ahead, when it suited him.” He scribbles on a piece of paper: three digits, then a letter and another three numbers. “It’s round the corner,” Tam says. “McMadden Storage. Looks all modern now, but nothing’s really changed. First number tells you which door to use. The letter’s for which floor, and the last one tells you which container it is. It’s all locked up, of course.”
“Where’s the key?” Polly Cradle asks.
Tam grins. “Oh, well …”
Joe Spork grins back, a wolf’s lolling tongue peeping out from under a sheep costume. “If you need a key, you’ve got no use for what’s in the box.”
Polly persuades Joe not to crash the car through the fence, which is his first, heady option, so he cuts the wire instead, right under a security camera. She waits for the alarm to go off, and nothing happens.
“Most of them don’t have one,” Joe murmurs, “and the ones which do, well, it’s property crime, isn’t it, not residential. Police’ll show up in the morning. Guard’s not about to come and see what’s happening if he can help it, is he? Even if the cameras work, which that one likely doesn’t because it’s not plugged into anything. Most of the world works that way. It just assumes you’re too chicken to find out.”
“I think it’s wireless,” Polly Cradle says carefully. “I remember the catalogue.”
“Oh.” He looks at the little lens. It abruptly seems very alert. “Well, best we hurry, then.” He grins, unrepentant, and she laughs.
A few moments later, in the shadow of the corrugated iron wall, he uses the same bolt-cutters on the padlock of door 334. He shoulders through, then shuts the door and turns on the lights.
“Wow,” Joe Spork says after a moment.
This is almost certainly the most orange place in England. It may be the most orange place in the world. Row upon row of numbered orange boxes, and beyond them, orange doors set into orange walls. It is not a soft, sunset orange or a painter’s orange, but a bright, plastic, waxed-fruit orange which knows no compromise. It’s the kind of orange which would allow you to find your container in a blizzard or after an avalanche.
Polly Cradle assumes he will also cut the lock on container C193, but he doesn’t. Instead, he just lifts the door up and out, and it comes off quite smoothly. He uses the padlock as a hinge.
Inside, there’s a man.
He’s sitting with his back to them in a big leather armchair. He wears a hat and a pair of gloves. By his left hand is a carpet bag, and by his right, a trombone case. He doesn’t move.
Joe Spork edges forward, and breathes out. It’s just a dressmaker’s dummy. Very ha ha, he thinks. Very Mathew. A small shock, just to keep you on your toes, test your mettle. Or maybe just for fun. Mind you, Mathew himself might have shot it, and that would have ruined a perfectly decent hat. Exactly the kind of hat Joe was thinking of a few hours ago. A hat to ravish dancehall girls in, to shade a fellow’s face while he runs moonshine. He moves closer.
The zip on the carpet bag is thick and dry. It sticks. He tugs at it, back, then forward, then back. Yes. The bag opens.
Shirts. A wad of money, perhaps a thousand pounds, in useless old-style ten-pound notes. A small pouch containing what can only be diamonds. Today’s value in the straight world: a couple of hundred thousand. Walking-around money. A toothbrush, because Mathew hated to be without, and a couple of tins of preserved fruit. A bottle of Scotch, a packet of tobacco. And … oh. Another set of Polaroids, rather ribald: a rubicund fellow in a wealth of female company on the sofa at one of Mathew’s parties. Not a lot of clothing to speak of, and a number of things going on which one newspaper or another might consider a bit naughty. The Hon Don takes his pleasure, 1 of 6 in Mathew’s hand on the back. A very solid bit of blackmail, ho ho, and surely this is what the somewhat dishonourable Donald was expecting when Joe bearded him the other day.
He looks around and sees what he’s looking for, taped loosely to the trombone case: a dirty postcard from Brighton circa 1975 showing a cheeky disco girl with her dress falling down.
Joe glances at the card, praying to God the text on the back is not long, not tortured, most of all that it will not apologise or accuse, or tell him he has sisters in five counties and a brother in Scotland. Or that there’s a corpse field under the warehouse.
Joe, it says, in large, friendly letters. Oil the slide and watch the safety, it’s loose. Love, Dad.
Here, in this room, is evidence of care from Mathew Spork for his one begotten son, a gesture of love and an appeal for absolution. Not just a memento or an escape kit. A Gangster’s Parachute. Just in case the straight life doesn’t work out.
Without hesitation, Joe strips the dummy and changes his clothes. The suit is a little loose around the shoulders, but other than that, it’s a good fit. His father’s guess at his full growth, and the tailor’s. Polly Cradle watches in silence as he puts on the hat.
He turns to the trombone case.
It isn’t a trombone case, of course. It looks a bit like one, but—Arthur Sullivan notwithstanding—no one in Joe’s situation actually believes their problems can be solved with a trombone. Unless he is greatly mistaken, the case contains something louder and less musical. It is also extremely illegal, but Joe is rather a long way past the point where he cares about that. He opens the case. The not-trombone is resting in pieces in black velvet compartments. Various tools and expendables are included in the kit, so that he can maintain and furnish his not-trombone at home. There’s even a score, telling you how to play music on it, and what ingredients are nec
essary for the creation of further vital supplies. And on the inside of the lid is the maker’s mark: the Auto-Ordnance Corporation of New York.
Papa Spork’s beloved Thompson sub-machine gun.
He realises, suddenly, how very long he has been waiting for this moment.
He grins, and carefully slots the pieces into place, then stands in the semi-dark. He lifts the tommy gun in across his chest, and smiles a smile of wide, boyish joy.
“ ‘At last, my hand is whole again,’ ” says Crazy Joe Spork.
XVI
Drinks at the Pablum Club;
Jorge, Arvin, and the Tricoteuses;
dangerous to mess around with.
The Pablum Club is not actually in St. James’s. It’s off to one side, and it isn’t nearly as ancient as the doorman’s spectacles would suggest. Founded as a place where gentlemen who retained fire in the gut could escape from the fossilised remnants at the Athenaeum and the O&C, it has all the external trappings, all the leather chairs and expensive brandies, but the patrons generally discuss their mistresses rather than their handicaps, and an iron rule of secrecy applies to all conversations great or small, on pain of disenfranchisement. If the modern establishment has a special fortress, a medal for long service at the old boys’ wheel, it is the Pablum.
The Hon Don is a major stakeholder, so Joe orders himself an obscenely ancient and expensive malt whisky and a Patrón Gold tequila (with actual gold in it) for Polly Cradle. Then he puts his two-tone brogues up on the mahogany coffee table and lets his head fall onto the backrest of his thronelike chair. After a moment, the fellows’ butler arrives to ask him not to and to inquire as to whether the lady would not prefer the Ladies’ Bar. Polly Cradle smiles and says she wouldn’t, and the fellows’ butler replies that he is almost sure she would, and Polly Cradle very gently tells him that really, she wouldn’t, whereupon the fellows’ butler appeals to Joe and Joe tells him to get the Hon Don toot suite, and shows him his gun.
The fellows’ butler runs like hell, but does not—because gentlemen with fire in the gut are prone to this sort of outburst—call the police. Polly Cradle lets Bastion out of his bag, and he selects a damasked sofa and, despite being small, occupies it entirely. Joe smiles a smile of malign anticipation, and waits.