Part of him—he’s coming to think of his hesitations as Old Joe—feels strongly that his presence here is premature. He should plan, he should husband his resources. He should, in fact, be sensible. To this injunction the inner gangster responds with a deep and flatulent raspberry. If life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. If it gives you compromising pictures of venal bankers with a wide and varied social acquaintance in the halls of power, then you blackmail while the sun shines.
“I need the Hon Don,” he’d told Polly Cradle on the way back to London, “and I need the Night Market. Whatever I’m doing, I’m going to need them. I can feel it.” She made love to him, as promised, between junctions fifteen and seven. He closes his eyes for a moment in heady recollection.
A notedly traditionalist bishop goes to sit on the damasked sofa, leaps up as the episcopal fundament is assailed by Bastion’s one remaining tooth, and then nearly expires of sheer horror at the pink marble eyes and the halitotic sneer.
The Hon Don arrives a moment later with their drinks.
“Hello, Hon Don!” Joe carols.
“Hello, Hésus, my old friend,” the Hon Don says loudly, and nods to the shaking bishop. “ ’Lo, Your Eminence, have you met Hésus, sounds like your sort of fellow, doesn’t he, with a name like that, but of course it’s very common in Spain, where he’s from.” This with a warning glance at Joe and Polly. “Yes, indeed, Count Hésus of Santa Mirabella—and I do believe I’ve not met the countess, you must be she, how charming, utterly,” and at this point he’s put down the drinks and is close enough to snarl “What the fuck are you doing here, you little shithead?” as he goes to embrace his guest.
Joe Spork smiles a beatific smile, and produces a colour photocopy of the incriminating Polaroid snaps. “I bring closure, Don. I bring joy to all mankind. My family’s estates may lie in ruins, but I have my father’s heritance. I know you’ll be relieved to hear it’s all intact and in a safe place. There was something he always wanted you to have, but death took him”—he smiles at the bishop, who has found a dog-less and uncomfortable-looking lounger in the corner, and waves—“I should say ‘the Lord God, merciful and mighty, took him off to his just reward,’ hello, Your Eminence, most pleased to make your acquaintance, I am Hésus de la Castillia di Manchego di Rioja di Santa Mirabella, and this is my lady wife, Poli-Amora, greetings from the Most August Court of Spain! Yes, greetings, to you and your family, may they have many children within wedlock and rock the vault of Heaven with their procreations!” But when he turns back to the Hon Don sotto voce there is suddenly an absolute cold in his face, a shadow of days and nights in the tiny room at Happy Acres, “So you’re all mine, you old goat, or your life will be miserable unto the last hour, you hear me? Because your first problem will be explaining what you were doing with two girls from the chorus at The Pink Parrot and that will be as nothing—as nothing—to the fuss which will kick off when they learn whose living room you were in and who dobbed you in, namely me, namely Britain’s most wanted, and they will dig through every aspect of your life and fuck it up as they have done mine, and they will find nothing about me (which will only make them more suspicious) and doubtless a few dozen things which you would prefer were not revealed, and after that, if I am not dead, I will come into your house like a cleansing flame and I will smite you as you have never been smote before, sing hallelujah!”
He flings his hands high into the air and smiles at the bishop, who nods genially back and hides behind the Financial Times. The Hon Don glowers.
“What do you want?”
“Addresses, Donald. Names and places. I wish to know of the lives and loves of a fat man and a thin one, mandarins from the shady bit of our glorious civil service. I shall also require the use of one of your more secluded—no, let’s stretch a point and say soundproofed—properties. I believe you have a couple on the edge of Hampstead Heath which would be ideal. We shall speak of it in camera. But have we established the principle?”
“Yes,” the Hon Don mutters through gritted teeth, “we have.”
Fifteen minutes later, Joshua Joseph Spork is on his hands and knees in a tide of local papers, cutting out the small ads for a hidden message: the perfect image of paranoid schizophrenia. The scissors are a nice touch, culled from an embroidery set and blunted at the ends. A selection of pencils of various colours is scattered across the floor of the Hon Don’s office at the Pablum Club. The Hon Don is elsewhere, no doubt soothing his fevered brow with a brace of exotic dancers. Polly Cradle leans, Bacall-style, on the bar, and listens to her lover mutter.
“No, right, that’s the Advertiser. Fine. So ‘Come home Fred, all is forgiven,’ fine. That’s the Crawley Sentinel, and underneath … ha! Yes. Then … Yaxley Times, all right: ‘Be mine, Abigail, be mine!’ which is a bit desperate and I think … oh, bloody hell, it’s real, fine …” and so it goes, a litany of clippings clipped and cast aside. A moment later, Joe grins. “Find the lady!”
Polly extends her hand, then stops. “What do I do?”
“Nothing! It’s done. But help me: I was never very good at this. It’s like a crossword … Here: ‘For Sale: three matched mountain bikes. Divorce compels forced march to bank.’ That’s the date. 3 March. Right? Then here: ‘Sing-a-long-a-Sound-Of-Music, Toxley Arms, Dover Street. Tickets in advance only.’ So, Dover Street. But which Dover Street, because there are a few, and what number or what have you … oh.” Joe looks disappointed. The third clipping holds no answers, obviously. Polly Cradle peers.
“Could it be the Toxley bit?”
He stares. “Yes! I’m back to front. Toxley Arms is the entrance. A pub. A pub in …” He scans the third clipping again. “Belfast? That can’t be right.”
“The ship, maybe?”
“Yes! On the Thames. The pub closest to HMS Belfast. There’s a way down into the Beat. Yes. Exactly.” He grins again. “Get out your best frock, Mistress Cradle, and your fine dancing shoes. I’m taking you to the Night Market.”
The Market looks different and the same; today it’s in a great Henry VIII–era water cistern pumped dry for refitting and filled with wooden scaffolding, hung with glowsticks in baroque lanterns and wind-up electrical lamps, the smell of water offset by great censers streaming fresh flower scent (stolen, a sign proudly proclaims, from a chemical company in Harchester which specialises in olfactory ambience, more available on request). People glance at them, then look again: oh, fugitives. But the older ones, and the quicker, look a little longer and see Joshua Joseph Spork with a bad woman on his arm and a gangster’s hat, and know that something is afoot, so that the whisper runs from stall to stall along the winding central aisle: Is that Mathew’s boy? My God, he’s huge! And done something to upset Lily Law, but it’s not what they say, that much I do know …
A man named Achim gives them a glass of wine each and cheers. Others hurry to look the other way—no desire to learn anything which might be relevant to an ongoing inquiry. In any other place Joe would fear betrayal, but the Market is sacrosanct: it can only continue if it remains secret, and the penalties for betrayal are stark. Starker now, probably, than they were. Now that Jorge runs the place in Mathew’s stead—or, as Jorge would be the first to acknowledge, in Joe’s.
In what must be a maintenance room overlooking the cistern—a pumping station or an overflow—Jorge has established an office and is doing business, and you can be sure the whisper has reached him before they do, but Jorge is all about volume.
“Holy fucking crap, Joe Spork! Fuck! You are one most wanted fucker, you know that? There’s a reward out on me just being in a room with you. Jesus! Vadim, this is totally cut-your-own-throat-after-reading, okay? This asshole was never here.”
Jorge has no second name, no surname and no patronymic. He’s just Jorge, the messy kid with the thick arms who shared his cake and scurried along at the back of the crowd. Jorge, chief among those who have kept the Market alive after the death of its king. He trailed Mathew like a puppy, worshipped him. Joe’s
father picked up followers and acolytes the way other men breathe, and Jorge carries that loyalty ridiculously forward to Mathew’s son. He was small then, for his age. He’s small now, vertically speaking, but he makes up for it with sheer volume and a Russian appetite. His breath, forcibly expelled in all directions, smells of salt fish and vodka. Joe is quite certain that Jorge plays up to his heritage, to people’s expectations. Who, after all, living in London for his entire life, still sounds like a sailor from Krasnoyarsk? Only Jorge.
Vadim, across the desk from him, is an expensively dressed character in gold-rimmed glasses, with a look of deep self-regard which might just be mistaken for poetry, or pain. His eyes rest on Polly Cradle’s cleavage, then skitter away when she favours him with a broad, challenging grin.
“Listen, Vadim,” Jorge says, throwing short arms in the air, “I got to talk to this guy. Debt of honour, okay? So, look, being honest: you are the worst erotic photographer on the face of the planet. Seriously, it’s better you point the camera away from the girls and make photos of the patio. These pictures …” He holds up a sheaf of eight-by-six-inch prints and flicks through them. “This one is like medical exam. This one is botany, maybe agriculture. Joe, Jesus, did you see this? What does this look like to you?”
“It’s … well, I’m fairly sure that’s an aubergine.”
“Thank the merciful Lamb, old friend, it is an aubergine. But also, you see how there’s fuck all else in the picture?”
“I do see that, Jorge, yes.”
“And yet this is a photograph of Vadim’s girlfriend Svetlana, who is—and I do not exaggerate here, okay?—she is the girl I most wish to see naked after Carrie Fisher in Return of the Jedi. In this picture she is entirely fucking naked. If it was not a close-up you would catch fire and explode looking at it. Would you like to see the wide shot?”
“All right.”
“So would we all, Joseph, but this unfortunately is impossible, because that asshole there did not take a wide shot. Go, Vadim, please. I got to cry on my friend’s shoulder, okay?”
Joe Spork waits until Vadim has removed himself, clutching the contraband aubergine porn, and then his face drops into its new, sharper lines. “Business,” he says.
“You serious? Like real business? Not fucking slot machines?”
“Real business.”
“You going to kick me out, Joe? Run the Market all of a sudden?” Jorge is joking. Kidding around. His wide face is clear of malice or alarm. Joe Spork wonders where the guns are, and the men.
“No, Jorge. The Market’s all yours. I’m getting back into the game, for sure. But I don’t want your chair. Too much hard work for an honest villain like me.”
Relief flickers across Jorge’s features. His shoulders relax a little, now that he’s no longer carrying the weight of sudden violence. “Honest villain! Yes! My God, Joe, I tell you, we should have more honest villains in this world!”
“I’m glad you say that, Jorge, because I need some help.”
Jorge looks grave. “The way I hear it, Cradle’s is gone, you’re on the run. Maybe you’re too broke for business. I can get you away. Danish ambassador got little local problem, killed his wife’s lover with lawnmower. But no favours, Joseph, not big ones. Not even for you.”
For answer, Joe removes from his pocket one of Mathew’s larger diamonds, and sets it on the table.
Jorge brightens. “Okay, Mr. Spork does business. It’s a great day! You tell me what you need.”
“Phones. Untraceable credit. Can your Danish ambassador get us identities to use today, right now?”
“Sure. I put money into accounts for you, you pay in stones. Family rate. Good for ever unless you are loud. You buy a Ferrari and crash it in Pall Mall, we got serious problem.” Jorge starts to laugh, then sees the speculation on Joe’s face as he wonders whether this might actually happen. “Oh, sheee-it. You look just like Mathew. Don’t do that, it freaks the crap out from me. Okay, what else?”
“Tell the Market I’m putting a job together.”
“Big job?”
“Biggest ever. No kidding, Jorge. Bigger than anything, ever. I need them, Jorge. And they need me. The Old Campaigners, even. All of them.”
“I don’t think they think they need you, Joe. I think maybe they think you can go to Hell.”
“Not for this job. I’m the only one who can do it.”
“What kind of job?”
“Security.”
“Getting around it?”
“Being it. Stopping an assassination.”
“Whose?”
“The universe.”
Jorge stares at him, then down at the diamond, then at Polly Cradle. She nods.
“The fucking universe is getting killed now?”
“Maybe.”
“Not just the world, which by the way would be completely enough.”
“The world to start with. Everyone on it.”
Jorge lets his head roll back and stares up at the ceiling as if exhausted. “This is bee-related, maybe?”
“Very much so.”
“Bee-related is not good. Word is out that anyone messing with bee situation will see the inside of some invisible shithole prison for terrorists. And you—you are very wanted, Joe. You’re maybe the bad guy. It happens that nice people go batshit sometimes. I have to think maybe I shouldn’t help you even this much, even for honour and family and shit. Even for very nice diamond.”
“You know the Ruskinites?”
“The asshole-monk-bastard-sadist-fuck Ruskinites?”
“Yes.”
“I know them to scrape off my fucking shoe.”
Joe grins. “They’re on the other side. They want me dead.”
Jorge nods. “Okay, then you’re maybe not entirely the bad guy.” He jiggles his head left and right, a man ducking punches. “Not the bad guy. But you’re playing in the fucking big leagues, even if there’s no end of the world, for sure. Dangerous shit.”
“Kings and princes, Jorge,” Joe says sonorously, in his best Mathew impression. In spite of himself, Jorge smiles.
“For sure, Joe. Kings and princes, I remember. But … seriously? The fucking universe?”
“Seems so.”
Jorge sighs. “Fuck me, Joe. You don’t come here for twenty years, now you want to save creation?”
“I am a Spork. We don’t do things small.”
“Yes. I guess you are.” Jorge rolls his huge head around his neck, and they can hear his neck clunk through the layers of flesh. “Fuck, Joe,” he says again, in a rather pensive way. And then, by way of agreement: “Fuck.”
In the daylight world, the Hon Don has left an envelope at the desk of the Pablum, along with stern instructions that the Prince is not to be allowed into the building. He has backed this order with some curiously aristocratic sort of slander such that the doorman’s eyes are both stern and admiring as he hands over the envelope. It contains some typed pages, a handwritten note with two addresses, and a set of house keys labelled as belonging to a third.
Momentum, Joe considers, is the vital thing. He has to keep moving, gathering momentum. Even a very small object, travelling at the right sort of speed, can deliver a considerable wallop.
He glances over at Polly Cradle. “You don’t have to do this one.”
She tuts. “On the contrary. This is the one you don’t have to do.”
He stares at her. Polly raises one eyebrow and continues. “I would go so far as to say that you can’t. God knows what will break loose in you. I like you crazy, Spork. I don’t want you catatonic.”
“But—”
“I will do this one, Joe. You will stand in the back and watch. Besides. It’s time you saw me at work.” She frowns. “Although … for this, I think I will want some additional muscle. No,” she adds, as he immediately opens his mouth to volunteer, “not that kind of muscle. Suasion.”
“Suasion?”
“I am an investigator, Joe Spork. Suasion is one of the things I d
o. Now: watch.”
He does.
Polly Cradle plays Jorge’s untraceable mobile telephone like a tin whistle. She is charming and plausible and ever so slightly needy. He remembers Mathew saying you can burgle a nice house with a ladder at noon so long as there’s a pretty girl in a ball dress holding it steady. Old ladies will approve your gallantry and coppers will stop to give you a hand. Polly has a sunny, hopeful manner and a gentle appeal which makes people want to help her out. She sets organisational structures against themselves, deftly squeezing between switchboards and departments into the gaps, and coming back with all their secrets.
Via the bored receptionist at Lambeth Palace, she gets access to an old cleric in Salisbury who handles accommodation for protected witnesses in canon law cases. The cleric has recently been asked to find a safe place for a woman of late middle age who is sought by unfriendly eyes. Polly absolutely refuses any information about that, scolding him politely for even mentioning it, and he basks in her discretion. A moment later she is talking to his assistant about some completely other matter, but somehow comes away with the name of a layman newly returned from Afghanistan and seeking to atone for his sins who has lately been charged with the protection of an old lady. A brief call to an old friend in the London Authority yields the man’s home phone number, where his wife is delighted to learn that her husband has won a substantial award for his service and concerned that he must be contacted immediately because he’s in Royston on business and can’t be reached.
This in turn yields a soldier’s pub called the Cross Keys which has rooms, and which is just across the road from where Harriet Spork is safely ensconced in a temporary apartment the Church has rented for her, guarded by lay brothers Sergeant Boyle and Corporal Jones, late of Her Majesty’s Special Air Service and now retired. Since they are Harriet’s protection and not her warders, and since while Polly may be formidable she is clearly not in Sergeant Boyle’s weight class, gaining entry is only a question of knocking.