“What’s happened?” Joe asks.
The tosher scowls. He’s big and grey and has the face for it, his nose wrinkling like a bulldog’s. “Some muckety muck has happened,” he says, “gone and put bloody electric fences and all that in the bloody tunnel. Infrared cameras and the like. My mate’s in the hospital with taser burns and a wonky ticker. They say he’s lucky to be alive, the amount of juice it put through him. Sodding embassy or something, I should think. They’re always trouble.”
Joe nods. “Is there another way in?”
The man stares at him. “I know you.”
“I doubt it, I’m not—”
“You’re that Spork, you are. Crazy Joe.” He turns, calls over his shoulder. “Oy, lads, it’s Crazy Joe!” He looks back. “Come on, then, what’d you really do? Pinch the Queen’s knickers, was it? Rob the Bank of England?”
“Nothing like that—”
“Bet it was. I knew your dad, back in the day. Well, you’re a right ’un, I can see that. Anyone can see that. You a killer? Bollocks, is what it is. He’s took the bullion from the vault, I reckon,” he opines to the man behind him.
The other man nods. “Likely.”
“So this house, you want in?” The first tosher gestures vaguely up and back.
“Yes, very much.”
“Well, not from down here. It’s all the same, all the way round. The Tosh Herself is hopping mad, I will say.”
Joe ponders this for a moment, and looks around at the nexus of pipes in which they stand.
“You know,” he says, carefully, “that Sharrow House has a moat?”
“A moat?”
“Seriously.”
“Well, la-di-dah.”
“And it occurs to me that Herself might want to do something about that. ‘Block the Beat, the Beat blocks you,’ isn’t that what they say?”
“They do.”
“Well, suppose somehow the pipes got all messed up and the supply for the pipe were to rupture … or maybe some high-pressure mains were diverted at just the right moment …”
“Oh,” the tosher says, “I see. Yes. Do you think that would be upsetting for the muckety muck?”
“I do.”
“That amount of water could pack quite a wallop, you know. Dangerous to mess around with. You could get the moat sort of spreading itself all over the place.”
Everyone’s grinning now.
“That would be,” one of the other toshers says neutrally, “really distracting. If some bloke were thinking of robbing the place.”
“That’s true,” the first man agrees. “Is there a particular moment, Mr. Spork, when you might think, with your unique understanding of the criminal mind, that such a heinous act might be perpetrated?”
“I wouldn’t want to speculate,” Joe says. “But roughly, if I had to guess, 2 a.m. the day after tomorrow, and then run like hell.”
XVII
Back on track;
the Old Campaigners;
the Chairman declines to assist a wanted felon.
Back in the brewery basement, Joe stares down a long, wide gallery at a row of mannequins wearing army-surplus and thrift-shop clothes, posed in a variety of aggressive stances. Bald, blind enemies. Behind and beside them, boxes, boards and water barrels protect the brick. Mathew gave his stolen space over to practice; this was where he brought his boys before a caper to sharpen up, and the dim yellow electric bulbs they installed—running, of course, on pilfered current—are still hanging from the ceiling.
By now, if he is honest, he had assumed he would have a plan: a bold, deranged plan, both cunning and explosive, which would outwit and outgun the Opium Khan’s soldiers and get them into Sharrow House. He had daydreamed himself coming up through the drains with an army, descending from the tower with the Fifth Floor Men, stepping from behind a curtain to reveal that he had bribed the butler.
Instead, he has nothing. A blueprint which exposes only strength; a promise of assistance with something which isn’t really a big problem; a gun, a girl, and a lawyer.
In the semi-dark, he grins. That last part, at least, is completely authentic gangstery.
He opens the trombone case and looks at the gun. Shiny, oiled metal gleams up at him. He waits for revelation, but doesn’t feel it. The gun is, after all, just a gun; an outdated, inaccurate piece of battlefield weaponry beloved of bootleggers in the United States during Prohibition time. And to be honest, it’s more a prop than a piece of ordnance. There are—there were even in Mathew’s day—better guns; lighter, faster, deadlier guns.
He unpacks it, lets his hands assemble the pieces. Click, twist, clunk. Rudimentary. Obvious. Not crude, just simple. In fact, it’s an elegant thing, in its way. He pantomimes: You’ll never take me alive, copper!
Less funny than it might be.
More carefully, he lifts the gun to his shoulder, selects the single-shot option and aims down the gallery. He breathes out, relaxes the tension in his body and then prepares to receive the impacts which will follow. Looking along the barrel, he keeps both eyes open, captures a mannequin in the V of the rear sight. He aims for the body, having no delusions of competence. He lets himself feel the moment. Young Joe, after all, wanted this more than anything else, in the world, ever, and somehow was never permitted.
He pulls the trigger.
The noise is stunning. A jet of flame spears out from the muzzle and the butt slams against his body. The shot whines away into the dark. Gritting his teeth, he fires five more times, having some notion that six is a marksman’s number, and walks down to look at the damage.
There is none. The mannequins are unscathed. Behind them, his bullets have splintered boards and chipped stone.
He stares at the gun in his hands, and wonders if he will cry. Instead, he walks back to his stool and sits, smelling pointless gun smoke.
He has no idea what to do. This was supposed to lift him up. Instead, it has smashed him, at this late date and with the fate of the world apparently hanging in the balance.
So he sits, and stares at nothing.
“Need some help?” Polly Cradle asks.
She has come in very quietly, and now she touches Joe lightly on one shoulder. Her finger turns him towards her, and a soft kiss brushes his lips. In his gut, a flicker of angry bear: I will keep this woman safe. I will bite anyone who is unkind to her.
The bear, at least, has no doubts.
She grins at him, as if hearing the inner growl, and squirms onto his lap.
“So, come on. What are you doing?”
“Looking for Mathew,” he confesses.
She nods. “But he’s not here?”
“No.”
“Why Mathew?”
“Because this is his kind of thing.”
She stares at him, and then, very precisely, blows a raspberry into his face. “Rubbish!”
“What?”
“I said, rubbish. Utter nincompoopery. What … gah!” Words fail her. “Joe. You don’t need to look for Mathew. You’re you. His son. But, mostly, you. And you are good at this! Look at the last few weeks and tell me I’m wrong.”
He is about to do so, but she points one finger sharply at his eye. Independent supervillain in my own right. Yes. That surely includes collegial respect.
“Good,” Polly Cradle says. “Now. Show me the gun.”
When he does, she laughs.
“You fire it the way you want to fire it, Joe,” Polly Cradle says, when she can speak again, “not the way you think you should. Bollocks to should. Say it with me.”
“Bollocks to should,” Joe intones dutifully, and she makes him say it over and over with her, until the sense of transgression lifts him up again. Being the new unafraid Joe is wonderful, but it’s also like a slippery log: he can walk along it for a while, but in the pauses he loses his footing and falls off. Momentum is important, and practice. And it’s easier in opposition, too, in the face of someone who can be delighted or appalled. He finds himself feeding off the au
dience.
Polly grins at him, feral, from the shadows to one side. Motions to the gun: go ahead.
Joe sets himself, plants his feet wide, switches the Thompson to full-auto mode, feels the coat on his shoulders and the excitement of the child he was. This is the gun. That gun. Dad’s gun! The strictly forbidden un-toy, the tool of a gangster’s trade.
A mad grin tugs at his mouth; not the mild nostalgia of his first effort but a kind of deranged glee. He lets it show his teeth, then pulls the trigger as if launching an ocean liner.
The gun howls and jerks, sending ripples of shock through his arms and chest. He wrestles it, fights to hold it down, keeps his finger clamped on the trigger. You don’t see a gangster squeezing off rounds like a miser. Hell, no. You see him hosing the enemy with hot lead, doing property damage, making a point. A gangster is not a sniper. He is profligate, needless, heedless. He is mad as a shaved cat.
He ends up almost leaning on the gun as if it were a small, wiry demon trying to get out of a box. He fires off the whole drum, and realises he is laughing outright, a deranged, terrified or terrifying cackle. Finally, the roar stops, the beast is still, and the damage is prodigious. He stares down the range, through wisps of smoke and dust.
The mannequins are in pieces. Chunks and strands of them are strewn all over, splattered into the wall behind. The wall itself is peppered and speckled with impacts, the boards and barrels stacked against it to absorb the ricochets are so much kindling. There are little fires and charred holes everywhere. He picks his way through the devastation, stares at what he has made. And once again, he understands.
“Wow,” Polly murmurs.
Joe Spork grabs her up and kisses her soundly, triumphant. “You’re a genius.”
“I am?”
“Yes. You are. Because I get it. I get it now. This is what it’s all about. The stricture of the gun.”
She smiles. “Tell me.”
He grins. “Imagine this: suppose you had some other gun and I had that thing. Right? And on the count of three, we’re both going to start firing. Really, you ought to win. You’ll be faster and more accurate, and you can duck and weave, you’ll take me apart. Right? How do you feel about it?”
“I don’t fancy it.”
“Exactly. Because a man carrying a tommy gun plants his feet and lets loose and no one knows—literally no one—what will happen next. This is a gambler’s weapon. A gangster’s gun. It’s not about perfection or skill or even surviving. It’s about brass and swagger. It’s big and loud and ridiculous and it says: Give it your best! Because one of us is going down and I don’t know or even really care which it is!” He grins again.
“You’re back on track, then,” Polly murmurs happily, and sees him nod, and then nod again more slowly, his eyes opening very wide. Criminal epiphany.
“Oh, yes,” he says fervently. “Yes, I am. Back on track, indeed.”
“Mercer!” Joe Spork yells at the top of the stairs. “Your sister is a genius!”
“What?” Mercer peers at him, then blanches slightly. “No, she isn’t, you must be mistaken.” And when this makes no impact on the effervescing Joe, “Oh, shit. This is what old Jonah told me would happen. He said one day I’d be running along behind you like the last Marx brother trying to catch the vase. I told him you were sensible.”
“I was. Look where it got me. So now I’m not.”
“Joe, what—”
“No time. I need to prepare. So do you. Tell Jorge I need them all tonight.”
“Need what?”
“He’ll know.”
“I don’t!”
“I’ve got a plan.”
“What sort of plan?”
“You’re going to hate it.”
“Oh, good.”
“Let’s see about the army first, and then we can argue.”
“Army? What army?”
Joe grins and dashes out.
“What army? You don’t have an army! Apart from”—he gestures at the dog lying flatulently on the sofa—“the world’s smallest airborne toxic event over there! Joe? Joe!”
Polly Cradle emerges from the Tosher’s Beat with her eyes fixed on one of the Sharrow House maps. “Oh,” she says, after a moment. “Oh! Oh, my.” Long nails scratch lightly at the glossy paper, tracing the line of the old railway which leads to one wall of the grounds. “Oh, my …” Her breath catches in her chest.
“What?” her brother asks.
“He’s back on track.”
Jorge’s message goes out to one person at a time—the Night Market has no website, no bulletin board—but for every felon, receiver, forger or fixer he tells, five more find out, and then ten. Invitations go to the big players and rumours to the small, but in the Market a rumour might as well be embossed in gold. All this chatter comes, inevitably, to the notice of law enforcement, but Jorge is well-used to signal leakage and disperses lies and fables to nurtured snitches. A police task force is dispatched to Manchester on a snark hunt, another to Bray. Analysts are awash in Spork sightings by lunch, cursing by tea. All the while, the intended recipients of the message are hearing it louder and louder: Joe Spork is putting together something big.
Big Douggie, boxer and purveyor of doughnuts, did prison for the Post Office job in ’75, and got out just in time for Mathew’s death and the changing world. He’s washing towels when the phone call comes, wishing he could find a way to stop them smelling like day-old fish stock.
Joe Spork’s putting a job together.
What, Joe the Clockmaker?
Yeah, but not any more. They say it’s the biggest ever. I heard Mathew planned it before he died.
Of course, Douggie says yes.
Dizzy Spencer runs the Carnaby-Royce School of Motoring, teaching older ladies who have never learned how to navigate the Congestion Charging zone. She does a roaring trade with recently arrived Saudi royals. In Mathew’s time—when she wasn’t under the sofa with the Honourable Donald—she was the best getaway driver between Shoreditch and Henley. She’s bored out of her mind and ready to pop.
Joe Spork’s putting a job together.
Dizzy doesn’t hesitate for one second.
Caroline Cable—Aunt Caro—designs locks for the company no one’s heard of which makes the locks you actually can’t crack with a tensioner and a number three pick. The simplest one is the best: there’s no keyhole, just a drawer you put the key into and a handle. Key goes inside, you shut the drawer and turn the handle, the key fits the lock and the door opens. If the key doesn’t fit, no dice. No way to access the mechanism when the drawer’s closed, no way to turn the handle when the drawer’s open. Thank you and good night.
Poacher turned gamekeeper, and she hates every penny of it.
Joe Spork—
“Hell, yes,” Caro Cable says.
Paul McCain, of the Grantchester McCains, missed the high days and wishes he hadn’t. His dad ran with the great ones: Mathew Spork and Tam Coppice and the others. They nicked a dinosaur from the Natural History Museum once, bespoke, for a certain Indian gent who had a space for it in his house in Goa.
Honestly. Nicked a dinosaur. They don’t do crimes like that these days.
Paul says yes, and feels as if he’s won the lottery.
Word spreads, and London’s crooks are not immune to sentiment. The fun’s gone out of the life; it’s a little professional, a bit grey. People have accountants now, and tax consultants, and Lily Law has them too and you don’t want to be investigated by that lot, not even a little.
But here’s the thing: Joe Spork is putting a job together.
And that has to mean fireworks.
And then there are the others: the ones who went pro and made good, who don’t like surprises or displays. Dave Tregale, who can shift money around the globe, into the white economy and out of the black and back again; Lars the Swede, once Joe’s teacher in basic personal defence, who can have you removed from circulation in seven languages; Alice Rebeck, of unknown origins, now
a retriever of lost journalists from foreign lands, and—so it is whispered—vanisher at need of over-curious investigators. Half a dozen others, names to be mentioned with circumspection, if at all.
These, too, receive the invitation from Jorge, from Tam, from a new law firm titling itself Edelweiss Feldbett, or by signs and portents unknowable.
Joe Spork is putting a job together.
These are not people who are used to receiving instructions any more, not men or women who take kindly to midnight pre-emption. They do not enjoy fireworks. Still less are they comfortable with one another’s company, here, in—of all places—the grand hall of the Pablum Club (to the Hon Don’s most strenuous sotto voce discontent). But where, after all, would you be less likely to look for a gathering of serious crooks, than in a very exclusive members’ club in St. James’s?
The hour comes, and a little after, and this great, gathered mass of criminality grows restless. Sure, they’ve renewed some old acquaintances and seen some people they always thought there might be some chemistry with, back in the day, and met some new people there might be some with now (ho ho!) and of course it’s always nice to hear what everyone else is up to, even in the most guarded terms, and work out where there might be an opportunity, perhaps even the possibility of collaboration. But still and all (murmur black suits and serious faces, pinstriped ladies and elegant dames) time is money, after all. And Big Douggie and Caro and Tony Wu, sitting at the edges and in the shadows, feel out of place and very straight-laced, and wish they were somewhere else.
And then a man comes in by the east door. He comes in quietly, as if they weren’t all waiting for him. He grins and shakes hands and waves, and lets the rumour make him bigger. He flings wide his arms and embraces a respectable geezer whose bank specialises in discretion.
“Liam!” the fellow says. “As I live and breathe! Liam Doyle, of all the things, they said you were dead!”
“Not me,” cries the oldster, much delighted, “I haven’t gone on yet, and bollocks to those as wish I would! There’s cash yet in the old cow!”