Angelmaker (73 page)

“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 do. Now: watch.”

He does.