V 02 - Domino Men, The (15 page)

“I say, Hawker,” said the smaller man.

“Yes, Boon?” said his beefier companion.

“Corks!  He’s not the least bit how I expected.”

“Abso-bally-lutely, old top.  He’s a queer-looking bird an no mistake!”

Boon nodded in enthusiastic agreement.  “He’s got gangly limbs.”

“Fishy eyes.”

“A rum sort of gait.”

One of them pointed at me.  “Everything went wrong with you, didn’t it, sir?”

“You’re a reject, sir!  A misshape!”

“If I was your pa, Mr. L, I’d take you back to the shop and demand a refund.”

Peals of laughter, curiously high pitched.

“Sorry, sir.”  Boon wiped his eyes with the scuffed blue sleeve of his blazer.  “Don’t mind us.”

“We’re just a-joking.”

“Just joshing.”

“Only a bit of banter, sir.  Only horseplay.  We’re really frightfully bucked to meet you.”

As they chattered on, I felt a strange inertia creep over me, the kind of numb fascination you’re supposed to experience coming face to face with a predator in the wild, the terrible hypnotism of the carnivore.  I stepped a fraction closer — though I wasn’t so bewitched that I didn’t remember to keep a careful distance from the chalk circle.

“You’re the prisoners,” I said softly.

“You might say that, sir.”

“Indeed you jolly well might.”

I stared at them in their absurd little outfits listened to their ludicrous manner of speaking, and for a moment I wasn’t sure that I shouldn’t laugh.  Such naïveté, in retrospect, given all that I know now.

Hawker beamed.  “Frightfully sorry to hear about your grandpapa’s fall.”

“Terrible pity, sir.”

“He was wizard, your granddad!”

“What a brick, sir!”

Hawker’s eyes were brimming with dewy wistfulness.  “And — oh — he had a lovely sense of humor.”

The Prefects exploded into mocking laughter.

I stood silently, determined that these creatures should not get the better of me, that I wouldn’t be reduced to cowering at their cell door like the pit bull Steerforth.

As the Prefects finished cackling, Boon leant forward and looked me in the eye.  “I take it old fish-face has sent you?”

“He has,” I said quietly.

Hawker chortled.  “He must be sweating conkers now your grandpa’s popped off.  S’pose he’s told you to nose out where Estella is?”

“Sad, isn’t it?” said Boon before I could reply, although I expect my expression told him all he needed to know.  “Predictable.”

“Dashed predictable.”

“Beastly little prig.”

“Greasy ape.”

“He need a vigorous slippering and I don’t mind admitting it.”

I tried my best to stay calm.  “So do you know,” I asked, “where this woman is?”

Hawker waggled his eyebrows.  “Rather, my old shoehorn!  Your grandpa told us!”

Boon gave a triumphant grin.  “If you’re nice to us, one day we might even pass it on.”

I glared back.  “I think Mr. Dedlock will want more of a guarantee than that.”

“’Fraid he’ll be disappointed then.”

“Not today, sir!”

“Nothing doing!”

“No room at the inn, sir!”

“Dedlock told me you knew my name,” I said.  “How?”

“Oh, but we’ve always known about you, Mr. L.”

“We wanted to see your face, sir.”

“We wanted to look you in the eye.”

A chill slithered down my spine.  “Why?”

Boon flashed another sharky smile.  “So that we’ll know you when we meet again, sir.  Out there in the real world.  Just before the end.”

They exchanged glances, sly and conspiratorial.

“I think you’re lying,” I said.

“Oh!”  Boon gave a gleeful yelp.  “He thinks we’re lying.  He’s only just made our acquaintance, Hawker, and already he’s calling us fibbers.”

“Getting rather frilly, ain’t he, Boon?”

“Fearfully bold.”

“The cheek of it.  The sheer brazen cheek of it.”

“Say what he thinks, doesn’t he, our young Mr. Lamb?”

“Oh, he calls a spade a spade.”

“Do you know, I rather like that.”

“I respect it.”

“Sound fellow!”

“Good egg!”

“Ripping sport!”

“Come and see us again, won’t you, sir?”

“How we’d adore another visit.”

They laughed uproariously.

“But before you skedaddle, sir.”

“Just one more thing before you cut.”

“A quick word about your father, sir.”

“Your late, lamented pa.”

“My father?” I asked, feeling the stirrings of panic.  “What do you know about my dad?”

Boon gave me a subtle look and I felt a heave of nausea.

“Do you want to know how long it took him to die, sir?  Trapped in the tangled wreck of his automobile as the medical chaps tired and failed to cut him free?”

The sound of blood thundered through my head.  “How do you know this?”

Hawker smirked.  “Four hours, sir.  Four unbearable hours before he finally popped off.  Wasn’t a nice death, was it, Boon?”

“Bally awful if you ask me.”

“Protracted, I’d call it.  Horribly protracted.”

“Golly, Boon, you know some long words.”

“So I should, Hawker.  You are talking, after all, to the winner of the Cuthbert Cup for Prolixity for five consecutive terms.”

“Congratulations, dear thing.”

“Thank you, my old hat stand.”

Hawker grinned at me.  “He bled to death, Mr. L..  Nasty gash in the tummy, I think.  Absolutely the worst place for it to happen.”

“He called for you at the end.  He shouted your name as delirium took hold and his bowels let him down.”

I turned and banged on the glass window.  “Let me out!”

Hawker winced.  “Something we said, sir?”

Tears streaming down my face, I slammed my palm into the pane.  “Steerforth!  Open the bloody door!”

Boon winced.  “Hit a nerve, did we, Mr. L?”

I struck the glass as hard as I could.  At that moment, I doubt I’d have cared if it had shattered in my hand.  “Steerforth!”

Hawker was still smirking.  “No need to cut up rough, old thing.”

At last, the door slid open.

Boon gave me a wave.  “Bye-bye, Mr. L.”

“Toodle-oo, sir!”

Tinkety-tonk!”

They were still laughing when I staggered out into the corridor where Steerforth was waiting, into whose arms I practically collapsed as the door hissed shut.

“I’m sorry,” he said, an uncharacteristic tenderness in his voice.  “I’m so sorry.”

The rain thrashed against the car as we were driven from Downing Street, the force of the downpour making it spray back into the air like steam.  I sank down into my seat, finding, for once, the omnipresent smell of soggy dog almost welcoming.

Barnaby was hunched forward, peering past the wipers into the storm, trying to see his way as the rain became torrential.  Steerforth was slumped sideways, eyes half closed, hands clasped together.  I wondered if he was praying.

In the end, to my surprise, it was me who broke the silence.

“They knew about my dad,” I said, feeling my fear begin to ebb away and be replaced with anger, with raw, burning rage at those Whitehall obscenities, those knuckle-kneed monsters who find nothing so unremittingly hilarious as human misery.  “How did they know about Dad?”

The pit bull did not reply but gazed solemnly at the floor as though in hope of absolution.

The rain smashed down on the roof; there was a flash of lightning and the timpani growl of thunder, and as the storm illuminated Steerforth’s face I saw his features begin to convulse, saw them squeezed, tugged and contorted in something utterly impossible.

For a second, I think I forgot to breathe.

When Steerforth spoke I heard that his voice had once again become a parody of his master’s.  “Good evening, Mr. Lamb.”

“Dedlock?” I said softly.

“Did you get it?” he asked.  “Do we know the whereabouts of Estella?”

“I couldn’t get them to talk.  I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry?  You’ve let me down, Henry Lamb.  You’ve let me down and as a result of that failure the city stands on the brink of catastrophe.”

“They knew about my father,” I said.  “They know everything.  The smell in there…  The way you feel when they look at you…  like needles in your head.”

“You have to see them again.”

My stomach contracted at the thought of it.  “I’m just a filing clerk.”

“No objections.  You see them again tomorrow.”  I tried to protest but it was already too late.

As Dedlock departed from his body, Steerforth fell back into his chair, frantically sucking in lungfuls of air.  Struggling to breathe, he loosened his tie and flicked down the first few buttons at the top of his shirt.

I caught a glimpse of the big man’s chest, and even now, I dearly wish I hadn’t.  Poor Steerforth — zigzagged in maggot-white scars, scored with old stitches, furrows, grooves and crenellations, the skin repeatedly punctured with pinkish indentations.

Steerforth must have realized what I’d seen, as he swiftly covered himself up, his face aflame with humiliation.  “You don’t deserve this,” he murmured.  “None of us deserve this.”

Barnaby dropped me a street away from the flat and I had little choice but to make a dash for it through the rain.  By the time I got home, my clothes were clinging to my body, my shoes felt squelchy and waterlogged and my hair was a bedraggled mop.  The first thing I did was knock on Abbey’s bedroom door.  There was no response, but rather than doing the sensible thing — take a hot shower and retire discreetly to bed — I knocked even harder.  At last, I heard the click of her bedside lamp, the rustle of a duvet, somnolent steps toward the door.

“Henry?”

“It’s me.”

The door opened a crack and my landlady peered out in her pajamas, yawning, blinking voleishly into the light.  My spirits lifted, just a little, to be breathing the same air as her.

“You’re drenched.  Where the hell have you been?”

“Never mind about that.  I want to tell you how I feel.”

The hint of a smile.  “And how do you feel, Henry?”

“I want to say that you’re really special.”

“I think you’re special, too.  But it’s late.”

“Lunch tomorrow?  My treat.”

She sounded bemused.  “Fine.  Sounds nice.”

“Fantastic,” I said as, pushing my luck just that crucial bit too far, I moved an inch closer to her.  “I’d like to kiss you.  But I’m rather damp.”

“Good night, Henry,” she said (not unkindly) before — and there’s really no getting around this — slamming the door in my face.

I stood there for a bit in the hope that she’d come back and offer to towel me down or something.  But there was no such luck, and, getting tired of loitering and dripping all over the carpet, I had that hot shower and flopped into bed.  It was past midnight and I was drifting off to sleep when I sat up with a start and began to wonder exactly when it was that the madness of my life had ceased to seem wondrous and bizarre and started instead to become a reality which I simply accepted with the same flint-faced fatalism as Jasper, Steerforth and all those other freaks and victims who had given themselves over, body and soul, to the Directorate.

After the latest bout of mawkish reminiscence from Mr. Lamb, clotted with glutinous sentiment and rendered practically unreadable by the torpidity of his prose, you are doubtless aching to return to the more palatable meat of our narrative.  We can scarcely blame you for good judgment.  Welcome back, and count yourself lucky that once again you find yourself in the hands of those who understand how to tell a story with verisimilitude and conviction.

As the storm screamed down the Mall and hurled itself against the walls of Clarence House, Arthur Windsor was receiving an unexpected education at the hands of Mr. Streater.

“Get your laughing gear round this,” the blond man said, brandishing his teapot.  “Wouldn’t want you getting thirsty, chief.”

“Please don’t call me that.”

Streater poured the prince more tea.  “When I meet a bloke I like to call him ‘chief.’  And I like you.  So tough titty.”

Arthur’s brow wrinkled in distaste.  “Tough what?”

“Arthur,” Streater said, allowing his impatience to show.  “We haven’t got long.  Your mother’s sent me to tell you a secret.”

“Secret?  What secret?”

“It’s the secret, Arthur.  The big one.  You’ve been lied to your whole life.  You haven’t been ready until tonight.  But now a whole lot of shit’s about to make a whole lot more sense.”

Arthur took a jittery sip at his tea.  He kept reminding himself that this was what his mother wanted (wasn’t that what Silverman had said?) and he had not disobeyed his mother since he was five or six years old and one of his nannies had found him in the great hall inking beards and moustaches onto portraits of his ancestors.

“Arthur?”  Suddenly, Streater was close to him — uncomfortably close — near enough for the prince to smell whatever hung on the man’s breath, something cloying, sickly and too sweet.

“I’m sorry?”

“Thought we’d lost you there for a minute, chief.”

“My apologies.  I have a regrettable having of wandering alone in the foothills of my thoughts.”

“Whatever.”  The blond man clapped his hands and the old ballroom sank into darkness.

“Streater?  What’s happening?”

The blond man stayed silent and invisible in the dark.

Gradually, Arthur realized that the darkness was not total.  At the far end of the room there was a tiny flicker of light.

The prince moved toward it.  To his surprise, as he drew closer, he realized that the light emanated from an old-fashioned oil lamp.  Then — an even greater shock.  There was someone else in the room.  A middle-aged woman running to fat, folds of flesh coiled around her neck, her gray hair curled close to her scalp, a look of disapproval etched indelibly upon her face.