V 02 - Domino Men, The (8 page)

Nonplussed:  “I’ve no idea.”

“Hmm.  I wonder.”  He appeared to savor some sort of mental image before exclaiming:  “Perfect, Mr. Lamb.  That girl was perfect!”

“What are you talking about?”  I wondered if this wasn’t some kind of office prank, if for the purposes of someone else’s entertainment I’d been yoked to a lunatic for the day.  Surreptitiously, I looked around for hidden cameras.

Jasper stopped short.  “We’re here.”

Baffled, I looked up.  “But this is the Eye.”

“Come inside.”

There were dozens of tourists shuffling patiently in line, tortoising forward a few inches at a time.  Jasper barged past them all to get to the front of the queue, and the curious fact was that none of them seemed to object, almost as though they hadn’t notice we were there at all.  I observed, too, that for all his bravado and swagger Jasper seemed to be inspecting each of them carefully, like he was searching for someone he knew.  More than once, I noticed him turn and nervously scan the line behind us.

“Looking for someone?” I asked.

“The enemy, Mr. Lamb.  The enemy are always watching.”

“Enemy?” I said, feeling even now that this was most likely to turn out to be some insanely elaborate practical joke.

We reached the front of the queue, pushed past a ticket inspector who offered not the slightest objection to our presence and stood before an open pod filled with a group of Japanese tourists, all of them bristling with guidebooks and cameras, totally oblivious to the two of us.

Jasper gestured into the pod.  “After you.”

The tourists were still ignoring us.

“But it’s packed.”

“Trust me.”

I didn’t move.

“Mr. Lamb, what you’re about to see is above top secret.  Breathe the merest word of what you see here today and the most extreme measures will be set in motion against you.  Is that understood?”

I nodded, feeling oddly light-headed — like I was in a dream and knew it, that my actions would have no real effect in the waking world.

“Well then.  Walk on.”

“I can’t.  It’s full.”

Jasper seemed to lose patience.  “Just go.”  He pushed me forward and I stumbled into the pod.

To my amazement, I seemed to pass through the ranks of tourists as though they were no more substantial than mist — will-’o-the-wisps clutching souvenirs, digital cameras and laminated maps of the city.

Jasper stepped smartly in behind me.  “Smoke and mirrors…,” he murmured, in the kind of tone you might adopt trying to soothe a child woken in the night by bad dreams.

Inside, it was darker and larger than I had expected.  Dimly, I heard the door hiss shut and the pod begin its smooth ascent.  There was a smell in there which seemed tuggingly familiar, redolent of floating bandages and verrucas.  It took me a moment to pinpoint.  It was chlorine — the smell of a public swimming pool.

Our view of London was obscured by what appeared to be a large tank of water which took up almost half of the pod, as though we had somehow entered an aquarium by mistake.  Through it, I could see the landmarks of the city, distended and made strange by refraction — St. Paul’s elongated and obscene, the Houses of Parliament shimmering and fragile, the spires of Canary Wharf stretched out and distorted, its citadels of commerce glimpsed as though through the bottom of a clouded glass.

More disconcertingly even than this was what floated in the tank.  It was a man, evidently at the extremity of old age, his skin wrinkled and puckered, wattled, creased and liver-spotted.  He was naked save for a pair of faded orange swimming trunks and seemed to be floating underwater, his ancient body, backlit by the sun, bathed in a halo of yellow light.

I wondered how he could possibly breathe inside that tank, before dismissing the notion that he could actually be alive as absurd.

Then, impossible though I knew it had to be, the old man spoke.  His lips moved underwater yet I heard him as clearly as if he were standing beside me.  His was a deep, old, sad voice, full of strange inflections.

“Welcome, Henry Lamb!” he said — and he said it warmly, as though he knew me, like we went back years together, he and I.  “My name is Dedlock.  This is the Directorate.  And you’ve just been conscripted.”

“At the Directorate, we don’t deal in volunteers.”  The man called Dedlock was grinning at me, bobbing up and down with a grisly vigor which belied his age.  “You’re one of us now.”

I opened my mouth to say something but not a single word would come.  Instead, I found myself staring at the old man’s torso, fascinated by a progression of creases that seemed to strafe his skin, flaps of flesh which throbbed and pulsated as though with independent life.

Gills?

Surely this man couldn’t have gills?

Dedlock was glaring.  “You find us in the midst of war.  And I’m rather afraid we’re losing.”

For several minutes my mouth had been too dry to speak.  Now, at last, I squeezed out a sentence.  “War?  Who’s at war?”

The old man dealt the side of the tank a ferocious blow.  Jasper and I flinched backward and I wondered what would happen if the glass were to shatter and the water gush out, whether Dedlock would flail and flop on the ground like a beached carp.  “Secret civil war has been waged in this country for half a dozen generations.  This organization is all that stands between the British people and their oblivion.”

I felt concussed.  “I don’t understand.”

“Comprehension is unnecessary.  From now on you simply have to follow orders.  Is that understood?”

I vaguely remember nodding.

“Tell no one what you’ve seen here.  There are less than two dozen men alive who know the true purpose of the Directorate.”

I managed an objection.  “What happens if I say no.”

“To you?  Nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  To your good mother, on the other hand…  To your pulchritudinous landlady…”  He seemed to soften slightly.  “You’ll find your salary many times in excess of your old employment.  And we offer a first-rate pension plan.  Every cloud, Henry Lamb, every cloud…”

I began to get dizzy, felt the room and its impossible occupant slide away from me and become distant and faint, like the world viewed through the wrong end of a telescope.

“Water…” I stuttered.  “You’re underwater.”

“Amniotic fluid,” the old man hissed, grimacing as though at some wretched, long-neglected memory.  “Not my design.”  His eyes flicked dismissively over my body.  “Were you close to your grandfather, boy?”

I said that I was.

He nodded.  “And does the name Estella mean anything to you?”

“I just about managed a “no.”

“You must have heard something.  Did he never mention her?”

“Never.”

The man in the tank made an awful clenching sound which I took to be his closest equivalent to a sigh.  “If you truly know nothing then the war may already be lost.”

“What war?  Who are you people fighting?  Who is this enemy?”

“You know their name,” Dedlock said, his voice filled with rancor and bile.  “You carry their likeness with you everywhere you go.”  A twitch of his lips, as though he couldn’t decide whether to sneer or to smile.  “We’ve been fighting the British royal family since 1857.  We’re at war with the House of Windsor.”

I remember blurting out some objection before my limbs turned to rubber, everything started to fade and darkness closed over me.

Dedlock looked on, disdain and disappointment in his eyes.  “Dear, dear.  It seems we have ourselves a fainter.”

My balance went.  I stumbled backward, fell into the arms of Mr. Jasper and, just before I passed out, I heard the old man’s voice again, bitter and sarcastic.

“His grandfather would be so proud.”

I woke the next morning, hours after the alarm clock usually pesters me into wakefulness, punch-drunk and groggy, with a dank, sickly sensation in the pit of my stomach.  Beside my bed was a glass of water, a packet of Alka-Seltzer and a small square of cream-colored card on which was scrawled the following:

Report Monday morning.
We’ll send a car at 8.

Then, an unconvincingly hearty postscript.

Enjoy your weekend.

As soon as I had showered and felt at least 70 percent awake, I switched on my computer, logged not the Internet, clicked into Google and typed the phrase:  “the Directorate.”  It returned not a single hit.  According to the most powerful search engine in the world, the organization which Dedlock had told me was the last hope for the British people did not even exist.

I had supper with Abbey before she went out, fielding her bemused inquiries by improvising something about having got an unexpected promotion, asked if anyone had come home with me the previous night.  She shot me an oddly disappointed look.  No, she said.  She hadn’t seen or heard anyone but me.

We did the washing up together and she left to meet her friends, leaving me lolled in front of the television, flicking aimlessly from game show to sitcom to murder mystery, wondering whether all of it wasn’t so much lather and bubbles to mask the real truth of the world, the grime, the scum beneath.

On Sunday, partly because I couldn’t think of anything better to do, partly because Mr. Jasper had peremptorily suggested it, I went into town, where I bought myself a new gray suit, a couple of shirts and some fresh underwear, and where, for a short while, things felt almost normal again.

In the afternoon, I saw Granddad.  The ward was busier and noisier than before, cramped with families trooped dutifully in to visit half-forgotten relatives, packing the place with their guilty faces, their bored offspring and wilting bunches of grapes.  There they sat, disguising their yawns, making pointless small talk, checking their watches every other minute, counting down till the end of visiting time.

I took Granddad’s paper-skinned hand in mine and broke my silence only once.

“What were you keeping from me?” I asked.  “What did you have to hide?”

No answer save for the ceaseless reproach of life support.

Suddenly the lull was over.  I was out of bed on Monday morning, showered and breakfasted at least an hour before I needed to be ready.  I sat watching the morning news with its usual countdowns of crisis and disaster, feeling as fluttery and nervous as I suppose I must have done on my first day at school  Abbey drifted into the room in her pajamas and dressing gown, peerlessly elegant even as she rubbed sleep from her eyes.  “You’re up early.”

“My new job starts today.”

“I know.”  She grinned.  “Wouldn’t forget that, would I?”

“You might,” I burbled.  “No one expects you to keep track of the lodger.”

She reached out and ruffled my hair.  “Oh, you’re more than a lodger.”

I turned a shade of damson.

“New suit?”

I said that it was.

“Thought so.  But you’re not cycling in that, though, are you?”

“Believe it or not, they’re sending a car.”

Abbey arched an exquisite eyebrow.  “You have gone up in the world.”  She disappeared into the kitchen and re-emerged a few minutes later with a bowl of chocolate cereal.  I rose, checked my appearance in the mirror and turned to say good-bye.

“Have a good day.”

“You too.  Good luck.”

I walked toward the door.

“Henry?”

I turned back.

“I really like the suit.”

“Thanks.”

“You look good…”  An implication of naughtiness crossed her face.  “I definitely would.”

There was another silence, still longer than before, during which I cannot honestly say which of us flushed the pinker.

“Bye,” I said, and fumbled with the latch, burning with embarrassment and improbable hope.  I was halfway down the stairs and almost onto the street when I was struck by a tiny irony.  Today was my birthday.

An elderly black cab idled by the curb, a torn piece of card blue-tacked against its window.  It read:

Lamb

The driver (unkempt, straggle haired, a stranger to the razor) was engrossed in a chunky hardback book.  I tapped on the glass and he wound the window grudgingly down.

“Good morning,” I said, trying my best to sound cheerful.  “I’m Henry Lamb.”

The driver stared at me.

“I was told you’d be waiting.”

Another long, sizing-up look, until:  “You can call me Barnaby.  You’d better get in.”

I hauled open the door and scrambled into the back seat.  The interior was covered in the kind of long white hairs which smell of wet dog and cling jealously to your clothing for days.

“So you own a dog?” I asked, trying to make conversation as I strapped myself in and Barnaby cajoled the engine into life.

“Dog?  Why would you think I own a dog?  Yappy little gits.”

A long and very awkward pause ensued.  We were passing through the dregs of Stockwell before either of us spoke again.

“What are you reading?” I asked at last, still attempting to be pleasant.

Alarmingly, Barnaby took his eyes from the road to glance down at the title.  “
The Middle Narratives of H. Rider Haggard and the Structuralist Problem of Modernity
.”