‘It is the plague doctor, no?’ explained Giovanni, miming the long nose. ‘They wear herbs in their beak. They think it will stop the plague. It did not!’ He laughed and, pulling back a black curtain, ushered them through into his workshop.
Everywhere they looked surfaces were covered in half-finished toys and puppets.
‘It is beautiful,’ said Tamar, squatting down to appreciate a highly polished rocking horse.
‘It needs a saddle,’ said Giovanni, cantering around as if on horseback, ‘otherwise the little people will not be able to ride him.’
He pointed towards the far end of the workshop. In the corner was a large puppet theatre. The stage was about a metre square, ornately painted, decorated with pieces of wooden scenery, trees, bushes and a sea broken down into white-crested waves. Golden-painted wings jutted out from it and the whole was surrounded by a cubicle draped in heavy purple cloth. The puppeteer would stand inside the cubicle, invisible to the audience as he enacted the play.
‘I have a story for you, I think!’ said Giovanni, pointing to a couple of fold-out chairs that were placed in front of the theatre. ‘Since your call, I have been talking to my friends,’ he mimed being a string puppet, ‘and they have something they want to show you.’
Toby and Tamar looked at one another and began to laugh. ‘Why not?’ Toby said.
‘Excellent!’ Giovanni gave them a little round of applause, bowed and then disappeared behind the purple drapes.
‘I like him,’ whispered Tamar. ‘He is mad, but a nice mad.’
All around them, the lights turned off until only the stage was visible in a single narrow spot.
A puppet trotted on from downstage left. It was a man dressed in a suit. It’s face bore a large smile as it approached centre stage.
‘Good evening my friends,’ it appeared to say. ‘I am a spy from fair London town and I am hunting a bad man.’
‘It’s you!’ laughed Tamar, tapping Toby on the arm.
‘Looks nothing like me,’ said Toby but laughed along.
‘If you see the bad man,’ the spy puppet said, ‘you will be sure to tell me, won’t you?’
Toby and Tamar didn’t reply.
‘I said,’ the puppet repeated, a slightly angry edge to its voice, ‘you will be sure to tell me, won’t you?’
Toby and Tamar looked at one another before both shouting ‘Yes!’
The spy puppet gave a bow. ‘Thank you. Though I ask you to remember an important thing. Sometimes we do not see what is real. Sometimes, what we think has played out before us is not as we perceive it. Our eyes cheat. Our hearts lie. Sometimes it is necessary to make…’ it stretched out its arms, ‘a little theatre.’
It bowed once more.
‘So, I am looking for a bad man. I must catch him because he wishes to harm the ones I love. I will do whatever it takes to make sure he is stopped.’
Behind the spy puppet, another appeared. This man was dressed all in black. It stopped, half on, half off the stage, peering around the curtain. Then, from the other side of the stage, another creation appeared. This was not human: it appeared like a dark cloud, streamers billowing from it thanks to some unseen updraft.
‘It’s Fratfield and the curse demon,’ said Toby.
‘The bad man is there!’ shouted Tamar. ‘Look behind you.’
‘I can feel it coming,’ the spy puppet agreed, ‘and I thank you.’ But it did not turn around, even though the other two puppets now began to creep towards it. ‘I will not run. Because sometimes running is not the way.’
The other puppets continued to draw closer, the spy puppet placed one wooden hand to its temple as if in pain.
‘You will have no choice but where to go,’ it said. ‘I do not need to tell you. Everything falls into place. Everything falls.’
And closer.
‘And you must remember, sometimes it is all just theatre.’
The cloud puppet pounced on the spy puppet and it gave a piercing scream that made Toby flinch in his seat.
‘And sometimes,’ the puppet continued, as the cloud began to obscure it from view, ‘it is death.’
The Fratfield puppet extended its arm and in its hand it held a gun. There was a loud pop and the smell of gunpowder filled that air.
The cloud suddenly vanished upwards revealing the spy puppet once more, a red streamer dangling from its temple. The Fratfield puppet extended its other hand, and this one held a pair of scissors. It extended the scissors towards the puppet’s strings and, one by one, they appeared to snap until the spy puppet toppled to the stage.
‘Was that helpful?’ asked Giovanni from behind them, his voice making them jump. He presented them with a tray. On it were two small glasses of limoncello.
‘How did you…?’ Toby stared at him, the question hanging unfinished, then looked back at the stage where the Fratfield puppet was slowly walking offstage.
Suddenly there was another bang and this time both Toby and Tamar nearly jumped out of their seats. A thin cloud of smoke worked its way across the stage, dissipating into the air.
‘I thought I would get us all a drink while my friends told their story,’ said Giovanni, standing up and turning on the lights. ‘I don’t always like to see what they do.’
‘I can’t say I enjoyed it much either,’ Toby admitted. ‘But how did you operate them if you were…?’
Giovanni put his finger to his lips. ‘Hush my friend. Sometimes you do not ask questions, no? I am sure Carl has told you that. Now, drink…’
He handed each of them their limoncello, pouring a third for himself.
‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘the meaning is not always clear. Sometimes it only becomes so later once it has time to make sense in your head.’
‘Maybe,’ said Toby.
‘It was clear,’ said Tamar, ‘and I do not like it. You died!’
Toby sipped his drink. ‘It’s just a puppet show.’
Giovanni laughed. ‘So is life, my friend, so is life!’
They left Giovanni’s as quickly as politeness allowed, their earlier good humour thoroughly trashed by the old man’s bizarre little play.
‘It’s just like I said earlier,’ Toby insisted, ‘in order to catch him we’ll have to let him come to us.’
‘I do not want him coming so close you are dead.’
‘Well, no, neither do I.’ He put his arm around her shoulders as they worked their way back through the narrow streets to their hotel. ‘But we’ll worry about that when it happens. I won’t die easily, I know that for a fact.’
‘How can you know?’
He squeezed her tightly. ‘Because I have you to look after me, don’t I?’
They stopped and kissed. Somewhere in the distance a catfight erupted followed by the sound of shattered glass. A voice cried out in anger. Somewhere else a violin played, its high, beautiful note cutting through the venetian night. Beyond that a crowd of people laughed and burst into song, a raucous, brutal thing filled with notes that no musician had ever written.
Toby’s phone rang. They broke their kiss so he could answer it. He was on the phone for no more than a few seconds.
‘It was April,’ he told Tamar. ‘August is in trouble. We have to go back.’
Two hours later they were on a plane back to London.
April was sat behind the wheel of her old Mini. She hadn’t the first idea of how she’d got there. The last thing she could remember was the jogger in the park. He had offered her the gun… had she taken it? She just couldn’t remember. Her head was aching and she made to press her hands to her temples but discovered that they were fixed to the steering wheel with plastic cable ties.
‘I’m afraid I couldn’t risk you running off,’ said a voice from the backseat.
She looked up and saw Oman’s face looking back at her from the rear-view mirror. She tried to turn around, but her fixed arms held her in place. She looked through the car windows. She was parked just around the corner from the Section 37 office.
‘Oman?’ she asked. ‘What the bloody hell are you playing at?’
‘Oman… Oh man!’ He laughed. ‘I’m just giving you a little rest. You can only bear to have me inside you for so long.’
‘You’re not getting inside me for one second, you filthy git!’ she replied and then gave a pained sigh – shouting made her head hurt all the more.
‘The connection gets… painful,’ he continued. ‘For both of us actually. I don’t mind so much. I quite like pain. It’s better than nothing.’
‘Cut me free and I’ll give you all the pain you could want.’
‘No, no. You have to rest a little more yet. Just a few hours. Just until you’re better. You need to eat and drink too. I can force you if you make me but you’re not stupid, I think you’ll just do it. After all, I just bet your little mind is ticking over with ways you might be able to overpower me, isn’t it?’
‘It might be,’ she admitted.
He nodded. ‘And of course, your best bet is to bide your time, wait until I do cut you free so you can drive. Yes. That will be your best chance. You’ll have to be quick, though. Alert. So a little sustenance won’t go amiss. I bet you’re hungry.’
She was. Starving, in fact, though she couldn’t for the life of her figure out why. It wasn’t usually her first concern when she found she’d been made a captive – dear Lord, she thought, you just know you’ve lived a full old life when you can talk from jaded experience about being someone’s prisoner.
‘Thirsty too,’ said Oman. ‘You’ve had a busy night and having me on board can really drain some people. I wonder why that is? Because it’s forced perhaps? Like a virus? Is the body constantly fighting me off? Who knows?’
April certainly didn’t. ‘I haven’t the first idea what you’re talking about,’ she admitted. ‘Or why you’re doing this. You’re our friend, Oman.’
‘Really? The funny little foreign man who runs the shop downstairs? A friend? How often did you invite him out for a drink? Dinner? He was just useful to you. He was a commodity. That’s fine, I’m no different, but at least be honest about it.’
‘Why are you saying “he”?’
‘Hmm?’ Oman was staring out of the window, watching a group of girls stumbling out of the local pub in a burst of raucous laughter. ‘Obviously I’m not Oman,’ he replied, offhandedly, still staring at the girls. ‘You’d think I’d tire of it, wouldn’t you?’ he said. ‘The flesh. But I never do. I don’t know how you people restrain yourselves. I’m never sated. Never. Look at them.’ He stroked the glass with his finger, following the route of the girls as they walked past. ‘How can you see that and not want to pounce? Why are they not just torn apart the minute they appear? It’s almost more than I can bear to let them go. I want to fuck them, kill them, bite them, eat them. I want to bury myself in the meat of them. I want to drown in meat.’
April looked at the girls and wished they’d hurry up and leave. They had no idea what was being thought about them as they laughed and joked with one another.
‘What are they for except to play with?’ Oman – or the thing that looked like Oman – said. ‘There’s no other point to them.’
‘What do you mean there’s no other point? They’re people!’
‘What’s that even mean? They’re people? They’re not me, that’s all that’s important. Inside me there’s real thought. I exist.’
‘So do they.’
He shrugged. ‘So you say. I can’t tell from here, I can’t feel their thoughts, can I? Why should I believe they even have any? I look at them and their insides are silent. They’re just moving meat. In their heads there’s nothing unless I go there and then I’m just wearing the meat sack. Eventually, April, you realise you’re the only real thing left in existence. Everything else is just empty.’ He smiled and touched her on the shoulder, making her recoil. ‘Including you, of course, so it’s no wonder you don’t understand.’ He sat back again. ‘I was too careful in the past. Why didn’t I just have more fun? Lesson learned. If I didn’t have to keep an eye on you, I’d go and have fun now, just jump from one to another, over and over again, feel all their flesh. Give them all meaning. Boys, girls, old, young, I’d turn this whole street into an orgy. The gutters would run thick. But no, I have to stay here.’ He sighed. ‘And soon, of course, I’ll have a permanent home. Well, semi-permanent. I have plans about that… Who wants to be an old man for ever? Principle is one thing but I’m not stupid.’
‘You know I don’t have the first idea what you’re on about?’ April asked, relieved to see the girls turn the corner and vanish from sight.
‘Your brother,’ he said, ‘made me a promise a long time ago and promises have to be kept. Of course, he’s done all right out of the deal. When I made the bargain he was young, fit, handsome. Now what have I been left with, eh? The last bloody chicken in the shop. Still, I can do a few things to improve on that. Flesh is so easy to manipulate, you’re all just base matter. On the subject of which, I did a little work on your hips and had a general tidy.’
April had no idea what she was supposed to say about that.
‘It’s a freebie,’ he continued. ‘Don’t mention it. I just needed to be a bit more agile, it was getting tiresome lugging your old bones around. Still, Shining…it’s about principle. He made a promise and he has to deliver on it. He’s done well out of it, for a long time I was…’ He looked uncomfortable, ‘I wasn’t together. I wasn’t myself. But I will have him, I will use him, and, after that, there’s always Fratfield, another debt owed…Or…’ He leaned forward again. ‘Do you find Toby attractive?’
‘What?’
‘Just wondering. Strikes me he would be a good choice. Easy to convince too. All I’d have to do would be to threaten to cut the throat of that new wife of his. She’s lovely. He’d do whatever I wanted if he thought he was saving her.’ He laughed. ‘Of course, in the end I’d do what I wanted to her anyway! But he’d be too panicked to think about that.’
‘She’d break your legs if you so much as put your hand on her.’
‘Possibly,’ he nodded. ‘Anyway, there’s more to life than sex and death. I can’t quite think what at the moment, but I’m sure there is. You’ll have to forgive me, I’m in an… earthy mood.’ He looked up the street, remembering the girls. ‘All I want to do is fuck!’ He laughed.
He rubbed at his face as if trying to shake himself out of it. ‘I think flesh is addictive. I think I’m in danger of becoming a little too single minded. I blame this obsession with your brother. I should have left him alone, I’d probably have had a better time of it.’ He grinned. ‘I don’t know, though, it has been fun. Ah…’ he waved his hands in the air like a giddy schoolchild. ‘I’m all conflicted tonight, aren’t I? I don’t know what I’m thinking. Just ignore me.’