Communion Town (14 page)

His voice wavered as though he was having trouble controlling himself. But he went on: ‘You have tracked a happy trail, Mr Moody, because my colleagues and I are in a position to help you. Oh yes – I see the salmon hope flash in the torrent of your heart, though your manly outer form strives to conceal it – yes, very much so, we can help. More! My friend the doctor here has a power in his receipts to bring you to her direct and immediate. Think of it, sir, you have succeeded against all expectation by the shortest way and now, very now, she will be yours, impossible though it may have seemed, and all you must do is place yourself entirely – in – our – hands.’

He wafted closer like a sheet flapping on a line.

‘What’s he talking about?’ I asked Dolly.

She just shook her head.

‘The lady is not, precisely, here,’ the Captain was saying. ‘But the important thing to bear in mind is that we can, if you will, convey you to her. The process, be assured, is quite painless and requires only that you place in us a modicum of the trust to which, as your well-wishers, if I may say so, we are surely entitled. Doctor, if you would. The, ha ha, solution to your dissatisfactions resides altogether here, in this rarest of the doctor’s preparations, which I am happy to say is administered … orally.’

Dogg had produced a finger-sized glass phial filled with black stuff. But Dolly laid her hand on top of his.

‘Put it away,’ she said, ‘and you: can the flim flam.’

The Captain’s smile didn’t flicker but very softly he snarled between his premolars: ‘Enough, woman.’

‘You don’t need this, Hal,’ said Dolly. ‘Forget it and get out of here.’

‘Aha, ha ha. You must pardon our fair friend, what she means –’

‘Hold it.’ I turned on her. ‘Are you telling me there’s something in this? These jokers can help me find her?’

Dolly’s eyes pleaded.

‘You’re telling me I drink that stuff and I find her?’

She sagged. ‘I ain’t saying nothing, Hal.’

‘Most credible, don’t you think? Very convincing indeed,’ the Captain’s voice hummed in the background. Dogg snorted in response. Maybe the three of them were all nuts together in their own special fruitcake, but part of me was insisting it didn’t matter. If this could be a chance, who cared whether it made sense?

I motioned to Dogg.

‘What is that stuff?’

His face twitched. ‘What you need to understand, Mr Moody,’ he said, in a voice that threatened to dissolve into reedy giggles, ‘is that time is strange in certain rooms.’

Before I could ask him what that was supposed to mean, he held the phial towards me and pulled the cork. It ponged like it should have been trickling in the pestilent gutters. The odour coiled out of the tube and fixed its claws in my sinuses. I gagged. Dogg’s lips began to writhe again. Drink it? I’ve been clobbered in the homburg department my share of times, but what did they take me for? The smell flushed through my head and in the ensuing instant I saw the meanness of the low cellar, the streaked bricks, the drained faces. There was no help in this room, just two half-starved charlatans and a raddled hissy having fun at the expense of an old gumshoe.

Blackness crept into the edges of my vision and I lashed at the so-called doctor, colliding with him awkwardly shoulder-first and knocking him aside. Hunched against the wall, shaking, he cradled his phial. His face contorted and tears pressed from the corners of his eyes. I spun around and swung my fists at the Captain, but he danced easily away, his hands billowing. He quivered with the effort of restraining himself. He couldn’t even speak any more.

I shoved past Dolly and stormed up the corridor, fighting off insubstantial enemies. Behind me, they gave up their composure, and the howls of laughter propelled me back to the street. I couldn’t tell if any were hers.

9. City of Regretful Lights

What was it that happened next? Tell me what, kid – because if you won’t, then who will in the world? Whatever it was, it didn’t unfold in ordinary time, moment linking to moment, beat to beat. I lost my grip on that like a drunk missing the handrail at the top of a staircase. I arced through a glutinous descent of unmeasured duration, days, weeks or months, clonking off every third step. I plunged, in fact, into the finest and most sustained period of investigative work I’d ever accomplished.

Let me tell you how it goes. It’s nothing to do with observation or deduction. It’s like running at an oblique angle into a brick wall and dragging your head along as far as you can take it. It means you have no trail to follow but you pound the pavements until in your lunacy everything’s part of the trail. You never stop, think of nothing else, batter the world like if you go at it hard enough it’s going to spill its guts. If none of it makes sense then why not call every last thing a clue? Why not think by sheer lead-skulled persistence you’re going to turn bewilderment into an answer? It could happen.

I stopped going back to my office. That would have taken time from the search. Brittle, I crumbled myself into the stews, where I dissolved. I slept in snatches of minutes at diner counters, in tram shelters, in the porchways of derelict apartment buildings. Days and nights were the swinging of a bare light bulb, the rattle of a tram across a lattice of girders. I pounded. My beard filled out and my suit grew stiff and malodorous, I tugged at my necktie until the knot was unpickable, but I kept searching. Salt Park, Shambles Heath, Sludd’s Liberty, Moebius Wall. Bloodstone Cross, Bittergreen, Gorgonstown, Low Glinder. Lawntown, Twistgate, Serelight, Glory Part. I went where I went. I was working on nothing better than an inkling that if I kept moving I might glimpse you. I did my best to follow the only advice you’d ever given me. But the longer I spent walking up and down those corridors and staircases, under those arches, along the interstices of dust and through the sweat-stale nowheres of the twenty-four-hour supermarkets, the more convinced I became that any guesses were useless. I might have been born yesterday. The news-stands were all disease and murder. I didn’t know these streets. What I’d always thought of as the city was just an idea I’d been inventing without realising it for longer than I could tell.

Want to know the weird thing? It didn’t even hit me that hard. I mean the moment that had to come: which came one overcooked evening on the Strangers’ Market, no one around but me and this one big johnny mooching under a lamp post like he’d lost something. I reached up and touched his shoulder, asking the only question I had left to ask, the question I couldn’t stop asking. But the johnny – he was one of your big slow armour-plated sorts, right up there with the Cherub brothers – he gave me a look like I was head-to-foot buboes, and scarpered. Couldn’t get away fast enough. That did it. That was the moment that yanked my perception out of my skull and snagged it dangling from the lamp post so I saw myself like another person, a wrecked and bruised figure panhandling for a hallucination, approaching strangers and saying the name, just your name, over and over, as a question. None of that was strange when I saw it. Instead, in that lucid moment, all I thought was: yes. Now we’re getting somewhere.

What did I want from you anyway? Did I believe I was earning the fee that I still carried crammed into every pocket of my suit? I hadn’t lost or traded a scrap. But what did I want from you? It scared me what I might do if we ever found each other. You could hardly answer my obsession, it had grown beyond that, it had broken the decorum of scale so that as I trailed the tall streets I might as well have been meandering in the maze of one of your fingerprints, lost in your open hand.

And as I wandered, a commentary came to me, a monologue in the voice of Dave Cherub. Why was it his voice, which in reality only grunted with dumb laughter? Whyever. Aw dese men, it said, echoing up from some basement dive of my mind. Aw dese men chasin aw dese juicies, but for wot? Ve city’s fulluvem. We follerem dahn ve streets, we cun taker ize offem. Bu’if we addem, fuknoze wop weed oowivem, yiih, if grasp wuz reech, if curridge wuz eekwal wiv dizzire, if we ackshly addem ve same uz we wonnem. You wooden avver clue, boy, woodjer. Vey say when a John’s chasin some cluck – yiih, n vat’s you, innip – vey say it ain’t really er e’s chasin at aw. Vey say e’s really chasin is ahn sohw. Vat’s ripe, boy, yer sohw, she fits ver discripshin: you cun getter aht yer ed an you dun nah nuffin abahter. Frangly, ooda forp yer sohwd be so easy on ve i? Hur hur hur. Yiih – an woss vat sayabaht you, enway, if yer asslin vis pore chitty buh yer ain even in’rested in er fer erself? Wossit to er if sum wank’a zonna prufahnd inna quest fer compleshun wivvin is bein? Sheeza yung zafty wivver ahn prodlems, nop yore bleedin hannimer!

The admonitions rang ahead of me as I dragged out the search. I shambled along the waterfront in the molten core of the afternoon, when the sun was a bucketful of liquid lead and space itself on the point of crisping up and shrivelling. Anyone with a functional sense of cause and effect was indoors with a cool flannel over his face. The boards clunked under my feet, a bone-dry xylophone. Tide-abandoned mud extended to the horizon, an infinite vacant lot of mud, every bit reeking. Behind me was the Part bridge and ahead lay the wreck of the west pier, its grand pavilion listing down to the mud like a crash-landed flying saucer, with the fishbones of decayed struts bowed underneath.

Two figures were approaching through the shimmer. I couldn’t tell how far off. They got bigger in uneven jumps. My dried tongue fumbled, forming itself around your name, so I’d be ready with the question when they were close enough. Why were they so large but still so far away? Then something slipped, perception ratcheted, and they were with me: one before, one behind.

‘It’s a mystery,’ Don Cherub said, ‘why you refuse to see what’s good for you.’

He checked up and down the waterfront. No one else was in sight. He pushed me up against Dave, who pinioned my arms.

‘My dog learns faster that certain acts have certain consequences. My geraniums learn faster.’

His fist jabbed out. I coughed, then cursed. Dave held me upright.

‘I got nuffin against you, Hal,’ Don was saying, ‘but I got a job to do and you tire me out, see?’

Dave spun me around into the hardly-less-inescapable grip of his brother, who kept talking into my ear.

‘I mean, you could’ve dropped your investigation at any point and spared everyone the inconvenience. But, all right, I can understand you got professional pride of yer own. You got standards.’

Dave rolled up his sleeve. I offered him a grimace, which he socked into the middle distance.

‘What I don’t get, Hal, is what kind of bleeding operation you think you’re running. See, you’re all over town, making a nuisance, getting on everyone’s nerves, an’ you keep running up against me and Dave here. But it ain’t occurred to you to ask why
we
keep running up against
you
. You ain’t asked yourself who’s making it worth our while. We ain’t doing it for our health.’

He spun me back into Dave’s embrace. I spat colour on the boards.

‘You got a point here, Don?’

‘Yeh. I got one. Dave an’ me, we view our work serious. We take a job, we do it, that’s all. We was hired to warn you offuv searching for the broad. Fine. We done it. But we ain’t patsies, yeh? We dunt like being in the middle of anyone’s funny games. Each to his own, that’s what I say,
day gutsy bus non dipso tandem
, but frankly you people turn my stomach. So that’s it, we’re finished. This is the last yer getting. If you find her, you can tell her we done the job like we said we would, but we ain’t doing it no more.’

I’d never seen Don Cherub look so forlorn. It was like watching a pneumatic drill come to terms with disappointment.

‘And,’ he said, ‘you can give her a refund.’

From his pocket he brought a handful of delicate gold bits. He dropped them on the boards at my feet. Then Dave let me go, and the brothers continued along the boardwalk.

10. Perfidy in a Pencil Skirt

The boards had fixed their splintery teeth in my knees. The scattered coins, so familiar and so unexpected, filled my vision for what could have been any span of time at all, filled my clumsy hands; then that sight whirled away. Perhaps my legs were walking, perhaps I was hauling myself along the boardwalk railing like a man on an ocean liner in the kind of storm you don’t survive. But I couldn’t tell you for sure, because I was moving through a new set of dimensions, subtle dimensions of treachery, marked in increments of outrage. I discovered a whole new city, mapping streets of fury and avenues of humiliation and gridlocked intersections of desire.

Betrayal, kid. I’ll grant you one thing, you were an education. Who knew one word contained such multitudes? Who knew that gaining a new fact about the world could make me understand it so much less?

You’d paid the Cherubs. You’d set me going one way and them going the other. Why had you come to me at all? Just what kind of ride were you taking me for? I tasted it over and over, now sipping delicately, now downing draughts, all the time finding new and more complex flavours of betrayal.

Meanwhile my legs freewheeled under me and the city spooled past. Maybe I could find my way to some high ground and from there I could get a good look at what you’d done, glimpse the masterpiece entire. I hadn’t known you were an artist. But you must be the sort that has a special deal with the man downstairs. I contemplated what you’d done with a bitterness that you might as well call wonder, and a joy you can call rage if you like.