Gears of the City (28 page)

Brace-Bel stood quaking. Tears ran down his sallow cheeks. The stick—did it still shine? It was hard to say now—fell from his hand. “Tonight was to end in pleasure,” he said. “Such cruelty! Such … Where is Ivy? Oh Gods, where is Ivy?”

S
even servants had died, including Basso; Ivy wasn’t among them. She came back into the room once it was silent and looked around and said: “We have to bury these bodies.”

“They were brave men and women,” Brace-Bel said. “Each was a great love.”

“Yeah,” Ivy said. “The police’ll be here soon, or the Know-Nothings, after all that bloody noise and light.”

There were no shovels in Brace-Bel’s house—no useful implements of any kind, in fact—and the bodies could not be buried. Instead the survivors dragged the dead down to the wine cellar. Brace-Bel was too overcome to assist. Arjun dragged Stevie by her
blackened withered arms; he wore gloves and a cloth over his face, and managed not to vomit. Ivy locked the cellar door, and disposed of the key.

After that the servants dispersed. They collected their meager belongings from their rooms and vanished into the night. They shucked their fabulous costumes and pulled on plain sweaters and skirts. They crept up to Arjun and whispered:
what were they?
—and he shrugged—and
will more of them come?
—and he couldn’t answer. They left one by one, as if scared to be together, as if unable to look at each other. Brace-Bel, sobbing, didn’t seem to notice their leaving. Ivy seemed not to care; she’d lost interest in them. By morning only Ivy and Arjun remained to keep Brace-Bel company. They were unable to clean the ballroom floor of blood.

I
n the morning there was a cold grey fog, and all the windows were broken and the house was cold, and besides the whole building stank of blood and burning, so Arjun and Ivy brought Brace-Bel outside into the garden to sit in one of the shrines. Brace-Bel wore a thick shiny green bathrobe and hugged himself like a miserable caterpillar. He stared glassily and muttered. He yearned doglike after Ivy with his eyes. “I am quite shattered,” he said. “Quite shattered. Everything comes to ruin.”

Ivy scavenged in the dewy grass of the garden, and found nothing but torn wires, broken glass, fused plastic, torn webs, inert lumps of metal and bone. “Everything’s broken,” she said. “They broke everything.” She shook her head. She stood with her hands on her hips, as if awed at the methodical and precise destruction.

She lifted Brace-Bel’s stick from his nerveless and limp hand. She shook it and peered at the crystal. “Does this look flawed to you?”

Arjun shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Does it look broken? Does it look used up?”

“Ivy, I don’t know. Does it matter? The Hollow Men are all gone.”

She looked at him like he was stupid. “There’ll be more. There are always more ofthat sort ofthing. Don’t you know anything?”

“I’m constantly surprised by how little I know.”

“Pathetic. I’ll be ready for them if they come again.”

She gave Brace-Bel his stick back. Then she went back to searching in the grass. “Come away,” Arjun said. She ignored him.

At midmorning the Know-Nothings drew up at the gate.

They came mob-handed. Two flat-backed horse-drawn vehicles like little black omnibuses carried six men apiece. A closed wagon shuttered in black canvas followed. The men disembarked and stood at the gate, scowling and swearing, rubbing their hands and stamping their feet to keep warm. They wore long black coats. There were not enough cigarettes to go round. The horses steamed and shifted. Their leader made a megaphone out of his cupped hands and called out, “Morning, all. All well, Mr. Brace-Bel?” It was Inspector Maury, from the checkpoint, in fine good humor. “Lot of noise last night, Mr. Brace-Bel!”

“Hide him,” Ivy told Arjun. He nodded, helped Brace-Bel to his feet, and led him back into the house, by a circuitous route that was not visible from the gate. He sat Brace-Bel on a bench in the library, and watched from the window as Ivy went down to meet Maury.

“Look,” Brace-Bel said, pulling books from the shelves. “All blank. All gone.” Arjun shushed him.

Ivy was a tiny form in the distance. He saw her open the gate. He saw her shrug and point back at the house.
A fire in the kitchen
, was what she’d be saying.
Nothing to worry about. No Black Masks here, no ghosts, no nothing.

Arjun had tried to warn her how much Maury, how much the Know-Nothings, hated Brace-Bel, how much they resented his wealth and his impunity; but she’d been so coldly confident of her ability to lie to them, to confuse and charm them, that he was almost surprised to see them grab her by her arms and drag her, seemingly too stunned to resist, into the back of the black wagon.

For a moment it occurred to him that she’d
wanted
to be arrested. She frightened him; he was willing to believe strange things about her.

Then the Know-Nothings entered the garden—slowly, nervously. When no unnatural curse blasted them, when their feet didn’t burst into flames, no one was turned into a frog or a pig, no one went blind and no one went mad—then they realized that Brace-Bel’s garden, if it had ever had any power or mystery, was stripped of it now, was just grass and weeds and paving-stones, was
just a place in the city like any other; and then they picked up their pace. They were laughing with each other as they approached the house and joking about who’d get to have a go on Brace-Bel’s whores and who’d have to settle for the rent boys …

Arjun dragged Brace-Bel up off the bench, and together they fled out the back of the house by the servants’ quarters and the overflowing bins and rubbish heaps, which had
still
not been cleared away, and maybe now never would be. Behind them, as they fled for the estate’s rear gate, there was the sound of Know-Nothings shouting,
stop, you fuckers, stop
, and the crash of their boots, and the hateful barking of their dogs. Before them, across the road, as Arjun fumbled with the rusted padlock on the gate and Brace-Bel slumped bonelessly against the wall, there was the faint sound of someone in the garden of the next estate over practicing a simple tune, badly, on an expensive flute, while a nervous-sounding tutor muttered encouragement,
yes, Mrs. Shandy, that’s excellent progress, very good
, and as Arjun listened to the stumbling, halting music and in his mind gently
mended
and completed it, the padlock suddenly leapt in his hands chiming like a bell, and when he fell through the gate, pulling Brace-Bel after him, it was warm, and he was lying on soft grass, and the blue sky overhead sang with swallows and larks, and he had no idea where he was or how he’d got there.

A Warning-Authority-Family Arguments-Corruption-Resistance

Ruth

T
he Know-Nothings
took Ruth and Zeigler back to the Chapterhouse. Ruth walked in silence. Silence was best—talking only made them angry, only showed weakness. Zeigler, stunned, outraged, frightened, seemed inclined to argue; she put an arm on his elbow to say,
keep quiet.

The local Chapterhouse stood in what used to be the Hall of Trade, on Holcroft Square, across from the Museum. The old ornate pillars and friezes of the Hall of Trade were blackened with soot and grime. The grand brass-bound doors to the old lobby were locked, forgotten, jammed with decades of wet windblown rubbish and leaves; the Know-Nothings went in and out by the back door, the old servants’ entrance. A small sign by the side of the door read civic league local 141c, beneath which was a list of the League’s local corporate sponsors—Holcroft, Patagan, Axis, half a dozen others. Otherwise the building was unmarked. Everyone knew what it housed.

Inside it smelled of beer, cigarettes, oil lamps; sweat and fear. The sound of typing rattled through the corridors. Young men lounged with their feet up on the tables, played cards or darts, stared into space—aimless, stupid, restless time-wasting. Some of them were people Ruth recognized. In the outside world a few of them were almost friends—she didn’t much like Know-Nothings on principle, but people did what they had to to get by, and …

In here things were different. They looked at her coldly—like a
thing.
A ghost. She shivered, went pale. “In here,” Siddon said. They put her and Zeigler in separate rooms.

A
nd to her surprise, her slowly growing relief, they didn’t beat her, didn’t so much as lay a hand on her. Her questioner was an old man, round and grey and shoulderless, with the look of one of those who’d been in the League so long that they’d settled into it as a kind of comfortable retirement. He was almost courtly. He called her
a pretty young thing
, and she didn’t tell him to get lost, she batted her eyelashes and spoke softly, thinking:
better to be ashamed of yourself later than shot in the head now.

“What did that … ghost say to you?”

“I don’t remember. I don’t know.” Plead ignorance. That was what they liked to hear.

“What did you mean about a, a monster?”

“Don’t know. I’m sorry, I don’t know. I had a dream, once. That Museum scares me, sir. Who knows what’s in it? I don’t know. I was upset, because of the …”

/
don’t know.
That was the catechism. Over and over. The interrogator nodded, coughed, smiled, stared at her with weak pale eyes.
I don’t know anything about anything.

It wasn’t an interrogation; it was a warning.
Keep your mouth shut.
She bowed her head. She could take a hint.
I never saw anything. I don’t know anything.
By the end of the day she almost believed it.

They released her and Zeigler both at the same time. It was evening, and cold. Zeigler’s nose was bloody and his scalp bruised, his spectacles broken, the fingers of his left hand swelling and the nails going black. “They took my notes, Ruth, can you believe it?”

The warmth of relief ebbed away, and Ruth began to shake with the fear and anger she’d been holding back all day—but the Know-Nothings were still watching, so all she said was, “Shh, please, Mr. Zeigler.”

She helped him home.

Maury

Inspector Maury rode across the city in the back of the black motor-wagon, sat on the hard rattling benches, under the darkness of black canvas, in the constant smell of leaking fuel, in the constant drone of the wagon’s engine.

The motor-wagon was a rare and remarkable thing. It was one of the perks of his rank and his special status, his roving and open-ended jurisdiction—as were the security detail who rode behind in the motorcar.

Even by motor-powered vehicles, it was a long trip from Brace-Bel’s house on Barking Hill northwest to Fosdyke, and Holcroft Plaza, and the Museum.

The woman—Low comma Ivy—the
prisoner
—sat on the bench across from him, and stared defiantly into his eyes. A contest of wills was taking place, and he wasn’t entirely sure he was winning.

She’d answered
none
of his questions about Brace-Bel, or about the Arjun fellow who’d fled with him, or about anything at all, until, on a whim, he’d said, “Arjun, then—don’t pretend you never talked to him—he says there’s some kind of monster in the old Fosdyke Museum—did he tell you anything about that?” She smiled; her eyes lit up.

“The Beast. The lizard. It has scars, Inspector—I’ve seen it. I may even know who made it, in what laboratories.”

She wouldn’t say anything more, so of course he slapped her around a bit. In fact he bloodied her up a little more than felt proper, with a pretty face like that. But she seemed indifferent to pain, contemptuous of it. He had a sense that she was waiting, somewhat bored, for him to reach an obvious conclusion. She made him feel unimaginative and small. He stopped and lit a cigarette to cover the shaking of his hands.

“Fosdyke,” he told his bodyguards. “You heard. There’s something sick going on in the Fosdyke Chapterhouse.” That was the nature of Maury’s special rank and status. Internal investigations. He
watched the watchmen.
That was a line from an old book he’d had burned. “We’re going to have some fucking questions for the Fosdyke Local. Take this bitch with us. Back of the wagon, tie her hands.”

Now he sat across from her, in the back of the wagon, and tried to meet her gaze.

Maury’s wife had died, what, ten years ago? Since then he hadn’t had much in the way of dealings with women—what one did with ghosts, of course, not counting. His wife had been a good woman, but plain, and thick as two short planks. He didn’t have much experience with beauty. The Low woman made him uncomfortable. He felt his authority slipping in her presence. Once, as they went north through Marriot, he jumped up and slapped her, and she sneered back at him, “Did that help, Inspector?” It didn’t much. He didn’t do it again. The wagon rattled and strained up and down hills, over iron bridges, into the night.

A
nd so Inspector Maury hit Local 141C at just past midnight like a
storm
, like a wicked gale blown down from the Mountain, that rattles the windows and strips the trees and fills strong men with nightmares—that bloody woman might not have been scared of him, but those lads were all right. Midnight shift in the Chapterhouse, skeleton crew, a few pale unbloodied lads hanging around over the last gaslamp in the mess hall, drinking, smoking, farting, telling each other ghost stories; none of them ready for Maury, who’d been building up a great head of steam in the back of the wagon, and was ready to explode. “You want to see my fucking papers, boy? Do you? Are you challenging my fucking authority?”
No sir, no sir
, too fucking right they weren’t. Maury’s own personal staff flanked him, cracking their knuckles, ready for the word, ready for just so much as a
nod irom
Maury—and he thought about it, he definitely thought about it. Local l4lC’s night shift looked ready to piss themselves. Can’t get the quality anymore. This lot had a particular look to them—furtive, corrupt. “I hear you’ve been keeping
secrets.”
Oh, they knew—he could smell it. “Keys to the Museum, boys. Let’s go digging.” They didn’t dare say no. Throughout all this the prisoner, the Low woman, Ivy, stood by his side like she was his own personal bodyguard or advisor or something, and it didn’t seem quite right, but it didn’t seem exactly wrong either.