The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2) (48 page)

The woman sitting in front of Malcolm began to do that, but Malcolm stood up first. He turned to the gunman and pointed to himself. The gunman shrugged, and the woman sat down heavily.

“What are you doing?” said Parker.

“Wait and see.”

Malcolm stepped out into the aisle and put his hands up as the gunman indicated. Other hostages, two of them women, were doing the same and being ordered down towards the stage. Malcolm watched and followed their example.

He reached the stage with the rifle prodding his back. There were steps on each side, and he climbed them, as the others were doing. As the first woman had to step past the body of the old farmer, where a pool of blood was still slowly growing larger, her dæmon dog suddenly howled and refused to step in it. She tried to pick him up, but the gunman behind her pushed hard with his rifle and she fell over into the blood herself. She cried out in horror, and another of the hostages helped her up and kept his arms around her as she sobbed and nearly fainted.

Malcolm watched with close interest. The young man in charge had made a bad mistake. He should have let his cat dæmon deal with the raven and avoided shooting altogether. The situation was getting more complicated every second, and the gunmen had no plan to deal with it—a death, hostages, a whole audience imprisoned, but now with no one to hold them at gunpoint, all the intruders being on the stage, guarding their hostages. At any moment someone would run to an exit and try to get out, and then there’d be a panicked scramble to leave, in which anything could happen. Malcolm saw the young man looking at everything, calculating swiftly, working it all out, and then give a few harsh sentences of command.

Three of the men who’d come from the auditorium turned back and covered the audience with their rifles. The other three gestured at the six hostages, including Malcolm, to follow the leader into the wings at stage left. Malcolm was sure that the leader was improvising, and that hostages had never been part of his plan, but he had to admit that the young man was forceful and decisive. If he was going to be stopped, it would have to be soon.

And it was Malcolm who’d have to do it. He hadn’t had many fights as a boy, because he was big and strong and most people liked him, and in the playground scuffles he was forced into he’d found himself bound by a sense of chivalry and fairness. Oakley Street had got rid of that. And as soon as he stepped into the wings, there came a piece of outrageous luck. Oakley Street had taught him what to do about that too: use it at once and don’t wait.

He found himself in a crowded confusion of long black curtains, which were swaying and releasing a thin shower of dust. And just ahead of him, holding the pistol, was the young man who’d shot the farmer, and he was about to sneeze.

Seeing that, Malcolm shook the nearest curtain hard and the dust fell more thickly. For no more than a couple of seconds the curtains cut them off from everyone else, and as the young man opened his mouth and shook his head and blinked in the shower of dust, trying to hold back the sneeze, Malcolm kicked him very hard in the groin.

The sneeze came at the same moment. Helpless, the man dropped the gun and uttered a stifled grunt. Malcolm stepped forward, seized the young man’s hair with both hands, and smashed his head downwards, at the same time bringing his own knee up hard into his face. Then he let go with one hand and, grabbing the man’s beard, slammed it sideways while pulling his hair the other way. There was a loud
crack,
and the gunman’s dæmon vanished before he hit the floor.

“This way!” said Asta quietly, at the level of Malcolm’s head.

He saw she was clinging to a ladder, black-painted iron rungs set into the brickwork, and he swung himself up silently, holding his breath, until he was above head height. His clothes were dark; there was very little to see, even if anyone had looked in the right direction. And all around were the dark hanging curtains, swaying in the confusion as the men and their hostages fumbled their way through.

And Asta was up higher already, on a gantry, looking down through the steel mesh floor at the doubt and confusion below, where some men had halted, some hostages were calling out in fear, and where the leader’s body was lying, half hidden by a curtain. A moment later, Malcolm was climbing the ladder again. He moved out onto the gantry and waited.

Asta whispered, “What now?”

“They’ll find his body in a minute, and—”

It was less than that. One of the gunmen fell over it and called out first in surprise and annoyance and then, when he realized what it was, in high alarm.

Malcolm watched as the others responded in various ways: at first, none of them could see what had caused the alarm, and some called out to ask, while others, closer by, fumbled their way past the enveloping curtains and almost fell over the body of their leader and the man who still lay sprawled in terror beside it.

Complicating the scene were the hostages, who themselves were terrified and confused. One or two took immediate advantage of the distraction and fled further into the maze of curtains and darkness in the wings. Others clung together, too frightened to move, and that meant more blundering collisions and cries of alarm.

“They didn’t plan this very well,” said Asta.

“Neither did we.”

The gunmen were now engaged in a desperate argument. There was no point in Malcolm’s wishing that all the hostages would vanish into safety: things were as they were. At some point the gunmen would work out that the only person who could have killed their leader was the hostage who had disappeared, and then they’d begin to look for him, and then they’d find the ladder, and then they’d look up, and then they’d shoot him.

But this was a gantry. It spanned the stage. Surely there’d be another ladder at the other end, and Asta darted away to look and came back: there was. A few moments later Malcolm had climbed down, and found himself in a similar black-curtained space at stage right.

And now what held him up was doubt. The one thing he must not do was make it more likely that innocent people would be shot, but how best to manage that? He might be able to find his way out of the building without being seen, but shouldn’t he stay and try to find a way to save them?

“Just go,” Asta whispered. “Don’t be foolhardy. We can’t stop them if we can’t argue with them, and we can’t speak their language. We can be much more use outside. How will it help Lyra for us to be shot dead in here? They’ll do that as soon as they see you. Come
on,
Mal.”

She was right. He moved towards the back wall: There must be a door in here somewhere….And there was, and it was unlocked. Turning the handle very carefully, he opened the door and stepped through before closing it again. Now he was in almost total darkness, but in the dim glow of an anbaric fire alarm he could make out a narrow flight of stairs. Before going up, though, he looked back at the door, and sure enough, there was a bolt. He could hear the noise of arguing getting louder; someone was shouting, and there were feet running on the stage. More voices joined in from the auditorium.

He slid the bolt home with as little noise as possible.

Asta looked at him from the foot of the stairs, thinking,
??

“No,” he said. “There’s another door just along there.”

He moved past the stairs and along a short corridor, seeing very little, but confident: Asta’s eyes caught every photon there was to catch.

The door had a push bar, not a handle, like a fire exit.

“These make a noise,” said Malcolm. “I wonder if I can do it without banging….”

Left hand on the vertical bolt, right hand on the bar. Stop and listen. There was a distant hubbub, but it was voices, not shots. He eased the bar inwards, and felt the bolt slide down.

A waft of cold air, laden with the smells of size and paint and turpentine, came out of the dark as he pushed the door open. There also came the sense of a large space with a high ceiling.

“Scenery painting,” said Asta.

“That means there’ll be a door to the outside for deliveries. Can you see it? A big door.”

“There’s a bench right in front of you—a workbench—go left a bit—that’s it. Now you can walk straight ahead….Five more steps—here’s the back wall.”

Malcolm felt the wall and moved along to the right. Almost at once, his hands found a large entrance closed with a roller shutter, and next to it a normal-sized door. It was locked.

“Mal,” said Asta, “there’s a key on a nail beside the door.”

The key fitted the lock, and a moment later they were outside the building and in a small yard open to the alley beyond.

Malcolm listened carefully, but heard nothing more than the normal sounds of urban traffic. There was nothing unusual going on: no police cars, no crowds of people rushing out, no gunshots, no screams. They went out and turned right to bring themselves round to the theater entrance.

“So far, so good,” said Asta.

The theater foyer was glowing with light. It was empty—Malcolm supposed that the staff had all fled. He stepped inside and listened hard while Asta raced to the stairs and made for the dress circle. Malcolm could hear voices raised from the auditorium, several voices, but not in anger or denunciation or pleading. They sounded like a large committee discussing a point of order.

A minute went by, and Malcolm was about to move further in when a small shadow appeared from the staircase, and Asta jumped up onto the box-office counter to speak quietly.

“I can’t make it out,” she said. “The men with guns are on the stage, and they’re arguing with some people from the audience—farmers, maybe, hard to tell, but some women too—and someone’s found a rug and laid it over the body of the man they shot, and they brought the leader’s body out onstage too, and someone was tearing down a curtain to cover him with.”

“What is the audience doing?”

“I couldn’t see them clearly, but they’re mostly still in their seats and they seem to be listening. Oh, and Bryan is there! On the stage, I mean. It looks as if he’s taking minutes.”

“No threatening, then? No guns?”

“They’re holding their guns, but not pointing them at anyone.”

“I wonder if I should go back in.”

“Whatever for?”

That was a good question, in the circumstances. There didn’t seem to be much for him to do.

“Back to Calvi’s, then,” he said.

Calvi’s was the bar where he’d arranged to meet Bryan Parker earlier in the evening.

“Might as well,” said Asta.

Thirty minutes later, Malcolm was sitting at a table with a glass of wine and a dish of grilled lamb. And as if they’d planned it, in came Parker. He pulled out a chair and beckoned a waiter.

“Well, what happened?” said Malcolm.

“They were horribly baffled. They ushered the hostages back onto the stage. We could see that something had gone wrong with their plans, but of course we had no idea what. I’ll have the same as this gentleman,” Parker said to the waiter, who nodded and left.

“What then?”

“Then there was a stroke of good luck. It turned out that Enver Demirel was in the audience. Heard of him? No? Conservative politician in the provincial assembly, young, very bright. He stood up and called out—and that took some courage, because the gunmen were very frightened, very jumpy—offering his help to moderate a discussion between all the parties. That was where the rest of us realized for the first time that their leader wasn’t there, because, the way he’d been speaking before, he wasn’t one for discussions of any sort.

“Anyway, they accepted Demirel’s offer, and I must say—I was never an admirer of his—he was superb. Calmed everything down, explained it all to the audience as he went along. And then we heard what had frightened the gunmen: their leader had been killed, and no one had seen it happen, and the killer had vanished.”

“Extraordinary.”

“Then I decided to join in. All good copy. I offered my services as secretary to the discussion. Demirel recognized me and urged the men to agree, which they did. Little by little, you see, moving the whole thing towards talk and away from violence.”

“Clever.”

“And cleverer still. The big mystery was who had killed the leader. They found him in the wings with his neck broken. Had he fallen? Had he been attacked? If so, by whom? There was no sign of anyone else around, and all the hostages were just as mystified as the gunmen, and just as frightened. That was the point when Demirel introduced the idea of divine justice. At least—let me get this right—he heard it in a remark from one of the hostages, and skillfully tended it, not putting out any ideas himself, just allowing time for that notion to develop. The dead leader had been the one who killed the farmer. The retribution occurred so quickly that it seemed very likely to have a supernatural cause.”

“Quite possibly.”

“Then someone asked if all the hostages who’d come up were still there. There was a count, and a lot of complicated yes he did no he didn’t yes he was no he wasn’t, and in the end they agreed that since every other explanation was impossible, it must have been the case that there had been an angel among the hostages, that he’d struck down the leader as punishment for shooting the farmer, and then vanished, probably flown back to heaven.”

“No doubt.”

“Or to Calvi’s.”

“Improbable,” said Malcolm blandly.

The waiter brought Parker’s food, and Malcolm asked for another bottle of wine.

“Anyway,” Parker went on, “Demirel persuaded them to give up their guns into his charge, in exchange for which they could leave the theater and disappear. A discussion about that, and then they agreed. So that’s what they did. I must say, I’ve changed my view of that man. It was brilliantly done. He moved the atmosphere of the whole thing, the whole complicated situation, away from passion and towards rationality, and once they’d got there, it was clear to everyone that even letting them get away without punishment would be better than a massacre. So in the end it was a fair outcome for everyone. Except the poor farmer, obviously.”

“Quite. Bryan, there was a phrase that young man used—‘the brotherhood of this holy purpose.’ Have you heard that before?”