The Great Game (2 page)

  Smith shook his head. Verloc snorted again. He touched the small scar under his eye and a look of surprise, momentarily, filled his whole face, as if he had forgotten, or not even known, that it was there. Then it was gone and Verloc nodded stiffly and went back inside the shop and shut the door.

  Smith chewed on that as he walked. Did Verloc seem jumpier than usual? Was there something in his manner to indicate that he, too, felt the change in the air? Perhaps he was daydreaming, he thought. His active days were long gone, over and done with. He came to the post office. Colonel Creighton was working the counter. "Good morning, Mr Smith," he said. Smith nodded. "Colonel," he said. "Anything for me today?"

  "A package," Colonel Creighton said. "From London. Another book, perhaps?"

  "I do hope so," Smith said, politely. He waited as the old colonel rummaged around for his package. "There you are," he said. Then, "Looks like rain, what?"

  "Rain," Smith said.

  The colonel nodded. "How are the cabbages coming along?" he said.

  "Green," Smith said, which seemed to pacify the colonel.

  "Dreadful bloody weather," he said, as though offering a grave secret. "Miss the old country, don't you know. Not the same, home. Not the same at all."

  Smith nodded again, feeling a great tiredness overcome him. The colonel was an old India hand, recalled at last back to pasture. The empire rolled on, but the colonel was no longer a part of its colonial effort, and the knowledge dulled him, the way an unused blade dulls with age. Smith said, "Might go to the pub," and the colonel nodded in his turn and said, "Capital idea, what?"

  It was not yet noon.

  As he approached the pub, however, the unopened package held under his arm, his sense of unease at last began to take on a more definite shape. There were tracks on the road of a kind seldom seen in the village. One of the new steam-powered baruch-landaus, their wheels leaving a distinct impression in the ground. Visitors, he thought, and he felt excitement hurry his pace, and his hands itched for a weapon that was no longer there. Opposite the pub he saw the old bee keeper, standing motionless under the village clock. Smith looked at him and the old bee keeper, almost imperceptibly, gave him a nod.

  Interesting.

  He went into the pub. Quiet. A fire burning in the fireplace. A solitary drinker sitting by the fire, a pint by his side. Smith looked straight ahead. He went to the counter. The Hungarian baroness was there. She welcomed him with a smile. He smiled back. "What can I get you, Mr Smith?" she said.

  "A pint of cider, please, Magdolna," he said, preferring as always the use of one of her many middle names.

  "Cold outside?" she said, drawing his pint. Smith shrugged. "Same old," he said. "Same old."

  The baroness slid the pint across the counter to him. "Shall I put it on the account?" she said.

  Smith shook his head. "Somehow," he said, "I think it best if I paid my tab in full, today."

  The baroness glanced quickly at the direction of the solitary drinker by the fireplace and just as quickly looked away. She pursed her lips, then said, softly, "Very well."

  Smith paid. The transaction seemed to finalise something between them, an understanding that remained unspoken. He had run into the baroness in eighty-nine in Budapest and again a year later in the
Quartier Latin
, in Paris. She was half his age, but had been retired early and, unseen behind the bar, she walked with a limp.

  Their business done, Smith took hold of the pint and, slowly, turned to face the common room. It seemed to him that it took forever for his feet to obey him. He took a step forwards, at last, and the second one came more easily, and then the next, until at last he found himself standing before the solitary drinker, who had not yet looked up.

  "Sit down," the man said.

  Smith sat.

  The man was half-turned in his chair, and was warming long, pale hands on the fire. He was tall and pallid, with black thinning hair and a long straight nose that had been broken at least once. He resembled a spidery sort of thing. He wore a dark suit, not too cheap, not too expensive, an off-the-rack affair several years old. His shoes were black and polished. He said, "Looks like it might rain."

  Smith said, "Bugger the rain."

  The man smiled a thin smile and finally turned to face him. His eyes were a startling blue, the colour of a pond deeper than one expected. He said, in a voice that had no warmth or affection in it, "Smith."

  Smith said, "Fogg."

 
 

 
 
 

"I told you I would kill you the next time we met," Smith said.

  It was hot in the room. The baroness had retreated to her quarters, but not before she turned the sign on the door. It now said
Closed
.

  The two men were alone.

  "I had hoped you'd delay the pleasure," the man he had called Fogg said.

  Smith sighed, exhaling air, and felt a long-held tension ease throughout his body. He took a sip from his cider. "Where is Mycroft?" he said.

  Fogg said, "Mycroft's dead."

  Smith went very still. Outside a wet sort of thunder erupted, and with it came the patter of falling rain. His reflection stared at him from the glass. He examined it as though fascinated. "When?" he said at last.

  "Two days ago."

  "Where?"

  "Outside his house. He had just returned from the club."

  Smith said, "Who?" and the man before him smiled that thin, humourless smile and said, "If I knew that, I wouldn't be here now."

  At the words an odd excitement took over Smith, overwhelming any sadness he may have felt. He said, "Where is your driver?"

  Fogg said, "The baroness is looking after him."

  Smith nodded, absent-mindedly. After a moment Fogg raised his glass. Smith followed suit, and they touched glasses with a thin clinking sound. "To Mycroft," Fogg said.

  Smith said, "Who–?" even though he knew. Fogg said, "I'm acting head."

  "So you finally got what you wanted," Smith said. Fogg said, "I didn't want it to happen like that."

  Smith said, "That was the only way it was ever going to fall. Heads don't retire–"

  "–they roll," Fogg said, completing the sentence. He shrugged, looking suddenly uncomfortable. "Still. One never imagined–"

  "Not the fat man," Smith agreed.

  "Sure," Fogg said. He sounded sad. "Not the fat man."

  They drank in silence.

  Then: "Why are you here?"

  Fogg: "You know why I'm here."

  Smith, staring at him. Trying to read what was hidden in those deceptively innocent eyes. Saying, "I don't."

  Fogg snorted. "We need you," he said, simply.

  Smith said, "I find that hard to believe."

  "Do you think I
want
your help?" Fogg said. "You are a loner, a killer, you have problems taking orders and you just don't
fit
into an organisational structure!" eThe last one seemed to be the worst, for him. "And you're
old
."

  "So why are you here?"

  He watched Fogg, closely. Saw him squirm.

  "Mycroft left instructions," Fogg finally said.

  "That makes a little more sense," Smith said.

  "Unfortunately, the decision is out of my hands," Fogg said. "The fat man wanted you on the case."

  "Did he know he was going to die?"

  A strange, evasive look on Fogg's face; Smith filed it away for future reference. "I can't fill you in on the details," Fogg said. "You're not classified."

  That one made Smith smile. He downed the rest of his drink and stood up. Fogg, in some alarm, watched him get up. "Where the hell do you think you're going?"

  "I'm going to spare you the trouble," Smith said. "Sorry you had a wasted trip."

  "You
what
?" Fogg said.

  Smith said, "I'm retired."

  He turned to go. Fogg, behind him, gave a gurgled cry. "You can't just walk away!" he said.

  "Watch me," Smith said.

  He was almost at the door when Fogg said, "Alice."

  Smith stopped, his hand on the door, ready to push it open.

  He didn't.

  He turned slowly and stood there, breathing deeply. Old memories, like old newspaper print, almost washed away in the rain.

  Almost.

  He said, "What about her?"

  Fogg said, "She's dead too."

  Smith stood there, not knowing what to say. The fat man he could understand, could have lived with. But not her. He began to say, "Where?" but Fogg had anticipated him. "Bangkok," he said. "Two weeks ago."

  Two weeks. She had been dead and all that time he'd been tending the cabbage patch.

  He felt sick with his own uselessness. He opened and closed his hands, mechanically. It was still raining outside, the rain intensifying. He turned and pushed the door open, and a gust of cold wind entered and brought with it the smell of the rain. He blinked, his face wet. Across the road the old bee keeper was still standing, like a silent guardian, watching. Very little escaped him, still.

  Smith took a deep breath. The cold air helped. After a moment he closed the door and went behind the bar and drew himself another pint. Then he drew one for the thin man he had once sworn to kill.

  He left money on the counter, for the baroness, and carried both drinks with him into the common room and sat back down. He stared at Fogg, who had the decency to look embarrassed.

  "Same
modus operandi
?"

  "So it would appear."

  "Fogg, what in God's name is going on?"

  Fogg squinted, as if in pain. Perhaps the mention of God had hurt him. "I don't know," he said, at last. Resentful for having to make the admission.

  "Have there been others?"

  Fogg didn't answer. The rain fell outside. In the fireplace, a log split apart, throwing off sparks. Smith said, "How
many
others?"

  "You will be briefed," Fogg said. "In London. If you choose to come back with me."

  Smith considered. Bangkok. London. Two links on a chain he couldn't, for now, follow. And each one, rather than a name, or a climate – each one represented the end of one thread in his own life, a sudden severing that had left him reeling inside. Alice and the fat man. He had not seen, nor spoken, to either one of them for a long time, yet they were always there, the very knowledge of their existence offering a sort of comfort, a fragile peace. A peace he could no longer pretend to have.

  Yet he suddenly dreaded the return to the city. A part of him had been restless, longing to go back, and yet now that it was offered it came at a price that gave him no joy. The fat man, Alice, and a bloodied trail he feared to follow. There was a reason he had been retired, a reason all of them were there, in that village that could not be found on any map, running their little shops and tending their little gardens, pretending, even the bee keeper, that they were regular people at last, living ordinary lives.

  None of us are very good at it, he realised. And yet there
had
been comfort in the pretence, that forced withdrawal from the former, shadowy world they had inhabited. He needed to think. He needed the refuge of his library, even if for one last time.

  "I need a day," he said, at last. Fogg didn't argue. Not a death, Smith thought. Deaths. One two weeks before, the trail already growing cold, one here, and recent, but still, his would be a cold trail to follow, and a day would make little difference.

  Fogg stood up, draining the last of his pint. "I shall expect you at the club, first thing tomorrow," he said. And with that he was gone.

 
 

 
 
 

He had almost forgotten the book. The package from London. He had been expecting a slim volume of poetry, ordered from Payne's, the newly rebuilt shop on Cecil Court. It had been destroyed some years previous in an explosion. He had not been a part of that particular case, which had been attributed to the shadowy Bookman. He took the package, unopened, with him as he walked back to his place. Behind him he could hear Fogg's baruch-landau starting with an ungodly noise, smoke belching high into the air as it wheeled away, back towards the city.

  On a sudden, overwhelming need he turned back. He went down the high street and they were all watching him, the retired and the obsolete, former friends, former foes, united together only in this, this dreaded, dreary world called retirement. He ignored them, even the old bee keeper, as he came to the church, the book still held under his arm.

  Fogg had looked offended at Smith's evocation of God. Faith was no longer all that popular, a long way since the day of the Lizard King James I, when his authorised – if somewhat modified – version of the Bible was available in every home. That man Darwin was popular now, with his theory of evolution – he had even claimed, so Smith had heard, that it was proof the royal family and their get, Les Lézards themselves, were of an extraterrestrial origin, and couldn't have co-evolved on the Earth. It was not impossible… Rumours had always circulated, but that, just like the Bookman investigation, had been Mycroft's domain, mostly: he, Smith, was in charge of field work, dirty work, while the fat man sat in his club and ran the empire over lunches and cigars.

  Too many unanswered questions… His life had been like that, though. He seldom got the answers. His, simply, was to be given a task, and perform it. How it fit into a larger picture, just which piece of the puzzle it turned out to be, was not his concern. Above him was the fat man and above the fat man was the Queen, and above the Queen, he long ago, and privately, had decided, there must be one more.