The Midnight Mayor (12 page)

- then I pulled the plug.

It vanished. Glass fell with a splatter onto the desk and over my trousers, black smoke rolled in eye-watering sickly sweetness from the gutted interior of the screen. I flapped ineffectually at the smoke, coughing and blinking tears from my eyes, pushing myself away from the desk even as the young man with the A-level textbook stood up and began to shout in three different languages, all of them obscene.

Then he saw our face, and fell silent.

I walked away. No one tried to follow me.

 

It took two night buses to get where I wanted to go. It was faster than the one-every-three-minute bus routes of the day, despite the fifteen-minute wait, the bus swishing through empty streets, their natures lost beneath a haze of sodium glow. I breathed in the deep, heavy warm air of the buses, smelling sticky beer and old chips. The familiar weight of it comforted me, washed out some of the fatigue from my bones: an elixir almost as good as sleep.

The bus crossed Euston Road at Tottenham Court Road, skirted the southern edge of Regent’s Park and headed towards Marylebone, into little neat streets untouched by chain stores, selling mostly fish and chips, Italian wine and cheese.

Raleigh Court was a nice name for a bad idea. It hadn’t been so much built as slotted together out of old grey cereal boxes pretending to be flats. They were stacked one on top of the other in four flat tombstones around a dead place of concrete and garages with locked doors and no room for cars, just tall enough to block out the sun, though not high enough to see anything but each other. It was a bad place to die, an anonymous, forgotten hole. The air hummed with mobile phones and a tight, pressed-in magic, a magic of black shadows and little rattling things in the night, the kind of power that lent itself to the summoning of rats and invocation of ghosts, to the forbidden enchantments of naughty men who thought of life as just a trick of perspective. It was easy, in this place at 4 a.m., to slip past the police tape and the slumbering copper on duty. The tarmac ate up the sound of my footsteps; the neon bent away from my passing, willing to oblige a grey friend in a gloomy time. It was a place that looked after its own, frightened strangers away.

Signs of battle were scarred on the buildings inside the police cordon. Windows were taped up with dustbin bags, the broken glass either blown inside or already swept away. Scorch marks had burst up from between the gaps in the paving slabs where the gas had ignited, to send blackness crawling a few storeys up the overlooking walls. Electricity cables had been crudely strapped back together; phone lines dangled off the sides of buildings, awaiting repair. The metal shutters of garages were twisted and bent, and rubbish bags split open and blasted flat. A bomb hadn’t exploded here. A bomb had been blasted out of the ground on a volcanic plume of gas, risen up to the height of a man’s invoking hands, and spawned a dozen little scuttling offspring that ran to each corner of the court and exploded.

The whole calamity would be in one of those police reports that D. B. Sinclair and his “concerned citizens” filed carefully under “T” for “Things” at the back of a locked filing cabinet in the vehicle-licensing centre a day before a bonfire got accidentally out of control. Dudley Sinclair and his friends were
very
good at losing information that they didn’t want to be found. Bureaucracy seems so innocent until it eats you up; but then this mess was pure embarrassment and mayhem written in sparkling mystic letters. Someone had to have seen it.

As it happened, someone had. I found a half-eaten kebab in the spilt litter billowing over the cobbles and, a bit below, a thrown-away end of pizza, nibbled to tatters except for the crusts. The guilty kebab shop was only round the corner, twenty-four hours a day of pulverised cardboard cooked on a spike. I bought two kebabs: one for me, one for my witness. Then I went back to Raleigh Court and sat down on the charred, wobbling remains of a bench, ate my kebab and left the second one open, salad and all, on the ground at my feet.

My witness had clearly been freaked by the night’s activities; he came out reluctantly, not at his usual jaunty trot. I waited patiently, wiping ketchup and suspicious white goo from my chin, stuffing a tattered grey watery vegetable into my mouth that the shopkeeper had claimed was lettuce. We liked all foods, even the kinds that didn’t like us, and at four in the morning, kebab in a bun is food the gods would eat.

My witness snuffled closer. I held my hand out to him, fingers stained in dubious sauce, and cooed, “Hello, come to Uncle Matthew. Come talk to us.”

He was the size of a small dog, not too small to yap infuriatingly, not large enough to bark with any great power. His fur in the lamplight was dark orange heading for auburn, his nose a black wetness with a pair of whiskers sticking out above jaws that looked fit for biting arms off. His tail might once have been bushy, but wars with others of his kind, plus feral cats and traffic, had left it a tatty stump. Personal hygiene was not high among his priorities, and he stank of wet mud, old oils and frustrated alpha-male animal. He looked up at us, we looked at him. He started to eat the kebab at our feet, and we patted him gently on the head.

There’s a long tradition of magicians keeping pet familiars. Once upon a time, an owl or wolf was the companion of choice; but magic, above all else, has to move with the times. For as long as I could remember, you couldn’t do much better than to find yourself a fox.

I scratched the creature behind its ears and said, “Mind if I call you Mr Fox?”

It wasn’t an imaginative name, but he didn’t object.

I let him eat the kebab. He was not an underfed animal, and clearly choosy enough in his diet to avoid the limp salad. When he was done, I patted the wobbly planks of the bench where I sat, and he leapt up, regarding me curiously. I kept stroking the rough, sticky fur on the top of his head, all matted together with slime from the rubbish bins, and dried blood. After a while, my fingers were used to the texture, and the more relaxed my companion grew, the easier it was to . . .

Overhead, a pigeon flapped in the darkness. I could feel the claws of the rats in the drains beneath me, their noses itching with mine. I kept on stroking the fox, which nuzzled its damp nose into my ribs, and I got a taste of . . .

“Come on, Mr Fox,” we crooned. “Show us what you smelt last night.”

“Come on, Mr Fox,” we heard a voice say that might have been ours. “Come on, come on . . .”

A thousand miles away, at the end of the badly receiving telephone line: “Come on, Mr Fox . . .”

Here it came. We could smell the memories, see the stench of it in our eyes, hear the hum of smell in our ears, here it came, all that my precious witness, his fur covered in dirt, had seen . . .

human man standing in night. looking something somewhere eyes turned upwards doesn’t see me in the darkness doesn’t care don’t fear human human is
. . .
burning bright warm red fire. smell rat. rats are watching too rats down below smell stinking rat rat dead in jaws rats down below are watching human too pigeons up above feathers stuck in teeth pigeons are watching too and we watch the human because
. . .

smells of
. . .
alcohol mixed with smell of flowers (FLOWERS!), silks softened by soaps black leather rubbed with varnish suit caressed with steam hair swept with oil face pampered with cream smells of lighter smoke still city but somewhere the cars do not go so much of contained shut away contained of leather seats and interior of car solid weighty hot heavy shakes door handle sweat sweat running down spine sweat on head sweat fear listen! listen heart listen! smell fear! eat fear!

“Good Mr Fox, good Mr Fox . . .”

A thousand miles away, a hand stroking the head of a fox was wired to a brain that might possibly have been our own, and we smelt the fear on Nair, along with expensive aftershave and oiled hair, we smelt terror and heard the beating of his heart and whispered, “What else, Mr Fox, good Mr Fox, come on . . . what else? Show me what you smelt.”

“What, Mr Fox? Show me!”

“What else?!”

“What does he look like?”

And it’s only Nair’s fear . . .

. . . we can only smell Nair’s fear . . .

We smell . . .

We see . . .

And there was something in his hand?

What was in Nair’s hand?

Something in his hand, held up to his ear—

I knew what it was. Recognised it, even through the confusion of the fox’s memories, saw the little plastic shape, saw the shattered remains of Nair’s lips

speaking into it, and recognised it, saw the shattered bloody flesh that was Nair speaking with his dying breath into a mobile phone.

Dead
.

Just like that. We looked, me, us and the fox, through the terrified haze of its memories, and saw the body of Nair, torn meat inside a neat black silk suit, lying in his own blood, mobile phone the last thing the bloody criss-cross remains of his fingers were going to touch. And then, because the fox had looked, finally, the fox dared to look, we looked up at the man who had killed A. Nair, the Midnight Mayor.

And the fox was right. He was absolutely right. We saw a man, dressed in a neat pinstripe suit utterly untouched by the flames still burning in the rubbish bins, by the glass spilt across the floor, by the swinging electric cables and the spitting remains of electric lightning, by the fallen aerials and shattered metal shutters, by the torn bricks and broken paving stones; not a scratch on him. He wore a suit, the crease impeccable all the way down from his waist to his ankle; a pair of black leather shoes that clacked neatly with every step, a pinstripe jacket done up over a white shirt, the collar ironed and unstained. A white silk handkerchief stuck up from his jacket pocket, his thin dark hair was swept back, not a fibre out of place, from a high pale forehead and on his face was a look . . .

. . . a look that a busy plumber might give to a boiler that’s been giving him more trouble than it’s worth and has now been fixed; the conquering contempt of an expert who has proven his worth to a dumb machine.

And he had no smell. To the fox, watching this, Nair had stank from the moment he entered of expensive cleaning products and shaving lotions, of terror and fear. His shoes had smelt, his clothes had smelt, every part of him offering a different tone to the medley. But the man who had killed him, the
thing
that had killed him, which looked like a man in a pinstripe suit, who now stood over him utterly uncaring for either his triumph or the pity of the dead, had no smell. Not a part of him smelt, not even of cleanliness. He was a walking blank on the fox’s recollection, even the dirt on his shoes. His heart made no sound; nor was there any proof, except that he had just killed a living man, that
this
man lived at all.