by Neil Gaiman
FAT CHARLIE DROVE OFF, NOT ENTIRELY CERTAIN WHERE HE WAS going. He had crossed the Atlantic for the third time in two weeks, and the money that Spider had given him was almost tapped out. He was alone in the car, and being alone, he hummed.
He passed a clutch of Jamaican restaurants when he noticed a sign in a storefront window: Cut Price to the Islands. He pulled up and went inside.
“We at A-One travel are here to serve all your travel needs,” said the travel agent, in the hushed and apologetic tone of voice doctors normally reserve for telling people that the limb in question is going to have to come off.
“Er. Yeah. Thanks. Er. What’s the cheapest way to get out to Saint Andrews?”
“Will you be going on vacation?”
“Not really. I just want to go out for a day. Maybe two days.”
“Leaving when?”
“This afternoon.”
“You are, I take it, joshing with me.”
“Not at all.”
A computer screen was gazed at, lugubriously. A keyboard was tapped. “It doesn’t look like there’s anything out there for less than twelve hundred dollars.”
“Oh.” Fat Charlie slumped.
More keyboard clicking. The man sniffed. “That can’t be right.” Then he said, “Hold on.” A phone call. “Is this rate still valid?” He jotted down some figures on a scratch pad. He looked up at Fat Charlie. “If you could go out for a week and stay at the Dolphin Hotel, I could get you a week’s vacation for five hundred dollars, with your meals at the hotel thrown in. The flight will only cost you airport tax.”
Fat Charlie blinked. “Is there a catch?”
“It’s an island tourism promotion. Something to do with the music festival. I didn’t think it was still going on. But then, you know what they say. You get what you pay for. And if you want to eat anywhere else it will cost you.”
Fat Charlie gave the man five crumpled hundred-dollar bills.
DAISY WAS STARTING TO FEEL LIKE THE KIND OF COP YOU only ever see in movies: tough, hard-bitten, and perfectly ready to buck the system; the kind of cop who wants to know whether or not you feel lucky or if you’re interested in making his day, and particularly the kind of cop who says “I’m getting too old for this shit.” She was twenty-six years old, and she wanted to tell people she was too old for this shit. She was quite aware of how ridiculous this was, thank you very much.
At this moment, she was standing in Detective Superintendent Camberwell’s office and saying, “Yes, sir. Saint Andrews.”
“Went there on my holidays some years back, with the former Mrs. Camberwell. Very pleasant place. Rum cake.”
“That sounds like the place, sir. The closed-circuit footage from Gatwick is definitely him. Traveling under the name of Bronstein. Roger Bronstein flies to Miami, changes planes, and takes a connection to Saint Andrews.”
“You’re sure it’s him?”
“Sure.”
“Well,” said Camberwell. “That buggers us good and proper, doesn’t it? No extradition treaty.”
“There must be something we can do.”
“Mm. We can freeze his remaining accounts and grab his assets, and we will, and that’ll be as much use to us as a water-soluble umbrella, because he’ll have lots of cash sitting in places we can’t find it or touch it.”
Daisy said, “But that’s cheating.”
He looked up at her as if he wasn’t certain exactly what he was looking at. “It’s not a playground game of tag. If they kept the rules, they’d be on our side. If he comes back, then we arrest him.” He squashed a little Plasticine man into a Plasticine ball and began to mash it out into a flat sheet, pinching it between finger and thumb. “In the old days,” he said, “they could claim sanctuary in a church. If you stayed in the church the law couldn’t touch you. Even if you killed a man. Of course, it limited your social life. Right.”
He looked at her as if he expected her to leave now. She said, “He killed Maeve Livingstone. He’s been cheating his clients blind for years.”
“And?”
“We should be bringing him to justice.”
“Don’t let it get to you,” he said.
Daisy thought, I’m getting too old for this shit. She kept her mouth shut, and the words simply went round and round inside her head.
“Don’t let it get to you,” he repeated. He folded the Plasticine sheet into a rough cube, then squeezed it viciously between finger and thumb. “I don’t let any of it get to me. Think of it as if you were a traffic warden. Grahame Coats is just a car that parked on the double yellow lines but drove off before you were able to give him a ticket. Yes?”
“Sure,” said Daisy. “Of course. Sorry.”
“Right,” he said.
She went back to her desk, went to the Police internal Web site, and examined her options for several hours. Finally, she went home. Carol was sitting in front of Coronation Street, eating a microwavable chicken korma.
“I’m taking a break,” said Daisy. “I’m going on holiday.”
“You don’t have any holiday time left,” pointed out Carol reasonably.
“Too bad,” said Daisy. “I’m too old for this shit.”
“Oh. Where are you going?”
“I’m going to catch a crook,” said Daisy.
FAT CHARLIE LIKED CARIBBEAIR. THEY MIGHT HAVE BEEN AN INTERNATIONAL airline, but they felt like a local bus company. The flight attendant called him “darlin‘” and told him jus’ to sit anywhere that struck his fancy.
He stretched out across three seats and went to sleep. In Fat Charlie’s dream he was walking beneath copper skies and the world was silent and still. He was walking toward a bird, vaster than cities, its eyes aflame, its beak agape, and Fat Charlie walked into the beak and down the creature’s throat.
Then, in the way of dreams, he was in a room, its walls covered with soft feathers and with eyes, round like the eyes of owls, which did not blink.
Spider was in the center of the room, his legs and arms extended. He was held up by chains made of bone, like the bones of a chicken’s neck, and they ran from each corner of the room, and held him tightly, like a fly in a web.
Oh, said Spider. It’s you.
Yes, said Fat Charlie in his dream.
The bone chains pulled and tugged at Spider’s flesh, and Fat Charlie could see the pain in his face.
Well, said Fat Charlie. I suppose it could be worse.
I don’t think this is it, said his brother. I think she has plans for me. Plans for us. I just don’t know what they are.
They’re only birds, said Fat Charlie. How bad could it be?
Ever heard of Prometheus?
Er…
Gave fire to man. Was punished by the gods by being chained to a rock. Every day an eagle would come down and tear out his liver.
Didn’t he ever run out of liver?
He grew a new one every day. It’s a god thing.
There was a pause. The two brothers stared at each other.
I’ll sort it out, said Fat Charlie. I’ll fix it.
Just like you fixed the rest of your life, I suppose? Spider grinned, without mirth.
I’m sorry.
No. I’m sorry. Spider sighed. So look, have you got a plan?
A plan?
I’ll take that as a no. Just do whatever you have to do. Get me out of here.
Are you in Hell?
I don’t know where I am. If it’s anywhere, this is the Hell of Birds. You have to get me out.
How?
You’re Dad’s son, aren’t you? You’re my brother. Come up with something. Just get me out of here.
Fat Charlie woke, shivering. The flight attendant brought him coffee, and he drank it gratefully. He was awake now, and he had no desire to go back to sleep, so he read the Caribbeair Magazine and learned many useful things about Saint Andrews.
He learned that Saint Andrews is not the smallest of the Caribbean Islands, but it tends to be one of the ones that people
forget about when they make lists. It was discovered by the Spanish around 1500, an uninhabited volcanic hill teeming with animal life, not to mention a multiplicity of plants. It was said that anything that you planted in Saint Andrews would grow.
It belonged to the Spanish, and then to British, then to the Dutch, then to the British again, and then, for a short while after it was made independent in 1962, it belonged to Major F. E. Garrett, who took over the government, broke off diplomatic relations with all other countries except Albania and the Congo, and ruled the country with a rod of iron until his unfortunate death from falling out of bed several years later. He fell out of bed hard enough to break a number of bones, despite the presence in his bedroom of an entire squad of soldiers, who testified that they had all tried, but failed, to break Major Garrett’s fall, and despite their best efforts he was dead by the time that he arrived in the island’s sole hospital. Since then, Saint Andrews had been ruled by a beneficent and elected local government and was everybody’s friend.
It had miles of sandy beaches and an extremely small rainforest in the center of the island; it had bananas and sugarcane, a banking system that encouraged foreign investment and offshore corporate banking, and no extradition treaties with anybody at all, except possibly the Congo and Albania.
If Saint Andrews was known for anything, it was for its cuisine: the inhabitants claimed to have been jerking chickens before the Jamaicans, currying goats before the Trinidadians, frying flying fish before the Bajans.
There were two towns on Saint Andrews: Williamstown, on the southeast side of the island, and Newcastle, on the north. There were street markets in which anything that grew on the island could be bought, and several supermarkets, in which the same foodstuffs could be bought for twice the price. One day Saint Andrews would get a real international airport.
It was a matter of opinion whether the deep harbor of Williamstown was a good thing or not. It was indisputable that the deep harbor brought the cruise ships, though, floating islands filled with people, who were changing the economy and nature of Saint Andrews as they were changing the economy of many Caribbean islands. At high season there would be up to half a dozen cruise ships in Williamstown Bay, and thousands of people waiting to disembark, to stretch their legs, to buy things. And the people of Saint Andrews grumbled, but they welcomed the visitors ashore, they sold them things, they fed them until they could eat no more and then they sent them back to their ships…
The Caribbeair plane landed with a bump that made Fat Charlie drop his magazine. He put it back into the seat pocket in front of him, walked down the steps and across the tarmac.
It was late afternoon.
Fat Charlie took a taxi from the airport to his hotel. During the taxi ride, he learned a number of things that had not been mentioned in the Caribbeair magazine. For example, he learned that music, real music, proper music, was country and western music. On Saint Andrews, even the rastas knew it. Johnny Cash? He was a god. Willie Nelson? A demigod.
He learned that there was no reason ever to leave Saint Andrews. The taxi driver himself had seen no reason ever to leave Saint Andrews, and he had given it much thought. The island had a cave, and a mountain, and a rainforest. Hotels? It had twenty. Restaurants? Several dozen. It contained a city, three towns, and a scattering of villages. Food? Everything grew here. Oranges. Bananas. Nutmegs. It even, the taxi driver said, had limes.
Fat Charlie said “No!” at this, mostly in order to feel like he was taking part in the conversation, but the driver appeared to take it as a challenge to his honesty. He slammed on the taxi’s brakes, sending the car slewing over to the side of the road, got out of the car, reached over a fence, pulled something from a tree and walked back to the car.
“Look at this!” he said. “Nobody ever tell you that I is a liar. What it is?”
“A lime?” said Fat Charlie.
“Exactly.”
The taxi driver lurched the car back into the road. He told Fat Charlie that the Dolphin was an excellent hotel. Did Fat Charlie have family on the island? Did he know anyone here?
“Actually,” said Fat Charlie, “I’m here looking for someone. For a woman.”
The taxi driver thought this was a splendid idea, since Saint Andrews was a perfect place to come if you were looking for a woman. This was, he elaborated, because the women of Saint Andrews were curvier than the women of Jamaica, and less likely to give you grief and heartbreak than the Trinis. In addition, they were more beautiful than the women of Dominica, and they were better cooks than you would find anywhere on Earth. If Fat Charlie was looking for a woman, he had come to the right place.
“It’s not just any woman. It’s a specific woman,” said Fat Charlie.
The taxi driver told Fat Charlie that this was his lucky day, for the taxi driver prided himself on knowing everyone on the island. If you spend your life somewhere, he said, you can do that. He was willing to bet that Fat Charlie did not know by sight all the people in England, and Fat Charlie admitted that this was in fact the case.
“She’s a friend of the family,” said Fat Charlie. “Her name is Mrs. Higgler. Callyanne Higgler. You heard of her?”
The taxi driver was quiet for a while. He seemed to be thinking. Then he said that, no, he hadn’t ever heard of her. The taxi pulled up in front of the Dolphin Hotel, and Fat Charlie paid him.
Fat Charlie went inside. There was a young woman on reception. He showed her his passport and the reservation number. He put the lime down on the reservation desk.
“Do you have any luggage?”
“No,” said Fat Charlie, apologetically.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. Just this lime.”
He filled out several forms, and she gave him a key and directions to his room.
Fat Charlie was in the bath when a knock came on the door. He wrapped a towel around his midriff. It was the bellman. “You left your lime in reception,” he said, and handed it to Fat Charlie.
“Thanks,” said Fat Charlie. He went back to his bath. Afterward, he went to bed, and dreamed uncomfortable dreams.
IN HIS HOUSE ON THE CLIFF TOP, GRAHAME COATS WAS ALSO having the strangest dreams, dark and unwelcome, if not actually unpleasant. He could not remember them properly when he woke, but he would open his eyes the next morning with a vague impression that he had spent the night stalking smaller creatures through the long grass, despatching them with a blow of his paw, rending their bodies with his teeth.
In his dreams, his teeth were weapons of destruction.
He woke from the dreams feeling disturbed, with the day slightly charged.
And, each morning, a new day would begin and here, only a week away from his old life, Grahame Coats was already experiencing the frustration of the fugitive. He had a swimming pool, true, and cocoa trees, and grapefruit and nutmeg trees; he had a full wine cellar and an empty meat cellar and media center. He had satellite television, a large DVD collection, not to mention art, thousands of dollars’ worth of art, all over the walls. He had a cook, who came in each day and cooked his meals, a housekeeper and a groundskeeper (a married couple who came in for a few hours each day). The food was excellent, the climate was—if you liked warm, sunny days—perfect, and none of these things made Grahame Coats as happy as he felt was his due.
He had not shaved since leaving England, which had not yet endowed him with a beard, merely given him a thin covering of the kind of facial hair that makes men look shifty. His eyes sat in panda-dark sockets, and the bags beneath his eyes were so dark as to appear to be bruises.
He swam in the pool once each day, in the morning, but otherwise avoided the sun; he had not, he told himself, amassed an ill-gotten fortune to lose it to skin cancer. Or to anything else at all.
He thought about London too much. In London, each of his favorite restaurants had a maître d‘ who called him by name and ensured he left happy. In London there were people who owed him favors, and there was never any difficulty in getting firs
t-night tickets, and for that matter in London there were theaters to have first nights in. He had always thought he would make a fine exile; he was starting to suspect that he had been wrong.
Needing someone to blame, he came to the conclusion that the entire affair was Maeve Livingstone’s fault. She had led him on. She had attempted to rob him. She was a vixen, a minx, and a hussy. She had deserved everything she had coming to her. She had gotten off easily. Should he be interviewed on television, he could already hear the bruised innocence in his voice as he explained that he had been defending his property and his honor from a dangerous madwoman. Frankly, it was some kind of miracle that he’d made it out of that office alive…
And he had liked being Grahame Coats. He was now, as always while he was on the island, Basil Finnegan, and it irked him. He didn’t feel like a Basil. His Basilhood had been hard-won—the original Basil had died as an infant, and had a birth-date close to Grahame’s own. One copy of the birth certificate, along with a letter from an imaginary clergyman, later, and Grahame possessed a passport and an identity. He had kept the identity alive—Basil had a solid credit history, Basil traveled to exotic places, Basil had bought a luxury house on Saint Andrews without ever seeing it. But in Grahame’s mind, Basil had been working for him, and now the servant had become the master. Basil Finnegan had eaten him alive.
“If I stay here,” said Grahame Coats. “I shall go mad.”
“What you say?” asked the housekeeper, duster in hand, leaning in at the bedroom door.
“Nothing,” said Grahame Coats.
“Sound like you say if you stay in you go mad. You ought to go for a walk. Walking good for you.”
Grahame Coats did not go for walks; he had people to do that for him. But, he thought, perhaps Basil Finnegan went for walks. He put on a broad-brimmed hat and exchanged his sandals for walking shoes. He took his cell phone, instructed the groundskeeper to come and get him when he called, and set out from the house on the cliff edge, heading toward the nearest town.