The Book of Lamps and Banners

by Elizabeth Hand

  After a minute, the youngest-looking skinhead leaned across the aisle to say something to one of the bearded guys, who laughed. As Canary Wharf’s towers disappeared behind us, a voice rang out from the other end of the car.

  “Friends, I have two children and nothing to feed them. If you can help, please…”

  A slight brown-skinned man stood at the rear of the train, white plastic bucket in one hand, head bowed as though afraid to look up. Beneath his nylon windbreaker, an oversize Wembley T-shirt hung almost to his knees. His filthy sneakers had no laces and flapped open as he walked down the aisle.

  “Please, we have nothing. Anything you can spare, please…”

  As in New York, most of the passengers ignored him. A white girl toting a laundry bag dropped some coins into the bucket as the man worked his way down the car. Two of the skinheads nudged each other and stood. Like pit bulls snapping to attention, the others removed their headphones, slid their mobiles into pockets, stood, and headed toward the panhandler.

  “Get the fuck out of here.”

  A barrel-chested skinhead towered over the slight man and pushed him toward the back of the car. I pulled up my hood, stood, and followed, slipping behind the skinhead.

  “Leave him alone,” I said.

  The skinhead turned. He did a double take when he saw my face just inches from his own. Few guys ever get the chance to gaze eye to eye with a six-foot androgyne in a bad mood. This one obviously didn’t know how lucky he was.

  “You fuck—” he spat. Before he could go on, two of the Swedes marched toward us.

  “Hey, man,” one said. He gestured to a woman who’d raised her mobile to record the fracas. “Calm down.”

  The train slowed, approaching the next station. The panhandler elbowed past his tormentors, dropping his bucket as he raced toward the doors. The skinheads watched him but didn’t move. Several more people had now whipped out their mobiles.

  I quickly turned and headed toward the back of the car. The last thing I wanted was to show up on anyone’s amateur video. The train pulled alongside the platform; the doors opened. The skinheads hopped out, shoved through passengers waiting to board, and disappeared. I saw no sign of the man in the Wembley T-shirt.

  But the three Svarlight guys stood on the platform, talking to a transit cop. One held the white plastic bucket: he pointed at the train, then turned to gesture toward the exits. The transit cop nodded, began speaking into his walkie-talkie, and headed in the direction the Swede had indicated. I had no way of knowing what the Svarlight crew had told him, but I suspected it wasn’t a complaint about neo-Nazis.

  The train’s doors closed. I sat. The car was now almost empty. The other passengers kept their heads down, and I did the same. After a short time, a recording announced the next stop: Rotherhithe.

  Chapter 15

  Much of this part of London had been destroyed during the Blitz. What remained was a combination of old brick warehouses and postwar construction, all repurposed as housing for those who could afford a view of the Thames and the gleaming forest of skyscrapers and ancient landmarks on the other side of the river: a desolate if striking palimpsest of a city devouring itself.

  For the hundredth time, my hands reached for my camera. I sighed, withdrew Gryffin’s mobile, and stared at the black screen. Digital photography held no magic for me. I’d rather shoot one perfect black-and-white photo than thousands I’d never look at. I dropped the mobile back in my pocket.

  I halted to lean against the railing above the river and gazed at the dark water far below. I could count the things that defined me on the fingers of one hand: photography, Quinn, booze, drugs. I’d lost half of them. I removed the Lagavulin from my bag and swallowed a mouthful, then another, waited for the familiar warmth to dissolve my anxiety.

  At last I turned to gaze at the foreshore. I could always buy another camera, or steal one. I had a few rolls of Tri-X left in my bag. Finding a place that still processed black-and-white film would be more of a challenge. But I might find a darkroom, too, if I looked hard enough.

  Quinn was another matter.

  Shoulders hunched against the cold, I crossed the street and continued walking. I scanned street signs and buildings for anything named for Darwin, a blue plaque or boutique or car park. Nada. Despite the dystopian surroundings, most of the pubs here valorized London’s maritime past with names and signs that favored anchors and compasses and clipper ships. I chose a place called the Bollard and walked inside.

  It was close to eleven, but the pub was still crowded. I elbowed past Barbour-jacketed drinkers, ordered a pint, and slipped along the bar counter to where several women stood chatting. I sipped my beer, scrolling through the email on Gryffin’s mobile in hopes he might have received something about the book, or Harold. Other than some special travel offers and announcements from Advanced Book Exchange, it was a wash. I turned to the woman beside me.

  “Hey, is there a place around here called the Darwin?”

  The woman frowned. “I don’t think so. Sylvie?”

  Her friends shook their heads. One pulled out her mobile, did a quick search, and came up with the same brasserie I had. I finished my pint and left, hit up two more pubs before I got lucky at an Indian takeaway.

  “Darwin? Not that I know of.” The guy behind the counter bagged me a kebab and an onion bhaji, took my money, and yelled into the kitchen. “Noni, is there a Darwin bar around here?”

  A young woman stepped out from the kitchen, wisps of curly hair escaping from a hot-pink hijab. “Darwin bar? I don’t think so.”

  “Not necessarily a bar,” I said. “Any place named Darwin.”

  “Darwin?” She wiped her hands on her apron, thought for a moment before nodding. “Oh yeah, there is. But it’s not a pub. It’s a boat.”

  The man behind the counter said, “She’s not looking for a boat. Are you?”

  I ignored him and turned to the woman. “Where’s the Darwin?”

  “Down that way.” She pointed out the front window. “Big piece of junk. You can’t miss it.”

  I thanked her and hurried out, eating my kebab and bhaji on the fly. When I’d finished, I crossed back to the river walk. A concrete barrier ran alongside the pedestrian way, separating me from the foreshore. It was high tide. A twenty-foot drop ended in black water and the bilious yellow wake churned up by a River Bus carrying passengers to Greenwich. Squat black barges cruised along with surprising speed. I squinted at them, trying to make out a name that might be DARWIN. If things had gone according to plan, Quinn and I would have been sequestered on one of those barges, already on our way to Greece.

  I wandered farther along the river walk. The wind carried the estuarine reek of exhaust fumes and dead fish, the roar of aircraft far overhead. I gulped more whiskey, stumbling on a chunk of broken concrete; called Quinn’s number again but disconnected before the voice mail kicked in.

  I rubbed my eyes, wondering if I should cut my losses and find a cheap hotel. Years ago my father had given me the number of an attorney friend, in case I ever found myself in real trouble. Maybe the time had finally come to call him.

  In the near distance, a shadowy bulk rose from the shore. As I drew near, I saw that it was a boat—a commercial fishing vessel of some kind, long retired from the looks of it. White paint flaked from its hull. Rusted sheet metal peeled from the stern, where rivets protruded from a makeshift repair job. A length of chain dangled from the aft deck, heavy enough to shackle an elephant. Below, murky water lapped at the base of scaffolding that held the boat upright. The smell of fuel was so strong I was surprised that the boat hadn’t been torched by a stray match. The vessel seemed out of place amid the gentrification: one of those vicious, red-eyed drunks who can’t be evicted from the street corner where they hurl abuse at passersby.

  A makeshift rope bridge extended from the bow to the seawall. An artificial Christmas tree stood on the small deck, along with several folding chairs and a plastic fuel tank. Light glimmered from a
porthole window. On the hull, barely visible in the shadows thrown by the seawall, faded words were painted in block letters:

  DARWIN’S FAULT

  LEIGH-ON-SEA

  Chapter 16

  After a quick look around, I tucked my bag under my arm and hoisted myself over the seawall railing. The rope gangway sagged beneath me as I scrambled across, until I reached the deck and clambered on board, ducking into the shadows by the door.

  Light fell through a grimy porthole. Through the pitted glass I could see the pilothouse, gutted of controls, and hear thrash metal. Stale cigarette smoke cut through the smells of piss and fetid water. I remained in the shadows, waiting for someone to appear in the doorway. When no one did, I counted to fifty, and knocked.

  Inside, the music fell silent. A face filled the porthole, and the metal door creaked open.

  A sixtyish white man stood in the doorway, his nimbus of gray hair aglow from the overhead light. A paint-stained sweatshirt hung loosely from his bony frame, and a lit cigarette dangled from fingers crosshatched with dirt and pale scars. Sun-worn face, sunken cheeks, a nose familiar with the wrong end of a fist or a barroom floor. One eye was a pure sea blue. Pale skin sheathed the other’s empty socket, the flesh drooping in soft, waxy-looking pockets.

  “Yeah?” He squinted at me with his good eye.

  “I’m looking for Quinn O’Boyle. Is he here?”

  The man took a drag from his cigarette, twisted his head like a bird’s to look me up and down with his one blue eye. “No one by that name.”

  “I’m a friend. Cass. Cass Neary. Has he been here or called or something?” I dug my fingernails into my hand to steady myself. “I thought you might know him.”

  “No one by that name,” he repeated. The door closed in my face.

  “Goddamn it.” I pounded on the steel frame. “Just talk to me!”

  Music blasted from inside, even louder than before. I tried the door handle—locked. Abruptly it turned in my grasp and the door opened. Someone else stood there, lankier than the first man and bare chested, glaring at the floor with bloodshot eyes.

  “Who the fuck is it?” He did a double take when he saw my boots, looked up into my face. “Cass?”

  He dragged me inside, kicking the door closed, pushed me against the wall, and ran his hands across his stubbled scalp, shaking with anger.

  “Goddamn it, Cassie, what the fuck happened? I told you to wait at Bruno’s place!”

  Before I could answer, he took my chin and lowered his face to mine, his fingers digging into the flesh as he kissed me. His mouth tasted of rust and ash, a sweeter undercurrent of beer and whiskey. He withdrew and I pressed my face against his bare chest, felt beneath my fingertips the ravaged map of scars there, the rope of puckered flesh that ran down his side and the imprint of the brand upon his left breast—three creatures whose entwined limbs and teeth formed at their center a human skull: the Gripping Beast.

  “Cassie.” He tilted my face up to his. “Jesus, what happened? Your hair…”

  “I needed a change.”

  “I like it.” He grinned, pinned me against the wall again, and traced a finger along my arm. “You look hot.”

  “Get a fecking room, O’Boyle.”

  The one-eyed man loomed behind Quinn, reached past us to throw the door’s dead bolt. Quinn lit a cigarette, pinched the match between his fingers, and dropped it into a beer can on the table.

  “Wink, this is Cass. We’ve known each other since we were kids. Cass, this is Wink. We’ve known each other since we were in Pentonville. When was that? ’Eighty-three?”

  “Nineteen eighty-four. My girl bailed us out, night before the wedding. Remember that?”

  “She came through.” Quinn sat at the galley table. “But she was wicked pissed.”

  Wink nodded. “I don’t blame her. All that blow was for our honeymoon.”

  “She was a bitch.” Quinn pushed a chair toward me. “What was her name? Reba?”

  “Rhonda.”

  “Right. Help me, Rhonda, help me get the hell out of jail.”

  Quinn laughed. He picked up a half-full bottle of Myer’s dark, sloshed a few inches into a grimy coffee mug, and handed it to me. Wink tugged down the window shades, went to a small refrigerator, and hooked two bottles of Bud between his fingers.

  “I’ll leave you two romantics,” he said, and stepped into the adjoining room.

  The thrash metal resumed, but at a lower volume. Quinn poured himself some Myer’s while I surveyed the room. A Formica-topped table and three folding chairs, boxes full of empty beer and liquor bottles, some nautical charts on the wall. I turned back to Quinn.

  “Who is he?”

  “Old friend.” Quinn took a final drag of his cigarette, his pale green eyes glittering. “So what the fuck happened?”

  I gave him the short version of what had gone down since he’d left me four days earlier in Canary Wharf, omitting the details as to what I was doing when Harold Vertigan was killed. Quinn listened, lit another cigarette, and smoked nervously, flicking ashes onto the floor. The roar of diesel engines rose from the river whenever a large boat passed, drowning out the chain-saw roar of Slipknot and Motörhead.

  Quinn’s gaze never left mine, his mouth twisted into a permanent, mirthless smile by two horizontal black lines tattooed on either side of it: relics of his time in Alaska, along with the three vertical red lines incised between his eyes. I’d asked him once what the lines signified.

  “They mean I killed a man.”

  Now the flickering fluorescent light turned his gaunt face into a mask as ominous as the image of the Gripping Beast. A four-day growth of gray stubble covered his skull and chin. As I poured myself another jolt of rum, he leaned across the table to press his fingers to my mouth.

  “Stop. My fucking head is going to explode. If you were a cat, you’d be on your sixth or seventh life by now.”

  I drank my rum. “Good thing I’m human.”

  “Jury’s still out on that one.”

  “So what the hell happened to you? You were supposed to be gone for three hours.”

  Quinn sighed, closing his eyes. “I ran into someone I know. Things got problematic.”

  He opened his eyes, and I was confronted by the same icy don’t-fuck-with-me gaze I’d first seen decades ago, when I’d photographed him holding a spoon over a lit candle in a Kamensic Village bedroom. When he didn’t continue, I asked, “What about Greece?”

  “What about Greece. Like I said, things got fucked up. Wink’s contact got detained in Marseilles, they found a bunch of dead refugees in the hold of his barge. So scratch that. I can think of seven guys here in London who’ll kill me if they find me. And that’s before Interpol enters the picture. Why I quit shaving. I oughta do what you did and dye my hair. Get tinted contact lenses.”

  He lurched to his feet, picked up the bottle of Myer’s. “I should never have left Iceland. Come on, I’m beat.”

  I followed him through the next room, where Wink sprawled on a vinyl couch surrounded by empty bottles, a laptop on his stomach. He stared at it with his Cyclops eye, riveted by a field of exploding Humvees.

  I followed Quinn down a metal ladder. Below, the only light came from an overhead fluorescent bulb. The cabin was barely ten feet wide and maybe twice as long, its walls pleached with mold. Nylon nets suspended from the ceiling held sprouting onions and potatoes. A faded school photograph of a young girl in a soccer uniform was taped above the metal sink. The air reeked of cigarette smoke and gasoline, with a pervasive note of burnt plastic. I didn’t want to think about what the wiring looked like.

  Opposite the galley, a door opened onto a tiny cabin, with clothes strewn on the floor.

  “That’s Wink’s berth.” Quinn pointed to a stained bedsheet that hung from the ceiling. “This is mine. Luxury quarters.”

  He pulled aside the sheet to reveal a pair of bunks, the top one crammed with tools and electrical equipment, a backpack I recognized as Quinn’s. A sleep
ing bag took up most of the lower bunk, where Quinn’s leather jacket hung from a nail. He tossed the jacket onto the upper bunk, took off his biker boots.

  “Make yourself at home.” He crawled into the lower bunk and lit a cigarette, its tip glowing like an emergency beacon.

  “Is that safe?” I pointed at the cigarette and set my bag on the top bunk.

  “None of it’s safe. Wink pays off someone on the local council so he can stay here, guy owes him a favor. They’ve been trying to get him out for years.”

  He took a drag on his cigarette, pinched it out, and flicked it into the near darkness. I peeled off my leather jacket and draped it over Quinn’s, removed my boots, and slid into the bunk beside him. There was barely room for both of us. He pulled me close, his breath warm against my cheek.

  “Damn it, Cassie,” he whispered. “I thought something bad happened to you.”

  “Something bad did happen to me.”

  He pressed his mouth to my temple. His tongue flicked at the star-shaped scar beside my eye as he unbuttoned my jeans. He slid his hand down my stomach, to the snarl of scar tissue left there by a zip knife when I was raped. He kissed me, then drew back to stare at me with his green-glass eyes.

  “You been fucking someone?”

  “Yeah. But that wasn’t something bad.”

  “Not as good as this, though…”

  He yanked the bedsheet drape across the opening to the bunk and tugged down my jeans. We fucked like we did as teenagers, with half our clothes on, covering each other’s mouths so we wouldn’t cry out. Later, Quinn cradled my cheek in his hand.

  “What is this, Cass?” he murmured.

  I ran my finger along his upper lip, a drop of blood where I’d kissed him. “What do you mean?”

  “All these years and we’re still like this. How come?”

  I kissed him gently. “Nobody else thinks Berlin is a better album than Transformer.”