The Vesuvius Club

by Mark Gatiss

  ‘My God!’ I breathed. ‘Tiepolo!’

  I raced to the exit door of the carriage and banged the heel of my hand against the woodwork as the vehicle clanked with painful tardiness into the station.

  ‘What is it?’ cried Bella concernedly.

  I craned my neck to see the Duce Tiepolo’s bear-like figure receding into the crowd.

  ‘Forgive me, Bella,’ I yelled, wrenching open the door. I turned and addressed the young man, Victor. ‘Sir, would you be kind enough to escort this lady back to the Vesuvio Hotel? Can’t explain now!’

  I was just aware of Bella’s vaguely baffled expression and young Victor raising his hat as I tore from the funicular and out into the station. Barging through the crowd of tourists, I clattered down towards the plain, just in time to see Tiepolo slip into the back of an expensive-looking motorcar which chugged away in a cloud of yellow dust.

  I returned to my hotel and changed into evening dress for my appointment with Jackpot, dashing off a note of apology to Bella. I found a pleasant café by the quayside where I downed a few kirs. The Duce Tiepolo was here in Naples! And to risk recapture he must have a very good reason. But what connection did he have to Mrs Knight, her first husband, Morraine, and, by extension, to the professors? That old Quibble was in danger I was now certain but why, if Naples were the locus of this mystery, had he not already been done away with? Perhaps he was the source of the danger! Yet his reaction to the deaths of his old colleagues had been genuine enough. Quibble was no dissembler. ‘You want to bring all that up again,’ he had raged. All what? There had been no word from Unmann regarding the import/export business of the curious undertakers but here, at last, was a lead of sorts. This young man Charlie Jackpot appeared to know something. I clapped my topper to my head and set off for the ancient heart of the city.

  The steady chirrup of insects kept me company as I walked the gas-lit avenues of Decumano Maggiore, its cobbles worn into ruts by the traffic of the centuries.

  The premises on Via Santa Maria di Costantinopoli were distinguishable from their low and unhealthy-looking neighbours only by the ruby-red light above the lintel. The gas-flame behind the cheaply stained shade shuddered like a rheumy, winking eye.

  I made my way softly down the steps to the door. It bore no knocker, nor number of any kind. I had raised my hand when it groaned open, seemingly of its own accord. Shudder not, reader, this is not a spook story! Whatever agency lay behind the door was most assuredly human.

  Actually, I must immediately qualify that remark as what lay behind the door appeared to be a monkey. In the light of the sallow gas-jets I could make out poorly papered walls weeping with damp and the stooped figure of whom I spoke: a curious man with very long arms, dressed in green velvet plush. His hair, scraped from a centre parting en brosse, stank of oil.

  He cocked his pallid face to one side by way of an interrogative. What should I say? Was his master at home?

  I took off my top hat with as much nonchalance as I could muster and decided to be bold. ‘I understand that a young man of my acquaintance is expecting me. We’re old pals and I haven’t spoken to him for some time. I wonder –’

  The little creature seemed uninterested in my story, however. He moved to the back of the dismal hallway, nodding absently, and drew aside a disreputable-looking curtain.

  The monkey-man smiled grimly, his mouth like a wound. ‘Si, si. Uno ragazzo.’

  I was spared any more of his charming conversation, however, by the sudden appearance of Mr Jackpot himself from behind the drawn curtain. He was wearing a slovenly jacket and trousers, both too big for him, the pantaloons held to his hips by a thick brown belt and a good two inches shy of his stripe-socked shins. In stark contrast, his collarless shirt seemed clean and there was a white rosebud in his lapel.

  ‘Hullo,’ he said.

  I gave a little bow.

  Jackpot smiled lop-sidedly, his large lips sending dimpled echoes over his cheek. ‘Won’t you come in, sir?’

  He gestured into the darkness. I followed without a word. The tiny doorman melted away into the gloom – for all I knew, he had gone back into the wallpaper from which he had sprung.

  I was ushered into a small, square chamber, underlit and overheated. Perhaps Jackpot had become accustomed to his master’s tastes. The décor seemed all of a piece with the grisly entranceway; there was a brass-framed bed containing a stained mattress, and a jug and wash-bowl on a spindly table. On a Turkey rug sat a drab chaise-longue of surpassing vileness. A miserable fire sputtered in the grate, damp sea-coal popping and spitting against faded Dutch tiles.

  ‘How nice,’ I said at last.

  The boy closed the door behind me and took my hat, coat and gloves like the good and faithful servant he was.

  I lit a cigarette to disguise the smell and tossed one to Jackpot who ignited his from the fire. Moving to the sofa, I flapped aside the tails of my coat, prior to sitting. I stopped with my rear end halfway to the upholstery. ‘May I?’

  ‘Of course, sir,’ said Charlie. He hovered by the door a moment, wiping his hands over the greasy fabric of his jacket. Then: ‘Might I join you, sir?’

  I was already lounging back as if I owned the place. I waved a hand and bid him do so.

  As he sat down next to me, I pushed him sideways with my leg and, grabbing at his cropped hair, pulled back his head until he yelled in pain. His fag dropped to the dirty floor.

  I smiled. ‘I believe you have something to tell me.’

  Charlie scowled and fixed me with a penetrating and vaguely unnerving stare. I tugged his head back still further but he had stopped yelling. ‘That won’t get you anywhere,’ he murmured in a low voice.

  ‘Then perhaps this will,’ I cried, grabbing my pearl-handled revolver from beneath my shirt. I pressed the cold barrel to the youth’s temple and glared at him. ‘Now. What precisely do the initials VC mean to you?’

  But still he seemed unmoved. I watched as his Adam’s apple bobbed slowly up and down.

  Charlie Jackpot just smiled.

  Irritated by my failure to intimidate him, I moved the revolver slowly down his smooth face and pushed the barrel between his lips. Charlie’s very blue eyes regarded me levelly over the glinting gunmetal.

  I withdrew the pistol from his mouth with ill-grace.

  ‘There now,’ said Charlie with a smirk. ‘Isn’t this nicer?’

  Mr Jackpot turned his huge eyes on me in a kind of mute enquiry. A moment later he put his hand on my thigh.

  Well, what was I to do? For the well-bred gentleman there was surely only one recourse. I fucked him.

  XIII

  L.B. TO V.C.

  CHARLIE Jackpot had that annoying knack of looking ravishing even in sleep. He lay stretched over the burst stuffing of the chaise, starkers except for his striped socks. Whatever these had once possessed by way of elastic had long since perished and they hung slackly over his white shins like discarded caterpillar pupae.

  For myself, I sat on a creaking chair, also in the buff, relishing the gorgeous glow of the fire as I contemplated this most recent act of naughtiness. You are shocked, are you not? Or, perhaps, reading this in some distant and unimaginably utopian future like that funny little man Mr Wells would have us believe in, you are not shocked at all! Fact is, Lucky Lucifer here has still more secrets. My arsenal is formidable – a sentence which comes across more interestingly in a French accent.

  As you know, there is no service I am unprepared to render for King and country, and I am not averse to a pretty face and a pretty rump, whether they be man’s or woman’s (I draw the line at beasts, unlike at least one member of the Cabinet). It is the prerogative of the secret agent to be (and to have!) whatever he fancies, don’t you agree? This is not a privilege extended to the population at large, as I found when I was discovered in a house off the Bow Road – the incident that brought me to the attention of Joshua Reynolds. The old dear helped extricate me from that spot of bother but saw it as a very useful way
of getting me on to his payroll. In the yellow-backed novels it is known as blackmail.

  Images are removed here

  You must remember that London was in a bit of a panic, with the recent exigencies of Mr O.F.O’F.W. Wilde so fresh in the memory, and J.R. had me by the unmentionables. The compensation was that my divers assassinations took me all over the globe where the love that dared not speak its name was positively encouraged to bellow from the rooftops. Such as in old Napoli, it seemed.

  Still, it was a dangerous game and I was in no great hurry to do two years’ hard labour just for a frolic with some dolly renter.

  Charlie opened a sleepy eye (exhausted, poor thing) and smiled his simian smile. Reaching over to my discarded coat, I retrieved my cigarette case and lit a fag for myself and then for him, padding naked over the cheap carpet to the chaise and delicately inserting the cigarette between his kiss-crushed lips. Charlie sucked in the smoke as though his life depended on it and let it rise over his mouth like the curly tips of a ghostly moustache.

  ‘Ta,’ he said softly.

  ‘How much do I owe you?’

  ‘Owe me?’

  ‘For services rendered.’

  The boy dragged on the cigarette. ‘My pleasure.’

  I bowed my head. ‘Then, tomorrow, you must at least allow me to buy you a bun.’

  Charlie draped himself across my lap with his knees up. Gazing into my face he idly scratched his balls. I could feel his hot feet against my thigh. ‘’Spect you’re wondering why I was so forward with you,’ he said at last.

  ‘Forward?’

  ‘You know. This evening at the old fella’s place.’

  I blew smoke into his face.

  ‘Young men often throw themselves at me. I’ve come to regard it as something of a burden.’

  ‘I’d seen you before.’ He grinned.

  ‘Really? At Ascot? Windsor? I was in Mentone last summer, perhaps we met there?’

  He scowled again, rather pleasingly, and wiped at his nose. ‘Do you know where you are?’

  ‘Yes. A filthy knocking shop for undiscerning tourists.’

  Charlie got to his feet and perched on the edge of the table, crossing one foot over the other. ‘No, no. There’s a little more to it than meets the eye.’

  I grunted sceptically. In my experience there’s very rarely more to these places than meets the eye.

  ‘This one’s different,’ he said quickly. ‘Better even than that big yellow house in Islington.’

  That was where he’d first spotted me! A Hallowe’en Masque held by a very pretty couple called Flora and Walter Paste. I had come as the Prince of Darkness (of course) and come across a fetching Succubus in very tight fleshings. It had been a night of grand indiscretion. Lawks. No wonder Jackpot been so damned impudent at Quibble’s.

  ‘It’s supposed to be strictly members only but I know a trick or two. Get your togs on.’

  ‘I am not in the habit of obeying orders.’

  ‘All right. But it’s the only way you’re gonna find out about the VC.’

  I pulled up my braces. ‘Very well. Shall we get on?’

  Charlie dressed quickly with the abandon of one who cares little for his appearance. Curbing my natural instinct to spend at least an hour getting back into my clothes I graciously allowed Charlie to help me with my collar studs and cuffs. I shrugged on my cut-away and, moments later, looking only a little the worse for wear, followed him back out into the corridor.

  Several identical doors studded the shoddy walls, plaster hanging like rotten cloth in the spaces in between. The place reeked of damp. There was no sign of the ape-like doorman.

  Charlie walked on ahead, ignoring these doors, all of which undoubtedly led to similar bleakly furnished rooms.

  As we advanced I became aware that we seemed to be moving almost imperceptibly but inexorably downwards. Also, the corridor’s decoration stabilized so that smooth expanses of crimson wall began to emerge, as though we were travelling along an artery and had left behind some morbid and diseased junction.

  I flipped my watch from my waistcoat. Nearly two o’clock in the morning. From ahead of us came a curious subdued hubbub. Music. Chatter. What I can only call carousing.

  We had come to the end of our journey. Before us stood a massive set of ebony doors. They looked very old indeed, banded in iron and carved into grotesque, leering faces.

  Charlie gave me a strange smile and then hammered on the doors, like some scruffy Black Rod. The doors shuddered open. I caught a vague impression of a hulking doorman with whom Charlie exchanged either words or a kiss. Then I was ushered through.

  Beyond the doors was a vision of Hell.

  Don’t fret. It is Lucifer’s domain, after all.

  The chamber we had entered was very large and lit by dim gas-light. A series of swooping arches stretched away into the darkness and I realized, dimly, that we must be in some kind of adapted tunnel system running right under the roadway above. The walls were expensively rendered in a brilliant display of the art nouveau, black and gold tendrils curling like some monstrous plant from floor to ceiling.

  Tapestries and great swathes of scarlet cloth billowed overhead like the skirts of a giantess. Upon them was wrought, in (well, exquisite is not quite the word) well-observed detail, classical pornography of the most astonishing variety. Priapic old lechers pursued virgins with a passion around a witches’ sabbat, dominated by a frightening goat-headed Devil. Girlish youths and Rubens-esque ladies formed a frame around scenes of Caligulan excess, where satyrs had their way with women deprived of their togas, and centaurs carried off drunken revellers.

  The embroidered shenanigans, however, were as nothing to what was being enacted beneath them.

  Flashes of colour rose up out of the gloom; male and female faces fixed in orgasmic relish, oil-slicked hair bobbing over a sea of unbuttoned britches, silken knickerbockers flung up from the mêlée like flags of surrender. The stench of absinthe and tobacco was overwhelming.

  I glanced at Charlie Jackpot but his expression was unreadable in the murk. Of course my overwhelming emotion was one of horror. Not at the extraordinary outrages being committed in the name of love all about me, of course, but at the dreadful, unarguable fact that such a place existed and it would take me four days throwing up over the side of a steamer to get to it! What price my poor Pomegranate Rooms now?

  Charlie pushed his way through the fleshy miasma, kicking aside copulating couples, until he found us a kind of ottoman. The pair he dislodged from this with the toe of his boot rolled off on to the floor with hardly a murmur, locked together like the jaws of a ferret.

  I leaned back against the cushioned velvet. Charlie disappeared for a moment and then returned with a battered silver tray, bottles and glasses crammed upon it up to its tarnished edge. Pouring me some kind of hideous brandy, he gulped down most of a pint of porter and wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

  ‘You work in shifts, then?’ I pondered.

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘I was just wondering how you find time to look after Sir Emmanuel. It must be exhausting to wash dishes and then come on to this place.’

  He giggled. ‘I like my work.’

  I drank the brandy as swiftly as I could so it didn’t have time to touch the inside of my mouth.

  Charlie leaned closer until his lips brushed my ear. ‘I’ll tell you it all, Mr Box. But you have to promise to get me out of here. Set me up.’

  ‘I can make no assurances,’ I said, my attention distracted momentarily by the sight of a Negro youth in a guardsman’s uniform merrily tossing himself off over the patrons to our left. ‘Not unless you have something of real import to impart.’

  ‘That I do. See, I hear things,’ murmured Charlie, darkly. ‘They don’t know that I work up at the house as well as here.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  There was a swish of skirts close by. I was conscious of a scent of mimosa and suddenly someone was standing right at m
y elbow.

  ‘Buonasera, Charlie.’

  The low voice belonged to a girl of middling height, exceptionally slim, wearing only an ivory corset and mustard-coloured stockings. Her long auburn hair was piled high and interlaced with flowers, crowning a face of surpassing loveliness; almond-shaped eyes heavily lined in kohl.

  ‘Venus!’ cried Charlie delightedly. He pulled the girl on to his lap and kissed her fiercely, running his hand up and down her stockinged leg. She adjusted herself in his embrace and cast a furtive glance to me.

  ‘Who ees this?’ she asked in the same seductive whisper. Her accent was as thick as tomato sauce.

  Charlie grinned. ‘This is Mr Box. Mr Box, meet Venus.’

  I gave a little bow. Venus proffered a painted hand. I kissed the middle knuckles, taking care to let the tip of my tongue linger a moment. It seemed the form in these environs.

  Venus’s gaudily rouged lips puckered and she looked down, all abashed, the little minx. I had the queerest feeling that we’d met before.

  ‘You like-a ma place, Signor Box?’ she said with a half-smile.

  My eyes widened. ‘Your place, my dear? Well, you do surprise me. Yes. Yes, it’s quite something. What do you call it?’

  It was Charlie who answered, fixing me with a meaningful stare and taking a plug of his porter. ‘This? This is the Vesuvius Club.’

  Well, of course I noticed. Vesuvius Club. V.C.! Not the Verdigris Collective, not the Verdi Cabal, not the Victoria Cross and not the bloody Venomous Centipede. The Vesuvius Club! K to V.C. Poor old Poop must have known of this place!

  ‘Is-a something wrong, Signor Box?’ cooed Venus.

  I shook my head to clear it. ‘Not a bit, my dear. It’s just that Mr Jackpot and myself have some…business to conclude…’

  Venus put one hand on her hip and smiled. ‘I never stand in thee way of custom, eh? Perhaps you would be more comfortable in ma private quarters?’

  I glanced at Charlie and he nodded.

  ‘How kind,’ I cooed. ‘Will you lead the way?’