“As to Replevin, we’re frankly of mixed opinion at the Yard. Some feel he’s only in it for, as they say, the æsthetics of the thing. I’m not much for modern poetry, but I know codes when I see them, and our Lamont seems to be using a particularly fiendish one. The cryptos have been on it around the clock, but so far they haven’t cracked it.”
“Is any of it being sent in clear? English? German?”
“Oh, aye, not to mention Russian, Turkish, Persian, Pashto, spot of Mountain Tadjik as well. Something going on out there, all right. We’re not allowed, of course, to visit the premises officially, but we wondered if, in light of all this Shambhala to-do, it being up your street here at the T.W.I.T., and you personally enjoying a freedom from legal constraint we can only dream about . . . well, you see.”
“If it was me? I’d just break open a crate and see what’s inside.”
“And find it full of precious Chinese rubbish, and next thing I’m down in Seven Dials on the graveyard watch poking me torch into dustbins. Perhaps not.” He regarded the ruinous aftermath of his breakfast. “Don’t suppose there’d be anything like a nice dish of baked beans on these premises? There never do seem to be any.”
“Something religious, I think.” Lew waved his thumb at a sign over the entrance to the kitchen which read , “Avoid beans”—according to Neville and Nigel a direct quote from Pythagoras himself.
“Well. I’d better finish up this spotted dick, then, hadn’t I.”
That wasn’t all that was on the Inspector’s mind, but it took a Yarmouth bloater and several currant buns for him to get to it. “I’m supposed to reiterate once again how little enthusiasm there is around the Yard for your continued interest in the so-called Headingly bomb subject.”
“Closing in on him at last, are you?”
“We’ve several very promising leads, and the investigation just now’s at a particularly sensitive stage.”
“Sounds familiar.”
“Yes, and who’s to say we mightn’t’ve had him by now, too, if not for these unauthorized dilettantes all pottering about and queering the pitch.”
“You don’t say. How many of us are there?”
“One. It only seems like a dozen of you.”
“But he knows I’m after him. Thought you Yard folks would’ve appreciated having some kind of sacrificial goat out there, to draw him in, maybe force him into a mistake.”
“Full of yourself today.”
“Ordinarily I’d be full of my breakfast, but it don’t look like there’s much left.”
“Yes well if you don’t mind I believe I shall take a bit of this ‘shape’ here, unusual color I must say, what’s it made of I wonder mgghhmmbg. . . .”
“Maybe you don’t want to know.”
At that moment an acolyte came in with a message for Lew to report with all dispatch to Grand Cohen Nookshaft’s office. Inspector Aychrome industriously wiped his face, sighed tragically, and prepared to withdraw to the Embankment again, and his chill home-element of grimy brickwork, blue lamps, and the smell of horses.
The Grand Cohen received Lew in official regalia with an emphasis on lamé surfaces and faux ermine trimming. On his head, in some vivid shade of magenta, with gold Hebrew lettering embroidered on the front, perched what would have been a yarmulke except for its high crown, dented Trilby style fore and aft. “Any last-minute toadying, lad, better get it in while you can, coz me term’s almost up, yes it’ll be back to Associate Cohen for little Nick Nookshaft, a truly blessed release, and the turn of the next poor ‘sap’ to enjoy this thankless groveling before the contempt of a High Directorate who only go on reducing one’s budgets year after year, while like missionaries sent onto hostile shores, we are left to God’s whim, and back beyond the sea, amid the pleasures of Home, those who signed our edicts of exile roar and frolic.”
“Sure sounds like somethin’s cooking around here,” said Lew.
“Ever so frightfully sorry,” eyes downcast. “You reproach me.”
“Naw, Cohen, I’d never—”
“Oh yes, yes, nor would you be the first. . . . You see what a state I’m in. . . . Brother Basnight, we would not have wished to drag you into this Shambhala business, but with hostilities imminent, perhaps by now under way, we shall need everyone on station. Inspector Aychrome has briefed you on Lamont Replevin, but there are aspects of this the Met cannot appreciate, and so it falls to me to add that Replevin has come into possession of a map of Shambhala.”
Lew whistled. “Which everybody’s after.”
“But makes no sense unless observed through a device called a Paramorphoscope.”
“Want me to do a hoist?”
“If Replevin knows what he has, then he’s already moved it to safety. But he may be operating from an entirely different set of premises.”
“Guess that means I’ll have to go have a gander. Can you give me an idea what I’m looking for?”
“We do have a similar map of Bukhara, thought to be from the same period.” He produced a sheet on which had been reproduced a design that Lew could make no sense of at all.
After a quick consultation in Kelly’s Suburban Dictionary, Lew found his hat and was out the door. By the time he got to the railway station, evening was already gathering, along with a proper winter fog, which went on thickening, drops of water condensing on everyone’s hat, producing a shine that to certain nervous constitutions approached the sinister. The first pale husbands of the evening stood waiting for suburban trains never meant to arrive at any destination on the rail map—as if, to be brought to any shelter this night, one would first have to step across into some region of grace hitherto undefined. Lew entered a compartment, slouched in a seat, pulled his hatbrim over his eyes, the wheels were ponderously cranked and he was off for the remote and horrible town of Stuffed Edge.
THE SUBURBS OUT this way tended to be corrupted versions of the Mother City, Wenlets combining the worst of village eccentricity and big-city melancholia. Descending to the platform at Stuffed Edge, Lew found a prospect bleak and hushed, all but unmodified by vegetation . . . a scent of daylight oil hung over the scene, as if phantom motor vehicles operated on some other plane of existence, close but just invisible. Streetlamps had been lit up, he guessed, for hours. Far away, down by the police station, a dog was howling at a moon no one could see, perhaps imagining that, summoned repeatedly enough, it would appear with food of some kind.
Elflock Villa turned out to be a semi-detached residence of singular monstrosity, painted a vivid yellowish green which had refused to dim at the same rate as the day. Even before he got inside, Lew could smell the coal-gas—“the smell,” as he had put it in more than one field report, “of Trouble.” If any of the neighbors had noticed, none were in evidence—indeed, strangely for this suburban hour, very few windows hereabouts seemed to be lighted at all.
Having inserted a Vontz’s Universal Pick, before which the door bolt, as if having read his mind, smoothly withdrew, Lew stepped into the overwhelming smell of alchemized coke and a suite of equivocal shadows, whose walls were covered with Lincrusta-Walton embossed in Asian motifs, not all of them considered respectable. Stationed everywhere, not only in the niches intended for them but also, like obtrusive guests, in the dining-room, the kitchen, even (perhaps especially) the lavatories, life-size sculpture groups exhibited the more disreputable of classical and biblical themes, among which bondage and torture seemed particularly to recur, the bodies of the subjects athletically perfect, materials not limited to white marble, drapery arranged to reveal and arouse. No degree of the allegorical avoided an excuse to present an impudently hipshot youth, or a captive maiden in some appealing form of restraint, naked and charmingly disheveled, in her face an awareness dawning of the delights awaiting her in the as-yet-unilluminated deeps of her torment and so forth.
As silently as possible, Lew crossed an expanse of black floor-tiles, each surrounded by silvery grouting, some composite with that soft a shine to it. The tiles, a c
ombination of scalene polygons of different shapes and sizes, had a radiant blackness which likewise failed to be onyx or jet. Visitors of a mathematical bent had purported to see repeating patterns. Others, doubting its solidity, were often afraid to walk upon the silvery web . . . as if Something had built it . . . Something that waited . . . that would know exactly when to cause it to give way beneath the unwary visitor. . . .
Lew descended to the kitchen, the businesslike beam of his Apotheosis Sparkless Torch sweeping the gloom until it revealed a human form, hanging from the ceiling by one foot beside the ominously hissing stove, just like the figure in the Tarot card, except that its head rested halfway in the open oven door, where remnants of an exploded pork pie, almost certainly owing to a failure to include steam-vents in its crust, horribly coated the oven’s interior. The hanging man’s face was partly covered by a hinged mask of magnalium, connected to the oven by gutta-percha hoses. In the process of shutting off the gas and opening windows, Lew discovered that the “corpse” was breathing after all. “I say, would you mind letting me down?” it groaned, gesturing toward the ceiling, where Lew saw a block-and-tackle arrangement whose hoisting line ran over to a cleat on the wall. Lew undid the line and carefully lowered Lamont Replevin (for it was he) to the smart linoleum flooring. Removing the metal device from his face, Replevin crawled over to a nearby tank of pressurized oxygen, also equipped with a breathing mask, and administered himself a volume of the useful element.
Upon tactful inquiry, Lew learned that, far from desiring any premature exit, Replevin was enjoying a regular daily broadcast of the ongoing drama The Slow and the Stupefied, currently a great rage among the gas-head community.
“You hear it? See it, smell it?”
“All of those and more. Via the medium of Gas a carefully modulated set of waves travels from the emissions facility to us, the audience, through the appropriate hoses to the receiving-mask you have seen, which one must of course wear over ears, nose, and mouth.”
“Have you ever considered,” the question emerging not as gently as Lew had intended, “eh, that is . . . gas-poisoning? some kind of . . . hallucination . . .”
Seeming only now to notice Lew, Replevin stared, a chill glint in his eye. “Who are you, by the way? What are you doing here?”
“Smelled gas, thought there might be some danger.”
“Yes yes but that wasn’t the question was it?”
“Oh. Sorry.” Out with one of several phony business cards he always kept handy, “Pike’s Peak Life and Casualty. I’m Gus Swallowfield, Senior Underwriter.”
“I’m quite satisfied with my coverage at the moment.”
“For fire, I’m sure, with all this gas around—but now how about burglary.”
“Burglary insurance? how odd, I must say.”
“At the moment most theft policies are written in the U.S., but there’s a great future here in Great Britain. You saw how easily I strolled in here—and I got a pretty good idea of your household effects on the way in. In less than half an hour, that could all be inside a pantechnicon and rolling away to be resold at any of a dozen markets, well before tomorrow’s dawn. You know the business, sir—a legitimate bill of sale and no one can be charged with receiving.”
“Hmm. Well, come along. . . .” Replevin conducted Lew upstairs, across the shimmering web of the foyer flooring, into a private suite of offices, dominated by a lurid sculpture executed in a purplish stone streaked with several colors of the red family.
“Pavonazzetto,” Replevin said, “also known as Phrygian marble, once believed to take its coloring from the blood of the Phrygian youth Atys, the one you see right there, in fact—driven mad through the jealousy of the demigod Agdistis, he is shown in the act of castrating himself, thus to be presently conflated with Osiris, not to mention Orpheus and Dionysus, and become a cult figure among the ancient Phrygians.”
“Sure took things seriously back then, didn’t they?”
“This one? all too contemporary I fear, The Mutilation of Atys, by Arturo Naunt, Chelsea’s own, shocking the bourgeoisie since 1889. If you’d like to see some genuine Phrygian pieces, there are plenty of those about.”
Among bridle hardware, fragments of silk from Chinese Turkestan, seals both ceramic and carved in jade—“Here for example—a Scythian koumiss vessel, third century B.C. You can clearly see the Greek influence, especially in the friezework. And almost certainly an image of Dionysus.”
“Worth a few what you call quid.”
“You’re not a collector, I take it.”
“I can appreciate it’s old. How do you find stuff like this?”
“Thieves, grave-robbers, museum officials both here and abroad. Do I sense moral disapproval?”
“Way out of my line, but I could frown a little, if you’d like.”
“It’s a gold rush out there now,” Replevin said. “The Germans in particular are everywhere. Shipping things out by the caravan-load. Naturally now and then something will fall off a camel.”
“What’s this?” Lew nodded at a scroll on the desk opened to a specific couple of feet, as if someone had been consulting it. Replevin immediately grew shifty, which Lew pretended not to notice. “Late Uyghur. Found its way to Bukhara, like so many of these pieces. I fancied the design, interesting complexity, a series of wrathful deities from Tantric Buddhism would be my guess, though depending on the angle you hold it at, sometimes it doesn’t look like anything at all.”
He might as well have been screaming “Be suspicious!” To Lew it looked like symbols, words, numbers, maybe a map, maybe even the map of Shambhala they wanted so much to see back at Chunxton Crescent. He beamed vaguely and pretended to shift his attention to a statuette of a bronze horse and rider. “Would you look at that! Mighty handsome critter, ain’t it?”
“They were horsemen above all,” said Replevin. “Your American cowboys would have felt entirely at home.”
“You wouldn’t mind if . . .” Lew producing a tiny German hand camera and removing the lens cover.
“Please do,” after hesitating just long enough for Lew to understand that he had been appraised for harmless idiocy and pronounced genuine.
“O.K. if we turn up the gaslight?”
Replevin shrugged. “It’s only raw light, isn’t it.”
Lew brought over a few electric lamps as well, and began taking snapshots, making sure that any he took of the scroll included other pieces, just for cover. He moved out of the offices to shoot some more, keeping up a professional patter, for misdirection’s sake.
“Hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but hanging upside down with your head in the oven and the gas on? taken strictly from a risk point of view, I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t inquire how you were fixed for life insurance.”
Replevin was not reluctant to bend Lew’s ear on the topic of Gasophilia, which could be said to date from Schwärmer’s epochal discovery that gas-pressure, analogous to voltage in an electromagnetic system, might be modulated to convey information.
“Waves in a timeless stream of Gas unceasing, illuminating-gas in particular, though including as well waves of sound, which might, as in that mainstay of Victorian science, the Sensitive Flame, modulate waves of light. To the cognizant nose in particular, the olfactory sector—or smell, as it is known, can be a medium for the most exquisite poetry.”
“Sounds almost religious, sir.”
“Well, out in south India, if you go into a particular sort of temple, for instance the one at Chidambaram, into the Hall of a Thousand Pillars, asking to see their god Shiva, what they’ll show you is an empty space, except that it’s not really what we mean when we say ‘empty,’ of course it is empty, but in another way, one that’s not at all the same as nothing being there, if you follow me—”
“Sure.”
“They worship it, this empty space, it’s their highest form of worship. This volume, or I suppose nonvolume, of pure Akaša—being the Sanskrit for what we’d call the Æther
, the element closest to the all-pervading Atman, from which everything else has arisen—which in Greek obviously then becomes ‘Chaos,’ and so down to van Helmont in his alchemist’s workshop, who being Dutch writes the opening fricative as a G instead of a Chi, giving us Gas, our own modern Chaos, our bearer of sound and light, the Akaša flowing from our sacred spring, the local Gasworks. Do you wonder that for some the Gas Oven is worshipped at, as a sort of shrine?”
“I don’t. But then I never didn’t wonder either.”
“Am I annoying you, Mr. Swallowfield?”
In Lew’s experience of English English, this usually meant he was about to overstay his welcome. “All done here. I’ll bring these back to the office, we’ll write you up a sample policy, feel free to make any changes you like, or to say hell no altogether.” And he withdrew again out into the empty suburban lamplight, the stridently unpopulated evening.
One day, the day he would be some time coming to terms with his idiocy in not seeing the obvious approach of, Kit was summoned to the local branch of the Bank of Prussia in the Weenderstraße and beckoned into its back regions by Herr Spielmacher, the International Manager, hitherto friendly enough but today, how would you put it, a little distant. He held a thin sheaf of papers.
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