Damien, in that respect, could almost admire them.
In every other respect he abhorred them.
The Orphans bad-eyed him as he entered the shop. Damien didn't avert his gaze, neither did he stare back. He gave them a level, measured look that said they had nothing to fear from him as long as he had nothing to fear from them.
Mr Ho, behind his unbarred counter, greeted Damien with an ebullient wave.
'Mr Scrase.'
'Mr Ho.'
'How can I help you this fine day?'
'Just some cigarettes.'
'You've given up.'
'Not that I recall.'
'I could swear, last month you told me never to sell you another packet. You made me vow.'
'Well, I've changed my mind.'
'Don't tell me. You've failed to get back together with that lady of yours.'
'You can read me like a book.'
Mr Ho shrugged. 'She was the reason you took up smoking again the last time. You said the other day you had hopes of a reunion. Now you're buying cigarettes. It doesn't take a genius to work it out.'
'It's a tense time for me generally, Mr Ho,' Damien said, with a meaningful emphasis.
Mr Ho took the hint. 'Fair enough. Say no more. It's Pedigree Milds, isn't it?'
'Ho ho, Mr Ho.'
'No, of course not. Only Family-independent brands for you. Which narrows it down a bit.' Mr Ho reached round and took a pack off the shelf behind him. The carton was festooned with Cantonese ideograms. 'A twenty-pack of Parent Nation. China's finest. I'm afraid import duty has gone up again.'
Damien took the cigarettes off him. 'Can't be helped. Anyway, I don't mind. All in a good cause.'
'Yes, China,' said Mr Ho, with a sardonic glint in his eye. 'The only real democracy in the world. Family-free for over half a century. A true paradise. I can't wait to return there.'
'Oh come on, it's not that bad.'
'Take it from me, Mr Scrase, China is a shit-hole. I know it offends you principles, but it's true. I couldn't wait to get out of there. Nothing works. Nothing gets done. Political corruption is off the scale.'
'And this country's better?'
'It's not worse.'
Damien remained resolutely unconvinced. He knew China wasn't perfect but it was trying its hardest. A decade after ousting its Families, it was a country still struggling to find its feet. He was sure that, in time, it would succeed. China was an experiment. It was setting the pattern which, one day, the rest of the world would follow.
'Let's agree to differ,' he said.
'Fair enough,' said Mr Ho. 'Anything else I can get you?'
'Box of matches. Oh, and would you have latex gloves?'
'Latex gloves?' Mr Ho raised an insinuating eyebrow.
'Don't ask.'
'It just so happens that the All-Day Emporium does stock latex gloves. You mean the disposable type, I take it. They're down the household aisle. If you want, I can get them for you...'
'No, I can do it.'
'That's it. That's the aisle. A little bit further down. Yes, there you are, on your left. No, your other left. Look up now. Yes, there. Directly in front of your nose.'
On his way back to the counter with the box of gloves Damien heard the chime of the electric bell over the shop door. A moment later he saw Mr Ho's welcoming-shopkeeper expression curdle into distaste. He turned in the direction Mr Ho was looking.
Three of the Orphans had come in and were standing slumped, hands in pockets, each pretending to examine a different display of groceries. They could not have looked more like three would-be shoplifters if they had tried.
'Listen, you lot,' said Mr Ho. 'I know you're not here to buy anything. Scram.'
The Orphans peered at him from beneath their lank fringes. They all belonged to that category of teenager who was congenitally incapable of closing his mouth.
'Go on,' Mr Ho said, with a flick of his hand for emphasis. 'I mean it. Only good customers like Mr Scrase are welcome here.'
One of the Orphans grabbed a tin of frankfurters in brine and held it up. 'But I want this,' he said. 'I want to buy it off you. I want you to make a profit off of me with your enormous mark-up.'
'No, you don't. You have no money. Put it back and leave.'
The Orphan glared at Mr Ho. Mr Ho returned the glare.
Reluctantly, sullenly, the Orphan replaced the tin. He thought for a moment, then said, 'Fuckin' Chinkie tampon.'
Damien couldn't help himself. He snorted, half with laughter, half with derision. 'What was that? What did you just say? Was it "Chinkie tampon"?'
The Orphan, puzzled, nodded.
'Do you have any idea how asinine that sounds? "Chinkie tampon". It doesn't even make sense. It doesn't mean anything.'
'Yeah, it does,' said the Orphan, defensively.
'Does it? What?'
'It, um ... it means he's a fuckin' slitty-eyed Chinese shit-wanker.'
'That doesn't mean anything either. For God's sake, if you're going to slag somebody off, at least make sure you do it coherently.'
Baffled now, the Orphan groped further into the limited recesses of his vocabulary, found nothing there that was going to be of any use, and so hawked up a wad of phlegm and gobbed it onto the floor. Then he spun on his heel and hunched out of the All-Day Emporium. His two cohorts followed.
'Sorry about that,' Damien said to Mr Ho.
'I'm used to it. I've been called worse. What gets me is that we went on that rent-strike two years ago to badger the Risen London Authority to improve conditions here, and when you see kids like those you have to wonder why we bothered. They don't deserve to have this place made better.'
'Maybe, but the rest of us certainly do. And if this place is made better, perhaps those kids won't behave the way they do.'
'Oh, I think they still will.'
'Yeah, you're right, but perhaps the next generation of gang-tribes won't emerge. If this estate was somewhere they could take pride in...'
'It's a nice dream. Doomed to failure, though, if our last experience was anything to go by.'
'Maybe,' said Damien. 'Maybe not. We'll see.'
Leaving the All-Day Emporium with his cigarettes, matches and box of latex gloves, Damien found the Orphans waiting for him outside. This wasn't exactly a surprise. It would have been naïve of him to think he could openly ridicule one of them and not be made to pay for it.
The Orphans had arranged themselves in a loose semicircle around the shop entrance. There were a dozen of them all told, and they were spaced out in such a way that Damien wouldn't be able to walk between any two of them without brushing at least one shoulder. The physical contact, however slight, would be construed as a shove. The shove, in turn, would be legitimate grounds for combat.
Damien halted in the shop doorway. He swivelled his head, taking in the Orphans one by one. Fully half of them had the reddened eye-whites and the receding gums of the habitual Tinct-user.
His face broke into a wide, fearsome grin. 'Trust me, lads,' he said. 'I will kill you all. Gladly. One of you so much as lays a finger on me, you're dead, the lot of you. You do not fuck with someone like me. So what do we say you just step out of my way and there's an end of it? Hey?'
The Orphans frowned. He was supposed to be intimidated. Why wasn't he? There were a dozen of them and only one of him. Why was he the one making the threats?
'Come on,' Damien said. 'I won't say it again. Do yourselves a favour. Get out of my way.'
All it took was one of the Orphans to shuffle his feet uneasily. Straight away, their pack mentality collapsed and their ranks broke. The semicircle drifted apart and the various Orphans wandered off in twos and threes to regroup further down the arcade, where they began a fierce debate among themselves as to why and how it was that one man had managed to talk them out of kicking his head in. It was a mystery. Downright perplexing.
Meanwhile Damien, sauntering back to the lift, lit himself a Parent Nation. He dragged on the cigarette and felt
the nicotine-hit scour through him. He had been on the cancer-stick wagon for far too long. Falling off it was like greeting an old, familiar friend.
Continuing to suck on the cigarette, his thoughts sharpening with every puff, he mused on his standoff with the Orphans. It was a truth not always universally acknowledged that in any confrontation with thugs your best weapon was your brain. Thugs were, almost by definition, thick. They were also, at heart, cowards. All you had to do was act more aggressively than them, state with utter conviction that this was a fight they couldn't win, browbeat them, and invariably they would back down.
Of course, it was crucial that you were prepared to enforce words with deeds if it came to that.
Damien could feel the pommel of his sheath knife pressing into the small of his back. The weight of the whole weapon was dragging down on his trouser belt. Cigarette in mouth, he reached behind him, slipped a hand under the fabric of his shirt and briefly stroked the knife's haft, his fingers tracing the ridged contours of deerhorn like a blind man reading Braille.
He was glad he hadn't been forced to use the knife.
And those Orphans should be thanking their lucky stars he hadn't.
20
Gangs of cheerfully whistling workmen dismantled Venice. With hammer and crowbar they clawed the city apart and loaded it section by section, shattered façade by shattered façade, onto the backs of flatbed lorries. What had taken days to construct was taking hours to deconstruct. The beautiful illusion of La Serenissima was being reduced, little by little, to paint-and-plywood reality.
Late in the afternoon, with Venice all but gone, Cynthia came out and exchanged a few words with the foreman overseeing the demolition. If the foreman thought she seemed wan and listless, her conversation not at all sparkling, he put it down to the effects of a hard night's partying.
Back indoors, her duty discharged, Cynthia debated whether to try taking a nap again. She was bone-deep weary. However, she had gone to bed earlier in the afternoon and not managed so much as a wink of sleep, her head a churning vortex of suppositions and fears. She didn't think she would have any better luck this time.
Keep moving. Keep busy.
She headed for the eastern end of the house, where Great's quarters were. On the way, she passed Triumph. The statue's ivory eyes, gazing down from its golden face, seemed to taunt her as she went by. Cynthia, by way of rebuke, reminded herself that Triumph's beauty was purely superficial. Such a weight of soft metal and brittle tusk could not support itself unaided. Within the statue lay an armature of thick iron bars, the crude, mundane truth behind the magisterial illusion.
Great lived in what had come to be called the Granny Flat - a self-contained ground-floor annex with its own private patio outside and, inside, all the plush amenities you would expect. For Great's benefit, it was additionally kitted out with a panoply of medical and orthopaedic equipment, and there was a telephone hotline straight to the nearest hospital, in Reading, where the doctors were ready to drop everything and come running if an emergency arose. The annex was a more than agreeable place in which to spend the last few years of your life, and back in another age, before the events of this morning, before her world collapsed, Cynthia had always foreseen herself retiring happily here, conceding full run of the house to the next generation and its progeny. Anticipating that she would outlive her husband, she had looked forward to being a resident grandmother, on hand but not in the way. Now, all at once, the prospect of such a future seemed an unrealisable dream.
Her knock on the Granny Flat's main door went unanswered. She knocked again, with still no response, and so opened the door and strode in. Sounds of splashing drew her to the bathroom, and she tendered a 'Hello?' as she neared it.
'One moment, ma'am.'
Not one but several moments later, Carver emerged from the bathroom. He had an apron on and his shirtsleeves rolled up, and he was drying off his forearms with a towel.
'Great offers his apologies but he is taking a bath and cannot see you right now. If you were to come back in half an hour...?'
'As a matter of fact, Carver, it's you I want to talk to. Would that be possible?'
Carver glanced towards the bathroom doorway. 'I'm sure I can spare a minute or so. Great will summon me back if he needs me. How may I be of assistance?'
Cynthia marshalled her thoughts. Deprived of sleep, her brain seemed to be mired in mud.
'My husband has left for the Island,' she began.
'Indeed, ma'am. He and Master Fortune departed for the airfield an hour ago. I imagine the dirigible is taking to the sky even as we speak.'
'He's called an Extraordinary Congress.'
'That he has.'
'I'm afraid he's going to do something rash.'
'It's not my place to speculate on such matters.'
'He's blaming the Kuczinskis for Provender's disappearance.'
'The enmity between the two Families goes far back, ma'am.'
'Do you think he's right, then?'
'I couldn't say.'
'But you fought in the War.'
'I fought against the Pan-Slavic Confederation army. I fought Eastern European soldiers. I didn't fight the Kuczinskis directly. I was a mere infantryman, as was my master.'
'But war was sparked by a dispute between Gleeds and Kuczinskis.'
'A spat at a Family Congress - that, as I recall, was the catalyst, ma'am. Wojtek Kuczinski believed that Basil Gleed made an insulting reference to his albinism. Allegedly Master Basil called him a "white bastard" but in all probability what he said was "right bastard". Still an insult but not quite so personal. If only Master Basil had been able to overcome his speech impediment... It always flared up at moments of tension. But then it is said, isn't it, that the wheels of history turn on the tiniest of factors. Cleopatra's Nose and all that.'
'And I'm concerned that history is about to repeat itself, Carver. Prosper has gone completely off the deep end. I've never seen him like this. It's as if he's suddenly discovered a purpose in life, after fifty-odd years of significantly failing to do so. But the thing is, he's spent so long doing nothing, just idling along, that now that there's a crisis he doesn't know how to react. He's overreacted.'
'Again, ma'am, not my place to speculate.'
'I know. I know. I shouldn't really be burdening you with all this.'
'However, ma'am, were it my place, I would be expressing an opinion not entirely contrary to yours. I would add that it is good that that Master Prosper's brother has gone with him. My hope would be that Master Fortune might act as a calming influence on Master Prosper. Perhaps, when they get to the Island, Master Fortune will be able to mitigate anything Master Prosper might say to the head of the Kuczinskis. Serve as a buffer between the two of them, perhaps.'
'I wish I shared your optimism.'
Carver gave a broad-shouldered shrug. 'Master Fortune's conviviality can be infectious. But I'm sensing, ma'am, that you're not here for just a sympathetic ear. You want something more from me. Perhaps some form of practical help...?'
'Carver,' Cynthia said, nodding, 'practical help would be immensely welcome.'
'Specifically?'
'There has to be something we can do. You can do. To find out who has Provender.'
'Go to the police, perhaps.'
'Not the police. Not yet.'
'They have the resources. The manpower.'
'They also don't know how to keep their mouths shut. Gone are the days when you could be sure the police would act on a Family's behalf quietly and discreetly. Now, you call them in, and next thing you know, one of them's gone to the press or a TV station and told all, and it becomes a circus.'
'The modern media's interest in the Families is insatiable.'
'There's money to be made out of us, that's the trouble.'
'It's a debased age,' Carver said, with feeling.
Cynthia did not demur. 'So no, not the police. Not unless we absolutely have to. The longer we can keep this to ourselves, the better
. What that leaves us with, however...'
Carver waited, then realised he was being asked to contribute. 'What that leaves us with, ma'am,' he said, 'is some kind of private avenue of investigation.'
'Yes.'
'Some independent organisation without authority ties, looking into the matter.'
'You sound,' Cynthia said, 'as though you may have something in mind.'
'Not necessarily.'
'Please say you do.'
'There is one possibility that occurs, ma'am. I cannot guarantee it will bear fruit, but I do believe discretion could be assured, which is a significant factor.'
'What is it? What do you have in mind?'
'I would require your permission to act in any way I see fit, and a substantial discretionary fund to draw on.'
'You have both.'
'I will not, however, be able to set anything in motion until tomorrow.'
'Why not?'
'Late on a Sunday afternoon, I fear that I would not be able to contact those whom I need to contact.'
'But you could first thing tomorrow?'
'I could, ma'am. First thing.'
There came a tapping from the bathroom, the familiar arrhythmic drumming of Great's signet ring. Against the bath's ceramic side the ring made a sharper and more resonant sound than it did when striking the frame of Great's wheelchair.
'My master calls,' Carver said. 'I must go to him. You'll excuse me.'
'Of course. Oh, but before you do, just one last thing. Fort mentioned something about an anomaly. Some kind of problem with the catering staff last night. He said you were looking into it.'
'That's correct. I have indeed looked into it.'
'And?'
'Master Prosper didn't inform you of my findings?'
'Obviously not.' Cynthia had had no contact with her husband since slapping him in his study. She and he had been scrupulously avoiding each other all day.
'It may be that two members of the catering staff left the party early last night,' Carver said. 'The head count at the end of the proceedings came up short. Now, it's by no means certain that the two were the kidnappers. They may simply have got fed up with working and decided to leave.'
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