And every time I sailed past there’d be a friendly nod and a wink and a slap, a cheery reassurance that made me want to kill them all horribly. I kept having this mental vision of a huge bundle of notes tiptoeing quietly away.
Beyond my flailing feet rose the high walls of the old warehouse district, turning its back alleys into deep shadow canyons that only seemed darker as the first sunbeams slanted across the open streets beyond. We didn’t go that way. This lot were adepts at keeping out of sight, and we slipped from shadow to shadow like returning ghosts. All the threshing I could do made no difference, and it was only when they checked, momentarily, in the shadow of a twenty-foot brick wall that I drew enough breath to roar at them. Instantly I was lowered featherlight on to my feet, with hands dusting down my clothes, patting down my hair, and generally smoothing me out.
‘Hey, whatsa matter, Maxie?’
‘Ees anything amiss?’
‘De wall’s no sweat, ve can—’
‘No! I mean, thanks, thanks again, but you shouldn’t – run away with me like that! Where’re you taking me, anyway? There were … things I wanted to go back for first!’
‘Possessions? Arr, dross, trash, nothings! What’ll ye need o’them when we’re a-layin’ the bloody world at yer feet? Only come now—’
‘I said—I mean, I asked, where’re you taking me?’
‘Why, to de sheep, of course!’
‘Sheep – Jesus, not again! I don’t want to go to your sheep – I mean—’
Instant groans of hurt and disappointment all round.
‘Ya you do! No place safer dan dere! No place you’ll find more friend!’
‘Those pigs of constables shall not emprise you there, señor! Come, be kind, accompany us!’
‘Aye, aye, lad, ye’ll not be lettin’ yer true shipmates down!’
‘We shall sail, lord Maxie, far beyond their grasp, to realms of pearls and gold and finest jade, to palaces of fair walks and languid concubines making drowsy music, to sunny pleasure domes with caves of ice—’
I twitched. ‘Come again?’ The Oriental didn’t strike me as the literary type. Kung Fu or Shun Tzu, if anything, not Coleridge.
He twirled his moustache. ‘The lord Maxie does not believe me? Behold, and wonder!’
He whisked one of those horrible swords off his back, so fast it whistled. A Japanese sword, not the graceful samurai curve but the straight, vicious ninja blade. That figured. He whirled it in true schlock-film fashion, but fast, so fast it seemed to open a shimmering umbrella of steel before my eyes, drawing them in. And in that hissing circle of light an image formed and grew.
I blinked. A girl, Japanese probably – though the Oriental didn’t look that, either. Not your actual geisha, though. They’ve got this thing about little schoolgirl uniforms there, and that’s what she was wearing, more or less, and she was looking pretty cheerful about it. She wasn’t just a picture, either. She was smiling, reaching out – to me. She knew I was there. She mouthed my name, and writhed a little. And behind her there was a blonde girl, falling out of an old-fashioned négligé – a bit too top-heavy for my taste. An old-fashioned idea, or an Oriental one – like all those bug-eyed manga heroines, maybe. And a black girl, just as overdeveloped, another, some kind of Polynesian—
I blinked again. My own private Miss World, all clearly longing for little me. Invisible coils of heady fragrance snaked around me, tickling my nose and other sensitive areas. How the hell I noticed what the black guy was doing I can’t imagine, but I vaguely saw him upend his helmet above the arc of the blade. Out of it tipped a spill of coins, a stream of gems, strings and sprays and necklaces of many strands, cascading down among the girls as they squealed and giggled and snatched at them.
Abruptly the sword was rock-still before my eyes, mirroring the same image in its glossy greenish metal. The girls were writhing at the foot of a dais below a huge black leather chair, a sort of modern throne, plutocrats and mad dictators for the use of, flanked with macho-looking guards in ducky leather uniforms and brutal machine-guns. It looked as if somebody’d hired Dr No’s interior decorator. I half expected Ilya Kuryakin to come abseiling down the chandelier any moment.
To either side men were bowing, men in immaculate suits, men who had the very stamp of tycoons and zaibatsu bosses, the kind of characters who looked down on mere millionaires like my father’s City friends as they might look down on me, falling to their knees or being forced there by the goon squads. But the casually elegant figure in the chair ignored them and went on tossing riches to his pampered toys …
Guess who?
Well, OK. I mean, I know about come-ons, I’ve been a strip-club barker, and this was strictly for the cheap seats. The guards, for a start. I knew the real me would be more frightened of them than my enemies ever would. I’d go all paranoid and start sleeping on beds floating on mercury pools, like some old Chinese emperor, so the assassins couldn’t creep up on me. Mind you, with all that nice mercury vapour they wouldn’t need to.
Not that the vision didn’t have some effect, especially when I imagined Ahwaz among the kowtowers. Even then, though, my fantasies didn’t go much further than a really good boot up his jacksy and a short spell in the snakepit – short, because snakes are sensitive animals and I’d hate to hurt their feelings.
The same went for this lot.
‘Yeah, yeah!’ I said brightly, easing the sword aside with a gentle finger. ‘Really nice, but … look, I’m not really into all that, not the type really, I just want to get my mo – my things, and, well, settle down for a while and think about—’
‘See!’ barked Hong Kong Fooey, and tilted the blade about an inch from my eyes, which didn’t leave me much alternative. It caught the light with a blinding emerald flash, and another image sprang to life. Drably real this time, pale green official-looking walls lined with paper-strewn desks and filing cabinets, and a large map festooned with concentric circles and arrows of tape, and a couple of mugshots. Hard-faced men in brash casual clothes swigging from plastic cups, sitting on desks talking vigorously to … other hard-faced men, looking bruised and haggard, and wearing a weird assortment of bits and pieces. One with a yard-brush moustache, and bare legs protruding from under a long mac. I knew him, and I could read that map, and see where the arrows pointed. And the mugshots I knew only too well. I remembered the police photographer being sarky about my noble profile. This was an incident room, centring on the marsh, and the only face in sight was mine.
I whimpered a little. The bandits were oddly quiet.
‘Maxie!’ whispered one woman urgently. ‘Now you must come away wit’ us! What choice have you got left?’
Her hand clutched my sleeve. Not hard, and there was nothing but sincerity in her face or voice. I shivered, and let my hand fall. ‘Yeah – no choice. OK, fellas! Have it your way!’
They relaxed, with a sigh I could feel – and I plucked my sleeve loose and dived between their legs.
Advertising I can cope with, it’s what you expect. But when they pull sincerity out of the bag, I just know I’m being sold one.
Tall timber time, kiddies. I rolled on the pavement, sprang up and bolted. OK, they could move like lightly scalded cats, but maybe the surprise …
I stopped in the sudden sunlight at the street’s end, stupidly wondering why I wasn’t surrounded by a tangle of brown arms – or jangly blades. It was almost disappointing. I blinked back, mildly irritated, half expecting to see nothing, just a suddenly empty street. But there they stood still, colourless in the grey-green morning shadows, clustered close as if to remind me of the solidarity I was losing.
‘Come back!’ they called, their voices mingling, and they half raised, half spread their arms. For the first time I hesitated. There was a real hunger in those voices, and it struck a chord somewhere. ‘Come back, Maxie, come and sail off with us to fortune and happiness! Come, and never know loneliness again! Never know want! Come, and sail the seas of the Spiral!’
I stopp
ed dead. That name I’d heard before, and I knew where. The inn. The Wheel. That sleek SOB Steve. Somehow it had almost faded from my mind. Now it all came back, all the bloody daft things he’d told me, cresting a bubbling tide of indignation.
The bandits were coming towards me, slowly, as if they too were hesitant.
‘Remember, señor Maxie!’ called one of the girls, her voice sounding oddly fainter the nearer she came. ‘So near, so far, we cannot help you. Only in the places where the ways cross and recross, where the wall between the worlds is weakest, only there may we come to you! Yet call on us in your need, and you shall still have what power we can spare! For are we not yours, señor, and you bound to us more strongly than with chain or cord?’
‘And in the end,’ said the Oriental softly, ‘does not the proverb say all men are drawn in by the bonds they make for themselves?’
He reached out suddenly, and his fist abruptly swelled and blurred, like an unfocused photo.
I jumped back, around the corner, expecting a rush of feet. But there wasn’t a sound. After a moment I very nervously put my nose around the corner, on the theory you can afford to risk what you’ve got most of. The alley was empty. No noise, no footsteps. They’d just … gone. The sun topped the walls at last, and the alley flooded with light. The early morning was silent still, no sound of footsteps or traffic. Except for those sirens—
I hopped like a rabbit. I had to get off the street, out of sight. That incident room vision would still be in the future. This would just be the snatch squad’s backup. Even so, anybody wandering around the area at dawn they’d notice and file away in their tiny blue minds for future abuse. Better if I got out of sight somehow. The sirens were getting louder. I ducked into a deep little doorway and did my best to look like a hinge. On the off-chance I tried the handle – well, you do, don’t you? It wouldn’t budge – but a small panel, a sort of porthole, slid open.
My eyes bugged. A white beard came out and waggled in my face, neatly framing a benign smile in the middle. ‘Now, touching upon the nature of these mysterious manifestations, good sir—’
I let out what must have been a sort of strangled castrato squeak, slammed the port shut and, forgetting the sirens, I ran for my life.
The Spiral.
One man had used that word to me before, and that had been the start of my troubles. It was all spilling back to me now, dripping icily down the back of my neck. The sirens came screaming down the main road, and I dived over the wall of an office block forecourt, not an instant too soon. Hunkered down with some miserable miniature conifers tickling the gap between shirt and jeans, I got one thing straight at least. I figured out who I was more afraid of.
Forget the money, forget the getaway, forget everything else till I got these psychos off my back, useful as they sometimes were. I was going back to the Wheel. I was going to talk to Mr Smarmy Steve his own self.
Really talk.
CHAPTER FIVE
Proceed with Caution
THERE WAS JUST one problem with that idea. I couldn’t find the bloody place.
I stood high up on the junction’s narrow walkway, leaning on the railing, with the wind flinging my hair in and out of my eyes. They were aching with scanning the horrible tangle of concrete tagliatelle spread out below. The traffic flowed under and around and behind me like worms down an endless gut. It was really dispiriting. All those lovely motors, and I couldn’t get my hands on any of them.
I couldn’t hang around here much longer, either. I was too conspicuous. This wasn’t exactly a local beauty spot, more the kind of place people got talked down off, and if the cop cameras spotted me they might assume I was planning the big dive.
Much more of this and they might have a point.
At least I looked respectable, which only goes to prove what they say about appearances. These were the first decent clothes I’d owned since God knows when, paid for by the motley crew of stiffs out on the marshes; luckily I hadn’t put their dosh in with the rest. It was only a few hundred, plus the guilders; it wouldn’t get me far. I still knew some good outfitters, though, and the big station washrooms had provided shower and shave. So the next thing I needed was some wheels. Well, don’t I always?
Of course I had more sense than to go off and nick one of my characteristic high-price jobs. That’s just what the cops would be watching for, modus operandi Maxissime. So I shivved my way into a nice bland downmarket Toyota instead, the sort thousands of ordinary citizens polish on Saturdays.
Well, what else could I do?
OK, so I wouldn’t normally be seen dead in one, but I couldn’t buy anything, and a hire place would want my licence. Anyhow, I drove the thing as if it was full of eggs – which it was, actually, having been lifted from a supermarket park. The citizen who polished it would hardly know it had been gone. And I was careful to ditch it somewhere conspicuous, outside Vi’s Egganburger, a battered roadside trailer caff that lies in wait to ensnare unwary Eurotruckers and similar innocents. The polishing citizen could pick it up there none the worse. Unless he celebrated with one of Vi’s sandwiches, that is – cheese, ham or salmonella? Rumour had it the junction roadbed had been laid on her doughnuts and topped off with her tea.
Besides, I’d left it unlocked with the key in, so with a bit of luck somebody else would nick it, and cop all the blame.
Even that thought didn’t cheer me up much. By the time I’d legged it up here I was freezing, and I was even worse now. The heart of the junction was down there, and all I could see in it was a moth-eaten hedge, ruined by these huge machine cutters, and a smallish field inside it. The low light played long shadows across its mangy grass, but you didn’t feel they hid anything; they didn’t have room. It was just a larger version of the neglected roundabout centre or central reservation – uncut havens for wildlife, otherwise known as roadkill ranches. It was far too small for anything I remembered. I clutched my head and groaned. Had the whole thing been hallucinations, all along?
Yeah. So I was hallucinating the money in my pocket, the clothes on my back and about five thousand rozzers sniffing at my trouser legs. If I didn’t do something damn soon, I’d be able to ask them. No, it had happened, and the only one I could think of to tell me the hows and the whys was this Steve character. Complete with an I-told-you-so smirk on that male-model face of his …
There was an awful sinking feeling, as if the concrete mountain beneath my feet was suddenly crumbling away. Given what I knew about road contractors – and Vi’s doughnuts – it probably was, but that wasn’t why. I’d thought the bastard looked familiar, and now I knew why.
Steve, sure, one of the boys. Stephen Fisher, no less, the shipping tycoon. Stephen Fisher, creator of C-Tran, the worldwide automated freight network. Stephen Fisher, the billionaire, one of the biggest in Europe – and the daftest, the man who made Howard Hughes look sociable and Bill Gates …
Well, maybe not quite that, but up among the leaders in the Gates Fruitcake Handicap, for sure. Hello! had done a profile of him, while I was in stir; you’ll read anything in there, after a while. Not an easy job, they’d claimed, because he was given to disappearing into the wilds for months and months, when he wasn’t living in one of his string of castles across Europe. They’d run him to earth in his great Scottish pile, all claymores and banners and open fires, medieval as hell with a helicopter pad on the roof and a cellar full of computer gear. What had really stuck in my mind was shots of his wife, not at all a bad bit of stuff if you liked them keen and athletic, with eyes that could burn through a stone wall. Just the sort of thing you dream about in the slammer, but in real life she’d have scared the shit out of me. She’d been some sort of cop, apparently, so that’d account for it. I remembered thinking he’d have to be several per cent nuts to cope with that babe. The article said they shared a peculiar sense of humour, something along those lines.
Yeah. I could believe it. It fitted all too well, didn’t it? A critically rich fruitbat, with a taste for the grandiose,
the medieval – and just maybe the practical joke.
Except that some of the things I’d seen nobody could have staged, not outside the SFX department. My own mind, maybe, suitably tampered with – dope, post-hypnotics, mind control. Somebody might well enjoy playing God with those. And I’d be a perfect guinea-pig, a nobody in no position to protest. But I didn’t believe it. I could still feel that diamond-hard air in my lungs, hear that cry …
I shivered. There was one even worse alternative. These loony experiences could be true, and him still in charge of them. There was that mysterious character among the bandits, or maybe two of them; I never saw them clearly enough. There was the way everyone at the inn reacted to him. He’d known something would happen if I took that path.
Christ, what did we have here? Some kind of black magic tycoon? I didn’t know what to think. The whole thing made me want to puke.
Some dough-faced citizen shouted at me from one of the passing cars – wondering if I was about to jump, or maybe suggesting it. It’d be dark soon; I had to make a move, somehow. Maybe I ought to just go down and poke my way about that hedge. The answers were there, one way or another. And if those weird characters showed up just one more time, the answers might become sort of urgent.
I slouched off down the ramp, wondering if it really would be that bad, going sailing off with the Lost SOBs or whoever they were. Worse than working for Chaddy, or moonlighting for Ahwaz? Worse than slinking back from the stinking peepshow to my stinking little garret?
Worse than just being me?
OK, they played a bit rough. Maybe it was time I started. I flexed my shoulders, enjoying the weight of a proper coat across them. How long since I’d felt that? I’d been born small, I’d lived small. Cars lent me the body I didn’t have; cars made my feelings larger, made citizens pay attention to me. So maybe the bandits would do that too. And what they were promising me went a lot further than four wheels. All right, people might get hurt. I’d been hurt, too. About time I called in my dues. The thought of it gave me a shivery little feeling in my guts and a tautness in the crotch. People would get hurt. The ones who hurt me. Maybe they’d better start forming queues …
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