Madrigal

by John Gardner

  The cards were large, even for Boysie’s great fists. He shuffled awkwardly.

  Madrigal went on speaking. ‘While y-you’re sh-sh-shuffling I would like you to ask the cards a question. Out loud if you like.’

  ‘Okay. What does the future hold?’ Boysie asked looking at the cards.

  ‘Again.’

  ‘What does the future hold?’ A right load of old nonsense this was.

  ‘Now hand the c-cards back to me.’

  Madrigal cut and laid the top four cards, face upwards in a diamond pattern on the table. ‘L-let’s see what you’ve drawn.’ Madrigal scrutinised the cards. ‘Ye-yes. This is good. At the top you have L’Empereur, there is power here. Ne-ne-next L’Amoureux, the lovers.’ Cupid straddled the sun, aiming towards a trio below. ‘G-good. Trials can be surmounted. Then Le Bateleur, the magician or ju-ju-juggler. Again power. You are a man with mu-much power. Or about to find power. La Papesse, the female p-p-pope. The high priestess. Serenity, wisdom, and knowledge.’

  Boysie looked up at Madrigal. The man was visibly shaking. Fear crossed the table between them like an electric current. The stammer got worse.

  ‘Th-this is v-v-very g-good, Mr. O-Oldcorn. Very good. P-power, wi-wisdom. Th-the surmounting of trials. B-but the test c-c-comes with the final card and we will find this by a-adding together the numbers of these c-c-cards. You-you do it and t-t-tell me wh-what you’ve got.’

  Boysie began to tot up. L’Empereur was four. L’Amoureux six, and Le Bateleur one, bringing it to eleven. Two for La Papesse. Thirteen in all.

  ‘Unlucky for some,’ he said brightly.

  ‘The number please.’

  ‘Thirteen, of course.’

  The tension seemed to go from Madrigal. From the light of the angle-poise Boysie could see that his adversary’s face was more relaxed. The hint of a smile.

  ‘C-c-card number thirteen.’ Madrigal thumbed through the pack, placed it face upwards, centred between the other cards. Boysie looked down. The card crudely showed a skeleton, sizing a field of human heads, feet, and hands.

  ‘The joker.’ Boysie flippant.

  ‘I’m-m af-f-fraid not, Mr. Oldcorn. This card brings good fortune to an end. Number thirteen is Death.’

  Boysie took his cue promptly. At the word death he allowed his eyes to stare blindly ahead, His body in a paradoxical state of rigidity. Madrigal got up, waved a hand in front of Boysie’s eyes, then returned to his seat. He began to speak slowly and softly with hardly a trace of stutter.

  ‘You are already asleep. In a few moments I am going to count from one to five. When you next hear the number five your eyes will dose and you will be deeply asleep. Deep. Deep. Deep. One...two...three...four...five.’ Boysie closed his eyes. He had nothing to fear any more. Dr. Fox was his only hypnotic control. Fox had taught him about fear.

  ‘We haven’t much time,’ said Madrigal. The same, soft voice. ‘I’m going to give you something. Hold out your right hand.’ Boysie did as he was told and felt a small oblong piece of cardboard on the palm of his hand. ‘That is a ticket,’ Madrigal continued. ‘It will admit you to Manchester Docks. Go through the main gate and show it. Then ask where the MV Gardnia is tied up. They will direct you. Someone will meet you on the way. You are going on a long sea journey. It will be pleasant.’

  Good luck, thought Boysie.

  ‘I may even join you myself. You will go now. You are able to walk, talk, and act normally. Plenty of taxis pass this building. You know what to do? Answer.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Boysie, doing an imitation of a space-age robot.

  ‘You have a ticket pocket in that jacket?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Put the ticket in that pocket until it is required at the Docks. You have money?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I will count five to one. The next time you hear me say one you will open your eyes and leave. You will carry out my instructions. Five...four...three...two...one.’

  Boysie opened his eyes, stood up, and walked towards the door. In the passage, he did not look back. Madrigal had closed the outer door by the time Boysie was halfway to the lift. He increased his pace, pulling on the gloves. Button. Press. The whir of the lift. Boysie looked back towards Madrigal’s apartment. Nobody. The lift came up and stopped. Griffin stood there, grinning. Boysie nodded and opened the outer gate. Griffin slid the inner gate, then closed it. Boysie followed suit with the outer gate and turned away to run, tiptoes, up the stairs. Seventh floor, eighth, God, he ached from the fight. Ninth. Tenth. Now the small staircase and metal door with its warning. The door was unlocked, the fireman’s axe clamped to the wall. In front of him, Boysie saw the big drum with four ridges on which the cables rode. One ridge was empty. No cable. Griffin had done his stuff. Griffin. The cables started to move.

  Boysie whipped the transceiver from his pocket, switched on, and extended the telescopic aerial before reaching out for the fireman’s axe. Underestimating, as usual, Boysie pulled too hard and the axe fell with a clatter, nearly taking his right foot off. He placed the transceiver on a ledge below where the axe had hung and bent down for the wooden handle. The axe was beautifully balanced. Boysie made like a headsman. Traitors, he said quietly to the cables. The cables stopped moving. Griffin had made it to the fifth floor. He could hear the gates. Silence. Then the cables moving again. Upwards? Madrigal?

  Boysie held the blade of the axe above the centre cable. The mechanism stopped again. Gates. Open. Close. From the transceiver came Griffin’s voice. ‘Right.’ Boysie raised the axe. Middle cable in one. The far side took two strokes, but his last all but embedded the axe into the drum. The cables snaked away through the slots in the floor. From below came a fading rumble. A bumping noise and then an echo. Undramatic. No screams, no cries, no hideous crashing of metal and wood. Boysie closed the telescopic aerial, switched off the transceiver, and slipped it into his pocket, then replaced the axe and left.

  The building must have been empty or filled with deaf mutes and cripples. Nobody had rushed out of their flats, summoned by the noise. Boysie reached the fourth floor. There was only one person—Griffin.

  ‘’E weren’ in i’.’

  ‘Madrigal?’

  ‘Well, we wasn’ after King Kong, was we? Sorry, Mr. Oakes, bu’ ’e tumbled us. Come ou’ o’ the flat and definitely opened the lift doors. I thought ’e was well in, bu’ I saw the bloomin’ thing goin’ down. No’ a soul in there.’

  Boysie looked upwards.

  ‘Wha’ we do now then?’ Griffin asked.

  ‘There’s only one thing to do.’ Boysie started up the stairs. Griffin watched him for a moment, mouth gaping, then ran beside him.

  *

  Madrigal opened the door to their knock, polite and courteous backing away into the main room, light now with the curtains pulled back.

  ‘I expected you to return,’ said Madrigal, herded by the twin Python revolvers.

  ‘Why didn’t you run for it then?’ asked Boysie.

  ‘The inevitable is inevitable, Mr. Oakes. The Tarot told us that this afternoon. Knowledge, wisdom, and serenity. The Death card could hardly cancel those. In a Tarot reading the Death card can mean many things. The abrupt ending of something—like losing your job. It can also mean death, not necessarily one’s own death.’

  ‘You mean you really go for all that stuff?’

  ‘Of course.’ Madrigal tremendously relaxed. ‘It is my life.’ He laughed. ‘Was my life. You know everything of course. Very clever. Our section has had a fair run with your trade unions. But don’t be mistaken. Our section is not the only one. Nor is our method the only method. It will go on and on until the glor—’

  The Colt Python jerked twice against the glove, two explosions sounding like hand grenades in the confined space of the long room.

  Boysie had never seen anyone shot at close range. On the television or at the pictures they simply doubled up, clutching their guts. Madrigal was lifted off his feet and flung across the room, spinning vio
lently. When his back was towards them, the two men could see the great gaping exit wounds, as though someone had torn his flesh away. Madrigal hit the far wall with his shoulder, then bounced to the floor. The bedroom door was flung open, and Mu-lan ran out. She got three paces into the room, dishevelled, but beautiful as ever in her white underwear, hand to mouth. Her lungs filled to scream as she saw Madrigal.

  The Python cracked again, and Mu-lan was pushed against the wall. She slid down in an untidy bundle of useless flesh, bone, and blood, leaving an ugly smear on the wallpaper.

  Boysie’s shoulders began to shake long before the gloved hand reached out and closed the door.

  GRIMOBO WILL RETURN

  If you enjoyed Madrigal you might be interested in The Secret Houses by John Gardner, also published by Endeavour Press.

  Extract from The Secret Houses by John Gardner

  Prologue

  Nothing much ever happened in St Benoît-sur-Loire. The Abbey still stood where it always had, and the town went about its business with almost painful normality, philosophically shrugging off the fact that it had spent four years under the Nazi tyranny. German soldiers were regular customers in the bars. Occasionally the military police came asking questions; sometimes a girl would get pregnant by a German. They would take her away, and people presumed she was cared for.

  They had all heard of the Gestapo man in Orléans – Klaubert. Who had not heard of him? The man was a beast. Le Diable d’Orléans he was called, and not without reason.

  You heard things. If you went into the city you might see things also – as well as the damage.

  They knew of course that there had been acts of sabotage right across France. Certainly there had been mishaps and explosions near St Benoît-sur-Loire, as well as the damage already done to Orléans during the fighting, and in the bombing. But, like everybody, the good citizens of St Benoît-sur-Loire now held on to hope. Five weeks ago the Americans, British, and their own Free Forces had landed in Normandy at long last. France would soon be at liberty again, so there was no need to fear the Nazis. During the previous week there had been talk of American parachutists near this very place. Some claimed to have heard shots fired.

  Then suddenly, in the small hours of dawn, it happened. Some heard it from their beds, others as they rose before sunup: cars and trucks driving into the town at full speed, the knocking on doors, and the sound of heavy boots on the pavement.

  The men who came were mainly Gestapo, with some regular troops for weight. They went to three houses and shots were fired in one of them. Later some people saw two bodies being carried out. Nobody viewed the other people – men and women – being jabbed, punched, and hustled into trucks, just as nobody saw the radio set being taken from the house where there had been shooting.

  A Wehrmacht sergeant, fat, friendly, and without malice, told one of the local barmen that criminals had been arrested and were being held by the Gestapo in Orléans. Nobody believed that. They knew it was a Resistance réseau – a network or circuit – that had been crushed. Nobody fancied the chances of the people who had been taken to the Gestapo headquarters in the Rue de Bourgogne, Orléans.

  They did not know the réseau was called Tarot. Nor had they ever heard of the English family called Railton, or the American family named Farthing. How then, could they know the deep effect the breaking of Tarot had on these two families – bound together by marriages and an affinity for their work?

  For the Railtons and Farthings it had started even before the war. It did not end until long after the conflict was over. For two in particular it began in the summer of 1940.

  Part One

  The French Houses

  Chapter One

  ‘Well?’ Caroline stood at the turn of the stairs, outside the cracked and scarred door to their flat. Through the opening Jo-Jo could glimpse the familiar simple furnishings of the place they had called home for the past two years. She now knew it would be home for only a few more hours.

  ‘It’s come.’ She lifted her hand to wave the postcard pulled from her purse. ‘The boy said he should have brought it yesterday, but they needed him for other things. I didn’t believe him.’

  Caroline turned, walking back into the five-room dingy apartment. Each room was no larger than a small cell. Jo-Jo, four years Caroline’s senior, and the taller of the pair, saw that her cousin was frightened. Caroline stopped, looking down from the square window into the Rue de la Huchette. The whores, and the men who protected them, were there arguing.

  The street was notable for two things – the dowdy, run-down third-rate hotel which had been Oscar Wilde’s home, and the brothel, with its ornate doorway flanked by statues of two black pageboys, that made the area safe for les petites Anglaises as the locals inaccurately called them. The whores were friendly, and men employed to watch the place always made certain the two girls were never bothered by passing trade. Further, the apartment was cheap.

  Not that there was any shortage of money, but Jo-Jo and Caroline were, like so many of their tangled family, stubborn and determined young women. Girls of a new breed, they lived almost ahead of their time with a shining idealism that put rank and power to one side, choosing instead to work and exist among ordinary people and so share lives vastly different from the glittering, privileged ways of their sisters and cousins back in England.

  Barely a month previously, the war, which had seemed until then unreal, had exploded into the horror of battle and rout. Hitler’s legions were unleashed, first on Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg, with bombs from the air and storm troopers landed by glider and parachute. The great force massed itself, and within hours General Guderian’s Panzer divisions clattered, rolling into France, the ground ahead blasted by Stuka dive bombers; the Panzers, followed by half-tracks towing guns; and the leapfrogging infantry of the Wehrmacht, with the gallant, brutal, expert soldiers of the Waffen SS. The lightning war – Blitzkrieg – had struck, moving across Europe like a giant warm knife through a mound of butter, beating back the defenders, pushing the British toward the sea, and the French into their graves and panic.

  Paris had been chaos for the last two weeks – noisy, the streets clogged with those who wished to flee, the air rife with rumour, the eyes of its people wary with fear. Slowly they heard the approaching thunder of war, until the Panzers were poised only a few miles east of the city, with others working to the north and south. Then, today – Thursday, the 13th of June – Paris sighed and lay back silently like a woman bracing herself for rape. The streets emptied; houses closed their shutters; traffic disappeared; there were stories of looting; others said the Métro had come to a halt. Only occasional, and sometimes desperate, people were seen on the great thoroughfares. Jo-Jo had been one of them.

  Now she could see the nerves and muscles of Caroline’s small body go taut with tension. Jo-Jo knew the girl’s feelings and emotions by the look in her eyes or the way she moved. When Caroline was born, Jo-Jo had only recently arrived at the great house which was their true home in England. The other children seemed alien to the little girl, and she fussed around the new baby like a tiny second mother. When Caroline had started to toddle, Jo-Jo was always at hand, and, as they grew, the pair became inseparable.

  Caroline glanced into the street again. ‘What does the postcard say?’ Her long fingers grasped at the pasteboard – a familiar black and white view of the marketplace with the statue standing proud in its centre, and Caspar’s neat hand on the back, in green ink – Things much the same here. We think of you. Remember the tempest will not last forever. Her eyes seemed calmer now as she looked at her cousin.

  ‘It means we have to get out now. Come home, or do as we agreed,’ Caroline said in almost a whisper. Her nostrils flared briefly. Since childhood this had been a habit, a sign of anger about to burst. But this time she held back the fury. ‘He didn’t mean us to get out, back to England, did he?’

  Jo-Jo shook her head, a hand tight on the other girl’s shoulder. ‘I shouldn’t think so. Woul
d you, if you had been Caspar?’

  There was a pause, the sounds of the squabbling whores sucked in through the half-window. ‘Come on, Caro. We’ve known for a week there was no way out.’ She gave a little laugh, like the twitter of some bird. ‘We did agree to do it.’

  Caroline dropped her head, the tousled dark hair falling almost to hide her face, then she swept it back with one hand. ‘We agreed, but nobody thought it would happen.’

  ‘Caspar did. Two months ago Uncle Caspar did.’

  Was it really two months? Caroline thought. More than sixty days since Caspar had sat in this room with bread, ham, and a cheap red wine, laughing and eating with them. Jo-Jo also thought of him: how he had sat opposite her across the table and taken her long hands in his, and how she felt the metal of his false left hand through the glove he always wore.

  When Caspar had lost his arm and leg in 1914, he had worn the makeshift artificial limbs of the time, but now things were more sophisticated and, unless you knew he was a cripple, it was difficult to detect his disablement at all, except for the gloved hand.

  ‘I have no right to ask this,’ he had said, smiling as though preparing them for some household chore.

  ‘But you’re going to ask it just the same, Uncle Caspar.’ Jo- Jo laughed. He was one of the first men of the family she could remember from childhood. Now Caspar Railton was in his late forties, but Jo-Jo recalled the jolly limping figure who had met them after the strange journey which now seemed like a dream, sometimes returning to haunt her – especially after she had been told the truth, on her sixteenth birthday.

  Jo-Jo Grenot had been brought, at the age of four, to the big, exciting, and beautiful Berkshire house called Redhill Manor. The manor seemed to belong to Uncle Richard and Aunt Sara. It was always full of people, and there were a lot of children. Quickly, as she grew, Jo-Jo became aware of the complexities of her family – how Uncle Richard Farthing was an American who had married Sara Railton, a member of the powerful Railtons only through her previous marriage, yet accepted by the family as truly one of them.