999

by Al Sarrantonio

  This was a couple of years ago, in July. I remember that I was standing in the Earls Court Road, in Earls Court, looking up at the Earl’s Court Tube Station sign and wondering why the apostrophe was there in the station when it wasn’t in the place, and then staring at the junkies and the winos who hang around on the pavement, and all the time keeping an eye out for Mr. Alice’s Jag.

  I wasn’t worried about having the diamonds in my inside pocket. I don’t look like the sort of bloke who’s got anything you’d want to mug him for, and I can take care of myself. So I stared at the junkies and winos, killing time till the Jag arrived (stuck behind the road works in Kensington High Street, at a guess) and wondering why junkies and winos congregate on the pavement outside Earl’s Court Station.

  I suppose I can sort of understand the junkies: they’re waiting for a fix. But what the fuck are the winos doing there? Nobody has to slip you a pint of Guinness or a bottle of rubbing alcohol in a plain brown bag. It’s not comfortable, sitting on the paving stones or leaning against the wall. If I were a wino, on a lovely day like this, I decided, I’d go down to the park.

  Near me a little Pakistani lad in his late teens or early twenties was papering the inside of a glass phone box with hooker cards—CURVY TRANSSEXUAL and REAL BLONDE NURSE, BUSTY SCHOOLGIRL and STERN TEACHER NEEDS BOY TO DISCIPLINE. He glared at me when he noticed I was watching him. Then he finished up and went on to the next booth.

  Mr. Alice’s Jag drew up at the curb and I walked over to it and got in the back. It’s a good car, a couple of years old. Classy but not something you’d look twice at.

  The chauffeur and Mr. Alice sat in the front. Sitting in the back seat with me was a pudgy man with a crewcut and a loud check suit. He made me think of the frustrated fiancée in a fifties film; the one who gets dumped for Rock Hudson in the final reel. I nodded at him. He extended his hand, and then, when I didn’t seem to notice, he put it away.

  Mr. Alice did not introduce us, which was fine by me, as I knew exactly who the man was. I’d found him, and reeled him in, in fact, although he’d never know that. He was a professor of ancient languages at a North Carolina university. He thought he was on loan to British Intelligence from the U.S. State Department. He thought this because this was what he had been told by someone at the U.S. State Department. The professor had told his wife that he was presenting a paper to a conference on Hittite studies in London. And there was such a conference. I’d organized it myself.

  “Why do you take the bloody tube?” asked Mr. Alice. “It can’t be to save money.”

  “I would have thought the fact I’ve been standing on that corner waiting for you for the last twenty minutes demonstrates exactly why I didn’t drive,” I told him. He likes it that I don’t just roll over and wag my tail. I’m a dog with spirit. “The average daytime speed of a vehicle through the streets of Central London has not changed in four hundred years. It’s still under ten miles an hour. If the tubes are running, I’ll take the tube, thanks.”

  “You don’t drive in London?” asked the professor in the loud suit. Heavens protect us from the dress sense of American academics. Let’s call him Macleod.

  “I’ll drive at night, when the roads are empty,” I told him. “After midnight. I like driving at night.”

  Mr. Alice wound down the window and lit a small cigar. I could not help noticing that his hands were trembling. With anticipation, I guessed.

  And we drove through Earls Court, past a hundred tall red-brick houses that claimed to be hotels, a hundred tattler buildings that housed guest houses and bed-and-breakfasts, down good streets and bad. Sometimes Earls Court reminds me of one of those old women you meet from time to time who’s painfully proper and prissy and prim until she’s got a few drinks into her, when she starts dancing on the tables and telling everybody within earshot about her days as a pretty young thing sucking cock for money in Australia or Kenya or somewhere.

  Actually, that makes it sound like I like the place and, frankly, I don’t. It’s too transient. Things come and go and people come and go too damn fast. I’m not a romantic man, but give me South of the River, or the East End, any day. The East End is a proper place: it’s where things begin, good and bad. It’s the cunt and the arsehole of London; they’re always close together. Whereas Earls Court is—I don’t know what. The body analogy breaks down completely when you get out to there. I think that’s because London is mad. Multiple personality problems. All these little towns and villages that grew and crashed into each other to make one big city but never forget their old borders.

  So the chauffeur pulls up in a road like any other, in front of a high, terraced house that might have been a hotel at one time. A couple of the windows were boarded over. “That’s the house,” said the chauffeur.

  “Right,” said Mr. Alice.

  The chauffeur walked around the car and opened the door for Mr. Alice. Professor Macleod and I got out on our own. I looked up and down the pavement. Nothing to worry about.

  I knocked on the door, and we waited. I nodded and smiled at the spyhole in the door. Mr. Alice’s cheeks were flushed, and he held his hands folded in front of his crotch, to avoid embarrassing himself. Horny old bugger.

  Well, I’ve been there too. We all have. Only Mr. Alice, he can afford to indulge himself.

  The way I look at it, some people need love, and some people don’t. I think Mr. Alice is really a bit of a don’t, all things considered. I’m a don’t as well. You learn to recognize the type.

  And Mr. Alice is, first and foremost, a connoisseur.

  There was a bang from the door, as a bolt was drawn back, and the door was opened by an old woman of what they used to describe as “repulsive aspect.” She was dressed in a baggy black one-piece robe. Her face was wrinkled and pouched. I’ll tell you what she looked like. Did you ever see a picture of one of those cinnamon buns they said looked like Mother Teresa? She looked like that, like a cinnamon roll, with two brown raisin eyes peering out of her cinnamon roll face.

  She said something to me in a language I did not recognize, and Professor Macleod replied haltingly. She stared at the three of us suspiciously, then she made a face and beckoned us in. She slammed the door behind us. I closed first one eye, then the other, encouraging them to adjust to the gloom inside the house.

  The building smelled like a damp spice rack. I didn’t like anything about the whole business; there’s something about foreigners, when they’re that foreign, that makes my skin crawl. As the old bat who’d let us in, who I had begun to think of as the Mother Superior, led us up flight after flight of stairs, I could see more of the black-robed women, peering at us out of doorways and down the corridor. The stair-carpet was frayed and the soles of my shoes made sticking noises as they pulled up from it; the plaster hung in crumbling chunks from the walls. It was a warren, and it drove me nuts. Mr. Alice shouldn’t have to come to places like that, places where he couldn’t be protected properly.

  More and more shadowy crones peered at us in silence as we climbed our way through the house. The old witch with the cinnamon bun face talked to Professor Macleod as we went, a few words here, a few words there; and he in return panted and puffed at her, from the effort of climbing the stairs, and answered her as best he could.

  “She wants to know if you brought the diamonds,” he gasped.

  “Tell her we’ll talk about that once we’ve seen the merchandise,” said Mr. Alice. He wasn’t panting, and if there was the faintest tremble in his voice, it was from anticipation.

  Mr. Alice has fucked, to my personal knowledge, half a brat-pack of the leading male movie stars of the last two decades, and more male models than you could shake your kit at; he’s had the prettiest boys on five continents; none of them knew precisely who they were being fucked by, and all of them were very well paid for their trouble.

  At the top of the house, up a final flight of uncarpeted wooden stairs, was the door to the attic, and flanking each side of the door, like twin tree trunk
s, was a huge woman in a black gown. Each of them looked like she could have held her own against a sumo wrestler. Each of them held, I kid you not, a scimitar: they were guarding the Treasure of the Shahinai. And they stank like old horses. Even in the gloom, I could see that their robes were patched and stained.

  The Mother Superior strode up to them, a squirrel facing up to a couple of pit bulls, and I looked at their impassive faces and wondered where they originally came from. They could have been Samoan or Mongolian, could have been pulled from a freak farm in Turkey or India or Iran.

  On a word from the old woman they stood aside from the door, and I pushed it open. It wasn’t locked. I looked inside, in case of trouble, walked in, looked around, and gave the all-clear. So I was the first male in this generation to gaze upon the Treasure of the Shahinai.

  He was kneeling beside a camp bed, his head bowed.

  Legendary is a good word to use for the Shahinai. It means I’d never heard of them and didn’t know anyone who had, and once I started looking for them even the people who had heard of them didn’t believe in them.

  “After all, my good friend,” my pet Russian academic said, handing over his report, “you’re talking about a race of people the sole evidence for the existence of which is half a dozen lines in Herodotus, a poem in the Thousand and One Nights, and a speech in the Manuscrit Trouvè à Saragosse. Not what we call reliable sources.”

  But rumors had reached Mr. Alice and he got interested. And what Mr. Alice wants, I make damned sure that Mr. Alice gets. Right now, looking at the Treasure of the Shahinai, Mr. Alice looked so happy I thought his face would break in two.

  The boy stood up. There was a chamber pot half sticking out from beneath the bed, with a cupful of vivid yellow piss in the bottom of it. His robe was white cotton, thin and very clean. He wore blue silk slippers.

  It was so hot in that room. Two gas fires were burning, one on each side of the attic, with a low hissing sound. The boy didn’t seem to feel the heat. Professor Macleod began to sweat profusely.

  According to legend, the boy in the white robe—he was seventeen at a guess, no more than eighteen—was the most beautiful man in the world. I could easily believe it.

  Mr. Alice walked over to the boy, and he inspected him like a farmer checking out a calf at the market: peering into his mouth, tasting the boy, and looking at the lad’s eyes and his ears; taking his hands and examining his fingers and fingernails; and then, matter-of-factly, lifting up his white robe and inspecting his uncircumcised cock before turning him round and checking out the state of his arse.

  And through it all the boy’s eyes and teeth shone white and joyous in his face.

  Finally Mr. Alice pulled the boy toward him and kissed him, slowly and gently, on the lips. He pulled back, ran his tongue around his mouth, nodded. Turned to Macleod. “Tell her we’ll take him,” said Mr. Alice.

  Professor Macleod said something to the Mother Superior, and her face broke into wrinkles of cinnamon happiness. Then she put out her hands.

  “She wants to be paid now,” said Macleod.

  I put my hands, slowly, into the inside pockets of my mac and pulled out first one, then two black velvet pouches. I handed them both to her. Each bag contained fifty flawless D or E grade diamonds, perfectly cut, each in excess of five carats. Most of them picked up cheaply from Russia in the mid-nineties. One hundred diamonds: forty million dollars. The old woman tipped a few into her palm and prodded at them with her finger. Then she put the diamonds back into the bag, and she nodded.

  The bags vanished into her robes, and she went to the top of the stairs and as loud as she could, she shouted something in her strange language.

  From all through the house below us there came a wailing, like from a horde of banshees. The wailing continued as we walked downstairs through that gloomy labyrinth, with the young man in the white robe in the lead. It honestly made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle, that wailing, and the stink of wet-rot and spices made me gag. I fucking hate foreigners.

  The women wrapped him up in a couple of blankets before they would let him out of the house, worried that he’d catch some kind of a chill despite the blazing July sunshine. We bundled him into the car.

  I got a ride with them as far as the tube, and I went on from there.

  I spent the next day, which was Wednesday, dealing with a mess in Moscow. Too many fucking cowboys. I was praying I could sort things out without having to personally go out there: the food gives me constipation.

  As I get older, I like to travel less and less, and I was never keen on it in the first place. But I can still be hands-on whenever I need to be. I remember when Mr. Alice said that he was afraid that Maxwell was going to have to be removed from the playing field. I told him I was doing it myself, and I didn’t want to hear another word about it. Maxwell had always been a loose cannon. Little fish with a big mouth and a rotten attitude.

  Most satisfying splash I’ve ever heard.

  By Wednesday night I was tense as a couple of wigwams, so I called a bloke I know, and they brought Jenny over to my flat in the Barbican. That put me in a good mood. She’s a good girl, Jenny. Nothing sluttish about her at all. Minds her P’s and Q’s.

  I was very gentle with her, that night, and afterward I slipped her a twenty-pound note.

  “But you don’t need to,” she said. “It’s all taken care of.”

  “Buy yourself something mad,” I told her. “It’s mad money.” And I ruffled her hair, and she smiled like a schoolgirl.

  Thursday I got a call from Mr. Alice’s secretary to say that everything was satisfactory and I should pay off Professor Macleod.

  We were putting him up in the Savoy. Now, most people would have taken the tube to Charing Cross, or to Embankment, and walked up the Strand to the Savoy. Not me. I took the tube to Waterloo station and walked north over Waterloo Bridge. It’s a couple of minutes longer, but you can’t beat the view.

  When I was a kid, one of the kids in the dorm told me that if you held your breath all the way to the middle of a bridge over the Thames and you made a wish there, the wish would always come true. I’ve never had anything to wish for, so I do it as a breathing exercise.

  I stopped at the call box at the bottom of Waterloo Bridge. (BUSTY SCHOOLGIRLS NEED DISCIPLINE. TIE ME UP TIE ME DOWN. NEW BLONDE IN TOWN.) I phoned Macleod’s room at the Savoy. Told him to come and meet me on the bridge.

  His suit was, if anything, a louder check than the one he’d worn on Tuesday. He gave me a buff envelope filled with word-processed pages: a sort of homemade Shahinai-English phrase book. “Are you hungry?” “You must bathe now.” “Open your mouth.” Anything Mr. Alice might need to communicate.

  I put the envelope in the pocket of my mac.

  “Fancy a spot of sightseeing?” I asked, and Professor Macleod said it was always good to see a city with a native.

  “This work is a philological oddity and a linguistic delight,” said Macleod as we walked along the Embankment. “The Shahinai speak a language that has points in common with both the Aramaic and the Finno-Ugric family of languages. It’s the language that Christ might have spoken if he’d written the epistle to the primitive Estonians. Very few loanwords, for that matter. I have a theory that they must have been forced to make quite a few abrupt departures in their time. Do you have my payment on you?”

  I nodded. Took out my old calf-skin wallet from my jacket pocket and pulled out a slip of brightly colored card. “Here you go.”

  We were coming up to Blackfriars Bridge, “It’s real?”

  “Sure. New York State Lottery. You bought it on a whim, in the airport, on your way to England. The numbers’ll be picked on Saturday night. Should be a pretty good week, too. It’s over twenty million dollars already.”

  He put the lottery ticket in his own wallet, black and shiny and bulging with plastic, and he put the wallet into the inside pocket of his suit. His hands kept straying to it, brushing it, absently making sure it was still th
ere. He’d have been the perfect mark for any dip who wanted to know where he kept his valuables.

  “This calls for a drink,” he said. I agreed that it did, but, as I pointed out to him, a day like today, with the sun shining and a fresh breeze coming in from the sea, was too good to waste in a pub. So we went into an off-license. I bought him a bottle of Stoli, a carton of orange juice and a plastic cup, and I got myself a couple of cans of Guinness.

  “It’s the men, you see,” said the Professor. We were sitting on a wooden bench looking at the South Bank across the Thames. “Apparently there aren’t many of them. One or two in a generation. The Treasure of the Shahinai. The women are the guardians of the men. They nurture them and keep them safe.

  “Alexander the Great is said to have bought a lover from the Shahinai. So did Tiberius, and at least two Popes. Catherine the Great was rumored to have had one, but I think it’s just a rumor.”

  I told him I thought it was like something in a storybook. “I mean, think about it. A race of people whose only asset is the beauty of their men. So every century they sell one of their men for enough money to keep the tribe going for another hundred years.” I took a swig of the Guinness. “Do you think that was all of the tribe, the women in that house?”

  “I rather doubt it.”

  He poured another slug of vodka into the plastic cup, splashed some orange juice into it, raised his glass to me. “Mr. Alice,” he said. “He must be very rich.”