Angelmaker

by Nick Harkaway

  Joe nods under his ridiculous hat. “Of course, Ari. I quite understand.”

  “It’s not that we’re not friends.”

  “Ari. I understand. I’d do the same.”

  “I wanted to see where you live,” Polly says angrily.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “God, it’s not your fault.”

  This seems like such an astoundingly astute and important observation that he nearly starts to cry. Instead, he swallows bile. There is a sharp determination in him where he expected to be desolate. It’s as if she turns him inside out, and things which should destroy him make him stronger instead.

  The policeman is looking over again. Polly Cradle edges the car around the corner. “Where now?”

  He can’t get to the riverside store by his usual route. The image of an old lady, six foot tall and wearing a Carmen fruit hat, pegging it along an alleyway in the company of a dark-haired bombshell with erotic toes would almost certainly attract some attention.

  “Down here, then right,” he tells her, then guides her onward through the maze of almost-dead ends and derelict warehouses. Twice, he actually takes her through one of the buildings, cavernous spaces with the river wind blowing through them and rags hanging on the broken glass of the windows. He hopes nothing cuts up the tyres.

  A few moments later, they’re standing on a long wooden pier. A thick snake of electrical cable runs along the edge out over the water, and at the far end dives into the hatch of a top-heavy old riverboat. Aboard the riverboat, towards the prow, is a sandy-haired man with a pony tattooed on one arm. He holds a grubby life-jacketed toddler on a sort of lead, and over some manner of infant rebellion is trying to read aloud from a dog-eared copy of Winnie The Pooh. Griff Watson is an anarchist and the husband of an anarchist, not to mention the notional owner of that evil cat known only as the Parasite, but he looks more like the sort of person who would write a book on professional fly-fishing.

  “Hullo, Joe!” cries Griff. “Where away?” Because it is his fantasy that the houseboat is a vessel under weigh, and not moored for ever on the muddy bank of the Thames.

  “Hullo, Griff! This is Polly. Polly, this is Griff.”

  “Hullo, Polly! Come aboard. It’s not too choppy today.”

  Polly Cradle looks at Joe, and he nods. “Yes, Cap’n,” she says gamely, but Griff Watson corrects her gently. To an order from the captain, he explains, the only proper response is “aye aye.”

  Joe Spork has shed his hat disguise, but is still wearing a rather unbecoming floral wrap. If Griff Watson sees anything odd in this, he doesn’t say. Before he can get too cosy, though, or start to discuss conditions in the German Bight, Joe raises a hand.

  “Griff, I need a favour. But you have to think about it—you can’t just say yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Is for me. You’re one of the good ’uns.”

  “I need to borrow the dinghy and go up to the riverside store. You remember?” Griff once kept an ancient harpsichord there, found in pieces and reassambled in Joe’s workshop, a present for his wife. It’s in the top cabin even now. On summer nights, you can sometimes hear her picking out a tune, hesitant, arrhythmic plinking rattling over the water. The harpsichord needs tuning, but even if it didn’t, Abbie Watson has a tin ear.

  “ ’Course I remember. Shall we go now?”

  “That’s the easy part. The hard part is that I may be in some trouble. I haven’t done anything wrong, but I’m mixed up in a mess, and you could get some stick for it.”

  “Will this help you get out of the trouble?”

  “It might.”

  “So do you want to go now?”

  “You don’t want to ask Abbie?”

  “She’d want to know why I hadn’t done it already. You’re a good neighbour, Joe. Decent man. One day the scales will fall from your eyes. There’s not many like you round here. Or anywhere in the world, come to it.” He glances at Polly. “He’s awfully stubborn about taking help, isn’t he?”

  “He thinks everything that happens anywhere on Earth is in some way his fault,” she replies. “My brother says it’s some sort of inverted egotism.”

  “What sort of trouble is it, then?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Government?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  Griff spits very precisely into the river. The gesture doesn’t suit him, which makes it oddly powerful. This is not a spitting man. This is a mild fellow, but that’s how strongly he feels.

  “Got a name?” Griff has an encyclopaedic knowledge of conspiracy theories. He can summon information about everything from black helicopters and the arms trade to drug cartels to MJ-12 and the Freemasons and a curious body called the Ark Mariners.

  Joe glances at Polly Cradle. “Titwhistle,” she says.

  Griff growls. “Bastard.”

  “You’ve heard of him?”

  “ ’Course I have. He’s on the Legacy Board. Is the bloody Legacy Board, most likely.”

  “What’s that, when it’s at home?”

  “Tidies up the government’s messes, doesn’t it? All the odds and ends. All the secrets they kept so long they don’t know what they mean any more. When one hand mustn’t know what the other one’s up to, the one doing the whatever-it-is is the Legacy Board. Started in Henry the Eighth’s time, killing bastards. Illegitimates, not bastards like Titwhistle. You watch your back, Joe.”

  “If you’d rather not be involved …”

  “Piss off. You’re in the war now, mate. Brother in arms. Just don’t know it yet.” And with this alarming endorsement, Griff leans down into the boat. “Jen! Come up and look after your brother. I’m sorting out the whaler.”

  Polly glances at Joe.

  “The correct term for Griff’s dinghy,” Joe Spork explains, because he doesn’t wish to talk about whether the Legacy Board is a fantasy on fringe websites or a serious problem, “is technically a ‘whaler’. These things are very important.”

  “Are they?”

  “They are if you’re Griff.”

  Griff hands the toddler on a leash to a smudged, whey-faced girl with coloured cotton wrapped into her hair and purple dungarees. In one hand, she clutches a cracked china doll on a wooden base.

  “How’s Rowena?” Joe asks her, indicating the doll. Jen smiles and touches the base. A pleasing musical tinkle strikes up, and the base rotates. If one were to stand the toy up, the doll would now be turning in a slow circle to the music. One of the small bits of bric-a-brac Joe Spork passed to the Watsons in calmer days. “Good,” Joe says. Jen nods.

  From the water side of the houseboat, a dull gurgle announces that the whaler has been woken from its slumber. The smell of cheap fuel burning in a mistimed engine washes over the boat. The toddler makes a face.

  “Flow tide,” Griff calls. “Time to go!” He hesitates. “Do you need me to come with you?”

  “No, Griff,” Joe says firmly. There are limits to the gifts of trust he will accept. “I can handle an outboard. You took me fishing, remember? We’ll just be ten minutes.” And nearly crashed us into a coastguard ship, insisting we had right of way. Which no doubt we did, but we were very tiny and those things have no brakes.

  “All right, then! Godspeed.” He casts them off.

  The whaler whickers out across the oily Thames, and along the wood-buttressed banks. It’s perhaps a mile to the warehouse, a little less to the store. Are they watching the river? Are there faces pressed against the glass? A thin man and a fat man, perhaps? But there’s no direct access to the river unless you count the Victorian flood run-off pipe under the basement, which goes into the Thames itself, and he doesn’t see them as desperate enough to swim in the Thames on the off chance. Besides, as far as they know, he’s hiding in the Raspberry Room at Noblewhite Cradle, like a good, sensible boy. And why isn’t he?

  Joe cuts the engine and the whaler drifts in towards the shore. He hands the tiller to
Polly Cradle. “You know how to do this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let the whaler run back with the tide. Give me about two minutes, then start the engine again—red button there, I know you know—and come and get me. If we keep it running, someone might hear.”

  Talking to his girl. His confederate. His co-conspirator. His accomplice. Jesus. I’m on the lam. I’m running from the Law.

  A moment later, Joe steps onto the slimy lower step of the store, and opens the door. He scoops up the record bag, along with the golden bee and the mysterious tools, wishing he’d thought to add a portable gramophone to the trove, and turns to go. He sees something drop from above onto the narrow ledge. His first thought is a dead crow or a rubbish sack falling from the ledges above. Then it seems to expand out of itself, straighten and stiffen.

  In the doorway stands a faceless figure swathed in black linen.

  Witch. Vampire. Leper.

  He opens his mouth to speak. The Ruskinite steps through the door and peers at him. At least, he assumes it is peering at him. It tilts its head slowly, one way, then the other. Then it ignores him, and goes around him to the shelves.

  Jesus. It’s blind.

  But no, that’s not true. It steps smoothly around him, around the clutter on the floor, seasick steps.

  It’s not interested in him.

  He stands in the middle of the tiny storeroom, very still, wondering what to do. Then, very slowly, he moves towards the door.

  The Ruskinite lunges forward, hands shooting out in a straight line towards him. The linen makes a sharp crack as it whips against itself. Joe jerks his face and neck out of danger, but the hands—gloved hands swaddled in cloth, bony hands, fleshless under the linen—are reaching for his arms to pin him, and they are ludicrously strong. Narrow fingers like handcuffs and immovable muscles lock him in place. The featureless face seeking his own, but under the cowl there must be a mask; the head pressed against his as they struggle is hard. He tries to punch: no give. He tries to separate his arms. The cloth-covered face snakes towards him again, very fast. He moves his head and hears a mouth snap shut like a beak. There’s a solidity to the bite, like the door of an expensive car closing. Sharp teeth. Jesus. He hears a rasping sound he hopes is breathing. There is a fear growing in him, deep in the gut and powerfully strange, that this is not a man at all.

  Flee. Fight. Survive.

  His entire life has been about flight for so long that his instincts for fight are rusty, but here, in this tight little space with the river on one side and the dark passages of London’s past on the other, there is nowhere to run to. The monster has come, and the retreat is closed off. Clumsily, he gathers his legs and surges upwards. It’s … oddly easy. He’s strong. Stronger than he usually thinks about. At the same time, he has a sense that the Ruskinite is trying to restrain him rather than kill him. Perhaps they have orders regarding Joe Spork.

  Not reassuring, actually.

  He lifts the Ruskinite into the air and slams him against a wall, using his enemy as a cushion. No response. Not even a gasp. He does it again, and feels the grip on his right hand loosen slightly. He lifts and surges again. And again. They grapple, winding around one another. Joe moves closer, forearm braced under the other’s chin so it doesn’t bite, his shoulder grinding into the enemy’s armpit to take that hand out of the fight. All the time, the head is reaching for him, a constant, jerking, snake-strike motion which is somehow very wrong, and very frightening. Joe yells something wordless which means get off! and shoves his enemy back, hard. It’s an explosion from the heels, through the hips, into the hands: the whole of his weight and muscle going into the other’s chest.

  The Ruskinite flies back into the old, metal-braced shelves, and hangs there, jerking sharply and rasping as if stuck on something. Joe edges around him, and peers.

  One of the struts has come away from the wall and the shelf. The sharp, pointed metal end comes to a halt in the shoulder of Joe’s enemy, and he hangs there, pinned like a butterfly. From his mouth emerges a low, rasping hiss. After a moment, he begins to inch his way forward off the spike.

  Joe Spork turns and runs for the door, slamming it behind him. Polly Cradle is just bringing the whaler into the dock.

  “Get us the fuck out of here!” he shouts, then, rather embarrassed, appends a more Joe-ish “please,” but Polly has already spun the whaler in a tight arc and twisted the throttle, and the little boat is virtually standing on its end.

  “Are you okay?” she yells back.

  “Yes.” And then on sober reflection, because it seems in retrospect that he has just impaled a man on a shelving unit, “No. I hurt someone. I don’t know what that means.”

  “It means he didn’t hurt you,” she says firmly, and reaches out to poke him, making sure he’s all still there.

  They leave the whaler with Griff Watson and tell him to take his family to France for a long holiday. When Griff opens his mouth to explain that he can’t, Polly Cradle assures him money will appear in his account to cover the cost. It’s just to be on the safe side, she says, and she knows a hotel where they’ll spoil them rotten. There will also be work for him and Abbie when they return, to whatever extent they want it. Positions will be found, educational bursaries made available for the children. Things will be arranged so that none of these blessings place the Watsons in the clutches of the system. The Cradle umbrella has opened over their heads as of this moment.

  Joe Spork watches her tread the narrow line between charity and bribery without ruffling Griff’s feathers. He says nothing, admiring her skill and fearful that his big, clumping feet in the conversation will ruin what she has done. Then they get back in the car and head off, away from the warehouse and into the wilds of Hackney, on a road running along the side of a bizarrely rural scene of cows and a purple sunset.

  “I couldn’t have done that,” he tells her, watching the cows. “I couldn’t have found the words.”

  But when Polly proposes that one adventure is enough, Joe becomes obstinate, and persuades her—she is afterwards absolutely unable to say how—to make one more stop before they go home.

  IX

  Women of Consequence;

  the Treasure of Mansura;

  Habakuk.

  Edie Banister, wearing a false moustache which tastes of tiger flank and erotic dancer, sitting six storeys up on the windowsill of the aged mother of a renownedly murderous prince, takes a few seconds to contemplate the unusual direction of her life. She realises she had no idea what she was expecting, but if she had been expecting anything it wasn’t this. Dotty Catty’s bedroom is papered in a very fine rose and green vertical stripe. There’s a picture rail, and a lot of tables with doilies. A china cow sits on the mantel, the base declaring it a present from Salisbury, and a red baize card table is covered in writing paper, all weighted down with a metal model of the Westminster Clock Tower.

  And yet, this is not the Dotty Catty she saw at dinner, or even the author of the letter which brought her here; the affronted trout is gone, and the waffly old broad and former socialite is not in res. This is Dowager-Khatun Dalan, wearing a simple white robe and gown and with her aged hands trembling ever so slightly in her lap. There is a smear of soot on her left thumb—lighting her own lamps?—and she looks as if she’s just run a marathon. Not surprising, in context. This is something of a big moment for her. Softly, softly, lest the old dear take fright and this mission be for naught.

  “My son murdered my husband and his brother, Commander Banister.”

  “Yes,” Edie says. “I know.” Because what the Hell else do you say to a statement like that? She stays on the windowsill, her hands flat on the stone, legs dangling like a child’s.

  “He burned my grandson in an iron box.”

  “Yes.”

  “He is still my son,” the Dowager-Khatun says. “What can I do? He is still my son. I should not love him any more. I hate him. But he is still my son. So I hate him, and when I hate him the most, I see him
when he was very young and I remember the way he looked at me, and I wonder what it was that I did so very, very badly that he became this man. This perfect, awful man. This Opium Khan of Addeh Sikkim, that all the world knows is a monster. That makes me a monster’s mother. Grendels modor. Wretched hag … But am I also aglœc-wif? That’s the question …” And, seeing Edie’s blank look, “Have you read Beowulf?”

  “My headmistress at school called it a work of pagan darkness touched by the dawning of Christ.”

  “Then I suspect you only got the highlights. To be aglœc is to possess greatness, for good or ill. My son has it. He killed his family. I was drowning in the scale of him. I chose to float, to be carried on his tide. I did not know what else to do. Monster’s mother.

  “And then there was this. This new design, this plan: a thing to end war. The Frenchwoman has aglœca, no doubt. A divine smith, perhaps. Or a woman Prometheus, a thief of fire. She has no idea what my son will do with what she makes in her forge. Or perhaps she does. Perhaps she plots, too. The gifts of gods were always dangerous. A hero’s sword may be the blade on which he dies. So. But I do not know. I do not think she sees the world like that. She is not … small … enough.

  “But something in me said: no. No more. This far and no further. I will not let him make the world in his own image. Horror and war and selfishness. No.” Dotty Catty sags. She waves her hands once, twice in front of her face, warding off flies and memories. Edie suspects she sees the young Shem Shem Tsien, looking for a lost ball or a favoured pet: Mother, can you help me? No, child. Not now. Not any more.

  “So I betrayed him to your King. But I told them, I shall only meet a woman. They assumed it was customary. Bah! What do I care for custom, here, now? Do you imagine that I do? I plot against my son. Of course I do not care who comes to my room. Send the first five regiments of the British Army in India! Send them all, naked as they were born! I shall not be afrighted in the slightest. But I knew, if they sent a woman, she must be a rare one. To do this work at all, to be accepted, to be trusted with such a thing. They would have to think carefully. Send the best.” The Dowager-Khatun shakes her head, and Edie can smell rosehips and oil. From the lined, empty face, little dark eyes are measuring, probing. She wants something.