Moon Over Soho

by Ben Aaronovitch

  “I heard Leslie is in town for an operation,” I said.

  “She’s going to be fine,” said Dr. Walid. “You just need to make sure that when she asks for your help, you’re ready to give it. How do you feel about her injuries?”

  “It didn’t happen to me,” I said. “It happened to Leslie and Dr. Framline and that poor Hari Krishna sod and the others.”

  “Do you feel guilty?”

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t do it to them and I did my best to stop it. But I feel guilty that I don’t feel guilty, if that helps.”

  “Not all my patients start off dead,” said Dr. Walid. “Not in my medical practice anyway. Sometimes, no matter what you do, the outcomes can be less than optimal. It’s not whether you feel responsible, it’s whether you don’t shy away when she needs you.”

  “The thought of her face scares me to death,” I said, before I could stop myself.

  “Not as much as it scares her,” he said and patted my arm. “Not as much as the thought that you might reject her scares her. Make sure you are there when she needs you—that’s your responsibility in this—your part of the job, if you like.”

  We were way over our daily quota of emo so I changed the subject.

  “Do you know about the nest of vampires in Purley?” I asked.

  “That was a nasty business.”

  “Nightingale called what I felt there the tactus disvitae, antilife,” I said. “He implied that the vampires sucked ‘life’ from their environment.”

  “As I understand it,” he said.

  “Have you ever had a chance to section the brain of one of their victims?”

  “Usually they’re in an advanced state of desiccation when we get them,” said Dr. Walid. “But one or two of them have been fresh enough to get some useful results. I think I know where you’re going with this.”

  “Did the brain sections show signs of hyperthaumic degradation?”

  “It’s hyperthaumaturgical degradation,” said Dr. Walid. “And yes, they showed terminal levels of HTD, damage to at least ninety percent of the brain.”

  “Is it possible that ‘life’ energy and magic are essentially the same thing?” I asked.

  “That wouldn’t contradict anything I’ve observed,” he said.

  I told him about the experiments I’d run with pocket calculators and about how the damage done to their microprocessors had resembled the damage done to the human brain by HTD.

  “That would mean that magic was affecting biological and nonbiological constructions,” said Dr. Walid. “Which means it might be possible to develop some form of nonsubjective instrumentality.” Clearly Dr. Walid was just as frustrated as I was with the Toby the Dog method of magic detection. “We have to replicate your experiments. This has to be documented.”

  “We can do that later,” I said. “But what I need to know now is about the effect this might have on life extension.”

  Dr. Walid gave me a sharp look. “You’re talking about Thomas,” he said.

  “I’m talking about the vampires,” I said. “I checked in Wolfe and he lists at least three cases where it was confirmed that the vampires were at least two hundred years old.”

  Dr. Walid was too good a scientist to just accept the word of a natural philosopher from the early nineteenth century but he conceded that the evidence indicated it was a possibility. Really, you’d expect a cryptopathologist to be a bit more credulous. Still, I wasn’t going to let a little bit of skepticism get in the way of a perfectly good theory.

  “Let’s say for the moment that I’m right,” I said. “Is it possible that all the creatures with extended lives, the genii locorum, Nightingale, Molly, the vampires—isn’t it possible that they’re all drawing magic from the environment to keep themselves from aging?”

  “Life protects itself,” said Dr. Walid. “As far as we know, vampires are the only creatures that can take life—magic, whatever—directly from people.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Let’s forget about the gods, Molly, and the other weirdos for a moment and concentrate on the vampires. Would it be possible for there to be a vampire-like creature that fed off musicians—that the act of making music made them uniquely vulnerable?”

  “You think there are vampires that feed off jazz?” he asked.

  “Why not?”

  “Jazz vampires?”

  “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck …,” I said.

  “Why jazz?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. My dad would’ve had an answer. He would have said it had to be jazz because that was the only proper music there was. “I suppose we could line up different kinds of musicians, expose them to our vampire, and see which ones suffer brain damage.”

  “I’m not sure that would meet the BMA’s ethical guidelines on human experimentation,” he said. “Not to mention the difficulty of finding volunteers to be guinea pigs.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Musicians? If you offered them money. Free beer, even.”

  “So this is your hypothesis for what happened to Cyrus Wilkinson?”

  “It’s more than that,” I said. “I think I may have stumbled upon a sort of trigger event.” I explained about Peggy and Snakehips Johnson and the Café de Paris and it all sounded thinner and thinner even as I was laying it out.

  Dr. Walid finished his tea as I wound down.

  “We need to find this Peggy,” I said.

  “That much is certain,” said Dr. Walid.

  I DIDN’T feel like doing data entry and I still couldn’t get Leslie on the phone. So I cropped a high-resolution image of Peggy in 1941 and printed out a dozen copies on the laser printer. Armed with those, I headed into Soho to see if I could find anyone who remembered her. Starting with Alexander Smith. After all, Peggy and Henry Bellrush were one of his top acts.

  When he wasn’t paying women to take off their clothes in an ironic postmodernist way, Alexander Smith operated out of a small office above a sex-shop-turned-coffee-bar on Greek Street. I buzzed the intercom and a voice asked who I was.

  “PC Grant to see Alexander Smith,” I said.

  “Who did you say you were?” asked the voice.

  “PC Grant,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Police,” I said. “Open the sodding door.”

  The door buzzed and I stepped into another narrow communal Soho staircase with worn nylon carpet and handprints on the walls. A man was waiting for me on the landing at the top of the stairs. He seemed quite ordinary when I was at the bottom but like one of those weird corridor illusions he got bigger and bigger the farther up I got. By the time I reached the top he was four inches taller than me and appeared to fill the landing from one side to the other. He was wearing a navy blue High and Mighty suit jacket over a black Led Zeppelin T-shirt; he also had no visible neck and probably a blackjack concealed up his sleeve. Staring up his hairy nostrils made me quite nostalgic. You don’t get old-fashioned muscle like that in London anymore. These days it was all whippet-thin white guys with mad eyes and hoodies. This was a villain my dad would have recognized and I wanted to embrace him and kiss him firmly on both cheeks.

  “What the fuck do you want?” he asked.

  Or maybe not.

  “I just want a word with Alexander,” I said.

  “Busy,” said No-Neck.

  There are a number of police options at this point. My training at Hendon Police College emphasized polite firmness—“I’m afraid, sir, that I must ask you to stand aside”—while my street experience suggested that the best option would be to call in a van full of TSG and have them deal with the problem, using a taser if necessary. On top of that, generations of cockney geezers on my dad’s side were yelling at me that this was a diabolical liberty and he deserved a good kicking.

  “Look, I’m the police,” I said. “And we could … you know … do the whole thing, but you’d get arrested and blah blah blah and stuff, whereas I just want a chat … so what’s the point of all … th
is?”

  No-neck thought about this for a moment, before grunting and shifting enough to let me squeeze past. That’s how real men settle their differences. Through reasoned discussion and a dispassionate analysis. He farted as I reached the inner door as a sign, I decided, of his respect.

  Alexander Smith’s office was surprisingly neat. A pair of self-assembly desks, two walls lined with bracket shelves covered with magazines, books, papers, overstuffed box files, and DVDs. The windows had dusty cream venetian blinds, one of which had obviously gotten stuck halfway up sometime around the turn of the century and hadn’t been touched since. Smith had been working on a PowerBook but ostentatiously closed it when I walked in. He was still a dandy in a lemon-yellow blazer and crimson ascot, but outside of the club he seemed smaller and meaner.

  “Hello, Alexander,” I said and threw myself into his visitor’s chair. “How’s tricks?”

  “Constable Grant,” he said and I noticed that he’d picked up an involuntary leg tremor. He noticed me noticing and put his hand on his knee to stop it. “What can I do you for?”

  Definitely nervous about something. And even though it probably had nothing to do with my case, a little extra leverage never hurts.

  “Have you got something you need to be doing?”

  “Just the usual,” he said.

  I asked him if his girls were all right and he visibly relaxed. This was not the source of his nerves.

  Bollocks, I thought. Now he knows I don’t know.

  To prove it, he offered me a cup of instant coffee, which I declined.

  “Are you expecting company?” I asked.

  “Eh?”

  “What’s with the gorilla on the door?”

  “Oh,” said Smith. “That’s Tony. I inherited him from my brother. I mean, I couldn’t get rid of him. He’s practically a family retainer.”

  “Isn’t he expensive to feed?”

  “The girls like to have him around,” said Smith. “Is there anything particular that I can do for you?”

  I pulled out one of my 1941 prints and handed it to Smith. “Is that Peggy?”

  “Looks like her,” he said. “What about it?”

  “Have you seen her recently?”

  “Not since the gig at the Café de Paris,” he said. “Which was spectacular. Did I tell you that. Fucking spectacular.”

  And weirdly coincidental but I wasn’t going to tell Smith that.

  “Do you have a home address?” I asked.

  “No,” said Smith. “This is a bit of a cash-only business. What the Revenue don’t see, the Revenue don’t worry about.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I’m pay-as-you-earn myself.”

  “That could change,” said Smith. “Anything else you’re interested in? Only some of us don’t get paid by the hour.”

  “You go back, don’t you?” I asked.

  “We all go back,” he said. “Some of us go back farther than others.”

  “Was she around then?”

  “Who?”

  “Peggy,” I said. “Was she dancing back in the 1990s?”

  “I generally get nervous when they’re still at infant school,” he said.

  “How about in the 1980s?”

  “Now I know you’re mucking me about,” he said, but hesitated just a little bit too long.

  “Maybe not her then,” I said. “Maybe it was her mum—same sort of look.”

  “Sorry. I was abroad for most of the ’70s and ’80s,” he said. “Although there was one bird used to do one of them fan dances at the Windmill Theatre, but that was 1962—that would be a bit far back even for Peggy’s mum.”

  “Why’d you have to leave the country?”

  “I didn’t have to,” he said. “But this place was a shit hole so I got out.”

  “You came back, though.”

  “I missed the jellied eels,” he said. But I didn’t believe him.

  I wasn’t going to get anything else useful, but I made a note to look up Smith on the PNC once I got back to the tech-cave. I gave No-Neck Tony a friendly pat on the shoulder as I squeezed past.

  “You’re a living treasure, my son,” I said.

  He grunted and I was satisfied, as I went down the stairs, that we’d made a connection.

  Anyway, confirmation—either Peggy’s grandmother bore an uncanny resemblance to her granddaughter, or Peggy had been around since 1941 feeding on jazz musicians. So far all my confirmed sightings of Peggy and all the recent deaths had taken place around Soho. So that seemed the place to start. It would also be useful to pin down some “known associates,” particularly Cherry or Cherie—Mickey the Bone’s girlfriend. This is the point when somebody working on a proper investigation asks his governor for some bodies to do a door-to-door canvass, but there was only me. So I started at one end of Old Compton Street and worked my way down.

  They didn’t know her in the Spice of Life or Ed’s Diner, or the other food places at the east end of the street. One of the ticket staff at GAY said she looked familiar but that was it; a woman working in a corner newsagent/mini supermarket said that she thought she’d seen Peggy come in and buy cigarettes. I didn’t get anything at the Admiral Duncan except a couple of offers to take me out to dinner. They knew her in Trashy Lingerie as “that posh bird who comes in every so often and turns her nose up at our stock.” I was thinking it might be worth heading up to A Glimpse of Stocking when a madwoman ran out of Patisserie Valerie calling my name.

  It was Simone, high heels skidding on the pavement as she swerved to avoid a startled pedestrian. She was wearing a pair of faded stretch jeans and a burgundy cardigan that gaped open to reveal nothing but a crimson lace bra underneath—front catch, I noticed. She was waving and yelling and I saw there was a smear of cream on her cheek.

  Once she saw that I’d spotted her, she stopped shouting and self-consciously pulled the cardigan closed across her chest.

  “Hello, Peter,” she said as I walked over. “Fancy running into you like this.” She touched her face, found the cream, grimaced, and tried to rub it off with her sleeve. Then she wrapped her arms around my neck and pulled my face down for a kiss.

  “You must think me perfectly demented,” she said as we broke.

  “Pretty demented,” I said.

  She pulled my head down again and asked me in a whisper whether I was free that afternoon. “You left me alone all yesterday,” she said. “I think you owe me an afternoon of carnal pursuits at the very least.”

  Given that it was that or several hours of door-to-door canvassing, I didn’t really have to work that hard. Simone laughed, slipped her arm through mine, and led me up the street. I waved a hand at the Patisserie Valerie. “What about your bill?” I asked.

  “You mustn’t worry about the patisserie,” she said. “I have an account.”

  IT STARTED raining sometime after lunch. I woke up in Simone’s big bed to find the room filled with gray light and rain drumming against the window. Simone was pressed warmly up against me, her cheek against my shoulder, one arm flung possessively across my chest. After some maneuvering I managed to check my watch and found that it was past two o’clock. Simone’s arm tightened around me, her eyes opened, and she gave me a sly look before kissing the hollow of my neck. I decided that it was too wet for doing door-to-door anyway, and that I would compensate by doing all that boring data entry as soon as I got back to the Folly. My schedule suitably modified, I rolled Simone over on her back and set to seeing how worked up I could get her without using my hands. She sighed as my lips found her nipple, which wasn’t the effect I was going for, and gently stroked my head.

  “Come up here,” she said and tugged at my shoulders, pulling me up and between her legs so that I slipped in without even trying and then, when she had me arranged to her satisfaction, she held me there, a look of contentment on her face.

  My hips twitched.

  “Wait,” she said.

  “I can’t help it,” I said.

  �
��If you could just restrain yourself a moment,” she said. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

  We stayed locked together. I felt a strange vibration in my chest and belly, which I realized was Simone humming deep in her diaphragm, or whatever it is singers use. I couldn’t quite make out the tune, but it made me think of smoky cafés and women in padded jackets and pillbox hats.

  “Nobody makes me feel like you,” she said.

  “I thought I was the first,” I said.

  “Hypothetically,” she said. “If there had been others, none of them would have made me feel the way you do.”

  I twitched again but this time she lifted her hips to meet me.

  Afterward, we dozed again, sweaty and content and lying in each other’s arms. I would have stayed there forever if I hadn’t been driven out of bed by my bladder, and a guilty sense that there were things that I needed to be getting on with—important things.

  Simone lay sprawled naked and inviting across the bed and watched me getting dressed under deliberately heavy-lidded eyes.

  “Come back to bed,” she said and let her fingers drift idly around one erect nipple, then the other.

  “I’m afraid the mighty army of justice that is the Metropolitan Police never sleeps,” I said.

  “I don’t want the mighty army of justice to sleep,” she said. “On the contrary I expect it to be most diligent in its dealings with me. I’m a bad girl and I need to be held accountable for my actions.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “At least take me to your father’s concert,” she said.

  I’d told her about Dad’s upcoming gig, but I hadn’t told her that Cyrus Wilkinson’s old band would be playing with him.

  “I want to meet your mum and your dad and your friends,” she said. “I’ll be good.”

  I knelt down by the bed and kissed her. She clutched at my arms and I thought, Sod it—they’re going to find out sooner or later. I told her she could come.

  She finished our kiss and threw herself back on the bed.

  “That is all I wanted,” she said and waved her hand in a regal fashion. “You may go about your duties, Constable, and I shall languish here until we meet again.”