Moon Over Soho

by Ben Aaronovitch

  Back in the days before E numbers and food technologists, I thought. Which was, as it happened, about where I wanted to be. Luckily the iPod chose that moment to play the last track on the playlist—Ken “Snakehips” Johnson’s very own version of “Body and Soul.” I don’t care what purists like my dad think. If you want to dance you can’t beat a touch of swing. Simone certainly thought so because she stopped trying to strip me and instead started to pull me around the coach house in tight little circles. She was leading but I didn’t mind—that was all part of the plan.

  “Did you ever hear him play live,” I asked as casually as I could. “Ken Johnson?”

  “Just the once,” said Simone.

  In March 1941 of course.

  “It was our last day of freedom,” she said. “We’d all joined up as soon as we were old enough.” She told me that Cherie joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service and Peggy was a Wren in the Women’s Royal Naval Service. But Simone had chosen the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force because somebody had said there was a chance she might fly.

  “Or at least meet a handsome pilot who’d take me up in his crate,” she said. It was Peggy’s Canadian uncle who got them into the Café de Paris and Cherie had said that they’d be fine, money-wise, providing they didn’t order any food or have more than one drink.

  Simone pressed her cheek against my chest and I stroked her hair.

  “Our table could have been better, perhaps,” said Simone. “It was surprisingly small and not at all conveniently placed.

  “If the band were at six o’clock we were sort of half past one.”

  The club was full of handsome Canadian officers, one of whom sent over a bottle of champagne to their table, sparking a spirited discussion about how appropriate it would be for them to accept it, which ended only when Peggy downed her glass in one gulp. This led to another discussion about whether they could get a second bottle out of the Canadians and what, Cherie asked darkly, might they expect in return?

  Peggy said that as far as she was concerned, the Canadians could have whatever they liked. In fact she was of the opinion that it was their patriotic duty to make the brave soldiers of Commonwealth welcome and she was perfectly prepared to do her duty and think of England.

  But they never got their second bottle of champagne and the Canadians didn’t get their just deserts. Because at that point the band struck up “Body and Soul” and the girls only had eyes for Ken Johnson.

  “Nobody had ever told me,” said Simone, “that a colored man could be so beautiful. And the way he moved—no wonder they called him Snakehips.” She frowned up at me. “You haven’t kissed me for ever such a long time.”

  She pouted, so I kissed her. It was the single most stupid thing I’ve ever done, and that includes running into a tower block thirty seconds before it was due to be demolished.

  Vestigium is usually hard to spot. It’s the uneasy feeling you have in a graveyard, the half memory of children laughing in a playground, or a familiar face in the corner of your eye. What I got from that kiss was a full-on high-definition reproduction of the last moments of Ken Johnson and forty-odd others at Café de Paris. I didn’t get to enjoy the ambience much. Laughter, uniforms, a live swing orchestra at the height of its power, and then—silence.

  During the Renaissance, when there was a flowering of art, culture, and almost continuous bloody warfare, some particularly foolhardy engineers would break sieges by rushing up to the castle and attaching a primitive-shaped charge to the gate. Sometimes, because fuses were more of an art than a science in those days, the charge would go off before the luckless engineer had gotten clear and he would be blown, or “hoisted,” through the air—often in bits. The French, with that subtle rapier wit that has made them famous, nicknamed the bombs “petards” or farts. People still use the phrase hoisted by his own petard to refer to a situation where one is damaged by one’s own scheme. Which is what happened to me when I guided Simone back into her memories, and she proceeded to suck my brains out.

  You don’t experience a bomb blast so much as remember it afterward. It’s like a bad edit or a record jumping a groove. On one side of the moment there is music and laughter and romance and on the other—not pain, that comes later, but a stunned incomprehension. A tangle of dust and splintered wood, a splash of white and red that becomes a man’s dress shirt, tables overturned to reveal bodiless legs and headless bodies, a trombone minus its slide standing upright on a table as if left there by a musician while two men in khaki uniforms stared blindly at it—killed by the blast wave.

  And then noise and shouting and the taste of blood in Simone’s mouth.

  My blood, I realized—I’d bitten my lip.

  It was Simone who pushed me away.

  “How old am I?” she asked.

  “I make it a shade short of ninety,” I said, because there’s just no stopping my mouth sometimes.

  “Your mother was right,” she said. “I am a witch.”

  I found I was swaying and my hand was shaking. I held it up in front of my face.

  “She was right,” she said. “I’m not a person, I’m a creature, an abomination.”

  I tried to tell her that she was definitely a human being and that some of my best friends were functionally immortal. I wanted to say that we could work it out, but it came out as a series of wah sounds like Charlie Brown’s teacher.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to go and talk to my sisters.” She gave a bitter little laugh. “Only they’re not my sisters, are they? I’m Lucy, we’re all Lucy Western.”

  She turned and ran out of the coach house. I heard her heels clanging down the spiral staircase. I tried to follow but toppled slowly onto my face instead.

  “THAT WAS not the most intelligent thing you’ve ever done,” said Nightingale as Dr. Walid shone a light in my eyes to make sure my brains were intact. I’m not sure how long I’d flopped around on the floor of the coach house, but as soon as I’d gotten enough muscle control to use a phone, I’d called Dr. Walid. He was calling it an atonic seizure because, even if he didn’t know why it had happened, it was important to give it a cool name. I’d been hoping that I’d have a chance to come up with a plausible explanation before Nightingale arrived, but he came in just behind Dr. Walid.

  “I had to be sure she was related to the Café de Paris case and not the Strip Club of Dr. Moreau,” I said. “I mean, she’s not a chimera like the Pale Lady. In fact, I think she’s an accident.” I explained about Miss Patternost and her musical shapes.

  “You think that their ‘shapes’ acted like forma?” asked Nightingale.

  “Why not?” I asked. “I used to make shapes when I was going to sleep when I was a kid, or listening to music. Everyone does it and among billions of people, no matter how unlikely something is, if you repeat the action enough times there’s a result—there’s magic. How else could Newton stumble onto the principle in the first place. They were the wrong girls doing the wrong thing in the wrong place and …”

  “And what?” asked Dr. Walid.

  “I think they survived the blast at the Café de Paris because they channeled magic, or life energy, or whatever this stuff is, through the forma in their minds. We know that magic can be released at the point of death—hence sacrifices.”

  “Hence vampires,” said Nightingale.

  “Not vampires,” I said. I’d been studying my Wolfe. “Tactus disvitae, the antilife, is the mark of the vampire. This is more like alcohol or drug dependency; the damage is an unintended consequence, like cirrhosis of the liver or gout.”

  “Human beings are not bottles of brandy,” said Nightingale. “And Wolfe always was too keen on categorizing and subcategorizing everything. A rose by any other name and all that. Still—where would she have gone?”

  “Most likely the flat on Berwick Street,” I said.

  “Back to the nest,” said Nightingale. And I didn’t like the way he said it.

  Dr. Walid handed me a couple of painkillers and
half a bottle of Diet Pepsi he must have found in the fridge. There was no fizz when I unscrewed the top and it tasted flat when I swallowed the tablets—it must have been in there for ages.

  He sat down next to me on the sofa and put his hand on my arm. “If your father really did have a close encounter with Simone at some point in the past we may be able to find evidence of that. So I want you to bring your father to the UCH tomorrow at eleven,” he said and then pointed at Nightingale. “You I want in bed in the next half hour with a hot milk and a sleeping tablet.”

  “There’s—” said Nightingale but Dr. Walid didn’t give him a chance to start, let alone finish.

  “If you don’t follow my instructions, I swear on my father’s life that I’ll have you both put on medical leave,” he said. “Do you both ken me on this?” We nodded obediently.

  “Good,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Later, while we were wrangling hot drinks out of Molly in her kitchen, Nightingale asked me if I thought Dr. Walid actually had the authority to carry out his threat. “I think so,” I said. “He’s down on paper as our OCU’s registered medical adviser. If we had any cells here he’d be the one we called in if our prisoners needed medical attention. Do we have any cells?”

  “Not anymore,” said Nightingale. “They were all bricked up after the war.”

  “In any case,” I said, “I vote we don’t push to find out how far his authority extends.”

  Molly reverentially handed a mug of hot chocolate to Nightingale. “Thank you,” he said.

  “What about mine?” I asked.

  Molly held up Toby’s lead and wagged it at me.

  “Not me again?”

  “I’m on bed rest,” said Nightingale. “Doctor’s orders.”

  I looked down at Toby, who was crouched half hidden behind Molly’s skirts. He gave me an experimental yap.

  “You’re not making any friends around here, you know,” I said.

  DR. WALID let me watch while he fed my father into the MRI scanner at UCH. He said it was a 3.0 Tesla machine, which was good, but that really the hospital could do with another one to cope with the demand.

  There’s a microphone inside the tube so you can hear if the patient’s in distress—I could hear my dad humming.

  “What’s that sound?” asked Dr. Walid.

  “Dad,” I said. “He’s singing ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’.’ ”

  Dr. Walid sat down at a control desk complicated enough to launch a satellite into low earth orbit or mix a top-twenty hit. The magnetic drum in the scanner started to rotate with the sort of banging sound that makes you drive your car into the nearest garage. It didn’t seem to bother my dad, who carried on humming, although I noticed he did shift his rhythm to match the machine.

  The scans went on for a long time, and after a while the microphone picked up my dad’s gentle snoring.

  Dr. Walid looked at me and raised an eyebrow.

  “If you can go to sleep while my mum’s on the phone,” I said, “you can pretty much sleep through anything.”

  When they’d finished with my dad, Dr. Walid turned to me and told me to strip off and get in the machine myself.

  “What?”

  “Simone was probably feeding off you too,” he said.

  “But I don’t play jazz,” I said. “I don’t even like it that much.”

  “You’re making assumptions, Peter. The whole jazz aspect may just be a boundary effect. If your lady friend is an uncharacterized category of thaumovore then we can’t know what the mechanism is. We need more data, so I need you to stick your head in the MRI machine.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “It’s for science,” he said.

  There’s something uniquely claustrophobic about sliding into an MRI scanner. The rotating magnets are on an industrial scale and generate a magnetic field sixty thousand times that of the earth. And they feed you into it wearing nothing but a hospital gown that lets a breeze flap around your privates.

  At least Dr. Walid didn’t make me wait around for the results.

  “This is your dad’s,” he said. He pointed to a couple of dark gray smudges. “Those look like minor lesions, probably hyperthaumaturgical degradation. I’ll have to refine the image further and make some comparisons to be sure. This is your brain, which is not only pristine and unsullied by thought, but also showing no sign of any lesions.”

  “So she wasn’t feeding off me. Then why did I pass out?”

  “I’d bet she was feeding off you,” he said. “Just not enough yet for it to damage your brain.”

  “She was doing it while we were having sex,” I said. “She practically told me that herself. Do we know what she’s actually feeding off exactly?”

  “The damage I’m looking at is consistent with the early stages of hyperthaumaturgical degradation.”

  “She’s a vampire,” I said. “A jazz vampire.”

  “Jazz may just be the flavoring,” said Dr. Walid. “What’s being consumed is magic.”

  “Which is what exactly?”

  “We don’t know, as well you know,” he said and sent me off to get changed.

  “Is it brain cancer then?” asked my dad as we got dressed.

  “No, they just wanted to record your empty head for posterity,” I said.

  “You’ve never been very lucky with birds, have you?” he said. It’s weird watching an elderly parent when he’s half naked. You find yourself staring in fascination at the slack skin, the wrinkles, and the liver spots, and thinking—one day all that will be yours. Or at least it will be if you can avoid getting killed or falling in love with vampires.

  “Apart from the thing with Mum, how did the gig go?”

  “Not bad at all,” he said. “We could have done with a bit more rehearsal, but then you always can.”

  Even with sterile needles supplied by the NHS my dad had still collapsed the veins on his arms and I’d assumed he’d been injecting into his legs. But looking now I couldn’t see any tracks.

  “When was the last time you had your medicine?” I asked.

  “I’m temporarily off the gear,” he said.

  “Since when?” I asked.

  “Since the summer,” he said. “I thought your mum told you.”

  “She said you’d quit smoking,” I said.

  “And the rest.” My dad slipped into his rifle-green shirt with the button-down collar and shook his arm in the approved cockney geezer manner. “Got off both horses,” he said. “And to be honest giving up the fags was the harder of the two.”

  I offered to take him home, but he said that not only was he all right but he was looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet. Still the sun was going down so I waited with him at the stop until his bus came and then I walked back to Russell Square.

  I’m used to having the Folly to myself, so it was a bit of a shock to wander into the atrium and find half a dozen guys making themselves comfortable in the armchairs. I recognized one of them, a stocky man with a broken nose, as Frank Caffrey, our contact in the fire brigade and reservist for the parachute regiment. He stood up and shook my hand.

  “These are me mates,” he said.

  I gave them a nod. They were all fit-looking middle-aged men with short haircuts and while they were dressed in a variety of civvies their manner suggested that uniforms were a very real possibility. Molly had supplied them with afternoon tea, but slung under the occasional tables and stacked beside their armchairs the men had sturdy black nylon carryalls. The ones with the reinforced straps and handles allowing you to carry small, heavy metal objects around in safety and relative comfort.

  I asked where Nightingale was.

  “On the phone to the commissioner,” he said. “We’re just waiting for the word.”

  The “word” made me cold and sweaty. I doubted this word was to extend Simone and her sisters an invitation to tea. I managed to keep the fear off my face, gave Caffrey’s mates a cheery wave, and headed through the back door and across the yard and out the c
oach house gate. I reckoned that I had at least ten minutes before Nightingale figured out I’d gone, twenty if I left the car in the garage. He knew me well enough to know what I was going to do next. He’d probably thought he was trying to protect me from myself, which was ironic because I thought I was trying to protect him from himself.

  Twenty minutes to notice I was gone, ten minutes to tool up and pile into whatever nondescript van the paras had brought with them, ten minutes to reach Berwick Street. Forty minutes, tops.

  A black cab was turning the corner as I stepped out on the pavement and shouted “Taxi.” I stuck my hand out, but the bastard pretended he hadn’t seen and cruised right past me. I swore and memorized his license plate in case an opportunity for petty but deeply satisfying vengeance came along later. Fortunately a second cab came around the corner immediately and dropped off some tourists outside one of the hotels on Southampton Row and I slipped in before the driver could experience any problems with his night vision. He had the cropped hair of a man too proud to cover his bald patch with a comb-over. Just to make his day I showed my warrant card.

  “Get me to Berwick Street in under ten minutes and I’ll give you a free pass for the rest of the year,” I said.

  “And the wife’s car?” he asked.

  “Same deal,” I said and gave him my card.

  “Done,” he said and demonstrated the amazing turning circle of the London black cab by doing an illegal U-turn that threw me into the side door, then accelerated down Bedford Place. Either he was insane or his wife really needed help with the traffic tickets, because we did it in less than five minutes. I was so impressed I even paid him the fare as well.

  Friday night on Berwick Street and the punters were quietly slipping in and out of the sex shops on the corner with Peter Street. The market had closed but the pubs and the record shops were still open and a steady stream of media workers were threading their way home through the tourists. I took some time to check the front of Simone’s house—up on the top floor the light was on.