Communion Town Page 11

  ‘Hal. Seems you ain’t given up.’

  ‘Where is she?’ My head felt as hard, angular and hollow as the heaped blocks. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘That,’ said Don, ‘is what you ain’t going to find out.’

  ‘Tell me where she is.’

  ‘You should have listened in the first place, Hal, and turned down the case. But you ain’t a man to take friendly advice. So here we are again.’

  Don was holding something close to his leg, something blunt and leaden. Brass glinted at Dave’s fist. I lifted my chin. No one quite seemed to know what to say next.

  ‘Come on, then,’ I offered at last, and, shyly, the brothers moved towards me.

  … mid-morning sunlight angled through the holes and tracked across unfinished floor. Dust moved in small whorls, the motes buddying up and falling out again. I stirred. I was spread on the ground all ready for outlining in white tape. I moved a hand to find out what shape my head was, then sat up, full of regrets. From the precipice of the staircase you’d have seen me feeling my skull, surrounded by scattered gold bits. They had burst from my pockets and the Cherubs had left them where they fell. Those boys and their professional ethics.

  You hadn’t been here. I gave it to myself straight: she wasn’t here, it was them instead. I was in no state not to despair. There were no leads, there was no way forward. I knew nothing about you except what wouldn’t help.

  With my thoughts cramped tight as my jaw I gathered up the thin coins, restoring every last one to my pockets. I knew their weight, now, to the penny. I thought I’d head back into the city then inter myself at the back of Meaney’s and see how many whiskies I could swap them for. Then I noticed something else in the dust. I picked it up. A business card: a name, unknown to me, was printed on the front, and the name of a trade, and an address. But when I flipped it over, the pale-pencilled handwriting there nearly floored me again. The characters were already fixed in my mind. Four words. Take care of yourself.

  8. Tough Guys Bruise Easy

  I pounded the streets. I’d have driven but the Cherubs had cut my tyres, so the jalopy was beached up on Lorenz Drive and I’d slogged it back into the city on foot, parched, earning blisters. The cheap business card was in my pocket, its edges already rubbed soft by my fidgeting thumb. My thinking was, you’d slipped it into my pocket back in the office. I didn’t like that but it was something to go on. It took me all afternoon to find the address. It wasn’t a district I knew, and I kept having to turn back, making detours with my handkerchief clutched to my nose and mouth, because the red sigils clustered ever thicker and just out of sight the bells were ringing. Plenty of streets were too far gone for containment. The doors hung open and bodies lay half in and half out, kinked across doorsteps and kerbstones, able to crawl so far and no further, or perhaps in some confused attempt to cool down. In these murky trenches the air lay like piping hot asparagus soup. They moaned to each other, lifting mottled limbs, the ones that could. Here and there daring entrepreneurs, their bodies robed and their heads swaddled in herb-stuffed bandages, slung the still and the still-twitching alike on their carts before hauling them off to collect a few pence a head at the burial pits. I hurried past, monitored by the rats that laced themselves in and out of the mounds blocking the alleys to the first-floor windowsills.

  The address on the card turned out to be a sullen door a couple of steps below pavement level. I had to shove to reach it because the street was obstructed by a crowd of young boys and old women clustered around a pair of dogs fighting over some raggedly round, bloodied object. The spectators slashed at the frantic animals with sticks and shoes, and called out bets to each other.

  I consulted the card again –

  DOCTOR S. DOGG

  MYSTERIES OF SCIENCE

  97 DAPPER STREET, GLORY PART

  – and was none the wiser. So I tightened my greasy half-windsor, rasped a palm across my jaw, and battered the wood with the heel of my fist. At once, locks tumbled and bolts shot on the other side. I was all ready to go in hard and force some answers out of there. But when the door opened I was struck stony.

  She folded her arms tight under her bust. It didn’t look so friendly as sometimes. She spiked me with that challenging look she had, kohl-ringed for emphasis. The tough guy act is all very well for scaring up information from the unsuspecting, but what are you meant to do faced with a flimsy who’s looking at you like she’s seen all your tricks before? Worse, she had, and I knew it. The angle of her chin was saying she’d been more impressed by her puppy the last time it left a damp patch on the floor. I spluttered and found my tongue.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Believe it or not, Hal, you don’t know everything about me. A better question is what are you doing here?’

  ‘I’m on a case,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, I’ll bet you are. Listen –’ she glanced back into the dark house ‘– this ain’t a good place for you. Turn around and go home, all right?’

  ‘I’m on a case.’

  She leant closer, and I caught the bready flavour of her breath. She spoke in a hurried undertone.

  ‘Dammit, Hal, I’m getting sick of looking out for you all the time.’ Her brown hair brushed my stubble, and her eyes softened, but only for a moment. ‘Do you even notice? You shouldn’t have come here. Go away!’

  As she flared, she shoved me in the chest. I caught her wrist and we tussled on the threshold. I saw the gap in her strong teeth and tested the sturdy softness of her arms. But then a voice flowed out of the house’s interior, and a presence slid forward to encompass us. He was hard to see. He came over as a tidy group of impressions, a frictionless smile and hair parted with a ruler, a gust of cologne, a linen jacket crisply immune to the heat, a pair of pointed patent tiptoes that seemed to slip along on hidden rails, an arm that curled across Dolly’s shoulders and mine all at once to guide us together into the house. Above all he was a voice, a pleasant, continuous hum of a voice. The man was hard to see straight because the voice never stopped describing itself so smoothly.

  ‘Well,’ it said, ‘well well well, and who have you found for us today, Royal Doll, incomparable lady, can it be that you have brought us the well-known Mr Hal Moody? Ah, yes yes, very striking, most characterful, and so very much exactly as one would have expected, ha ha – we are honoured indeed though we flatter ourselves it was inevitable you should find your way here in due course – oh, allow me, yes, this way please, might I relieve you of your hat, ah, no, I perceive you prefer to retain that cephalic accoutrement, by all means, but may I introduce myself, I am known to one and all as the Captain, and may I express, Mr Moody, if I might, my admiration for, how shall I phrase it, your straightforwardness in coming here, no no, a particular species of courage without a doubt and I am quite confident we shall be more than able, and, needless to add, willing to ease you in actualising your desires given certain reciprocal considerations into which it would diminish us both to go further at this juncture. Yes, I can assure you it is merely a matter of procedures which though startling to the layman are for the initiated routine, and on that point I beg leave to introduce to you our learned colleague and I would go so far as to say the genius of our little republic – see how he appears from his potently befugged laboratory in the back – this is Dr Dogg himself, blinking behind the pebbly lenses of his erudition. Permit me to apologise in advance for the lapses in manners that are certain to ensue in the course of his conduct but we must take into account that he is a man of brilliance such as must not be yoked by the guidelines of quotidian social concord if we are to reap the bounty of his virtue – here, doctor, you see, our valued client himself, yes!’

  This guy didn’t draw breath. He only smiled, smooth as Vaseline. He’d ushered us into a room in the heart of the house. In here there were no windows in the stained brick, and the only light was from a bulb dangling bare from the ceiling. The cement floor was tracked with oily marks. Even so, the Captain hovered in the middle of
the den like it was the set of a game show.

  The short, undernourished figure stumping from the back room, with his multicoloured fingers and the scorchmarks down the front of his smock, was more in keeping. He peered up at me and pursed his lips so that against his yellow pallor his sparse moustaches wriggled in their own grease. Blackheads stuck out of his nose like peppercorns. He began to quiver silently.

  The room was furnished like a bankruptcy in a rag-and-bone shop. There was a sofa that looked to have spent some considerable time on a landfill; there was an incongruous full-length mirror, a selection of packing crates, and a three-panelled screen whose printed cotton had been ripped out, leaving only the wooden skeleton. Against one wall stood a glass tank, murky with waterweed, in which I saw a grey-green shape moving with flicks of a flattened leaf tail.

  ‘I observe that you share our esteemed doctor’s passion for natural history,’ said the Captain. ‘Here we find yet another one of creation’s young creatures which he has, with all the compassion and rigour of his vocation, nursed from sickness into health and now nurtures towards the fullness of its potential. It is, as you will of course immediately have recognised, an immature salamander, in the larval stage. Once it has undergone its metamorphosis and entered into its adult form, the doctor, evincing the hatred of all forms of bondage that is native to his constitution, is determined to set it free to live in the wider world with its many risks and fulfilments. Think of that, Mr Moody, and consider then whether Dr Dogg is not one into whose hands you are confident to entrust your hopes. If he would do so much for a dumb beast, then how much for you?’

  The Captain’s gaze tick-tocked between me and the thing in the tank. It was a bug-eyed blighter with a fringe of fleshy lobes around its neck, frantically pulsing its gills and waving its clubbed legs in the water. Dogg seemed to be suppressing a coughing fit.

  While he creased himself up, Dolly Common hung back, hard-lipped, and the Captain bobbed around, his large, flawless hands flicking and stroking the air as if conducting our interactions. It was time to show these clowns what was what.

  ‘What you’re selling, buddy, I ain’t buying,’ I told him, acting like the diminutive sniggerer wasn’t even there. ‘I’m asking the questions here and you’re going to spill, see?’

  Dolly rolled her eyes and Dogg was still locked into his soundless convulsions, but the Captain dipped and swayed. ‘But natürlich, but anything we can do, we are at your service entire –’

  I cut across him with your name, clipped and curt. ‘What do you know about her?’

  ‘Ah, ha ha, yes, but of course, we know her of whom you speak, we share even if I may say so a certain intimacy, and who could know her without holding her in a deep regard? Not yourself, certainly, no, not you. He is a seeker, is he not, poor darling Doll? A pilgrim, we might say, don’t you think, my dear doctor?’

  His voice wavered as though he was having trouble controlling himself. But he went on: ‘You have tracked a happy trail, Mr Moody, because my colleagues and I are in a position to help you. Oh yes – I see the salmon hope flash in the torrent of your heart, though your manly outer form strives to conceal it – yes, very much so, we can help. More! My friend the doctor here has a power in his receipts to bring you to her direct and immediate. Think of it, sir, you have succeeded against all expectation by the shortest way and now, very now, she will be yours, impossible though it may have seemed, and all you must do is place yourself entirely – in – our – hands.’

  He wafted closer like a sheet flapping on a line.

  ‘What’s he talking about?’ I asked Dolly.

  She just shook her head.

  ‘The lady is not, precisely, here,’ the Captain was saying. ‘But the important thing to bear in mind is that we can, if you will, convey you to her. The process, be assured, is quite painless and requires only that you place in us a modicum of the trust to which, as your well-wishers, if I may say so, we are surely entitled. Doctor, if you would. The, ha ha, solution to your dissatisfactions resides altogether here, in this rarest of the doctor’s preparations, which I am happy to say is administered … orally.’

  Dogg had produced a finger-sized glass phial filled with black stuff. But Dolly laid her hand on top of his.

  ‘Put it away,’ she said, ‘and you: can the flim flam.’

  The Captain’s smile didn’t flicker but very softly he snarled between his premolars: ‘Enough, woman.’

  ‘You don’t need this, Hal,’ said Dolly. ‘Forget it and get out of here.’

  ‘Aha, ha ha. You must pardon our fair friend, what she means –’

  ‘Hold it.’ I turned on her. ‘Are you telling me there’s something in this? These jokers can help me find her?’

  Dolly’s eyes pleaded.

  ‘You’re telling me I drink that stuff and I find her?’

  She sagged. ‘I ain’t saying nothing, Hal.’

  ‘Most credible, don’t you think? Very convincing indeed,’ the Captain’s voice hummed in the background. Dogg snorted in response. Maybe the three of them were all nuts together in their own special fruitcake, but part of me was insisting it didn’t matter. If this could be a chance, who cared whether it made sense?

  I motioned to Dogg.

  ‘What is that stuff?’

  His face twitched. ‘What you need to understand, Mr Moody,’ he said, in a voice that threatened to dissolve into reedy giggles, ‘is that time is strange in certain rooms.’

  Before I could ask him what that was supposed to mean, he held the phial towards me and pulled the cork. It ponged like it should have been trickling in the pestilent gutters. The odour coiled out of the tube and fixed its claws in my sinuses. I gagged. Dogg’s lips began to writhe again. Drink it? I’ve been clobbered in the homburg department my share of times, but what did they take me for? The smell flushed through my head and in the ensuing instant I saw the meanness of the low cellar, the streaked bricks, the drained faces. There was no help in this room, just two half-starved charlatans and a raddled hissy having fun at the expense of an old gumshoe.

  Blackness crept into the edges of my vision and I lashed at the so-called doctor, colliding with him awkwardly shoulder-first and knocking him aside. Hunched against the wall, shaking, he cradled his phial. His face contorted and tears pressed from the corners of his eyes. I spun around and swung my fists at the Captain, but he danced easily away, his hands billowing. He quivered with the effort of restraining himself. He couldn’t even speak any more.

  I shoved past Dolly and stormed up the corridor, fighting off insubstantial enemies. Behind me, they gave up their composure, and the howls of laughter propelled me back to the street. I couldn’t tell if any were hers.

  9. City of Regretful Lights

  What was it that happened next? Tell me what, kid – because if you won’t, then who will in the world? Whatever it was, it didn’t unfold in ordinary time, moment linking to moment, beat to beat. I lost my grip on that like a drunk missing the handrail at the top of a staircase. I arced through a glutinous descent of unmeasured duration, days, weeks or months, clonking off every third step. I plunged, in fact, into the finest and most sustained period of investigative work I’d ever accomplished.

  Let me tell you how it goes. It’s nothing to do with observation or deduction. It’s like running at an oblique angle into a brick wall and dragging your head along as far as you can take it. It means you have no trail to follow but you pound the pavements until in your lunacy everything’s part of the trail. You never stop, think of nothing else, batter the world like if you go at it hard enough it’s going to spill its guts. If none of it makes sense then why not call every last thing a clue? Why not think by sheer lead-skulled persistence you’re going to turn bewilderment into an answer? It could happen.

  I stopped going back to my office. That would have taken time from the search. Brittle, I crumbled myself into the stews, where I dissolved. I slept in snatches of minutes at diner counters, in tram shelters, in the porchwa
ys of derelict apartment buildings. Days and nights were the swinging of a bare light bulb, the rattle of a tram across a lattice of girders. I pounded. My beard filled out and my suit grew stiff and malodorous, I tugged at my necktie until the knot was unpickable, but I kept searching. Salt Park, Shambles Heath, Sludd’s Liberty, Moebius Wall. Bloodstone Cross, Bittergreen, Gorgonstown, Low Glinder. Lawntown, Twistgate, Serelight, Glory Part. I went where I went. I was working on nothing better than an inkling that if I kept moving I might glimpse you. I did my best to follow the only advice you’d ever given me. But the longer I spent walking up and down those corridors and staircases, under those arches, along the interstices of dust and through the sweat-stale nowheres of the twenty-four-hour supermarkets, the more convinced I became that any guesses were useless. I might have been born yesterday. The news-stands were all disease and murder. I didn’t know these streets. What I’d always thought of as the city was just an idea I’d been inventing without realising it for longer than I could tell.

  Want to know the weird thing? It didn’t even hit me that hard. I mean the moment that had to come: which came one overcooked evening on the Strangers’ Market, no one around but me and this one big johnny mooching under a lamp post like he’d lost something. I reached up and touched his shoulder, asking the only question I had left to ask, the question I couldn’t stop asking. But the johnny – he was one of your big slow armour-plated sorts, right up there with the Cherub brothers – he gave me a look like I was head-to-foot buboes, and scarpered. Couldn’t get away fast enough. That did it. That was the moment that yanked my perception out of my skull and snagged it dangling from the lamp post so I saw myself like another person, a wrecked and bruised figure panhandling for a hallucination, approaching strangers and saying the name, just your name, over and over, as a question. None of that was strange when I saw it. Instead, in that lucid moment, all I thought was: yes. Now we’re getting somewhere.