“Yes,” the Hon Don mutters through gritted teeth, “we have.”
Fifteen minutes later, Joshua Joseph Spork is on his hands and knees in a tide of local papers, cutting out the small ads for a hidden message: the perfect image of paranoid schizophrenia. The scissors are a nice touch, culled from an embroidery set and blunted at the ends. A selection of pencils of various colours is scattered across the floor of the Hon Don’s office at the Pablum Club. The Hon Don is elsewhere, no doubt soothing his fevered brow with a brace of exotic dancers. Polly Cradle leans, Bacall-style, on the bar, and listens to her lover mutter.
“No, right, that’s the Advertiser. Fine. So ‘Come home Fred, all is forgiven,’ fine. That’s the Crawley Sentinel, and underneath… ha! Yes. Then… Yaxley Times, all right: ‘Be mine, Abigail, be mine!’ which is a bit desperate and I think… oh, bloody hell, it’s real, fine…” and so it goes, a litany of clippings clipped and cast aside. A moment later, Joe grins. “Find the lady!”
Polly extends her hand, then stops. “What do I do?”
“Nothing! It’s done. But help me: I was never very good at this. It’s like a crossword… Here: ‘For Sale: three matched mountain bikes. Divorce compels forced march to bank.’ That’s the date. 3 March. Right? Then here: ‘Sing-a-long-a-Sound-Of-Music, Toxley Arms, Dover Street. Tickets in advance only.’ So, Dover Street. But which Dover Street, because there are a few, and what number or what have you… oh.” Joe looks disappointed. The third clipping holds no answers, obviously. Polly Cradle peers.
“Could it be the Toxley bit?”
He stares. “Yes! I’m back to front. Toxley Arms is the entrance. A pub. A pub in…” He scans the third clipping again. “Belfast? That can’t be right.”
“The ship, maybe?”
“Yes! On the Thames. The pub closest to HMS Belfast. There’s a way down into the Beat. Yes. Exactly.” He grins again. “Get out your best frock, Mistress Cradle, and your fine dancing shoes. I’m taking you to the Night Market.”
The Market looks different and the same; today it’s in a great Henry VIII–era water cistern pumped dry for refitting and filled with wooden scaffolding, hung with glowsticks in baroque lanterns and wind-up electrical lamps, the smell of water offset by great censers streaming fresh flower scent (stolen, a sign proudly proclaims, from a chemical company in Harchester which specialises in olfactory ambience, more available on request). People glance at them, then look again: oh, fugitives. But the older ones, and the quicker, look a little longer and see Joshua Joseph Spork with a bad woman on his arm and a gangster’s hat, and know that something is afoot, so that the whisper runs from stall to stall along the winding central aisle: Is that Mathew’s boy? My God, he’s huge! And done something to upset Lily Law, but it’s not what they say, that much I do know…
A man named Achim gives them a glass of wine each and cheers. Others hurry to look the other way—no desire to learn anything which might be relevant to an ongoing inquiry. In any other place Joe would fear betrayal, but the Market is sacrosanct: it can only continue if it remains secret, and the penalties for betrayal are stark. Starker now, probably, than they were. Now that Jorge runs the place in Mathew’s stead—or, as Jorge would be the first to acknowledge, in Joe’s.
In what must be a maintenance room overlooking the cistern—a pumping station or an overflow—Jorge has established an office and is doing business, and you can be sure the whisper has reached him before they do, but Jorge is all about volume.
“Holy fucking crap, Joe Spork! Fuck! You are one most wanted fucker, you know that? There’s a reward out on me just being in a room with you. Jesus! Vadim, this is totally cut-your-own-throat-after-reading, okay? This asshole was never here.”
Jorge has no second name, no surname and no patronymic. He’s just Jorge, the messy kid with the thick arms who shared his cake and scurried along at the back of the crowd. Jorge, chief among those who have kept the Market alive after the death of its king. He trailed Mathew like a puppy, worshipped him. Joe’s father picked up followers and acolytes the way other men breathe, and Jorge carries that loyalty ridiculously forward to Mathew’s son. He was small then, for his age. He’s small now, vertically speaking, but he makes up for it with sheer volume and a Russian appetite. His breath, forcibly expelled in all directions, smells of salt fish and vodka. Joe is quite certain that Jorge plays up to his heritage, to people’s expectations. Who, after all, living in London for his entire life, still sounds like a sailor from Krasnoyarsk? Only Jorge.
Vadim, across the desk from him, is an expensively dressed character in gold-rimmed glasses, with a look of deep self-regard which might just be mistaken for poetry, or pain. His eyes rest on Polly Cradle’s cleavage, then skitter away when she favours him with a broad, challenging grin.
“Listen, Vadim,” Jorge says, throwing short arms in the air, “I got to talk to this guy. Debt of honour, okay? So, look, being honest: you are the worst erotic photographer on the face of the planet. Seriously, it’s better you point the camera away from the girls and make photos of the patio. These pictures…” He holds up a sheaf of eight-by-six-inch prints and flicks through them. “This one is like medical exam. This one is botany, maybe agriculture. Joe, Jesus, did you see this? What does this look like to you?”
“It’s… well, I’m fairly sure that’s an aubergine.”
“Thank the merciful Lamb, old friend, it is an aubergine. But also, you see how there’s fuck all else in the picture?”
“I do see that, Jorge, yes.”
“And yet this is a photograph of Vadim’s girlfriend Svetlana, who is—and I do not exaggerate here, okay?—she is the girl I most wish to see naked after Carrie Fisher in Return of the Jedi. In this picture she is entirely fucking naked. If it was not a close-up you would catch fire and explode looking at it. Would you like to see the wide shot?”
“All right.”
“So would we all, Joseph, but this unfortunately is impossible, because that asshole there did not take a wide shot. Go, Vadim, please. I got to cry on my friend’s shoulder, okay?”
Joe Spork waits until Vadim has removed himself, clutching the contraband aubergine porn, and then his face drops into its new, sharper lines. “Business,” he says.
“You serious? Like real business? Not fucking slot machines?”
“Real business.”
“You going to kick me out, Joe? Run the Market all of a sudden?” Jorge is joking. Kidding around. His wide face is clear of malice or alarm. Joe Spork wonders where the guns are, and the men.
“No, Jorge. The Market’s all yours. I’m getting back into the game, for sure. But I don’t want your chair. Too much hard work for an honest villain like me.”
Relief flickers across Jorge’s features. His shoulders relax a little, now that he’s no longer carrying the weight of sudden violence. “Honest villain! Yes! My God, Joe, I tell you, we should have more honest villains in this world!”
“I’m glad you say that, Jorge, because I need some help.”
Jorge looks grave. “The way I hear it, Cradle’s is gone, you’re on the run. Maybe you’re too broke for business. I can get you away. Danish ambassador got little local problem, killed his wife’s lover with lawnmower. But no favours, Joseph, not big ones. Not even for you.”