Rodney Titwhistle looks reproachfully at Joe as if to say “This person is your friend?” and “You didn’t have to do this to me, I was only asking.”
“Good Lord,” Mercer says, with rising glee, “I happen to have my client’s shoes here. Joe, you lemon, put these back on, you’ll get muscle cramps in your toes and then where will the compensation end? Joseph! With me, please… He is often absent-minded under pressure,” Mercer Cradle avers as he helps Joe into his shoes. “Suppressed guilt relating to his father’s heinous acts, I shouldn’t wonder. Why, he once went on a date with a lady officer of the police service and proposed to her over dessert, quite extraordinary, of course she said ‘no,’ well, who wouldn’t when there was still coffee and petits fours to come? Tell me, Mr. Cummerbund, how long has it been since you saw your ankles…?” Mercer keeps up his barrage until they’re out of earshot and in the street, and Mercer and his mute companion are hustling Joe into the car.
The Ruskinites watch from behind their veils, silent and motionless as lizards on a wall. One of them takes two bobbing, birdish steps, then draws back. They make no sound.
“Joe, you did fine,” Mercer says. “You were great. But there is no question that we are in the shit. We are in the savage jungle. For some reason, which I do not yet apprehend, there are titans stirring in the deeps and shadows on the stairwell. As my youngest cousin Lawrence would say, we are up to our necks in podu. This, incidentally, is Reggie, who is one of my occasional thugs,” indicating the gnarled youth on his left. “Now retiring to become a vet, would you believe, but for the next ten minutes you can trust him with your life, only don’t, trust me instead. Anyway… good evening, and what the fuck is going on, and try the lamb, it’s excellent.”
Because Mercer, good as his word, has brought a picnic.
Below the thunders of the upper mezzanine, behind the first of three vast tungsten-alloy security doors, Noblewhite Cradle maintains a suite too elegantly attired and well-plumbed to be called a panic room, but too well-fortified and paranoid to be anything else. Joe is a little disappointed, but also massively relieved, to find that he is not actually lodged in the fortress itself. It is on the sofa in the Raspberry Lounge—which may be thought of as the barbican of Noblewhite Cradle—amid the deep pink cushions and highlights of damask, that he falls asleep for a full hour before Mercer rouses him by placing under his nose a mug of thick coffee made in the approved Noblewhite fashion, so that it tastes the way fresh coffee actually smells. Mathew Spork, in the olden, golden days, used to say that he only ever got caught in the act when he really needed some of Jonah Noblewhite’s home-brew. Nach dem Grossmütterart, Jonah Noblewhite would respond in gentle remonstrance. Not mine, Mathew. My grandmother’s, and Joe’s father would say Yes, Jonah, we know. In all our Earthly strivings for perfection, we shall none of us reach the greatness of the foremothers. And whether the conversation took place in this bolt-hole or in the great mustard-yellow living room in the Mathew Spork mansion in moderately unfashionable Primrose Hill, there was Joe listening and absorbing it all, and thinking his father was a leader of men and a ruler of thousands.
“Hail, the conquering hero! All hail!” Mathew Spork cries, five foot eight and lean as a river trout, his arms thrown up as if to display the trophy, then snapping down to receive, not a great silver chalice, but Harriet Spork in a great fluster.
Mathew wraps himself around her and lifts her up and murmurs horsewhispers in her ear, and kisses her soundly on the mouth until she stops speaking (which is quite some time) and strokes her like a much-unsettled cat. She soothes, and slows the stream of questions and remonstrance, and remembers to include in their embrace the boy they made.
Joshua Joseph scrambles up his father’s suit and perches between his parents, much delighted by this position, and presses their heads together with infant muscle, so that their noses squash, and this causes a great volcano of laughter from all three.
The source of Harriet’s alarm is never precisely stated, but earlier this same day some enterprising scoundrel concealed himself in a purloined armoured truck and managed to gain access to the Bridlington Fisheries & Farming Mutual Lending Society, from whence—with the aid of three further gangsters, identities unknown—he secured some two and a quarter million pounds and diverse objects of value totalling yet more.
The tommy gun was not in its box this morning when Joshua Joseph sneaked into his father’s study, and there was a smell of oil on the workbench. Imagining what great works must be afoot, Joshua Joseph laid his hand across the velvet dips and forms of the case and tried to imagine the heft of the thing, the coolness of it, before his mother found him and chased him out. Now, though, he understands that another blow has been struck by the grand House of Spork against the iniquitous forces of the financial community.
So tonight is the victory bash, in the shag-pile carpeted, chromed and bear-skinned lower floors of the Primrose Hill house, there on the corner of Chalcot Square. Everyone who is anyone is here. Over by the bar with an oyster in each fist is Umberto Andreotti the tenor, talking dog-racing with Big Douggie who is out on bail and thinking he may need to spend some time abroad. Eyeing them both with speculation is Alice Rebeck, until recently a geisha and still dressed like one. But something in her face says to be careful; Alice has given up the oldest profession. She has business in hand with clients around the world. “Retrievals,” she tells Mathew politely, and “people, darling, not objects” when he asks if there’s anything he might have run across that she’s needing returned (ho ho, huge wink: the gentleman thief returning his stolen goods as a gesture to a lady). Smoothly stepping in to occupy her time is Rolf McCain of the Glasgow McCains, the best family of housebreakers in the business, the cleanest, the fastest, and the most loyal. Rolf was party to one of Mathew’s more splendid crimes, that business with the brontosaurus. He was nearly sent down for it and never breathed a word. The McCains never turn on a friend, not ever, not in two hundred years and more of solid crookery, but that doesn’t mean Rolf will let Mathew monopolise Alice. Even a generous Scotsman must draw the line at that.
On a sofa of his own for obvious reasons is the Honourable Donald (known as Hon Don), unfavoured son of the grand banking house of Lyon & Quintock, indentured into the civil service and utterly desperate to get his rocks off as many times as possible before the inevitable blue-blood bride. Swaddled in Savile Row and primped by experts, noted habitué of brothels from Bangor to Bangalore, the Hon Don is a redhead in the vein of Peter the Great, a wet-eyed sex maniac with thin arms and enormous hands, each of which is presently occupied with the exploration of a different doxy of the day: the curvaceous Anna and the sagacious—if lewd—Dizzy.