Vardy had closed his eyes. He leaned against the wall and puffed out his cheeks. When at last he opened his eyes again he did not look at Baron or Collingswood: he stared intently through the window at the crippled Chaos Nazi.
“We know what that’s about, right?” Baron said. “Let me rephrase. We’ve no idea what it’s about. No one does. But we’ve a reasonable notion of what it bloody is that swooped in and swept young Harrow away.”
“Alright, I’m going back to the museum,” Vardy said. “See if I can make a little more sense of this. Just once,” he said with abrupt savagery, “in a goddamn while, it would really be a pleasure if the goddamn world worked the way it’s supposed to. I am tired of the universe being such a bloody aleatory frenzy all, the bloody, time.”
He sighed and shook his head. Gave an abashed, tight brief smile at Collingswood’s surprise.
“Well,” he said. “Really. Come on. Why the bloody hell is an angel of memory protecting Billy?”
BUT NOT PROTECTING DANE, WHICH FACT WAS WHAT HAD HIM NOW woozily half waking, strapped in a horribly cramping position that it took him a long time to identify as a crooked cruciform. He was attached like an offering to a rough man-sized swastika. He did not open his eyes.
He heard echoes; footsteps; from somewhere, deliberate, foolishly screaming laughter, that made him afraid anyway, despite its ostentation. The growl and barking of a huge dog. One by one he tensed the muscles of his arms and legs, to check that he was still whole.
Kraken give me strength, he prayed. Give me strength out of your deep darkness. He knew, if he opened his eyes, what figures he would see. He knew his contempt, no matter how real and strong, would be equalled by his terror, and that he would have to overcome that, and he did not have the head or stomach to do so, just at that moment. So he kept his eyes closed.
Most wizards of Chaos would bore you arseless about how the Chaos they tapped was emancipation, that their nonlinear conjuring was the antithesis of the straight-lined bordering mindset that led, they insisted, to Birchenau, blah fucking blah. But it was always a sleight of politics to stress only that aspect of the far right. There was another, somewhat repressed but no less faithful and faithfully fascist tradition: the decadent baroque.
Among the fascist sects, the most flamboyant, eager as Strasserites to reclaim what they insisted was the true core of a deviated movement, were the Chaos Nazis. The creaking black leather of the SS, they insisted to the tiny few who would listen, and not run or kill them on sight, were a coward’s pornography, a prissy corruption of tradition.
Look instead, they said, to the rage in the east. Look to the autonomous terror-cell-structure of Operation Werewolf. Look to the sybarite orgies in Berlin, that were not corruption but culmination. Look to the holiest date in their calendar: Kristallnacht, all those Chaos scintillas on stone. Nazism, they insisted, was excess, not prigrestraint, not that superego gusset bureaucrats had chosen.
Their symbol was the eight-pointed Chaos star altered to make a Moorcock weep, its diagonal arms bent fylfot, a swastika that pointed in all directions. What is “Law,” they said, what is Chaos’s nemesis but the Torah? What is Law but Jewish Law, which is Jewishness itself, and so what is Chaos but the renunciation of that filthy Torah-Bolshevist code? What was best in humanity but the will and rage and indulgence, do what thou wilt the autopoiesis of the Übermensch? And so, endlessly, on.
They were provocateurs of course, and a ludicrously tiny group, but notorious even among the wicked for occasional acts of unbelievable, artistic cruelty, restoring the true spirit of their prophets. Sure the Final Solution was efficient, they insisted, but it was soulless. “The problem with Auschwitz,” their intellectual wags of torture-killing insisted, “is that it was the wrong sort of ‘camp’!” Their hoped-for Chaos Führer, they thought, might achieve a sufficiently artistic genocide.
It was to these figures that Tattoo, Goss and Subby had gone for help, and they had let London know to whom they had gone. They had approached these outrageous, dangerous monster-clowns to hunt down Dane and Billy. And from them Billy had been saved, and Dane had not.
Chapter Forty-Nine
BILLY PUT ON HIS GLASSES. THEY WERE IMMACULATELY UNBROKEN, and still clean. He said, “Wati.”
“I don’t know where Dane is,” Wati said immediately. “I keep looking, but we’re going to have to hope Jason has more luck. They’ve got charms up or something.”
Billy said, “I want to tell you something I dreamed.” He spoke as if he were still dreaming. “I could tell it was important. I dreamed about the kraken. It was a robot. It was back, the whole thing in the tank. I was standing next to it. And something said to me, ‘You’re looking in the wrong direction.’”
There were seconds of silence. “Jason’s going in, and while he is I want to find out why that angel’s looking after me,” Billy said. “It might know something about what’s going on. It knew to come find me. And it might have been looking after me, but it let Dane get taken.”
He told Wati what Fitch and Saira had done. He felt no hesitation, though he knew it was a deeply secret secret. He trusted Wati, insofar as he trusted any Londoners now. “Tell them they have to help us,” he said.
Wati went leapfrogging, body to body, but had to return. “I can’t get in there,” he said. “It’s the London Stone. It pushes out. Like swimming up a waterfall. But…”
“Well you better find a way to tell them they have to help me, because otherwise I’m going to walk around the city screaming what they did. Tell them that.”
“I can’t get in, Billy.”
“Screw their secrets.”
“Billy listen. They’ve made contact. I got a message from that woman Saira. She’s smart-she knows I was with you and Dane. She put a message through my office. Didn’t give nothing away, just, ‘We’re trying to get in touch with our mutual friend. Perhaps we can arrange a meeting?’ She’s telling us they want to help. They’re already against the Tattoo. That makes them nearer friends than enemies to us, right? I can’t go in, but I’ll try to send some of my people. Get them to ask Fitch where the Nazis are.”
“Because if it’s in London…” Billy said. “He should know.”
“That’s the idea. That’s the idea.”
“How long?”
“Don’t know.”
“We move,” Billy said. “We’ll get him out. I’m looking in the wrong direction. I have to know who’s fighting me and who’s fighting with me. So Wati, how do I find out about angels?”
I N A CITY LIKE LONDON…
Stop: that was an unhelpful way to think about it, because there was no city like London. That was the point.
London was a graveyard haunted by dead faiths. A city and a landscape. A market laid on feudalisms. Gathering and hunting, little pockets of alterity, too, but most of all in the level Billy had come to live in a tilework of fiefdoms, theocratic duchies, zones and spheres of influences, over each of which some local despot, some criminal pope, sat watch. It was all who-knew-whom, gave access to what, greased which palms on what route to where.
London had its go-betweens, guerrilla shadchans facilitating meetings for a cut. Wati could tell Billy where they were, and which had weak connections with the angels. Wati kept searching, and he had his own war to attend to, too. The moon made horns, the sky was gnarly. The cults were skittish.
So there was Billy, all alone, and he knew that he should have been terrified, but he was not. He was itching. He felt as if clocks hesitated with each of his steps. It was early when he started walking the list Wati gave him.
Billy knew how hunted he was. Now more than ever. He discovered that his legs had learned the step-spells that Dane had stepped for him, that he walked now with self-camouflaging rhythm. That he automatically went for half-shade, that he moved a little like some occult soldier. He held his phaser in his pocket, and he watched his surrounds avidly.