So, alone, Billy knocked on a door at the back of a sandwich shop in Dalston. A church and a carpet showroom in Clapham. A McDonald’s in Kentish Town. “Wati said you could help me,” he said again and again to the suspicious people who answered.
The safest approach was to never speak to anyone about anything. Communication could mean implication in some fight you might not even believe was taking place, taking a side, inadvertently signing on a dotted line. Nonetheless.
Fixers and goers-to had their scenes. Rooms and Internet shacks where men and women employed by their faiths to steal, torture, kill, hunt and fix could be among others who understood the pressures of the work and got the references of gossip.
“Dane couldn’t have gone,” Wati had warned Billy. “He’d be recognised. But people don’t know you. They might know your name, if they keep their ears open. But not your face.”
“Some do.”
“Yeah.”
“Some might be talking to Goss and Subby.”
“Might.”
“Where even are they?”
“Don’t know.”
The politics of a city of cults made for complex encounters. Seeing an assassin of the Beltway Brethren share a joke with someone from the Mansour Elohim but blank the twins from the Church of Christ Symbiote was a crash course in realtheologie. As much as possible, though, in these places Billy visited you left allegiances at home. That, as a message above the door in one hideaway had it, is the Loar.
Law or lore it maybe-“Loar” a superposition of those two homophones-but let’s not be idiots. Billy entered each place cautiously, and wore a false moustache. Even had he not been looking for Dane and shoring up his compañeros, Wati could not have come in. There were no familiars allowed, and NO DOLLS, said the entrance signs, and Billy wouldn’t risk disobeying. All statuettes had been cleared out since the strike began. Wizardry was a petty bourgeois world. They spent this unwanted leisure time denouncing their familiars, and did not want an organiser listening in.
Twice Billy’s request for help was declined when he mentioned what little cash he had to offer. “Memory angels?” one old woman said. “For that? I can’t get mixed up with that. Now? With them walking?” Billy played out fantasies of bank robberies, but a sudden very different thought occurred, another way to fish for such aid. He went back to where he had seen the key in the tarmac. In moments between cars he took a knife to it and prized it from the road. Straightening up with it he swayed, orthostatic. He ate quickly in a basement restaurant and examined the tarry key. A junk-bit grubby with metaphor. Thinking in that register helped him take unexpected advantage of the place. On the way to the toilets, in an alcove in the wall, there was a lightbulb resting in a frying pan. It was so unrestrained a visual pun, so utterly ovate, he gasped. He had to take it, in a moment of simultaneously meaningless and powerful theft.
When he arrived at the next address he had for a broker of contacts, a bar in Hammersmith, the first thing he said to the young man was, “I can pay you. Put this in the right hands, this’ll unlock the road.” He held out the key. He held up the bulb. “And I don’t know what’s incubating in this, but someone might hatch it.”
Chapter Fifty
“VARDY’S GOING BANANAS,” COLLINGSWOOD SAID. THEIR SAVANT miner of vision was in and out of the office on a frenetic schedule. He was racing off with one folder or other full of connections and contacts.
“Come on,” said Baron. “You know how it works. We have to give him his head.” He hesitated. Vardy’s colleagues had not seen him go quite so hard, for so long, perhaps ever before. They came in to find incomprehensible notes, references to interviews Vardy had conducted solo, with suspects or people whose identities they were not sure of. Like everyone else, his behaviour was new in the shade of the catastrophe, that late, thuggish millennium.
“Where is he now?” Baron said, a little plaintively. Collingswood shrugged and glanced at him with narrowing eyes. She was sitting feet up playing a video game. Her romping avatar evaded the electronically growling beasts that tried to eat it. She was not in fact moving it, was concentrating on the conversation, had knacked the joystick into clearing the level on its own.
“No idea,” she said. “From what I can decipher of his fucking crab scrawl he wants to find some informer from Grisamentum’s old crew. One of the necros or pyros or something. Do you think he even has a clue what it is he’s looking for?”
“No,” said Baron. “But I bet you he’ll find it. I gather there are gunfarmers in town.”
“I told you. Yeah them and everyone. We get all the best visitors, man,” Collingswood said, pointing at the reports in front of her.
“Which visitors?” It was Vardy, returned with papers in hand.
“About time,” Baron said. “I thought you’d buggered off?”
“So it’s true about the farmers?”
“Did you find anything out on your little mission?”
“If it is true,” Collingswood said. She swung in her chair to face Vardy. Her digital figure continued its adventures. “Would you be scared?”
He raised an eyebrow. “I’m scared of all sorts of things.”
“Would you?”
“There’s no shortage of assassin-sects out there.”
“Exactly.” Collingswood had nicked members of a few herself. Sisters of the Noose, Nu-Thugees, theologies of Nietzschean kitsch. They were like the cruder readers of Colin Wilson and de Sade, aficionados of Sotos and a certain genre of trite “transgression,” an inverted BBC moralism. They glorified what they quaintly thought the will, slandered humanity as sheep, maundered murder. Their banality did not mean they were never dangerous, did not perform atrocities for the glory of themselves, whatever Lovecraftian deity they illiterately decided wanted their offerings, their orientalist’s Kali, or whomever. Even as they killed you, you’d hold them in contempt.
“Well, they aren’t like that lot,” Vardy said. “They’re only mercenaries sort of contingently. The point of a gun isn’t the killing but the gun. At first it was more generally pagan as it were.”
“Care to fill an old man in?” said Baron. “Sorry to intrude on this.” Vardy and Collingswood glanced at each other, until she smirked.
“Did you ever meet any?” she said to Vardy.
“Do you mind?” Baron said.
“They got sick, boss, back in the day,” she said. “But I could never work out what it was about the guns.”
An arcane disease had taken their ur-tribe and made their life infectious. What they touched would jostle, tables would tap, chairs would tap, books dance, the inanimate as boisterous and alarmed as any newborns. Midas couldn’t eat a sandwich made of gold, but no more could one of these vectors, Life-oid Marys, eat the bread and cheese slices all abruptly eager to run around.
“It was a mutation,” Vardy said. He said it carefully and with neutral distaste. “An adaptive mutation.”
“Is that bad?” Collingswood said, at the sight of his face.
“Bad for whom? Mutation saves, apparently.” Perhaps it was because of the careful grooming husbandry necessary for a flintlock, that fussy lead-barking animal; perhaps repressed resentment at life: whatever, it became only their firearms they made alive, in quieter, less motile ways-what weapons they wielded became selfish-gene machines. “The bullets are gun-eggs,” Collingswood said to Baron, looking at Vardy. Farmers squeezing their holy metal beasts to percussive climax, fertilisation by cordite expulsion, violent ovipositors. Seeking warm places full of nutrients, protecting baby guns deep in the bone cages, until they hatched. “What I never got’s why all that makes them all badass.”