Goss and Subby would be hunting. Buy them and you bought them. They would be raging to get back into the service of the illustration he wore.
Paul would be crippled, this time. He knew he would be blinded, boxed without limbs, forced to swallow vitamined gruel without the tongue that would not be left him.
He slowed at very last. He did not feel tired. He looked carefully around him.
“Is it driving you crazy?” he whispered, so only his own skin could hear. “Not knowing what’s going on?” Blind and mute. “You must be able to feel I’m running.”
He heard breaking glass. He felt knacked percussions that the news would probably nervously report as Molotov cocktails. Paul vaulted iron railings into a scrub-filled corner between streets, a green oversight too small to be a park. Huddled runaway animal out of sight of the estates, he lay in shrubbery and thought.
The Tattoo stayed quiet. At last Paul stood. It really did: the Tattoo was still. He put the tiny container he had grabbed in front of him. He stared at it as if he might throw in his lot with this adversary of his tormenting skin, as if he might collaborate with Grisamentum. He watched the ink watch him.
He whispered to it. “Thanks for the offer,” he said. “Thanks. For, you know. Warning me. And saying that you’d take care of me. Thanks. Do you think I’m going to let you run me instead?”
He stood. He unzipped his fly and urinated messily into the tiny pot, dissipating and spattering the tiny self of the ash king of London, pissing him away. “Fuck you,” he whispered. “Fuck you too. Fuck you as much as him.”
When he was done there was only his urine in the bottle. He took out the paper on which Billy’s hand had let Grisamentum write himself. Helpful wind moved the last clinging leaves so a streetlamp could shine on it directly. Paul looked through every piece he had. He put together bits of information about Billy from these remnants from Billy’s bag. Patchwork detectiving. He worked things out.
One sheet he kept hold of. He sat, his back to the railings, and read and reread it many times. He folded it and put it to his head and thought and thought.
At last, treading the streets again in his shabby Converse he found a phone box. He went through a thicket of front organisations reversing charges and taking their cuts, even then, that night, before connecting to the number on the paper. It was voice mail.
“I have the leaflet you put out here,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Is that Marge? I have your leaflet. I know where Billy is. Do you want to meet? I know it’s all going weird tonight, but it’s now or it’s not going to happen. I’ll wait here. Here’s the number. Call me when you get this.” He gave it. “I need you to pick me up, and I need you to come now. I’ll tell you everything.”
Finally, but hesitantly, the Tattoo twitched. The movement was, by chance or not, in time with a horrible twitch in history. Everyone felt that. A heating up, a smoulder and disappearance. History was scorching.
“DID YOU FEEL THAT?” FITCH SAID.
If Paul surrendered to what he wore and the Tattoo regrouped and came back for them, they were done. The Londonmancers agreed. Or perhaps Paul might even collaborate with Grisamentum, the little drips he carried, take them back to the rest of the liquid criminal, in which case it was all finished, too.
“What kind of team-up would that be?” Billy said.
No one heard him over the overlapping arguments. Fitch shouting at Dane and Billy for letting Paul go, then lapsing into muttering. Dane growling back in a truly scary way, then giving up suddenly and sticking his head out of the trapdoor or window and whispering to Wati, who if he woke in the doll said nothing anyone else could hear. Londonmancers shouting at Fitch, despite who he was, at the plan they could still hardly believe he might have countenanced. Saira saying nothing.
“There’s just too many dangers,” Fitch said. “He’s not stable. The Tattoo’s back out there, now. First thing it can, it’s going to be making for Goss and Subby. You understand? Then they’ll come for us… and it’s not just us who’ll die.”
They could not let it happen. They had to keep the kraken safe from the burning approach.
“What did we say in front of him?” someone said.
“I don’t know,” Fitch said. “We have to take the kraken somewhere safe.”
“Where do you fucking propose?” Dane said. “It’s starting.”
“Don’t you understand?” Saira said. “We could only keep this safe so long as no one knew it was us, and no one knew where we were. Well, the worst two people in the world know, now.”
Chapter Seventy
PAUL AND MARGINALIA SAT OPPOSITE EACH OTHER. WHERE THE fuck to begin?
She would not risk answering any of her phones anymore, but she checked her messages, and she had arrived after many hours in her cheap car. She had sneaked back to her flat for it and come for him. Paul had watched it arrive, pulling slowly like some sea-carriage through sunken streets. It was quiet in the London corner he had found.
She had parked metres away from him under a different lamp. She had waited and waited and when he did not run for her or do anything other than wait, too, she had beckoned. Marge wore headphones. Paul could hear a tiny tinny yattering voice from them, but she seemed to be able to hear him reasonably over it. “Drive,” he had said. “I’ll keep you out of sight.”
They had driven around and around the night. She followed his directions. He’d listened to his ink parasite; he knew how to have her drive a sigil. “Here,” he said. “Turn.”
“Where are we going?”
“There’s places it’s hard to find us.”
He directed her a long way through London, sticking to rear alleys, intricate convolutes. “Where was it?” he muttered, nodding at memories. At last to an underground carpark at the entrance to some swanky flats. Between pillars in the dark they stared at each other.
Paul looked at her. Marge looked at the ruin-faced man. He was agitated. He was a man, she thought, with plans.
“Where are we?”
“Hoxton.”
“I don’t even know what to ask you…” she said. “I don’t know what to-”
“Me too.”
“Who are you? What’s your story?”
“I got away.”
Silence. Marge kept her grip on the stun-gun Taser thing she had got hold of. You could get anything. He looked at it.
“Why you talking to me?” she said. “Where are you in all this?”
“I know a friend of yours, I think…”
“Leon?” The hope was ebbing from her voice before the end of the word. “Not Leon…”
“I don’t know who that is,” he said gently.
“Billy?”
“Billy. He’s with the Londonmancers. He’s with the squid.”
“Did he send you?”
“Not exactly. It’s complicated.” He spoke as if unpracticed at it.
“Tell me.”
“Let’s both.”
Over hours she gave him what small details she had, descriptions of her altercations with Goss and Subby, which made him wince and nod. He said he would tell her his story, and said that he was doing so, but what came out was a soup of specifics, names, images that made little sense. She listened, though she never removed her earphones, and did not learn anything she could make sense of. At the end of it, she understood only that Billy was way deep in something, and that the sense of something ending was not a paranoia of hers.
“Why did you find me?”
“I think we can help each other,” Paul said. “See, I want to get a message back to the Londonmancers, and to Dane and Billy, but I’ve got good reason not to think they’ll play straight. Not with me. Dane and Billy I don’t know. I don’t know about them. But I need them to listen to me too because I got plans. When I saw your paper, I thought, Oh, she knows Billy. I remembered I heard about you. He’ll play straight with her, I thought.”