“It’s not as if we’re exactly secret,” he said. “It’s not so much ‘plausible denial’-that’s not the best strategy these days. It’s more ‘plausibly uninteresting.’ Everyone’ll be like, ‘FSRC? Why on earth you asking about them? Silly nonsense, bit of an embarrassment…’” He smiled. “You get the idea.”
Billy could hear officers in the corridors outside. Phones were ringing.
“So,” said Billy at last. “So you’re cult people. So what’s this got to do with that poor sod in the basement? And what’s it got to do with me?”
Vardy brought up a video file on his laptop and placed it where all three men could watch. An office, a tidy desk, books on the walls, a printer and PC. There was Vardy, sitting three-quarters toward the camera, another man with his back to the lens. All that could be seen of him was slicked-back thinning hair and a grey jacket. The colours were not very good.
“… so.” Billy heard the hidden-faced man say. “I done a stint with that bunch in Epping, bog-standard manickies they are I think, balance balance balance not very interesting, I wouldn’t waste your time.”
“What about this?” said video-Vardy, and held out what Billy could see was the symbol he himself had drawn.
The obscured man leaned in. “Oh right,” he said. He spoke in a breathless conspiratorial drone. “The tooths, the toothies,” he said. “Yeah no I don’t know,” he said. “The toothies they’re new I think I hen’t seen them much except they been drawing that leaving it about. A sign a sign. You been to Camden? Saw it and I thought I’ll have some of that but they’re odd ones, they sort of wave hello but then you can’t find much of them. So. Are they secret?”
“Are they?” said video-Vardy.
“Well you tell me you tell me. I can’t get to them and you know me so it’s, you know it’s tantalising is what it is.”
“Tenets?”
“Got me. What I hear,” the man made gossip-talk movements with his fingers, “all I can tell you is they talk about the dark, the rise, the you know the reaching out. They love that the outreaching, hafay…”
“What?”
“Hafay hafay, where’s your Greek professor? Alpha phi eta, hafe, hapsis if you like, touchy touchy, that’s what they say-it’s a haptic story, this one.”
Vardy froze the picture. “He’s sort of a freelance research assistant. A fan. He’s a collector.”
“Of what?” Billy said.
“Religions. Cults.”
“How the hell do you collect a cult?”
“By joining it.”
OUTSIDE THE WINDOW WERE THE WIND-BOISTEROUS LIMBS OF trees. The room felt very close. Billy looked away from the light outside.
The man on-screen was not the only one, Vardy said. A small obsessive tribe. Heresy geeks, going sect to sect, accumulating creeds as greedy as any Renfields. Soldiers of the Saviour Worm one week, Opus Dei or the Bobo Dreds the next, with genius for devotion and sudden brief bursts of sincerity sufficient to be welcomed as neophytes. Some were always cynically in it for the notch on the bedpost, others Damascene certain for two or three days that this one was different, until they remembered their own natures and excommunicated themselves with indulgent chuckles.
They gathered to compare gnoses, in Edgware Road cafés over sheesha or pubs in Primrose Hill or somewhere called Almagan Yard, mostly their favoured hangouts in the “trap streets,” Vardy said. They traded dissident mysteries in vague competition, as if faiths were Top Trumps cards.
“What about your apocalypse, then?” “Well, the universe is a leaf on the time-tree, and come autumn it’s going to shrivel and fall off into hell.” Murmurs of admiration. “Ooh, nice one. My new lot say ants are going to eat the sun.”
“HE WANTS TO JOIN THESE ‘TOOTHIES,’ YOU SEE,” VARDY SAID. “HE’S a completist. But he can’t find them.”
“What’s a trap street?” Billy was ignored.
“Toothies,” Baron said. “Get it? Harrow, sit down.” Billy had stood up and was walking toward the door. “Toothies,” Baron said. “Get it? Tyuh-tyuh-tyuh-Tyoothies.”
“I’ve had enough,” Billy said.
“Sit down,” Vardy said.
“We’re the bloody cult squad, Harrow,” Baron said. “Why d’you think we’re called in? Who do you think’s responsible for what’s going on?”
“Teuthies.” Vardy smiled. “Worshippers of the giant squid.”
Chapter Six
“THE ARTICLE THAT GOT NICKED,” SAID BARON. BILLY STOOD still, his hand on the doorknob. “It’s where old Japetus names Architeuthis for the first time. ’Course you can get hold of a reprint, but originals are a bit special, aren’t they?”
“He was refuting folklore,” said Vardy. “The whole piece is him pooh-poohing some fairy story, and saying, ‘No no, there’s a rational explanation, gentlemen.’ You could say it’s where the sea monster meets…” He gestured around him. “This. The modern world.” The stress was mockery. “Out of fable into science. The end of an old order. Right?” He wagged his finger no. Baron watched him indulgently.
“Death of legend?” Vardy said. “Because he gives it a name? He said it was Ar-chi-teu-this. Not ‘great’ squid, Billy. Not ‘big,’ not even ‘giant.’ ‘Ruling’.” He blinked. “It rules? That’s him being faithful to the Enlightenment? He shoves it into taxonomy, yeah, but as what? As a bloody demiurge.
“He was a prophet. At the end of the lecture, you know what he did? Oh, he had props. He was a performer like Billy Graham. Brings out a jar, and what’s in it? A beak.” Vardy snap-snapped his fingers. “Of a giant squid.”
The light was going: some cloud cover arriving, as if summoned by drama. Billy stared at Vardy. He had his glasses in his hand, so Vardy was a touch hazy. Billy had actually heard this story, or its outlines, he remembered: an anecdote in a lecture hall. Where they could, his lecturers, with vicarious panache, would spice the stories of their forebears’ theories. They told anecdotes of a polymath Faraday; read Feynman’s achingly sad letter to his dead wife; described Edison’s swagger; eulogised Curie and Bogdanov martyred to their utopian researches. Steenstrup had been part of that dashing company.
The way Vardy spoke was almost as if he could no-shit see Steenstrup’s performance. As if he were looking at the black weapon thing Steenstrup had lifted from the jar. That leviathan part, more like a tool of alien design than any mouth. Preserved, precious, manifest like the finger bone of a saint. Whatever he had claimed, Steenstrup’s bottle had been a reliquary.
“That article,” Vardy said. “It’s a fulcrum. With a certain way of looking at things, it would easily be worth breaking the law for. Because it’s sacred text. It’s gospel.”
BILLY SHOOK HIS HEAD. HE FELT AS IF HIS EARS WERE RINGING.
“And that,” Baron said, audibly amused, “is what the professor gets paid for.”
“What our thieves have been doing is building a library,” said Vardy. “I bet you good money that over the last few months stuff by Verrill and Ritchie and Murray and other, you know, classic teuthic literature has also been nicked.”
“Jesus,” said Billy. “How do you know so much about this?” Vardy swatted the question away-literally, with his hand-as if it were an insect.
“It’s what the man do,” Baron said. “Zero to guru in forty-eight hours.”
“Let’s move on,” said Vardy.
“So,” Billy said. “You think this cult nicked the book, took the squid, and killed that guy? And now they want me?”
“Did I say that?” Vardy said. “I can’t be sure these squiddists did anything. Something doesn’t add up, to be honest.”
Billy started up unhappy performed laughter at that. “D’you think?” he said.
But Vardy ignored him and went on. “But it’s something to do with them.”
“Come on,” said Billy. “This is batshit.” He pleaded. “A religion about squid?”