“Nor me,” said Johnny Boy. “But the demons and angels are still among us and only we know that they’re here.”
“Perhaps there’s nothing we can do but wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“Wait for a new generation to grow up. A generation that doesn’t have its head massaged. That generation will see the truth.”
“That’s a cop-out ending, if ever there was one,” said Johnny Boy. “Have you given up on being a relocator now? Perhaps now your brother is in the loony bin, you don’t have to try any more. You don’t have anything to prove. Is that it?”
“No, that’s not it.” Icarus sighed. Perhaps that was it. Perhaps now, with his brother safely locked up, perhaps he no longer did have to prove anything.
“And something I haven’t asked you,” said Johnny Boy. “Whatever happened to your mum? Did Cormerant do something horrible to her when he went to your house to get the left luggage locker key you’d mailed to yourself?”
“No, she was out at the time. Apparently he smashed open the front door and simply snatched the envelope from the floor.”
“Well isn’t that hunky-dory? So you don’t even have any revenge to take. Let’s just have another drink and wait for the next generation.”
“Give it a rest,” said Icarus. “I’ve done all I can. I don’t know what else I can do.”
“No,” said Johnny Boy, finishing his drink. “You don’t. But I bet your brother does. I’ll bet if he was out of that loony bin and back on the case, he’d sort everything out.”
“He’s too sick,” said Icarus. “He’s a regular dying detective. He’s got broken bones and everything.”
“Has he hell,” said Johnny Boy. “I’ve visited him. He’s just got a couple of teeth missing and a few bruises. He could have been out of there and back on the case, if you hadn’t signed his death warrant.”
Icarus went up to the bar to get in another round of drinks. The barman with the watch fob leered at him. Icarus stared into the evil face. The long reptilian head, the eyes with their vertical pupils, the quivering quills, the hideous insect mouthparts.
“You haven’t put any little treats in my direction lately,” said the barman, fingering the watch fob with a terrible talon. “You’ll just have to pay for this round of drinks. Nothing comes for free in this world, you know.”
Icarus paid and returned with the drinks to his table.
“We’re going to the hospital,” he said. “We’re going to get my brother.”
“I’m an only child,” I said. “I don’t know why you keep going on about me having a brother.”
“I do have your case notes here,” said the doctor. “I do know who you really are.”
“I’m Woodbine,” I said. “Lazlo Woodbine,” adding, just for the hell of it, “Some call me Laz.”
“Woodbine,” and the doctor nodded. At least he’d got my name right. “The world famous private eye. Everybody knows his name, but no-one can put a face to it.”
“That’s the way that I do business.”
“Are you sleeping well?” the doctor asked.
“I haven’t slept for five days. I daren’t sleep, I’ll give away the ending if I sleep.”
“Barry will give the ending away, will he?”
“I don’t want to talk about Barry,” I said. “Forget about Barry.”
“All right, let’s forget about Barry. Let’s talk about you. Mr Lazlo Woodbine, private eye.”
“Good choice of topic,” I said. “Could I have another wideawake pill?”
“Now according to my notes …” The doctor was at those goddamn case notes once again. “According to my notes, Lazlo Woodbine works in only four locations.”
“You got it,” I said. “The office, the bar, the alleyway and the rooftop. No good detective ever needs more.”
“Not even a bedroom, for all that gratuitous sex you genre detectives are so noted for?”
“There are some promises that even a detective can’t keep.”
“So you stick to the four locations.”
“I do,” said I. And I did.
The doctor stretched out his arms and put his hands behind his head. “So how do you explain your present location?” he asked.
“Name any location,” said the taxi driver. “Anywhere in Inner or Greater London and I’ll tell you how to get to it from here.”
It wasn’t the same taxi driver. But you’d have been hard pressed to tell the difference. He had that same curious thing with hair on the left hand side and that same odd business with the tongue when he used the word “plinth”.[17]
“I’m not really in the mood,” said Johnny Boy.
“Oh go on,” said the cabbie. “It will make me go faster.”
“All right,” said Johnny Boy. “How do you get to the Flying Swan?”
“That’s easy,” said the cabbie. “You go up Abbadon Street, along Moby Dick Terrace, turn left into Sprite Street, right into …”
“He’s making it up,” said Johnny Boy.
“I think they always do,” said Icarus Smith.
“You make all this up,” said the doctor. “It’s all a fantasy. If you were the real Lazlo Woodbine, you couldn’t be sitting here now.”
“Hm,” said I. “Well.”
“Over the last five days you have told me a story that is a complete fantasy. About a voice in your head that put in a word with the widow of God. About a drug which enables people to see angels and demons. And if I’m not mistaken, you’ve been under the impression that I’m one of these demons. One of these ‘wrong’uns’, am I correct?”
“Well,” said I. “Hm.”
“And there are these bars that you go to, where the barman is always your friend Fangio. Who was a fat boy and now is a thin boy, because he bopped you on the head, so that you could stay within the rules of your genre. The nineteen-fifties American detective genre. One that only truly existed in fiction. You live your life in fiction, my friend. You have no hold on reality.”
“No,” I said. “I do, I really do.”
“You don’t,” said the doctor. “Just think about this. Every time you are in what you call a ‘tricky situation’, you are rescued.”
I shrugged.
“And who rescues you?”
I shrugged again.
“Your brother rescues you,” said the doctor. “And the evil men who have you in the sticky situation, the doctor and the third child of God, another brother, you note, who was telling you about living in the shadow of his brother, these evil men vanish away to melted goo the moment your brother arrives to save you.”
“Coincidence,” I said.
“Tell me about your brother,” said the doctor.
“I like to think of myself as a relocator,” said the cabbie. “I relocate people. Take them from one location to another. In my small way I help to put the world to rights. If people weren’t in the wrong places at the wrong times, there’d be no need for cabbies. We put people where they want to be. Where they should be. You could learn a lot from cabbies.”
Icarus looked at Johnny Boy.
And Johnny Boy looked back at him.
“If I asked you how to get to Shangri La, do you think you might drive a little faster?” said Johnny Boy.
“Perhaps quite fast,” said Icarus, glancing into the driver’s mirror. “There’s a long dark automobile following us.”
“Are you following me?” asked the doctor. “Do you see where my reasoning is taking us?”