Angelmaker (32 page)

“Sit, please.”

She smiles up at him, then, when he does not smile back, she scowls, and repeats the instruction. Joe, not really knowing why, perches himself on the edge of a modern red cloth stool, and wobbles. The woman in front of him gives an encouraging smile.

“Mercer asked me to wait around in case I was needed. This almost certainly isn’t what he had in mind, but that’s the thing with Mercer. His genius is extremely obscure, even to himself. Perhaps particularly.”

“Bethany?”

Her mouth quirks for a moment, whether in annoyance or approbation he cannot tell. “Not me. Bethany is still in the control room arranging a night of intense confusion at the London traffic-management centre, which will alas preclude the charming Mr. Titwhistle from locating you by speed-enforcement camera. Tomorrow will not be a good day to drive in London. No, I do some investigative work. However, at present I am here for menial tasks. I have, for example, more coffee. And sandwiches. Would you like a sandwich?”

It’s a perfectly innocent question. It must be the faint sound of her stocking as she removes her toe from his thigh and puts her feet neatly together which makes the word “sandwich” sound rude. Joe has never found it so before. He tries it now, in his mouth.

“Sandwich.” No. Nothing rude about that. He tries again. “Saaan-d-
witt
-cha.” Yes, that’s more like it. He gives it a couple more goes.

“Yes,” the bold receptionist says, “a sandwich. In this case, avocado and bacon between two slices of granary bread. I can also arrange for other,” she smiles at him, “sandwiches.”

“Anything goes,” Joe says, and watches the words spiral out of his mouth and settle.
I am a berk
.

“Yes,” she says brightly, “it often does, with sandwiches. I, however, hold very clear beliefs on this subject. I do not believe in allowing tomato to soak into the bread, for example. Tomato, in a sandwich, should be applied latest of all ingredients and sealed between pieces of lettuce or salami, to prevent,” and here she purses her lips, “
leakage
.”

There it is again. A perfectly ordinary word, but she’s done something to it. A shiver passes down Joe’s spine.
Leakage
.

It ought to be a disgusting expression, but actually, as it passes her front teeth, which are briefly exposed as she enunciates the second syllable, it becomes a vibrant, enticing notion. This is not slurry from a rusted pipe, this is the beads of honey emerging languorously from a slice of baklava. Joe shuts his eyes for a second to stop himself from staring at her mouth. Red lips. Pale, sharp teeth. Very precise diction. The tip of her tongue. What a woman. For the second time tonight, he is rescued by Mercer.

“I see you’ve found Polly.”

“Oh, um, yes.”

“Polly, were you listening in?”

Polly nods at a notepad on her desk, covered in scribbles and question marks. “Of course.”

“Any thoughts?”

“What’s a book?”

“I had hoped for something a bit more—”

“Mercer. Seriously. What is a book? Is it a collection of papers bound like something by Dickens? Or is it a gathering of information, an archive? In this context, particularly, it seems to me it’s the latter. Joe’s book wasn’t just paper, it was an ignition key. The book gives control of the machine—except, somehow, it doesn’t. There’s a missing page or a cog or another volume. I don’t know. The point is, they thought they’d have it all by now and they don’t. So they need Joe.”

Joe finds himself thinking of the Recorded Man again. The book of someone’s life, of their every waking sense. He shivers.

Mercer nods, conceding Polly’s point. “Well, they need Joe for something. By the way, did I hear you mention more coffee?”

“Indeed you did.”

“Is it the particularly aggressive kind?”

“It has potential in that direction.”

“You could coach it?”

“I believe so.”

“And then we can get to the business of seriously examining what’s going on while Joe catches another forty winks.”

“Ideal.”

“Then by all means, Polly, please do.”

“I shall.”

And off she goes, leaving Joe to wonder whether she is Mercer’s girlfriend, and when his tongue will cease to adhere to the roof of his mouth, and whether it is obvious that he finds this woman frantically attractive, albeit for no doubt complex and inappropriate reasons owed in part to his state of fight-flight agitation.

“You still want to leave?” Mercer demands.

“No.”

“Good. Then come back in here and let’s go through it in detail, please.” He pauses. “Joe? I can almost certainly get you out of this. It’s going to be okay. But it’s going to get harder from here and you have to do what I say and live very, very small for a while. Maybe even take a holiday. All right?”

Holiday. He has an image of Polly in the shade of a beach umbrella. “All right.”

It is all right. Mercer always gets him out of it. Mercer always can. And with the bold receptionist somewhere around, Joe Spork feels suddenly very content in the Raspberry Room of Noblewhite Cradle.

I
n the fitful dreams of Edie Banister, crazy old punk lady and dogbearing fugitive, the broad black deck of
Cuparah
is slick with brine, and she reels as another wave strikes the bow. The ship yaws hugely, lurching in the swell. Edie swallows bile, but even the sense of imminent vomiting can’t dampen her delight.

Cuparah
is a submarine.

More than that, it is a Ruskinite submarine, a nacred, seaswell ghost which cuts through one wave and plays on the next. The shape is functional—a whale-ish blunt-headed shape, swirled with weird water patterns for camouflage, asymmetrical and misleading—but every detail is splendid. The conning tower is swept back dramatically, not bolted on but seemingly grown from the body, and inside, a stair unfolds from the main body to the hatchway which makes the tower look like the entrance to a ballroom. The hatch itself is trimmed on the underneath with oiled brown leather, tooled with the names of the men who built it, and despite years of use the principal odour wafting from below is leather and varnish: warm, living smells.

“For Christ’s sake, get up here and in,” Amanda Baines says. Corporal Albert Pritchard—known mostly as Songbird, and last seen gasping in Mrs. Sekuni’s Number 4 wristlock—gamely grips Edie by the shoulder and buttock and boosts her over the guard rail to the hatch. Songbird is one of Edie’s lads, a team of veteran uglies who will support
her by breaking heads and blowing things up should she require it. The others are already on board and no doubt arguing over bunks.

Edie peers down into the depths of
Cuparah
. There’s red light in the depths, and a cool scent of unwashed male rises out of the dark. Curiously, her nausea ebbs. She climbs down inside the hatch, and Songbird follows.

“Welcome aboard,” Amanda Baines says, passing Edie a waxed canvas grip filled with something heavy and soft. Behind her, the rest of Songbird’s squad nod greetings and grin shyly. Edie’s command. Her boys. Lethal and wicked and noble as the day.

Edie nods, stares at the narrow gang and breathes in the air. A Ruskinite, draped in black, hurries past with a strange brass tool in one hand and a concentrated expression on his face. As he passes through a hatch, she sees in the cabin beyond a familiar bank of valves and vacuum tubes. Of course. What could be more mobile, or more difficult to destroy, than a submarine code-breaking station?

The dead man’s hatches between compartments are fitted out in brass, and the cut steel is scrolled with elegant spirals and curlicues, a maker’s mark stamped into the upper left quadrant.
Mockley fecit
. “Mockley made me.” Edie grins. Nice to know who created the machine on which your life depends. She trusts Mockley, and hence also
Cuparah
. When she looks up, she finds a wide sky above her, a beautiful illusion of clouds and air.
Cuparah
is a thing to lift the heart, even down here in the dark beneath the waves.

“Best get used to the uniform,” Amanda (Captain) Baines adds, gesturing to the case. “Try it on before you sleep, and wear it in the morning.”

“Yes,” Edie says. “Of course.”

In her cabin—
Cuparah
, of necessity, is big; in fact, it is huge for a submarine, like a Gothic destroyer sunk and overturned, with an Art Deco cruise ship inside, so cabins are like rooms in very expensive boutique hotels—Edie Banister stares at the photograph, and the face in it stares back at her in the light of her cabin’s curlicued reading lamp. All around her, there’s a whisper of water and air: the submarine has two hulls, one within the other. The inner walls are a honeycomb—for strength, flexibility, and lightness, the Ruskinites on
board have told her, and to permit cabling and pipes. As the ship moves, it sighs and chuckles to itself, so that Edie fancies herself surrounded by a giant, generous, asthmatic dog.

The white shirt has trim sleeves and a severe cut which vanishes her already minimal bust. Over the top goes a jacket with broad shoulders, making a very male, very triangular torso dropping to her hips. Rummaging in her bags she finds her rank pins, and twists them through the thick collar. She also has a false moustache not entirely unlike Shem Shem Tsien’s, a brace of neat sparrow’s wings. Careful, she fixes them very firmly to her upper lip (in absolutely no sense does she wish to have a conversation with the Opium Khan which begins: “Commander Banister, your moustache has fallen in the gazpacho”) and turns to look in the mirror.

The effect is rather more than she had anticipated. A pale, severe face stares back at her, a young man’s only just out of boyhood—perhaps trying a little too hard—but definitely not a woman’s. How curious. She puts her cap on and looks again. Actually, that young man in the glass is quite attractive—not in a rugged way, but in the manner of a refined creature, inexperienced yet supple, in need of Edie’s skilled, frank schooling. An entirely different set of fantasies winds across her inner vision.
My oh my
 … her hands trace the outline of his—her—uniform.
Ho hum
. It’s rather a shame she can’t go to bed with herself. She turns sideways … 
Delicious
.

And distracting. Edie sneers at her reflection, hoping to produce a dangerous expression.
Hm
. That’s not a look which will stop an advancing foe. She tries again, going for confident disdain. It doesn’t work, but produces a strange, fey look of murderous intent instead.

Cuparah
shudders and barks; it’s something called the thermocline. Edie doesn’t know what that may be, but hitting it and bouncing off it is like running the rapids, and every time it happens she abruptly remembers how far beneath the waves she is, and how very far from home. If only she could get some warmth into her bones. A hundred feet down in an iron cigar filled with working men, why the Hell is it so cold? She wonders if she can ask Amanda Baines for a heater.

Actually, she knows why it’s cold. Excess heat is a major problem in submarines, and
Cuparah
is worse than the average because she is bigger and contains all manner of clever doohickeys, including the coding machine, which gets so hot that in England it would be operated by girls wearing only their most sensible underwear. Because this
is a Ruskinite submarine, it has an incredibly clever solution involving water being pumped around the vessel between the inner and outer hulls. This water is also—even more cunningly—used to assist in manoeuvring, and because it is not compressible, actually adds to the strength of the hull.
Cuparah
’s cooling system is the Keeper’s best work. Amanda Baines calls it Poseidon’s Net, and smiles a little when she does because she is the only submarine captain who has one. It is brilliant.

It also makes all the cabins in Edie’s section really cold.

Conscious of the weight above her, Edie slips out of her uniform. She steps carefully, feeling a ridiculous nervousness about leaning on the walls in case she punctures the armoured skin and drowns the boat. Ridiculous. Impossible. But she can’t shake the aching horror of the idea, shed the imagined feeling of an eggshell cracking.

She draws her blanket around her and falls asleep, wishing very devoutly for a friend in need, or actually, just the warm embrace of a friend in bed.