Angelmaker (69 page)

In the paper, pictures of Tess and Joyce, alive. Descriptions of how they died. Descriptions so lurid you can’t help but wonder, unless you really know someone well, whether they might have done it, after all.

Almost everyone who trusts him that much is here, now.

Joe Spork stares at the dead faces, and the headline.

Every man’s hand is against him now.

Joe Spork stares into nothing and waits for his heart to break, or his mind. He waits for the impact of this appalling, impossible lie to cause everything he is to crumble and collapse. He looks up and sees Polly watching, and Mercer, and knows they are waiting too.
Sorry
, he thinks.
I’m done. I don’t have anything left
. He waits to hear his own mouth make nonsense sounds, for his body to curl up into a ball and just stay there, until they come for him.

Instead, a completely other thing happens which catches him quite by surprise. He comes to the end of himself and finds, at the last, a piece of solid ground and a hard wall to set his back against.

Sometime between the moment when his father’s heart went
ba
but not
boom
and the dropping of Mathew’s silver-chased casket into the earth, Joe Spork buried the part of himself which knew how to hustle, cheat, and rob in a coffin of its own, and in some indefinable way accepted that his was to be a life of inconsequence and hohummery. He studied with Daniel in an effort to turn back the clock to some previous point when Mathew was not just still alive but not yet criminal; he sought, in fact, to become the man his father might have been under other circumstances.

He stares into his own reflection in the double-glazed window, and tries to remember the man he could have been.
Crown Prince of Crime. Worse than his dad ever was, and that’s God’s honest truth. Mad bastard, he is. Not afraid of nothing
.

That person has never existed, and yet he has always been possible. He has never gone away. Now, finally, is the moment to make him real. And yet it seems to Joe a very long journey to that place in himself, a long, hard uphill struggle against years of accumulated obstacles and self-made fences.

He begins with the man he is now: Joe Spork, who did not murder his friend, but is accused of it, and of things more desperate and vile for reasons which are not his fault; who shares his bed with Polly Cradle, and means to make that matter.

He rolls his shoulders, sets his jaw, and goes on.

He is the man who was taken by monsters, and tortured, and is not dead.

He is the man who knows that innocence is not a shield, and that keeping your head down does not mean you will be safe.

He is the man who was set up by an old woman in the name of love and a better world, and who watched her die to save him.

He is the man who will look after her dog.

He is the man who charged a loaded gun and a sword with nothing more than his anger.

Oh, yes, and his father was trouble, too. And his grandmother before that.

A slow, satisfied grin moves across his face. Mad Dog Joe. White Knuckle Joe. Run-Amok Joe.

Crazy Joe.

All right, then. He looks at his reflection again. He judges the work good, but not finished: the new Joe should not slouch.

He breathes in and sticks out his chest, looks again. No, too much. Less is more. Solidity, not hot air. Strength, not bluster.

He straightens his back, flexes his arms, but the power is carried in the core, not the fists. The gangster doesn’t bluff, doesn’t threaten. He simply is, and you know the score.

The city belongs to me. The world. It is mine. Other men rule because I have more important things to do
.

Good. Now, the hat. The gangster is perpetually wearing a hat. Even when he is not, he carries himself as if he is. The light falls across his face just so; one eye is in darkness, glinting. Piratical. A wolf eye on the edge of the firelight, a pirate captain in a storm.
Defiance
.

The coat, like armour. It needs to hang wide, open, to emphasise his scale. It casts its own shadow, hides him yet again. His hands are by his sides, so he might be armed … No, scratch that. One way or another, he is armed. Is it a baseball bat? Very American. Where would he get such a thing? A length of pipe. A gun. A boathook. Good. And in his pocket, some further surprise. Not a gun. Not a knife. Something more alarming. A Molotov cocktail, perhaps, or a grenade. He has heard that Russian mobsters use grenades. It seems like massive
overkill. Ah. Yes. But that’s the point, isn’t it? Overkill. Bring a sledgehammer to a knife fight. Bring a tank to play chicken. It’s not about subtle or measured. Shem Shem Tsien is subtle, a crooked spider in the dark, a liar, a thief of hope, a killer of Watsons and Joyces. Murderer of old women and sorrower of dogs.
I am not a subtle or a measured man. I am Crazy Joe Spork, and I will bring you down if I must topple the house around us
.

Yes.

From the window surface stares back the man he must be from now on: one-eyed wanderer; battlefield ghost; stranger; titan; mobster; angel of destruction.

A man who might be able to win, after all.

“Your escape route goes through Ireland,” Mercer is saying. “Ferry, then a flight to Iceland, on to Canada. Canada’s great for disappearing. It’s very big and there’s nothing in it. If you leave in the next few hours we can get you out before the bees arrive. I don’t know if that will help, but it’s worth a try.”

Joe Spork doesn’t seem to hear. Mercer moves around him, waves. “Do I have your attention, Joe?”

“Station Y,” Joe says. Mercer raises his eyebrows. Joe nods. “Okay. Do that in a minute. Does anyone have the box from my mother?”

Mercer frowns.

“Yes,” Polly says.

“May I have it, please?”

She rummages in her bag, produces it. The key is taped to the bottom, in the fashion of nuns rather than gangsters. He opens it.

Old pictures, Polaroids, wrapped with an elastic band from the Post Office—of course. Smiling lockpickers, the very first Old Campaigners of Mathew Spork’s inner circle. Parties with women in baby-doll dresses and men in velvet suits. A candid picture of Harriet which Joe hastily pushes to the back, so lustful and alarmingly ripe does she appear.

And then, very much out of place, three more pictures in their own little group, with a smaller elastic band around them and a piece of paper with the single word “Josh” on it just to make the point, and Joe Spork finds he can read them as if they were postcards:

Uncle Tam and Mathew, looking very grave, shaking hands on a deal in the Marketman’s fashion, a double clasp.
Your Uncle has something for you
.

Mercer and, yes, Polly, clasped in the arms of their parents on the steps of Cradle’s.
These are the people you can trust
.

And Joe himself, in a sheepskin jacket, perched on Mathew’s knee and punching the sky, Mathew’s face for once quite open and joyous, gunman’s hands on his son’s narrow shoulders. That one’s almost too simple, too primal to put into words. Even
I love you
doesn’t really do it justice.

He can feel Mathew’s breath on his hair. His father used to inhale him from time to time, simple, honest, mammalian.

“Ireland, Joe,” Mercer says.

Joe looks over at him, genuinely surprised. “Oh, I’m not running.”

“What? Of course you are.”

“No.”

“Joe, you can’t fight this. It’s too big.”

“He’s going to kill the world, Mercer. And he’s already killed me. The old Joe is done. I won’t be doing a lot of business now, will I? Even if the bank doesn’t foreclose, which they will.”

“It will blow over. Someone else will no doubt stop him. There are people who do those things.”

“The Legacy Board. Rodney Titwhistle. Yes. He’s on top of it, all right.”

“For God’s sake, Joe! You’re a clockworker. That’s what you wanted. That’s who I’ve been trying to help!”

“And he says ‘Thank you.’ From the bottom of his heart. But he’s gone, Mercer. Now it’s me.” He glances over at Polly Cradle.

“Tell him!” Mercer demands, but Polly just smiles back at Joe and slowly claps her hands, eyes shining.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Mercer shouts. “You’re not serious!”

“Yes,” Joe says. “I began to get it when I was in there. I don’t know when. Maybe after the first month.”

Mercer hesitates. “Joe, you weren’t in there a month. It wasn’t even a full week. I know it must have seemed like longer, but you escaped after five days.”

Joe Spork shakes his head, and his smile is very fey indeed.

“No, Mercer,” he says gently. “It just felt like that to you, because you were on the outside.”

There is a ghastly silence. Mercer starts to object, to correct him, and then the upside-down truth of this sinks into him and he crumples.

“I’m so sorry, Joe,” he murmurs. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help. I’m sorry. I did my best, and it wasn’t … it wasn’t anything like enough.”

“You were superb,” Joe Spork tells him gently. “They tried to tell me you’d given up. Both of you.”

They bristle, and he smiles. “Look: this is just how it is now. My whole life I’ve been telling myself to be calm, to be reasonable, to be respectable. To toe the line. But here I am, all the same, because they cheated. They changed the game so that I couldn’t win by being an honest man. But the thing is, I wasn’t very good at being an honest man. I had to put so much of me away to do it. But being a crook, now … I’ve got the skills for that. I can be an amazing crook. I can be the greatest crook who ever lived. I can do that, and still do the right thing. I’m not bonkers, at all. I’m
free
.”

Polly Cradle cocks her head, and considers.

“What right thing?” she asks.

Bastion growls softly.

Joe gestures at the newspaper.

“They’re coming after me. They’re killing people and it’s only a matter of time before they get”—he looks around, and finds himself gazing at Polly, looks away—“one of you. I’m not running any more. It’s time to give them something to think about.”

He folds his arms.

Mercer opens his mouth to argue, and Bastion Banister chooses this moment to open
his
mouth and snap at the circling bee. To his own evident surprise, he captures it, and there’s a curious little glonking noise as he swallows it whole. Mercer cringes slightly, as if expecting the dog to explode.

Nothing happens.

“All right,” Polly Cradle says, and then,
pro forma
, “Bastion, you’re a very naughty boy.”

“Yes,” Mercer says acidly. “The dog has consumed a possibly lethal technological device of immense sophistication, deprived us of our only piece of tangible evidence and possibly doomed us all to some sort of arcane scientific retaliative strike. By all means, chide him severely with your voice. That will solve everyone’s problems.”

There is silence, and then Joe Spork starts to sputter, and Polly
Cradle snorts, and then Joe actually laughs: a small snigger which grows into a loud, open laugh, and finally a great shout of mirth, and Polly is laughing right alongside him, with relief and delight and in honour of the expression of profound affront on her brother’s face. Finally, even Mercer joins in.

When the fit is over, they regard one another with glad eyes.

“Mercer,” Polly says, “we are now going to hug. As a group. The experience will be very un-English. It will be good for you. Do not speak, at all, especially not in an attempt to diffuse the emotional intensity of the situation.”

They hug, somewhat awkwardly, but with great feeling.

“Well,” Mercer says, after a moment, “that was certainly—”

“I will hit you with a shovel,” Polly Cradle murmurs.

The clasp goes on a second longer, and then they step back.

“All right, then,” Joe Spork says. “Let’s get started.”

“This is actually not something I’ve done before,” Joe says a few moments later to the man in the pink shirt, “but I felt almost sure I would have natural talent.”

The man nods hurriedly, but very gently, because he’s worried about the Sabatier cleaver resting just under his chin. Joe liberated this gruesome item from the kitchen in the giant mint, and his face brightened significantly as he appreciated its weight and general nastiness. The owner of the house is apparently some sort of closet gourmet, because Polly was able to arm herself with a brace of short, fat-bladed items used for shucking oysters which, while small, possess a similar measure of menace and utility.