Provender Gleed (18 page)

'Who's here already?' Prosper asked. He was reclining in an armchair with a steaming cup of coffee.

'Umm... I can see the von Wäldchenliebs' dirigible, I think. Theirs is the crest with the black eagle, right? And the Savages'. They've got the eagle that isn't black. What is it with some people and eagles? What's wrong with having something small and unpretentious as your Family symbol? A piece of fruit, for instance. Speaking of which, there's the Maketsis' pineapple. And that looks to me like the al-Harouns' crossed date-palms. The Borgia de'Medicis have made it, of course. Nobody beats
them
to the Island.'

'They get a head start. They're always the first to be told.'

'Being the ur-Family does have its privileges, doesn't it. Oh, and look. The Pongs. How the hell did
they
get here so quickly, I wonder.'

'Their dirigible has that new jet-propulsion system.'

'Even so. How far away is Thailand?'

'I expect they were visiting someone at the time. My guess would be the Savages.'

'Ah yes. What with all their marital and business links. The Savages and the Pongs. Imagine if they went the whole hog and merged. D'you think they'd call themselves the Savage-Pongs?' Fortune chuckled heartily.

'You're not the first to crack that joke, Fort,' said Prosper, 'and I seriously doubt you'll be the last.'

'It's still funny.' Fortune's expression abruptly turned sombre. 'Oh-ho, what have we here? Can it be the famous Black Dirigible?'

Prosper sprang to his feet and joined his brother at the viewing gallery.

Halfway along the line of tethered dirigibles, almost all of which were the standard silvery-grey in colour, was one whose canvas shell was the deepest, darkest, most night-like shade of black conceivable. The crest on its flank was picked out in blood red and was a simplified silhouette representation of a bat in flight.

'The Kuczinskis,' Prosper said, coldly, crisply.

'And to judge by the angle we're coming in at, I'd say we've been assigned the space next to them,' said Fortune. 'Luck of the draw? Or maybe someone down there in the control tower has a nasty sense of humour.'

The Kuczinski dirigible loomed like a thundercloud. Its rudder fins continued the bat motif - they were scallop-edged, like a bat's wing. Also unusual about the aircraft were its windows. All, with the exception of those in the control car, were blacked out. The Kuczinskis found it necessary, and preferable, to travel in constant darkness.

'They seem to have made it here in very good time,' Prosper observed. 'Perhaps they knew they'd be coming.'

'Steady on,' Fortune warned. 'Innocent until proven.'

The Gleed dirigible nudged in alongside the Kuczinskis' and, with a whine of reverse propulsion, came rocking and bumping to a standstill. Ropes unfurled from the mooring cones at the nose and tail, and were gathered up by ground crew and secured to motor-driven winches. The dirigible's engines cut, bringing a sudden sonorous silence, and the winches took over and slowly hauled the aircraft down to earth.

Once the dirigible was secured and stabilised, a gangplank was extruded from its belly. Crewmen descended first, lining up in two rows, fingers slapping to foreheads in salute. Prosper and Fortune emerged, passing between the crewmen. The heat was sudden and ferocious, and became more so as they stepped out from the dirigible's shadow into the full flare of the subtropical sun. At a brisk march, the two Family members set off along the peninsula, heading for the Congress Chamber and the ancillary buildings clustered around it.

23

Somewhat to his own surprise, Provender had slept. He had woken up several times during the night and been obliged to ease out a kink in his spine or a cramp in his calf. He had never managed to get anywhere near comfortable, there on the bare bathroom floor, blindfolded, bound hand and foot. All the same, he had slept.

He knew it was morning because the building around him, having been silent for several hours, was now making noises again. They were dim sounds, and all bathroom-related: water gurgling, a badly-fixed pipe rattling. The bathroom he was in shared its plumbing system with countless others. He pictured people going about their ablutions, their ordinary Monday-morning routine. Shaving. Bathing. Brushing their teeth. Using the lavatory. Thinking about work, or school, or the duties of the day, or perhaps trying their best
not
to think about any of these things. And all the while not having a clue, any of them, about the man being held captive in their midst, the man who could hear the results of what they were up to in their bathrooms, the man who would have given anything just to be able to stand up and wash his face as they were doing, perhaps check his chin for spots in the basin mirror, and then straddle the lavatory and partake of a long and blissfully unaided piss. How many flats were there in this building? How many bathrooms? From impressions he had collected, Provender guessed he was in a populous urban high-rise. There could be anything up to two thousand souls sharing this block with him, and each of them had a bathroom which was linked to this one by pipes and ducts. A connective maze of copper and ceramic tubing. The building's venous system. Clean water one way, waste water the other. It was, in some hard-to-describe way, reassuring. He was isolated but not wholly alone.

And then, very definitely, he was not alone. The door opened, the light switch clicked, the extractor fan started its bronchitic rattling again, and someone entered the room.

Straight away Provender knew it was Is's accomplice. The man had a heavy presence. He seemed to displace more air than most people.

Provender kept still, pretending he was asleep.

The man shuffled up to him barefoot and stood over him. His breathing was slow and steady. He jabbed a toe into Provender's midriff.

Provender flinched and braced himself, thinking the jab must be the prelude to a kick.

No kick came.

''Morning, Provvie,' the man said. 'Wakey-wakey, rise and shine. Sleep well? I expect not.'

Provender had decided on a policy of not talking to the man. The man seemed the sort you could antagonise without meaning to.

'Not at all what you're used to, eh?' the man said. 'Nothing fancy about the accommodation here. I bet even boarding school wasn't as bad. Still, it's good for you. This way you get to experience how the rest of us live, the ordinary people your Family craps on all the time. Speaking of which...'

Provender heard the lavatory seat being flipped up and the sound of the man seating himself. What came next he wished he didn't have to listen to: the squeak and grunt of someone defecating just inches away from him. Even worse was the smell, so ripe he almost gagged.

'How's that then?' the man asked, to the accompaniment of unravelling toilet paper. 'My partner's using a bucket out there in the main room. Says she couldn't 'go' with you right next to her. Me? I'm not so squeamish. You could say I don't give a shit.'

Provender couldn't restrain himself. He was too revolted. The retort sprang out of him. 'That's because Is is a decent person and you're not.'

There was a moment of deadly quiet, then the man said, 'She told you her name. Stupid cow. I suppose it doesn't make a lot of difference, but even so... I told her not to. Oh, that's annoying.'

Provender braced himself again, fearing that he would be taking the punishment for Is's slip-up.

As before, though, the man did not lay into him. Instead he said, 'Well, I was going to do the decent thing and flush, but now I think I'll just leave it to marinade for a while. Nice chatting with you, Provvie.'

The door closed, and soon afterwards Provender heard raised voices coming from the other side of it. Is and the man arguing. He didn't catch everything that was said but the odd phrase came through, giving him the over-all gist. Is was accused of treating their captive too leniently, not keeping a distance from him like she should. She defended herself by saying that the point of kidnapping him wasn't to torture him. She gave as good as she got but in the end the man's aggression won through. Provender heard Is's voice take on a conciliatory tone, and the volume of the conversation dwindled to inaudibility. Meanwhile the extractor fan churned away, toiling to cleanse the air in the bathroom, with little success. Eventually it timed out and lapsed into silence, as if exhausted from its efforts. The smell of the man's bowel movement lingered noxiously on.

Provender, taking care to breathe through his mouth, deliberated over what had just happened. At a stroke, two suspicions had been confirmed. One was that the man was a confirmed anti-Family type, close to pathological in his hatred of all things Familial. The other was that the relationship between the man and Is was strained and that Is was helping him, if not under duress exactly, then against her better judgement.

It came as something of a surprise to Provender that he was heartened by these two pieces of information. He realised he could, if he chose to, use them to his advantage. Through them he could maybe even engineer his escape.

Then again, if he didn't play his hand just right, he risked making an already bad situation worse.

What it hinged on, really, was whether or not he had the guts to try.

That, and his captors' reading habits.

24

'Why us?'

It was a question that had to be asked, and Milner asked it with as much nonchalance as he could muster. He didn't want to sound as if he and Moore were unwilling to take on the case, but at the same time it was a case of such magnitude, such awesome importance, that he felt obliged to voice a note of reservation.

'Why you indeed,' Carver said. 'First of all, you aren't the police.'

'That's for sure,' Moore said. 'COP LIE.'

Carver shot him a quizzical look.

'We haven't had much luck in our dealings with the police,' Milner explained. 'They've taken the credit for a couple of cases
we
cracked, and on the whole they've not been very cooperative. So we've anagrammatised POLICE to COP LIE. It's what we do.'

'It's what
they
do,' Moore grumbled.

'I see,' Carver said. 'Then that's a further point in your favour. Not only are you not the police, but you'll have no qualms about keeping the police out of the equation.'

'None whatever,' said Milner.

'The other reason I chose to come to you,' Carver went on, 'is that you have scored a number of notable successes while still managing to maintain a low profile.'

'You mean no one's heard of us.'

'If you like. I'd rather see it as you have everything to prove and nothing to lose, which in this instance is a highly desirable combination. It means I can be assured of your utter loyalty and your wholehearted attention.'

'So how did
you
hear of us?' Milner said.

'You may recall you applied to the Gleeds for patronage last year.'

'Did we? I don't think so.'

'Um,' said Moore, 'as a matter of fact we did. Or at least, I did.'

'What?'

'I didn't mention it at the time. We were going through one of our lean patches, and I thought, I'll put in an application for patronage, see if we can get the Gleeds to support us, no harm done if we can't, all it'll cost is the price of a stamp.'

'And you didn't tell me?'

'I was going to, Merlin, if anything came of it. But nothing did. I got a pro forma reply acknowledging the application had been received, and that was that. Nothing else.'

'Oh.' Milner looked askance at his fellow Anagrammatic Detective, unable to decide if what he had done constituted a betrayal or not. He felt, on balance, that it didn't.

'I apologise that you didn't get any more than that,' Carver said, 'but as you can imagine, the Gleeds receive hundreds of requests for patronage every week. Sorting through them is a Herculean task and sometimes some of them, I regret to say, slip through the net. Yours, however, was given due consideration, believe me. I was on hand when the Family discussed it, and while Prosper Gleed was minded not to accept it, I myself made a mental note to remember you. Something told me I might have need of your services sometime.' Again, he flashed that unenchanting smile of his. 'And here I am. I cannot, of course, offer you patronage. That is solely within the Family's power to decide. But I can guarantee you this. If you help us, if you do manage to find young Master Provender, you will never have to worry about finding work again. No question about it. There won't be anyone in the world who won't have heard of Milner and Moore, the Anagrammatic Detectives. Your reputation will have been made. Your future prosperity will have been secured.'

Milner and Moore avoided each other's glances. Neither wanted to see the look of wild avarice he knew was in his own eyes.

'Now,' said Carver, 'I take it you are going to accept the case.'

What could either of the Anagrammatic Detectives do except say yes?

'I'm most pleased. A couple more points, then, before I leave you to get on with it. You will liaise with the Gleeds solely through me. I am going to give you a private phone number to contact me on. Any information you uncover, you report to me. Is that understood? The Gleeds have entrusted me with their full authority in this matter. You are to treat me as if I am the Family.'

'Fine,' said Milner.

'Also, you will doubtless be needing funds to cover your start-up costs, incidental expenses and the like.' Carver reached into his inside jacket pocket and produced a thick wad of banknotes which he placed on the desk in front of Milner, just out of the Anagrammatic Detective's reach. 'More, much more, is available should you require.'

Milner and Moore stared at the money, agog. They estimated they were looking at the equivalent of an average year's income for the agency. Milner immediately thought about moving to more upmarket premises, while Moore entertained the idea of hiring a receptionist-cum-secretary. He had always fancied having a receptionist-cum-secretary in the office, someone young and attractive, with a trim figure and nice legs. She didn't even have to be particularly good at the job. Just sit there within his view, call him Mr Moore, make him coffee, dress smartly and sexily - that was all.