The Henchmen's Book Club (15 page)

18.
LICENCE TO LITERATE

I was hauled over the coals the next day for upsetting the applecart, but not
too severely because nobody could really blame me for trying to stay in one
piece, no matter how much it had let the team down. Still I’d still cost The
Agency a contract and could’ve potentially frightened away future business if
word got around that they had some schizoid instructor who didn’t know his
place, so they returned my status to operational and sent me packing too.

It was a shame because I’d been enjoying
my time on the island, and what’s more I’d been earning. Not a lot, but it had
been a regular wage and the odd fighty bitch asides, the only serious danger
I’d experienced was when I’d come perilously close to losing my nominating
rights following some scandalously low scores for
The Kenneth Williams Diaries
, which while it had admittedly been
overly long and soul-sappingly tedious in large chunks, had thrown up a few
interesting insights. It didn’t matter though, a new rule was collectively
voted in banning all books over five hundred pages in length and anything even
remotely
Carry-On
related.

I arrived back in Petworth later that
night and wondered where I went from here.

I
dropped by and saw Bill in Arundel after a couple of days, and was able to pay
him back a couple of grand, which pleased Bill no end, but infuriated Marjorie
beyond all volume control. I also took Bill for a pint and told him all about
my recent adventures; my African excursions, my time in the West Indies, my
stint as an instructor and even about book club.

Of all the things I talked about, the
crocodiles, the nuclear blast, the run-in with Sun Dju, it was my book club
that most unsettled Bill.

“They worry people they do,” he said,
sitting forward and leaning on his walking stick with both hands in a manner
that reflected his discomfort at such a revelation.

“Book clubs?”

“No. Well yes. Well more, organisations
within organisations,” Bill responded.

“We’re only passing the time,” I told
him. “They’re just books.”

“Yeah, and Opus Dei is just teaching the
way to spiritual enlightenment. But they still get to open fifty-million dollar
headquarters in New York and phone up Presidents in the middle of the night
with their political Christmas lists so don’t go underestimating The Agency’s reaction
should they ever get wind of it.”

“Well I can see what books you’ve been
reading lately,” I deduced, reaching for my Guinness and knocking its head off
it before setting it back down. “We’re hardly Opus Dei. There’s only two or
three of us,” I lied, apt to downplay the extent to which we’d spread in light
of Bill’s paranoia.

“Yeah, and so were Opus Dei when they
first started out. What organisation’s not? Two blokes having a chat and
starting a club. But these things spread. They’re fine if they spread
independently in the outside world. That’s fair enough and good luck to them,
but you don’t let a parasite lay its eggs in your brain just because they’re
only eggs, do you? Eggs hatch.”

“And little Opus Deis are born,” I
finished for him.

“Exactly,” Bill nodded, looking over his
shoulder this way and that before figuring it was safe to take a sip of beer.

“So you don’t want to join us then?” I
put to him.

“What?” he double-took.

“You don’t want to join our book club
then?”

“Are you asking me?” Bill checked.

“Of course,” I said.

“What seriously?”

“Yes, seriously,”

“Honestly?”

“For fuck’s sake Bill, have a word with
yourself.”

“Straight up?”

I decided to stop knocking the ball back
across the net as I figured this rally could go on for some time and eventually
Bill accepted that I was honesty, seriously, genuinely asking him to join.
Straight up.

“Ah Mark, you’re a star,” Bill positively
beamed, putting his stick to one side and shaking me by the hand as if I’d just
announced I was having puppies.

“So you’ll join?”

“Absolutely,” he enthused.

“It’s
just a book club, Bill,” I reminded him.

“Oh yeah, of course, no I understand,” he
brimmed anyway. “It’s just nice to be asked,” he grinned. “Nice to be a part of
something again after all these years; part of something with the boys.”

I gave him his USB stick, this one
tailored to look like a Ladbrokes’ pen, which is where Bill spent most of his
retirement these days, and Bill (or
Pops
as he was to be known) savoured every word of it as I instructed him on how to
use it.

Like I said before Bill missed the life.
He’d been an Affiliate from the late-sixties to the early-noughties and had
been involved in some of the biggest and most spectacular heists the world had
ever seen. Or not, as the case may be. Forget The Great Train Robbery, that was
handbag snatching compared to the stuff Bill had been a part of – the
plot to blow the Hoover Dam, the hijacking of the Space Shuttle
Atlantis
, the underground germ warfare
lab in Mount St Helens, the assassination of Henri Paul – Bill had led a
life most men could only dream of. But it had all caught up with him in an
abrupt fashion when a bullet in the back had finally ended his career in 2000.
It had almost ended his life too, but I’d not given up on him. I’d worked on
him non-stop until The Agency choppers had arrived, bundled him on board of the
first one out of there and got him to the hospital ship just in time. By the
skin of my teeth, I’d saved his life – but Bill’s fighting days were
over. Despite being super-fit for his age, a partial paralysis to the right leg
and the loss of a kidney meant Bill could never bear arms again. And a part of
Bill died with his loss of operational status.

He’d
kept his hand in by going back to the island as an instructor, but had lasted
little more than a year after a new and painfully young Agency staffer was
promoted to Overseer and did what all painfully young men do when they’re
promoted to senior positions – he got rid of all the old guard.

So Bill was unceremoniously thrown on the
scrap heap. He had precious few mementoes to remind himself of his past glories
either – well you didn’t collect photos or visa stamps when one trawl of
the family album could get you extradited to pretty much every country on
Earth, did you? And unlike the veterans of legitimate armies, there were no
days, no ceremonies, no medals and no obelisks to commemorate the campaigns
we’d fought. Or the comrades we’d lost. Not when you were an Affiliate. No sir.
When the fighting was over, we were expected to go away, keep a low profile and
never speak of what we’d seen or done again. If we’d been lucky enough to see
old age, of course. Which most Affiliates didn’t because the lure of signing up
again was always there. With all the unfinished business and unrealised riches
that came with it.

So Bill missed much about his former
life. He missed the action. He missed the huff and the puff. He missed the
exotic locations. And he missed the camaraderie. But most of all, Bill just
missed making a difference; even if that difference was invariably a terrifying
plot that threatened to destabilise the entire free world. But like Bill said,
it was just nice to be a part of something.

So a USB stick disguised as a bookie’s
biro and an invitation to join a reading circle might’ve seemed like a pretty
poor proxy to most blokes, but Bill was made up with it all the same and
couldn’t shake the smile from his battle-scarred face. It was good to see.

“Thanks again, Mark. I really do
appreciate it,” he told me for the sixth or seventh time.

“It’s okay, Bill, glad to have you on
board. Welcome to book club,” I said.

“And so, I just put this in the back of
my computer do I?” he asked, popping the lid off his USB to examine it closely.

“Yeah, that’s it. Just stick it in your USB
port, log on with your username and password and off you go. Oh, there are some
rules on it too, so you should probably have a look at them first before you do
anything else,” I remembered.

“And that’s it?” he said.

“Pretty much,” I replied. “Well, there is
just one other thing.”

“What’s that?” Bill asked, his boyish
enthusiasm exposing a vulnerable underbelly.

“The first book you have to read is by
Russell Davies.”

“Russell Davies,” Bill noted. “Got it, no
problem, what’s it called?”

“
The
Kenneth Williams Diaries
,” I confirmed, figuring I might as well pay him
back for letting that kid fall through the grinder at boot camp.

19.
THE DYMETROZONE COUNTERSTROKE

The weeks hang heavy when I’m not working. It’s not so much the inactivity that
always gets to me, more the knowledge that my savings were plunging inexorably
towards the red; and that when they were gone, they’d take my farmhouse and my
comfortable life with them.

I can’t live in a town. I can’t live in a
city. I’m a limbo man between lives. And as good as my documentation appeared
to the naked eye, it wouldn’t stand up to close scrutiny. It couldn’t, because
Mark Jones didn’t really exist. And all it would take was one nosey neighbour
or one inquisitive bank manager to get the Easter Egg hunt under way.

I had to stay in the sticks. I had to
keep myself to myself. I had to stay solvent.

So I lived to work and I worked to live.
Most Affiliates did.

Still, there was nothing I could do until
a suitable contract came up. I’d put my name down on the short and middle term
contracts lists so now I just had to wait. Hopefully something would come along
before the year was out. I had enough money to get by until then – if I
tightened my belt and stopped buying
Heinz
brand baked beans.

To pass the days in the meantime, I’d
managed to get a part-time job in a little second-hand bookshop in Petworth.
This contributed a few pennies to the coffers and allowed me to read all the
books I wanted for free. Naturally, I didn’t want to attract unnecessary attention
or scare off customers, so I dispensed with the eye patch and wore my Sunday
best cosmetic orb, though there was precious little I could do about the six
inch scar that ran across my face, so I stuck to the backroom whenever
possible.

And it was while working here that the
oddest things began to occur.

The boss of the place was an inoffensive
old stick called Stewart, who was probably only about five years older than me,
but who dressed more like my granddad’s scoutmaster. Stewart was a remnant of
the last century. He mistrusted anything that required batteries, refused to
acknowledge more than four channels on his TV set and thought corned beef and
pickled onion sandwiches were a pretty good thing. Not that Stewart spent much
time watching his TV set mind. Books were his thing. They were his refuge, his
passion and his livelihood. He bought them, sold them, traded them and consumed
them. He even smelt like them and acquired great box-loads of paperbacks from
house clearances and auctions and spent his afternoons going through them like
lucky dips, occasionally cooing with delight when he’d find an early Graham
Greene tucked in amongst several hundredweight of Mills & Boons.

Pretty much everyone around Petworth
liked Stewart, despite his obvious eccentricities and musky odour. He was a
character, but an amiable one, so it raised a few eyebrows when he was found
unconscious at the wheel of his car, stinking of scotch and wrapped around a
tree just outside of town. Stewart was arrested when he came to in the back of
the ambulance, but didn’t have a clue how he could’ve got in such a state.

“I don’t even like scotch,” he protested
afterwards. “Especially at eleven o’clock in the morning when I’m coming back
from an auction, for goodness sake. I don’t know what could’ve happened.”

What indeed?

I didn’t give Stewart’s denials much
credence because I had a few secrets myself, and fully intended blaming
everything on a huge international Masonic conspiracy when my own skeletons
finally caught up with me. But then a couple of nights later the bookshop was
broken into – but nothing stolen.

I learned this when I strolled up to work
on the Thursday morning and found Stewart waiting outside his front door
nervously smoking a cigarello.

“Hey Johnny Walker, what’s going on?” I’d
been in the middle of greeting him, only to stop dead in my tracks when a
uniformed police Sergeant stepped out of the shop doodling into his notepad.

“We’ve had a break-in, Mark. The whole
place is a disaster area,” Stewart said, rushing towards me as if a hug and a
reach-around were on the cards. Fortunately my stunned reaction was
misinterpreted by all parties and I was able to regain my composure before the
Sergeant focussed his pencil on me.

“And what might your name be, sir?” he
asked.

What
might your name be, sir
? What a way to ask that! Why not
simply, “What’s your name?” instead of all the hyperbole? No wonder foreigners
had such a hard time learning English with wordsmiths like him stalking our
land filling sentences with unnecessary prose. But then, his phrasing had been
no accident. Those extra few words and inclination added rich layers of
intrigue to the Sergeant’s question and had me mentally feeling for the stubby
throwing knife in my belt buckle.

“Mark Jones,” I eventually replied when I
remembered.

Stewart confirmed like a nodding dog.
“Yes this is Mark. Mark works for me.”

The Sergeant lifted an eyebrow to join
his tone. “I see,” he mused. “New in town are you, sir?”

“No, I’ve lived around here for almost
ten years,” I replied, hosing down that particular line of inquiry to a fine
steam.

“I’ve never seen you before. I’d think
I’d remember you too,” the Sergeant needled.

“The face is new. I’m not,” I said,
referring to my scar.

“Nasty,” he whistled. “How d’you come by
it?”

“At work.”

The Sergeant looked back at the bookshop.
“Paper cut was it?” he chuckled, all pleased with himself.

“My other work,” I clarified.

“And what might that be, sir?” he asked,
lining up his pencil in case it was breaking into bookshops at night.

“I’m an engineer,” I told him.

“I see,” he repeated, reminding me of the
Agency interviewers. “And where exactly do you work, Mr Jones?”

“Abroad, the Far East mostly. Indonesia,
Mongolia, Malaysia.
Bosco
Drilling,” I elaborated,
which was an Agency front and employed half the battle-scarred engineers in
Northern Europe. “Do you need their details?”

“No
no
, that’s
quite alright,” he assured me. “Just an address will be fine.”

“They’re in Humberside somewhere. I’ll
have to look out their exact address.”

“No,” the Sergeant smiled. “I mean your
address.”

“Oh, it’s
Petherton
Farm, Station Road, just past the river.”

“Oh really, I know it. I’ve always
wondered who lives there,” the Sergeant perked up.

“Then the mystery is finally resolved,” I
told him.

“Yes, well quite,” the Sergeant agreed
then redirected his pencil at Stewart. “Well, like I was saying, it’s probably
just kids messing about but make a list of what’s missing and drop it by the
station as soon as you can and we’ll keep our eyes peeled.”

Stewart made as big a deal as he humanly
could out of agreeing with the Sergeant, so the Sergeant suggested he allowed
himself a nip of scotch. “For the shock. Just if you’ve got any with you,” he
added, raising an eyebrow my way before pedalling off with a chortle.

“Do you need a drink?” I double-checked.

“No I don’t,” Stewart objected. “Why does
everyone keep asking me that?” he fizzled.

We spent the best part of the day tidying
and checking the stock, and sure enough found nothing had been taken, not even
the first edition John le
Carré
that Stewart kept in
the window, the one he’d optimistically marked up £800 after someone had
scrawled John le
Carré
on the title page, supposedly
John le
Carré
, which could’ve been possible, but the
love hearts and kisses looked an ill-advised afterthought on the part of the
last trader.

The break-in had undoubtedly been kids.
Stewart and the Sergeant both agreed on that and the file was closed with a
claim to the insurance company, but I was less sure. Kids took souvenirs. Kids
left fingerprints. Kids broke things for fun.

The shop had been trashed but it hadn’t
been joyously trashed. There was very little in the way of real damage. Books
had been tossed out of the shelves. A window had been broken. A door yanked
open. But the breakages looked somehow cosmetic. Like how you’d expect a
bookshop to look had it been broken into by a bunch of naughty
kids.

Something was up. Just what was Stewart
into?

I was in my local in town a couple of nights later, having a quiet pint after
work with the
Guardian
crossword when
the pub rhubarb suddenly stopped. It took me a few moments to notice this, so
entrenched was I to find a four letter word that meant appendage, third letter
M. I kept putting ARMS and scribbling it out when nothing else fitted, and it
was only when I finally arrived at LIMB that I become acutely aware of the
sudden silence.

I’ve experienced this before, not in my
local, but in the jungle. A big cat will step into a clearing and all the
tweeting and warbling will immediately stop. But it wasn’t a big cat that had
just stepped into The Star, but an astonishingly luscious piece of crumpet that
would have the Ferraris piling into each other had she been waiting by the
lights in Monte Carlo, let along a few Rotarians choking on their real ale in
Sussex.

She was a redhead, but a redhead of such
dazzling richness that the second thought to cross my mind concerned her
collars and cuffs. I almost didn’t have to wonder either, for she was dressed
in a figure-hugging mini-dress that revealed more than it covered and sporting
an unbelievable set of pins, decked off with a dazzling pair of ruby heels that
wouldn’t have looked out of place sticking out from beneath a fallen house.

She ordered a
Dubonnet
Manhattan.

“Stirred, that’s very important,” she’d
insisted, but had to rethink her whole order when a quick search of the optics
(and the internet) by the landlord revealed they were all out of Rouge
Vermouth, not to mention Maraschino cherries. Obviously there’d been a recent
rush. After several more aborted orders, she finally had to make do with a
vodka Red Bull and a bag of dry roasted before turning to face the gobsmacked
pub.

Quick as a flash, the pub started staring
at their pints again, including me, who’d inadvertently taken half a dozen
digital photos of her arse while she’d been up at the bar. For the next few
seconds, the redhead’s eyes drifted across all the locals as her heels circled
the pub, and eventually her tumbler and packet of Planters parked themselves in
front of me to indicate she’d made her choice.

“
Osteology
,”
she said when I looked up, taking a careful little suck on her curly straw
without breaking eye contact.

“What?” I replied.

“It’s the study of bones,” she
elaborated, lifting an eyebrow to suggest she knew what she was talking about,
even if I didn’t.

“Is it?” was all I could think to say.

“Fourteen across.”

“Huh?” it was then that I realised she
was referring to my crossword. “Oh!” I finally twigged, and scribbled it in.

“Glory Days,” she then said.

I checked the crossword to see where that
one fitted, but she called my attention back.

“No, I’m Glory Days –
Gloria
Days,” she said before adding, “
Doctor
Gloria Days.”

“Oh, right,” I acknowledged, but left it at that. I didn’t
tell her my name. Not even my fictitious name as it was getting a little worn
from all its recent use, so I just stared at her and waited for her next
announcement.

Glory teased her straw a little longer before asking me if
I’d ever seen charms like hers, dropping her eyes towards her chest to give me
permission to check out her knockers. Clearly, she was referring to the weird
geometrically-shaped pendant that decorated her cleavage, but I took it all in
just out of courtesy.

“Ever seen anything quite like them?” she jiggled, a naughty
smile dancing across her scarlet lips.

Now obviously, I’d seen tits before, even nice tits, and
they’re always a welcome distraction when I’m struggling to finish a crossword,
but I was still stuck for what exactly it was she wanted.

“I’m sorry, but do I know you?”

“No,” she replied. “But my father’s Professor Days… or at
least, was.”

“Who’s your dad now?” I asked.

“No, I mean, he’s dead,” Glory amended.

“Oh,” I
ohhed
again, none of this
meaning the slightest little thing to me. “Sorry.”

“Sorry? What are you sorry for? You killed him after all!”
she snapped, causing old Trevor to look up from his shepherd’s pie in surprise.

“Me? Look, there’s been some mistake, I’ve never even heard
of your dad, let alone killed him. Are you sure you’ve got the right bloke?”

“Don’t worry, he was an arsehole anyway. I’m not here for
revenge,” she reassured me, dispensing with her straw and staring over at old
Trevor until he blinked and looked away. “But you should know one thing. I’ve
got the
Dymetrozone
now,” she whispered.