The Minority Council (11 page)

At this hour of the night, when good men were sleeping, naughty men like Morris Prince were doing nothing of the kind.

I caught the night bus towards Holland Park.

For a man who dealt in nasty stuff, Morris Prince had few vices. He ate well, exercised regularly, and was reasonably loyal to his sexual partners, in the sense that he would always buy them an expensive pair of shoes when their three months were up. He even had a recycling bin outside his flat. I had a look inside: champagne bottles, juice cartons and unopened magazines advertising new bathrooms for amazing prices. The lights were out behind his expensive blinds, but a security alarm flashed a regular blue light above the front door, and there were other kinds of alarm too. I found the trigger for the first in the gaps between the cobbles, where someone with a low sense of humour and a reasonable grasp of warding had rubbed salt into the mortar between the stones. I expected there would be more, but had no intention of trying to disarm them all tonight.

Instead I walked up to the front door, and rang the bell.

I was wearing a suit.

Not much of one. The white shirt was several sizes too big, the black trousers were a little too short, the black jacket was a slightly different shade of black from the rest
of the ensemble and we hadn’t been able to find a pair of shoes that matched. I still had my satchel, and my fingerless gloves to hide the scar on my hand, but if you ignored these discordant notes, out of tune, the picture was almost complete.

It took nearly a minute for someone to answer. That someone was a maid, complete with frilly apron, and she opened the door on the chain only. Her accent was Eastern European, her age probably no more than nineteen, and her gun small enough to hide in the pocket of her black jacket.

“Hello?”

“My name’s Sinclair,” I lied. “I’m here to see Mr Prince.”

“Is Mr Prince expecting you?”

“No. He will, however, want you to let me in, since if you keep me standing outside for more than a few more seconds, it will be considered evidence enough for the men presently watching this door to move into the house in an aggressive and unpleasant way.”

“You…”

“I’ll wait inside the hall. Scout’s honour.”

She hesitated, then closed the door enough to take the chain off, and let me in.

The hall was a mixture of old and new. A passage that had once let in muddy servants to below stairs in their master’s mansion had been converted into a shiny entrance with new oak floorboards and cream-silk-covered walls, off which hung the kind of Impressionist painting that put the mind-altering powers of LSD to shame. They weren’t there to be regarded, but rather noted out of the corner of your eye. The maid said, “Wait here, please.” There was a
chair for this purpose, and a coffee table laden with magazines about fast cars and holidays in Dubai. It felt like going to an expensive dentist.

When the maid returned, she wasn’t alone. A man in a black leather jacket, with the look of someone who’d never owned anything that wasn’t black leather, walked right up close, and looked down at me.

He said, “No one here knows you. So who are you?”

“What a great logical progression,” I said. “Clearly your boss is a man for whom if the thing is not perceived and understood, it cannot be real. Unfortunate, considering your present situation.”

He moved an inch closer, which was enough to block out what little light remained to me in the room.

“Who are you?” he repeated. His voice was a low rumble that had been a long way to get from belly to lips and hadn’t enjoyed the journey.

“Sinclair,” I replied. “Dudley Sinclair. I’m… how shall we say… I’m an interested party. Now, I’m on something of a schedule here so, if we could just hurry things up, I need to talk to Mr Prince.”

“Mr Prince doesn’t talk to you.”

“Mr Prince would rather not talk to me,” I replied, my smile locked in place. “He would prefer not to talk to me; he would, if he could choose, not wish to talk to me. Regrettably, though, he shall talk to me. As, if he does not talk to me, then in…”—I glanced at my watch, fifty pence from a lucky-dip machine and complete with Bugs Bunny ears for handles; should probably find something better—“… about twelve minutes the Midnight Mayor, protector of the city, defender of the walls, guardian of the lonely nights et cetera et cetera, is going to come in here and
burn the building down. Which would be unfortunate for us all. Did I say twelve minutes? I meant eleven.”

Suspicion met caution and fought for control of each face muscle.

To everyone’s relief, caution won out.

He said, “Stay here.”

“Don’t take your time,” I sang out.

He went.

A couple of minutes after that, he came back. This time, there were two other men with him, also in black leather and, behind them, in a smart grey suit complete with lime green tie, the bulked-up hairless figure, stinking of internal transformative magics, that could only be Mr Morris Prince.

He said, “Search him.”

I stood as they turned out my pockets—empty—and rummaged through my bag. My small collection of loose change, spray paint and blank keys were tossed out onto the floor. They didn’t impress. Two of the lackeys held my arms as if expecting a bunch of flowers to suddenly spring up between my palms as Prince advanced closer, looked me up and down and told them, “Out.”

“Your loss.”

They had the door open, one gave a shove and I fell out into the street. Picking myself up, I turned and said, “Eight minutes, Mr Prince, and I’d say the buzzards are already circling.”

He didn’t raise his voice, but said, cold and quiet, “You come back here again, and I’ll see you torn to pieces.”

The door began to close. For a moment we wondered if they were too dumb to have noticed. Then someone did. I heard a voice raised in surprise; then the door eased back,
the shape of a man blocking the light. I looked behind me and, yes, they were there, dozens of them swarming for cover beneath the bins and down the drainage pipes to the sewers. The smallest was no bigger than a Christmas orange, the largest had made it to the size of a young terrier. Their eyes reflected yellow in the night, their tails were mottled pink. They were only there for a second, but it was long enough. Morris Prince had seen the rats.

The door opened further. I was already heading at a swagger for the end of the mews and the lights of the main road when a voice called out, “You! Stop!”

I didn’t.

“You! Hey, you!”

There were running footsteps; and when a hand seized my collar and an arm swung me with Newtonian inevitability into the nearest wall hard enough to wind me, I wasn’t surprised. Less predictable was the flick-knife pressed against our throat. Prince still stood in the spill of light from the door; at a gesture I was dragged inside, and the door slammed shut. This time, Prince did his own work, whacking an arm across my throat and pushing me back until I couldn’t see much beyond his hairless scalp and the ceiling.

“Who are you?”

“Sinclair,” I wheezed. “And thanks, but no thanks, I’m going to go now…”

The pressure tightened, causing a wave of hot black spots to blossom and burst across my eyes. I gagged and scrabbled at his arm, and he eased off just enough to let me breathe. “The rats,” he demanded. “Yours?”

“Midnight Mayor’s,” I replied. “He’s a sorcerer. He uses the rats, the pigeons, the foxes; they all spy for him.”

“Why here?”

“I told you, he’s coming.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“You know what, maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe I should just go now. If the rats are already here, he’s not far behind.” His eyes were bright as they looked into mine; I could see every fleck of grey in the pattern of his iris. “I tried to warn you, give you time,” I added, “but sorry, too late. If you’re going to die, I don’t see why I should get burnt with you, and so if you don’t mind…”

He grabbed a handful of my hair and slammed my head back against the wall hard enough to set off a ringing in our ears. “Who are you?!” he roared.

“Dudley Sinclair! I have contacts with the Aldermen, they warned me to warn you. The Midnight Mayor is going to kill you,” I wheezed. “He thinks you took someone he knows, he’s going to destroy this house. The Aldermen say this will cause a war between them and the dusthouses, they don’t want that to happen, so they sent me to get you out of his way, to prevent it. I’m just a messenger!” I wailed. “I was told, get to Morris Prince, get him out, and then hide! For Christ’s sake, I don’t want to deal with some fucking mad sorcerer!”

He hesitated, eyes darting all over our face. It wasn’t hard to feign fear. “If you are lying, they will never find your grave.”

“Sure, sure,” I gasped. “Just let me go and I won’t…”

“No. We go together.”

He marched down the hall while I was dragged behind him. A door opened into a garage containing three equally tasteless cars, ranging from tasteless in size to tasteless in speed. He opened the back door to one of
these, a silver Mercedes that would have blended into any landscape about as convincingly as Michael Jackson in Mogadishu, and I was pushed inside. One man got in next to me, and Prince sat next to the driver.

The car was gunned into life, the garage door slid back, and we sped off.

I was a rabbit in a car of hungry wolves.

The lights rushing by in the night-time streets spread their hypnotic patterns across the dark interior of the car. I huddled back in my seat, and wheedled.

“Hey, guys, seriously. I was just meant to give you the message…”

“Enough.” Prince’s eyes were fixed everywhere on the streets around us. “Tell me about the Midnight Mayor.”

“You took someone he likes, that’s all it is! Last I heard about it, he went mental in this club in the city and beat up these users…”

“Which club?”

“Some place called Avalon; why, does it matter?”

Prince already had his phone out. I heard the little beeps of dialling. He didn’t have to wait long to be answered and, evidently, hear someone confirm what I’d just told him.

Hyde Park was passing by, locked away behind dark trees and pointed railings. Prince wore a frown of concentration as he said, “The Aldermen sent you?”

“Yeah. They don’t want to piss off the dusthouse. I mean I know they work for the Midnight Mayor and stuff, but have you heard about him? We’re talking about a serious wacko. He’s like this undead sorcerer guy with this serious, like, demon thing attached and the Aldermen say he doesn’t listen to a word they ever tell him.”

“Who’s this friend?” he asked quickly. “The one he’s looking for.”

“I don’t know…”

“Tell me what you do know, or you’re out of this fucking car right now, and don’t think we’ll slow for the corners.”

“Okay, okay! Jesus! It’s some chick named Meera or something.”

“Meera what?”

“I don’t know, I swear, I don’t know. She’s a witch or something and he must be really into her, I mean
really
into her.”

Prince’s associate was already dialling again, a bare flicker of eyebrow enough of a command from his master. “Yeah, me. Look, did we get some woman called Meera pulled tonight?… I don’t fucking know, just check it, okay?…”

And at the same time, Prince was making another call to a different number. “… Yeah. Yeah, I know the time, do I sound like I care? Listen—I need some info. Your boss, where is he?…”

Something in my stomach clenched up tight.

We tasted petrol on our tongue, felt the hum of the engine beneath us. We were ready: at a single sound we would pop the engine of the car like a cork, burst the tyres, set the fuel on fire beneath our seats. One whisper out of place, and we’d turn Morris Prince and his men into kebab meat.

Prince hung up. He hadn’t got his answer after all. “Fucking amateurs!” I forced out a slow breath, and let the power go. Let it seep back into the churning engine and the humming car, let the smell of petrol out of my
nose and mouth, the heat of fire waiting to happen out of my veins. “Can he track us?” he demanded, turning to glare at me.

“He’s the Midnight Mayor,” I replied. “He can find us anywhere.”

“All this for some woman?”

“He’s not normal. He’s got no sense of perspective, no grasp of politics or the greater good. He’s a liability to himself and to others.” I gave a weak smile. “I did try to warn you, so yeah, if you wouldn’t mind throwing me out of the car at the nearest corner, that’d be lovely, thank you.”

“You stay.”

For men who showed no feelings, they were starting to look fidgety. We entered Soho: by day a place of art publishers, graphic designers, film executives and a perpetual smell of chilli, garlic and ginger on the air. At night, though, Soho turned on the red lights, threw beer cans into the streets, set the policemen patrolling with growling Alsatian dogs and let its hair down. A reveller looking for a good time could start in an Irish pub, swing next door for a chicken korma, stagger out across the street to holler away in a karaoke bar, fuelled by sushi and vodka, and then fall into the moderately priced arms of whichever gender took their choice, all within twenty yards of each other.