Moon Over Soho (33 page)

“I was wondering if you could help me with my inquiries,” I said.

She took me through into a kitchen furnished in French oak and cool green tile. She offered me tea, which just to be on the safe side I refused. She poured herself a white wine.

“What inquiries are these?” she asked.

I asked her to cast her mind back to her days as an undergraduate at Oxford University.

“Where I gained my double first,” she said. “Not that I think that was an achievement. Being less important than the mere act of being born within the sound of the Bow Bells.” She finished her glass and refilled.

“While you were at Oxford,” I said, “did you notice anyone practicing magic, perhaps clandestinely?”

“Does this have something to do with the altercation at the Trocadero Centre?” she asked.

“It’s related, yes,” I said. “And to the attack on Ash.”

“I’m curious,” she said. “What makes you think I should tell you?”

“So you were aware of magic being practiced,” I said.

“What makes you think that?”

“Because you think you have something to withhold,” I said.

“I’ll admit it’s a trifle irrational, but I still find myself minded to tell you to piss off,” she said. “Why should I help you?”

“If you tell me what you know I promise I’ll go away,” I said.

“Tempting,” she said.

“And because we think there’s an evil magician operating in London and we think he may have been at Oxford—at the same time you were.” I looked at her. “You may even know him.”

“No. I would have smelled him,” she said. “Even as I can smell you now.”

“So what do I smell like?”

“Ambition, vanity, pride.” She shrugged. “Fried plantain and honeysuckle. Don’t ask me why.”

“Who were they?” I asked. “The practitioners at Oxford—I know you know.”

She tried to stop herself but in the end there are some varieties of information that are only fun if you tell them to someone else.

“There was a dining club. Do you know what that is?” she asked.

An excuse for students to gather together and get pissed, as far as I knew. The membership criteria were set at variable levels of exclusivity and expense. I doubted Tyburn had joined one and, had I gone to Oxford, I’m not sure I could have joined one if I’d wanted to.

It was called the Little Crocodiles, she told me. And it was boys only, and while it wasn’t exclusive to any one college it was mostly a Magdalen crowd. They were considered to be very dull, not aristocratic enough for the social climbers and not riotous enough for the aristos.

“Not my cup of tea,” said Tyburn. “But I remember running into a couple of members once at a party and catching that whiff.” She waved her hand in front of her nose. “Like I
said, ambition, sweaty, like somebody who’s working too hard.”

“Do you remember their names?” I asked.

She did, because remembering who was who was part of who she was. She also had half a dozen other names of possible Little Crocodiles.

“And you’re sure the dining club were actively training?” I asked.

“I made a point of getting close enough to smell any member I could find,” she said. “I thought they were somehow related to Professor Postmartin and your boss. I assumed that this was their attempt to expand the influence of the Folly.”

She shook her wine bottle and poured the remaining half measure into her glass.

I judged that now would be an opportune moment to depart, so I thanked her, put away my notebook, and stood up.

“For fifty years they do nothing and then suddenly there’s you,” she said. “How did that happen?”

“You know what you smell like to me, Ty?” I said. “Brandy and cigars and old rope.”

“They hung Jonathan Wild at Tyburn,” she said. “For all that he thought himself the Thief Taker General of Great Britain.”

I didn’t answer that one because I felt getting out the front door intact was more important.

I
TOLD
Nightingale what I’d learned over breakfast the next morning and he insisted we go down to the firing range in the basement and blow the shit out of some targets. To be fair, I think he’d been planning a training session for some time. He also didn’t swear.

Several months of random fire by me had depleted our stock of World War II vintage silhouettes so I’d bought some 1960s NATO standard-issue targets off the Internet. Gone were the coal scuttle helmets and rampaging Hun, to be replaced by snarling figures carefully stripped of any national or ethnic identity. NATO, these figures implied, was ready to take on paper soldiers from anywhere.

Nightingale put three fireballs in the center mass of the left-hand target.

“What made you think Ty would tell you?” asked Nightingale.

“She couldn’t help herself,” I said. “First law of gossip—there’s no point knowing something if somebody else doesn’t know you know it. Besides, I think she has such a low opinion of us that she thinks it’s only a matter of time until we … mess up and she can sweep in like the cavalry.”

“Given our track record so far,” said Nightingale, “that’s hardly prescient.”

“A Ministry of Magic,” I said. “Is that what she really wants?”

“Deep breath,” said Nightingale. “And
loose!
”

The trick behind an effective fireball is that it becomes an ingrained
forma
. A spell that you don’t have to think about to perform. I loosed a trio of fireballs that I could see moving, which was bad, but at least I hit the target—or
a
target at any rate. I also forgot to release them immediately, which meant that they sat there and fizzed a bit before exploding.

“Have you been practicing at all?” asked Nightingale.

“Of course I have, boss. Watch this,” I said and threw a skinny grenade down the range, which stuck right in the center mass of the target.

“Your aim is getting better,” said Nightingale. “It’s a pity about the release …”

The grenade detonated and cut the target in half.

“And what was that?” asked Nightingale. He didn’t always approve of me departing from the strict forms he laid down for spells. His motto was that bad habits now could get you killed later.

“Skinny grenade,” I said. “You use
scindere
like you do with
lux impello scindere
except instead of a light in a fixed place you get a bomb.”

“Skinny grenade?”

“From
scindere
,” I said. Nightingale shook his head.

“How are you managing the timing?” he asked.

“That’s a bit hit and miss,” I admitted. “I did some tests and it’s anywhere between ten seconds and five minutes.”

“So you don’t know when it’s going to explode?”

“Not really,” I said.

“Is there anything I could say that would stop you from doing all this unauthorized experimentation?”

“Honestly,” I said. “Probably not.”

“I have to ask,” he said. “Why did you use
impello
at the Trocadero Centre—why not a fireball?

“I didn’t want to kill her,” I said. “And I’m still more confident with
impello
than I am with anything else.”

“You realize she was just a diversion,” said Nightingale. “Alexander Smith was shot in the chest with a couple of narrow-gauge fireballs.”

“I thought it was gunshots,” I said.

“That’s why he used a narrow-gauge fireball to disguise the wound.”

“Forensic countermeasure,” I said. “This guy is way too fucking clever.”

“He probably walked out the back while you were chasing the Pale Lady out the front.”

I cut a target in half with my next fireball.

“That’s much better,” said Nightingale. “They need to go faster. If the enemy can see them coming, you might as well just carry a gun and shoot them with that instead.”

“Why don’t we just carry guns?” I asked. “I know you’ve got a roomful of them.”

“Well, for one thing,” said Nightingale, “the paperwork has become very tiresome, then there’s care, maintenance, and trying to ensure one doesn’t leave it on the Underground by mistake. Plus a fireball is more versatile and can pack more of a punch than any caliber pistol I’d be happy to carry.”

“Really?” I asked. “More than a .44 magnum?”

“Indubitably,” he said.

“What’s the biggest thing you’ve zapped with a fireball?” I asked.

“That would be a tiger,” said Nightingale.

“Well, don’t tell Greenpeace,” I said. “They’re an endangered species.”

“Not that sort of tiger,” said Nightingale. “A
Panzerkampfwagen sechs Ausf E
.”

I stared at him. “You knocked out a Tiger tank with a fireball?”

“Actually I knocked out two,” said Nightingale. “I have to admit that the first one took three shots—one to disable the tracks, one through the driver’s eye slot, and one down the commander’s hatch—brewed up rather nicely.”

“And the second Tiger?”

“I didn’t have time to be so clever with that one,” said Nightingale. “Straight frontal shot into the weak spot where the turret meets the hull. Must have caught the ammo store because it brewed up like a firework factory. The turret blew right off.”

“This was at Ettersberg, wasn’t it?”

“This was the final act at Ettersberg,” he said. “We were trying to pull out when this platoon of Tigers just came crawling out of the tree line. We didn’t expect the Germans to have anything but rear-echelon troops, so it caught us on the hop, I can tell you. I was the rear guard, so I had to deal with them.”

“Lucky you,” I said. But my brain was still trying to get around the idea that Nightingale could put a hole in four inches of steel armor when I still sometimes had trouble getting through the paper of the targets.

“Practice and training,” said Nightingale. “Not luck.”

We kept it up until lunch and after that there was exciting paperwork including a surprisingly long form in which I explained how I’d managed to lose an expensive X26 taser pistol and reduce the working insides of an airwave handset to sand. Coming up with a plausible explanation for both kept me busy until late afternoon when Simone phoned.

“I’ve found us a hotel room,” she said and gave me an address off Argyle Square.

“When shall we meet?” I asked.

“I’m already there,” she said. “Naked and decorated with whipped cream.”

“Really?”

“Actually,” she said, “I’ve eaten the whipped cream, but it’s the thought that counts.”

Argyle Square is about a fifteen-minute walk from the Folly. Twenty if you stop off at the mini market to pick up a couple of cans of aerosol whipped cream—it always pays to be prepared.

It was only a two-star hotel but the sheets were clean, the bed was sturdy, and it had a tiny en suite toilet and shower. The walls were a bit thin but we only found that out when next door banged on the wall for us to be quiet. We did our best that one last time—which, and I’m guessing here, lasted a couple of hours and resulted in both of us walking funny the next morning.

Then we got to stay in our sturdy yet comfortable bed and fall asleep to the London lullaby of police sirens, shunting trains, and catfights.

“Peter,” she said. “You haven’t changed your mind about tomorrow, have you?”

“What about tomorrow?”

“Your dad’s gig,” she said. “You said I could come, you promised.”

“You can meet me there,” I said.

“Good,” she said and fell asleep in my arms.

T
HE IMPORTANT
thing about Camden Market is that nobody planned it. Before London swallowed it whole, Camden Town was the fork in the road best known for a coaching inn called the Mother Red Cap. It served as a last-chance stop for beer, highway robbery, and gonorrhea before heading north into the wilds of Middlesex. In the early nineteenth century men in frock coats and serious muttonchop sideburns built the eastward branch of Regents Canal just to the north of the coaching inn. I say they built it, but the actual work was done by a couple of thousand strapping Irish fellers who came to be known, because of their canal work, as inland navigators or navvies. They and the navvies who came after them would go on to the build the three main phases of infrastructure development that characterize the history of the industrial revolution: the canals, the railways,
and the motorways. I know this because I built a model of the area in junior school and got a gold star, a commendation, and the enduring hatred of Barry Sedgeworth, playground bully and poor loser. A couple of serious canal locks were built next to the Chalk Farm Road, from whence the market gets its name—Camden Lock. There were extensive warehouses along the canal and a large timber merchant.

In the 1960s the planning department of the London County Council, whose unofficial motto was Finishing What the Luftwaffe Started, decided that what London really needed was a series of orbital motorways driven through its heart. The planning blight caused by these schemes meant that what should have been lucrative land to be developed into multistory car parks or municipal rabbit hutches was instead leased to a trio of London wide-boys dressed in Afghan coats. These likely lads set up craft workshops in the old timber yard and on the weekends held a market where the products could be sold. By the mid-1980s the market had spread up Chalk Farm Road and down to the Electric Ballroom, and Camden Council finally stopped trying to put it out of business. It’s currently the second most visited tourist attraction in London and home to the Arches Jazz Club where my dad was going to make his comeback gig with the irregulars.

The irregulars were surprisingly nervous but my dad was remarkably unfazed.

“I’ve played bigger gigs,” he said. “I once played with Joe Harriott in a basement in Catford. After having to go on with him I never got stage fright again.”

The Arches Jazz Club had, in the early days of Camden Lock, been a disreputable dive located in a former lockup under a brick railway arch—hence the name. As the market prospered, the club had moved to one of the units in the west yard just short of the horse bridge, so that while waiting for a gig a punter could sit outside at a café table and have a drink while enjoying the view across the lock basin. These days, my dad assured me, you almost never found dead dogs floating in the canal.