But Vardy ignored him and went on. “But it’s something to do with them.”
“Come on,” said Billy. “This is batshit.” He pleaded. “A religion about squid?”
The little room felt like a trap. Baron and Vardy watched him. “Come on now,” Vardy said. “You can have faith in anything,” Vardy said. “Everything’s fit to be worshipped.”
“You going to say this is all a coincidence?” Baron said.
“Your squid just disappeared, right?” Vardy said.
“And no one’s watching you,” Baron said. “And no one did anything to that poor sod downstairs. It was suicide by bottle.”
“And you,” said Vardy, staring at Billy, “you don’t feel anything’s wrong with the world, right now. Ah, you do, though, don’t you? I can see. You want to hear this.”
A silence. “How did they do it?” said Billy.
“Sometimes you can’t get bogged down in the how,” Baron said. “Sometimes things happen that shouldn’t, and you can’t let that detain you. But the why? we can make headway with.”
Vardy walked to the window. He was against its light, a dark shape. Billy could not tell if Vardy was facing him or facing out.
“It’s always bells and smells,” Vardy said, from his obscurity. “Always high-church. They might… abjure the world”-he rolled the pomp of the phrase around-“but for sects like this it’s all rites and icons. That’s the point. Not many cults have had their reformation.” He walked out of the window’s glare. “Or if they have, hello you poor buggers in Freezone, along comes a Council of Trent and the old order bites back. They really have to have their sacraments.” He shook his head.
Billy paced between posters, cheap artworks and pinboard message exchanges between colleagues he did not know. “If you worship that animal… I’ll put it simply,” Vardy said. “You, your Darwin Centre…” Billy did not understand the scorn there. “You and your colleagues, Billy-you put God on display. Now, who would a devotee be not to liberate it?
“It’s lying there pickled. Their touchy hunter god. You can imagine how that plays out in psalms. How God’s described.”
“Right,” Billy said. “Right, you know what? I really need to get out of here.”
Vardy seemed to quote: “‘It moves through darkness, emptying into that ink ink of its own.’ Something like that. Shall we say a black cloud in water already black? There’s a koan for you, Billy. It’s a tactile god with as many tentacles as we have fingers, and is that coincidence? Because that,” he added, in a more everyday voice, “is how this works, you see?”
Baron beckoned Billy to the door. “They’ll have verses about its mouth,” Vardy said behind them. “The hard maw of a sky-bird in the deep trenches of water.” He shrugged. “Something like that. You’re sceptical? Au contraire: it’s a perfect god, Billy. It’s the bloody choicest perfect simon-pure exact god for today, for right now. Because it’s bugger-all like us. Alien. That old beardy bully was never plausible, was he?”
“Plausible enough for you, you bloody hypocrite,” Baron said jovially. Billy followed him into the corridor.
“They venerate the thing,” Vardy said, following. “They have to save it from the insult of what I strongly suspect is your cheerful affection. I bet you have a nickname for it, don’t you?” He tilted his head. “I bet that nickname is ‘Archie.’ I see I’m right. Now, you tell me. What person of faith could possibly allow that?”
THEY TRACED THROUGH THE MUSEUM’S CORRIDORS, AND BILLY HAD no idea where they were going. He felt absolutely untethered. As if he were not there. The hallways were all deserted. The darks and woods of the museum closed up behind him.
“How do you…? What is it you’re doing?” he said to Vardy as the man took a breath, mid-insight. What do you call that? Billy thought. That reconstitutive intelligence, berserker meme-splicing, seeing in nothings first patterns, then correspondence, then causality and dissident sense.
Vardy even smiled. “Paranoia,” he said. “Theology.”
They reached an exit Billy had never used, and he gasped in the cool air of the outside. The day blustered: the trees wriggled in wind and clouds raced as if on missions. Billy sat on the stone steps.
“So the guy in the basement…” he said.
“Don’t know yet,” Vardy said. “He got in the way. Dissident, guard, sacrifice, something. At the moment I’m talking about the shape of something.”
“None of this should be your business,” Baron said. With his hands in his pockets he addressed his remarks to one of the building’s stonework animals. The air shoved Billy’s hair and clothes around. “You shouldn’t have to fuss with any of this. But here’s the thing. What with Parnell on the bus, what with that sort of attention, it just seems like for whatever reasons… they’ve noticed you, Mr. Harrow.”
He caught Billy’s eye. Billy twitched in the attention. He glanced around the grounds, beyond the gate to the street, into the shifting plant life. Bits of rubbish shifted in gusts, crawled on the pavement like bottom-feeders.
“You’re part of some conspiracy that trapped their god,” Vardy said. “But more than that. You’re the go-to squid guy, Mr. Harrow. You seem to have got someone interested. As far as they’re concerned, you’re a person of interest.”
He stood between Billy and the wind. “You found the squid gone,” he said. “You put it there in the first place. It’s always been you who’s had magic mollusc fingers.” He twiddled his own. “Now you found this dead bloke. Is it any wonder they’re interested?”
“You’ve been feeling… like stuff’s going on,” Baron said. “Would that be fair to say?”
“What’s happening to me?” Billy managed to speak calmly.
“Don’t worry, Billy Harrow. That’s perspicacity, not paranoia, that, what you’re feeling.” Baron turned, taking in the London panorama, and wherever he looked, whenever he paused facing some particular patch of blackness, Billy looked too. “There is something wrong. And it’s noticed you. That’s not always the best place to be.” Billy sat in the middle of that world’s notice, like a tiny prey.
“What is it you want to do?” Billy said. “I mean, find out who killed that guy. Right? But what about me? Are you going to get the squid back?”
“That would be our intent, yes,” Baron said. “Cult robbery, after all, is part of our remit. And now there’s murder, too. Yes. And your safety is of, shall we say, no little concern to us.”
“What do they want? What’s Dane in all this?” Billy said. “And you’re some secret cult squad, right? So why are you telling me this?”
“I know, I know, you’re feeling a little exposed,” Baron said. “A bit out in the glare of it all. There are ways we might help. And you could help us back.”
“Like it or not, you’re already part of this,” Vardy said.
“We have a proposal,” Baron said. “Come on in out of the cold. Shoot on over with us back to the Darwin Centre. There’s a proposition on the table, and there’s someone you should meet.”
Chapter Seven
THE ROOMS SETTLED AROUND THEM, AS IF FINICKETY GENII LOCI were adjusting. Billy felt like an outsider. Was that glass he heard, clank-sliding out of sight? A clatter that might be bones?
The two uniforms guarding the tank room did not react to Baron with any visible respect. “Clocked that, did you?” Baron muttered to Billy. “Right now they’re coming up with hilarious jokes about what FSRC stands for. The first half is always ‘Fucking Stupid.’”
Inside was the disdainful young woman again, glancing at Billy perhaps a shade more friendly than before, her uniform as casual as ever. She had a laptop open on the table where the squid no longer was. “Alright?” she said. She mock-saluted Vardy and Baron, raised an eyebrow at Billy. She typed one-handed.
“I’m Billy.”