“But he could tell I didn’t,” Billy pleaded. “He said I had nothing to do with anything.”
“Yeah,” said Dane. “But then I rescued you.”
“We got you out, so we’re allies,” Moore said. “So you are his enemy now.”
“You’re under our protection,” said Dane. “And because of that you need it.”
“How did you take the Architeuthis?” Billy said at last.
“It wasn’t us,” said Moore quietly.
“What?” But it was a relic. They would fight for it, surely, like a devout of Rome might fight for a shroud, a fervent Buddhist might liberate a stolen Sura. “So who?”
“Well,” said Moore. “Quite.
“Look,” he said. “You have to persuade the universe that things make sense a certain way. That’s what knacking is.” Billy blinked at this abrupt conversational twist, that word unfamiliarly verbed. “You use whatever you can.”
“Snap,” said Dane. He clicked his fingers, and with the sound came a tiny fluorescent glow in the air just where the percussion had been. Billy stared and knew it was not a parlour trick. “That’s just skin and hand.”
“You use what you can,” Moore said, “and some what-you-cans are better than others.”
Billy realised that Dane and his priest were not, in fact, changing the subject.
“A giant squid is…” Billy petered out but he was thinking, Is powerful medicine, a big thing, a massive deal. It’s magic, is what it is. For knacking. “That’s why it’s been taken. That’s why that tattoo wants it. But this is craziness,” he added. He couldn’t stop himself. “This is craziness.”
“I know, I know,” Moore said. “Mad beliefs like that, eh? Must be some metaphor, right? Must mean something else?” Shook his head. “What an awfully arrogant thing. What if faiths are exactly what they are? And mean exactly what they say?”
“Stop trying to make sense of it and just listen,” Dane said.
“And what,” Moore said, “if a large part of the reason they’re so tenacious is that they’re perfectly accurate?” He waited, and Billy said nothing. “This is all perfectly real. The Tattoo wants that body, Billy, to do something himself, or stop someone else doing something,” Moore said.
“All these things have their powers, Billy,” he said intensely. “‘There are plenty of currents on the way down deep’ is what we’d say. But some go deeper, quicker, than others. Some are right.” He smiled not like someone joking.
“What would someone do with it?” Billy said.
“Whatever it is,” Dane said, “I’m against it.”
“What wouldn’t they?” Moore said. “What couldn’t they? With something that holy.”
“That’s why we need to get out there,” Dane said. “To find it.”
“Dane,” said Moore.
“It’s a duty of care,” Dane said.
“Dane. We need understanding, certainly,” Moore said. “But we have to have faith.”
“What could show more faith than getting out there?” Dane asked. “You understand what’s going on?” Dane said to Billy. “How dangerous it all is? The Tattoo wants you, and someone has a kraken. That’s a god, Billy. And we don’t know who, or why.”
A GOD, BILLY THOUGHT. THE THIEF HAD A BLEACHY Formalin-preserved mass of rubbery stink. But he knew truths were not true.
“God can take care of itself,” Moore said to Dane. “You know things are happening, Billy. You’ve known for days.”
“I seen you feel it,” Dane said. “I seen you watching the sky.”
“This is an end,” Moore said. “And it’s our god’s doing it, and it isn’t in our control. And that’s not right.” He splayed his fingers in a ludicrous prayer-motion. “That’s why you’re here, Billy. You know things you don’t even know,” he said. The fervour in it gave Billy a chill. “You’ve worked on its holy flesh.”
Chapter Eighteen
“YOU COULD JUST STAMP YOUR LITTLE FEET, COULDN’T YOU, Subby? You could unbuckle your shoe and throw it in the lake.”
Goss stamped. Subby walked a few paces behind him, his hands behind his back in crude mimicry of the man’s pose. Goss was bent forward and beetling with energy. He uncoupled his hands repeatedly and wiped them on his mucky top. Subby watched him and did the same.
“Where are we now?” Goss said. “Well you may ask. Well you may ask. Where indeed are we now? Not often his nibs is wrong, but that Mr. Harrow clearly not so butter-wouldn’t-melt as he’d give you to think, if he’s got bouncers like that ready to spirit him away. Still not sure who that was who banged your bonce, you poor lad. You doing better?” He ruffled Subby’s hair to the boy’s openmouthed gaze.
“What is he like? He’s all snotted up in this like slurry in alveoli. Still our best lead, of which his skin-inked eminence now admits, and, what do you say, once is never enough. We’ve caught up with him before, we’ll do it again.
“Where? That’s the question mark indeed, my young apprentice.
“Ears to the ground, Subby, tongues aflap.” He did as he said and tasted where they were, and if pedestrians or shoppers in that pre-suburban shopping precinct noticed his slurping snake lick they pretended not to. “Mostly we’re after Fluffy, so any flavours of the you-know-what, a distinct and meaty-bleachy-gamey bouquet I’m told, then veer we go, but otherwise, seems Mr. Harrow knows a little smidgeon, and of him I still recall the savour.”
THERE WERE ALL KINDS OF DRAMAS OCCURRING IN THE CITY IN those days: machinations, betrayals, insinuations and misunderstandings between groups with distinct and overlapping interests. In the offices, workshops, laboratories and libraries of angry scholars and self-employed theorist-manipulators were screamed arguments between them and those nonhuman companions still around. “How can you do this to me?” was the sentence most regularly spoken, followed by, “Oh go fuck yourself.”
In the headquarters of the Confederation of British Industry was a hallway between a much-frequented toilet and a small meeting room, that, if most members of the organisation noticed, they did so to briefly wonder why they had never done so before; and they tended not to again after that first time. It was not as brightly lit as it should be. The watercolours on its walls looked a bit vague: they were there, certainly, but rather difficult to pay attention to.
At the end of the corridor a plastic plaque read STOREROOM or OUT OF ORDER or something-some phrase tricky to recall with exactitude but the gist of which was not this door, go somewhere else. Two figures ignored that gist. In front was a large man wearing an expensive suit and a black motorcycle helmet. Just behind him, her hand in his, a woman in her sixties stumbled and tripped like an anxious animal. She was slack-faced, dressed in a threadbare trench coat.
The man knocked and opened without waiting for an answer. Inside was a small office. A man stood to greet them, indicated the two seats in front of his desk. The suited man did not sit. He pushed the woman into one of the chairs. He kept his hands on her shoulders. Her coat swung open and she wore nothing beneath it. Her skin was cold- and sick-looking.
For several seconds nothing happened. Then the woman moved her mouth extraordinarily. She made a ringing noise.
“Hello?” said the man behind the desk.
“Hello,” said the woman, clicking and hollow-sounding, in a man’s voice, a London voice. Her eyes were blank as a mannequin’s. “Am I speaking to Mr. Dewey of the CBI?”
“You are. Thank you for contacting me so quickly.”
“Not a problem,” the woman said. She drooled slightly. “I understand you have a proposal for me. With regard to the, ah, current dispute.”
“I do, Mr… I do. We were wondering whether you might be able to help us.”
IT WAS IN CRICKLEWOOD THAT, AFTER A CONSULTATION BASED ON highly specific geographopathic criteria, the Metropolitan Police had located its abquotidian operatives: the FSRC and their highly specialist support staff-secretaries unfazed by the information they were required to type, pathologists who would autopsy whatever bodies were put in front of them, no matter how unorthodox their arrangements or causes of death. Vardy, Baron and Collingswood met in the cold lab of one such, Dr. Harris, a tall woman vastly unfazed by absurd and knacked evidence. They had her show them the remains from the basement of the museum one more time.