“Whatever it is has to do with the fucking squid,” she said. “If we knew who’d taken the bugger…”
“We know who the top suspects are. Certainly if anyone in the office asks.” The devout might pay a lot for the corpse of a god. The FSRC listened and fished, ho ho, for word of the secretive Church of God Kraken. But the disappearance might be a more profane, though knacked and abnatural, crime. And that would be a complication.
Bureaucracies turf-war. The FSRC were the only officers in the Met who were anything other than blitheringly inadequate to deal with the eldritch nonsense of knackery. They were the state’s witches and hammers of witches. But their remit was a historical quirk. There were no Wizardry Squads in the UK Police. No SO21 to police Crimes of Magic. The Flying Squad did not. There was only the FSRC, and technically they were not concerned with the powers of ley lines, charmed words, invoked entities, et cetera-they were a cult squad, specifically.
In practice of course it was staffed by and kept watch on all those with questionable talents. FSRC computers were loaded with occult hexware and abgrades (Geas 2.0, iScry). But the unit was obliged to maintain appearances by describing all its work in terms of the policing of religion. They had to take care, if they concluded that it was purely secular abcriminality behind the Architeuthis disappearance, to stress what links they could with London’s heresiarchs. Otherwise they would lose jurisdiction. Without cult-games at the heart of the squidnapping, it would be handed over to some brusque unsubtle unit-Serious Crime, Organised Crime. Antiquities.
“God preserve us,” Collingswood said.
“Just hypothetically,” Baron said. “Between you and me. If this is crims, not godsquadders, you know who our top suspect is.”
“Tat-fucking-too,” said Collingswood.
Baron’s phone went. “Yeah,” he said into it. He listened and stopped walking. He looked sick, and sicker, and old.
“What?” Collingswood said. “What, boss?”
“Alright,” he said. “We’ll be there.” He shut the phone. “Goss and Subby,” he said. “I think they found out that Anders gave them to us. Someone… Oh, bugger me. You’ll see.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
WHEN BILLY WOKE HE REALISED THAT HIS DREAMS HAD BEEN nothing but the usual cobbled-together fag-ends of meaning.
Why wouldn’t the gods of the world be giant squid? What better beast? It wouldn’t take much to imagine those tentacles closing around the world, now would it?
He knew he was at war now. Billy stepped out into it. It wasn’t his city anymore, it was a combat zone. He looked up at sudden noises. He was a guerrilla, behind Dane. Dane wanted his god; Billy wanted freedom and revenge. Whatever Dane said, Billy wanted revenge for Leon and for the loss of any sense of his own life, and being at war with the Tattoo gave him at least a tiny chance for that. Right?
They were simply disguised. Hair flattened out for Billy, teased up for Dane. Dane wore a tracksuit; Billy was absurd in clothes stolen from the imaginary student. He blinked like the escapee he was, watched Londoners hurrying. Dane took a couple of seconds to open a new car.
“You got some magic key?” Billy said.
“Don’t be a twat,” Dane said. He was just using some criminal finger technique. Billy looked around the vehicle’s interior-there was a paperback, empty water bottles, scattered paper. He hoped with a hopeless sense of fret that this theft would not hurt someone he would like, someone nice. It was a pitiful equivocation.
“So…” Billy said. Here he was, in the trenches. “What’s the plan? We’re taking it to them, right?”
“Hunting,” Dane said. “We have leads to follow. But this is dangerous? I’m… Now I’m rogue you and me need some help. It ain’t true we got no allies. I know a few people. We’re going to the BL.”
“What?”
“The British Library.”
“What? I thought you wanted us to keep a low profile.”
“Yeah. I know. It ain’t a good place for us.”
“So why…”
“Because we have a god to find,” Dane snapped. “Alright? And because we need help. It’s a risk, yeah, but it’s mostly beginners’ territory. People who know what they want go other places.”
There was magery there, he said, but strictly newbie. For serious stuff you looked elsewhere. A deserted swimming pool in Peckham; the tower of Kilburn’s Gaumont State, no longer a cinema nor a bingo hall. In the meat locker of an Angus Steak House off Shaftsbury Avenue were the texts powerful enough to shift position when the librarians were not looking, which were said to whisper lies they wanted the reader to hear.
“Keep your mouth shut, keep your eyes open, watch and learn, show respect,” Dane said. “And don’t forget we’re hunted, so you see anything, tell me. Keep your head down. Be ready to run.”
It rained, briefly. When it rains, Dane quoted his grandfather, it’s a kraken shaking the water off its tentacles. When the wind blows, it’s the breath from its siphon. The sun, Dane said, is a glint of biophosphor in a kraken’s skin.
“I keep thinking about Leon,” Billy said. “I need to… I should tell his family. Or Marge. She should know…” It was nearly too heavy to articulate his feelings like that, and he had to stop speaking.
“You ain’t telling no one,” Dane said. “You ain’t talking to no one. You stay underground.”
The city felt like it was hesitating. Like a bowling ball on a hilltop, fat with potential energy. Billy recalled the snake unhinging of Goss’s jaw, bones jostling and a mouth with precipitous reconfiguration a doorway. Dane drove past a small gallery and a dry cleaners, a market collection of junk, tchotchkes in multiplicity, urban twee.
IN FRONT OF THE BRITISH LIBRARY, IN THE GREAT FORECOURT, A little crowd was gathered. Students and other researchers, laptops clutched, in trendy severe spectacles and woolly scarves. They were gaping and laughing.
What they stared at was a little group of cats, walking in a complicated quadrille, languidly purposeful. Four were black, one tortoise-shell. They circled and circled. They were not scattering nor squabbling. They described their routes in dignified fashion.
Far enough away to be safe but still startlingly close were three pigeons. They strutted in their own circle. The paths of the two groups of animals almost overlapped.
“Can you believe it?” said one girl. She smiled at Billy in his foolish clothes. “You ever seen such a well-behaved bunch? I love cats.”
Most of the students, after a minute or two of amused watching, went past the cats into the library. There were a very few among the crowd, though, who looked not in humour but consternation. None of these men or women entered. They did not cross the stalked lines. Though it was early and they had only just arrived, on seeing the little gathering they would leave.
“What’s going on?” said Billy. Dane headed to the centre of the forecourt, where a giant figure waited. He was uneasy being out. He looked constantly to all sides, led Billy with a kind of cringing pugnacity toward the twenty-foot statue of Newton. The imagined scientist hunched, examining the earth, his compass measuring distance. A tremendous misunderstanding, it seemed, Blake’s glowering ecstatic grumble at myopia mistranslated by Paolozzi as splendid and autarch.
A broad man stood by the figure, in a puffy jacket and woolly hat and glasses. He carried a plastic bag. He looked to be muttering to himself. “Dane,” someone said. Billy turned, but there was no one in earshot. The hatted man waved at Dane, warily. His bag was full of copies of a left-wing newspaper.