I called in on Dave at a little after eleven p.m.
“You look a bit shagged out,” said Dave.
“I am,” said I. “Sandra’s new body is a blinder.”
“Can I have a go?” Dave asked.
“Certainly not. Get your own zombie.”
“Hm,” said Dave. “When you put it like that, it sort of puts it in perspective. I think I’ll stick with living girlfriends.”
“So, what are we doing tonight?”
“Well,” said Dave, “I made a list of possibilities.”
“Yes?” I said.
“And then I crossed them all out.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I used my head,” said Dave. “If you want to be a really great thief, then you have to use your head. You have to put yourself in the position of the person you’re stealing from. Think, if I were you where would I, as you, hide the booty?”
“Go on,” I said.
“So,” said Dave, “it occurred to me that we would not be the first people to come up with this idea. After all, FLATLINE, or Operation Orpheus, has been around since wartime. Don’t you think that others before us would have thought of doing what we intend to do?”
“Yes,” I said. “You’re right.”
“I am,” said Dave. “So, following the direction of this thinking, where does it lead us to?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Where?”
“To the top,” said Dave. “You’d have to go to the top.”
“To God?” I said.
“To Winston Churchill,” said Dave.
“What?” said I.
“Churchill would know,” said Dave, “where all the Nazi booty went. He’d have got his Hitler impersonator to find out. So Churchill is the man to speak to.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know about this,” I said. “We’re not just going for Nazi booty here. We’re going for all booty.”
“In recent history, the Nazis nicked the most. It’s probably all in Switzerland in special bank vaults.”
“I’m getting out of my depth here,” I said.
“I’m not,” said Dave. “Nicking is my business. Let me have an hour on the phone with Mr Churchill and we’ll both be rich men. I’ve looked up his death date, like you told me you have to. I’ve got it here. Let’s do it.”
“Well, I can’t see any harm in that. Let’s give it a go. Follow me.”
And Dave followed me.
We took the lift to the seventeenth floor. I picked the lock of room 23 and led Dave to the telephone box. “Take as long as you like,” I said. “Dial in his full name and date of birth,” and I explained to him all the rest, “and do your stuff.”
“Sorted,” said Dave and he entered the telephone box.
I dithered about outside. I paced up and down, then I sat and smoked a cigarette. Then I paced, then sat and smoked another one.
At what seemed a very great length, Dave emerged from the telephone box. And Dave didn’t look very well.
“Are you all right?” I asked him. “You look a bit shaky.”
“I am a bit shaky,” said Dave. “I wasn’t expecting to hear all that I just heard. That Winston Churchill is a very angry dead man.”
“Oh,” I said. “Why?”
“He says that he was betrayed. He says that a secret elite is plotting to take over the world.”
“The British government,” I said. “You told me that.”
“Not them,” said Dave. “He says aliens.”
“Space aliens?”
“According to Winston Churchill. And who is going to argue with him?”
“Did he say anything about the booty?”
“Oh yeah,” said Dave. “He said lots. Apparently there’s a secret underground complex beneath Mornington Crescent tube station. All the booty is there. And all the rest of it. The real communications network centre.”
“For communications with the dead?”
“No, the aliens. The aliens who are us.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” I said. “But let me tell you this, Dave, and I’m sorry I didn’t mention it to you earlier. You can’t take everything the dead say as gospel truth. They have a tendency to make stuff up. They tell a lot of lies. I wouldn’t take this aliens stuff too seriously if I were you.”
“I wouldn’t have,” said Dave, “except that it tied up with something that you told me years ago, when we were kids. Remember when you told me that you’d overheard those two blokes talking about human beings not really doing their own thinking? About their thoughts being directed from somewhere else outside their heads? About our brains being receivers and transmitters but not really brains that do thinking? Remember?”
“I do remember,” I said. “Those two young men in the restricted section of the Memorial Library. One of them works here now.”
“And there was something about this at your daddy’s trial, although it wasn’t reported in the papers.”
“The Daddy must have known something about all this,” I said.
“He did work for the GPO,” said Dave. “And you told me that he was on bomb disposal in the war. Perhaps he was part of the secret operations network.”
“Now, hold on,” I said. “Are we going to get rich here, or not?”
“That sounds like the kind of question I should be asking.”
“Well, you ask it, then.”
“No,” said Dave. “But I’ll ask you this. What do you think we should do? We could go to Mornington Crescent and if there’s anything valuable there that can be nicked I assure you that I can nick it. Or, and this is a big or, we could go to Mornington Crescent and try to find out what the truth of all this really is. What do you think?”
I thought long and I thought hard and it was a whole lot of thinking.
“All right,” I said, when finally I had done all the thinking that I could do. “Let’s go.”
“And do what?” asked Dave. “One or the other?”
“Let’s do both,” I said.
“OK,” said Dave. “That’s cool.”
Now, this wasn’t going to be easy, because I worked the day shift and Dave worked the night shift and so I couldn’t see how we could go together. And even if we did go together, how we were going to find what we were looking for, whatever exactly that was. I confided my doubts to Dave and Dave was, as Dave had always been, optimistic and up for no good. And, as he always had been, up to doing things at his leisure.
“You leave it with me,” said Dave. “I have to do a bit more research with a few more dead men. I’ll get back to you in a few days.”
“Don’t you want me to let you into room 23 each night?” I asked. But that was a stupid question. This was Dave, after all.
“I’ll let myself in,” said Dave. “You go home. Give my best to Sandra, if you know what I mean and I’m sure that you do. And if we meet as we change shifts, just nod. Pretend you don’t know me.”
“OK,” I said and I shook hands with Dave. I felt absolutely confident in Dave. After all, he was my bestest friend and he had never, ever, let me down. I trusted him. He was the only one I had ever owned up to regarding my homicidal tendencies. I’d never mentioned them to Sandra. Some things you just don’t say to your wife although you would say them to your mate. It’s a man-thing, I suppose.
So I went home and gave Dave’s best to Sandra.
And for the next week I just nodded to Dave when I changed shifts with him, and he nodded back when he changed shifts with me. And then I found a note on the table of the bulb booth telling me to meet him on Friday evening at eight-thirty at the Golden Dawn.
So on Friday evening I togged up in my very bestest, put Sandra’s head in the fridge to keep it fresh and stop her wandering about while I was out, and strolled off down the road towards the Golden Dawn.