I parked the car at the top of Hoe Street. It was a fair walk from there, but the car was likely to be still there when I got back, possibly even with engine and wheels attached. That was worth a little additional effort.
A couple of minutes’ walk past the station there’s a building with a Cecil Masey frontage that still looks beautiful through all the shit and peeling paintwork and graffiti. Aggressively Moorish, like all his best stuff: the centrepiece is a massive window in that elongated, round-topped, vaguely phallic shape, flanked by two smaller versions of itself. The same shapes appear up on top of the walls like crenellations, or like waves frozen in brick. The interiors are all marble and mirrors and gilded angels, courtesy of Sidney Bernstein or one of his underpaid assistants.
It opened in 1931 as a Gaumont, had its heyday and its slow decline like all the other pre-war super-cinemas, and gently expired exactly three decades later. But then some ghoul exhumed it in 1963, and reinvented it as a members-only establishment with some grandiose name like the Majestic or the Regal. For the next twenty-three years it screened soft-core porn to jaded bank managers at prices set high enough to keep the riff-raff out. Now it was dead again, its second demise mourned by nobody, and Nicky had bought it for a song – probably the Death March from Saul.
It was the perfect home for him: he too was on his second time around.
I went in around the back, up the drainpipe and through an unlocked window, the front being boarded up solid. The council nailed the boards up in the first place, but Nicky had added some additional barricades of his own: you can buy Nicky’s services if you know his price, but he doesn’t have much use for the passing trade.
Inside it was dark and cold, heat being another thing that Nicky has no truck with. As I walked along the broad, bare corridor to the projection booth, past peeling posters from two decades before, a draught of Arctic provenance played around my ankles. I rapped on the door, and after a few seconds the security camera up top swivelled to get a better look at me. I’d passed three other cameras on the way up, of course, so he knew damn well it was me, but Nicky likes to remind you that Big Brother is watching. It’s not so much a matter of security – although he takes his security more seriously than Imelda Marcos takes her footwear; it’s more the statement of a philosophical position.
The door opened, without a creak but with the faintest suggestion of roiling vapour at floor level, like the effect you’d get from a dry-ice machine set on low: either a side effect of Nicky’s spectacularly customised air-conditioning, or something that he does on purpose.
I pushed the door open carefully, but I didn’t step inside right away. I don’t like to barge in without a direct invitation, because this is the keep of Nicky’s little castle – and he really does think in those terms. He’s installed all kinds of deadfalls and ambushes to stop people from intruding on his privacy. Some of them are ingenious, bordering on sadistic. In my experience, there’s nobody who can think of more varied and interesting ways to abuse living flesh than a zombie.
‘Nicky?’ I called, opening the door a little further with the toe of my shoe.
No answer. Well, someone had to have unlocked the door, and someone had to be operating the cameras. Taking my life – or at least the integrity of my balls – in my hand I stepped inside, into a chill that you could reasonably say was tomb-like.
I looked around, but saw no sign of Nicky. The booth is larger than that word makes it sound: a sort of first-floor hangar, with a very high ceiling which apparently helps the whole heat-exchange thing. Nicky keeps his computers up here, and anything else that’s close to his cold, cold heart at any given moment. Right now, that included a hydroponics garden, which seemed to be doing nicely despite the blisteringly cold temperature. There was a screen across one half of the room, made up from a row of malnourished, cane-like plants rooted in buckets of evil-looking brown swilclass="underline" the tallest of the plants were stretching to the ceiling and spreading their leaves out across it – reaching for the sky just to surrender, as Leonard Cohen sang somewhere or other. They’d grown as far as they could without bending their backs and shooting out horizontally, and as it was they looked to be balanced pretty precariously on the inadequate foundations of the plastic buckets.
Normally Nicky would have been at the computer terminal on the other side of the room – or maybe leaning on his elbows at the plan chest off to my far right, poring over maps and charts of London, England and the world scribbled over and over with his own hermetic symbols. Both of those spots were currently empty.
‘Hey, Nicky.’ I called, a little irritably. ‘Whenever you’re ready, mate. Meter’s running.’
‘Open your coat, Castor.’ Nicky’s voice doesn’t carry all that much, so it wasn’t a shout – just an insinuating murmur that didn’t seem to come from any particular direction but crept along the ground with the sparse tendrils of water vapour. I finally placed him, though: he was standing behind the row of spindly cane trees looking like Davy Crockett at the Alamo – except that the pistol he was holding in his hands was no museum piece: it was a chunky service automatic with a lot of miles on the clock but a very convincing businesslike look about it. Nicky was looking pretty serious, too: ordinarily the fake tan he insists on wearing gives him a slightly clownish look, but a gun adds a whole big helping of gravitas.
‘Have you lost your fucking mind?’ I asked him.
‘Nope. There’s some fucking weird shit going down in the big city right now, and I’m not planning to be a part of it. Just open your coat up. I want to see if you’re carrying a weapon.’
‘Only the usual, Nicky. Unless that’s some kind of coy euphemism for—’
‘Do it, Castor. Last time of asking.’ The volume was turned up a little bit this time, which meant he’d taken a big breath just for the occasion: when he’s not talking, he forgets to do that.
Swallowing some very bad words, I unbuttoned my paletot and shrugged it open to left and right. ‘There you go,’ I said. ‘No shoulder holsters. No bandoliers. Not even a machete in my belt. Sorry to disappoint you.’
‘If you’d disappointed me, you’d know it. Turn out your pockets.’
‘Christ Jesus, Nicky!’
‘I told you – this isn’t anything personal. We’re friends, as far as that goes. If I trusted anybody, it’d be you. But we’re in uncharted territory tonight, and I’m honest-to-God not taking any risks.’ His hand made a pass-repass over the gun, and I heard a sound that I recognised from countless movies and maybe twice in real life: the sound of the slide release on an automatic pistol being racked back and then forward again.
I stopped arguing. There wasn’t that much in my outside pockets in the first place: what there was – keys, wallet, Swiss Army penknife with thing for getting stones out of horses’ hooves – I hauled out and dropped to the floor. There was a second set of pockets sewn into the lining of the coat, though, and with the things that were stored in there I took a fair bit more care: an antique knife with an inlaid handle; a small goblet in stained and heavily oxidised silver, the porcelain head of Abbie’s doll. These I laid down on the floor with care, one at a time. Last of all came the tin whistle. ‘Just one hand,’ Nicky warned as I slid the whistle out and held it up. As far as he was concerned, this was a weapon – and it had his name on it.
I’d had just about as much of this as I could take by this time, and I was in the mood to do something rash. Slowly, with elaborate and exaggeratedly unthreatening gestures, I bent from the waist and laid the whistle down on the bare cement floor. I gave it a little flick with my thumb as I did it, so that it rolled: I knew Nicky’s gaze would follow it, the way your stare would follow a grenade without a pin. Then I knelt down a little lower. The bucket that held the cane tree at the end of the line nearest to me was just within the reach of my left hand at full stretch: I grabbed it right in under the rim.