Aurorarama (21 page)

However, as Blankbate turned on a gas lamp on the wall, Gabriel could see that the boarding platform (or, as it had been known, the Reception Room) apparently not only remained in good condition but also was still as luxurious as it ever had been, dust and cold notwithstanding. Pictures and gas brackets alternated on the striped tapestry above the easy chairs of the former waiting room. A frozen fountain with a fish basin, now empty, was laid out in the middle, a stopped clock stood at one end, and there was even a piano, smothered in dust, disconsolately untuned. A cylinder-shaped silver car was waiting below a staircase, its door open, and in front of it, framed by two torch-holding bronze Inuit, the perfectly circular tunnel opened toward nonexistent destinations. There was something Pompeiilike to it, though the catastrophe here had only been low rent-ability. But that was apparently enough to freeze worlds in time and turn them into literal Neverlands.

On the platform, Blankbate opened a door revealing a room furnished as a first-class businessman’s office.

“This will be your home, Ms. Lenton,” announced Blankbate. “There’s a folding bed there. Bathroom’s off the waiting room. You will be safe here, and once it is heated, it should be fairly comfortable.”

Chipp was already fumbling with an Eclipse gas stove, which soon started to purr.

“The Gentlemen of the Night know of this place?” asked Gabriel.

“They know enough to never come around and not enough to see why they should.”

“This will be perfect. Thank you very much,” said Lilian, passing her gloved finger over the dusty desk.

“You have a pneumatic tube, if you need anything. We’ve connected it directly to the Fisheries.”

As Gabriel’s first glimpse of the Scavengers’ secret operations, this was certainly impressive. He wondered about the nature of their underground activities. If they were not a criminal organization (though they were notoriously trafficking in some sort of black flea market economy: the Scavengers were reputed to be able to find and deliver almost anything), they certainly could turn into one at the very first occasion. It reassured Gabriel to think of them as Brentford’s confederates, although Brentford had made clear that he needed them more than they needed him and that dealing with them was a rather delicate business that could get out of hand at the slightest mistake. But at least this was a world free of the influence of the Gentlemen of the Night, and Gabriel took a deep breath to celebrate this.

Blankbate turned toward him.

“Now, the dead lady.”

Lamp in hand, he took them down the stairs and led them through the Tunnel, not minding that Lilian was blending her echoing steps and curved shadow with theirs. Gabriel tried to strike up a conversation.

“Sorry to have mistaken you for Sandy Lake,” he said, with, he hoped, more complicity than indiscretion.

“Oh. No offence. I am even a little flattered that you recognized
her
. Miss Lake has been a long time gone. Who’d have thought anyone would remember her?”

“Musical memories are not easily forgotten. Nor is someone who wore luminous garlands in her hair. And so, if I may ask, what happened to Sandy Lake that she became Lilian Lenton?”

There was a little pause before Lilian answered, which she did with a gravity Gabriel had not expected.

“Sandy was a bit of a shallow, superficial girl, wasn’t she? She needed to grow up and to grow old. In a foreign country, she met someone very courageous, and she wanted to become
like her, or if not, to pay homage to her. And then she had the inspiration that this admiration would be better directed if she could put it to use in her own hometown. She just took her friend’s name so that her spirit might accompany her on her way back. Or I should rather say, might accompany
us.”

“Us? Your new band?”

“The band is just an advertisement for another us. The U.S. of Us, if you like. Your best enemies and your best friends,” she added, lightening a little.

“It seems a bit cryptic to me,” admitted Gabriel.

“I’m afraid it has to remain so for a little while,” she said, her slightly husky voice now striking an amused note, as they reached the other end of the tunnel. There, they stepped onto a wider side platform, whose cast-iron pillars and Gothic arches reminded Gabriel of a deserted church. Ignoring a staircase that must have led to street level, they crossed the platform toward another door.

“It’s rather cold in there,” warned Blankbate as he opened the lock with a jangling of keys.

It looked like a fabric shop, with long tables and shelves up to the ceiling, but it had been used, Blankbate explained, as a storeroom and workshop for maintenance purposes. It was now something else entirely: a cave of wonders or, rather, the den of the Forty Thieves. This was where, Gabriel understood, the Scavengers piled up their “loot” of outmoded, discarded objects. Strange machines with forgotten or absurd functions, baby cribs, sleighs, skis and snowshoes, stuffed animals, worn-out hides and moth-eaten furs, ships in bottles, sextants and other Navy paraphernalia, Eskimo objects and weapons, and faded paintings and mutilated statues from all places and periods rose up from the floor, flooded the tables, and scaled the shelves, appearing and disappearing with the passing of the lamplight like the exhibits of a spectral World’s Fair.

“We call this place the Arcaves,” said Blankbate, just as Gabriel wondered if there really was a profit to be made from these second-hand or last-chance objects. It was, then, in its own, dusty, stifling, desperate way, a Memory palace, a crumbling and frail monument to all the anonymous lives that the city had forgotten about. It was preserved there, smelling of shipwreck and ruin, patient and melancholy, crouching in the dark, biding its time, perhaps.

“Of course, if someone ever wants something we’ll retrieve it.”

“For a profit?” asked Lilian, who was much less shy than Gabriel.

Blankbate turned his beak toward her.

“Depends on who asks for what. The less you need it, the more it’s going to cost you.”

Somehow, that seemed logical to Gabriel.

The door at the other end led to a cold-storage room. It chilled Gabriel to the bone as he entered it, and the lamp that Blankbate held, trembling as it did, did not make the place any cosier. The mysterious sled Brentford had told Gabriel about was in the middle of the room under an oiled tarp that Blankbate lifted up with one swift, powerful gesture of his black-gloved hand, revealing the glass top of the copper cylinder. The lady’s face, that of an almost old woman, was not unknown to Gabriel, but he could not quite pin it down.

“So?” asked Blankbate, who seemed now to be in a hurry to be done with it all.

“No means of identification whatsoever?”

“There is one thing,” said Chipp. “There. At the back.”

Blankbate moved the lamp down, revealing a coat of arms. Very simple. Gabriel had never been much of a heraldry fiend, but he knew he knew this one, and then recognized it for good. Sable three snowflakes argent. He remembered the motto by heart.
Nix super Nox
. This was incredible.

“Nixon-Knox,” he said. “Isabella Nixon-Knox.”

“Like the former Councillor?” asked Lilian.

“His wife. Her maiden name was Isabelle d’Ussonville.”

“Like … the Sleeper?” Lilian whispered.

“His
daughter.”

“But the Sleepers weren’t supposed to have children,” she said.

Gabriel knew the story from his father, from the time when he had been Portcullis Pursuivant of the City’s Civil Registry Records at the House of Honours and Heraldry. It was a story that his father liked to tell a little bit too often and it was he who had started spreading the rumour around various bars and shebeens until he had been deemed a nuisance and “put on ice.”

“They were not supposed to. It was part of their oath. So that there would not be any dynastic complications to their promised collective ‘return’ from cryogenic sleep. But, even if d’Ussonville learned it too late, his wife was pregnant before the oath and could not be persuaded to go away from the city. She was to be the only exception to the rule. The daughter would be married to a councillor and that councillor would make sure that she did not bear children, so that the family line would stop there. At some point, Nixon-Knox got tired of watching her, and when he was sure she could no longer become a mother, he sent her into exile, nobody ever knew where.”

“Why did she come back?” asked Lilian.

Gabriel shrugged.

“It’s her city, after all.”

“And why was
Lancelot
written on the mirror?” asked Blankbate, who now seemed less impatient and even interested in the matter, as far, that is, as his mask allowed Gabriel to guess.

Gabriel spread his hands, clueless. Flummoxed, that was his middle name, not Lancelot, he thought.

“How would I know?”

The idea that it might have something to do with the fact that he happened to be one of the few people to know her story crossed his mind. But if it pointed toward some responsibility, well, thank you, he certainly wasn’t going to pursue the matter further.

“Can I show you something?” asked Blankbate. “It’s not too pretty, though.”

“If you wish,” said Gabriel, checking his fob watch so as to be sure he would not miss Stella when she came out of her damn show at the Trilby Temple.

“It’s fine with me,” said Lilian.

“You have been warned,” said Blankbate, walking toward a large tarpaulin that covered and outlined some bulky vertical shapes lined up against the wall.

“Help me with this, Chipp.”

Each took an end of the tarpaulin and pulled it down firmly.

Lilian let out a little cry.

Gabriel fought not to vomit.

Seven silvery cylinders appeared in the trembling light, revealing, under their crystal lids, the mortal remains of seven old men dressed in black frocks and starched white shirts, wearing sashes and livery collars around their necks. Their swollen, blackened faces were grinning from unfinished putrefaction.

Gabriel had never believed the Seven Sleepers would ever come back from their sleep as the legend promised, and it was well known that their Claude Cryogenic Coffins had been damaged during the Blue Wild, but facing the bare truth still tore away for him some piece of persistent childhood.

Blankbate and Chipp quickly put back the tarpaulin.

“Where did you find
these?”
Gabriel managed to ask, while a pale Lilian held her gloved hands to her mouth.

“In a canal in Lotus Eaters. With cast-iron weights tied to the coffins. All of them swaying straight up. They must have been dumped before the winter, but the ice has limited the damage.”

“The Council did it?” asked Lilian.

“It’s cold in here,” said Blankbate. “Maybe we should go back.”

B
rentford turned off the faucet and took a towel from the tray. As he bowed down to throw it in the basket, he checked in it to see if the answer he was waiting for had already arrived. Yes. It was there. This “waste” network really worked. He picked up the folded paper and deciphered the code. Lilian had been exfiltrated out of the Kane Clinic and was safe somewhere. He tore up the paper and threw the towel away on top of it.

Was it a good idea to have started this? He could not really tell. Barely out of the Blazing Building, he had felt an urge to
take his revenge on the Council in one way or another. He had scribbled a hasty note and thrown it, not far from the Blazing Building, into one of the special garbage cans that the Scavengers used as post boxes and where he knew it would be collected quickly. They had acted swiftly and, as usual, efficiently. Now he owed them another debt, but he felt there would be plenty of occasions to repay them. Or to beg them for help again.

He went back to the theatre, if the Trilby Temple could be called that. It was more like a music hall, actually, and typical of the Midway. Behind its neoclassical facade it hid what was allegedly a replica of the Place St-Anatole-des-Arts in a fantasy of Bohemian Paris. The mock-leprous walls were decorated with false windows and panes and some hanging laundry, and stylized slate roofs with crooked chimneys reached up to the crudely painted starry ceiling. The floor was painted to simulate cobblestones, and rusty light-green metal chairs surrounded small, round, overcrowded tables. Brentford, however, had a table on a mezzanine disguised as a balcony. As he walked up the corkscrew staircase, Sybil waved, her face lighting up as if she had not seen him for years.

“Spencer the Clumsy Conjuror” was, thank God, finishing his routine to polite applause. Brentford had seen the act before, maybe done by the same man (the name Spencer
conjured
something in his mind that he could not exactly place), and felt rather impatient with it all. He knew it was now a standard feature in magic shows to let a supposedly incompetent assistant drop things and show the ropes, the better to amaze the spectators with the performance to come, but nevertheless the sight of an old man bungling his tricks on purpose saddened Brentford more than it amused him.