Ink (14 page)
Authors: Hal Duncan
Joey feels around for any other traces of the copycat, or of the Jack who died here twenty years ago, however unlikely that might be. He pushes his mind out of his body and still he finds nothing.
No. Wait. Somewhere under the drift-dams of rotting debris, amid the oozing sludge, he can sense some sort of life, down there in the filth, rats big as cats, warped by the mix of methane from decaying landfill and orgone seeping from
the abandoned mines that lace the whole of Kelvinhill, breeding and feasting, and feasting and breeding, buried in their own shit and trapped under the bulldozed earth, and slowly running out of shit to feed on.
“It's a fucking rat race, mate,” says Joey to the dead sentry.
“It's a fucking rat trap,” he hears Jack saying, a long time ago.
“Rat race or rat trap, it's still all about survival. You trap a bunch of rats in a cage without food, they don't work together for freedom. They just eat each other.”
Joey picks up the matchbook. This place reminds him of his childhood, all right. But under all the memories of infant thieves and thugs, there's no glorious, heroic Jack Flash, only the vicious monotonal compulsions of rodent hunger and lust, the visceral music of sex and death.
he
W
ays of
L
unatics and
F
ools
I enter, singing.
“O holiness, queen of eternity, sweeping on golden wings over the earth! Hear the words of Pierrot in his conceit, cursing the son of Simile, spirit of festivals and feasts of flowing wine, the one who lets the drowsy rest, glass in their hand, in ivy shade, or rouses revelers at the masquerade, who drags them up to dance, to shake off their dull care and wake the flute.”
And Harlequin up on the roof gives out a regal wave, a royal salute.
“The life of leisure, ruled by reason, rests unshaken and sustains the home, a pleasure dome, for in ethereal estates the powers divine, though they live in the distant far-ago, know every individual's state.”
I sing out to the Duke, flatter his vanity, flutter my eyes and bow, as if to say: Oh, yes, I see just how magnificent m'sire is in his munificence and magnanimity.
“This mystery ends all rhetoric lacking law and sense: Life is too short to squander it in abstract logic, unwise sophistry; and those who fail to understand, aim at the skies instead, they miss the joy at hand. These ways, I say, these are the ways of lunatics and fools.”
“The ways of lunatics and fools,” Don interrupts, and Guy looks over his shoulder as he flicks the reins, the wagon rolling on across the rolling plains under the rolling clouds. I look up from this new script Guy has given us, stop reading, blink from one to the other. It's so seldom that gruff, grizzled Don says anything at all that when he does, the rest of us tend to shut up.
“You don't like the line?” asks Guy.
“The line is fine,” says Don. “Just thinking”—and he points far down the road ahead, at spires of splendor lit with golden fires that rise up like a mountain, our far-distant destination. “Ways of lunatics and fools,” he says.
“Quite so,” says Guy. “Quite so.”
“Oh let us fly” sing I, “sail through the sky, and enter ciphers, enter isles of a free doubt, where spirits of love laugh, live and soothe man's sylph. To pathos, never fed by river rain, but rich with centuries’ mouths!”
I stand upon the roof of rumbling roughwood, skipping side to side to balance as the wagon trundles over broken flagstones, arms thrown out with pages flapping in my hand, proclaiming to the wilds, to the dust devils and the slumbering, half-buried masonry in the sands. Jack lounges in the sun beside me, flicking through his script and looking up every so often with a lazy yawn.
“Do I have any lines in this at all?”
I drop to my knees to ham it up right in his face.
“Oh lead me, Harlequin, guiding star of drunken pilgrims, to the holy slopes of oil lamps, haunt of muses. There is the grace. There is the soft desire. There is the revelry of your devotees free of the Empyre.”
“Will you shut up, up there,” shouts Joey from below.
“Fuck you,” I say, “I'm practicing.” And sing out, louder still.
“The joy of our spirit is in banquets. Son of Sooth, savior of wayward boys, he hates all those who will not deign to live the life of bliss, in days and nights of joy. To ease our pains, he gives us riches as his gift. He savors peace and so, to rich and poor alike, he gives delicious wine, glorious booze, to lift the heart and soul above the wisdom of the scholar, endlessly refined. This, then, I choose: that which the poor and ragged man approves.”
And over grooves and potholes worn by cars and trucks and carts and hooves, the wagon trundles on along a broken road with signs for nonexistent towns, abandoned rest stops, heading for another city where another king or lord or godfather or—in his own mind—god holds court among lost souls who've strayed across this wide land of the dead to end up in his maze, captivated by the order of his streets and roads, becoming slaves. The ways of lunatics and fools, indeed. The palaces of Pantaloons.
Jack huffs a butterfly away from his nose, swipes at it lazily. I lean my chin over the edge of the wagon's roof, looking down at Guy and Don.
“So what happens in Act Two?”
“Oh, Act Two,” says Guy, “that's where things really start to heat up.”
—
T
he
U
niversal
C
ity
omewhere in the city below, a muezzin sings the call to evening prayers, and he stands at the window, cigarette in hand, looking down over the slope of roofs and gardens, listening to the waver of that distant clarion voice. Slim twin minarets prick the sky here and there, domes nestled between them. It's largely a modern city though, all roads and apartment blocks, sprawling over the valley floor and crawling up the slopes of Mount Uludag behind, where the Dilmun Otel sits perched among the cafes and restaurants of the hotel quarter.
He stubs the cigarette out in the ashtray, slings his jacket over his shoulder and grabs his room key—proper old-fashioned room key with a fistful of metal attached to discourage you from taking it outside with you—and pulls the door closed quietly behind him as he leaves. Everything is hotel rooms these days.
He takes the lift down to reception. Floor six… five… four… three. Ground. There's no two or one for some reason, maybe because there's two subground floors housing the restaurant and health club. It seems a little odd, but different strokes for different folks. Like the way they make the beds, with the covers folded under themselves instead of tucked under the mattress. Or the little sachets of Nescafe with sugar and powdered milk already added that sit beside the electric kettle on the table in the room. As if there's just Turkiye kafe and that weird Western shit which, as far as they're concerned, always has milk and sugar in it, doesn't it?
“Iyi akşamhr,”
he says to the receptionist and she smiles.
Good evening.
“Iyi ak§amhr,”
she says as he heads out the front door.
——
“Arap§ukru, lutfien”
The Heykel taksi takes him the five-minute, five-million-lira drive to the Arap§ukru—the Street of Fish Restaurants—and he fumbles through his wallet for the right note.
No, that's five hundred thousand. Here's the one. We
still can't get over how much the founder of the modern Turkish nation, Emil Attaturk, looks like the mad, camp villain-hero from this fifties sci-fi serial,
Lost in Space.
Dr. Zachary Smith, his name was. Swear to God, it's the spitting image of him. Needless to say, he hasn't pointed this out to any of the Turks; it would be bad form.
“Te§ekkur.”
Thanks.
“Te§ekkur. Iyi ak§amlar.”
“Iyi ak§amlar.”
Outside the taksi, the early-evening city streets are busy, shops open later than they would be back home, people here thronging the way they do in these warm countries where there's little worry about the weather, about raincoats and umbrellas. Street culture, street living: It's one of the things he likes about this time and place. He couldn't stay here forever—you can't get a good White Russian in all of prewar Bursa—but it's good to visit once in a while, for the ambience.
The waiters hovering outside the restaurants haggle him, beckoning at the displays of fresh fish by the doorways, the warm glow of the little two-story buildings with their waxed-cloth table covers, TV sets showing Galatasaray playing Fenerbahçe FC, men inside cheering, bottles of Raki. He smiles, shakes his head and walks on. It's only a few more yards before the last of the restaurants is behind him and the street is darker, quieter. He unslings the jacket from his back and puts it on before ducking down the alleyway over cobblestones and—
Dug-up tarmac, fenced off behind wire mesh. The whole road is blocked like this, little mechanical diggers parked behind the fence. The pavement—sidewalk, whatever—is uneven and narrow even without the stalls of socks and plastic trinkets. He keeps finding himself moving against the flow of people, having to weave between them. He turns a corner onto a less busy street, heading toward the Zocalo, checking his watch and quickening his pace. It's nearly eleven here, and there's a free concert on tonight in the vast square in the center of the city; he doesn't want to get stuck in the flow of the mob moving back to their homes after Alessandro Gussman's finished singing. Not after the last time. Christ, there's twenty-five million people in the Distrito Federal, and the last time he was here
and now, it seemed like they'd all been at the concert, and like they all had to go down the same street to get home. Eventually, he'd just given up and ducked into a small cafe for a cerveza and a cigarette while he waited for the street to quieten down. It was a cute little place, all decked out in red, green and white bunting, which he'd assumed was some kind of cheery nationalism in the run-up to Independence Day, until he spotted the football—soccer, that is—on the television, Inter Milan against… someone or other, and realized that it was an Italian cafe. In the heart of Mexico City.
He jogs across a road, strides down the block to get to the next corner and across before the first of the concertgoers come streaming down onto the street behind him. Made it.
“Perdón, señor.”
He turns as the kid bumps past him, lets himself stumble a little, grab the kid's arm so he doesn't fall. It brings the kid round between him and the woman on his other side, her hand slipping back into her own pocket as if it had never left, an almost imperceptible frown on her face as she walks on.
“Perdón,”
he says himself, patting the kid on the shoulder.
The kid doesn't even notice that he's lost his own wristwatch and the roll of bills from his inside pocket. Serves him right for being such a bloody amateur.
He pats his chest to feel the bulk of the wallet still resting there. It wouldn't have done the pickpockets any good anyway, a handful of Turkish lira and a bunch of credit cards that expired two years ago.
He turns a corner.
Another street, another city, another year. The buildings are still black with grime, the stone still ground in with decades of car fumes and coal fires, once resplendent tenement-style, banks and offices ornate enough that you could probably climb right up their grooved, ledged facades if you wanted to. The rubbish in the gutters still stinks of rotting fruit and the people still sit in bars shouting at television sets. The city is universal. The universe is a city. At least, his is.
Down Rosenstrasse and across the Bridge of Sighs. Skirting Skid Row, Hell's Kitchen and a Soho that's as much New York as London. Brown brick, red brick, sandstone, granite. Every so often he spots a landmark that he recognizes, but mostly he ignores them; impressive as they are, they're not his navigation beacons on these streets of refuse and real life. No, it's the congruences that he follows, the commonalities of people leaning out of windows to shout down at friends outside, of folks walking their dogs, or cigarette butts falling down a drain. That's one of the reasons that he smokes, actually; you drop a cigarette in a puddle and it
links you to a million other instants—or more—of a cigarette falling with a splash and a hiss into a puddle, instants all different, never quite the same, but close enough that you can take just one small step across from one into the other. Bursa, Mexico City, Mirenburg, Firenze. In the end, they're all one city, a universal city of a million districts, Latin Quarters, Jewish Quarters, West Ends and Chinatowns all mixed up in the mess of their inhabitants’ forgotten heritages, the little bits of homeland brought with them in their hearts to be displayed in windows and on walls, collages of identity cut up and strung together so you could, if you weren't paying close attention, mistake them for mere decoration, like red, green and white bunting in an Italian cafe in Mexico City.
He cuts off Ingram Street, down past a low red sandstone block of a building— some once-rich Glasgow tobacco importer's commissioned offices long since rebuilt inside, transformed into a nightclub—and comes out at the top of Virginia Street, a dilapidated side street of gay bars and shopping arcades, the loading bay of a department store. There are a couple of buildings collapsed here, another just condemned, steel on the doors and windows, warning signs. Another corner and he's on a side street off the side street, and in a different decade entirely.
He walks up the steps, nodding at the bouncers in their disheveled tuxes far too tight for them. It's not exactly a gentleman's club but they do have Bombay Sapphire and good armchairs in Club Soda, downstairs, behind the dance floor, down a corridor of dark-green wallpaper and wood paneling, in the back room where the poker is played. He's whistling as he pushes the door open.
He recognizes Joey immediately, almost smiles his recognition with a chipper hello before the khaki uniform and its insignia register … and the four guards with him, all armed.
“Major Joseph Pickering,” the man says. “If you'll just come with us, sir. Let's not cause a fuss here.”
F
oolish
S
tories
, M
ad
S
tories
“My name is Reynard Carrier. I was—”
“Reinhardt von Strann,” says Pickering, cutting him off.
“I was born in Rene-le-Chateau, in France. I was brought up in Paris. I owned a nightclub in Berlin until the Futurists—”
Pickering shakes his head. How long is the damn fool going to keep this bloody charade going?
“Your name is Reinhardt von Strann,” he says. “You were born in Strann, West Prussia. Christ, man, we know who you are. We know everything.”
It's not entirely true. Pickering has a file on Reinhardt von Strann, aka Guy Fox, that's as Joycean in its incomprehensibility as in its length. The problem is that over half of the intel and intercept contained in it, verified from multiple trustworthy sources, is entirely contradictory. So saying
everything
is therefore something of a fudge. And to be fair, it's not so much
we
as I. The rest of MI5 isn't terribly interested in a “crackpot pamphleteer,” a mad socialist-anarchist railing against the dangers of the new government's “fascist” policies. There are more important enemies these days.
“This is absurd,” says the man.
His accent is impeccably French, of course—a hint of American in his English as one would expect, but not a trace of guttural German. Pickering doesn't believe it for a second. He takes his cap off momentarily to rake his fingers through his crow-black Brylcreem hair and slaps the cap back on his head; it's an unconscious habit, as if he's pushing long hair back out of his face, and he has no idea where he picked it up, having worn a short back and sides since the day he joined the army.
“You
were
a nightclub owner in Berlin before the war,” he insists, “for a brief period following a less illustrious career as a—how can I put this—gigolo and jewel thief.”
“Oh, now really, I can't say I've led the most virtuous life but I'm no thief.”
“No
common
thief.”
Pickering stands up from his chair and wanders to the corner of the room, leans back against the wall, arms folded, sizing the prisoner up. He returns, takes his cap off and lays it on the table.
“In July 1940,” he says, “you were arrested for your activity in helping refugees escape from Germany, and sentenced to death, a traitor to the Neues Reich. Given the pedigree of the von Strann family, this was no small scandal. Not that your family was without scandal before this … your brother, for instance. But we'll come to that.”
“Look, I don't have a brother. Please check your records. I am the only child of Alphonse and Marie Cartier of—”
“Shortly before your execution, however, you managed to escape Gestapo custody and nothing was heard of you until—”
“I'm telling you, you have the wrong man.”
“
Until
after the war, September 1947, when you were caught breaking
into
a Siberian gulag. They had you in a locked room, no windows. They leave you
alone for one minute and—
poof-
—you're gone. Two days later a man answering your description is shot at by Polish border guards crossing over the Iron Curtain. We have the NKVD and Stasi files on it all. Believe me, it makes for interesting reading. Two days to get from Siberia to Warsaw. Two
days.”
“Major—Pickering, was it?—I've been in Britain—sorry, Albion, I mean—I've been in Albion since I fled Berlin in 1941. I wish I was this von Strann character you talk about. He helped refugees escape, you say? He sounds an admirable man.”
The prisoner smiles weakly.
“But I am not a brave man, Major Pickering. The most I ever did against the Futurists was to urinate in their cognac. And I was very drunk at the time. I was afraid of them, Major Pickering. And when the opportunity arose, I fled, alone. I got out through Holland and I did not look back. I took no one with me, thought of no one but myself. I am not like this von Strann. I am not this man. The Dutch Resistance, your own people, there are scores of individuals in London alone who can verify my story. The captain who debriefed me, Captain MacChuill—”
“General now. Yes, General MacChuill remembers you quite well. As he recalls, you supplied some quite invaluable information as regards munitions sites, potential targets.”