Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway
Mercer looked at Jonah Noblewhite, and thanked him very much. He picked up the envelope, and, taking care not to look at the text of the missive within, he removed the cheque. He considered the amount, which was prodigious, and the cold, blank pages of the exercise book in which one of his schools had demanded he make a family tree, and came to a decision. He returned the cheque to its place, waited until the crêpes Suzette ignited, and thrust the envelope firmly into the flames. When it was burning he withdrew it, and held it calmly until his plate was filled with steaming pancakes and his nose was filled with the heady scent of orange and brandy. Then he dropped the letter and its secrets into the empty copper pan, and asked the waiter to take it away.
Part of the reason for this froideur was that Mercer Cradle had not been alone when he was abandoned. When the son of Mathew Spork ran riot in the Night Market with Mercer, and roughhoused with giant guard dogs and skipped stones on the river Thames, the two were followed dutifully by a stringy, mouse-haired infant named Mary Angelica, whose birth certificate bore the same false flag as her brother’s.
The Bold Receptionist is Mercer’s beloved sister, rather different now from when last seen at the age of eleven, but—Joe Spork has no doubt—still the apple of her brother’s eye. And that eye is apt to look with a jaundiced glower upon this latest sequence of events. Joe just hopes that this outrage which he has inadvertently perpetrated upon the innocence of the Cradle family will not offset the Service, the ancient deed of valour which bound the firm of Jonah Noblewhite—and his adopted son—to the House of Spork unto the nth generation and for ever and ever, amen.
Mathew Spork was a-courtin’, and the world was bright. This was the dawn of all good things, when Mathew for all his bluster still stepped a little cautious around the law, and when he still felt the need to impress a girl instead of just overwhelming her, and here was Harriet Gaye, the finest singer in London, with deep brown eyes and strong forearms made to grab a fellow about the neck and draw his head to her lips.
Mathew took a table at Leonardo’s, because it was expensive and they knew him, would kowtow and make a fuss of him, would tell him he had the best table in the house because he was opposite this beauty, would actually give him the best table into the bargain. And Leonardo’s was the place, the in spot. If you knew London’s miserable food and iffy wine cellars, you knew that the one place where they really could cook halibut or slice a truffle, or would give you lamb which hadn’t been cooked unto its utter destruction, was Leonardo’s. It was swish and smooth and Continental, it whispered of Monte Carlo and Rome, of champagne and casinos and sharp suits. The kitchen at Leo’s (and there was no Leo, he was an opium dream of all the best cooking in the world, a fat hallucination whose white hat was occupied by seven unemployed Shakespearean actors between ’62 and ’79) used garlic and plenty of it, traded in spices that the rest of England hadn’t heard of and wouldn’t dream of using in a Christian dish if they had.
They were five minutes from Leonardo’s when Mathew stopped the car abruptly and reversed so that he could look down a particular alleyway, then swore in terms that even Harriet, making time with musicians from the far corners of the world, had rarely heard.
“You stay here a bit,” Mathew told his future wife. “I just need to straighten my tie.”
And then he got out of the car and walked into the night.
Jonah Noblewhite—at this point, Mathew only thought of him as “the tubby bloke”—had his back to the wall and a short length of wood clutched in his hands. He looked like a cornered guinea pig. In front of him stood three men with shaven heads. One of them had a swastika tattooed on the back of his neck, which Mathew considered very thoughtful, as it gave him something to aim for with his billy club. The blackshirt went down on one knee, which was impressive, as most people just fell over unconscious. Mathew reckoned he still had the initiative, so he hit him again, with interest. The remaining two stared at him, and Jonah Noblewhite took the opportunity presented to cudgel the man closest to him with his chunk of wood.
The third man was fast. He stepped in and smashed Jonah twice with his elbow, once up, and once down. Jonah collapsed.
Mathew looked at the third man. He looked at his heavy, ugly boots and his studded denim jacket. He looked at his narrow face and almost invisible eyebrows.
He obviously didn’t see much to write home about.
The man dipped one hand into his pocket and produced a knife. Mathew looked at the knife. That didn’t seem to interest him very much, either. The man set himself in a crouch, the blade weaving. Mathew stayed exactly where he was, knees not locked, dancing shoes steady in the alley’s grime. Then he spoke.
“Mucker,” he said, “at this moment, you and I are having a little local disagreement. Your friends will shortly wake up and you can all go to the pub, although you’ll want to find one which isn’t in my manor. But if you have a go at me with that pig-sticker, I will take exception.”
He did not specify the consequences of his taking exception. He waited, with his hands at his sides. At some point, he shifted just slightly, giving the other a view of his pale silk shirt and of the snub-nosed revolver in its holster at his hip.
Twenty minutes later, Jonah Noblewhite joined Harriet and Mathew for dinner, and it emerged that he collected American baseball cards and was a fan of Joan Greenwood. Harriet had declared him the sweetest man in the world, and had fastened her grip upon Mathew’s hand and clearly did not intend ever to let him go. He was a hero and a warrior and he protected the good from the wicked. A week later, Mathew proposed, and Jonah was the first person they told. When Joshua Joseph was born, Jonah pronounced him a great scion of the British people, and shortly thereafter, finding himself by coincidence charged with the care of a newborn boy and girl, suggested that the Heir of the House of Spork might relish the company of his two castaways. The three grew up together as a matter of inevitability, though Mary Angelica was somehow aloof from the two boys, and life whisked her away to a foreign school just as she began her transformation from gosling to swan.
And now, it seems, Joshua Joseph Spork has just had steamy, athletic, back-arching, chemical-waste-train sex with Mercer’s sister.
The blissful doze recedes from him. Joe Spork lies looking at Polly Cradle’s ceiling, then gazes at her. Her face in repose is beautiful, with just a quirk of mischief around the wide mouth. She snuffles, and Joe has a profound urge to bury his nose in her neck, wake her with his lips. He contents himself with inhaling her scent, and closes his eyes for a moment.
He wakes again a little later, and finds that she has rolled over on her side. The cello sweep of her back is exposed. He pulls the blankets up over her, and she makes a small, happy squeak. Content, but now very much awake, he slips out of bed and wanders. On her bookshelves: a generous selection of crime novels, a spread of P.G. Wodehouse, and a selection of erotica notable for its breadth and gusto.
He turns on the kettle, thinking he will make her tea, and absently glances at the Nokia handset he carries reluctantly for business. A picture of an envelope is sitting in the grey corner of the display: voicemail. He nudges the retrieve button with his thumbnail, and winces as it presses back. The phone seems to have been made—actually, they all do—for an elf or a pixie. For a Polly Cradle, perhaps. He feels like a troll. Big bad troll, in a cave. He has kidnapped a maiden and wrought his wicked will upon her. Grr. Arg. Soon the villagers will come, with pitchforks, and all will be well again.
He thinks about the figures who came to visit and the ones who were waiting for him. Shadows. Inquisitors.
Ruskinites.
He listens to the message.
“Joseph? Joseph, it’s Ari, from the corner shop. You’re being burgled! Or you have been late with your rent. There are men here with a truck. They’re taking everything. Or are you moving house? You did not tell me. I don’t know whether to call the police. What should I do? My daughter is frightened. She says she saw a witch in the back of their truck,
“Oh, dear,” Polly Cradle says a few moments later, “I had thought we could avoid this part.”
Joshua Joseph Spork, caught red-handed—or rather red-footed—fully dressed at three p.m. and about to go out of the door of her house, blushes from crown to chin.
“The whole point of that conversation we had was to assure you that—” She peers at him. Her hair hangs a little over her face, but he can see genuine alarm in the portion of it which is visible. Whatever irritation she feels on finding him sneaking out is failing to bite, finding no purchase in her heart. It is already too full with something which is almost worse—a kind of confusion which comes from the contemplation of things which are very strange and very new. Polly Cradle, at this moment, is struggling to understand a world she had thought she knew. Joe Spork, by comparison, is an open book. A moment later, she snaps her fingers and glowers at him.
“Oh, bloody Hell!” she says. “I’m an idiot! You weren’t sneaking out on me, at all. You were sneaking out on Mercer. You were going to do all the things he told you not to.” And to his amazement, the look on her face now is relief. Then she frowns again.
It had not, in fact, occurred to Joe Spork that his vanishing might be attributed to moral cowardice regarding sex. Only five heartbeats ago—and his heart is beating very fast—when he saw Polly Cradle’s lower lip between her (delicious) teeth, did he suddenly consider what hurt she might take from his clandestine departure, and on the heels of this realisation came an urge to repentance and explanation which was still in fullest flood when she short-circuited that part of the argument—he is fairly sure this is about to be an argument—by divining in a flash his true purpose.
“You are a putz,” Polly says. “You are a lemon. Also a blockhead, a dimwit, a dunce, a ninny, a nitwit, and a nincompoop.” She pauses. “Nin-com-poop! You have one of the best lawyers in London looking after you and you propose to ignore him. You have a safe place to be and you want to go into danger. And you propose to do all this and leave me behind?” She punches him, not gently, on the shoulder. “You …” she can’t find the right word “… fool!” It’s considered a mild description, these days, but it comes out of her mouth with real weight, and Joe hangs his head. “Well, never mind. Let’s go.”
“What?”
“You think you need to go there. We shall go. We shall do so wisely, and by that I mean that we shall do it my way.”
“What?”
“Please stop saying ‘what.’ It makes me doubt your intelligence. I am taking you to do whatever it is you think is important. You can explain on the way. When we do it, however, we will do it according to the Polly rules, not the Joe rules, because my rules are sophisticated and practical and yours are very strange and confused. I will make this happen for you, but not at the expense of your freedom or mine. Are we clear?”
“Yes.”
“You are going to sit very low in the back of my car and wear a very large, disgusting hat I bought for a wedding, which has fruit on it, and you are going to wrap yourself in a lace blanket and hunker down so that anyone looking will see a short, fat old besom being driven around by an attractive daughter-in-law.”
“Oh. Right.”
“This is where you say, for the sake of your own interior peace, ‘But why are you helping me?’ ”
“Why are you?”
“Because I am considering investing heavily in J. Joseph Spork stock, and I do not care to have the opportunity taken away. Also, this fidelity to the right thing over the clever thing speaks well of you as a romantic lead. It seems unlikely I will have to detach you from an Estonian fashion student or some similar harpy at any point down our mutual road together, if there should be one. This is a quality which a girl should value over and above common sense, although in doing so she must take on the burden of keeping you alive in the face of your own considerable nincompoopery. Thus. My way, or the highway.”
“Oh. Oh! Your way. Absolutely.”
“Yes. Now wait here. Because I swear if you run away on me, I will hunt you down and do terrible things to you.”
“Oh.”
“And later, Joe, be advised, you are going to do terrible things to me by way of compensation for missing the four fifty-one from Finch Chemicals.”
“Oh, right, yes! Of course.”
Polly Cradle favours him with a brain-melting smile.
“Then we can go.”
From the back of Polly Cradle’s car and disguised like Mr. Toad escaping from the clink, Joe Spork stares at his home.
Quoyle Street is a foreign land, overrun with blue lights and bailiffs’ vans and private security. A lone plain-clothes officer is there to see fair play and supervise the ruckus, and in case the homeowner (known to have shady connections and presently a person of interest in an ongoing murder inquiry) should return and kick up a fuss. Three large fellows are lifting a long-case clock, Alexander of Edinburgh, 1810, and they have left the workings loose, so even as Joe watches the weights roll up inside the case and smash the face through the glass front. He wonders if they have been instructed to be as brutal as possible with his stock. That bit there, in the light: that’s the pendulum, and those are the pieces of a very fine hand-painted dial. Now it’s kindling, and the pendulum could as well be a divining rod. He watches another man carry the Death Clock in a bear hug, more gentle. Typical. The one thing he really wouldn’t mind seeing smashed.
“They’re fitting you up,” Polly Cradle says.
“What?”
“This is a frame. All this mess and confusion. They’re leaving room in the thing for planting evidence later. When they want the truth, they’re tidy.” She glances at him. “Don’t look surprised. I am a Cradle.”
“That clock,” he murmurs, “is two hundred and fifty-nine years old. It has never done anyone any harm.”
“I’m sorry, Joe,” Polly says. A sharp-eyed policeman peers at the car. Polly Cradle ignores him.
“It’s not mine, really. I mean, I own it, but I never meant to keep it.” He shrugs. “I got it to sell on. But it’s … It’s a real thing. You could spend a lifetime just understanding what’s happened in front of it, how it got all those little nicks. I think it went to America and India. I’ve got provenances. That clock saw the rise and fall of the Empire. It outlasted Queen Victoria. My grand-father would have said the stricture of that clock was endurance. Or craftsmanship, maybe.”
“I don’t think they care.”
“No. I suppose they don’t.”
Joe stares through the car window into the broken doorway of his home. He can see things, scattered and strewn on the ground, which are his. He makes a noise he can’t classify, and hopes it sounds like an old lady if anyone’s listening. He fears they may think she’s dying and come to help. One of the bailiffs glances over and snorts. The old dear’s having a blub. Probably coming in to buy back Daddy’s watch.
The car glides on. Ari’s shop is just around the bend.
“Stop here, please,” Joe says.
“Not a good idea.” Polly glances over her shoulder. The policeman is looking away. She wonders if he is talking to someone. He seems very relaxed.
“Please, Polly.”
Ari stands outside his shop, hands clasped behind his head. Joe winds down the window and squeaks at him.
“Young man?”
Ari comes to the car in a series of half steps, then frowns. “Who’s that?”
“Ari, it’s me. Joe.”
“Joseph? You should not be here.”
“Yes. No, I shouldn’t. I know.”
“What is going on?”
“It’s a fix, Ari. I’m being screwed. Feel free to deny me to all comers. Thrice, if necessary.”
Ari sighs: a long-drawn-out noise of self-reproach and appreciation of tragedy. “Well. I should have seen it. I thought it was burglars and I rang you. Then there were the others,
“No. I blame the cat for this. If you’d just let me kill it when I wanted to …”
“That would be a sin against the great ultimate, Joseph, for which I could never forgive myself.”
“The great ultimate likes demon cats but not antiques dealers?”
“It is not known. The universe is ineffable. Ineluctable. Sometimes intolerable.”
Ari smiles gently, forgiven, empathising. Then:
“I am so sorry, Joseph. Truly … I have something for you. They left a bag in the rubbish. My daughter went and fetched it. I tried to stop her, because I was afraid. But now I am glad …” He reaches into his shop and comes back with a pale plastic sack containing some fragments of wood, some cogs, and the broken remnants of two blue ceramic bowls. “It’s not much, and I don’t know what … well, there are pieces of springs and so on here …”
“Thanks, Ari.”
Ari nods again, and turns to go. Then he stops and turns, hesitantly. Joe sees guilt in his eyes, and shame.
“Joseph, I’d consider it a favour, if you wouldn’t speak to me for a while. Until all this is over. I don’t want my shop to burn down. I’m not proud to ask you, but you offered.”