Double or Die

  ‘Seven hundred,’ said Abbadabba without even stopping to think.

  ‘Kid,’ said Dutch, ‘I like you. How’d you like to come and work for me?’

  ‘Leave it,’ said Abbadabba.

  James was in a daze. Everyone around the table was clapping him on the back and congratulating him, and the croupier was raking over a big pile of chips with a sour look.

  ‘Now,’ said Dutch, rubbing his hands together, ‘we’re gonna go again. With a winning streak like this you can’t just stop.’

  ‘You’ve made your money back,’ said James. ‘Can’t I go now?’

  ‘You ain’t going nowhere, kid,’ said Dutch and at that moment James felt hands take hold of him by either elbow and he was pulled backwards.

  ‘He’s coming with us,’ said a voice he recognised. It was Ludwig Smith, with Deighton the butler and another security guard.

  They began to manhandle James through the crowd.

  ‘Hey, kid,’ Dutch yelled after him, ‘where should I send your money?’

  ‘Just send it to the Eton Mission,’ said Ludwig with a nasty laugh. ‘They can use it to pay for his funeral.’

  18

  What’s Your Poison?

  ‘You’ve been bad news right from the off, haven’t you, Oliver, or Bryce? Or whatever you’re called. What’s your real name, I wonder?’ ‘

  Rumpelstiltskin,’ said James, but nobody laughed.

  He was in a room high above the casino floor. It must originally have been the factory manager’s office. There were big square windows all along one wall looking out over the cavernous space below, so that the boss could look down on his workers and keep an eye on them.

  It was decorated like any other rich man’s office. There were boring landscape paintings on the walls, a telephone, brass lamps with green shades, shelves of books and files. The only odd note was a weird machine standing near the door. It consisted of a device like a typewriter connected to a metal frame filled with a complicated jumble of cogs, levers and gearwheels.

  Sir John Charnage was sitting behind a big leather-topped desk. He was leaning forward, resting his chin in his hands. A cigarette smouldered in an ashtray next to a tumbler of whisky.

  He was flanked by Wolfgang and Ludwig Smith, who were standing at each shoulder. Deighton had left them to it and returned to his duties downstairs, but sitting in the shadows at the back of the room was a woman. With the desk lamp shining in his eyes James couldn’t see her properly. She was sitting very still and very quiet and her unexplained presence unnerved him.

  ‘It’s no matter,’ said Charnage. ‘We don’t really need your name, old pal, because we’ve got you, haven’t we, eh? And by the time we’ve finished with you, you won’t need your name either. Except perhaps for your headstone. What do you think your epitaph should be? How about, “Here lies a boy who couldn’t keep his nose out of other people’s business”?’

  James was determined not to let Charnage know just how scared he was.

  ‘I prefer, “Here lies a man who lived to be a hundred and three”,’ he said.

  Charnage chuckled and took a sip of whisky.

  ‘How can you laugh, after what he done to your car?’ said Ludwig.

  ‘We’ve got him now, Ludo,’ said Charnage casually, picking up his cigarette and taking a long drag. ‘So everything’s all right with the world, isn’t it?’ He let out a thin stream of smoke from between his lips. ‘The only question is, now that we’ve got him, what are we going to do with the little pest?’

  ‘Leave him to me,’ mumbled Wolfgang, through broken teeth, and he came out from behind the desk and advanced on James. ‘I’ll sort him out.’

  ‘I wouldn’t get too close to him if I were you, Wolfgang,’ drawled Charnage. ‘Every other time you’ve met, you’ve lost part of your anatomy.’ He laughed again and Wolfgang gave him a dirty look.

  If anything, the look that Ludwig gave him was even dirtier.

  ‘Shut your mouth,’ he snapped. ‘Don’t you laugh at my brother.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so pompous,’ said Charnage. ‘And don’t forget who you’re working for.’

  ‘That still doesn’t give you the right to laugh at Wolfgang,’ said Ludwig.

  ‘You must admit it is rather funny, though,’ said Charnage. ‘He’s falling apart. First his ear, then his teeth. What next, I wonder? A kidney? His left leg? He’s already hobbling about like a man who’s trodden on a landmine.’

  ‘There won’t be a next time,’ snarled Ludwig. ‘Me and Wolfgang are going to string the brat up by his guts.’

  ‘I appreciate your enthusiasm, Ludwig,’ said Charnage. ‘But we mustn’t rush into things. We need to think carefully about this. We’re not quite ready to move yet, and I don’t want the police on my back before we are.’

  ‘We can bury the body where no one will ever find it,’ said Ludwig.

  ‘I’m sure you can,’ said Charnage. ‘But it may be better if someone did find it.’

  ‘How can that be better?’

  ‘Because if they find him, Ludwig, they won’t be looking for him, will they? Think about it. A young lad, discovered dead as the result of an unfortunate accident. Nobody’s fault but his own. End of story.’

  Charnage looked at James and smiled. The smile then changed to a theatrical expression of mock concern. ‘Oh, how rude of me,’ he said. ‘I haven’t offered you a drink. What would you like? I have whisky, brandy, gin… Russian vodka.’

  ‘No, thank you,’ said James.

  ‘Oh, come along,’ said Charnage, with a syrupy smile. ‘You’re among friends here. I won’t tell anyone you’ve been touching the demon drink.’

  ‘I won’t drink anything you give me,’ said James.

  ‘Why ever not?’ said Charnage. ‘Oh, I know. You saw my little collection at home. You’re worried I might slip you some poison.’ He took a sip of his drink and licked his lips. ‘Did you know,’ he said, ‘that in Renaissance Italy, that murderous, scheming family of cut-throats, the Borgias, were so in love with poison that they laid down rare bottles of the stuff in their cellars, just as if they were bottles of vintage wine? And one of the Borgias was the Pope!’ He laughed at this and took another sip from his glass. ‘I’ve always been an admirer of the Borgias,’ he said, ‘and have made something of a study of poison. Do you know how many different types of poisonous creature there are in our oceans for instance?’

  ‘No,’ said James. ‘It’s not something I ever think about.’

  ‘Have a guess,’ said Charnage.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said James. ‘A hundred?’

  ‘Twelve hundred,’ said Charnage. ‘And that’s just in the sea. On top of that we’ve got four hundred types of poisonous snake, two hundred spiders, seventy-five scorpions, sixty ticks… I could go on, but in short, it’s a poisonous world out there. In fact everything is poisonous, if you swallow enough of it. Most medicines, after all, are simply poisons given in tiny doses. Too large a dose, and, instead of curing you, it’ll kill you. Even water’s poisonous. If you drink too much, your blood becomes so thin it’s not really blood any more, and you drop dead of hyponatremia. So what I’m saying is that I don’t need some fancy poison to polish you off, old pal. I don’t need to dose your drink with arsenic while your back’s turned, or hide a cyanide capsule inside my ring, or give you a secret shot of curare. All very colourful, I’m sure, but wholly unnecessary. What I have in mind is to kill you with an everyday substance, so that nobody is at all suspicious.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ said Ludwig and he sniggered.

  Charnage drained his glass, which he instantly refilled, then he stood up and went over to a cabinet, which he opened, revealing a gleaming array of bottles.

  ‘You and I are going to have a nice little drink,’ he said. ‘So, come along – what’s your poison?’

  Again Ludwig sniggered.

  ‘I won’t drink,’ said James stubbornly.

  ‘You will,’ said Charnage. ‘
One way or another. Now, I think good old British gin. Let’s be patriotic, eh? Let’s drink to merry old England. Rule Britannia and all that rot. Let’s drink to the British Empire. Let’s drink to good old King George who sent millions of young men off to die in the war.’

  ‘I won’t drink,’ James repeated.

  ‘I really don’t blame you,’ said Charnage, filling a large tumbler almost to the brim with gin. ‘Alcohol is a positively lethal substance. Rots the liver, rots the guts, rots the brain, poisons the blood and clogs your arteries with fat. It turns a sane man mad and a clever man into a fool. I wonder why it is that most of man’s greatest pleasures are things that kill him,’ he added. ‘Perhaps it’s evidence of God’s sense of humour. Now, then… Who wants to be mother?’

  He passed the glass to Ludwig and sat down on one corner of his desk.

  Ludwig walked over to James and held the gin in front of his face. James smelt flowers and lemons and cleaning fluid, and the alcohol caught in the back of his throat.

  ‘You going to take it?’ asked Ludwig. ‘Or am I going to have to make you?’

  James defiantly took the glass. The gin looked so clear and so harmless, if it wasn’t for the smell it could have been water.

  Charnage raised his whisky. ‘Chin-chin,’ he said. ‘What ho! Down the hatch!’

  James hurled his glass with all his strength straight at his head. Charnage casually ducked out of its way and the tumbler smashed harmlessly against the wall behind him. The gin had gone everywhere and its stink filled the room.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ said Charnage, mopping at his desk with a silk handkerchief. ‘The party just got boring.’

  He opened a drawer and took out a pair of handcuffs.

  ‘Use these,’ he said, tossing them to Ludwig.

  Ludwig caught them cleanly, but, while he was distracted, James leapt out of his chair and charged at him, slamming him back against the wall and winding him. Charnage grabbed James from behind and wrestled him back towards the chair, twisting his arms up behind his back. James lashed out with his heels, stabbing at his shins. Charnage cursed as James stamped down hard on his instep and he stumbled. He didn’t let go, however, and jerked James’s arms higher up his back.

  Ludwig returned to the fight and got James in a headlock, but Wolfgang was keeping his distance.

  It was quite a struggle; James didn’t let up for a second. The men were stronger than him, though, and at last they got him sat down with his hands fastened to the chair behind him.

  James saw with some satisfaction that Ludwig had a bloody nose and Charnage was limping worse than before. He hadn’t held out any real hope of escaping and had simply wanted the satisfaction of not going down without a fight. The brief explosion of violence had also calmed his nerves, cleared his mind and released some of his anger.

  ‘Right,’ said Charnage, pouring more gin into a fresh tumbler. ‘Let’s try again, shall we?’

  Without warning, Ludwig viciously pulled James’s head back and clamped his nostrils shut so that he had no option but to part his lips or suffocate. Quickly Charnage tipped the gin into his open mouth, and James had to swallow or choke.

  The gin was bitter and burnt his throat all the way down to his stomach, where it sat like a cold lump. Ludwig let him go and Charnage went over to the desk to refill the tumbler.

  James sat there coughing and spluttering and dribbling gin and saliva on to the carpet. He groaned. His body was already telling him that something was wrong. The stuff in his guts was bad and should be got rid of. But before he could do anything about it, Charnage jerked his head back again and emptied another glass of gin into his mouth. His throat tried to close up and he managed to spit half of the liquid out, but the other half went down.

  ‘What I’m interested in,’ said Charnage, staring into James’s face and still holding his hair, ‘is what exactly you hoped to achieve with your schoolboy heroics?’

  ‘Find Fairburn,’ James gasped. ‘Free him, and stop you from doing whatever it is you’re doing.’

  ‘ “Stop me from doing whatever it is I am doing”?’ sneered Charnage, with heavy sarcasm in his voice. ‘It’s all rather vague, isn’t it, old pal?’ He picked up his own drink and gazed at James over the rim of his glass. There was a look of cruel amusement in his sleepy eyes. ‘You don’t really have a clue, do you?’ he said, sitting down.

  James was already feeling the effects of the alcohol. Everything looked woozy and distant. Part of him wanted to keep his mouth shut and say nothing, another part felt reckless and light-headed.

  As ever the reckless side won.

  ‘I know you’re building a machine,’ he said, his voice slurred.

  Charnage sat back in his seat and raised his eyebrows in mild surprise.

  ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘A machine that thinks like a person,’ said James, ‘only a thousand times faster.’

  Charnage frowned and glanced back towards the woman who still sat motionless in the shadows.

  James pointed to the machine near the door. ‘Is that it, there?’ he said.

  ‘That thing?’ Charnage laughed. ‘That’s just a toy.’

  ‘You were working with Peterson, weren’t you?’ said James. ‘I expect he built that one for you, didn’t he? Maybe it’s a prototype for the larger machine, I don’t know.’

  ‘Of course you don’t know,’ said Charnage wearily. ‘You don’t know anything, you’re just a silly boy clutching at straws.’

  ‘Peterson started work on the larger machine,’ said James, ‘but he couldn’t do it by himself. You needed Fairburn, but he wouldn’t help you, would he? Because he knew who you were making the machine for. He knew that you had done a deal with the devil.’

  For the first time Charnage looked like he was taking this seriously.

  ‘Who told you that?’ he said.

  ‘So you believe me now?’ said James. ‘It’s sinking in that I do know what you’re up to.’

  ‘Who am I working for?’ said Charnage coldly.

  James said nothing.

  The truth was that he had no idea. Three of Fairburn’s clues remained unsolved.

  Charnage nodded to Ludwig who stepped forward and forced more gin into James’s mouth.

  He gagged, his throat desperately trying to block the poison. The gin bubbled and gurgled and some went down the wrong way into his lungs and spread fire through his chest.

  Before James could recover, Ludwig tipped more in and his stomach gave a lurch. He retched and a gob of acid was released into the back of his mouth. He swallowed hard and retched again.

  ‘It’s deadly stuff,’ said Charnage. ‘It’s no wonder the do-gooders got it banned in America. But you can’t ban what men desire. The chief result of Prohibition was that criminal gangs sprang up everywhere, ready to supply the badly needed illegal liquor. I believe you met one of these American hoodlums downstairs, the charming Mister Schultz, beer baron of New York. He doesn’t look much, does he? But this year I believe he made fourteen million dollars and killed God knows how many of his countrymen. What more do you know, boy?’

  Charnage’s voice sounded hollow and echoing. It hurt James’s ears. A throb had started behind his eyes as if someone was hammering inside his skull, trying to smash their way out.

  He looked around. The colours in the room were muddy and dull. Everything was reduced to sickly yellows and browns. He tried to latch on to something, but his vision couldn’t get a grip and kept sliding. Finally his eyes came to rest on the woman.

  The desk lamp must have shifted position, because he could see her clearly for the first time. She was dressed in a drab khaki outfit that clung tightly to her stocky frame. Her short hair was grey. She had a wide flat face that looked hard, as if it had been carved out of stone. If it wasn’t for her eyes she would have looked like any middle-aged woman who had lived a tough outdoors sort of a life. The kind of woman you saw on market stalls, or working in the fields. But her eyes were frightening. They were b
lack and unspeakably ancient. They looked like they had seen everything and that nothing could ever surprise them. James knew that it would be pointless to appeal to these eyes for help.

  The room began to spin, greasy and dizzying, as if James had been too long on a roundabout and made himself giddy. He closed his eyes and it was worse; he couldn’t tell which way was up or down and felt horribly out of control.

  ‘What more do you know, boy?’ Charnage repeated. ‘Who am I working for?’

  Thoughts were sloshing about inside James’s head like the evil liquid that filled his guts. They were confused and random, but a stray one kept fighting its way to the surface…

  The tramp, Theo, had said something that had made a tiny connection in James’s brain, so small he hadn’t noticed it at the time, but that connection had made other connections. Bits and pieces of information were coming together in the churning soup of his drunken mind.

  It was something about Karl Marx.

  What had Theo said?

  That Marx was buried in Highgate cemetery. Yes. But there was something else, a phrase he had used.

  He was the man who turned the Russian bear red.

  Russia was always represented as a bear, like the British bulldog or the American eagle.

  And red was the colour of communism.

  James remembered joking with Perry in the taxi outside the cemetery, that they were looking for a red bear sailing a boat.

  Rouge Callisto. The red bear. Was that what Fairburn had been trying to tell them in his clue?

  And Alexis Fairburn had been born Alexei Fyodorov.

  James lifted his head and looked straight at Charnage, trying to get his eyes to focus.

  ‘You’re working for the Russians,’ he said.

  Charnage stood stock still, staring at James. The room had gone very quiet. It was as if time had stopped.

  The spell was broken by the woman, sitting so silently at the back of the office. Now, for the first time she spoke. One word.