Then he was gone, swallowed up in the great mass of humanity that surged down the canyon-like roadway.
I stood aside for a plump dowager in silver furs, then slipped inside the tea rooms. The din from outside was immediately replaced by reassuringly elegant chatter and the gentle tinkling of a grand piano. Waiters moved swift and silent as eels through the mahogany dimness.
Joshua Reynolds scarcely looked up as he stirred his coffee, ladling sticky wedges of brown sugar into its creamy depths.
‘Morning,’ I said brightly, unwinding my scarf. ‘I didn’t know you made house calls. Or are you here Christmas shopping?’
‘Sit down, Box,’ he muttered, gesturing towards the plump green velvet.
‘I say, public meetings in the Moscow Tea Rooms. Whatever next! Your illustrious predecessor was far fonder of the shadow and the whispered word…’
Reynolds’s fat face snapped upwards, the flesh wobbling slightly like the skin on cocoa.
‘Times have moved on, Box,’ he said, the voice oily and self-satisfied. ‘You’d do well to remember that. We live in a rapidly changing world. Everything’s faster. Motor cars, aeroplanes, even the Prince of Wales.’
This might have been a joke. I didn’t risk a smile. A waiter brought me a polished silver teapot which tinsel-glinted wonderfully in the dark.
‘As it happens,’ said Reynolds at last, ‘the business of the Academy has brought me this side of the Atlantic. A wretched crossing. I shall do my best never to repeat the experience. How do you find it?’
I allowed a pleasant memory of the bell-hop’s bum to surface for the moment. ‘Oh tolerable, tolerable.’
‘Speaking of speed,’ continued Reynolds, returning to his earlier theme, the suggestion of a sneer creeping onto his lips. ‘That chap Flarge, he’s certainly fast. Particularly when getting up the stairs of belfries, eh?’
‘Yes. Very nimble,’ I said dryly.
Unconsciously, my hand drifted to my breast pocket, where Hubbard the Cupboard’s curious hankie was safely stowed. Flarge wouldn’t be getting his mitts on that in a hurry. It might be important or it might be the airiest nothing but it was the only advantage over my rival I currently possessed. I’d hoped to have the thing deciphered and presented like prep to the boss, but the charming Rex had taken up all my spare time.
‘Flarge saved your bacon, by all accounts,’ continued the fat man. ‘Plays a straight game. Best man we have in the show. Clean. Lean. Healthy. Kind of chap the Royal Academy needs more of, eh?’
I took a sip of tea. ‘Is that a roundabout way of saying you need less of chaps like me?’
Reynolds smiled. ‘If you like.’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t like.’
He took a great slurp of his coffee and set the cup down so heavily that it rang off the saucer. ‘Look here, Box. I’ll not pussyfoot around. You’re getting too old for this game. No doubt you once had some flair for it all—’
‘I’m the best,’ I said coolly.
Reynolds harrumphed into his fat-knotted tie. ‘Not being hidebound by friendship or misplaced loyalty, however, I judge only by results.’
He glanced down at some papers on the table before him. Was this it, then? The great cashiering? I looked about, wanting to fix this moment in my mind’s eye, but a big-eared diner’s braying laugh cut through the chatter and I roused myself.
Reynolds mouth turned down, as though someone had stuffed a lemon in it. ‘Frankly, if it were up to me you’d be back on the boat and daubing your way into your dotage by now but it seems you still have some friends in positions of influence.’
‘How reassuring.’
Said friends he dismissed with a casual wave of his flipper-like hand. ‘There’s a job of sorts come up. Nothing too taxing. Just the thing for you to bow out on.’ He smiled and it was like a candle flaring into life behind a Hallowe’en mask.
I sighed. That it should end like this! Trailing a paltry little crook like Hubbard had been demeaning enough. What was this final mission to be? Vetting recruits for evidence of transvestism? Checking the collar studs on King George’s shirt-fronts for miniature arsenical capsules?
‘F.A.U.S.T.,’ said Reynolds at last.
‘The opera?’
‘The organization. Heard of it?’
I brushed biscuit crumbs from my napkin. ‘Can’t say I have.’
‘Out of touch again. Never mind, never mind. F.A.U.S.T. stands for the Fascist Anglo-United States Tribune.’
I laughed. ‘An acronym so tortuous it can only be sinister.’
Reynolds looked down at his file. ‘That is, I suppose, the thinking of our superiors. This lot want to create closer ties between the fascist movements on both sides of the Atlantic, as the name implies. For myself, I’m not too vexed by these johnnies. Broadly right on the Jews, of course, and you must admit Mussolini’s turned Italy round.’
‘Always presupposing that it needed turning,’ I ventured, smiling. ‘Who’s in charge?’
Reynolds shifted in his seat, his rump making the leather parp like the horn of a motor. ‘Fellah called Olympus Mons. Bit of a swaggerer.’
‘Have to be with a name like that. I like him already.’
‘Yankee-born, Balliol-educated. Anglophile. Sees himself as the fascist Messiah. His acolytes call themselves amber-shirts.’
‘You want me to kill him?’
Reynolds’s guffaw almost knocked over his coffee pot. ‘I’m afraid such a task will, in future, be left in safer hands. No, you’re merely to observe his activities. If you’re still capable of doing so.’ He shot me a nasty look. ‘We’ve a lead of sorts. One of Mons’s amber-shirts seems to have grave doubts about his leader. Wants to tell all.’
‘Where do I meet him?’
Reynolds drained the last of his coffee and smacked his lips unpleasantly. ‘This is all we have.’
He tossed over a slip of paper. On it was a neatly typed message: ‘You: Robespierre. Me: Peter Pan. “99”. 8.30’.
Reynolds wiped his hands on the tablecloth. ‘No idea what it means. Just that he’ll find you there. Tonight. I’m afraid you might have to do a little work, Box, and find out for yourself. Think you can manage that?’
With a flick of the wrist, I was dismissed into the bleak December day.
I looked about, hoping to catch sight of my cigar-smoking friend, but sign of him was there none, so I took a cab back to the hotel and sought out my own couch until lunchtime.
Night-time found me motoring up-state dressed as the renowned French Revolutionary. I was grateful the message hadn’t suggested Marat as I wouldn’t have been able to fit the bathtub into the Cadillac. As I barrelled along near-deserted roads fringed by pine trees, their boughs weighed down with snow, gas stations and houses loomed out of the darkness, Christmas decorations glittering around their eaves. I swung left down a drift-covered road, passing a pile of the Lloyd-Wright Californian school jutting from a hillside like a great tithe barn, all glass and dressed stone with an imposing tiled roof.
I pulled up at a red light and let the engine chug. Soft, wet snow coated the bonnet. Tugging at my britches (they kept getting caught up in the gear-stick), I mused over my situation. It hadn’t taken long to establish the meaning of the message from Olympus Mons’s disaffected colleague. A quick word with dear Rex the bellhop (what a useful boy he was) furnished me with all the necessaries and I was now heading towards the mysterious “99” and an encounter, it was to be hoped, with Peter Pan. Odds on that the fellah nursed a grievance against his boss–over lack of advancement, probably–and was now prepared to stick in the knife with gay abandon. With any luck, Mons was involved in some lurid sexual scandal the details of which we at the Royal Academy could store up for future use. Sordid, I know, but it’s a living.
The light changed and I threw the Cadillac into first gear. The wipers thrummed back and forth, smearing the snow into bleary triangles. Ahead, projecting from the flat fields, were half a dozen parabolic buildings, pewt
er-grey and rusty with age. A mesh fence ringed the place, and as I bounced the car along the track, stones spitting up against the wheel rims, a lopsided ‘keep out’ sign became visible.
A bundled-up figure–all scarf and goggles–stomped towards me and knocked on the jalopy window. With some difficulty, I managed to hinge the glass open. Snow whirled inside, settling on the dark leather.
‘Can I help you, bud?’ said the newcomer, through his moth-nibbled muffler.
‘I have a ticket to Rio,’ I said crisply. ‘No baggage.’ Which is what Rex had told me I must say. Frankly, I’ve always found passwords and codes a little tiresome. Say what you mean, is my adage. Unless it’s ‘I love you’, of course.
The insulated man gave an affirmative grunt and dragged the protesting gates open. I slid the Cadillac through.
The aerodrome–for such it was–was a sad sight. Through the falling snow, weeds were visible, erupting through the long-disused potholed landing strips. But though the curved buildings were dark and silent, a streak of livid yellow light blazed from under the huge doors of the main hangar.
There were already thirty or so other cars parked up in front of it, and as I clambered out of the motor I saw Genghis Khan and what could have been the Empress Josephine getting better acquainted in the moonlight. Their faces were masked and I slipped on my own, covering me as far as the bridge of my nose. Settling a periwig onto my head, I walked to the hangar and without further challenge, was let inside.
All was light. A wave of warmth hit me like a brick. By way of introduction, I was greeted by the elongated honk of a trombone and the rasped strains of ‘I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You!’.
Glancing at once to my right, I saw a septet of jazz musicians attacking their syncopated tune with ferocious relish, limbs blurring in a frenzy of polished brass and banjo, oiled hair falling forward and sticking to their sweating foreheads.
A wonderful room had been constructed within the hangar, a kind of cat’s cradle of girders and struts with gantries up a height leading to a series of neat compartments. Great sheets of canvas encompassed the whole like gigantic drapes, surrounding fat sea-shell-shaped easy chairs in exquisitely tooled white leather and a vast glass table.
Dotted about were various items of ephemera: a mirrored cocktail cabinet, a huge map of the world, a small wood and chrome ship’s wheel and a massive Union Flag. It was, do you see, the wreckage of the R-99, the splendid airship that had gone down over Martha’s Vineyard some two years previously, happily without loss of life and without exploding in an inferno of hydrogen as they are wont to do.
The fixtures and fittings were so damnably pretty, so the thinking had gone, that it seemed only right to turn them to good use. Now the “99” was New York’s swellest speakeasy and clearly the place to be seen–albeit in fancy dress.
The somewhat arctic style of the ruined airship was currently offset by the astonishing blaze of colour provided by the costumed guests. Coloured streamers poured from the roof girders, mingling giddily with explosions of taffeta, silk and velvet, got up in every form of uniform, toga and frock. It’s marvellous how stylish duds can transform even the most commonplace person, and perhaps even more marvellous how a simple half-mask of black or white can render the must lumpen of features strangely romantic.
I swept as gracefully as I could through the carousing throng, passing Cleopatras, Abraham Lincolns and a variety of gorgeously frocked queens (of the divorced, beheaded and died variety, you understand), all gyrating wildly to the strains of the jazz band. There was a frenzied air to their enjoyment and the grins visible under the masks had a fixed, rictus quality that was almost alarming. Perhaps I was just feeling jealous of their youth.
I’m always trying to recapture my youth–but he keeps on escaping.
Standing with one bandaged hand on tricoleur-sashed hip, cigarette in the other, I waited until a flunkey in a turban deigned to offer me some pink champagne.
The face of our informant, ‘Peter Pan’, was unknown but I kept my lovely eyes peeled for such a vision, or even his independent shadow shuffling along the skirting boards. All manner of fairies, nymphets and dryads pirouetted before me, the shimmering of cut-glass chandeliers speckling their lithesome young bodies like sunlight through forest leaves–but there was no sign of any denizen of Neverland.
A giddy couple–Adam and Eve by their state of déshabillé–stumbled past me.
‘None of your beeswax!’ cried the girl, slurping her cocktail. ‘It’s just some caper he’s got on and–Oh…hi!’
She laid a friendly hand on my sleeve and giggled. ‘Hey. Have you seen Raphael?’
I blew a languid smoke-cloud through my nose. ‘The Urbino Master?’
‘The guy. You know. Raphael! Hey, Leonard. Butt me, would ya?’
Her companion leant in and popped a slim cigarillo between her lips. I gave her a light from my own. She clasped my hand as she bent down, glancing up at me with saucy eyes.
‘Thanks. Hey, you wanna dance?’
‘Aren’t you looking for Raphael? And what about Adam?’
But the Biblical first-hubbie was engaged in a frantic Charleston with a dime-store Pola Negri in a bad wig. Eve dismissed him with a curt shake of her lovely head.
She was certainly a stunner in her fleshings, a cleverly embroidered fig leaf covering both her breasts and her unmentionables. Had fate not intervened, I might well have asked her to give me a little tour of the Tree of Knowledge, but just then someone knocked into me, sloshing pop onto my silken sleeve and dragging Eve away. Of course, she forgot me at once and disappeared into the throng.
Tutting, I reached into my pantaloons and pulled out my handkerchief.
‘Where’d you get that?’
I glanced up. A small white-blond fellow, togged up as Julius Caesar, was peering at my wipe. Looking down, I realized I’d pulled out Hubbard’s curious relic by mistake.
The noblest Roman jabbed out a fat, hairless hand. ‘May I see?’
There was a curious timbre to his voice, a kind of faintly hysterical edge as though he was fighting to control his emotions. I waited a moment, not sure how to play the situation, then dropped the ragged silk into his palm. His quick eyes–bespectacled beneath the slits of his half-mask–scanned the relic with hungry eagerness. ‘My, my,’ he cooed, blinking lashes pale as straw. ‘It’s very old. Medieval, at a guess. Northern European. Quite a miraculous survival.’
He cleared his throat twice and beamed at me. ‘Where’d you get it?’
I can recognize affected nonchalance when I see it. For the second time, I ignored the question. ‘Do you know what all that writing means?’ I asked.
A faint smile broke the small man’s impassivity. ‘Ah, now.’ Cough-cough. ‘That’s the question.’
I took a sip of champagne. ‘You have some…expertise?’ I ventured.
‘A little, yes,’ he said mildly. ‘Name’s Reiss-Mueller. Professor Reiss-Mueller. I work at the Metropolitan Museum. Down in the bowels. Drop by some time. I can give you my honest opinion on it.’
‘In return for what?’
The little man hooked a finger over his lower lip, like a child contemplating what it might want for Christmas.
Then, suddenly, there was a low brown Yankee voice in my ear. ‘How goes the Revolution?’
It was so close to my flesh and pitched so low that I shivered, then swivelled about on my high-heeled velveteen shoes.
‘Not so bad. Are you a friend of Tinkerbell’s?’ I cried, tucking the handkerchief into my trousers.
Peter Pan was revealed, not the puckish individual I was expecting, but a rather strapping fellow in a challengingly short green tunic and matching tights. A feathered cap looked rather dainty on his expensively cut chestnut hair. Beneath the white half mask, large brown eyes burned intensely.
I turned back to Reiss-Mueller but the little man had melted away into the seething, chattering crowd.
4
I Move In
Bad Company
Returning my full attention to the newcomer, I found myself somewhat distracted by the impressive bulk of his thighs. Clearing my throat embarrassedly, I looked Peter Pan full in the face. He had a rather heroic jaw with that indefinably attractive just-shaved glow, only some rather bad pocking spoiling the otherwise flawless effect of his skin. He gripped my arm and pulled me aside. ‘Sal Volatile’s the name. We gotta talk.’
I took a long drag on my cigarette. ‘So I gather. You have some information to impart?’
‘Uh-huh.’ The brown eyes darted about inside the slitted hollows of the mask. ‘Secrets.’
I smiled my wide smile. ‘Secrets, eh? Well, you’re the boy who never grows old. I beg you to blab.’
His face (or half of it) fell. ‘This is serious.’
‘I’m sure it is. How much do you want?’
His chin suddenly lunged so close to mine that I recoiled. ‘I don’t want money!’ he hissed. ‘Jesus! You think I’d risk it all for…’
He glanced away and I followed his gaze. Anne of Cleves and one of the Abraham Lincolns were busily chopping up lines of cocaine with a razor blade. They sat on opposite sides of the glass table, chatting merrily like children divvying up sherbet. The woman inhaled a vast quantity and then shook herself all over like a dog emerging from a pond. Her eyes grew glassy for an instant and then she giggled uncontrollably, her hand flying to her mouth and a little dribble of colourless mucus forming on her upper lip.
‘Do you believe in Evil, Mr Box?’ said my companion, grinding his jaw and looking at the couple with unfeigned contempt.
‘Only on Wednesdays.’
The jest was not appreciated. ‘Evil, sir. Old as the Earth. Seductive as a lover’s promise. Patient, watchful Evil…’
‘If you’re referring to the narcotics, my boy, then I consider there are greater perils threatening the globe just now.’
‘How right you are.’
I sighed. ‘Look here, Mr Volatile. I dislike riddles. Has all this cryptic blether got anything to do with F.A.U.S.T.?’