Jago (79 page)

‘No, but we can make an effort to be unpredictable.’

‘You’re hoping for a small boat we can, ah…’

‘Requisition? Not necessarily. What do you weigh?’

Orlando didn’t know. His only scale was a wonky jeweller’s cast-off.

‘About nine stone, I’d think. And I’m fourteen. Together, we’re not too heavy.’

‘I’m not going in the river.’

Lytton shuddered. ‘No fear of that.’

Nearby was a pier, gated and locked at this hour. Lytton took out an impressive Swiss Army implement and unfolded a blade. He started working on the hinges of the tall gates.

‘What’s behind those that you want?’

‘Nothing,’ Lytton said. ‘I want the gates themselves.’

* * *

The makeshift raft drifted out onto the river, dubious liquids sloshing over the edges. Orlando’s tummy was distinctly roiling, from the stench as much as the movement. God didn’t mean for him to live on water, which is why He had built many fine bridges over His favoured river. It took nervous minutes to get beyond the clogged banks, but when the current caught them, the board whirled out, not towards the opposite bank but along the Thames, seaward. They had a couple of planks for oars, but Lytton wouldn’t let Orlando use them yet. They lay quiet on the raft as it passed under the Chelsea Bridge. The knot of fellows up above were harassing early foot-commuters like licensed footpads.

‘Someone on the river,’ shouted a voice.

Lytton mouthed a swear word.

Orlando cringed and reconsidered his aversion to sliding off the raft and into the water. The worst of the filth was along the banks, not in mid-stream.

‘You there, halt,’ said a bobby. ‘In the name of the law.’

‘Bugger that,’ said a rougher voice.

There was a blast and a plop. It wasn’t a warning shot, but inaccurate marksmanship. The next rifle-shot blew a spouting hole in the raft.

Lytton was on one knee, pistol up, sighting carefully. He judged their sluggish drift and the upward angle, probably the wind.

He fired twice.

The policeman’s helmet flew off and the rifleman’s shoulder came bloodily apart.

A fusillade, mostly cobbles but with a few wild shots mixed in, came down on the river, raining into the water where the raft had been. Orlando paddled furiously now, wrestling with the board as the river tried to take it away from him.

The bridge receded into the fog. There was a glint, off the glass of a scope. Lytton fired at it, and someone whirled away from a broken implement.

‘There’ll be another krewe on Vauxhall Bridge,’ Lytton said. ‘We’ve got to make it to the other side.’

‘You could help by paddling. I’m just tiddling us round in a circle.’

Lytton holstered his pistol, and took up a plank.

A flare rose from the bridge, spurting through the fog, and exploded like a Guy Fawkes rocket. Orlando wondered how many eyes were up for the signal.

Paddling faster, they could see the other embankment now.

‘Where are we?’ Lytton asked.

‘Pimlico,’ Orlando said, heart sinking. ‘Not a good place to strike land.’

The raft nudged shingles, scraped through another drift of muck, and fetched up somewhere under the Grosvenor Road.

Orlando was pleased to get his shaky knees onto dry land, even here.

‘Come on,’ Lytton said, hauling him upright, ‘hurry along.’

Orlando allowed himself to be dragged into the worst borough in London for the likes of him.

* * *

They passed under a lamp-post. Reeking feet knocked Orlando’s hat off. He scrambled around on the cobbles for it.

‘What’s that?’ Lytton asked.

They looked up. The corpse had been dangling for a few weeks and the deader’s face probably hadn’t been much in the first place. A neatly printed sign was pinned to the chest, in the style of a special offer in a greengrocer’s window. ‘Sturdy Beggar’. The hanged man’s coat pockets were stuffed with rolled-up copies of
The Big Issue.

‘Neighbourhood Watch,’ spat Orlando. ‘It’s the borough’s Short Sharp Shock policy.’

They hurried on, away from the ghastly reminder.

Pimlico, in loose alliance with Westminster and Lambeth, was a law unto itself. The Lord Mayor Elect was holding talks with the councillors of these districts, to bring them back into the Assembly. Orlando thought the tinpot dictators, imposing their ‘emergency regulations’ years after the emergency, would not easily give up power.

Now, with what he knew, that was all open for argument.

‘You two there,’ said someone. ‘Passports, please.’

A patrol emerged around them, like an ambush. Soldier suits and deckchair attendant hats, flintlock side-arms and butcher-knives.

Even if Orlando still had his papers, none of them would be of any use. He’d never been sent down for anything serious, but Pimlico operated Zero Tolerance. A few parking tickets or a drunk and disorderly earned a stripe from the cat. With Orlando’s sheet, he was due for a hoist up the nearest lamp-post.

Lytton made no move to produce any document.

‘Passports,’ repeated the Watchman, a short, balding, brush-moustached bank manager-type. None of his fellows were especially hard, but they had the numbers. One was a tubby woman, with Diana hair and white robes. She carried a clockwork-powered prod, crackling with blue electricity. Flounces of multicoloured ribbon were pinned to their breasts with badges that emblazoned their post-codes.

‘They won’t have any,’ said a taller man, with a deeper voice.

He didn’t have NW insignia, and wore no council ribbons. He reminded Orlando of the conductor-in-chief, but where Yellow-Eye’s face had been hard but bland this man was black-browed and hollow-cheeked, a skull coated with papier mache. His eyes were like bullet-holes.

‘Good morning, James,’ the new man said to Lytton.

Orlando realised Lytton was tense, hand close to his pistol.

‘Hello, Stryng,’ he said.

‘I didn’t realise we were scouting for you,’ said Stryng. He had a slightly recessive r, which should have sounded silly but didn’t. ‘I’d have demanded a bigger purse if I’d known there was challenge involved. They only told me about your crookback pet.’

‘Really, there are procedures,’ said the NW jobsworth.

‘Shut up, little man,’ said Stryng. The petty Watchman swallowed it, but went red. His mates muttered at the breach of discipline. The Dianahead raised her prod like a magic wand.

‘This is Captain James Lytton,’ said Stryng. ‘My old c.o. at the Siege of Manchester. He got a Victoria Cross. And I got a dishonourable. You wouldn’t credit how close things came to being the other way round.’

‘Lieutenant Rutland Stryng,’ said Lytton. ‘You were lucky to get off with a dishonourable discharge.’

‘You voted for the blindfold, didn’t you? Well, we all make mistakes’

Stryng drew a serious pistol, a Webley. Lytton let him, which surprised Orlando. Stryng didn’t fire, as Lytton must have known.

‘I’m disappointed,’ said Stryng. ‘It seems your reputation for sharp reflexes is exaggerated. When it comes down to it, you’re a snail-fingered slowcoach.’

Lytton tapped his left hip, drawing Stryng’s attention, and slapped away Stryng’s gun-barrel with his right hand, twisting the pistol out of the Lieutenant’s grip and tossing it into the street. Then, he drew his own pistol and pointed it at Stryng’s surprised face.

Stryng whistled, unevenly. A drip of sweat ran from under his feather-brimmed hat and into his eye.

‘So, you are swift. Pity it isn’t loaded.’

‘Yes,’ said Lytton. ‘Isn’t it?’

Counting, Orlando realised the Captain had shot his six and not reloaded. Always a mistake to go about without spare ammo.

He smashed Stryng across the side of the head with the heavy barrel, raising a red welt.

‘Run,’ he shouted.

Stryng tried to grab Lytton’s shoulders but the Captain heaved him off, throwing him against the NW krewe. Stryng landed on the plump Dianahead, who charged her shock prod full into his arse. He yelled as blue light arced all around.

Orlando didn’t need to be told twice.

He was running. And Lytton was catching up fast.

* * *

They were in Greencoat Place, coming up to the kink of Greycoat Place, into Artillery Row and Victoria Street. Even in dire panic, with street-signs obscured by fog, Orlando knew that much. St James’s Park wasn’t far off, and the Mall.

Though he’d never been inside the building, he knew the Diogenes Club. It was an unobtrusive establishment, with the most modest of brass plates. Orlando had exaggerated a smidge when he told Lytton he had run ops for the Club during the Civil War. In those troubled times, there had been opportunities, and he’d found agents of the Diogenes Club by far the best people to pass on any information that came his way. They paid better than the police or parliament, and could protect you from the likes of Truro Daine or the Traffic Wardens. At least, that had once been the case. Now that the Lord Mayor Elect and the Prime Minister agreed the faithful dogs had had their day, Orlando didn’t know what to expect.

Since their tangle with the Pimlico Watch and Rutland Stryng, Lytton had said nothing. Orlando wondered if he was professionally shamed to have fired his gun empty. Obviously, there was unsettled business between the Captain and the former Lieutenant. Orlando didn’t understand the honour of the service thing, but then again he had ducked conscription through his feet and a week’s soap diet.

It was mid-morning. Hardy Londoners were on the streets around Victoria Station, swarming to Whitehall and Westminster. They wore fog-breather faceplates with dangling elephant’s trunk filters, topped offwith bowler hats. Everyone had a furled umbrella, most containing flick-blades as insurance against road agents or persistent spare change extortionists. Unmasked, Orlando and Lytton stood out among civil servants and office workers.

They crossed Victoria Road and made their way to St James’s Park through back-streets. The fog was less thick in the park, but chill mist rose from the duck-pond. It was a foolhardy soul indeed who stepped off Birdcage Walk and walked on the grass. The grounds had controversially been declared sacred to Diana by Geodfroy Arachnid, and his sect sent patrols out to keep the paths virginally untrodden, though word from the Palace was that the sanctification of the Martyr Princess was highly unofficial. Frequent punch-ups took place between the Household Guard and the Dianaheads, skirmishing over rotting floral tributes left at the Palace gates, which the Guards liked to dump in the pond.

‘We’ll use the bridge,’ said Lytton.

They could see it, rising over the pond. A favoured duck-feeding spot, it was festooned with wreaths in the shape of landmines and tank traps. Orlando wouldn’t have been surprised to learn they were genuinely booby-trapped.

‘Whatever you say, Captain.’

They strolled to the bridge. As usual, Orlando felt itchy with grass and dirt under his shoes. It was too much like being cast out of the city, crawling into the sticks where the cat-eaters and the sheep-worriers ruled. When the Countryside Alliance had tried to besiege the capital, he’d seen the shotgun-toting yokels at their worst, staging fox-hunts through the streets of New Malden, setting their hounds on London folk, destroying food stores by sending in diseased ferrets. The Lord Mayor Elect-to-be had rallied disparate Watches and Guards to see off the yokels, halting the green tide at Traps Lane, throwing back at the CA their own slogan, ‘get orff moi laand!’ For that alone, he would have had Orlando’s vote—if Orlando had wanted to volunteer an address and register on the rolls, which as it happens wasn’t convenient.

The humpbacked bridge was hung with Diana-face tributes. Hundreds of identical smiles and sparkle-eyes. Lytton eased a triffid-sized arrangement of white chrysanthemums out of the way and set foot on the bridge. He crossed over, and Orlando followed, uncomfortable. It was as if all the dead eyes were on him. He often profaned the Sacred Name with oaths like ‘Di’s diminishing braincells!’, ‘Diana’s spew!’ and ‘Di’s diet!’ As the star of
The Sinful Milkman,
a one-reel flicker produced for private audiences, he had upset an ingenue by ad-libbing the immortal line, ‘you be Princess Di, and I’ll be the Naughty French Coroner’. Now, superstitious terror gripped him. The Princess was reputed to be a vengeful soul, unforgiving of her most casual enemies.

He made it off the bridge, and heaved a sigh.

‘That wasn’t so hard.’

A flock of ducks swarmed off the waters of the pond and surged at their ankles, stabbing with bills, quacking in fury. They were used to fare more substantial than bread-shreds, and all had mad Diana eyes.

Orlando and Lytton ran away, hardly heroes.

* * *

The windows of the Diogenes Club were boarded. No one stood guard at the front door. Orlando was afraid they’d come too late, and the Club was abandoned, its members packed off to the provinces. Clearly, the institution’s many enemies were in the ascendant.

Lytton opened the door and stepped inside. Orlando followed. The lobby was deserted, a strew of old periodicals over the scuffed marble floor. Light patches stood out on dark walls where portraits had hung. A half-disassembled field-gun gathered dust in the corner, under a torn Mayoral election poster.

Orlando found a bell-pull, which he yanked. A distant tinkle sounded, the giggle of an idiot angel. Scouting this level, he found only locked doors. Ahead stood the main stairs. The secret business of the Diogenes Club was conducted on the upper floors; off the lobby were only the chambers that most resembled an old-fashioned gentleman’s club.

‘Come on, I know the way.’

Lytton mounted the stairs. Orlando was getting used to the Captain’s way of moving. Apparently casual and at ease, but always with an underlying tension, alert to potential threat.

The first-floor landing was heavily carpeted. White corpse outlines marred the red plush, and darker patches suggested they weren’t just a ghoulish decoration. There had been fighting here, during one of the attempted coups.

‘Who’s there?’ came a voice. ‘Who’s there, blast you!’