The Clown Service (23 page)

‘What’s wrong with my dress-sense?’

‘We were discussing your sense of self-doubt.’

‘Fuck that! I want to know what your problem is with my suit.’

‘Nothing at all. I’m sure it was excellent value and it’s lovely that you like to donate to charity.’

‘It wasn’t second-hand!’

‘Oh, I was wondering why such a thing would have been bought twice. A catalogue then?’

‘This from the woman who looks like a cake stand in a self-indulgent French patisserie.’

‘Good enough to eat, certainly. Now, have we stopped fretting about ourselves quite so much? I’m not terribly good at counselling.’

I smiled at her and shook my head. ‘Terrible woman. God knows how your brother stands it.’

‘I am his rock.’ She stubbed her cigarette out on the damp wood of the windowsill, improving the look of it considerably.

My phone rang and with it came the sudden realisation that I had forgotten something …
someone
.

‘Derek?’

‘Charles. Look, I’m in a bit of a panic. Has that girl come back to you? She said she was a friend of yours and Leslie’s. Only … it’s my fault. I’ve been so caught up in what I was doing. You know what it’s like: the repairs were a nightmare and I lost track of time and—’

‘Derek, calm down and tell me what’s happened.’

‘She was upstairs, just looking around. I wasn’t really worried. I just … well, I kind of forgot about her.’

That made me angry because I had forgotten her too, being so caught up in everything else.

‘I just finished,’ he continued, ‘and realised I hadn’t heard her for a while so I went to look and … well, there’s no sign of her. She’s nowhere in the building. I thought she might have come back to you?’

‘She’s not here.’

‘Oh God … you don’t think … like with Leslie …?’

‘It’s my problem, not yours. Just get out of there for now and I’ll meet you tomorrow morning. Can you do that?’

‘Of course, but I should look for her, she must still be …’

‘Listen, Derek, I need you just to get out of there. OK?’ I wasn’t about to risk the same thing happening to him. ‘I’ll meet you first thing, say six o’clock, outside the cafe where we saw you today. I’ll handle this.’ I hung up on him. I could explain properly the next day and the more back-up I had the better. In my panic at the moment August disappeared, I had insisted Derek get his machine functioning again. As time had passed I now realised it had been unnecessary: August hadn’t vanished into another time; he’d been snatched by a man who was very much a problem in the present. Both Derek and Tamar had been placed in a vulnerable position for nothing. I really needed to focus before I risked the safety of anyone else.

‘It’s Tamar,’ I said to April, the words uncomfortable in my mouth. ‘She’s vanished too.’

I tried to call Tamar but there was no answer. I hadn’t expected there to be, but I would have been an idiot not to try.

We had now lost two of our people. I tried not to let that trigger The Fear. Objectively the mission hadn’t changed. I would get both of them back. Hopefully.

April and I took our leave of the office. She agreed to use her connections to get things moving here in case I failed – a possibility I had to accept. If our plan to find Krishnin and sabotage the signal didn’t work, then there needed to be back-up, someone to prepare people for what was coming.

I went back to my flat to eat and sleep, to recharge my batteries.

I even called my father, God knows why. Perhaps because I felt I needed even more of an emotional kicking. The call went straight through to his answer phone. I couldn’t be bothered to leave a message.

I spent the night on the sofa. Turning everything over in my head, trying to find some sense. Maybe even a logical answer to everything, something that would prove that all of this was just delusional, that there was a sane explanation.

I gave up at about three in the morning. Sometimes you just have to look the crazy in the eyes and get on with it.

I showered and changed then left the apartment at about five.

By the time I made it to Tower Bridge, the sun was coming up over the water. I took a moment to stop and stare. Just to soak a little of it up. After all, I might not get the chance again.

I had opened the app on my phone on the way over, listening to that repetitive voice for a few minutes before shutting it off again. To hell with countdowns; they didn’t help. I had about thirty-six hours to deal with Krishnin. Either I would manage it or I wouldn’t. Time had little to do with it. I could only hope it might be enough for April to do something constructive if I failed. Though
what
I couldn’t begin to guess. What could anyone do? Put an armed guard on every graveyard in the country?

I pushed the thought away. For now that was her problem. My job was to make sure nothing like that would be necessary.

I walked down to the waterfront and along the river, allowing the time to make myself as calm as possible. I should have been exhausted from the lack of sleep, but I was still wired. If I was lucky enough to get through what lay ahead, I would no doubt come crashing down. For now, it was all I could do to swallow the nervous energy and hope to use it constructively.

Jamie was seated on a bench on the promenade, Derek pacing nervously up and down next to him.

‘I’m finally getting to meet all the gang,’ said Jamie as I joined them, his voice slightly slurred. ‘Thanks for that. Maybe we can even have a Christmas party this year. Providing we’re not all horribly dead.’

He took a long draught from a takeaway coffee mug and smiled blearily at me.

Derek pulled me to one side. ‘I don’t mean to worry you,’ he said, in that way people have when they mean to do exactly that, ‘but the lad is
steamed
. I mean, utterly off his head. Whatever’s in that cup, it isn’t a bloody latte.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘it’s all part of the plan.’

‘Alasdair wouldn’t come,’ said Jamie, taking another drink. ‘I did try to convince him he ought to, seeing as I might never come back, but he didn’t come in from clubbing until two hours ago and he fell asleep in the bath. He thinks he’s making a statement. As far as I can tell the statement is: “I can’t handle how amazing my boyfriend is, so I fall asleep in bathtubs”.’

‘He worries for you,’ I said.

‘How sweet. I’ll tell him you said that once I’ve got home and prized the loofah off his cheek.’

‘Are we ready?’

‘What do you think?’ He took another drink.

‘I’d say so.’ I turned to Derek. ‘OK, is your van nearby?’

‘Just around the corner.’

‘We need to go there.’

I helped Jamie walk the short distance, trying not to panic about the fact that he seemed to find paving stones both hilariously funny and impossibly hard to walk on.

‘I’ll have to shift it soon,’ Derek said once we’d arrived. ‘I don’t want to get a ticket.’

‘That should be fine. Jamie …’ I shook him, trying to get his attention, ‘does it matter if Derek moves our bodies?’

‘Nah,’ he shook his head, ‘we’ll always come back to them. If we can.’

That was as good as I could hope for under the current circumstances. I tried to explain to Derek what it was we were about to do. Needless to say he took some convincing, but his panic over Shining and Tamar had made him was willing to just do as he was told.

‘I need you to keep our bodies safe,’ I said. ‘That’s your job, OK? We’re going to lie down in the back of the van and then we’ll be out of it, dead to the world.’

‘Not the best choice of words,’ said Jamie, trying to open the van’s back door.

‘You need to make sure the bodies aren’t interfered with –’ I continued, slapping Jamie’s hand away from the handle ‘– that they are left in peace and are safe for us to return to.’

‘Fine, I’ll watch you like a hawk.’

‘I don’t know how long we’ll be gone,’ I explained. ‘Jamie tells me time moves differently over there, so what feels like minutes for us could be hours to you – I really don’t know. To be honest I’ve barely got my head around it myself. Just don’t worry and keep us safe.’

‘You can rely on me.’

‘I know I can.’ I patted him on his big arm, opened the back of the van and climbed in. I lay back and indicated the floor next to me. ‘Come on, lie down. Let’s get on with it.’

‘It’s like sixth form all over again,’ Jamie chuckled, clambering in, ‘getting up to no good in the back of a Transit.’

‘Just shut up and do whatever it is you do.’

He lay down, put his drink next to him and took my hand.

‘Takes a minute,’ he explained. ‘I just need to …’

He drifted off. I closed my eyes.

The morning was quiet but I could still hear the distant sound
of traffic, the way our breathing echoed inside the confined space of the van.

‘How do you know if it’s working?’ Derek asked.

I was about to tell him to shut up when I felt myself sink away.

When I was a kid I broke my arm. I was stupid: playing on a rope swing with some mates from school. We’d built a large bed of leaves and the challenge was to see who could swing the highest and land on them. I won. Later, in hospital, lying on the gurney after the anaesthetist had put a cannula in the back of my hand, I listened as she told me to count back from ten. I would be unconscious before I finished, she assured me. She opened the valve and I began to count. I could feel the liquid rising through my arm, a heat that emanated from the back of my hand soaring upwards.
I’ll be asleep by the time it reaches my head
, I thought. It reached my biceps and I switched off. Blank. Gone without even being aware of it.

This was just like that.

Then I was aware again. Surrounded by silence. The floor of the van beneath me felt distant, as if I had been lying on it so long that my nerves had gone dead. The only thing that felt real was the touch of Jamie’s hand in mine. The only true sensation. The anchor. The lifeline.

I opened my eyes.

Olag Krishnin made his way across Alexanderplatz, his mind filled with the future. He had always been a dreamer. A man born to change things. His father had always said as much, right up until the NKVD put a bullet in his head for sedition. Krishnin had learned from that. To foster great ideas was only natural, but you kept them to yourself if you wanted to draw breath long enough to act on them.

He made his way to Mollstraße, chain-smoking his unfiltered cigarettes as he walked. He was like a locomotive, glistening in his long, black leather coat, puffs of smoke dissipating in his wake.

Sünner’s apartment was on the top floor of a short complex and he made himself run up the stairs, always determined to challenge himself if he could. If you made things difficult and yet succeeded, you were always the champion of your world.

‘I hope you brought something to drink,’ said Sünner after letting him in. ‘I haven’t left the house in days and we will want to celebrate.’

‘You’ve done it?’

‘In my own time. Go through. Let me have my moment; they do not come so often since the war.’

Sünner’s living room was a chaos of abandoned moments, meals half-eaten when the hunger became too profound to ignore, papers half-read. A selection of blankets on the sofa suggested he had taken to sleeping in here.

‘I’m using the bedroom for storage,’ he explained, making a half-hearted attempt to tidy. ‘There just isn’t the space.’

Krishnin pulled a half-bottle of vodka from the poacher’s pocket of his coat. ‘Find some glasses. Clean, if possible.’

Sünner went in the direction of the kitchen while Krishnin made space for himself on one of the chairs. The German soon returned, holding a glass which he offered to Krishnin and a teacup which he kept for himself. ‘Always give the guest your best,’ he said and laughed.

‘Tell me how it happened,’ said Krishnin after he had poured them their drinks.

‘The irony is delicious,’ said Sünner. ‘The breakthrough came from the Jews. I savour that. It’s a little piece of poetry.’ He hunted for a cigarette, eventually accepting one from Krishnin.

‘You are familiar with the Golem?’ he continued.

‘No.’

‘It is a creature from their heritage. A man made from mud, brought to life with the word of God, a little piece of magic buried inside the dirt. It has always been a symbol of their fight against oppression.

‘There are many accounts but this is the most famous: In the sixteenth century, Rudolph II sought to expel the Jews from Prague. The rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel built a Golem from river clay, bringing it to life with the secret name of God and
using it to defend his community. Legends claim that it was their saviour, until Rabbi Loew forgot to deactivate it on the Sabbath and it went wild, killing Jew and Gentile alike.

‘The truth, of course, is more brutal. The Golem was always mindless, a thing without a soul, dead matter that sought only to attack and kill.’

Krishnin had been growing impatient, only too aware of Sünner’s habit of wandering off the point. These words brought his attention right back.

‘That makes you think, eh?’ said Sünner, draining his cup of vodka and holding it out to be refilled. ‘It did the same for me. Come this way.’

He led the Russian through to the bathroom, a yellowing, foul-smelling place of mould and dripping pipes. He pointed towards the bath where a stunted figure lay in a few inches of dark water. It was a rough sculpture of a man, about a third natural size, its face a rough flower of gouged clay.

‘I built one,’ said Sünner. ‘And have spent the last few weeks trying to isolate the process for giving it life.’

He looked at Krishnin. ‘The secret name of God, eh? My reading is expansive but that took even me a while.’

He pulled a piece of paper from the pocket of his shirt and dropped it into the hole in the sculpture’s face. He smoothed over the clay and stepped back.

‘It’s not just the name,’ he said, moving over to the sink where a bulky cassette recorder lay inside the chipped ceramic bowl. ‘It’s the prayer.’

He pressed play on the cassette and a hissy recording of chanting filled the small room. Krishnin could recognise none of the words; the low quality of the recording and the damaged
speaker rendered it into an indistinct wall of noise. But the thing in the bath heard it well enough as it began to thrash, its wet, paddle-like hands slapping the tin sides, its stumpy legs kicking and flexing, spraying dirty water across the wall where it dripped like arterial spray.