The Devil in Amber (3 page)

A
t eight the next morning, I left the cosy embrace of young Rex (sucked off and buggered if you must know) to keep my appointment with the boss.

I’d had an uneasy night–once my eyes closed–caught in a nightmarish New York of the future, all sky-scraping apartment blocks and rocket ships, as in those unpleasant German films. The dream-me, wearing only queerly tight underwear with President Coolidge’s name embroidered about the waist, sauntered past the Algonquin, the pavement transformed into a howling white tunnel of cocaine. Overhead, Hubbard the Cupboard was performing dazzling aerobatics like Lucky Lindy, but the smoke trailing from his rocket-ship transformed into narcotics too, falling on my shoulders like snow. As his machine roared past, I distinctly saw bright rivulets of blood pouring from the aviator’s nostrils and the dead man laughing at me, fit to burst.

Later, out in the real street, I darted between the yellow flashes of the taxi cabs, my brogues tramping through the drifts of mud-coloured
slush. Despite the temperature, New York teemed with Christmas activity, the scents of coffee and perfume as vivid as incense. Shopping was approaching fever pitch and I found myself shouldering through crowds like a three-quarter in a greatcoat.

I was mentally preparing myself for the meeting that the soapy message had foisted on me. Joshua Reynolds awaited my pleasure.

He was not, alas, the dwarfish chap whom you may have encountered before: the cheeky fellah with the vivid little eyes who’d steered me through countless adventures too numerous or scandalous to mention.

No, he’d gone the way of all flesh, his titchy heart giving out just one month into the retirement he’d always craved. The name was then passed on like a title–I never did find out the dwarf’s real moniker–and a very different personage had ascended to the top of the Royal Academy’s secret staff.

We were about of an age but whereas I had taken strenuous efforts to maintain my superlative physique this new J.R. had run to fat. He had the look of a minor bishop–a colonial one, perhaps, always perspiring into his purple and wishing they’d given him the See of Leicester (or something just as dreadful). As I peered in through the window of the tea rooms I could see his rumpled, disappointed face glowing whitely in the gloom like the moon behind clouds in an Atkinson Grimshaw.

I had a hand on the door knob when I caught sight of a chap on the opposite side of the road. Tallish and well built, I noted a suggestion of tousled curls and pocked skin, briefly brightened by the flare of a match. He drew on his cigar and glanced briefly at me. Did I flatter myself that a flash of
something
passed between us?

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, pewter-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.