The Neon Court (6 page)

“Yes. She lands from Mumbai in forty minutes. Her ambassador sent out immediate representation to the Aldermen requesting – no, demanding – our assistance against the aggressive actions of the Tribe.”

“She demanded that the Aldermen help her?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t that kinda naive?”

Dees let out the bare minimum of a breath, that might have been a sigh. “We have a defensive alliance with the Court.”

“We have a what?”

“A defensive alliance. Signed in 1959, a mutual pact of accord. When one party is attacked, the other will come to its aid.”

My heart found a new low to sink to. “And by we, you mean …”

“The Midnight Mayor and Lady Neon signed the treaty.”

“I didn’t sign it – I wasn’t bloody born!”

“But you are the Midnight Mayor. Prime ministers are bound by the treaties of their predecessors whether they like it or not.”

I raised a warning finger, extended towards the sharpened point of her nose. “OK, let me get this clear right here, right now. Some bloke is dead, the Court blames the Tribe, and now Lady Neon is expecting me to fight her battles on the basis of some bit of paper signed fifty-something years ago? Which part of what the hell begins to cover this?”

“I’m afraid there’s more.”

I slumped back against the work surface, elbow bumping a bowl of chilli powder. “Course there is.”

“The … incident in which the daimyo in question was killed also took the lives of at least five other people, possibly more. The daimyo of the Neon Court, one of his men, and what we suspect are two members of the Tribe, although we are waiting on proper confirmation.”

“What, all of them, all in the same place?”

“These are merely the bodies that we could identify, but yes.”

“You said five bodies?”

“A fifth individual was caught in the fire, and died. A homeless man, who used to live in the tower. The body was badly damaged; we don’t yet have the material for proper identification.”

I took my time with the words, careful in case they got ideas of their own. “What … fire?”

“There was a fire in an abandoned tower block in Sidcup. The daimyo in question was killed with his own tanto.”

“Tanto?”

“A short stabbing sword, easily concealed, with a refined crystal glass blade.”

I stayed very very still. “Really?”

“Yes.”

“Daimyo … that’s a senior dude in the Court, right?”

“Very. They are masters of the local Court in the cities they reside in, only one step below Lady Neon in both authority and power.”

“And … anything else wrong with him? Besides, I mean, getting a sword in the back?”

“I didn’t say back,” she replied quietly. “I said stabbed.”

I shrugged, too much, too easy. “Figure of speech. Anything else?”

We had to force ourself to keep looking her in the eye. “Acid burns to his face and eyes.”

“Who recovered the bodies?”

“The fire brigade. The fire was brought under control an hour and a half ago, although the building is still too dangerous to enter. There is no doubt that it was started deliberately; it raged out of control too fast, and it is no coincidence that a daimyo of the Neon Court and two enforcers of the Tribe were found inside it.”

“No doubt,” I sighed. “And the Neon Court wants war, huh?”

“Indeed.”

“Any word from the Tribe?”

“They maintain … very poor connections with the Aldermen, and have frequently refused to acknowledge the authority of the Midnight Mayor.”

“Any reason why?”

“Disobedience and recklessness is the nearest thing they have to a philosophy.”

“Or maybe the Midnight Mayor’s always been a bit of a tit,” I hazarded.

“Mr Mayor …”

“Just saying, just suggesting, you know, pushing that one out there …” We were silent a while. Then I said, “OK. What am I supposed to do now?”

“By the terms of our defensive alliance with the Neon Court, we have twenty-four hours to investigate any breach of terms which might elicit an aggressive response.”

“And now in little words?”

“We have a day to find out whether the Tribe really did kill the daimyo, start the fire, start a war.”

“At the end of which …?”

“I believe, in the words of an illustrious American president, the philosophy is, you’re either with us, or you’re against us.”

“You know, Ms Dees, I think perhaps professional practising magicians should leave the terms of diplomatic accords to professional practising diplomats. I mean, it’s kind of like me saying, ‘Hey, I once put an Elastoplast on someone’s right elbow, let me diagnose your herpes!’”

“As soon as the building is safe we will send in forensic teams.”

“Does the Neon Court understand the concept of forensic teams?”

“The Court and the Tribe have always hated each other. Their peace, of sorts, for the last few years has been tenuous at best. Rivalries flare; sometimes there are assaults; sometimes there are curses; sometimes there are worse. But this is the first time Lady Neon has come to London for such an event.”

“Yeah. She’s arrived pretty smartish, hasn’t she? I mean, if you only got word that a daimyo was dead an hour and a half ago, and she arrives in forty minutes’ time, that’s a fairly speedy flight from Mumbai, isn’t it?”

Dees was silent. Then, “Yes. It is somewhat remarkable.”

Silence again.

Then, “Dees?”

“Mr Mayor?”

“If it turns out that the Tribe didn’t kill this daimyo, that they’re not responsible for the fire, what happens to the sap who is?”

“The Neon Court will most likely hunt him down and destroy him.”

“And we’re going to let that happen?”

“It is murder.”

“What if it was self-defence? What if this daimyo character was really, really rude?”

“It is not worth risking a war with the Neon Court over one life,” she replied. “These are the political realities we deal with.”

I nodded, sighed, rose, stretched. “Yeah. That’s what I guessed you’d say.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to take a walk. Have a think.”

“Is that …” Dees stopped herself mid-sentence. “I’ll let you know if there are any developments.”

“Cheers.”

“We’re holding an emergency senior management meeting to discuss the issue at nine.”

“Spare me.”

“Mr Swift?” I glanced on my way to the door. Her face was calm and earnest, her eyes fixed on the papers she was riffling to no effect in her case. “This is your responsibility now, whether you like it or not. Whatever happens here will affect you, no matter what you decide. So you may as well make a decision.”

“We know,” we sighed. “And it makes us angry.” Then, “What was his name?”

“Whose?”

“The daimyo. The servant of the Neon Court, the dead man with the sword in the … the stabbed guy with the acid in the face?”

“Minjae San. He was a master of the Soho Court, one of the triad.”

“I’m guessing we’re past polite reason?”

“I think you guess astutely, Mr Mayor.”

“Good morning, Ms Dees,” I sighed, heading for the door, one hand turned in an absent wave of farewell.

“Good evening, Mr Swift,” she answered, not raising her eyes from the paper. We hesitated at her reply, then half shook our head, and walked away.

In which a war escalates, a transport zone vanishes, and a walking corpse stoutly refuses to concede its own mortality.

I thought I could hear footsteps in the darkness behind me.

I stopped to look down the little alley from which I’d come.

No one.

The streets of Greenwich were filling with buses, commuters pressed into every window, faces of every kind, empty faces turned vacantly onto the world outside, seeing nothing but their own thoughts. The uniforms of the working city – suits and ties for the offices, jeans and a T-shirt for the trendy “creative” jobs and hi-vis jacket for the builders. Schoolkids in a special shade of brown known as “poo-humility” shuffled by with black backpacks on their shoulders, mobile phones pressed to their ears. I caught the smell of garlic from the front door of an Italian kitchen, and of fresh bread being synthetically pumped out of a supermarket.

I had to get to Oda.

I headed for the mainline station. South London works on different geographical rules from North London; everywhere is twice as far apart, and takes twice as long to get to. Some time during the great suburban expansion that created places with such unlikely names as Martin’s Heron, Winersh Triangle and Carshalton Beeches, a cruel urban god decided to take the transport infrastructure of North London, and stretch it out over South London like a rubber spider’s web, to see how far it could go before the strands between each join became so thin that it snapped.

I walked through an early-morning Greenwich, a mishmash of old and new: neat white terraces that had, a hundred years ago, housed the genteel citizens of London who couldn’t stand the odours of the old city and, a hundred years before that, their naval grandfathers. Yellow-brick council estates thrown up behind the river where the bombs had fallen or the need for housing had grown faster than architectural pride; shops selling electronics from Taiwan, clotted cream from
Devon, lampshades from the backyard of a craftswoman in Norfolk and sandwiches produced by their thousands in Sheffield. A red-brick church with patchwork stained glass offered God Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays, with judo on Tuesdays, Women’s Institute on Thursdays and youth community drama Saturdays, 1–3 p.m.

I became aware of the limo even before it started following me.

It was, after all, a limo, black, with frosted windows and a bass beat coming from somewhere inside it that drowned out even the belching engines of the garbage trucks. The chance that it wasn’t following me declined with every step until finally, in the little side street that ran towards the mainline station, I stopped, turned, put my hands on my hips and said, “Oh, for God’s sake.”

The limo stopped.

The back door opened: a long way back. It was not a car designed for cornering in a city built to a fifteenth-century street plan. A boot extracted itself from the inside of the car. It was leather, it was buckled, it clung to the curves of a calf all the way up to the knee, considered flexibility around the joint, then carried on a little bit further. The flesh that emerged from that was almost corpse-white, clad in fishnet, and fairly promptly – although not promptly enough for some tastes – vanished into a leather miniskirt that wasn’t designed to protect against the cold. Above the miniskirt was a corset. It was black, though with a hint of silver and purple running through it that changed with the angle of the light. The corset was also clearly not designed with the weather in mind. A pair of corpse-white arms emerged from this get-up along with a neck of biologically absurd length, wearing some sort of throttling silver bangle with no evident means of release. The whole thing culminated in a face wearing, for its hair, an electrocuted blowfish. We considered this last for a while. Some part of the fragile ecosystem of the planet had suffered to create the hair crowning this head. It was perfectly white, and stuck out in a halo, a lion’s mane made of electrostatic repulsion and hairspray. The owner of the head moved; and the hair didn’t even droop in the breeze. We wondered whether it was real. We wondered what you had to go through to make it if it was not.

The woman who’d got out of the limo said, “You must be the Mayor.”

Her voice was a conspiracy between cigarettes and jazz; low, warm, fuzzy, smooth and probably quite hard to achieve.

I said, “Sorry, mate, you’ve got the wrong guy,” and tried to walk away.

She reached out to stop me.

Her nails stuck out nearly an inch from her fingertips. They were silver, and not just in colour. I stopped before they could lacerate me on my way, and looked into a pair of cool lilac-blue eyes.

“You’re him,” she replied. “The other guy died.”

“The other guy?”

“The guy who went before you. Nair. He died. They say the death of cities killed him, whatever that means.”

“Just this once, it does what it says on the cover.”

“And you’re the new guy.”

I craned to see past her, into the interior of the limo. Cigarette smoke, leather upholstery, pounding bass music, low bluey-red light. I said, “And you must be from the Neon Court. Didn’t wait long to have a chat, did you?”

She grinned. It was like watching the sun rise over an iceberg. “We wanted to have a quick conversation … privately, before matters escalated further. Don’t really admire that, considering the circumstances. Can I give you a lift?”

“My mummy told me not to accept lifts from strangers.”

“The Neon Court has no ill will towards you, Mr Mayor. In fact, we’re practically allies.”

I managed a dumb smile. “I’ll walk. Cheers.”

She stepped directly into my path. The lipstick on her lips was violet, drawn only in the middle, to give her the appearance of a perpetual pout. “Mr Mayor,” she said smoothly, “can you imagine how uncomfortable it is to walk in these boots?”

I considered them. They looked like they’d been based on medieval torture devices. “Fairly?” I guessed. “Look, I get it. You guys are pissed, the Tribe is pissed, you’re going to kill each other, whatever, major mess, blood in the streets. Hey – if I ask you not to, would that go down a storm?”

Her pout, if it was possible, deepened a little.

“Tell you what, you scrap this whole vendetta business, and I’ll get in the car.”

“Lady Neon has personally requested you.
Personally
.”

“I don’t come when she calls.”

“She hasn’t called until now; and besides, from what I know of the Midnight Mayor, you do.” She stood aside, leaving the door open to the smoke-filled interior.

I said, “At least open a window, will you?” and got into the car.

She treated me to another smile. I felt each tiny tooth rattle against my spine on the way down. “I don’t think they do. It’s not one of the features,” and she got in beside me, pulling the door shut.

It was the first time in our life we had been inside a limo.