The Quorum (51 page)

On the bridge of the Doomship, the Lesser Deathspitters assumed the respectful position, bifurcate tails in the air, forehorns to the manure-clogged deck. An Inferior Scumjumper handed Ghidrah a Cancer Sceptre. He flicked its head, and thick smoke poured from its end. His lieutenants began to transform. The Sacred Gargantuan Killing Cry rose in competition with the Hum.

‘May The Great Devastaticon feast on the entrails of our enemy this day,’ roared Ghidrah. ‘Begin the attack!’

‘Aye-aye,’ snapped Provisional Humanoid Blastmaster General ‘Gung Ho-Jones, saluting smartly as he brought his mailed fist down on the activation control of the ship’s main battery of termination tasers. Instant death sprang from the Doomfleet.

The cathedral arches of the ship rang with the din of battle.

Like a shark breaking inky waters, the big black car surfaced out of the night, its searchlight headlamps freezing the Bolsheviks en tableau as they huddled over their dynamite. Cohen, their vile leader, tried to control his raging emotions, realising that yet again his schemings to bring about the ruination of the British Empire were undone. Borzoff, his hands shaking uncontrollably, fell to his ragged-trousered knees and tried one last prayer to the God whose icons he had spat upon that day in the mother country when he had taken his rifle butt to the princess’ eggshell-delicate skull. Petrofsky drooled into his stringy beard, his one diseased eye shrinking in the light like a slug exposed to salt, and uselessly thumb-cocked his revolver.

The canvas top of the Rolls Royce ‘Shadowshark’ raised like a hawk’s eyelid, and a dark shape seemed to grow out of the driver’s seat, cloak billowing in the strong wind, twin moons reflected in the insectlike dark goggles, wide-brimmed hat at a jaunty angle.

Petrofsky raised his shaking pistol, and slammed back against the iron globe of the chemical tank, cut down by another silent dart from the doctor’s famous airgun. In the distance, the conspirators could hear police sirens, but they knew they would not be taken into custody. The shadowman would not allow them to live out the night to further sully the green and fruitful soil of sacred England with their foul presence.

As the doctor advanced, the headlamps threw his expanding shadow on the Bolsheviks.

Israel Cohen, the Mad Genius of the Revolution, trembled, his flabby chins slapping against his chest, sweat pouring from his ape-like forehead down his protruberant nose to his fleshy, sensual lips. He raised a ham-sized fist against the doctor, sneering insane defiance to the last:

‘Curse you, Shade!’

R
EX
C
ASH
,
Dr Shade
Vs
the Dynamite Boys
(1936)

They ate an expensively minimalist meal at Alastair Little’s in Frith Street, and Basil Crosbie, Leech’s Art Editor, picked up the bill with his company card. Throughout, Tamara, his agent, kept reminding Crosbie of the
Eagle
awards Greg had picked up for
Fat Chance,
not mentioning that that was two years ago. As with most restaurants, there was nowhere that could safely accommodate his yardsquare artwork folder, and he was worried the sample strips would get scrunched or warped. He would have brought copies, but wanted to put himself over as sharply as possible. Besides, the ink wasn’t dry on the pieces he had finished this morning. As usual, there hadn’t been time to cover himself.

Whenever there was dead air in the conversation, Tamara filled it with more selected highlights from Greg’s career. Greg guessed she had invited herself to this lunch to keep him under control. She remembered, but was carefully avoiding mention of, his scratchy beginnings in the ’70s - spiky strips and singletons for punk fanzines like
Sheep Worrying, Brainrape
and
Kill Your Pet Puppy
- and knew exactly how he felt about the Derek Leech organisation. She probably thought he was going to turn up in a ripped rubbish bag, with lots of black eyeliner and safety-pins through his earlobes, then go for Crosbie with a screwdriver. Actually, while the Sex Pistols were swearing on live television and gobbing at gigs, he had been a neatly dressed, normal-haired art student. It was only at the easel, where he used to assemble police brutality collages with ransom note captions, that he had embodied the spirit of ’77.

If Tamara would shut up, he thought he could get on with Crosbie. Greg knew the man had started out on the
Eagle,
and filled in on
Garth
once in a while. He had been a genuine minor talent in his day. Still, he worked for Leech, and if there was one artefact that summed up everything Greg loathed about Britain under late Thatcherism, it was Leech’s
Daily Comet.
The paper was known for its Boobs ’n’ Pubes, its multi-million Giveaway Grids, its unflinching support of the diamond-hard right, its lawsuit-fuelled muckraking, and prose that read like a football hooligan’s attempt to imitate the
Janet and John
books. It was Britain’s fastest-growing newspaper, and the hub of a communications empire that was putting Leech in the Murdoch-Maxwell bracket. In Madame Tussaud’s last annual poll, the statue of Derek Leech had ranked eighth on the Most Admired list, between Gorbachev and Prince Charles, and second on the Most Hated and Feared chart, after Margaret Thatcher but before Adolf Hitler, Colonel Gaddafi, Count Dracula and the Yorkshire Ripper.

Crosbie didn’t start talking business until eyedropper-sized cups of coffee arrived. With the plates taken away, the Art Editor opened his folder on the table, and brought out a neatly paperclipped set of notes. Tamara was still picking at her fruit salad, five pieces of pale apple and/or pear floating in a steel bowl of water with a solitary grape. She and Crosbie had been drinking dry white wine with the meal, but Greg stuck to mineral water. The gritty coffee gave him quite a punch, and he felt his heart tighten like an angry fist. Since
Fat Chance,
he hadn’t done anything notable. This was an important meeting for him. Tamara might not dump him if it didn’t come out right, but she might shift him from her A-list to her B-list.

‘As you probably know,’ Crosbie began, ‘Leech United Kingdom is expanding at the moment. I don’t know if you keep up with the trades, but Derek has recently bought up the rights to a lot of defunct titles with a view to relaunch. It’s a lot easier to sell something familiar than something new. Just now, Derek’s special baby is the
Evening Argus’.

‘The Brighton paper?’ Greg asked.

‘No, a national. It folded in 1953, but it was very big from the ’20s through to the War. Lord Badgerfield ran it.’

‘I have heard of it,’ Greg said. ‘It’s always an
Argus
headline in those old films about Dunkirk.’

‘That’s right. The paper had what they used to call “a good War”. Churchill called it “the voice of true democracy”. Like Churchill, it was never quite the same after the War... but now, what with the interest in the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Britain and all that, we think the time is right to bring it back. It’ll be nostalgia, but it’ll be new too...’

‘Gasmasks and rationing and the spirit of the Blitz, eh?’

‘That sort of thing. It’ll come out in the Autumn, and we’ll build up to it with a massive campaign. “The voice is back.” We’ll cut from this ovaltine-type ’40s look to an aggressive ’90s feel, yuppies on carphones, designer style, full-colour pages. It’ll be a harder newspaper than the
Comet,
but it’ll still be a Leech UK product, populist and commercial. We aim to be the turn-of-the-century newspaper.’

‘And you want a cartoonist?’

Crosbie smiled. ‘I liked your
Fat Chance
work a lot, Greg. The script was a bit manky for my taste, but you draw with clean lines, good solid blocks of black. Your private eye was a thug, but he looked like a real strip hero. There was a bit of
Jeff Hawke
there. It was just what we want for the
Argus,
the feel of the past but the content of the present.’

‘So you’ll be wanting Greg to do a
Fat Chance
strip for the new paper?’

Greg had made the connection, and was cracking a smile.

‘No, Tamara, that’s not what he wants. I’ve remembered the other thing I know about the
Argus.
I should have recognised the name straight off. It’s a by-word...’

Crosbie cut in, ‘That’s right. The
Mirror
had
Jane
and
Garth,
but the
Argus
had...’

Greg was actually excited. He thought he had grown up, but there was still a pulp heart in him. As a child, he had pored through second- and third-hand books and magazines. Before
Brainrape
and
Fat Chance
and
PC Rozzerblade,
he had tried to draw his other heroes: Bulldog Drummond, the Saint, Sexton Blake, Biggles, and...

‘Dr Shade.’

‘You may haff caught me,
Herr Doktor Schatten,
but ze glory off ze Sird Reich vill roll over zis passetic country like a tchuggernaucht. I die for ze greater glory off Tchermany, off ze Nazi party and off Adolf Hitler...’

‘That’s where you’re wrong, Von Spielsdorf. I wouldn’t dirty my hands by killing you, even if it is what you so richly deserve.’

‘Ain’t we gonna ice the lousy stinkin’ rat, Doc?’ asked Hank the Yank. The American loomed over the German mastermind, a snub-nosed automatic in his meaty fist.

‘Yours is a young country, Henry,’ said Dr Shade gently, laying a black-gloved hand of restraint upon his comrade’s arm. ‘That’s not how we do things in England. Von Spielsdorf here may be shot as a spy, but that decision is not ours to make. We have courts and laws and justice. That’s what this whole war’s about, my friend. The right of the people to have courts and laws and justice. Even you, Von Spielsdorf. We’re fighting for your rights too.’

‘Pah, decadent
Englische schweinhund!’

Hank tapped the German on the forehead with his pistol-grip, and the saboteur sat down suddenly, his eyes rolling upwards.

‘That showed him, eh, Doc?’

Dr Shade’s thin, normally inexpressive lips, curled in a slight smile.

‘Indubitably, Henry. Indubitably.’

R
EX
C
ASH
, ‘The Fiend of the Fifth Column’,

Dr Shade Monthly
No 111, (May, 1943)

The heart of Leech UK was a chrome and glass pyramid in London docklands, squatting by the Thames like a recently arrived flying saucer. Greg felt a little queasy as the minicab they had sent for him slipped through the pickets. It was a chilly Spring day, and there weren’t many of them about. Crosbie had warned him of ‘the Union Luddites’ and their stance against the new technology that enabled Leech to put out the
Comet
and its other papers with a bare minimum of production staff. Greg hoped none of the placard-carriers would recognise him. Last year, there had been quite a bit of violence as the pickets, augmented by busloads of radicals as annoyed by Leech’s editorials as his industrial relations policies, came up against the police and a contingent of the
Comet
-reading skinheads who were the backbone of Leech’s support. Now, the dispute dragged on but was almost forgotten. Leech papers had never mentioned it much, and the rest of the press had fresher strikes, revolutions and outrages to cover.

The minicab drove right into the pyramid, into an enclosed reception area where the vehicle was checked by security guards. Greg was allowed out and issued with a blue day pass that a smiling girl in a smart uniform pinned on his lapel.

Behind her desk were framed colour shots of smiling girls without uniforms, smart or otherwise, their nipples like squashed cherries, their faces cleanly unexpressive. The
Comet
Knock-Outs were supposed to be a national institution. But so, according to the
Comet
, were corporal punishment in schools, capital punishment for supporters of Sinn Fein, and the right to tell lies about the sexual preferences of soap opera performers. Greg wondered what Penny Stamp - Girl Reporter, Dr Shade’s sidekick in the old strip, would have made of a
Comet
KnockOut. Penny had always been rowing with the editor who wanted her to cover fashion shows and garden parties when she would rather be chasing crime scoops for the front page; perhaps her modern equivalent should be a pin-up girl who wants to keep her clothes on and become Roger Cook or Woodward and Bernstein?

He rode up to the 23rd floor, which was where Crosbie had arranged to meet him. The girl downstairs had telephoned up, and her clone was waiting for him in the thickly carpeted lobby outside the lift. She smiled and escorted him through an open-plan office where telephones and computers were being installed by a cadre of workmen. At the far end were a series of glassed-off cubicles. She eased him into one of these and asked if he wanted tea or coffee. She brought him instant coffee, the granules floating near the bottom of a paper cupful of hot brown water. There was a dummy edition of the
Evening Argus
on the desk. The headline was
IT’S WAR
!
Greg didn’t have time to look at it.

Crosbie came in with a tall, slightly stooped man and ordered more coffee. The newcomer was in his seventies but looked fit for his age. He wore comfortable old trousers and a cardigan under a new sports jacket. Greg knew who he was.

‘Rex Cash?’ he asked, his hand out.

The man’s grip was firm. ‘One of him,’ he said. ‘Not the original.’

‘This is Harry Lipman, Greg.’

‘Harry,’ Harry said.

‘Greg. Greg Daniels.’

‘Fat Chance
?’

Greg nodded. He was surprised Harry had kept up with the business. He had been retired for a long time, he knew.

‘Mr Crosbie told me. I’ve been looking your stuff out. I don’t know much about the drawing side. Words are my line. But you’re a talented young man.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Can we work together?’ Harry was being direct. Greg didn’t have an answer.

‘I hope so.’

‘So do I. It’s been a long time. I’ll need someone to snip the extra words out of the panels.’