Yesterday's Hero (13 page)

And then: “What…” A voice breaks the thunderous silence, then trails away. We all turn to stare.

Devon seems to suddenly grow very small indeed. She clears her throat. Then she looks at me, and swallows, and says, “Well, I mean, I realize, you know, new girl on the team. Not completely up to speed on everything. Still wrapping my head around the infinite realities part of the day. But, well, that bit, where Arthur mentioned the time magic. Well, it rather… You know, you’ll be cooking scones and spam, for example. Well, maybe you don’t, but I do, and say I am, for example, of course, but there you are, elbow deep in dough and spam grease and time is just whipping by you, half the day gone in a blink. And then there’s ten minutes until ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway’ and suddenly that takes up the second half of the day. And, well, I suppose my point is, in a roundabout sort of way, that time is a slippery little chap, like some sort of pixie, or elf. At least that’s how I’ve always imagined him. But yes, doesn’t that make sense? The bit that Arthur said? About the time magic? I rather thought, you know, now that apparently I live in a world with zombie T-Rexes that that sort of all added up a bit. Maybe.”

I want to run across the room and hug Devon and kiss her dimpled cheek and pump her hand like an oil prospector dredging up the last gallon from his well.

But, well, public decorum.

Kayla pats Devon on the arm in another very un-Kayla-like moment, which shows that she must have woken up at some point.

“Ha!” Coleman brays a phlegmy half-laugh. Devon sinks further into her chair.

“I say,” he booms at Devon, wiping froth from his mustache, “I rather think it’d be a better use of that pretty face of yours to try and convince me to buy you dinner than it would be to try and convince me this prick is even halfway right about anything.”

The silence is thunderous. The sound of a momentous and collective, “what the hell?”

Did Coleman just… Did he seriously just proposition Devon in the middle of all this?

She turns first red then almost purple. Then confusion wins out over embarrassment and rage. “What?” she says. “I just… what?”

And then, out of nowhere—the icicle making its triumphant return from hell—Kayla steps forward and says, in no uncertain terms, “You better mind your feckin’ manners.”

Better men than Coleman—a term which, admittedly, encompasses all men throughout space and time—have tried to stand up to Kayla and failed.

“I—” he starts. He puffs out his cheeks.

Kayla narrows her eyes. “I’ll have no more of it.”

And I don’t understand. And I have misread Kayla before, almost to the detriment of the entire world, but I have never seen this from her. Such defensiveness. Such loyalty. Almost… mothering.

Oh…

Oh, that I have seen after all. Except her girls…

Oh, that’s not going to work out well at all.

Coleman opens and shuts his mouth at Kayla. He runs his hands down the lapels of his jacket. And then, he turns on his heel and stomps towards the door. “That’ll be all then.”

He opens the door. Pauses. “Oh, and tomorrow,” he says over his shoulder, “we’ll be relocating to London.”Another round of silence and bewilderment.

“Wait,” Felicity finally pushes away from the wall. “We’ll do what, George?”

“London, Felicity. I’m sure you heard me.” Coleman doesn’t even bother turning around. I can still see the bright spots of red on his cheeks, though.

“Russians are there. Obviously,” he says. “We should be there. Obviously. And there’s free space at MI6. I’ve already made the arrangements. Pack up. Tonight. Shouldn’t take long considering the state of this shithole.”

And then he’s gone, through the door, leaving confusion and outrage behind him.

Fifteen minutes later, in Felicity’s office

“Y
ou know, Arthur,” says Felicity, “it is generally considered unseemly for a man in his thirties to sulk.”

The look I give Felicity is not a charitable one. I feel more worked over and bruised from the encounter with Coleman than I do from the one with the Russians.

“Come on,” she says. She carefully lifts an orchid off one of the shelves that line her office and places it into a cardboard box. “Work’s over. Get it off your chest.”

But now is not the time. Now whatever I say will be confused, and mixed up with other unfair emotions. Really the best thing to do is to hold my tongue and wait until I’ve calmed down a bit.

So I say, “Is that how it is then? We turn off the relationship from nine to five. Then, oh wait, time to head home, let’s be friends again?”

Not my finest moment of heeding my own advice.

Shaw shakes her head and unclips a daylight lamp from the shelf. “We spoke about this, Arthur. I’m your friend. Your,” she pauses over the next word, “girlfriend. But I’m your boss too. We can joke, and laugh, and shoot monsters in the face, but in the end I have responsibilities to my position here. You have responsibilities to your own. The fate of the world. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These are not little things, Arthur. They’re not things lightly set aside. So, when we’re at work, I am going to put that first when I have to. Only when I have to. But I will. That’s going to be part of this.”

She is calm and collected, reasonable and rational. It makes me less so.

“Oh,” I say, dumping a stack of folders into a box with an unceremonious crash, “so sitting by and watching Coleman treat me like his new favorite pinãta was a responsibility that came first? I see now.”

And part of me knows that I’m acting like a prick, but unfortunately it’s not a big enough part.

“Coleman is really not worth it, Arthur. He’s really not.”

“You’re not the one whose ass he’s riding.”

She looks away at that. I smell blood in the water.

“One word,” I say. “Just one of support, would have been nice.”

“He was right, Arthur,” she snaps. She turns to look at me, holding her orchid, a beautiful complex architecture of purple petals. “He was right.”

And that shuts me up.

“He may have been a jackass about it. But you screwed this one up.”

I’m holding more folders. I slowly lower them into the box and don’t stand up. Just sit and let that sink in.

“We won,” I say. But the enthusiasm has been kicked out of my defiance.

“The Russian got away with the papers.” Felicity shrugs. “That’s not a victory.”

I stare at the floor. It’s much harder to fight back when someone is being so nice about letting you know how much you screwed up.

“Come on,” Felicity says. “It’s not like I haven’t had to chew you out for failed missions.” Her voice is softer now, her expression softer, the shadows of her face deep as she unplugs another daylight lamp. “They come with the territory. This is hard work and there’s little margin for failure. And you’re up against hard odds. Though I should say, talking to the Weekenders was totally on your own head. That was completely within your control.”

“They’re good people,” I say. Still stubborn.

“Good people is not the same as competent people, Arthur.”

Except I really hope it is.

“It’s just…” I shake my head. “Coleman’s been here less than twenty-four hours and already it seems like he’s
calling all the shots. You’re the boss. Not him. It’s bullshit you letting him strut around the way he is.”

Felicity sets down the orchid, reaches a hand out to me. “Coleman is really not worth worrying about, Arthur,” she says, pulling me up to my feet. “He’s a little man who likes to throw his weight around. MI6 was not a promotion for him. And he’s only back here because everyone else from the eighties has managed to move on to something bigger and better. He’s the tail-end of the good old boys club, nothing more. I need to tread a little carefully around him for a while. Give him enough rope to hang himself. Just remember, if anything, he’s intimidated by you.”

I laugh at that. A caustic bray. I’m comfortable enough to be honest here. “Me? How on earth would I intimidate him?”

I stand, grab a bundle of folders and put it in the box. I grab another and then I notice Felicity still hasn’t answered. I don’t have to be an ex-detective to spot she’s holding out on me.

“Felicity?” I say, half-formed anxiety nudging my stomach. “Why would he be intimidated by me?”

Her back is to me.

“Oh,” she says, then stops there. “Well.” She clears her throat. “I mean… It’s just… You know…”

It’s like Clyde’s taken over her speech patterns.

Jesus, that’s suddenly become something I feel like I might one day actually have to worry about…

“Felicity?” I say for the third time. In the fairy tales they have to answer you the third time you ask.

“Well,” she pauses again, then takes the plunge, “you know how I mentioned I had worked with exes before…?”

And just… no. No. She can’t mean that. She can’t. She mustn’t?

“Coleman?” I say, and my voice climbs to a pitch I haven’t managed to access since I was eight years old. “No.” I shake my head. “Not Coleman. Not Coleman. Please tell me—”

“It was a long time ago.”

She’s still not facing me.

And that’s it. The final kick to the nuts that this day can deliver. The lowest of the possible blows.

Didn’t I save the world the other day?

“You have to be kidding me.” I’m begging really. I don’t care if she lies or not. I just want her to take it back.

“I was young. It was a bad mistake. I’d just come into MI37. And, well, he presented a certain aura of confidence. And I was taken in by that. Literally taken in. It was essentially a confidence trick. He duped me for a while. But I see him now. I learned. That’s what we do when we make mistakes. We learn. We learn not to repeat them. And what he and I had…” She hesitates again. And the horrors I fill that pause with. “It was just a stupid physical thing, really. That’s all.”

And even I didn’t go to those depths of depravity.

“That’s all?” I say. “That’s all? That’s all?” I’m a record skipping. I want to get past the phrase, past this, but I think I’m going to be stuck here for a while. All I can picture is the ends of Coleman’s mustache flopping rhythmically up and down.

I think I’m going to be sick.

“No, Arthur. No.” Shaw steps forward, puts a hand on my shoulder. I almost flinch away. “I meant…” She trails off. She’s flustered, searching for words. It should be adorable. This should be a moment where I smile and feel the warm and fuzzies take over my soul, but instead all I can do is listen to the claxon siren in my head screaming, “Mistake! Mistake! Mistake! This was a mistake!”

“What we have, Arthur, it’s more than that. It’s the physical thing
and more
. That’s what I meant. Coleman has nothing that you don’t also have. That’s what I meant.”

And that’s a nice thing to say. A sweet thing. I look and meet her eyes. Her face is unguarded, a little defiant.

“This doesn’t change who I am, Arthur. This was all as true yesterday as it was today. This doesn’t change where you should sleep tonight.”

There’s an invitation there. And… I don’t know.

Some things are worth fighting for. Worth sacrificing for.

I swallow, and I nod. She steps forward and holds me.

And still in my head I see the ends of Coleman’s mustache. Flop. Flop. Flop.

One night together later

F
elicity and I take her minivan down to London. She double-parked outside my apartment last night while I threw things into a suitcase. Jackets, pants, shaving kit. Simple enough. Easy enough. But it was an evening defined by us working in parallel rather than together. The companionable awkwardness of the previous night was missing. Coleman seemed to loom over everything. His mustache draped over the night.

Flop. Flop. Flop.

Stop it.

We pull up outside the hotel Her Majesty’s government has deigned to pay for. From the looks of it, it’s time to raise taxes again.

“The Virginian” appears to have been press-ganged into wedging itself between a long chain of grease-stained restaurants, and an industrial-sized pet store which I suspect supplies them with their better cuts of meat.

A teenage boy, who appears to have had all his personality surgically removed, stands, pasty-faced and impassive, behind a crumbling Formica desk in a lobby that makes a postage stamp seem roomy.

“Shaw,” Felicity informs him. “We’re sharing.” She uses what available space there is to turn and nod in my direction.

My eyebrows bounce up. I suppose I hadn’t really thought about sleeping arrangements. Or if I had, that Coleman would have booked us separate rooms.

And… Well it’s not exactly that I object, or that she really needed to consult with me, I suppose. Except, aren’t we only on two dates? Shouldn’t there be the courtesy, “you want to shack up?”

The boy grunts, in what could be a profound insight into the effect of the liberal attitudes of the sixties upon modern culture and acceptance, or a belch. It’s hard to say.

“Need a hand with bags?” Clyde appears on the stairs. Or at least as much of him as will fit in the lobby. He has his hood cinched so tight only a square inch is open. I have the feeling that just wearing the mask openly would be less suspicious.

Then we all take part in an odd shuffling dance which involves getting poked in the ribs by as many elbows as possible as I try to get the bags to the stairs and Clyde attempts to ascend them without breaking his neck. I think the Russians might actually be less hazardous to our health than this place.

The room I’ll be sharing with Felicity turns out to be slightly smaller than the lobby. Through some space-folding trick twin beds separated by a shared bed-side table have been crammed into it.

“Shaw amenable to the whole cohabitation thing?” Clyde asks, twisting his head about in the confines of the hoody as he dumps Felicity’s bags on one bed.

“Her idea, actually,” I say, opening my own bag to see how many of my possessions have been ruined by a spilled shampoo or soap or some such. An unavoidable byproduct of travel in my experience.