Anansi Boys

by Neil Gaiman

  “We could skip all that,” said Daisy, “and you could just tell us what we want to know. Anyway, we don’t have any Jaffa cakes.”

  “I told you everything I know,” said Fat Charlie. “Everything. Grahame Coats gave me a check for two grand and told me to take two weeks off. He said he was pleased I’d brought some irregularities to his attention. Then he asked for my password and waved me good-bye. End of story.”

  “And you still say you don’t know anything about the disappearance of Maeve Livingstone?”

  “I don’t think I ever actually met her properly. Maybe once when she came through the office. We talked on the phone a few times. She’d want to talk to Grahame Coats. I’d have to tell her the check was in the post.”

  “Was it?”

  “I don’t know. I thought it was. Look, you can’t believe I had anything to do with her disappearance.”

  “No,” she said, cheerfully, “I don’t.”

  “Because I honestly don’t know what could have—you what?”

  “I don’t think you had anything to do with Maeve Livingstone’s disappearance. I also don’t believe that you had anything to do with the financial irregularities being perpetrated at the Grahame Coats Agency, although someone seems to have worked very hard to make it look like you did. But it’s pretty obvious that the weird accounting practices and the steady syphoning off of money predates your arrival. You’ve only been there two years.”

  “About that,” said Fat Charlie. He realized that his jaw was open. He closed it.

  Daisy said, “Look, I know that cops in books and movies are mostly idiots, especially if it’s the kind of book with a crime-fighting pensioner or a hard-arsed private eye in it. And I’m really sorry that we don’t have any Jaffa cakes. But we’re not all completely stupid.”

  “I didn’t say you were,” said Fat Charlie.

  “No,” she said. “But you were thinking it. You’re free to go. With an apology if you’d like one.”

  “Where did she, um, disappear?” asked Fat Charlie.

  “Mrs. Livingstone? Well, the last time anyone saw her, she was accompanying Grahame Coats into his office.”

  “Ah.”

  “I meant it about the cup of tea. Would you like one?”

  “Yes. Very much. Um. I suppose your people already checked out the secret room in his office. The one behind the bookcase?”

  It is to Daisy’s credit that all she said, perfectly calmly, was “I don’t believe they did.”

  “I don’t think we were supposed to know about it,” said Fat Charlie, “but I went in once, and the bookshelf was pushed back, and he was inside. I went away again,” he added. “I wasn’t spying on him or anything.”

  Daisy said, “We can pick up some Jaffa cakes on the way.”

  FAT CHARLIE WASN’T CERTAIN THAT HE LIKED FREEDOM. THERE was too much open air involved.

  “Are you okay?” asked Daisy.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You seem a bit twitchy.”

  “I suppose I am. You’ll think this is silly, but I’m a bit—well, I have a thing about birds.”

  “What, a phobia?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Well, that’s the common term for an irrational fear of birds.”

  “What do they call a rational fear of birds, then?” He nibbled the Jaffa cake.

  There was silence. Daisy said, “Well, anyway, there aren’t any birds in this car.”

  She parked the car on the double yellow lines outside the Grahame Coats Agency offices, and they went inside together.

  ROSIE LAY IN THE SUN BY THE POOL ON THE AFT DECK OF A KOrean cruise ship2 with a magazine over her head and her mother beside her, trying to remember why she had ever thought a holiday with her mother would be a good idea.

  There were no English newspapers on the cruise ship, and Rosie did not miss them. She missed everything else, though. In her mind the cruise was a form of floating purgatory, made bearable only by the islands they visited every day or so. The other passengers would go ashore and shop or parasail or go for rum sodden trips on floating pirate ships. Rosie, on the other hand, would walk, and talk to people.

  She would see people in pain, see people who looked hungry or miserable, and she wanted to help. Everything seemed very fixable to Rosie. It just needed someone to fix it.

  MAEVE LIVINGSTONE HAD EXPECTED DEATH TO BE A NUMBER of things, but irritating had never been one of them. Still, she was irritated. She was tired of being walked through, tired of being ignored, and, most of all, tired of not being able to leave the offices in the Aldwych.

  “I mean, if I have to haunt anywhere,” she said to the receptionist, “why can’t I haunt Somerset House, over the road? Lovely buildings, excellent view over the Thames, several architecturally impressive features. Some very nice little restaurants as well. Even if you don’t need to eat any longer, it’d be nice for people-watching.”

  Annie the receptionist, whose job since the vanishment of Grahame Coats had been to answer the phone in a bored voice and say, “I’m afraid I don’t know” to pretty much any question she was asked, and who, when she was not performing this function, would phone her friends and discuss the mystery in hushed but excitable tones, did not reply to this, as she had not replied to anything Maeve had said to her.

  The monotony was broken by the arrival of Fat Charlie Nancy, accompanied by the female police officer.

  Maeve had always rather liked Fat Charlie, even when his function had been to assure her that a check would soon be in the mail, but now she saw things she had never seen before: there were shadows that fluttered about him, always keeping their distance: bad things coming. He looked like a man on the run from something, and it worried her.

  She followed them into Grahame Coats’s office and was delighted to see Fat Charlie head straight over to the bookshelf at the back of the room.

  “So where’s the secret panel?” asked Daisy.

  “It’s not a panel. It was a door. Behind the bookshelf over here. I don’t know. Maybe there’s a secret catch or something.”

  Daisy looked at the bookshelf. “Did Grahame Coats ever write an autobiography?” she asked Fat Charlie.

  “Not that I’ve ever heard about.”

  She pushed on the leatherbound copy of My Life by Grahame Coats. It clicked, and the bookshelf swung away from the wall, revealing a locked door behind it.

  “We’ll need a locksmith,” she said. “And I don’t really think we need you here any longer, Mr Nancy.”

  “Right,” said Fat Charlie. “Well,” he said, “It’s been, um. Interesting.”

  And then he said, “I don’t suppose you’d like. To get some food. With me. One day?”

  “Dim sum,” she said. “Sunday lunchtime. We’ll go dutch. You’ll need to be there when they open the doors at eleven-thirty, or we’ll have to queue for ages.” She scribbled down the address of a restaurant and handed it to Fat Charlie. “Watch out for birds on the way home,” she said.

  “I will,” he said. “See you Sunday.”

  THE LOCKSMITH UNFOLDED A BLACK CLOTH WALLET AND took out several slim pieces of metal.

  “Honestly,” he said. “You’d think they’d learn. It’s not like good locks are expensive. I mean, you look at that door, lovely piece of work. Solid that is. Take you half a day to get through it with a blow torch. And then they let the whole thing down with a lock that a five-year old could open with a spoon-handle… There we go… Easy as falling off the wagon.”

  He pulled on the door. The door opened and they saw the thing on the floor.

  “Well, for goodness’ sake,” said Maeve Livingstone. “That’s not me.” She thought she’d have more affection for her body, but she didn’t; it reminded her of a dead animal at the side of the road.

  Soon enough the room was filled with people. Maeve, who had never had much patience for detective dramas, was quickly bored, only taking an interest in what was happening when she felt herself being pulled, unarguabl
y, downstairs and out the front door, as the human remains were taken away in a discreet blue plastic bag.

  “This is more like it,” said Maeve Livingstone.

  She was out.

  At least she was out of the office in the Aldwych.

  Obviously, she knew, there were rules. There had to be rules. It’s just that she wasn’t very sure what they were.

  She found herself wishing she’d been more religious in life, but she’d never been able to manage it: as a small girl she had been unable to envision a God who disliked anyone enough to sentence them to an eternity of torture in Hell, mostly for not believing in Him properly, and as she grew up her childhood doubts had solidified into a rocky certainty that Life, from birth to grave, was all there was and that everything else was imaginary. It had been a good belief, and it had allowed her to cope, but now it was being severely tested.

  Honestly, she wasn’t sure that even a life spent attending the right sort of church would have prepared her for this. Maeve was rapidly coming to the conclusion that in a well-organized world, Death should be like the kind of all-expenses-included luxury vacation where they give you a folder at the start filled with tickets, discount vouchers, schedules, and several phone numbers to ring if you get into trouble.

  She didn’t walk. She didn’t fly. She moved like the wind, like a cold autumn wind that made people shiver as she passed, that stirred the fallen leaves on the pavements.

  She went where she always went first when she came to London: to Selfridges, the department store in Oxford Street. Maeve had worked in the cosmetics department of Selfridges when she was much younger, between dancing jobs, and she had always made a point of going back whenever she could, and buying expensive makeup, just as she had promised herself she would in the old days.

  She haunted the makeup department until she was bored, then took a look around home furnishings. She wasn’t ever going to get another dining room table, but really, there wasn’t any harm in looking…

  Then she drifted through the Selfridges home entertainment department, surrounded by television screens of all sizes. Some of the screens were showing the news. The volume was off on each set, but the picture that filled each screen was Grahame Coats. The dislike rose burning hot within her, like molten lava. The picture changed and now she was looking at herself—a clip of her at Morris’s side. She recognized it as the “Give me a fiver and I’ll snog you rotten” sketch from Morris Livingstone, I Presume.

  She wished she could figure out a way to recharge her phone. Even if the only person she could find was the irritating voice that had sounded like a vicar, she thought, she would even have spoken to him. But mostly she just wanted to talk to Morris. He’d know what to do. This time, she thought, she’d let him talk. This time, she’d listen.

  “Maeve?”

  Morris’s face was looking out at her from a hundred television screens. She thought for a heartbeat that she was imagining it, then that it was part of the news, but he looked at her with concern, and said her name again, and she knew it was him.

  “Morris…?”

  He smiled his famous smile, and every face on every screen focused on her. “Hullo, love. I was wondering what was taking you so long. Well, it’s time for you to come on over.”

  “Over?”

  “To the other side. Move beyond the vale. Or possibly the veil. Anyway, that.” And he held out a hundred hands from a hundred screens.

  She knew that all she needed to do was reach out and take his hand. She surprised herself by saying, “No, Morris. I don’t think so.”

  A hundred identical faces looked perplexed. “Maeve, love. You need to put the flesh behind you.”

  “Well, obviously, dear. And I will. I promise I will. As soon as I’m ready.”

  “Maeve, you’re dead. How much more ready can you be?”

  She sighed. “I’ve still got a few things to sort out at this end.”

  “For instance?”

  Maeve pulled herself up to her full height. “Well,” she said. “I was planning on finding that Grahame Coats creature and then doing…well, whatever it is that ghosts do. I could haunt him or something.”

  Morris sounded slightly incredulous. “You want to haunt Grahame Coats? Whatever for?”

  “Because,” she said, “I’m not done here.” She set her mouth into a line and raised her chin.

  Morris Livingstone looked at her from a hundred television screens at the same time, and he shook his head, in a mixture of admiration and exasperation. He had married her because she was her own woman, and had loved her for that reason, but he wished he could, just for once, persuade her of something. Instead, he said, “Well, I’m not going anywhere, pet. Let us know when you’re ready.”

  And then he began to fade.

  “Morris. Do you have any idea how I go about finding him?” she asked. But the image of her husband had vanished completely, and now the televisions were showing the weather.

  FAT CHARLIE MET DAISY FOR SUNDAY DIM SUM, IN A DIMLY LIT restaurant in London’s tiny Chinatown.

  “You look nice,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I feel miserable. I’ve been taken off the Grahame Coats case. It’s now a full-scale murder investigation. I reckon I was probably lucky to have been with it as long as I was.”

  “Well,” he said brightly, “if you hadn’t been part of it you would never have had the fun of arresting me.”

  “There is that.” She had the grace to look slightly rueful.

  “Are there any leads?”

  “Even if there were,” she said, “I couldn’t possibly tell you about them.” A small cart was trundled over to their table, and Daisy selected several dishes from it. “There’s a theory that Grahame Coats threw himself off the side of a Channel Ferry. That was the last purchase on one of his credit cards—a day ticket to Dieppe.”

  “Do you think that’s likely?”

  She picked a dumpling up from her plate with her chopsticks, popped it into her mouth.

  “No,” she said. “My guess is that he’s gone somewhere with no extradition treaty. Probably Brazil. Killing Maeve Livingstone might have been a spur-of-the-moment thing, but everything else was so meticulous. He had a system in place. Money went into client accounts. Grahame took his fifteen percent off the top and standing orders ensured that a whole lot more came off the bottom. Lot of foreign checks never even made it into the client accounts in the first place. What’s remarkable is how long he had kept it up.”

  Fat Charlie chewed a rice ball with something sweet inside it. He said, “I think you know where he is.”

  Daisy stopped chewing her dumpling.

  “It was something about the way you said he’d gone to Brazil. Like you know he wasn’t there.”

  “That would be police business,” she said. “And I’m afraid I cannot possibly comment. How’s your brother?”

  “I don’t know. I think he’s gone. His room wasn’t there when I got home.”

  “His room?”

  “His stuff. He’d taken his stuff. And no sign of him since.” Fat Charlie sipped his jasmine tea. “I hope he’s all right.”

  “You think he wouldn’t be?”

  “Well, he’s got the same phobia that I have.”

  “The birds thing. Right.” Daisy nodded sympathetically. “And how’s the fiancée, and the future mother-in-law?”

  “Um. I don’t think either description is, um, currently operative.”

  “Ah.”

  “They’ve gone away.”

  “Was this because of the arrest?”

  “Not as far as I know.”

  She looked across at him like a sympathetic pixie. “I’m sorry.”

  “Well,” he said. “Right now I don’t have a job, I don’t have a love life, and—thanks mostly to your efforts—the neighbors are now all convinced I’m a yardie hit man. Some of them have started crossing the road to avoid me. On the other hand, my newsagent wants me to make sure the bloke who kn
ocked up his daughter is taught a lesson.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “The truth. I don’t think he believed me though. He gave me a free bag of cheese-and-onion crisps and a pack of Polo mints, and told me there would be more where that came from once I’d done the job.”

  “It’ll blow over.”

  Fat Charlie sighed. “It’s mortifying.”

  “Still,” she said. “It’s not as if it’s the end of the world.”

  They split the bill, and the waiter gave them two fortune cookies with their change.

  “What does yours say?” asked Fat Charlie.

  “Persistence will pay off,” she read. “What about yours?”

  “It’s the same as yours,” he said. “Good old persistence.” He crumpled up the fortune into a pea-sized ball and dropped it into his pocket. He walked her down to Leicester Square tube station.

  “Looks like it’s your lucky day,” said Daisy.

  “How do you mean?”

  “No birds around,” she said.

  As she said it, Fat Charlie realized it was true. There were no pigeons, no starlings. Not even any sparrows.

  “But there are always birds in Leicester Square.”

  “Not today,” she said. “Maybe they’re busy.”

  They stopped at the tube, and for one foolish moment Fat Charlie thought that she was going to kiss him good-bye. She didn’t. She just smiled and said “bless,” and he half-waved at her, an uncertain hand movement that might have been a wave and could as easily have been an involuntary gesture, and then she was down the stairs and out of sight.

  Fat Charlie walked back across Leicester Square, heading for Piccadilly Circus.