by Damien Love
Alex actually felt his heart jump inside him, then slam into the pit of his stomach. A cold feeling.
“Ohhhhhhhhrrrr,” the man grunted again. The eyelid Alex could see was flickering.
The eye opened, rolled to stare at the floor, closed.
Then opened.
“Uuuuuuuuuuurrrffff.”
The sausage-link fingers of one huge hand twitched. The hand spread itself flat on the rubbery floor, beginning now to push, lifting his unimaginable bulk into a kneeling position. He held that pose for a moment, swaying gently over the toilet seat, eyes closed, looking like he was considering being sick into the bowl.
Not taking his eyes from him, Alex edged toward the door.
Slowly, the man raised his quite enormous, square-looking head and blinked. He turned to Alex, staring confusedly at him. He lifted a hand and pointed.
Alex scrabbled at the lock. The catch slipped out of his sweaty grasp as though it had been buttered.
The man was on his feet, rocking slightly with the motion of the train.
Rap-rap-rap. Rap—rap
Alex twisted uselessly at the lock.
Rap-rap-rap. Rap—rap
He felt a heavy hand land on his shoulder, pulling him back.
Rap-rap-rap. Rap—rap
Alex kicked back hard with his heel. The grip on his shoulder loosened. It was enough for him to lunge forward. With the last desperate brush of his straining fingertips, the catch clicked. The door swung open.
“Goodness’ sake, Alex, what took you so— Oh, hello.”
His grandfather stepped in past him, cane twirling, a black-and-silver blur. Alex saw the other bald man lying facedown in the corridor. He heard a blunt thwacking noise close behind and turned to see the man in the toilet crumbling to his knees again.
“Give me a hand, would you, old chap?”
His grandfather had stepped back into the corridor and was lifting the man from the floor.
“Going to see if I can’t drag him in.” He nodded toward the next carriage. “Could you keep a look out?”
Alex stood looking dumbly at him.
“Alex? Look out?”
Alex stepped over to stand hovering by the carriage entrance, shifting unconsciously from foot to foot. His head felt empty.
Behind him, with a lot of huffing and grumbling, his grandfather maneuvered the hulking figure into the little toilet and dropped him on top of his colleague.
Through the glass panels of the sliding doors, Alex watched a girl of about sixteen in a gray sweater and jeans rise from her seat halfway down the next car. She was, he thought vaguely as she began walking toward him, about the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. Even from here, her eyes, which now glanced up and caught his, were an astonishing green. Long chestnut hair.
Walking toward him.
“Right, then,” his grandfather grunted in satisfaction. He stood in the toilet doorway regarding his handiwork, the men on the floor, rubbing his lip with his thumbnail. He broke off as Alex jumped back, spluttering.
“Someone! Coming!”
His grandfather grabbed him and shoved him into the toilet with the men.
“Lock it,” he whispered urgently, stepping out and pulling the door shut again.
“What? No!”
“Lock it.”
Fingers trembling, Alex turned the lock.
He was actually standing on top of the men now, he noticed, his feet on the uppermost one’s massive chest. With glum fascination, he saw that he bobbed up and down a little as the man snored quietly under him.
Outside, his grandfather had started cheerfully whistling a loud, ornate tune.
“Afternoon!” the old man’s voice suddenly sang out. “Lovely journey, eh?”
Alex stood listening, staring down at the unconscious man he stood on.
“Grandson’s just popped back in,” his grandfather’s voice bubbled on. “Shouldn’t be too long now. Least I shouldn’t think so. I mean, he’s been running in and out of there constantly getting on for twenty minutes already. Quite horrendous case of diarrhea. Can’t imagine there’s too much left to come now. I did warn him.”
The eyes of the man under Alex’s feet were flickering, eyeballs moving rapidly left to right behind thin eyelids.
“Dodgy-looking portion of jellied eels. I said to him, ‘Those things just don’t smell right.’ But you can never tell anybody anything, eh? That’s one thing I’ve learned. Hmmm? How’s that? Oh, yes, now, I think there is another one, yes. Just back down through the carriage toward the other end of the train. Can’t miss it. Well, you have a lovely trip now, miss! Lovely talking to you! Watch out for those eels!”
The whistling started again, fading gradually to silence.
Rap-rap-rap. Rap—rap
Alex pulled the door open as far as the legs of the men he was standing on allowed.
“‘Horrendous case of diarrhea’?”
“Look out,” his grandfather said, leaning past him, swinging his cane briskly. There came another thunk, another sighing groan.
“Now,” he said, stepping in, pulling the door closed. “Let’s see what we can do here.”
With the four of them in there, there was barely room to move. Feet straddling the men on the floor, elbows in Alex’s face, his grandfather swayed from side to side with the train as he rummaged in his bag at the sink, hemming and hawing. When he turned, he had several ties draped over his arm.
“Handmade. Awful shame to waste these. But needs must. Now, Alex, help me get them on their sides, face-to-face.”
Grunting in the hot little room, Alex’s grandfather bent over the men, working swiftly, binding each man’s hands together behind his back with intricate knots, securing their ankles, then tying the bonds at wrists and ankles together. Alex was reminded of a film he’d seen, cowboys roping up at rodeo.
Patting his pockets, his grandfather produced four cotton handkerchiefs. Scrunching two into loose balls, he stuffed them casually into the men’s mouths. He twirled the others into thick strands, then tied them firmly around their heads, gagging them.
“Promise they’re clean,” he said, patting one of the sleeping men on the cheek.
“Is that . . .” Alex swallowed. “Him?”
“Him? Him who? Oh, I see. No, no. Just a couple of his pets. Now, then.” The old man pulled the door open a crack, peered into the corridor. “Coast’s clear, out you pop.”
Alex stepped gladly from the stifling room, nervously watching the door to the next carriage. His grandfather stood behind him, bent fiddling at the lock, then jumped out into the corridor, wrenching the handle up and slamming the door hard. He tried the handle, and turned with a triumphant smile.
“Et voilà,” he chirruped, pointing at the lock with a flourish. The sign had been flipped to red, ENGAGED. “Handy trick,” the old man said. “Teach it to you sometime. Now would you look at that!” He gasped, pointing to the window behind Alex.
“Paris. Isn’t she lovely?”
V.
THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY
THE TRAIN SITS idling in Paris’s Gare du Nord station. Most of the passengers arriving from London have long since left. But in a carriage toward the rear, the small man and the moon-faced girl stand beside the closed toilet door. They do not speak. For a time it seems as though nothing is happening.
A banging begins behind the door. It trembles. Finally, with an enormous splintering, it is ripped open, wrenched off its hinges.
The two bald men stand crammed in the doorway, panting, bruised, and shamefaced. The girl shakes her head. Beside her, Beckman makes a small, empty giggle, devoid of humor. He sighs. With great reluctance, he begins removing the bright scarf from his neck.
“And so,” he says, weakly.
Beneath the scarf, his neck is a horrible red and sore-looking
network of scars, some still fresh. From a pocket, he produces a small piece of thick, waxy white paper and unwraps it to reveal a shiny new razor blade. He lifts the blade to his throat.
“No.”
The voice stops him. Silhouetted in the gray light streaming through the window, the tall man in the long black coat steps into the carriage. He puts a hand on Beckman’s arm, pushing the blade away.
“Something more, I think.”
He turns to the girl. Smiling eagerly, she reaches into her coat and pulls out a battered old pouch containing an empty syringe, a rubber tourniquet, cotton wool swabs, and a small bottle of clear alcohol. Shrugging one arm free from his coat, the tall man pushes up his shirtsleeve, locates a clear spot amid a mess of old scars and scratch marks that mottle the skin from wrist to elbow. He inserts the needle and begins drawing out his blood.
A train cleaner has the bad luck to enter at this moment. He splutters at the broken toilet door.
“What the—?”
He stops, words dying, as he notices what the tall man is doing.
The girl whips around, glaring. There is a strange stirring inside her coat. As she throws it open, the cleaner catches sight of something: some silver blur, moving fast through the air.
And then he sees nothing more.
* * *
• • •
FOR ALMOST TWO hours, to a commentary of muttering, sighing, and shrugging from the driver, Alex’s grandfather made the taxi drive this way and that through busy, drizzling streets, while he sat studying the traffic behind them through the rain-smeared rear window. Beside him, Alex wondered if the numbness in his head was shock.
By the time the old man gave the driver a definite destination, it was midafternoon. The day was already dark. Lights glowed softly along blue boulevards as they pulled up outside a hotel that managed to look both grand and comfortably ramshackle.
The porter cursed quietly while he wrestled to erect a camp bed for Alex in the corner of their top-floor suite. His grandfather sat at a table beside doors leading to a small balcony, flipping through street maps in a guidebook.
“Here we are.” He pointed out to Alex. “That’s us. Métro station just around the corner, see? Very handy. And my friend Harry’s place is just”—his finger traced a short wavy line across the page—“here.”
He handed Alex the map, then crossed the room and dialed room service, excitedly ordering an ever-larger late lunch.
“Bed okay?” he asked Alex as the porter left, pocketing a tip.
“Huh?” Alex stood staring in the general direction of his feet. He looked at the bed and sat, halfheartedly patting the mattress. “Yes, fine.”
“Important thing, a decent bed,” the old man said over his shoulder, disappearing into his own room. There was a pause, followed by a sudden, complaining squeal of mattress springs. “Oh, yes. That’s just the ticket.”
Sighing, Alex wandered over. His grandfather lay spread-eagle on his back on a huge white bed, looking very much as though he had flung himself backward onto it straight from the doorway. He bounced contentedly up and down, one hand clicking a remote control at a large TV on the wall.
“Two thousand channels,” he said, flicking through a great number of them at a blur. “Nothing on, of course.”
“It’s really valuable then?” Alex said.
“Hmm?” His grandfather had stopped on a talk show. Two large teenage girls sat on either side of a larger woman, shouting at each other. “‘Sister, Take Your Cheating Face Out of Our Mom’s Man,’” he read from the onscreen caption. “Good lord.”
“Our robot,” Alex tried again, wondering distantly if he was growing more patient, in shock, or simply too tired to get worked up. “It must be really valuable?”
“Ah,” his grandfather said. He sat up, clicked the TV off. “Yes. Quite possibly. And possibly even more valuable than that. Invaluable, you might say.”
There came a polite knock.
“Excellent,” the old man said, springing to his feet with one eager bounce. He squeezed past Alex, rubbing his hands. “Luncheon.”
They sat at the table by the balcony, Alex dimly surprised to find he was prepared to set his questions aside for a moment as he concentrated on spooning down a wonderfully hot and thick brown soup.
“Cream of mushroom.” His grandfather slurped happily. “Rivaled only by cream of tomato as the king of soups. Don’t believe what anyone else tells you. Although, there are those who follow the cream of chicken path. And leek and potato is never to be sniffed at.”
Bowls scraped clean, Alex picked at the spread, assembling a sandwich from cheeses and salads. His grandfather did likewise, but with considerably more ambition, then further set about a platter of biscuits and pâté, polishing off another small bottle of champagne in the process.
“Now,” the old man said, eyeing the stand of cakes. “I’m feeling rather warm after that. I think coffee on the balcony. Care to join me?”
It was bracingly cold outside. The rain had stopped. His grandfather stood balancing his cup on the iron balustrade as he popped the remains of something sugary into his mouth and buttoned his coat.
“Ordinarily, around this point,” he said, “I’d have myself a cigarette. But, of course, I’ve stopped.”
“Have one if you really want,” Alex said without looking up, staring out at the soft and mysterious city, the black traffic swishing along the gold-and-orange street seven floors below.
His grandfather reached an eager hand inside his coat, hesitated, brought it back empty.
“No, you’re quite right, Alex.” He sipped his coffee and sighed. “Lovely. You know, just around the corner there”—he pointed off toward the end of the building—“you can see the Eiffel Tower. There are rooms on the other side of the hotel that have the most ravishing views of it by night. But, I don’t know, I thought that would have been a bit touristy. Although, I rather wish we’d taken one now. I think it’s going to snow.”
He turned back to Alex, watching him closely over his cup as he drank.
“So. Our robot. Yes, if it’s what I think it might be, then it is very valuable. Very valuable indeed. Alex, you remember what I told you about the first and best toy robots, where most of them came from?”
“Japan,” Alex replied automatically. It was a basic collector’s lesson, drummed into him long ago. “After the Second World War, when they were trying to get their industries going again. They used scrap tin from the canning factories.”
“Very good. And we’re talking around about when . . . ?”
“The 1940s, the end of the 1940s.”
“Excellent.” His grandfather beamed. “Now, what if I told you our robot might date from earlier than that, maybe even the early 1920s? And what if I told you it didn’t come from Japan, but from Europe? From what we used to call Czechoslovakia. Prague, to be precise. Tell me, Alex, do you know where the word robot comes from?”
“Um.” Alex frowned. This was a new one. “No. I thought it was just . . . you know . . . the word.” He winced at how lame it sounded.
“Really.” His grandfather tutted. “Words all come from somewhere, Alex. Okay. Robot comes from a play, Rossum’s Universal Robots, by a man named Karel Čapek, a Czech writer. Wrote it in Prague back around 1920. There’s a Czech word, robota, you see, which means drudgery, menial work, and his play was about a factory that makes these artificial people—these robots—to do all the boring work for humans. But the robots, they begin to think for themselves, you see, and . . . well, that’s another conversation. Although, actually, it ties in with what I was telling you before, about that film with the computer—”
“Okay,” Alex broke in, feeling himself dangerously near the edge of one of his grandfather’s massive, swampy lectures, and keen to get away from it. “So, our toy robot.”
“Oh, yes. Now, there
was a man in Prague, a watchmaker and toymaker on the side, name of Benjamin Loewy. Sometime soon after Čapek’s play, he was inspired to make his own little clockwork robot toy, probably the first in the world. Strange thing: in the play, Čapek’s robots looked more like humans, so we might even have Loewy to thank for coming up with the idea of making them look like metal machines. But it’s not such a stretch, I mean—”
“So, he made these toy robots.” Alex sighed.
“Oh. Yes, well. Story goes, he only ever made three. Two are known to be in the hands of private collectors—rather odd chaps, actually, hate each other, and never show any of their stuff to anybody—and both those are in badly damaged condition. The third, though, has never turned up. Most people believed it was destroyed long ago. But recently there were rumors of a big find: a cache of old toys discovered in an old woman’s basement in Prague. She had died and her family were selling the stuff off and . . .”
He raised his eyebrows meaningfully.
“And you think this is it?” Alex asked.
“Well, it’s tricky. There have been copies made over the years. But yes. I’ve spent a long time looking, and I really think we might have found Loewy’s robot. But that’s why we’re here. The only man I can trust for a second opinion is my friend Harry. Which reminds me, I need to call him.”
Walking back inside, his grandfather stood holding the room’s phone to his ear.
“Ringing out,” he mused, tugging at his bottom lip. “Well, it’s not far; we can go over, see if we can’t find him.” He nodded to Alex. “But first, you should call your mother, let her know you’re all right.”
“Okay,” Alex piped back innocently. “Shall I tell her about being attacked on the train and you locking me in a toilet with the men who were attacking us?”
“Yes, very amusing.”
Alex pulled out his cell phone. He realized it had been off since the night before. It shuddered in his hand. Nineteen new messages.
“Now, don’t use that thing,” his grandfather groaned. “Curse of your generation, Alex. I mean, you all go on about being so individual, and the whole time you’re all chained, addicted to these devices, shuffling around with your faces bent to all these little screens, like some science-fiction cult. Reading live updates of one another’s thoughts before any of you have had a chance to think about anything. Use a proper telephone, man, one that was simply designed for talking like a civilized human being.”
