by Hal Duncan
“The truth, Herr von Strann?”
“My name is Reynard Cartier—”
“Your name is Reinhardt von Strann. You came to Britain in 1947 from East Germany. Two years ago. From Futurist East Germany.”
“What? Are you saying I'm a spy now, a Futurist agent?”
“I'm saying I don't know how you've built this … charade of a life around you, but, believe me, I'm going to tear it down and get to the truth—”
“What truth?”
“The truth about you, about your brother.”
“I have no brother.”
“Liar! This is all lies.”
A BATTERED MATCHBOOK
“and his thopter going down inflames, and he was burning as he fell—”
White noise shrieks through the broadcast.
“but he jumped at the last second, Don, and he just disappeared in the sky—”
Jump cuts, voice to voice.
“so there he was on the burning deck of this exploding airbarge—”
Militia must be trying to time-jam the bastard, thinks Joey.
“and I tell you, Don, he walked out of that pile of wreckage without a scratch on him, then he just fucking shimmered and vanished like some fucking ghost—”
Joey closes his mind to block the broadcast, closes the door to mute the noise of music too. Even down the long corridor of burgundy carpet and peeling green wallpaper, the sound of the nightclub travels, a weird blend of the driving rhythms of the downstairs dance floor and the syrupy easy-listening music audible from upstairs. He used to like this place but it just irritates him now. The same fucking faces, the same fucking bullshit, the same people sitting in the same booths, making big plans that will never come to anything. This is where they first met Finn, the two of them, Jack and Joey, just two punk-ass kids stealing and dealing among the other guttersnipes of the Rookery, and Finn and Fox and Anaesthesia sitting in armchairs up on the balcony above the bar, planning revolution. Free Love, Free Speech, and Fuck the War. I'm in, Jack had said, grinning like it was all a fucking game.
Joey sticks his hands in his jacket pockets, casual, in control.
The club singer leans against the dresser, spitting blood into his handkerchief, the neon tubing round the mirror edging his face with a glow as red as his tuxedo, as red as the stains on his shirt, red as the sullen anger in his eyes.
“Joey,” he says. “We go back a long way. Don't do this to me. Don't do this to yourself.”
Joey takes two steps and slams the man's head into the mirror, shoves him backward halfway across the room and down onto a frayed leather couch.
“so I think he went where all dead heroes go, into the ether, into the Hinter, you know. But if anyone can walk out of Hell —”
The signal amps up even as the static cuts right across it.
“one of the Red Clydesiders, right, the only one who got away when they sent in the Black and Blues, and he swore that he'd take revenge for the deaths of all his comrades—”
“the Edward Assassination, the Stone of Scone, the destruction of the Crystal Palace. It can't all be coincidence—”
“Participation in this broadcast will result in prosecution. Repeat—”
“Who's the wannabe?” says Joey. “I want to know what he looks like, when he was here, who he was with, what he was drinking, and if he went to the toilet did he wipe his fucking arse.”
The man flinches as Joey flips the matchbook from his coat pocket at him with a sharp flick of two fingers; it bounces off his chest, lands in his lap. It's just a battered matchbook, decaled for the seedy nightclub, a couple of matches missing, a phone number written on the inside. It's not a clue in itself—Joey's already checked the number out and it was just some squalid little hustler's mobile—but the fact that it's for this nightclub, this of all places, means it was left on the sentry, like the cigarette, as a signpost. A little piece of where it all began left as a message for him where it all came to an end, on the bridge.
The singer looks at it in confusion, ft doesn't mean anything to him at all, but Joey can feel the death engrained in that tiny piece of cardboard even from where he's standing:
“Who are we?”
“I'll ask the questions, mate. Just don't you fucking move.”
And the sentry's thinking, shit, it's just his luck, every fucking nutter has to come his way, but he better call it in, and why won't this buggery phone come—got it—right then—
Shit.
Joey shrugs the pathetic final memory off, the last thoughts of the desperately banal, too dumb and slow to even be scared. You might think a dying man's last moments would be intense, life flashing before their eyes, the stab of pure adrenaline, the instant fear and fury of a wounded animal, a cornered rat. No. Most people die thinking to themselves this isn't real, this is just silly.
The fucker didn't even get a good look at his killer's face.
“—and he died. But, see, what happened is he sold his soul to the devil for one day on earth in every ten years, just one day when he's free to do whatever he wants before the devil drags him back to Hell—”
“—and according to this Moorcock guy, back in the 1890s there's this series of murders in Knightchapel, but the Masons covered them up so nobody will even admit they happened—”
“—and the Thieves Guild still tell stories about Spring-Heeled Jack. I'm telling you, Don, it goes deeper than you think—”
“What do you say, Harvey? You still there?”
“For fuck's sake, they'll be saying he climbed a fucking beanstalk next—”
“—like, man, I'm telling you, I saw it in this dream, right. He's, like, from the inside of our heads, man, like a ‘meme,’ you know, an idea, a virus that just moves around from host to host. That's why he doesn't stay dead. You can't kill an idea—”
“So what's it like, working for the Man, Joey?”
The singer turns the matchbook over in his fingers, looks at Joey like what he's holding is so mundane that Joey must be cracked to try and make something of it. He pulls himself up straighter in the couch, tilts his head back to try and stop the bleeding nose.
“How's the food up at the Circus? Better than prison food or hospital food, eh? Or was it the medication swung it for you.”
“I'll ask the questions, mate,” says Joey Narcosis.
The singer stands up, goes over to the dresser and flips some tissues from a box to plug his nostrils. Nervous bravado. He's hiding something.
“So Joey Narcosis is a big man now,” he says. “Shit, you're just another inmate like the rest of us.”
Joey doesn't answer him, just cricks his mind outward a little bit, presses up against the singer's thoughts, slides round his fear, his anger, his frustration and—fuck you, you little prick—slices into his mind and secateurs his head open like a cadaver's abdomen in autopsy. The singer drops to his knees. It only takes a couple of minutes, and he's stopped screaming by the time Joey is finished.
Joey Narcosis fixes himself up in the mirror before he leaves the room. He has a perfect mental image of his quarry now. It doesn't worry him that the image is the perfect double of how he remembers Jack standing in the club, a glass in one hand, toasting Guy Fox, his other arm draped over Fast Puck's shoulder, just like the old days. No. He popped another pill before he entered Club Soda, so it doesn't worry him at all.
“You don't get it. You don't fucking get it. Sure, he's dead. Ten years or twenty years, it doesn't matter. ‘Cause we're all dead. Don't you see? We're all fucking dead but we won't admit it; we just play our old lives over and over, this way, that way, but it's all the same. We're dead. We're fucking dead—”
“—unsanctioned and illegal broadcast. Repeat, this is an unsanctioned and illegal broadcast. Participation in this broadcast is a criminal act and will result in prosecution. Repeat…”
The King of Tears
“I'll have you thrown into the deepest dungeon known to man,” Pierrot says.
Jack do
es a kung-fu flip that brings him off the ground and to his feet.
‘And my dear dad will set me free at my command,” he says.
He strolls across the stage until he's stopped by Joey's foot upon the chain. Jack holds his hands up like he had forgotten he was even wearing manacles, and laughs. He twirls a little spin that wraps a length of chain around his waist.
“Since you're quite mad,” he says, “I'll clue you in.”
He wraps the chain around his arm and yanks it out from under Joey's foot. As Joey staggers back, Jack pirouettes, and flips the chain out like a whip round Joey's neck. It's done so fast the audience don't see the trick behind the stunt, the way Pierrot grabs it with a hand between the metal and his throat (although in the rehearsal I remember Joey swearing, Jesus Christ, you nearly took my head off. Fucking cunt). No. All they see is Jack's slick move, lassoing Joey, and the choking tug that hauls him in close as a dancing partner. Jack blows a kiss at him.
“There's no constraint,” he says, “can hold the Harlequin.”
“Constraint!” Pierrot snarls, pulling the chain from round his throat. “You barely know the meaning of the term. Well, it may be that when you stand with all your followers and call your so-called father's name, he'll set you free. Where is he now, though? I don't see a thing.”
His hand clamps round Jack's throat, a grip that pushes up his chin.
“He is beside me even now, a witness to my state,” says Jack. “He's right in front of you, my friend. You're simply blinded by your hate.”
Pierrot looks around with a slow sneering, shakes his head.
“Go, lock him up,” he says. “Let's see you do your dancing in the stables, in the pitch-black gloom.”
Don picks the chain up.
‘And these women of yours that share your crimes, well, they can share your doom. Their delicate hands that beat the drums with such a noise, they can be put to good use at the looms. Oh, yes, I'll work them in the mills to serve my industry, and if that doesn't break their wills, I'll sell their broken bodies into slavery.”
“I'll go,” says Jack, “for that which fate forbids can never fall on me.”
He lets Don lead him, turning only at the last to strain, pulling his hand around to point at Pierrot, despite his chains.
“But for this mockery,” he says, “you can be sure the Harlequin will take a fee. I swear on the spirit whose existence you deny. You know, Pierrot, you insult him now as you imprison me.”
“Take him away. The man's a fool, mocking the king of this city of Themes.”
“You just don't fucking see,” shouts Jack as Don pulls him offstage. “The very substance of your world, your life,” he shouts, “is only dreams.”
“I am Pierrot, king of everything that you see here.”
“Your name is Sorrow,” Jack spits from the wings, “the King of Tears.”
The Hunter and the Fox
The double doors to the library are still swinging shut behind me, an angry rebuke hardly out of my mouth, when I see him and I stop.
He sits in our father's favorite—plushest—armchair, a dark leather-bound volume open in his lap and an intensely studious look upon his face. It's so out of character for my brother that for a second I imagine that it's Father himself back in his usual seat, his usual pose, nose buried in a book. On the occasional table at the side of the armchair, a glass of port lies untouched and, as he reaches up to turn on the reading lamp, I can't help but think of the times my brother and I stood here behind our mother's skirts. She would ask our father quietly, calmly, if he would be having supper with his family tonight, and he would look up from the book he was caught up in, and switch on that lamp, only now aware of the twilight that had crept up on him. A cursory wave of his hand would dismiss us. When I was ten, I think, Mother moved the three of us permanently into the town house in Strann. We would visit occasionally, and each time we would find him there again, as if he never moved from that chair. He was a diplomat before the Great War—I remember misspent years of childhood in the countryside outside Paris, and then England, which I always had a soft spot for—but, as I understand, he fell from favor in the years before the war broke out, and it changed him. In the end, he retreated from the world into his books.
And now my brother sits in his place, his usually impeccable uniform unkempt, the top buttons on his gray tunic undone. I never really understood his fascination with the martial ethic—his choice to give his life to those who had little more than contempt for his kind—but his martial primness was always something of a benchmark for my own, more wayward character. Now he sits slumped in the half-light, more wild and disheveled even than Father was toward the end. Books and broken glass litter the floor of the library, debris from the cabinets that line the walls. I step carefully with both feet and words as I approach him.
“Since when did I ever give a damn about foxhunts, Johann?” I say. “You know I never had a taste for blood sports.”
My voice is casual, but, in my pocket, my fist squeezes a crumpled telegram.
COME HOME SOONEST STOP FOXHUNT ON STOP J
“Well, I didn't want to be too obvious, Fox,” he says.
“You haven't called me that since we were children,” I say.
I must have been five years old or so when the folktale of Reynard the Fox, King of Thieves, gave me the nickname that was to become so deeply ingrained in my identity that, as long as I can remember, I have felt more of a Reynard than a Reinhardt. Before his change, you see, our father's books were as much a part of our life as of his. Mythology and folklore were his hobbies, and we learned our English and our French from translations of the Brothers Grimm and Aesop's Fables. As we grew older, we moved on to Greek and Roman myths, the Bible of course, and even Oriental texts. It seemed terribly important to him that we appreciate these myths and legends as he did, the universalities of them; and it was all one with his method of teaching us the languages that they were written in, how the vocabularies shared common roots.
“Bruier,” he would say, “brother, frater.frere. You must listen to the similarities as well as the differences. If you learn the way the sounds shift, then you understand that we all once spoke the same tongue, told the same tales.”
Sometimes I think he was more interested in the idea of us, in who we might be, than in who we were. It can't be wrong, can it, to see the potential in your children? But perhaps one should keep the actualities in mind. Anyway, as Reinhardt I became Reynard to him, his little Fox, the King of Thieves; meanwhile my brother Johann became John, Jack, Killer of Giants. My brother would taunt me that my name fit because I was sneaky and a big coward, but I just rolled the phrase around in my head: King of Thieves. King of Thieves. When we played, after that, I would often be the wily Fox, and my brother the noble hero Jack, thwarting my schemes, smoking me out wherever I hid, battling me, defeating me, though I, of course, always escaped.
Our mother kept photograms of us on a display cabinet in the front room of the family town house. One shows my brother as a member of the Wandervogel, out on some camping trip and looking quite the thing in his lederhosen and neckerchief; it was the trip that he came back from prattling excitedly about his new friend—Thomas this and Thomas that—and how they were going to be soldiers together. Another picture shows me as four-year-old fop, proud in his pressed attire. I'm told that at that age I had a girl who thought me so sweet she virtually adopted me at kindergarten, even tying my shoelaces for me if they came undone. Apparently, I was quite capable of tying them myself but, well, she did not need to know that.
I look at my brother in his rumpled uniform and I wonder how much our lives have been shaped by the stories told to us of ourselves.
“What exactly is this all about?” I ask.
“I have a job for you,” he says.
I smile. Although I know there is more to all this cloak-and-dagger than a sudden opportunity for respectable employment, I try to make light of it.
“Some dreary desk j
ob in one of father's friends’ businesses?” I say. “You know I've rather done my best to avoid that horror up to now, and I wouldn't want all those years of baccarat to go to waste. No, I already have an occupation, thank you, and while it may not be the most respectable—”
“Respectable?” he interrupts.
He closes the book and lays it on the table at his side. Cracked black leather, brass clasp, I presume that it's one of Father's books, though I don't recognize it—it looks more like some fantastic grimoire than one of those interminable treatises on medieval Spanish romance literature or some such. His hand moves gently across the surface of the cover, fingertips just touching, almost fondling, and I look around at the shattered debris strewn across the library floor; is this the product of some fevered search, I wonder, or just a pointless tantrum? I had heard that, since Hitler's speech outside the Reichstag, my brother had become … unpredictable, but this disturbs me.
“I wouldn't describe your current employment as respectable,” he says.
I pull a second chair across from a corner of the room, sit it on the other side of the table. Glass crunches under my feet.
“I'm not defending the Fatherland against—what is it now—Jews? Futurists? No. But people do need entertainment. I provide a service.”
“Ah, yes,” he says. “Cabaret and whores. Drink and song.”
He taps one finger on the stopper of a crystal decanter sitting beside the glass. I wander over to the sideboard where the decanter belongs, to fetch another glass.
“Don't underestimate the value of simple … diversions,” I say. “You and your people can have your running battles with the Futurists, your rallies, demonstrations and counterdemonstrations. The rest of us just want to get on with our lives, to forget about our troubles in an evening of, yes, drink and song. It may not be noble but it serves a purpose. I should have thought you'd be thankful that I'm actually doing something constructive with my life these days.”
