by F. G. Cottam
‘A right old song and dance,’ he said, raising an eyebrow. His voice was low and confidential. ‘I was attached to how I looked before, but needs must and all that, Jacob.’
The impending threat of him remained unchanged. He was poised, as though ready to spring and tear and maul. The cut of his clothing was impeccable but the muscles and sinews it concealed seemed barely restrained.
‘Ready to risk hell on the turn of a card,’ he said. ‘You’ve got some nerve.’
‘I’ve also got a fifty-fifty chance.’
‘And if you win?’
‘You go back with Brother Philip.’
‘Not the most congenial place, Jacob, neither the most congenial of hosts.’
‘They’ve got lots of new staff, Edmund.’
Caul appeared to consider this. He said, ‘It’s the culture disagrees with me.’
‘But you’ll take the bet?’
His pale eyes inventoried what Jacob wore. He said, ‘They’ve decked you out like a Christmas tree. That was quite unnecessary. I’m happy with the stake and I think the odds slightly favour me.’
Jacob frowned. He said, ‘The odds are entirely even.’
Caul smiled at that. He said, ‘But I’ve got the luck of the devil.’
It was hard to disagree with him.
‘Now, chum, let’s find a quiet table well away from the rabble, away from the riffraff and the hoi polloi.’
There weren’t many people in the room. Jacob reckoned he should really think of it as a cabin, since it was a vessel they were aboard and not a building they were in. He said, ‘Do they have tables on the deck?’
‘They have a couple, why?’
‘Because in this filthy weather that’s where it’s likely to be quietest.’
‘And you don’t consider damnation a spectator sport?’
‘Do you?’
‘I’m not publicity-shy, Jacob. I figured you’d have worked that out about me by now.’
Caul told him to go and pick up a fresh pack of cards from the woman in the teller’s booth on the casino deck below and then to meet him at one of the tables on the outer deck, at the Allegra’s stern. And it was while he was performing this ritual gambler’s task that the enormity of what he was about to risk hit Jacob like a physical blow.
He winced and then smiled bitterly to himself, the cards in their tight cellophane slippery between his sweating fingertips. The cardinal had used the plural, talking about this moment the way a boxing coach was apt to do discussing an impending bout. But when the bell went, the only people turning to answer it were the fighters in the ring.
Daniel Barry had been through this same ordeal. He’d faced the same awful risk, but at least he’d been involved in the give and take of a physical struggle and not dependent for his salvation on the trivial turn of a card.
Jacob was for a moment overwhelmed by self-pity for his own plight. He thought about turning away and running. The smog would be his refuge, facilitate his escape. And the temptation to do that was stronger in him than any he’d ever resisted in his life. He could just flee and forget this surreal episode and return to normality.
Except that if he ran he would never know when to stop running. Besides, his normality had gone. Everyone’s had. The world was out of kilter and the weird weather was only the least of it. He’d heard blindly discordant sounds on his route there earlier in the evening. The one constant had been the gunfire, popping and ricocheting through streets he couldn’t see, bringing a harsh cordite smell to the ashen atmosphere.
The Lazarus Prophecy had never been closer to fulfillment. It might be too late to arrest the momentum of events but it had been made his fate to try. Capitulation guaranteed failure. He had a responsibility to common humanity to do the best he could. There were still many more good than there were bad people in the world. By any measure that made it a world worth saving.
On a personal level the fray had been entered. The challenge was made, the gauntlet picked up. There was no going back. It was too late for that. He had a fifty-fifty chance of banishing Caul, saving his soul and ensuring that Jane Sullivan remained safe. He might not share the luck of the devil, but they weren’t the worst of odds. Were they?
On legs that felt they didn’t belong to him, with a springy gait afflicting every stride, with thumping heart and throat tinder-dry, he walked to the rear of the boat where his opponent waited, sprawled in a chair at a table, affecting a look of patience as bogus as the features his new face now wore.
‘Shall I shuffle,’ he said, ‘or will you?’
‘You do it,’ Jacob said, who had never played cards before in his life.
The cards sifted expertly through Caul’s long fingers. They snapped and shifted and blurred and their laminate smacked. Then he was done and he placed them in a perfect rectangle at the centre of the table.
‘Do you want to draw first, or shall I?’
‘I’ll go first,’ Jacob said. He reached for the deck. His hand he saw was surprisingly steady. He slipped out a card and flipped it to face him and then showed it to Caul, who viewed it expressionlessly and then stroked his chin.
‘The king of clubs,’ he said. ‘Your odds have suddenly got a lot healthier, Jacob. I’ll stop short of congratulating you just yet. That would be premature.’
He reached for the deck. He slipped out a card. He didn’t even bother to look at it. He showed it to Jacob and smiled. It was the ace of spades.
‘Aces high,’ he said. ‘You know what that means?’
‘It means I’ve lost.’
‘And we were playing winner take all. So I’ll have the watch and the tie-pin. Put them on the table. Put everything on the table.’
Jacob unfastened the watch bracelet and unclipped the tie-pin. He took out the cuff links and reached for the wallet. He hesitated over the cigarette case.
‘Put it on the table. I’m partial to the occasional smoke. Had a bad experience once with hard drugs, but I don’t mind nicotine.’
Jacob put down the case.
‘That was a joke, Jacob.’
‘I’ve rather lost my sense of humour.’
‘You’ve lost a great deal more than that, chum. Anything else?’
‘Just loose change.’
‘Let’s have it.’
‘It’s not worth much.’
‘It’s still rightfully mine.’
Jacob felt a tearing sensation. It was followed by a kind of weightless tug. The Allegra’s solid planks no longer supported him. He was no longer on the placid, smog-bound Thames. He felt as though his moorings had snapped and he was adrift helplessly, born towards waters that were bottomless, alone aboard a tiny boat. The boat was frail and listing under him. He could feel waves judder against its thin hull. The depths were unfathomably cold. His craft was doomed to sink beneath a dark waste of ocean. There was no chance of rescue. He felt hopeless and bleakly afraid.
‘You’re all at sea, Jacob.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Damnation,’ Caul said. ‘That’s the sensation you’re undergoing. It’s an experience always analogous to one of the elements. With you I expect it will be water. You’re wet, Jacob, irredeemably so.’
‘What was it with Lazarus?’
‘With him it was fire. He escaped it. But you know that, just as we both know you won’t. Now don’t distract me any further from the spoils of my victory. Hand over the money you’re hiding.’
‘It’s only loose change.’
‘But it’s my loose change.’
Jacob took out a cloth bag. He pried open the drawstring at its neck and coins chinked and rolled and then settled on the table top, where they lay still and innocent. They added up to only seven in number. Heads showed the face of Christ. Four of them settled displaying that. The three that settled on tails showed God the Father crushing the head of a serpent underfoot. They were hand-struck, their stamped detail neither crudely nor exquisitely done. But each of the two designs was unmistaka
ble in the subject it depicted.
All the coins were shiny, because they’d been recently minted and never put into circulation. They were quite large, which gave them an old fashioned character in Jacob’s view. They glimmered brightly, even under the pall of smog. Caul stared at them, the colour draining from his face as the pale illusion of his blue eyes shrank as they focused on his spoils and dimmed again to their original black.
He was not reverting, though, to the smug and dandified appearance he’d possessed on the afternoon of the rally in Trafalgar Square. He looked wild, bedraggled and as antique in appearance as the coins. His hair retained its widow’s peak but straggled down darkly to his shoulders, centre-parted by its own weight. A wispy beard covered his upper lip and the point of his chin.
Like the hair on his scalp, Jacob saw that his beard seethed busily with flees and lice. There was an audible buzz to this sudden, squirming infestation. He opened his mouth in an expression of loathing and a plump maggot plopped from between his lips and fell onto the table where it squirmed palely.
Caul was sweating and breathing hard. He hadn’t been a secretor, apparently. He was secreting now. His clothing was moldering on his body into rags. The garments frayed and rotted and reeked. They tore and withered as if tormented by a tearing wind to which nothing but him was subjected. He rocked and twisted, fighting it. He’d become very strong and his strength was defiant. Around him, all was calm. He glanced over Jacob’s right shoulder and said, ‘Jane! My appointment with you isn’t until tomorrow night.’
‘You stacked the deck,’ Jane said.
‘A lovely surprise, your turning up, nevertheless.’
‘You stacked the deck.’
Caul tried to smile. The vermin, Jacob saw, had departed him as suddenly as it had been delivered. His clothing regained a little of its expensively tailored lustre. It restored itself in a stealthy creep across his torso and shoulders, along the length of his sleeves. He glanced back down at the coins on the table. If this was a reprieve, Jacob thought it was an ominous reprieve. It only meant that the indignities he’d just suffered were judged by the power inflicting them to be nowhere near enough.
Nothing further happened for a moment. Music still drifted through the plush salons of the vessel’s interior. It was still jazz, still shrill and brassy, still a rendition of ‘The Lambeth Walk’ played at a tempo uncomfortably fast for the lilt of the melody. From somewhere at a remote reach out over the smog-bound water, a bell tolled a collision warning from some groping, timid craft.
Without looking back to where Jane stood, Jacob said, ‘Where are your men?’
‘I stood them down,’ Jane said. ‘They wouldn’t have recognized him. If they had, he’d have killed them.’
Caul sighed. ‘That’s certainly true,’ he said. He was still staring at the coins.
Then Edmund Caul’s ordeal properly began. His forehead crimped in a jagged line and the skin broke and began to bleed in trickles down his face. He gasped and looked at his hands, where wounds erupted, piercing both palms. ‘It hurts,’ he said, surprised.
Jacob wondered had he ever felt pain in his life before.
He was feeling it now. He grabbed at a sudden rent in the left side of his suit jacket as gore welled from a deep gash cleaved open under his ribcage.
He bled profusely and it stank, corrupt, black and copious. It splattered onto the table-top, dribbling across the playing cards. It dripped onto the planks beneath his chair. The smell reminded Jacob of the cloying bouquet of altar wine.
There were noises in the exhalations heaved out of him. There were whispers in languages that had the dry rustle of papyrus about their words. They were an ancient babble, a chorus of uncertainty. I am Legion.
‘You can stop this,’ he said, in his own voice, to Jacob.
‘It’s nothing to do with me. You’ll have to stop it yourself.’
‘They’re the marks of the crucifixion,’ Jane said, looking down at Caul.
To Jacob, again, Caul said, ‘You can stop this.’
‘I think that one of us is going to hell,’ Jacob said.
‘She’s right. I cheated. You won the bet. The wager’s void. Take back the coins.’
‘There’s a vacancy, Edmund. Room has been made for a new resident.’
‘Or an old one,’ Jane said.
‘I want you to take it,’ Jacob said. ‘I want your word.’
Caul bowed his head and ground his teeth. He shuddered and groaned in defiance. He looked at his ruined hands as their fingers stretched and convulsed in front of him. Through the holes piercing each palm, small bones, pale and broken, formed torn lattices. He tried to master the pain, this assault on him a shocking novelty. His scalp ripped under its crown of remembered thorns and one of his eyeballs was raked by an unseen barb and punctured and began to dribble viscous fluid down his face.
His one good eye blinked. ‘I can’t die,’ he said.
Jacob said, ‘That’s not for you to decide.’
‘I won’t die.’
‘We all owe God a death,’ Jane said. Her tone was neutral.
The babble of discord competing within him was hushed now. There was only the deep and regular shudder out of him of wounded breaths. ‘You have it,’ he said, finally. ‘You have my word.’
‘Then we’ve a deal.’ Jacob began to scoop and recover the coins from the table top.
Caul rose stiffly from his chair. He turned and his back was crimson from the flaying Christ endured on the march under the cross to Calvary. He was limping on feet with bones crippled and smashed by hammered nails. He turned back and managed a smile and bowed painfully to Jane. ‘Touché,’ he said, ‘Adieu.’
She didn’t answer him.
‘Since I won’t now have the pleasure of doing so myself, please extend my farewells to Madam Reynard.’
‘Go to hell.’
He walked along the deck and away, trailing blood, beaten for the moment, exiled from the world in which he’d briefly reveled, his grand scheme only so much empty rhetoric and dust. He walked steadily and without a backward glance. But his gait improved, the bargain struck, his wounds already healing. He was going home, after all. He was strong and he would mend and he might even forget the insult of the pain endured. By contrast he might learn from it, though his overweening pride could well impede that lesson, Jacob thought.
Jacob reached for Jane’s hand. He held it firmly and she returned his grip. His fingertips were dry and smooth now and he felt confident of her touch and grateful for it. He did not know what the future held but thought that matters might be about to brighten for them. Human beings were optimistic by nature. It was the way of things.
They watched Caul recede from them. The pall of airborne dirt cast him into monochrome before he reached the gangplank. He reached it though already more sure-footed and straight-backed, with the hint of a swagger returning to his stride. His retreat gained rhythmic steps like drumbeats in the gloom and his arms an easy swing. In the space of a few more steps, he was almost sauntering. Jane thought he might be moving in time to the music, antic and brassy, from below.
‘It’s a game to him,’ she said.
‘It always has been,’ Jacob said.
And when we have our bit of fun,
Oh, Boy.
The Smog engulfed the figure of Edmund Caul before he reached the quayside so entirely that it looked as though he might never have existed at all.
‘None of this happened,’ Jane said, squeezing Jacob’s hand so hard her grip made him wince, her eyes on the small bulge of coins in their bag on the table again.
Epilogue
The coins given to Jacob by Brother Philip for his wager were cast from silver. The silver had, until the smelting and casting, existed for centuries in the shape of a simple cross. This relic had itself been created out of silver coins. There had been thirty of them originally, small and thin, faded and ancient; the price paid an apostle called Judas in return for his betrayal of Jesus Chris
t.
It was Brother Philip’s belief that Divine Intervention was rare. Man had not been abandoned, but the tinkering with him of the Old Testament was a thing of the distant past. Free will was one of Christianity’s defining principles. Sometimes, however, the intervention of the Almighty was urgently required. And Philip was a realist. He thought there far less chance of getting it through prayer than provocation.
He’d thought that if making the money paid for Christ’s life the devil’s property didn’t provoke help from above then nothing was going to do it. It was a gamble he thought he might pay a price for taking in the afterlife, but he was sanguine about that. Its success relied on the entity called Edmund Caul cheating at the table. But Philip was a shrewd enough judge of character to have regarded that as a betting certainty.
The crisis worsened over the week that followed events that evening aboard the Allegra. Political and religious hostility escalated and spread internationally. A riot in Hyderabad claimed the lives of almost 400 people. Racial gang war at a number of high security prisons in America threatened to undermine the nation’s entire penal system and a score of Federal correction facilities went into total lockdown.
A State of Emergency was declared by the Mayor of the city of Detroit. The western suburbs of Paris burned, becoming a no-go area for the forces of law and order. There were mass demonstrations in Stockholm and Sidney and Milan and a curfew was imposed in the English city of Birmingham. Spanish unions called a General Strike. The workers of Greece came out in solidarity. Armies were mobilized in Russia and Pakistan. The world held its breath.
By the time the British Home Secretary was assassinated ten days later, the situation had actually begun to settle and calm. Moderate people, given a taste of anarchy and the subsequent destruction and danger it posed to them as individuals, recognized that they had far more to lose than to gain from a religious or racial conflict for which they didn’t really have the stomach or the will. The cause was ultimately a dubious one and the collateral damage unacceptable. To paraphrase the old anti-nuclear slogan, global war would cost the earth.
