False Value (Rivers of London 8)

by Ben Aaronovitch

  It wasn’t until Jacob/Stephen made a guilty little jump away from me that I realised what he was doing. I put my hand on his arm and then snatched it away to sell the illusion, and tried to look like an embarrassed teenager. I suspect I merely looked horribly off balance, which probably served just as well.

  The female bodyguard gave me the side eye and pointedly paused until the blue door closed behind her. I caught a glimpse of the edge – it was at least ten centimetres thick and had locking bolts at the top and bottom – and, beyond, a stretch of white corridor.

  I nodded to the bodyguard as she walked past and said good morning.

  She nodded back but said nothing.

  ‘I’ll tell you something for nothing,’ said Jacob and/or Stephen. ‘Those guys are definitely sus. Right?’

  ‘What should I call you?’ I asked. ‘Jacob, Stephen, Mr West?’

  ‘Stephen,’ he said. ‘And you?’

  ‘Peter,’ I said.

  ‘Is that your real name?’

  ‘I think me and you should go somewhere to have a chat,’ I said. ‘Somewhere away from here.’

  ‘Is this a date?’

  ‘You should be so lucky.’

  ‘In that case, let’s go somewhere we can get a drink.’

  Old Street roundabout is a diamond-shaped circulatory system designed in the late 1960s to thin out the number of cyclists heading in and out of the City. In line with the then-current planning conventions they added a series of mugger-friendly underpasses, an insufficiently wide entrance to Old Street Underground station, and a small shopping arcade lined with urine-attracting beige tile. The big planning fad in those days was to create inaccessible spaces and thus the central island became a jumble of ventilation towers, leaky flat roofs and a delivery access for the arcade.

  Fast-forward some decades and the wave of City money heading north met the deep gentrifying current flowing south and created a boom in property prices. Once the proportion of working-class Londoners had fallen to acceptable levels, the roundabout was redeveloped – although no amount of exciting pop-up retail opportunities was going to disguise the seediness of the original arcade. You can say what you like about late-sixties architecture, but when they baked in the ugly they baked it in good.

  The man currently known as Stephen led me along the subway under the roundabout, through an archway opposite a branch of Nin Comp Soup and into a short dark corridor painted sci-fi black with stars and planets. This ended in a staircase that led up above ground. Wedged between the cooling shafts and lift machinery towers was a sort of shanty town nightclub built out of painted offcuts from a builder’s yard and scavenged furniture. The rain rattled off a haphazard array of tarpaulins stretched between wooden frames and concrete pinions. It was almost totally empty, so we chose seats sheltered under a roof constructed of corrugated Perspex sheets.

  I got in two pints of lager, plonked one on the table and sat down opposite Stephen. I raised my glass and said cheers. He held up his pint and delicately rotated it as if assessing its quality.

  ‘Cheers,’ he said finally and had a sip.

  I followed suit to show willing.

  Magic is almost impossible to do when you’re pissed, although you can bet many have tried. So drinking with a rival practitioner can be considered, if not a peace offering, then at least a sign that you’re not planning to fight them straight away.

  ‘Who trained you?’ I asked.

  Stephen pulled a face.

  ‘I’d rather not say,’ he said.

  ‘And I’d rather not call my contacts in the FBI and ask them to find out,’ I said.

  Stephen shrugged. Obviously he didn’t rate the FBI – I’d have to mention that to my friend Agent Reynolds the next time we chatted.

  ‘And that will make things official, won’t it?’ I said. ‘Which means I have to arrest you for attempted murder.’

  He looked genuinely amused.

  ‘And who am I supposed to have murdered? Sorry – attempted to murder?’

  ‘Me actually,’ I said.

  ‘I barely knocked you down,’ he said. ‘And you’d better not have left water stains on those books now. Although I did like that water spell. I’m going to have to get you to teach me that one.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not the bit where you resisted arrest and assaulted a police officer. The bit where you left a lethal demon trap guarding your flat.’

  That shut him up, which at least told me that he knew what a demon trap was.

  ‘Wasn’t me,’ he said.

  ‘Wasn’t you what?’

  ‘I don’t even know how to make a trap,’ he said. ‘That knowledge is forbidden.’

  ‘Forbidden by who?’

  Stephen pulled a face.

  ‘You know.’ He bobbed his head from side to side. ‘Forbidden. Did you defuse it?’

  ‘Somebody did,’ I said, not wanting to give away anything I didn’t have to. ‘And I was there.’

  ‘Did you catch its signare?’ he asked.

  Signare is the unique quality that every practitioner gives to their work. Apprentices are influenced by their trainers, and so different magical intuitions and traditions can have distinctive signare.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘I was a little bit busy at the time.’

  ‘Was it fishy?’

  ‘It was a bit too amorphous to be fishy,’ I said. ‘But there was definitely a whiff of the sea about it.’

  ‘Fuck,’ said Stephen. ‘And in my apartment?’

  ‘Just inside the front door.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘You know who put it there?’

  ‘Not for sure,’ said Stephen, shaking his head. ‘But whoever they are, they’ve been biting my ass since I got here.’

  ‘Any ideas?’ I asked, because I know a fishing opportunity when I see one.

  ‘West Coast. Maybe out of LA or Santa Cruz,’ said Stephen. ‘There’s some very strange people over on that side of the country. Collectives and communes and religious groups, all of them with their own little slice of magical heaven. Some of them are pretty scary too – militia types – know what I mean?’

  ‘Native American?’

  Stephen shrugged.

  ‘I don’t know much about them,’ he said. ‘Except that there’s some variety of treaty that keeps them on the reservation.’

  ‘And they accept that?’

  Stephen didn’t know for sure, but told me there was rumoured to be a whole department within the Bureau of Indian Affairs whose one job was to come down hard on any Native American practitioner who tried to practise outside the reservations. I wondered if Reynolds knew this. And, if she did, why she’d never mentioned it to me.

  ‘So probably not Native Americans then,’ I said. ‘It still could have been you. A bit of insurance against anyone getting too curious.’

  Stephen sighed and held up his hand.

  ‘I’m going to do a spell,’ he said, and closed his hand into a fist. ‘Just a small one, so don’t get all excited and overreact.’

  I braced just in case, but after checking to see nobody was looking Stephen opened his hand to reveal a small globe shining with pearly light. I felt the signare of his magic as a hushed whispering like papers and a busy growling undertow like engines underground.

  Nothing like the suffocating cloud of rotting fish that had permeated the demon trap.

  ‘We call that a werelight,’ I said. ‘What about you?’

  ‘Same,’ said Stephen. ‘Satisfied?’

  ‘It means you didn’t manufacture it, at least,’ I said.

  Stephen snorted and extinguished the light.

  I glanced up as a tall man in a good black pinstripe suit cut in an old-fashioned Savile Row style sat down in one of the booths that lined the wall behind Stephen, put a half of lager do
wn on the table, carefully folded a copy of the Telegraph on his knee and started in on the crosswords. I let my eyes slide back to Stephen’s face before he noticed. The man was DCI Thomas Nightingale – my boss.

  Now I had backup I could press a little harder.

  ‘Since we’ve gone around the houses a couple of times,’ I said, ‘why don’t you tell me who trained you, who you’re working for, and what you’re doing on my manor?’

  ‘You don’t want much, do you?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ I said. ‘Not really, when you consider the alternative.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Stephen. ‘When I was fifteen I ran into something unreasonable on the subway, and one thing led to another and I found myself pursuing an alternative career path to the one I expected.’

  ‘Which was what?’

  ‘Sex worker, drug runner and unmourned casualty of the street life,’ he said. ‘Originally I was from Concord, but I ran away when I was thirteen.’

  I wanted to know what he’d run into, but sometimes even I have to prioritise my curiosity.

  ‘So, who trained you?’ I asked.

  ‘The Librarians,’ he said.

  ‘Librarians?’

  ‘Not librarians,’ he said. ‘The Librarians.’

  Because in New York there was only one library with a capital L, and that was the Main Branch on Fifth Avenue, which had been built with a ton of cash donated by Andrew Carnegie, who had a thing about libraries. Given that libraries were the repositories of knowledge it made sense that they were also the home of secret wisdom.

  The Librarians took him in – he was maddeningly vague on how many of the employees of the New York Public Library system were actually practitioners, although it couldn’t be all of them.

  ‘They gave me a place to stay, three squares a day, a job, a purpose,’ said Stephen. ‘A reason not to kill myself.’

  ‘And they taught you magic?’

  ‘They made sure I graduated high school as well.’

  ‘And what do you do with your magic?’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I uphold the Queen’s peace,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’ said Stephen. ‘The Queen’s peace?’

  ‘To the best of my power.’

  ‘And when your power isn’t enough?’

  ‘I call in backup,’ I said, making sure I didn’t glance at Nightingale.

  ‘I don’t work for the Queen,’ he said. ‘But we probably deal with the same problems. Ghosts, revenants, black magicians. Does that sound familiar?’

  ‘And the police?’

  ‘We prefer not to involve the cops.’ Stephen gave an apologetic shrug. ‘Although we do have some contacts in the department, we find they tend to get in the way.’ He put the tip of his finger under his eye and pulled gently. ‘What the eye don’t see . . .’

  Stephen had said ‘department’ singular, not forces or even law enforcement. I knew that big city arrogance – had a case of that myself.

  ‘So do you cover the whole country?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Stephen. ‘Just the five boroughs and parts of Jersey. Maybe upstate – if something starts to smell.’

  ‘So what’s so fragrant that it brings you all the way to London?’ I asked.

  ‘Would you believe a sabbatical?’

  ‘No,’ I said, letting my tone harden. ‘I fucking wouldn’t. Now stop pissing about and tell me why you’re here or I’m going to have you arrested.’

  He shifted in his seat subtly, tensing for action. I forced myself to stay relaxed and aimed for maximum insouciance.

  ‘How about I just bounce you round and round the block?’ he said.

  I shrugged and pulled out my mobile.

  ‘Have it your way,’ I said.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ said Stephen. ‘Jeez, you guys really have a stick up your ass, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s called a backbone,’ I said. ‘Why are you here?’

  Stephen screwed up his face and tilted his head to one side.

  I held up my phone and he relaxed and sighed.

  ‘Do you know what a Mary Engine is?’ he asked.

  I did, as it happened, but people love ignorance in other people – it gives them a chance to sound knowledgeable – so I said no.

  ‘But you know who Charles Babbage is?’ he said.

  I said I did – a nineteenth-century pioneer of mechanical calculation.

  ‘His big plan was to build an analytical engine,’ said Stephen. ‘A programmable calculator.’

  And he’d worked with Ada Lovelace, the Enchantress of Numbers, to build it.

  ‘But something happened,’ said Stephen. ‘And they never finished the thing – nobody knows why.’

  He’d left out Babbage’s attempts to build the simpler ‘difference’ engine, and his dispute with the British Government over all the money they’d paid him and got sod all in return for.

  I asked why Babbage and Ada hadn’t finished it.

  ‘Typical tech venture,’ said Stephen. ‘They got sidetracked into another project.’

  And the source of this distraction were the Lilly and the Rose.

  ‘Two female practitioners,’ said Stephen. ‘Some people think the Lilly might have been Mary Somerville, but nobody has a clue who the Rose was. I figured you’d have heard of them, you being a Brit and everything.’

  I said that I knew who Mary Somerville was, but I’d never heard of the Lilly or the Rose.

  ‘Unless she’s something to do with Rose Jars,’ I said.

  ‘Bingo,’ said Stephen. ‘You know what those are, right? Rose Jars?’

  ‘Devices for trapping ghosts,’ I said.

  ‘Have you ever seen one, with a ghost trapped in it?’

  ‘Just the one,’ I said.

  And a room full of empty jars at the Chesham ghost palace.

  ‘They’ve got some downstairs in the basement of the Library,’ said Stephen. ‘But they’re all dead. What was a live one like – if that’s the right expression?’

  For a moment I’d stood in a palace of glass facing the ghost of a man in a frock coat who told me that existence was not life and went into the darkness gladly while the singing of the jars faded to nothing.

  ‘It was like a big thermionic valve,’ I said.

  Stephen nodded.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Figures.’

  ‘Never mind the ghost jars,’ I said. ‘What’s any of this got to do with you being here?’

  ‘What if I told you they made a magical mechanical engine?’ he said.

  ‘This would be the Mary Engine?’ I asked.

  Stephen smiled.

  ‘And?’

  ‘They built it but nobody knows where it went,’ he said.

  He explained how it became a rumour, a ghost, something tracked only through marginalia in certain books and gossip amongst American practitioners.

  ‘They used to talk to each other back in those days,’ said Stephen. ‘After the war – not so much.’

  When I did arrest him, I decided, I was going to hand him over to Professor Postmartin, the Folly’s pet archivist, to lecture him. That would teach him to try and distract me.

  ‘Then two years ago it pops up on eBay,’ he said.

  I tried to look suitably startled.

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Truth,’ he said. ‘Only stayed up a week and then was withdrawn.’

  But now the Librarians knew there was a Mary Engine knocking about on the open market. So, when they heard a whisper that a certain Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur had acquired it, they took an interest.

  I asked Stephen why the interest, and it was his turn to look startled.

  ‘It’s a forbidden object,’ he said.

  The Librarians kept a list of dang
erous magical artefacts, and one of their duties was to collect those artefacts wherever possible and lock them away. Wherever they might be found.

  ‘Even if they’re in other countries?’ I asked. ‘What happened to just the five boroughs?’

  ‘Some things are too important to leave to chance,’ he said.

  ‘Or Terrence Skinner?’

  ‘Definitely not him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘These techbros have tunnel vision,’ said Stephen. ‘They’re so fucking busy with their dreams of the future they don’t stop to think about where they are or what the fuck they’re doing.’

  ‘Do you know what he plans to use it for?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Stephen. ‘But it’ll be nothing good.’

  ‘Then our first step should be to find out what his plans are, isn’t it?’

  Stephen shook his head.

  ‘My idea is simpler,’ he said. ‘I lift the loot and split. No fuss, no muss.’

  ‘It is a simpler plan, but it rests on a basic logical fallacy,’ I said. ‘Which is that you have any choice in the matter. You’re on my manor now, so the only question is, do you want to do it my way or do you want be arrested, charged and deported?’

  He gave me a long stare. I couldn’t tell if he was really weighing his options or whether he thought that if he left it long enough I might change my mind. But with Nightingale sitting behind him in his blind spot I didn’t have any worries at all, and took the opportunity to finish my beer.

  In the end he agreed – it wasn’t like he had a lot of choice.

  So we spent half an hour going over some plans, each of us acting with all the sincerity of a south London used car salesman. One of us was going to end up with an old banger with a suspiciously low mileage, but I was pretty confident it wasn’t going to be me.

  As we headed out I glanced over at Nightingale, who was still apparently engrossed in his Daily Telegraph. Written in the margin on the side facing me in large block capitals were the words – cold fish.

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