by Nick Baker
11
THE STONE OF MADNESS
The Humpback of Notre Dame
HERMES BING WAS IN a bad mood. That in itself was no surprise as his disposition was apt to fluctuate like the vagaries of the stock market he had recently disparaged in a Comet editorial. Bing’s newspaper had had the temerity to describe the City as a gambling den of iniquity frequented by affluent wide boys who had been too stupid at school to achieve any notable success, ending up where they were on the basis of who they knew rather than what they knew. Not surprisingly, this assessment had not gone down well in the financial quarter, but for Bing, this was no problem. His views were lauded by the masses who bought his newspapers in ever increasing numbers and, to Bing, this was all that really mattered.
Today, however, and Bing’s bad mood was only ever going to get worse; it always did when the coffee was late. His outbursts appeared far too often for the staff of the Star whom he met each morning before the paper went to press in time for its early afternoon distribution. These meetings were fraught with difficulties at the best of times, although the beleaguered staff came to realise that Bing’s fits of rage were neither personal nor likely to last beyond the first cup of strong coffee to pass his lips, although no ordinary coffee would do.
Cassiopeia, his secretary, had already managed to deliver a coffee to him almost the moment he opened his eyes, which was good. What was not so good was that Bing preferred his coffee made from beans grown on a single plantation situated on the sloping terraces of the mountains overlooking Sana’a, the capital city of Yemen. Wonderful place, wonderful coffee, but for him, nothing else would do. The fact that his usual supply had not arrived when the courier making the delivery was involved in a fatal motorcycle accident, and had scattered the cargo far and wide, was irrelevant. Neither was Bing interested to learn that a further shipment was being airlifted at that very moment and would arrive later in the day. By then it would be too late, and his black mood far too dark to contemplate.
These circumstances were only compounded when John Valentine, the newspaper’s Chief of Security, rang in to request an impromptu meeting. Ever since Bing had received a recent mysterious phone call, he had done his utmost to find out who had been behind the call and what best to do with the information the caller had ventured. After Valentine had met with limited success in tracing the call, Bing had shifted his attention elsewhere. The caller had suggested that Bing was under consideration for election to the Council, but their leader, Henry Price, was planning to block the move. Bing barely had time to deliberate before he decided that being a member of the revered, and somewhat secretive, Council was definitely in his best interests. So, should he try and make Price change his mind and vote in his favour? Or somehow ensure that Price fail to make the meeting? With these options in mind, he had tasked Valentine with finding out what Price was up to.
After the application of some gentle persuasion in all the right places—bribery was never considered unseemly for an institution like Bing’s media conglomerate—Valentine made the intriguing discovery that Price had been the subject of a recent burglary. Despite the authorities’ best attempts to cover up news of the theft, the scoop was published in the Comet the following day, but to Bing’s dismay, the article provided little more than sketchy information at best.
Bing prided himself on his empire’s prolific database of criminals, delinquents, thieves, pickpockets, cardsharps, tricksters, fences, snitches, moles and grasses, or anyone, for that matter, who could be relied upon to perform wrongdoing of any kind. After all, as Bing was often quoted as saying, ‘Where else would you expect to find the reputable information upon which we base our publications?’
Despite turning over many stones in all sorts of dubious places, little else surfaced, apart from the revelation that the only item taken was an archaic book penned by a man with the ridiculous name of Piotrowski. Bing knew something odd was going on simply by the cover-up. He also anticipated that if he could get to the bottom of the burglary, then it would give him a bargaining tool that he could use to manipulate Price. He had immediately dispatched Valentine to keep watch on Price and to track him at every turn, but thus far, the ploy had yielded disappointingly little.
Despite the awful coffee, Bing’s mood lifted the moment Cassie called to inform him that Valentine was on the way up. He scrutinised the day’s itinerary while waiting for Valentine to arrive with what he hoped was some new or potentially useful information. His mood, however, plummeted to yet unheralded depths the moment Valentine vacated the elevator with a hangdog expression etched on his face that was enough to make Bing weep.
As a ruthless journalist, he had learnt to read a face within a fraction of a second, and it was clear that Valentine was no poker player from the anxiety-laden creases adorning his brow and the dilated pupils betraying his fear. A symmetrical, rhythmical pulse beating at his temples merely corroborated the incipient rise in the man’s blood pressure, telltale signs of someone about to go into a meeting that was destined to go badly.
‘What is it?’ barked Bing in a voice that was harsh and threatening.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr Bing,’ Valentine said as he edged across the broad expanse of floor space towards his employer.
‘Cut out the flimflam. Just tell me the news,’ Bing snapped.
‘S-sorry, I … I …’ Valentine stammered.
Bing glared, waiting for him to continue.
‘You remember, boss, we were trying to keep track of Price?’
Bing did not reply but drummed his fingers impatiently on the table. The sound resonated sharply around the room.
‘I’m, er, afraid we managed to lose him.’
‘What do you mean by “lose him”?’ spat Bing. ‘Lose as in mislaid or lose as in failed to keep up with? No, don’t even bother to answer that,’ he continued without coming up for air. ‘Who did you have tailing Price and how could this person be so incompetent? It’s not as if it was a difficult task, after all, now was it?’
‘The man we use is generally very reliable,’ replied Valentine, wringing his hands nervously.
‘We! Don’t you mean you? And generally isn’t good enough!’ barked Bing.
‘I know, boss, but McCall’s got an excellent track record. He’s never failed me before.’
‘Well, you’d better get him back on the case before we miss out on some valuable information.’
‘That’s what’s so odd,’ replied Valentine. ‘I said the same to him, but he just came back with some poorly disguised excuse and declined point-blank to have anything further to do with Price.’
‘Hmm. We all know how dangerous Price can be. I’d wager Price has somehow got to him; remind me, what’s this man’s name?’
‘McCall.’
‘Then I suggest you find McCall and question him a little more diligently. I expect you to get to the bottom of what actually happened. All is not yet lost. Perhaps we can turn this to our advantage after all.’
‘Of course, Mr Bing,’ replied Valentine.
‘Get out of here and get on with it,’ Bing ordered, surveying the dramatic early morning skyline while patently ignoring his loitering employee.
Valentine turned quickly on his heels and headed for the elevator. He gave an audible sigh of relief as he placed a palm on the touch pad next to the lift and waited for the green light to confirm that the elevator was on its way.
‘Not long till your retirement now, John,’ Bing called out unexpectedly.
Valentine did not reply, nor did his boss expect him to; it was a statement based on fact, and was a simple, but ill-disguised threat aimed at reminding Valentine of the consequences of yet more failure with his comfortable retirement away from the bustle and turmoil of the city teetering on a knife-edge.
The elevator doors opened, and Valentine moved quickly into the car.
Bing afforded himself the satisfaction of a hollow smile. There was a time and a place to be ruthless, or at least give a good imp
ression of it, and he was never one to shirk his responsibilities. The stakes were too high, and he could ill-afford to lose this opportunity; after all, it was unlikely to repeat itself again in the future. He inherently liked Valentine and had worked with him for many years. It pained him to threaten him in this way, but Bing was too experienced not to realise what motivated men like John Valentine. It would be all too easy for him to sit back and await the comfort his pension would bring. What better way to ensure his commitment by a gentle, yet none too subtle, reminder of the consequences of failure?
The intercom suddenly crackled into life.
‘Mr Bing?’
‘What is it, Cassie?’
‘Your meeting with the—’
‘Yes, yes, I know. When’s the damned coffee going to arrive?’
‘It should be here by two this afternoon, Mr Bing.’
‘Well, just make sure it does. Oh, and in the meantime, I want you to get all the past copies of our newspapers, not to mention any supplements or periodicals, containing references to either Henry Price or his precious Council. Is that clear?’
‘Yes, of course. I’ll get on to it right away, sir.’
‘Just make sure you do. I expect everything to be in my office, including the coffee, by five to two,’ said Bing, pressing a prominent red button on top of the intercom, bringing the conversation to an abrupt end.
Bing fidgeted uncomfortably in his chair. Too much caffeine provoked a headache in most, but for him, it was the opposite. He wondered whether substituting his craving for caffeine with a small dose of nicotine would help to relieve the pounding at his temples. He crossed the room and opened the double doors leading to a terrace that jutted improbably from the side of the building. The cool morning breeze was refreshing, but as he leaned over the balcony and surveyed the city many hundreds of feet below, he thought better of the cigarette. With his physician’s recent words still ringing in his ears, he would just have to wait for the coffee.
The rest of the morning turned into a series of interminable meetings that became progressively worse as the day went on. By the time Bing returned to the office, casually casting aside his false beard and Rabbi’s hat on the leather sofa adjacent to the elevator, he had long since lost his patience.
It had started badly at the pre-press meeting of the Star, although he knew it was not the staff’s fault that there was no noteworthy news with which to festoon the paper’s front pages.
‘Good journalists make their own news,’ Bing had boomed, but deep down he knew that, from time to time, days like this were destined to happen.
The meeting had dragged on for two hours longer than scheduled, and this, of course, had made Bing late, and increasingly vexed, for the subsequent meetings listed in his diary.
His staff were scouring the world press in desperation for a story the Star could lead with, and as the deadline edged ever closer, Bing finally agreed on a bizarre tale that even he found amusing, despite the depressing way the day was progressing.
One of the sub-editors had unearthed a story in a local edition of Le Parisien about a stray whale stranded in the Seine. Bing immediately saw that, with the right lead, the story could be a runner. Following some quick thinking, the headline writers came up with the somewhat quirky, and almost certainly factually incorrect, headline of, ‘The Humpback of Notre Dame’. The fact that the whale was of the Minke variety and was nowhere near Notre Dame when it was found proved irrelevant, and with time running short, Bing agreed to run with the story.
The whale had somehow found its way up the Seine, and despite all good intentions to repatriate the beast, it had died and been washed up in the middle of Paris. French bureaucracy determined that the whale’s remains should linger on the riverbank until someone in authority decided what to do with them next.
It was only when Professor Devereux, proprietor of the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle, came forward and offered to take the whale for ‘scientific purposes’ that the outcome was agreed. Unfortunately, by the time the museum made arrangements to salvage some seven tons of dead whale, the residents were already beginning to complain about the stench. When three tall cranes and twenty museum workers lifted the carcass onto a suitably large truck, the vehicle only managed to trundle a few hundred yards before the whale exploded onto a crowd of bewildered onlookers.
When asked for his comments by a Star reporter, Professor Devereux responded with an off-the-cuff statement that was incorporated into the article as quick as a wink.
‘Ze poor beast should never ’ave been left zere for so long. I’m afraid ze authorities are never very good when something ’appens zat is not in zeir rulebooks. Ze delay to move ze whale caused a ’uge build-up of gases inside ze animal’s stomach as it decomposed. Unfortunately, Jacques, one of my men, lit up a Disque Bleu after ze gargantuan effort to get ze mammal onto ze truck. Jacques is, ’ow do you say? one short of a full pod of peas, and tossed ze butt in the direction of ze beast’s waterspout.
‘’Ow was he to know zis would ignite ze sulphurous gases emanating from ze beast’s guts? Fortunately, Jacques was left with no more zan a set of singed eyelashes. I’m afraid ze onlookers were not so lucky and were splattered by a combination of blood and decaying guts. Et Voilà! It was an ’orrible sight.’
Bing was delighted when some further probing by a wily old hack revealed the Professor to be the real villain of the piece. Following the whale’s explosive demise, Devereux was left with the delicate task of explaining to the dog food company he was surreptitiously dealing with that the ‘horse meat’ consignment he had agreed to sell for a fee of several thousand Francs would no longer be coming their way. It was hardly a surprise that Bing exposed the facts exclusively in the Star.
Bing left the meeting with a sense of satisfaction at the ingenuity of his staff, but this was not enough to raise his spirits now that he was running late. He called Cassie to cancel a meeting with a disgruntled cartoonist then set off for a lunchtime rendezvous with his old friend and rival, Montague Fielding, the owner of The Daily Sting.
The Sting was the only coherent competitor to the supremacy of Bing’s newspapers, and despite the intense rivalry between the editors and their insistence on disparaging one another in their respective publications at every opportunity, in private, they remained firm friends. For the sake of the daily battle fought to bolster their newspapers’ ratings, it remained imperative that the men were seen to be adversaries in every conceivable matter. In public, if one man said, ‘black’, the other would say, ‘white’, it was as simple as that, but between them, they agreed on too many things they cared to admit. They both knew that it would have an unfavourable effect on their respective media empires if the truth of their friendship ever came out, and for this reason, their meetings were only ever held in secret.
It was Bing’s turn to visit Fielding, but, fortunately, this required little more than a thirty-second stroll. The newspaper empires faced one another across the street like two behemoths wrestling in a perpetual struggle for supremacy, much the same as the feigned antagonism that existed between the media moguls that owned them. It went unsaid that whenever the men held a meeting, they travelled incognito, resulting in increasingly outrageous disguises, culminating in Fielding’s recent appearance dressed in the attire of a Zulu tribal chief, complete with shield and spear.
After the profligacy of his friend at their last meeting, Bing’s dress, on this occasion, was rather understated. When he slipped into the Sting’s headquarters through a locked side door to which he had received the access code via a cryptic message sent to his secretary earlier in the day, he did so in the attire of a rabbi, resplendent in black dress and hat, and complete with a false beard.
The quick trip across the divide, however, was not without incident. When a woman clutching a babe in arms leapt out in front of the bogus scholar, eager to quiz him on his interpretation of a passage in the Torah, the interview was cut short when the child grabbed Bing’s shockingly white
beard only for it to come off in the tot’s hands. Quite who was the most surprised during the brief intercourse that followed, it was hard to tell, but in the ensuing commotion, Bing slipped apologetically away without further ado.
Lunch was a relatively quiet affair, dining in Fielding’s office on seared calf’s pancreas served on a bed of Beluga caviar washed down with a bottle of fine French claret, a 1945 Château Mouton Rothschild. The discourse was somewhat stale, largely as a result of Bing’s caffeine deficiency and Fielding’s discomfort from a severe attack of gout afflicting the big toe of his left foot, and it was with great relief to both parties when their luncheon was prematurely terminated by the arrival of Fielding’s personal physician to tender to the aforementioned big toe. The doctor was particularly displeased to see the remains of the gout-inducing meal Fielding had just partaken of and insisted he immediately retire to elevate the inflamed digit.
So it was that Bing, on his return to the summit of Bing Tower, smiled unassumingly at what awaited him in the office, having cast off the remnants of his disguise on the brown buckskin sofa next to the elevator. For most wealthy men, it was a stunningly attractive woman or a priceless piece of art, but for Bing, it was the combination of the aroma wafting towards him and the sight of a cafetière sitting on the desk. He did not need to be told that the coffee had arrived; he simply took in the bittersweet smell and rejoiced in his fortitude at not having indulged in that earlier cigarette.
He crossed to the desk with a heightening expectation that was almost too much to bear. He poured the coffee adroitly and lifted the cup to his lips, staring all the while at the dark, thick liquid shimmering enticingly in the cup. Before allowing himself a sip, he inhaled deeply, savouring the roasted flavours of leather and tobacco. He closed his eyes and imagined himself standing in the invigorating air of the mountains overlooking Sana’a on the Arabian Peninsula. Was it the imagined rarity of the atmosphere or the heady expectation of an end to his caffeine deficiency that set his head spinning? Bing did not know, and not wishing to dwell on it, he tipped back the cup in one fluid motion, swallowing the liquid with carefree abandon in a single gulp. The familiar tannic edge and dried fruit flavour combined with a hint of cinnamon spiciness flooded his senses. He flopped back into the chair almost overwhelmed.
