“Well, I didn’t draw them.”

Icarus ripped the map from the wall.

“What are you doing that for?”

“Have you a pair of scissors?”

“You’re not going to cut up my map?”

“Oh yes I am,” said Icarus Smith. “I’m going to change the world.”

7

Now I’m not into autoerotic podophilia, so I don’t shake in my shoes at the first sign of trouble. Nor am I some taurophiliac, so you won’t find me going off like a bull at a gate. I reason things out and then I leap into action.

I put my feet up onto my desk and lit up another Camel.

“This would be the reasoning it out bit, then, would it, chief?”

“No, Barry, this would be the me with my feet up on the desk while you get your little green bottom in gear bit, actually!”

“Don’t quite follow you there, chief.”

I blew a smoke ring out of my nose and smiled a winning smile. “Tell me, Barry,” said I. “How exactly would you describe yourself?”

“Chirpy, chief. Chirpy and chipper and cute as a cuddler’s cuddly.”

“I meant, what are you?”

“I’m your Holy Guardian, chief.”

“Exactly, and as a Holy Guardian, I’ll just bet you have lots of other Holy Guardian buddies, don’tcha?”

“Millions, chief. We’re all one big happy family.”

“So why don’t you put the word out on the old celestial telephone? Because if God’s down here on Earth, one of your big happy family is bound to have seen Him.”

“Smart thinking, chief, but no can do.”

“Come again, please, if you will.”

“Against the rules, chief. We’re not allowed to speak to one another.”

“But I clearly recall you saying you’d put ideas into a couple of heads to get me my hat and my gun back. Weren’t you talking to the Holy Guardians then?”

“No, chief, just the human schmucks.”

“Damn and blast,” said I. “Then I’ll just have to do this myself. So what do we have, Barry? Do we at least have a photo of God, so I have something to go on?”

There was the kind of silence that I for one wouldn’t pay you five cents for.

“That would be a no, then, would it, Barry?”

“That would be a big no, chief.”

“OK. Fair enough, we’ll just have to do it the hard way. If you had a thing about Jewish virgins, where would you go to meet some?”

“Israel, chief?”

“Would you care to narrow that down a little?”

“Isl?”

“Most amusing.” I gave my head a violent shake. “Ooh” and “Eeek” went Barry.

“I would go to the Crimson Teacup,” I said.

“The Crimson Teacup, chief? Not the Crimson Teacup! Don’t tell me you want us to go to the Crimson Teacup?”

“You know the place, Barry?”

“Never heard of it, chief.”

The Crimson Teacup was a gin and ginseng joint on Brentford’s lower east side. The Jewish quarter. It was not the kind of venue that I’d want to take my granny to. But hey, I wouldn’t want to take my granny anywhere. The old bag’s been dead for three years.

The Crimson Teacup was one of those leather bars, where guys and gals who like to dress as luggage get together and sweat it out beneath the pulsing strobes. Fuelled on a diet of amphetamines and amyl nitrate, they strut their funky stuff to the tribal rhythms of the techno beat and discuss the latest trends in nail varnish while the DJ’s having his tea break.

I loaded up the trusty Smith and Kick butt west of the Pennines and rammed it into my shoulder holster. Cocked my fedora onto my brow at the angle known as rakish. And, with more savoir-faire than a pox doctor’s clown, was off and on my way to glory.

The Crimson Teacup was having one of its specialist evenings. It was a theme night and the theme was “Come as your favourite food”. Now I thought that I’d seen every kind of cuisine that could possibly be splattered over the human form in my time as a private eye. Because, let’s face it, in my business you get to meet some pretty messy eaters. But when I walked into the Crimson Teacup that evening, I was ill prepared for the startling sight that met my peering peepers.

“The joint’s empty,” I said.

“It’s early yet,” said Fangio. “Care for a piece of chewing fat?”

I swanked over to the bar and settled my bottom parts carefully onto a stool. “I didn’t know you worked here, Fange,” I said.

“I bought the place. Thought I’d branch out. And a house without love is like a garden overgrown with weeds, I always say.”

“Well, set ’em up, fat boy,” says I.

“Ah. Excuse me, sir,” said Fangio, a-preening at his lapels.

I looked the fat boy up and down, then up and down some more. “Is this a mirage?” said I. “Or am I seeing things?”

The fat boy was no longer fat!

In fact he was freer of fat than a scarecrow in a sauna bath. He was willowy as a whipping post and pinched as a postman’s pencil. I’d seen more flesh on a supermodel’s shadow. This guy was wasted. He was scrawny. He was gangly, wire-drawn, waif-like, spindle-shanked, spidery, shrivelled …

“Turn it in, Laz,” said Fangio. “I’m not that thin. I’m svelte.”

“Svelte?” said I. “Svelte?”

“Svelte,” said the sylph-like barkeep.

“Now just you turn that in,” I said. “You’re Fangio the fat boy. Always have been, always will be.”

Fange shook his jowl-free bonce. “Remember our deal?” said he. “Remember back in my bar at lunchtime, when you didn’t have the-dame-that-does-you-wrong to bop you on the head and I whispered to you that I’d do it, if we came to an agreement?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I must have amnesia. I got this bop on the head.”

“You lying git. I agreed to bop you on the head, as long as I didn’t have to be the fat boy any more. As long as you would refer to me in future as the handsome snake-hipped barkeep with the killer cheekbones and the pert backside, and you said—”

“That’s outrageous!”

“That’s exactly what you said. But you had to agree, so you could stick to your genre and do things the way they should be done. Am I right, or am I right?”

“Huh!” I made the kind of grunting sound that goes down big in a piggery, but tends to turn a head or two at the last night of the Proms. “I didn’t think you meant that thin. I thought you just meant a couple of stone off your big fat bum.”

The handsome snake-hipped barkeep with the killer cheekbones and the pert backside poured me a gin and ginseng.

I sipped at it and cast a steely eye about the place. It hadn’t changed much since the last time I had been in. There was the same old junked-up jukebox, the same old spaced-out salad bar, the same old trippy tables and the same old stoned-again stools. The bar counter looked as if it had been on a five-day freebasing fallabout in Frisco and the ashtrays had chased more dragons than a St George impersonator at an Anne McCaffrey convention.

“Oi!” said the svelte boy. “Turn that in. There’s no drugs allowed in this bar.”

“Since when?” says I.

“Since last week,” says Fangio. “I recently had a bad experience with drugs. I snorted some curry powder, thinking it was cocaine.”

“Oh yeah?” I said. “What happened?”

“I fell into a Korma.”

Oh how we laughed.

“But I’m not here to talk toot tonight,” said I. “I’m here on a case.”

“The briefcase case?”

“No, this case is bigger than that.”

“A suitcase case?”

“No, bigger than that.”

“You don’t know how big a suitcase I was thinking of,” said the wasp-waisted wonderboy. “This one’s really huge. I used to get inside it when I was a kid and go through this doorway into a snow-covered land where I met a lion and a witch.”

“Surely that was a wardrobe?”

“No. It was definitely a witch.”

I whistled a verse of “You’re a twat, Fangio” and sipped on my gin and ginseng.