“Not everyone,” Collingswood said. “There’s gunfarmers about, but they’re on some other dime. No one knows who, and no one’s feeling very safe about that.”
“Well that’s got to be our squidnapper, surely,” said Vardy. “So who’s paying them?”
“Can’t track it. They’ve gone into hush mode.”
“So get it out of them,” Baron said.
“Boss, what do you think I’m trying to do?”
“Splendid,” said Baron. “It’s like a Zen koan, isn’t it? Is it better or worse if holy visionary shooters are fighting against us alongside Chaos Nazis, or against them and we’re in between? Answer that, my little bodhisattvas.”
“Can we please,” said Vardy, “establish what’s going on here with that chap? Did any of them tell us anything?”
“Certainly,” said Baron. “He had to finesse how quick I got him to roll over, so under guise of glorying in the chaos he would bring by terrifying me with the truth, a-blah-dy blah-dy blah, this little bugger sang like the most beautiful nightingale.”
“And?” said Vardy.
“And Dane Parnell is not having a good time of it. They snaffled our exile, sounds like. That much he saw”-he pointed through the window with his chin-“before passing out. Which leaves little lost Billy out on his tod in the city. Whatever will he do?”
“Yeah, but he ain’t exactly helpless, though, is he?” Collingswood said. “I mean, just pointing out…” She waved her hand at the savagely wounded man. “It ain’t as if Billy’s got nothing fighting his corner, is it?”
“Vardy,” said Baron. “Care to give us your opinion?” He made a big show of opening his notebook, as if he didn’t remember everything about the description he was about to give. “‘It was a bottle, policeman, you law-worm, we brought chaos to each other, you scum, etc…’” he read, deadpan. “I’m going to editorialise. I’ll trim the epithets and skip to specifics. ‘It was a bottle. A bottle that came at us. It bit with a skull. Its arms were bones. It was a real glass enemy.’ I like that last line, I have to say.” He put the notebook away. “So, Vardy,” he said. “You must have thoughts.”
Vardy had closed his eyes. He leaned against the wall and puffed out his cheeks. When at last he opened his eyes again he did not look at Baron or Collingswood: he stared intently through the window at the crippled Chaos Nazi.
“We know what that’s about, right?” Baron said. “Let me rephrase. We’ve no idea what it’s about. No one does. But we’ve a reasonable notion of what it bloody is that swooped in and swept young Harrow away.”
“Alright, I’m going back to the museum,” Vardy said. “See if I can make a little more sense of this. Just once,” he said with abrupt savagery, “in a goddamn while, it would really be a pleasure if the goddamn world worked the way it’s supposed to. I am tired of the universe being such a bloody aleatory frenzy all, the bloody, time.”
He sighed and shook his head. Gave an abashed, tight brief smile at Collingswood’s surprise.
“Well,” he said. “Really. Come on. Why the bloody hell is an angel of memory protecting Billy?”
BUT NOT PROTECTING DANE, WHICH FACT WAS WHAT HAD HIM NOW woozily half waking, strapped in a horribly cramping position that it took him a long time to identify as a crooked cruciform. He was attached like an offering to a rough man-sized swastika. He did not open his eyes.
He heard echoes; footsteps; from somewhere, deliberate, foolishly screaming laughter, that made him afraid anyway, despite its ostentation. The growl and barking of a huge dog. One by one he tensed the muscles of his arms and legs, to check that he was still whole.
Kraken give me strength, he prayed. Give me strength out of your deep darkness. He knew, if he opened his eyes, what figures he would see. He knew his contempt, no matter how real and strong, would be equalled by his terror, and that he would have to overcome that, and he did not have the head or stomach to do so, just at that moment. So he kept his eyes closed.
Most wizards of Chaos would bore you arseless about how the Chaos they tapped was emancipation, that their nonlinear conjuring was the antithesis of the straight-lined bordering mindset that led, they insisted, to Birchenau, blah fucking blah. But it was always a sleight of politics to stress only that aspect of the far right. There was another, somewhat repressed but no less faithful and faithfully fascist tradition: the decadent baroque.
Among the fascist sects, the most flamboyant, eager as Strasserites to reclaim what they insisted was the true core of a deviated movement, were the Chaos Nazis. The creaking black leather of the SS, they insisted to the tiny few who would listen, and not run or kill them on sight, were a coward’s pornography, a prissy corruption of tradition.
Look instead, they said, to the rage in the east. Look to the autonomous terror-cell-structure of Operation Werewolf. Look to the sybarite orgies in Berlin, that were not corruption but culmination. Look to the holiest date in their calendar: Kristallnacht, all those Chaos scintillas on stone. Nazism, they insisted, was excess, not prigrestraint, not that superego gusset bureaucrats had chosen.
Their symbol was the eight-pointed Chaos star altered to make a Moorcock weep, its diagonal arms bent fylfot, a swastika that pointed in all directions. What is “Law,” they said, what is Chaos’s nemesis but the Torah? What is Law but Jewish Law, which is Jewishness itself, and so what is Chaos but the renunciation of that filthy Torah-Bolshevist code? What was best in humanity but the will and rage and indulgence, do what thou wilt the autopoiesis of the Übermensch? And so, endlessly, on.
They were provocateurs of course, and a ludicrously tiny group, but notorious even among the wicked for occasional acts of unbelievable, artistic cruelty, restoring the true spirit of their prophets. Sure the Final Solution was efficient, they insisted, but it was soulless. “The problem with Auschwitz,” their intellectual wags of torture-killing insisted, “is that it was the wrong sort of ‘camp’!” Their hoped-for Chaos Führer, they thought, might achieve a sufficiently artistic genocide.
It was to these figures that Tattoo, Goss and Subby had gone for help, and they had let London know to whom they had gone. They had approached these outrageous, dangerous monster-clowns to hunt down Dane and Billy. And from them Billy had been saved, and Dane had not.
Chapter Forty-Nine
BILLY PUT ON HIS GLASSES. THEY WERE IMMACULATELY UNBROKEN, and still clean. He said, “Wati.”
“I don’t know where Dane is,” Wati said immediately. “I keep looking, but we’re going to have to hope Jason has more luck. They’ve got charms up or something.”
Billy said, “I want to tell you something I dreamed.” He spoke as if he were still dreaming. “I could tell it was important. I dreamed about the kraken. It was a robot. It was back, the whole thing in the tank. I was standing next to it. And something said to me, ‘You’re looking in the wrong direction.’”
There were seconds of silence. “Jason’s going in, and while he is I want to find out why that angel’s looking after me,” Billy said. “It might know something about what’s going on. It knew to come find me. And it might have been looking after me, but it let Dane get taken.”
He told Wati what Fitch and Saira had done. He felt no hesitation, though he knew it was a deeply secret secret. He trusted Wati, insofar as he trusted any Londoners now. “Tell them they have to help us,” he said.
Wati went leapfrogging, body to body, but had to return. “I can’t get in there,” he said. “It’s the London Stone. It pushes out. Like swimming up a waterfall. But…”
“Well you better find a way to tell them they have to help me, because otherwise I’m going to walk around the city screaming what they did. Tell them that.”
“I can’t get in, Billy.”