Angelmaker

XVII Back on track; the Old Campaigners; the Chairman declines to assist a wanted felon.

Back in the brewery basement, Joe stares down a long, wide gallery at a row of mannequins wearing army-surplus and thrift-shop clothes, posed in a variety of aggressive stances. Bald, blind enemies. Behind and beside them, boxes, boards and water barrels protect the brick. Mathew gave his stolen space over to practice; this was where he brought his boys before a caper to sharpen up, and the dim yellow electric bulbs they installed—running, of course, on pilfered current—are still hanging from the ceiling.

By now, if he is honest, he had assumed he would have a plan: a bold, deranged plan, both cunning and explosive, which would outwit and outgun the Opium Khan’s soldiers and get them into Sharrow House. He had daydreamed himself coming up through the drains with an army, descending from the tower with the Fifth Floor Men, stepping from behind a curtain to reveal that he had bribed the butler.

Instead, he has nothing. A blueprint which exposes only strength; a promise of assistance with something which isn’t really a big problem; a gun, a girl, and a lawyer.

In the semi-dark, he grins. That last part, at least, is completely authentic gangstery.

He opens the trombone case and looks at the gun. Shiny, oiled metal gleams up at him. He waits for revelation, but doesn’t feel it. The gun is, after all, just a gun; an outdated, inaccurate piece of battlefield weaponry beloved of bootleggers in the United States during Prohibition time. And to be honest, it’s more a prop than a piece of ordnance. There are—there were even in Mathew’s day—better guns; lighter, faster, deadlier guns.

He unpacks it, lets his hands assemble the pieces. Click, twist, clunk. Rudimentary. Obvious. Not crude, just simple. In fact, it’s an elegant thing, in its way. He pantomimes: You’ll never take me alive, copper!

Less funny than it might be.

More carefully, he lifts the gun to his shoulder, selects the single-shot option and aims down the gallery. He breathes out, relaxes the tension in his body and then prepares to receive the impacts which will follow. Looking along the barrel, he keeps both eyes open, captures a mannequin in the V of the rear sight. He aims for the body, having no delusions of competence. He lets himself feel the moment. Young Joe, after all, wanted this more than anything else, in the world, ever, and somehow was never permitted.

He pulls the trigger.

The noise is stunning. A jet of flame spears out from the muzzle and the butt slams against his body. The shot whines away into the dark. Gritting his teeth, he fires five more times, having some notion that six is a marksman’s number, and walks down to look at the damage.

There is none. The mannequins are unscathed. Behind them, his bullets have splintered boards and chipped stone.

He stares at the gun in his hands, and wonders if he will cry. Instead, he walks back to his stool and sits, smelling pointless gun smoke.

He has no idea what to do. This was supposed to lift him up. Instead, it has smashed him, at this late date and with the fate of the world apparently hanging in the balance.

So he sits, and stares at nothing.

“Need some help?” Polly Cradle asks.

She has come in very quietly, and now she touches Joe lightly on one shoulder. Her finger turns him towards her, and a soft kiss brushes his lips. In his gut, a flicker of angry bear: I will keep this woman safe. I will bite anyone who is unkind to her.

The bear, at least, has no doubts.

She grins at him, as if hearing the inner growl, and squirms onto his lap.

“So, come on. What are you doing?”

“Looking for Mathew,” he confesses.

She nods. “But he’s not here?”

“No.”

“Why Mathew?”

“Because this is his kind of thing.”

She stares at him, and then, very precisely, blows a raspberry into his face. “Rubbish!”

“What?”

“I said, rubbish. Utter nincompoopery. What… gah!” Words fail her. “Joe. You don’t need to look for Mathew. You’re you. His son. But, mostly, you. And you are good at this! Look at the last few weeks and tell me I’m wrong.”

He is about to do so, but she points one finger sharply at his eye. Independent supervillain in my own right. Yes. That surely includes collegial respect.

“Good,” Polly Cradle says. “Now. Show me the gun.”

When he does, she laughs.

“You fire it the way you want to fire it, Joe,” Polly Cradle says, when she can speak again, “not the way you think you should. Bollocks to should. Say it with me.”

“Bollocks to should,” Joe intones dutifully, and she makes him say it over and over with her, until the sense of transgression lifts him up again. Being the new unafraid Joe is wonderful, but it’s also like a slippery log: he can walk along it for a while, but in the pauses he loses his footing and falls off. Momentum is important, and practice. And it’s easier in opposition, too, in the face of someone who can be delighted or appalled. He finds himself feeding off the audience.

Polly grins at him, feral, from the shadows to one side. Motions to the gun: go ahead.

Joe sets himself, plants his feet wide, switches the Thompson to full-auto mode, feels the coat on his shoulders and the excitement of the child he was. This is the gun. That gun. Dad’s gun! The strictly forbidden un-toy, the tool of a gangster’s trade.

A mad grin tugs at his mouth; not the mild nostalgia of his first effort but a kind of deranged glee. He lets it show his teeth, then pulls the trigger as if launching an ocean liner.

The gun howls and jerks, sending ripples of shock through his arms and chest. He wrestles it, fights to hold it down, keeps his finger clamped on the trigger. You don’t see a gangster squeezing off rounds like a miser. Hell, no. You see him hosing the enemy with hot lead, doing property damage, making a point. A gangster is not a sniper. He is profligate, needless, heedless. He is mad as a shaved cat.

He ends up almost leaning on the gun as if it were a small, wiry demon trying to get out of a box. He fires off the whole drum, and realises he is laughing outright, a deranged, terrified or terrifying cackle. Finally, the roar stops, the beast is still, and the damage is prodigious. He stares down the range, through wisps of smoke and dust.

The mannequins are in pieces. Chunks and strands of them are strewn all over, splattered into the wall behind. The wall itself is peppered and speckled with impacts, the boards and barrels stacked against it to absorb the ricochets are so much kindling. There are little fires and charred holes everywhere. He picks his way through the devastation, stares at what he has made. And once again, he understands.

“Wow,” Polly murmurs.

Joe Spork grabs her up and kisses her soundly, triumphant. “You’re a genius.”

“I am?”

“Yes. You are. Because I get it. I get it now. This is what it’s all about. The stricture of the gun.”

She smiles. “Tell me.”

He grins. “Imagine this: suppose you had some other gun and I had that thing. Right? And on the count of three, we’re both going to start firing. Really, you ought to win. You’ll be faster and more accurate, and you can duck and weave, you’ll take me apart. Right? How do you feel about it?”

“I don’t fancy it.”

“Exactly. Because a man carrying a tommy gun plants his feet and lets loose and no one knows—literally no one—what will happen next. This is a gambler’s weapon. A gangster’s gun. It’s not about perfection or skill or even surviving. It’s about brass and swagger. It’s big and loud and ridiculous and it says: Give it your best! Because one of us is going down and I don’t know or even really care which it is!” He grins again.

“You’re back on track, then,” Polly murmurs happily, and sees him nod, and then nod again more slowly, his eyes opening very wide. Criminal epiphany.

“Oh, yes,” he says fervently. “Yes, I am. Back on track, indeed.”

“Mercer!” Joe Spork yells at the top of the stairs. “Your sister is a genius!”

“What?” Mercer peers at him, then blanches slightly. “No, she isn’t, you must be mistaken.” And when this makes no impact on the effervescing Joe, “Oh, shit. This is what old Jonah told me would happen. He said one day I’d be running along behind you like the last Marx brother trying to catch the vase. I told him you were sensible.”

“I was. Look where it got me. So now I’m not.”

“Joe, what—”

“No time. I need to prepare. So do you. Tell Jorge I need them all tonight.”

“Need what?”

“He’ll know.”

“I don’t!”

“I’ve got a plan.”

“What sort of plan?”

“You’re going to hate it.”

“Oh, good.”

“Let’s see about the army first, and then we can argue.”

“Army? What army?”

Joe grins and dashes out.

“What army? You don’t have an army! Apart from”—he gestures at the dog lying flatulently on the sofa—“the world’s smallest airborne toxic event over there! Joe? Joe!”

Polly Cradle emerges from the Tosher’s Beat with her eyes fixed on one of the Sharrow House maps. “Oh,” she says, after a moment. “Oh! Oh, my.” Long nails scratch lightly at the glossy paper, tracing the line of the old railway which leads to one wall of the grounds. “Oh, my…” Her breath catches in her chest.

“What?” her brother asks.

“He’s back on track.”

Jorge’s message goes out to one person at a time—the Night Market has no website, no bulletin board—but for every felon, receiver, forger or fixer he tells, five more find out, and then ten. Invitations go to the big players and rumours to the small, but in the Market a rumour might as well be embossed in gold. All this chatter comes, inevitably, to the notice of law enforcement, but Jorge is well-used to signal leakage and disperses lies and fables to nurtured snitches. A police task force is dispatched to Manchester on a snark hunt, another to Bray. Analysts are awash in Spork sightings by lunch, cursing by tea. All the while, the intended recipients of the message are hearing it louder and louder: Joe Spork is putting together something big.

Big Douggie, boxer and purveyor of doughnuts, did prison for the Post Office job in ’75, and got out just in time for Mathew’s death and the changing world. He’s washing towels when the phone call comes, wishing he could find a way to stop them smelling like day-old fish stock.

Joe Spork’s putting a job together.

What, Joe the Clockmaker?

Yeah, but not any more. They say it’s the biggest ever. I heard Mathew planned it before he died.

Of course, Douggie says yes.

Dizzy Spencer runs the Carnaby-Royce School of Motoring, teaching older ladies who have never learned how to navigate the Congestion Charging zone. She does a roaring trade with recently arrived Saudi royals. In Mathew’s time—when she wasn’t under the sofa with the Honourable Donald—she was the best getaway driver between Shoreditch and Henley. She’s bored out of her mind and ready to pop.

Joe Spork’s putting a job together.

Dizzy doesn’t hesitate for one second.

Caroline Cable—Aunt Caro—designs locks for the company no one’s heard of which makes the locks you actually can’t crack with a tensioner and a number three pick. The simplest one is the best: there’s no keyhole, just a drawer you put the key into and a handle. Key goes inside, you shut the drawer and turn the handle, the key fits the lock and the door opens. If the key doesn’t fit, no dice. No way to access the mechanism when the drawer’s closed, no way to turn the handle when the drawer’s open. Thank you and good night.

Poacher turned gamekeeper, and she hates every penny of it.

Joe Spork—

“Hell, yes,” Caro Cable says.

Paul McCain, of the Grantchester McCains, missed the high days and wishes he hadn’t. His dad ran with the great ones: Mathew Spork and Tam Coppice and the others. They nicked a dinosaur from the Natural History Museum once, bespoke, for a certain Indian gent who had a space for it in his house in Goa.

Honestly. Nicked a dinosaur. They don’t do crimes like that these days.

Paul says yes, and feels as if he’s won the lottery.

Word spreads, and London’s crooks are not immune to sentiment. The fun’s gone out of the life; it’s a little professional, a bit grey. People have accountants now, and tax consultants, and Lily Law has them too and you don’t want to be investigated by that lot, not even a little.

But here’s the thing: Joe Spork is putting a job together.

And that has to mean fireworks.

And then there are the others: the ones who went pro and made good, who don’t like surprises or displays. Dave Tregale, who can shift money around the globe, into the white economy and out of the black and back again; Lars the Swede, once Joe’s teacher in basic personal defence, who can have you removed from circulation in seven languages; Alice Rebeck, of unknown origins, now a retriever of lost journalists from foreign lands, and—so it is whispered—vanisher at need of over-curious investigators. Half a dozen others, names to be mentioned with circumspection, if at all.

These, too, receive the invitation from Jorge, from Tam, from a new law firm titling itself Edelweiss Feldbett, or by signs and portents unknowable.

Joe Spork is putting a job together.

These are not people who are used to receiving instructions any more, not men or women who take kindly to midnight pre-emption. They do not enjoy fireworks. Still less are they comfortable with one another’s company, here, in—of all places—the grand hall of the Pablum Club (to the Hon Don’s most strenuous sotto voce discontent). But where, after all, would you be less likely to look for a gathering of serious crooks, than in a very exclusive members’ club in St. James’s?

The hour comes, and a little after, and this great, gathered mass of criminality grows restless. Sure, they’ve renewed some old acquaintances and seen some people they always thought there might be some chemistry with, back in the day, and met some new people there might be some with now (ho ho!) and of course it’s always nice to hear what everyone else is up to, even in the most guarded terms, and work out where there might be an opportunity, perhaps even the possibility of collaboration. But still and all (murmur black suits and serious faces, pinstriped ladies and elegant dames) time is money, after all. And Big Douggie and Caro and Tony Wu, sitting at the edges and in the shadows, feel out of place and very straight-laced, and wish they were somewhere else.

And then a man comes in by the east door. He comes in quietly, as if they weren’t all waiting for him. He grins and shakes hands and waves, and lets the rumour make him bigger. He flings wide his arms and embraces a respectable geezer whose bank specialises in discretion.

“Liam!” the fellow says. “As I live and breathe! Liam Doyle, of all the things, they said you were dead!”

“Not me,” cries the oldster, much delighted, “I haven’t gone on yet, and bollocks to those as wish I would! There’s cash yet in the old cow!”

“I’m sure there is!” replies the other. “I’m sure indeed. Can you still dance, though, Liam? You danced the foxtrot with Caro once, in the Primrose Hill house.”

“Blow me!” replies Liam Doyle. “I’m sure I did! I would have danced anything in those days! Well, I’ve no idea. I haven’t danced in… oh, well…” And his voice trails away.

But before it can become maudlin, Liam’s friend says “I bet you’ve still got it!” And Liam says it’s true, he has, of course! Of course he has. And then it’s “Hullo, Simon, I know that’s you, my God, is this your wife? How superb, I swear, she looks like a queen, and I’m not talking about our bloody queen, God bless, I’m talking Titania! Yes, I am! May I kiss the bride?” And he does, planting a smacker on the gentle, homely face and grinning as if he’s won a prize. “And Big Douggie! I see you there! Come off the bench, man! You remember Douggie, don’t you, Simon?” And Simon does, in fact they had a brawl back in the day, and bloody Hell, if Douggie wasn’t the toughest bastard ever threw a punch, I swear to you, Douggie, I still dream about it, seeing that fist on its way!

“Well,” says Douggie, “I don’t mix it up, now. I teach the young ones. But, well, every now and again I show them a thing or two, for laughs. I think they go easy on me, mind…” And he grins, gap-toothed, and everyone thinks Not if they bloody want to get out of the ring alive, they don’t. “How about you, Simon?”

“Oh, well,” says Simon, a bit sad, “I’ve moved on a bit. I still follow the boxing, or… I used to…”

And once again the whisper of regret. So many things we used to do. So many laws we used to break and laugh at. And now we creep around and make more money and what are we, if not crooks?

Well, rich, of course, and happier for it.

Happier, absolutely.

Around and around it goes. Joe has the touch, the memory for every face, and there’s a fire in him, a rich desperate longing for days everyone had forgotten about, and the strength in his arm to make you believe. Behind him goes the whisper: that’s Joe Spork. He’s putting a job together, and he’s going to ask us to help.

It must be some job.

He will ask, won’t he?

Sure he will.

And finally, when the nerves and the nostalgia are about ready to boil over, Joe climbs up on the back of an extremely expensive Italian leather sofa in his workman’s boots, and he says:

“I expect you’re wondering why I asked you all here this evening!”

They are. Of course they are.

“I may have misled you a bit, in a way. I think I told Jorge I was planning a big job. Well, I’m not.” He grins, a naughty-boy grin, Mathew’s face staring over a mustard polo neck and a tan bullhide coat, superimposed on the weathered, blockish features of his son. “I’m not planning a big job. I’m planning ten. Or a hundred. However many it takes to make the point. I’m talking about the brass ring. I’m talking about robbing every bank in London and half of Hatton Garden, hitting the payroll and the Mint and everything in between.

“Now I know, because I’ve seen you, that you don’t do those things any more. I know, at least, that that’s what you think. And I also know, because I’ve seen you, that when you see the Bond Street caper, with those lads lifting a hundred grand a pop and busted by the end of the week, or the Heathrow diamonds, or the Millennium Dome, you look at those sorry jobs and you think to yourselves: I could have done that twice as fast and taken twice as much and I’d be sitting in bloody Duke’s Bar when the Lily came and nothing to say I was ever anywhere else. Because those jobs were grand, but they had no exit, and they were brassy, but they had no class. And you’ve got class.”

The Old Campaigners grin at one another. Sure enough, they have class. They know the importance of balls, for sure, but also of smarts and timing, and above all, of getting away with it. Robbing is easy. Robbing clean is hard—but that’s what separates the men from the boys, isn’t it?

“I remember, don’t I, how it’s done? I remember when the Boldbrook delivery was taken by person or persons unknown, and the police were swarming the Crespind Club because they’d had a tip-off the place was a brothel. Which it unquestionably was. But when they got there it was all awash with bigwigs in their drawers, so when the same fellow called in a robbery at Boldbrook—ten minutes before it happened—they told him to stick it in his ear, and then of course when Boldbrook himself called they told him the same thing. And no one ever told a bloody word of how it was done, not the cracksman nor the lookout nor not a one of them, because they were men of the life. Women of the life. (I won’t name names, but I could. We all know who they were. And not a one of us has ever told, have they?)

“But I look at you, and I see one more thing. I see talent going to waste. I see skills like no one ever had before or since. I see the long con and the short, I see high-score planners and forgers and dippers and smugglers and high-wall men and strong arms and gunhands and lead-footed getaway drivers and what have you done for us lately? You’ve let crime get white-collar and dull. You’re rich and you’re dying of respectability. I see you, Boy Reynolds. I see you with your arm in a sling! Crashed a souped-up Mercedes into a sand dune at one hundred and eleven miles an hour between Paris and Dakar.

“Because you are bored. You are so bored you could die of it.

“You’re all respectable and safe. And not one of you is having any fun.

“Well, I’m in deep shit. I touched something I wasn’t supposed to. I know things I mayn’t. I’m at war with Brother Sheamus of the Ruskinites and Mr. Rodney Titwhistle of the Legacy Board, and what they will do to me if they get me doesn’t bear discussion. I’m on the run from the law, and these days that’s a short course. They’ve had me once: not again. No more white rooms and torture for this lad. Not again.

“They’ll have SO19 out there, anyway, so no matter. God help any poor bugger caught outside in a fedora this month!” Joe grins again, and this time it’s the wolf grin, the wartime grin, the Englishman’s inner barbarian, which every one of them keeps close at hand for the dark days.

A flash of Argyle socks as Joe shifts his weight and opens his arms to them again.

“And I’ll tell you, people. I’m having more fun than I have ever had in my entire, safe, taxpaying life!

“What’s it all about? I’ll tell you. There’s a wicked sort who wants something he can’t have. He can’t have it because if he gets it he’ll likely kill us all. He’s a lunatic and a bad egg. He’s not a crook, he’s a devil, and that’s all there is to it. I mean to put a stop to him. I mean to stop him dead. And if I don’t, well, it’ll be down to you lot anyway, because he’s bought the government or some such thing, and is sheltered in their breast. If I don’t do the job, my lords, ladies, and assorted crooks, we shall all go down six feet. Think of him as a mad bugger who wants to test a nuclear bomb in Trafalgar Square. He doesn’t, but it’s as good as. But here, you leave that to me. I’ll take care of the Opium Khan. All I want you to do… is steal every blighted thing that isn’t nailed down and preferably most of what is!

“I am going to raise unholy Hell. The Tosher’s Beat is going to ring again to the sound of escaping felons. The rooftops will buzz to the sound of our circular saws, and all across the mighty city of London things of enormous value will be liberated from vaults of veritable impenetrability. We will remind everyone on Earth that London’s crooks are the best there have ever been.

“And in the process, we will save the world.

“And if that doesn’t sound like fun, you rotten lot, you have forgotten the meaning of the word! So all those in favour…” he makes calming motions with both hands, as if holding them back. “All those in favour can signify by acclamation. My name is Joshua Joseph Spork. But you can call me: Crazy Joe! So let’s hear you say it. If you raise the roof of this place, we’re on, and we’re away.

“Now, then: what’s my name?”

There’s a roar of laughter and applause, and a lot of glasses raised.

From the back, a woman’s voice says: “Crazy Joe!” and then a man’s from the far corner: “Crazy Joe!” And then Big Douggie growls it out and Tony Wu, and even Dizzy Spencer, and then the great, too-cool, too-professional black-suited multitude are chanting it in a gathering wave of noise which breaks over Joe Spork and seems to set him alight, and he roars like a great ape and swears to God he will embrace every one of them, all at once, and it seems he will really try, and then his arms are full of a small, sassy, dark-haired beauty with outrageous toes, and as he raises her into the air for a passionate, demonstrative kiss, no one remembers or cares that Polly Cradle was the first to call out his name, or that her brother was the second.

Later, when the Pablum’s function room is all but empty, a man in a black suit is left standing with Mercer Cradle, who brings him to Joe Spork in a quiet corner. He’s tall and pale and very grave. Joe Spork takes his hand.

“Mr. Spork,” the man says, “my name is Simon Alleyn.”

“Very pleased to meet you. Thank you for coming.”

The Master of the Honoured & Enduring Brotherhood of Waiting Men nods and says nothing. It’s very effective. Tool of the trade, no doubt.

“I’ve got myself into a big fight, Mr. Alleyn. I was wondering if you’d like to join me.”

“So I understand. It’s not really our kind of thing. Not even for Brother Friend, I’m afraid.”

“No.”

“No, we let the police handle that sort of thing.”

“I’m sure. But there’s something you might want to know, all the same.”

“Go on, then.”

“Billy Friend was murdered by Vaughn Parry.”

Simon Alleyn doesn’t blink. His face doesn’t change at all. And yet Joe Spork is aware of having his fullest attention.

“Should I understand, then, Mr. Spork, that Vaughn Parry has somewhat to do with all this?”

“In a way, he is at the heart of it.”

“In a way?”

“You could argue that he is… no longer who he was. That he has become someone worse.”

“Worse.”

“Very much worse.”

“And you know where he is?”

“Yes.”

Simon Alleyn studies the empty air in front of him for a moment. Then he nods. “The Waiting Men have business with Brother Vaughn. Whoever he is now.”

And then, later still, in a quiet moment, in an empty room.

“Hello?” the voice on the other end of the phone says cautiously.

“Hello,” Joe says. “You know who this is?”

“Well, I know who it can’t be. There was a chap I once sent socks to, and you sound like him—but that fellow’s been accused of all manner of frightful things. The government thinks he’s a regular walking Armageddon. Amending the Human Rights Act and passing all sorts of rather iffy laws. I don’t approve, to be honest. I think the law’s the law and it says what it says for a reason. Do you know, they sent a rather indifferent policeman up here to ask me if I knew anything?”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Lord, it is you. How extraordinary.”

“Yes, I suppose so. I hope I didn’t cause you any trouble.”

“No, no. It was rather exciting. I told him you breathed fire and ate raw meat. He seemed to think he knew that already.”

“Oh. Yes.”

“So what on Earth are you doing on my phone? I would have thought you had Sabine women to abduct and suchlike.”

“How’s the golf coming along?”

“God, what a question. Do you know, I think I hate golf? It was never my favourite thing, but somehow now I suspect it will kill me, in the end. That and the membership. I feel I can say this to you because you’ve got larger things to worry about than telling the board of governors I’ve gone off the game. And of course no one in their right mind will believe anything you say.”

“That is quite true.”

“But with the best will in the world, I doubt you really want to know about golf. It doesn’t strike me as your biggest worry, just about now.”

“Well, no. To be honest, I wondered if you’d do something for me.”

“Highly unlikely. You’re a sinner.”

“I quite understand.”

“Not an offer I can’t refuse, or anything? No horse’s head coming my way?”

“I always felt sorry for the horse. It didn’t have anything to do with him, did it?”

“No. But I think I hate horses more than golf. My grandchildren are at that stage. It’s actually more time-consuming than a marriage, having a horse, and suddenly I have four to take care of, because there’s no question of a ten-year-old really looking after a horse by herself.”

“Oh. Well, anyway, this isn’t that sort of offer. It’s the other sort, where you can say ‘no’ if you want to. I’m actually expecting you to, but I have to ask.”

“I suppose I had better hear what you want, just so I can refuse in fullest understanding.”

“Well, I sent you a package.”

“Oh, was that you? Marvellous gallery of fancy and lies, I thought.”

“It’s all true.”

“So you say.”

“Yes. But you read it, is the point.”

“Oh, yes. Mind you, I suppose, given what’s happening with the bees and so on, it’s no more far-fetched than the official line.”

“No.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“Well, I’m going to steal a plane, and I wondered if you wanted to fly it.”

“Definitely not.”

“Right.”

“In fact, I’m going to come down there and refuse in person. Where shall I meet you?”

“I’ll have someone pick you up.”

“As long as you understand the answer is absolutely no.”

“I do.”

“I’ll bring my flight suit, just to rub it in.”

“Right.”

“What kind of plane am I refusing to fly here?”

“A Lancaster, I thought.”

“Good choice. If I was mad enough to do anything of the kind for you, I’d appreciate your sense of history. Save the world, eh?”

“I’m a madman. Everyone says so.”

“Hah. Well, I don’t think I could argue with that even if I was going to help you. You better have someone meet my train, I always get frightfully lost in London.”

On the roof of the Pablum Club, Joe Spork lies on his back and stares into the endless sky. The felons and free spirits have gone home, and the plan—call it one plan, though in truth it’s about a thousand plans, all jumbled together in a tangle of criminal behaviour so bewildering as to make even his eyes water—is in motion. Everyone else’s bit, at least. His own remains to be begun, let alone accomplished. The clock is ticking, and he can hear it in his head, imagines the tiny wings of Frankie’s bees on their way home. When the circle closes, he must be ready, or it won’t matter how good his plan was. On the other hand, if it’s not good enough, he’ll never get to where he needs to be. And yet, as he looks up and up and up, he finds that he is not worried about that at all. The things he will do over the next twenty-four hours—attack, fight, live or die—are the right things. The best things he could be doing.

A moment later, he hears a step on the asphalt, and feels the warmth of Polly Cradle lying next to him. Soon they must get up, and travel, and do gangster’s work. But these stolen moments are theirs alone.