City of Lost Dreams

SEVEN

Nicolas Pertusato woke up in a very comfortable bed at the Ritz. The woman next to him was snoring. Nico studied her, curious. She lay on her back, but her large breasts pointed skyward in defiance of all gravitational law. Silicone. Nico lifted the sheet and inspected her pubic hair, or, rather, the lack of it. Just a narrow strip. It was definitely the twenty-first century, then.

Nico lay still for several minutes, running through an internal checklist in his brain. He reminded himself of the current day of the week, month, and—most important—year. For extra credit he named the phase of the moon: waxing gibbous. He cataloged the state of his physical health. Remarkably, he was not hungover. After leaving Soane’s he had gone to another pub, perhaps two, and he remembered picking up a wallet and also—more vaguely—this creature.

Nico sat up.

Why had he been so despairing yesterday? Really, looked at in the proper light, the whole thing was actually . . . interesting.

Someone had been alchemy shopping all over London. That in itself wouldn’t be so surprising—there were millions of crackpot theorists around, on scavenger hunts for the Holy Grail or Excalibur or Bigfoot. It was entirely possible that someone had conceived a quest for the Golden Fleece. But someone knew that Nico was looking for it, too. Someone had sent Saint John to Nico’s restaurant of saints. Someone had left a dwarf figurine in place of a medicine chest. No wonder he hadn’t been able to find anything of John Dee’s that traced back to the Fleece.

Who was his antagonist? Anyone who could connect him to the Fleece had been dead for hundreds of years. And even then, the only people who knew that he had briefly held the book could be counted on one hand.

Sarah knew. But Sarah wanted nothing to do with alchemy, even though she had a PhD in it. What did she call herself? A neuromusicologist? Please. An alchemist by any other name would smell as sulfurous. Max? Max was desperate to find the Fleece, not to use it, but because he believed it was part of his family’s duty to protect it. Secret Order of the Golden Fleece, sworn protector knights, and so forth.

Anyway, to work. Nico still had a few tricks up his sleeve. His opponent might have temporarily gained the upper hand, but now Nico was invigorated. Inspired. There was nothing like having a worthy adversary to liven things up.

Sherlock Holmes had needed a Moriarty to bring him out of his chronic ennui.

And so had he.

Nico hopped out of bed, took a bath, and decided a shave was really in order, as he needed to look respectable for today’s plan. He had just lathered up when his evening companion stumbled through the door, collapsed in front of the toilet, and heaved. Nico soaked a towel in cold water and handed it to her.

“Oh, thank you,” she said, in quite cultured tones, closing the lid and then sitting on it. She was a lovely woman, but Nico turned his attention to his chin. He hadn’t shaved in about fifty years. He didn’t get five o’clock shadow. He got half-century shadow.

“Last night was quite an experience. I’m beginning to remember it now. You are incredibly . . .”

“I know,” said Nico.

“Oh.” Nico could see in the mirror that she was staring at his naked back. She leaned forward and touched him. “I remember. Your scar. Got in a fight with gypsies, I believe you said?”

“I never fight with gypsies.” Nico examined his teeth. “Nor should you, if you ever come across one. No, this was self-inflicted, I’m sorry to say.”

“You stabbed yourself in the back?”

“It seemed funnier at the time,” Nico conceded.

“Also . . . your wrists.”

Nico glanced down at the very faint white lines that marked his wrists.

“What if I told you I couldn’t kill myself even if I wanted to? What if I told you I was immortal because of a scientific experiment gone awry, that for four hundred years I’ve watched all my friends die, everyone I loved or cared for, while being unable to die myself?”

“I would assure you that this is a delusion. Not common, maybe, but one I’ve seen before, with varying specifics. I would tell you that such delusions can be treated.”

Nico looked at her and she laughed shyly.

“I’m a social worker. My name is Lucinda, in case you’ve forgotten. Lucinda Smythe-Crabbet.”

He had forgotten. There were just too many names. And this creature had three of them. And a title, he now recalled.

Really, Nico thought, after bidding Lady Lucinda a fare-thee-well outside the Ritz, he had always acted rashly when it came to women. You would think that after a couple of centuries he would have gotten this under better control, but no, humans were built to be irrational and could evolve only so far, no matter how long you lived. You might get past one or other of the big three—desire for love, fear of death, belief in God—but not all three at once. Buddhist monks came close, and Nico had met some severely autistic children who had surpassed the human condition, but Buddhism required intense meditation (which he was far too Epicurean to practice) and the other was denied to him by virtue of his genetic makeup, imperfect and frozen as it was.

At eleven a.m. Nico presented himself at gate A of the east wing of Blythe House, the massive Victorian building that had once been a National Savings Bank and was now used as storage for the spillover collections of a number of museums. The red and white brick edifice was topped with coils of barbed wire. From the outside it looked like an insane asylum. The inside was even worse: dirty glazed yellow tile, crumbling staircases, dimly shadowed corridors. But it had quite a lovely, cheerful staff, and all one needed to gain admittance to have a look at a certain object from the Wellcome Collection was an appointment. Once buzzed in, Nico made his way to the porter’s office, presented his credentials, and received a yellow plastic visitor’s pass. He was met by a Miss Ponds, who was delighted to show him the object he had requested.

“I expect you’ve been to see the permanent collection at the Euston Road museum?” she chirped. “It’s wonderful. But of course, it’s only a tiny portion of what Henry Wellcome gathered during his lifetime. He had agents all over the world hunting down artifacts, curiosities, medicines, tools, anything to do with the human body. Most of this would seem very primitive and wrongheaded to us now, of course. But it’s a fascinating glimpse into the history of medicine. There were over a million objects in the collection, you know.”

Nico did know. He had been an agent for Henry Wellcome in the early 1900s and had once spent a harrowing six months in Khartoum in his employ. Henry had been the first to market medicine in tablet form to the general public, and his pharmaceutical company had made him immensely rich. The man had been obsessed with immortality, was totally without a sense of humor, and had bizarre notions of temperance, insisting that none of his employees touch alcohol. Despite all that, Nico had rather liked him. Like most true eccentrics Wellcome had fewer prejudices about the differences of others, at least other men, and had treated Nico well, even making one of his custom medicine/tool chests in just his size. He still had it.

Miss Ponds was punching a security code into a door. Security here was very good, no need for cameras in any of the individual rooms, which was lucky for him. Miss Ponds gave him a pair of plastic gloves and they stepped inside a narrow cell lined with shelves.

“Now, let’s see . . .” she said, bending down. Nico whipped a syringe out of his pocket and stuck it firmly into Miss Ponds’s conveniently upturned ass.

“Oops-a-daisy,” she said, before collapsing on the floor.

Nico ran his eyes over the shelves. He had requested to look at a particular specimen: a stuffed ram’s head mounted on wheels. The top portion of the head opened up to reveal a compartment. In fact, Nico had no interest in this object, which he felt was obscene, and not in the way he usually found pleasant. No, he was after something a bit older, something he had given Henry from his own personal collection, as a joke, and to make up for all the things he had bought with Henry’s money and never handed over.

“The box is late seventeenth century,” he had told him, presenting it. “You can see that it contains some sort of powder within. The man who sold it to me swore it was electuarium mithridatum.”

Actually, the box contained the crushed bones of an elk that had belonged to Tycho Brahe. Albrecht had been his name. As much as an elk can be an asshole, Albrecht had been an asshole. Henry had been delighted with the box, and with what he thought was the acquisition of a sample of the seventeenth-century antidote against poison and infectious diseases. According to the Wellcome Collection database, the box was housed in this room, as item #7963.

Yes. Here it was, neatly tagged and with the false description of the contents lettered in tiny script. Holding his breath, Nico carefully opened the jar. The powdered remains of Albrecht had survived.

Score one for the dwarf, thought Nico. He could manage a fair bit of alchemy with genuine seventeenth-century elk bone. Particularly when the elk in question had died while under a massive dose of beer and Tycho’s Westonia. God knows where Albrecht had thought he was when he fell down the stairs to his death. Cavorting with mastodons, perhaps.

Nico pocketed the box and replaced it with one of his cards:

Removed for curatorial purposes.

“Mhmm,” mumbled Miss Ponds. Nico bent to her side and helped her to her feet. “What happened? Did I faint?”

“It seemed as if you were going to.” Nico dusted, perhaps a trifle too enthusiastically for Miss Ponds’s taste, the knees of her skirt. “Perhaps you bent over too quickly.”

“Oh. Oh, how strange. I’m so sorry.”

It took a few minutes before Miss Ponds’s composure was restored, and then a dull half hour while he pretended to admire the ram’s head snuffbox and make a few notes.

Nico exited the building and hailed a cab.

“Heathrow,” he told the driver.