Maxie’s Demon (39 page)
‘Afraid so,’ said Fisher. At least he was honest, a virtue I’ve always liked in others. ‘Up to a point, anyhow; and for the first few years. I’ve a business to run. But you can’t expect to get away without some penalty, at least. Think of yourself as walking wounded. With a scar that’ll gradually heal. That’s a lot luckier than some.’
I looked
at him, and I thought. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry; but then nobody did, in this strange place, a halfway house between worlds. Except me, and maybe that had been my mistake. ‘Look,’ I said at last. ‘I’m grateful. I appreciate – well, everything. I can’t pretend I’m not being pulled, hard; and I know damn well I don’t want to go back to being what I was. But, well, I’ve always made other
people’s mistakes, if you know what I mean – from my father’s onwards. Now there’s just me, and I’ve picked up a bit of street smarts, as you say. Whatever I do, however it turns out, I’d better make my own way, clean. Maybe I won’t do as well, but …’
I
shrugged.
So did Fisher. ‘I thought you were going to launch into “My Way”. Well, suit yourself.’
‘That’s what I can do now, isn’t it?’
He
smiled, and nodded. ‘The offer’s open if you want it. Give my people a call. Feel like some breakfast now?’
‘No thanks.’ I jerked a thumb over the gate. ‘I’ve rather lost my appetite. And besides, I think the sooner I’m out of here, the better. Give my love to Poppy, will you? And respects to your wife and the other – lady. And you … Christ, you really dumped me in this, didn’t you?’
He grinned.
‘I own cars. And I did save your hide, in the end.’
‘Yes. So thank you, too – you bastard.’
‘Don’t mention it – you thieving little git.’
We grinned, and I scrambled over the fence. The hiss of a scythe stopped me in my tracks. That psychotic Willum had appeared from somewhere and, apparently oblivious to the smoking corpse, begun hacking away at the grainstalks. There never seemed to be any
fewer of them.
I turned back to Fisher. ‘What’s he really cutting?’
Fisher munched a fresh grass stem. ‘You don’t want to know. Believe me, you
really
don’t.’
I picked
my way through them gingerly, and waited till I reached the fence to make a rude gesture at Willum. He looked up, and tapped his scythe meaningfully. Hastily I clambered through, and was nearly flattened by an early-morning bread
truck. Back home with a vengeance.
Only not quite. How? I thought of standing there sticking out my thumb, till I heard the sirens. There were at least three cop cars flocking to what looked like the remains of a gruesome car crash in the central reservation. I recognised the red door that lay to one side, and decided not to look any closer. Time’s complicated enough as it is. Besides, I was
still allergic to cops.
And that brought back my dilemma. I really had been pulled this way and that, but by a factor even the mighty Steve Fisher didn’t seem to know about – that fifty grand in the chimney stack.
If the cops hadn’t found it yet. If they weren’t staking it out. If Ahwaz wasn’t keeping an eye on things.
Maybe if I waited – but then it might be discovered. Maybe if I went at
once – then I might be nabbed. I didn’t dither too long, though. Speed would be the essential, that was clear. In, then out, fast; and heigh-ho to a whole new life.
The trouble was still how. I had all that dosh waiting. I had at least a grand’s worth of gold in my pocket. But any modern money, not being in a purse, had rolled out under the general stress of events, and I couldn’t offer a taxi-driver
pure gold thalers; I’d like to see him make change, for a start. I should have touched Fisher for my fare, but I wasn’t going back, not with Willum in the way. So how?
I strayed
thoughtfully across the junction, looking around and wondering. Even a basic bus fare was out of the question. People I tried to panhandle referred me politely to the cops, or not so politely. I wasn’t the hitchhiking
prospect I’d been, not the way my clothes looked now. But I had to get back, had to.
I looked around. Almost without thinking I’d strayed into the service station car park. It was filling up quite well already, considering the hour. Just the sort of time I liked – had liked, once. Plenty of choice, plenty of cover, nobody especially alert after night driving. A good time for lorry hijacking,
too; but that wasn’t my main line, I needed backup muscle for that. Better stick to what you know, for just this one last time.
And the target was obvious, a low, open sports four-seater, a type I knew; its deliberately antique lines concealed a mighty fistful of V8 performance. Under the cover of its neighbours I slithered up alongside it, crouching down, peering over into the seating well.
This was a beautiful model with a ritzy interior, sleekly styled period door handles, animal-esque hood ornament, the lot – just the kind of wheels to whisk me on my way.
As a loan, of course, just this last time.
And nothing to hold me back but a couple of alarms and an immobiliser – a few seconds’ work, even without my trusty Swiss Army knife, the
Autoverbrecher
model. A tracker, too, probably
– hard to find, but what the hell, by the time they locked on I’d be long gone. I took hold of the door handle – and screamed.
It was wet,
it was hot and it had teeth, and they clamped down on my fingers, hard. I only just managed to tear my thumb free from the horrible little demon head it had become. Then, as I staggered back, clutching my ballooning thumb, I was horrified to see that hood
ornament rear up, with the morning sun flashing on its chromium claws and teeth, and spring down lightly on to the tarmac. Barely in time I bolted for my life, with the little monster ripping away at my trouser legs, snapping at my ankles and snarling in a shrill, metallic squeal.
Oh, sure, it was logical enough when you thought about it. This was the nearest car park to the junction, the Spiral
was bound to still have some effect, I couldn’t be expected to remember Steve Fisher drove a Morgan. But why, of all the cars in the universe to break into, did I have to pick on that one?
It’d be cameras next, honestly.
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The Winter of the World
1.
The Anvil of Ice
(1986)
2.
The Forge in the Forest
(1987)
3.
The Hammer of the Sun
(1988)
4.
The Castle of the Winds
(1998)
5.
The Singer and the Sea
(1999)
6.
Shadow of the Seer
(2001)
Spiral
1.
Chase the Morning
(1990)
2.
The Gates of Noon
(1992)
3.
Cloud Castles
(1993)
4.
Maxie’s Demon
(1997)
Other Novels
Run to the Stars
(1982)
The Ice King
(1986) (with Allan J. Scott)
A Spell of Empire
(1992) (with Allan J. Scott)
The Lord of Middle Air
(1994)
To Colin Murray and Tim Holman for editorial support; to the late and sadly missed Richard Evans, for unfailing belief and help; to my wife Deb, for the same, and introducing me to Prague; and to Mike Skelding and the late Pete Bayliss, also much missed, who – in an entirely different context! – came up with the opening line.
To Richard, Colin and Tim
I
T
HAD BETTER
be pointed out that Maxie’s views on people, police, places and life in general are like icy roads – safest taken with more than a pinch of salt. In any case, they don’t necessarily represent those of the management.
Prague
The
city of Prague has been described as the Crossroads of Europe – which might well explain why Maxie gets so tangled up in it. It seems to have given
birth or shelter to more extraordinary characters, both real and fictional, than almost anywhere else. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which. Is it the hapless Gregor Samsa whose outlook Maxie so radically rearranges, in
Chapter 8
? Selling insurance was certainly Samsa’s job; but the appearance and manner belong to his creator, Franz Kafka – who, somewhat unexpectedly, was a cheerful, even
arrogant extrovert, a snappy dresser and ladies’ man. It was only through his subconscious, perhaps, that the city’s shadowy alleys wound and twisted their wormtrails.
They may also have played a part in the story of Emilia Marty,
née
Elina. She was nominally created by the Czech fantasist Karel Čapek, inventor of the term
robot
, in his play
The Makropoulos Case
– more famous as Janáček’s brilliant
opera. But in her eerie, timeless allure she too is something of an archetype, an embodiment of the spirit of the city.
The
Emperor Rudolph II, on the other hand, who supposedly brought about her fate, was entirely real. His portraits, including the weird ones by the painter Arcimboldo, depict a jolly, rubicund face, but with an underlying sensuality and cold slyness no flattery can conceal.
He was a great ruler in his way, devoted to arts and pleasures, and – for his time – remarkably broad-minded and enlightened, impatient of church dogma. He was also fascinated by any kind of unusual knowledge or research, and, as was common in his time, he lumped serious scientific research together with outright magic and sorcery. It was said that he encouraged the Jews because of their kabalistic
magicians, but it was their financial facilities he really valued.
Rudolph’s Prague may have been slightly more tolerant than Maxie found it, but Jews still had to wear distinctive yellow circles and endure scorn, assaults and occasional pogroms. Nevertheless many of them managed to grow rich – not least by financing the Emperor – and raised some fine buildings in the Jewish Quarter, which survive
to this day. Only thirty years later the first Jew was elevated to the nobility, and they increasingly became an integral part of the city, and one of the largest communities in Europe. Ironically enough, the Nazis, who finally wiped it out, also carefully preserved the Jewish Quarter’s buildings, to create a museum to a ‘vanished’ race.
Among these is the Old Cemetery,
Stary Zidovsky Hrbitov,
in which stands the grave of another real person, Rabbi Loew. He is remembered as a wonder-worker, and people still insert written prayers for help into the crannies of his tomb. His seat in the oddly named Old-New Synagogue is still marked. Whether or not he really was a kabalist is unknown; but legend says that the Golem itself is still concealed somewhere about the building. If so, some dedicated
restorer is in for a surprise.
The
Hussites, briefly encountered in
Chapter 8
, were a fierce religious and nationalist movement in fifteenth-century Bohemia – now the Czech Republic. They began as followers of Jan Hus, an influential church reformer who was, as usual, burned at the stake. Under his successors they fought the Holy Roman Empire to a standstill, and, while they were faction-ridden
and often gorily fanatical, they were the founders of Czech national identity. They bulk as large in the national consciousness as Washington and Lincoln for Americans, Bruce and Wallace for the Scots, or for the English Churchill and … Bobby Charlton?
Doctor Dee
Also entirely historical are the most improbable characters of all. Maxie is not the most reliable witness, but they, and their wives,
and their tangled relationship, seem to have been very much as they appear here. Dee was famous in his lifetime as a scholar and a magician, and may have been the model for Shakespeare’s Prospero. He was born in 1527, the son of a London wine merchant, and studied at Cambridge, and at Louvain and elsewhere in Europe. The seventeenth-century chronicler John Aubrey had Dee described by people who
knew him: ‘He had a very faire cleare Rosie complexion; a long beard as white as milke; he was tall and slender; a very handsome man …’
He was
unquestionably one of the greatest scholars of his age, whose mathematical work helped to advance sciences such as navigation and astronomy, and sought to systematise astrology and magic in the same way. He was a genuine genius; but nobody knew it better
than he did. He was, to quote another chronicler and fellow-astrologer William Lilly, ‘… the most ambitious person living, and most desirous of Fame and Renown …’ He believed that kings and rulers should be guided by the wisdom of distinguished scholars – with, of course, appropriate honours and rewards, which he was not slow to demand. He appears to have treated the angels in much the same way;
the invocation on
page 208
is taken from his own records. He also had another weakness, all too common in geniuses – an utterly naïve, irrational streak, which they will defend with all their brilliance, often to the point of self-deception, and with an angry contempt for lesser intellects who somehow won’t share it.
Queen Mary engaged him as an astrologer, then jailed him for predictions she
didn’t like. This smoothed his path with Elizabeth I, on whom he made a considerable impression. She called him her philosopher, and under her protection and patronage he assembled an immense and famous library at his Mortlake home, visited by notables from all over Europe. He married, as his third wife, one of her young ladies-in-waiting, Jane Fromond. Increasingly, feeling the limitations of ordinary
knowledge, he began to explore what would now be called divination and mediumship, to get in touch with higher powers. Various willing ‘scryers’ flocked to take advantage, among them, sometime in 1581, one Barnabas Saul. A year later, apparently worn out inventing clever enough angelic messages, Saul fled. Three days later a young man, one Edward Talbot, introduced himself to Dee with an account
of Saul’s shady past. One suspects that word of a vacancy had got around in certain circles. He too began to ‘scry’ angelic visions in Dee’s equipment, producing much richer, wilder and more scholarly revelations. Dee, delighted, immediately engaged Talbot at the high wage of £50 a year plus board and lodging. Their association survived the discovery, a year later, that ‘Talbot’ was actually
one Edward Kelley.