have leads to follow. But this is dangerous? I’m … Now I’m rogue you and me need some help. It ain’t true we got no allies. I know a few people. We’re going to the BL.”
“What?”
“The British Library.”
“What? I thought you wanted us to keep a low profile.”
“Yeah. I know. It ain’t a good place for us.”
“So why …”
“Because we have a god to find,” Dane snapped. “Alright? And because we need help. It’s a risk, yeah, but it’s mostly beginners’ territory. People who know what they want go other places.”
There was magery there, he said, but strictly newbie. For serious stuff you looked elsewhere. A deserted swimming pool in Peckham; the tower of Kilburn’s Gaumont State, no longer a cinema nor a bingo hall. In the meat locker of an Angus Steak House off Shaftsbury Avenue were the texts powerful enough to shift position when the librarians were not looking, which were said to whisper lies they wanted the reader to hear.
“Keep your mouth shut, keep your eyes open, watch and learn, show respect,” Dane said. “And don’t forget we’re hunted, so you see anything, tell me. Keep your head down. Be ready to run.”
It rained, briefly. When it rains, Dane quoted his grandfather, it’s a kraken shaking the water off its tentacles. When the wind blows, it’s the breath from its siphon. The sun, Dane said, is a glint of biophosphor in a kraken’s skin.
“I keep thinking about Leon,” Billy said. “I need to … I should tell his family. Or Marge. She should know …” It was nearly too heavy to articulate his feelings like that, and he had to stop speaking.
“You ain’t telling no one,” Dane said. “You ain’t talking to no one. You stay underground.”
The city felt like it was hesitating. Like a bowling ball on a hilltop, fat with potential energy. Billy recalled the snake unhinging of Goss’s jaw, bones jostling and a mouth with precipitous reconfiguration a doorway. Dane drove past a small gallery and a dry cleaners, a market collection of junk, tchotchkes in multiplicity, urban twee.
• • •
IN FRONT OF THE BRITISH LIBRARY, IN THE GREAT FORECOURT, A little crowd was gathered. Students and other researchers, laptops clutched, in trendy severe spectacles and woolly scarves. They were gaping and laughing.
What they stared at was a little group of cats, walking in a complicated quadrille, languidly purposeful. Four were black, one tortoise-shell. They circled and circled. They were not scattering nor squabbling. They described their routes in dignified fashion.
Far enough away to be safe but still startlingly close were three pigeons. They strutted in their own circle. The paths of the two groups of animals almost overlapped.
“Can you believe it?” said one girl. She smiled at Billy in his foolish clothes. “You ever seen such a well-behaved bunch? I love cats.”
Most of the students, after a minute or two of amused watching, went past the cats into the library. There were a very few among the crowd, though, who looked not in humour but consternation. None of these men or women entered. They did not cross the stalked lines. Though it was early and they had only just arrived, on seeing the little gathering they would leave.
“What’s going on?” said Billy. Dane headed to the centre of the forecourt, where a giant figure waited. He was uneasy being out. He looked constantly to all sides, led Billy with a kind of cringing pugnacity toward the twenty-foot statue of Newton. The imagined scientist hunched, examining the earth, his compass measuring distance. A tremendous misunderstanding, it seemed, Blake’s glowering ecstatic grumble at myopia mistranslated by Paolozzi as splendid and autarch.
A broad man stood by the figure, in a puffy jacket and woolly hat and glasses. He carried a plastic bag. He looked to be muttering to himself. “Dane,” someone said. Billy turned, but there was no one in earshot. The hatted man waved at Dane, warily. His bag was full of copies of a left-wing newspaper.
“Martin,” said Dane. “Wati.” He nodded to the man, and the statue. “Wati, I need your help—”
“Shut your mouth,” a voice said. Dane stepped backward in obvious shock. “I will talk to you in a sodding minute.”
It spoke in a whisper, with a unique accent. It was between London and something bizarre and unplaced. It was a metal whisper. Billy knew it was the statue that spoke.
“Uh, okay,” the man with the newspapers said. “You’ve got stuff to do, I’m going to split. I’ll see you Wednesday.”