from the crude figure on the roof’s vertex. “You got had, is what, you psychopath motherfucker.” That came from a comedy-frog-shaped eraser discarded by the kerb.
And from a windowbox of long-dead plants, the voice of a little plastic diver: “Good night.”
“Well,” said Goss, in the silence after Wati left. “Well, Princess Subby. Would you look at that? What a fiddly tra la.”
THEY WERE OVER THE RIVER. WITH WATER BETWEEN THEM AND that awful fight ground, Dane guided the car to a silent space behind lockups, mean garages at the bottom of a tower. He turned off the engine and they sat in the dark. Billy felt his heart slow, his muscles relax one by one.
“This is why we should go in with him,” Dane said. “We can’t take that sort of shit on our own.”
Billy nodded slowly. The nod mutated until it was a shake of the head. “It doesn’t make any sense,” Billy said.
He closed his eyes and tried to think. He looked into the black behind his own eyes as if it was the black of the sea. He tried to reach down into it, for some deep intuition. He could reach, and feel, nothing. He sighed. He drummed his fingers on the window in frustration. The touch of the glass cooled his fingertips. Not an idea, but a focus, a sense of where to look. He opened his eyes.
“The guy,” he said. “In the bottle, the guy I found. Where’s he in all this?”
“I don’t know,” Dane said. “That’s the problem, we don’t know who he is.”
“Uh …” said Wati. “That ain’t true.”
“What?” Dane said to the tiny figure.
“I told you, when that officer-thing grabbed me, it sort of bled. Bits of info and stuff that went into it. I think I remember feeling … I knew who …” Wati probed his sore spots for information. “Adler,” he said. “That was his name, the geezer in the bottle.”
“Adler?” Dane said. “Al Adler?”
“Who is he?” Billy said. “Was he? A friend?”
Dane’s face went through a run of feelings. “Not exactly. I met him but I never … Al Adler was a tuppenny nothing until he got in with Grisamentum.” They looked at each other. “He turned into a fixer. He ran stuff for Gris.”
“What happened to him after Grisamentum disappeared?” Billy said.
“I thought he was off drinking himself to death or something. He was totally Grisamentum’s man. I met him like once just after the funeral, I thought he was losing it. He was yammering about the various people he’d been working with because of his boss, how exciting blah blah. Total denial.”
“No.” Billy looked away and spoke out of the car window, through the glass into the garage’s shadows. “He wasn’t propping up any bars anywhere. He was doing something that got him killed, in the museum, on the night the kraken went. What if he’s been working for Grisamentum all this time?”
“There was something,” Wati said. “It was like …” He interpreted the bruises of the police-thing. “It was like it was, he’d been there for a long time. Since before you knew him. He was done before he was born.”
“How does that …?” Billy said.
“Oh, time,” Dane said. “Time time time. Time’s always a bit more fiddly than you reckon. Al got turned into a memory, didn’t he?” He beat out a pattern on the dashboard. With his tension came little flexes of whatever small arcane muscles he had, and bioluminescence pulsed in his fingertips with each contact.
“Alright,” Dane said finally. “He’s involved. We’ve got Simon, we’ve got a lead. We have to find out who hired him. I need to steal a phone and I need to get begging with Jason Smyle. The chameleon you asked about once. He’ll help us. Me.”
“Yeah,” said Billy. “You know what we’re going to find out, though, right? It’s him. Grisamentum. He’s behind this. He’s got the kraken.” He turned back to face his companions. “And for whatever reason, he wants us too.”
Chapter Forty-One
EVERYONE WITH AN EAR TO THE CITY KNEW GOSS AND SUBBY were back. Goss, about whom they said he didn’t keep his heart in him, so he’s not afraid of anything; and Subby, about whom what can you say? Back for yet another last job. There was a lot of that going around. This time the Tattoo was their paymaster, and the job was something to do with the disappearance of the kraken—yes, the squidnapping—which the Tattoo either had or had not engineered, depending which