in the gloom behind it. A watery blue eye appeared in the crack, looked me up and down. An indignant male voice said, “Who are you?”
“Me? I’m Matthew Swift, the last sorcerer left in this damn town, the blue electric angels made flesh, the Midnight fucking Mayor. Are you going to make me stand in the rain until I blast your bloody door down or what?”
There was a moment’s silence from behind the door. Then it closed, the chain was pulled off from the inside, and it was opened up. A dark corridor, possessed of coat rack (empty), mirror (clean) and coffee table (bare). I stepped inside carefully, looking for the owner of the watery blue eye. He stood at the top of a steep, narrow flight of steps, hands folded around a detachable TV aerial, which he held like a shield. He was bald - not just with a shaven head, but every inch of his visible anatomy shining with taut, stretched pale skin, as if the distance between bone and air was so narrow that hair simply didn’t have the chance to grow. He wore a white shirt and dark trousers; his little face, too small for the neck it sat on, wore an expression of serious mistrust.
“Who are you?” he demanded again. “What do you want here?”
“Strangely, I’ve been entirely honest with you. Are you going to try and use that” - I nodded at the TV aerial in his hand - “to hurt us?”
“If you’re what you say you are, it wouldn’t make much difference.”
“Well, quite.”
“If I believe you’re what you say you are.”
I shrugged. “Think of it as being like a nuclear bomb. You don’t want to give the terrorist his million quid not to detonate on basic principle, but on the other hand, are you really going to take the chance that that little red button is fake?”
“What do you want here?”
I looked up the dark stairwell, then past Mr Umbars to the gloomy
corridor into what I guessed was a kitchen. I said, “Look. You’re a quack, right, in a business where quacks seriously do try to make gold from lead or whatever. I don’t really care. You know a guy I’m looking for. He calls himself Boom Boom - the Executive Officer of a club called Voltage. I’m thinking you did some work for him, on a cardiac problem. I’m thinking he’s had a relapse lately owing to some . . . unforgivable fool . . . grabbing his beating heart in an angry and electrified fist and squeezing it until it nearly popped. Where is he?”
“Why do you want him?”
“I’m going to save the fucking city,” I replied with a chuckle.
“Are you for real?”
“You’ll never know until you press that button. We aren’t in the mood for pleasant games. Where is he?”
There was a basement.
There’s always a basement in these circumstances. You got into it via a small triangular door cut into the side of the staircase going upstairs, down a flight of grey concrete steps, beneath a bright white bulb swinging from the ceiling. I said, “For a quack, you’re not big on disabled access, are you?”
He looked at me with the expression of a man thinking about red buttons.
“Humour,” I said cheerfully. “It’s my only redeeming quality.”
The basement had been turned into a . . .
Surgery did it too much credit. That implied bright lights, scrubbed floors, needles, plastic chairs and steel beds, people in overalls and machines that went “ping”. This wasn’t a surgery. It was a nightmare out of the mind of a surgery patient scheduled to have their heart bypassed in the morning, who knew, just knew, that they’d be one of the ones for whom the drugs didn’t take. The longest wall was covered with all the alchemical ingredients an urban magician might ever require - feather of albino pigeon, leg of rat drowned in a burst of raw sewage, fat from the bottom of the basin in the chip shop, buddleia from the derelict mansion on the corner of the high street, burnt tyre carved carefully off the base of a burnt-out bus, tail of squirrel that found the winter too warm to sleep through, dribble of oil from the bicycle that skidded into the cement truck, black tar scraped up from the street that had started to melt in the summer’s sun, ground ballast from the furthest platforms of Paddington station, kebab feasted on by King Fox, vodka bottle still bearing the red lipstick-kiss