appeared to its denizens, he considered, rather than to its visitors, its transients and tourists. If you lived in the place it existed for you as a great matrix, an ever-more-complex web of potential routes. This was how you grappled with its size, how you attempted to make it submit to your control. Come to dinner in… There’s a meeting at… Pick me up from… See you outside… It’s not far from… And so on. Each day threw up its set of route conundrums: how to get from A to B, or F, or H, or S, or Q – a sophisticated formula that factored-in local knowledge, public or private transport, traffic conditions, roadworks, time of day or night, priorities of speed or calm, brutal expediency or more relaxed sagacity. We are all navigators, he thought, quite pleased with the romantic associations of the metaphor, millions of us, all finding our individual ways through the laby-rinth. And tomorrow? Stockwell-Pimlico, and then perhaps he should stay put, though he knew that he should really go further east, to Silvertown, and start thinking about the décor and furnishing for the new flat.
Ivan had spotted him and stuck his death’s head out of his smoked glass door.
‘Lorimer, my dear fellow, you’ll freeze.’
Ivan was wearing a biscuity tweed suit and a floppy, oyster-grey bow-tie (‘You have to dress the part for this job,’ he had said slyly ‘and I think you know exactly what I mean, don’t you, Lorimer?’). The shop was dark, walls covered with chocolate-brown hessian or else darkly varnished exposed brick. It contained very few, hilariously expensive objects – a globe, a samovar, an astrolabe, a mace, a lacquered armoire, a two-handed sword, some icons.
‘Sit down, laddie, sit down.’ Ivan lit one of his small cigars and shouted upstairs, ‘Petronella? Coffee, please. Don’t use the Costa Rica.’ He smiled at Lorimer, showing his awful teeth and said, ‘Definitely the time of day for Brazil, I would say’
Ivan was, to Lorimer, the living, breathing representation of the skull beneath the skin, his head a gaunt assemblage of angles, planes and declivities somehow supporting a pendulous nose, large, bloodshot eyes and a thin-lipped mouth with a partial set of skewed brown teeth that seemed designed for a larger jaw altogether, an ass’s or a mule’s, perhaps. He smoked between twenty and thirty small, malodorous cigarlettes each day, never seemed to eat and drank anything on a whim – whisky at 10 a.m., Dubonnet or gin after lunch, port as an aperitif (‘Très français, Lorimer’) and had a rare, distressing, body-racking cough that seemed to rise from his ankles and made its appearance at roughly two-hourly intervals, after which he often went and sat quietly alone in a corner for some minutes. But those rheumy, bulging eyes were alive with malice and intelligence and somehow his feeble frame endured.
Ivan began to enthuse about ‘almost an entire garniture’ he was assembling. ‘It’ll go straight to the Met or the Getty. Amazing the stuff coming out of Eastern Europe – Poland, Hungary. Turning out the attics. Might have a couple of things for you, old chum. Lovely closed helm, Seusenhofer, with beavor.’
‘I’m not so keen on the closed.’
‘Wait till you see this. I wouldn’t wear a white shirt with that tie, my dear old china, you look like an undertaker.’
‘I was having lunch with my ma. Only a white shirt will convince her you’re in gainful employ.’
Ivan laughed until he coughed. Coughed until he stopped, swallowed phlegm, patted his chest and drew heavily on his cheroot. ‘God love me,’ he said. ‘Know exactly what you mean. Let’s have a look at our little treasure, shall we ?’
The helmet was of average size and the bronze had tarnished and aged to a dirty jade, encrusted and flaky, as if it were covered by a vibrantly coloured form of lichen. The curved cheek plates were almost flush with the nose guard and the eye holes were almond-shaped. It was more like a mask than a helmet, a metal domino, and Lorimer supposed that was another reason why he instantly coveted it, why he desired it so. The face beneath would be almost invisible, just a gleam from the eyes and the lines of the lips and chin. He stood staring at it, some ten feet away from where it had been placed on a thin plinth. A small two-inch spike rose from the centre of the cranium.