The Midnight Mayor

I pointed into Raleigh Court. “In there. Where Nair died. We’re looking for a safe house run by an individual called Boom Boom. The Executive Officer of a nightclub called Voltage who got a little bit scared of a guy in a pinstripe suit and agreed to help him kidnap a kid who liked to visit his club. That’s where the shoes went, by the way. They like clubbing. Pity the owner lacked moral fibre. And a heart. But anyway — somewhere in here, we hope, is the kid Mo. And that would all be fine and grand of itself, except, you may have noticed, this is where Nair got the skin peeled from his flesh. It’s number 53, top floor. Shall we meet you up there?”

“You know,” murmured Oda, “testosterone is one of the many ways in which God tests our natures — women, as well as men.”

“Sorcerer . . .” began Kemsley.

“I swear, I swear, the next person to call me ‘sorcerer’, as if I didn’t have a name and a small intestine, will get a sharpened pencil shoved firmly up their flared nostril.”

There was a slightly taken-aback silence. Then Kemsley said, “Mr Swift.”

“Yes?”

“Are you ready?”

“Sure.”

“Good. As Midnight Mayor . . .”

“You want me to go first?”

“No. I want you to stay as far back as you can.”

“With pleasure.”

They did the assault/SWAT thing. Rifles, corners, kneeling, standing, running, climbing, gestures — fist, two fingers, flap, twiddle — the whole lot.

We tried not to laugh as we trailed along behind. Even Anissina was playing along, pistol in hand. You have to have a lot of training to be a storm trooper, we concluded. It wasn’t just about learning when to duck and when to fire; it was about learning to take yourself seriously as you did it. I looked at Oda in the hope she was appreciating the humour. It was a naive look.

As council estates went, the interior wasn’t so bad. Someone had recently painted the stairs an unoffensive pale blue, and there was a general soft smell that I associated with my gran’s cooking and fat cushions on padded chairs, and the regular shifting of dirt by plastic brooms and warm soapy water. The troopers stormed the stairs; I shuffled along behind. Number 53 was, as promised, on the top floor, a long balcony punctuated by the occasional bike, kitchen windows and wilting geraniums. The Aldermen and co. clattered along to the green door, spread themselves out around it, and at a cry of “go!”, kicked it open with a heavy studded boot, and threw something in there that went snap! There was a burst of bright light and a high buzzing noise. I leant against the edge of the balcony and looked down into the courtyard below, wondering where Mr Fox had gone and if my furry friend was eating enough kebabs. The armoured men counted to three, then burst inside the flat, shouting impressive things like “clear!” or “go go go!” as they did. Oda said, “Gum?”

“You chew gum?”

“No. But I always carry it, to use as barter when visiting prisons.”

“Do you see how I’m not asking?”

“Smart. So, how scared are you?”

Inside I could hear the thumping of many heavy boots, the slamming of many light doors, the rattling of many, probably futile, loaded weapons.

“On a scale of one to ten?”

“If you insist.”

“Where one is ‘so doo-lally-happy I could jump off a cliff and whistle numbers from The Sound of Music on the way down’ and ten is ‘can’t open the window in case the air eats me’ scared?”

“If you feel obliged to use these assessments — then yes.”

“Pretty much up there.”

“Why?”

“Why do you care?”

“Because,” she said carefully, as in the flat lights began to be turned on and orders barked in brisk military voices, “being, as you are, an arrogant spawn of the nether reaches of creation, for something to have frightened a creature so relentlessly self-certain as you, it must be significant. It is in my interest to know about it.”

I smiled sideways at her. We respect honesty, even if we can’t stand its owner. “You’ve never heard of the death of cities.”

“As a concept?”

“As a man.”

“Then no. I never have.”

“It’s a myth.”

“Like the Midnight Mayor?”

“In that sort of region, yes. Just a rumour, a legend. You hear stories. Stuff like . . . when the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, there was a house right in the middle of the blast, at its very heart, untouched while the rest of the city was levelled. They say that there was a man in the house, who had his face turned towards the sky as the bomb fell and who just smiled, smiled and smiled and didn’t even close his eyes. But then again, you’ve got to ask yourself . . .”

“. . . who survived that close to the bomb to tell?”

“Right. It’s always the problem with these sorts of stories. Or they say that when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, there was a man who walked through the flooded streets and laughed and the water could not buffet him, or when they firebombed Dresden there was a guy untouched by the flames, or when the child tripped running into Bethnal Green station during the Blitz, that there was someone who knocked her down and climbed over the bodies piled up in the stairway. Myths. That’s all. Rumours and myths. And just in case these things aren’t scary enough on their lonesome, they just had to go and give this smiling, laughing, burning man a name, and call him the death of cities. Naturally, I don’t believe a word of it. And yes, of course I’m scared. Just in case.”

She looked, for a moment, like she was going to say something else. Then Kemsley was there, and his face did not glow with happiness.

“There’s nothing in the flat.”

I shrugged. “Makes a kind of sense.”

“If you thought . . .”

“I thought. I thought that Boom Boom probably wasn’t going to lie to me, what with me having my hand in his chest cavity at the time. Then I thought Nair came here; Nair was killed. It makes sense that whoever — whatever — killed him would only do so if Nair was getting close to something important. It makes even more sense to have moved that something to somewhere less likely to be found. Sorry. I just can’t pretend I’m surprised.”

“Then why are we here?” he growled.

“Think how stupid you’d feel if we’d known about this place and just ignored it,” I said, beaming as sweetly as we could in the face of his dentistry. “Let’s have a gander, yes?”

Kemsley was right.

The place was empty.

Surgically empty. You could have removed cataracts in the kitchen; you could have skated across the bathroom floor. It smelt of bleach, a stomach-clenching, eye-watering smell. No furniture, no curtains, no pictures, no nothing to indicate any sort of life. Even the carpets had been bleached a faded grey-white, even the pipes. An estate agent would have called it “full of promise”, and that’s all it was, four rooms of great potential and not much else, being walked over by size-twelve assault boots.

Kemsley said, “Nothing. See? This hasn’t helped at all.”

“Mo was here,” I replied firmly.

“How’d you know that?”

“The Executive Officer didn’t lie to us.”

“Sure. Because no one would.”