that cut through the midnight shadow of stubble. And for just a moment they might have been lovers. The roll of money in her bra banished the illusion quickly enough.
Noah left her in bed. As he closed the door behind him he remembered her name: Margot.
He stepped out into the street. The North Star was bright in the night sky. Street lights burned sodium yellow on the pavement. A fat-bodied rat scurried out from beneath the mountain of plastic trash bags stacked in the gutter. No matter where you were in London you were never more than ten feet away from a rat, or so they said.
Noah’s 1966 racing green Austin Healey was parked up against the curb. It looked like a relic from a better, nobler age, surrounded by the corporate uniformity of the Volvos, Fords, BMWs and Citroens lining either side of the street. The Austin’s side panels were beige, finished off with gold and black piping. The black leather soft top was down. He had fallen in love with the car when it was a wreck up on cinderblocks in a wrecking yard by Clapham Common. There was just something about it. It was like the proverbial bullet with his n it; they were destined to be together eventually.
The registration papers listed its original date of sale as March 27, 1966. He liked the idea of the car being “born” on the same day Pickles found the old Jules Rimet trophy under a hedge in South London. Noah had spent thousands of pounds and hundreds of hours restoring the car. In truth, the car was the one constant in his life; the one thing he loved. No doubt a shrink would point to a loveless childhood and a lack of hugs when he scraped his knee, either that, or every time he entered the car he was thinking about his mother in some Oedipean way. Sometimes, though, a car was just a car, and that man-love was just man love for the wire rims and the walnut dashboard.
He gunned the engine and peeled away from the curb.
London at night was a strange beast. It was alive with the pheromones of danger, adultery and random acts of senseless violence. Like Sinatra’s New York, it was his kind of town. On the corner he passed a three-legged dog trying to piss up against the wall without falling over. Ahead of him two girls walked, arms linked, down the white line in the middle of the road. He honked once, then swept around them, accelerating from a crawl to sixty in a couple of seconds and back to a dead stop at the first set of red lights. Noah loved the illusory freedom the wind in his hair gave him, even if it was short-lived.
This part of London existed on three levels: the underground; street level, with its instant gratifiers of fast food joints, discount clothes shops, electronics stores and florists; and overhead, with its amazing architecture that everyone down below was too preoccupied to notice. Windows were hidden behind steel shutters, the steel shutters hidden beneath inventive graffiti and spray-painted gang tags. He could never get used to the sheer emptiness of the city at night. It wasn’t that the city was dead. It wasn’t. It was vampiric. Come midnight the only people out were those who for one reason or another were afraid of sunlight.
Bracing the wheel on his thighs, he reached down for the rack of CDs lined up beside the gearstick and picked the one he wanted. Ignoring the lights, he took the left onto Belgrave Road at seventy-five and chased it down through Pimlico, hitting Vauxhall Bridge Road just shy of ninety miles per hour.
As he crossed the Thames, James Grant’s melancholic voice wondered who in their right mind would want to live in this city of fear. It was a fair question. Noah loved London almost as much as he loved Grant’s voice. Both had that lived-in quality that made them immediately comfortable, familiar but not so much so as to breed contempt. Both of them were so much more than they appeared to be when you scratched away at the surface. The voice and the streets were steeped in hidden subtleties. He couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. He was a London boy to the core. He lived and breathed the city. He grinned, knowing full well that no one would be in a rush to accuse him of being in hisht mind.
The needle on the speedometer only dipped below ninety twice on the thirty-mile drive out to Ashmoor and Nonesuch Manor. He cranked the volume up louder as the road opened up and lost himself in the music. Noah left the main road a mile short of Ashmoor proper, and took a bridle path up that jounced and juddered along the side of the grazing land toward the trailing avenue of lime trees that marked the way to Nonesuch. Out of the city the night was absolute. There were no stars. The branches trailed low, whispering in the Austin’s wake. Up ahead of him rose the towering iron gates of Nonesuch Manor House. Two grotesque gargoyles perched on the gateposts watched him drive up. Their eyes had been hollowed out and replaced with surveillance cameras.
Noah decelerated, tires spitting gravel as he followed the drive up to the house. The drive was spotlighted. All around him the powerful lights conjured shadow demons that bent and bowed with the wind. He pulled up alongside Ronan Frost’s Ducati Monster 696. It was the only bike in the courtyard. The rest were cars, and every one of them was something special. There was a Lamborghini Diablo with mud splashes up its sides, a flame-red E-Type Jaguar, a Bugatti Veyron, a canary-yellow Lotus Elan, Sir Charles’ own Daimler, a timeless classic, and pick of the bunch, a silver v12 Aston Martin Vanquish. As Frost liked to say, if you had no life, the very least you could do was drive a nice car.
Noah lifted himself out of the bucket seat. He left the keys in the ignition.
No one was going to steal the Austin from outside of Nonesuch.
He walked toward the house, though calling it a house was a misnomer. In truth it looked more like a castle. The left wing was even crenellated, part of which had crumbled where the climbing plants had undermined the masonry and worked their way deep into the crevices between the bricks. The ring wing appeared to be a huge gemstone, opalescent in the night. It was the old man’s atrium with his hundreds of rare plants. The glass turned the night on itself. Lights burned in three of the windows on the ground floor, the rest covered with wooden shutters.
The old man’s butler, Max, was waiting for him beneath the portico. “I trust you had a pleasant drive, sir?” Noah nodded. There was no love lost between the two. “Sir Charles is waiting for you with the others in the drawing room. May I take your coat, sir?” Noah shrugged out of his leather jacket and handed it over. “Thank you, sir. Will you be requiring anything else?” And then, almost as an afterthought, the butler added, “Toothpaste, perhaps? Your breath reeks of whoever had the misfortune of sitting on your face tonight.”
Noah ignored him and went inside.
Nonesuch was a huge, sprawling old house with narrow passages, mezzanine levels and servants’ staircases. The foyer was oak paneled. They showed signs of water damage. The old man’s family crest stood above a huge open fireplace. There was no sign that a fire had burned in the grate in the last decade.
On a small table beside the empty fire, an exquisitely carved chess set played out the Saavedra position. It was a beautiful endgame and a wonderful example of how one move could make someone famous well outside their own lifetime. It was a salutary lesson to every man who didn’t understand the nature of war. Sometimes subtlety is more important than might.
A granite and iron staircase rose in three tiers to the upstairs. The center of each riser was worn smooth by the scuffing of thousands of footsteps over the three hundred years since the old house had been built. There was a wheelchair stair-lift and wear marks along the wall where the old man’s chair had bumped up against it. Somehow he couldn’t imagine Sir Charles enduring the humiliation of the stair-lift. He wasn’t that kind of man. No, he was more likely to claw his way up on his hands and knees. That was the kind of man that he was.
For all the grandeur of the entrance hall there was an almost tired air to it, like the staircase and the cracked oak shutters covering the windows. There were no priceless works of art on display, no old masters, no precious antiquities. The casual visitor would have been forgiven for thinking the old man was broke. He wasn’t; he just invested his money elsewhere.
Noah crossed the foyer. The drawing room was the first door on the right, opposite the library.
He didn’t knock.
He pushed the door open and walked inside.
The drawing room was anything but the classic Englishman’s retreat. The old man called it the crucible. Noah thought of it in military terms: it was the debriefing room. The vast room was essentially the gloss of glass and the sharp lines of steel juxtaposed against Old World England’s conservative charm. Everything in the room was laid out with Sir Charles’ disability in mind.
One entire wall comprised twelve huge high-definition plasma displays capable of showing either a single image as a visual mosaic orspliced into a dozen individual ones. On the second wall there were two bookcases: one filled with priceless first editions-Bunyon, Marlowe, Fielding and Goethe on the first shelf, folio editions of Lavater and Glanvil, Maturin and Collins, each annotated with corrections in the author’s own hand-and the other with
