The Watchmaker Of Filigree Street Part 28

It didn't. 'I can't. There has to be rain, otherwise the fire will ... you will never make it away before the other buildings catch. Everything here is wooden. You've got it,' he said, then took the rain vial from him when he didn't understand.

'How long is there?' Thaniel asked.

'Three minutes.'

'That's enough,' he said. Three minutes was enough to play a reasonable sonata. It was more than enough to go up to the top floor of the building and down again.

Thaniel pushed open the elevator grille and was about to press the fifth lever when he saw that Mori wasn't with him. He was looking at the top of the elevator. The ceiling was nothing but copper mesh, and through it, the darkness of the high shaft stretched up and up, striped with light from the upper floors. He came after that tiny lag, but he had clenched his hands so hard that he had cut his palms. As the lift hummed upward, he stood very still, looking at the floor so that he wouldn't see the flashes of the other hallways they pa.s.sed, or the gaping darkness above them. Thaniel pushed a handkerchief between his hands to soak up the blood. Mori watched him do it as though his hands belonged to someone else.

'So, Grace and I will go down the stairs,' Thaniel said. 'You'll need the elevator to get down again from the roof. We'll meet you by the gates. Is it ... going to be as big as the Yard?'

Mori lifted his eyes. 'I don't know. I won't see all of it.'

'Don't be stupid. You can get down in time, you'll just have be quick. Look at me. You haven't forgotten completely, it's only hard to remember because it's unlikely.'

'Yes. Probably true. But I still can't remember.'

'Christ, your hands ... '

'What happened to your face?' he said quietly.

'Just Lord Carrow.'

He closed his fingers over Thaniel's to stop him chasing the blood that had pooled again along the lines of his palms. 'Be careful with yourself. Please. She will make you much less than you should be, if you aren't careful. I don't mean you won't be happy. But you will be small.'

'Don't ... '

The elevator stopped. Thaniel swallowed hard and opened the grille again, and flicked the last lever for the roof, so that Mori wouldn't have to. 'I'll see you soon,' he promised.

The elevator disappeared upward. Mori had closed his eyes.

Thaniel shoved open Matsumoto's door. It banged against the wall, and in the doorway that led out to the balcony, Grace spun around. She was waiting, he realised, to see if the fireworks would start. The balcony was at the wrong angle for her to have seen what had happened by the paG.o.da, only the general commotion. She was wearing Thaniel's clothes, holding his coat closed across her chest against the cold that had seeped into the unheated room. The grate was dark.

'Thaniel, what-'

'There's a bomb somewhere in here. Yuki tried to kill a j.a.panese minister, he just shot at him and this must be his failsafe. Stairs, quickly, Mori's got the elevator. Come on!'

'What do you mean-'

'Now!' he shouted at her. He couldn't speak and keep count internally at the same time, but the elevator had taken at least a minute. He pulled her out and down the corridor. Five floors: thirteen, fifteen steps between each, probably. The staircase was wooden when he found it, creaking and old, and the heels of their boots thumped hollowly in the empty s.p.a.ce that must have been beneath the steep risers.

He slowed, because he could hear something peculiar. It was coming from inside the elevator shaft, a skitter of something smooth and steel against the wall, moving irregularly. It wasn't anything much larger than a rat, because its colour was pale and thin, a watery blue that deepened as it moved further and further down the shaft. There came a greenish slither as it slid down the counterweight's steel cord, as if the thing had managed to hold on. The shade of it was familiar. It made him think of the tide, and the way the salt water thinned at the edges of incoming waves and grasped the pebbles.

'Thaniel?'

He lost the sound over the noise of their own steps. 'Did you see anyone else in here on the way up? There weren't any lights, but-'

'No, everyone was at the operetta.'

When they reached the ground floor, he ran back from the building to see up to the roof, and realised with a sick feeling that Mori was still there. The lamps on Kensington High Street cast an orange glow behind the chimneys, just enough to silhouette him.

'Mori!' he shouted. 'Now is not the time to be afraid of heights! Come down!'

His heart was loud in his ears from running on the stairs. Grace was already nearer the paG.o.da than to them. A small wind ruffled the paper lanterns around the empty stage, and the sheet music still clamped into place on the stands. Everyone else had gone. It had been more than three minutes, he was sure of it; still no explosion and still no sign. 'Climb down to the balcony, you can come down the scaffolding, it looks-'

Something plinked. It was a neat little noise, the same watery shade as whatever had been falling down the elevator shaft. A strange sigh billowed from the firework shop, and then flames that burst outward. Thaniel was thrown backwards, but as he fell, he saw the blast race up the shaft he could see the flashes through the windows as it moved upward and Mori turned around on the roof, looking toward where the explosion would emerge first. It tossed him backwards too, off the edge of the roof. Then he was lost in the smoke. So was Thaniel. It was deep and dense, and strobe flashes of different colours flared somewhere deep in the heart of it, not sound, he realised, but fireworks. The back of his head cracked against the ground. Embers helixed red above him. He didn't think that he was hurt, but part of him remained sceptical, and was unsurprised when everything faded to an endless grey. From a long way off he heard thunder.

TWENTY-SEVEN.

Thaniel opened his eyes. There was a ceiling above him, and part of a window. Creaking footsteps walked by. He sat up. It was a hospital ward. He had never been inside a hospital before. It smelled of fearsome disinfectant. Across the far end, two nurses scrubbed the floor on their hands and knees. Stiff, he twisted his head from one side to the other. It must have been a quiet day. The beds around his were empty. Beside him, Grace was slouched in a stiff wooden chair, watching him over a science journal.

'Morning,' she smiled.

'Where are we?'

'St George's.'

He shook his head, confused. The ward was airy and well proportioned. It was not the kind of place that treated people for nothing. He didn't have any hospital subscriptions; they cost something absurd, two or three guineas a year. 'But I haven't-'

'I paid. How are you feeling?'

He felt as though somebody had stuffed his head with wool and left its more usual contents in a jar. The idea of a whole sentence was daunting. 'Hazy,' he said instead.

'The nurse says you've a concussion. Lots of sc.r.a.pes and bruises.'

'What happened to you?'

'Nothing, I was much further back. b.u.mped my arm.'

'No, I mean before.' He swallowed, and tasted smoke. 'Everyone thought you had been kidnapped.'

She blinked. 'Kidnapped? No. I might have knocked a few things around. I just left. I was angry.'

'But where did you go?'

'I walked round town. Then I got on the underground when it opened.'

His head hurt. 'I'm sorry.'

'Never mind that now. We're both all right. So is almost everyone else. The police are saying it was a miracle that it rained. There were sixty people in the teahouse when the roof caught fire, but the storm put it out before the smoke could trap them.'

He looked down the empty ward. 'But he's dead, isn't he?'

'Who, Mori? No. He's in surgery.'

'Surgery for what?'

'No idea. Thaniel stay where you are,' she said, pus.h.i.+ng her fingertips to his chest.

'Yes,' he lied. He leaned back a little. 'I can't believe he didn't see it coming,' he said, to distract her. 'Modernist Mr Ito visits the home of Yuki the mad nationalist, whose father makes fireworks? I told him from the start to get Yuki away, but he wouldn't listen.'

'It could have been anyone,' Grace said quietly. 'That firework shop was so busy when I went up that a man dressed in a gorilla suit might have strolled in unremarked.'

'No. You don't know Yuki, he attacks people. He tried to kill Mori once. Tried to shoot Ito at the show.' He coughed. The back of his throat was raw and dry, and the water she gave him only made it itch. 'Mori sounded like it had taken him by surprise. Nothing ever surprises him. And none of this surprises me, so I don't see how-'

'Think about it later,' she said gently. 'Listen, I must sort out fees and so forth, and then see my parents, if they think I've been kidnapped. Good G.o.d, I go for a walk and the world goes mad. You get some rest.'

Thaniel promised that he would, waited until she had gone, then called over a nurse and told her that he wanted to be discharged. Once they had both signed the papers and she had given him back his clothes, he pulled the curtain around his bed closed. He dressed behind it. There were small cuts across his chest, splinters from the blast. The middle of his back felt stiff from the graze there. Nothing terrible.

He lost count of the number of loops in his tie and had to start again.

When the surgery was over, the nurse told him, Mori would be taken to the Jewish ward. It was upstairs. The staircase was hung with huge oil paintings, which gave way to long windows on the wards, all slightly open in order to let the air circulate. Beneath one of them was a warning poster about the dangers of mephitic odours. He knew vaguely that they had to do with the spread of disease, but he had no clear idea of the subject. He could smell only the cleaning salts and over those, the chemical sweetness of carbolic acid. When he opened the double doors of the ward, he found it mostly empty. Some Yiddish men were playing cards. Another was suffering an epileptic fit while two nurses struggled to hold him down. A third nurse saw Thaniel and shooed him out.

'Visiting hours do not begin until three o'clock!'

'Could you tell me-?'

'No! Wait outside the hospital, or in the galleries.'

He tried to argue and was shown out by one of the taller doctors, who left him halfway down the stairs. He stared after him. His eyes still stung from the smoke and he rubbed them, then stopped when he saw that his fingertips had come away wet.

Below him in the entrance hall, a pair of nurses hurried in through the front door, letting in a gust of cold air. Best not to wait outside in the cold in this state. His logical capacity was divorced from the rest of him, observing from a few inches to the left of his head. It directed him along the long corridor that led away from the door. After some drifting about, he found the gallery. It was tucked away to the left of the back door, which opened out into a conservatory overlooking a wide garden. The windows were all shut, the air warm.

As he stepped into the gallery, the floorboards creaked. They were old. In gla.s.s cabinets stood wired skeletons of all sizes, adults and children, and in one, a pair of strangely conjoined twins, whose two spines curved from one pelvis. Each had two ordinary arms and a head. He studied the wiring, certain that it was a fake, but then he saw that the tailbones were fused together. Whoever the skeleton had belonged to, he they had been nearly six feet tall. It was difficult to see how they could have walked. It must have been a matter of one leg each and a good deal of trust. They had clearly managed. The bones weren't warped or uneven. Everything was symmetrical and strong, cleaned to a pearlescent s.h.i.+ne. He moved on to look at the other cabinets, avoiding his own reflection.

Further on were pictures, mainly paintings of dissections or operations. The people didn't look real. Half-formed things hung suspended in bell jars. Around them were more cabinets filled with waxworks. One showed a face, stripped of skin on one side to expose the complicated muscles underneath, another a flayed hand. A family of skeletons leaned over an anatomy book that had proven so interesting that being dead hadn't distracted them. He wandered for a while, bending to see into cabinets but never touching them, not wanting to cover them in fingerprints. Someone had cleaned most of the soot off him, but it was still in the lines of his fingertips.

He was glad that the gallery was so strange. It was keeping his mind off surgery. He wished he knew what kind. If it was serious, they would use chloroform. Chloroform was better than a large whisky, but he knew a little about it, Annabel's husband having died under it. It killed some people. It triggered a form of allergic reaction. n.o.body knew why.

He sat down on the floor beside the twins' cabinet and tried to think of nothing. It worked best when he counted. After every nine hundred or so, the city bells rang to mark the quarter hour. Towards half past one, a doctor came by and pulled him up by his elbow, a.s.suming he had escaped from somewhere. Thaniel a.s.sured him he hadn't, but the doctor sent him outside anyway.

At first it was numbingly cold, but that was only because he had been sitting still for so long. After he had walked around for a while he didn't feel so bad. Yesterday's thunderstorm had washed away the snow, but the puddles had frozen and the street crackled with the sound of ice splintering under boots and cartwheels. While he waited, a small crowd gathered outside the double doors; other visitors, with seedcake or fruit or small bottles of gin hidden in their pockets. At three, a fat janitor opened the doors and stood between them as people pa.s.sed through. Whenever the man saw a suspicious b.u.mp in a coat, he s.n.a.t.c.hed it out and laid his prize on the table to the side of the corridor. He seemed disappointed when he patted Thaniel's pocket and found only his watch which was, despite everything, not broken. Thaniel watched him confiscate an apple from an old woman. He couldn't see what was wrong with bringing food on to the wards, but he was too tired to ask.

When he found the Jewish ward again, he saw Mori almost straightaway. He was still asleep. Beside him, a doctor made notes on a chart.

'Are you a relative?' he said to Thaniel, sceptically.

'I'm a cousin, he's half English. Is he going to be all right?'

'He is,' the doctor said. 'd.a.m.n miracle. Fell from the roof, apparently. Rope burns on his hands; he must have caught hold of something. He was found in a doorway at the base of the building. Astonis.h.i.+ng luck. We're keeping him here tonight to sleep off the chloroform. If he doesn't wake in an hour, tell the duty nurse.'

Thaniel nodded again and sat down in the chair by the bed. He cast around for a newspaper. There were none. Visitors were not encouraged to linger. He leaned forward against the mattress, his head cus.h.i.+oned in his arms, and faded to nothing but listening. Gas shushed as the lamps flared on. The bells, sometimes. Half past three, four, half past four. Twice, footsteps paused near him, but no one asked him to leave.

A cold hand pushed itself through his hair. 'Are you asleep?'

He jolted upright. 'You're awake. My G.o.d, the surgeon more or less told me you'd die from the anaesthetic-'

Mori smiled a little. 'Don't exaggerate.'

'I'm not!'

'I'm not allergic to chloroform. I'm not allergic to anything but yellow liquorice allsorts and those haven't been invented yet.'

Thaniel took his hand back before he could touch the bandages that just showed through the hospital night s.h.i.+rt. 'What did they do?'

'They took out some shrapnel, that's all.'

Thaniel watched him for a long time. 'Well,' he said at last, 'now we know why you're afraid of heights.'

Mori smiled properly. The lines around his eyes were deeper than usual now. They made him look like an old photograph of a young man, often crushed, but ironed carefully so that only the ghosts of the marks remained. Thaniel moved the edge of the blanket over his arm. With the windows open, the ward was frozen.

'What in G.o.d's name were you doing?' Thaniel said. 'Grace was only on the underground trains, and then she went up to Matsumoto's flat to see the fireworks after the operetta. Why couldn't you just have tied Yuki up somewhere until Ito was gone? He shot at him before the explosion; it isn't as though any of us were surprised when the bomb went off, and for Christ's sake how could you have even allowed for there to be a bomb? How could you not have known?'

'It was so unlikely that I couldn't even remember why I was afraid of heights.'

'How? How was it unlikely? I saw this coming and I don't remember any futures at all. Yuki was always going to do it!'

Mori sat up, slowly. 'I don't think it can have been Yuki.'

'Why not?'

'Because I would have done something more useful than fall off a building if he had meant to do that.'

'Mori, you ... you fell, before, on the underground tracks, you said. You hurt your ankle. That would have made you late for everything else. He must have decided and done it and before you could have even reached the village, never mind ... '

He trailed off because Mori was already talking over him. 'I don't need to stop things in person. If it was Yuki, there would have been something in place that would stop him as soon as he decided. I wouldn't have let it all hinge on my not falling in pitch dark, I'm not that stupid, or I hope not.'

'No, you're not. I was there to keep him from killing Ito.'

'Even that has a last-resort look about it to me. I don't think ... ' He shook his head. 'I'm so sorry. I don't know what I can have been thinking.'

'I don't care. You're alive.'

'You should care, if I'm putting you in the way of idiots with guns or-'

Thaniel closed his hand over his arm. 'No, no. He couldn't have hurt me, I'm twice his size, and after the Yard I don't think my heart even beat faster. I was well qualified.'

Mori only shook his head again. He was looking at the folds in the blanket. His eyes were clouded. Watching him try to find the pieces of himself he had forgotten was worse than imagining him on an operating table. Thaniel moved on to the edge of the bed and hoped Mori could feel the future in which he did dare, despite the frowning nurses, to put his arm around him, but he didn't think he could.

'Just leave it now,' he said quietly. 'It's done.'