Page 49 of No Man's Land

“I told you in Pops that he’d be trouble,” Dutta said. “And now”—he pressed a hand to his chest— “you’re entangled.”

Alex met Josef’s eye, unflinching and unrevealing. “Nonsense.”

“Liar.”

Turning away, Alex blew a stream of smoke into the cold air. In the dusky light, his eyes looked like chips of coal. “Well,it doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’ve got my orders, and I’ll follow them. You know I will.”

After a silence, Dutta put a hand to Alex’s shoulder. “Yes, I do,” he said, letting go as he turned back to the club. “That’s what concerns me the most.”

No loose ends, Josef thought with a shiver.

It was transparently obvious thathewas the loose end in question.

Chapter Fifteen

“Well,” Josef said, “this has been enlightening, but if you’ll excuse me, I should be getting back to—”

“The Cohens?” Alex shook his head. “I don’t think so. Not unless you want to bring this,” he made an encompassing gesture with the hand holding his cigarette, “to their door.”

“But you killed the…” He grimaced. “… the ghoul.” It sounded ridiculous in his ears, but he had no better word for the creature that had attacked him; certainly, it had not been a man.

Alex lifted an eyebrow. “I killedaghoul.”

“There are more, then.”

“Inevitably.”

Josef folded his arms, shivering as the rising breeze cut through him. “What—fuck, I can hardly believe I’m asking this, but what are they, then? Ghosts or…?”

“Not ghosts, no.” Alex’s eyes met his, bright with something like satisfaction. Excitement, perhaps? “They’re creatures of the Otherworld, ancient and slumbering, for the most part, in the deepest parts of the earth. But now we’ve woken them, and they’re hungry.”

“You’vewoken them? Your society? Why?”

Alex shook his head, took a drag on the remains of his gasper, and dropped the stub on the pavement. Crushing it out with the toe of his shoe, he said, “When I say ‘we’, I mean mankind.” He looked up again, right into Josef’s eyes. “This bloody war has woken them, the violence and blood and agony of it sinking into the earth. And not only them.” Alex cocked his head. “You must have heard the stories at the front? Angels and ghosts in no man’s land.”

Josef had, of course. “Men staring death in the eye will inevitably imagine ghosts and angels.”

“Maybe so, but do their imaginings often chase them through Belgravia?”

Josef had no answer to that. His mind was slowly rearranging itself around a reality too incredible to believe, and yet with no convincing alternative. Eventually, he said, “I have a lot of questions.”

A smile tugged at Alex’s lips. “I can try to answer them for you, but let’s go somewhere warmer, shall we?”

Josef couldn’t argue with that; he was bloody freezing. “Any decent pubs in this neck of the wood?”

Alex consulted his watch and said, “The pubs aren’t open yet.” After a hesitation, he added, “My flat isn’t far.”

The idea of returning to Alex’s warm and sumptuous mansion flat, with its soft carpet and well-stocked drinks cabinet, was extremely appealing. Too appealing. And Joe Shepel was no fool; he remembered the revolver on the laundry basket, and Saint’s warning about loose ends. “How about you treat me to a cup of tea, instead? There must be somewhere around here.”

Alex’s expression closed. “There’s always Harrods, I suppose. It’s not far.”

Harrods? “I was thinking of something more like a Corner House.”

“It’s a tramp to Leicester Square,” Alex said, “and in the circumstances, I’d rather avoid the Underground.”

Josef couldn’t help but agree. The very thought of those dark tunnels made him shiver with something worse than the cold. To distract himself from unwanted memories, he said, “Lord Beaumont takes the Underground, does he?”

“Only when his golden carriage is unavailable.” Then, with an exaggerated sweep of one arm, Alex said, “Shall we go?”

---