Mind the Gap (Hidden Cities #1)

Mind the Gap (Hidden Cities #1) Page 26

"You can carry on!" she called.

She heard him laugh. "I'm no Pavarotti."

"Sing me a song."

He was silent for a while but for the chop and scrape of his meal preparation. A saucepan lid rattled, she heard the click-roar of a gas flame being lit, and then water ran into a metal container.

"I really can't sing," he said at last.

Jazz felt strangely disappointed. But as she drifted into a light doze, buoyed by the beautifully warm water, there was something comfortable about the continuing silence.

"Men," her mother said. She stared at her daughter, sitting across from her in the restaurant. Jazz was fourteen at the time. She picked at her food. She'd never been a fan of pasta, but her mother loved Italian, so Jazz never complained.

"What about them?" Jazz asked after a while. Her mother had muttered the word and left it hanging there, as though it would expound on itself.

Her mum sighed. "I suppose I need to talk to you about them."

Jazz laughed. She couldn't help it.

"Mum," she said, "I know all about that!"

Her mother ate another mouthful of lasagna. As she chewed she looked at Jazz, examining her face, her hair, her mouth and neck. "You're such a beauty," she said.

Jazz posed prettily and fluttered her eyelashes. "Follow my mum."

"Of course you do." Her mum put her fork down and glanced around, her expression neutral. It was like a nervous tic her mother had developed. Jazz hoped she never ended up that paranoid, that afraid.

"You may know about that, but not what leads to it. There's sex and there's seduction. One is an act and one an art, and you need to be able to identify and deal with the artist."

"Okay," Jazz said. "Let me have a guess. A Dali would woo me with his intellect, a Picasso would make me see things in a different way, and a Warhol would just show me his dick."

"Jasmine!" her mum said, but she was smiling.

"I have an appreciation of art, Mother."

"You've done it at school, you mean. There's lots more to it, sweetie. You can learn about geography sitting in the classroom, but there's nothing like actually going places to get a true understanding."

"Fine. So...men?"

Her mother sighed, and for an instant her eyes were taken with that wretched look of sadness that filled them from time to time. She truly scared Jazz then, because she thought her mother was seeing the future, visualizing where this strange life of theirs would someday lead. "Trust is hard to come by," she said.

"You tell me that all the —"

"I mean it! Trust no one, Jazz!"

"What, ever?"

"Never! You can't, sweetie. They'll tell you you're beau-tiful and buy you such things, sing to you and take you places. But you can't put your fate in anyone else's hands. That's especially true of men. And more so when the men are trying to seduce you."

Terence knocked on the bathroom door. "You awake in there?"

"Am now." Jazz sat up, startled, and her eyes flicked to the unlocked door.

"Dinner's bubbling away nicely. You've got about fifteen minutes."

"Right." She wiped her hands across her face. Damn, that was stupid of me!

As she climbed from the bath, dried, and dressed in the clothes Terence had laid out for her, Jazz smelled the mouthwatering scents of dinner drifting under the door. Cooking meat, spices, and baking bread.

She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply. With the United Kingdom she usu-ally ate food that could be cooked in a microwave. On rare occasions, Harry fried sausages or steaks under a vent. They never went hungry, but when Harry was in one of his more paranoid moments, he made them eat cold, afraid that the smells of cooking would give them away to someone higher up. Meal times had been quiet, the food eaten quickly and from necessity rather than any real desire.

She guessed that now things would be different.

Dried and dressed, she exited the bathroom and walked through into the kitchen. Terence was at the cooker, stirring something in a large frying pan and whistling softly again.

"Nice bath?"

"Very, thank you."

"No problem." He glanced up at her and smiled, look-ing her fleetingly up and down, taking in the rolled-up jeans and shirtsleeves. "They look better on you."

"More my sort of clothes anyway. I don't usually dress up. What's the apparatus?"

"Oh," he said. He continued stirring, bobbing pieces of meat beneath the surface of the thick, aromatic sauce. "I had rather thought we could chat over dinner."

"Okay," Jazz said. "I'll help you serve it up. I've done everything you wanted today, and I think I've passed the tests pretty well."

"Tests?" he asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Don't piss me around, Terence."

He blinked. "I hoped you would emerge from the bath calmed and laid back."

"I am calm. But ever since meeting you, I've felt like I'm in the middle of something huge, and it's all rotating around me. Does that make sense?"

Terence nodded and sighed, a sad sound that reminded Jazz of her mother. "It does. Pass me that spoon, would you?"

Jazz removed two plates that had been warming in the oven and watched Terence serve their meal.

He did it with-out any arty flourishes, yet he had created a dish that would not have looked out of place in any restaurant Jazz had ever been to. Bowls of saffron rice, ladles of curried lamb, its sauce containing red peppers and roughly chopped shallots, and on the side, dishes of onion bhajis splashed with mint sauce. Jazz helped him carry the plates to the table, then he returned to the kitchen and emerged with several jars of chutneys.

"You don't make your own?" Jazz asked, making a big point of examining the label on one of the jars.

Terence shook his head. "I know my limitations. Mak-ing chutney is an art, and no artist is good at every disci-pline."

"What's your art?"

"I would have thought that was obvious." He forked in the first mouthful and sighed in genuine appreciation of his own cooking.

"Stealing is an art?"

Terence paused with the next mouthful raised halfway. "You seriously ask me that?"

Jazz shook her head. "Doesn't matter."

He pointed at her plate with his fork. "You're not going to try?"

She collected up some lamb and rice, made sure it was liberally coated in the sauce, and popped it in her mouth. It tasted heavenly. She half-closed her eyes as she chewed, making approving noises, using the side of her fork to slice off a portion of the bhaji and ready it for her next mouthful. That was equally superb.

"Is there anything you're not good at?" She hated her-self for asking, but damn him, he'd prepared a feast in the time it took her to have a bath.

"Chutney."

Jazz smiled. "So," she said, resisting talking through an-other mouthful. "The apparatus."

"Hmm." Terence chewed and looked up into the corner of the dining room, thoughtful and contemplative. "Well... that blade you stole is part of it."

"Right. So it's a weapon."

"Oh no, not a weapon! And that's not really a blade. It's a gear."

"So what does it do?"

Terence ate some more, chewing slowly and taking a sip of wine. He had not asked her again whether she wanted any, and Jazz was beginning to regret saying no. He exam-ined her frankly, staring as though trying to see past her outer self to the real Jazz beneath. This is the real me, she thought. She wondered whether he heard.

"I'm going to trust you. Partly because I like you and I think you're trustworthy, but mostly because you have se-crets too, Jazz. Lots of secrets. And something tells me that once we start talking, we'll be helping each other a great deal. We both hold pieces of a puzzle, I suspect. Perhaps this evening we can make it whole."

"Perhaps," she said. "But you know nothing of my se-crets."

"Of course not," he said, eyes glittering. "Which is why they're secrets. But Pooh was right: some secrets are heavy, and a burden shared is easier to carry. And some are dark. And a friend can shed much light."

"So now we're friends?" Jazz asked.

Terence shrugged and ate some more of his meal. He left the word hanging, and it seemed to echo around the small dining room.

Jazz laughed a little, looking around again. "This really doesn't seem like you," she said.

Terence held his hands up, mock-offended. "It's home!"

Home, Jazz thought. Maybe that's my first dark secret be can brighten for me. I never really had a home.

"My father always wanted to be a magician," Terence said. He put down his knife and fork, took another sip of wine, and rested his elbows on the table. "But when he found out the price of magic, everything changed. He couldn't gain the knowledge he wanted if it meant visiting pain on others. So instead of a magician, he tried to become a savior. But the Blackwood Club killed him."

"They killed your father," Jazz said in a monotone.

Terence nodded.

"Why?"

"Because the cause of the Blackwood Club —their rea-son for being, from the day of their inception right up until today—has been the acquisition of magic." He took another sip of wine, then without asking poured some into Jazz's glass as well as refilling his own.

"Go on," Jazz said.

"You know some of this," he said. "Don't you?"

She took a drink. It was cool and refreshing, but she heard her mother's warning voice at the back of her mind. Drink too much, and you'll lose your way so badly you might never get back. You need your wits about you all the time, Jazz. Jazz sighed, half-lowered the glass, then took another mouthful.

"Tell me your story," she said. "Then I'll tell you what I know. And if we meet somewhere in the middle —"

"We will. We do!"

Jazz stared at her host.

"The spirit of London," Terence said. He waited for a reaction, but when Jazz gave him none he continued.

"There are ghosts down there in the Underground —the Tube lines, the shelters, the sewers and storage places, and places far deeper too. The souls of London past, played out again and again; the spirit of the ancient city itself. All big cities have a hidden soul, do you know that? London has al-ways been a turbulent place, a place of learning and mystery. There were plenty of people who lived here long ago who had a much better grasp of arcane knowledge than most people do now. Now, a child's mind is polluted from an early age with the wrong kind of input, made so that it can't be taught the things that many were taught two hundred, six hundred, a thousand years ago."

"Polluted by what?" Jazz asked.

"TV. The cult of celebrity. Society nowadays places im-portance on the wrong things and often the wrong people. Three hundred years ago, it was the learned types of London who held most respect, and many of those men and women had their fingers on the pulse of the city. Now... someone sells a movie of their ex-girlfriend fellating them, and they're both instant superstars. Where's the magic in that?"

"I have no heroes," Jazz said.

Terence became animated, pointing at Jazz with his fork. "Yes, but you're unique!"

Jazz ate her final mouthful of food and followed it with more wine. Terence looked off into the corner of the room again, tapping his wineglass with the signet ring on his right hand, almost lost in his own world.

"Your father?" Jazz said.

"My father. Alan Whitcomb. A magician who tried to become a savior. He knew what the spirit of London was, you see. He knew there was true magic there, down beneath the streets, just waiting to be picked up and learned by who-ever had the desire. But sometimes that spirit screams, and when he first heard that he recognized its true state: tor-tured."

Jazz paled and Terence stared at her, but she said noth-ing. Let him finish his story, she thought.

Then I'II decide whether I should talk to him. ..or run.

"My father was a very clever man. A genius, from a long line of geniuses. All my life, I've aspired to his greatness. The more he knew about the tortured spirit of the old city, the more he wanted to help it. He researched old London, looking through books and records. There are places in London designed to keep secrets, which keep them still, but my father found his way in. He spent fifteen years gathering knowledge, and at the end of that time he started building."

"The apparatus," Jazz said.

"Yes, the apparatus. The Blackwood Club knew of him already, of course. You can't investigate the hidden secrets of London without them eventually knowing your name. But where his genius came in was making them think he was no threat. He started building an apparatus made from arcane segments and parts, which, when finished, would put the spirit of old London to rest."

"And the magic?"

"The magic would go down with it. The time of magic and magicians is dead, Jazz. Humanity has moved on. The past weighs on society like Marley's chains. A people, a cul-ture, a city like London must molt from age to age, like a snake shedding its skin."

Jazz frowned. "Sorry. I don't understand."

Terence gave it a moment's thought, then forged on. "The direction of my life has been totally defined by the murder of my father. But it's common for people to be forged by their past, even shackled by it. Until we put the past to rest, we can't move on. We might as well be carrying our dead ancestors on our backs."

Jazz shivered, thinking of her mother's murder and the death of her father so long ago.

"Think of a deposed king who cannot accept a world in which no one bows to him anymore,"

Terence continued. "Even ordinary people are often affected by the memory of their glory days. Now extend that idea to an entire city. Once, London was the heart of an empire. Magic thrived here. The collective consciousness of London had an image of itself not unlike that king. But the king is dead, Jazz.