At least the tunnel they were now walking down was dry. It was a high-tech tunnel: all silvery pipes and white walls. The marquis and Door walked together, in front. Richard tended to stay a couple of paces behind them. Hunter moved about: sometimes she was behind them, sometimes to one side of them or to the other, often a little way in front, merging with the shadows. She made no sound when she moved, which Richard found rather disconcerting.
There was a crack of light ahead of them. “There we go,” said the marquis. “Bank Station. Good place to start looking.”
“You’re out of your mind,” said Richard. He did not mean it to be heard, but the most sotto of voces carried and echoed in the darkness.
“Indeed?” said the marquis. The ground began to rumble: an Underground train was somewhere close at hand.
“Richard, just leave it,” said Door.
But it was coming out of his mouth: “Well,” he said. “You’re both being silly. There are no such things as angels.”
The marquis nodded, said, “Ah. Yes. I understand you now. There are no such things as angels. Just as there is no London Below, no rat-speakers, no shepherds in Shepherd’s Bush.”
“There are no shepherds in Shepherd’s Bush. I’ve been there. It’s just houses and stores and roads and the BBC. That’s all,” pointed out Richard, flatly.
“There are shepherds,” said Hunter, from the darkness just next to Richard’s ear. “Pray you never meet them.” She sounded perfectly serious.
“Well,” said Richard, “I still don’t believe that there are flocks of angels wandering about down here.”
“There aren’t,” said the marquis. “Just one.” They had reached the end of the tunnel. There was a locked door in front of them. The marquis stood back. “My lady?” he said, to Door. She rested a hand on it, for a moment. The door opened, silently.
“Maybe,” Richard said, persisting, “we’re thinking of different things. The angels I have in mind are all wings, haloes, trumpets, peace-on-earth-goodwill-unto-men.”
“That’s right,” said Door. “You got it. Angels.” They went through the door. Richard shut his eyes, involuntarily, at the sudden flood of light: it stabbed into his head like a migraine. As his eyes became used to the light, Richard found, to his surprise, that he knew where he was: they were in the long pedestrian tunnel that links Monument and Bank Tube stations. There were commuters wandering through the tunnels, none of whom gave the four of them even a first look. The perky wail of a saxophone echoed along the tunnel: Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again,” being played more or less competently. They walked toward Bank Station.
“Who are we looking for again, then?” he asked, more or less innocently. “The Angel Gabriel? Raphael? Michael?”
They were passing a Tube map. The marquis tapped Angel Station with one long dark finger: Islington.
Richard had passed through Angel Station hundreds of times. It was in trendy Islington, a district filled with antique shops and places to eat. He knew very little about angels, but he was almost certain that Islington’s tube stop was named after a pub, or a landmark. He changed the subject. “You know, when I tried to get on a Tube train a couple of days ago, it wouldn’t let me.”
“You just have to let them know who’s boss, that’s all,” said Hunter, softly, from behind him.
Door chewed her lower lip. “This train we’re looking for will let us on,” she said. “If we can find it.” Her words were almost drowned out by music coming from somewhere nearby. They went down a handful of steps and turned a corner.
The saxophone player had his coat in front of him, on the floor of the tunnel. On the coat were a few coins, which looked as if the man had placed them there himself to persuade passersby that everyone was doing it. Nobody was fooled.
The saxophone player was extremely tall; he had shoulder-length dark hair and a long, forked dark beard, which framed deep-set eyes and a serious nose. He wore a ragged T-shirt and oil-stained blue jeans. As the travelers reached him, he stopped playing, shook the spit from the saxophone mouthpiece, replaced it, and sounded the first notes the old Julie London song, “Cry Me A River.”
Now, you say you’re sorry . . .
Richard realized, with surprise, that the man could see them—and also that he was doing his best to pretend that he couldn’t. The marquis stopped in front of him. The wail of the saxophone trailed off in a nervous squeak. The marquis flashed a cold grin. “It’s Lear, isn’t it?” he asked.
The man nodded, warily. His fingers stroked the keys of his saxophone. “We’re looking for Earl’s Court,” continued the marquis. “Would you happen to have such a thing as a train schedule about your person?”
Richard was beginning to catch on. He assumed that the Earl’s Court he referred to wasn’t the familiar Tube station he had waited in innumerable times, reading a paper, or just daydreaming. The man named Lear moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue. ” ‘S not impossible. What’d be in it for me, if I did?”
The marquis thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his coat. Then he smiled, like a cat who had just been entrusted with the keys to a home for wayward but plump canaries. “They say,” he said, idly, as if he were simply passing the time, “that Merlin’s master Blaise once wrote a reel so beguiling that it would charm the coins from the pockets of anyone who heard it.”
Lear’s eyes narrowed. “That’d be worth more than just a train schedule,” he said. “If you actually had it.”
The marquis did a perfectly good impression of someone realizing, my, it would, wouldn’t it? “Well, then,” he said, magnanimously, “I suppose you would have to owe me, wouldn’t you?”
Lear nodded, reluctantly. He fumbled in his back pocket, pulled out a much-folded scrap of paper, and held it up. The marquis reached for it. Lear moved his hand away. “Let me hear the reel first, you old trickster,” he said. “And it had better work.”
The marquis raised an eyebrow. He darted a hand into, one of the inside pockets of his coat; when he pulled it out again it was holding a pennywhistle and a small crystal ball. He looked at the crystal ball, made the kind of “hmmm” noise that means, “ah, so that’s where that went,” and he put it away again. Then he flexed his fingers, put the pennywhistle to his lips, and began to play an odd, rollicking tune that leapt and twisted and sang. It made Richard feel as if he were thirteen years old again, listening to the Top Twenty on his best friend’s transistor radio at school during lunch hour, back when pop music had mattered as it only can in your early teenage years: the marquis’s reel was everything he had ever wanted to hear in a song . . .