Deep Secret (Magids 1) - Page 47

Finally I got to work on the manager himself and persuaded him to give up in disgust and send the rest about their business. One of the chefs went in past me, saying, “Well, all I can say is that if it is a car radio, why is it always the same music?”

The waiter with him agreed. “Thirty-six hours, it’s been going. Any car would have a flat battery by this time.”

I went cautiously out to where my car sat disguised as a B-reg Ford, drawing power from the sun and exuding a faint far-off tinkle of Scarlatti. I could understand why the hotel staff were spooked. Unless you knew, the sound didn’t seem to be coming from anywhere.

“Stan,” I began as I unlocked the door.

“What’s going on? What were all those people hunting for?” he wanted to know.

“You,” I said.

He was very chastened when I explained. “You mean I’ve got to go without music even?” he said piteously. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Can’t you make yourself psychic earphones or something?” I demanded. “I’ve got enough on my mind without you terrifying the hotel staff.”

“I never thought of that. Psychic earphones, now,” he mused. “Let’s see…” I was about to point out to him, rather acidly, that he was not here to learn all five hundred-odd Scarlatti sonatas by heart, when he said, “You’re going to wipe that list then?” and I realised he was just kidding me.

“It’s more or less wiped itself,” I told him. “Fisk massaged my hands for an hour while she told me my aura was like a grey psychic blanket, but unfortunately the greyness is hers. She’s swathed in it. She can’t see outside it any more. I don’t know what she’s done to herself, but she smells of the bad stuff. Thurless too. He—”

“Hang on. What do you mean, ‘smells’?” Stan interrupted.

If the mad Gabrelisovic could describe this sensation as smell, then so could I, I thought. “You must know the feeling, Stan. It’s like acid indigestion to your soul, or as if someone were sponging your mind down with strong bleach. You get it when black practitioners start to talk to you. Or in bad cases, when they just look at you.”

“Oh, I get you!” Stan said. “Mindburn, I used to call it. Thurless has it too?”

“Much stronger than Fisk,” I said. “I talked to him for quite a time, while he gave me a dreary history of all the times people have let him down, or insulted him, or pinched his ideas, or persuaded publishers not to take his latest book – in the end, I asked him straight out if it might not be his own fault. I asked him if he’d ever gone out of his way to be nice to anyone, or had a kind or an affectionate thought. And he didn’t know what I was getting at, Stan. And by then this – mindburn, was it? – smell was coming off him so strongly that I felt ill and had to go away. And then—”

“The Croatian?” asked Stan.

“Mad,” I said. “Certifiable. And—”

“Then what about Punt?” said Stan.

“He’s even more irresponsible than Mallory. He sees himself as Court Jester to the world, I think. But let me tell you about Mallory’s latest caper.” I told him about the way I had set off to see Will, and my horrified astonishment when I arrived at Will’s gate to find Maree and her cousin running after me. “The boy, Nick, said he wanted to talk to me. I’ve no idea about what. Nothing could justify the risk, Stan! They could have got themselves stripped. Will and I could have spent the evening picking pieces of them out of five different worlds!”

“I take it they weren’t to know that, though,” Stan remarked.

“They weren’t to know anything,” I said sourly, “except that Will then went blandly ahead and told them all about Magids. All I could do after that was pretend to fly into a rage and put embargoes on their telling anyone else.”

“Pretend?” asked Stan.

“Yes, I am still pretty angry,” I admitted. “With Will as well.”

“Seems to me,” Stan said musingly, “that our Will must have had a reason for telling them. I admit he’s a tactless bugger, always shooting his mouth off, but he’s surely got to have thought they were Magid material after what they did. Was it just the girl who transferred them both, or did the boy do it too?”

“Both of them,” I said. “That boy’s pretty gifted in a quiet way. But for one thing he’s too young, and for another he’s about the most self-centred kid I’ve ever met. I don’t think Will thought at all. And yes, I’m going to wipe that list and start looking all over again just as soon as I’ve unwound this working.”

“Then you’d better lay in a load of Palestrina and Monteverdi,” Stan observed. “I’ll be on to that next. What about the working? Is Will coming here?”

“Middle of this afternoon,” I told him. “I don’t have to meet Dakros until around six, so there’ll be plenty of time for Will to take hold. Meanwhile – I’m sorry about this, Stan – could you seriously think of a way to listen to Scarlatti without all the hotel staff hearing it too?”

“I’ll try,” Stan said dubiously. “It won’t be easy, but I’ll do what I can.”

I left him to try and went back into the hotel. There was a panel on at midday on “What Makes Good Fantasy”, and I thought I might pass the time by going to it and finding out. In the meantime, I bought one of Hotel Babylon’s excellent pots of coffee and took it into the Grand Lobby to drink.

The area was, as usual, crammed with people, some in strange attire and most of them looking thoroughly hung over after the publishers’ parties the night before. Ted Mallory was sitting in one corner, looking more hung over than anyone. His wife sat beside him, obviously bored, in a new and startling jumper. At a quick glance, it looked as if someone had thrown a pint of blood at her right breast. Whatever the red stuff was, it glistened like a raw wound. I looked hastily away and spotted Maree and Nick Mallory perched on a bench at the side of the area, under one of the long windows. It occurred to me to wonder, as I made my way over to them, at the way the elder Mallorys took almost no notice of the younger ones. I had realised at yesterday’s breakfast, of course, just how acutely Janine disliked Maree, but I did marvel that, apart from buttering one slice of toast for him, she had never to my knowledge done anything maternal for Nick. Maybe it was simply that Nick didn’t let her. People of fourteen are touchy about mothers fussing around them. But Nick seemed to rely heavily on Maree instead. The marvel of it, to me, was that Janine tolerated that. She did not strike me as a woman who tolerated much.

I suppose I speculated this way to disguise from myself the fact that I was going to talk to them. I planted my coffee tray on the windowsill and found I was saying, “Coffee, either of you? I got the largest size of pot.”

Tags: Diana Wynne Jones Magids Fantasy
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