South by Southeast Read online

  It was cool inside the theatre. I could feel the perspiration beading on my face. I wondered how much of the show I would have to watch before it was safe to go out. It didn’t make any sense. How had Scarface and Ugly managed to turn up at the station? Charlotte had said that Charon seemed to know everything she did – before she did it. How? In London, at the ice-rink and now in Amsterdam, Charon always seemed to be one step ahead.

  There was more applause and I glanced at the stage. A Queen of Spades was rising, seemingly on its own, out of Mr Marvano’s top pocket.

  “Was this the card you picked?” the magician asked. He said it in Dutch but I understood anyway. I’d seen it, and heard it all, before.

  Somebody appeared, walking down the aisle, and stopped at the end of my row. I looked round and froze. It was Scarface.

  I half rose, planning to slide out the other way. But another shape loomed out of the darkness, blocking that way, too. Ugly had come round the other side. I was trapped between them.

  The magician was calling something out from the stage. Ugly produced what looked like a folding comb and pressed a button on the side. It was a flick-knife. About twenty centimetres of steel sprang out of his fist, slanting towards me. Scarface began to move closer. Ten seats and he would be on to me. I had a wall behind me and people in front. I had nowhere to go.

  Mr Marvano had finished what he was saying. There was a long pause. Ugly was closing in from his side, too. The flick-knife flashed momentarily in one of the lights trained on the stage. I looked back the other way. Scarface carried no weapon but his fingers, long and skeletal, stretched out towards my throat.

  “And now, please, I require a volunteer from the audience.” Mr Marvano had tried it in Dutch and found no takers so now he tried English. Only three seats separated me from Scarface on one side and Ugly on the other.

  My hand shot up. “I volunteer!” I shouted.

  Every eye in the theatre turned to look at me. A spotlight swivelled round and everything went white as it hit me in the eyes. Scarface and Ugly froze where they were, just outside the beam. Somehow Ugly had managed to spirit away the knife. Ignoring them, I clambered over a seat, almost landing in the owner’s lap. But a moment later I was away, moving towards the stage while the audience urged me on with another round of applause. For the time being, anyway, I was safe.

  Mr Marvano had wheeled a big, multicoloured box onto the stage. It was about the size of a washing-machine with a round hole in the top and about a dozen slots around the sides. I didn’t much like the look of it but it was too late to back out now. Mr Marvano grabbed my hand and beamed at me through teeth that looked even older than him.

  “And what’s your name?” he asked, again in English.

  “Nick.”

  “Nick. Thank you. And now, Nick, I am telling you the trick.”

  He wheeled the box towards me and opened it. It was empty inside. But now I saw that if I knelt down inside it and if he closed it, I would be neatly trapped with my head protruding from the round hole at the top. I didn’t much care for the idea. For a moment I thought of making a break for it and trying to find a way out of the theatre. But I had lost sight of Scarface and Ugly. And while they were around I was safer here, on the stage, in the light.

  “I am calling this the Mexican dagger box,” Mr Marvano said. He repeated the words in Dutch. “Now I am asking you please to step inside.” I hesitated, then stepped in. The audience watched in silence but I could barely see them behind the glare of the spotlights.

  I knelt down. Mr Marvano closed the box shut and pressed four studs, locking it. I tried to move. But the box must have been smaller than I had thought. I was completely trapped, with the wooden sides pressing against my back, my shoulders and my arms. From the outside it must have looked like I was taking a Turkish bath. I wasn’t too happy about being on the inside. What was it he had said about Mexican daggers…?

  “The box is locked – here, here and here,” the magician explained. “And now I will get the Mexican daggers.” He waved a finger at me. “Don’t go away!”

  There was no chance of that. Painfully, I swivelled my head round and watched him as he ambled off the stage. The audience laughed and I realized I probably looked even more stupid than I felt. There was a rack of silver knives hanging in the wings, but no sign of any technicians or stage hands. Mr Marvano reached out to take the knives.

  But then Ugly appeared, suddenly looming up behind him. He lashed out with a fist, catching Mr Marvano on the side of the jaw. The magician crumpled. Ugly half-caught him but then let him fall, at the same time dragging off his tailcoat. It was a neat trick, but I was the only person who had seen it. A moment later, Scarface stepped out from behind the curtain. Quickly, he put on Mr Marvano’s jacket. Then, pushing the rack of Mexican daggers, he walked onto the stage. The audience stirred, puzzled. I smashed an elbow against the side of the box. My old wound from the wheatfield flared up again. The box didn’t even creak.

  “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” Scarface said. He spoke in English, perhaps for my benefit. “I’m afraid Mr Marvano has been taken ill. So he asked me to finish the trick.”

  He snatched up one of the daggers. It was even more lethal than Ugly’s switchblade, about twenty-five centimetres longer with a wide, curving blade. The handle was decorated with some sort of fake Aztec design. Maybe the dagger was fake, too. But from where I was sitting, it certainly looked real.

  Slowly he advanced towards me. I had never felt more helpless. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. All I could do was watch. And Scarface was enjoying every second of it.

  He smiled at me, a smile that was full of hatred.

  “Wait a minute…” I began.

  “The first knife, ladies and gentlemen,” Scarface said.

  He slammed it in. I shut my eyes and winced. Was I dead? Was I even wounded? I opened my eyes. Scarface looked as surprised as I did. The knife had certainly gone in the box one side. It had come out the other. But it didn’t seem to have gone through me.

  The audience was surprised, too. They seemed to have woken up now. Perhaps they could tell that this new magician had a quality that the last one had lacked. Complete insanity, for example. They broke into louder, more enthusiastic applause.

  Scarface picked up two more knives. Snarling, he plunged them into the box. Both of them passed right through without even scratching me. The audience clapped again.

  Snarling and muttering to himself in Dutch, Scarface picked up the rest of the knives. There were twelve in all. One after the other he stabbed them into the box, each time waiting for me to cry out and then exit into a better world. But none came close. I was untouchable.

  By now I was doing a good impersonation of a pin-cushion. The audience was delighted. There were no more knives left and, for that matter, no slots in which to stick them. But Scarface hadn’t finished. His hand went into his pocket and when it came out he was holding Ugly’s switchblade. He pressed the button and the blade shot out.

  The audience fell silent. He bent down over me. I could see the veins throbbing under his skin and one of his eyes had developed a twitch. “There are no more holes, Diamond,” he hissed. “This one is for you.”

  “Thirteenth time lucky?” I asked.

  He snarled. “You were a fool to meddle in our affairs.”

  “I was only doing it for the medals, Scarface,” I said.

  “Goodbye…”

  He took careful aim. This time he wasn’t going to bother with the box. His eyes were on my throat, right underneath my chin. Slowly, deliberately, he lifted the switchblade in his hand.

  The audience waited. In the wings, Ugly leered at me over the unconscious body of Mr Marvano. The switchblade stopped, high above me.

  I shut my eyes and waited. There was nothing else I could do.

  THE WRONG MAN

  The whole scene was frozen in the glare of the spotlights: Scarface, the knife, the waiting audience. Then everything happened
at once.

  The knife flashed down. There was a gunshot. Scarface screamed and reeled back, clutching his hand. The knife hit the stage and stuck there, quivering, in the wood. Ugly twisted round, trying to see what was happening. Scarface bent over his cradled hand and groaned. Blood seeped out between his fingers and dripped onto his legs.

  “Good shot, Ted.”

  “Thanks, Ed.”

  “Lower the curtain, Red.”

  The men from M16 had sprung out of nowhere. Now they swarmed over the stage while the audience – evidently in a good mood – gave them a cheerful round of applause. Ugly had put up a token resistance. One of the agents had given him a token punch on the nose and now he was out cold. Two more of them dragged Mr Marvano off while Ed and Ted grabbed hold of Scarface himself. His hand was bleeding very badly now. Ted’s bullet had smashed right through it, and I can’t say I was sorry.

  Red lowered the curtain. Ted came over to me. He was wearing the same dark suit he’d had on at the London International the first time we’d met, and the same sunglasses. But now he took off the shades and looked me straight in the eyes.

  “Are you OK, kid?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. I was fine – except that I still couldn’t move.

  Ted opened the box. “That was some trick,” he said.

  “They probably do it with mirrors,” I agreed.

  Then Tim came in between two more agents. Ned and Zed, perhaps.

  “We found him outside,” one of them said. “He was hiding in a dustbin.”

  “Rubbish!” Tim exclaimed.

  “Yes. He was hiding in the rubbish.”

  Tim shook himself free and came over to me. “Are you OK?” he asked.

  “I’m fine,” I said. But it wasn’t true. I’d been chased enough. I felt as if I hadn’t stopped running for weeks. I turned to Ted. Or maybe it was Ed. “Please. I want to go home,” I said.

  “I’m very glad to see you,” Mr Waverly said. “As soon as I got a report that you were in Amsterdam, I realized that you’d gone after Charon. So I sent my agents over to look after you. They spotted you just in time. Luckily for you…”

  Tim and I had been flown over to London and now we were back more or less where we’d begun; at Number Seventeen, Kelly Street. Only this time there was no Bodega Birds. The headquarters of MI6 was just how it had been the first time, with Mr Waverly examining us with his hooded grey eyes over the polished leather surface of his desk. Ted and Ed stood guard by the door.

  “You may have rescued us,” I said. “But it was you who got us into this mess to start with.”

  Mr Waverly shrugged. “That was really your own fault,” he said. “How were we to know that Charon would try to kill you?”

  He sounded innocent but I knew better. Mr Waverly had somehow let Charon know that we were working for MI6. He had drugged us and dumped us. We were his sitting targets. And when he had sent his men across to Amsterdam, it hadn’t been to rescue us. It had been to find Charon.

  “I expect you have a lot of questions,” Mr Waverly said.

  “I’ve got one,” Tim cut in. “What happened to the birds?”

  “The birds?” It took the head of MI6 a moment to work out what he was talking about. “Oh – you mean Bodega Birds. That was just a front. We had to do that. You see, we couldn’t allow you to get the police involved.”

  “Sure,” I agreed. “They might have found out that it was you who paid Charon to kill Boris Kusenov.”

  That got him. For one second his eyes were unguarded and I saw the panic that was hiding behind those small, faded pupils. Behind him, Ted and Ed shifted uneasily. All three of them were like guilty schoolboys who had just been caught smoking behind the gym. “How did you find out?” Waverly asked.

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out the cheque that I had found in Charon’s drawer. “I found this,” I said.

  Mr Waverly hardly needed to look at it. He knew what it was. He coughed and ran a hand through his hair. “I have to congratulate you,” he said. “You’ve been very resourceful.”

  “So why did you do it?” I demanded. “If you wanted to stop Charon, why did you pay him in the first place?”

  Waverly sighed. I think he was actually relieved to get the confession off his chest. “It was an operation that went horribly wrong,” he began.

  “I’m sorry,” Tim chimed in. “I didn’t know you’d been ill.”

  “I haven’t been ill, Mr Diamond!” Waverly paused. This was going to be more difficult than he’d thought. “We had to find Charon,” he went on at last. “Too many people had died. Not just in England. America. France. Even Russia. It was always Charon. So we decided to mount an operation to bring him in. To unmask him. And we came up with an idea. The simplest way to find him was to become his client.”

  “How did you do that?” I asked.

  “It was easy. He had a number of agents working for him. The man who knocked out the magician, for example. We got a message to them. They passed it to Charon.”

  “So you hired him to kill Kusenov.”

  “Yes. We chose Kusenov because we knew he had no intention of coming to England. He doesn’t like England. In fact he never leaves Moscow. In other words, in order to kill him, Charon would have to go to Russia. And so of course, there was something he would need…”

  “An aeroplane?” Tim suggested.

  “A visa. You can’t enter Russia without a visa. Don’t you see? It was brilliant. All we had to do was monitor all the people applying for a visa to Russia and one of them would have to be Charon. And of course if anyone who applied for a visa had only nine fingers…”

  “So you never really wanted Kusenov dead.”

  “Oh no. That was just the point. We were certain that Charon would be unable to kill him. He was meant to be an impossible target.”

  Suddenly I understood. Waverly was right. It had been a brilliant plan until it had gone terribly wrong. “But Kusenov decided to come to England after all!” I said.

  “Exactly. That wretched painting, ‘The Tsar’s Feast’, came up for auction at Sotheby’s. Kusenov was a collector, and he had this fixation about the artist, Salvador Dali. He believed the painting had to hang in Russia – so he came over to bid for it. It was the last thing we’d expected.”

  “I get it…” I said.

  “I don’t,” Tim muttered.

  I turned to him. “If Charon had killed Kusenov on British soil and the Russians had then found out he’d been paid by MI6—”

  “It’s too horrible to contemplate.” Waverly finished the sentence. He had sunk into his chair as if he were deflating.

  “You still haven’t found Charon,” I said. “Kusenov still isn’t safe.”

  “My dear boy.” Mr Waverly recovered quickly. “The man with the scar! He was Charon.”

  “Scarface…?”

  “Yes. He’s in a prison cell now. It has to be him. He has only four fingers on his right hand.”

  I thought back to the theatre in Amsterdam. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Of course he’s only got four fingers on his right hand!” I exclaimed. “Ted shot the other one off!”

  That sent a ripple of alarm through the three agents. Quickly they conferred. Then Ted spoke. “It’s true I shot him in the hand,” he admitted. “But I didn’t see him lose a finger.”

  “He must have lost it!” I insisted. “He certainly had all his fingers when we first met.”

  Ted shook his head smugly. “Relax, kid. Your Mr Scarface is Charon, all right.”

  “Has he admitted it?” I asked.

  “No. But we’ll crack him.”

  Personally, I doubted Ted could even crack a walnut without help from a friend but I didn’t say that. I turned back to Mr Waverly. He was my only hope. “Mr Waverly,” I said. “I know that Scarface is not Charon. Please believe me. You’ve got the wrong man.”

  But Mr Waverly wasn’t having any of it. Suddenly he was all suit and old school tie. “I t
hink I can be the best judge of this,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m the head of MI6 and you’re just a fourteen-year-old boy!”

  Tim shrugged. “He has a point.”

  I started to speak, then bit my tongue. There was no point arguing with them. I’d be better off working it out on my own. “What about us?” I asked.

  Mr Waverly smiled. “You can go,” he said. “I’ve had a word with the police. That business with the bank. Everything’s been explained. You’re no longer wanted.”

  We weren’t wanted. Not in any sense of the word.

  Tim stood up. “So that’s it,” he said.

  “That’s it.”

  “Right.” Tim thought for a moment. “I don’t suppose you could lend us the bus fare home?”

  We walked home. Every step of the way the same thought went through my mind. They’ve got the wrong man. They’ve got the wrong man. I knew Charon wasn’t Scarface. He had been in the room at the Winter House with Ugly and a third man. It was the third man who was Charon.

  I thought back to the desk, the drawer with the cigarettes, the mirror and … something else. I couldn’t remember any more. I was tired. I needed to rest. But I couldn’t – not yet. They’d got the wrong man.

  Tim picked up a newspaper on the way back. Someone had left it on a bench and now that the adventure was over he was keen to cut out any photographs of himself. But there wasn’t even a mention of him. He was yesterday’s news, already forgotten.

  We climbed the stairs into the office and while Tim went through the paper again I put on the kettle and made us some tea. By the time I’d carried it into the office and sat down opposite Tim, my mind had begun to click into action. Carefully, I set out the pieces of the puzzle and tried to make sense of them.