The Fourth Bear Page 10

  “Babies with spaghetti on their heads?” said Jack, thinking of a typical mealtime with Stevie. “Sounds like you might have something there.”

  He nudged Madeleine, who said, “Yes, I’ve often considered spreading my creative wings. I thought swans during sunset might be a good idea, too.”

  “Mr. Ottery-Squish?” inquired a young man dressed in a faded sports jacket and a necktie that looked as though it would have been better tied by his mother.

  Attery-Squash smiled politely, despite the interruption.

  “Yes?”

  “My name’s Klopotnik. Wendell Klopotnik. I have a novel that I’ve just written, and I’ve chosen you to publish it for me.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” replied Attery-Squash, winking at Madeleine.

  “I have a résumé somewhere,” Klopotnik muttered, rummaging through his pockets. “It’s called Proving a Point—a psychological thriller set in an all-night bakery.”

  Jack and Madeleine excused themselves and walked off to find their table.

  “What did Hatchett want?” whispered Madeleine as they threaded their way through the crowded ballroom.

  “Help. His sister’s gone AWOL.”

  “I hope you told him to get lost.”

  “On the contrary. Politically it could be a good move. I’ll make a few inquiries and see what I can dig up—metaphorically speaking, of course.”

  She shook her head and smiled at him. Jack rarely bore a grudge. It was one of his better features.

  They sat down at their table, and Jack introduced himself to his neighbor, a shabby-looking individual named Nigel Huxtable. He was, it transpired, another Armitage Shanks finalist, and he jumped when Jack spoke, as he had been trying to hide two bread rolls in his jacket pocket.

  “So what’s your book about?” asked Jack brightly.

  “It’s called Regrets Out of Oswestry,” he said, fixing Jack with an intelligent gaze that was marred only by a slight squint. “It traces one woman’s odyssey as she returns to the place of her childhood in order to reappraise the relationship with her father and perhaps reconcile herself with him before he dies of cancer.”

  Jack frowned. “Didn’t you submit that book to the competition last year?”

  Huxtable looked hurt. “No.”

  “Oh. It just sounded familiar, that’s all.”

  Madeleine hid a smile.

  “I know what you’re saying,” said Huxtable in an aggrieved tone, “but I tell you, more copies of my book have been stolen from bookshops than all the other Armitage Shanks finalists’ put together.”

  “Do stolen books count on the bestseller lists?”

  “I should certainly hope so,” replied Huxtable, thinking that it had been a colossal risk and a waste of his time if they didn’t, “but in any event it’s a modern benchmark of success, you know.”

  Jack couldn’t avoid a smile, and Huxtable gave up on him, striking up a conversation along similar lines with his other neighbor.

  In the end neither Huxtable nor Sphincter won. The first prize went to Jennifer Darkke’s Share My Rotten Childhood. Lord Spooncurdle gave a pleasant after-dinner talk. He made several obscure puns about cheese making and wondered why no one laughed.

  That night Jack lay awake in bed, staring at the patterns on the ceiling. He was thinking about Goldilocks and the Gingerbreadman, the NCD, his career and the psychiatric assessment—and just how noisy Mr. and Mrs. Punch’s lovemaking was next door.

  “How long have they been at it now?” asked Madeleine sleepily, pillow over her head to block out the thumping, groans and occasional shrieks that penetrated through the shared wall.

  “Two and a half hours,” replied Jack. “Go to sleep.”

  10. Porridge Problems

  Most illegal substance for bears: The euphoria-inducing porridge (“flake”) is a Class III foodstuff, and while admitting a small problem, the International League of Ursidae considers that rationed use does no real harm. Buns (“doughballs”) and honey (“buzz” or “sweet”) remain on the Class II list and are more rigorously controlled, except for medicinal purposes. Honey addicts (“sweeters” or “buzzboys”) are usually weaned off the habit with Sweet’n Low, with some success. The most dangerous substance on the Class I list is marmalade (“chunk,” “shred” or “peel”). The serious pyschotropic effects of marmalade can lead to all kinds of dangerous and aberrant behavior and are generally best avoided as far as bears are concerned.

  —The Bumper Book of Berkshire Records, 2004 edition

  The day broke clear and fine. A light breeze in the night had cleared away the haze, and the morning felt crisp and clean and sunny—the sort of morning that is generally reserved only for breakfast cereal commercials, where members of a nauseatingly bouncy nuclear family leap around like happy gazelles while something resembling wood shavings and latex paint falls in slow motion into a bowl.

  No one was bouncy in the Spratt household that morning, but Jack dragged himself up and was out of the house at eight, telling Madeleine he was off to see the counselor first thing. She’d replied, “You’re a lying hound. Good luck on the Goldilocks hunt, and invite Mary and Ashley around for dinner one evening.”

  Twenty minutes later he was driving down the unpaved road to the lake where Mary lived. There were many flooded gravel pits dotted around the area, but only one had people living on it. Several boat-minded individuals had settled here in the thirties and begun a precedent that couldn’t easily be broken. Until Mary started living on the lake, Jack hadn’t known that residential moorings existed here at all. It was quiet at the lakeside, and the houseboats, moored on the ends of pontoons to stop them from running aground, barely moved at all in the placid waters. The first boat was a converted Great War naval pinnace, her decks covered in plastic and in a constant state of conservation. She had been a Dunkirk little ship, so the enormous effort being expended in her rebirth, thought Jack, was quite justified. Beyond this was a Humber lighter, sunk at its moorings three winters earlier and abandoned by its owners. Next was the Nautilus, an ancient riveted-iron submarine designed by its owner, an eccentric and reclusive millionaire by the name of Nemo, who was spending his retirement in the rusting hulk writing his memoirs and redefining the classification of sea creatures after a lifetime’s research. The Nautilus was resting on the gravelly bottom with its large viewing windows on the waterline. No one knew how he’d gotten the submarine into the lake, and he never gave anyone a straight answer when they asked.

  Mary lived on the next mooring to Nemo in an old Short Sunderland flying boat, an ex-civilian version that she had bought from a bankrupt theme restaurant in Scotland, dismantled and shipped to the lake on the back of two flatbed trucks. She spent her spare time converting the inside to a comfortable home and had recently managed to get the number-three engine started, the only one still in position. Madeleine and the children had come down for a barbecue that day and cheered as the old radial burst into life, belching clouds of black smoke, frightening a flock of geese and straining the old airplane at its moorings until Mary feathered the prop.

  “Anyone home?” shouted Jack through the open door.

  “I’m on the flight deck!” said a voice that echoed down through the flying boat.

  Jack stepped inside the hull and picked his way over the heaps of building materials and rolls of insulation that were piled up inside the cavernous hull. She had as yet converted only the prow. Jack climbed the spiral staircase to the navigator’s office that Mary used as a kitchen.

  “There’s some coffee on the stove!” she called out. He helped himself and joined her on the flight deck, a large room roofed in sun-clouded Plexiglas. Mary was sitting in the left-hand seat with her feet up on the remains of the instrument panel.

  “Good morning,” said Jack. “How’s the acting head of the NCD?”

  “She’s fine,” replied Mary with a smile. “How’s the NCD’s unofficial full-time consultant?”

  “He’s all right.”<
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  Jack sat down on the copilot’s seat and balanced his mug on the throttle quadrant. They were at least twelve feet above the water level and were afforded a good view of the lake. To the left of them they could see Captain Nemo hanging up his socks on a makeshift washing line strung between the conning tower and tail of his rusty craft, and to their right was the lake, a full mile of open water, the glassy surface interrupted only by the marker buoys for the dinghy racing. It was quiet and peaceful, and Jack could see why people would forgo the luxuries of land-based dwelling for a life on the water.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” murmured Mary. “I wouldn’t live anywhere else for all the money there is.”

  Jack took a swig of coffee. “I think you’re right. Me, I’d worry about the kids falling in the drink.”

  “If you brought them up to regard water the same way as they regard roads, I don’t think you’d have a problem.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Everything okay at the office?” asked Jack.

  “Fine. We were sorting through the statements for the Scissor-man’s pretrial hearing after you left. The prosecution has asked for more witnesses and the thumbless victims of previous scissorings to try to create a cast-iron case against him.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I think Ashley was serious about that date.”

  Jack shrugged. “So? It only has to be a drink or something.”

  “Do aliens drink?” she asked, not really knowing much about Rambosians, never having really considered them at all. “I mean, what if he tries to kiss me or something?”

  “Then call it off. After all, you’re something of an expert when it comes to wriggling out of dates.”

  Mary smiled. “I am, aren’t I? So…what’s with this early visit, Jack?”

  “I bumped into Josh Hatchett at the Déjà Vu last night.”

  She made a face. “What joy. I hope you wished him all the worst.”

  “He has a missing sister.”

  “If I were his sister, I’d post myself missing, too.”

  “And we’re going to find her.”

  Mary stared at him. “We’re going to help the person instrumental in your enforced sick leave and effective demotion? Who got you reprimanded over the Scissor-man case? Are you nuts?”

  “Yes, yes and quite possibly, in that order. Look upon it as a long-term strategic operation to bring about a quantum change in press relations as regards the continuing effectiveness of the NCD.”

  “We’re cozying up to Josh to get better press coverage?”

  “More or less. I think it might be an NCD case. Her name’s Goldilocks.”

  “So? She could be a Goldilocks, not the Goldilocks. There’s probably hundreds of people with that name.”

  “We have a vague bear connection—and she’s fussy.”

  “Ah. A not-too-hot-not-too-cold-just-right sort of fussy?”

  “In one. She may have found out some answers about the blast at Obscurity and three other unexplained explosions around the globe.” He handed her the manila folder that Josh had given him.

  “Hmm,” she said, looking at the “Important” written on the front, “this could be important.”

  “I did that joke already.”

  “Sorry.”

  She opened the folder. It contained newspaper clippings. The most recent explosion was at Obscurity, and it had attracted a lot of competing theories from news sources of varying reliability. The Obscurity “event” had been catnip for conspiracy theorists, who generally liked things going bang for no clearly explained reason. Mary flicked through the clippings to find an article about a detonation in the Nullarbor Plain, a lonely area in the vast emptiness of the Australian desert.

  “September 1992,” she observed, “twelve years ago.”

  “The Australian government denied that any tests had been undertaken,” said Jack, who had been reading the clippings the previous evening, “and no explanation was forthcoming.”

  Mary turned over another clipping to reveal a faxed extract from the Pasadena Herald dated March 1999. It, too, described an explosion, this time in a neighborhood on the edge of town. The detonation had shattered windows up to three miles away and tossed debris over a thousand feet into the air. The owner of the house, who died, had been retired mathematician Howard Katzenberg. There were more clippings about a blast in Tunbridge Wells, where someone named Simon Prong had perished in an unexplained fireball, and that was it. Four explosions with no link that they could see other than that they were all reported as “strange” or “unexplained.”

  “What do you think?” asked Mary.

  “No idea. Josh seemed to think she was looking for a link between them.”

  “And how is this related to bears?”

  “I’m not sure. On Monday she meets up with Cripps in Obscurity. Six hours later he’s dead in the blast. She tells her brother she’s onto something big, and he last hears from her Thursday afternoon.”

  Mary shrugged. “She might be on holiday.”

  “And she might not.”

  They both sat in silence and watched a pair of swans attempt a long and slow takeoff from the surface of the lake. As soon as they were airborne, they landed again with a flurry of spray. It seemed a lot of effort to travel three hundred yards.

  “I don’t like station politics,” said Mary a half hour later. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “Listen: The longer that twit Copperfield is playing hunt-the-cookie, the more victims there will be. Look upon it as a back door to the natural order of things.”

  “I don’t like it, Jack.”

  “It’s NCD, Mary. It’s what we do.”

  “No, I mean I don’t like your car.”

  They were driving across Reading toward Shiplake and the industrial unit that Tarquin had told them was the place where he had picked up the porridge oats. It was the first time that Mary had driven the new Allegro.

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Couldn’t I explain what’s right with it? It’ll take a lot less time. Why don’t you get a proper car?”

  “A car without porous alloy wheels that let the tires go flat overnight?” asked Jack, smiling. “A car whose drag coefficient is better forward than in reverse? A car whose rear window doesn’t pop out when you jack up the back tires?”

  “Anything. I’d prefer to be seen in a wheelbarrow.”

  “It could be arranged.”

  They picked up Ashley, who was waiting for them at a prearranged street corner. He wished Mary a very good morning and inquired meticulously after her health, and Jack smiled to himself. Quite unlike Mary, Ashley was dead impressed with his new Allegro, and since he had memorized all the chassis numbers of every British car built between the years 1956 and 1985, he could proudly announce that the car came off the production line at Long-bridge on September 10, 1979.

  “Really?” said Jack, amazed at Ashley’s ability to recall utterly pointless facts. “How do you remember all this stuff?”

  “Very easily,” he replied with a shrug. “Humans rely on a pattern of charged neurons to build up a picture that is revived by association. If the memory is not recalled now and again, it fades—if it is retained at all. Our memory works quite differently. Every image, fact or sound is translated to binary notation and then stored in molecular on/off gates within the liquid interior of our bodies. Since each teaspoon of rambosia vitae contains more molecular gates than there are visible stars, the extent of our memory is extraordinarily large. Best of all, we can erase what we don’t need. Important memories are stored near our core, but the boring stuff migrates to the extremities. If we run out of memory, we simply reformat an arm.”

  “You best be careful not to delete the wrong arm,” said Jack with a smile.

  “Even if I did,” replied Ashley without seeing the joke, “I’d be okay—I’ve got my core memories backed up at home in a jar.”

  They pulled up outside the Shiplake industrial e
state office a few minutes later.

  “I’ll have a word with the site manager,” said Mary, and she climbed out of the car. Jack and Ashley sat there in silence for a while, Jack thinking about how he was going to pass the psychological appraisal that he’d arranged for that afternoon. He’d only have to outline a typical case to a police shrink to be branded B-4: “unfit for duty on mental grounds.”

  Ashley, on the other hand, had no particular worries—few Rambosians ever did. He was amusing himself by calculating the cube root to eight decimal places of every number under a million, and when he’d done that, he said, “Sergeant Mary is very attractive in a pink, fleshy, hairy, forgetful sort of way.”

  “I never thought of Mary as hairy,” admitted Jack.

  “Oh, it’s strictly relative,” said Ashley, whose own skin was totally hairless, pliant and shiny, a bit like a transparent beach ball. “Do you think she’s really over this Arnold chap?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is that he doesn’t seem to be able to understand no and she doesn’t seem to be able to stop wanting to tell him.”

  “It all sounds very complicated,” said the alien. “Where I come from, we just agree to a mutual memory erasure, and neither of us knows we’ve even met. In fact, it’s possible to fall in love with someone you once hated—several thousand times.”

  “Ash,” said Jack, unable to contain his curiosity any longer.

  “Yes?”

  “How do aliens…do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “You know. It. Thing. Have babies.”

  “We don’t have babies. Humans have babies.”

  “You know what I mean—reproduce.”

  “We swap egg and sperm sacs,” he said matter-of-factly and without the slightest trace of embarrassment. “We can do it by mail if we wish, and the sacs will keep in a dry airing cupboard for anything up to nine centuries—it’s very convenient.”