Dave Hutchinson: Sleeps With Angels

Willem had got out of the Espace. “Is this good news or bad news?”

“If we didn’t have bad news, we wouldn’t have any news at all,” Rae said as she walked past him and out into the middle of the junction. Behind her, she heard Willem reach into the back of the car for his rifle. She looked over her shoulder and called, “Don’t do anything stupid.”

“I’ve been doing stupid things ever since I met you,” he called back. Rae shook her head and went to meet Eddy Colorado and the English soldier.

The soldier was in his early thirties and he towered at least a foot and a half over little Eddy Colorado. His uniform was clean and neatly-pressed and in addition to the automatic rifle slung against his chest he had an automatic pistol in a holster at his hip, and a combat knife strapped to each calf. Beside him, Eddy Colorado was carrying his Italian shotgun and grinning. He winked at Rae as they approached.

Rae blinked and her hangover went away. She smiled at the soldier, put out her hand, and said, “Hello.”

The soldier ignored the hand. “Captain Gottlieb, Household Cavalry,” he said.

“Captain Gottlieb,” Rae said, “you have a German name.”

“My Grandfather, ma’am,” Gottlieb answered without missing a beat or betraying any emotion at all except smooth efficiency.

Rae waited a moment to see if any more details of Gottlieb’s antecedents were forthcoming. When they were not, she said, “Okay.”

“Are you Mrs Peterson?” Gottlieb asked.

“Miss.”

The distinction just bounced right off Gottlieb. “I understand you have a sick child.”

“That’s right.”

“Could I see her, please?”

“Are you in a position to help us?” Rae inquired mildly.

“I am,” said Gottlieb. “May I see the casualty, please?”

Rae thought about it for a moment or two, then she turned and indicated the convoy. “Of course. She’s back here.”

Elżbieta was in the back of the ambulance. Marta and Beata, the nuns who had driven her all the way from Poznań, had got out of the vehicle and were standing watching Gottlieb distrustfully.

“It’s all right,” Rae reassured them. “Open the door, please.”

Beata looked at the Captain for a few seconds, then went round to the back of the ambulance, turned the handle, and pulled the door open. She stepped back while Rae and Gottlieb clambered into the back of the vehicle, where a sheet-covered bundle lay writhing gently on a stretcher.

Rae lifted the sheet. To Gottlieb’s credit, he didn’t flinch. Rae thought his expression may have softened slightly, but it might have been her imagination.

Gottlieb climbed out of the ambulance and straightened up. Willem appeared in the doorway beside him, holding his rifle. Gottlieb ignored him and looked at Rae. “I understand you can talk to the Dust,” he said.

Rae got out of the ambulance and glanced around, but Eddy Colorado was nowhere to be seen. She sighed.

“Perhaps you could demonstrate, please?” asked Gottlieb.

Rae looked at him for a few moments. “Perhaps we could give you some beads and a couple of mirrors and be on our way, Captain,” she said evenly.

That finally got a smile out of Gottlieb. Thin and wry, perhaps, but a real smile. For the first time, Rae noticed how tired the soldier looked beneath that shell of smoothly-pressed efficiency. “A quick demonstration would do,” he said.

Rae lifted her arm and snapped her fingers and all of a sudden she was holding a wizard’s staff. It was just a bit of wood, not much more than a broom handle — she could do this kind of thing in her sleep — but it was topped with a crown of thorns cupping a tiny bright light. Rae had always found that this impressed the post- Lord Of The Rings generation.

Gottlieb, on the other hand, did not seem unduly impressed. Perhaps he’d never got into Tolkien. He looked levelly at the staff and he said, “Could you come with me, please?”

Rae looked across at Willem, who suddenly looked concerned. “Where?”

“Not far,” Gottlieb replied. “We have…” Suddenly, and charmingly, he seemed rather embarrassed. “We have a little problem you may be able to help us with.”

Rae made the staff go away. “What kind of little problem?”

“It really would be easier to show you,” he admitted.

“I’ll go with you,” said Willem.

Rae looked at the two men and sighed. “Mikhail?” she called.

Mikhail appeared around the side of the ambulance, bushy eyebrows raised. “Can I come too?”

“No, Mikhail, you can’t come too,” she said patiently. “Make sure everybody stays near the vehicles. We won’t be long.” She looked at Gottlieb and said, “Will we be long?”

Gottlieb shrugged.

“We won’t be long,” she told Mikhail. “Try to stop people wandering off.”

He said, “What about Eddy Colorado?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” She rubbed her eyes. “Try to stop everybody else wandering off. Use your common sense, Mikhail, please.”

“We have food,” Gottlieb suggested.

“Well so do we ,” Rae snapped at him. She closed her eyes and took a breath. Opened her eyes again. “I’m sorry, Captain,” she said, and she genuinely was. “We probably look rather unorthodox to you, but we’re actually quite well-organised.”

Gottlieb looked levelly at her. “I haven’t seen anything that looked orthodox for about fifteen years, ma’am.”

“That much is probably true,” Mikhail said. He and Gottlieb looked at each other. Willem rolled his eyes, slung his rifle over his shoulder, and put his hands in his pockets.

“Eddy Colorado will come back when he feels like it,” Rae told Mikhail. “Just keep an eye on everybody else.”

Gottlieb led them a little way up the Tottenham Court Road, where a black cab was waiting, its motor running and a uniformed sergeant sitting behind the wheel.

“You’re joking,” said Rae.

“You’d rather we travelled around in humvees and half-tracks, Miss?” Gottlieb asked, holding one of the passenger doors open for them.

“Good point,” Willem allowed.

“And it certainly contributes to the local colour,” Rae added.

The sergeant drove north a little way, then turned the cab onto Mortimer Street, then into the maze of little one-way streets in Fitzrovia. Rae sat looking out of the window, watching the BT Tower go by. Everything seemed neat and tidy; the Household Cavalry had been busy, clearing the streets of cars, using them to block off side-roads. All the buildings were clean and undamaged; there was no sense of abandonment here, more the feeling of a particularly quiet Sunday afternoon. The cab turned up Portland Place, not far from Broadcasting House, where a stripped-down version of the BBC was still putting out a few hours of music and news every day, and negotiated a tricky roadblock of skips and buses on Park Crescent to turn onto the Marylebone Road.

“How many people are here?” Rae asked Gottlieb.

Sitting on the fold-down seat with his back to the driver and his rifle cradled in his arms, Gottlieb shrugged. “On Oxford Street we’ve got almost a thousand,” he said. “In Greater London? We don’t know for certain. Not very many.” He paused and then said, “May I ask a personal question?”

Rae was so touched that, in a situation like this he had asked permission, that she beamed at him. “Of course, Captain.”

“What language were you speaking to that gentleman back there by the ambulance?”

“Lithuanian. Mikhail’s Lithuanian.”

“And I noticed you spoke Polish to the two young ladies.”

Rae nodded.

“You sounded fairly fluent in both languages.”

Rae nodded again.