Dave Hutchinson: Sleeps With Angels

“How many languages do you speak?”

“All of them.” She smiled at him again.

The cab stopped outside Madame Tussaud’s and the driver said, “Here we are, guv. That’ll be six-fifty. Cash or account?”

Gottlieb opened the door. “Yes, thank you, Sergeant Nutt,” he said in the tone of voice of a man who has heard an old joke one too many times. “Wait for us here, would you?”

“Right you are, guv.”

“Sergeant Nutt was a cabbie in Civvy Street,” Gottlieb said sotto voce as they stood on the pavement. “He’s very handy for getting around London, but he won’t go south of the River. Anyway…” He looked at Rae and Willem and then gestured towards the front doors of Madame Tussaud’s. “Shall we?”

Rae remembered a school trip to the wax museum years ago. She supposed she must have been eight or ten years old, and she remembered that apart from the figures of The Beatles she hadn’t recognised a single one of the exhibits. It was hard to imagine quite why Gottlieb had brought them here, or what he wanted her to see, but the moment the captain pushed the doors open she heard music inside and her legs suddenly gave way and she stumbled against Willem.

“Hey,” he said, putting an arm round her waist. “Are you okay?”

For a moment, her head swam and she thought she was going to be sick. She hung on Willem’s arm while Gottlieb stood just inside the doorway with a quizzical expression on his face. Rae took a deep breath and stood up. “I’m all right,” she said. “Really. Must be the heat.”

“You sure?” asked Willem.

“Yes, really.” She patted his shoulder and swallowed. “I’m fine.” She looked at Gottlieb. “Lead the way, Captain.”

Later, when she looked back on it, Rae thought the short walk from the foyer to the museum’s main exhibition space might have been one of the bravest things she had ever done. At the time, all she could do was grip Willem’s arm and drive herself onward, step after step after step, because being strong had become a habit and she wasn’t about to fail now. Willem and Gottlieb kept glancing at her with concerned looks on their faces, but she kept shaking her head and urging them on through the music, trying to disguise her fear with a show of irritation.

Madame Tussaud’s, as Rae remembered it, had been laid out in a series of themed rooms. Sports, politics, music, and so on. You moved from one to the other and looked at the waxwork tableaux, and it had all been rather cosy, if a little puzzling for a schoolgirl.

The intervening years, it seemed, had seen a radical rethink about display policy. Now all the exhibits stood around the edge of a single huge room, a great atrium with a curving glass roof that owed more than a little to envy of the roof of the British Museum’s Great Court. The room was divided into segments by waist-high movable barriers, arranged so that visitors could pass in an orderly manner from one to another, and in each segment were a dozen or so interactive tables so that visitors could learn more about the wax models of the celebrities standing in ranks before them.

Rae didn’t recognise many of the waxworks. She spotted a couple of American Presidents she thought she knew, a Prime Minister or two. The King and Queen. Lord and Lady Beckham. The last surviving member of U2. Pretty much all the models were strangers to her. But they were all singing. Like a bizarre frozen choir, only their mouths moving, they were all singing — quite heartily — ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy.’ Rae felt her knees sag again for a moment before she somehow found the strength to stand up.

Gottlieb looked at her with what she thought might have been trepidation. “They’ve been doing this ever since we got here,” he said. He had to raise his voice to make himself heard over the singing. “It bothers the men.”

Rae almost burst out laughing. It bothers the men . “You can’t hear it from outside, Captain.”

Gottlieb inclined his head. “But they know it’s happening,” he said. “They know these things are singing. All the time.”

“Maybe they only sing when you come in here,” Willem said, and Rae hugged him for saying it. “Maybe they don’t do anything when nobody’s present.”

Gottlieb nodded. “Well, we did think of that,” he said. “That would have been worse, really. But we set up recorders. These things sing all the time, regardless of whether anyone’s here or not. We put the recorders in here eleven years ago and they haven’t stopped for a moment. And I’m reliably informed they’re all singing in Bobby McFerrin’s voice.” He looked about him, at the hundreds of singing waxworks, and shook his head. “I have to admit, it’s bloody spooky.”

“And you want me to stop it,” said Rae.

Gottlieb looked at her. “Could you?” he asked.

“Oh, Christ yes,” said Rae, and she sent the kill codes and a sudden silence fell on Madame Tussaud’s. It was like a weight rising from her shoulders. She stood up straight and let go of Willem’s elbow and rubbed sweat from her eyes. She wondered just how terrible she must look. She said, “Do I pass?”

Willem, who was used to her everyday miracles, just stood there. Solid, watchful, reliable. Gottlieb turned slowly in place, looking at the waxworks with an expression of wonder on his face. Finally he looked at her, and she thought he was a little afraid of her. “There’s a gentleman who would like to speak with you,” he said.

“Well, that should be an experience, Captain,” said Rae. “I haven’t spoken with a gentleman for quite a while. Lead the way.”

“He’s not here right now,” said Gottlieb. “He’s on his way, though. He’ll be here tomorrow.”

Now the song was gone, she felt stronger. “And where is this gentleman coming from?”

“He’s in Berlin,” Gottlieb told her. “But he’s on his way. I’m to offer you and your party every courtesy while you wait.”

Rae felt Willem tense up beside her and she said, “We would really rather not wait, Captain. We’d like to be on our way.”

Gottlieb nodded. “I do appreciate that, Miss Peterson. But I’m obliged to ask you to wait until the gentleman arrives.”

“Are you going to try to stop us?” Willem asked.

Gottlieb looked at him and tipped his head to one side for a moment. “I promise you, we are better armed than you are,” he said. “And the groups controlling all the other routes to… your destination are not as well-disposed towards strangers as we are.”

Willem started to say something, but Rae squeezed his arm. “We’ll be delighted to accept your hospitality, Captain,” she told Gottlieb. “To be honest, I think we could all use a shower and a decent meal. Isn’t that right, Willem?”

Willem never took his eyes off Gottlieb. “Yes,” he said finally. “Creature comforts. Yum yum.”

Gottlieb seemed relieved. “And we have some of the best creature comforts in London.” He gave the silent ranks of waxworks a last glance, and Rae had a sudden malicious impulse to start them singing again. “Perhaps we could go now?” Gottlieb said. “Sergeant Nutt will have kept the meter running. It’s his little joke.”

The Household Cavalry’s territory extended a kind of pseudopod south and east from the Tottenham Court Road into Covent Garden and down towards Leicester Square. Gottlieb led the convoy to a hotel on one of the streets off Seven Dials. It was one of those hotels that used to be called ‘boutique,’ for no good reason Rae could ever understand; the sort of place where wealthy tourists and visiting film stars and musicians used to stay while in London, discreet and quiet and unfussy. A couple of Gottlieb’s men showed them up to their rooms, and for about fifteen minutes the corridor rang with voices expressing delight in several European languages.