Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [15]
‘I’ll be all right, love.’
‘Not unless you get treatment, Cathy.’
Cathy tried to laugh and tottered out on to the streets. One of her boot-heels was gone, so she had a comical limp. She held up her head, wrapping the scarf around her like a duchess’s fur stole, and wiggled provocatively past Jago’s Christian Crusade, slipping into the fog.
‘Dead in a year,’ remarked the desk sergeant, a new-born with a snout-like protrusion in the centre of his face.
Geneviève said, ‘Not if I can help it.’
5
THE DIOGENES CLUB
Beauregard was admitted into the unexceptional foyer off Pall Mall. Through the doors of this institution passed the city’s most unsociable and unclubbable men. The greatest collection of eccentrics, misanthropes, grotesques and unconfined lunatics outside the House of Lords was to be found on its membership lists. He handed over gloves, hat, cloak and cane to the silent valet, who arranged them on a rack in an alcove. While deferentially slipping off Beauregard’s cloak, the valet subtly established that he was carrying no concealed revolver or dagger.
Ostensibly for the convenience of that species of individual who yearns to live in monied isolation from his fellows, this unassuming establishment on the fringes of Whitehall was actually much more. Absolute quiet was the rule; violators who so much as muttered under their breath while solving a crossword puzzle were mercilessly expelled without refund of their annual dues. A single squeak of marginally inferior boot-leather was enough to put a clubman on probation for five years. Members who had known each other by sight for sixty years were entirely unaware of one another’s identity. It was, of course, absurd and impractical. Beauregard imagined the situation which would eventuate were a fire to break out in the reading room: members stubbornly sitting in the smoke, none daring to call out an alert as the flames rose around them.
Conversation was permitted in only two areas, the Strangers’ Room, where clubmen occasionally entertained indispensable guests, and, far less famously, in the sound-proofed suite on the top floor. This was set aside for the use of the club’s ruling cabal, a group of persons connected, mostly in minor official capacities, with Her Majesty’s Government. The ruling cabal consisted of five worthies, each serving in rotation as chairman. In the fourteen years Beauregard had been at the disposal of the Diogenes Club, nine men had served on the cabal. When a member passed on and was discreetly replaced, it was always overnight.
As he was kept waiting, Beauregard was carefully watched by unseen eyes. During the Fenian Dynamite Campaign, Ivan Dragomiloff had penetrated the Club, intent on executing a commission to exterminate the entire ruling cabal. Detained in the foyer by a porter, the soi-disant ethical assassin had been noiselessly garrotted so as not to offend the sensibilities or excite the interest of the ordinary members. After a minute or two – no ticking clocks disturbed the peace – the valet, as if acting on telepathic command, lifted the purple rope that barred the unremarkable staircase leading directly to the top floor, and gave Beauregard the nod.
On the stairs, he remembered the several times he had been summoned before the ruling cabal. Such a call inevitably resulted in a voyage to some far corner of the world, and involved confidential matters affecting the interests of Great Britain. Beauregard supposed he was something between a diplomat and a courier, although he had at times been required to be an explorer, a burglar, an impostor, or a civil servant. Sometimes the business of the Diogenes Club was known in the outside world as the Great Game. The invisible business of government – conducted not in parliaments or palaces but in Bombay alleys and Riviera gambling hells – had afforded him a varied and intriguing career, even if it was of such a nature that he could hardly profit in his retirement