Each night, Cyrus Barker falls asleep in this manner: he lays his head on the pillow, he closes his eyes, he relaxes his body, and within sixty seconds, he begins to snore. It’s that simple and that quick. It’s another gift that God or nature has bestowed upon him, as opposed to lesser mortals.
I, on the other hand, stare at the ceiling for hours, while all my insecurities and inadequacies parade above me, like the Lord Mayor’s show. I change positions, fluff my pillow, and when worse comes to worst, go downstairs and try reading something in the library. I would not wish insomnia upon my worst enemy, but over the years we have established a kind of truce. Someone informed me once that it is a malady of particularly intelligent people. I assume the person who told me that was a fellow sufferer.
That night I went to bed and followed my usual routine. When last I looked at the clock by the feeble light of the moon it was a quarter past twelve.
There was a tinkle and a loud thump reverberated through the house, seeming to come from nowhere. I had finally fallen asleep and it woke me immediately. I opened my eyes and ran the back of my hand across my forehead.
“Lad!” Barker bellowed from his chamber above me, and then pandemonium ensued. There were heavy footsteps and the sound of metal clanging against metal as a pitched battle broke out overhead.
I seized my thick fighting stick and ran into the hall. After climbing the narrow and steep stairs to Barker’s garret room, I found my employer fighting with a large man. The intruder wore gray clothing and his head was wound in dark cloth, so that his eyes alone were visible. It was unsettling. I stepped forward into the room and my bare toe encountered something sharp. There was glass all over the floor. Looking up, I saw that the entire skylight had been shattered.
The room looked as if it had been shaken like a pair of dice in a cup. Chairs were upended, tables broken, books tossed all over the floor, and under all, a layer of broken glass. The only thing untouched was the fireplace.
Barker drew a hatchet from his wall, which is covered in all sorts of weapons from various countries. He threw it, but the man ducked out of the way. He pulled down a bronze sword and suddenly there was a loud clanging as he defended himself again from the intruder’s attack. I caught the gleam of one of those long Japanese swords as it beat down upon the Guv’s defenses.
I tried to pick my way among the shards of glass, aware that the stick in my hand was no match against a sharp blade. As I watched, the assailant wrenched the sword out of Barker’s hands and tossed it behind him. In response, Barker pulled another weapon from his wall, a long stick of whitish driftwood. It seemed an unlikely choice.
The man attacked, but unaccountably I heard the sound of metal on metal once more. The clanging reverberated across the wide, low chamber. I made my way over to a desk where I knew my employer kept a pistol in a drawer. I was in the act of retrieving it when the drawer was struck with the sword. Having no luck with the Guv, the assailant had decided to come after me.
I raised the pistol to fire it, but had trouble finding room to extend my arm. I stepped back, but the man closed in on me. He must have realized if I got my arm free I would shoot, so he would not give me the opportunity.
The intruder was massive, or at least it seemed that way to me. He drove me back, crushing me between the wall and his heavy body, knocking the air from my lungs. I was still trying to breathe when he swung me by my nightshirt down the stair. I plunged head over heel down the hard mahogany steps. Striking the wall of my bedroom, I fell to the carpet. A moment later I heard, or rather felt, the assailant step over me. I groped after him, seizing an ankle, and received a hard kick in the face for my troubles.
There was a bright flash and a loud bang downstairs. I recognized the sound. It was Mac’s sawn-down shotgun. He’d given our visitor a parting shot, literally. Then I heard Harm in the backyard, baying. Poor blighter, I thought. This assassin had no idea what he was doing when he decided to drop in on Cyrus Barker.
“Thomas?” Barker asked, surveying the damage. “Is anything broken?”
“I don’t think so, sir, but ask me in the morning.”
I looked up. Barker’s left cheek had been laid open and was bleeding to his chin. The rest of him seemed sound enough.
“Sorry I couldn’t stop him,” I said, as he helped me to my feet. I was banged and bruised, but the worst was the piece of glass I’d stepped on as soon as I’d entered the chamber.
Mac came up the staircase with his shotgun broken over his arm, removing the shell. A moment later Harm entered from the stair, a scrap of dark gray fabric between his hideous teeth. He seemed very pleased with himself, growling as if to say, “Look what I did!”
My employer took the cloth from Harm, who gave up his trophy most reluctantly. He examined the simple dark cloth a moment before returning it to the dog, who carried it off to his bed as if it were treasure.
“It was an assassin,” Barker explained. “A Japanese assassin. His sword was different, not a samurai sword. Still, he was very definitely Japanese.”
“And large,” I said. “He was very large.”
“Ohara.”
“The ambassador’s bodyguard? Why attack us?”
“I shot his master, or so the Foreign Office will have informed the embassy. It was revenge. Without a master, he is a lone wolf, fending for himself.”
Mac had gone downstairs and returned with a shaving bowl full of water and some gauze.
“Let’s get that glass out of your foot.”
“Ouch!” I said as he touched it to see how deeply it was wedged in my foot.
“It’s only a sliver of glass,” he said.
“That’s easy for you to say. Be careful.”
He pulled the glass, dyed my toe with iodine, and wrapped my foot. He put another sticking plaster on Barker’s cheek. Then he went upstairs to look over the state of the skylight and all the glass on the floor.
“See you in the morning, lad,” the Guv said.
“That’s it?” I replied. “He could come back in the middle of the night.”
“Surely not.”
“Shouldn’t we talk about it? I mean, we both nearly got killed ten minutes ago!”
“‘Nearly’ being the optimum word. We both survived, relatively unscathed.”
“I feel very scathed, thank you very much. He squashed me flat against the wall there. Then he threw me down the bloody stairs.”
“The fact that you are protesting is proof that you still have air to protest with.”
I could not argue with that logic, I supposed. I listened as he went out of my room and up the stairs again. I heard Mac sweeping up glass on the floor above me. By the time he was finished and had turned out the light, I could hear the steady rumble of Barker snoring again.
“Barmy,” I said, to no one in particular. “Absolutely bloody barmy.”
* * *
I was still sore the next morning. Dummolard was in the kitchen, cooking breakfast. He took down one of his copper saucepans and handed it to me for a mirror.
“You are keeping ze pet mouse these days, Thomas.”
I regarded my reflection. There was a purple lump under my right eye, where the hilt of the assassin’s sword had caught me. My face was drained of all color otherwise as far as I could tell.
“Where is he?” I asked, referring to the Guv.
“Out there,” Dummolard said, gesturing with the fag end of his French cigarette. He was a bear of a fellow, unshaven and ill-tempered, but he was part of the household, so he was one of us, for good or ill.
I looked outside. Barker was in the yard, not gardening or performing one of his martial forms, but sitting in the pagodalike gazebo by the back gate. He was not alone, though it was not yet half past six.
“Who is he sitting with?”
“Ze general. They are playing Go.”
I was curious. Very curious. However, every atom of my being was in pain and in need of coffee. Go, a game from China that Barker had tried to teach me before quitting in frustration, involved black-and-white stones on a wooden board. A game can last all day. I had time for a cup of coffee or two, and probably a bite of breakfast. Or lunch, perhaps.
“I understand you had some amusement here last night,” Dummolard continued.
“How did you know?”
“The skylight, she is out. I saw it from the street.”
“Ah, yes.”
“Eggs, in truffle butter, perhaps?”
“I have no objection.”
“Bon!”
There are positive reasons for having a graduate of the Cordon Bleu in one’s home, even if he is an ill-tempered Frenchman who smokes continually and complains about everything. Barker doesn’t actually pay him. He used our kitchen to experiment on new recipes for his award-winning restaurant and, I suspect, to avoid his wife.
A few minutes later a plate was set before me. My body might have been ailing, but my mouth was serenely happy. Truffle butter will do that to a fellow.
“This is perfect, Etienne.”
“Mais oui,” he said, and mashed another cigarette into the flagstone floor.
One omelette and two cups of coffee later, I pushed myself up from the table and stepped outside.
The morning was warm, the smell in the air loamy. Harm lay on the bridge which straddled our narrow stream, his head up but his eyes closed in the warmth of the sun, a king in his kingdom.
My mind went back for the hundredth time to when Barker encountered the Japanese delegation and had stiffened. One doesn’t do that when someone one likes arrives unexpectedly, only when someone one dislikes arrives. But if it was Mononobe, why invite someone you dislike to play a game with you in your own home? Perhaps it was someone else in the entourage.
Cyrus Barker is not one to play games, unless there is a very good reason for it. As a Baptist, he does not play cards. However, he once told me that Go is not a game of chance, but of strategy. All Japanese generals play it in order to discover each other’s weaknesses. Who would be the first to show fear or to make an unconscious mistake?
It’s a deceptively simple game, far easier to learn than chess. One player has white stones, the other black. Each puts down one stone on the gridded board. If one encircles the other player’s pieces completely, they are removed from the board. That’s it, really. And yet, people play this game for hours every day. There are masters at the game who are revered. It is taught in military academies, and not merely in the East.
We were playing a game of Go here in London, using real lives. It wasn’t a mere delegation or an official visit. A slice of Japan had been carefully cut and set down in a mansion in Bermondsey. They disdained our British rules of decorum. They were playing by their own.
I came near to the gazebo. Both men were concentrating on the board. General Mononobe looked up from the board and glared at me. My movement had distracted him. Anyway, our eyes met, possibly for the first time. Perhaps it was my mood at the moment, after the difficult night and all it had entailed, but it seemed to me I was staring into the face of the very devil himself.