The Demi-Monde: 40th Day of Winter, 1004
UnderMentionables in the ForthRight are only permitted to live within the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto. Under-Mentionables are classified as Category B citizens and may only be educated up to the age of 14 years, and must not receive medical treatment beyond the age of 50 years. No places of worship other than those consecrated by the Church of the Doctrine of UnFunDaMentalism are permitted within the Warsaw Ghetto. All UnderMentionables working or travelling outside the Warsaw Ghetto must be in possession of a valid visa, issued by the Checkya. All nuJus working or travelling outside the Warsaw Ghetto must be in possession of a valid visa, issued by the Checkya, and must wear an armband (not less than five inches in width) displaying a black five-pointed star on a white background.
– Decree 7823 relating to the Control and Confinement of UnderMentionables within the ForthRight: ForthRight Law Gazette, Spring 1003
There was no escape.
One look at her skin colour and she would be arrested and the last thing she wanted to do was spend the rest of her life in a Demi-Mondian prison. Unfortunately there was no way to hide her colour: her veil might mask her face but she wasn’t wearing any gloves. Desperate to keep her hands out of sight and stop them shaking with fear, Ella placed them on her lap and knotted her fingers. She could feel the colour drain from her face – an unfortunately inaccurate description – and the sweat pooling under her armpits.
‘The man is two tables away,’ said Vanka idly. ‘When I say laugh I want you to laugh out loud, I want you to guffaw. And then I want you to raise your napkin to your mouth as though embarrassed. Doing this will help mask the nervousness that has started to manifest itself in your body language.’ He looked up. ‘One table away. Oh, yes, and if you are asked, you live at Twenty-Three-A Morgan Street, and your name is Delores Delight. Now laugh!’
It was hysteria that drove the laugh and once Ella had started she found she couldn’t stop. She found that she had to raise the napkin to her mouth to try to muffle her squawking. It took the appearance of the huge, black-uniformed Checkya sergeant alongside their table to terrify her into silence. She pushed the napkin and her hands back under the table.
‘Papers, Comrade,’ he snapped.
Vanka handed his over and the man, beetle-browed and sporting a huge handlebar moustache, studied them carefully. ‘Says ‘ere you’re from Rodina.’
‘That’s right, Sergeant, I’m in the Rookeries on business.’
‘And where are you residing whilst in the Rookeries?’
Vanka flipped a card out of his top pocket. ‘At the Hotel Metropolitan, it’s…’
‘I knows the Metropolitan,’ the Sergeant interrupted brusquely. ‘Wot business is you about ‘ere in the Rookeries?’
‘I’m a Licensed Psychic, Sergeant.’ Vanka flashed his licence and a smile. ‘I’ll be giving seances at the Prancing Pig all next week.’ He gave the Sergeant another smile. Vanka was a great smiler. ‘If you let me have your name I’ll arrange for complimentary tickets to be left at the door.’
‘I ain’t a great one for the occult, Comrade, it gives me the heebie-jeebies, it does. Best left to experts like His Holiness Comrade Crowley.’ The Sergeant turned to Ella, letting his eyes wander leeringly over her body. ‘Papers, Miss.’
Ella almost passed out, but realising that this might be her last act as a free woman she dug her hand into the right-hand pocket of her coat to retrieve her papers.
They were gone!
A wave of ice-cold panic washed over her.
‘I’ve lost them!’ she spluttered.
All Vanka did was chuckle. ‘Calm yourself, Delores, my dear, the Sergeant won’t bite. I distinctly remember you placing them in the inside pocket of your coat when we left the hotel this evening.’
Baffled by Vanka’s certainty, Ella pushed her hand into the pocket he had suggested and there, to her astonishment, were her papers.
Well, not her papers exactly but certainly a set of papers. She handed them to the Checkya Sergeant, who studied them carefully. ‘Address?’
‘Er…’ For a heart-stopping instant she thought she had forgotten the address Vanka had given her. ‘Twenty-Three-A Morgan Street.’
A disappointed sniff from the Sergeant. ‘And wot is your relationship wiv this man, Miss Delight?’ he asked brusquely.
Before Ella could utter a word, Vanka had answered for her. He reached over and took her trembling hands in his, skilfully covering her small dark-skinned ones with his larger white ones. ‘Delores is my assistant on stage and my fiancee off it,’ he said, beaming a puppy-dog look at Ella.
‘Seems to me, Miss, that you ain’t much cop as a psychic’s assistant iffn you don’t even know which pocket your papers was in.’ He handed them back.
Ella tried her best to make her reply as normal as possible. ‘Oh, even a PsyChick can be forgetful occasionally, Sergeant.’
‘You ain’t wearing no engagement ring neither,’ observed the Sergeant. It was then that he noticed the colour of Ella’s skin. ‘Would I be right in finking that you are ov the Shade persuasion?’
Vanka didn’t miss a beat. ‘Ours is a somewhat unofficial engagement, Sergeant.’
‘Yous being a citizen ov the ForthRight, Sir, must be aware ov the Seventh nuCommandment that condemns the practice ov miscegenation. I would be grateful iffn you would raise your veil, Miss Delight, so that I might confirm your racial bone fids.’
Ella’s heart sank. Now there was no escape. She slipped her left hand into her pocket and closed her fingers around her derringer. If necessary she would shoot her way out.
She could hardly believe this was happening. Two hours ago she had been a student, a part-time singer and now here she was contemplating murder. She caught herself: it was an indication of how real these Dupes were that she could think of killing one as murder. The Demi-Monde was so persuasive a place that it was almost impossible for her to suspend belief.
‘Sergeant,’ interrupted Vanka very sotto voce, ‘I would prefer it if my fiancee did not do that. Our tryst here tonight has not met with the approval of my family nor of the authorities.’ He smiled and pushed a five-guinea note across the table in the direction of the Checkya Sergeant. ‘You’re a man of the world, Sergeant.’
‘Is yous trying to bribe me?’ asked the Sergeant disdainfully. ‘
Yes,’ confirmed Vanka as he added a second five-guinea note to the first.
‘Then look here, I am a member of the Checkya and we’s…’
In desperation Ella reached out and grabbed the Sergeant’s hand. ‘Please… Sergeant Stone… I implore you…’
‘‘Ere, ‘ow do you know my name?’
Fuck!
Thank you, PINC!
That was the problem with knowing everything about everybody: she had to remember what she shouldn’t know about somebody.
Or something like that.
Swallowing hard, Ella tried desperately to think of a way out. There was only one thing for it. ‘I know your name because I’m a clairvoyant, Sergeant. My abilities allow me to commune with any man or woman I meet and to know their innermost secrets.’
The Sergeant eyed her suspiciously. ‘That right?’
‘Yes, Sergeant, perfectly right. If you really want to know what fate holds in store for you, why don’t you take up the Colonel’s kind offer of those tickets and come along to see us at the Prancing Pig?’
‘Very kind ov you, I am sure, Miss. But that does not alter the fact that yous a Shade and your identity papers state yours racial type to be Grade One: Anglo-Slavic and this being the case I ‘ave no alternative but to…’
‘I’ll make sure there are two tickets waiting for you; you will, after all, be accompanied by Arthur.’
The Sergeant eyed Ella carefully. ‘‘Ere… wot do you know about Arthur?’
‘Everything,’ said Ella, the single word replete with ominous meaning.
The Sergeant’s face blanched. ‘But… you won’t be saying nuffink to nobody about Arthur, now will you?’
‘My lips are sealed, Sergeant. If you forget all about having met me, then your wife and your superiors will never hear about Arthur.’ Ella touched the sleeve of Sergeant Stone’s black uniform. ‘And we both know how severe Vice-Leader Beria is regarding members of the Checkya engaging in zadnik-like activities, don’t we, Sergeant?’
‘How…?’ began Vanka as he watched the bemused Checkya Sergeant shuffle, with a couple of worried backward glances and ten guineas of Vanka’s money in his pocket, out of the coffee house.
‘You first, Vanka. How did you pull that stunt with the papers?’
Vanka shrugged dismissively. ‘Nothing to it. I knew there was a chance that the Checkya would start checking papers so I found the girl in the crowd that was the closest match to you in terms of age and hair colour and lifted her papers. Of course she was a Blank, but in the circumstances it was the best I could do. There aren’t that many Shades in the ForthRight.’
Ella bridled at the use of the word ‘Shade’ but decided to let it roll. After all, the man had just saved her life.
‘I substituted them for yours while we were walking into this place,’ explained Vanka as he drained his coffee and then grimaced. ‘Foul,’ he mumbled, dabbing his lips with his napkin.
‘Amazing: you must be a very accomplished pickpocket, Vanka.’
He chuckled. ‘All stage magicians – close-up magicians, that is – are good with their hands. If you can’t palm things then you’ve no right calling yourself a magician.’ His gaze settled on Ella and his face took on a more serious cast. ‘Now it’s your turn, and make it good.’
‘I have special powers, Vanka. I know about people.’
‘What? You’re telling me that you’re a real clairvoyant?’
‘Exactly. Please don’t ask me how, but I have an instinctive knowledge about everybody I meet in the Demi-Monde. It seems that the closer I am to them the more powerful my reading becomes and if I touch them…’
‘Oh, fiddlesticks. Don’t try and gull me, young lady. Come on, admit it, you already knew this Sergeant Stone, didn’t you? Maybe he’s interviewed you before, maybe you saw his name somewhere on his uniform.’
‘Then how did I know about Arthur?’
‘A lucky guess. Arthur is a pretty common name. Maybe he had it engraved on his watch-chain or something.’
‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, Vanka, but there was no lucky guessing and no engraved watch-chain, just insight.’
‘Twaddle. Look, Miss Thomas, I’ve been around the DemiMonde too long to believe in this sort of nonsense. Maybe Crowley and his sorcerers are the real magicians they claim to be, but for my part I’ve never seen anything magical about the Demi-Monde.’
‘But aren’t you a Licensed Psychic and Occultist? So you must have powers.’
Vanka looked around the coffee shop to make sure no one was eavesdropping on their conversation, then leant closer to Ella. ‘As you so rightly observed, Miss Thomas, Spiritualism is just flimflam. It’s Party-inspired sleight of hand to have people believe that there is some point in enduring the sorry excuse of a life they have here in the ForthRight. All Spiritualism does is give the poor and gullible the belief that their horrible, mundane, painful lives are not meaningless and random, that there is some purpose to human existence, that there is a better life after death. So don’t tell me you’re a medium or a clairvoyant or a bloody sensitive, Miss Thomas, because I can’t – I won’t – believe you.’
‘What you will or won’t believe, Vanka, is immaterial. The fact remains that I have such powers.’
‘Very well, tell me about me. Give me some insight about myself that only I could know.’
Ella shook her head. ‘I can’t. I don’t know why but I can’t read you. You’re a mystery to me.’
‘Hah! Typical.’
‘Ask me something else. Ask me something about Burlesque Bandstand. When I shook his hand I learnt everything there was to learn about him, and some of it, I freely admit, was bloody disgusting. The man is a walking bag of corruption.’
‘All right, Burlesque had a fling with someone, just before Winter set in. He kept it very hush-hush. So who was it?’
‘Oh, that’s easy. Burlesque Bandstand and Julie the Jug Juggler were an item for nearly two weeks. Burlesque got quite spoony over her. He really liked her jugs.’
Vanka’s face took on an expression a little like the one on the face of a cat who had been presented with a very large bowl of cream. ‘Now that is amazing. I thought I was the only one who knew about Julie.’ He fell silent, lighting one of the pungent French cigarettes he favoured. She was about to object when she noticed that virtually all the other men in the cafe were smoking. Puffing contentedly on his cigarette, Vanka studied Ella carefully. ‘Maybe, Miss Thomas, I might be able to do a bit better than three guineas a seance.’