The Last Suitor. A J McMahon
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too many people around at this time but seeing Tagalong sitting nearby, Nicholas beckoned him over.
‘Mr Raspero, we meet again,’ Tagalong said. Seeing that Nicholas was very deliberately not looking at him but gazing across the room, Tagalong turned to follow Nicholas’s gaze. Nicholas was looking at where the men who had attacked Angela were sitting, enjoying a drink and a smoke; they were looking over at Nicholas with mocking smiles. ‘They were granted bail immediately, Mr Raspero and they —’
‘Come with me, Mr Longman,’ Nicholas said brusquely and set off for the side, where he had already identified the wand protection as being at its heaviest. He went through an alcove, his approach observed by others present in the Burke Tavern but not challenged. If Jolly had a visitor it wasn’t their business. Nicholas came to a door and scanned for wands behind it. There was one wand in the space beyond. He opened the door without delay and stepped through, beckoning for Tagalong to follow. As Tagalong followed Nicholas closed the door, took Tagalong’s wand and bound and gagged him so swiftly Tagalong had no time to make a sound. He left Tagalong on the floor while he made his way to where the wand was and stepped through a door. He was in a kitchen, and the man sitting with his feet up on the table looked at him with his mouth open in surprise. This was not a promising start to their fight for Jolly’s man, given also that he was clutching a huge tankard of beer in his hand. He had not even moved before Nicholas had taken his wand and it was not long before Nicholas had the man, now dripping with beer, tied up and gagged.
Following where the wand protection was heaviest, Nicholas made his way along the corridor and stepped through a curtained doorway into what must be, judging from the luxury, Jolly’s private quarters. He returned and helped Tagalong to come with him by the simple expedient of throwing him down the corridor and then through the door into Jolly’s private quarters. The gagged Tagalong protested at his treatment but his protests were muffled. Nicholas bound Tagalong to a chair.
Nicholas looked around for where the wand protection was thickest and found the safe behind the painting of the volcano. It was a Basing safe; it had no handles, presenting only a smooth charcoal-grey shiny surface to the observer. It was the most expensive safe on the market, its selling price justified by its widely believed claim that it was next to impossible to break into. Nicholas had it open in less than ten seconds. It was a very large safe, full of money in bank notes, documents, notebooks, jewellery, and various other items. The safe was divided into two compartments, with the notebooks neatly lined up on the top shelf. Nicholas cleared Jolly’s desk by sweeping everything off it onto the floor in one wave of his wand, gathered the notebooks with another wave of his wand, and went and sat down at Jolly’s desk to look through them. He knew all too little of what Jolly was about and he needed to know more.
Nicholas opened the first notebook that came to hand and started to leaf through it. There were names followed by various comments: highly personal comments, more names of servants with additional comments, references to points of access in various houses, a listing of information of a technical nature such as encoding ciphers and bribes given and received or refused. Nicholas did not bother to read all of it; he picked up the next notebook and leafed through it. He was getting the general idea. He ungagged Tagalong and started to read out these names, asking who they were. Tagalong was very obliging and had no hesitation in telling Nicholas more than he needed to know. Nicholas gained the understanding he sought of what the notebooks were about: they were detailed accounts of some of the wealthiest and most powerful grandees of New Landern which could be used for a variety of purposes such as blackmail, breaking and entering and all sorts of other mayhem. There was also one small notebook, barely the size of the palm of a hand, which was divided into two parts, one headlined Friends, one headlined Enemies. Nicholas pocketed this notebook while sitting behind the desk in such a way that the watching Tagalong couldn’t see what he was doing.
Nicholas pointed his wand at the fireplace, where the fire was already set, as it had been in Angela’s apartment, given the unseasonably cold weather today, and set it alight. He waited for it to catch, adding more wood. When the fire had started to burn properly, Nicholas added the notebooks one by one.
‘May I enquire as to why you are burning these notebooks, Mr Raspero?’ Tagalong asked, his voice shaking a little. He could guess what their contents were and he was privately appalled at the wanton destruction of items of such incredible value. They were not a different kind of money, they were a different kind of printing press with which to make money. Tagalong was shocked, shocked beyond measure at the barbaric destruction which he was obliged to witness of those unbelievably valuable notebooks. He felt that the crouching figure by the fire was like a force of destruction beyond reason on the other side of a line which represented sanity, and when Tagalong considered all the crimes which he could have committed with those notebooks, he could have wept for the world he had lost. As Nicholas had ignored his question he repeated himself a little plaintively, ‘May I enquire as to why you are burning those notebooks, Mr Raspero?’
‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Nicholas said.
‘I assure you I have an excellent comprehension of many matters pertinent and germane to the subject under discussion,’ Tagalong assured him readily.
‘Be quiet or I’ll gag you again,’ Nicholas told him.
Tagalong said nothing further.
Once all the notebooks were merrily burning, Nicholas returned to the safe. He emptied its contents and took them to the desk. There were wads of strada banknotes, worth perhaps nine hundred and seventy thousand or so, a variety of documents, jewellery, a broken child’s toy which Nicholas assumed had some personal significance for Jolly, and letters. Nicholas started looking through the documents. He was not able to understand the meaning of any of the terms he encountered in these documents so he enlisted Tagalong’s help again. Certified Assets Restricted Funds, Consolidated Financial Trading of the Baskets of Listed Depository Receipts, Asset Backed Securities of Bond Issuer Indentures, Short-Term Securities Tendering of Financial Residuals, Direct Registration Securities of Collateralised Commodities Spread, and many other such terms which Nicholas found incomprehensible.
Tagalong also found them incomprehensible but without hesitation he set forth to pretend that he did understand these terms. It was not just that lying was second nature to Tagalong, if not even perhaps his first nature; it was also that Tagalong had always found it useful to pretend to know things he didn’t and he was not going to change his ways now. As it happened, he had once spent an entire dinner under a false name in the company of financial traders and his retentive memory now came up with some of what he had heard on that long-ago occasion. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said with an outwardly complete assurance of knowing such things as well as he knew his own name, ‘Certified Assets Restricted Funds are cross-sectional share holdings of a designated turn-around system as determined by the debt-service coverage ratio of convertible bonds. Consolidated Financial Trading of the Baskets of Listed Depository Receipts forms the bond equivalent covenant of the adjusted preset value of Certificates of Amortised Revolving Debt. And so on, as one might suppose, Mr Raspero.’
Tagalong had said all this nonsense with such an air of confidence that Nicholas was completely taken in by his performance. A thought struck Nicholas then and he gave Tagalong a look but said nothing further at the time. He shuffled through the documents until he came to the Total Assets Valuation as of 1 May 1544 A.F. He looked up at Tagalong with a speculative look in his eye and read out this term with the accompanying figure of 19,325,547 strada.
Tagalong, all of a sudden, felt seasick. He knew of the enormity of the wealth of the wealthy but to hear this cold hard figure was staggering.
Nicholas looked briefly at the letters, ascertaining that they were personal in nature and therefore either incriminating to others or of sentimental value to Jolly, who was already a dead man as far as Nicholas was concerned, and threw them into the fire. He walked over to Tagalong and said nothing for a moment, while he gave Tagalong a long look and then said, ‘Mr Longman, you talk too much. It’s time you listened. Now, in the kitchen,’ Nicholas pointed in the direction where the kitchen was, ‘there is a man who is bound and gagged. You may either join him in the kitchen where you will remain excluded from the subsequent events of tonight or you may remain in this room where important