h2g2 Storytime III

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Chapter II

'What's happening now?' Arthur pressed.

'Andrei seems to be settling down at Dalmooreby's table — they're embracing; they seem to know each other,' X said.

'What? Arthur hissed.

At that moment, Andrei glanced around the room, locked eyes with X and then looked away again and sat down, appearing not to register the rictus-like look of absolute innocence that had frozen on X's face like a toddler with his hand caught in the cookie jar.

'It's all right, he hasn't seen us,' he whispered to Arthur, who was crouched down on his haunches with a look of studied concern.

'It can't be a coincidence,' Arthur was muttering to himself. 'Doesn't make sense.'

'Who is he?'

'Well, you remember I said Boutros had fired him years ago for drinking on the job?'

'Yes,' said X, taking a substantial quaff from his pint, appearing not to notice the irony.

'Well, it was more than that... I was still just a recruit then... Boutros... was... just the boss; I didn't know him till later. There was some... local difficulty... and I...'

Suddenly there was a commotion on the other side of the room. Andrei had risen to his feet and was shouting in a loud voice — 'Pah! Enough of this! Lies! Filthy English!' — and pulling his coat tightly around him he marched out of the door.

In the commotion, neither Arthur or X had seen Andrei slip Daltmooreby a note. The patient and relaxed former Agent palmed the note and brought his hand around just enough that he could read it.

'TWO SPIES BEHIND US — MEET AGAIN AT MIDNIGHT.'

Daltmooreby allowed his gaze to drift up just enough so that his eyes were masked behind the droop of his overly-large toupée. Through the strands of grey, matted fake hair, he spotted one character perched by a table, idly flipping a beermat and catching it again. 'Trying to be inconspicuous is so obvious sometimes,' he thought and suppressed a smirk as he did so. 'Well, that was one — where was the other one?'

Shawn looked down slightly, between the tables that blocked his full view of the first spy. This one had four legs.

'That makes two,' he sighed. He stood up, adjusted his collar and made his way into the nearby toilet door. Some vandal had deemed it hilarious to scratch out the 'I' to make 'TO LET'.

'I've got to know what he's doing here,' said Arthur. 'Stay here — if Andrei comes back, distract him or something!'

Arthur unfurled himself and, adjusting his tie, set off across the bar to the 'to let'.

He gingerly opened the door expecting to see Sean in his white suit stood at a urinal — but not only had the spy vanished into thin air, there was no toilet in here either. A few missing tiles exposed some piping that had yet to be completed.

Arthur glanced around; the cubicles lay in piles of self-assembled abstraction. There was a small window frosted over — not big enough to let a man through and certainly not to permit passage to the spreading waist of Daltmooreby. Feeling most perplexed and more than a little puzzled, Arthur scanned the room another time and quickly left again.

On his way back to rejoin X, Arthur stopped by the bar. He attracted the monobrowed barman's attention.

'Yes?'

'Erm...I was just wondering, I need to use the toilet. and...' He gestured in the direction of the 'to let' sign.

'Oh no, I quite understand — follow me.'

Arthur signalled to X his intention with a complicated series of blinks and facial ticks and walked behind the bar and through the curtain, following the barman. He led Arthur along a corridor. Arthur, always curious, watched as a room with basic kitchenette facilities passed by on his right, a broom cupboard on his left and some stairs up to presumably the bedrooms.

"Here we go," said the barman up hooking an overly large ring of keys from his belt. Selecting a tiny bronze coloured one, he unlocked the back door and Arthur got his first look at The Toilet.

At the end of a long strip of garden, surrounded by a small stricken fence that drew one's eyes to the cheerfully inept crazy paving path that ambled down the centre isle of the lawn, a stand-alone shack that was badly listing. An outhouse. Arthur felt his soul chill and shrivel up inside him.

'That,' he said, swallowing hard, 'is the toilet?'

'Uh huh,' said the barkeep. 'You'll need these,' he added, handing Arthur a small ice pick and a newspaper.

'Uhh?' gesticulated Arthur, a bit unsure as to why.

The barman had clearly dealt with this situation before. 'It gets very cold out here on the plains at night — we tend to find that the water in the bowl freezes, so you'll need this to chip through — also, we don't have any paper left, so that will have to do.'

Arthur gawped.

'S'where we've got the name from, y'see? The Blue Moon. I can't count the number of times we've come down to find guests frozen to the seat who've needed to be thawed out again! My advice: try not to sit down if you can at all help it.' He gave Arthur a hearty slap on the back and grinned.

'I see,' said Arthur, testing the point of the pick with his thumb experimentally.

'Run along now, I got customers to serve,' he said. He turned on his heels and left.

Arthur looked down at the objects in his hand and back out at the limp structure of the toilet. Its sheer delapidatedness was beyond description; nonetheless, he figured Daltmooreby must have hidden somewhere... Arthur stepped outside.

smiley - birosmiley - birosmiley - biro


From his vantage point on the ceiling, Daltmooreby finished counting to 10,000 let go of the button and the crampon and steel wire that had suspended him above the 'to let's' doorway retracted into his wrist-watch and Shawn landed with nimble and cat-like grace. Turning he adjusted his wig in the dirty mirror that hung on the opposite wall.
"Arthur Robinson." the old spy said. "Well, well" and satisfied walked out of the door.

smiley - birosmiley - birosmiley - biro

X was attempting to lean nonchalantly against a birdbath and discovering that he couldn't.

'Something stinks here, but it's not that privy.' Arthur paused for a moment, rather pleased with himself. 'I'm going to check the upper floors, Daltmooreby can't have gotten far...'

'I'll stay here and investigate this outhouse a little more, I think,' X said and blanched at his partner's look, snatching the newspaper and icepack from his grasp and marching with deliberate dignity into the dim recesses of the primitive toilet. The door rattled when he slammed it shut.

'A little privacy, hmm?' came the cry from within.

Arthur slinked through the back door out of the night, hearing the barman shouting 'Last orders, bitte!' and insinuated himself along the wall to the stairs. He suggested himself up them and implied himself along the door-lined upper corridor, as silent and lethal as a sharp rock. From the rooms, tremendous Teutonic snores assailed his ears.

'So, Daltmooreby,' Arthur thought. 'You were good, back in the day. You were very good indeed, for a womanising, alcoholic misanthrope with a gambling problem, but' — and this was a very private thought, which the professional side of Arthur's brain would disavow all knowledge of — 'but now you're old...' His darting eyes lighted on a small mess lying outside the door to room 14. '...and you're making mistakes.'

He rumoured himself over to the door and looked closer. An empty bottle of Soviet-era vodka and a small clinical bottle labelled 'Hair Apparent: Super-Glue for the Folically-Fake' lay discarded on the floor. Arthur gave a tiny, professionally acceptable smile and spoke softly into his collar.

smiley - birosmiley - birosmiley - biro

His business concluded, X was examining the fœtid inside of the outhouse.

'A secret switch,' he decided. 'Had to be. Maybe if I try the planks in the wall...'

The wall revealed nothing but woodworm and a strange sticky fungus he had to wipe off his fingers. 'All right. Try tugging on the "Girls of Tbilisi 1967" calendar...' The greasy hook snapped, X fumbled and the 'Girls of Tbilisi' settled in the murky crevice behind the cistern where even narrative is reluctant to delve. Finally, just as he was considering the potential of the rusty toilet-roll holder to be a gateway to secret realms, his earpiece fizzled into life and began breathing soft words into his eardrum.

'...outside room 14, and I can hear voices... strange smell of cheese... proceeding to enter without detection...'

There was a distant click.

'...see Daltmooreby and Andrei... talking, arguing... there's someone else, his back is turned... wait, I can —'

There was a sudden burst of noise from the earpiece and the transmission cut off.

smiley - birosmiley - birosmiley - biro

There was nothing suggestive about the way X made his entrance into the room. His first thought was that the room was empty — recently and hurriedly vacated, to judge by the lit cigarette butts and a half-finished gateau. The second thing that caught his attention was, as Arthur had mentioned, an overpowering smell of cheese. The third thing to focus his mind was his partner, revealed in the flickering light of a swinging bulb, lying on his belly on the narrow bed, apparently unconscious.

He was also painted blue from head to toe.

X sighed and went downstairs to look for some white spirit. Luckily, the bartender, who had a low opinion of his rural customers' ability to recognise vodka, had plenty in stock.

smiley - birosmiley - birosmiley - biro

'This is really not going to look good if someone were to walk in right now,' X said to himself before taking a step back to see what progress he had made with the spirit.

Arthur began to wake up. 'What... what happened?'

'I've got good news and I've some bad news...' said X while Arthur lifted himself up. The good news is that you're wearing clothes and I managed to get most of the paint off...'

'And the bad?' asked Arthur, holding his head. He hadn't completely heard what X had said.

'Well... I can't take the paint off your eyelids for health reasons.' X waved the spirit cheerfully. 'Irritant, you see.'

As they entered the bar from the stairs, the hubbub quieted for a moment, then returned to its former level. The two Agents, X smirking slightly and Arthur holding his eyes open with fierce concentration, threaded their way to the bar.

'You break anything, you pay for it,' said the barman suspiciously.

No, no, everything is in order,' said X reassuringly. 'Trust us. We're... civil servants.'

He slapped a banknote down on the bar in front of Arthur, and his partner twitched and started to sweat a little. (Keep eyes open...)

'I was thinking this. The way you are dressing, yes. Work for government. The pay, she is not too good?'

X stopped waving his hand in front of the grimacing Arthur and frowned for a moment.

'Well. That's beside the point. We have some questions for you... don't we, Arthur?'

'Es...' growled the agent, his eyeballs beginning to feel like hot marbles. (Keep eyes open...)

'Good, yes. But first you will try our local Swiss special drink?'

'And what is that?' asked Arthur, his face a rictus of concentration.

The barman shoved a small glass into his face. 'Garlic vodka.'

Arthur's eyes revolted against his brain and clamped firmly shut, revealing the blue paint for all to see. The barman chuckled.

'Is this, you are some kind of dancing girl? With the, the mascara?' His monobrow curled upwards and he gave a belly laugh. Other patrons saw now and there were demonstrations of that sophisticated humour known in rural districts all over the world.

'Ho, Liebling! Hahaha! You look like a Frau! Hahaha!'

'He is painted as though he were a woman! Hahaha!'

'Hahaha! Go bake me a Schwarzwalderkirchtorte, woman!'

'Hahaha!'

Arthur's hands twitched in fury, and he gave a low growl. 'If my strong moral upbringing didn't prevent me from using my training for personal ends...'

X laid a hand on his partner's shoulder, stifled his mirth and whispered, 'Focus, old friend. Don't let the fact that you now look like a painted panda cloud your vision.'

Arthur shook his shoulders, swallowed hard and turned back to the barman.

'Ahem. We have some questions about some of your patrons. Your assistance would be appreciated. Any reluctance to help in our enquiries, however...'

The barman looked in his eyes, and the humour drained out of his body. 'Y-yes?'

'...wouldn't.'

Spreading his arms wide, the barman smiled nervously. 'I like you. I will help you. Yes yes.'

Arthur smiled viciously and leaned forward on the bar. 'I thought you'd say that. First question...' He took gentle hold of the barman's collar, pulled him closer and whispered, '...would you, in this building, have anything resembling a makeup set?'

'Have you tried to actually wash the paint off?' asked the barman.

'There was no sink in that To-let, so if you mean I have to dunk my head in the outhouse in the garden, think again.'

The barman reached under the bar and passed over a small paint-by-numbers kit. 'That's the best we got, only the red's missin'. Will that be a problem?'

Arthur scowled and went back upstairs to find a decent mirror.

Five hours later, after Arthur's eyes were a beetroot colour patched with small bits of blue after trying to scratch off the blue colouring, they decided they had better give their thanks to the barman and leave. They made their way out and tried to find their tube. However, after 20 minutes of trying to find the tube again, they discovered they couldn't remember which tree it was parked in so found themselves without transportation. Thankfully, the Barman at the Blue Moon was very accommodating in letting them borrow his car. X considered this was a misapplication of the term and that the 'car' possessed a pedigree that X was sure included a Soviet tank design. But the barman assured them the Lada got excellent mileage.

They put on false smiles, waved back and grumbled some unprintable words, and they were off again in search of the next nearest village on the map recovered from inside the glove box.

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