Chapter Nine Gold, and Gold #3
“I need to report something, sir, but I need the Office of Right Duty, not the police. It’s not a crime exactly, but I think it’s something they’re probably interested in.”
“Office of what?”
“I think that’s what they’re called. Office of Right Duty. There were a couple of their vans in the garden back there a few minutes ago and I tried to catch them up but they left too quick—”
“What you want me to do?”
“I just need to know where their main office is, so I can report it, sir.”
“Where you come from?”
“Gibraltar, sir.”
“Where’s that?—Oh, never mind. I think what you mean is the Bureau d’Obligation Correcte.”
“That sounds like it, sir. Thank you. D’you know where their headquarters is, sir?”
“What this thing you want to report?”
“It’s not a thing, more of a person really. Someone I saw looked like a man I heard they were looking for.”
“What his name? Where you see him?”
“I think there’s a reward for it, and if I tell you…”
“I share it with you. Fifty-fifty.”
Asta was talking quietly into the ear of the dog daemon, who turned to the policeman with her tail between her legs, and said something in Arabic. The young man looked down, and then back at Lyra, his callow features trying to show something like respect.
“The clock tower,” he said. “Bab al-Faraj. You know that? Huh?”
Lyra nodded, though she didn’t.
“You go along that street across there, with the café on the corner, well, you go along there till you can see the clock tower. There’s a little street on the left called Hasbeiya Street. There is the palace of the nuncio. Le Bureau, that’s where it is.”
“Hasbeiya,” said Lyra, and he nodded. “Thank you very much, monsieur le gendarme.”
He saluted briefly and was clearly glad to see Lyra and Asta move away.
“What did you say to his daemon?” Lyra asked.
“I said you were the daughter of the mighty Prince Edward of Windsor.”
“Well, it seemed to work. I’ll have to live up to it.” They crossed the road and set off in the direction he’d indicated. “The nuncio’s palace, did he say? What’s a nuncio?”
“Sort of ambassador of the Magisterium. That would make sense. What are we going to do there?”
“We’ll think of something.”
—
No more than ten minutes later, they were there.
“Not much of a palace,” Lyra said.
Hasbeiya Street was a quiet semi-commercial place, with apartment blocks set between office buildings and small workshops, and there was nothing to show that an important official of the Magisterium lived and worked there but a brass plate on a large dull respectable-looking house.
The lettering was too small to read from across the street.
“It must be that,” said Asta. “Have we thought of anything yet?”
“Yes. We won’t go in that way. Let’s look in here first.”
The only shop in the street was a narrow shabby place that sold household goods: buckets, dusters, brushes, small tools, and so on.
Asta followed Lyra inside. The proprietor put down his newspaper with a faint sigh while Lyra paid for a broom, a small blue tablecloth, a packet of safety pins, and a brush and dustpan.
The shopkeeper picked up his newspaper again and they left.
“I think I saw a narrow alley opposite the palace. We’ll go down there for a moment,” Lyra said, and Asta scouted ahead and told her it was clear.
“You know, you could talk to me and we could plan things together,” said Malcolm’s daemon.
“I’m sorry. You’re right. I’ve been on my own for so long it’s hard to remember…”
There was another reason too. If Asta had been her own daemon, and they were talking quietly together, she would have been sitting on Lyra’s shoulder; but the great prohibition against touching seemed even more absolute when Malcolm was involved.
But Lyra didn’t think either of them would mention that.
Once out of sight of the street, which wasn’t very busy anyway, Lyra unfolded the tablecloth and tore it in two.
She put the larger part on like a headscarf and fastened it with a safety pin.
Then she tore the rest of the tablecloth into two smaller pieces and crumpled them up in the dustpan, and dirtied her face a little with dust from the brick wall.
“My rucksack…” she said.
Asta replied, “The dustbins. If they’re full, better not leave it near them, because it might be time for the collectors to come. But if they’re empty—”
“Good idea!”
The first bin had a layer at the bottom of what looked like the contents of a few wastepaper baskets.
“That’ll do,” Lyra said, and felt inside the rucksack for her Pequeno, her little stick, and put it in her belt. Then she retrieved the alethiometer needle and dropped the rucksack in the bin.
“Now, you’re going to be a housemaid, are you?”
“We are both going to be a housemaid.”
“We can’t go in the front door, then…Wait! Listen!”
The unmistakable sound of an air-cooled engine came from the street. A vehicle was just leaving the building across the road, and gathering speed as it moved away.
Asta darted to the corner and looked across, and then turned back. “That’s it,” she said. “One of those vans like the ones in the garden. Maybe the same one.”
Lyra joined her, peering out cautiously.
“See the main building? There’s an archway at the side. It came out of there.”
“Then that’s our way in,” said Lyra.
“Just like that?”
“Exactly like that.”
They crossed the street and went in under the archway into the courtyard.
As they did, a door opened in the main building and a soldier of some kind came out.
He had a sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve.
Lyra bowed her head low and shook out one of the “dusters” before slipping past the sergeant and in at the same door.
She was remembering the advice of Anita Schlesinger, about the actress who could make herself invisible, and now she, Lyra, was doing the reverse, just as the witches did, just as Will could do, and Asta saw at once and joined in perfectly.
The sergeant saw a housemaid shaking a duster, and took no more notice.
Once inside the door Lyra moved purposefully—heavily but purposefully—along the corridor and stopped at a corner. This part of the building was like the service area of a hotel: shabby, functional, not a showplace. The floor was covered in rough matting, which at least was silent to walk on.
The building around them was quiet too, but not silent; there were people there; work was going on.
Lyra thought: If it was Pan beside me now, we’d know exactly what to do.
No need to say anything. Perfect understanding.
But Asta was doing everything right, and it was comforting to have her quick and intelligent company.
As they hesitated at the end of the corridor, Malcolm’s daemon whispered, “Someone coming.”
They heard the sound of conversation before they could make out any words.
One voice dominated, a middle-aged man’s, snapping impatiently, occasionally answered by a younger voice, soothing, apologizing, reassuring.
The voices came from around the corner of the corridor, and somehow below, as well; and then a door opened and the speakers came out.
Lyra was already kneeling and making herself busy with the brush and dustpan.
She didn’t look at the men. Asta was doing what a housemaid’s daemon would have done, making herself humbly useful, but she was ready to flee, or fight, or simply to look for another spot that needed cleaning.
The voices moved away. They were speaking Arabic.
Another door opened and closed and the voices vanished.
“Did you understand what they were saying?” Asta whispered.
“No. Did you?”
“The older man was asking about a light that was on when it should have been switched off.”
“Odd. He sounded important. They came up from downstairs—a basement or something. Let’s go and look.”
“Lyra—” Asta began, but stopped herself. “I mean, Tatiana.”
“What?”
“I’m not even going to say take care. There, I haven’t said it.”
A door opened in the corridor behind them, the one they’d come in through.
Lyra bent to brush away some nonexistent dirt from the edge of the floor as two more men, the sergeant from the courtyard and a private, came past and took no notice.
The soldier was questioning the sergeant about something, in Italian this time, and the sergeant merely grunted.
They went past Lyra and Asta without seeming to notice them, though the terrier daemon of the private turned to look briefly before they turned the corner and went through the distant door as the others had done.
Lyra and Asta shared a glance, and understood each other at once.
Any observant person would see something odd about the pairing of this girl and this daemon.
It might pass without notice in a busy street or marketplace, but it wouldn’t take long in a setting like this to realize that the two of them were not one being.
And that might be fatal. Anita Schlesinger was right: don’t attract attention.
“We can’t just turn and go,” said Lyra. “Let’s look downstairs.”
She took up her cleaning things and moved housemaidishly around the corner, looking for the door through which the first two men must have come.
It was only a few feet away on the right.
Broom under her left arm, brush and dustpan on the floor, she reached for the door handle.
A moment later they were through, and found themselves at the top of a staircase.
A single anbaric bulb on the wall showed peeling paintwork, stained and scraped and scratched. A smell of damp and mold hung in the air.
“We’re in the right place,” Lyra whispered.