LITMIR.BIZ

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flaps (feeling the seductive, semi-hollow crackle of his Marlboro packet through the lining). Gaffar immediately slapped it shut.

      ‘Yves Saint Laurent,’ he announced, haughtily.

      ‘Not a chance, man,’ Kane snorted. ‘It’s gotta be knock-off.’

      Gaffar (rising like a pike to the bait) shrugged the jacket from his shoulders and showed Kane the label.

      ‘Wow.’ Kane perused the label at his leisure (it looked legitimate), while casually slipping his free hand into the pocket and removing his cigarettes. ‘So there you go, huh?’

      ‘So there you go,’ Gaffar echoed, scowling, as Kane tapped out a smoke and flipped it into his mouth.

      He pulled the jacket back on (wincing slightly as it snagged on his neatly re-bandaged arm). Kane relaxed down into the sofa again (matches? Lighter?), his expression one of tolerant bemusement. As he leaned he felt something crumple behind him. He shoved his hand under the blanket and withdrew a large, slightly dented brown envelope. He stared at it for a while, frowning.

      Gaffar, meanwhile, had returned to the kitchen and was dishing himself up a large bowlful of beans. In the bread-bin he’d located a half-used wholemeal loaf from which he’d already torn a sizeable portion. He balanced the bread on top of the beans and carried the bowl over to Beede’s desk, placing it down, carefully, on to the battered, leather veneer and taking off his jacket (hanging it over the back of the adjacent chair).

      He sat down and began to eat, employing the bread as a makeshift scoop. Several mouthfuls in, he noticed a large World Atlas on a bookshelf close by, hauled it out, one-handed, opened it, and began casually paging through the maps.

      Kane watched Gaffar for a while, patting away – like a zombie – at his pockets (impressed by the Kurd’s apparent ability to make himself feel at home). The suit (Kane wryly observed) gave Gaffar the furtive air of a man struggling to pass himself off as Minister of Sport – or Information, or the Arts – in a tin-pot military dictatorship (somewhere much too hot) after his brother, Sergio (the ambitious, pissed-up lieutenant), had shot the bastard general and promptly stepped into his highly polished, size eleven lace-ups –

      

      Ah yes –

      The whole tragic socio-political edifice was currently hanging – like a badly mounted stuffed elk – on Gaffar’s family resemblance, terror, and the faultless cut of his Yves Saint Laurent.

      

       Sergio?

      Man –

       What am I on?!

      He finally located a box of matches (tucked down the side of the sofa), lit his cigarette and returned his full attention back to the brown envelope. He inspected the seal –

      

      Not glued, just –

      He kept his smoke dangling loosely from his lip as he popped out the flap. He peered inside – inhaled – and saw a thickish sheath of photocopied papers. He exhaled –

      

       Hmmn

      – and gently removed them.

      It was a very old book – forty pages long – badly reproduced and slightly blurry (although the frontispiece was in bolder type and so marginally more legible than the rest). It was written in Old English –

      

       Well, old-ish…

      Some (but not all) of the ‘s’s were ‘f’s.

      

       SCOGIN’S JESTS;

      he read:

       Full of witty Mirth and pleafant Shifts;

       done by him in FRANCE

       and other places.

       BEING

       A Prefervative against Melancholy.

      Then underneath that:

      

       Gathered by Andrew Board, Doctor of Phyfick.

      This was followed by a whole ream of publishing guff.

      Kane casually opened to the first page. He stiffened. On the blank, inner leaf, in pencil, somebody had written: –

      

       So Beede –

      There’s a whole series of these things (one for each of the various monarchs’ funny-men, although I didn’t get a chance to look at any of the others). Apparently there was quite a vogue for them in the 1600s (and for several hundred years after that – I saw at least two editions of this one – the earlier called Scoggin’s Jests by an Andrew Boord – 1626 – and this one, in which the spelling’s more familiar, from 1796 – that’s a 170-year gap!), indicating how popular these guys actually were (plus: note the celebrity publisher…)

      Kane returned to the front page again: –

      

       Printed for W. Thackeray at the Angel in Duck Lane, near Weft-Smithfield, and J. Deason at the Angel in Gilt-Spur-Street.

      He stared at this, blankly, for a while, removing his cigarette from his mouth (looking around for an ashtray, but not finding one, so tapping off the ash on to the knee of his jeans and patting it into the fabric), then turned back to the inside leaf and picked up where he’d left off: –

      

       The information enclosed isn’t considered especially reliable, though. This book was written years after John Scogin’s death. Much of it will be based on either legend or hearsay (would’ve been considered ‘tabloid’, even at the time of its publication).

      The actual story of his life (and a critique of Andrew Board, this book’s compiler, who seems like a rather dodgy character – ‘physician to Henry VIII’, apparently) features in R.H. Hill’s Tales of the Jesters, 1934 (and I wouldn’t have a clue what his sources were), but – believe it or not – the text was registered unavailable (read as ‘some miserable bastard stole it’).

      The librarian in the Antiquarian Books Section (who was actually quite chatty) sent me to go and see some journalist called Tom Benson who happened to be in the library on that day and in possession of an associated text called A Nest of Ninnies by Robert Armin (He’s writing a book about comedy and is very interested in jesters’, she said).

      I tracked him down to the Music Section. He was a little hostile at first (you know how territorial these people can be), but after a brief conversation he admitted that he actually had his very own copy of Tales of the Jesters at home which he’d ‘found’ in a second-hand bookshop in Rye (this might’ve just been sheer bravura on his part – that whole ‘journalists v academics’ hornets’ nest. Or maybe not).

      The last section (in brackets) had been hurriedly crossed out.

      

      Anyhow,

      Kane continued reading:

      

       I asked if I might borrow it some time (or even just make a copy of the relevant chapters) but he got a little prickly at this point and said he was still in the middle of using it, but that he would definitely call me when he was done ( I gave him my number, although I won’t be holding my breath). Then he told me some stuff over coffee (I bought the Madeira cake – it was a little dry) which you might find interesting. Will inform you in person.

       The quality of the copy is poor

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