Billion-Dollar Brain Read Free Page A

the top of the building. This room was cleaner than any of the others but the clutter was worse. A table with a white plastic surface occupied much of the room. On the table there were jam-jars crammed with punches, needles and scrapers, graving tools with wooden mushroom heads that fit into the palm of the hand, and two shiny oilstones. Most of the wall space was filled with brown cardboard boxes.
    ‘Mr Jolly,’ said Sonny Sontag, extending a soft white hand that gripped like a Stillson wrench. The first time I ever met Sonny he forged a Ministry of Works pass for me in the name of Peter Jolly. Since that day, with a faith in his own handiwork that typified him, he always called me Mr Jolly.
    Sonny Sontag was an untidy man of medium height. He wore a black suit, black tie and a black rolled-brim hat which he seldom removed. Under his open jacket there was a hand-knitted grey cardigan from which hung a loose thread. When he stood up he tugged at the cardigan and it came a little more unravelled.
    ‘Hello, Sonny,’ I said. ‘Sorry about this rush.’
    ‘No. A regular customer should expect special consideration.’
    ‘I need a passport,’ I said. ‘For Finland.’
    Looking like a hamster dressed in a business suit, he lifted his chin and twitched his nose while saying ‘Finland’ two or three times. He said, ‘Mustn’t be Scandinavian, too easy to check the registration. Mustn’t be a country that needs a visa for Finland because I haven’t time to do a visa for you.’ He wiped his whiskers with a quick movement. ‘West Germany; no.’ He went humming and twitching around the shelves until he found a large cardboard box. He cleared a space with hiselbows, then just as I thought he was going to start nibbling at the box he tipped its contents across the table. There were a couple of dozen mixed passports. Some of them were torn or had corners cut and some were just bunches of loose pages held together with a rubber band. ‘These are for cannibalizing,’ explained Sonny. ‘I take out pages with visas I need and doctor them. For cheap jobs—the hoop game * —no good for you, but somewhere here I have a lovely little Republic of Ireland. I’d have it ready in a couple of hours if you fancy it.’ He scuffed through the mangled documents and produced an Irish passport. He gave it to me to look at and I gave him three blurred photos. Sonny studied the photos carefully and then brought a notebook from his pocket and read the microscopic writing at closer range.
    ‘Dempsey or Brody,’ he said, ‘which do you prefer?’
    ‘I don’t mind.’
    He tugged at his cardigan, a long strand of wool fell away. Sonny wound it quickly round his finger and broke it free.
    ‘Dempsey then, I like Dempsey. How about Liam Dempsey?’
    ‘He’s a darling man.’
    ‘I wouldn’t attempt an Irish accent, Mr Jolly,’ said Sonny, ‘it’s very difficult the Irish.’
    ‘I’m joking,’ I said. ‘A man with a name like Liam Dempsey and a stage Irish accent would deserve all he got.’
    ‘That’s right, Mr Jolly,’ said Sonny.
    I got him to pronounce it a couple of times. He was good with names and I didn’t want to go around mispronouncing my own name. I stood against the measure on the wall and Sonny wrote down 5', 11", blue eyes, dark-brown hair, dark complexion, no visible scars.
    ‘Place of birth?’ inquired Sonny.
    ‘Kinsale?’
    Sonny sucked in a breath of noisy disagreement. ‘Never. Tiny place like that. Too risky.’ He sucked his teeth again. ‘Cork,’ he said grudgingly. I was driving a hard bargain. ‘OK Cork,’ I said.
    He walked back around the desk making little disapproving sounds with his lips and saying, ‘Too risky Kinsale,’ as if I had tried to outsmart him. He pulled the Irish passport towards him and then turned up the cuffs of his shirt over his jacket. He put a watchmaker’s glass into his eye and peered closely at the ink entries. Then he stood up and stared at me as though