A firmer possibility occurred to Rook. He need not search his diary or his conscience any more. Of course! The staff’s solemnity could have only one cause. By God, the old man’s dead! he thought. ‘No sign of life’ indeed! Rook almost felt relieved, as all that morning’s oddities were now explained. The missing Fix It list, the closed, locked door, the empty schedule, those phrases, ‘It’s been cancelled … He’ll not be down today.’ What apart from death, or at least a major stroke perhaps, would keep Victor from his work? If he had tumbled, say, and cracked a hip, his memos would be flying plumply from his bed like pigeons from a loft. While there was air left in his lungs and sufficient power in his arm to hold a pen, nothing would stop him orchestrating his affairs.
So that was it. The stick had snapped at last. Victor had died, and no one on the staff was senior enough to let Rook know. Or else, perhaps – this was a possibility – they thought he knew and were embarrassed by his lack of gravity or grief, his flippancy. ‘It’s not for us to say,’ the women on Reception had insisted. And they were right. Rook had been the boss’s eyes and ears, his fixer and his messenger. He was as close, as intimate, as anyone could be to such a cube of ice. No wonder nobody could face him with the news. No doubt the Finance Manager or the Group MD would come up from the floor below to inform Rook personally that there had been ‘a sad event’. Or Anna, even. She was senior enough. Rook sat and waited, hoping it was Anna who would come. He closed his eyes and dropped his chin onto his chest. He felt – for the first time since the Friday night – that he would benefit from sleep.
Rook’s door was open. There was no need for Anna to knock so formally on the stained veneer. Yet she was wise enough to knock and wait. He woke from his half-sleep and waved her in. Already he had prepared an elegiac face; already he was searching in his mind for what the death of Victor meant to him. Advancement? Displacement? Something in the will? At least it meant that this was no time to close the office door and push his hands beneath the bands of Anna’s skirt and blouse.
Anna did not look at Rook. Her expression was the same as those worn by the Reception staff, by the accountant as he hurried to his room, by the commissionaire who had ignored Rook’s airy greeting as he had entered Big Vic from the mall. Now he was sure he had identified the truth. She looked so shocked, so drained, so unlike the face upon the pillow. ‘Come in. What’s wrong?’
‘Bad news,’ she said. She looked as if her knees would give. He held her in his arms. It didn’t matter what the staff might think. Her tears fell on his jacket and his tie.
‘Sit down. Sit down,’ he said. He wished to cry himself. He felt so nervous and so powerful. He could not focus on the old man’s death.
‘What’s wrong?’
She took deep breaths, and then she looked him in the face at last. ‘I wish it wasn’t me who had to tell you this,’ she said.
‘I know.’ And then, ‘No need to tell me, Anna. I can guess.’
‘Guess what?’
‘It’s Victor, isn’t it? He’s ill. He’s dead.’
She shook her head. She almost laughed. ‘He isn’t dead. You’ll wish he was. It’s you … It’s us!’ She wiped her face, and took deep breaths until she found her usual even voice: ‘He says you’ve got to go. He seems to know that we’ve been meeting out of work. How can he know? It’s not his business anyhow. This isn’t sane!’
She handed him an office memorandum. Victor had put it on her desk, unsealed. Some office rubber-neck had read it and spread the news. It only took one prying clerk, one internal phone call, to circulate bad news throughout Big Vic, from the atrium to the 27th floor. Victor had written the memorandum – in pencil – late on the previous Friday night, his birthday night. It instructed Anna to tell Rook: ‘His out-of-work contacts and activities are not morally compatible with the trust invested in him. They have no place in an organizaion such as mine where relationships between all members of the office staff, producers, clients, and customers, should be based on propriety and honesty. He is dismissed. Please inform him that he has until midday to clear his desk, and that there can be no further contact between us except through the mediation of lawyers.’ There was an envelope for Rook – a formal note of termination.
‘He’s mad,’ she said. She understood the comforts of hyperbole. ‘He’s old and mad and wicked! He’s shut himself away up there like a gutless little kid. Does he think he owns us all? Can’t we have “contacts, out of work” without the nod from him?’
But Rook was in no doubt what Victor meant by ‘contacts and activities’. Someone – he hadn’t got an inkling who, not yet – had spilled the beans. Victor knew now all about the pitch money which the soapies had paid each quarter and which had made Rook so rich and careless.
‘He isn’t mad,’ he said. ‘And this hasn’t got anything to do with you, or us.’
‘We’ll fight for you! Come on!’
She was prepared to head an office strike, to draft petitions, risk her job, give Victor merry hell. She was prepared to burrow into Rook, and make a warren at his heart. Rook shook his head. Why fight to lose? Who’d be his ally when the word got out about the scheme he’d run, the money that he’d made, the cynicism of his office jocularity? If he made merry hell, then Victor or his lawyers might make hell of some less cheerful kind. They could inform the police and then the charge might be extortion or embezzlement. He’d end up in a cell. The old man hiding in his room had struck a distant deal with Rook that robbed him of his work but not his liberty.
‘Anna. Please,’ he said, and shook his head. ‘No fuss.’ That’s all he had the heart to say. Already he was letting work and Anna go. He only asked for dignified retreat. He almost packed a bag and just walked out. But Anna would not understand. She stood her ground.
‘Do something now,’ she said.
Her pluck – and innocence – put Rook to shame.
‘All right. I’ll make him talk to me.’ He thought there might be just a chance of changing Victor’s mind. He’d find a way of justifying the unofficial payments he’d received. The payments were in Victor’s interest, after all. They kept the traders quiet. They guaranteed Rook’s role as intermediary between both camps. ‘I had to take their money,’ he could say. ‘They wouldn’t trust a man who wasn’t in their pay.’
He knocked on Victor’s office door again. He tried to call him on the apartment’s internal phone, but the day-valet merely repeated that his boss could ‘take no calls until the afternoon’. The truth was that Victor was hiding in the greenhouse on the roof, exterminating aphids once again and primping plants and looking out through glass and rain and wind on distant neighbourhoods. What was the point in facing Rook himself, when he could deputize dismissals, and Rook could just evaporate before the afternoon and leave no trace?
Well, Rook could not cooperate. He could not disappear, at least while Anna was around. He could not clear his desk and leave no trace. He planned, instead, to sit it out. He’d stay exactly where he was, his feet up on his desk, his door ajar, his room a mess of plastic leaves, until Victor tired of hiding on the roof. Let him descend. Let them discuss it face to face. Let’s see, he thought, if Victor has the strength to be a tyrant other than by deputation or by memoranda. Might something, then, be salvaged from the wreck?
At midday Rook was still inside his room, alone and looking out across a rain-lashed city. Already cars and buses drove with full headlights, and the neon on the streets was liquid and intense. The coloured awnings of the marketplace could not be seen and certainly no hills or woods or parkland greens, no shafts of natural light, lent any gaiety to what he saw. The city was as grey and formal as an office suit. Rook heard, but did not recognize, a man’s voice ask for him by name. He heard a secretary whisper something in reply, then footsteps to his room. Two men, in uniform, one from Security, the other a commissionaire, his face familiar from the entrance hall and atrium, stood at the door.
One coughed. ‘Are you ready, sir?’
‘Rea
dy for what?’ asked Rook. Was this the summons from his boss?
‘It’s midday, sir.’
‘And so?’
‘And so we’ve come to escort you … outside.’
Outside! The word was a kidney punch; it winded him. Outside. Out in the cold. Out on his arse.
He shook his head: ‘Not yet.’
‘It’s midday, sir.’
‘Not yet.’
They came into the room. ‘Come on,’ they said.
‘I haven’t done my desk.’ Rook opened up a drawer to show he was not ready yet, and rescued his nebulizer from amongst the pens and calculators. He sucked on the mouthpiece. He could feel the spongy alveoli tightening in his lungs.
‘We’ve got our orders, sir. It has to be midday.’
They offered him some help. Was it his breathlessness, or were they simply being firm? They lifted him by his elbows. They pulled his chair clear, and shut the desk drawer. They might have been from the ambulance brigade, they were so mild, and Rook so pale.
‘You’ll have to leave your staff pass with us.’ Rook put his hand into his pocket, to do as he was told. He was resigned to going like a lamb. He fumbled for the sharp edges of his laminated pass, and found instead the old flick-knife, the bunch of keys. How long was it since he’d put Joseph on the ground? Here was an opportunity to use his fists again.
He found and gave them his staff pass. He would have ripped it into two if laminated plastic had been more biddable and if he could have controlled his shaking hands.
‘We’d better go,’ they said, and led him through the offices to Reception and the lifts. There was no sign of life. Even Anna had disappeared. Someone had had the cruel sense to ask the staff to keep away while Rook was led ‘outside’. He let them take him to the lift. He let them walk him to the tasselled rope and join him – three to one segment – in the automatic door. He let it sweep him into the rain and wind beyond. He wrapped his fingers round his keys, key tips protruding through his knuckles, so that his punches when they came would do the greatest harm. But the moment never came. Such moments never do, except in books and films. His warders were too proper and too big to fight.
‘Thank you, sir,’ the commissionaire said, deferential to the last, as he watched Rook pass from the dry into the wet. No one offered to summon a company Panache, or a taxi. He was expected now to take his chances on the street. He was of less importance than a perch.
He knew, he felt it in his water and his bones, that already Victor was at work, no longer hiding from the world. Security would call and say, ‘He’s gone!’ and Victor could count it safe enough to come downstairs and sit behind his desk as if he had no hand in all the harm that had been done, and would be done. Would he miss Rook? What should he miss? His fixer’s willingness to serve? His care and knowledge of the marketplace, his intimacy with vegetables and fruit, his office cheeriness, his social skills? No, Victor had the wealth and power to replace these things, to find another yet more honest Rook, who would be glad to be old Victor’s aide. He hardly gave the man another thought. He was too old and crammed.
Beyond the tinted, toughened glass of Victor’s suite the wind was fast and strong and sharp with rain. Big Vic was swaying slightly at its top, and whistling. Victor’s coffee moved inside its cup. His office door fell open, then fell shut. A paperweight shaped out of polished serpentine slid across the old man’s desk. And Rook, once more, was out upon the canyon floor, between the gleaming, swaying, whistling cliffs of glass and steel and stone.
2
WHAT WOULD YOU expect of Rook? That he would decompose without the frigorific regime of the working day? Most city people – men at least – are wedded to their jobs, and when you take those jobs away they soon become as empty and as brittle as blown eggs. Work is for the idle. It gives a chaptered, tramline narrative to life; it empties suburbs and estates and provides the displaced, liberated residents with dramas structured by the clock. It then provides the wages note, the cheque, the cash, the banking draft which, more than where you’re born or live, is what it takes to be a citizen. A salary can make an interloper feel at home; ‘An empty purse’, or so the saying goes, ‘makes strangers of us all.’ But no, Rook, weak and self-indulgent though he seemed, was not the sort to crumble like dry pastry. He was – like everybody else with any sense – too selfish and too vain to sacrifice himself. He spent three days indoors, bereaved. He would not answer Anna’s calls from work, or let her in when she came round to the apartment in the evenings, or respond when she delivered a snapshot of her – younger – self, inscribed ‘Let’s meet and talk’. What was the point? He did not even read the baffled notes which she left in his letterbox to reassure him that ‘whatever Victor does can make no difference to us’. Rook knew better. She would not seek him out once she had learnt exactly what his ‘contacts and activities’ had been. Why nourish love when it was bound to fail? He dared not think of her or quantify his loss. He needed first to concentrate on how he could excrete, transmit, the anger that he felt. He was consumed by malice, but none of it was turned upon himself. What had he done, except to be a cheerful pragmatist who’d seen a chance and taken it? He blamed the cheerless millionaire. He blamed the hidebound traders in the Soap Market. He blamed the coward who had gone behind his back to blab. Who blabbed? Rook did not find it very hard to know who told and when. It must have been one of Victor’s cronies, one of the five arthritic soapies who had shared the birthday lunch. Which one? He could not tell – so, for the moment, he would blame them all.
He’d once seen a film – One Deadly Kiss – in which an English lord had hunted down, one by one, the five male passengers on a country post-chaise bound for London. His motive? One of the men – and only one – had ‘kissed and robbed’ his wife as she slept in the cushions of the coach. ‘Better that all five die than that one blackguard lives to taint again the honour of a lady,’ the Englishman had said, in those vaulting, vowelly tones that English gentry, and English actors, used to have. He bribed the coachman, richly, to reveal the passenger list, and set off across the country in wild and righteous pursuit. He did not know, as he despatched another with a pistol or a knife, that all five men were guilty of some other, capital offence – arson, murder, treachery – and so ‘deserved’ to die. He did not know – how simple these films are! – that none of the five had touched his wife. The rapist was the bribed and silent coachman, free, as the credits rolled, to kiss and rob some more!
The English love these ironies, and Rook took pleasure in them, too. Rook dreamed the film, but in his dream the passengers were greengrocers, the coach was Victor’s birthday lunch. Rook became a younger man, the firebrand dressed in black. He hunted down and polished off the five. They fell amongst their fruit. They died on beds of spinach. Who was the coachman, free to sin again? Rook’s dream was crowded out by deeper sleep before the credits rolled.
By day, Rook fantasized; and in these angered fantasies he would avenge the noon indignity of being thrown out, a vagrant, from Big Vic. He would be the English lord, though more heroic and less mannered. His weapon would be Joseph’s knife. He practised with the blade, and mimed the damage he might do. He punched the bathroom door. He bit off the nails on both his hands. He masturbated, but could not hold the image of a woman in his head. He lay in bed too long. He stayed up late, and drank too much of the Boulevard Liqueur he had bought for Anna during the weekend. His breathing became laboured, first with nerves, and then his asthma took hold in his right-side chest, brought on, intensified, by his loss of work and income and the anger that he felt. He nebulized more often than he should. He grew lightheaded and unsteady from the alcohol and medicine and from the cheap narcosis of his dream.
At last – for wrath’s a sprinter and soon tires – he became more calm, less frantic. Bruised, he was, discoloured by the blows that he’d endured. But it slowly dawned on Rook, the self-approving optimist, that he was not weakened as a man, but made more potent. He was persuaded now that Victor had f
reed him from a curse. The job that Rook had lost was no great loss. Good riddance to it. He’d paid for it a dozen years before, with … what word is there to use but ‘soul’? The moment that young Black Rook had taken Victor and his cheque by the hand he’d dropped the sanction of the street, he’d lost the casual chatter of the marketplace. The city sparrow had spread its wings to rise on cushioned thermals beyond the pavement commonwealth and join the austere governance of hawks. Now he was back on earth again.
He felt too sick to eat, too shaky in the hand to lift a fork or pour a cup of coffee, but now at least he looked ahead as much as he looked back. What could he do with this new potency, this rediscovered soul? He was too old to start a fresh career. But, surely, he was rich enough to set up a modest business of his own. He checked the balance of his savings. He counted all the currency notes which he’d amassed. He had no debts, no obligations, no family to maintain. His situation could be worse. To be a rich man without work was not the meanest fate of all. There was no rush. He’d take a month or two of rest, and keep his eyes peeled for … for what? A bar, perhaps? A shop? He was alarmed by the dullness in prospect. Could he afford six months of rest? Or nine? He deserved a little breathing space to plan his future years. At least the spare time on his hands could be good fun. He’d please himself and no one else. His tie could hang loose all the time. He need not wear a tie. He need not wear a suit. That was the uniform of servitude. He need not hasten through the city streets, his coffee hardly drunk, to be at work on time.