Rook spread his arms and flapped his hands in mockery of her. But there was no illusion at his fingertips – no desire to see the real world disappear, no wish to interfere in the bustling kinship of the citizens who went about their business in the Soap Market with the fitful, browsing innocence of weevils in a cake.
‘What can I do?’ Anna said. ‘Victor keeps his room locked. And anyway, those plans aren’t small. They’re tablecloths.’
‘And what about your fancy architect?’ Rook let her repossess his hand.
‘Who? Busi?’
‘Yes. He must have duplicates.’
Anna nodded, shrugged, as if to indicate she had no access to this man.
‘I think,’ said Rook, his hand pushed through the buttoned vents of Anna’s coat, his palm upon her slimmer waist, a finger tucked beneath her belt, ‘that it might be a good idea to let the signor take you out to dinner. At the Excelsior, no less.’
5
ROOK WAS A JUGGLER. He held and tossed five lives. He had to spin and mix them in the air. He had to pitch them so that they arched and fell into his hands with just the angle and the impact he required. Rook had to space the five lives in his grasp, ensure they did not meet or touch, for he was keen to settle scores – deftly, speedily, undetected. He was ready and impatient now to pay off debts and make amends, with Busi, Joseph, Anna, Con, but, most of all, with Victor. Quite what he ought to juggle up, Rook was not sure, though at their simplest and their meanest his intentions were to punish Con and Victor for the job, the private income from pitch payments, the self-respect they’d robbed from him.
The uniformed expulsion from Big Vic tormented him. He had to torment in return. This was unadorned revenge, and revenge is next to lust in its single-mindedness, its self-regard. So Rook did not care that Busi, Anna, Joseph, and yes, Con and Victor, too, were mostly innocent of blame for the malfunctions in his life. He’d still be on the 27th floor and welcome in the Soap Market, sweet with Victor, Anna, Con, if he’d resisted those envelopes of cash, that money in the palm, those bribes. This is something that country people understand more readily than townies. If you sow thorns, then you get thorns. They don’t need watering. They flourish and they snag.
Rook would not admit his pettiness, that what he wanted most was some wounding, simple recompense. He fooled himself that there were nobler motives driving him. The fiction that he made was this: that his months of leisure, free from Victor and Big Vic, had resurrected an old self that had ideals and principles worth fighting for. How could he forget the man he’d been a dozen years before when the produce boycott had been organized? They’d listened to him in the market then. They’d cheered. He’d stood on a platform made from crop boxes, dressed in clichéd black, and made that speech that all the papers had reproduced in full.
‘This Soap Market,’ he had said, ‘is here to make good salads and fruit pies. To put some muscle into stews, some zest in cake, to keep the city fed. It is not here to make men millionaires. So we traders should let the market die before we let the prices outstrip the common people.’ They’d flocked to that – and they’d held out on strike for seven weeks. A stirring time. The world turned upside down, with market customers bringing cake and cheese and bread to feed the soapies, and every stall and awning dismantled, and not a scrap of lettuce to be seen.
The striking soapies had given Rook the mandate to negotiate. They’d trusted him. But Victor knew the trick of tearing notes in half. ‘Why let the market die?’ he’d asked, made loquacious by the seven weeks of damage to his wealth. ‘You only harm yourselves.’ His agents and his managers had offered Rook a compromise. You lift the boycott, and trade according to the prices we have set, they counselled. And in return we freeze the market rents for two years, maybe three. You traders save a little cash for … OK, you win, let it be frozen rents for the full three years. You save the marketplace for good.
Rook had said he was only a mouthpiece, that was all, but that he doubted his colleagues would betray their principles. Victor had spoken again. How much are principles? he asked himself, but he said out loud, ‘It would be democratic, don’t you think, if my, our, colleagues in the market had some constant spokesman at my side to represent their principles.’ He had not looked at Rook, but had written a sum in pencil on a memorandum pad and slid it across his desk so Rook could see. ‘That is the kind of yearly sum that we would pay for such a diplomat.’ Rook had shaken Victor by the hand and had taken the stipend of the diplomat.
So now Rook felt he had the chance to make amends, to piece together once again the man that had been raised within the odour of the marketplace, that had been schooled in radishes and rambutans, that thrived in clamour and crowds. He’d save the Soap Market. He’d be the champion of marketeers. He’d climb up on the platform once again and ‘represent their principles, their fears’. But then, once he had sobered from the fever of the phrases in his head, he thought again, more clearly. Platforms were for innocents. Speeches only waylaid passion with fine words. The player with the strongest hand, the running flush, was not required to show his cards. So it was in politics – for, yes, Rook was now so inflated with the altruism of his mission that he’d cast himself as a man in service to the citizens. In politics you did not need to spout or strut or speechify if you could quietly slip behind the scenes to sabotage, to juggle, and to complicate. He had a plan, unformed but irresistible, which would deliver Anna to his bed, and damage Con, and punish Victor, and introduce that muscly Joseph to the truth that brains and money are more powerful than youth. He’d cause a little mayhem, too, for Signor Busi of Milan – and leave himself the hero of the marketplace.
So, four days after Rook and Anna reconnected in the Soap Garden bar and on the day that Signor Busi won the contract for Arcadia and once again invited Anna to his table, they walked to the Excelsior. They’d been together every night and had slept so deeply, back to back, that the dreams and snores which celebrated their resurrected passion did not wake them. They were refreshed by the affection that they gave and got, and Anna took the change in Rook, his liveliness, his youth, to be a sign that he returned her love. Why else would she, a careful woman wedded to her work, agree to dine with Busi and to chance his busy hand so that she could, for Rook, become a common thief?
Rook had been careless. He should have let Anna walk the final metres to the Excelsior on her own. But she was nervous – as she had a right to be. Dining with a stranger in a hotel such as this would make the toughest of us tremble. Rook had let her hold his arm until they reached the polished marble steps of the Excelsior.
‘Aha, my dear. You’ve brought a companion?’
Signor Busi was standing at the carpet edge, spying on the women in the street. Anna let go of Rook and, at once, wondered why. She held his arm again.
‘He’s a friend,’ she said, but had the sense to give no name.
Rook was disadvantaged by Busi’s height, his clothes, his age.
‘I was just passing by,’ he said. ‘Have a pleasant evening.’ He walked away, but slowly enough to note how Signor Busi had a voice that was as carpeted and marble as the hotel steps.
Rook would never know what happened between Anna and Busi that night, and she would never learn how Rook had passed his time. Though they, of course, would tease each other with alternatives.
It was quite clear to Rook and Anna that they were tethered to the ardour of the night. As they parted, both were charged with the sexual static implicit in the triangle that they formed – the ageing, elegant seducer; the apprehensive woman in her finery (bathed, perfumed, bangled, silk-dressed in gold and black); the thin-faced breathless lover transformed to thin-faced, breathless pimp as he despatched his paramour on her – on his – assignment; the dining table set and waiting with its single rose, its silver tub of ice, its candlelight and its connivance in the creed that all is fair in love and trade; the hotel bedroom with the balcony and matching lampshades, curtains, bedspread; the salacity of wintertime.
Rook had said to Anna, ‘Do what you can to get a copy of those plans. Do anything. It’s up to you.’ He had not said she ought to sleep with Signor Busi but, then, he had not asked her not to. He was excited, that’s for sure, by the power that he seemed to have. He liked to enmesh her in his intrigues and to allow the notion, if not the fact, that she would sleep with Busi if instructed so. How sensual it was, how riggish, how sportingly loyal, how grandly stimulating that she might do this thing for him. What would she not do, now, with Rook in his own bed, on his own floor, if she could be so dutiful as to serve him with another man?
Anna, for herself, had not contemplated for too long what Rook had meant by ‘Do anything. It’s up to you.’ She took his meaning, but she took it as a joke. She did not want to think that Rook, despite his recent protestations of affection, would use her as a bribe, a trinket. She had no wish to be his representative in Signor Busi’s arms. But Rook had spoken with such passion and such verve about his mission to save the Soap Market that she had redefined herself as a woman who, by surrendering and making servile her love for Rook, could consolidate his love for her.
Of course, she would not, when it came to it, allow the architect to touch a centimetre more of her than the pale, unsensual flesh around her wrist. But she had fooled herself into believing there was no insult in Rook’s evident indifference. She did not say, ‘If that old smoothie has the nerve to try it on with me he’ll get my dinner in his lap,’ or ‘If you’re so keen to get a copy of these plans why don’t you go and sleep with Busi yourself. He doesn’t seem the choosy sort. And nor do you.’ She did not say, ‘I’m not a prostitute.’ She simply let the atmosphere between them stay a little warmed and moist with the licence he had imposed on her to ‘Do what you can to get a copy of those plans’.
So she had bathed and dressed for the Excelsior in clothes which she had brought from her own home to Rook’s apartment. As she dressed before the mirror, arranging belts and tights and underclothes, and testing scents and bracelets on her arm, Rook sat and watched. His breath was shallow, his tongue was dry, his heart beat fast. Not asthma – but an ailment which nearly every man is martyr to, the subjugation of all sentiments and resolutions to the tyranny of sex. He smelt of badger. He felt his penis lengthening inside his trouser leg. He had to shift his leg and readjust his clothes. He was not slow to help her with her zip or take the landlord opportunity to wet her neck with a kiss and press himself into her back.
‘Not now,’ she said, and rubbed his trousers with her hand, proprietorially. He was transfixed, entranced, by the prospect of the night. But he had lost the chance of giving full expression and relief to the promptings and the tensions that he felt. He’d happily see the market torn down, and Victor triumphant and untouched, and Signor Busi left to dine alone, if only Anna would agree to turn around and put her face to his. He’d happily – but for how long? – relinquish mission and revenge for five demented, silken, musky minutes in her arms.
She was putting on her shoes, and smoothing down her dress, and searching for her toothbrush in her bag. And they were descending to the street. And they were walking arm in arm like married couples do, respectably. And Rook was looking up at Signor Busi on the hotel steps and saying, ‘A pleasant evening to you both.’
Rook walked down to the Soap Garden and found an isolated chair where he could sit in privacy and think. And drink. What were the diners doing now? Had they reached dessert? Anna liked sweet things and Signor Busi would insist she had exactly what she wanted. No doubt she bubbled; it did not take much drink to make her gamey. No doubt the old Italian was urbane and courteous, and lightly anecdotal in the way that men who are not young must be if they want to charm their juniors. Rook pictured Busi as he lightly put his hand upon his guest’s bare arm and called the waiter to the table so that his intimacy could pass as etiquette. Perhaps he asked if she required a digestif. A Boulevard Liqueur? Did she stay still? Did she encourage him to leave his hand in place? To stroke her arm, perhaps? To take her hand in his?
Rook shook his head, and rearranged the dinner table once again. This time the architect was silent and Anna was urbane and cunning. She kept the conversation light and tempting. She flattered him, his suit, his taste in wine. He boasted of his fame as an architect, the work he’d done to shape the new Arcadia. She said, I’d love to see those plans myself. He said, They’re in my room. She said, Why don’t you order some nightcaps and we can take them up.
Again Rook cleared his head. He’d conjured up a harpie, out of character. Anna was not a predator. She’d have to be cajoled upstairs, unwillingly, but with her task in mind, to borrow, steal, a second set of plans. Perhaps she’d asked to see the plans. Busi said, You’ll have to come upstairs. He let her know that dinner was not cheap and that Victor would not wish his architect to go without affection in his town. Rook could almost see the plans upon Signor Busi’s bed. He saw the look on Anna’s face as Busi hung his trousers, creases straight, across a chair, and turned to watch the black and gold on Anna loosen, crumple, drop. Rook saw her, Busi watched her, hold her stomach in as she pushed down her tights and underclothes and stood, in nothing but her slip. Signor Busi cleared the plans and elevations from the bedspread and then pulled Anna to him by her wrists. ‘My name is Claudio,’ he said.
Now Rook, if he had been a younger, fitter, more dramatic man, would have run between the Soap Garden and the Excelsior. Not out of anger, nor jealousy. He was not fool enough to be jealous of these chimeras. But out of lust. He wanted sex; he wanted intercourse. He wanted to express himself before he burst from lack of it. He could not hold his coffee cup. He could not halt himself. He walked unsteadily, a little drunk on his imaginings.
He found a girl – not more than seventeen. A country girl who’d never kissed a man she loved. She took him to a third-floor room two streets behind the house where he was born. She pulled her blouse apart. She pulled her denim skirt up to her waist. She wore no underclothes. She was as thin and unprepared for city life as Anna was mature. Rook said to her, ‘My name is Claudio.’ There were two grey patches on the mattress of the bed, where ten thousand knees had been before. Rook put the money on the chair, and did as he was told.
‘Undress,’ she said. Then ‘Wash.’
The water on his penis sobered him, but he was drunk again when she came to him with a sheath and rolled it on. She lay down on the bed. She removed her watch and chewing gum and, pressing the gum onto the watch face, dropped them to the floor.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘It’s up to you.’
She might have been a country girl, but she was as nonchalant and passive in her work as any city labourer or clerk or factory hand. It paid the bills. She held a steady course between professional cupidity and personal disdain. She was wise enough to forge a little interest in the man who paid. The bread won’t rise without the yeast. She shook her head or nodded as required. She matched a dozen groans of his with one of hers.
They always looked the same, these men, when they were done – a little disappointed, eager to depart. She retrieved her chewing gum. It was still moist and almost warm. She watched him search his trouser pockets and then the pockets of his leather jacket. He found his handkerchief and wiped his nose. He pressed a spray into his mouth and sucked on it, as if he wished to blast away the taste of her with Pine-’n’-Chive. His face was red, but weren’t they all, and with good cause? But this one did not rapidly turn pale. His breathing was not free. His chest was quivering as if his orgasm was trapped and heading for his lungs. She did not care. He’d only paid for fifteen minutes and time was up. Another girl would want the room. She picked his trousers up and put them in his hand.
‘You’d better get some fresh air,’ she said.
She waited by the door until he put his spray away and pulled his trousers on. She went alone down to the street where she had friends and where her face and chewing gum could stretch and soften in the darkness.
Rook had cleared his mind at last. H
e left the street and market area. And as quickly as he could – in other words not speedily at all, but chin upon his chest and hands upon his lungs and phlegm upon his lips – he returned to his apartment.
He lay on his bed and shut his eyes and could not disentangle Anna, Signor Busi, the prostitute. They coiled like anglers’ worms so that it was a puzzle where they ended or began. He slept and trod the waters of a shallow dream. Too much nebulizer. Joseph wore the uniform of a commissionaire. He threw Rook out of doors, apartment doors, office doors, and doors to gloomy bars. He slept with Anna, and Anna slept with Victor, and Signor Busi slept with Rook until the bed became a market stall turned to leaf and root. The prostitute was in his bed and would not leave, and Anna’s feet were on the stairs. And she was not alone. Now someone joined them in the bed and put a hand upon his chest. ‘You don’t look well,’ she said. Her breath was garlic and cigar. Her perfume was Boulevard Liqueur.
She sat in front of the mirror and let him wake. She took her bracelets and her earrings off and started on her eyes and cheeks with cotton wool and rose oil.
‘How did it go?’ he said.
Anna was too satisfied to tell the truth. How easy it had been, with Signor Busi keener to secure her admiration and her rapt attention than to lure her to his bed. He had not touched her once. He seemed afraid that he might go beyond the point where he impressed her. He was adept with wine lists and cigars. Waiters were polite with him. The chef – a fellow Milanese – came up and shook his hand. He thrived on conversation. He could talk and eat and drink as neatly and amusingly as a juggler with five balls. He flattered Anna charmingly. He could let her go without seducing her and do his reputation not a jot of harm. But if he tried his luck with her? What then? At best he’d take her to his room and she would see how papery he was beneath the suit and how his posture – tall, erect – was aided by a spinal truss. It took him minutes to remove his jacket. He had to shake his shoes and trousers off. To see him climb onto his bed, undressed, was (he admitted it himself) to watch a scene from Marat/Sade or witness anti-ballet of the kind danced by the chorus of the dead in Przewalski’s Crematorium.