So there they stayed, at table, in public safety. He was, he said, excited by the prospect of spending a few months in town. His junior partners were good at seeing ideas through, but not so good at nurturing the building itself. He was the old-fashioned sort of architect, he said. He liked to have a love affair with everything he built. He let this slogan do its work, and then he threw it out before it did him harm in Anna’s eyes: ‘Excuse an old man his absurdities. I promise I’ll be less extravagant at the press conference. No gibberish, I think, for journalists.’
‘Ah, yes, the conference,’ said Anna. ‘Victor will need another set of plans … before the conference.’
‘Of course, my dear.’ (He had not used her name or even asked her what it was.) ‘I’ll send them over to him by courier.’
‘I’ll take them now, if it’ll help. That’ll please Victor. I’ll feel I’ve earned this splendid meal.’
‘They weigh at least ten kilos.’
‘I’m stronger than you think.’
Signor Busi was not keen to go with her to his room, or, indeed, to do the round trip all alone. It was too far. He was too tired and full. He called a bell boy to the table. He handed him his key. ‘Be so good as to go up to my room and fetch a yellow file. It’s this thick and so high.’ He mimed the file. ‘You’ll find three of them leaning up against the window bay. Just bring me one.’ He gave the boy a hundred note, and then embarked upon an anecdote about a client’s file that he’d once lost in New York, in a cab. The telling of it tired him. He lost the thread, and was relieved when the boy came back with the yellow file. He could not fight a yawn.
‘I’ll let you get to bed,’ Anna said.
Signor Busi stood and slowly straightened. His stomach squalled. He took her hand. ‘Good night, my dear,’ he said. ‘It has been a great pleasure.’ He watched her leaving for the line of taxis in the street, the bell boy and the file of papers at her side. She walked triumphantly.
She really is the most enticing woman, Signor Busi thought as he began the journey to his room.
Rook was now sitting up in bed. ‘How did it go?’ he asked again. Anna pointed to the bedroom door. A yellow file, fat with plans and papers, leant against the frame.
‘Have faith in me,’ she said. Why should she tell him any more. Let him imagine what he wished. Rook did not betray his lack of faith in her. His conscience was not clear but smudged with two grey marks where he had placed his knees.
They sat in silence for a while, Anna at the mirror, Rook in bed, each with secrets to preserve, but only one of them felt sure enough to smile.
6
ROOK SMILED AT CON. ‘Let’s talk,’ he said.
‘What for?’
‘Because, unless we talk, your market stall will fall to bits.’ His arms were up and stretched. ‘All this will disappear.’
‘Get lost.’ Con smiled at Rook, but his smile was lipless. It did not crease his eyes or pack his cheeks. It was tight. It elevated ‘Get lost’ from curt indifference to chilling malediction. The smile dismissed Rook as a man not worthy of contempt. But Rook was not dismissed. He put his hand out to stop Con packing for the night. He had counted on Con’s hostility. He’d hoped for it. It would not do if Con was a conciliator who preferred What’s done is done to the bald Get lost. Rook rubbed a finger and a thumb to mime the crumbling of a solid into dust.
‘Get lost,’ said Con. ‘I’ve work to do.’
‘But not for long,’ said Rook. ‘You’ll soon be out of work and rattling round the streets like me. Except you won’t have the savings I’ve got to make your unemployment pleasant.’
‘You’re farting through your mouth,’ said Con, but he was enticed enough to stop his efforts with his stall and turn to look Rook in the face.
Rook had prepared his speech. ‘Pay attention,’ he said, as if the trader were a six-year-old. ‘Don’t be a fool. We’ve more in common than you think … and I’m not blaming you.’
‘Not blaming me? For what?’
‘For that stupid scuffle with the country boy, and all your poke and squeak with Victor. For losing me my job. What do you think?’
‘You can blame yourself for that,’ said Con. He’d not bother to deny that he’d launched Joseph on the fumbled attempt to repossess his pitch payment. Why should he? It was reclamation, just and fair. He did not understand what ‘all your poke and squeak with Victor’ might be or why he should be blamed for Rook’s dismissal. Nor did he care. Rook was despicable, he thought, but as harmless as a snake that having lost its venom makes do with hiss. It did not matter what Rook knew about that farce with Joseph in the walkers’ tunnel. How could Rook damage Con now that he was, by all accounts, truncated from his boss for good?
‘You had it coming, and you got off lightly,’ he said. ‘I should have sent four boys, not one. You’d be on crutches now. Why should I feel guilty? I’m only sorry I wasn’t there myself.’
‘Don’t play the hero,’ said Rook. ‘If I was holding grudges I wouldn’t be here at all. I’d fix you privately. I’m here to help you out. Not that you deserve my help.’
‘Get lost.’
Rook wrapped his fingers round his keys. How he despised this man, his smell, his clothes, his tight and unforgiving face. But Rook had to persevere. His only route was Con. He put the yellow file of duplicate designs from the Busi Partnership on the trader’s stall, amongst the bruised fruit and the waste that Con would jettison. He took the top drawing out. There were the melting glass meringues, the starfish corridors, the indoor trees, the relocated cobblestones in wash and watercolour. There was the legend: ‘ARCADIA – a sketch’.
‘What’s this?’
‘It’s what dear Victor has in mind for you.’
Now Rook was free to make his speech. He told how Victor was not satisfied with profits from the marketplace, how he’d been prompted by his bankers and his strategists to build, how Signor Busi and Arcadia had won the old man’s ear – and eye. An easy task because Victor was demented with old age, indigestion, and his obsession with a statue of some kind: ‘A mother and a child, would you believe. And not a statue of himself!’
Rook made the most of his regrets that he was no longer in Victor’s pay. It was his view, he explained with patient irony, that since the one man who knew the Soap Market ‘from the inside out’ had been removed from Victor’s side, then Victor had been free to run amuck.
‘I protected you,’ he said. ‘Maybe you didn’t like to pay for that, but I protected you – and see what’s happened now that the Soap Market has got no one to speak for it inside Big Vic.’ He punched the drawings. ‘There’s a press conference in three days’ time,’ he said. ‘They think they’ve got the only set of plans. But your man Rook has earnt his pay and got a second set.’ Rook recalled for Con the chilling boasts of Busi, ‘There’s nothing to preserve’, ‘We level off and take away’, ‘We start from scratch’.
‘I don’t hold out much hope for you or this, unless you organize, unless you defend yourself. Yourselves,’ concluded Rook. He’d said enough. He pushed the file of papers towards Con.
‘Why me?’ asked Con. ‘Why not one of those old windsocks you hang out with in the bar?’
‘Because they’re windsocks, like you say. Limp when things are fine, and when it’s stormy full of air. But you, you’re not a windsock; you’re one of life’s malcontents. You’re not afraid of fights. You were the only one to give me any trouble over payments for your pitch. The only one from what? … from two hundred and eight stallholders. You’re one in two-o-eight. You, Con, are a natural troublemaker. And may you be in Heaven for an hour before the Devil knows you’re dead.’
‘All right, so I’m a malcontent. Then why not you? You’re the maestro amongst mischief-makers. You’ve got the plans. You know the innards of the man. God knows, you’ve got enough spare time to organize a global war. Why me?’
Rook spoke with passion now. He was not obliged to equivocate with abstracts. He spoke of his damaged
reputation in the marketplace, how he might still be seen as Victor’s eyes and ears, as some double agent whose loyalties were as brief and unpredictable as shooting stars. Or else the word would be that the sacked factotum of the millionaire, disgruntled, venomous, was using marketeers to settle his own scores. The press and television would make a meal of that. They loved bad motives. They preferred an intrigue to the simple justice of a cause.
Or else no one would trust him. The older traders would not forget how Rook’s blinking leadership a dozen years before had been so readily tranquillized by Victor’s cheque. His appeasement had impoverished everyone but himself. Unless they were as forgetful and forgiving as chastised dogs they would suspect him.
‘Besides,’ said Rook, ‘I’ve got to stay out of sight. That architect has seen me with … the person from Big Vic who stole the plans for you. I can’t name names. The less you know of that the safer she, or he, will be. With luck they won’t trace the leak. But if Busi sees me with the plans he’ll make connections. He’s slow and foreign but he’s not stupid. Our routes to Victor and to Busi will be blocked and our informant will get sacked, at best. As things stand our sharpest weapon is surprise. What do you say?’
Con did not say a word. He gathered up the papers on his stall. He pushed them in his bag together with his newspaper, his change of shirt, his takings for the day. He’d sleep on it. Then, next morning, he would call a meeting of the marketeers and take directions, not from Rook but them.
He set to work dismantling his stall. He was dispirited by what he’d heard, though, normally, when work was at an end and home was near, he felt at his most contented. He wished that Victor’s man – he could not think of Rook in other terms – would take the hint and leave. He’d said his piece. He’d mixed his poison. He ought to disappear. But Rook seemed keen to stay. He was smiling, even; the same smile with which he’d burdened Con before they spoke.
Rook took the end of Con’s stall and helped him lift it from the trestles. He packed the produce boxes to one side. He unhooked the green and yellow awning and began – inexpertly, incorrectly – to fold the canvas. His hands and fingers were as soft and clean as soap. Con took the bulky canvas and unfolded it. He stowed it once again, so that it made an almost perfect square. He stood on it to clear the air. ‘I don’t need help,’ he said.
Rook shrugged. ‘We all need help.’
‘Get lost,’ said Con and, as he had his back to Rook, allowed himself the briefest smile, but one which packed his cheeks and creased his eyes and put his lips on show. It was true what Rook had said. He relished fights. He was the one in two-o-eight.
7
VICTOR AND Signor Busi were taking breakfast on the 28th when Con and his two hundred colleagues set out from the Soap Garden. Press cameramen and a television unit from the local studios were there to film the marketeers’ procession to Big Vic.
Rook, in his role of unacknowledged puppet-master, had made the phone calls to the press on his own initiative. Even though he was not fool enough to join the demonstrators, he watched them from his usual cafe table and was pleased. Two hundred out of two-o-eight was good, though not all the men and women there were stallholders. Some were porters, some were soapie wives and sons. Others represented the cafes and the bars that Victor wished to level to the ground. There were some customers, too – a dozen men and women from restaurants and small hotels in the Woodgate district who bought fresh produce from the Soap Market and liked the cheaper prices. They all feared change. Yet they believed that change could be confronted and repelled. Remember how the residents of Stephens Well, a small and wealthy suburb, had beaten back developers, or beaten them down at least. They’d forced the architects to lop three storeys from the top of their new office block because it cast a shadow on the suburb’s private park for forty minutes every day. That contravened the ancient Law of Light. Consider how the city’s conservation groups had stopped the widening of roads when widening would bring down trees. Trees of that age and size were protected by the Sylvan Ordinances of 1910. The marketplace had trees and light as well. So there was hope.
Rook drank his coffee, and peered at everyone who passed. His newspaper was spread out across his lap, unread and wet. It did not matter what the headlines were, or what the world was coming to, or that, if NASA got it right, an asteroid, one kilometre in width and travelling at 74,000 kilometres per hour, would ‘wing’ the Earth at noon, missing the Soap Market (also one kilometre in width) by an astronomically narrow half a million kilometres of space. His mind was focused on the detail of his life and not Eternity. Here – within a stone’s throw – he and the soapies were confronted by a danger they could witness, understand and quantify in human measurements. Here was a space they could protect.
Of course the market did not close. The marchers all had partners, deputies, or family to defend them from a trading loss. Each stall was open and the crowds were much the same as on any other day, at least on any other day that rained as hard as this. The demonstrators used their placards as screens against the rain. They pulled on hats. The television unit clothed its camera in a plastic hood. Someone had thought to bring a drum and he was ordered to the front by Con. They set off through the marketplace a trifle sheepishly, routed and regrouped by Cellophane. He’d never known such ordered crowds, such unity, before.
It’s difficult to concentrate on grievances when all around are friends. Con had a dozen leafleters. The Soap Fund – a reserve to pay for traders’ funerals or help out widows or support those injured at their work – had provided money for paper and printing. The leaflet showed the Busi sketch in ink and wash of Arcadia. Its black and Gothic banner was ‘Arcadia? Who pays?’ – and then it listed, with more regard for impact than for grammar, ‘You, the shopper … Me, the trader … Us, the citizens … Them that value history and tradition.’
When they had regrouped, at the Mathematical Park, to enter Tower Square and curve round with the traffic into Saints Row, the leafleters set to work, walking in the road to press their message on to drivers, dodging through the pavement crowds. The crowds, in fact, had slowed to let the traders through. They had no choice. Their umbrellas made it difficult to negotiate a passage through the squints and alleys of a throng. It only takes a drum to cause the gawpers in the street to stand and watch, or to make those drivers with a little time to spare twist at their steering wheels to see what the drum might signify. Once a few had stopped to look, then everybody slowed. The usual speeding lava of the streets had cooled. Then there were horns and tempers. Pedestrians, blocked on the pavements by the ones who stopped to watch, spilled out onto the street and tried to hurry on between the cars and vans and gusts of rain. A courier motorcyclist bumped up on the pavement, and tried to clear a passage for himself.
The soapies could not find an easy way. Only the drummer, whose pulse and drumsticks seemed to threaten anyone that blocked his path, proceeded with much speed. The camera crew and the photographers walked backwards through the traffic. Their lenses squared the scene and transformed this hapless chaos, unintended and shortlived, into an act of scheming anarchy. Marching in a traffic jam to the formal beat of drum and to the blatant discord of car horns, the protest had undermined itself. It could hardly move. The rule of modern cities is that wheels and legs must keep on moving or keep out of town. At least they should keep separate. They should observe the segregations of the kerb.
The police arrived – a single officer, already wet and robbed of patience – and there were comic scenes adorning both the evening and the morning television news and the front pages of the daily papers, showing the drummer and policeman eye to eye. Both had their sticks raised in the air, both were intent on beating skin. The policeman, though, had been discreet and brought his nightstick down upon the drum and not the drummer. The drummer was less restrained. He beat a tattoo on the policeman’s hat. In the photograph, two traders were stepping forward through the jam of cars to intervene. They held placards as if they meant to chop
the policeman down. One placard said, They Shall Not Pass – ironically, in view of all the chaos in the street. The other exhorted, Save our Market from the Millionaire. That was the picture that the city saw. Those were the slogans that introduced them to Arcadia.
The traders were elated. Now they understood that, for a while at least, two hundred citizens could bring the city to a halt. They formed a crowd, a laughing, animated crowd, at the top of the steps to the tunnel beneath Link Highway Red. Soon they were chanting slogans with one voice, walking unencumbered except by wind and rain down the centre of the mall. Their voices ricocheted wetly off the office glass and stone and sounded like a bullet sounds when it is shot in a ravine and lodges in the buttocks of an elk. They were loud enough to summon Signor Busi and his host from their breakfast to the parapet of Victor’s rooftop garden, and to crowd the tinted, toughened windows of Big Vic with staff, including Anna on the 27th floor.
The mall had not witnessed noise or passion such as this, not since the builders had removed their huts and debris and left the buildings clean and free for business. The architecture said Don’t raise your voice, Don’t run, Don’t hang around. Office workers, coming, going, did what they were told. The mall prepared them for the obeisances of the office desk just as the aisles of churches subdue their congregations between the door and the altar. But the procession of greengrocers was not intimidated by the prospect of a desk. Encouraged by the cameras, the echo and the camaraderie of rain, they bellowed slogans down the mall. The closer that the soapies got to Big Vic, the unrulier they became. To see their faces you would think that they were mutinous and angry. In fact, these men and women were having fun. What is more fun than making noisy mayhem in a place where you’re not known but, yet, are flanked by a company of friends? For once they felt like crusaders instead of selfish middlemen in trade. This day enriched them. Indignation and a drum would save their market from Arcadia.