‘Come up with something better,’ the chief of police instructed his aide. He was in luck. The officers who went to Rook’s address to tell his next-of-kin, if he had next-of-kin, found Rook’s apartment violated, the keys left hanging in the lock. They found the ne’er-do-well asleep, his elbows on the table, his birthmark cushioned by the newly reunited notes. They recognized the face – the boy in all the photographs, the crazy anarchist from German insurrection camps. Within a day they had the evidence that they required. Two witnesses had seen this Joseph kneeling at Rook’s side. One swore he’d noticed blows rained down on Rook, slaps to the face, punches to the back ‘consistent with the bruises on the corpse’. The other said he’d seen a knife. He thought it was a knife. It gleamed. But, no, he could not be certain there was not something blunt as well. A cobblestone, perhaps. The ground was strewn with broken cobblestones. A broken cobblestone can tear a testicle and fracture sixteen ribs.
What chance had he? He was the one in the photographs, assaulting policemen with vegetables and fruit. Just the sort to pick on someone middle-class, respectable, like Rook. Perhaps at first he only sought to steal a jacket for disguise, but then – ever the feckless, opportunist thief, so everybody from his village claimed – he’d seen the wallet and he’d killed for it. The prosecution case was clear. Here were two men who’d seen it all. Here was the stolen jacket and the shirt, in halves, on Joseph’s back. Here was a ‘nife’. Here were the black field boots with which he’d bludgeoned Rook. The muddy imprint from them marked the victim’s face. Here was the accused man, fresh from the murder, in Rook’s home, a fortune in his hands. And his defence? Joseph only had deranged and farfetched explanations – the mugging in the underpass, the severed notes, the lighting of the fire – to show why he and Rook weren’t foes, but partners.
11
VICTOR, AS USUAL, had not gone early to his bed on New Year’s Eve. His night-time wanderings from room to room in Big Vic had distorted fitfully the perfect conifer of lights. Just short of midnight he had gone out on the roof to clear his lungs by jettisoning and melting phlegm in the potting compost of his plants. The country people always cleared their lungs on New Year’s eve: ‘Spit out bad debts,’ they used to say if they were merchants, or ‘Last year’s spit for next year’s spring,’ if they were working on the land. The merchants spat like pellet guns; the farmers dropped their phlegm onto the soil like bakers adding egg to cake.
Victor was not obliged to spit alone on New Year’s Eve. He could have chosen company. There’d been the usual annual invitation to be the mayor’s guest at the businessmen’s banquet. But Anna had sent off Victor’s annual regrets and his donation to the Widows’ Fund. He said he was too old to celebrate the passage of another year.
‘You’re there in spirit,’ Anna said, flourishing the widows’ cheque for him to sign.
Yet being on his own as all the city clocks struck twelve was not entirely to Victor’s taste. He had been tempted to suggest that Anna ought to stop behind and join him for a drink – but why embarrass her. She was not family. Her duties ended at the office door.
On the twelfth stroke he’d almost gone down in his lift to shake the hands of those tall men in uniform who kept Big Vic secure right round the clock. He need not hold a conversation with these men, a modest gratuity would satisfy. For once, he felt regret that Rook had gone. The man was neither honest nor efficient, it was true, but he was more like family. A flippant nephew, say, determined to amuse. And he was skilled – Victor acknowledged this – at catering for veterans. That birthday meal that Rook had organized had been the highlight of the year, just like the village parties he had known and never known. He hummed the march from La Regina which Band Accord had played that early summer’s day upon the roof. The coming year would make him eighty-two. Would he be there to celebrate?
The midnight roof was cold. But then old men are always cold, like fish. It’s heat they cannot bear, and noise, and sudden movements close at hand. He shivered but was glad to be outside – almost the only ‘outside’ in his life, these days – liberated from the humming equanimity of air-conditioners. The wind snatched at his spit and tugged his dressing-gown. He hurried through the darkness to the greenhouse door and found the switch to light two meanly powered orange bulbs, the ‘forcing lamps’ of market gardeners. The orange light expelled the night. The glass leaked wind. It moaned and chattered in its frame. Two liquid-gas heaters kept the winter greenhouse warm. They kept his specimens alive and made the winter temperate for succulents, for palms, for greenfly and for bugs.
He found low staging for a stool. He found the brandy bottle, amongst the liquid feeds and aphid sprays. He spat again. He spat for spring. And then he filled his mouth with brandy from the bottle. Its fierceness numbed his mouth. He drank more manically, determined to gulp down the medicine, the sleeping draught. He held the bottle up against the light. It looked like melted beeswax. He took his medicine until the brandy was lower than the bottle’s label. Enough to make him moan and chatter to himself in unison with window frames. Victor was neither hot nor cold. He was the temperature of plants. He pressed his nose upon the glass, staring out at first towards the outskirts and the hills. There were no stars, just damp and glass and greenhouse algae acting as a screen against the night. He heard the fire sirens at his back. He turned to see the flames, the incandescent trees, the unprecedented sight of car lights on the market cobblestones. At first he could not place the flames. He could not place them geographically or in time. The oblongs of greenhouse glass made the distance two-dimensional. It was a film, a flaring, fading early colour film, the print besmirched by water, algae, fumes. Here was a scene brought on by sleeplessness and drink. Here was a scene that was familiar. He dared not blink. He had to concentrate to bring the memory back. The flames were old and watery. But, at his bidding, people had appeared, and sound. There was an old straw hat. The smell of bread and urine. The disconcerted snufflings of sleepers on bare boards. The sirens were his mother’s screams, the screams of Princesses on fire, of people separated from their homes, the screams of rain-soaked timbers made dry and hot too swiftly by the fire.
He drank more brandy, finished what was left. He stood and looked more closely at the market flames. He wiped the glass clean with his dressing-gown. The film was three-dimensional at last. The flames waved and beckoned to him – the ancient and dramatic call to warmth that is so eloquent at night. The fires seemed close when viewed through dewy glass, so close, he thought, that they could have been candles mounted on the roof-top parapet. Victor blinked the candles into distant fire. He sent them off. He brought them close again. Now he saw his mother in the glass, packing her possessions in a canvas bag and strapping her only child across her chest with a shawl. She threw some grains of maize across the doorstep of their country home. She lit a single candle and left it – for too short a time – standing at the centre of their wooden table. She closed the door.
When Victor focused once again, his mother’s table was alight. The door was orange flame. She could not keep the fire away. She could not stop the timbers cracking. She called for Victor. He was gone. She went down on her hands and knees. She could not breathe. She curled up in the smoke and flame. She did not know if he was safe or dead. They’d find her well-cooked body in the morning, the rain its undertaker. They’d find a blanket for her, a morgue, a box. They’d give her earthen eyelids in the common grave. Victor blinked the fire back into candle. He blinked up tears, but then old men are used to having water in their eyes without good cause. It’s part of growing old. Besides, the heating of the greenhouse let out fumes, and fumes are just as sure as sentiment to make men weep.
By now the helicopters were aloft. Their searchlights left Victor in no doubt – once he had wiped the past away and focused on the night – that there was trouble in the Soap Market. The helicopters sobered him. They were a match for brandy and self-pity and for the apprehension that he felt. He left the orange bulbs to burn. He chanced t
he rooftop wind and made his way to bed. For once he slept quite readily. He did not dream or need to wake to urinate. When dawn came, his body on the mattress formed an arthritic question mark, his right ear on the pillow, his torso curved, his knees and legs brought up for comfort. His question was – Why do I feel so scorched and dry?
It was New Year’s Day and – not for the first time in his life – Victor was plagued by an anxiety which he could not name. Who’s dead? What’s dead?, he asked himself. What could the fires and helicopters mean? He had a hollow in his chest that only getting out of bed could displace, that only going out into the town and seeing for himself could fill. He tried to conjure up his mother’s face, but failed. He saw his aunt. But more than Aunt he saw the market as it was when he was young and poor. He sat cross-legged upon the ground. A tray of eggs at his feet. There were no customers. It seemed that this imagined market was piled with produce – but, when he looked more closely, the sacks and bags, the spuds and watermelons, turned to corpses. There were a thousand bodies on the ground. The cobblestones were corpses too, as still and stiff as graveyard flesh, as implacable as eggs.
So it was, when Anna came on New Year’s Day to rehearse his duties for the week, Victor was prepared.
‘You’ve heard the news,’ she said. He shook his head. She showed the morning papers and the police reports. Joseph straddled the front page, ‘The Market Rioter’. And naturally there was an unnamed corpse. A man of middle age, stripped naked to the waist, softened, bruised and split like an old banana by the beating he’d received.
‘I had a dream like this,’ he said. ‘I dreamed this death.’
‘It’s not a dream,’ she said, unnerved that he should mention dreams. ‘It’s pandemonium downstairs. The phones are smoking – traders, press, the police, the architects, the building contractors. Arcadia will have to wait a day. I don’t think we can go in with clearance gangs until they’ve buried that poor man at least.’ She pointed at the sub-heading, ‘Man Dead in City Violence’.
‘Condolences are due, perhaps,’ he said, ‘if he has family. Please organize a cheque for me to sign.’
She made a note. ‘It’s all in hand,’ she said, ‘though there are problems to be solved.’
‘Please specify.’
‘Such as, the market stalls. They are all destroyed. What will the traders use tomorrow when the car-park site opens? The city must be fed.’
Victor did not seem alarmed. It was his view that merchants have to cope. They did not need their trestles to do trade. They were the sort who’d sell fruit off the floor or from their vans and be content so long as money bruised their thighs. He might have been alarmed, perhaps, if fire and riot had reduced Arcadia to rubble on the ground. Yet no damage to Arcadia was done, or could be done. Not for a while at least. The riot was benign as riots go. A riot on an empty building site could do no harm.
He shrugged at Anna, as if to say, Don’t worry me with trifles. But what he said was this: ‘It would be diplomatic, don’t you think, if I went down to show my face?’ The shrug was meant to hide his awkwardness.
‘Down where?’
‘To the Soap Market. Where else?’ And then, ‘I feel I ought to demonstrate concern. But privately, you see. No need for fuss. Or press. I simply want to satisfy myself, with my own eyes, that all is well.’
It was the early afternoon when Victor’s black Panache was backed up to the entrance to Big Vic. ‘The old man’s going out,’ the chauffeur had been told. He hardly had the time to air the car, to polish off the dust. Security held the rubber-neckers back as Victor came out of the lift, with Anna at his heels. Her new winter coat was black and long and astrakhan. His coat was alpine wool, and grey and fifteen years of age. They knew how cold it was on New Year’s Day, and how the wind could grip the knees and thighs, how rain could bounce off paving stones, how colds and rheumatism were unforbearing muggers on the street.
Anna had already lost the final kilo of the three she’d targeted, and so she felt the cold more keenly than before. She wore a business suit beneath the astrakhan, the same creamy colour but a more expensive cut than Joseph’s On the Town. It did not tug across the chest or pinch the waist. Her hair was short and razored still, though her hairdresser had added ‘just a little fire’ by lightening her quiff. She was not the jolly Anna any more, and glad of that. Jolliness is a despairing refuge for women of her age. It tries to take the place of youth and looks, and is not dignified. Anna was now as solemn and as trim as the clothes she wore. She’d had enough of men, and she had vowed, for this New Year, to do without their oily approbation. She would not seek their sexual patronage. She would not be their carrion. Let them fear her for a change. She held the keys to Victor now – and anyone who sought the chance of sitting at his desk, enveloped by his cheesy old-man’s breath, must knock upon her door.
The doormen did not wince a smile at her as they’d once done, as she followed Victor onto the rainy mall. They almost called her Sir, she was so manly in her self-regard. And she herself no longer had the need to smile from 9.00 to 5.00, or be polite, or defer to the men in suits and uniforms. Promotion had redeemed her from the curse of growing old. She had an office of her own, an office staff, the power of command. She’d use that power to the full. She’d not be loose at work like Rook had been, his feet and cake crumbs on his desk. She’d not emulate his lack of gravitas, his office improprieties, his open door. She’d not be Rook, or Mrs Rook. She would, though, welcome just one chance to see the man again, to let him know how disengaged she had become from him. To let him see – and rue – her power and her sleekness and her pride. She’d have him on his knees. He’d be like Victor, like a child.
The old man now was in the car. His door was closed. His face was purposeless and spoiled. He needed her like no man ever had, that is to say he had no need for love or touch. Where should she sit? Beside the chauffeur? With the boss? The doormen knew the protocol. They opened up the front and near-side door so that she could sit in the servant’s seat, where Rook had sat on those rare occasions when he’d shared a car with Victor. But Anna walked round to the driving side, emboldened by her freshly minted resolution for New Year. The chauffeur was too slow to open up the far rear door. She opened it herself and sat down on the same bench seat as Victor, one upholstered metre between their hips. He would not try to hold her hand. He would not try to touch her knees, or even look at them, despite their newly nobled shape, now that they sat as colleagues side by side. She tapped the glass behind the chauffeur’s cap and they set off into the city. When they cleared the mall she spoke for Victor into the intercom. ‘We’re going to the Soap Market,’ she said. ‘We’ll need an umbrella when we’re there.’ Then no one spoke. The chauffeur hid behind his cap, disturbed by the breach of protocol which placed a woman at the boss’s side. The old man closed his eyes and mouth, in disapproval, surely. The chauffeur could not see him breathe or move.
Anna, sitting with her fingers laced across her lap, sucked on a granny mint to make her breath and stomach sweet and anodyne. What would she do if she saw Rook where Rook was bound to be, amongst the soapies in the marketplace? She let herself imagine he was standing there, among the idlers on the cobblestones, with nothing else to do but watch the limousine, with Victor getting out, and Anna hovering behind. She’d look him in the eye if he was there, if she had pluck enough to lift her head and face the crowd. She’d have no need or time to smile. It was too windy and too wet to smile. She closed her eyes and mouth to match the old man at her side. The windscreen wipers sounded like an oxygen machine, pumping air into their lungs. If it stops raining we will die, she thought. Her heartbeat matched the wipers. It pulsed beneath the astrakhan. The black and courtly limousine advanced through the rain. There was no haste. They were like mourners in a hearse, composed, embarrassed, fearful for themselves, grey-eyed, but from weariness not grief.
When Victor’s chauffeur took the car through the Woodgate district to the edge of what had been the Soap M
arket, all appeared quite well. Much of the debris had been removed, and nearly all the cars that had been parked were claimed and driven off. Already work had begun on the wooden palisade that would enclose the empty oval while Arcadia was being built, and city labourers were taking down the hazardous charred remains of bars and trees. For the first time for six hundred years the fountains and the gargoyles of the ancient washing place were unattended. They were as disused by the city now as pyramids. Soon the trenchers and the labourers would come to harvest cobblestones and box them up like sugar beets for their deployment in Arcadia.
The police had cleared the site of everyone but the workmen and themselves. Detectives had set up a caravan at the market edge to interview those witnesses who volunteered to speak. They looked through the rubbish for evidence of organized disruption and put the charred and broken bottle-bombs in plastic bags together with examples of the fruit and cobblestones that had been thrown. They interviewed the last few young men who came to claim their cars. A fixed-frame canvas shed had been erected above the spot where Rook had died, but no one stood on guard. Inside, placed on the cobblestones, were six or seven lighted candles and a spray of greenhouse blooms, making the inside of the shed a warm and makeshift corpseless shrine. Who’d put the candles there no one was sure. But they’d been left to burn themselves into the ground. Two uniformed policemen controlled all access to the market site. They hesitated when they saw the black Panache, but were persuaded by the chauffeur’s cap and the imperious flashing of the limousine’s front lamps to lift the makeshift barrier. Victor and Anna were driven a further twenty metres. Then they stopped. The chauffeur’s umbrella matched the car and Anna’s coat. Now Victor and his female aide were thigh to thigh beneath the chauffeur’s outstretched arm. She took her boss’s elbow to help him walk. He was no longer used to cobblestones or hazards such as broken glass, wet leaf mush, splintered wood. She let him lead the way, but he was lost. There were no markers in this empty space for him to recognize. Where had the women sat with their shallots? Where had he stood with eggs? Where was the thoroughfare of stalls which seemed, by day, as ancient and as permanent as a Roman road? Who’d start a fire, who’d die, to save a place so empty and so dull?