Rook took the plastic branches, a roll of sticky tape, some string, into the office storeroom and began to fix them to the back-rest of an antique wooden chair. The moulded twig ends protruded through the spindles of the chair and made the decoration amateurish, and rushed. Rook tried to bite off lengths of string so that he could tie the twig ends back. But the string was just as tough and artificial as the greenery. He searched the shelves for scissors – and then remembered the knife he’d picked up in the tunnel, the flick-knife that the clumsy, birthmarked mugger in that too-large suit had dropped.
The too-large suit! The thought of it, ill-fitting, grimy, badly made, was all it took to solve the mystery of the second picture Rook had found amongst the debris in the pedestrian underpass. So that was what he’d recognized. Once more Rook found the piece of catalogue and scrutinized the faces and the bar. No other recognition, now. Except, bizarrely, for that suit. Rook smiled at On the Town, at its frugal price and style, at the implication that the early photograph of Rook himself had come not with pitch payments as he’d thought, but from the pockets of the young man’s suit. He’d been no chance encounter, then, but targeted. This lad had known, and God knows how, that he would carry cash in quantity between the old town and the new. But how the ageing photograph tied in with that he could not tell. Some opportunist soapie? Some maverick inside Big Vic? Some oddball with a pettifogging grudge? Who knows exactly who one’s foes might be?
Rook held the knife out, sprang the blade and set to work on cutting string and strapping back the plastic twigs. It was then he spotted the eleven worn letters scratched inexpertly on the handle, ‘JOSEPH’S NIFE’. He felt he’d like the chance to hand the flick-knife back, not to make amends for the kick he’d landed and the cheating fist of keys which had inflicted such a bloody face, but for the chance to find out who’d set this ‘Joseph’ up, and why. But for the moment he was glad to have the knife at hand, to put its blade to proper use for Victor and his chair. The decoration now was neater. Only leaves were on display. It looked as if the stained, antique wood of the chair, long dead, had undergone a resurrection of some kind, had put down roots and put out foliage, like the farmer’s magic chair of fairy tales. A little spit and polish was all it took to finish off the job. The spit took off the office dust. The polish – a Woodland-scented aerosol – put back the colour and the sheen. Rook’s handkerchief buffed up the waxen glimmer of the leaves.
He’d promised there’d be cats for Victor’s lunch. They were a part of Victor’s dream. The boss himself had three, to chase off pigeons from the roof. Rook had arranged that they should be brought down to the office suite. They’d settled in, two on the sofa, one underneath the desk. The tablecloth was white, exactly as required. The air-conditioning provided just sufficient breeze. In the visitors’ lobby the three musicians of the Band Accord were practising the country dances they would play for Victor. The fruit and cheeses were in place. The champagne was on ice. Rook went through to the inner room and Victor’s desk. He telephoned the chef. The perch were cooked and already steeped and cooling in the apple beer. The waitresses were standing by. The five old greengrocers were seated, subdued and patient, in the atrium below, waiting for the summons to the lift. Rook carried Victor’s birthday chair into the anteroom. He placed it with its back against a wall, so that the tiara of leaves faced into the room, and the disenchanting clutter of plastic, string and sticking tape could not be seen.
When the call came that lunch was ready to be served and that his friends – his guests – were already waiting in his suite, Victor was in his rooftop greenhouse on the 28th, examining the yellow aphids which congregated in a ruly crowd on the underleaves and along the infant stems, a congregation of busy wingless females plus a single ant which feasted on their honeyed excretions. Victor hesitated with his spray. He almost cared for insects more than plants – but not quite. These aphids were too common to be lovable. He showered them with toxic milk. The ant, he spared. How high, he wondered, would he have to build to rise beyond the pigeons and the flies, to reach above the aphids and the ants? Forty? Fifty storeys? Would there be oxygen enough up there for vegetables to thrive, for bees to come and pollinate his plants? He looked out through the lichened, mildewed glass, northwards, beyond the mall, the highway and the high-rise stores, towards the old town, and the suburbs, and the hills. Skyscrapers are the skyline optimists. They have the first light of the dawn, the final warmth of day. They get the flattened, cartographic view of towns, the neat geometry of north, south, east and west.
Victor knew his city like a hawk knows fields. The innards of the city were laid bare from the 28th floor, from what was once the Summit Restaurant of Big Vic but now, because the Summit diners could not stomach the swaying flexibility of skyscrapers in wind, was private garden. Innards are chaos and a mystery to any but the practised eye. In time, with study, Victor had got to know the spread-out entrails of the streets. He knew the bones and organs of the town – the university, the stadium, the graveyards, and the parks. He knew the Bunkers where poor, delinquent townies lived in blocks as packed as hives. He knew the yellows and the ochres of the public buildings, the grand works of the eighteenth-century trading potentates, the book-end buildings of the police headquarters where once the low-rise slums had been.
The routes and patterns were quite clear. No river – but a line of pylons and the railway halved the town, and link highways made a rhombus as a frame containing both these halves. The rhombus, in the midday summer heat, dangled from the city’s flight and swoop of motorways like a box which swings on ribbons. Beyond the box? The groundscraper mansions of the wealthy, crouching behind the thick masonry of security walls. The suburbs and their trees. Out-of-town commercial centres with fields of tarmac for the cars. A threatened cul-de-sac of countryside, earmarked as building land.
Victor liked the grey and green of boulevards the best, where lines of trees and central lawns plunged living splinters into the city’s skin. He liked the city humming to itself: the cheerful plumes of smoke which came from rubbish tips and factories and crematoriums, the distant drone of traffic, the cadences of wind.
The suburbs of the city from the 28th through Victor’s less than perfect eyes were patterned fabric, not quite alive, though shimmering like shot silk in greens and greys and browns. Nearer to the eye, the striped and garish awnings of the market, dignified only by the grey-green of the Soap Garden with its few two-storey trees, seemed capricious and unnatural, set at the centre of the old town’s patterned stratagems of startled roofs with their exclamatory chimney pots.
Victor did not like the marketplace. He did not like its awnings and disorder. He did not like its crowds, so dense that taxis could not pass. He disapproved of truck-back trading, of noise and inefficiency, of waste. He’d not been to the market now for seven years – too old, too frail, too numbed by life – but he could see it every day, a garish blockage at the centre of the city which spurned both logic and geometry. He’d put it right. Why not? What else could old men do? He’d stood inside his greenhouse now for fifteen minutes at the very least. Three times enough for him to earn the money for a month in Nice, a car, a year’s supply of clothes. His farms and markets, his offices and shares, his merchant capital crusading in a dozen countries, a hundred towns, earned fortunes by the minute. Thirty millions a month. Morocco’s health and education budget in a year. Enough to build a dream in bricks. Or stone. Or glass.
His accountants and advisers had been working on him for a year or more. The marketplace, they said, was out of date. It did not earn enough for such a central site. It was – compared to canneries and bottling plants – a poor outlet for fruit. There’d been hints from the city government that if he were to seek approval for a plan to renovate, or move the market elsewhere, say … then, there would be no fight. No fight, indeed! Victor was not so foolish as to think there’d be no fight if he were to tinker with the marketplace. He knew what soapies were, an awkward bunch, opposed to any change o
n principle. Well, that’s Rook’s job, he thought, to keep the soapies quiet. Yet Victor would not share his thoughts with Rook. He did not trust the man to hold his tongue. He did not trust his judgement or his loyalty. Rook was no businessman. What businessman would be so sociable? What businessman would settle for such a salary as Rook and for so long? What businessman could see the market operate and not be shocked at its trading nonchalance? But Rook, he loved the Soap Market. He loved its crowds. He’d said as much: ‘It’s paradise for me.’ And Victor thought, If that is paradise, that regimented, noxious crush, that milling battlefield of chores and errands and anonymity, then that’s the paradise of termites.
Old Victor took his stick and walked quite steadily between the pots of young peppers and tomatoes towards the lift. And lunch. He paused to rub out with his thumb the greenfly on the fessandra bushes which grew in sentinel pots at the roof-top door. He wiped the mush of bodies on the lintel, wheezed, coughed, and spat a practised splash of phlegm into the pot compost. It glistened for a moment like the gummy, silver residue of slugs. ‘Good luck,’ said Victor, to himself. That’s what all good farmers said when they spat in the soil. The luck was for the soil and for the spitter, too. The luck that Victor wished upon himself was this: that he would live into his nineties, long enough to make his lasting, monumental mark upon the city. His age was not an enemy. In fact, the day that he was eighty seemed the perfect moment to begin the spending of his millions. He had no family to leave it to. He had no debts. What should he do, then? Leave it all to charities, and tax, and undeserving skimmers-off like Rook? Or play the geriatric fool and plough the crop back in?
Eighty was the age for second childhoods, so they said. He’d never had his first. He’d never been a boy. He’d only been a baby and a man. So let’s commence the childhood now, he thought. Let’s be an old man full of impulse, prospects, hope. Let’s lay the bitterness aside and die at peace. He spat again – more to clear his lungs than to win more luck than he deserved – into the compost of the second pot.
6
VICTOR’S SIMPLE DREAM of celebrating eighty years in country style could not come true. The air inside Big Vic lacked buoyancy. It was heavy and inert. It was soup. Dioxides from the air-conditioning; monoxides from the heating system; ammonia and formaldehydes from cigarettes; ozone from photocopiers; stunning vapours from plastics, solvents, and fluorescent lights. What oxygen remained was drenched in dust and particles and microorganisms, mites and fibres from the carpeting, fleece from furniture, airborne amoebi from humidifying reservoirs, cellulose from paper waste, bugs, fungi, lice. The air weighed too much and passed too thickly through the nostrils and the mouths of the guests at Victor’s lunch. They coughed and sneezed and grew too hot. Their eyes began to water, their heads to ache, the rheumatism in their knuckles and their knees to grumble. Big Vic was sick. Contagious, too. It shared its sickness speedily with these old traders, these outdoor men, as they waited for their boss. They blamed their wheeziness, their migraines and their lethargy on nerves. They blamed their dry mouths on embarrassment at the prospect of what had been described on their printed invitation cards as ‘a relaxed birthday lunch for a few close friends’. Relaxed? Not one of them could be relaxed in Victor’s company unless there was a deal to close or market business to be done. Close friends? Were they the closest friends that Victor had? It made them smile, the very thought of it.
But then, who else could he have asked if not these five? He had no family, as far as anybody knew. There were no neighbours on the mall. This was not, after all, the countryside, where people lived so close at hand and in such sodality that they were free and glad to sit in overnight to ease the passage of a corpse, to be the wedding guest, to aid with births or weeping, to help an old man puff his eighty candles out.
‘We’re here,’ one ageing soapie remarked, ‘because there’s no one else.’
‘We’re here,’ another said, ‘because, these days, we have to do what Victor wants. We’re here because we haven’t got the choice.’
It was true they’d been more intimate, at one time, when Victor’s empire was as small as theirs and his unbroken dryness had been seen as irony, his silences as only childlike, not malign. But now he was the ageing emperor and they the courtiers, obsequious, fearful, ill at ease. Indeed, the whole lunch had been arranged as if this old man were a medieval ruler, addicted to the indulgences and flattery of everyone who crossed his path. He’d been met, as he stepped out of the bright lights of his lift into his office suite, by quiet applause. A respectful corridor was formed for him, so that he could make his progress to the table without the hindrance of his old colleagues. Three accordionists accompanied him across the room with the March from La Regina, the bellows of their instruments white and undulating like the young and toothy smiles of the staff who had gathered at the door.
The snuffling trader guests closed in when Victor passed and formed his retinue. A waiter or a waitress stood at every chair, except for Victor’s. Rook stood there, like the prince-in-waiting or the bastard son in some fairy tale, clapping both the music and the man. Even Victor felt emotions that, though they did not show, were strong enough to make him sway and lean more heavily upon his stick.
They begged, of course, that Victor should sit down, and then they clapped some more. He asked for water, but surely this was the perfect moment for champagne. Trays of it were brought, for Victor and his guests, for all the workers in the outer rooms. Even the accordionists were given glasses of champagne, though hardly had their nostrils fizzed with the first sip than they were called upon to play – and sing – the Birthday Polka. So Victor sat, the Vegetable King, surrounded by employees, waiters, clients, acquaintances, and cats, each one of them dragooned to serve him for the afternoon, as two stout ladies and their friend pumped rhapsodies of sound and celebration round the airless room. Those few who knew the words joined in. The others hummed or simply stood and grinned.
There was an instant, when one of the three cats jumped up amongst the cheeses and the fruits on the table and put its nose into the butter dish, when it seemed that village ways had made the journey into town. But Rook’s raised eyebrow and his nod brought that fantasy and the cat’s adventure to an end. A waiter, none too practised in the ways of cats, removed the creature from the butter, lifting it clear by its hind legs as if it were a rabbit destined for the pot.
The music ended. Rook nodded once again, and all the staff, following the details of his memo to them earlier that day, left Victor’s room and returned to their screens, their telephones, their desks, their manifests of trade in crops. The Band Accord played – largamente – at the far end of the room. The guests sat down to the silent whiteness of the tablecloth, while the waitresses served the coddled fish. Rook, bidding everybody Bon appetit, left Victor to hold court and joined Anna and her staff for flattened cakes – and more champagne – in the outer rooms. Later on, when Victor had been softened by the meal, he’d enter with the birthday chair.
The meal, in fact, was not as perfect as the cook had hoped. The perch, despite their freshness, were just a little high, a touch too bladdery. They had not travelled well. Only one guest, his palate bludgeoned by the pipe he smoked, dispatched his fish with any appetite. The rest concealed their daintiness by making much of savouring the olives and the bread, or filling up on cheese and fruit. They turned the perches’ bones and mottled skin to hide the flesh they could not eat.
It was not long, of course, before the meal was finished and the waitresses had cleared the dishes, leaving the old men, freed by champagne and liqueurs, to follow the informal agenda of the birthday lunch and reminisce. There’d be no gifts or speeches. That was Victor’s stated wish. His hearing was not good enough, despite his humming, temperamental hearing aid, for gifts and speeches. But stated wishes of that kind are only code for something else. No one demands the gift they want. Instead they say, ‘No need. No fuss. I’m happy just to see you here.’ So Victor’s friends had done thei
r best to translate the old man’s code. What gift would please a frail and childless millionaire about to embark upon his ninth decade? Something you cannot buy, of course. They’d had grim fun, these five ageing traders, identifying all those things that can’t be bought and which were lost as men got old. Good health. Good looks. Teeth, hair, and waists. The pleasures of the bed. Patience. Energy. A fertile place in someone’s living heart. Control of wind and bladder. All these were gone and way beyond the sway of credit cards. What then for Victor’s birthday gift? A place in history? Esteem? These must be earned, not bought.
‘A statue, then!’ The suggestion had been meant in jest. A statue to the vanity of age. But the idea was better than the jest, and soon had the old traders nodding at its aptness. They’d place a statue with a plaque in the Soap Garden. They’d raise the funds through subscription. All the traders in the marketplace would want to give. A good idea. A public gift to the city to mark the old man’s birthday. They’d had some drawings done by the woman who had cast a bronze statue (for the entrance of the new concert hall) of the city senators who died on lances in 1323. They liked her work. These senators were men in pain. Those lances were as straight and cruel as Death’s own finger. The hands which sought to stem the wounds or pull out the lances by their shafts were hands like mine or yours, except a little larger and in bronze. This was no abstract metaphor. She was no artist of the modern school. She’d talked to them in terms they understood: payments, contracts, completion dates, the price of bronze. Despite his spoken wishes, then, there was a shortish speech, a gift. The five old men presented Victor with the artist’s drawings. ‘They’re just ideas,’ they said. ‘You choose. We’ll see your statue is in place before you’re eighty-one.’ Victor did not make a speech. He nodded, that is all, and put the portfolio of drawings on his desk.