Arcadia (21 page)

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?’

‘Ready 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.

W
HAT 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 freed 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.

Now he was ready to go out. He searched his wardrobe and he found the black leather jacket he’d once worn. The skin was scuffed and greying and the cuffs had split, but still it fitted,
and the zip was good. The leather smelt a little of the marketplace, and the lining was stained beneath the arms and in the middle of the back from working sweat. He did not have the working
trousers or the shirt to match – but he had dark and casual office clothes, and these he wore. He felt transformed. The jacket set him free. He had resurrected the man he’d been a dozen
years before. He transferred his keys and wallet, his nebulizer, the Joseph ‘nife’ from his suit into the zipped pockets of the leather jacket. He tidied the apartment, read the notes
that Anna had left, put her snapshot on the mantelshelf, and went into the town.

It was just a week since Victor’s birthday lunch, a week in which he’d rediscovered love, and lost his job, and soared and plummeted, one hundred metres, twenty-seven floors, onto
the street. All in all he felt winded and invigorated, like some shaken boy who’s just stepped safely from a switchback ride. He set off for the Soap Market. The sooner he was seen amongst
the stalls and soapies the better for his shaken self-esteem.

He walked between the banks of vegetables and fruit without a greeting or a glance. He was not snubbed. He was not recognized, at first. His leather coat was a disguise. It made his walk more
bearlike, from the shoulders, hands in jacket pockets, collar up. The suited Rook had seemed a little taller, more loose-limbed, and walking from the hip. But once he sat amongst the traders at a
bar in the Soap Garden, his face was known. He heard the whispers, and caught the glances and the nods. The waiter was his usual pleasant self, but waiters do not count. The market workers –
the porters and the salesgirls – did not speak to him, but then they never had. He’d been too grand. He’d been the old man’s nuncio, his representative on Earth.

Rook did his best to seem relaxed. But he was not relaxed enough to hold his cup steady with one hand. He shook so badly that the sugar for his coffee trembled in the spoon. He wished he had a
newspaper with which to shield himself. He wished that he could hide behind a cigarette without the smoke occasioning a fireball in his chest. Part of him feared that he would see one of the
birthday guests, some arthritic merchant on a stick, and feel obliged, compelled, to make a scene. But mostly he feared what the market men might do to him now that he was stripped of office. He
feared their jeers, their ironies, the jabs and punches they might give to him, and with good cause. Those modest tithes, those sweeteners, which Rook had levied every quarter and for which
he’d guaranteed clean access to the boss’s ear, were now revealed as money down the pan. Rook was further now from Victor’s ear than any soapie in the market. He was the only one
whose contact with the boss was limited to ‘the mediation of lawyers’.

Mid-morning, though, is not the time for arguments or scenes. The market was too busy and the traders too immersed in chalking prices for the day to spend much time on Rook. It was no secret,
naturally, that he had lost his job – but no one there was certain why. The five old men were keeping quiet. Old men have enemies enough, and take more pleasure out of secrecy – their
greenhouse secret with the boss – than spreading tales amongst the market hoi polloi. So Rook was noted, but not judged. The men who never cared for Rook, did not abhor him more or less
because – or so the rumour was – he’d lost his job. Why would they like him any less because he was dismissed? The traders did not know the social protocol. His misfortune was,
perhaps, good news for them. It might save them money. Who could tell? But then, there’d be new Rooks, and tougher ones whose pitch fees were less modest. They’d rather stick with their
asthmatic. He was not loved but he was witty in his way and had the common touch. He had, at least, sprung from the marketplace. He’d robbed them, true, but done no lasting harm. Such is the
vagrant logic of the street that Rook was almost popular with his old foes, just as a bully’s popular when he releases captives from his grip.