“When you rang…”
“I knew Dani.”
“That seems…”
“Yes?”
“Stupid thing to say to a stranger if you’re…”
“I figured we’re both…”
“In it?” Faris’s head turned a little to one side, the chip drooping between pinched fingers. “Shafted?” he added, running through options, tasting the ideas. “Up shit creek?”
“Yes.”
“How’d you get my number?”
“Found Dani’s phone. Her other phone—the one they were looking for the night she died.”
A shrug. Faris supposed someone had to find it; there are worse people than Theo. “Why’d you get involved?”
Theo hesitated, eyes drifting up as he ordered his thoughts. “Dani Cumali has a daughter. She hasn’t… hadn’t… seen her for fourteen years. She tried to blackmail me into helping. Blackmailed her boss. He got her work at the Ministry of Civic Responsibility. She stole documents. She’d get into the lift with three bags of trash and leave with only two. In her last message to me she claimed to have found something big—‘They broke the world,’ she said. I think she was looking for something to leverage against her daughter’s freedom, more blackmail. Her boss, he said this thing—‘there’s a market for everything.’ Lucy—that’s her kid—she’s on the patty line. Still a juvenile, it’s all just writing reviews, nothing… but you get stuck—these things—you get stuck and before you know it…”
Whoomp whoomp whoomp went the music and the security guards looked the other way and money switched hands and no one cared, and none of it mattered.
Theo looked at the damp bowl of sagging chips in front of Faris, and felt suddenly hungry. “Whatever Dani found in the Ministry killed her. They sent a woman called Seph Atkins. Atkins is being defended by Faircloud Associates. Faircloud Associates works for the Company, and the Company is in part run by a man called Simon Fardell. Simon Fardell is the oldest friend of Philip Arnslade, minister of fiscal efficiency. They have… shared experiences. Dani, when she blackmailed her boss, made him send her to a place called Danesmoor. Danesmoor is the ancestral home of Philip Arnslade. I’m not sure what this means yet, I’m not sure what she found, and I’m not sure I want to find out, given that they killed her for it. But I am sure that if they killed once, they’ll kill again. Before she died, Dani threw a mobile phone away—this phone.”
He laid it on the table, an ugly brick in a world of neon.
“There were three numbers on the phone. One of those is yours, one of them is mine. I thought that maybe this might create a shared need to communicate.”
He stopped, head turning a little to one side. Faris’s lips were drawn to invisibility across his mouth, a paper cut where smile, scowl, anything should have been, as if he would swallow his own features whole. Behind them a waitress in a little white apron exclaimed in a bad Texan accent, “Oh hun, you’ll just love the special!”
Faris ate a chip, picked up another, moved it towards his mouth, stopped, put it back in the basket, turned the basket so that the longest edge aligned with the bottom edge of the table, spun his empty burger plate so that the largest smear of ketchup was at the top, picked up another chip, ate half of it, put the other half back in the basket, leaned back in his chair and for a while
had absolutely nothing to say for himself.
Theo waited.
“I was a journalist,” Faris announced, a tale told too many times, the meaning sucked away into only words. “I was done for libel. The indemnity was £329,560. Few years ago, government licenses the Company to collect taxes. It was part of mainstreaming the income process blah blah blah, that shit, business efficiency taking over from creaking public authorities. Deal was, Company pays the government a guaranteed cool four hundred billion every year, just like the budget says they should, and the Company gets to keep any profit above and beyond that. They’re not allowed to set the tax rates, not officially, but of course they’re allowed to choose how they exercise their power how they…
…so they set the rates, I mean, it’s not official but everyone knows that’s what’s happening because the Company are controlling the algorithms that do the maths and you can appeal if you’ve got the cash or time but who’s got that except the rich guys and the rich guys are getting really good rates, I mean rates that would…
…and the Company is netting maybe six fifty, seven hundred billion a year. That’s a two-hundred-and-fifty-billion profit and sure, there’s some objections, people who are, like ‘That’s our money they’re taking this is tax farming they’re squeezing us dry’ but who even listens to that stuff these days? And some bleeding-heart liberals start a petition and a few try to take the whole thing to court but it was the government who made this deal and you know what? That makes it law. That means no one did anything wrong.
Except Philip Arnslade, the minister of fiscal efficiency—he’s getting two million a year from the Company for ‘consultation services,’ and pays ground rent of a quid for a palace off Sicily, and that’s corruption, I mean, that’s proper, provable corruption not just mismanagement, cos you can’t arrest someone for being crap but you can arrest them for…
But the Ministry said I’d misunderstood the tendering process and was bringing them into disrepute, and their lawyers took it all the way to the appeals court, and I lost when I couldn’t pay my barrister. By then I was broke anyway. I got five years on the patty line, but because of my CV I was sponsored out by a copy-writing company, given four years six months proofreading washing-machine manuals. My parole finished two months ago, and they decided not to keep me on at full salary. Cheaper to pull people like me from the patty line instead.”
Theo sat silent, one elbow nudging a pool of beef fat that had solidified on the table to a translucent smear.
“My daughter’s paying for me at the moment. That’s how I get by. She works for the Company, does their marketing for the pharma side of things. I can’t get sponsorship for benefits; my record means I’m an unsound investment. They keep telling me to fill out the form again. That’s what I do, mostly. I fill out the forms. I also help some of the others fill out the forms on the sly, you’d get into trouble if anyone found out that… that’s how I knew Dani. She wanted all these forms done, trying to find her kid. No chance in hell they’d let her see her, but… she kept on trying. Gotta hand it to her. Waste of bloody time.”
“Was that it? Was that all she wanted?”
The chips are getting cold. Faris’s gaze is lost to some other place.
“If a Company man kills a stranger, he pays less than an ordinary citizen. He’s worth more to society than other people—no point penalising the successful for a lapse in judgement. Wouldn’t be efficient. So that’s it. That’s our world. Eat your fucking chips and deal with it, right?”
A defiant chip, defiantly consumed, if George Washington had eaten his fries like this, the War of Independence would have been over twice as fast.
“This isn’t new,” mused Theo. “Everyone knows how the system works, everyone knows that’s just… how things are. The Company makes a profit to keep things efficient, it’s better that business profits than… than…” Stopped himself, couldn’t even remember the words he was supposed to say.
“Yeah,” grunted Faris. “All of that crap.” Another chip. Then a thought, a flicker almost of something excited, alive. “You heard of the queen of the patties?”
“Yes—a little.”
“She’s got this enclave somewhere up north, a place for the ones who dodge parole to run to, somewhere even the Company can’t be buggered to go, no point in it. The queen says this country is a slave state. That there aren’t any chains on our feet or beatings on our backs because there don’t need to be. Cos if you don’t play along with what the Company wants, you die. You die cos you can’t pay for the doctor to treat you. You die cos the police won’t come without insurance. Cos the fire brigade doesn’t cover your area, cos you can’t get a job, cos you can’t buy the food, cos the water stopped, cos there was no light at night and if that’s not slavery, if that’s not the world gone mad if that’s not…