‘Anna. Please,’ he said, and shook his head. ‘No fuss.’ That’s all he had the heart to say. Already he was letting work and Anna go. He only asked for dignified retreat. He almost packed a bag and just walked out. But Anna would not understand. She stood her ground.
‘Do something now,’ she said.
Her pluck — and innocence — put Rook to shame.
‘All right. I’ll make him talk to me.’ He thought there might be just a chance of changing Victor’s mind. He’d find a way of justifying the unofficial payments he’d received. The payments were in Victor’s interest, after all. They kept the traders quiet. They guaranteed Rook’s role as intermediary between both camps. ‘I had to take their money,’ he could say. ‘They wouldn’t trust a man who wasn’t in their pay.’
He knocked on Victor’s office door again. He tried to call him on the apartment’s internal phone, but the day-valet merely repeated that his boss could ‘take no calls until the afternoon’. The truth was that Victor was hiding in the greenhouse on the roof, exterminating aphids once again and primping plants and looking out through glass and rain and wind on distant neighbourhoods. What was the point in facing Rook himself, when he could deputize dismissals, and Rook could just evaporate before the afternoon and leave no trace?
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.
2
WHAT 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.