Those who’d been on good terms with Rook and considered the pitch payments to be bribes initiated by themselves, felt just as proprietorial now about their ‘man at Victor’s ear’, despite the fact that their man had been sacked. Indeed, they even felt a little guilty that their market cunning might have been the cause of Rook’s dismissal. They felt a little fearful, too. What might the old man do? They judged it best to wait and see. But there were one or two — the younger ones, the ones who’d had less coffee and more shot — who went across to Rook. They shook his trembling hand. ‘A bad business,’ they said, inviting Rook to reveal exactly what had occurred with Victor. And then to end the silence, ‘Let us know if you need any help.’ Or they put a shot down on the table and invited Rook to stun his bad luck with a little drink.
So Rook still had a welcome in the marketplace, somewhere to pass his time while he decided how to spend his life. He came each morning, exchanged a repertoire of gestures with Cellophane Man, who stood as usual at the market edge directing people, trolleys, vans, and sat amongst his allies there. If they enquired, ‘Come on, what did you do to get the push?’, he told no lies. But neither did he tell the truth. He was good at keeping quiet and hinting with his mouth and eyes that he was innocent of blame. Within a few days the market men behaved as if he’d never been their go-between, or in their pay, or they in his, and just enjoyed his dry sarcasm and his cawing, nasal laugh when he told stories of the boss amongst his cats and insects on the 28th. Market memories are short so long as debts are settled fast. A lasting grudge is one that’s waiting to be cashed.
Rook wandered through the alleys and the lanes of vegetables and fruit with fresh eyes now. He need not be as watchful as before, noting prices, faces, infringements of the market code. He need not be prepared to take pitch payments, surreptitiously, or listen to complaints about the price and quality of olives or pears. If he pushed through the crowds to the peaks and canyons of a citrus stall, no fruiterer would simply click his tongue and shake his head to signify ‘No need to pay!’ He was the public now and he was ruled, like anybody else, by the market creeds which one trader — tired of scrumpers or being asked for credit — had chalked up on his stalclass="underline" ‘No Loot, No Fruit’, and ‘We take IOUs, but only in cash!’
Rook was content to be a simple shopper, thumbing, like all the other shoppers there, but with more blatant expertise, the skins of fruit to check their readiness. Or plucking one leaf from pineapple tufts and judging by its reticence the softness of the core. Or testing whether pod-beans would snap or bend between his fingers. Or lifting melons to his nose and knowing, from the smell, the reasty from the ripe. Or scratching new potatoes with his nails to see how well the blistered skins would lift. He knew the trick of listening to cabbages: the hearty ones were silent in the ear. He understood the colours of the carrot, and how the reddest roots were soapiest and only good for stews. You could not confuse him with a waxy pear, or with mushrooms ‘dirtied’ with a spray. A butcher might make a fool of Rook with some false cut, some trick with bone or fat, but no one in the Soap Market had greater, wider skill with fruits and roots and leaves.
Why waste such expertise? Why couldn’t he return from whence he’d come — the smart son of a marketeer — and become a marketeer himself, a soapie for the second time? Because of Victor? Because he was a snob, who having laboured at a desk was not prepared to rise at five to bend and lift and sell? Because he was too old to mend his ways? He was not rejuvenated by the thought of merchant Rook, his thin and greying head peering from behind a gleaming splash of fruit, his fortune measured out in paper bags. But neither was he much seduced by the alternative — a Rook with nothing much to do except to sit and age and spend. If only he could find the heart — and shamelessness — to lift a pen, a telephone, and answer Anna’s calls to him, then, maybe, having nothing much to do but spend would seem less mournful.
Rook hoped to meet her on the street, by chance. He was alert for her, for any word of her. Anna’s was the only face, he thought, from which he could get pleasure. For sure, he did not hope to see his mugger once again. The boy — whose ’nife’ he still possessed — had no importance in his life. Yet, on the morning of Rook’s tenth visit to the market bar, he encountered Joseph for the second time. The youth was barrowing red sacks of onions, three at a time, from an open truck which was parked amongst the vans and cars at the market edge. Rook was not pleased to see these two adversaries of his in such a partnership, with Joseph working for the man who’d always treated Rook with cold disdain. He was perplexed at first. He could not think what chance, what scheme, what machination, had brought these two together. But his confusion could not last because the moment that he focused on the strangeness of it all, he realized the truth. Rook did not need to draw himself a map. The mugging and the sacking of two weeks before now made full sense. Details that had escaped him returned in trusses and in clusters. Rook remembered now how Con had shaken the sealed envelope of pitch money so tauntingly in his face, a challenge on his lips. Then, within two hours at the most, Joseph — armed with a photograph, a knife — had tried … tried what? Tried at Con’s behest to resecure the envelope. And having failed to resecure it with a knife, what had Con done? He’d made a call, or sent an unsigned note, that afternoon to Victor. And here was Joseph, still in Con’s employ. And here was Rook, disinherited, without a job to do. Those five blameless party guests! Those harmless, dry old men! Rook found it grimly comic that he’d dreamed of tracking down and wiping out such innocents. So now he knew who’d caused this chaos in his life. If he had half a chance he’d see to it that Con was sent the bill.
But, for the moment, it was Joseph on his mind, not Con. He’d beaten Joseph once before; he’d beat him yet again. So when a few days later Rook spotted him in the Soap Market, he determined they should speak. It was quite late and dark. It was that summer’s warmest night and the city had its sleeves rolled up and could not sleep. For once, Rook had outstayed the waiter’s welcome at the market bar. The Soap Garden was becoming his backyard. He and three other men had played domino dice until all the other empty chairs and tables had been stacked and the bar staff had changed into their own clothes.
The barman closed the shutters and rinsed the final glasses and left the four men in the midnight July gloom to finish off their game. Rook was the last to leave. He was not skilled at dice and he had chanced his stake on one hot throw. He’d won, against three lukewarm throws from his companions. They’d settled up in thousand notes, and Rook had ten of them, folded in the pocket of his leather coat, as he set off for home.
The sweep-jeeps and the men with hoses had been at work and what had been a dusty, waste-strewn space, cluttered with dismantled stalls and flattened produce boxes, was now as gleaming and as scrubbed as a spray-washed shingle beach — except that night-time beaches reflect the white lights of the sky, and smell of medicine, and perform a nocturne, made from water, wind, and stone. This washed place smelt more of soup. It honked the jazz of traffic horns and voices in the summer night. It was lit by the yellow, oblong constellations of distant windows in offices and rooms where no one had the energy, in such a heat as this, to pull the blinds or go to bed.