‘Or cigarettes?’
Rook shook his head. Joseph put his hand out, palm upturned. ‘You woke me. You’d better watch it, mister. I know you now. You’ll pay for what you’ve done … Come on, give me some money for some food.’
‘Go to hell.’
‘Piss off yourself!’
Rook was nervous of the threat that Joseph posed. He knew how strong the young man was. He’d seen him tossing onion sacks as if an onion grew fat and ripe on helium. He should have turned and walked away. Or run. But Joseph’s words, ‘You’d better watch it, mister. You’ll pay for what you’ve done!’ convinced him that the two of them should now negotiate for peace.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I only meant to give you back the knife.’ He pressed the blade into the handle and gave it to Joseph. ‘Hold on!’ He found a crumpled nest of notes inside his jacket pocket. He pulled them out one by one, looking for a fifty. But the first ten were thousands, his winnings from the dice. He smoothed them out and held them in his left hand. He found the fifty, let it loop and float onto the cobblestones at Joseph’s feet, and then spread out the ten one-thousand notes. He’d put them to good use.
‘How’d you like to earn a wad like this?’
‘For doing what?’ Joseph was certain now that Rook was looking for a man to share his bed. He’d been approached before, but not for so much cash. For money of that kind he’d take a chance. To make a living he would do ‘bad things’ — his simple phrase for kicking down a door or kicking in a rib or letting some dull man pay for his touch. Whatever Rook was offering, there was bound to be a way of cheating on the deal. Ten thousand? What might that buy? What might a man like Rook expect for such a fee?
Rook himself had not yet formulated what he wanted Joseph for. But he was market-wise. He knew that Joseph could be bought, by Victor, Con, by anyone. Rook knew he had to purchase this On the Town before he went elsewhere. Here was a bargain too tough and useful to be missed. Buy in haste, use at leisure. He’d take his time dreaming up some useful task for this hireling to commit, something to damage Victor, Con, or anyone.
‘I’ll speak to you again, be sure of that,’ he said. ‘Do what I ask and this little bunch of notes is yours.’
Joseph was not pleased. ‘“If and when” don’t butter bread,’ he said, but for an instant he saw himself as the well-dressed model in the catalogue, his pockets stuffed with one-thousand notes. He would — with Rook’s fat fee — sit at the bar and hold the barmaid by the wrist. He would drink muscatino from midnight till midday. He held his hand out for the notes.
‘Just wait!’
‘I’m sick of waiting. Give me something now!’
Rook arranged the ten one-thousand notes so that they made a perfect sheaf. He folded them in half.
‘Give me the knife,’ he said.
The knife had danced between the pair of them so often now that one more time was neither here nor there. Joseph returned the knife. The blade was sprung. Rook slipped the knife inside the notes and cut along the fold.
‘Money is the peacemaker!’ He mimicked Victor perfectly. ‘One half for you. One half for me.’ He put one set of severed half-notes in his pocket, and gave the matching set to Joseph, wrapped round his knife. ‘So now you know I’m serious.’
‘I can’t spend this.’
‘Nor can I!’
‘So what’s the point?’
‘The point, dear Joseph, is that we will have to talk again. As friends. I’ve got a job for you. Don’t ask me what. But when that job is done, I’ll add my half to yours.’
3
VICTOR WAS flattered by the courting of the architects, their optimism. He liked the language that they used; the ease with which they sang of pits and peaks and galleries and foliage travertines and moduled trading canyons, as if the market buildings which they had conceived were ancient caves, or forests, mountains, landscape parks, as if they were importing countryside to colonize the city’s heart.
In November — five months after Rook’s dismissal — building plans which were jostling for the privilege of standing at the ancient market site were presented to Victor in his offices by men who looked like poets or composers dressed as restaurateurs. Expensive suntans, casual suits, the glistening, barracuda eyes of those who live by their imaginations and their wits. Not one contested that the existing market was diseased. Their diagnoses matched. They were agreed on its ill-health, its pathology, what treatment it should get, what surgery. The old Soap Market was a tumour at the city’s heart and had to be removed. They prescribed the chemotherapy of the bulldozer, the radiation of the great iron ball. ‘Reduce the little that is there to rubble. And rebuild.’
These architects were far too grand for schools and houses. They boasted of the museums, marinas, hotels, and concert auditoria, the bank HQs, the city halls, the celebrated malls, that they had built elsewhere in the city and elsewhere in the world. In Tokyo. And Amsterdam. And Barcelona. And Zagreb. In tedious, smaller towns which they had placed upon the map by squeezing in a white-walled university where once there’d only been some fields, some woods, a rundown neighbourhood.
Great swathes of greased paper with lightly pencilled plans and elevations spread across Victor’s desk, and draped his chairs. Scale models, computergrams, and video enhancements presented new Soap Markets all of which the architects espoused like stage evangelists. Axonometrics 3-D lifted up the draughtsmen’s lines and made them real.
Victor had no eye for shape or form. He assessed the buildings by the words that were used for their promotion. He’d heard it said — and liked the phrase, despite its false extravagance — that architecture was frozen, geometric music. He judged the tone and rhythm of the plans by how the architects could sing their wares, what bafflegab they used. Once he’d made his mind up, then he would allow the managers, the financial planners, the development engineers, the accountants in his pay to take command.
Anna made arrangements for the eleven men and one woman to visit Victor in his office suite. She met each of them at the entrance from the mall and during the journey through the twenty-seven floors she gave them strict instructions that they should stay no longer than forty minutes and that they should not be ‘overtechnical’.
‘Victor is eighty,’ she explained. ‘He’s not patient. His hearing isn’t good.’
One architect — the first to audition — said his building had the swagger which was fitting for a marketplace. A forum for the sale of food, after all, deserved a confident demeanour. No need to skulk like banks or barracks do. No need for bashfulness. A market ‘hall’ could be ambitious, energetic, optimistic, noisy, rash, hi-tech. And here his presentation sketch showed all the anorexic shamelessness of modernism on a spree, the veins, the innards and the entrails, the ducts and pipes, clinging thinly to the building’s black glass skin.
Too varicose,’ was Victor’s judgement, though he, or more exactly Anna, expressed this view more blandly in a letter of regret which was delivered to the architect that same afternoon.
Others presented plans in the postmodern cocktail style so favoured by hoteliers and out-of-city shopping magnates: a dash of Empire grandeur, two shots of common sense, a slug of metal rhetoric, all sweetened and made palatable by twists of pastel ornament.
The woman architect — from the practice which designed the Wall Memorial in Berlin — was a no-nonsense pragmatist. She had no time for curves. Her inspirations were tombstones, bookends, freight containers, washing-powder packets, the square black holy Kaaba at the heart of Mecca, the Pentagon, matchstick boxes, wooden packing cases, dice. She most admired the tall, straight democratic canyons of Manhattan. She wished to put up on the market site ‘a bold and simple slab, free of ornamental flippancy, in which the dogma and perfection of the rectilinear design confronts and challenges the inevitable disorder of the marketplace — and, incidentally, doesn’t jeopardize your profit margins’.