‘I don’t hold out much hope for you or this, unless you organize, unless you defend yourself. Yourselves,’ concluded Rook. He’d said enough. He pushed the file of papers towards Con.
‘Why me?’ asked Con. ‘Why not one of those old windsocks you hang out with in the bar?’
‘Because they’re windsocks, like you say. Limp when things are fine, and when it’s stormy full of air. But you, you’re not a windsock; you’re one of life’s malcontents. You’re not afraid of fights. You were the only one to give me any trouble over payments for your pitch. The only one from what? … from two hundred and eight stallholders. You’re one in two-o-eight. You, Con, are a natural troublemaker. And may you be in Heaven for an hour before the Devil knows you’re dead.’
‘All right, so I’m a malcontent. Then why not you? You’re the maestro amongst mischief-makers. You’ve got the plans. You know the innards of the man. God knows, you’ve got enough spare time to organize a global war. Why me?’
Rook spoke with passion now. He was not obliged to equivocate with abstracts. He spoke of his damaged reputation in the marketplace, how he might still be seen as Victor’s eyes and ears, as some double agent whose loyalties were as brief and unpredictable as shooting stars. Or else the word would be that the sacked factotum of the millionaire, disgruntled, venomous, was using marketeers to settle his own scores. The press and television would make a meal of that. They loved bad motives. They preferred an intrigue to the simple justice of a cause.
Or else no one would trust him. The older traders would not forget how Rook’s blinking leadership a dozen years before had been so readily tranquillized by Victor’s cheque. His appeasement had impoverished everyone but himself. Unless they were as forgetful and forgiving as chastised dogs they would suspect him.
‘Besides,’ said Rook, ‘I’ve got to stay out of sight. That architect has seen me with … the person from Big Vic who stole the plans for you. I can’t name names. The less you know of that the safer she, or he, will be. With luck they won’t trace the leak. But if Busi sees me with the plans he’ll make connections. He’s slow and foreign but he’s not stupid. Our routes to Victor and to Busi will be blocked and our informant will get sacked, at best. As things stand our sharpest weapon is surprise. What do you say?’
Con did not say a word. He gathered up the papers on his stall. He pushed them in his bag together with his newspaper, his change of shirt, his takings for the day. He’d sleep on it. Then, next morning, he would call a meeting of the marketeers and take directions, not from Rook but them.
He set to work dismantling his stall. He was dispirited by what he’d heard, though, normally, when work was at an end and home was near, he felt at his most contented. He wished that Victor’s man — he could not think of Rook in other terms — would take the hint and leave. He’d said his piece. He’d mixed his poison. He ought to disappear. But Rook seemed keen to stay. He was smiling, even; the same smile with which he’d burdened Con before they spoke.
Rook took the end of Con’s stall and helped him lift it from the trestles. He packed the produce boxes to one side. He unhooked the green and yellow awning and began — inexpertly, incorrectly — to fold the canvas. His hands and fingers were as soft and clean as soap. Con took the bulky canvas and unfolded it. He stowed it once again, so that it made an almost perfect square. He stood on it to clear the air. ‘I don’t need help,’ he said.
Rook shrugged. ‘We all need help.’
‘Get lost,’ said Con and, as he had his back to Rook, allowed himself the briefest smile, but one which packed his cheeks and creased his eyes and put his lips on show. It was true what Rook had said. He relished fights. He was the one in two-o-eight.
7
VICTOR AND Signor Busi were taking breakfast on the 28th when Con and his two hundred colleagues set out from the Soap Garden. Press cameramen and a television unit from the local studios were there to film the marketeers’ procession to Big Vic.
Rook, in his role of unacknowledged puppet-master, had made the phone calls to the press on his own initiative. Even though he was not fool enough to join the demonstrators, he watched them from his usual cafe table and was pleased. Two hundred out of two-o-eight was good, though not all the men and women there were stallholders. Some were porters, some were soapie wives and sons. Others represented the cafes and the bars that Victor wished to level to the ground. There were some customers, too — a dozen men and women from restaurants and small hotels in the Woodgate district who bought fresh produce from the Soap Market and liked the cheaper prices. They all feared change. Yet they believed that change could be confronted and repelled. Remember how the residents of Stephens Well, a small and wealthy suburb, had beaten back developers, or beaten them down at least. They’d forced the architects to lop three storeys from the top of their new office block because it cast a shadow on the suburb’s private park for forty minutes every day. That contravened the ancient Law of Light. Consider how the city’s conservation groups had stopped the widening of roads when widening would bring down trees. Trees of that age and size were protected by the Sylvan Ordinances of 1910. The marketplace had trees and light as well. So there was hope.
Rook drank his coffee, and peered at everyone who passed. His newspaper was spread out across his lap, unread and wet. It did not matter what the headlines were, or what the world was coming to, or that, if NASA got it right, an asteroid, one kilometre in width and travelling at 74,000 kilometres per hour, would ‘wing’ the Earth at noon, missing the Soap Market (also one kilometre in width) by an astronomically narrow half a million kilometres of space. His mind was focused on the detail of his life and not Eternity. Here — within a stone’s throw — he and the soapies were confronted by a danger they could witness, understand and quantify in human measurements. Here was a space they could protect.
Of course the market did not close. The marchers all had partners, deputies, or family to defend them from a trading loss. Each stall was open and the crowds were much the same as on any other day, at least on any other day that rained as hard as this. The demonstrators used their placards as screens against the rain. They pulled on hats. The television unit clothed its camera in a plastic hood. Someone had thought to bring a drum and he was ordered to the front by Con. They set off through the marketplace a trifle sheepishly, routed and regrouped by Cellophane. He’d never known such ordered crowds, such unity, before.
It’s difficult to concentrate on grievances when all around are friends. Con had a dozen leafleters. The Soap Fund — a reserve to pay for traders’ funerals or help out widows or support those injured at their work — had provided money for paper and printing. The leaflet showed the Busi sketch in ink and wash of Arcadia. Its black and Gothic banner was ‘Arcadia? Who pays?’ — and then it listed, with more regard for impact than for grammar, ‘You, the shopper … Me, the trader … Us, the citizens … Them that value history and tradition.’
When they had regrouped, at the Mathematical Park, to enter Tower Square and curve round with the traffic into Saints Row, the leafleters set to work, walking in the road to press their message on to drivers, dodging through the pavement crowds. The crowds, in fact, had slowed to let the traders through. They had no choice. Their umbrellas made it difficult to negotiate a passage through the squints and alleys of a throng. It only takes a drum to cause the gawpers in the street to stand and watch, or to make those drivers with a little time to spare twist at their steering wheels to see what the drum might signify. Once a few had stopped to look, then everybody slowed. The usual speeding lava of the streets had cooled. Then there were horns and tempers. Pedestrians, blocked on the pavements by the ones who stopped to watch, spilled out onto the street and tried to hurry on between the cars and vans and gusts of rain. A courier motorcyclist bumped up on the pavement, and tried to clear a passage for himself.