Anna tried to clear a path, but did not have the voice or strength to cut into the crowd. But when the press arrived a minute or so later, packed into Big Vic’s main lifts, the crowd was soon pushed back and Victor was identified by cameramen and journalists who wished to winkle from him some idea of what he meant to say to the soapies on the far, wet side of the revolving doors.
Now Security did its work. It cleared a path. It made the staff give way. It made the pressmen step aside, and let Anna, Victor, and the breathless publicity manager whose face they knew, proceed towards their confrontation on the mall. Rank, age, and power, and the circling quarters of the automatic doors — too fast and intimate for more than one high-ranker at a time, or so the doorman judged — conspired to send the old man, first and singly, into the rain. The taxi captain knew his boss’s face. He’d been at Big Vic since the start. He hurried over with a black umbrella and followed Victor as he crossed from private territory into the public domain of the mall. There was no sudden wind. The sun did not break through to mark this unaccustomed meeting between the subjects and their distant king. The rain was democratic and it fell as dully everywhere — except that Victor was not wet. He had his canopy, and now a retinue of three — Anna, PR, and the umbrella man.
The stout commissionaire — the one who had escorted Rook out of Big Vic with such inflexible diplomacy — took it on himself to block the building’s exits. If the boss was on the mall, then it became Victor’s private place and no one could presume the right to go outside and join him there unless they had appointments to do so. The newspaper and the television cameramen had to press their lenses to the rain-splashed, tinted glass, while the soundmen and the scribes stood by helplessly or made the best of their imprisonment by interviewing Signor Busi.
Victor’s hearing suffered in the air and light. He was surrounded by the banners and the slogans of the marketeers, but he could not make sense of what they said. The news that he was Victor had somehow spread. It rippled every placard there. It made each demonstrator briefly vehement in preparation for the quiet they knew must come. They crowded him. They waved their placards and their leaflets — and, one or two, their fists. If only Victor could have separated sound from sound he would have understood the essence of their anger, that a man who lived in grandeur in an office penthouse on a business mall could, by decree, destroy their livelihoods, could build on them, could sweep them up and bin them out like worthless market waste.
‘Who speaks for you?’ he asked.
They pushed Con forward and made him stand square on to Victor so that the rain which ran off the black umbrella splashed at his feet.
‘You have been misinformed,’ Victor told the man. ‘You’ve been misled.’ He took the leaflet from the trader’s hand. ‘I don’t know how you got hold of this.’ He pointed at the illustration of Arcadia, taken from Busi’s confidential plans. ‘But had you been more patient you would have heard the good news that we have prepared for you. “Arcadia? Who pays?”, your leaflet asks.’ He put his finger to his chest. ‘I pay. Who else? Sixty million US dollars it will cost, but not one dollar of that comes from you. I take the risk. I tremble at the bills. And who will benefit from this? Who will have dry and permanent premises? Who will no longer need to put up and pack away the stalls each day? Who will no longer need to barrow in the produce from the market edge, but will have storage space and access for the lorries and dumper lifts to bring the produce to the stalls?’ He spread his arms to encompass everybody there. He promised them that he would not betray his ‘market friends’. He spoke of meetings where all the details would be hammered out and all their worries could be voiced. He suggested there should be liaison every week, and a trading parliament inside Arcadia on which the marketeers could have their representatives, their ministers.
Victor looked around to check there were no journalists, and then he spoke again the words that had worked so well earlier that day.
‘The market’s getting taller, that is all,’ he said. ‘I’m eighty years of age. I’ve seen it grow. When I was just a kid and your fathers and grandfathers were the traders there, they put their produce out on mats and sat like Buddhists on the cobblestones. When we brought in raised stalls, the sort you use and seem to love today, your fathers rioted. They said they were a modern curse. They said no one would buy from stalls. But market stalls have made you wealthier. And now we have Arcadia with all its beauty and its benefits. Everyone will want to buy their produce there. Not just the poor. The wealthy too. Why else would I agree to invest so much in you? To make us all as poor as our grandfathers were? My friends, have faith. Arcadia will make you rich.’
Now Con was saying something in reply. Though Victor could not make out all his words, he knew the mood had changed. The placards were gripped less resolutely. After all, the boss himself had come out. He’d treated them as colleagues. He’d promised them meetings, safeguards, parliaments. And what he said made sense. Why would he wish to damage market trade? Their business made him rich.
Victor made a show of shaking hands, and then he turned about with Anna and the umbrella in his wake and re-entered Big Vic. He would not talk to journalists. His publicity manager (now surrounded by the traders) was paid for that. He felt immensely tired and disconcerted. It was not age, but anger that such private plans as his should suffer from such scrutiny, from press, from public, from market traders, and that despite his eminence and wealth he had to barter in the open air as if he were a boy of seven dependent on a tray of eggs.
He shared the lift with Anna. He said, ‘Now I suppose you’d better see to it that meetings are arranged. We must be democrats.’ He held up Con’s leaflet for closer scrutiny. ‘Those plans were confidential. Someone’s leaked.’ He looked at Anna. Looked straight through her. ‘Find out who leaked,’ he said. ‘Give me the name, it doesn’t matter who, or what it costs. He gets the sack.’
For a moment Anna almost gave the boss a pair of names, her own and Busi’s. Would the old man reward her for her honesty? Would he send Busi home, Arcadia and all? She doubted it. But then, why should she take the blame? There was another name, a guilty name. Rook was the man, and he was safe from anything that Victor might do. You cannot sack a man when he is sacked. If she was ever cornered, then Rook would be the name to help her out, to keep her safe, to earn rewards. ‘I’ll ask around,’ she said.
Victor ordered sweetened tea and waited for it, standing at the window of his office suite. The mall was almost clear. A broken placard lifted slightly in the wind. A few of Con’s blue leaflets were plastered to the marble flagstones by the grease and rain. Unhurried soapies stood in a circle by the fountains, as unimpassioned in their manner as a crowd of football fans discussing their team’s uninspiring draw.
The evening paper ran the photograph of comic revolution on the streets, the policeman and the trader beating skins. The Burgher, on an inside page, led with some gossip about a writer and his wife. His seventh item had the heading, ‘Victor’s Glass Meringue’, and comprised one long-winded feeble joke — I must admit — at the expense of cakes and architects and millionaires. But the frontpage headline read ‘You have been misled’. The newspaper group for which the Burgher worked had financial interests in Arcadia and the trading wings of Victor’s companies. It did not wish the old man any harm.
8
THIS IS THE sorcery of cities. We do not chase down country roads for fame or wealth or liberty. Or romance, even. If we hanker for the fires and fevers of the world, we turn our backs on herds and hedgerows and seek out crowds. Who says — besides the planners and philosophers — that we don’t love crowds or relish contact in the street with strangers? We all grow rich on that if nothing else. Each brush, each bump, confirms the obvious, that where you find the mass of bees is where to look for honey.