The bars and restaurants which fringed the Soap Garden had most to fear. There’d be no place for them in Victor’s car park. They’d been promised leases in Arcadia, and there was compensation to be paid, negotiated by lawyers from Big Vic. They’d have to look for premises elsewhere. But for two years? What landlord would let his premises for just two years? Theirs was a quandary impossible to solve — to move, to stay, to wait and see? Yet, as the new year drew closer, so the market mood transformed again. Business boomed at all the bars. The marketeers were thirsty all day long. They stayed at tables, stood at counters, found perches on the weathered stones around the medieval washing fountains. You’d think they had no work to do, and had no end of cash. You’d think they were in celebratory mood, the noise they made, the bottles that they drank. Theirs was a carnival of despair, the despair of those whose rafts draw closer to the weir and see both the tumbling dangers and the placid pools beyond. No one is fool enough to swim, yet none looks forward to the rocks.
Of course, they played the game of If. What if they moved as docilely as lambs and did their best at what they did the best, that is, sell fruit and vegetables to people in the town, no matter where? Would car-park profits be the same as those made in the Soap Market? By spring, would they be smirking at the fears they’d had and wishing, secretly, for Arcadian delays so they could stay and flourish in the car park? What if, what if they’d stood their ground and said, We stay!? These cobblestones are ours. We don’t want risks and challenges. We want the market as it is. What if that Rook, that braggart Rook, that told-you-so, had not been sacked and still held Victor’s ear on their behalf? Would he have stopped Arcadia, as he now claimed? What if old Victor had not lived to be so old?
Rook was Cassandra now, the unregarded prophet whose truth was trash. He and Anna were no longer friends. A woman of her age does not need ballast of his kind. She kept away, and when she thought of Rook she flushed with anger not with love. As he grew freer of Big Vic so she became more part of it, more loyal to work which now she thought of as ‘career’. She wished the boss to favour her and so, of course, ambition ruled her tongue.
‘I have a name for you,’ she told Victor. ‘Remember what you said? The name of who it was leaked Signor Busi’s plans. You said I should enquire. I’m certain it was Rook, the day that he was sacked. He went into your room, I’m sure. He used the photocopier … I have informants in the Soap Market. They say he boasts about the theft.’ She knew the timing made no sense, that Rook had gone before the plans arrived. But she guessed — and hoped — the old man’s memory was logically unsound. He’d not know one month from the next when both these months were over one year old.
Victor rewarded her with nods. He was content to believe the thief was Rook. He would not have to endure the awkwardness of sacking someone else.
‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘We harmed him more than he harmed us, I think.’ He was ready now to turn to other matters. But Anna knew that silence would not earn much from Victor. She had betrayed a one-time friend, at no cost to that friend, perhaps, but still, it was a real sin and sins should stir up wind: ‘Rook’s workload has transferred itself to me in this past year. I’ve worked here now for seven years. I wonder if …’
‘We’ll see,’ he said, but it was clear to him what he would do. Anna, when all was said and done, was already Victor’s eyes and ears. She did what Rook had done, except she knew the innards of Big Vic more closely than she knew the Soap Market. What could that matter now? He’d send a memorandum to her, giving her Rook’s job, Rook’s salary, Rook’s desk, Rook’s access to his suite, his apartment, his rooftop hermitage. He almost gave her the news right then, by word of mouth. But he resisted such intimacy, and asked that she present the cheques and documents to sign. He was not fond of gratitude. Gratitude was not the same as debt. You could not settle gratitude by cheque.
So Rook and Anna were lieutenants in opposing camps. So what? They did not meet again, or even glimpse each other on the street. Their streets were not the same. And Rook would soon be off the streets for good. There was bitterness between them, unexpressed. Rook saw that Anna’s name was where his name had been, on letters to the traders from Big Vic, on market documents.
‘Don’t trust that woman,’ he warned them, shocked at the ease with which he told such lies. ‘She’s loyal to no one but herself.’ She was the one, he said, who’d given Busi’s plans to Con. What should they make of that? The woman who had chanced her job by stealing documents was now promoted to Victor’s personal aide, the old man’s buffer and his fixer. In Rook’s version, everything was clear. It had all been a plot. ‘Don’t underestimate that man. He planned your demonstration on the mall. He had the press on hand. He had his speech prepared. No doubt that PR monkey laboured over it for weeks and rehearsed each word with Victor. “The market’s getting taller”? Oh, yes? And who is standing there out in the rain while Victor makes his pretty little speech and promises to make you rich? Sweet Anna, that is who. His parlourmaid. Who was it chaperoned old Busi at the Excelsior? Who was it, actually, who sacked me from my job? Who’s now ensconced in my old chair? Anna goes from strength to strength while you, poor fellows, pack your bags on New Year’s Eve for two years’ hard labour at the gulag car park in the frozen wastes of New Town.’
Rook sketched for them a future made from rotting unsold fruit, and yellow leaves, and roots gone soft and pliable. No one would last the two years ‘in the wilderness’, Rook said. That was Victor’s masterplan — to shed the soapies so that he could have Arcadia himself. But Rook was talking to nobody. His bitter punditry, his ironies, made people turn their backs, and seek out less bilious company. And company like that was not in short supply. By mid-December the marketplace was frolicsome. For once the centre of our city was in vogue. Perhaps it was not paradise, but then neither was it hell. The soapies knew of better places and much worse. Who’d volunteer, they wondered, to live, along with twenty million others, in Mexico City in ghettos so dirty and so packed that roaches fled to the countryside and pig ticks came to town? Or in Hong Kong, where, it was said, apartments were so small and public space so scarce that should you wish to twist around in bed at night you’d have to take the ferry and twist around in mainland China? Who’d spend a single night by choice in London? Half the population there could only sleep with pills. Who’d want to breathe the air of Tokyo — where the holy mountain of Fuji was no longer visible through the smog? Or drink the waters of Detroit, where the Rouge River was so thick with effluent that in infrared satellite pictures it showed up as solid ground? Who’d swap our modest traffic jams for those great constipations in LA? Compared to these great towns, the unromantic modesty of our city centre was cause for gratitude.
As December drew to its end so everybody in the city came to see the market for the final time. They brought their children. They blocked the streets with cars. They bought their token vegetables, their memento fruit, and wandered in between the stalls remarking how engaging marketplaces were. Cellophane directed them. They did what they were told. They treated him with more respect than he had ever known. They stood transfixed to watch him swing his arms or block the passage of a wayward van.