Rook was not aware that Joseph had come or gone, or what he’d done to save his life. He felt the cold of New Year’s dawn and all the fires put out and no shirt or jacket on. He shivered when he became conscious. He was startled by the noise and by his semi-nakedness. He almost stood, and as he almost stood two URCU saw his lack of clothes. He was the one without the shirt. They pulled Rook up. They hit his legs and then his back with swinging blows. They put the handle of their batons in his ribs and pressed. They kicked him in the face and testicles, their boots scooping water from the ground and skidding on Rook’s skin. They were well trained. It was a rule that policemen who were obliged to assault a suspect on the street would not arrest the man, but leave him to be found by other officers. The two that roughed up Rook were wise enough to roll him on the ground and disappear.
Joseph, split in two, Rook’s wallet on his heart, found a car at last of which the window could be forced. It took him half a minute to get in. Another half to squeeze into the boot. He was appalled at being trapped like that, but hoped that he was safe. Indeed he was. No one was checking boots, while there were people still free in the marketplace. Joseph curled up in the darkness. Once he felt the car rock violently as someone outside was thrown against the frame. He heard one cry. But mostly he heard nothing, except the pulse inside his ears, his nervous breath. He did not hear, six cars away, the cough and splash as Rook rolled over for his last time, his dead face half-submerged on market cobblestones.
10
WHEN JOSEPH HEARD the ambulance siren, he re-emerged from the warren of the boot. He squeezed into the rear of the car, and peered out on semi-darkness. Dawn was a narrow silver bar across the windscreen. Already it had reached the edge of town and was advancing with the first trams along the boulevards. The upper storeys of Big Vic could not be seen. Low cloud enclosed them. New Year’s Day would be a rainy one.
The few officials and the policemen that remained in the Soap Market had their backs to Joseph. They did not see or hear him open the passenger door and step out onto cobblestones. A pulse of icy light was flung out by the ambulance like an irrigation sprinkler watering a field. Joseph ducked each time the beam swept by, as if he feared a drenching in the light. Joseph thanked St Joseph, the Patron of the Holy Corpse, the Undertaker of Our Lord, that he was well enough to leave the marketplace by foot and not by ambulance. He’d made it through to the new year without the beating he deserved. His only bruise was in the muscles of his shoulder, from throwing too much fruit.
There’d been a thousand injuries between the midnight and the dawn, though some of those had been administered at police HQ, in the privacy of cells. But there had only been one death. The corpse had not been found until the market site was cleared of drunks and revolutionaries. They might as well pump air into a brick as try the kiss of life. Rook would have blushed at being caught like this, flat on his back in water, naked from the waist up, his chest a splintered prow, his stomach just a touch too plump for one so slight and vain. The market boy had died the market death, his back on cobbles, green from Grief, discarded like a bruised courgette, and looking now as dull and common as the stones which were his mortuary. Here was a most unlikely Martyr for the Cause — though, as time would prove, his name was good for martyrdom. Not easy to forget. We all remember Rook.
Joseph recognized the face, but did not wait to see the body wrapped inside the body bag. He stole a broom which had been left leaning on the side panels of an URCU truck. He soon became just one of dawn’s sweepers, brushing up the missile debris for little pay and less respect. He was invisible. He swept his way across the cobblestones, past URCU men, reporters from the papers, gawpers on their way to work, young men returned to claim (they hoped) their unburned cars. He swept towards the market edge, towards the exit where the banana vans had been but were no more. He joined the early morning New Year crowd, his severed clothes hardly noticed by the late-for-work, the late-to-bed. He made his way through the squints and alleys of the Woodgate district, uncertain whether he was rich or poor. Perhaps Rook’s death had been a cunning way to keep the two halves of the banknotes forever separate, as disunited as the clothes upon his back.
Joseph found a place to stop at last, a graveyard in a cul-de-sac with high tombstones and cypresses, and two plane trees, the perfect citizens surrounded by the sloughed-off litter of their toxic bark. There were no spectators, except for pigeons, and a pack of feral dogs. He pulled Rook’s wallet from Rook’s jacket and went through the spoils. He laid them out before him on cold stone. A photograph of Anna, inscribed ‘Let’s meet and talk’. A set of keys. The ten odd halves of the ten one-thousand notes. An ID card with a photograph of Rook, a grainy square in grey and black, expressionless, with — below — Rook’s home address, his status ‘Single Male’, and his signature in neat green ink. A folded advert from a catalogue, the model on the stool, the barmaid in his grasp, the suit, the unattended glass. Five untorn fifty notes. A contraceptive. Credit cards. A throat spray of some kind.
Joseph only kept the money and the keys. He lifted up a slab of stone and put the empty wallet and the rest beneath. If ever he had need for contraceptives or had a customer for stolen credit cards then he could find this stone again. He memorized the mossy name upon the stone, but the feral dogs would snout the wallet out as soon as he was gone. Already he had memorized the address on Rook’s ID card, and set off looking for a bed and an inheritance.
He’d seen that Rook was ‘Status: Single Male’ and knew there was a chance that Rook’s home would be undefended. What better way to spend the dawn on New Year’s Day than use the dead man’s keys, and find some shelter, warmth, some food, some sleep between four walls?
He found a parcel of deliveries in the entrance hall of Rook’s apartment block. He tucked the parcel under his arm and took his time upon the stairs. What could be more normal at that time of day than deliveries? If anybody met him on the stairs they’d take him for an errand boy, a scruffy, docile errand boy of the usual kind. He met no one. He found Rook’s door and tried the keys. Two locks. Two sets of teeth unclenched. The locks obeyed the keys. He was inside. This was the dream he had when he was loading produce onto trains: the day would come when he came home to his apartment in a city. He closed the door on everything. He’d never known such perfect carpentry or such a calm as this. He went from room to room. He opened every cupboard, every drawer. He looked inside the fridge. He did not touch, or eat, or steal. That could wait. He knew what he was searching for. A roll of clear tape. He found it in a wicker basket with some scissors. He sat down at the table and, breathing through his nose for better concentration, made for himself, from twenty half-notes — his and Rook’s — a fortune and a future.
The police would say they found him looting Rook’s apartment. Already he had stolen, it would seem, a parcel of antique books intended for the collector in the attic rooms. They said that every drawer and cupboard had been opened and all Rook’s valuables had gone. They said he planned to strip the place, that his accomplices would come with vans to take the furniture, to make off with the fridge and television set, the knick-knacks that were Rook. Who knows? Joseph was not a saint, though in a way he’d been a hero of a kind, for half a night at least.