They had his picture in the first newspapers of the year, but not for burglary. Not yet. They had him semi-naked on page one, his arms raised up, an aubergine in hand. He was ‘The Face of Discontent’, ‘The Market Rioter’. He shared the page with Rook. The headline was ‘Man Dead in City Violence’, and underneath reporters reproduced what they’d been told by police, how ‘groups of Trotskyists and anarchists, trained by foreign radicals and at secret camps in Germany, have been identified as orchestrating the disturbances’. The dead man’s name had not been learnt officially, but on the street the word had spread that URCU men had bludgeoned him to death. He was an ‘activist’, an innocent, a man who simply wished to voice his fears. The police had hit a thousand heads the night before. They’d hit this one too hard.
No statements came from URCU. They were beyond the press. But police PR was doing what it could to give the corpse a name, to find the cause of death. They had their answers by midday. The marketplace had witnesses. A trader had seen a semi-naked Rook go down and not get up. He’d seen the URCU pair run off. The police had rioted, he said, ‘not us’. He made his statement to the radio and to a journalist from the sentimental left-wing press. So Rook became a martyr to the cause. The man who’d been top brass in Victor’s palace; the man who’d left Big Vic on principle because he feared for the Soap Market, the man who had fought off-stage against Arcadia, the man who was a trader’s son himself, this market boy, had been brought down — ‘assassinated’ was the word — by police clubs and boots. Coincidence? Wake up! They’d sought him out, the rabble-rousers said. They’d marked him down for death.
The chief of police had hardly slept. He and the mayor and two financiers had celebrated the new year long after their wives had been driven home. They’d smoked the butt and drunk the dregs. Their waking tempers were not sweet. Their throats were raw with talk and smoke and spicy food. The chief was nonplussed by the headlines in the morning paper. Where was the ‘sudden order’ he’d requested in the night? He’d sobered up to find a scandal on his hands. A middle-aged man was dead, and rumour on the run. How long before some busybody asked, ‘Where was the chief of police when his men were clubbing citizens to death?’ He took some comfort from hurried medical reports that the ‘victim’ (a mistake, he thought, to have used that word) had died from respiratory failure — ‘asthma, possibly’. But there were broken bones and bruises, too. His ribs had sixteen fractures. His testicles were torn. His back and legs were ribbed and grilled with bruises. His scalp was peeled by blows from boots. There were sole marks on his cheeks. His nose was pointing east-south-east. A vehicle had crushed the corpse’s knee. If this was asthma then this man’s lungs deserved a trial and punishment, and we all courted death each time we sneezed.
‘Come up with something better,’ the chief of police instructed his aide. He was in luck. The officers who went to Rook’s address to tell his next-of-kin, if he had next-of-kin, found Rook’s apartment violated, the keys left hanging in the lock. They found the ne’er-do-well asleep, his elbows on the table, his birthmark cushioned by the newly reunited notes. They recognized the face — the boy in all the photographs, the crazy anarchist from German insurrection camps. Within a day they had the evidence that they required. Two witnesses had seen this Joseph kneeling at Rook’s side. One swore he’d noticed blows rained down on Rook, slaps to the face, punches to the back ‘consistent with the bruises on the corpse’. The other said he’d seen a knife. He thought it was a knife. It gleamed. But, no, he could not be certain there was not something blunt as well. A cobblestone, perhaps. The ground was strewn with broken cobblestones. A broken cobblestone can tear a testicle and fracture sixteen ribs.
What chance had he? He was the one in the photographs, assaulting policemen with vegetables and fruit. Just the sort to pick on someone middle-class, respectable, like Rook. Perhaps at first he only sought to steal a jacket for disguise, but then — ever the feckless, opportunist thief, so everybody from his village claimed — he’d seen the wallet and he’d killed for it. The prosecution case was clear. Here were two men who’d seen it all. Here was the stolen jacket and the shirt, in halves, on Joseph’s back. Here was a ‘nife’. Here were the black field boots with which he’d bludgeoned Rook. The muddy imprint from them marked the victim’s face. Here was the accused man, fresh from the murder, in Rook’s home, a fortune in his hands. And his defence? Joseph only had deranged and farfetched explanations — the mugging in the underpass, the severed notes, the lighting of the fire — to show why he and Rook weren’t foes, but partners.
11
VICTOR, AS USUAL, had not gone early to his bed on New Year’s Eve. His night-time wanderings from room to room in Big Vic had distorted fitfully the perfect conifer of lights. Just short of midnight he had gone out on the roof to clear his lungs by jettisoning and melting phlegm in the potting compost of his plants. The country people always cleared their lungs on New Year’s eve: ‘Spit out bad debts,’ they used to say if they were merchants, or ‘Last year’s spit for next year’s spring,’ if they were working on the land. The merchants spat like pellet guns; the farmers dropped their phlegm onto the soil like bakers adding egg to cake.
Victor was not obliged to spit alone on New Year’s Eve. He could have chosen company. There’d been the usual annual invitation to be the mayor’s guest at the businessmen’s banquet. But Anna had sent off Victor’s annual regrets and his donation to the Widows’ Fund. He said he was too old to celebrate the passage of another year.
‘You’re there in spirit,’ Anna said, flourishing the widows’ cheque for him to sign.
Yet being on his own as all the city clocks struck twelve was not entirely to Victor’s taste. He had been tempted to suggest that Anna ought to stop behind and join him for a drink — but why embarrass her. She was not family. Her duties ended at the office door.
On the twelfth stroke he’d almost gone down in his lift to shake the hands of those tall men in uniform who kept Big Vic secure right round the clock. He need not hold a conversation with these men, a modest gratuity would satisfy. For once, he felt regret that Rook had gone. The man was neither honest nor efficient, it was true, but he was more like family. A flippant nephew, say, determined to amuse. And he was skilled — Victor acknowledged this — at catering for veterans. That birthday meal that Rook had organized had been the highlight of the year, just like the village parties he had known and never known. He hummed the march from La Regina which Band Accord had played that early summer’s day upon the roof. The coming year would make him eighty-two. Would he be there to celebrate?
The midnight roof was cold. But then old men are always cold, like fish. It’s heat they cannot bear, and noise, and sudden movements close at hand. He shivered but was glad to be outside — almost the only ‘outside’ in his life, these days — liberated from the humming equanimity of air-conditioners. The wind snatched at his spit and tugged his dressing-gown. He hurried through the darkness to the greenhouse door and found the switch to light two meanly powered orange bulbs, the ‘forcing lamps’ of market gardeners. The orange light expelled the night. The glass leaked wind. It moaned and chattered in its frame. Two liquid-gas heaters kept the winter greenhouse warm. They kept his specimens alive and made the winter temperate for succulents, for palms, for greenfly and for bugs.