Cloud Cuckoo Land Page 18

  ‘Who are you, you bastard?’

  Raymond didn’t say a word; he was trying to gain an advantage, pretending to be hurt more than he was. This brought the yob’s face closer.

  ‘I said, who the fuck are you?’

  The yob’s face was close enough for Raymond to push both his thumbs into his mouth and pull apart as hard as he could. The yob screamed, his top lip unzipped and blood started running into his distorted mouth. He backed off and Raymond got to his feet, but then the yob pulled a gun.

  ‘Who are you? You cunt!’

  ‘I’m sorry, I am unable to answer that question.’

  The yob grabbed Raymond by the throat and backed him into the barn, kicked into the backs of his knees and Raymond was forced to the ground again. He was pushed face down and a rope was wound around his left wrist, it ran across his throat and down to the other wrist. Same with his feet, then a last bight of rope was looped around his neck again and back to his feet. There was tension on his throat, the rope tightened when he moved and wouldn’t slacken off.

  While he’d been working, the yob had been swearing and licking his own blood off his lips. He was an angry fucker now and his anger had been transmitted to the tightness of the bindings. He gave each knot an extra, fucked-off tug.

  ‘Now then, smart arse, you’re not going anywhere until you tell me who you are and what you are doing here?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I am unable to answer that question.’

  The yob did something behind Raymond’s back; he was sliding a slipknot, increasing the choke.

  ‘Stop it! I can’t breathe!’

  There was a pause then the tension eased off as the knot was slackened off. Raymond tried to move his arms.

  ‘Don’t move, you idiot, that’s a constrictor knot I’ve tied behind your back. The more you move the tighter it gets.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Why don’t you just tell me everything you know, eh? It’s that simple.’

  ‘I’m a runner, an administration runner. I followed my target to this house.’

  ‘What do administration want with Leonard?’

  ‘He’s breached security.’

  ‘Do elaborate.’

  Raymond stayed quiet until a foot pressed his shoulder and tightened the loop at his throat.

  ‘He’s seen the survival project, the construction site. He’s got to be detained before he can jeopardise the programme.’

  ‘And just where is this site, exactly?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I am unable to answer that question.’

  ‘How could he jeopardise the programme?’

  Another pause.

  ‘Come on now, you can tell me, nobody will know; nobody really cares who did it, in whodunnits.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I am unable to answer that question.’

  ‘Look, Leonard had to have been tagged. He could never have made it onto the site otherwise. So how did that happen, did Warden tag him? How did Leonard get access to the pistol?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t tell you anything else. I don’t know anything else.’

  That was enough for Ian, his patience had run out and he knew what to do now anyway. He would have to confront Leonard and get his answers there. But he couldn’t in all innocence do that now, he didn’t think it was a great idea to knock on the farmhouse door and say he was just in the neighbourhood. Not looking the way he did with the blood still spilling from his opened lip.

  He put his foot into the middle of Raymond’s back and pulled on the tensioning rope, like he was loading a crossbow. The rope choked on tight and the body rolled away, looking like a very elaborate but primitive harp, a single-stringed instrument of suffocation and slow death.

  ◊

  Warden was sitting on his own, drumming his fingers on the desk; when he closed his eyes, he could imagine it was horses galloping. He could shift the sound by drumming in the middle of the desk or close to the edge. When he did this carefully, he could produce a doppler sound effect like the horses were approaching, passing close by and galloping off into the distance.

  There was still a full day ahead and he wasn’t feeling his best. He sat and looked into the computer screen with a file open for no real reason. He let his eyes lose focus and his head drop; the painkillers were doing a fine job, he felt nothing at all, not the slightest twinge. He knew that down in the bottom left hand drawer, were several tools of self-destruction. That reassured him, all he had to do was slide the drawer open a fraction and the edge of a pistol, pill bottles, fuses and high explosives would be visible to his naked eye.

  His job was not a demanding one; it was like any other office of power, as long as you landed the position in the first place, you could then relax. Everything around you then made it seem as if you were the man for it: the office, the schedule, the helpers, the telephone calls, the respect accorded. But Warden didn’t have to be the man they thought he was. Inside, he was his own man with his own ideas, and mostly he was able to forget what he was supposed to be doing entirely. The job was a kind of lie anyway, a public service bluff. The truth was that it was very hard, this close to a devastating, international incident, to care about who was doing what. If he weren’t such a sick old man, maybe he would make more of an effort. But he was, so the idea of the Ice Moon hurtling toward the earth was oddly comforting. So comforting that it was this he focused his mind on at night, to help him get to sleep. The impending arrival of the thing, the idea of a great cleansing fire coming soon to a cinema very near you. The idea of it coming to crush his own sickness into dust, to clear it all away, was comforting. It was time for an end, and this would be quite a fitting end.

  ◊

  Adeline stepped out into the storm to close the boot of the car. Tony was loading up and he’d left it open. As she crossed the pavement towards the kerb, hail pelted down. It was a weird sensation because she felt dry for a while, until her body heat melted the ice. When Tony came out through the door again he was carrying a sack, a big billowing sack that appeared to weigh next to nothing.

  ‘What you got there?’

  ‘Rubbish.’

  ‘What kind of rubbish?’

  ‘Stuff we don’t need anymore.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘What do you care, Adeline?’

  Tony turned, dumped the sack onto the back seat, opened the driver’s door and turned to her. The way he built the drama before delivering his lines was beautifully paced. He dipped his head and looked to the side before he said,. ‘I’m still in love with you, Adeline.’

  Adeline’s eyes looked for a safe focus.

  Tony was actually shocked to see how far this had fallen short. How too little, too late was just embarrassing for both of them. He felt like shit, like a wanting, needful fool.

  ‘I tried, Tony. I tried my best.’

  He hit her sharply across the cheek with the flat of his hand. This time the blow was way out in the open, in plain daylight. Then he turned and climbed into the car, that was all. Adeline watched him drive off, watched his tyres clear black tracks on the whitened road surface.

  ◊

  Waves of wintry showers blew across the road so Leonard flicked the headlights on and tested his brakes. Up ahead, a man walked with his arm outstretched and his thumb up, a lost and indecisive Caesar, looking for a decision to make. Leonard slowed down, the guy wasn’t wearing enough to conceal a weapon so he stopped and threw open the passenger door.

  The head came in, surprised and flushed.

  ‘Town?’

  ‘Yeah, get in.’

  The man hesitated.

  ‘You’re not mad or nothing?’

  ‘No, are you?’

  He got in.

  ‘Ok then, thanks.’

  Leonard had the feeling that the guy was trying to think up a conversation but never quite made it. So they were silent all the way in, until, all of a sudden he said. ‘Here’ll do. Yeah right here, this is fine.’

  He leant on the roof
, wrote Leonard out a C.O.D. and handed it over. When he’d closed the door Leonard took a close look at the spiky handwriting, it said: I.O.U one journey.

  ◊

  The Administration Building was just across the street and Leonard was standing beneath a telegraph pole with the cables fanning out above his head. The wires ran to the corners of shops and houses, looped around a black gadget and then disappeared through drill holes in window frames.

  He’d parked the Mercedes several blocks back, door open, keys and Reggie’s spare shotgun tucked under the seat. If he had to make a run for it, at least he’d be able to speed off sharpish, and at least he’d be armed. There was no point in avoiding the interview, they’d pull him in eventually and it also gave Lena an opportunity to get into Warden’s apartment and take the pistol.

  The big building was imposing; it had the psychological upper hand. Those inside were invested with a degree of power they wouldn’t ordinarily have out on their own at street level. The building had a commanding position, overlooking a tangle of major roads. It was always intended to be an ugly building, a building that was purely functional. It was, though, unnecessarily ugly and the ugliness set the tone for the whole area. At the design stage, the architect had said that the building was supposed to be ugly because ugly was far more powerful than beautiful. Ugly will not give way on a point of order. Whereas, what does beauty say? It says - relax, come on in and be well treated, let us talk as equals, we all want an equitable outcome, we want to please, to contribute, we’ll be accommodating. So the planners understood, and ugly it was and now nobody argues about the featureless brickwork and the smoked glass windows; the kind that never open and are cleaned from the outside by men in a cradle, on a year round rota.

  Even though he knew all this, as soon as Leonard stepped inside the place, he felt picked on, he felt oppressed.

  Warden’s office was at the rear of the building, up on the top floor.

  You reached it by taking, or in Leonard’s case being escorted through, the ground floor to a private lift. He was left on his own to ascend and when the doors opened on the fourth floor, he was welcomed by a plush red carpet neatly vacuumed into cricket pitch stripes.

  He hung around in the lobby for a while and looked at some of the beautifully framed pictures, all perfectly levelled, hung at head height and individually lit by halogen spots. Various subjects - an original crayon drawing of a woman’s face by Matisse dated June 1945, a small, smudgy cityscape and a group photograph of a management celebration, the Administration’s Christmas do. Leonard recognised a very young Warden sitting off to the side, in the background of the picture. The image had an unsettling quality to it because it reminded him of those second world-war photographs of Nazi socialising, where ten or twenty dapper faces in dinner dress looked off into the mid distance, half crazed with just being there. These were the only photographs Leonard had ever seen where it was possible to know exactly what the guests had been thinking, and what they’d been thinking was, ‘I wonder how much longer all this is going to last? I wonder when all this will finally catch up with us, and kill us the way we’ve been killing all the others?’

  Warden’s office door opened and his secretary came out.

  ‘Gopaul?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘We’re waiting for you.’

  Leonard walked into the outer office and turned to watch as the secretary used his big fingers on the intercom phone. The man looked as hard as nails, like he’d been hit around the head with a piece of wood on and off for several years. There was a whole history of scars on his face.

  He finished with the phone and approached Leonard until he stood right up close. He put his hands on Leonard’s shoulders and started to search his clothing for weapons. He dragged his hands down his chest and arms, over his back, abdomen, down each leg. Then he pulled back just far enough to smack Leonard one, around the chops. It wasn’t a punch; just a token humiliation to say that there was plenty more where that came from, if he didn’t behave.

  ‘That’s for nothing, now in you go and be polite.’

  Leonard didn’t say a word; he just turned to the door, knocked and waited. He heard, ‘Ahh, hah’, so he went in.

  Warden was standing in the doorway of a washroom, brushing away at his teeth. He turned and yawned, which was not pretty with all the paste foaming up his gob. He gestured for Leonard to sit down and he rinsed his mouth out.

  ‘Now then, Leonard, you have been giving us the run around, haven’t you?’

  Leonard stayed silent.

  ‘What got into you? I thought you were a perfectly nice chap. You came across very well at interview. Well?’

  Warden was still holding a hand-towel, dabbing his lips from time to time.

  Leonard wanted to tell him to throw it in, to give it all up.

  ‘I simply wanted to know what I was getting myself into.’

  ‘I should have thought that was pretty obvious. I thought you wanted to get onto the bloody lifeboat, just like everybody else.’

  ‘But that’s just bollocks, isn’t it? Not a single person you have interviewed will be given access to the survival programme.’

  ‘And what makes you such an expert?’

  ‘I’ve seen the construction site!’

  ‘Now that is a pity. I might have tried to work with you on this, but well, that is a pity. Can’t really give you any leeway at all now, can I?’

  Warden pressed the buzzer on the intercom.

  ‘What about your grand-daughter?’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘I’m trying to keep her safe, make sure she’ll survive.’

  ‘Yes, well, she doesn’t like me very much, she seems to have got the idea into her head that I killed her parents.’

  There was a knock at the door and Warden’s secretary looked in.

  ‘That’s alright, we’re not quite through yet.’

  The door closed again and Leonard had to ask.

  ‘Did you kill her parents?’

  Warden sat on the edge of his desk. His face was patchy, like he’d applied some cosmetic powders. Leonard noticed that his baggy tracksuit was not that clean and that it was draped over an increasingly skeletal frame. His mood had darkened.

  ‘The world has grown foul Leonard, surely you would agree with that? What’s right and what is wrong has become less significant, we have entered an era of blatancy, of kill or be killed. I can sympathise with you, I can see it is awkward for a man like you, you have a conscience, you think you have understood what is right and what is wrong. Well, I have to remind you that there is not a place for you here, you will be faced with impossible decisions where doing the right thing, doing the human thing, will get you killed. Now that’s OK for martyrs but somehow I just don’t see you as a martyr. I think you are smart enough to realise that there is no lasting value, no real longevity, in posthumous awards.’

  ‘I’m not a hero, I’m Joe average, but I just can’t stand it when the bastards get their way. I can’t leave it at that.’

  ‘Admirable sentiment, really quite admirable. And one more thing: if you must know about Lena’s parents, I’ll tell you. I was driving and there was an accident, that’s all. My wife never forgave me, the mad old bat insists on blaming me and trying to do me harm!’

  Leonard was fazed; the old bastard was far from being a fool.

  ‘The “world”, Leonard, will go its own very particular way, with or without you. You must find the humility to step aside and let those who are up to it, survive.’

  Warden rocked himself forward and limped around the desk. He picked up his walking stick and braced it against his hip. Leonard saw that there wasn’t really that much left of the man, he was shaky on his pins and down to featherweight. Then Leonard realised something.

  ‘You’re dying, aren’t you? That’s why none of this really matters, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well done, very astute. But listen, I asked you here to strike a deal. I want you to
tell me how you were tagged and if I am satisfied with your answer, well, then I am prepared to let you keep your place.’

  Before Leonard could think of an answer, Warden started to slide down his own stick, which didn’t last long because he was the one holding the stick. He hit the floor. Warden’s expression was not of pain, it was more that he was pissed off, like he’d taken a roller coaster that hadn’t been thrilling and there he was on the floor, afterwards, dissatisfied.

  He pointed to his desk, the left hand drawer. Leonard reached over and pulled on the handle. Warden managed a couple of words.

  ‘Morphine, fucking morphine.’

  Leonard picked up a handful of pre-loaded syringes and brought them over. Warden snatched one up, whacked it into the top of his leg and pressed on the plunger. The morphine went straight through the jogging bottoms, no time for a wipe with a piece of sterile cotton wool.

  Leonard was hoping Warden’s secretary would not appear at the door, there was a very good chance he would misread the scene. He returned to his seat and kept his eyes fixed on the old man.

  ◊

  Lena nearly always did what the adults asked her to do, and if she was going to get in trouble for doing what Leonard had asked, well she wasn’t really to blame. She was a kid and if she were found out, well, that would be her excuse.

  It would be easy enough because she knew that security would let her in, they would tell her that Warden was out but she would say that she was going to wait.

  When Lena turned up at the reception desk of Warden’s apartment building, the security guards were extremely accommodating. They gave her a key and let her make her own way up to the apartment. She opened the door, ran through to the sitting room, then straight through the musty smelling kitchen and into the study.

  She crossed to the CD cabinet and flipped the lid open; the pistol was there in its place, so she lifted it out. She put everything else back as it was and left the apartment.

  ◊

  Warden stretched out his arms and legs like a newborn animal. He lifted his head and rested his weight on his elbows; he bent his legs and made it to his knees. He picked himself up off the floor, dusted himself down and smoothed his hair off his face. He didn’t bother to turn and look at Leonard but walked the other way instead, into the washroom. He closed the door, braced himself over the sink and looked up at his own face in the mirror. Yes, it was him, but only just. He shook his head and rubbed his eyes, then practised the expression he often lived behind, the one where he looked like he was fed up with listening to limericks.