“Here for?” he grunted.
“Reclamation, of course,” said Hans, indicating his and Karel’s overalls.
“Which apartment?”
“Penthouse suite. There was an ‘accident’ there last night.”
The security guard rolled his eyes. “Third this year. Those Sant’angelos and their parties.” He handed back the documentation. “All right, go on up.”
He unlocked a reinforced-glass door that led to a second bank of lifts. These gave access to the remaining floors, from the thirty-first to the top. One lift was waiting. Inside it, Hans pressed the button marked “P”. The doors rolled shut and the lift began to rise.
They emerged on the top floor into a marble antechamber lit by a twenty-branched chandelier. In front of them were a pair of doors made of stained glass whose delicate shades and rounded, abstract patterns were reminiscent of a butterfly’s wings. The doors operated like a butterfly’s wings, too, flattening inwards on a central hinge after Hans had pressed the bell-button.
Passing through, the two workers found themselves in a long, opulent hallway hung with gilt-framed oil paintings, several of them askew. Empty and partly-empty bottles and glasses crowded the sideboards and occasional tables. A hand-painted vase lay on the floor, broken, and next to it was a drying, congealing puddle of vomit which Hans steered Karel around with a stern “Careful”.
They ventured further into the suite until they came to a high-ceilinged room that was still curtained from the night before, swags and swathes of maroon velvet obscuring the daylight. The room had the air of a battlefield after the fighting is over and the corpses have been carted away. Furniture was overturned. Lamps lay on their sides. Books and records were strewn. A mirror bore a spider’s web of shatter marks. There were more discarded glasses and bottles all over the place, and on a marble coffee-table, beside an ashtray crammed with cigarette butts, there was a sprinkling of white powder and a scattering of pills.
Surveying the scene, Hans pursed his lips and slowly shook his head. “It’s all right for this lot. They don’t have to watch their pennies. Anything they break, they can just go out and buy another.”
“Excuse me, gentlemen?”
A thin, beautiful young woman in a silk dressing-gown was peering at them from the doorway to another room. She seemed of a delicate constitution, not improved by her evidently hung-over state. She had a hand clasped to one side of her forehead and was blinking at Karel and Hans with purple-ringed, bloodshot eyes. Her hair was a dishevelled mass of Medusan tangles, and last night’s make-up still caked her face.
“Miss Sofia Sant’angelo?” said Hans.
She nodded.
“We’re from Reclamation. You called us.”
“Oh. Of course. You’ve come for Luciano. My brother.”
“Where is he?”
“Out in the roof garden.” Painfully Sofia scanned the room, as though noticing its disarray for the first time. “Good heavens, what a mess.”
“It must have been quite a party,” said Hans.
“It must have,” she agreed vaguely. “I have to say, after midnight it all became a bit of a blur. I think I crashed out around one-thirty. If someone hadn’t left a note by my bedside, I doubt I would have discovered Luciano until much later today.” She pointed across the room. “The window on the other side of that curtain there slides back. Would you mind going outside on your own? I don’t think my eyes can cope with direct sunlight just yet.”
“Don’t you worry, Miss Sant’angelo. Leave it to us.”
Fresh-smelling breezes swirled around them and made the roof garden’s boxed orange trees, potted shrubs and low privet hedges quiver. Karel could not help but pause to admire the view. It was a whole different world up here. The buildings seemed further apart, cleaner, and had larger windows and spacious balconies brimming with greenery. The sky spread over everything, bright and wide, the unfettered sunshine dazzling. He saw whispering jetcopters shuttling between the rooftops, ferrying the residents of these rarefied climes from landing pad to landing pad. The aircraft took off and came to rest as lightly as dragonflies.
Nerving himself to approach the parapet at the garden’s perimeter, Karel glanced over and down. The ground seemed impossibly, inconceivably far below. He could just make out the road, but between it and here there was a shifting, sifting grey miasma that thinned and thickened and sometimes hid the lower portions of the buildings completely from view.
“That’s enough gawping,” said Hans. “He’s over here.”
Luciano Sant’angelo was lying prone at the edge of an ornamental pond, his face immersed in the water. Goldfish clustered around his head, nibbling speculatively at the tips of his hair, a radiant piscine halo.
“What do you think?” Karel asked.
Hans squatted beside the body. “Drink? Drugs? How the hell should I know? Fellow probably got so out of it he thought he could talk to the fishes underwater. Does it matter how it happened? The rich are always finding ways to kill themselves. It’s what they do best—that, and spend money and have parties. Remember that game of Russian roulette we had to clean up after over in Arrondissement 7 last month? And those two idiots in Arrondissement 15, I think it was, who tried to walk around the edge of their building using the balcony balustrades? No, wait, that was before your time. I tell you, when we scraped up those two we didn’t find a whole lot that could be reused.”
“But they’re so…so casual about life. That’s what gets me.”
“Not about life, Karel. Death is what the rich are so casual about. You and me, working men, we’ll keep going, keep on working, for as long as the Health Bureau can keep us functioning. The rich are free from all that. They lead short, brilliant lives. They flitter and flutter and—poof!—are gone. Hardly any of them survive past forty, do they? They can buy anything they like, do whatever they please, but for them there’s one ultimate luxury. One thing that demonstrates how truly extravagant they are.”
“That?” said Karel, pointing to the cold corpse of Luciano Sant’angelo.
“Precisely,” said Hans. “That.”
Once they had dismembered the body, they transported it down to the Reclamation Vehicle in three journeys. Each limb required a plastic sack of its own, as did the head. The internal organs all went into a sack together, and the hollowed-out torso, hewn in half, occupied two further sacks. Every piece of Luciano Sant’angelo was tagged and labelled and stowed in the vehicle’s refrigerated rear. Then it was a question of mopping up the blood and other fluids spilled in the roof garden and disinfecting the site. Finally, Karel and Hans cleaned their tools, swabbing down the various scalpels and knives and picking bits of bone and gristle from the teeth of the surgical saw.
“All done,” Hans told Sofia Sant’angelo in the hallway. By now Sofia was dressed and making a half-hearted attempt at tidying up.
“Thank you.” She fumbled in the breast pocket of her blouse and produced a wad of folded money. “Here you go.”
Hans accepted the tip and stashed it discreetly away without inspecting it He would share it out with Karel, almost equally, later.
“I’m sorry about your brother,” Karel said.
“Oh. Luciano. Yes, well …” Sofia waved a hand in front of her face, as though a gnat had swooped at her. “Thank you.”
In the lift on the way down, Hans said, “See? They just don’t care. She’s probably having a hard time remembering she even had a brother.”
The Reclamation Vehicle would not start. Several times the engine turned over but then clunked and shuddered and died. Hans hit the dashboard and swore till he was hoarse, but on this occasion the vehicle appeared immune to goading by words and fisticuffs. He thrust open the door, stomped round to the front, and yanked up the bonnet. After a couple of minutes, Karel slid out of his seat to join him.
The engine, to Karel, who was not mechanically-inclined, was just a dirty jumble of tubes and parts, not unlike the interior of a human. He watched Hans tw
eak and twiddle and twist, and finally sigh and nod to himself. “Well, there’s the problem. OK, Karel, here’s what you have to do. See that cable? Hold the end down in place just here, like so, while I turn the ignition. That should get the motor going, and when we make it back to the depot we can request a full service, which in my view is long overdue.”
Bracing his shins against the snowplough, Karel did as instructed. Hans climbed back inside the cab. “Ready?” he called.
“Ready.”
There was a deafening churn as the engine came to life, and then Karel felt an impact like a punch to the sternum and he was flat on his back and being pushed, being bodily shoved along the road, and distantly he could hear Hans screaming, “Oh no! Oh God, no! Stop, you fucking thing, stop!”
His overalls tearing beneath him.
Icy numbness in his legs.
Unable to breathe.
Silence.
Dark.
Hans’s face was the first thing Karel saw when he came round. His co-worker was sitting beside the bed, his expression pained and solicitous. They were in a hospital ward that smelled of antiseptic and formaldehyde. From beyond the green curtain enclosing them there came a soft susurration of activity: rubber shoe-soles squeaking, people talking in low voices, a radio playing martial music at a subdued volume.
“How are you feeling?” Hans asked.
Karel tried to reply but his throat was dry and all that came out was a clicking croak.
“Never mind. Don’t try to talk if you can’t. God, Karel, I’m so sorry about what happened. I swear, the vehicle just leapt forward. I couldn’t control it. Damned thing. The service department’s given it a complete overhaul, so hopefully it shouldn’t do it again. I told them they should send it to the junkyard and get a new one, but you know how they are. Waste not, want not.”
Karel frowned.
“You’re fine,” Hans assured him, interpreting the frown correctly. “The surgeons did a good job.” He uttered a brittle laugh. “Would you believe it? That Sant’angelo lad, the one who drowned in the pond? Those are his legs you have now. How about that? He was the perfect fit for you. Isn’t that a funny thing?”
Karel tried to move his legs but could not.
“No,” said Hans, patting his arm. “You stay still. Don’t want to tear the stitches. You just lie there and recuperate. The docs have said you’ll be right as rain soon enough. Right as rain and able to go back to work. No rest for people like you and me, eh? They just fix us up and plonk us back on the treadmill. No rest for the wicked.”
The legs, after a few weeks, worked fine, and Karel was soon back on reclamation duty with Hans, as before. He felt proud of himself for having survived such a traumatic injury and for having taken his first proper steps, as it were, to becoming an everlasting worker. He was a living, breathing, (literally) walking example to all.
Sometimes he wondered what it would be like when other parts of him went wrong or were ruined and had to be replaced. At what point would there be so little of him left that he was no longer himself? When would the animating essence that was Karel Vukovic cease to feel that it was in charge any more? He did not know. Perhaps that was the same point at which really old people started to lose a hold on themselves and crumble to bits. But if he was tough with himself, if he stayed mentally strong, maybe that would never happen. Maybe he would live for ever.
And sometimes he would experience a strange, straying urge in his legs, and if he was on the ground or in a lower storey he would stop whatever he was doing and direct his gaze upwards to the summit of the nearest building, up to where nearly half of him had once belonged. He would feel a memory in his legs, an incarnate knowledge of what it was like to dance, to swagger, to stagger, and eventually to stumble and trip and fall to the floor.
And sometimes, at night, he would dream of penthouses and parties, of lives like match-flames, flaring then gone.
Mostly Karel thought of the wealthy with indifference, or did not think of them at all. Money could buy possessions, but work was the best reward.
But sometimes—sometimes—while deep in the toils of yet another working day, he found himself envying the rich the one thing they owned that he might never have.
The option that they could choose to take any time they wanted but that would not be permitted him until there was no alternative.
Their greatest, simplest disposable asset.
Mere frail mortality.
JUNK MALE
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In today’s edition of
The Individual
Your daily newspaper
The government’s new taxation schemes and how they will affect you, Nigel Cunliffe … … … … … … … . p2
Melting polar icecaps – how, as a resident of the London Basin, you should be concerned … … … … … … . . p4
Single men in their early thirties: a revealing new lifestyle survey you must read… … … … … … . .p7
It’s your mother’s birthday next week – what sort of gift does a woman like Margaret Cunliffe want? … … . . p13
Reviews of the TV programmes you have been watching, the books you are reading, the movies you are planning on seeing … … … … … … . . p21
Your horoscope … … … … … … p34
Crossword (exactly your preferred level of difficulty) … … … … … … . p36
PLUS in the Financial Section: how your particular mortgage, Nigel Cunliffe, compares against the mortgage schemes offered by five other major building societies. Are you getting the best deal possible?
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Diversifications Page 19