by John Brunner
Table of Contents
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HONKY IN THE WOODPILE
John Brunner
ONE
The first time I saw Fierro Ponza, head of the Madrugadan Government in Exile, was from the window of a cab in Notting Hill Gate. I don’t usually travel by taxi around London, or anywhere else, because I generally can’t afford to. You don’t grow fat in my profession. Just as well, maybe—it makes you an easier target.
Tonight, though, walking wasn’t safe. It was the evening of the day they killed Dr. Small… who would have been the first colored member of the House of Commons since Saklatvala if he hadn’t been shot down in Trafalgar Square.
Along with thirty thousand other people, I’d seen him die, and I was sick with rage and about ready to kill someone in my turn. So too, according to the radio news I’d caught, were half the black and colored population of Britain. There were riots.
The driver of my taxi was an old-style Cockney, about fifty, with a small wrinkled face and a shrill voice. I’d noted his appearance because he was the one who had stopped after three or four of his colleagues had deliberately ignored me, and I wanted to know who, tomorrow, might be if not exactly on my side then at least not entirely on the other, like a Jew in Berlin in the thirties making a mental checklist of those few Christians who meant what they kept saying in church. And I got well acquainted with his voice because he kept on and on telling me what a terrible thing the murder was.
I had to be told that? Me?
It was about a quarter to eight. The January evening was dark and bitterly cold, but it wasn’t that which had drained London’s streets of people. It was a mixture of shock and fear—as it were, “It can happen here!” I’d rather have sat in a bar somewhere getting drunk, but I had an appointment with Michael Raftery, who had organized the one-day conference on national liberation movements at which next afternoon Aloysius Small should have been the featured speaker. There were a lot of pieces to be picked up.
Suddenly, as the cab approached a red light, I spotted two men hurrying along the pavement: well dressed, thoroughly muffled against the icy wind—and black. They kept glancing from side to side and occasionally over their shoulders.
With good reason. I leaned forward and called to the driver.
“Pull over, will you? I’ll see if those guys want a ride.”
Nodding, he looked in his mirror, but didn’t pull over because he couldn’t. A bus was sliding through on our near side, also halting for the red. And, the moment it slowed down, five white youths poured off its platform and took out after the pair of spades: a gang of skinheads aged about seventeen to twenty, crop-haired, mostly thin, in the standard uniform of working clothes and outsize bovver boots with steel toecaps.
I know trouble coming when I see it. I’ve been in more of it than most people. After the pent-up frustration of the day I was almost pleased.
Jerking open the door, I thrust a handful of coins at the driver. But he had seen what I’d seen.
“Never mind that, sir!” he exclaimed. “Go ahead—I’ll wait for you the other side of the lights!” They were changing to green as he spoke.
“Thanks!” I said, and eeled around the nose of a car next behind the bus and on to the pavement. I had murder in my heart, and I knew it.
The two black men had broken into a run the moment they realized what was happening, but the fatter of the pair was slow and two of the boys jumped him. I reached the pavement just in time to see him go down, covering his face with his arms and shouting. His companion checked to turn back and help him, and that gave the others the chance to catch him as well.
A window slid up on the second floor of the nearest building and a shadowy figure looked out. A couple of cars went by, too, and another bus. But all these witnesses were white.
By the time I caught up to them, two of the skinheads were kicking at the man on the ground. Two more were grappling with the guy who was still upright, while the fifth—armed with a length of lead pipe—circled around the struggle trying to get a clear shot at the captive’s head. I went straight for this fifth boy. Without mercy.
I seized his right wrist in my left hand and used my full strength to spin him around and then my full weight to slam him back against the solid brick of the wall behind him. He howled and lost his grip on the pipe. I snatched it from him and swung it underhand towards his crotch. But I was breaking one of my own rules, about not fighting when you’re blind with rage, and I missed his balls. I did get his right kneecap, though, and he lost the use of that leg for the time being. When he tried to come back at me it folded like a wet drinking-straw and he went sprawling.
The two boys kicking the man on the ground had noticed me by now and were turning towards me, their faces very pale, their eyes round and their mouths ajar, as though this was something they hadn’t bargained for when they jumped off their bus. That was fine by me. I hefted the pipe. One of them was braver than the other and was rushing at me when I swung. I got him on the left arm just below the elbow and heard the bone crack. He screamed at the top of his voice and I knocked his legs from under him for good measure. He fell on the damaged arm and lay there, whining.
The other decided to run, but he seemed to be drunk—at any rate his reactions were slow. He had hardly turned his back when I hit him, on the right side between the rib-cage and the hipbone. He stumbled a pace or two, doubled up, and began to vomit great gouts of partly-digested beer.
The guy who was still on his feet was giving a hell of a good account of himself, but he needed help. The nearer of his attackers had his back to me. I didn’t have steel-capped boots on, but that was no reason not to give the bastard a dose of the skinheads’ favorite medicine. I kicked him at the base of the spine. That’s a great blow if you can deliver it, because it inhibits the breathing reflex. His mouth opened like a codfish’s, and he forgot all about fighting for the next few minutes. He could barely keep his balance.
That left one still in action, who wanted very much to make himself scarce. But the guy he’d been battering had other ideas. He managed to delay the boy by hanging on to his left arm, giving me time to close the yard’s distance between us. With his free hand the boy was dragging something from his pocket: a clasp-knife. The instant it appeared I used the pipe one final time, catching him square across the back of the hand. The knife went skidding across the pavement and landed in the gutter.
“Gracias!” the man said, panting. That was when I realized who he was. I’d seen several photos of that high-browed, high-cheeked, mid-brown face.
“De nada,” I answered with considerable satisfaction as I surveyed the wreckage of the skinhead gang. One on his bottom by the wall, clutching his hurt leg and crying, the tears pouring down his face in mingled pain and fury, like a kid who’s been smacked to stop him putting kitty on the fire. Another also crying, nursing a broken arm and staring at me in horror as though this were a nightmare and he couldn’t wake himself up. A third still hopelessly retching, moaning when he had the chance to draw enough breath. A fo
urth howling with a broken hand, and a fifth, the one I’d kicked in the arse, enough recovered to be shouting hysterical obscenities.
“You fucking nigger bastards! I’ll get you for this! I’ll cut your fucking balls off, I will!”
I bent and retrieved the knife from the gutter and opened it one-handed. In a measured voice I said, “If you’re still here when I’ve counted three, I’ll use this to write my name on you. It’s a long name. It’s Cyprus Maximilian Curfew.”
From the guy at my side I heard a hissing intake of breath—as it were, “So that’s who he is!”
It didn’t mean anything to the skinheads, of course, but something else did. At that moment, distantly, we heard the donkey-bray of a police car, growing louder. The boy with the broken hand overcame his pain long enough to force out, “Sandy, the bugger means it! And that’s the coppers coming!”
“Let the bastards come! I don’t give a shit!”
“Counting now,” I said. “One!”
“Sandy, he means it!” Clawing at his pal’s arm with his good hand. “Come on!”
Whimpering, the drunken one joined in as well, and in next to no time they were on their way, cursing, limping and weeping.
Satisfied we were in no further danger, Fierro Ponza had hurried over to where the other man was lying and dropped on one knee to examine his injured head. I joined him. Without looking up he said, “Señor Curfew, we are indebted to you. I am Fierro Ponza and this is my brother Rafé.”
“I know,” I said. “You’re the delegates from Madrugada at the Ack-Ack conference tomorrow. You must have been on your way to Michael Raftery’s home.”
“Yes. And by the map it was so short a walk from our hotel, we did not think to take a taxi. Never in London did we expect a thing like this!”
Nor would I have done, a few years ago…
Rafé stirred now and tried to sit up. In strongly accented Spanish Fierro ordered him to lie still. To me he said, reverting to English, “He must go to a hospital. He has been kicked very hard.”
“I have a taxi waiting the other side of the junction,” I said. “At least I think I have.” Slipping the knife in my pocket, I rose. Yes, there was what looked like my cab. I waved vigorously, the length of pipe still in my hand, and saw an answering wave. The cab drew away from the kerb and started to swing around.
That was the moment when the police car appeared: a white Rover with its blue light flashing.
“Diablo!” Fierro burst out. “Policía?”
“I’m afraid so,” I muttered. Presumably the person who had looked out of the window as the fight started had put in a 999 call. Damn—it would have been better if we’d simply vanished before the busies made an appearance. Still, now they were on the scene, we could at least ask them to radio for an ambulance to pick up Rafé. Mentally I rehearsed a condensed explanation of what had happened.
And had no chance to use it. The instant the police car drew to a halt, two men leapt out. One came at me, the other at Fierro. Both were brandishing regulation truncheons. They were damned good with them, too. Mine got me first in the solar plexus, then as I doubled over a second time on the nape of the neck, and I went slamming face down to the ground. A boot crushed my right wrist to open the fingers I still had curled around the length of pipe. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. Too damned surprised to react before the man’s whole weight crashed on the small of my back and he grabbed my arms and cramped handcuffs on me.
“That’s your lot for tonight, blackie!” I heard him say with satisfaction.
“Hey!” A shrill voice I recognized, over the ground-bass of a diesel taxi idling. “Hey, they’re not the ones you want! It was a gang of bloody skinheads started it—run off when you lot arrived!”
“If you know what’s good for you, dad,” another voice said surlily, “you’ll keep your nose out of what doesn’t concern you. Wouldn’t like to lose your license, would you now?”
“But I’m telling you, I saw the whole thing! Bloody skinheads jumped off a bus and—”
“One more peep out of you,” the cop interrupted, “and you’ll come along too. Got that? Now hop it!”
My head was ringing and that blow in the belly had almost deprived me of the power to breathe, but I managed to roll my head to one side, so I wouldn’t be talking straight to the flagstones, and shouted, “Driver! Go to the address I gave you, tell them what’s happened! The guy’s a lawyer—”
I was trying to get to my feet as I called out. The cop booted my legs from under me and sent me sprawling a second time.
“You shut up,” he muttered. “We’ve had enough of you niggers mucking up our country. Now someone’s starting to hit back, and it’s not before time!”
TWO
“This one’s called Curfew,” the cop said in the bare horrible echoing hallway of the police station. Behind the desk the station sergeant took particulars. They’d worked me over in the car when I tried to argue, and I was one vast ache from scalp to shoes. Also there was blood leaking down my chin. I seemed to have retreated to somewhere a long way away, so that I heard what was being said as if through an ear-trumpet, distorted, almost meaningless.
“Charge?”
“Possession of an offensive weapon, this bit of pipe. And carrying a concealed weapon, this knife.”
“Right. How about the other two?”
“Max! What are these fucking idiots doing?”
Coming up the concrete steps from the doorway at a run: Michael Raftery, his red beard magnificently aggressive above his Irish thornproof tweed suit—complete, as usual, with waistcoat and gold watch-chain. Suddenly, as he saw the constables standing at the desk with me, he stopped dead.
“You!” he said, and packed an infinity of meaning into the single sound.
“Who are you?” the sergeant rasped. “And what the hell do you want?”
Michael didn’t reply immediately. He looked at me first; then he looked at Rafé Ponza slumped on one of the hard benches at the side of the tiled hallway, head bloody from the kicks he had received, although by now the blood had dried and was scarcely visible on his brown skin. Then, lastly, he looked at Fierro. He’d been hit in the car, too; his nose was bleeding and he was dabbing it with a sodden-red handkerchief.
Hovering uncertainly by the entrance I saw the helpful cab-driver, and I silently blessed him.
“A phone,” Michael said at last, striding forward. “This one will do!” Reaching the desk, he snatched up a receiver.
“Now look here!” the sergeant blasted. “You—”
But Michael interrupted him, addressing the operator who had answered the phone. “A line to the Yard, quickly—Deputy Commander Finch! I know he’s there because I was talking to him half an hour ago. My name is Michael Raftery.”
Fierro reacted to that. I’d forgotten for the moment that he couldn’t yet have had a chance to meet Michael; he and Rafé had arrived very late last night, and all today the Rafterys had been tied up with the procession and meeting in honor of Dr. Small’s election.
But there was no doubt Michael had recognized him from his pictures, and Rafé too.
He continued now to the sergeant, who looked as though he had just been hit very hard below the belt, “Don’t sit there like a bloody waxwork! Get those ‘cuffs off Mr. Curfew! Send for a doctor!… Commander Finch?”—as the phone uttered noises. “Raftery here. I’m at Garden Grove nick. Remember those two constables we had trouble with a few months ago, Hargreaves and Hooper? Know what the damned fools have done this time? Knocked off three of the delegates to the Ack-Ack conference tomorrow, including the head of the Madrugadan Government in Exile!… You’re damned right it’s serious! The moment I’m finished with you, I’m going to ring the BBC and ITV—it’s not too late to catch tonight’s news bulletins—and then I’ll start on the Sunday papers and catch their South of England editions… What? Chief Superintendent who?… Yes, I know Donaldson. Tell him to make it snappy!”
The s
ergeant had come around from behind the desk, very slowly, and was fiddling with my handcuffs.
“You’d better sit down,” he muttered. “I’ll get the doctor.” Meantime, still at the phone, Michael was saying, “Shepherd’s Bush eight thousand? Ferdie Brewer, please; I’m afraid I’ve forgotten his extension, but… Yes, that’s right, News Department.”
Someone decided I could be bribed to calm down with a cup of foul canteen tea and a biscuit. I knocked the tray out of the bastard’s hands. It was just spreading a puddle on the floor when Chief Superintendent Donaldson arrived from the Yard and hauled the constables into an interrogation room.
Hargreaves and Hooper. I was going to remember those names. And faces.
Also a doctor arrived, and called an ambulance for Rafé and attended to Fierro and me, and eventually Michael said, “Max! You and Mr. Ponza go on to my place, hm? I’ll warn Sonia to expect you. The cab-driver is still waiting. Don’t worry about paying him—I slipped him a fiver, and anyway he’s a decent chap.”
“What about the conference?” I said, carefully so as not to break the new scab on my lower lip.
“They voted to abandon it.” With a scowl. “I did my best to insist they went ahead, but… there it is. All that work for nothing! So I’ll stay here for a bit and go on raising what hell I can. Not that this affair is likely to make the headlines tomorrow when it has Dr. Small’s murder to contend with.”
Right. Talk about work for nothing! I knew a little about the effort which had gone into Aloysius Small’s by-election campaign. I’d done what I could to help, down to and including shouting myself hoarse at street-corner meetings and getting pelted with eggs and mud. He had only secured his majority after a recount, but he’d made it. Overjoyed, immigrants of all shades and cultural backgrounds had temporarily shelved their differences and assembled this chilly Saturday at Euston Station to welcome him with steel bands and choirs. Nothing like it had been seen since Ramsay MacDonald was escorted to Parliament wearing a traditional cloth cap and followed by a brass band.