The Green Gene

by Peter Dickinson

  No progress has been made in discovering the perpetrators of the explosion. A woman is still helping the police with their enquiries.

  They hadn’t even given his name! He who a fortnight before had been fanfared on the trumpets of Fleet Street as a world-famous scientist was now a defunct and anonymous member of the statistical department! He was shaking with rage as he passed the paper back.

  “You didn’t say about the explosion, Pete,” said Mr. Zass.

  “I had forgotten it, but now I remember the noise, and a roof floating up through the sky … they are all dead. All my friends are dead.”

  “That’s too bad, Pete.”

  “Even the dogs are dead.”

  “Now, that’s a very English thing to say. Course, I’ve heard that some of you Indians are more English than …”

  “The dogs were horrible,” snapped Humayan. He stalked out of the cell, past the acid-smelling buckets, and lay on his bed in the dark.

  At first he did no more than surrender himself to the miseries and dreads that gusted round the cavern of his being. His right hand crept for comfort to his left wrist, to fiddle with the amulet that he no longer wore. The face of the witch who had given it to him swam before his eyes, calling. Glenda had been running along the pavement clutching the collar. So she was not dead, then.

  But Doctor Glister was, and Mr. Leary—for his paper now had a new Celtic Affairs Correspondent—and Moirag. But Moirag had died before the others, with her throat slit on Kate’s bed. Too many deaths, too many deaths.

  Humayan felt suddenly irritable with the untidiness of it all. In such a short space of time one housemaid had been murdered, a household had been blown up, and an Indian visitor senselessly kidnapped. It was easy to imagine many motives for murdering Moirag, but not there, in that fashion—and whoever had done it must have come and gone along the ledge, which was Mr. Leary’s private road. Humayan was considering Moirag’s look of mad triumph as she announced supper that last evening, when the light in his section of the cellars flicked on.

  “Let’s try and get us out of here, Pete,” said Mr. Zass.

  “Impossible,” said Humayan.

  “It’s a kick to nothing, Pete. Listen—that’s shooting. My guess is that’s your police come to look for us, and we’re hostages. Maybe we can’t get clear, even if we do find a way out, but perhaps we can hide long enough for them not to use us the way hostages do get used when the chips are down. And if they weren’t intending to rub us out—hey, I’ll still be able to tell Mrs. Zass I tried to escape. You never met a woman wants to respect a man the way Mrs. Zass does. Come along, Pete—I had a look round that first night they brought you, when they left the lights on.”

  As if in symbol of leadership Mr. Zass settled his cocked hat firmly on his head and strode off under the further arch. Humayan padded sulkily behind. In the next compartment there were no wine-bins; it ended at an open door, beyond which was a room with a blackened floor across which three stone partitions projected from the right-hand wall, making four short, narrow alleys. At the end of each alley a square door was set high in the wall, fastened with a big bolt that was held in place with a padlock.

  “Coal-chutes, I reckon,” said Mr. Zass. “See how that lintel slopes? They opened the doors and shot different kinds of coal down the chutes, so they must lead outside. And see what I found.”

  He poked with his foot in a shallow heap of coal-slack and uncovered an S-shaped hook, pointed at each end.

  “If I put a bit of an edge on this I reckon we can gouge that bolt free. You go fetch a chair, Pete, and then stand sentry by the main door.”

  Humayan watched him remove his hat and braided coat, squat down and settle like a cave-man to a steady scraping of his hopeless tool on the flagstones. Then he went obediently off to fetch the chair—he could always claim, if they were caught, that he had had nothing to do with the escape attempt.

  Sitting cross-legged like a Bombay beggar with his back against the stonework by the big door, he tried to order his thoughts again. From far he now distinctly heard shouts, and the occasional shot, which disturbed the analytic process. Furthermore a mind used to sawing through the clean-grained stuff of numbers goes jerkily into the knots and flaws of human timber. But he persevered, driven mainly by the growing knowledge that he, P. P. Humayan, had been treated as a naïve idiot by practically every Saxon with whom he had had any dealings. A banked-up stream of anger kept the millwheels of his mind turning.

  He thought about Mr. Leary. It was a nuisance his being dead. If he were alive, it would be clear that he had murdered Moirag and then blown up the Glisters’ house to conceal the body. Moirag had been spying on him; Humayan had betrayed this by shrieking about knowing her wickedness; Leary had questioned her and she had tried to blackmail him—hence her look of mad triumph when she had announced supper. He knew the way along the ledge. The ‘books’ which the fake postman had delivered were explosives. Leary knew about explosives and explosions—he had waited for one to happen that other evening, by the children’s playground. Moirag had been blackmailing him about the brand on his shoulder—that made the meaning of the symbols clear.

  And Moirag had an alias on her card. And Mr. Mann had sent for it from the computer without referring to any directory, as though it were a variant on a code he knew well. And then he had talked on a scrambler phone with a senior colleague, whose extension was the same as Doctor Glister’s, thirty-six, talked about the colleague having an ex-C in his house. And Doctor Glister had played cricket all over the world, and he wrote the small ads in Prism himself, and the copy in the waiting room of R14 was next month’s, and the big computer had known about Humayan’s orange juice. And Doctor Glister, that strong and intelligent personality who worked at what seemed to be a half-phoney job, had gone far, far out of his way to attract a lodger who would be unwelcome to his wife, and then force her to accept the fact.

  But even Mrs. Glister had been less despised than he, Humayan, had been. She had been allowed to know about the explosion in the knitwear department at Harrods. Many of her friends had been RRB officials—and Mr. Mann had known her, even known her dogs enough to dislike them. Or had it been the Glisters he disliked? He had known Dr. Glister had the Enoc ap Hywel disc, with the RRB stamp beneath the label—and that the Glisters called Humayan ‘Pete’; and it had been Doctor Glister who suggested that Humayan should get the pass that carried that name. So the editor of Prism seemed almost to live in the pocket of the head of R14. And the new editor, Mr. Tarquin ffoster, had come out of that pocket.

  Humayan turned these thoughts round and round in his head, arranging them in patterns. The most coherent pattern still had several large pieces missing. He thought again about Mr. Leary and the scar on his back, and his relationship with the RRB, from whom he had even got the photograph to illustrate his article on Humayan. “Frank’s different,” Mr. Mann had said. And that was true. Frank had made one half-hearted attempt to conceal his closeness to the RRB, but he had not cared much, because …

  “You gonna try a shift, Pete?” said Mr. Zass; he was standing, streaked with sweat and coal-dust in the doorway to the coal-cellar, and his lips looked an unlucky colour. Humayan took the S-shaped hook from him and went unwillingly to his task.

  It was a cruel tool. With the sharpened point one could gouge out, by careful effort, a single small splinter of wood. Ten such splinters would have made a matchstick. The door was oak, nearly two inches thick, and the old bolt was held to it with nails that ran its full depth. There was nothing for it but to gouge clean round the bolt.

  Time, deranged before by the behaviour of their warders, now became meaningless, to be counted in rests, in drinks from the water pitcher (or in Mr. Zass’s case in swigs from Ian’s whisky-store) and in the imperceptibly swelling pile of sticks that grew between the chair and the wall. As Mr. Zass grew drunker so his drive became more furious. He screamed at H
umayan for the little he had done in his shifts, and lurched on to the chair and tore at the tough wood. Humayan screamed back, and wept, and did sentry.

  At last he heard a shout from the coal-cellar. Prickling with terror that the bolt had come loose, the door was open, and Mr. Zass had promptly betrayed them by his triumph, Humayan rushed round, to find that the ambassador had fallen off the chair and was lying groaning on the floor. The whisky bottle was empty. Humayan helped the drunken swine to his feet and led him to his bed, on to which he fell without even a grunt of thanks. Bitter with rage Humayan returned to the bolt.

  Ten minutes—two hours—three days later, give or take a lifetime, the bolt came loose, wholly unexpectedly, where a hidden split in the timber ran exactly along the line that still remained to gouge. With shaking fingers Humayan eased wood and bolt and lock away from the door, out of the stone and free. The whole door then opened with a groan, and beyond it a tunnel of stone sloped up and ended where the sweet night stars began. Very quickly he shut the door again, scared that some sentry might have seen the upshot beam of yellow electric light. Shivering with the thought of desperate deeds to come he went to shake his leader awake and tell him that the road to freedom lay open.

  His leader was unwakeable, gripped in the coma of alcohol and exhaustion. Humayan even wasted a few drops from the water-pitcher to sprinkle the broad brow, but Mr. Zass only muttered, “Not just now, honey,” and rolled away while the bedsprings played their tinker’s serenade. Several times Humayan stole back and forth between the bed and the chute, nerving himself to make the break alone and finally not daring. At last he chiselled some mortar from a crack, mixed it into a paste with spittle and coal-dust, wedged the bolt back in its place and filled the gouge-marks with his paste. He swept the pile of chippings into a corner and covered them and the hook with coal dust, cursing the fate that had bound him at such a moment to this drunken American hog. There had been no mention of any such detail in his horoscope.

  He could not sleep. He could not even rest, though he was almost delirious with fear, hunger and exhaustion. Numbers chased themselves meaninglessly across his mind. He prowled the cellars, grinding his teeth. Faint light showed round the cracks of the chute doors. He cursed again. How he would speak to Mr. Zass when the swine awoke! As a symbol of his contempt he snatched up the ambassadorial hat and put it on, though its rim came over his ears. He was still wearing it when he heard, on the other side of the main door, the first sounds of rescue.

  Voices muttered. A hacksaw whined into metal. The gaolers would have used a key! He croaked a welcome. The sawing stopped. Voices spoke. The lilt of Welsh was unmistakable.

  Humayan tried to beat his fists against his temples but was impeded by the ambassador’s hat. He took it off. The sawing continued. He did not know what to do, but so strong was the urge for action that he put the hat on again.

  At that moment the sawing ceased and the door rattled open. Humayan, posed under the electric bulb with his whole face shadowed by the hat, confronted a group of men, masked and armed, posed under the dawn-lit arch.

  “You this ambassador feller, mister?” said one of them in a voice so pinguid with geniality that Humayan knew at once that they were here to set Mr. Zass free.

  “Sure, that’s me,” he said in his best American.

  “And a grand morning to you,” said the man. The four of them moved towards him. He wished he could have seen the smiles under their masks—poor peasants, they were not accustomed to the company of the elite of the diplomatic corps.

  “OK, boys,” said the man suddenly. Two of them leaped forward. A soft, dark bulk knocked the hat from his head and at the same instant smothered his head and shoulders. His hands were seized and roped behind him. But after the first quake of terror he neither struggled nor protested, realising that it was only natural that they should want to conduct him from their hideout in such a manner that he could not tell the police anything useful. Moreover, he was now anxious not to wake Mr. Zass.

  Unnamable birds twittered in the sweet morning air. Humayan could hear them even through the sack over his head, and smell the sap of things. It was cold. He waited, swaying with tiredness and nerves. He could not steady the swaying.

  “Stand up, won’t you?” said a man, catching him round the shoulders to stop him falling for the second time.

  “I cannot balance! I cannot see!” he shrilled.

  “Ach, take the cloth off him then,” said another voice. Five seconds later Humayan stood blinking and smiling at the dazing day.

  He was standing on the side of a hill, on a large rectangle of fine-mown turf. Behind him and on two sides were stone walls which retained the earth where the hill had been cut away to achieve this terraced level. Plants, mauve and yellow and white, trailed in brilliance down the stone. A dozen men and two women, all masked, were conducting a low-voiced discussion a few feet away to his right. Most of them had their backs to him. Further away down the hill, in the only direction he could see out, lay an ornamental lake over which a faint dawn haze hung in bands. Two rowing boats were working on the lake in conjunction with a small group of men on the shore; the work seemed to involve taking a series of long, heavy parcels out into the middle of the water and dropping them over the side of the boats. When his eyes stopped blinking Humayan saw that the parcels were bodies, and that the reason that they looked like parcels was that the party on the shore were lashing them thoroughly to concrete fencing-posts so that they would sink and stay sunk. The lake was as pretty as anything Humayan had ever seen, with different coloured rhododendrons flowering and reflected along the further shore, the grey dome of a tiny temple emerging from the torrid flowers and the dark green of the leaves, and further up the lake two perfect swans surging towards the boats to see whether the activity of the humans involved any edible fragments.

  “Right,” said the man who had so far given all the orders. “Stand him over by that wall there.”

  The group took up some sort of formation, with a line of men to Humayan’s left, the women and leader and one other man opposite, and the rest in another line on his right. A tall white man took Humayan by the arm and led him to the back of the rectangle; looking down at the hand that gripped his elbow Humayan saw that the top joint of the index finger was bent almost at ninety degrees to the rest of it. There couldn’t be two hands like that, so battered, so red. But it would be a mistake to jeopardise his own chance of freedom by any sign of recognition—and Mr. Leary must have been of the same mind.

  One of the women took a small notebook from the pocket of her jeans and read from it in a clear gabble. The regional accent had been ironed off her voice and replaced by that of the emphatic intellectual. Humayan only half listened. The phrases floated in and out of the daze of his hunger and exhaustion. The last of the bodies down on the lake was being swayed overboard. It wore a kilt.

  “… ally of racist neo-fascism … crypto-genocide cultural violence … April the Fourteenth … so-called conciliation … United Nations resolution … arms shipments … conspiracy of capitalism … dollar investments …”

  She ended, it seemed, in mid-paragraph, as though her speech was something that was extruded from a word machine and could be chopped off anywhere.

  “Well, does the feller plead guilty or not guilty?” said the leader in a desultory voice.

  “Guilty,” said the other woman.

  “OK. Sentence?” said the leader.

  The group to Humayan’s left all raised their hands. “Death,” said the foremost of them.

  “Fine,” said the leader. “Firing party.”

  The group to Humayan’s right mooched round into a line opposite him. He heard the faint click of safety-catches.

  “No, no!” he screamed. “You are making a mistake! I am not the ambassador! The ambassador is asleep in the cellars where you found me! Mr. Leary can tell you I am not the ambassador!”

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p; His hands were still tied so he pointed with his toe at the tall white man with the battered hands.

  “Hold it,” said the leader. The guns came down.

  “I was thinking the newspaper photos were no’ verra like,” said someone.

  “You know the feller, Number Eight?” said the leader.

  “Sure,” said Mr. Leary. “He’s an official at the RRB.”

  “Then why the fucking hell didn’t you say so?” asked the leader. “We’ve wasted half an hour trying the bugger. Firing party.”

  “No! No!” screamed Humayan. “I am not guilty! I am a pure researcher! I am objective!”

  The guns levelled.

  “I can tell you who caused the explosion at Horseman’s Yard!” he screamed. “No!”

  He flung himself to the grass. The world was black and filled with clamour. Then it was still.

  “Pick the feller up,” said the leader. “Hang on to that other feller.”

  Humayan was hoisted to his feet. Memory began to tell him that only one gun had gone off, and now in the shocked and reeling morning he saw that two of the firing party were holding Mr. Leary’s arms, and one had a pistol to the stockinged temple. The leader strolled towards Humayan over the beautiful turf.

  “Now, will you tell us what the hell you are talking about?” he said fretfully.

  “Yes, yes,” gabbled Humayan. “I was residing in Horseman’s Yard, at the house of Doctor Glister, next door to Mr. Leary there. A maid of Doctor Glister’s tried to blackmail Mr. Leary, because she discovered that he was an RRB agent. He has the letters branded on his shoulder. He killed this maid and then blew up the house to conceal the fact, trusting that it would be thought that it was the work of guerrillas, because Doctor Glister was really the secret head of a section of the RRB called R5. I can explain all my reasoning …”

  “The hell with reasoning,” snarled the leader. He crouched as if he were about to strike Humayan, then swung round.

  “Let’s see his face then,” he snapped.