Incompetence

by Rob Grant

  The reason I had to get out, like I said, was this was contact day. I had to check a number of publications' personal columns for messages. I could have had them delivered, I suppose, but that would mean paying for them. Not that I'm mean, or I have any problems with money -- I have a virtually bottomless expense account which I hardly ever touch. It's just more fun to consult them in my local newsagent's, where a suspicious Asian staff member drops all his other duties to stand watching me relentlessly from embarrassingly close range with his arms crossed, daring me to carry on reading and not buying. I dare. I dare.

  Usually, there's nothing, or at least nothing I have to do anything about. Today was different. Very different.

  Here's how it works, my organisation. It's a fairly standard cell structure. There's me, and there's one operative either side of me. I only know the two of them, that's all. There are obvious advantages to the set-up. If I get uncovered and interrogated, I can only give up the names of the two people I know. And that's pretty much all I do know: two names. I don't know their addresses, I don't even know which country they're operating in. And even the names I know aren't real. We all have several identities, none that are really our own, all fully authenticable, no matter how you try to check. Me, I mostly go by the name of Salt. Harry Salt. That's what we call my core ID. But I have dozens of alternatives. I can be Cardew Vascular, or Simon Simons, or Harry Tequila. If you get even a sniff that an ID's been compromised, you dump it, quick as a Chinaman's orgasm. Me, I don't even wait for that sniff. I trash an ID as soon as I've used it in an investigation. I go through identities faster than a supermodel goes through international football squads.

  So, you could torture me for years, and that's all I could give you: two names that aren't even real. Nice to know, eh? Something for me to hang onto when they're warming up the old gonad electrodes.

  The three of us keep in contact through the personal columns of three different publications, in case one or two of them suddenly go bust, or get withdrawn or just plain old go on strike. That hardly ever happens. What does happen, and happens frequently, is that the copy desk gets the message more or less completely wrong, or forgets to print it at all. Even in this climate, it's unlikely that all three publications will screw the messages up. It's unlikely, but they do manage it, on occasion.

  Of course, all three of us use different publications, which means on contact day I have to scour twelve different personal columns, to check both of my neighbours' messages, and to make sure my own haven't been royally screwed up. That's why the hawk in the newsagent's loves me so fine. That's why he makes a noisy and laboured point of smoothing out and refolding every single newspaper and magazine once I'm through with it, even though I handle them with the same tender respect I'd handle the Dead Sea Scrolls.

  A standard message will be something like: 'Harry Salt -- All old ketchup. K.' or 'Harry Salt -- Ask overt Kenyans. K.' You don't have to be an international master spy to work out that's someone called K telling me everything's AOK.

  K is a fellow I know as Dick Klingferm. He's the guy who briefed me up on procedure way back when I was a raw greenhorn, so I spent quite a few weeks with him before I went operational. And although I'd never actually met him in the flesh since then, he was the only living person who actually knew some things about me that were essentially true, and that made him the closest thing I had to a friend.

  This time, though, the message was different. This time the message from Klingferm was: 'Harry Salt -- Rip Van Winkle. K.'

  This was a big one. This was Klingferm setting up a meeting. In the flesh. An actual meeting. Two operatives face to face? In the same place at the same time? Bad, bad and very bad. Klingferm wouldn't even think of arranging something so exposed unless he was facing trouble only just short of a nuclear threat.

  I checked, and it was the same message in all three of Klingferm's periodicals. Even more worrying. Dick Klingferm liked playing games, and normally he would vary the messages. One of them would have been 'Rampant Vole Warts' or 'Rub Vulvas Willingly', or some such, you get the idea. The 'R' and the 'V meant rendezvous and the 'W' was the location. It had been a while, so I had to dredge my memory deep for the mnemonic I'd used to retain the rendezvous sites -- it's not the kind of thing you commit to paper.

  W, as I finally recalled, was Rome. A fairly small, fairly central hotel there.

  I shocked the hell out of the newsagent by actually buying all three publications. He looked like he was going to have to spend the rest of the day lying down with a cold compress on his head in a darkened room to recuperate.

  I hate having to hurry. Having to hurry makes me cranky. I double hate having to hurry in snow. The only way to hurry safely in snow is to waddle like a giant penguin.

  But a message like that required an urgent response. Klingferm was onto something very big and very dangerous. He was probably in some serious personal danger himself. I had to get me to Rome as quickly as humanly possible.

  So I did the waddle thing back to my apartment block.

  I tried not to notice the heroin addict on my stairs jacking up in full view. There was a state-sanctioned 'shooting gallery' less than four hundred metres away, but the trip was clearly too demanding at this time of the morning for a junkie with nothing but blood pumping through his system. I tried to step over him while still maintaining the illusion I hadn't spotted him. I didn't want him thinking I'd noticed him, in case he asked me to help him, or something. In case he asked me to hold the belt round his arm just a little tighter to help him seek out a vein in there that was still capable of protruding. Incredibly, I actually managed to accidentally stand on his head without his seeming to notice me, either.

  You have to strike a balance when you're packing for any kind of journey where you're going to be separated from your luggage. It's an art form. You need to travel as light as possible, because the chances are you'll be spending an inordinate amount of time carrying your own baggage over distances you wouldn't normally contemplate without a good supply of camels or elephants. So you pack only essentials. But these essentials can't be so essential that you can't live without them, because, somewhere along the line, there's a reasonable chance they're going to get lost. You carry what you can on your person, bearing in mind that you're going to have to take everything out of your pockets at every one of a dozen or so security checks, and put it all back again. You wear spare socks and underpants, or carry them in an overcoat pocket, and you cram what you can into your hand baggage, once you've triple-checked it's the correct regulation size for hand baggage on your chosen airline, which, as a general guide, is likely to be approximately the same cubic capacity as a stingily filled beef sandwich with the crusts cut off.

  And you take a spare pair of shoes. Leather shoes. Leather shoes are not exactly illegal absolutely everywhere in Europe, but they're pretty hard to come by. In those states where they're not just plain outlawed, the manufacturers and retailers -- and therefore, the consumers -- are hit with a savage Environmentally Unfriendly Tax, which makes leather shoes close to commercially unviable.

  The final tip: never lock the suitcase. It just pisses off thieves and customs officers, who are usually one and the same thing, and forces them to brutalise your luggage to get at what they want.

  So I packed quickly and, I think, wisely, and set about the epic task of finding a way to actually get to Rome this side of the fourth millennium. I booked a flight easily enough, but getting to the airport and actually catching it was going to be something else entirely.

  I managed to book the flight from City airport. This has the unique advantage amongst London airports of actually being in London, which ought to have minimised my transport problem. Trains and buses were unlikely to be running anything like a normal service, which is, let's face it, useless anyway. The Tube wasn't much of an option either. You'd have thought that an underground train line would be relatively unaffected by a few centimetres of snow forty metres above it, but you'd be wrong, and t
he prospect of being stalled in a packed, airless carriage with a herd of commuters, of whom a good seventy per cent have failed to grasp the basic rudiments of personal hygiene, was not a pretty one.

  Taxi it was, then.

  I locked my door, stepped as best I could over the junkie lying on the stairs in his extremely temporary happy torpor, and left my apartment building.

  I didn't know it then, but I was leaving it for the last time in my life.

  FIVE

  Having a loaded gun pressed to the back of your head is not very nice. You may think that sounds a little obvious and trite, but then it probably hasn't ever happened to you, and if you're only even slightly lucky, it probably never will.

  It's happened to me five times, and I can remember every single millisecond of every single one of those times with such a stark and vivid sensory clarity, it's hard to imagine how my memory has any room left for anything else.

  It certainly focuses the mind. Everything gets amplified. You can hear flowers budding. You can hear injured insects limping. You suddenly realise that the air you breathe actually has a taste. You can feel your hair growing and your gums receding. Your skull suddenly feels like it's nothing more than an oversized eggshell, and you're excruciatingly aware that this ludicrously fragile crust of flimsy bone, no thicker than a pastry case on an apple tart, is the only thing that's keeping your brain inside your head. This brittle dome of ultra-thin blackboard chalk is all that's stopping your brain from glooping out of your ears onto the pavement and splattering there like a tossed blancmange in raspberry coulis. Your brain, your beautiful brain, with all its complexity, all its memories, all its thoughts, everything that's actually you is protected by a casing you wouldn't consider sturdy enough to use as a child's fucking piggy bank. What kind of design genius thought that was a good idea? Your skull should be made of steel, at the very least. Reinforced steel. It should be made of reinforced steel that's been reinforced with even more reinforced steel. Hell, it's protecting your brain, the second most important part of you; why spare the expense? It should be made of reinforced hardened platinum and at least five centimetres thick. You have to be talking about reinforced, hardened platinum, reinforced with reinforced steel as an absolute minimum requirement for skull construction. Bottom line, it should be bullet proof.

  A man's voice gruffed in heavily accented Italian that I shouldn't move. It was an unnecessary injunction. I had no plans to move for the next century or two without ample permission -- written, signed and in triplicate if need be. If they ever turn the kiddie party game of Statues into an Olympic event, I would breeze the gold, my friends.

  Even so, still as I stayed, the gun bearer saw fit to deliver an unnecessarily cruel jab to the back of my starkly unprotected head with his shotgun muzzle. 'What you doing here, Mister?'

  Now, this was a tricky one to gauge. What would the right answer to that question be? No pressure, Harry, but if you get it wrong, your frontal lobes wind up decorating the cobblestones, and a wild fox gets to take your hypothalamus home as a tasty treat for tea.

  What was this idiot worried I might be doing amongst the garbage? Why was he patrolling the garbage with a loaded shotgun in the first place? Just what threat was he supposed to be protecting the garbage from? Surely, garbage, by its very nature, is something you don't want. Is that not, in fact, a stunningly accurate definition of garbage? You no longer want something, you throw it away. That's how it becomes garbage. It wasn't born garbage, you made it garbage by the very act of throwing it away. If you cared about some part of the garbage, why throw it away in the first place? Why put valuable garbage out here with the garbage nobody could give a hootenanny about, so you have to patrol the garbage with a shotgun of sufficient calibre to blow a blimp-sized hole through an adult sperm whale? It just didn't make sense.

  So: was producing a police badge the right thing to do here? Was that the tack to take? Would that keep my mind where it mattered?

  I was just about to reach, very, very gently for my inside pocket, when another alternative struck me.

  I was in Rome, right? In Italy? What if this was a wiseguy? What if this was some giant mob garbage racket I'd inadvertently stumbled on? It didn't seem likely: how could anyone hope to derive any kind of substantial income from bags full of faecal matter? But if it was some sort of Mafia scam, producing the detective shield was probably not my best move.

  I suddenly realised I had my hands up in the air and I hadn't even noticed, because I felt something gooey trickling down my right shirt cuff. I glanced up at my hand, half expecting that the shotgun had somehow gone off and blown it away without my noticing. Mercifully, my hand was still there, and glued to its palm by some unknowable and unpleasant sticky green gloop there was a chunk of what looked like some very rancid cheese.

  And out of the blue, a life-saving plan came to me.

  It occurred to me that I probably didn't look like a man of any moment, on my knees, there, sifting among the bilge. My carrot-hide shoes were already separating at the soles, my suit was crumpled and caked in mildew and slime, and God knows what else. Plus, I had nameless gunk drooling down my hands from the garbage I'd been rooting through. My whole look was saying 'vagabond'. I thought I could pull it off.

  I tried half turning my head. I wanted to show how unthreatening I was, but the attempt was rewarded with another savage jab of the barrel.

  'I'm looking for food,' I said. My mouth was dry with fear, and I'm pretty sure I sounded suitably weak and vagabondish. I held up my right hand and showed him the slime-soaked cheese.

  'Food?' he growled. 'You hungry?'

  'Yes.' I nodded. 'Si, si. Hungry.'

  'You hungry?' he snarled. 'You eat.'

  Did he mean the cheese?

  Did he mean I should eat the filthy putrid cheese in my hand?

  The rancid, stale chunk of mould caked in green sludge that was at this very moment dribbling down my arm?

  You bet your boots he did.

  So I did something disgusting.

  I ate the cheese.

  I closed my eyes, and like I was savouring the most delicate morsel that ever graced an emperor's banquet table, I popped it in my mouth.

  And I ate it.

  Slime and all.

  To this day, I can still taste that cheese.

  And I'm pretty sure I always will.

  Not even death could wipe that taste away.

  The gunman swore behind me. Then he started laughing.

  I chewed, he laughed. I was silently praying for him to go away, but he kept watching and laughing, the bastard retard, and I kept chewing, but eventually there was no choice: I had to swallow.

  I had to swallow and make it look like that piece of cheese really hit the spot. So, God help me, I swallowed it. It didn't want to stay down, but stay down it had to. And stay down it did.

  The gunman swore again, and cracked me behind the ear with the wooden butt of his shotgun.

  I hit the garbage with my face and blacked out.

  I was unconscious, but I could still taste that cheese.

  SIX

  Something was nibbling my right ear.

  Not nice nibbling, neither. Nibbling like they meant to take a chunk out of my lobe.

  Something nasty was nibbling my ear, and there was a very, very bad smell. Way beyond funky.

  I sat bolt upright and slapped at the side of my face, but whatever had been doing the nibbling was long gone.

  The stink remained.

  My left cheek was sticky. I looked back where I'd been lying. I don't want to tell you which particular bag I'd chosen to take my little nap upon. It's enough to say that the bag had split open on impact, and that's why my cheek was sticky.

  My wallet was lying open on the floor. The cash had gone, but all the ID was still there. So, amazingly, was the credit card.

  I dragged myself to my feet. Something didn't feel right. I looked down at my stockinged feet.

  The evil bastard had stolen my carr
ot shoes.

  What kind of sick mind would do a thing like that?

  But, hey. I was alive, right? That definitely qualified as a result.

  Now, my experience of near-death situations -- that experience being, as you know, more than copious -- is that once your adrenaline settles, and you realise you've actually lived through it, you undergo the most incredible high. You're in love with the world, with life itself. All malice flies from your spirit. You want to write, personally, to everyone who was ever even slightly mean to you and forgive them. You want to swim with dolphins. You want to run naked on beaches. You want to frolic naked in heather. You want to throw back your head and laugh for forty minutes out of every hour. You want to make love through the night, every night, and you don't care who or what with. You want to be reckless. You want to parachute in blizzards, naked. Fly unpowered gliders, blindfold and naked. You want to ski down sheer glaciers, blindfold and naked and without skis. You want to ride untamed horses, possibly blindfold though probably not naked, and definitely without skis. You're high, but you're not insane. You want to get together all the world leaders, possibly naked, and bang their silly old heads together till they agree that war is a stupid thing and they're definitely going to stop doing it. You're so giddy, you actually think you might pull it off, too.

  I'm guessing everyone's experience is reasonably similar, though I'll accept maybe my reaction is overly focused on excessive nakedness. I've no idea why that is.

  This time, though, it was different. I certainly had a strange feeling in my stomach that was kind of on the giddyish side of things, but all I really felt like doing was puking for the next decade.

  I had to get out of that yard.