The Maggot People

by Henning Koch

  Michael sat still, listening to the waves.

  I’ll slip away when they’re not looking, he told himself. I’ll play the innocent but I’ll do what they say. Afterwards I’ll go to the Greek islands. I’ve got fifteen years of life left in me; I’ll fish and sleep in a cave and then when my time’s up I’ll swim out and drown myself.

  His reverie faded and he was aware of O’Hara waiting for his response.

  “Sure,” said Michael. “It’s easy. I just pull the trigger, that’s all.”

  The Cardinal held the gun under Michael’s nose. “Keep pulling it until the target looks like a shredded puppy.”

  21.

  Almost before he knew it, he was in an air-conditioned coach crunching across the gravel, leaving St. Helena behind. He’d been given a full collar shirt and cassock to wear, and they were quite unbearable in the heat. But as he sank into his seat and the cool air streamed over his flaming red face, he felt an overwhelming sense of relief.

  The brothers and sisters of St. Helena in their sandals and white cloaks had come to wave them off.

  Mama, standing at the head of the assembled group, had put on a colorful embroidered belt to set her apart. Elvira stood beside her, dressed in gray now to indicate she was close to blooming. Three white doves, attached to her by long red silk ribbons, pumped their wings frantically overhead as she strode forward ceremoniously, lifting her hand in a parting salute.

  She seemed to be searching the coach’s windows for him, and when she found him, her grave expression changed abruptly. She stuck out her tongue, taunting him, then held up a pair of golden scissors and cut the ribbons. The three doves rose into the sky, trailing their long red jesses.

  Mama leaned forward and took Elvira’s tongue into her mouth with tremendous greed.

  Michael stared at the two women, deeply troubled by their inhumanity, also relieved that he would never have to see them again. Another thought struck him: maybe this was precisely what they wanted him to feel? Once a person is broken, he can be bent and twisted. A broken man is a mechanical instrument made of flesh. Hadn’t Mama Maggot told him so?

  He rested back in his seat, choosing not to talk to anyone, focusing his attention instead on the video screens showing Pope Innocent giving his benedictions, waving his white-robed arm over the assembled masses in St. Peter’s Square.

  The sea crossing and disembarkation in Marseilles were uneventful, but just before they reached the Spanish border, O’Hara told Michael he would be dropped off at the train station in Perpignan.

  At about noon, the bus pulled into the small, dusty town and waited with its engine idling. Perpignan lay, as it has always lain, a conflicted settlement on an undefined border.

  O’Hara walked into the station with Michael, clutching at his arm. Old ladies smiled fondly at these two saintly men so urgently engaged in conversation. Talking of God, no doubt.

  They stopped outside the station café just as the Barcelona-bound train pulled in with screeching brakes like a many-armed serpent, North African immigrant workers hanging out of the windows, smoking and laughing, finally on their way home after months of undignified labor among infidel Parisians.

  O’Hara gave Michael the address of a bar in the Gothic quarter of Barcelona, where a local crook by name of Sergio had a weapon for him to pick up. “A nice little Beretta,” said O’Hara. “Should do you just fine. But do throw it away somewhere safe once you’ve finished with it.”

  He gave him a photograph of the abbot, a rotund and rather harmless-looking cleric. On the back of it was written the name of a monastery in Ripoll.

  “He doesn’t look too bad to me.” Michael stared at the photo.

  “Oh, bad enough, you’ll find,” said O’Hara, with a glare. “And you? Are you a good man, would you say?”

  “If I was good I’d be dead.”

  “It’s a good answer.”

  The Irishman produced an envelope from his pocket with an address scrawled on it. Inside was a set of keys. “Afterwards, lie low for a while. There’s food in the fridge and plenty of stimulants. After about two weeks some men will come to pick you up. In the night.”

  “Pick me up? Or shoot me? Boil me? Or will you just stick to water-boarding?”

  Michael rose from his seat and grabbed his bag, but O’Hara clawed his fingers into his arm. With a sinking feeling, Michael looked down at his yellow, filthy nails. “Don’t cross me, Michael, I may have a crucifix round my neck but in essence I am a soldier. Don’t forget it!” O’Hara softened his grip. “My friend,” he said consolingly, “it’s natural that you should resent me, but don’t let this cloud your judgment. You will have to be quick and bright to rid us of this troublesome abbot. Be aware of the fact that he and his entourage will try to trick you. They’ll be every bit as tricky as the horrendous maggot folk you just left behind. They’ll know that you have Vatican authority for what you’re doing. And they will play with your mind because that’s what people do. People are liars. People are swine.”

  22.

  A few hours later the train pulled into the reeking hinterlands of Barcelona. The moment Michael put his foot on the dust-swirling platform of Estació de França and walked into the bright and windy sunshine of the cocksure city, he felt as if his retinas and eardrums had been renewed. His senses came alive. With the ardors and strains of St. Helena behind him, he was like an exhausted mud wrestler stepping into a hot shower at the end of the day. And yet he also had a sense of a quickening inside, as if the maggots were aware of the task at hand and had decided to sharpen up their act to ensure his survival. Of course this was not because they cared about Michael, rather because they wished to preserve him. He was their country, after all. And so, technically speaking, he had a body that knew what to do.

  After the many hours he’d spent in St. Helena poring over street maps, he was able to navigate without difficulty through a labyrinth of narrow streets into the old Gothic quarter. His body steered itself effortlessly, like driving a fast car. He stopped outside a dingy little bar which lacked even a sign above the door.

  A dirty shower curtain over the entrance moved in the draft of the diseased airs from within. It was Sergio’s bar, he assumed.

  As he stood there watching, a woman built like a crane, with arms and legs thrashing in all directions came hurtling out of the doorway as if she’d been given a violent push from inside. She tore down the curtain on her way out and ended up on her miniskirted tail.

  Instead of getting up she hauled out a packet of cigarettes and lit one with a philosophical frown. But her self-control was short-lived. “Fucker!” she cried, turning round. When no one came out, she stayed where she was on the pavement, calmly puffing on her cigarette.

  Michael stepped forward. “I’m looking for Sergio.”

  “Oh, leave us alone!” she snapped. “I hate you people. Sergio hates you, too.” Then, thinking about it, she added: “Sergio hates everyone.”

  He noted that she seemed to have a perfect East London accent and this filled him with a certain wistfulness. It also occurred to him that he was still wearing his vestments, hence the confusion. He got out his wallet, showed her some money and as a result stirred up even more confusion: “I could do with a bit of heroin; I’m gasping for it to be honest.”

  “Heroin?” The girl stared, her opinion of him rising slightly. “You want heroin? Lord fucking preserve us.” She scratched her head. “I can’t go back in there now, padre, he’s gone fucking mad ‘cause I won’t lick up his spit.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He does that, the dirty fuck. He spits on the floor and I’m supposed to lick it up.”

  “And do you?”

  “No! And then he fucking beats me. The fuck!”

  “Maybe I should go and have a word with him.”

  A sliver of light entered her eyes, and she laughed, revealing a gap-toothed mouth. “Yeah, go on then, padre. Go in if you fancy a broken tooth; that’s his specialty.”

  �
�I have some other business with him. Don’t worry about me,” said Michael, picking up the curtain and rigging it back onto the rail before he stepped in.

  His eyes fell on a fat, beady-eyed gypsy woman behind the bar.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m looking for someone called Sergio?”

  She nodded. “Why you sorry?” Then added, “Sergio not here,” and pointed to a back door, whilst at the same time speaking a few words under her breath to a dark, sharp-chested youth of no more than seventeen, who ran off.

  Michael sat down. The long-limbed woman came back in and sat down with him. He offered her a drink and she asked for a Cinzano with ice.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Call me Honey,” she said. “What kind of fucking priest are you, anyway? Did you bust out of a monastery?”

  Michael downed his drink. “I’m the sort of priest who believes in doing whatever he likes.”

  “What’s that, then? Girls or boys? Or either?”

  “I like everything except what I don’t like and I don’t like anything. You understand?”

  “You don’t make a lot of sense to me but I won’t hold it against you. One thing I know: if I just sit here I’ll get another hiding when he comes back.”

  “Don’t worry; I’ll take care of it,” said Michael.

  Again she laughed and again that little streak of light entered her eyes. “You’re crazy. You’re worse than my mother.”

  “Your mother, what’s she got to do with it?” said Michael, realizing that this was the key to her.

  “Yeah, my mother. Don’t you have a mother?” she said defensively. “Course you bloody do, everyone has a mother even if she’s dead.”

  “Don’t worry; mine’s dead as well.”

  The peace was shattered when a bunch of tracksuit street sharks piled in behind an acne-scarred Andalusian gypsy. The sharp-chested youth passed something across to the gypsy woman.

  “I guess that older gypsy guy is Sergio, right?”

  “He’s going to throw you out on your ass like he does with me,” said Honey.

  “Oh, he’ll be all right once I’ve explained things to him,” said Michael, with an assurance that even he found perplexing.

  The fat gypsy woman came up and wanted fifty euro for two drinks. Michael paid up without protesting, which seemed to impress her. Quickly she asked for another hundred, then hitched up her skirt and gave him a cellophane-wrapped package from somewhere among her underwear. He got out his cash-fat wallet and paid. As he did so, he noticed Sergio sitting on a stool keeping his eyes on him before coming over. (Why is it that robbers always feel they have to start a conversation before they get to work?) Michael pre-empted him, walked up to him and grabbed his arm and muttered into his ear: “I’ve come for the Beretta.”

  Sergio reluctantly took his eyes off the pocket where Michael had put his wallet.

  “Why you did not say?”

  “Sergio, I could ask you things too. Why you don’t do something useful with your miserable life? Why you prefer walking around with a turd stuck up your ass? One of these days you’re going to shit yourself and then we’ll all know about it. You’ll stink to high heaven.”

  Honey couldn’t believe her ears. Michael counted four missing teeth in her wide-open mouth. Nervously she began itching her arms, pulling up her sleeves and exposing countless track marks and infected hypodermic punctures.

  For the sake of convenience Sergio decided to find the joke amusing. He roared with hoarse laughter, slapping his thighs. “Fucking God-man with no shit in your ass like a faggot, come back in an hour… I give you Beretta, okay.”

  Michael located a cheap hotel nearby, where he left his high-density plastic suitcase padlocked to the balcony railing. His room overlooked a narrow section of street fronted by cut-price electrical stores. Tall African men in colorful clothes stood haggling on the pavements or walked about with cardboard boxes (televisions, for the most part) balancing on their heads.

  When he opened a little cabinet above the mirror, it was full of used syringes. He didn’t have much time, just about enough to fix himself with one of his own needles and have some anchovy fillets on toasted bread and a glass of wine in a cavernous restaurant patrolled by gloomy waiters.

  When he got back to Sergio’s bar, the curtain was still undulating lazily in the draught but the place was much too quiet. He stood for a moment, letting the maggots do their surveillance.

  They were decidedly uneasy, and he was learning to listen to them.

  Just as he was about to step inside, he registered a movement in the window. The gypsy woman was crouching behind the aluminum-topped counter. Shielding his face with his forearm, he parted the curtain and stepped over the threshold directly into the path of a swinging baseball bat. His maggot arm bent out of shape from the impact, but with his other hand he lashed out, grabbed Sergio by the larynx and propelled him very hard into the concrete wall. His face made a nasty crunching sound as the bone and gristle separated. At the same time Michael felt a knife stabbing into his body from behind. The blade went in more or less directly where his kidney would have been, killing a good few maggots as it did so. Michael reacted instantaneously—or, more accurately, the maggots reacted.

  He spun around and looked into the twisted face of one of Sergio’s men who thought the job was done, but in a flash Michael had wrenched the knife out of his grip and opened up the brute’s arm like a fish gut. Remotely, as if through a pair of broken headphones, he heard the poor man shrieking.

  Sergio was squatting against the wall, pointing his flattened nose at the ceiling to stop any more shedding of blood over his dirty shell suit. His face had already ballooned. Michael could just about see the gypsy barmaid’s head behind the bar, where she was sitting on a low stool presumably kept there for occasions such as this.

  “While I’m waiting for my Beretta, I’ll have a large whiskey, if you please Signora.” Without getting up, her fat arm put a glass and bottle on the counter. Michael did his own honors and helped himself to a cigarette from an abandoned pack.

  Ten minutes later the Beretta arrived.

  “Take it, padre,” said Sergio with self-righteous indignation. “If you come here again, I shoot you in the head.”

  “Are you crazy, attacking an honest man of the cloth?” said Michael. “Can you really look me in the eye and tell me this was not deserved? You want to go to prison? You want your ugly faces splashed across the national newspapers, you stupid pork-eating slugs? How much beer do you get through every day, how many cigarettes? Lose your fucking spare tires before your hearts give up. Go home to your women and children, if you have them. Take a look at yourselves—do something with your lives before it’s too late!”

  Sergio, looking to reassert some authority, barked at Honey. “You! Get me fried chicken!”

  Michael took her arm. “Sorry. She’s coming with me.”

  Sergio sniggered even as he winced: “I don’t care. Take her, she almost dead and you almost dead too. If you come back here you dead, and if you not come back here you also dead. I am not a crazy. But I know you are a crazy, because you love a stupid bitch like she. Goodbye…”

  23.

  That night, Michael dreamed of Purissima, standing in her aromatic rose garden, looking anxious. She was calling to him, circling her nest like an alarmed blackbird as an intruder came crashing through the undergrowth.

  He realized he was the intruder.

  Up ahead he saw a dark tower with a single lit window. Inside, he saw Ariel standing with Sergio, who had just covered the floor in gobs of green snot and was pointing down and screaming at her to get on with it.

  He checked his pistol, only to discover that the chamber was empty. The firing pin made an empty click. He was surrounded by guards wielding high-powered automatics. All took aim at him as he started running.

  He woke to the sound of ricocheting bullets and lay there disoriented in the early morning light until he noticed Honey next to hi
m in the bed—her yellow miniskirt like a dead butterfly on the dirty floor. In the early morning light her face was pale as powdered chalk. He did not disturb her as he got up and showered, keeping the door open to make sure she did not try to escape.

  His body felt smooth and pleasantly enervated; his system was in balance. He lit a cigarette and ordered up coffee and pastries from the street, which he took at the door without letting the waiter inside.

  He pushed away the thought of the abbot in Ripoll, the disgusting thing he’d been sent to do. Why not just take Honey and go into hiding somewhere far away? Live their short lives under the palm trees, fill their hut with squawking parrots and pink conch shells? Feed on fruit and the fish of the sea?

  Honey woke up coughing. “Jesus, you smoke, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. I need cigarettes or I die.”

  She laughed and slurped her coffee. “I like you better like this, without those puta madre robes. Under all that nonsense there’s a man, I can’t see what’s wrong with that. Personally.” Her face clouded over and he saw her brittle wrinkles emerging. “I have to get back to the bar and give Sergio his money.”

  “Don’t go back. You’re safe here.”

  Honey reached down to pick up her dress and said in a forced, breezy voice: “You don’t know much about girls, do you, padre? We like doing our own thing and we get bored easily.” She smiled. “There again, the way you were going for it last night I could tell you hadn’t had a pair of thighs round you in years.” Her careworn body, covered in cellulite and folds of white pinched fat, filled him with a strange affection.