The Fat of Fed Beasts

by Guy Ware

  Ms Howard?

  I thought you was someone else.

  Are you Ms Howard?

  Only, I wouldn’t’ve opened the door.

  I hand her a card, according to which my name is Pitt and I am a chartered loss adjuster. She looks at it blankly, turns it over and looks there, too, as if expecting to find some further explanation. She stares at me, at my jacket that was once part of a suit, at my tee shirt and jeans, and hands back the card.

  Perhaps I should have gone to the Spences’ after all.

  Ms Howard? I’m here about Mr Rodkin. The basement flat?

  There ain’t no Howards here. Do I look like a Howard?

  I indicate the bells. The woman opens the door a little wider to see what I am pointing at.

  She says, Just a name on a bell. Nothing to do with me.

  And Rodkin?

  He’s dead.

  I nod. There is no arguing with that.

  Did you know him?

  The woman looks me in the face for the first time. The corners of her eyes are dull yellow. Her hair had once been ironed straight but has started to curl in the humid weather. Who d’you say you work for?

  I’m a loss adjuster. Mr Rodkin had insurance.

  No good to him now.

  He had family.

  Yeah?

  You never met them?

  I never met him, to speak to. Man went off all suited and booted in the morning, came back late. Separate entrance.

  She points over the steps to where the basement door sits locked behind its iron cage.

  I heard music sometimes, through the floor.

  I grab at that, the only personal detail she’s offered.

  What sort of music did he like?

  What sort?

  You know: pop? Jazz? Classical?

  That shit with the violins and stuff. He played that. Fucking loud, sometimes.

  Did you ever complain?

  The look she gives me says: you don’t live here, do you? She says, I shouted Shut the fuck up a couple of times. But I wasn’t really bothered. He got worse from me and Kurt.

  I say, Is there another way into the basement? From the hall, perhaps?

  She tenses up again.

  What d’you want to get in there for?

  I’m a loss adjuster . . .

  You said. Whatever that is.

  . . . I’m trying to understand the circumstances of Mr Rodkin’s death.

  Her glance mixes greed and cynicism. So you can pay out the insurance?

  I’m just trying to understand what happened.

  She shakes her head and crosses her arms tightly underneath where her breasts should have been.

  She says, The man slit his throat with a bread knife, bled to death. There was police all over the place. It was in the paper.

  I want to know who he was. Why he did it.

  I know this is thin. Life policies don’t pay out on suicides. Who’d care why he did it?

  Rodkin’s neighbour seems to feel the same. She says, Why the fuck does anybody do anything?

  A man comes up the steps behind me, speaks over my shoulder to the woman. He is taller than me, which doesn’t happen often, and two or three times as wide. The woman says, Some creep wants to know about downstairs.

  The big man reaches out and puts his hand on my shoulder. It’s like being pawed by a bear.

  Rodkin? You want to know about Rodkin?

  Did you know him?

  The man pauses. His head is like the round end of a huge brown egg, hairless and with no discernible neck. His ears are thick and fleshy and have been stuck on sideways, as if by a cartoonist. He smiles, and I can see a couple of gold teeth. He says, We met at church. Are you a reporter?

  I shake my head.

  I’m a loss adjuster.

  The man smiles again and nods. If he knows what a loss adjuster is, he doesn’t care; if he doesn’t know, he isn’t letting on. He says, You got a name?

  I say, Pitt, and hand him the card the woman had given back. He studies it, then slips it into his pocket.

  Well, Mr Pitt. I can get you in for fifty.

  I agree. Fifty is steep but there’s no point in arguing. It would just make an enemy out of someone who at least knew Rodkin; and it isn’t my money. Theo never queries my expenses.

  I hand over the cash, and the big man pushes the door open; the woman steps back to let us pass. He leads me through a broad hallway with cracked tiles on the floor and nothing on the walls except a few numbers scribbled in biro and a monstrous ejaculating penis boldly outlined in black marker. We go down half a flight of narrow steps; there is no banister rail, and the walls on either side are marked with broad bands of greasy finger marks. At the bottom of the steps, he unbolts a door that leads back outside. He says, There’s no way in from the house. It got bricked up when they converted the place. But there’s a back door.

  The garden is a long thin strip with high fences on either side and a brick wall at the bottom. The wall is topped with giant tinsel – six inch curling fronds of galvanized steel sharp enough to tear through clothes and flesh – that glints dully in the hazy sunshine. I guess the wall backs onto the bus garage. At its foot there is a solitary, faded gnome. Some sort of vigorous weed with thick, fleshy leaves and tiny, brilliant blue flowers like old-fashioned sweets has overrun the whole garden.

  Have you lived here long?

  I never said I lived here.

  That doesn’t mean he doesn’t though.

  I say, Are you Kurt?

  At the back the basement flat is level with the ground. There is a half glass door into a small kitchen. The door is barred like those at the front, but the big man has a key. Perhaps this was worth fifty after all.

  What kind of business did you do with Rodkin, Kurt?

  The bars are hinged like a second door. The man swings them open, then unlocks the glass door and holds that back, too, ushering me inside. He says, Never said I was Kurt, either.

  You didn’t say you weren’t, though.

  The kitchen is empty. Almost empty. There are no pots and pans, no plates, no sign of any food. But there is a magnetic strip on the wall above a counter, stuck to which are half a dozen knives. I can see a carving knife, a cook’s knife, a meat chopper and some smaller blades, including a boning knife. No breadknife.

  The big man closes the door. He leans against the kitchen counter, putting his bulk between me and the knife rack. He says, Now, Mr Pitt. You’re going to give me your wallet. And your watch. And your mobile phone.

  I do as I am told.

  7

  ONCE I DIDN’T have to stop myself thinking about the dead woman, I found I was free to think about the old man who wouldn’t get down on the floor, even when I’d put a gun against his head and told him to.

  Mostly what I thought was: what makes anyone that sure of what he wants and does not want?

  Karen opened the door without knocking. She asked if I was willing to see Gerald Pryor, who had no appointment but wanted a quick word. Gerald was the Head of IT and would be looking for money, hoping that my imminent departure would make me magnanimous. I agreed to see him.

  Gerald didn’t look like a Head of IT – he was round and jolly with a shiny bald head and a luxuriant moustache that he appeared to have borrowed from a raffish uncle. He was no more capable than any other IT Head I’d ever met of preventing computer projects running hideously over time and over budget. He asked how I was and I told him I was fine.

  “Looking forward to retirement?”

  “I’m fifty-six, Gerald. My father lived to ninety-three.”

  “Still . . . no kids, no wife, thirty years on the clock. You must be minted.”

  It wasn’t the money – money was just the chips. I might have had another forty years.
/>   “I won’t starve.”

  Gerald laughed. He said, “So what are you going to do with yourself?”

  “I thought I’d take up robbing banks.”

  That’s what I’d been saying whenever people asked. That or drug-trafficking. Once I said I’d re-train as an assassin. Hiding in plain sight, I told myself. It seemed to work.

  Gerald said, “You don’t want to do that.”

  “No?”

  “There’s no money in banks these days. Internet fraud, that’s where it’s all at. Speaking of which . . .”

  And there it was: the pitch. The digital security project that had spiralled out of control but which he could just bring to heel with another half a million. I told him to write it up and take it to the Programme Board.

  “Oh, I will, Bill. Of course. But I just thought . . . the Board would take it a lot more calmly if I could say you’re happy with the money side.”

  Of course they would. And I could do this, if I chose to, even then, when we were sacking people to make my budget add up; even when I had less than a week to go. I could have made a half million problem go away. If I’d wanted to.

  “Sorry, Gerald.”

  Gerald didn’t leave immediately, of course. He hung around making a bit more conversation about my future, but his heart wasn’t in it.

  At last he stood up and put out his hand. “All the best, Bill.”

  I shook his hand and decided there was nothing on earth that would make me turn up to my own leaving-do.

  As Gerald waddled out, I told Karen I was not to be disturbed for the rest of the afternoon.

  Yesterday afternoon, when Moody said “Who’s dead?” I had assumed that she was being deliberately obtuse, that she was trying to rub our noses in it. She’d straddled the uncomfortable office chair, her arms crossed over the back, her head resting on her arms. She looked like a truculent teenager. I said, “Come on.”

  She lifted her head, pushed herself up with her arms. “No. Who?”

  It was intolerable. If I’d shot someone, it was an accident. The sort of accident that happens, perhaps, when you take loaded guns into crowded places and point them at strangers. But I hadn’t intended to hurt anyone. DC Moody, on the other hand, had walked into a room, found an injured, traumatised woman, and shot her. Face-to-face.

  I said, “The woman. In the bank. The woman we killed. You and I.”

  “I never killed anyone.”

  Not a teenager. More like a five year-old playing hide-and-seek, putting her hands over her eyes and saying: you can’t see me.

  “I’m not saying you didn’t think you had to, but you did, Rachel. We heard it.” I turned towards Bernie, trying to implicate him in my appeal to the brutal truth. “We both heard you.”

  Bernie looked at the floor, but Moody was having none of it. “Heard me what?”

  I sighed and closed my eyes. I spoke slowly, deliberately, as if for the record. “I fired my pistol. Earlier than I meant to, I admit, but I was aiming to miss. I did miss. But the bullet passed through the wall and hit a woman on the other side. She was screaming. You went in, you fired a shot. And she stopped screaming.”

  I stopped. I opened my eyes. Moody was looking up at me with her mouth open. I had hoped for guilt, contrition, even fear, but had expected denial. I had not expected this: disgust.

  “What? You think I shot someone for screaming? And just carried on? Jesus, Bill. Sir. You’re sick.”

  “I . . .”

  “Sick.”

  Bernie was just catching up. He said, “You didn’t? You mean, nobody’s dead?”

  Moody said, “That’s right, Sherlock.”

  He balled his fists and punched the air, like a boxer blocking blows to his face. He hopped from foot to foot. He almost ran over to Moody’s chair and kissed her. “Oh, thank you. Thank fuck. Thank God. Thank you. Thank you, God.”

  Moody pushed him away, but gently, for her.

  For three hours, ever since the screaming started and then, just as suddenly, stopped, I’d felt numb, anaesthetised. You can’t rob a bank on charm and personality alone. But when I’d asked myself if – when push came to shove – if I could ever shoot someone, I’d always thought I never could; and now I had. But Moody hadn’t. I said, “What happened?”

  “You hit her, Bill. I’m sorry, but you did.”

  I sat down behind my desk. I steepled my fingers and leant my chin against them. “And?”

  “There was blood all over the place. She was hysterical. I couldn’t see where it was coming from. I put one through the ceiling just to get her attention.”

  Bernie interrupted. “Like you said you might?”

  “Just like I said. And it worked. When she stopped fighting me off I saw she’d been hit in the arm, probably the brachial artery, from the blood she was pumping about.”

  Bernie said, “Yuck.”

  “So I used my balaclava as a tourniquet. She’ll live.”

  As my anaesthesia faded, scepticism returned. “Your balaclava? Is that possible?”

  Moody groaned, like a disappointed teacher. “You push the top through the mouth hole? It makes a loop you can tighten and tie off with a plasticuff.”

  I must have looked blank.

  “Honestly. Civilians. Did you skip First Aid, or what?”

  I said, “I did a lot of it when I worked at the hospital. We didn’t have much call for balaclavas.”

  “In Accounts.”

  “I don’t remember them much in A&E, either.”

  “Whatever.”

  Bernie said, “Who cares? The point is – she’s not dead. Not. Dead.”

  Moody and I ignored him. Something was still bothering me. I said, “You left the balaclava behind?”

  Moody nodded. “Would you rather I’d let her bleed to death?”

  Now, when I got off the train I felt a few fat spots of rain. I sheltered briefly in a doorway, cigarette butts at my feet, but the rain wasn’t coming to anything, so I headed across the river. The dog returns to his vomit, I knew, the detective to the scene of the crime. I wasn’t a detective.

  On the bridge, I paused and leaned on the parapet wall. Below me the river was dull and grey, the colour of the battleship moored downstream. I watched a sleek-necked bird fly downriver, skimming the water until it seemed to pause, then plunge and disappear. A cormorant. I watched, waiting, scanning the turbid water for its re-emergence. Just when I had given up, it broke the surface, a slim black curve like a geisha’s eyebrow. It floated back upstream, effortlessly, because that’s the way the river was flowing – inland, past the heart of the city. It was just the tide, I knew, but it still felt wrong, somehow out of joint. The river was almost full, lapping against the highest reaches of the embankment walls; soon the tide would ebb and the river would flow down to the sea again.

  The old man had walked out but he did not raise the alarm. It was as if the robbery, the guns, the threats were simply nothing to do with him. I told myself he was the least dangerous witness in the whole affair: of all the people in the bank, he was the only one who never saw Moody’s face.

  And yet.

  And yet, something told me I had more to fear from his mild indifference than from Moody’s unmasking, from Bernie’s instability, or from the investigative prowess of our colleagues.

  Something told me I had to find the old man, to understand how he could have done what he did.

  Something? Call it a hunch.

  An accountant’s instinct.

  Willie Sutton wasn’t really Willie at all. Willie the Actor, Slick Willie – they were just nicknames the FBI made up. Nobody called him that. He was Bill, like me. But Willie was what it had to say on the jacket of his book.

  I straightened up, both hands pressing into the small of my back to ease the stiffness, and continued over the bridge toward
s the station.

  At the bank I was greeted by the chubby blonde woman who had greeted me the day before. She smiled. Without my balaclava and black uniform she did not recognise me. She warned me that the bank was about to close. I thanked her and walked on into the middle of the foyer, which, at that hour was almost empty. Two or three customers were withdrawing money or bending awkwardly over the narrow ledges the bank provided for people to lean on to complete paying-in slips, and which were always at exactly the wrong height. There were no queues. I hesitated, uncertain what to do now that I was there. I had expected things to be different: crime scene tape, perhaps, cordoning off the cash machine the old man had used, the one above which my bullet had pierced the sign and passed through the partition wall into the room behind. But it appeared that nothing had changed since the moment I entered the bank the previous day. I checked my bearings: the machine directly in front of me must have been the one. Above it a laminated sign read Cash Withdrawals. The sign was undamaged and must, I thought, be new. I could not see the manager, Mr Wenlock – whom I knew from our surveillance would not normally have been in the public area of the bank at that time, anyway – or of the woman Moody had bullied into co-operating. I could see no evidence that the raid had taken place at all.

  A young man emerged from the door into the private interior of the bank. He approached me and asked if he could help. He was tall and thin with blonde, almost colourless hair and a face both pitted and cadaverous, as if teenage acne had been followed by malnutrition; if he had been in the bank the day before he must have remained out of sight in the offices upstairs.

  I said, “I would like to see Mr Wenlock, please.”

  The young man looked doubtful. “Do you have an account with the bank, sir?”