5
Taking the soldier was disgracefully easy; the work lay in getting there and back.
It was as well that the darkness made it difficult to identify the filth in the water. We tripped over submerged snags and ran into floating, nameless debris, stinking rubbish carried down from the backblocks; we stumbled into potholes that the knowledgeable youngsters could not always save us from, and fought up out of them against soft slops of slime that touched and clung.
The kids headed straight for the old river embankment, now permanently under water, well beyond the purlieus of the towers. There we turned south toward the barracks. The army complex was brightly visible, alive with window lights, its two- and three-story structures glittering at the feet of the monstrous Swill blocks. It seemed to float on its built-up mound; when the moon dodged clouds for a few seconds we could discern the unlit bulk of the assault course running out into the water, a huge, man-made promontory.
Walking along what was once the embankment, in forty minutes we reached the assault course, every minute of it waist deep.
The water was cold – despite enduring summer it was always cold, fed by the new currents sweeping up from the melting ice. Shivering as I waded, a thought that would not go away was of the kids who made this disgusting, punishing trip night after night to trade their bodies for what they could get. As for the callous hunger of the young pimps who drove them . . . but I was passing beyond moral judgments where Swill were in question, perhaps where human beings of any kind were in question. Their need drove.
The wall of the assault course became palely visible in the thin light, a hundred-meter length heaving itself five meters out of the water, its grey cement flanks crowned with strands of barbed wire barely visible against the clouded sky. The blank sides seemed featureless but Bettine knew precisely where she was leading and fetched us up at a point very close to a rough black arrow, the marker that some lover – hungry Swill or itching soldier – had aerosoled on the cement, pointing up to the saddling paddock.
Drilled in what we must do, we left Bettine there and moved well away from her and sank into the water to eye level. My teeth chattered. Her business was to go up first and engage the man’s attention, ours to follow while he was distracted. She had understood, giggling, that we did not want him with his pants down, which would only cause delay. We wanted to be in and out with speed.
When we were in position she put two fingers in her mouth and split the night with a whistle. It seemed there was nothing furtive about these transactions, which meant that they were known to and tacitly ignored by military authority. After tonight they would not be ignored.
A voice on the height answered, ‘That you, Betty?’
Another, some way off in the night, called quietly, ‘Jonno’s bit of sniggle’s showed. Half your luck, Sarge!’
She had not said he was a sergeant. A good-tempered sergeant, too, who called back, ‘Fuck your fist, laddie! This is man’s work.’ It was just possible to see his form at the wire.
Bettine said, ‘Ya, feller. ’S’me.’
He was not entirely careless. A powerful torch beam lit her for a moment and swept the area, but we were well out of the way. He snapped it off and the wire rattled as he flung something over it to make a bridge. A folded blanket, I hazarded. He called, ‘Coming down!’ and I guessed at a rope snaking down the wall though I could not see it.
We moved in toward Bettine, who was already swarming up. It was an easy pull for her in bare feet, a 60 degree slope in rough cement. For a moment she loomed against the sky as she went over the wire like a small monkey.
Her method of concentrating the sergeant’s attention was simplicity’s self: she started a quarrel as soon as she hit the ground. Not all of it was acting – she was raging angry for her beastly Stevie and more than a little frightened, and she went for him like a squalling termagant. Not much was distinguishable but the word chewey came through in furious repetition and it sounded as though she accused him of all the plagues of Egypt.
I was halfway up the rope with Kovacs behind me before the man edged a word in to ask what in Christ’s name she was talking about, to be answered with a fresh flood of gutter Swill. With my head just above ground level I saw that she had moved around so that the sergeant’s back was toward us; I reached for Kovacs’ hand to ease him over the lip of the mound.
What lover-boy had flung over the wire was a field mattress, soft rubber thick enough to muffle the spikes. As the bedevilled man lost his temper and began calling Bettine all the stupid bitches he could lay a cursing tongue to, I put my hand on the mattress and vaulted over.
The wire squealed and rattled as Kovacs came after me and the man could not fail to hear it but he was within touching distance and his turning head laid him wide open. It does not take strength to knock a man out, only a knowledge of exactly where to hit him. Besides, I was wearing a knuckle sheath, and he went down without a sound. That was a bonus of fortune; so was the luck that made the guards roving pickets instead of stationed sentries, on the move and getting further away. I thought we deserved some luck for sheer nerve. Kovacs was ready with the gag and we tied his wrists in front of him rather than behind because there was a long, stumbling walk ahead of him.
Kovacs hissed at Bettine and she slipped back over the wire and down the rope. We lifted the sergeant on to the mattress and the twins took him off on the other side. Getting him down the wall was an affair of holding his dead weight with the straining muscles of one arm – he was a bigger man than any of us – and the rope with the other. The need for silence made the job twice as long as it might have been and all of us were breathless and sore when we hit the water.
The sudden cold brought the sergeant around and he struggled and grunted behind the gag. There was nothing for it but to hit him again. Then we had to carry him, holding his face out of the water, until we were beyond earshot of the assault course. We set him on his feet and Kovacs told him that he would have to walk because the distance was too great for carrying. He promptly dropped to his knees, leaving only his head and shoulders above the water, and made it plain that he intended to stay there.
Kovacs said in his ear, ‘We can always go back and get another one.’ The sergeant glanced at him but did not move. ‘We can’t leave you behind, though, can we now?’ And he shoved the man’s head under the water and leaned on his shoulders. The sergeant was a strong man but with his hands bound he had no chance. He heaved like a threshing horse but his breath only ran out the sooner. His struggles became twitchings and I protested, ‘Let up, man, you’re drowning him!’ Kovacs spat at me, ‘Shut up, copper gentleman!’ and held the poor brute down until the twitching slackened and almost stopped. Then he pulled the man’s head up by the hair and held him while he struggled all over again to breathe. I would have loosened the gag but Kovacs snarled, ‘Leave it! This is business and he better know it.’
In a vagrant spear of moonlight I saw Kovacs’ face for a moment and it seemed incongruously that he was suffering. I remembered that childhood canard, It hurts me more than it hurts you, and wondered if Kovacs would go the distance and drown the man if he did not capitulate – suffering, no doubt, all the while. And whether or not I would stand by and let him do it. I was not sure. Believe me, I was not sure.
The kids seemed interested but unmoved. What sort of brutality had they learned to absorb in growing up?
When we hauled the sergeant to his feet he stood with drooping head, not looking at us. The fight was gone out of him; only a fool dies for sheer defiance, Kovacs said, ‘There’s a long walk ahead of us, Sarge. Don’t make it hard on me.’
Hard on him.
We went slowly with the half-exhausted man. At some stage we heard shouting behind us and saw the flash of torches atop the assault course, but we were well away by then. If they had had a mobile searchlight, now . . . but at a picket post, why should they?
In an hour we splashed into the lobby of Twenty-three. It was still pitch dark.
The operation had been almost stupidly easy and I said so to Kovacs, who replied, ‘What sort of shit do they teach you in PI?’ That made the sergeant’s head snap up. ‘Success is knowing what you’re about and not taking silly chances.’
The enterprise had seemed to me an accumulation of chances but I had to admit that he had known what he was about and that he had what it took to earn a reputation among Tower Bosses.
But I would have preferred him without crocodile tears.
6
Kovacs had a small torch. We splashed through the dark lobby to a door under the stairway, behind the inoperative liftwell. As he opened it a sweetish, pungent odour was carried on a waft of warm air. The twins stepped back and Bettine made noisy play of being sick at the stomach. The sergeant was surprised and repelled but he stood still, waiting, body alert and eyes alive.
Kovacs said, as on some ordinary night at home, ‘Bed, you kids.’
His twins were unwilling but knew better than to argue. Bettine, unfamiliar with Kovacs-clan discipline, stood her ground when he jerked a thumb at her and ordered, ‘Get!’
Her young-old face hardened. ‘ ’S’mine!’
‘Eh?’
‘ ’S’my meat now. Orf, you!’
She argued with her own nasty logic that she had a right to see! She got him, didn’t she? She had a right to see Kovacs hurt him! She knew what was on and she wanted to see!
The sergeant darted a startled glance at the angry Kovacs and at Bettine a look of creeping horror. Kovacs said, ‘She’s only fourteen. They’re animals at that age.’
The sergeant thought he lied. ‘She told me—’
‘Sixteen? Age of consent? They get old fast in the towers. Bettine, get!’ In the end he had to tell the boys to drag her off while she shrieked her disappointment in a tirade which centered, peculiarly, on revenge for her sick Stevie, the pimp who beat and ran her. All drama and no sense.
The sergeant watched her out of sight. He repeated, ‘Fourteen!’ as if he feared we held it against him.
Kovacs pushed him to the door. ‘In there.’ We splashed down a short corridor to another door; when he opened it the sickly smell flooded out full blast and I recognized the stench of the garbage well. There were a dozen of them in the tower, deep slurry-pits that reduced everything but glass, plastic and metal to a thick sludge to be precipitated into the sewers and spat out by the city’s pumping units somewhere in the polluted bay.
The smell of decomposing matter, with an added sourness suggesting that the toilet flush system was leaking into it, was as much as I could stand without gagging. The sergeant was suddenly and desperately sick. Kovacs watched him, grinning and winking at me. I had been about to protest at use of this room until his wink reminded me of the psychological advantage given us by physical sickness in an already frightened man.
The place was windowless and the torch lit only glimpses of shapes but Kovacs moved familiarly, lighting hurricane lamps which revealed broken and bulbless electric brackets. The lamps added a fresh burden of stench to the fetor – God knows what was in them, probably a mixture of sump oils and greases filched from the factory discharges and home-processed in some tower-devised way.
Aside from some makeshift tools – rakes, hooks, shovels – leaning against the wall, the perimeter of the well was bare. The central sump was guarded by a wall of sandbags a meter or so high, a necessity where the floor level was permanently calf deep in water; in flood time the whole area would become a sewer but little could be done about that. The garbage chute descended from the ceiling nearly to the level of the bags and I looked over them to see a steel grill covering the well and over it a litter of all the bottles, tins and plasticware that should have gone to recycling instead of down the chute. The tools would be for Kovacs’ men to clear them away as they clogged the grill. Far down below I heard the rushing of outlets; when the storms rose most of their cargo would come pelting back to wash through the stinking streets.
The sergeant peered at the sandbags. ‘Army supplies.’
Kovacs nodded. ‘Have to get them somewhere, don’t we?’
‘Steal them?’ He had control of his voice as he played the scared man’s game of pretending interest in trivia.
‘Bought and paid for – after a fashion. Quartermasters like a good screw as much as picket sergeants and they pay in their own coin.’
‘Ah!’ The reference seemed to strike home.
‘Very corrupt, the army.’
No answer to that. The abominable smell of the place seemed stronger in silence.
‘I’m going to untie your hands, Sarge. Don’t dash for the door. The lad here’ll only have to flatten you again.’
I was not sure I could do it so easily to a man prepared for it. He was twenty kilos bigger than my seventy-odd and he had the unmistakable trained-down look; he could be faster than one expected of big men and if he were karate trained I could be in trouble. Still, there was Kovacs, with no guessing at his brand of fighting save that it would be nasty and effective.
The sergeant summed me up and nodded slightly; his assay of Kovacs took longer and he was not fool enough to discount slenderness or age or the knife with which Kovacs sliced his bonds. He leaned against the sandbags, breathing gently, waiting for us to make a mistake.
He was not the rough, tough drillmaster of military legend but a man in his mid-twenties, fair-haired and fair-skinned with the gentle profile my slender experience coupled with artists and writers, and full, red, almost girlish lips. He was, none the less, a strong, instructed fighting machine.
The poor light with upward slanting shadows gave Kovacs’ narrow skull and prominent bones the face of Satan. I think he knew it as he knew everything he could make use of. He produced a couple of chewey tablets, held them close to a lamp before he stripped the wrapping from one and popped it into his mouth.
He held out the other to the sergeant, who shook his head.
‘Don’t chew, Sarge?’
‘No.’
‘Dirty habit, eh?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Then try this.’
‘Why?’
‘So you can experience first hand what you’re handing out to Swill kids in exchange for a bit of gash.’
The man frowned. ‘I don’t follow. Is there something wrong with the stuff? It’s supposed to be high quality.’
‘Who says that?’
‘It says so on the carton.’
‘What carton?’
That was the right question because chewey is packed, for cheapness, in disposable pulp bags. It was the wrong question because Kovacs had leaped in too eagerly, homing in on the nature of his interest, alerting the sergeant that here was something of importance.
He said rapidly and clearly, ‘Sykes, John Phillip, Sergeant, Stores Security, Second Grade, V3472688,’ then clamped his mouth tight as a trap and stared defiantly at us.
Kovacs said, ‘That’s buggered it,’ berating himself.
I was surprised that he knew what had happened because use of the hypnotic trigger was not common knowledge. An army prisoner under questioning is required by international law to reveal only his name, rank and number, but our army had booby-trapped the prisoner’s brain by implanting ‘name, rank, number’ as a key to lock all other answers into a psycho-physical straitjacket. It was a routine hypno operation on all who served on border patrols.
Kovacs asked me, ‘You know what this is?’
‘I’ve heard of it.’
‘How much?’
‘He can’t answer any questions relating to military matters.’
‘That’s right.’ He grinned wickedly at Sykes. ‘What happens if he tries?’
‘Blinding migraine, nausea, muscle cramps, constriction of the throat muscles. He can’t answer.’
Sykes felt that he now had some control of the situation. He said to me, ‘He called you PI. What are you doing with Swill? It’s time you talked to me.’
As if he had not spoken K
ovacs held out the toxic chewey a second time. ‘Chew, soldier.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘Who knows? Maybe nothing. If there’s nothing wrong a little chew won’t hurt you.’
‘I don’t use the stuff.’
Without warning, without any tensing of the body that I saw, Kovacs hit him with a smashing right hook in the middle of his face. I heard his nose break and in the lamplight black blood flowed from his lips and nostrils. He slammed back so hard against the sandbags that I thought he would go over on to the grill but he leaned there, bent back, hands to his face, crying something unintelligible so distorted was it with pain.
I cried out, ‘Man, go easy on him!’
Kovacs snarled at me, ‘Shut your fucking mouth!’ and if ever lamps lit a demon’s eyes it was then. He held out the tablet. ‘Chew, you bastard!’
Sykes brought his hands down and behind the blood his expression was blank unbelief that this could have been done to him for so small a purpose. In patent bewilderment he took the tablet and his hands trembled as he stripped away the wrapper. With a last look of helpless inquiry at Kovacs he lifted the thing to his mouth.
I yelled, ‘No!’ but Kovacs was before me, slapping it out of his hand. It flipped over and over in the lamplight and dropped into the sewer.
Kovacs said, ‘He’s honest. He doesn’t know.’
It was impossible not to feel pity for Sykes as he listened to what Kovacs told him; there can be few horrors to equal being informed in bitter, squalid detail how you have been used to visit disease on the innocent while taking your own pleasure. I watched his face in that well of shadows as what was told him slotted into the items of his own undisclosable knowledge. In minutes he became the one of us who now knew both sides of the affair and could not tell what he knew.
He cried, and that was something I had not seen in a man since my father charged from the kitchen to the bedroom in the last despair of his life. Once I would have despised him but Carol and Nick and Arry had purged me of contempt; I ached for the poor brute trapped in his psycho-physical prison, alone.
The Sea and Summer Page 32