Dead Money

by Srinath Adiga

  At first, he didn’t think much of it. But as their numbers swelled, he turned to the amigos, who also wore worried looks under their chef’s hats.

  “Do you know what’s going on?” he enquired.

  “A rally, maybe,” one of the amigos guessed.

  “I think we should get the hell out of here,” said another nervously, echoing Theo’s thoughts. They could drive to a nearby church and carry on serving there. He was about to say this to a small handful of people in the queue when he saw an Orange Shirt walk toward them with a swagger. He was a short, scrawny man with a shaved head, glassy eyes.

  “What’s this?” he barked, standing open-chested, fists planted on the waist—a small man trying to act big.

  “We’re feeding the homeless,” Theo replied.

  “I’m homeless. Feed me.” The man grinned, exposing crooked yellow teeth. Theo looked up and down the man, noting his clean clothes and scrubbed face. He served the man with barely concealed disdain, giving him a piece of meat that had fallen on the floor.

  “What about my buddies back there?” The man jerked a thumb over his shoulder.

  “Sorry, there isn’t enough for them.”

  “Really?”

  He stood on his toes to look over the counter. But Theo folded his arms and blocked his view.

  The man flashed a thin smile and left with his plate. Theo hung up his apron and joined the amigos, who were clearing with added zeal.

  Suddenly, the truck rocked as if there were an earthquake. Theo spun around and to his horror, saw that a group of Orange Shirts was shaking the vehicle.

  Cabinet doors swung open and saucepans flew from the shelves. A knife slid off the counter and stabbed the floor, missing his foot by a whisker.

  “Stop, for God’s sake!” he pleaded, looking out the window. But there seemed to be more Orange Shirts now, rocking the truck. It pitched back and forth like a ship caught in a storm.

  He edged past the shrieking amigos, ducking more swinging doors, dodging the rain of condiments, somehow making it to the back door. He leapt out of the truck. As soon as his feet hit the ground, a hand snaffled his shirt collar. He cringed when he saw a large, knobbly fist bound for his face.

  A second later, a voice. One he hadn’t heard in a long time.

  “Theo?”

  He turned slowly, looking through the fingers spread in front of his face. His eyes widened when he saw the man who’d nearly punched him.

  “Mathias! My God!”

  He barely recognized the person before him. A far cry from the tanned gym junkie in Theo’s memory, this Mathias looked more like the Michelin Man draped in orange.

  He let go of Theo’s shirt and barked over his shoulder, “That’s enough.”

  He sounded like someone used to giving orders, and the men obeyed as if they were used to taking them from him. After the shaking stopped, the cooks emerged from the back door, scurrying away like mice that had just been freed. The Orange Shirts burst into laughter and bumped fists.

  “You shouldn’t have messed with my boys.” Mathias frowned as if the whole thing had been Theo’s fault.

  “Your boys?”

  “My boys. My family,” he declared, beaming proudly.

  “This isn’t your family!” Theo cried. “Your family’s in Den Bosch. They’re worried sick about you. And so was I. You should’ve come to me for help.”

  Mathias snorted. “Why? So you could make me feel like a loser? No thanks. I don’t think you really want to help me. You want to make yourself feel good. That’s why you didn’t like it when I was doing well. You were waiting for me to fail so you could play knight in shining armor.”

  “Do you really believe that? Did you really think I wanted you to fail? I helped you set up the business, for Christ’s sake,” said a hurt Theo. Where was all this bitterness coming from? Then again, he knew where. “I’m not trying to be a knight in shining armor. I need your help.”

  “You need my help?”

  “I need someone to manage my farms. Believe it or not, it’s hard to find smart and trustworthy people these days.” A lie, as Theo had a man in mind for the job, but he wanted to give it to Mathias now. Anything to get his friend out of that orange shirt.

  Mathias smiled. “You’re wasting your time, buddy. I’m not coming back.”

  Theo scoffed, “Is this what you want from life? I know you. You can be a bit of a dick sometimes. But this isn’t you. You’re not a racist hooligan.”

  “I don’t expect you to understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “We’re freedom fighters. We’re fighting an occupation,” Mathias proclaimed, face clenched with pride and determination.

  Theo laughed. “What occupation are you talking about? The Germans left decades ago.”

  “I’ve seen what they can do.” Mathias had a glazed look, as if he’d turned into a ventriloquist’s doll spouting someone else’s words.

  “Who are they? The Chinese?”

  “I’ve seen it with my own eyes. They were trying to buy up properties in Amsterdam.”

  “That’s because you were trying to sell to them. Or have you completely forgotten?” Theo’s voice was shrill with exasperation. He felt like slapping Mathias’s bald head to knock some sense into it. “Look, I know you’re upset that you lost everything. I get that. But if you’re looking for something to blame, it’s Afterlife Dollars. Of course, people like Charles don’t want to do that. Because he realizes it’s much easier to go for low-hanging fruit—”

  For the second time in less than an hour, Mathias grabbed Theo’s collar and pulled him close.

  “Say anything you want about me. But do not disrespect my leader.”

  Theo’s heart stopped when he saw the look on the face: lip curled, veins throbbing under the skin, blood rushing to the cheeks. He raised his hands to shield his face, convinced this time the punch would arrive.

  Suddenly, a voice crackled on a PA system.

  “Let’s go,” Mathias said.

  Theo hesitated. “Where?”

  “You don’t want to miss the party. Come on, dude,” Mathias urged, sounding for a second like his former self.

  “Come on.” He yanked Theo’s arm, dragging him into the procession of bodies departing the square. They arrived at a five-way junction where more Orange Shirts poured from all directions: the Red Light District in the west, Amsterdam Centraal station in the north, Plantage in the east, canal district in the south, streams of orange merging into a thick, foaming river.

  The presence of bilingual signs signaled they were in Chinatown. A man climbed a stepladder armed with a can of spray paint. With a few squirts, he erased the Chinese lettering on the street nameplate screwed to the eaves above a coffee shop.

  A sick feeling rose in Theo’s stomach. So this was what Mathias meant by a party? The bald man was no longer holding him, but the mass of orange had him firmly in its grasp. There was no escape.

  They entered a narrow street, hemmed in by crouched seventeenth-century buildings cloaked in a spectrum of earthy colors. The structures, leaning this way and that, appeared more crooked than usual, as if disturbed by a shifting of the ground underneath. Protruding from the fourth-floor gables like rhino horns were hijsbalks, horizontal beams used for hoisting heavy objects. For centuries, the city’s Chinese community had lived there peacefully. But now, the shop signs and pagodas jutting out of bricked facades looked like giant target boards. Restaurants, massage parlors, tacky souvenir stores, all hastily closed. Behind the locked doors and tightly drawn curtains, he pictured cowering bodies, the low thrum of their fear discernible despite the cacophony of that chorus echoing in the street:

  “Nederlande Trots. Nederlande Trots. Nederlande Trots. Nederlandse Trots …”

  Just about everyone was chanting. Everyone except Theo, a white stain in a brotherhood of pure orange. He was convinced that at some point, someone was going to notice and turn on him.

  The chanting died down,
giving way to murmurs of excitement as a man climbed a beer barrel outside a smoky, wood-paneled bar. The megaphone in his hand suggested he was about to launch into a speech. The significance of the location wasn’t lost on Theo. A brown bar, one of the oldest in the country: a real Dutch institution in the middle of Chinatown. The moment was loaded with all sorts of symbols and meanings.

  “We told them in the nicest possible way. Leave.” The man’s rasping, metallic voice reverberated in the walls of the gabled canyon. “Go home. But did they listen? No. Still here. Still sucking our blood.”

  His oration possessed the same rage as the party leader’s, but none of the dark wit. Not that he needed any to whip up this crowd. They were drunk, worked up from all the chanting, and raring to go.

  “Sometimes when an abscess doesn’t heal, what do you do? You just have to cut it off. People, are you ready to do what needs to be done? Even if it causes hurt and pain?”

  “YEEEESSSSSSSS!”

  “NEDERLANDSE TROTS!”

  Roused by the war cry, the mass of orange on the street exploded into thousands of wrecking balls, each swinging a crowbar, sword, hockey stick or knife. Theo pressed his back to the wall, mouth agape, until a crashing sound near his feet brought him out of his shock. A succession of objects flew out of the broken window of a souvenir shop: Chinese lucky cats, imitation Ming vases, Buddha figurines, medicine balls, brightly colored opera masks. The sun rose over the roofs and in that instant, the pool of broken glass and porcelain on the ground sparkled like gems.

  His gaze swung the other way, past puffs of rising dust from the ransacked grocery store to a man on a stepladder: tall, flowing blond hair, muscles in his upper arm rippling as he set about dismantling a pagoda with his hammer. A few meters from the man, a door flung open and waiters in black waistcoats stumbled into the arms of a bloodthirsty mob. Bodies twisted and curled as blows rained on them.

  Theo turned to look away when a pink object swinging in the air caught his eye. A long, double-ended rubber cock that looked disturbingly like the real thing was being used to smash paper lanterns hanging from the eaves. Another man charged into a bakery armed with a fisting dildo raised above his head like a sword. A few feet away, an Orange Shirt whipped someone with a cat-o’-nine-tails, presumably acquired from the same establishment as the rubber cock and fisting dildo.

  Meanwhile, a woman in pale pink lingerie and impossibly tall heels leaned against the wall, her bright red lips curved in a smile. A plume of smoke rose from a cigarette clamped between her fingers. The four of them, the men armed with sex toys and the woman, an off-duty sex worker who’d deserted her spot in the brothel window, were no doubt blow-ins from the Red Light District around the corner.

  Theo’s gaze fixed on the woman: dark hair extensions, fake tan, lacy push-up bra, tattoo of a rose below her navel. She was standing back and watching, just like him. But while he was mesmerized by the depths humanity could plummet to, she seemed to enjoy the spectacle, as if she were in the stands of the Coliseum, applauding lions mauling the Christians. One moment, the sight of her voyeuristic appreciation made his mouth curl with disgust. But next moment, he wanted to press her to the wall and fuck her. He turned away at once for fear of getting an erection.

  Suddenly, the sound of a gunshot brought the carnage to an abrupt halt. Theo slipped into a niche and pressed himself tightly against the wall, hoping it was the police.

  For a few seconds, an eerie quiet blew through a street glittering with destruction. Then the silence was broken by feet scraping on cobblestones. Theo gingerly leaned out to look.

  The source of the gunshot, as it turned out, was a Chinese man: short, sickly thin, face glistening with sweat. He was guarding the entrance to a medicine shop, swinging a shotgun in sharp arcs, causing the semicircle of Orange Shirts surrounding him to advance and retreat. Advance. Retreat. Advance. Retreat. Like a game. One the man couldn’t hope to win, for the simple reason that the number of people surrounding him, baying for his blood, far exceeded the bullets in his shotgun. The man must have done this arithmetic too, because a look of fear spread in his face.

  Moments later, he was hit flush on the forehead by something. An Orange Shirt lunged to divest the man of his weapon while he was off-balance. More pounced once he went to ground, drowning him in kicks and punches. Theo watched, mouth sour with disgust.

  The beatings thankfully stopped after a while. They lifted the man off the ground, face bloodied, body sagging like a marionette.

  A small group of Orange Shirts gathered in a huddle, an impromptu street court convened to discuss the man’s fate. A few minutes later, a man appeared with a long rope.

  Theo’s eyes darted from the rope to the hijsbalk, the hoisting beam jutting out of the fourth-floor gable. A wave of nausea passed over him when his mind put two and two together. He turned to leave when an arm blocked his path like a boom gate.

  “Where do you think you’re going, mister?” Mathias said.

  “Fuck off.”

  Theo tried to push past him, but python-like arms slithered around his neck, pinning him in a headlock.

  “Let go.” The strangled cry drew bemused looks as his twisted body was hauled through the crowd, chin trapped in the crook of Mathias’s elbow.

  “Look, I’ve got us the best seats in the house,” Mathias proclaimed. The front row for a street play heading toward a gruesome climax. The protagonist just a few feet away, face bloodied, lip blown open, swollen eye. His small, miserable body racking with sobs as a gum-chewing Orange Shirt tightened the noose around his neck. Up on the fourth floor, a man leaning out of the gable window passed the other end of the rope over a pulley attached to the hook on the hoisting beam.

  Theo jerked his head in a last-ditch attempt to free himself from Mathias. But he was trapped, just like the man wearing a noose in front of him. And just like this man, Theo was crying, because a part of him was going to die, too.

  He lowered his gaze to his feet, refusing to look. But even if he couldn’t see it, he could hear it. A loud creak, the sound of a rusty axle bearing the weight of a human being. This was followed by a trail of “oohs” in the crowd behind him. Someone started singing the Dutch national anthem.

  “Wilhelmus van Nassouwe

  ben ik, van Duitsen bloed …”

  Another creak, this one louder and sharper. Theo gritted his teeth and concentrated on his calfskin loafers. Genuine Italian leather, hand-stitched in Tuscany. Only ninety-nine euro at a closing-down sale in the Nine Streets. The only pair they had in his size. Lucky, because large sizes were the first to go.

  Suddenly, he felt a stinging pain in the scalp as Mathias seized his hair and lifted his head.

  “Look.”

  Theo looked. The man’s legs were halfway up the window, kicking, writhing, twisting, all frenzied movements strangely synched with the lynch mob’s solemn rendition of “Wilhelmus.”

  “den vaderland getrouwe

  blijf ik tot in den dood.

  Een Prinse van Oranje”

  The man kicked so hard his shoe slipped off his foot and fell to the ground. His hands desperately wrenched at the noose to loosen its grip on his sinewy neck. The dark-aubergine face contorted in the tug-of-war between life and death. Death trying to liberate, life doing everything it could to hold on.

  Theo grimaced. Die, you stupid bastard. Why are you making this harder for yourself? Harder for me?

  “ben ik, vrij, onverveerd,

  den Koning van Hispanje

  heb ik altijd geëerd.”

  The kicking, tugging, writhing, twisting and contorting finally stopped, much to Theo’s relief. He gaped at the lifeless body dangling near the first floor, unable to feel anything. Just a big hole where his heart throbbed a few moments earlier.

  Behind him, an orchestra of camera-phone shutters opening and closing. Mathias finally let go, but not before whispering in his ear, “Chinese lantern.”

  31.

  THAT NIGHT, IT RAINED. BIG, HE
AVY DROPS smashing into window panes in furious gusts. A siren grew in volume before fizzling away in the distance. In the darkness of his bedroom, Theo clutched the sheets drawn to his chest, unable to stop trembling, as he’d just seen that face. Bloodied, dangling from the hoisting beam. For a brief second, he was uncertain whether it was a nightmare or reality. The two seemed indistinguishable from one another, like identical twins.

  It was a nightmare, and the man had spoken, the accusing voice stinging like a raw wound.

  “Why didn’t you stop them?”

  A tear dribbled from Theo’s eye. How could he have stopped them? What could he have said or done?

  You didn’t even try.

  The man reappeared in his vision, lifeless, yet somehow frowning with displeasure.

  It’s your fault, Theo railed at the man. You could have taken the beatings like everyone else. But no, you had to pull a shotgun. Who the fuck did you think you were, taking on a mob single-handed? Chuck Norris? And what the fuck did you think they were going to do? Let you off with a slap on the wrist?

  Stupid man. Got what he deserved.

  But as soon as he thought it, his body wrenched with shame. Even the Orange Shirts had the decency to leave the man alone after he was dead. But Theo didn’t.

  He grimaced, bringing his hands together as if begging the man for forgiveness. Or was he praying? Wasn’t that what you did when logic and reason failed to deliver solace? But pray to whom? His atheist parents hadn’t given him anything to believe in. Later on in life, he’d developed a more nuanced position, which was that all gods died when you believed in them too much. His gods had died long ago and in their absence, all he had were prescription drugs.

  They were in a little brown bottle, conveniently located within arm’s reach on the bedside table. He picked it up and unscrewed the cap. He’d already swallowed two before going to bed. How many more would he have to take to sleep through the night? And how many to never wake up again?