Ward: Flew Air K last week and the broads could hardly walk … That one in Business, what is it, Conchita? Awesome bod. Oh, mercy, I could do her some harm.
Captain John Macmanaman: The hell with that kind of talk, Flight Engineer. Not in my cockpit, son.
Ward: Sorry, Cap.
Macmanaman: Forget it. Hey, Nick. Look at the power. Look at the speed. Oh sure. We’re going to stall at maximum up here … Nick? Hal? See what I see? Thrust-reversers are engaged.
Chopko: Jesus Christ. It’s fictitious, right?
Macmanaman: Damn right it’s fictitious. Or we’d be in cartwheel. If it’s fictitious — what else is fictitious?
In Pallet No. 3 the corpse of Royce Traynor minutely rearranged itself. Its chin now rested on one of the canisters marked HAZMAT. Extreme turbulence would be needed before Royce could make his next move.
His mahogany coffin was hard and heavy. Like the past, he was dead and gone. But Royce was still hard and heavy with it: hard and heavy with the past.
PART II
CHAPTER SIX
1. The Decembrist
Wearing a black tracksuit as refulgent as perfect shoeshine, he stepped out into the afternoon. His storefresh white trainers, his dark glasses, his bronzed countenance, his backswept silver hair: in the pharmacy, from which he was now absenting himself, they called him the Professor or the Englishman. But he was the Decembrist: well advanced into the final month of his year. It was a distinguished face, its lines apparently connected to something ancient or the study of something ancient — Etruscan Pottery, Linear B.
But here he was, in a modern setting: video rental, liquor locker, radio shack. The Decembrist was of medium height (and was heading, by now, towards less than medium); he was not conspicuous in a country — America — where old men dressed like children. Watch an aeroplane climbing a blue sky for long enough and a globule of sunshine will eventually kiss it and coat it and drip from it. So, too, with the glossy garb of the Decembrist, which blackly glittered. Above the suit, his handsome, martyred face. Below it, the white dots of his gyms. Out in the lot the cars were waiting, all in line but all dissimilar, like a conscript army of machines.
There was caution in his stride but nothing frail or halt, which was just as welclass="underline" a recreational vehicle weighing several tons jerked backwards out of its trap, and the Decembrist’s hands flew from his pockets as he himself jerked clear, seeming to levitate, with an avian lightness. But the sound he made was equine — whinnying, rearing, longtoothed.
The driver drew level, a cellphone nestling in the cup of his jaw (and what beautiful golden hair he had, also busy in the light, with its bullion, its specie), and said, in answer to the Decembrist’s disbelieving stare:
‘Fuck you.’
Having manoeuvred itself into the clear, the great bus surged forward, and now the film rewound — with the Decembrist moving suddenly into its speed and the wheels yelping to a halt six inches from his knees. After some exasperated honking the driver reversed, swerved, and sped on his way, the word asshole included in the passing gulp of his rhythm and blues.
The Decembrist paused, his lips working, and then pushed on to his German saloon.
He sat, days later, on an upright chair by the swimming-pool — the swimming-pool and its motion jigsaw. The pool moved, always and helplessly, but the man was still, his head thrown back as if in agonised exhaustion. Around him the acres of grass, the couch grass, the bent grass, the cheat grass; and the squirt of the ceaseless sprinklers, hissing like a monstrous cicada … In one movement he stirred and stood. Cruise-wear, now: the swing top, the blue pantaloons, the white canvas deck-shoes. He also sported a dude-ranch cowboy belt, which he now straightened. The cartridge sockets were empty, but the holsters had been modified to contain two slender spraycans. One spraycan specialised in mosquitoes and other insects of the air; the other spraycan specialised in ants.
First, an hour with his accountant. Then an hour with his gardener. He was served lunch on the canopied deck. He wiped his mouth and got to his feet. The wasp came weaving towards him the way they do, like a punchy old southpaw, with its halfremembered moves, its ponderous fakes and feints. He drew with his left and caught it full in the face. And the wasp rose up, bristling in grief and femininity and youth. They meandered towards you so middle-aged, but they too had youth, and delicacy and clarity of colour. He didn’t stay to watch its bouncings and wormings and coilings.
He moved on to the stables, and had words with a well-built young man called Rodney Vee.
‘Rodney.’ With a remind-me intonation and a lordly frown he asked, ‘How long …?’
‘Since Monday, sir.’
‘And where are we now?’
‘Friday, sir.’
He nodded and made a further indication with a sideways movement of his head.
They went past the back of the imported barn and down some steps and into the anteroom of the disused garage. He again wagged his head before Rodney opened the inner door.
At first it sounded like a large animal trying to breathe, and then it sounded like a small animal trying to cry.
‘That’ll be all, Rodney,’ he said.
He stepped forward. In the far corner a young man was strapped naked to a baronial dining-chair with a sack over his head. The young man’s chest was shaking, lamenting, and his breath was fierce and nasal — eddy upon eddy.
The Decembrist pulled up a footstool. Grumblingly he sorted through the tray of implements at his feet: skewers, chisels.
Half an hour passed.
He stood up. He lifted the cowl of sacking. After a flustered glance round the room his head dropped and he reached for his spraycans, one in the left, one in the right.
The young man’s golden hair was gone.
‘Open your eyes! Behold. Fuck … ME?’ said Joseph Andrews.
‘You can take this fucking little bumboy, and stuff him in a fucking mailbag, and go and … and go and …’ Andrews caught his breath. ‘And go and sling him over the fucking top at Quaker Quarry!’
‘It will be done, sir. It will be done,’ said Rodney Vee, who then closed the inner door and added, ‘Are you serious, Boss?’
‘Well … Give him a few hours to compose his thoughts. Nah. Where’s he live?’
‘Vermilion Hills, Boss.’
‘Yeah. You tell him it’s the Quarry. But you take him to fucking Vermilion Hills and sling him out the fucking van. On the road. And not lightly. One … two … three. Boof. Eh up. Ruthie rings Queenie, right?’
Rodney nodded. They were coming up the steps and into the sun.
‘She says, “Mum? You won’t like it, but I’m marrying Ahmed.” And Queenie’s gone, “What? You marry that Ahmed and you never darken me door again.” “But I love him!” All this. Six months go by. The phone rings and it’s Ruthie. “Mum! Come and take me away! Aw, what he’s been doing to me!” “So,” says Queenie, “your sins’ve found you out.” “Come on, Mum, don’t fuck about.” “Now calm down, love. I’ll be over in a minicab. Where are you?”