“Tact. That’s going to be the key word in there, comrades. Tact. Taste. If he looks a little dusty – as well he might – gloss over it. If they’ve got him rigged up in some kind of pulley system, don’t look taken aback. If he reeks – and there’s a fair chance he’s going to – I want you to take that in your stride. They reckon burnt flesh can smell a bit sweet. So if you smell something a bit sweet, that’s what it’ll be. Be mentally prepared for that. Be mentally prepared for anything. Maybe he’ll a bit charred. Maybe he’ll be all kind of pink and hairless. Maybe he’ll be partially wrapped in foil. I don’t know. I don’t know exactly what the damage is. Hopefully he won’t look like a freak at all. All I’m saying is, be fully prepared for the fact that he might. And if he does, act like he doesn’t. Treat him like he’s a perfectly normal human being. Even if he isn’t one any more. Especially if he isn’t one any more.”
Solemnly the Maoists inhabited the waiting lounge. Their shadows were vague in the shiny white floor, like ghosts trapped under ice. Col and Smithy occupied the vinyl courtesy couch, sharing a pack of chips dispensed by the vending machine. Blue sat by a low table awash with complimentary reading matter, including a newspaper whose front page said: Aggot Lies Low as Manhunt Intensifies. On his own chair of hard plastic Fenton writhed and squirmed, vexed by a nearby poster suggesting that tight jeans could give you cancer of the testicle.
“To state the fucking obvious, don’t stare at him. But by the same token don’t look away from him either. Look at him for exactly the same duration you’d look at a normal bloke for – no more, no less. Conversation-wise, let me set the tone in there. I want to maintain an upbeat vibe. Nothing too serious. Nothing too deep. Nothing about his injuries or his long-term future. I don’t want any shows of raw emotion in there, right? I don’t want to see him break down. Any idiot who makes him break down will be walking back to campus. You hear me? You’ll be out of the Kombi on your arse. I can’t underline that enough. If I can get in there and out of there without seeing him cry, I’ll be an extremely happy man.”
From somewhere inside his capacious leather jacket Gus extracted a box of matches and a chunk of unsmoked cigar. He had them halfway to his mouth before he remembered where he was. He unhappily returned them to the jacket. A sour look crossed his face as he sat there, hunched uneasily forward on his chair, large and hairy and deeply not at home in this sterile place.
On paper, his plan had seemed foolproof. Arrive in the middle of the lunch-hour, when visits would fairly obviously not be allowed. Get rebuffed by some gruff old matron. Have her convey their best wishes to Warren. And then depart, having earned full moral credit for trying to pay him a visit, without at any point having actually had to look at him or be in his presence. Then repair to campus and hit the Situation Room, where Gus would unveil this brand new plot of his: the ominously named Operation Aggot.
“And don’t mention his hands, obviously. That’s another topic that might set him off. I don’t care if they’re bandaged up like a giant pair of oven mitts. Just don’t refer to them. Don’t even look at them. Fucking don’t even mention the subject of hands in general. Or fingers. Or picking things up. In fact, try not to say anything at all. Leave the bulk of the talking to me. Unless of course he asks you a question. If he does, look him straight in the eye and answer him honestly. Unless of course it’s obvious you’d be better off lying to him. In that case, lie through your teeth.”
On paper, they should have been back at the Situation Room by now. On paper, Gus should already be unveiling Operation Aggot. But here was the snag. Warren lay in the Digital and Manual Trauma ward. And in the Digital and Manual Trauma ward, the normal ban on lunch-hour visits had turned out not to apply. On the contrary: because the patients in that ward were by definition incapable of wielding cutlery, their friends and families were positively encouraged to visit them at lunch-time, so as to assist the overworked and underfunded nursing staff with the laborious task of feeding them all by hand. Hence the Maoists, on presenting themselves at the enquiries desk, hadn’t been rebuffed by a gruff old matron at all. Instead a civil and pleasant-looking young nurse had issued them with a meal cart on which were arrayed a cling-wrapped glass of pineapple juice, assorted cutlery, a plate covered by a plastic lid the colour of Streetwise, and a dispenser of pre-moistened towelettes for those inevitable “accidents.” Now the cart sat ready at the edge of the lounge, its wheels pointing impatiently up the long and glistening corridor.
“And don’t imply that his actions have let us down. Obviously they have, but for God’s sake don’t imply it. Act like he’s some kind of hero. In his mind he probably is one. If that gets us through this without him weeping, let him think it. Watch me, follow my leads. Relax. Have fun in there. Or for fuck’s sake try and look like you are.”
“Can’t we just bail?” asked Smithy.
“Smithy.” Gus glumly sighed. “I don’t want to be here any more than you do. But face reality, mate. That hot little nurse knows we’re here now. For the sake of decency, we’ve got to at least stick our heads round his door. And look, hopefully that’ll be about it. Hopefully we can be in and out of there in two minutes. If I can swing that tactfully, I will. But I can’t guarantee it. It all depends on what the atmosphere’s like in there. Who knows, I might even have to unveil Operation Aggot in there, if we get stuck at his bedside with nothing to say. Like I say, hopefully it won’t come to that. But you have to play these things by ear. Same goes for this lunch of his. Ideally we can get in and out of there without having to feed it to him. But again, we’ve got to be a bit tasteful in how we go about that. Like, we can’t just not take the trolley in. I mean, fair’s fair. We can’t just ditch it somewhere. I don’t see how we can reasonably do that. We’ll just have to slip it in there unobtrusively and hope he doesn’t notice it. I don’t know what the set-up is in there, but maybe I can park it out of his eye line. Maybe we can get a few bodies between it and his bed. It’s not our job to draw his attention to it. Nobody said anything about that. With a bit of luck he’ll be that happy to see us he won’t clap eyes on it till we’re gone, and some nurse can feed it to him then. Let her cop a handful of his dribble. That’s what they get paid for. That’s why I pay my taxes. But let’s be clear about this. If he sees it, he sees it. End of story. We’ll roll up our sleeves and we’ll feed it to him without complaint. It won’t be the end of the world. Just remember, it’s you cowards that are partially responsible for him being here. Not you, Fent. But the rest of you women, if one of you’d of volunteered to be the explosives expert, he wouldn’t be laying here in the first place. It’d be one of youse instead. So just remember that. Incidentally Fent, don’t let the name of this thing mislead you. Operation Aggot. It still involves knocking off your mate Lego, you can rest assured of that.”
Fenton inclined his head in gratitude. Operation Aggot. You had to worry about that name. Whenever Gus made reference to it, his hand drifted unconsciously towards the rear pocket of his jeans. What might be in there? Some rough notes? A full blueprint? A new death list, unilaterally drawn up?
“And don’t leave any long silences, either,” Gus further instructed them. “We don’t want any long pauses that he might suddenly get all introspective in. Introspectiveness, that’s another sure-fire catalyst to him breaking down. If there is a long silence and it looks like he’s about to lose it, then you can say something. In fact you can say anything, provided it’s not about his hands, his lunch, or how he fucked up and let us down. Or having a wank. Don’t mention that either. That’s another topic he might want to weep about. Christ knows I would. And the fairer sex, let’s lay off that whole subject too. This bloke … this is a bloke whose whole future is shaping up as one long sex ban. Let’s put it that way.”
Col froze respectfully in the act of lifting a chip to his mouth. “What, he did some damage to his knob did he?” he gravely asked.
Gus reddened, and took one of his trademark uneasy glances at Fenton. “Christ Col. I’m talking about his hands, you fool. Ask yourself what ward he’s in. He’s not in the phallus trauma ward, is he? He wasn’t holding the bomb with his flute. He was holding it in his hands. And look, I don’t know what the extent of the damage was. All I know is what his old man told me, right? The gear went off in his hands. Personally, I still can’t see how he even survived that. But he did, and he’s here. And that’s all I know. Beyond that I’m as much in the dark as what you are. His old man’s sort of stopped taking my calls. And I can hardly ring up Wozz himself, can I? I doubt he’s even got a phone in there. And even if he does, how’s he going to pick it up? So I’m only speculating, aren’t I. But you’d have to assume his right mitt collected the brunt of it. Wouldn’t you? I mean, he’s right-handed, so that seems like a reasonable assumption to me. Maybe both his hands copped it, but you’d have to fear his right was first in line. And you’d have to fear it blew off – what? – say two or three of his sexworkers minimum. Maybe half a palm, I don’t know. Maybe the whole fucking hand. All I’m saying is, there’s a fair chance this bloke may never be able to face the cistern again. And remember, this is a bloke that wasn’t exactly beating the chicks off with a stick back when … back when he looked normal. Was he? So all things considered, I’d say the four-eyed bastard’s in a bit of strife, wouldn’t you? I’d say he’s in for a pretty rough trot. And don’t try telling me he can go left-handed, either. Have you ever tried it? It’s other-worldly, mate. It’s a joke. It’s like one of those machines at the bowling alley where you’ve got to pick up the soft toy with the hanging claw …”
On that note Gus decisively slapped his thighs, and stood, and took up a position at the helm of the meal cart. Silently the others fell in behind him.
“And remember,” he said comfortingly, “if the worst comes to the worst, I can always just whip out Operation Aggot at his bedside.”
His hand strayed briefly towards his back pocket again as he said that. Then he resolutely grasped the cart’s handle, and the Maoists moved in silent unison up the gleaming hall.
Operation Aggot. You had to hate that name.
Gus had assumed prime visiting spot by the drip gantry. The meal cart was stashed clumsily behind the laminated barrier at the bed’s foot. Fenton, by virtue of some osmotic process he didn’t quite understand, had once again wound up at Gus’s side, in the right-hand-man area, with the three remaining Maoists arrayed irrelevantly along the bed’s other flank. Lately he’d felt himself drifting unwillingly up the Maoist pecking order, getting inexorably stereotyped as Gus’s second-in-command. There seemed to be little he could do about this. Soon the junior Maoists were going to start hating him for it, if they hadn’t started already.
Awkwardness prevailed. The silence around the bed was starting to get critical. Fenton kept waiting for one of the other Maoists to break it. After all, they knew Warren a lot better than he did. But the juniors just kept silently looking, as per instructions, to Gus. And Gus, for all his vows to jam the air and set the tone, was choking. The pressure had struck him dumb. His lips were shaped into a ghastly false smile. His face worked valiantly against the tractor-beam pull of Warren’s mitted hands. Fenton had this malicious and growing urge to alert Warren to the presence of his lunch. He owed him that much, didn’t he?
Finally the nettle was grasped by Warren himself. He said, pluckily, “I’d shake hands with you, comrades. But …”
Then he fell silent again, and looked down introspectively at his bandages.
That was enough for Gus. His trance broke, and his right hand roved down in panic towards the back pocket of his jeans.
“Want some lunch Warren?” This was Fenton. “We brought you some. It’s just down there.” Yes, this was Fenton, who was phenomenally keen to go on not knowing what Gus had in his rear pocket. He was rather enjoying this gap between plans, this lull between parts or chapters. This soothing little interregnum in which there was, at least in a technical sense, no death plot hanging over him. He wasn’t nearly ready yet for this part to end, and for the next part to begin. Because he could sense already that this next thing was going to be terminal: the last great absurdity. Even now he felt the early swellings of it, the dark bulky shape of it implicit in this fool’s paradise of temporary calm, gathering below the surface of things like a monster wave. Postponing the inevitable: it had worked for him so far. Why couldn’t it go on working forever?
Gus looked round at him in appalled disbelief. But his roving hand, crucially, had halted at his pocket’s rim.
From the bed Warren said: “Sweet. I’m starving.”
Gus contemplated his options. For a scary moment it seemed he might just press ahead with the unveiling anyway. Then he yielded to the inevitable. Clapping his hands together with a show of great relish, he said to Warren: “Well that’s what we’re here for, champion!” He moved past Fenton to fetch the meal cart, delivering a rather petulant elbow to his ribs en route. Coming back the other way, he made a failed attempt to bring the cart into contact with Fenton’s shins. Fenton welcomed these acts of aggression. They confirmed his impression that he’d just done the right and proper thing, for perhaps the first time in the whole affair. It felt good. Maybe he’d keep doing it. Maybe there was hope for him yet.
“We’ll get some tucker into you, eh?” Gus heartily parked the trolley beside Warren’s head. “That’s the go. That’s the shot.” He clapped his hands together again. He lifted the buff-coloured lid. Two mesas of mashed vegetable matter were exposed, one cloud-white, the other a fierce orange. Between them lay a pair of drumsticks hailing from either a very small chicken or a fair-sized quail. Gingerly Gus picked one up. He proffered it avuncularly across the bed: to Blue.
“Blue. You’ll do the honours mate.”
Gus phrased this as a statement of fact rather than a query. Blue, with obvious reservations, accepted the fatty limb. He looked at it dubiously. “What am I meant to do? Just hold it there while he munches on it?”
“I’d say that’s the least we can do for the bloke, don’t you?” Gus said. Again this was not so much a question as a command, backed by a fairly clear threat of physical violence.
So Blue had no choice. In the manner of a squeamish biology student aiming a scalpel at an uncut rat, he moved the reviled poultry into the region of Warren’s beard. Warren gnashed hungrily into the purple meat. Blue shivered and pulled the bone prematurely away.
“Hoy!” Warren protested. “Hold it still!”
Something half-chewed dropped from his mouth to his chest.
“Do it Blue,” Gus cautioned – keeping his own eyes fastidiously averted from the feeding site.
“But it’s like – awww – ” Blue recoiled again as Warren took a fresh bite. “It’s like feeding an animal! And there’s no way I’m touching that,” he added, in reference to the item on Warren’s chest. In gesturing towards it, he inadvertently brought the drumstick into contact with Warren’s glasses.
“Hold it still you drongo!” Warren yelped. A smear of grease now marked one of his tinted lenses.
Blue turned imploringly to Gus. “Aw come on Gus. I feel like a poofter.”
“Hold it steady and count your blessings, Blue,” Gus snapped. “Show the maimed bastard some respect. This is a man who laid down his … who laid down his …”
Unable to help himself, he let his gaze fully stray to Warren’s bandaged hands.
An excruciating silence fell.
Now everyone was looking down at Warren’s bandages, Warren included.
Once more this was too much for Gus. His hand shot spastically to his pocket again. And this time the dreaded stationery was out before Fenton could think of a way to intervene. It was a sheet of yellow paper, folded into eighths. Ivan Lego’s new lease on death.
“So Warren, what’s the extent of your injuries?” Fenton extemporised desperately.
Gus shot him a look of horrified disapproval, and made haste to get the document unfolded.
Warren replied: “They reckon I was lucky not to lose a finger.”
Gus looked up from the sheet of yellow paper. His fingers had paused in the act of unfolding it. “What?” he said.
“The doc mate, he reckons I was lucky not to lose a finger.”
“Hang on.” Now there was the slow spectacle of Gus adapting himself to a new reality, adjusting to a contingency unbargained-for by his crude and hairy mind. His dilapidated mental pistonry clanked and groaned. His face laboriously rearranged itself, like a wombat rolling over in sleep. “You’re saying you didn’t lose a finger?”
“No mate,” Warren assured him. “They’re all intact. They reckon I was lucky but.”
“But …” The paperwork remained there in Gus’s hand, momentarily forgotten, still one fold shy of full disclosure. “So what did you lose then? Just the tips of your fingers, or what?”
“No mate. Not even a tip. I might have lost a nail off one them, I think.”
“What’s under all these bandages then?”
Warren paused to negotiate a further mouthful of chicken. “Mostly burns,” he said after that.
“Mostly burns?”
Warren chewed. “Well … Just burns.”
“What degree? Third? Second?”
“I don’t think he mentioned a degree.”
“Skin grafts, though?”
“Fuck no. They weren’t that bad.”
“Well how bad are they? Help me out here, Wozz. I’m struggling. What exactly’s wrong with you under there?”
“Basically,” Warren explained, “they’re just all red. And sort of peeling. Feels a bit like sunburn.”
“Sunburn!”
“Yeah. They reckon I can go home tomorrow.”
“But hang on.” Gus was still greatly confused. “I got told the thing was actually in your hands when it blew.”
Warren cleared his throat. “It was,” he said.
“But …” Gus’s face was slowly crumpling in on itself, like a flower dying in a stop-motion film. “What kind of bomb was it?”
“Pipe,” Warren evasively said, looking elsewhere.
“What kind of bomb,” Gus demanded to know, “explodes in your hands and doesn’t even take off a finger?”
Warren blushed, and said nothing.
“Or even some fucking skin?”
Warren hung his head. His contrite beard splayed out over his red pyjama top.
“Words fail me,” Gus said with contempt. “They simply fail me.” He was red with anger. He glanced rigidly round the rest of the ward, then added in a venomous whisper: “You told me you had it sussed, you irresponsible moron. You told me you were on top of it! We were an hour away from planting that thing outside Lego’s office. What would it of done to the cunt? Tanned him? Chapped his lips? What sort of message would that’ve sent out, you imbecile? This thing’s meant to get rid of our laughing-stock image, not bloody cement it.”
“Sorry Gus,” Warren said abjectly.
“You’re a disgrace, mate,” Gus coldly informed him. “You’re a bloody disgrace. Words fail me.”
“But Gus, I did shake off the coppers mate,” Warren offered in mitigation. “I threw ’em off the scent mate, just like you said.”
Gus just shrugged with disgust.
Fenton, on the other hand, found this information appallingly pertinent. “The cops,” he said, “were here?”
“Well not the cops. But a cop, yeah,” Warren confirmed, eager to keep this theme alive. “Just yesterday it was.”
“Who called them?”
“Must’ve been one of the doctors. Must’ve reckoned my injuries looked a little bit suspect.”
“Was it a detective?” Fenton pursued. How hard it was to frame these questions you didn’t really want to hear the answers to.
“Christ mate, how should I know?”
“Well Jesus, you saw him. Was he old or young? Was he wearing a uniform or a suit?”
Again Warren cleared his throat. “Actually mate, it was a chick. In uniform. And quite rootable she was too,” he reprehensibly added, for the benefit of the junior Maoists. “And young. Looked like she come straight out of the academy. Anyway, she’s given me this little lecture on the perils of making home-made bombs. She was some sort of …” Here he blushed, and stole a nervous glance up at Gus. “She seemed to be under the impression,” he said, “that I was just mucking around. Like I was planning to blow up someone’s letterbox or something. Some sort of prank like that. I think – I think she was some sort of liaison officer for kids.”
Gus sorrily groaned.
“But Gus, I threw her off, mate.”
“Words fail me,” Gus said.
“I made her think I was a lone nut, Gus, just like you said. Or a lone delinquent. Same principle. So then she makes me read this lame comic strip about this cartoon dinosaur who tries to make a copper bomb and accidentally blows his own face off. And then she breaks out this wicked photo album with all these mug shots of little ten-year-old kids with half their fingers blown off and that. And Gus? I played along, mate. I let her think she was scaring me straight. Gus?”
But Gus said nothing. Words really did fail him now.
“So anyway, then she just nicked off. Gus? I told her I’d learnt my lesson mate, and she was off. I handled it Gus, no drama.”
Gus just looked at him. He had the air of a man who had just made, or was just about to make, a very great decision.
“Gus? Could I maybe get that other drummy now, Gus?”
Wordlessly, Gus picked up that remaining drumstick and inserted its bone handle deeply and degradingly into the bandage folds on Warren’s right hand. His movements were brisk, economical. He moved like a man who was tired of wasting time, a man who refused to squander another second on inessential things.
He pulled a plastic chair to the bedside, straddled it, and removed the last fold of yellow paper that lay between the world and Operation Aggot.
Not doing what you wanted to do had its own terrible momentum. For some reason you kept not doing it, and the more you kept not doing it the harder it got to remember how doing it was done. And then one day you realised your life was this deepening trough of inaction and lost chances that you were just never going to climb out of, this quagmire you had let yourself sink into up to the throat. Why, for instance, was he still pretending to be a Maoist? It was by no means clear that the exercise was still working. Maybe it had never started working in the first place. He hadn’t talked to her for over a week now, and had no concrete arrangement or excuse to do so in the future, and wasn’t entirely sure that he had anything left to say to her anyway. Maybe their relations, such as they were, had peaked during those heady final days of Operation Lego. Perhaps that had been it. What if those luncheons had been a failed audition, an entrance exam that he had already sat and already flunked? Maybe the only move left to him now was to stop calling her and see if she came after him, or even registered the fact he was gone.
So why was he still here? Partly out of a vague but influential feeling that he had to be, that he owed it to someone other than himself. Partly because he had nowhere better to be. But mainly because it was just a lot easier, in general, to go along with things than not to. In other words, for all practical purposes he was a genuine and fully-fledged Maoist now. The fact that he was an impostor no longer counted for anything, and he couldn’t for the life of him recall why he had ever thought it made a difference. The fake identity had taken, like a graft, and he had no real life to go back to any more. The Maoist charade was his real life now.
In theory, of course, it was still possible to change things. In theory he was entirely free to stop being a Maoist right now, right this very second, before Gus could implicate him in anything worse than what he was implicated in already. But only in theory. To do it he’d have needed to be a different person.
And a different person wouldn’t have been here in the first place, would he?
Anyway, did he really want the charade to end? Probably not. His position was roughly this. For as long as there was still hope he would remain a Maoist. And for as long as he remained one, there would always be a glimmer of that.
“So anyhow, that’s the kind of shape I was in. That was my frame of mind at the time. Pulling a melancholy coney on the couch, and basically ready to chuck the whole thing in. And then this show came on the telly. And it was this thing about Neville Claude Aggot. This big special about his breakout and the great fucking enigma of where he is now. And anyway, they’re interviewing this chick psychologist. And she’s saying, a bloke like this, a total psycho like this, it’s dead-set only a matter of time till he just full-on snaps and goes on a bulk killing rampage. And not that bloody much time, either. And I’m sitting there thinking, what if this sick little bastard gets Lego? I’m that paranoid, that’s actually what I’m thinking. What if he gets to Lego before we can?
“And that’s when it hit me, comrades. I mean, it’s not like I sat down and worked this thing out bit by bit. It just came to me, just like that. It just popped straight into my head, fully-formed. I almost felt like a medium,” he told them solemnly, “for some sort of higher power.”
He shuffled his chair in closer. Metal screeched on the shiny white floor. The Maoists huddled in tighter over the bed.
“We do him,” Gus said in an ultra-low voice, “Aggot-style. We sneak into his house tomorrow night, after he’s gone to sleep. Me and Fent. And we do him by hand, Aggot-style. I mean we really go to town on him. We use knifes, meat-cleavers, tenderisers, whatever comes to hand. We really hack him up. Just like a psycho. And then we let Aggot take the fall for it. This is the genius part, you see. This is what makes this a thing of beauty. We’ve already got our Oswald. Poor old Aggot, he’s a sitting duck in this climate. People out there are that hysterical about him, any remotely grisly killing that occurs is going to get chalked straight up to him, no questions asked. We’ll hardly even need to try. All we’ve got to do is make it nice and messy, write a couple of things on the walls in his blood – and the court of public opinion,” he confidently concluded, “will take care of the rest.”
And that, apparently, was it. That was the whole plan. Had he really needed a whole sheet of paper to keep track of that? Fenton believed he would have considered it a remarkably asinine plan even if he’d been a real Maoist.
Now, inevitably, Gus was turning to him with a radiant smirk. “What do you say, Fent? I told you you’d still get to do Lego, didn’t I?”
Was it Fenton’s imagination, or were the other Maoists looking at him with open displeasure? As if they resented his automatic elevation to the death squad? As if they envied his status as first-choice wet boy?
Gus was waiting.
“I’m not sure I understand,” Fenton informed him, for starters.
“What’s there to understand, Fent? We basically just butcher the guy and make it look like Aggot did it.”
“Sure,” Fenton said. “But what’s the point of that?”
“The point?” Gus’s grin flickered a bit. “It puts Lego on a slab, mate. And it puts him there quick smart, with no logistical headaches. No bombs, no guns, no motorbikes. Nothing complicated or high-tech that can go wrong at the last minute. We just climb in his window in the dead of night and brutally slay him. Not much scope for technical failures there. We just shank him. It’s simplicity itself. If a spastic like Aggot can manage it, I don’t see why we can’t.”
“Why exactly would we want to frame Aggot though? I don’t quite see why we’d want to do that.”
“Why?” Gus genially frowned. “Because he’s got to be about the most frameable bastard in criminal history, Fent, that’s why! Pick up any newspaper, mate. All anyone’s talking about is where and when he’s going to make his move. Like I say, that’s the true beauty of this. Our Oswald, he’s already in place. We don’t need to develop him. We don’t need to set him up. He’s already set up. He’s right there in the public eye, just begging to be put in the frame. It’s fair-dinkum open season on him. Christ, the poor bugger’s that sick in the head he’ll probably reckon he’s done it himself!”
“But what would it achieve politically?”
“Isn’t that obvious, Fent?” Still the genial frown, as if Gus was rather charmed by Fenton’s continuing failure to grasp these elementary points. “One” – he flipped up a hairy thumb, counting off the first in a long series of merits – “it gets us off the hook legally. We won’t have the pigs breathing down our necks afterwards. They’ll be busy breathing down Aggot’s neck instead. Two” – the thumb got joined by the adjacent finger – “it gets us round the problem of the death threats. It neutralizes that whole issue. This is the real genius of it, if I say so myself. Nobody in their right mind’s going to credit this one to the Anarchists!”
“But nobody’s going to credit it to us, either.”
“Jesus, Fent. You don’t ask for much, do you?”
“But isn’t the whole point of this,” Fenton asked him reasonably, “to put ourselves on the map?” Yes, the other Maoists were looking at him with distinct hostility now, as if they considered these quibbles of his a display of rank bad form, the carryings-on of a spoilt child. Even Warren – this was a bit rich – appeared to be aiming a look of marked disapproval at him from the bed. So it was just as he’d always feared. The junior Maoists did hate him.
“Calm down, Fent,” Gus was saying. “We’ll put in a claim of responsibility, obviously. I assumed that was self-evident. Christ, it’d be a pretty ludicrous bloody plan otherwise!” He paused to collect his thoughts. He still seemed ready to ascribe Fenton’s puzzling attitude to some error on his own part – to a failure, perhaps, to communicate Operation Aggot’s full merits. “Look,” he clarified, “this is the way I see it panning out. Tomorrow night we knock him off. The next day – which’ll be what, Thursday – we’ll sit back and let them discover his body. And then we’ll wait till the old media gets hold of it, and whips itself up into a full feeding frenzy. Because this is going to be huge news, right. Think about it: our top thinker getting murdered by our top psycho. This is going to be front page stuff. So, we’ll wait till all that’s in full swing. And then we’ll ring up the TV stations and put in a formal claim of responsibility. And that’ll give ’em a nice new angle for the next bulletin, won’t it? Obscure Maoist group claims responsibility on Lego slaying. Suddenly we’ll be a household name. But legally – this is the sweet part – legally, we’ll be teflon. Because think about it: the pigs aren’t going to take us seriously, are they? Fuck no! They’ll be too busy cranking up the manhunt for poor old Aggot. As far as the pigs’re concerned, we’ll just be a bunch of opportunistic bloody lefty ratbags looking to score some cheap political mileage out of it. So from the official angle, from the pig angle, this won’t be considered a political murder at all. But publicity-wise, we’ll be the political group that didn’t do it. Get it? The Anarchists and all those other clowns’ll be left way back on the starting blocks, wondering what the fuck is going on. And while they’re rotting in the dustbin of history, we’ll be basking in the limelight. It’s win-win!”
“Unless Aggot gets recaptured before we do it,” Fenton soberly pointed out. “Or gets recaptured while we’re doing it. We won’t be teflon then.”
“Fent, you’re such a pessimist. What’re the odds – ” A nurse had come in, and was doing some feel-good teasing of a patient over near the door. Gus further lowered his voice. “What’re the odds of that? He’s been on the loose for a good week now. He’s managed to stay out this long. What makes you think he’s gonna suddenly get recaptured now? He’s not a complete melon. But he won’t stay on the run forever, I’ll grant you that. This is why I’m saying tomorrow night. I’d say tonight, but I thought we’d better be a bit sensible about this. I thought we’d better do a bit of homework first. A bit of recon. Christ, I thought that aspect’d be right up your alley, mate. I thought it’d appeal to your cautious nature. Plus which, I’ve been looking at the weather forecasts for tomorrow night, and they reckon it’s going to be a cold and rainy one. You couldn’t ask for a better omen than that.”
“I still don’t see,” Fenton rather sulkily said, “how it’ll ignite a revolution.”
“Oh you and your precious revolution.” Gus’s face was tightening up. “Sometimes I wonder if there’s any pleasing you at all. We simply can’t risk a purely political hit on Lego at this point. You’ve said it yourself. With these death threats hanging over him, the snuff’d most probably get credited to the Anarchists.”
“But even so – ”
“I mean, what do you suggest we do here Fent?” Gus exasperatedly asked him. “Just not kill the bastard at all?”
“Well, now you put it that way – ”
“I mean, Mother of Christ, Fent.” Gus had to bite down hard now to keep his volume seemly. “Have you gone bloody blind, or what? This plan … This is a fucking sensational plan. I thought if anyone’d appreciate the intricacies of it, it’d be you. But your attitude …” He took a harried look round the ward. “Your attitude. I have to say this, mate. Your overall attitude … I mean, last time it was all about going to jail. That was your issue last time. You wouldn’t bloody shut up about it. And now I’ve come up with a plan that won’t land us in jail, you piss on that too. You could at least be bloody consistent!”
Fenton said nothing. He wanted to climb into the nearest empty bed and press the button with the picture of the nurse on it.
“And frankly,” Gus added, “I thought you’d be a little bit grateful for this one. On a personal level. Because here I am handing you the chance to do your mate Lego personally. One on one. Hands on, face to face, just like your frenzied hatred of him demands.” He looked at Fenton with genuine incomprehension, with a real passion to understand. “Here I am giving you the chance to go right to town on him, to just desecrate the guy’s corpse, and full-on get away with it. And you’re acting like … You’re acting like …”
The carpark shimmered below. The drip bag dripped, draining slowly, puckering in on itself. Towards the end of a conversation like this one, your standards began to slip. Your capacity to form noble intentions began to shrivel. You began to feel like Warren’s drip bag: flat, droopy, dejuiced, ready for replenishment. All you wanted was to get the conversation over with. Your ambitions to achieve anything grander than that were gone. Your only thought about the bigger picture, the larger situation, was this: whatever you were going to do about it, it was going to have to be done later. Some other time. First you needed to get yourself alone in a quiet room for a while, and remind yourself what was so bad about death. You needed to get back your sense of dread and urgency. Because by the end of a conversation like this, the prospect of desecrating someone’s corpse had begun to seem not so bad. And could it really be said, reader, that if an atrocity of that kind did end up happening – and Fenton, let’s be clear about this, remained staunchly committed to seeing that it would not – but if it did, if the worst did finally come to pass, could it really be said that Fenton had not done his utmost to prevent it? Or if not his utmost, at any rate an awful lot? Can we honestly assert that we would have done much better in his place?
He stuck his hand out towards Gus. This seemed as good a way as any of making the conversation end. He said: “Gus, of course I’m grateful. Surely you know that. I’m just tinkering, that’s all. You know me. I’m a perfectionist. But I’m in. Of course I’m in. I hardly need to tell you that.” Gus had accepted the hand now, and was pumping it with extravagant relief. “Fundamentally,” Fenton told him, looking him fair in the eye, “I think we both want the same thing. We want to go to the mountaintop, as you say. And this plan – you’re right, Gus. Tomorrow night, this plan’s going to take us there.”
And then, because there seemed to be nothing to stop him from doing so, he nodded briefly to the other Maoists and walked out of the ward.