MARTIN AMIS - THE INFORMATION

Darko, and Belladonna, They had about them an air of isolation that

made him think-that made him think of the Siberian lepers and also, unconnectedly, wildly, of the awfulness of unforeseen consequences … "Look!" said Marco, as he rested on the bench by the gate.

High in the thin blue east, on an angled collision course, two airplanes climbed towards their shared apex-like needles, with the twin strands of white thread trailing from their eyes. They passed: no contact. Briefly, though (for the sky hates straight lines and soon destroys their definition), the two white slipstreams formed a leaning cross: leaning backward, away from the earth. Something was over, over on the other side.

"Terryterry," said Terry. "That what it all come down to. Every man want to be cock of the walk. All the Indians want to be chief. That what it all come down to: terryterry."

"Yeah mate," said Steve Cousins, and turned to his other guest- Richard.

"What I want," said Richard, and it was all right to do this, because Scozzy was conducting two conversations at once, and could probably conduct many more, as many as necessary, like a chess master giving a simultaneous display, "is a free sample. Well, not free. We could come to an agreement on that."

"You want me to let him have a slap."

"… Yeah," said Richard. "More than a slap. More like a-"

"Yeah well, that's what we call a slap. It's more than a slap." Steve turned to Terry and said, "Listen, I got my territory. And it ain't on the fucking street." From under his hat he looked from Terry to Richard and back again, and back again, inviting the two men to contemplate each other. His sparse but uniform eyebrows were genially raised. And above the gray band the hat's slopes were indented in direct answer to the cheekbones beneath and their famished angularity. He turned to Terry and said, "Ah. Star! See the way how me vex!"

Like most London faces, Steve could do a pretty good Yardie accent. He had even read the novel called Yardie -as had most Yardies. But Terry wasn't a Yardie. Terry, as Richard had been apprised beforehand, through the bleats and squawks of Steve's mobile phone, was a Quacko: the next lot. Richard was sitting in on this meet "as an observer": good material. And that was exactly how he felt. He was an onlooker, but he was shorn of point of view.

Terry said, "Some of my boys-they totally rootless. Debt mean nutting to them. Normal to them. Debt is they way of life."

"Jesus, I spend my life with all these speech impediments. The schwartzers I know all say roofless and def and nuffing." Like when we were going to do Nigel, thought Steve. I tell Clasford, He's a fuckin hippy. And Clasford says, A nippy. And I say, Nah-a hippy. And Clasford says, An ippy? Jesus.

"They all want the big car and the chain round the troat as big as you fist. Gold taps. Diamonds in the ear and the teet."

Steve turned to Richard and said, "When do you want this to happen?"

"Soon. This week."

"Okay. I'll give you a freebie. A teaser. And we'll get a schwartzer. Clasford. Nice, that. It works out. You know: Demi. You all right? Try the bacon sandwich."

The three men sat in what Scozzy had referred to as a spieler: a private (i.e., illegal) gambling club, way up the Edgware Road. You reached the back room through a low-morale beauty parlor and a half-flight of stairs. The ambiance was one of entrenched and hallowed old-firm London villainy: Jesster's was the resort of senior felons, of various career sons of bitches, and it was no small thing to be here among them. But if you didn't know any of this you could look around Jesster's and mistake the place for the lounge of an indulgent granny, with the teapot on the counter in its tasseled cozy, the antique fruit machine which would certainly respond to no current coin, the pictures on the walls of soldiers and fox hunters and the four or five old stiffs at the card table, playing not poker or even brag or pontoon but some strictly indigenous whist-derivative called Swizzle. Steve Cousins had a nice word for old men: he called them results. And Richard quite liked flips or flip: for girls. Otherwise, Steve contented himself with a smattering of rhyming slang-and Richard had written off rhyming slang long ago. The only ones that were any good were jekylls (for trousers, via Jekyll and Hides-strides) and syrup (for wig, via syrup of figs). And there was something almost poetically crass about boat (for face, via boat race. What boat? What race?) It was midmorning. Jesster's seemed wholly innocuous. Richard, whose internal alarm system was not what it ought to be, felt quite at home.

"Terry mate," said Steve, applying himself to his concentration. He stared without blinking into Terry's face, which was in fact a kind of deep yellow, like the seam of an aging banana, but darkened by its innumerable impurities-pocks, brown speckles, black freckles. "I'm having no trouble understanding you. You want my thing, right. You want my ting. "

"Yeh. They want you thing. The helt."

Steve Cousins liked to think of himself as a criminals' criminal. Every day he pulled off the crime of the century. They didn't have to be complicated or successful crimes, because he didn't mean this century. He meant the next one. Steve's thing was sweet-and it made money, unlike his other crimes, which were largely recreational (administering concus-sive beatings, for instance, to people whose drinks he had spiked with mind-expanding drugs). Steve's thing was: he sold cocaine and heroin to health clubs. No steroids or any of that buff stuff or sex-change shit. Coke and Smack. Frequenters of health clubs were by definition overin-terested in the body and often wanted to push it in both directions. All the way to detox, in some cases. Steve was proud of his thing, easy, safe, regular; but the point was that it came from left field. It was cute. It was cute, feeding a bushel of heroin to some stinking jock, a pinhead in a singlet under a crane of weights . . .

"Say you just changing you supplier," Terry suggested.

"You guys. You fucking guys. Where's it all leading, mate? You Quacks. I mean, when slicing up each other's kids and grans is what you nan with. That's dinosaur stuff. It's all paperwork now. That's how far we've come. From pickaxes-to paperwork."

Richard was wondering about the relationship between the history of modern crime and the history of modern armaments-or of modern literature. Gang A was in a garage polishing its knives. And Gang B showed up with handguns. And that was that until Gang C showed up with shotguns. And then Gang D showed up with machineguns. Old firms, then new firms, then Yardies, then Quackos. Gang Z. In the outer world, out there, the escalation ladder ended with-or pointed up towards-nuclear weapons. But the Quackos sounded more like Chaos Theory. That was the Quacks: tooled-up chaos. And the same with literature, getting heavier and heavier, until it was all over and you arrived at paperwork. You arrived at Amelior.

"We reach an understanding."

"Yeah I know about these understandings. I give you all my money,"

"Any message for my people?" said Terry as he got to his feet.

"If I wanted to send them a message, you know what I'd do?"

Terry's top lip curled up in appreciative anticipation.

"Send you home in three different minicabs."

They laughed. They laughed on, with willed raucousness. Then Steve turned to Richard and they worked out how they'd do it.

Half an hour later, as they were about to leave, Richard said, "I just want to see what it's like. Violence. It might not be … It might not be appropriate."

"Okay. We give him a slap. See how it goes down. Looking further down the road. Just thinking. Has he got any powerful friends?"