Nick Harkaway - The Gone-Away World

Buddy Keene minutes the recommendations from the committee and puts them in an orange envelope. He sets the orange envelope in a tray marked “Action Up” and moves on to sanitation and water. This is, if anything, more problematic than housing. I nod my way through it and wish I hadn’t come. The Lubitsch Project. Damn, damn, damn.

“How was it for you?” Buddy Keene asks, when it’s over and I can stop nodding.

“Fascinating, Buddy,” I tell him warmly. “Really great. I owe you.” And this is the right thing to say. Buddy Keene nods back. Service rendered, debt accepted, between guys who want to be Guys. The members of the committee make polite goodbyes and wish they’d seen me first.

I am shaking hands with Mae Milton when I hear a rustling behind me. An old man in a maroon V-neck is collecting the Action Up tray and putting an empty one in its place. I did not see him come in, and I realise now that there is a low concealed door, like a servant’s entrance in a country house, just behind the chairman’s place at the top of the table. Over his heart there is a narrow metal badge: “Robert Crabtree.”

“Hey,” says Mae Milton, “it’s the boss man!” She grins.

I look at him. Clearly, she’s making with the funny. Milton holds up a warning hand.

“Don’t be deceived. Mr. Crabtree is our secret master, right, Robert?”

Dark eyes rise slowly from his cart and peer at me from beneath heavy, folded lids.

“I just move the paper,” he says firmly. In the world of Mr. Crabtree, moving the paper is a trust. You don’t make jokes about the paper. On the other hand, Mae Milton is moderately charming, and even Robert Crabtree is not immune. She offers him a broad, genuine smile. It occurs to me that Mae Milton will not last long as a pencilneck if this is how she carries on.

“Mmph,” says Robert Crabtree. He moves the corners of his mouth a bit to indicate that he’s seen the smile, and wheels the cart around me. Mr. Crabtree has seen a hundred of my kind come and go. He is not impressed. By next year I will be promoted or fired. I will be erased or eulogised, and the only memory of my presence on this floor will be my initials carved into the back of a cubicle door in the executive women’s washroom. Fair enough. But Robert Crabtree is important. I don’t know how, but Mae Milton has shown me something significant, if I have the wit to grasp it.

I wave to her and wander after him. He makes no objection. I watch him walk the halls of Jorgmund with his cart, piling up orange envelopes. No one speaks to him. No one even really looks at him. He’s just there, cog in the machine. Finally he walks into a big round room with an expensive table in it. Some ferns (what is it with ferns?) make his passage to the head of the table more difficult, and he’s almost blocked by a display case with some high-echelon bric-a-brac inside.

“Senior Board room,” says Mr. Crabtree. He looks around as if seeing it for the first time. More likely it’s just the first time today. He sneers a bit at the bric-a-brac. Mr. Crabtree does not approve of fripperies. They get in the way of the paper. He dumps the whole cartload on the table, and lines the envelopes up so that they’re in piles, ready to go. Waiting for him is a smaller stack of yellow envelopes stamped “Forward to Core.” He takes them, and moves off down the corridor again. Maps and charts, Ronnie Cheung said in the dark outside K’s circus. Know your enemy. Follow the paper. I follow. Mr. Crabtree is my guide in a strange land. So, Robert, where are the maps and charts? Just curious, don’t want to be a bother.

“Pleased to meet you,” Robert Crabtree says, without looking up. I glance around. He is talking to me. He is saying goodbye.

We are coming to the edge of the building. At the end of this corridor there is a window looking out over Haviland City and a small, halfsize construction clinging to the side of the Jorgmund office. Robert Crabtree pushes his cart into a small service lift and turns to face me. There is only room for him.

“Core,” says Robert Crabtree flatly. The doors close.

I listen to the lift. It goes down a long way. Probably, it goes to the top floor of the other building, the one nudging up against Jorgmund. It might go to an office in this building which looks out over their roof. I stand at the end of the corridor, gazing out at the city, hoping no one sees me and thinks to ask why I am here. Ten minutes later the lift doors open again. Robert Crabtree emerges. His cart is covered in green envelopes marked “Execute.” He looks at me for a moment, wondering what the hell I am doing waiting around for him. He decides he doesn’t care.

“If you’re going to follow me like a bloody baa-lamb,” Robert Crabtree says abruptly, “you can put your hand on the front there, because otherwise the buggers fall off and get creased and there’s no end of bother.”

I hesitate. He takes my hand in his clumsy arthritic grasp, angry already, and settles it painfully hard on the front of the trolley. He wraps my fingers around the sharp-edged envelopes using his palm, because his own fingers don’t bend that well, and we make his round. We deliver thirty executive decisions. We are messengers of God, invisible, inevitable, ignored.

When we’re done, I go to the party to find Dick.

PINEMARTIN HILL is long and green. It is a genuine hill, quite a steep one, although the road runs along the side of it. Presumably part of the charm is having a view which tumbles away at your feet. The street lights are old-fashioned. There’s a big modern house on the left full of happy people having fun—a stilt house. My car pulls up by the topiary. It isn’t really my car; it was booked for someone else, but I stole it and its impassive chauffeur, and if the person it was booked for figures out what happened, he or she will almost certainly invite me to use it until I get settled in. The Brandon Club were so delighted to have my patronage that they gave me a free room for the night and a spa treatment, so I went to sleep for an hour while a matronly woman exfoliated me and talked about her family. Dressing, I chose the second shirt, the one softened in the mouth of a trained and perfumed albino hippopotamus and made entirely of pigeon’s wool, because it goes better with the shoes than the one stitched with baby hair. The cuffs gave me some trouble until I remembered that the button isn’t supposed to wrap your arm like an ordinary shirt, but to clasp the two parts of the sleeve together like a cuf link. Smooth.

The door to number one five four is open, and a lot of people are shrugging out of coats and shedding scarves. Jorgmund’s children—or maybe its myrmidons—do themselves well enough for clothes and rocks. I go in. The hallway curves round into a wide open living room with an alpine vibe, and, sure enough, beyond the garden terrace there’s a long drop to the ground. The decor features muted colours with lush, unmatched furniture, and low tables occupied by little bits and bobs of stuff like armadillo shells—used as olive bowls—or pufferfish skins with gilded spines, which have no discernible purpose and are very sharp. It’s a model of a home.

In any given situation there are myriad forms of attack. (Actually, there aren’t. A myriad is ten thousand in the Greek arithmetical system, which was based on their alphabet and made Archimedes’ life impossibly difficult. If he’d had decimals, he might have done remarkable things, and we’d all be driving flying cars and heating our bathwater with home fusion, or perhaps speaking Latin and living in the ashes of the Graeco-Roman Nuclear Winter; in any case, there are usually several ways of dealing with any given situation.) I could walk up to Dick Washburn and stick out my hand. Buddy Keene and Roy Massaman and Tom Link would all be there, and Dick would almost certainly have to take it. But I have worked hard to make Buddy & Co. think of me as a big fish, even a man-eating shark, and I might still need that. If I let them see me right next to Dick—if I walk up to him and shake his hand, Gonzo-style—reality will assert itself. I will be in direct conflict with Dick’s dominance, and he’s had longer to bruit it about and can actually back it up by firing people and buying expensive things. In a direct, mano-a-mano hard-form conflict, I will lose. By the criteria of Haviland City, Dick Washburn is infinitely bigger and meaner than I am.