Jim Crace - Arcadia

Rook’s door was open. There was no need for Anna to knock so formally on the stained veneer. Yet she was wise enough to knock and wait. He woke from his half-sleep and waved her in. Already he had prepared an elegiac face; already he was searching in his mind for what the death of Victor meant to him. Advancement? Displacement? Something in the will? At least it meant that this was no time to close the office door and push his hands beneath the bands of Anna’s skirt and blouse.

Anna did not look at Rook. Her expression was the same as those worn by the Reception staff, by the accountant as he hurried to his room, by the commissionaire who had ignored Rook’s airy greeting as he had entered Big Vic from the mall. Now he was sure he had identified the truth. She looked so shocked, so drained, so unlike the face upon the pillow. ‘Come in. What’s wrong?’

‘Bad news,’ she said. She looked as if her knees would give. He held her in his arms. It didn’t matter what the staff might think. Her tears fell on his jacket and his tie.

‘Sit down. Sit down,’ he said. He wished to cry himself. He felt so nervous and so powerful. He could not focus on the old man’s death.

‘What’s wrong?’

She took deep breaths, and then she looked him in the face at last. ‘I wish it wasn’t me who had to tell you this,’ she said.

‘I know.’ And then, ‘No need to tell me, Anna. I can guess.’

‘Guess what?’

‘It’s Victor, isn’t it? He’s ill. He’s dead.’

She shook her head. She almost laughed. ‘He isn’t dead. You’ll wish he was. It’s you … It’s us!’ She wiped her face, and took deep breaths until she found her usual even voice: ‘He says you’ve got to go. He seems to know that we’ve been meeting out of work. How can he know? It’s not his business anyhow. This isn’t sane!’

She handed him an office memorandum. Victor had put it on her desk, unsealed. Some office rubber-neck had read it and spread the news. It only took one prying clerk, one internal phone call, to circulate bad news throughout Big Vic, from the atrium to the 27th floor. Victor had written the memorandum — in pencil — late on the previous Friday night, his birthday night. It instructed Anna to tell Rook: ‘His out-of-work contacts and activities are not morally compatible with the trust invested in him. They have no place in an organizaion such as mine where relationships between all members of the office staff, producers, clients, and customers, should be based on propriety and honesty. He is dismissed. Please inform him that he has until midday to clear his desk, and that there can be no further contact between us except through the mediation of lawyers.’ There was an envelope for Rook — a formal note of termination.

‘He’s mad,’ she said. She understood the comforts of hyperbole. ‘He’s old and mad and wicked! He’s shut himself away up there like a gutless little kid. Does he think he owns us all? Can’t we have “contacts, out of work” without the nod from him?’

But Rook was in no doubt what Victor meant by ‘contacts and activities’. Someone — he hadn’t got an inkling who, not yet — had spilled the beans. Victor knew now all about the pitch money which the soapies had paid each quarter and which had made Rook so rich and careless.

‘He isn’t mad,’ he said. ‘And this hasn’t got anything to do with you, or us.’

‘We’ll fight for you! Come on!’

She was prepared to head an office strike, to draft petitions, risk her job, give Victor merry hell. She was prepared to burrow into Rook, and make a warren at his heart. Rook shook his head. Why fight to lose? Who’d be his ally when the word got out about the scheme he’d run, the money that he’d made, the cynicism of his office jocularity? If he made merry hell, then Victor or his lawyers might make hell of some less cheerful kind. They could inform the police and then the charge might be extortion or embezzlement. He’d end up in a cell. The old man hiding in his room had struck a distant deal with Rook that robbed him of his work but not his liberty.

‘Anna. Please,’ he said, and shook his head. ‘No fuss.’ That’s all he had the heart to say. Already he was letting work and Anna go. He only asked for dignified retreat. He almost packed a bag and just walked out. But Anna would not understand. She stood her ground.

‘Do something now,’ she said.

Her pluck — and innocence — put Rook to shame.

‘All right. I’ll make him talk to me.’ He thought there might be just a chance of changing Victor’s mind. He’d find a way of justifying the unofficial payments he’d received. The payments were in Victor’s interest, after all. They kept the traders quiet. They guaranteed Rook’s role as intermediary between both camps. ‘I had to take their money,’ he could say. ‘They wouldn’t trust a man who wasn’t in their pay.’

He knocked on Victor’s office door again. He tried to call him on the apartment’s internal phone, but the day-valet merely repeated that his boss could ‘take no calls until the afternoon’. The truth was that Victor was hiding in the greenhouse on the roof, exterminating aphids once again and primping plants and looking out through glass and rain and wind on distant neighbourhoods. What was the point in facing Rook himself, when he could deputize dismissals, and Rook could just evaporate before the afternoon and leave no trace?

Well, Rook could not cooperate. He could not disappear, at least while Anna was around. He could not clear his desk and leave no trace. He planned, instead, to sit it out. He’d stay exactly where he was, his feet up on his desk, his door ajar, his room a mess of plastic leaves, until Victor tired of hiding on the roof. Let him descend. Let them discuss it face to face. Let’s see, he thought, if Victor has the strength to be a tyrant other than by deputation or by memoranda. Might something, then, be salvaged from the wreck?

At midday Rook was still inside his room, alone and looking out across a rain-lashed city. Already cars and buses drove with full headlights, and the neon on the streets was liquid and intense. The coloured awnings of the marketplace could not be seen and certainly no hills or woods or parkland greens, no shafts of natural light, lent any gaiety to what he saw. The city was as grey and formal as an office suit. Rook heard, but did not recognize, a man’s voice ask for him by name. He heard a secretary whisper something in reply, then footsteps to his room. Two men, in uniform, one from Security, the other a commissionaire, his face familiar from the entrance hall and atrium, stood at the door.

One coughed. ‘Are you ready, sir?’

‘Ready for what?’ asked Rook. Was this the summons from his boss?

‘It’s midday, sir.’

‘And so?’

‘And so we’ve come to escort you … outside.’

Outside! The word was a kidney punch; it winded him. Outside. Out in the cold. Out on his arse.

He shook his head: ‘Not yet.’

‘It’s midday, sir.’

‘Not yet.’

They came into the room. ‘Come on,’ they said.

‘I haven’t done my desk.’ Rook opened up a drawer to show he was not ready yet, and rescued his nebulizer from amongst the pens and calculators. He sucked on the mouthpiece. He could feel the spongy alveoli tightening in his lungs.

‘We’ve got our orders, sir. It has to be midday.’

They offered him some help. Was it his breathlessness, or were they simply being firm? They lifted him by his elbows. They pulled his chair clear, and shut the desk drawer. They might have been from the ambulance brigade, they were so mild, and Rook so pale.

‘You’ll have to leave your staff pass with us.’ Rook put his hand into his pocket, to do as he was told. He was resigned to going like a lamb. He fumbled for the sharp edges of his laminated pass, and found instead the old flick-knife, the bunch of keys. How long was it since he’d put Joseph on the ground? Here was an opportunity to use his fists again.