Victor rewarded her with nods. He was content to believe the thief was Rook. He would not have to endure the awkwardness of sacking someone else.
‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘We harmed him more than he harmed us, I think.’ He was ready now to turn to other matters. But Anna knew that silence would not earn much from Victor. She had betrayed a one-time friend, at no cost to that friend, perhaps, but still, it was a real sin and sins should stir up wind: ‘Rook’s workload has transferred itself to me in this past year. I’ve worked here now for seven years. I wonder if …’
‘We’ll see,’ he said, but it was clear to him what he would do. Anna, when all was said and done, was already Victor’s eyes and ears. She did what Rook had done, except she knew the innards of Big Vic more closely than she knew the Soap Market. What could that matter now? He’d send a memorandum to her, giving her Rook’s job, Rook’s salary, Rook’s desk, Rook’s access to his suite, his apartment, his rooftop hermitage. He almost gave her the news right then, by word of mouth. But he resisted such intimacy, and asked that she present the cheques and documents to sign. He was not fond of gratitude. Gratitude was not the same as debt. You could not settle gratitude by cheque.
So Rook and Anna were lieutenants in opposing camps. So what? They did not meet again, or even glimpse each other on the street. Their streets were not the same. And Rook would soon be off the streets for good. There was bitterness between them, unexpressed. Rook saw that Anna’s name was where his name had been, on letters to the traders from Big Vic, on market documents.
‘Don’t trust that woman,’ he warned them, shocked at the ease with which he told such lies. ‘She’s loyal to no one but herself.’ She was the one, he said, who’d given Busi’s plans to Con. What should they make of that? The woman who had chanced her job by stealing documents was now promoted to Victor’s personal aide, the old man’s buffer and his fixer. In Rook’s version, everything was clear. It had all been a plot. ‘Don’t underestimate that man. He planned your demonstration on the mall. He had the press on hand. He had his speech prepared. No doubt that PR monkey laboured over it for weeks and rehearsed each word with Victor. “The market’s getting taller”? Oh, yes? And who is standing there out in the rain while Victor makes his pretty little speech and promises to make you rich? Sweet Anna, that is who. His parlourmaid. Who was it chaperoned old Busi at the Excelsior? Who was it, actually, who sacked me from my job? Who’s now ensconced in my old chair? Anna goes from strength to strength while you, poor fellows, pack your bags on New Year’s Eve for two years’ hard labour at the gulag car park in the frozen wastes of New Town.’
Rook sketched for them a future made from rotting unsold fruit, and yellow leaves, and roots gone soft and pliable. No one would last the two years ‘in the wilderness’, Rook said. That was Victor’s masterplan — to shed the soapies so that he could have Arcadia himself. But Rook was talking to nobody. His bitter punditry, his ironies, made people turn their backs, and seek out less bilious company. And company like that was not in short supply. By mid-December the marketplace was frolicsome. For once the centre of our city was in vogue. Perhaps it was not paradise, but then neither was it hell. The soapies knew of better places and much worse. Who’d volunteer, they wondered, to live, along with twenty million others, in Mexico City in ghettos so dirty and so packed that roaches fled to the countryside and pig ticks came to town? Or in Hong Kong, where, it was said, apartments were so small and public space so scarce that should you wish to twist around in bed at night you’d have to take the ferry and twist around in mainland China? Who’d spend a single night by choice in London? Half the population there could only sleep with pills. Who’d want to breathe the air of Tokyo — where the holy mountain of Fuji was no longer visible through the smog? Or drink the waters of Detroit, where the Rouge River was so thick with effluent that in infrared satellite pictures it showed up as solid ground? Who’d swap our modest traffic jams for those great constipations in LA? Compared to these great towns, the unromantic modesty of our city centre was cause for gratitude.
As December drew to its end so everybody in the city came to see the market for the final time. They brought their children. They blocked the streets with cars. They bought their token vegetables, their memento fruit, and wandered in between the stalls remarking how engaging marketplaces were. Cellophane directed them. They did what they were told. They treated him with more respect than he had ever known. They stood transfixed to watch him swing his arms or block the passage of a wayward van.
The soapies loved this valedictory clientele, this slow and gawping audience who bought bad fruit and never asked the price, who swallowed every tale a soapie told. One trader — asked a hundred times how he’d lost the last joint of his little finger — winked at his wife and told how he had found, the month before, a fruit snake in a tub of peaches.
‘It was no longer than my hand,’ he said. ‘But those fruit snakes are poisonous. One bite and you’re dead in thirty seconds. That’s if you’re fit and strong like me, and have the heart to last that long. What could I do? I took this bill hook and cut the finger off there and then before the poison reached my heart.’ At other times and other tellings, he carried out the surgery not with a bill hook but with a banana knife, a piece of glass, a razor blade, an axe, a coffee spoon. And once, ‘What could I do but hold my finger up and let my wife here bite it off? She spat it out. It landed in that carrot box. We haven’t found it yet.’
One apple trader, a man who kept a bottle by his till, lectured as he sold: ‘To bite an apple is to taste the world’s most scientific fruit. It was a falling apple that gave us gravity — though none of mine have fallen from the tree. They’ve all been picked and packed without a bruise. And here’s the apple tempted Eve. You see the blushes on its cheeks? And here are cooking apples like the ones that Einstein used in his experiments. It’s got the mass, it’s got the energy. It’s very good with cheese.’
Another found a bon viveur, or nectar bug, amongst his fruit, as swollen by juice as a ripe green grape. He held it up for all the customers to see — and, spotting children watching him, he did a sleight of hand and swapped the bug for a real grape. He tossed it in his mouth. It popped between his teeth. He poked his tongue out at the children. Squashed green flesh lay in the ladle of his tongue.
This new, naive, and richer clientele could not conceal its pleasure. Was this a circus or a marketplace? If only parking was a little simpler or the journey from the suburbs not so long, they’d do their shopping in the Soap Market every time. The fruit looked better free from cellophane. You had a chance to touch and choose exactly what you wanted. And so much choice. And much more fun — if less convenient — than the bright and covered stores they usually used, close to the office, a short walk from home, two minutes in the car. What a gift, as well, to find this patch of greenery at the market heart. There were such cheap cafes there — and bars like country bars with slatted tables, trees for shade in summer and protection in the winter, waiters and waitresses who were neither servile nor imperious. They could test the strangest drinks, and eavesdrop on a tumult of conversations, profanities, and propositions like they’d never heard before.
The buskers came, like wasps to beer. They played old songs and standards from America. It was so crowded that the Gypsy with the concertina could hardly stretch and squeeze his notes. The waiters had to carry trays of beers above their heads. The fact that Rook sat preaching doom was only further evidence that here, in this grassed and cobbled relic, life was ripe.
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