Jim Crace - Arcadia

Joseph recognized the face, but did not wait to see the body wrapped inside the body bag. He stole a broom which had been left leaning on the side panels of an URCU truck. He soon became just one of dawn’s sweepers, brushing up the missile debris for little pay and less respect. He was invisible. He swept his way across the cobblestones, past URCU men, reporters from the papers, gawpers on their way to work, young men returned to claim (they hoped) their unburned cars. He swept towards the market edge, towards the exit where the banana vans had been but were no more. He joined the early morning New Year crowd, his severed clothes hardly noticed by the late-for-work, the late-to-bed. He made his way through the squints and alleys of the Woodgate district, uncertain whether he was rich or poor. Perhaps Rook’s death had been a cunning way to keep the two halves of the banknotes forever separate, as disunited as the clothes upon his back.

Joseph found a place to stop at last, a graveyard in a cul-de-sac with high tombstones and cypresses, and two plane trees, the perfect citizens surrounded by the sloughed-off litter of their toxic bark. There were no spectators, except for pigeons, and a pack of feral dogs. He pulled Rook’s wallet from Rook’s jacket and went through the spoils. He laid them out before him on cold stone. A photograph of Anna, inscribed ‘Let’s meet and talk’. A set of keys. The ten odd halves of the ten one-thousand notes. An ID card with a photograph of Rook, a grainy square in grey and black, expressionless, with — below — Rook’s home address, his status ‘Single Male’, and his signature in neat green ink. A folded advert from a catalogue, the model on the stool, the barmaid in his grasp, the suit, the unattended glass. Five untorn fifty notes. A contraceptive. Credit cards. A throat spray of some kind.

Joseph only kept the money and the keys. He lifted up a slab of stone and put the empty wallet and the rest beneath. If ever he had need for contraceptives or had a customer for stolen credit cards then he could find this stone again. He memorized the mossy name upon the stone, but the feral dogs would snout the wallet out as soon as he was gone. Already he had memorized the address on Rook’s ID card, and set off looking for a bed and an inheritance.

He’d seen that Rook was ‘Status: Single Male’ and knew there was a chance that Rook’s home would be undefended. What better way to spend the dawn on New Year’s Day than use the dead man’s keys, and find some shelter, warmth, some food, some sleep between four walls?

He found a parcel of deliveries in the entrance hall of Rook’s apartment block. He tucked the parcel under his arm and took his time upon the stairs. What could be more normal at that time of day than deliveries? If anybody met him on the stairs they’d take him for an errand boy, a scruffy, docile errand boy of the usual kind. He met no one. He found Rook’s door and tried the keys. Two locks. Two sets of teeth unclenched. The locks obeyed the keys. He was inside. This was the dream he had when he was loading produce onto trains: the day would come when he came home to his apartment in a city. He closed the door on everything. He’d never known such perfect carpentry or such a calm as this. He went from room to room. He opened every cupboard, every drawer. He looked inside the fridge. He did not touch, or eat, or steal. That could wait. He knew what he was searching for. A roll of clear tape. He found it in a wicker basket with some scissors. He sat down at the table and, breathing through his nose for better concentration, made for himself, from twenty half-notes — his and Rook’s — a fortune and a future.

The police would say they found him looting Rook’s apartment. Already he had stolen, it would seem, a parcel of antique books intended for the collector in the attic rooms. They said that every drawer and cupboard had been opened and all Rook’s valuables had gone. They said he planned to strip the place, that his accomplices would come with vans to take the furniture, to make off with the fridge and television set, the knick-knacks that were Rook. Who knows? Joseph was not a saint, though in a way he’d been a hero of a kind, for half a night at least.

They had his picture in the first newspapers of the year, but not for burglary. Not yet. They had him semi-naked on page one, his arms raised up, an aubergine in hand. He was ‘The Face of Discontent’, ‘The Market Rioter’. He shared the page with Rook. The headline was ‘Man Dead in City Violence’, and underneath reporters reproduced what they’d been told by police, how ‘groups of Trotskyists and anarchists, trained by foreign radicals and at secret camps in Germany, have been identified as orchestrating the disturbances’. The dead man’s name had not been learnt officially, but on the street the word had spread that URCU men had bludgeoned him to death. He was an ‘activist’, an innocent, a man who simply wished to voice his fears. The police had hit a thousand heads the night before. They’d hit this one too hard.

No statements came from URCU. They were beyond the press. But police PR was doing what it could to give the corpse a name, to find the cause of death. They had their answers by midday. The marketplace had witnesses. A trader had seen a semi-naked Rook go down and not get up. He’d seen the URCU pair run off. The police had rioted, he said, ‘not us’. He made his statement to the radio and to a journalist from the sentimental left-wing press. So Rook became a martyr to the cause. The man who’d been top brass in Victor’s palace; the man who’d left Big Vic on principle because he feared for the Soap Market, the man who had fought off-stage against Arcadia, the man who was a trader’s son himself, this market boy, had been brought down — ‘assassinated’ was the word — by police clubs and boots. Coincidence? Wake up! They’d sought him out, the rabble-rousers said. They’d marked him down for death.

The chief of police had hardly slept. He and the mayor and two financiers had celebrated the new year long after their wives had been driven home. They’d smoked the butt and drunk the dregs. Their waking tempers were not sweet. Their throats were raw with talk and smoke and spicy food. The chief was nonplussed by the headlines in the morning paper. Where was the ‘sudden order’ he’d requested in the night? He’d sobered up to find a scandal on his hands. A middle-aged man was dead, and rumour on the run. How long before some busybody asked, ‘Where was the chief of police when his men were clubbing citizens to death?’ He took some comfort from hurried medical reports that the ‘victim’ (a mistake, he thought, to have used that word) had died from respiratory failure — ‘asthma, possibly’. But there were broken bones and bruises, too. His ribs had sixteen fractures. His testicles were torn. His back and legs were ribbed and grilled with bruises. His scalp was peeled by blows from boots. There were sole marks on his cheeks. His nose was pointing east-south-east. A vehicle had crushed the corpse’s knee. If this was asthma then this man’s lungs deserved a trial and punishment, and we all courted death each time we sneezed.

‘Come up with something better,’ the chief of police instructed his aide. He was in luck. The officers who went to Rook’s address to tell his next-of-kin, if he had next-of-kin, found Rook’s apartment violated, the keys left hanging in the lock. They found the ne’er-do-well asleep, his elbows on the table, his birthmark cushioned by the newly reunited notes. They recognized the face — the boy in all the photographs, the crazy anarchist from German insurrection camps. Within a day they had the evidence that they required. Two witnesses had seen this Joseph kneeling at Rook’s side. One swore he’d noticed blows rained down on Rook, slaps to the face, punches to the back ‘consistent with the bruises on the corpse’. The other said he’d seen a knife. He thought it was a knife. It gleamed. But, no, he could not be certain there was not something blunt as well. A cobblestone, perhaps. The ground was strewn with broken cobblestones. A broken cobblestone can tear a testicle and fracture sixteen ribs.