Sam Leith - The Coincidence Engine

‘Isla… Kara… Ana…’

‘Are you – are you all right?’ Alex tried. The man’s voice had changed and his face looked – grief-stricken.

‘Nameless,’ the tramp said then. ‘Nameless ones. All the nobodies…’

Then something passed – whatever neurological event had upset him, whatever mental weather had passed across his brain, blew itself out. The man swayed, blinked as if confused, and then his focus found Alex again. He stepped back as if a little embarrassed, and put a tetchy, proprietorial hand on the bar of his supermarket cart.

Out of the corner of his eye, Alex saw the bus arriving. It swung into the stop where they were standing and the door opposite the driver opened with a slap and hiss. Alex shouldered his pack and hopped quickly on, fumbling a rolled-up dollar bill into the feeder and wriggling down to the end of the bus, sitting on a hard plastic seat.

A couple of seconds later, he heard the tramp’s voice. He had climbed onto the bus, and was now arguing with the bus driver. Alex saw him fishing in his horrible trousers and waving something at the driver.

‘My money stink? My money stink? Zat it? Faggin’ liberal.’

The bus driver said something Alex didn’t catch.

‘…take a piss right here, lady. Just ask.’

He started a second, more purposeful rummaging in the horrible trousers before the driver shot out an arm and snatched the note from his hand. The door slammed shut behind him.

‘Heh,’ he said, and ambled stinkily down the aisle of the bus. Ignoring several vacant pairs of seats, he hoisted himself into the one next door to Alex, sat down and looked straight ahead. He seemed to have stopped barking.

‘Spare cigarette?’ he asked, then answered his own question with a long sigh. ‘Nahhh.’

Alex wanted to move, but he was sort of wedged in, and he didn’t like to seem impolite.

‘Ah, sir, your… things…’ Alex pointed at the window.

The tramp shrugged.

‘Ah, none of that stuff means… it’s just stuff, you know?’ He looked as if with the slightest curiosity out of the window at his shopping cart, orphaned on the sidewalk as the bus lurched away.

The tramp fished a single bent cigarette out of his trousers and put it in his mouth. He didn’t light it.

‘Don’ need bags of stuff when I got… my freedom. I can do anything, go anywhere…’ He delivered this in a tone of flat unenthusiasm. ‘Yessir. Whee. Free will. The open road.’

He paused, apparently reflecting on all that the glorious exercise of his freedom had brought him.

‘Where you from, kid?’ he asked.

Alex became conscious of a certain stiffening in the neck of the Korean girl a few seats in front. A raisin-skinned old woman down at the driver end of the bus adjusted her bag on her lap and looked pointedly out of the window. Everyone was pretending not to be listening. Alex felt acutely self-conscious.

‘Ah. Cambridge.’

‘Mass?’

‘What? Oh. No. England. Britain, England.’

The tramp’s head bobbed thoughtfully.

‘You -’ Alex coughed – ‘know it?’

‘Yarp. Posted there. Inna war.’

Another long pause, as the tramp seemed to zone out. Whenever he stopped talking his marine funk seemed to cycle chromatically through a range of species: now tuna, now kipper, now lobster-on-the-turn.

‘Fred,’ the tramp said.

Alex felt himself colour.

‘Alex.’ He twisted awkwardly in his seat and shook Fred’s hand. Always him, he thought. Always him. How much longer was it going to be before he asked for a -

‘Dollar? Y’lemme a dollar, pal?’ His voice now a confidential growl.

‘I -’

‘Gotta get inna shelter. I get inna shelter I can – look…’

Fred, surprisingly limber, ducked his head down, grabbed his own foot and levered it up on his knee. His shoe was like a Cornish pasty, split at the seams. The filling looked unappetising. He pulled it off, revealing a foot that had seen a lot of life. Its crowning glory was the nail on the big toe: a full inch long, with dry blood crusted at the base, it was the shape and colour of a tooth rather than a toenail.

‘Horrible,’ he said.

‘Um,’ said Alex.

‘They got clippers inna shelter. Lend me thirty bucks.’

‘Thirty?’

‘All I ask.’

‘I’m really terribly -’

‘Forty. Pal. I’m mentally ill.’

The unlit cigarette bobbed and wagged as if it were glued to his lower lip. The back of the Korean girl’s head looked fascinated by the exchange.

‘I get fits. Pal. Alex. I can’t work. There’s a bullet in my brain. Right here, look.’ He grabbed Alex’s hand and guided it to a place at the top of his forehead near his hairline where there was a scar. He pushed Alex’s fingers against it and there was a disconcerting boneless give under the skin.

‘Wenn in. Docs could never get it out. I pick up radio signals. Get visions. I know what’s going on. You better gimme forty dollars.’

‘I don’t – I’m really sorry. I haven’t got that much money. I’d like to help, but -’

‘Pal.’

‘I’ve – will this…?’ Alex pulled a note from his pocket. Shit. It was a twenty. Fred snatched it.

‘Humph,’ said Fred. Then: ‘Wait up.’ He produced something from his horrible trousers. It was a very, very crumpled one-dollar bill and a stub of pencil. ‘I got your change. Hah.’ He unfurled the bill and held it in front of Alex’s face. He twitched his finger and thumb, seigneurially. Alex found it very irritating.

‘Thank you,’ he said a moment later, snatching the bill from the air. Nineteen dollars down. And sitting next to a tramp on the bus. Alex put the bill in his pocket. It felt like their business was transacted, and they sat on in a tense silence, Alex looking out of the window and breathing, shallowly, through his mouth.

They pulled up to a stop, finally, within sight of the wire-fenced expanse of the airport car farm.

‘Bye,’ said Alex.

The tramp said something, but it was a little slurred. It sounded like ‘I’ll see you around’.

Alex wriggled past him and walked with relief down towards the front end of the bus to alight. Fred stayed where he was, and as the door shut behind him Alex heard from the inside of the bus what sounded like the bark of a seal.

What Hands told Red Queen about the Intercept was not what Red Queen had been expecting to hear. Not by a long chalk. What Red Queen took for signs of guilt or complicity had been, as it turned out, something entirely other. It had been embarrassment.

His first action when asked what he knew had been to protest, in a squawk whose sheer volume spoke of outraged innocence: ‘Nothing! Nothing at all!’

Red Queen had known, from early on, that there had been something odd about the professor’s response to the Intercept, something shifty. When put on the spot, he had gone crimson.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said, ‘by trying to humiliate me this way. But if I hadn’t been transported here in a style quite beyond the means of even my wealthiest students, I’d long since have thought this a sophomore prank.

‘Where did you get this from?’ he asked, in the too-shrill voice of a man who was now all bluster.

‘Professor Hands,’ said Red Queen, ‘where we got it from is far less important than your having written an eyewitness account of the event that is at the centre of our investigation, and then lied about it. There is a man in the hospital in Mobile with severe injuries as a result of this event – an event that we have no choice but to treat as an act of war. You have professed not to know anything about this event, or its architect, but you are one of a handful of people on earth who works, at a high level, in Banacharski’s field. At the moment you are looking very much indeed like a prime suspect. You are on the point of becoming -’ Red Queen finished with a hard stare – ‘a known unknown. And that entitles me to hand you over to some people who will be a lot less nice to you.’