Market Forces Part 16

'No.' He set down his drink and came to crouch in front of her. 'No, I didn't, Carla. I know you're just doing what you have to get by. We all are. Even Chris. I know that. But can't you see. Any argument for me going back to Norway is an equally valid argument for you. How do you think I feel, looking atyou, stuck in the middle of this?'

The thought stopped her like a slap. Her hands tightened on his.

'Dad--' She swallowed and started again. 'Dad, that's not it, is it?

You're not staying because of me?'

He chuckled and lifted her chin with one hand.

'Staying because of you? Staying to protect you, with all the money and influence I've ama.s.sed? Yeah, that's right.'

'Then tell me why.'

'Why.' He stood up and for a moment she thought she was in foranother lecture. Instead, he went to stand at the window again, staring out. The flames were stronger now and they stained his face with orange. 'Do you remember Monica Hansen?'

'Your photographer?'

Erik smiled. 'I'm not sure she'd like the possessive p.r.o.noun, but yes, Monica the photographer. She's back in Oslo now, taking photos of furniture for some catalogue. She's bored, Carla. The money's okay, but she's bored to screaming.'

'Better bored than sleeping in the streets.'

106'Don't exaggerate, Carla. I'm not sleeping in the streets. And, no, listen to me a moment, think about it. You said yourself there's no exclusion there like there is here. So what would I write about. Back in the comfort and safety of my own Scandinavian social system? No, Carla. This is the front line - this is where I can make a difference.'

'No one wants you to make a difference, Dad.' She got up from the chair, suddenly angry again, and faced him. She jerked back the other curtain and glared angrily down at the fire below. 'Look at that.'

The source of the flames, she saw as she gestured, was an overturned armchair. Other items lay scattered around, unrecognisable in the darkness and as yet untorched. A shattered window directly above suggested an origin. Someone had been in one of the first-floor flats, throwing down what it contained. Now figures in baggy, hooded sportswear stood gathered around the fire, making Carla think of menacing negative-image Disney dwarves out of some nightmare where it all definitely did not end happily ever after.

'Look at it,' she hissed again. 'You think those people care what you write? You think most of them can even read? You think people like that care about you making a difference?'

'Don't be so quick to judge, Carla. Like Benito says, don't make 3D judgments of what you can only see on your TV screen.'

'Oh, for ' Her expletives evaporated in an exasperation too old and deep for words. She rapped hard on the gla.s.s. 'This isn't a TV, Dad. It's a f.u.c.king window, and you live here. You tell me what we're looking at, community night barbecue maybe?'

Erik sighed. 'No, it's probably gang retribution for something.

Someone they thought informed on them, someone who spoke out of turn. They did the same thing to Mrs McKenny last summer because she wouldn't let her son run balloons for them. Of course, then he had to, just to buy some new furniture. You can't fault the gangwits on psychology.' He turned away from the window, and suddenly, in the motion, she saw how tired he had become. The vision only fanned the flames of her anger again. Up from the pit of her stomach, a licking, gusting sickness.

Erik appeared not to sense it coming. He was freshening his drink again, working on an ironic grin to match it. 'Of course, it could just be kids having fun. Random stuff. A lot of those first-floor flats have been empty for longer than I've been here. They just break in and '

He shrugged and drank.

'And throw the stuff out the window/' Suddenly she was yelling at him, really yelling. 'And set fire to it! For fun/Jesus f.u.c.king Christ, Dad,will you listen to yourself. You think this is novnal? Are you f.u.c.ked in the head?'

107.

IThe flashback caught like magnesium ribbon behind her eyes. Eleven years old again, and screaming at her father as he tried to explain what he had done and why she had to choose. It burned out as fast, afterimage inked onto her retina and the returning dimness of the room. She looked up quickly, caught the expression on Erik's face, and knew he was remembering too.

'Dad, I'm sorry,' she whispered.

Too late.

He didn't say it, but he didn't need to. Silence was settling around them in little black shreds, like scorched down from a pillow shot through at close range.

'Dad '

She had thought for a moment he might yell back, but he didn't. He only moved slightly, the way she sometimes saw Chris move when some piece of driving-induced injury caught him awkwardly. He moved and nodded to himself, as if her scream had been a swallow of rough but interesting whisky. She saw the way he was composing himself, and knew what was coming.

'Normal?' He said the word with careful pedantry that almost hid the returning gruffness in his voice. 'Well I think, in the context of the slaughter we've just seen committed by the man you share your bed with--'

'Dad, please--'

His voice trampled hers down. 'I'd call it normal, yes. In fact I'd call it comparatively healthy. Burnt furniture you can always replace. Burnt flesh is a little harder.'

She breathed deliberately, loosening the tightness in her chest.

'Listen, Dad, I'm not going to '

'Of course, there is always the double standard to consider. As Mazeau would have put it, crime is a matter of degrees and the degree that really matters in society's eyes is the extent to which the criminal has a.s.serted himself beyond his designated social cla.s.s and status--'

'Oh, bulls.h.i.t, Dad!'

But the anger had deserted her, and all she could feel now was the edge of tears. She held onto her drink with clumsy, eleven-year-old hands, and watched as her father retreated, swathing himself in the gauze bandage of political rhetoric to hide the hurt.'The sons and daughters of the powerful buy and sell drugs amongst themselves with impunity, because all they have done is overstep slightly the licence their cla.s.s ent.i.tles them to, misunderstood the lip service to legality that must be paid if the common herd are to continue grazing quietly. But let one child from the Brundtland enter their fairy kingdom and do the same, and watch the full b.l.o.o.d.y weight of the law fall on 108him, because he has prerumed to behave as he is not ent.i.tled, presumed to not know his place. And that we cannot allow.'

'Dad,' she tried one more time, voice pitched low and urgent. 'Please, Dad, look down there again. Never mind whose fault it is. Never mind the politics of it. Do you think anyone down there gives a flying f.u.c.k what you write? Do you think they give a f.u.c.k about anything any more?'

'And my son-in-law does?' He did not turn to the window, but his eyes were bright with the reflected fireglow. 'Chris gives a flying luck for the bodies he left on the motorway today? Or the bodies that they'll be stacking in the streets of Phnom Penh a year from now? You know what I wish, Carla? I wish you'd married one of those edge dealers down there instead of that suited piece of s.h.i.t you sleep with. The dealer, at least, I could make excuses for.'

'That's great, Dad.' Finally, with the insult to Chris, she had the anger back. The strength to hurt. Her voice came out flat and cold.

'You finally had the guts to say it to my face. The man who paid your rent and bought you a new kitchen last Christmas is a piece of s.h.i.t. And I guess it's clear what that makes me.'

She set down the drink on the coffee table and made for the door. She saw how he lifted one arm involuntarily towards her as she pa.s.sed him, but she shut it out.

'Where are you going?'

'I'm going to pack my bag, Dad. And then, if I don't get mugged and raped on the way out by one of your oppressed proletarians, I'm going home.'

'I thought you didn't want to be on your own in the house.'

He said it sulkily, but there was an undertone of fear and regret in his voice now. Dismayed, she realised that it was exactly what she wanted to hear. She could feel the relish bubbling up on hearing it.

'I didn't,' she said. 'But I'd rather be alone, somewhere safe and sane, than with you in this s.h.i.thole.'

She didn't turn to see his face as she said it.

She didn't need to.

Some damage, Chris had once told her, you don't need to see. You know what you've done on impact. You can feel it. All you have to do after that is disengage.

She went to pack.109FILE#2: ACCOUNTADJUSTMENTFIFTEEN.

It finally hit Chris while he was waiting at the counter in Louie Louie's for a double-spike cappuccino.

He'd sat up late the previous evening, going over the possibilities, and by the time he finally came to bed, Carla was already asleep. More and more, that was becoming the pattern. Work on the Cambodia contract was keeping him later and later at Shorn. He was forced to relegate his self-defence cla.s.ses and gun practice to lunch-time, which stretched the day even longer. Carla was getting home anything from two to five hours ahead of him during the week and they had given up any pretence of dining together. He ate the remains of what she had cooked for herself earlier and talked desultorily to her about his day. Loading the dishwasher was usually the only shared activity of the evening; after that, one of them would retire upstairs to read, leaving the other marooned down in the living room with the entertainment deck.

There was an air of detached politeness to their lives now. They had s.e.x at increasingly irregular intervals and argued less than they ever had before, because they rarely had the time or energy to talk about anything of significance. They kept meaning to take a long weekend together somewhere like New York or Madrid and use the time to recharge, but somehow it never came together. Either Carla forgot to book the Sat.u.r.day off with Mel, or Chris was suddenly needed for a weekend meeting with the Cambodia team. Summer came on, pleasantly mellow, but the layer of superficiality continued to thicken over their day-to-day life and Chris found himself enjoying the new weather only in moments of isolation that he was later curiously unwilling to share with Carla.

He lay awake beside her, turning the game over in his mind until he finally fell asleep.

On the drive in that morning he'd tried again, but he'd been too sleepy from the night before. In the last few weeks his habitual driver's caution had grown lax to a point that under other circ.u.mstances might have been called recklessness. As it was, the att.i.tude made perfect sense.

Following the Nakamura challenge, word had got out about the dangerous new player at the Shorn table and no one among the young no-name challengers was keen to go up against Chris Faulkner's clearly 113identifiable Saab Custom. The vehicle's s.p.a.ced armouring and Mitsue Jones's demise at its owner's hands were equally thoroughly mytholo gised among the driving fraternity - detail upon invented detail until it was impossible even for Chris to separate the true facts from the thicket of embellishments that had sprung up around them. In the end, he gave up trying and started to live with the legend. In this, he was probably the last person on board. Amidst all the hype, one thing had been universally accepted in the City of London weeks ago - there had to be easier ways to carve a name for yourself than go up against Chris Faulkner.

'Double cap for Chris,' yelled the girl at the counter.

He was on first name terms with the staff of Louie Louie's these days - they'd torn out the front cover of GQ that month and pinned it up behind the counter. Reluctantly, he'd autographed it, and now, every time he went in, his carefully groomed features grinned back at him from beneath the imprisoning gloss and black ink scrawl. It made him slightly uneasy. Fame had dripped like sap all over him and now it was hardening into amber and he was trapped inside for all to see. Fansites were starting to give him serious coverage for the first time since the death of Edward Quain. East European working girls with unlikely stage names and credit-card hotlines were in his mail, plying him with suggestions of varying subtlety.

And you're pinned down, overdeployed, no way to The solution boiled out at him like the milk froth from the steamer, bubbling up on itself as it unfolded. It might have been the crosshatched patterning of the yellow and black tiles behind the counter, or maybe just the results of dissociative thinking, a technique he'd picked up from a psych seminar the week before. Whatever it was, he fielded the insight and took it back up in the Shorn elevator with his coffee.

'Cambodia Resourcing continues to lead the rising stock trend,' the elevator informed him as they powered upward. 'With end-of-day trading at '

He tuned it out. He already knew.

Mike Bryant was talking to the machine. Chris could hear him through the door, dictating in jagged pieces to the datadown. It was a chewed-over version of a doc.u.ment to the Cambodian rebels that they'd been working on most of yesterday. The East Asia Trade and Investment Commission was leaning on them for Charter compliance with an uncharacteristic fervour. Industrial espionage reports suggested Nakamura bribes were going in at high level.

'We have no interest in the so-called, no, scratch that, no interest in the areas you have designated resettlement zones, nor are we concerned with what goes on within those zones. The administration of the camps114is, of course, not within our jurisdiction provided no overt human rights abuse, uh-uh, provided no human rights abuse, mhmmm, no, back up again, not within our jurisdiction, uhhh, provided, given that, oh f.u.c.k it--'

Chris grinned and knocked at the door.

'What?' Bryant bellowed.

'Having trouble?'

'Chris!' Bryant stood poised in the middle of his office s.p.a.ce, arms slung on a polished wood baseball bat that he'd braced at the nape of his neck. It gave him the posture of a man crucified, and the tiredness in his face did nothing to alter the impression. 'Would you believe I've been on this motherf.u.c.ker since eight this morning. It has to go to the uplink at noon, and I'm still splitting f.u.c.king hairs on the covering letter.

Listen to this.' He walked to the desk and read aloud from a piece of hardcopy that curled from the datadown printer. '"The administration of the camps is, of course, not within our jurisdiction, provided no human rights abuse occurs." Sary's going to go through the roof if we send him that - he'll say we're implying the Friday statement's a lie.'

'It is, isn't it?'

'Please.' Bryant rolled his neck against the wood of the bat. 'I'm trying to do politics here. We can't imply he's lying.'

'I thought we were going to go with "given that no human rights abuse is occurring".'

Bryant shook his head. 'Won't wash with the UN. There's an Amnesty report doing the rounds in Norway and no one's prepared to deny it at ministerial level. We've got to stay "vague but firm". That's a direct quote from Hewitt.'

'Vague but firm.' Chris pulled a face. 'Nice.'

'f.u.c.king Amnesty.'

'Yeah, well. s.h.i.t happens.' Chris came and stood at Bryant's shoulder, reading the hardcopy. 'What about...'

He tore the sheet from the printer and scanned it. Bryant unslung the baseball bat from his shoulder and parked it in a corner.

'... Confident. That's it, look. Admin of the camps blah blah blah not within our jurisdiction and we are confident that no human rights abuse, no, that none of the alleged human rights abuse has occurred.' He handed back the sheet. 'How about that?'Bryant s.n.a.t.c.hed it.

'You b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Forty-five f.u.c.king minutes I've been staring at this.'

'Caffeine.' Chris held up his take-out from Louie Louie's. 'Want some?'

'I'm all caffeined out. I was in at six with Makin, and this landed on my desk an hour ago from upstairs. Notley and the policy board.

115Response required. As if I didn't have enough else to do. Let's see . . .

"that none of the alleged human rights abuse has occurred". Right.

Now what about this? "However we cannot permit your forces to obstruct the pa.s.sage of fuel and supplies".'

'Try "forces operating in the area". Takes the sting out of it and makes him feel like a big man. Like you're asking him to police the zone generally, not just get a grip on his own troops.'

Bryant muttered and scribbled on the hardcopy as he read it back.

'"However we cannot permit forces operating in the area to obstruct the pa.s.sage of fuel and" blah blah blah blah. That's it. Brilliant.'

Chris shrugged. 'Ready-wrapped. I used the same scare on the Panthers of Justice a couple of weeks back, and they lapped it up.

Stopped the banditry dead. All most of these rebels really want is some kind of recognition. Paternal acknowledgement from some kind of patriarchal authority. According to Lopez, it had them swaggering around, posting police directives in every village.'

Mike barked a laugh. 'Lopez? That Joaquin Lopez?'

'Yeah.'

'So you put Harris up to tender after all.'

'Well, like you said. It was our investment he was f.u.c.king with. And Lopez works flat out for a half per cent less of total. Really took Harris apart in the bullring too, apparently.'

,I.

'Yeah, he's still young enough to have the drive. Harris burnt out :iI years ago, it's just no one ever called him on it. You did the whole tindustry a service putting him out.'

'It was your idea. If anything, I owe you one for the advice. So anyway, what's this six a.m. s.h.i.t with Makin? Anything I should know about?'

'Nah, shouldn't think ' Bryant stopped. 'Actually, maybe I should t bounce it off you. You worked the NAME, didn't you? North Andean I.

i Monitored Economy? Back when you were at HM?

Chris nodded. 'Yeah, we were into the ME in a big way. Anybody I.