Authors: Jim Crace
‘Don’t move,’ he said. ‘We owe each other favours, don’t we? Don’t shake your head. Don’t move. I gave you that.’ Rook pointed at the scar.
‘And you’ve scarred me. I ought to hand you over to the police. At least you’d have a decent place to sleep …’
Joseph sat up. He recognized Rook’s face at last, despite the lack of tie and suit. He was not frightened by the knife or anything this thin-faced man might do. His own face was wide
enough to take more scars. He did not care. He’d snap this man in half for waking him. He’d punish him for being rich when he was poor. Rook stood and backed away, the knife less
certain in his hand.
‘Have you got money?’ Joseph asked.
‘What’s that to you?’
‘Or cigarettes?’
Rook shook his head. Joseph put his hand out, palm upturned. ‘You woke me. You’d better watch it, mister. I know you now. You’ll pay for what you’ve done … Come
on, give me some money for some food.’
‘Go to hell.’
‘Piss off yourself!’
Rook was nervous of the threat that Joseph posed. He knew how strong the young man was. He’d seen him tossing onion sacks as if an onion grew fat and ripe on helium. He should have turned
and walked away. Or run. But Joseph’s words, ‘You’d better watch it, mister. You’ll pay for what you’ve done!’ convinced him that the two of them should now
negotiate for peace.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I only meant to give you back the knife.’ He pressed the blade into the handle and gave it to Joseph. ‘Hold on!’ He found a crumpled
nest of notes inside his jacket pocket. He pulled them out one by one, looking for a fifty. But the first ten were thousands, his winnings from the dice. He smoothed them out and held them in his
left hand. He found the fifty, let it loop and float onto the cobblestones at Joseph’s feet, and then spread out the ten one-thousand notes. He’d put them to good use.
‘How’d you like to earn a wad like this?’
‘For doing what?’ Joseph was certain now that Rook was looking for a man to share his bed. He’d been approached before, but not for so much cash. For money of that kind
he’d take a chance. To make a living he would do ‘bad things’ – his simple phrase for kicking down a door or kicking in a rib or letting some dull man pay for his touch.
Whatever Rook was offering, there was bound to be a way of cheating on the deal. Ten thousand? What might that buy? What might a man like Rook expect for such a fee?
Rook himself had not yet formulated what he wanted Joseph for. But he was market-wise. He knew that Joseph could be bought, by Victor, Con, by anyone. Rook knew he had to purchase this
On the
Town
before he went elsewhere. Here was a bargain too tough and useful to be missed. Buy in haste, use at leisure. He’d take his time dreaming up some useful task for this hireling to
commit
, something to damage Victor, Con, or anyone.
‘I’ll speak to you again, be sure of that,’ he said. ‘Do what I ask and this little bunch of notes is yours.’
Joseph was not pleased. ‘“If and when” don’t butter bread,’ he said, but for an instant he saw himself as the well-dressed model in the catalogue, his pockets
stuffed with one-thousand notes. He would – with Rook’s fat fee – sit at the bar and hold the barmaid by the wrist. He would drink muscatino from midnight till midday. He held his
hand out for the notes.
‘Just wait!’
‘I’m sick of waiting. Give me something now!’
Rook arranged the ten one-thousand notes so that they made a perfect sheaf. He folded them in half.
‘Give me the knife,’ he said.
The knife had danced between the pair of them so often now that one more time was neither here nor there. Joseph returned the knife. The blade was sprung. Rook slipped the knife inside the notes
and cut along the fold.
‘Money is the peacemaker!’ He mimicked Victor perfectly. ‘One half for you. One half for me.’ He put one set of severed half-notes in his pocket, and gave the matching
set to Joseph, wrapped round his knife. ‘So now you know I’m serious.’
‘I can’t spend this.’
‘Nor can I!’
‘So what’s the point?’
‘The point, dear Joseph, is that we will have to talk again. As friends. I’ve got a job for you. Don’t ask me what. But when that job is done, I’ll add my half to
yours.’
V
ICTOR WAS
flattered by the courting of the architects, their optimism. He liked the language that they used; the ease with which they sang of pits and
peaks and galleries and foliage travertines and moduled trading canyons, as if the market buildings which they had conceived were ancient caves, or forests, mountains, landscape parks, as if they
were importing countryside to colonize the city’s heart.
In November – five months after Rook’s dismissal – building plans which were jostling for the privilege of standing at the ancient market site were presented to Victor in his
offices by men who looked like poets or composers dressed as restaurateurs. Expensive suntans, casual suits, the glistening, barracuda eyes of those who live by their imaginations and their wits.
Not one contested that the existing market was diseased. Their diagnoses matched. They were agreed on its ill-health, its pathology, what treatment it should get, what surgery. The old Soap Market
was a tumour at the city’s heart and had to be removed. They prescribed the chemotherapy of the bulldozer, the radiation of the great iron ball. ‘Reduce the little that is there to
rubble. And rebuild.’
These architects were far too grand for schools and houses. They boasted of the museums, marinas, hotels, and concert auditoria, the bank HQs, the city halls, the celebrated malls, that they had
built elsewhere in the city and elsewhere in the world. In Tokyo. And Amsterdam. And Barcelona. And Zagreb. In tedious, smaller towns which they had placed upon the map by squeezing in a
white-walled university where once there’d only been some fields, some woods, a rundown neighbourhood.
Great swathes of greased paper with lightly pencilled plans and elevations spread across Victor’s desk, and draped his chairs. Scale models, computergrams, and video enhancements presented
new Soap Markets all of which the architects espoused like stage evangelists. Axonometrics 3-D lifted up the draughtsmen’s lines and made them real.
Victor had no eye for shape or form. He assessed the buildings by the words that were used for their promotion. He’d heard it said – and liked the phrase, despite its false
extravagance – that architecture was frozen, geometric music. He judged the tone and rhythm of the plans by how the architects could sing their wares, what bafflegab they used. Once
he’d made his mind up, then he would allow the managers, the financial planners, the development engineers, the accountants in his pay to take command.
Anna made arrangements for the eleven men and one woman to visit Victor in his office suite. She met each of them at the entrance from the mall and during the journey through the twenty-seven
floors she gave them strict instructions that they should stay no longer than forty minutes and that they should not be ‘overtechnical’.
‘Victor is eighty,’ she explained. ‘He’s not patient. His hearing isn’t good.’
One architect – the first to audition – said his building had the swagger which was fitting for a marketplace. A forum for the sale of food, after all, deserved a confident
demeanour. No need to skulk like banks or barracks do. No need for bashfulness. A market ‘hall’ could be ambitious, energetic, optimistic, noisy, rash, hi-tech. And here his
presentation sketch showed all the anorexic shamelessness of modernism on a spree, the veins, the innards and the entrails, the ducts and pipes, clinging thinly to the building’s black glass
skin.
Too varicose,’ was Victor’s judgement, though he, or more exactly Anna, expressed this view more blandly in a letter of regret which was delivered to the architect that same
afternoon.
Others presented plans in the postmodern cocktail style so favoured by hoteliers and out-of-city shopping magnates: a dash of Empire grandeur, two shots of common sense, a slug of metal
rhetoric, all sweetened and made palatable by twists of pastel ornament.
The woman architect – from the practice which designed the Wall Memorial in Berlin – was a no-nonsense pragmatist. She had no time for curves. Her inspirations were tombstones,
bookends, freight containers, washing-powder packets, the square black holy Kaaba at the heart of Mecca, the Pentagon, matchstick boxes, wooden packing cases, dice. She most admired the tall,
straight democratic canyons of Manhattan. She wished to put up on the market site ‘a bold and simple slab, free of ornamental flippancy, in which the dogma and perfection of the rectilinear
design confronts and challenges the inevitable disorder of the marketplace – and, incidentally, doesn’t jeopardize your profit margins’.
‘Let’s not disguise, but celebrate, the probity of rectangles and cubes,’ she said.
One handsome local architect, a young man much adored by social columnists for his daring disregard of public taste and of the women in his life, called for buildings which were visual
metaphors, the city’s aspirations made tangible in bloated glass and stone. The metaphor which he’d prepared for the Soap Market was most visible to God. Viewed from above – from
a helicopter at a pinch, or even the roof-top garden on Big Vic – its shape was cruciform, a square-winged bird in flight. Its split swallowtail was, for the people on the ground, two
tapering wedges which welcomed and embraced its clientele. It guarded them from wind and sun, and led them to the market doors at the swallow’s rump.
‘This building holds a dialogue with the people passing through,’ the architect proclaimed. ‘Its language is the language of the street.’ Victor was deaf to what it had
to say. If he had wanted metaphors for God he would have built a church.
He was more taken and more patient with the esperanto architects whose Shanghai-Aztec market halls were decorated with facades which owed their haywire debts to Marrakesh and to Mondrian, or to
pyramids and pagodas, or to the paint-by-numbers graveyard classicism of Rome and Greece and Père Lachaise, or to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the IBM Garden Plaza on New York’s
56th and Madison, or to spas and fairs and paddleboats. It was amusing to be guided through these global ‘theme’ environments, to hear of screens in bamboo and in steel, and roofs in
metalthatch, and market ‘trading modules’ whose veneered marble counters were friezed and plinthed like tombs.
But there was never any doubt who’d win the contract once Signor Claudio Busi arrived and told the old man that his creed was this: ‘My allegiance is to what you want. Great
buildings such as this must glorify the vision of the man who pays. I quote dell’Ova and I say, “The tallest buildings throw the longest shadows. Thus great men make their
mark.”’
He’d done his homework, God knows how, for Victor’s passions and aversions were not documented, and Anna, in the ascending lift, was tempting but not helpful. Or perhaps this Busi
simply had the gift of insinuating images into an empty head with flattery. But, by luck or cunning, everything he had to say was pleasing and on target.
Claudio Busi was a stringy man of sixty-nine, the eldest partner in a practice celebrated for its taste and pragmatism. It was Busi who designed the Riggings, the waterfront development at Port
St Phillips which had been laid flat by Hurricane Eduardo two years before and had not been rebuilt. The wrought-iron Exhibition Hall in Amsterdam was his work, too. And so was the Curtains Project
in Milan which won the UN Prize: ‘A stunning engineering adventure’. And the Centenary Center on the lake in Michigan. His book,
The World Beneath a Single Roof
, had started a
short-lived vogue for ‘space as playground, building as event’, and had established Busi as a charming, architectural pundit at colloquiums and on television shows. A lady’s man,
they said. He had the kind of peachy voice that could soften stone.
His younger partners had to treat him with respect – but they had largely forced him from the drawing board. He had become too careless, too passé. He did not understand the
functional obsessions of the modern clients who wanted ‘splendour out and squalor in’, that is to say, huge entrances, but offices as cramped and mean as prison cells. He travelled in
his olive suits between their studios in New York, Paris, and Milan much like a bishop travels his diocese, with great pomp but little power or control. He was a figurehead – and just the
man, his partners judged, to win for them the Soap Market contract. A man of eighty could both patronize and trust a man of sixty-nine. So Busi was despatched from Milan, to be their mouthpiece
– and to give them all a break from his phrasemaking and his charm.
Signor Busi would have preferred to be the spokesman for his own designs – but he had convinced himself that this task was his because he was considered by his colleagues and his rivals
‘a philosopher amongst journeymen’. (A journalist had once described him thus, though with the nuance that, perhaps, Signor Busi talked more convincingly than he performed, with
buildings and with women, too.)
He took a room at the Excelsior and spent a day looking at the Soap Market and its garden. The team of three from the Busi Partnership who had spent two months on site earlier that year had
warned the Signor in their briefing papers that the market was ‘cheap, inefficient and artificial’. Busi thought so too. ‘Squalid’ was the word he muttered to himself. His
taxi had abandoned him to walk – all very well in precincts and pedestrianized streets, but here was chaos, a nightmare for pedestrians. To cross the market by foot was to volunteer for
service in the bruising labyrinths of an ants’ nest. It was – for sure – neither beautiful, nor functional; neither playground nor event. It failed the Busi litmus test. It turned
the simple task of buying fruit into an expedition. He marvelled at the depth and animation of the crowd and at the patience of the traders obliged each day to erect their stalls, barrow in their
produce over cobbles, and then to box and barrow out each night the unsold residue, to end their day dismantling the stalls again. Inane. Insane.