Cronix (10 page)

The artist becomes Hitler.

He raised the glass and drank it dry.

***

It was dark already when Professor Poincaffrey suggested they wrap it up for the day. Lost in his story, Oriente realized he had been talking for hours. He felt as if he had been watching the tale unfold before him, memories untouched for years suddenly blossoming into life. He could briefly smell the odor of Rick’s flat, a long-ago tincture of lemon-zest floor cleaner, cigarette smoke and leather upholstery. The olfactory memory vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

The academics shook his hand, promising the session would resume in the morning. In the hubbub, like the end of the lecture, Oriente heard one of the professors exclaiming, “Extraordinary, just extraordinary.”

Hencock seemed less impressed. As he passed him at the door, Oriente heard the inspector asking Poincaffrey how he could know all of this. “After all, he wasn’t there, was he? He wasn’t there with this man…Glenn, was he?”

“I don’t know, commissioner,” replied Poincaffrey, getting his rank wrong in his rush to escape the dull bureaucrat. “I’m sure all will be revealed in due course.”

Snubbed, Hencock stepped up to Oriente and took him lightly by the elbow. “This way, Mr Oriente. There’s a vehicle waiting.”

Agent Demarra escorted Oriente back to the hospital. In the overgrown, barely lit streets, Oriente could make out virtually nothing of the city. Most buildings were long gone – the conservationists concentrated only on those of designated historical value, though some carried out side-projects in their spare time, maintaining a house or pub they might once have loved, before the Exodus. Occasionally, the DPP car would emerge from the darkness and trees into a half-lit square of stone terraces, ivy grasping at the facades.

Demarra bade him goodnight at the hospital. There was a guard at the door, Oriente noticed. Passing the nurses’ station, he peeked in to see if Lola was on duty, but there were two nurses he did not know. He went to his room, undressed and lay in the dark.

The next morning was foggy, the mist tangled in the trees that stood thick around the hospital grounds. Lola burst in at seven, face bright and showing no trace of the early hour.

“Morning sweetie,” she said, setting down a steaming breakfast tray. Bacon, fried eggs, grilled mushrooms with toast. “Full English, my friend. If you weren’t sick before, you will be after this lot,” she said, stealing a mushroom.

“Hi Lola,” Oriente said, grabbing the coffee before she pilfered that too. “Why are you here so goddam early? I don’t have to be at the Delpy till ten.”

“There’s a demonstration this morning on the bridge, so I had to get in early because some of the roads were going to be closed. A couple of local kids were killed by a Cronix a few days back, up in Hackney. The families organized a protest, say they don't want any more downloads until the system's fixed. They say there are way too many Cronix and scolds out in the woods right now.”

Odd, Oriente thought: Guld had said the same thing back in Dorking. He remembered the desiccated human skulls he had seen dangling from the belt of the Cronix near Fitch’s monument. The protesters’ demands seemed eminently reasonable.

He snapped off half a rasher of bacon and chewed on it as she sat and stared at him. “What?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she shrugged. “Just finished my job for the morning. Got nothing better to do than watch you stuff your face.”

“Don’t you have any other patients? What about the Muerte down the hall?”

“Oh him. Nah, they took him off to jail yesterday, while you were out. Good riddance too.” Her mood suddenly brightened again. “Hey, I saw Quinn last night for a drink. He said you were great. A real star.” She laughed, a throaty gurgle like an enthusiastic baby. Oriente stopped chewing.

“He’s a good looking boy,” he said. “You picked well.”

“I always pick well,” she said. “Anyway, he told me everything, though he wasn’t supposed to. I’m not sure why he was so excited by your story. Just sounded like some loser who ended up putting his dead friend in a fridge. Why would everyone get so worked up about that? Was the guy some kind of a criminal?”

Oriente swallowed his bacon. “No. Just confused. And alone.” He stabbed his egg with a piece of toast. “I’d tell you more, Lola, but I’ve been ordered to keep shtumm by the professors.”

“Okay,” she shrugged. “I’ll get it all tonight from Quinn anyway. I’m gonna see him at the Casa Roja. Best food in town, if you can call this place a town. Mostly trees and ruins. Pretty depressing.”

“Really? I rather like it,” said Oriente. As he wiped the last grease from his plate with his toast, she picked up the tray.

“There, finished for the day,” she said. “Tough job, nursing.”

***

As the Airbus began its descent to Newark, the large gentleman sitting across the almost empty first-class cabin from Glenn hailed the stewardess as she made a last run with the duty-free trolley. The man was casually dressed, in black jeans and a dark sweatshirt that refused to hide an expanse of a white belly. He spoke to the stewardess in a thick Slavic accent and pointed to an item listed in the duty free brochure.

“The Chanel, sir? Certainly.” He immediately flipped a page and pointed a thick finger again. “The Macallan? One bottle, sir?” The man grunted, lifted two digits. “Two bottles? Anything else sir?” For the next five minutes, he rustled his way through the brochure, pointing out whatever took his fancy. More perfume, colognes, wines and watches, paid for with a carelessly proffered platinum card.

Glenn watched with a thrill of anticipation. Who knew what crumbling post-Soviet economy had been looted by this monosyllabic lump, so that he could cruise at 30,000 feet and indulge his every whim? Had Glenn been sitting back in economy, his knees numb and his back stiff as he peeked through the curtain into this other world, he would no doubt have found some scathing comment about his imperious attitude. But this time, Glenn was sitting here right next to him, and could, if he had so desired, have similarly strip-mined the duty-free brochure.

Against the expectations of so many years, he had slipped back into life: some rusted gear had mysteriously been re-engaged. He was moving, the world was speeding by and New York City was reaching up through the clouds to embrace him. He smiled politely as he asked the stewardess for one last gin and tonic.

He knew he should have felt guilty, but couldn’t muster remorse. He hadn’t killed Rick any more than the ogre next to him had brought down Communism. He had simply manipulated a situation, and just as his fellow traveler had escaped the smokestack ruins of a bankrupt empire, so Glenn had taken what would not be missed by its former owner and done his own flit. Besides, history was just one long litany of sociopaths doing and getting, while saner people poured on scorn and wondered why they hadn’t done and got themselves. He wasn’t Hitler after all, he told himself, he was still an artist. A con artist.

As he nursed his brimming drink, the ice vibrating pleasingly against the glass as the plane surfed cotton wool cumulus, Glenn smiled at his own re-invention. No: his own rebirth.

After interring Rick in his icy tomb, Glenn had gone through the drawers in his flat mate’s bedroom. He knew Rick kept a small black notebook that he occasionally consulted when he forgot a PIN number or password. He found them on the inside of the last page and copied them on a scrap of paper.

Armed with the numbers and the cards he had taken from Rick’s wallet, he set out. It was still early, and there was no one about. At the first bank machine he came to, he took out the cards and the piece of paper, tapped in a code with a card. It was rejected. The muscular spasm beneath his right eye flared up again, but he meticulously inserted each credit card, using the same PIN number, until the machine spewed out a neat wad of twenties.

Glenn marked the card number next to the correct PIN, then repeated the process until he had completed his list. He left with a bulging pocket and a list of which card matched which code. With renewed confidence, he hit the next bank, and the next, until a message flashed on screen that he had hit his limit for the day. He went back to the apartment and fell into bed, passing into instant oblivion.

In the weeks that followed, Glenn made assiduous rounds of the banks. He started to thinking of it as a mining project. Some banks, oddly, were a rich seam, others appeared to balk at giving him more than a paltry amount. As his cash pile grew, he started depositing it every few days in his own account. He opened more accounts in other banks to spread the money out, trying to outwit a police force not even aware a crime had been committed.

That first day, he had phoned Rick’s office and, faking a cold, told his secretary he was unwell and would be off for a few days. He was surprised at how easily she bought his imitation, but guessed she simply didn't care. He packed up his stuff, added some of Rick's nicer shirts, and moved into a series of bed and breakfasts, favoring the faded terraces around Earl’s Court. He sought anonymity, and readily found it.

Occasionally, Rick’s cell phone would ring. Glenn had already changed the message to a mumbled apology that he was out of the country on business, without specifying when he would be back. Max left several messages, before Glenn texted him saying he was in the south of France for a month. There were flirtatious and angry messages from women, some of which were explicit and filled Glenn with a voyeur’s thrill as he listened to them. But they too soon tapered off. Rick’s boss left a series of increasingly angry recordings, then some threats, then he too vanished.

That had been his routine for almost a month. Cash, watches, gold, pawn shops, bed-and-breakfasts, until yesterday. He estimated the loot he had stashed was roughly equal to the amount on Rick’ last bank statement. That was when he had returned for the last time to his friend’s aerie in the sky above London.

Nothing had changed. It was dustier, but there was no smell of decay, no hint of what the refrigerator was about to disgorge. Glenn had brought some food and beer to restock it. Crime had made him obsessive about details, and he noted he had a natural talent for it. He took a shot straight from the bottle of Bowmore that stood exactly where he had left it weeks earlier, and opened the fridge door.

He had spent many an evening sitting in pubs, pondering whether he should leave Rick in the fridge after he fled, or whether it would be better to position him so that it might appear he had died in his sleep. The former would automatically trigger a police investigation when Rick was eventually found, as he certainly would be, once the utilities bills went unpaid shut and the electricity shut down. The latter would almost certainly trigger an earlier discovery, but the possibility that the crime itself would remain obscure. In the end, he had opted to recreate, as far as he could, Rick’s death scene in the bedroom.

Rick no longer looked like Rick. He looked like something from the British museum, a shrunken and trussed Inca priest in a display case. Gingerly, averting his gaze, Glenn eased the corpse out, teasing clothing from the ice's grip. The body thunked to the tiled floor and Glenn had to lean in to prevent it toppling on its face. He was thankful for the shot of whiskey, but surprised at how little revulsion he felt, either at the corpse or himself.

Glenn had planned to wait until the body thawed before placing it on the bed, but now, faced with the box-like figure on the kitchen floor, his resolve failed. He pushed him through the bedroom – how easily he slid over the polished floors, as though he had been designed just for that purpose – and to the bed. Grunting with effort, Glenn hoisted him so that the head was roughly next to the pillow, as though he might have been sleeping. Back in the kitchen, he took a last swig of Scotch and placed the bottle exactly back inside the ring of dust it had formed on the counter top.

He caught the 8am flight to New York the next day.

***

There was a photo on the wall of Poincaffrey’s study, a vast collection of ragged humans huddled in some unnamed desert, looking for all the world like the legendary Israelites lost in Sinai. The shot was taken from the air, showing the faceless straggle of refugees stretching off to the heat-haze horizon, clustered round tents and lining up for hand-outs.

Staring at it, Oriente wondered whether it was a scene from the Afterworlds, some recreation of the Biblical legend acted out by religiously inclined Immortals, or just one of the tragedies that used to regularly beset the poorer billions on an overcrowded Earth.

“Chad,” said Poincraffrey. “Now, if you look very closely, you can just about make out yours truly standing in there.” With the tip of his pen he pointed to a few white-skinned figures outside a Portacabin.

“Not very high-resolution, but you can make me out by the blond hair,” he said.

“What were you doing in Chad? This was during your natural term, right?”

“I was there with the Peace Corps, a few years into the Exodus. The government sent thousands of volunteers out with mobile chipping stations to help refugees who were beyond any earthly salvation. They were dying in droves, and the local warlords were stopping aid getting to them. So we were sent out to chip them while the Army Corps of Engineers were putting up soul poles across war zones. We must have saved millions.”