Authors: Ned Beauman
‘No, Alicja is taking you, but your mum and I will both be at your soccer game on Sunday.’
‘You mean football.’
‘Soccer.’
‘Football.’
‘Soccer.’
‘Football!’ both girls shout happily.
They pass out of earshot. ‘Come on,’ says Fourpetal.
Raf points out that he’s chaperoned by twins and a small dog. ‘I don’t think this is a good time to follow him.’
‘What else are we going to do?’
They set off. The incongruous council block at the top of the hill has a gabled roof with omelettes of yellow moss at the edges and below that satellite dishes roosting between the drainpipes. When Nollic and his kids cut across the playground at its edge, it becomes obvious that they’re on their way to the big supermarket on the other side. Raf and Fourpetal dawdle in the car park for a couple of minutes and then carry on through the automatic doors.
‘It’s hard to believe this is all about something as trivial as a party drug,’ mutters Fourpetal. ‘I do have some respect for good coke, but on the whole I always assumed drugs were something invented by film directors to densify value after inflation rendered big suitcases of cash obsolete.’
‘Why did they let him take his dog in? No one ever lets me take Rose into shops.’
‘People like him get what they want. They understand the congenital deference of the working classes.’
Remembering Zaya’s story, Raf initially hopes they’ll be able to move around in here unnoticed ‘like vengeful ghosts’, but when a supermarket worker lunges out of nowhere to force a free sample of marshmallow chocolate brownie on him, he realises they are going to need a different approach. He picks up a basket.
‘What are we supposed to be cooking?’ says Fourpetal.
They might as well get at least some use out of Ko’s curry recipe. ‘Let’s get onions, garlic, ginger. Um, coconut milk. That kind of thing.’ Raf’s noticed that in chain supermarkets like this the coconut milk, next to the sweet chilli sauce and poppadoms in the Asian section (which stocks Asian ingredients for non-Asian people), is at least double the price of the coconut milk next to the ackee and kidney beans in the much smaller West Indian section (which stocks West Indian ingredients for actual West Indian people), demonstrating that, as many skunk dealers in gentrifying areas will assure you, there is money to be made selling the same product at different prices to different ethnic groups according to their willingness to pay.
‘Are we a gay couple?’ says Fourpetal.
‘We’re flatmates.’
Fourpetal frowns. ‘You and me? Really? How did we become friends?’
‘I genuinely have no idea.’
They find Nollic in the baking supplies aisle, and for a while they just stand there watching him from a distance. He’s carrying the Pomeranian under his arm while his daughters swing one shopping basket between the two of them. Maybe they’re going to make pancakes or something. Raf thinks about what Lacebark has done: all the troublemakers executed inside the Concession; all the union organisers’ wives tortured in Gandayaw; all the friends of Zaya – and one friend of Raf – kidnapped and interrogated and then deleted from existence no more than a few miles from here. Somebody above Bezant had to order or at least approve all that horror, and it’s not as if Raf was expecting to see talons and hooves instead of hands and feet – he knew it was just going to be some normal-looking guy in a suit. But he just can’t make himself believe it was Nollic. Perhaps it’s not so much his loving manner with his daughters as his obvious affection for their silly candyfloss dog.
A few hundred million dollars a year in royalties to help prop up a military dictatorship: Nollic could probably live with that. Rivers running black from all the mine tailings dumped upstream: Nollic could probably live with that, too. But not dozens of murders. That was what Raf learned listening to Martin: yes, every one of these men has a price, like Zaya said, but every one of them also has a limit, even if they don’t know that they have one until suddenly it locks them in place like the clutch in a seatbelt. And it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re moral. It just means they want to look at themselves in the mirror and feel like nice guys.
Raf strides forward. ‘What are you doing?’ hisses Fourpetal.
‘Latimer Nollic?’ Raf says when he’s almost at the white sugar.
Nollic turns. ‘Yes?’
‘You work at Lacebark.’
‘Sure. Did we meet at . . .?’
Fourpetal catches up with Raf and starts yanking at his arm in panic, but Raf ignores him. ‘You have a guy called Bezant working for you in London. You know that, right? You’ve heard of him?’
Nollic sighs. ‘You’re journalists? Guys, honestly, I’m with my kids here. This isn’t how you do this.’ He has dark grey hair and one of those wealthy physiques that isn’t all that tanned or muscular but for some reason still seems unusually well tailored and resilient, as if he’s reinforced by a fine mesh of platinum filament just under the skin.
‘We’re not journalists. Men working for your company killed my friend.’
‘Is this for a documentary?’
Raf takes a deep breath. He can make this work. ‘You must know what’s happening in London right now. And you must be in a position to do something to stop it. I know you want glow. But, trust me, you’re not even close, OK? The other side are running rings around you. If you carry on with what you’re planning, then, yeah, I bet you’ll succeed in killing plenty more people. But that’s all. So why don’t you just end it now? Maybe I can put you in touch with the people you’re chasing. Maybe you can even negotiate. Maybe you can still get something out of this.’
‘Oh, I get it, you’re activists. You’re activists for Myanmar. Guys, we release reports on the human rights situation every six months.’
‘Yes,’ says Fourpetal, ‘I used to write them.’
Nollic gives him a quizzical look. ‘I’ve been to Myanmar,’ he says. ‘I can tell you, it’s not great, but it’s getting better every day. We’re doing everything we can. But this isn’t the place to talk about it.’
‘Have you ever been to Gandayaw?’ says Raf.
‘Yes, of course. Once in 2001 and once before that . . . I think it was 1990.’
This sets a pinion turning in the back of Raf’s mind. The Pomeranian’s long tongue hangs out of its mouth like a cord to be pulled in an emergency. Then Fourpetal blurts, ‘Take me back.’
‘Pardon me?’ says Nollic.
‘Take me back. I know more about all this than anyone at Lacebark. I can tell you everything.’
Raf looks at Fourpetal in disbelief. ‘What the fuck is this?’ he says. One of the girls giggles at the swear word.
‘With what I know, you can catch them all tomorrow,’ says Fourpetal. ‘Just promise me I’ll be safe. Please. Let’s make a deal.’
If Raf had to guess he’d say Fourpetal didn’t make the decision to do this until the moment the words flopped out of him. Hurriedly Raf starts indexing what he told Fourpetal earlier today. Fourpetal knows about Cherish tricking Lacebark. He knows how to find Zaya’s flat. He knows about Ko working for Zaya. He knows about the boy from the Serbian café sleeping with Win. And, of course, he knows about Raf lying his way into the training facility. If Fourpetal talks, everyone on that list who can’t get away in time is going to die in a Lacebark warehouse.
Nollic’s expression has changed, and now the box cutters of contempt in his gaze warn that he’s bored with pretending not to understand what this conversation is about. ‘Let me be clear, Mr . . .’
‘Mark Fourpetal. I was at the conference in North Carolina in April. I very much enjoyed your speech.’
‘Mr Fourpetal, even if I could make any sense of what you’re saying right now – and even if I would ever be willing to consider “making a deal” under these circumstances – I don’t need to make a deal with you or your friend. Understand? Right now nothing could interest me less. I have full confidence in all of Lacebark’s employees and I already feel sure that we will meet every one of our targets and objectives this quarter.’ From the way he says it, his meaning couldn’t be clearer: ‘We are going to win this war.’
Raf realises he was wrong before. If Nollic has a limit, he isn’t anywhere near it. Maybe it shouldn’t be possible for anyone to be scary with a Pomeranian nestled in the crook of his arm, but Nollic is scary, and mostly it’s because of his confidence: he doesn’t seem shaken in the least that the pathogenic reality behind his strategic calculations has invaded his life like this. That’s how certain he is that nothing can touch him. Raf and Fourpetal are no more of a threat than the foxes out in his garden.
‘You do need me,’ says Fourpetal. ‘Once you’ve heard what I know . . . You do need me.’
‘No, Mr Fourpetal. I don’t. Are we finished here?’
Raf recognises the trout-eyed expression on Fourpetal’s face because he’s seen it once before, in Isaac’s flat. So he knows, a useless semiquaver before it actually happens, that Fourpetal is about to make a run for it.
This time, unfortunately, Hiromi isn’t here to trip him up. Leaving Nollic to his pancakes, Raf drops his basket and sets off after Fourpetal, who is going in the wrong direction, away from the supermarket entrance, and will at some point have to double back down another aisle if he wants to get out. The chase that follows is like a badly edited tap-dance routine in a second-rate old musical, as the two of them dodge past pushchairs, shopping trolleys, and yellow wet floor signs, swerving awkwardly every few seconds and never working up any real pace. Before long, Raf is growling in frustration, and he wants to grab a can of coconut milk from a shelf to hurl at Fourpetal’s head but he’s too afraid of hitting the wrong person. Still, his reactions are generally quicker, so that by the time their squeaky dash has circled back around to the fruit and vegetables at the front of the supermarket he’s almost close enough to reach out and hook Fourpetal by the neck.
Then he feels a hand on his upper arm. ‘Sir!’ A tubby security guard stands in his way, glaring at him from beneath a mucoid crest of gelled orange hair. ‘Would you mind emptying your pockets, sir?’
Raf points indignantly at Fourpetal, who is now at the automatic doors. ‘What about that guy? Stop him too!’
‘We can go into the office if you’d rather, sir.’
As fast as he can, Raf proves to the guard that he hasn’t stolen anything, and finally he’s sent off with a warning that there’s no running allowed ‘within the store’. So he hurries out to the busy car park, with its tall halide lamps like spindles twisting the last flax of gold out of the dusk. But Fourpetal is nowhere to be seen.
8.19 p.m.
The dentist’s surgery here has a window display consisting of two overgrown pot plants and about a dozen maxillary dentures scattered at random across the tiles like vermin lying there dead after a fumigation. Reflected in the glass, the traffic lights and box junctions of Camberwell Green are a parcel-sorting machine sending bus after bus off south or east or north or west according to the address written on the label. Raf stands at the entry door on the left-hand side of the dentist’s window, harassing the buzzer of the third-floor flat where he’s now determined that Zaya lives.
He’s not looking forward to explaining to Cherish why he didn’t tell her sooner about seeing Noodels City through the window. What excuse is he going to give her? ‘I didn’t want you to stop having sex with me.’ Not good enough. ‘I thought I might get in trouble with you, even though it wasn’t really my fault that it happened.’ Not good enough either. Whatever he says, she’ll probably be so angry that he’ll never get to see her naked again, so he might as well just unwrap the deeper truth: that despite all she revealed that evening, he still had an inchoate suspicion that she was holding something important back from him – a suspicion backed up the next day when he found out about Fitch/Win’s perfect English – and so, for reasons that were either strategic or merely childish, he felt as if he ought to hold something back from her too.
This is going to be an uncomfortable conversation. But he doesn’t have any choice. Raf doesn’t think Fourpetal would be such a moron that he’d try to make a deal with Lacebark a second time after having been turned down so humiliatingly the first time. But there are a lot of other ways he might be reckless enough to get himself caught. Today, even before he lost his only ally, he was talking about kidnapping an adult man in broad daylight; tomorrow, maybe he’ll strap on a water pistol and launch a commando raid on Lacebark’s offices. To an extent it’s Raf’s fault that Fourpetal is such an urgent liability now, since the cunt might never have made that destructive gamble if Raf hadn’t tugged him into the moonless gravity well of Nollic’s dominance, and it’s also Raf’s fault that Fourpetal is pregnant with data about the Burmese underground. He has to warn Cherish and Zaya.
But no one is answering the buzzer.
Raf isn’t sure if the intercom upstairs is even connected, and he can’t stay out here with his hood up for too long in case he attracts attention to the flats, which is the last thing he wants to do. The handwritten indicators next to each button are lit from behind with a weak electric amber like windowblinds hiding their own formic tenements. Hoping he can at least get into the building, Raf tries the second floor, but the button must be broken because it drops back with no resistance and no bleep. Next, he tries the first floor, and after a few seconds a woman says, ‘Yes?’