The Book of Levi (13 page)

‘Sorry,’ replied Leslie. ‘I feel as awkward about this as you do.’

‘I don’t feel awkward,’ said the man.

‘You don’t?’

‘No. I’m just wondering why the hell you brought us up here?’

‘That stuff you’re always shouting about. That’s Marxism, isn’t it?’

‘What of it?’ asked the large man through a mouth full of minced meat.

‘How did you come to know that?’

The man stopped chewing. He looked Leslie up and down. ‘Are you the police?’

‘No,’ replied Leslie. ‘I’m one of the two newly elected consuls and I’m interested in your thoughts.’

‘Why?’

‘I want to change the way we live in this city. I want more social equality. I want to understand the needs of the poor.’

The man erupted with laughter at this. ‘Do you now? Well, let me tell you something, my fine richly feathered friend - what the poor need are the basics of life and some sort of opportunity to raise themselves out of the gutter. If you can give us sanitation and access to doctors, that’d be a start.’ He cast his eye around the room. ‘But it’s tough, isn’t it, sir, to inveigle your economy with lesser economies? It’s hard to be munificent when your island is bountiful and those surrounding are poorly stocked. It means that you soothe your wretched moral conscience at a cost. You might have to give up some of your finery to achieve your objective.’ He scoffed some more meat before returning the bowl to his mud-besmirched woman, who would not have been out of place as a human in the original version of the ‘Planet of the Apes’.

Leslie’s eyes were drawn momentarily to the woman’s breast and to the tiny child suckling there. Pity pierced him. ‘I want to help,’ he said quietly.

The man squinted at Leslie, as if trying to gauge his mettle, then relaxed the tension in his face as if he had made some decision. ‘Alright,’ he said, after downing a glass of water, ‘I wasn’t always living in the streets. I used to live in the scrapers. I was born into wealth, but I chose to give that up when I realised that I was living a lie – as you are now.’

‘Living a lie?’ replied Leslie, incredulous. ‘I’m not living a lie. I’m trying to help. And I’m not sure that I believe your story anyway. No one would leave the comfort of the scrapers for the poverty of the streets.’

‘I did,’ replied the man simply. ‘And you are living a lie.’

Leslie was becoming annoyed. He had invited this man into his home. The dishevelled fellow was all wet and stinking and here he was ungratefully telling him that he, a consul, didn’t care about the welfare of people in Corporate City. The nerve of the man.

But the man hadn’t finished.

‘Let me tell you something, sir. We don’t know each other’s name and neither of us need to. You’re rich and I’m poor and that’s the way the world goes – unless – those in power think about those they govern, rather than themselves. Public office should be a burden freely endured, not an invitation to the riches of the pigs’ trough. My whole adult life I’ve strained to be heard over the clinking of champagne glasses. And, quite frankly, consul, I’m sick of it.’

Throughout the man’s tirade Leslie had watched him. He was ursine; a bear of a man; almost Viking-like with his massive red beard, long straggly hair and all wrapped in Hessian rags. Leslie was struck by the man’s passion; by his conviction and also by his eloquence. He had been well educated, certainly, so it was probably true that he had once been a scraper-dweller. And hadn’t he, himself, chosen to live in the lower levels of the scrapers to achieve public office? And wasn’t what the man was espousing precisely what he himself believed? He stormed his thoughts to a climax and blurted, ‘I’m going to break the law. There’s probably corruption occurring in high places and I want to stop it. I’m going to commit treason and I want you to help me. Everyone else I know has too much to lose.’

The admission was electric. Leslie stopped. He couldn’t believe what he had just said. But there it was. He had said it. It couldn’t be unsaid. He watched carefully as the stunned man stared back at him. His wife also looked at him with clear, intelligent eyes, then they looked, one to the other, and back to him. Pinter’s counterfeit silence hung heavy on the room for some time.

‘Will you help me?’ asked Leslie, his words cutting through the haze of his admission.

The man hesitated. He looked to his wife and child again. ‘It sounds dangerous,’ he replied, no longer full of fire and vitriol but subdued like a teenager, suddenly in realisation of the ramifications of his actions.

‘Well of course it’s bloody dangerous!’ Leslie blasted back. Having related a huge state secret, albeit one he could deny if it ever came to that, he was now infuriated by this man’s sudden recalcitrance. ‘You’re not going to tell me that you’re going to back down, now that a concrete proposal’s been put to you?’

The man said nothing, but looked again to his wife and more particularly at his child.

‘Listen,’ Leslie continued, having seen the man’s glances towards his family, ‘I understand that you have a family. I don’t, okay? I have no family to consider. I can see that you do, but - here is a chance for you to help in a practical way. Here’s a chance for you to make a real contribution. Rather than yelling about it you can do something. I’m offering you a chance to act. And I promise you I’ll do everything to help you if something goes wrong. What do you say?’

The red bearded man looked like a prize fighter who had just taken a slug unlike any other he had ever taken before. He appeared momentarily groggy and disoriented. Fantasy had become reality and he was uncertain whether he was equal to it. Eventually her stammered - ‘Okay.’

‘Good,’ replied Leslie. ‘Your wife and child are welcome to stay here for the time being, so long as they don’t touch any of my equipment. There’s food in the fridge. I’m Leslie.’ He held out his hand.

The Viking man stood straight and tall as if remembering, ‘I’m Johannes,’ he said.

*

This time it was the corpse of a small boy that sat slumped in the chair. The metal helmet was still attached to his head and his limbs were splayed this way and that in death’s contortion. His right elbow had actually snapped with the vigour of his final spasm. Sebastian held the arm by the forearm and jiggled the lower portion of the arm as if he was weighing ingredients for a meal.

‘I must clamp them down in future,’ he said to himself. He unhooked the dead boy from the headpiece and cast him away from the chair. He landed like a discarded rag doll, his limbs askew and his face, in one final indignity, came to rest at the arse end of an old woman, also in rags and also dead. She, in her turn, had been deposited upon a middle-aged man, and he, upon another. In all, the boy joined seven corpses piled up like a bonfire in the corner.

‘Clear the room!’ screamed Sebastian through his thin gauze mask. To himself he muttered, ‘I must find a quicker mode of disposal.’

Two hulking guards entered. They appeared to be witless thugs, incapable of dissent. Obediently, they grabbed two corpses apiece and dragged them from the room. Sebastian removed his mask and climbed the stairs to the transference console while the bovine attendants continued their gruesome cartage.

He cast his stormy eyes towards the black box which sat beside a mainframe in the corner of the room. He read its display and he grinned with pleasure. ‘The chocolate box is full and soon it’s time to feast again,’ he sang to himself.

His eyes widened with imagination. He rubbed his pointed chin and he thought of Elizabeth Dawson.

*

Elizabeth was alone in her penthouse staring mindlessly out over the harbour. Her desk was full of untouched paper work. A vacant smile swept suddenly across her pretty face. She was so much looking forward to seeing Sebastian again.

The moon was just beyond full, waning and rising behind Leslie’s laboratory. It was a rarity to see the heavens these past few months but there she was, nonetheless, the faithful old moon, doggedly on patrol as she had been for billions of years, keeping her grim vigil around the Earth, silent and alone.

In spite of this romantic vision, Leslie cursed her for shedding too much light upon him as he and Johannes quietly made their way behind the building and entered through a back entrance that Leslie had discovered by chance some time ago. He figured that the guards would be out the front unaware of his back door. And he was right.

Once inside, he and Johannes crept unhindered down the hallway and into the radio room. Leslie made Johannes sit in the corner while he looked around.

He checked the clock upon the wall. It was almost eleven. He scoured the room to see what he could find but there was nothing of any significance. He scribbled down the precise co-ordinates that guided his satellite dish. He looked at the clock again and he wished the minutes away. He hoped against all hope that Elizabeth and Sebastian didn’t frequent the radio room every night at this time to speak with other cities. He needed at least one solid hour of radio contact with the outside world to try to convince someone that democracy was in trouble in Corporate City. What these distant governments could do to help, he had no idea, but he must try. If nothing else he must let them know. He must alert them to the quiet but ominous insurrection that he was certain was being perpetrated by Sebastian Levi from within the top levels of power in Corporate City.

‘Why did you bring me here?’ Johannes whispered. He looked around nervously. ‘You could have done all this by yourself.’

‘True,’ replied Leslie, turning on the radio, ‘but I want you to be a witness and if it comes to a fight, I expect you to back me up.’

‘A fight?’ Johannes echoed.

‘Yes, a fight,’ Leslie iterated. He turned and looked at Johannes, large and looming in the corner. ‘Or are you just all talk?’

This suggestion appeared to make Johannes angry. He sat straighter in his seat. ‘I can fight. Never you mind,’ he growled.

‘Good,’ replied Leslie, turning back to the radio set. ‘Okay. We’ll be on line in just a few minutes.’

He rummaged in a draw where he himself had kept his notes and found a writing pad that he didn’t recognise. Nor did he recognise the hand in which it was written, but his guess soon turned to certainty when he read the transcripts written within. These were Levi’s notes. The transcripts of multiple conversations with a plethora of world cities all attested to it. The presidents and prime ministers referred to him as Consul Levi or simply as Sebastian. But who had written them? There were no recording devices to be found in the room. Levi must have recorded them on a portable device and transcribed them after each call. ‘Very meticulous,’ thought Leslie, ‘and methodical’. There were tens of conversations: some with London; others to Teheran; to P’YongYang; to Beijing; to Rangoon. The list went on. The book was thick and full of notes. It must have taken Sebastian Levi all of his time to keep such copious, copperplate records.

Leslie flicked through the transcripts. It appeared that Levi had given the foreign representatives the idea that he had been democratically elected and that he spoke for the administration of Corporate City. Most of the transcripts were pages long but one page had scrawled across it: The Western Hemisphere can go to hell! It was as if a madman had suddenly acquired the book, graffitied it, and then returned it to its original owner who had resumed his earlier, cordial tone without missing a beat.

Leslie was about to read the last entry, when he heard a faint sound become audible in the distance. He listened with his hand trembling above the pages of the book, straining to discern what the noise was. He had never heard a sound exactly like it before. But it was growing louder.

He placed the book back into the drawer and turned to Johannes who was standing now, alarmed at the increasing ruckus. Leslie raised his hand to his mouth and his index finger up to his lips, concentrating with all his might upon the rising din and combing through his mind to match it with anything he had ever heard before. He couldn’t. Whatever it was, it was now very close. Leslie hurried into an adjacent room, stood by the window and pulled back the curtain just sufficiently to see the street outside.

A tremendous and noisy machine was landing there. It was like a giant mosquito, hovering metres above the road. Blades whirred above it with a smaller blade whizzing around at right angels on the tail. It was a ramshackle sort of affair. Its metal wasn’t painted and it looked like a prototype, but it was efficient enough. It reached the street and a large, armed guard dashed towards it. He opened the door and out jumped Sebastian Levi, resplendent in suit and tie and following him was Elizabeth Dawson, pretty as a picture in her winter jacket. The cacophony of the machine was slowly abating as Sebastian and Elizabeth made their way towards the building.

‘Shit!’ exclaimed Leslie.

‘What?’ asked Johannes in a gust of fear. He was only a metre away from Leslie but had chosen not to look out of the window for himself.

‘It’s him.’

‘Who?’

‘Levi,’ Leslie replied curtly as he raced past Johannes.

‘Who?’

Leslie switched off the radio set then checked the general area to ensure that he had left no traces of his presence. ‘Come.’ He waved Johannes into a large walk-in wardrobe that adjoined the radio room.

Johannes followed. They closed the swinging, wooden doors to separate themselves from the main room. Together they stood behind the doors, silently jockeying for best advantage of the view through the wooden slats carved into them.

It wasn’t long before they saw Sebastian approach the radio set. They were looking at his back. He switched on the set. Immediately it came to life. Sebastian paused for a moment, perhaps surprised at the speed with which it had warmed up. He seemed to dismiss the thought, however, and turned to address Elizabeth who was now directly behind him.

‘Sit,’ he ordered and she did, in the seat just occupied by Johannes.

‘Sit?’ muttered Leslie, amazed at the rudeness of the order and at Elizabeth’s readiness to obey it.

Sebastian sat beside the desk, pulled out his transcript book, pulled a pen from his top pocket and opened the book to the next available blank page.