by Alek Popov
The bus made slow progress through Fulham. The spinning antenna on its roof drew the attention of passers-by.
“Kensington,” announced Dale suddenly. “We’re really close! Hold on my ducklings!”
The van turned left in the direction of the Cromwell Road. Nat Coleway radioed his colleagues once more. He remembered a small Chinese restaurant on High St. Ken, with a suspiciously cheap menu and he felt a pang of regret because he himself often dropped by there when he was on duty, to stuff himself to bursting before a long shift. But he couldn’t let up now. The net was drawing tighter.
23
“Wow! Loads of chickens!” Racho said once the freezing cloud under the freezer’s lid had dissipated.
“They’re not chickens,” Kosta gloomily corrected him. “They’re ducks.”
The radioman scratched his head. The noise in his headphones continued its persistent pulsation. “Take them out,” he ordered.
“What for?” asked the cook, failing to understand.
“Because you’re in the shit.”
The cook began to take out the ducks one by one. The radioman listened to each one carefully, looking like a doctor. His actions were a mystery to Kosta, and it terrified him. The frozen ducks were slippery. His fingers were soon numb from handling their frozen carcasses. He got clumsy. One bird slipped from his grasp and escaped under the tables. He crawled after it on all fours, swearing himself blue.
Racho continued to listen, unaffected. Most of his patients were quiet, but from time to time one of them gave itself away with a little squawk, dinning in the headphones and ringing in his skull like a huge wasp. The radioman put the song-birds to one side. That way there were soon two piles, one large, and the other small. There were eight birds in the smaller pile.
“Now what?” asked Kosta stupidly.
“You tell me,” the radioman took a bird from the small pile and looked at it from every angle. It was cold and hard as a rock. He looked at the hole between its legs, shook it – nothing. “Give me a knife,” he said, turning to the cook.
Kosta gave him the big cleaver. Racho chopped off the greasy yellow parson’s nose, and, using the sharp corner of the cleaver, extracted a shiny silver disc that looked like a watch battery.
“What the hell is that?!” asked the frightened cook.
“Looks like some kind of transmitter...” replied the radioman thoughtfully. “Where did you get these ducks from?”
“From the market, where else...!” mumbled the cook unconvincingly.
“Don’t lie, Pastry!” Racho cut him off. ‘No one down the market puts transmitters up their birds’ arses!”
“Errrrrrr...Well, you s-see...” stuttered the other.
“You nicked them, eh? Thieving bastard! Where the hell from?”
“It wasn’t me!” shouted the poor cook.
“Who was it then?” Racho shouted back.
The cook ended up explaining the whole story. Once he knew where the ducks were from, the radioman grew suddenly nervous. There was no more time to listen. He snatched up the cleaver and extracted the rest of the transmitters.
“I’m amazed they haven’t found them yet,” he said thoughtfully, as he tossed the bugs in his palm. “Or maybe they have...”
“Shall we destroy them?” the cook suggested bravely. “I’ve got a mortar and pestle here...”
“No,” the radioman shook his head; he had been brought up to love and respect all things technical, and such an unintelligent method of disposing of the bugs disgusted him. “But we have to get them out of here immediately,” he added, then asked unexpectedly, “Do you have any bread?”
“Bread?!” Kosta gawped in surprise. “What for?!”
“Get on with it!” urged Racho.
Ten minutes later, the two men casually entered Kensington Gardens by the Gloucester Road entrance. They took the wide path to the oval lake and once there, started to feed breadcrumbs to the ducks and swans near the shore. The birds threw themselves hungrily at the big chunks of bread. Some insolent geese also tried to get in on the action but came too late. Then the clamour died down and the birds dispersed. Cunning satisfaction was written all over the men’s faces.
Just then, a van came down the main alley, which they just had taken, a flat spinning antenna on its roof. Then the tall helmets of ten police officers appeared through the trees on the other side of the lake.
“Do you see that?” asked the radioman. “You’ve escaped that by the skin of your teeth, dumb-arse.”
“I don’t know how to thank you!” Kosta sighed.
“I’ll tell you exactly how...” Racho said, thumping him on the shoulder, and added, “Now let’s get out of here!”
Dale Rutherford leapt from the van and raced up to the lake. “My ducklings! My little Ducklings!” he screamed.
Nat Coleway followed him, totally thrilled.
Soon the entire search team assembled on the shore. They tracked down the transmitters, and were soon hunting down the birds with big nets. Dale could not believe his luck. He flapped excitedly, getting under everyone’s feet. A large crowd began to gather.
“What d’you think you’re doing! Stop at once!” shouted an angry voice.
Dale turned quickly. Behind him, arms akimbo, stood a tall, well-built man in the uniform of the Parks Police. His face was as red as a tomato. “Sir, are you the instigator of this travesty?” he frowned menacingly.
“What travesty?” gasped Dale. ‘These are the ducks from Richmond Park that disappeared three days ago.”
‘Oh really?” The other smiled mockingly. “And I suppose they turn into swans all the time then?” He pointed to a huge white bird that was entangled in a net.
“Hey, you lot, can’t you tell a swan from a duck?” shouted Dale to the embattled police who were attempting to deal with the bird.
“There’s an implant inside it, sir,” an officer said.
“Whaaaaaat?!” Dale’s face suddenly fell.
Meanwhile, further Parks Police turned up, and not long after that, the Head Butler of Kensington Palace himself. The two groups faced off. Nat Coleway, seeing the scandal develop before his very eyes, felt the sudden urge to see every duck on the planet hanging upside-down in the windows of a Chinese restaurant. “Listen!” he started, trying to broker some kind of peaceful agreement. “Why don’t you just check their leg-rings.”
It was done immediately. Dale Rutherford received the news stony-faced. The police checked the birds that had somehow come by the Richmond transmitters. Three swans, four ducks and a goose. The ninth microchip was nowhere to be found.
“So what’s the result?” asked someone. “Have the Hyde Park ducks eaten the Richmond ones?!”
Those words were printed all over the press almost instantly.
Hyde Park Ducks Eat Richmond’s
Extreme Demonstration of Duck Cannibalism
Ducks and Duck-eaters
Beaked Monsters in Central London
Who Ate The Ugly Duckling?
Beaks – New Subject for Hitchcock
The cook and the radioman did not read the British Press, or watch the BBC. For that reason they had no idea of the after-effects of their covert operation. But they were not vain. It was enough for them that that evening was unusually quiet at home, and that their constantly nagging wives were happily working around their ovens, in which two juicy ducks were tenderly turning golden.
In his lonely quarters, Chavdar Tolomanov opened a tin of cat-food and swallowed it with the last shreds of his pride. Last month’s rent had sucked out his last financial juices and his future looked grim. There was no more Batushka, and nothing was working right now. The Serb did not want to hear about any ducks without health certificates. Kosta was acting strangely, and the newspapers were publishing cock-and-bull stories. The cat-food was surprisingly tasty.
Dale Rutherford was left unmoved by the saddle of lamb, served in his favourite dish. His wife Eloise looked at the cooling meal, sad and
worried, but did not want to encourage him to eat. If even his favourite dish, had no effect on him – that meant that things were serious! The kids, two in number, had eaten quickly, and sensibly gone to hide in their rooms. A dark, mourning cloud hung over the modest, yet cosy Richmond home. Eloise busied herself to clear the table. Dale stared at the dish as though seeing it for the first time. One niggling thought had been bugging him all this time. Only eight microchips had been found in Hyde Park. Where on earth was the ninth?
24
“I hope you have some good news for me!” sang a capricious female voice in the earpiece.
“Especially good,” he agreed. “I was just telling myself that I should phone you. The invitation has been accepted.”
“Then the Queen will come!” she shouted ecstatically.
“But we have to be very discreet,” he hurried to calm her. “Those are the conditions. The information must not be let out beforehand; otherwise the whole deal is off.”
“But I’ve already said that she’ll be there,” a note of worry crept into her voice. “Not officially, but, you know, amongst other things...”
“You shouldn’t have! Afterwards yes, beforehand no.”
“I don’t understand, why all the secrecy?” she asked crossly.
“It’s an informal engagement.”
“What is informal supposed to mean?” a suspicious tremor entered her voice. “It doesn’t sound very serious.”
“I meant to say personal,” he corrected himself quickly, and added in a Zieblingesque tone, “Personal engagements are more important than formal ones.”
“Really?!”
“Oh yes, far more important.”
“We’ll have to explain that to the journalists somehow...” she said worriedly.
“Let’s not put the cart before the horse!”
“Everything was okay wasn’t it?” Then she remembered and added, “Then again let’s not count our chickens...”
“I said let’s not put the cart...”
“Look,” she interrupted. “I’m fed up! I’m coming in two weeks time and if everything isn’t perfect, you’ll be sorry.”
“Of course everything will be perfect,” he assured her.
The line buzzed in his ear for a minute. Then the internal phone rang. It was the radioman.
A coded announcement had arrived from Sofia.
Cryptograms were not allowed outside the Secret Sector, and he had to go up there to read them. These moments particularly annoyed him because every time he went there he saw the hidden triumph of the radioman – that was his moment of power.
Varadin went up to the top floor, entered the code into the electronic lock, waited for it to click and pushed open the metal door. He was struck by the sharp antiseptic smell. Secrecy went with hygiene.
The radioman met him in the corridor and handed him the decoded cryptogram, printed unevenly and in block capitals. Varadin went into a small cubicle set aside specifically for reading and writing confidential information. In this innermost region of the Sector there were no windows and the laboratory smell of antiseptics was even stronger. The long fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling hummed monotonously, like a big overfed bee. In the cubicle a powerful hundred-watt bulb shone, heating it like an incubator. He began to read:
TOP SECRET!!!
WITH REGARD TO THE FORTHCOMING EXHIBITION ‘HYGIENE IN BULGARIAN LANDS’ WE INFORM YOU THAT IT HAS BEEN APPROVED NEITHER BY THE CULTURAL DEPARTMENT OF OUR BRANCH NOR BY THE MINISTRY OF CULTURE. IT HAS BEEN CREATED AT THE INITIATIVE OF THE LOCAL COUNCIL OF THE TOWN OF PROVADIA. THE OFFICIAL EUROPEAN STANCE AS REGARDS THIS QUESTION IS STATED IN THE ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITTANICA, WHERE IT IS WRITTEN THAT THE FIRST WATER CLOSET WAS INVENTED IN 1596, BY SIR JOHN HARRINGTON DURING THE REIGN OF QUEEN ELIZABETH I. A SURVEY OF ATTITUDES IN DIPLOMATIC CIRCLES, CONDUCTED RECENTLY, INDICATED THAT THE DISCOVERY IN QUESTION IS REGARDED AS AN INTEGRAL PART OF BRITISH CULTURAL IDENTITY, AND (IN A WIDER SENSE) OF EUROPEAN CULTURAL IDENTITY ALSO. THE QUESTIONING OF SUCH A KEYSTONE OF CIVILISATION, FIRMLY ROOTED IN THE SUBCONSCIOUS OF GENERATIONS OF EUROPEANS, WILL NOT CONTRIBUTE POSITIVELY TO OUR COUNTRY’S INTEGRATION PROGRESS WITH EUROPE, AND MOST LIKELY WILL ATTRACT A STRONG NEGATIVE RESPONSE. WE RECOMMEND THAT THE EMBASSY DISTANCE ITSELF AS FAR AS POSSIBLE FROM THE EVENT AND KEEP ALL CONTACT AT AN INFORMAL LEVEL.
MISTER G DIREKOV
HEAD OF MANAGEMENT COORDINATION AND ANALYSIS.
He rubbed his neck thoughtfully. So there were still brains at work in the Ministry who kept their National Interest in mind. Here was some crafty and cunning clerk, scrabbling to get out. That sensation was well known to him. He himself had scrabbled like mad to get out of his disconsolate office in the Ministry and knew that the result was worth the effort, and the very last drop of humiliation. He had known that sweet stupor of victory, when the posting sleeps snugly in a pocket next to the passport and plane ticket. Then you stop caring all of a sudden, you relax and only move things from one side to another for an entire three years. You earned it, for fuck’s sake! Until you land back in your dusty office in Sofia, stuck with your miserable salary again. The holiday is over! And it all starts again: you switch on again, you mobilise all the energy you stored up during your posting and start to run between floors once more; you revive your old connections, you look for new and more powerful patrons, you hang around in front of their offices for hours, you weep, you crawl, you listen constantly, with only one purpose – so they get so fed up of you that they kick you overseas again. The further the better!
After reading the cryptogram at least three times, out of habit, so as to grasp every nuance, Varadin adjoined a short resolution to its upper corner: to be circulated to all diplomatic staff! He signed it and left.
Almost immediately thereafter Mr Kishev ran upstairs: he took in the secret information in one fell swoop and quickly composed a cryptogram of his own. After the fiasco with the Queen he was in a hurry to prove his usefulness, sending secret information to Sofia as much as humanly possible. Usually these missives consisted of things he had read in the local press and presented as priceless gems that he had gleaned from conversations with bureaucratic Mandarins. Sofia, however, was not asleep either; the clerk in charge of information on Great Britain, a sneaky brown-nosed bureaucrat, who dreamed of taking Kishev’s place once his posting was over, quickly secreted these missives and sent them back reworked as ‘Analyses’. This unusual task fell on the shoulders of the radioman. In revenge, he often removed Kishev’s name from his telegrams, prepared with such effort, and sent them with the impersonal: Embassy, London. However, he was actually doing him a priceless favour, because in rare moments of lucidity Sofia would ask itself: which idiot had doubled the Press Review all over again?
***
Katya was in a hurry. She was hoping not to be seen in the office. Working with the new hoover gave her an almost physical pleasure. The clean vibrations from the powerful motor and the hot air flow smelling of engine oil charged the atmosphere with euphoria. ‘Red Devil’ was written in fiery letters on its shiny bullet-shaped carapace. And it really sucked like a devil! The other students were equally ecstatic about the unexpected acquisition, and no one doubted that it was all thanks to Katya. What had she done to him?! They asked each other slyly.
What could she say? She did not know why the Ambassador had (with no small pleasure!) liquidated the funds that the staff had been gathering for the children’s New Year’s Party.
The noise of the new machine sounded far more lively than had the roar of the old beast, though no less loud. Which was why Katya did not hear the door open and then discreetly close. Varadin leaned against the wall, staring at the girl’s healthy calves. All other thoughts left his mind, as though she had hoovered them up to the last speck of dust. His trousers started to bulge alarmingly; his member was outlined beneath the fine material, thin and pointy like a hound’s.
She turned to unplug the hoover. His smile struck her like a lost boomerang.
�
��I’m terribly sorry,” she started to excuse herself, “I’ve been very busy at the University these last few days. I thought that...”
“Does it suck well?” he interrupted unceremoniously.
“Oh yes, and then some!” she nodded, after overcoming her initial surprise. “We are very grateful indeed!”
He approached her, his gaze not leaving her for an instant, and asked her questioningly, “Red Devil, eh?!”
“Exactly, a real devil!” she agreed, her voice betraying some worry.
Her breasts stretched her t-shirt. She was not wearing a bra. Her breath smelled of fresh mint. Varadin reached out and touched the black hose of the hoover that hung across her shoulder. “I’d like you to clean the residence with that hoover,” he said in a seductive tone. “Any objections?”
“Of course not.” She smiled, although the idea seemed far from tempting to her, “You’ll just have to tell me when, exactly.”
“I’ll tell you,” he said cryptically, “Soon....”
25
THE VETERAN & THE PRINCESS
Scenario by Thomas Munroe
(Famous Connections)
Dramatis Personae:
Diana, Princess of Wales.
Sir Marston, Veteran of the Bosnia Peacekeeping Forces.
Military Field Hospital. Interior of a tent. Simple furnishings: canvas bed, battered metal locker, folding chair. Sir Marston is lying in bed, covered with a military blanket. His head is bandaged. There are some crutches leaning near the bed. Enter Lady Di, dressed in a short white uniform, basket in hand.
