by Iain Banks
I nod, trying to think back. I don't like the sound of that "one way or the other'. "Do I remember you bringing me here in a boat?" I ask.
He laughs. "Well, I don't have access to a helicopter." He grins. "Yes. An inflatable."
"Hmm."
He looks to each side, as if checking the gun and the phone are still there. "So; sitting comfortably?" he asks me.
"Well, no, but don't let it put you off."
He gives a small smile that disappears quickly. "I'm going to give you a choice later, Cameron," he says, sounding calm and serious. "But first I want to tell you why I did all those things."
"Uh-huh?" I want to say, It's perfectly fucking obvious why you did them, but I keep my mouth shut.
"It was Lingary, of course, first," Andy says, looking younger still now, and staring down at his hand and the bullet. "I mean, I'd met people I despised in the past, people I had no respect for and who I thought, Well, the world would be a better place without them. But I don't know, maybe I was being naive and expected that in a war, especially in a professional army, it would somehow be better; people would rise above themselves; stretch their own moral envelope, you know?"
I nod cautiously. I'm thinking, Moral envelope? Coast-speak.
"But of course it's not true," Andy says, rubbing the little copper and brass shape of the bullet between his fingers. "War is a magnifier, a multiplier. Decent people act more decently; bastards get to be even bigger bastards." He waves one hand. "I'm not talking about all that banality-of-evil stuff — organised genocide is different — I mean just ordinary warfare, where the rules are obeyed. And the truth is that some people do rise above themselves, but others sink beneath themselves. They don't gain, they don't shine the way some people do in combat and they don't even muddle through the way most people do, scared to death but doing their job because they've been well trained and because their mates are depending on them; they just have their faults and weaknesses exposed, and in certain circumstances, if that person is an officer and his flaws are of a particular type and he's risen to a certain level without ever encountering a real battlefield, those faults can lead to the deaths of a lot of men."
"We all have moral responsibility, whether we like it or not, but people in power — in the military, in politics, in professions, whatever — have an imperative to care, or at least to exhibit an officially acceptable analogue of care; duty, I suppose. It was people I knew had abused that responsibility that I attacked; that's what I was taking as my… authority."
He shrugs, frowns. "The situation was a little different with Oliver, the porn merchant; that was partly to throw them off the scent and partly because I just despised what he was doing.
"And the judge, well, he wasn't quite so culpable as the others; I was comparatively lenient with him.
"The rest… they were all powerful men, all rich — several of them very rich indeed. All of them had all they could ask for in life, but they all wanted more — which is okay, I suppose, it's just a failing, you can't kill people for that alone — but they all treated people like shit, literally like shit; something unpleasant to be disposed of. It was like they'd forgotten their humanity and could never find it again, and there was only one way to remind them of it, and remind all the others like them, and make them feel frightened and vulnerable and powerless, the way they made other people feel all the time."
He holds the bullet up in front of his face, peering at it. "There wasn't one of those men who hadn't killed people; indirectly, the way the Nuremberg Nazis mostly did, but definitely, unarguably, beyond any reasonable doubt.
"And Halziel," he says, taking a deep breath. "Well, you know about him."
"Jesus, Andy," I say. I know I should shut up and let him talk on as much as he likes but I can't help it. "The guy was a selfish bastard and a lousy doctor; but he was incompetent, not malicious. He didn't hate Clare or anything or wish her —»
"But that's just it," Andy says, holding his hands out. "If a certain level of skill — of competence — translates into the gift of life or death it becomes malice when you don't bother to exercise that skill, because people are relying on you to do just that. But," he holds up one hand to me, forestalling, and nods, "I'll admit to a level of personal vengeance there. Once I'd done all the others and I reckoned I didn't have much longer to operate overground, as it were, well, it just seemed the right thing to do."
He looks up at me, a strange, wide-eyed open smile on his face. "I'm shocking you, aren't I, Cameron?"
I gaze into his eyes for a while, then look away out the doorway towards the water and the small white shapes of the circling, crying birds. "No," I tell him. "Not as much as when I realised it was you who'd spiked Bissett like that and it was you behind that gorilla mask and you who burned Howie —»
"Howie didn't suffer," Andy says matter-of-factly. "I stoved his head in with a log first." He grins. "Probably saved him from a terrible hangover."
I stare at him, feeling sick and close to tears at the off-handed way the man I've always thought of as my best friend is talking about murder, and also feeling pretty vulnerable and at risk myself right now, too, no matter what he's said and even though he has untied my hands.
Andy reads my expression. "He was a cunt, Cameron." He pauses, looks at the ceiling. "No that's not fair, and that's what he usually called women, as well; so let's say he was a prick, a dickhead; and a violent prick, a vindictive bullying dickhead, at that. Over the years he broke his wife's jaw, both her arms and her collarbone; he fractured her skull and he kicked her when she was pregnant. He was just an unmitigated pig-fuck of a man. He was probably battered as a kid himself — he never talked about it — but fuck him. That's what we're human for, so we can choose to alter our behaviour; he wouldn't do it himself, so I did it for him."
"Andy," I say. "For Christ's sake; there are laws, there are courts; I know they're not perfect, but —»
"Oh, laws," Andy says, voice saturated with scorn. "Laws based on what? With what authority?"
"Well, how about democracy, for example?"
"Democracy? A two-way choice between tough shit and not-quite-so-tough shit every four or five years if you're lucky?"
"That's not what democracy is! It's not just that; it's a free press —»
"And we have that, don't we?" Andy laughs. "Except the bits that are free aren't read very much and the bits that are most read aren't free. Let me quote you: "They're not newspapers, they're comics for the semi-literate; propaganda sheets controlled by foreign billionaires who just want to make as much money as technically possible and maintain a political environment conducive to that single aim.""
"All right, I stand by that, but it's still better than nothing."
"Oh, I know it is, Cameron," he says, sitting back and looking slightly shocked at being so misunderstood. "I know it is; and I know that what powerful people can get away with, they will get away with, and if the people they exploit let them, well, in a sense that serves them right. But don't you see?" He jabs himself in the chest. "That includes me!" He laughs. "I'm part of it, too; I'm a product of the system. I'm just another human being, a bit better off than most, a bit smarter than most, maybe a bit luckier than most, but just another part of the equation, another variable that society's thrown up. So I come along and I do what I can get away with, because it seems fit to me to do it, because I'm like a businessman, you see? I'm still a businessman; I'm addressing a need. I've seen a niche in the market unfilled and I'm filling it."
"Wait, wait; hold on," I say. "I'm not buying this crap about fulfilling a need anyway, but the point about the difference between your authority and everybody else's is that you're just you; you've made up all this… this rationale by yourself. The rest of us have had to come to some sort of agreement, a consensus; we're all trying to get along because that's the only way for people to exist together at all."
Andy smiles slowly. "Numbers make the difference, do they, Cameron? So when the two greatest nations on
Earth — over half a billion people — were so scared of each other they were quite seriously prepared to blow up the world, they were right?" He shakes his head. "Cameron, I'd be prepared to bet that more people believe Elvis is still alive than subscribe to whatever flavour of secular humanism you currently think represents the One True Way for humanity. And besides, where has this consensus of yours brought us?"
He frowns and looks genuinely mystified.
"Come on, Cameron," he chides. "You know the evidence: the world already produces… we already produce enough food to feed every starving child on earth, but still a third of them go to bed hungry. And it is our fault; that starvation's caused by debtor countries having to abandon their indigenous foods to grow cash crops to keep the World Bank or the IMF or Barclays happy, or to service debts run up by murdering thugs who slaughtered their way into power and slaughtered their way through it, usually with the connivance and help of one part of the developed world or another.
"We could have something perfectly decent right now — not Utopia, but a fairly equitable world state where there was no malnutrition and no terminal diarrhoea and nobody died of silly wee diseases like measles — if we all really wanted it, if we weren't so greedy, so racist, so bigoted, so basically self-centred. Fucking hell, even that self-centredness is farcically stupid; we know smoking kills people but we still let the drug barons of BAT and Philip Morris and Imperial Tobacco kill their millions and make their billions; smart, educated people like us know smoking kills but we still smoke ourselves!"
"I've given up," I tell him defensively, though it's true I'm dying for a cigarette.
"Cameron," he says, laughing with a kind of desperation. "Don't you see? I'm agreeing with you; I listened to all your arguments over the years, and you're right: the twentieth century is our greatest work of art and we are what we've done… and look at it." He puts a hand through his hair, and sucks breath through his teeth. The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what we are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others."
He stares pointedly at me and his brows flex. I nod, reluctantly recognising something I wrote once.
"So," he says, "in that climate of culpability, that perversion of moral values, nothing, nothing I have done has been out of place or out of order or wrong."
I open my mouth to speak but he waves his hand, and with a faint sneer says, "I mean, what am I supposed to do, Cameron? Wait for the workers" revolution to make everything right? That's like Judgement Day; it never fucking comes. And I want justice now; I don't want these bastards dying a natural death." He takes a deep breath and looks at me quizzically. "So, how am I doing so far, Cameron? Do you think I'm mad, or what?"
I shake my head. "No, I don't think you're mad, Andy," I tell him. "You're just wrong."
He nods slowly at this, looking at the bullet he's turning over and over in his fingers.
"You're right about one thing," I tell him. "You are one of them. Maybe this spotting-a-niche-in-the-market stuff isn't so fatuous after all. But is a sick response to a sick system really the best we can do? You think you're fighting it but you're just joining in. They've poisoned you, man. They've taken the hope out of your soul and put some of their own greedy hate in its place."
""Soul", did you say, Cameron?" He smiles at me. "You getting religion?"
"No, I just mean the core of you, the essence of who you are; they've infected it with despair, and I'm sorry you can't see any better response than to kill people."
"Not even when they deserve it?"
"No; I still don't believe in capital punishment, Andy."
"Well, they do," he sighs. "And I suppose I do."
"And what about hope, do you believe in that?"
He looks disparaging. "What are you, Bill Clinton?" He shakes his head. "Oh, I know there's goodness in the world, too, Cameron, and compassion and a few fair laws; but they exist against a background of global barbarism, they float on an ocean of bloody horror that can tear apart any petty social construction of ours in an instant. That's the bottom line, that's the real framework we all operate within, even though most of us can't or won't recognise it, and so perpetuate it.
"We're all guilty, Cameron; some more than others, some a lot more than others, but don't tell me we aren't all guilty."
I resist the urge to say, Who's sounding religious now?
Instead I ask, "And what was William guilty of?"
Andy frowns and looks away. "Being everything he claimed to be," he says, sounding bitter for the first time. "William wasn't a personal score, like Halziel or Lingary: he was one of them, Cameron; he meant everything he ever said. I knew him better than you did, when it mattered, and he was quite serious about his ambitions. Buying a knighthood, for example; he'd been giving money to the Conservative party for the past ten years — he gave money to Labour, too, last year and this because he thought they were going to win the election — but he'd been putting respectable amounts into Tory coffers for a decade, as well as keeping an eye on how much the average successful businessman has to donate to ensure a knighthood. He once asked me which charity he'd be best advised to join, to provide the usual excuse; wanted one that didn't encourage scroungers.
"This was all long-term, but that was the way William thought. He was still determined to build a house on Eilean Dubh, and he even had a complicated scheme involving a front company and a threatened underground toxic-chemicals store in the area which, if it had worked, would have had grateful locals practically begging him to take the island. And a few times when he was drunk he talked about trading in Yvonne for a more up-market, user-friendly model, preferably one with her own title and a daddy in serious big business or the government. His non-ethical investment programme wasn't a joke, either; he pursued it, vigorously."
Andy shrugs. "It was just a coincidence that I knew him, but I don't think there was any doubt William was going to turn into a man like the others I killed."
He rolls the bullet around in his palm, eyes lowered. "However, for what it's worth, if killing him screwed up things between you and Yvonne, I'm sorry."
"Oh," I say, "that makes it all right, then." It's meant to sound sarcastic, but it just sounds dumb.
He nods, not looking at me. "He was a very charming but actually quite an evil man, Cameron."
I stare at him for a while; he rubs the bullet between his fingers. Finally I say, "Yes, but you're not God, Andy."
"No, I'm not," he agrees. "Nobody is." He grins. "So what?"
I close my eyes, unable to bear the relaxed, merely mischievous expression on his face. I open them again and look out through the empty doorway, at the water and the land and the ceaseless, wheeling birds. "Yeah. I see. Well," I say, "I don't think there's any point in trying to argue with you, is there, Andy?"
"No, you're probably right," Andy says, suddenly all cheery decisiveness. He slaps both knees and jumps up. He lifts the gun and sticks it down the back of his cords. He hoists the rucksack up and puts it over one shoulder. He nods down at the cellphone lying on the concrete floor.
"Here's your choice," he tells me. "Phone and turn me in, or not."
He waits for a reaction from me, so I raise my eyebrows.
He shrugs. "I'm heading down to the boat now; put the kit bag aboard." He grins down at me. Take your time. I'll be back in ten, fifteen minutes."
I stare at the phone on the littered floor.
"It's working," he reassures me. "Your choice." He laughs. "I'll be all right, whatever. Leave me be, and… I don't know; I might retire now, while I'm ahead. But on the other hand there are still a lot of bastards out there. Mrs T, for one, if that piques your interest, Cameron." He smiles. "Or there's always America; land of opportunities. On the other hand, if I end up in jail… Well, there are people in there I'd really like to meet, too; the Yorkshire Ripper,
for example, if it's possible to get to him. I'd need just a small blade, and about five minutes." He shrugs again. "Whatever. See you in a bit."
He skips out into the sunlight and the swirling wind, taking the steps two at a time down to a walkway between two concrete blockhouses. I lean back as he disappears, whistling.
I squat on my taped-together feet and lift the cellphone. It looks charged and connected. I dial the number of my mum and dad's old house in Strathspeld village; I get an answer-machine; a man's voice, gruff and curt.
I switch the phone off.
It takes a minute to get the tape off my ankles. I lift my Drizabone from the floor and dust it down, then put it on.
The coat-tails flap round my legs as I stand in the doorway, Fife to my right, the trees of Dalmeny Park and Mons Hill to my left and the two bridges ahead upstream; one tensed, webbed-red and the other straight-curved, battleship grey.
The firth is ruffled blue-grey, the waves marching away, wind blowing from behind, out of the east. Two minesweepers are heading upstream under the bridge towards Rosyth; a huge tanker sits tall and unladen at the Hound Point oil terminal, attended by a pair of tugs; two huge crane-barges float nearby, where they've been most of this year, installing a second terminal pier. A small tanker is almost level with the island, heading out to sea, low in the water with some product from the Grangemouth refinery. North, beyond Inchcolm, a red-hulled LPG tanker sits at Braefoot Bay, loading from the pipelines connected to the Mossmorran plant a few kilometres inland, position marked by white plumes of steam. I watch all this maritime activity, surprised at how industrial, how continuingly mercantile the old river is.
