by Mark Lingane
“No.”
“Are you sure? It could be under another spelling or just a silent number or something,” he finished lamely.
“No. We don’t have that number listed at all. Thank you an—”
“Hang on, I’ve got another one.”
The voice went silent.
“Hello?” ventured Joshua.
“Yes, I’m here and waiting.” The voice was a shade testy now.
“Ruth Friday.”
“Sorry, we have no listing under that name. Goodbye.”
Joshua was left with a beeping emanating from his earpiece.
He sat back in his chair and thought for a moment. He glanced at the piece of paper with the rendezvous time and date on it. He idly flicked the card between his fingers, lost in thought. He had just over a day and a half to make sure arrangements were as reliable as the elusive Miss Ruth would have him believe.
There was something else bothering him. The crooks wanted cash, but no one used cash any more. Certainly very few businesses accepted it. Everyone had swipe cards for cash transactions. They were far from anonymous, and helped the government keep an eye on everyone. So five hundred thousand dollars would be virtually impossible to find, let alone dispose of. Even the banks wouldn’t carry that amount of cash and it would be obvious if it were deposited into an account.
Joshua felt there was nothing for it. Time to venture outside.
He fished around for his raincoat and found it behind the couch, still dripping. He peered outside again into the ancient hallway and made a dash for the stairs. First stop was the Bureau of Corporate Affairs, which would have a listing of all the small and medium companies in the country, as well as all the major overseas ones.
Joshua stepped outside into the brave new world and, knowing what the locals were like, double-locked the front door to the shared brownstone he called home. The wind picked up and blew some errant newspaper sheets into his body. He scrabbled with them against the wind, eventually crunching them into a sodden ball. He headed down the road, looking for a bin that had some space available. The area was medium density, with only a couple of people per floor and buildings only a few stories high. There were places a lot worse than here to live.
As he walked, the buildings became taller and the ratio of occupants per floor greatly increased. Accents changed and clothes became optional. Smacked-out junkies fuelled on low-grade oxyten offered whatever they had left to those desperate enough to get close. Ones that hadn’t made it to their next hit or the medical detox center had collapsed on the street, waiting for last-minute salvation or body bags. Some hovered in doorways, touting their boundaries with a distant and vacant look in their eyes.
The high-density living dissolved into derelict industrial estates owned by property barons waiting for the junkies to die out so they could extort the land to urbanites demanding inner-city living. Until then, it was full of homeless deadbeats, trash, and inconsolable despair. And within the dead heart of this exhausted wasteland existed the government departments.
The Bureau of Corporate Affairs was a small, one-story building located uptown. Its drab appearance wasn’t helped by the gray paint covering the exterior.
Joshua opened the door and was immediately confronted by a ticket machine. Just in case he couldn’t guess what the procedure was, a sign that read PLEASE TAKE A TICKET AND WAIT FOR YOUR NUMBER TO BE CALLED in large red letters was directly above it. There was no queue, which made him feel better. He strode forward and snatched a ticket, which ended up being three stuck together.
He sat full of resolve and conviction that said he would not be beaten by this overburdened bureaucracy. I shall emerge a winner, he thought. Now all he needed was someone to serve him. He shook the rain off his coat and hat and looked around the room. The walls were painted gray, and edged with pink and green trim. He sat bolt upright, with his hat placed neatly on his knees and waited … and waited (slouching) … and waited (falling asleep with head against the wall).
A man wandered past the glass pane that acted as the front counter and disappeared down the corridor behind it.
Again he waited.
Eventually the man returned and sat behind the counter. He looked around the room, examining its contents. He glanced at the customer-counter dial. He shuffled some papers. He looked at his watch, sighed and called out Joshua’s number.
He looked horrified by the scruffy apparition that approached. “I’m sorry, sir, we don’t have a listing.”
Joshua fumed. What do you mean you don’t have a listing? It’s not as if you people have much to do. You sit around all day on your fat backsides wasting taxpayers’ money, and when one of the taxpayers actually wants some service you sit there quietly saying you don’t have a listing. You didn’t even look! I hate you all.
That was what he wanted to say. What he actually said was, “Are you sure? If it’s not too much trouble could you, like, look?”
“I’m sorry sir, we have no listing in that name,” repeated the stony-faced man. He looked down, picked up his pencil and continued on with his daily ritual of ringing typing errors in the newspaper. He was seated behind a window that seemed designed to keep trouble and work out. He pushed his glasses up his nose. His brown suit glared from the horrible gray office and Joshua felt like he was being watched, a caged wild animal in a zoo although who was in the zoo was questionable.
The man looked up and was surprised to see Joshua still there. “I assure you we have up-to-date records here.”
“I’m sure you do,” Joshua said in a tone that gave sarcasm a good run for its money. “I think I might try my luck with the Department of Personal Information. I’m sure they’ll be much more helpful.”
4
THE NAMING OF THE Department of Personal Information was another story unto itself. It was one of those great government blunders impossible to cover up. The boss, possibly the only person with any sense in the entire building, had gone on his annual holiday for three months and left his diligent yet not totally bright assistant in control.
“Just think of something snappy that will look and sound good when abbreviated,” the boss had said.
“Sure enough. I’m, like, all over it, boss,” had replied his diligent yet not totally bright assistant.
One thing led to another, and when the boss had returned from his holiday he nearly hit the roof. “You’ve called us the Department of Personal Information?” he screamed.
“Yes,” said the assistant, who thought it a good idea at the time. “It can be abbreviated to D-O-P-I. You see, P-I, like, as in private investigator. And private, like, as personal, like you want information to be. Private. Personal. See? I thought it was snappy and you’d like it like,” the assistant had tried desperately.
“So you didn’t think all the cynical bastards out there might start calling it Dopey?” The manager waved his arms frantically in the air.
“Well, er, I, er …” said the assistant, possibly seeing that forging the boss’s signature was not as useful a skill as he had hitherto believed. Now all the paperwork had gone through, and it was signed sealed and delivered. Stationery was on its way. The painters had already been paid.
The Department of Personal Information head office was a splendid building full of glass and green plants. A form of friendliness only the truly powerful could leak emanated from every point of the building. The expansive grounds were covered with lush lawns and manicured flowerbeds, giving the appearance of an English estate. The office sat towering in magnificence over other far more ordinary buildings, which were there merely to serve people and not frighten them. Ivory clung to the parts of the wall that were not glass, and gold glinted far too much for a public service building.
It was said the people inside were powerful yet friendly. It was said they really cared about the state of affairs in the world. It was said champagne flowed from fountains that inhabited each office and the windows were made of barley sugar. Some people will say anything to get attention.
<
br /> These people said it was a great place to be. It was only a minor problem that security didn’t even let Joshua through the cast-iron gates that kept the building safe from the likes of him. He had a feeling, as everyone gets who has to deal with public services, that he was getting nowhere. Or more to the point, he wasn’t allowed to get anywhere. He wondered if it was just him.
Joshua returned to his office. The light had taken the opportunity to use a window that he had left open and had sidled out of the building, making a swap for the rain; thus the room was dark and the carpet was wet.
He was quite happy with himself. He had just solved a case, paid his bar tab and he had a new client, although a fairly mysterious one. He had also done some investigating. It hadn’t revealed anything but it was early days in the case yet. All in all things could be worse. He allowed himself a little smile, reclined onto the hind legs of his special reclining office chair—which usually fell over when anyone leaned too far back—and closed his eyes.
This new client was troubling him. No records anywhere. She didn’t seem like a bad sort. Likable in an efficient kind of way. Not someone who would spontaneously get crazy. Or maybe she was. You could never tell with some people. Was she the kind that once a year indulged in a shot of something blue and sticky, and the next thing you knew she was singing Kim Wilde songs on top of the photocopier? Then you didn’t see her for a week as she recovered in rehab. But still, her being here in person did conflict with the apparent lack of records. It was like she didn’t want to exist. Perhaps she just didn’t want any mail-order catalogues. It was damned odd.
Joshua sat in his office chair wondering how he might broach the subject to his client about her lack of existence.
“Excuse me, ma’am, are you sure you exist?”
“By the way, have you checked if …”
“I have some bad news for you, Ms. Friday. You don’t seem to …”
“Look, lady, who are you?”
It was no good. He couldn’t put his clients off by sneaking around behind their backs checking them out. It didn’t seem ethical, even to a detective. Leave that to the journalists. He’d just have to play along for a little while to see where things ended up.
5
THE PHONE RANG. JOSHUA woke up with a start and looked at his clock, which said Made in China. He turned it around and saw, to his horror, that it was nine a.m. The alarm wasn’t due to go off for another hour. He reached over and picked up the receiver.
“Hello,” he grumbled.
“Hello, Mr. Richards. It’s Ruth Friday here. I’ve had a change in plans and I thought it best to notify you of this change.”
“That’s very kind of you.” He managed to squeeze the sentence in between her breaths.
“Yes. Now, instead of meeting at the location on the paper at the allocated time, I suggest we meet ten minutes prior to our original engagement at the jetty off Broun on the docks underneath the light. Is this convenient for you?”
There was a pause. Joshua could hear her straining, eager to get on with her monologue. He breathed deeply.
“I consider … that in my total experience … weighing up the pluses and minuses … the positive and the negative … the yin and the yang … with all these in mind I could comfortably say … without a shadow of a doubt, well, not much doubt … that in response to your question … I should supply the response of … yes,” he concluded.
There was a pause and Ruth said, “Yes to what?”
“To your proposition,” Joshua replied.
“I can’t remember what it was now, you took so long.” She was annoyed, and it was apparent in her tone. “Can you remember?”
“Er, not actually.”
“Oh, this is ridiculous. Hang on, I’ll just consult my Filofax.” There was some rustling in the background. “Here it is. Oh, that’s right. Meeting on the jetty.” She sounded relieved. “All right. We’re in agreement. I shall meet with you tonight at the agreed time. Good day, Mr. Richards.”
She hung up.
He hung up.
He looked down at the clothes he was wearing. He had spent the night in them again. It was time for drastic measures. He ventured into the bathroom and showered. He threw the old clothes in the corner of the room and took an exact duplicate of them from the closet. He dressed. He needed a quick change of scenery. Get out into the air, or the rain. Get some control over his life.
He left the office and rambled aimlessly, thinking about his case. The rain had eased to a light dribble and the air was relatively clean. He wandered from his office on Beacon Road to the markets. The lower side of town had a much more earthy and friendly feel than the uptown collection of dull government institutions.
The markets were just a collection of crates covered with tarpaulins suspended from overhead, occupied by people whose main purpose in life was to deafen anyone who came within selling range. They sold anything that was edible, could fit in a pocket or around the neck, or what some other luckless person hadn’t been able to nail down. The markets were alive nearly all day and night.
Joshua grabbed an apple for half a credit and continued his stroll past the old Gothic church on Grimmer Street. He had decided against a banana on offer. It reminded him of the infamous crash a couple of years back when an out-of-control truck carrying several thousand bananas had crashed into a hair salon. Now, not only could Joshua never look at a bottle of shampoo without shivering, but he had also lost his appetite for the soft yellow delicacy after being squashed by ten thousand pounds of them.
The day wore on. The more he walked toward the coast the seedier the city became. He preferred walking this way. Uptown was clean and sterile, with no life in it. Here it wasn’t so clean but it was alive. Even though the lights went off, life didn’t stop, except in some of the more extreme cases. The uptown businesses had tried to squash the life on the downtown streets, but downtown did it a whole lot better, and for a cheaper price.
Undoubtedly the inhabitants of uptown felt some kind of jealousy. There was a lot to be said for money, but there was a whole lot more to be said for life. Downtown had its cheap nightclubs and movie houses; the one that Joshua was passing was viewing Batman XXX-essive. Batman had adapted well to leather and rubber.
Opening any door revealed hot smoky interiors that didn’t only hint at secret desires and forbidden dreams but displayed them in vivid color, leaving so little room for imagination that it had to rent it elsewhere. Downtown had hotels, public bars and flashing neon signs. It generally presented a more exciting and illegal way of life, if only for a short time for the unsuspecting passerby. It was a little dangerous and out of control. More so than any other locale, this represented life humming along with as much happiness and self-gratification as could be bought. So right yet so wrong, a wondrous conflict. Despite all this, Joshua felt a strange sense of ease and comfort.
The medieval buildings adorned with neon lights rose four to five stories above the narrow cobbled streets, leaving only a narrow strip of gray sky. There were also the ‘caves,’ the basements of these buildings, once used for coal storage but now used as easy entrances for inebriated visitors to the city. Basically there were four levels of sin for the discerning shopper, and one (down) for the blind drunk who wasn’t too fussy.
Literally, miles of these old winding streets ran all the way down to the dock line. Miles of distractions. It had always been like this. It used to be a tourist Mecca; now it was miles of sex, drugs, greed, and violence.
Joshua turned down a quiet side alley, where a flashing blue neon sign above an unmarked doorway announced: Warrior Kombat: Unplugged. Warrior Kombat was the population’s answer to the primal urge for violence. Three levels were available: one, the video game. It was the most popular game of all time, and was available for every type of console, arcade machine, VR system, and home computer. There was nowhere the game had not been, and no one who had not played it. And that was only the beginning of the sport’s saturation.
&nb
sp; Level two was the television version, which was basically an athletic romp with beautiful bodies parading around in skimpy, shiny clothes.
Level three was the street version, or Cameras Unplugged as it was known by the officials. Here there were no rules, no mercy, and, generally, no survivors. Padded bokkens were replaced with real katanas; and rubber gloves were replaced with implanted steel claws. Taken from a collection of now illegal video games and action movies from an overindulgent late twentieth century, and the current version of the game in the arcades, convicted criminals fought for their freedom. The winners were given a full pardon and the losers were executed—if either of them survived. This was usually not the case.
Warrior Kombat: it was about blood, the most evil of desires, and large pointing fingers made of foam. Each night, in trashcan alleys around the less patrolled parts of town, there would be a subtle shift in the crowd as several hundred people tried to move toward the small doors. Only a few hundred seats were available, of which the first fifty were sold at the normal price, with the rest going to the highest bidders. This often made the competition for the seats nearly as violent as the competition itself. The ticket sellers for the first fifty were stationed in bulletproof glass cabinets with hand-sized holes through which the purchaser would pay the money and received a ticket. Once these fifty tickets had been purchased, the ticket points would close and the crowd would look up expectantly.
Shadowed against the night sky, four figures would appear on top of the alley buildings. Tethered to secure points, they would rappel down the building to a few meters above the crowd. The hushed crowd would then erupt, yelling and waving their money above their heads. The ticket men would, from their safe positions, look out over the crowd for those with the most money. They would then swing out over the crowd and grab the money, replacing it with an entrance ticket. If the buyer dropped the ticket, it was a free-for-all. Once the sales were over, the ticket sellers would be hauled up the walls and the games would commence. It was all part of the show. The rest of the disappointed crowd would re-enter the red-light frivolities.
