First Horseman, The

by Chambers, Clem

  Davas sat down on the camp seat. He looked drained. ‘Not necessarily Jim. There isn’t always a happy ending.’

  7

  Dear Professor,

  Thank you for asking why I no longer wish to be on the course. As you know I’m a chemist. Genetics has always fascinated me, so I thought, after my master’s, that biochemistry was the next step. However, I cannot work with/on animals.

  She was staring at the screen, her brow furrowed like a piece of corrugated cardboard. She was angry with the situation, herself, the professor, the course, the university. She was angry with the world. She continued typing:

  I really do not think I could look at myself in the mirror if I experimented on animals. Animals are no more machines than I am, and what is done to them in the name of science is horrible.

  ‘Horrible’ sounded lame. She found a better word with the online thesaurus. She scanned the new line: ‘What we do to them in the name of science is vile.’ Reading the sentence back, she felt a rush of release.

  Animals might treat each other badly in nature, but I do not see that as an excuse to act viciously towards them too. Unlike creatures in the wild, I do not have to tear my fellow beings to pieces in order to survive. I can try to wrap all sorts of clever arguments around why I am dropping out but the real reason is that I believe treating animals as you treated that mouse is an awful kind of bullying, predicated on a level of callousness that verges on inhumanity.

  She read the lines back. Was she suggesting that the professor was a vile, callous and inhumane person? She closed her eyes and thought. She was too upset to write to him just now, she told herself. She should delete the message and answer the email tomorrow. By then she’d be able to write in a less emotional and more balanced way.

  She didn’t want to make an enemy of the professor, especially as she needed another subject for her doctorate. She sighed. She had made two catastrophic choices: to do the course and to leave it. Her next idea had better be a good one or she’d mess up her whole life.

  She opened her eyes and clicked. ‘Oh, God,’ she moaned, realising she’d clicked ‘send’. She opened her ‘sent’ folder and groaned again. ‘You idiot,’ she cried. She opened the message and read it again. Perhaps the prof wouldn’t take it the wrong way. Fat chance, she thought. It was easily the rudest message she had ever sent.

  She prayed Cardini was as bloodless as his reputation suggested. Robots didn’t take umbrage. She wondered if she had an email-recall function, and tugged at her long chestnut hair with her left hand as she searched for it. Eventually she gave up. To hell with it, she thought, getting up. I meant every word. She headed for the kitchenette. A mint tea would calm her down.

  8

  Jim got up off the grass. Pierre, in his perfect cricket whites, was running towards him. The boy was growing into a giant. Only two years before he had been a couple of inches shorter than Jim, but now he was a couple of inches taller than his benefactor. ‘Hey, Jim,’ called Pierre. ‘I’m so glad you came to see me play. I’ll show you a trick or two.’

  Jim smiled at Pierre with pride. They had cheated death together in the DRC under Nyiragongo. They had been thrown together in the mountain jungle, Jim the hapless mining investor and Pierre the child soldier and defiant victim. They were both tenacious survivors, now bonded like brothers. Jim had adopted the boy and brought him to Britain, after making sure his family was provided for in the Congolese chaos.

  Kings and dictators sent their pampered princelings to this school yet despite his deprived and violent childhood Pierre had managed to get along. Still, there was something outlandish about his size and athleticism that made him seem older and much bigger than his peers.

  Now Jim hugged him. ‘We’re straight to the airport after the match.’

  ‘You going to come home with me?’

  ‘Not this time,’ said Jim. ‘I’ve got to see some people about a few things. We can go together at the end of term and take a look at the mine.’

  ‘Deal,’ said Pierre, grabbing Jim’s hand and shaking it. ‘Got to go now and play.’

  ‘Good luck.’

  Pierre laughed. ‘Way!’ he said looking back to Jim. ‘They’re going to need the luck.’ He loped off, his stride long and fluid.

  Jim had caught a whiff of a new English inflection in Pierre’s heavy French Congolese accent. He sat down, smiling to himself. It was good to see him so obviously flourishing. As Jim sat on the neatly cut grass, memories of squatting on jungle litter, pestered by insects, his body exhausted and soaked in sweat returned to him, a legacy of that adventure, like a whistle in the ears after a noisy concert. The more he wanted them to stop, the more he noticed them.

  He heard his late nan saying, ‘It’s a funny old world.’

  He often dreamt of the jungle and woke from the nightmares with a start.

  In a few short years, his talent for predicting the market had turned his life completely inside out. His ability to know if markets were going to rise or fall had set off a chain of events that had transformed him from a poor Docklands kid into a lightning rod struck by bolts of money and trouble. Often his life was like some strange hallucination and he would pull a hair on the back of his arm: pain proved he was in the real world. Sometimes it was the only proof.

  His ability to trade the global financial markets and never lose seemed harmless but it had terrifying consequences. When others tried to make money in the markets, they found it hard to be right 51 per cent of the time; when he traded he was 99 per cent correct.

  The outcome of this was his immense wealth. He lived in a world without the normal financial gravity that pinned everyone else to the ground. Enormous wealth changed everything, and for Jim it made the world a very dangerous place. However surreal his situation felt, it was as solid as a punch on the nose. While dreams couldn’t hurt, the real world seemed intent on wreaking his comeuppance.

  Millions of people try to make a living from speculation, but only a few are successful, and even the fortunate few probably win through luck. The law of the efficient market levelled all players, from huge banks to the smallest retail investors. Efficient markets made them into little more than desperate gamblers doomed by the laws of probability to fail in the end. Sometimes the gambles paid off, sometimes they didn’t, but in the long run even the mightiest ran out of luck and money. Banks blew fortunes as surely as the smallest private investor blew their savings.

  Jim suffered no such levelling. He traded and he won. He read financial charts like a navigator could plot a route on a map. It was a blessing and a curse. Perhaps Fortune was trying to get even, he thought. Perhaps it needed to wreak a counterbalancing loss to even out his bloated success. And that loss would have to be catastrophic. Which was how things seemed to develop for him: one potential disaster followed another. Sometimes he felt like a bug in a piece of software, a glitch that needed deleting. There had been too much craziness in his life.

  Pierre was opening the bowling. That’s a bloody long run-up, thought Jim. Pierre set off. He was running very fast when he let fly. Jim whistled as the ball pitched up short and the young batsman flinched back as it hissed past his head. A youth by the boundary just managed to stop it and save four byes.

  ‘How fast was that?’ muttered Jim. Too fast by half, he thought. Good job the kids were wearing helmets. They were going to need them.

  The ball came back to Pierre, who studied it as he returned to his mark. He scratched the spot with his boot, so he could find it again and charge from the same place. The batsman was banging the crease as if there was some kind of defensive magic in digging a small divot in front of the middle stump.

  Pierre set off with a little kick. The batsman started to bob up and down. Pierre let fly.

  Jim winced as the ball flew past the batsman at shoulder height. The wicket-keeper, ten yards back, tried to catch it but it was too fast, rocketing over the boundary for four byes.

  The umpire said something to Pierre, who nodded. />
  Jim had no idea about cricket and wondered if dialogue with the umpire was good or bad. It looked like a cautionary word and that seemed sensible. If he was the umpire he’d tell Pierre to slow down – but wasn’t bowling like that the point of the game?

  Pierre looked over at Jim, gestured at his eye and then at him, smiling happily. Pierre meant him to watch closely. Jim nodded. Pierre turned away, rubbing the ball hard on his whites as he returned to his mark. He stood still for a moment, steeling himself for the sprint. He set off and by the time he reached the wicket he was running flat out.

  Jim didn’t see the ball fly, just heard a thud at the batsman’s end and saw a stump fly backwards out of the ground.

  Pierre took off vertically, spinning around with his arms in the air. There was a chorus of shouts from his team mates.

  This was going to be a short game, thought Jim.

  Pierre swung into the passenger seat. ‘Nice car, Jim,’ he said. ‘All my friends are well jealous of me.’

  Jim smiled and started the Bugatti Veyron. ‘It was Stafford’s idea,’ he said. ‘He says I should have this kind of car. It’s suitable for a man of my standing, so he reckons.’

  Pierre laughed.

  Jim reversed out between the two parental Range Rovers. ‘You played bloody well,’ he said, checking to make sure he wasn’t going to hit anything as he pulled away.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Pierre. ‘I love cricket – it’s like friendly fighting.’

  ‘I’m not sure the other team would agree about the friendly bit,’ he said, nursing the car forwards.

  ‘Only bruises,’ said Pierre, ‘no blood.’ He waved out of the window at a friend.

  Jim glanced at the historic school building, then at the uniformed children watching him pass. He scratched his head, ruffling his short black hair. It was a world he had no understanding of. He slowed to a crawl as he took a tight turn.

  ‘How’s Jane?’ asked Pierre, swivelling in his bucket seat and lowering the window. He waved again, then poked his head out and shouted to another boy, laughing.

  Jim didn’t reply.

  Pierre pulled his head in. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Jim. ‘I didn’t say nothing.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Pierre. ‘That’s not good.’ He closed the window and screwed himself into the seat. ‘Does this car go fast?’

  ‘Like shit off a shiny shovel.’

  ‘You going to show me?’

  ‘Probably not,’ said Jim. ‘I’ve not really got the hang of it yet.’ He grinned. ‘But if we can get a stretch of clear, straight road, I might give it a go.’

  ‘Wicked!’

  Jim was finally out of the obstacle course of the school precinct, pleased to be on a proper road. He pushed the accelerator a little and the car surged away. He eased off and settled at the speed limit. ‘Nought to a driving ban in three and a half seconds,’ he said, laughing.

  ‘OK!’ said Pierre. ‘Go ahead!’

  ‘Maybe later,’ said Jim. ‘There’s plenty of time.’

  ‘So how about you come back to the DRC with me today?’

  ‘No can do,’ said Jim. ‘Got to see a man about some mosquitoes.’

  ‘Mosquitoes?’ said Pierre. ‘You can see plenty back home.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Jim. ‘But this is different. There’s a professor in Cambridge who’s trying to find a way of stopping mosquitoes spreading malaria. I’m thinking of funding him.’

  ‘You giving your money away again, Uncle?’

  ‘Uncle?’

  ‘Kind Uncle, gives his money away to all the girls.’ Pierre was laughing again.

  ‘It was your idea, remember?’ said Jim.

  ‘No,’ said Pierre.

  ‘You told me mosquitoes were to blame for so many deaths.’

  ‘I might have.’

  ‘It set me thinking and you’re right. The fucking mozzies are, like, the worst thing on earth. Little flying bastards spreading death.’

  ‘But all this money you keep giving away, you’ll run out of it.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Jim. ‘Anyway, if I do, I’ll make some more.’

  ‘Good plan. How’s the professor going to kill the mosquitoes?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Jim. ‘I’ll find out tomorrow.’

  Pierre put his hand on Jim’s shoulder. ‘Can’t you go faster?’

  ‘No,’ said Jim, ‘not yet.’

  Pierre groaned. ‘Jim, you’re so boring.’ He laughed. ‘But that’s OK.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Jim.

  ‘I’ll probably be boring too when I’m old and twenty-five like you.’

  An image of Pierre at fifteen, in his worn green irregular army uniform, a battered Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder, flipped into Jim’s mind. Now the boy, once named Man Bites Dog, was just a teenager watching the world go by. Jim grinned. ‘Let’s hope so.’

  ‘So what’s happened to Jane? Please nothing bad.’

  ‘Nothing bad,’ said Jim.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Nothing bad.’

  ‘You can tell me, Jim.’

  Jim stamped on the accelerator and the Veyron shot forwards.

  ‘Whoah!’ said Pierre. ‘This is great!’

  Jim looked into his rear-view mirror. Was that the flash of a speed camera?

  9

  A broad smile slowly spread over Professor Cardini’s face. He slapped the side of his right leg with his giant gnarled hand. ‘Ha.’ He laughed, in a single deep rumble. ‘Plucky,’ he said, raising a bushy eyebrow.

  Dear Kate,

  I appreciate your honesty in the matter. Over the years I, too, have had my reservations.

  If you can come to my office at eleven thirty tomorrow I have something I would like to share with you.

  I hope that will be a convenient time as my schedule is very tight.

  Sincerely,

  Cardini

  Kate sat in front of her Notebook, holding a cup of tomato soup, which she put down – she was worried that when she read Cardini’s email she might drop it.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. She sagged in her chair with relief. Thank goodness he’s cool, she thought. Perhaps he wasn’t such a horrible man, after all. She remembered the look he had given her as she’d left the laboratory and shivered, then picked up the soup and sipped.

  Dear Professor,

  See you at eleven thirty tomorrow.

  Kate

  10

  Jim threw the presentation down in disgust on the distressed gilded-leather-covered desk top. He looked up at Stafford, his butler, who sat on a delicate eighteenth-century chair opposite him. ‘How can this be so hard?’ he said, his voice tinged with despair. ‘If I dig a well, people might get poisoned by arsenic in the ground water, or some local guy’ll start charging for access. If I hand over money to someone else to give away, they drive around in an SUV lording it over starving people. If I pay five hundred dollars to ten thousand families, the money leaks away, and before you know it, they’re depending on me to keep paying. What am I supposed to do? How can you give money away without polluting everything?’

  ‘As you say, it’s not easy,’ said Stafford, quietly.

  ‘Most of these projects,’ said Jim, springing up, ‘are just filling in for evil governments who go around stealing all their people’s stuff.’ He threw his hands into the air. ‘Rather than funding boatloads of food, I’d be better off sponsoring an invasion to kick bastards like that out.’

  ‘It’s been attempted,’ observed Stafford.

  ‘Well, I’m trying to give my money to charity, not start another United Nations.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘So what’s the answer?’ wailed Jim.

  ‘Determination?’ suggested Stafford, with a hint of irony.

  ‘Well, this thing tomorrow better not be another British middle-class lifestyle sponsorship plan playing at being a charity.’

  Stafford stiffened a little. ‘It’s a research g
roup and it looks very interesting.’

  ‘Mosquitoes,’ growled Jim. ‘I hate them.’ Then he smiled. ‘If the professor drives a Merc, I’m not putting in a single penny.’

  ‘Professors are allowed nice cars, you know. You’re funding a scientist not a saint, are you not?’

  Jim wrinkled his nose, as if there were a very smelly piece of cheese under it.

  Stafford rose. ‘Would you like some lunch?’

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Jim. ‘I’m going out – I’m dying for a Big Mac.’

  Stafford tried not to look aghast, but failed.

  11

  The real-tennis court echoed to the grunts of Jim’s physical exertion and the thumping of staccato steps on the floor mats. His fists made slapping, squeaking sounds on the receiving gloves of his coach. He was sweating profusely.

  ‘Stop,’ said the coach.

  Jim straightened.

  ‘Very good, you showed a lot of speed there.’

  Jim grimaced. ‘Trouble is, Pat, I don’t feel I’m making any progress.’

  ‘You’re doing fine. You learn fast.’

  ‘But it’s not real, it’s just play-fighting.’

  Pat pursed his lips. ‘It’s close enough.’

  ‘I need to do it without this head guard on, under real conditions.’

  Pat drew a breath. ‘But you’ll get hurt.’

  ‘Pat, I’m not doing this to look cool. I’m doing it for my own protection.’

  ‘I know. You said.’

  ‘I’d have you punch the lights out of me but I can’t take it to the side. I’m all screwed up there.’

  ‘I remember you telling me so.’

  ‘But I have to be able to react in a real situation, against real blows, under real pain. I need to be able to respond properly if I get into trouble. I need to practise on something that’s as real as possible.’

  Pat was blanking him. ‘You’ll be fine,’ he said, smiling gently.