Alas, you’ve got to be behind the desk during core hours, all twenty of them a week. After a bit, you ask Tariq if you can borrow a pad so you can work on his dating website while you’re holding the fort: Nobody who walks in will know it from what you’re supposed to be doing, and you can do with the cash.
So you’re there one midafternoon, grinding your teeth over a broken style sheet, when the doorbell chimes. At first you mistake it for your IDE complaining about a syntax error, but then it rings again, and you see the desk set blinking its light at you. You’ve got company.
“Hello? Uh, consulate of the Independent Republic of Issyk-Kulistan?”
The desk set clears its throat. “Hello, the consulate? Please to be letting us in?”
You stare for a couple of seconds, then figure out which button to push on the antique console. You hear the front door open and hide Tariq’s pad before you stand up and go to see who it is.
Two men are peering twitchily around the lobby area of the shared offices. One’s in his late twenties, and the other is considerably older. They’ve both got close-cropped hair, bushy moustaches, and an indefinable air of perplexity that screams foreigner at you. The younger one is clutching the handle of a gigantic rolling case. “Hello? Can I help you?” you ask, politely enough, and the young guy nearly jumps out of his skin.
“Er, hello, this is consulate of . . . Przewalsk?” The younger guy’s English is clearly a second language—or third. “Hussein Anwar?”
“That’s me,” you say, nodding. “Can I ask what your business is, sir?” You really want to get back to fixing Tariq’s botched style sheet, and you haven’t snapped into the right head space, but it comes out sounding patronizing and officious.
The old guy turns to his young companion and rattles something off. The young guy replies, then turns to you. “He says we need to speak in your office. We are visiting trade delegation. Felix Datka sends us to you.”
Oh. Well that puts a different face on things! “Certainly, if you’d like to follow me?”
Your office is equipped with two plastic visitors chairs and a regrettably non-plastic rubber plant, which has hideous yellow-rimmed holes in its leaves but refuses to die despite your daily libation of coffee grounds. You usher the trade delegation past the plant and wave them into the seats. “What brings you to Edinburgh?” you ask.
“Emails are you has read, the?” begins the old guy before his young companion takes over: “My friend here, he is being lead trade mission to sell produce of our factories to foreign markets. There should an email be. We bring here for you a consignment of trade samples, to be distributed to visitors.”
The old guy nods emphatically. “You give we.” He waves at the huge and villainous suitcase, which is already settling into the carpet. “Samples.”
“Uh, yes. I see. What kind of samples?”
You watch, fascinated, as the young guy fiddles with the substantial locks on the case. He opens the lid with a flourish, not unlike a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat. “Look!” he announces.
The suitcase is full of white paper bags. He pulls one out and hands it to you. The label reads: INSECT-FREE FAIR TRADE ORGANIC BREAD MIX BARLEY-RYE. “For Western home bread-maker machine,” says the young guy, as the old guy grins broadly and nods. “Is produced by People’s Number Four Grain Products Factory of Issyk-Kulistan! Taste very good, no grit, batteries included, just add water.”
“Batteries?” You shake your head.
“Yeast,” he says hastily. “You give. Visitors.”
You eye up the enormous suitcase. “You want me to give visitors bags of bread mix?” you ask him. “But I don’t have room here—”
The old guy nods again. “Give he you visitors bread.” He looks at you, and suddenly you recognize his expression and you just about shit yourself. “Is visitors, yes? Email, is.”
“The instructions are for you in the email,” the young guy adds helpfully. He stands up. “We go, now. Other consuls, more trade!” He grins alarmingly widely and reaches out to shake your hand. His skin is dry and hot, his grip tight as a handcuff. “Am thanking you. You are good man, says Colonel Datka.”
After the “trade delegation” leaves, you sit behind your desk breathing heavily for a couple of minutes. The suitcase crouches behind the dying rubber plant, like a snooping secret policeman intent on exposing your guilt. Who do they think I am? Does Datka think I’m stupid, or something? You glare at the case. It’s obviously drugs. That’s what this is all about. They’ve figured out how to use diplomatic bags and “trade delegations” to smuggle heroin out of Abkhazia or Ruritania or somewhere, and now you’re expected to play host to an endless revolving-door parade of dealers. Well, it won’t do! You weren’t born yesterday. If they think you’re going to tamely take the fall, for a mere thousand euros a month—
You’ve got a wife and kids to look after. And you’ve met Datka. Colonel Datka. Spoken to him. He’s not stupid, he’s got to know this is shit.
Curiosity gets the better of you, and you reach for the white paper bag on the edge of your desk. It weighs about a kilogram. You close your eyes, hefting it. The suitcase has got to hold at least fifty more of them, from the way it’s digging in the carpet. If this is heroin, it’s got to be worth half a million on the street. Datka’s met you. Would you leave yourself in possession of half a million in heroin, sight unseen?
Holy Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, peace be unto him: No, you wouldn’t. But Datka knows where you live, he knows where Bibi and Naseem and Farida and everything you hold precious can be found, and you’ve met plenty of cheerfully ruthless men who wouldn’t hesitate to use—
Your hands are sweating, and you feel yourself shaking as you tear open the flap on the bag of INSECT-FREE FAIR TRADE ORGANIC BREAD MIX BARLEY-RYE, Produce of People’s Number Four Grain Products Factory of Issyk-Kulistan, and jam your thumb inside, crush the coarse flour against the paper, raise it to your mouth, and suck.
It’s just flour.
INGREDIENTS: Malted Barley (40%), Rye (30%), Wheat (20%), Ascorbic acid, fructose-glucose concentrate, Sodium Metabisulfite, Sodium Chloride, Amylase, Protease, Vegetable fat (3%), Raising agent (yeast).
Add water (320ml to 500g Bread Mix), place in bread-maker, and select “wholemeal rapid” program.
Your shuddering gasp of relief is that of a condemned man receiving his pardon on the steps of the gallows; it’s no less heart-felt. You lean back in your chair, eyes screwed shut. You’ve never been much of one for your daily observations, but right now you make a mental note to lay in a prayer rug against the prospect of future roving visits by feral international trade delegations. God is indeed great: He’s sent you organic stone-ground bread mix instead of heroin.
The only question is, why? And so at four o’clock you switch on call divert, lock the office behind you, and go in search of the Gnome.
This afternoon, Adam is holding court in the back of the Halfway House, a wee nook alongside Fleshmarket Close, an improbably stepped thoroughfare that runs up the arse crack from the City Art Gallery to Cockburn Street. (You know you’re in the Old Town when the street’s so steep they’ve been talking about fitting an escalator for the tourists.) You take a short-cut through the upper retail deck of Waverley Station, dodging the commuter crowds, and reach the front door with only a slight shortness of breath. “Ah, Anwar,” calls the Gnome: “Mine’s a pint of sixty bob.”
Bloody typical. You sidle up to the bar and smile ingratiatingly until the wee lassie deigns to notice you and pours your pints—your IPA and the aforementioned sticky black treacle syrup for the Gnome. You carry it to the back. The Gnome smacks his lips and slides his pad away. “I didn’t think there was any signal down here,” you say.
“There isn’t usually.” The Gnome looks pleased with his pint of mild. “Mm, it’s in fine form today. Chewy, with a fine malt aftertaste and some interesting hops.”
You open your messenger bag, extricate the (slightly leaky) sack of b
read mix, and plop it on the table in front of him. “Would it go with this?”
The Gnome stares at it for a moment, then picks it up. “You scanned it,” he says tersely. “Where did you get it?”
“No RFIDs,” you tell him. “Only the best organic ingredients, said the visiting trade delegation. I’m to hand them out to visitors, according to Colonel Datka.” You chug half your pint in a single panicky sharp-edged gulp. “What have you got me into?”
The Gnome, for once, is at a loss for words. “I dinna ken, sonny,” he says, lapsing into a self-parody of his ancestral Ayrshire accent. “Sorry. It appears to be . . . Bread mix.” He peers at the label. “Lots of malted barley: I suppose you could use it for home brewing. Some hops, a couple of demijohns, the yeast’s probably not ideal . . .” He trails off thoughtfully. Then he looks up at you. “It’s bread mix,” he says crisply. “Tell yourself it’s just bread mix. Give it to anyone who stops by. Tell them it’s bread mix. If by some chance the police pay you a visit? It’s just bread mix.”
You’ve got that frozen feeling again. “Fucking fuck, are you telling me—”
The Gnome reaches out and grabs your wrist. “It’s just bread mix,” he hisses. He stabs at the bag with one index finger: “If you put that in your bread-maker—if you’ve got one—it will make bread. End of story. That’s all you need to know.”
You pull your hand back. “No it isn’t.”
“Believe me,” he says slowly.
You cross your arms, mulish. “Tell me. Or it’s all going down the shitter tonight.”
He begins to smile. “I wouldn’t do that. Dough tends to clog the pipes. Just think of the plumber’s face . . .”
Despite yourself, you begin to relax. “What is it, really?”
The Gnome fidgets with his drink for a few seconds, then takes a mouthful and wipes his lips dry with the back of a grubby sleeve whose self-cleaning fabric he’s long since overloaded. “It’s bread mix. What you mean is, what else is it.”
“What? What else can it be?”
“Keep thinking that thought.” He smiles disquietingly. “Probably nothing, without Secret Ingredient X.” He whistles between his teeth. “‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.”
“Secret Ingredient X?”
“You read about so much stuff in the science blogs these days.” The Gnome holds up his pint. “Zymurgy: the oldest human science.”
“Zy—”
“Fermentation. Brewing. Saccharomyces cerevisiae, brewer’s yeast. It was one of the first organisms to have its genome sequenced, you know that? It’s used in baking as well; it’s what makes the bread rise.” He picks up the packet. “This bread mix is interesting. You could brew with it. The beer would probably taste like shit—it doesn’t have any hops—but it’ll still be beer.” And with that, he slides it into one capacious coat pocket.
You take another deep gulp from your pint glass. “So?”
“So think of S. cerevisiae as a handy little biological factory.” The Gnome peers at the bag of bread mix. “Normally it’ll produce bread. But suppose you want to send some interesting chemical feedstock to someone. All they need to know is that they chuck the bread mix in a sterile demijohn with five or ten litres of warm water. And then . . . It produces crap beer. Only before they put it in the demijohn, they add Secret Ingredient X, which is probably some dietary supplement you can buy over the counter in any health-food shop. And in the presence of Secret Ingredient X, some extra metabolic pathway gets switched on, because this is not your ordinary S. cerevisiae; this is mutant ninja genetically engineered superyeast.”
“But what does it make?”
The Gnome finishes his pint and meets you with a bright-eyed smile. “I really have no idea. And you know what? I don’t particularly want to know. You don’t want to know. Colonel Datka doesn’t want you to know; otherwise, he’d have told you. It’s a lot simpler if all anybody knows is that you’ve been told to hand out free samples of organic bread mix by your employer’s trade delegation. Oh, and we didn’t have this conversation, and we weren’t in the back of a pub where there’s sod-all phone signal and no free net access and no CCTV because it’s quarried out of the side of a granite cliff-face. Are we singing from the same hymn book?”
After a moment, you nod. “Is this what you were asking me to keep an eye out for?”
“Could be.” The Gnome reaches into one pocket and pulls out a fat lump of dead cow-skin, as battered and shapeless as if it has been whacked with a hammer. He opens it and pulls out a stack of bank-notes. “This is for you. Don’t spend them all in the same place.”
You reach out and snatch the money. There’s the thick end of a thousand euros there, maybe more. Before the savage deflation of the past few years, you might have thought he was cheaping on you. But not now. It’s enough to pay the mortgage arrears for three months. “I don’t know if I should be doing this.”
The Gnome’s grin slips. “Neither do I, laddie, neither do I.” He puts the wallet away, then pats you on the knee. “But just consider the alternatives.”
TOYMAKER: Headhunter
Ants. I am surrounded by fucking ants. Can’t they get anything right?
This is not rocket science. (Rocket science: fucking 1930s shit invented by Nazi übermensch engineers and so easy that by the 1990s even a bunch of camel-fucking towel-heads could master it.)
This is not AI. (Artificial intelligence: fucking 1950s shit invented by Jew-boy intellectuals at Stanford and MIT and so useless that by the 1990s its highest achievement was beating a vodka-swilling Russian commie dog-fucker at chess.)
This is not genetic engineering. (Genetic engineering: fucking 1970s shit invented by . . . you get the picture.)
This is logistics!
It goes back to the fucking Stone Age!
They can put a genetically engineered AI on Mars, but they can’t shift a fucking suitcase between two hotels without losing it.
I am surrounded by ants, and if this continues I am going to pull on my size-fourteen boots and go for a stomp. See if I don’t.
This isn’t a complex job. Truly, it isn’t. I move hotels every day or two—in fact, I’ve been doing it every day or two for several years now. It’s not as if my job’s compatible with having a mortgage or living in a fucking suburban shoe-box with an avocado bathroom suite and a bored housewife and nosy neighbours peering over the picket fence, is it? Santa’s got a lot of travelling to do if all good children are going to get their toys, and the jet lag’s a mother-fucker. (And so’s my carbon footprint, but that’s not my problem: The whiners’ll figure out a way to fix global warming. Meanwhile, I fly business class.)
As I was saying, I travel a lot, and I travel light. 5.62 kilograms, to be precise. That’s the maximum payload weight I allow myself to pack in my trolley case—that, and the clothes on my back and the contents of my brief-case. If it goes over 5.62 kilos, I have to throw something out. You can get a lot into 5.62 kilos: shaver, suit, change of shirt and underwear, commercial samples, computers. Hotels have same-day cleaning stores that sell toiletries and I’m on expenses and if something starts getting shabby I buy a replacement and it goes in the trash, capisce?
My needs are simple: I need a hotel room and my luggage and a desk to sit at with the pad at the end of the day (and no, I’m not stupid—I don’t keep anything important on my pad, it’s all waiting in the cloud—I am in a very virtual line of work, almost ethereal).
Anyway, this is what I am paying you for.
It inconveniences me mightily if I get to my new hotel room after a hard day’s work and my rolling flight case with 5.62 kilograms of home is not there waiting for me.
I need a change of underwear, and I need a shave, and I need my luggage. Only somebody has lost my shit.
I hold you responsible.
I see you nodding like a parcel-shelf dog. No, don’t look at me like that. This is about logistics, the
necessary life-support infrastructure for the modern commercial traveller. If you can’t get your logistics right, you don’t deserve to be in the hotel business, and I will personally make it my business to see that your corporate customer-satisfaction officer learns that there is a day manager on the front desk at this hotel who is fucking off the customers. And it won’t stop there. You will start to piss away corporate hospitality accounts like a junkie bleeding out into the urinal through his dick. Your staff will cross the road to avoid you, and you will see vultures circling overhead because your days in the hospitality trade will be numbered. You will lose your job and the government will foreclose on your mortgage and you will be cast out on the street to starve like an abandoned dog or be eaten alive by feral mutant children who will skull-fuck your rotting corpse through the eye-sockets with their huge gangrenous organs. This is all because you neglected to pay sufficient attention to your one most important customer today, namely me. No, don’t you fucking look at me like that, you cunt! If it’s not me, then it could be anybody else who walks up to your desk today, this month, this year.
It could be anybody, as long as they hate you with a fiery, all-consuming passion and decide to devote the next few months of their life to monstering you into an early grave for the sheer fun of pulling apart a quivering lump of feckless time-expired meat.
Get me my luggage, mister hospitality manager. It was due here two hours ago via interhotel transfer from the Marriott on Lothian Road—here’s the receipt. I’ll be generous: You’ve got a couple of hours to save your job, your career, and your life. I’m going to go hunt down some dinner. Make sure my luggage is in my room and waiting for me when I get back, and we’ll say no more about this matter.
—What line of work am I in, you ask?
It’s not really any of your fucking business.
I sell toys.
You’re the acting Toymaker in Edinburgh this month, here to take care of a nasty little headache for the Operation (along the way to setting up a new subsidiary). Supply-chain logistics and order fulfilment in the Central Belt—the Edinburgh–Glasgow M8 conurbation, where two-thirds of the population of the gallus wee free time-share republic huddle together below the highlands—have taken a dive in the shitter of late. Unfulfilled demand remains high, but supply is patchy, and there is a risk of ad hoc competition emerging.
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