Walking Dead

by Peter Dickinson

“He behaved like a manager, you know. The girl in the Igloo Bar heard him say that, and she must have known. And he didn’t pay for his drinks …”

  “These girls!” sighed Mr Gibson Trotter, frowning with his forehead but still smiling with his lips and eyes. “I don’t know what to do with them. I pay them a wage and they say it is too little and they strike. I pay them more, and at once they take a lover and buy him smart clothes and give him free drinks in my hotel. But, sir, you were not wanting to see this actor man. You were wanting to see the manager of this fine hotel. That is me. Now, how can I help you?”

  Foxe couldn’t lose his temper—he didn’t know how. His anger at what Dreiser had told him was still there, stirred to fresh churnings but unable to find an outlet. Mr Gibson Trotter’s version of events was perfectly possible, except that it was all lies.

  “I don’t know,” Foxe found himself mumbling. “I wasn’t looking for him because he was manager here—it was something else. He told me he was a herbalist.”

  “Tsk, tsk tsk, tsk,” said Mr Trotter.

  “… and I thought he might be able to tell me how to attend one of these dances I’ve heard about.”

  “In this very hotel,” cooed Mr Trotter. “Friday, Tuesday, in the ball-room. Tuxedos optional.”

  “No, not that sort. I mean the ones the Islanders go to.”

  “Oh yes, yes. I tell you. Saturday night, in the big dance hall on the road to Liberation Bay. Very colourful, very funny, very good lights for the tourists to film …”

  Foxe still felt that he was being somehow defrauded. It didn’t sound quite what Ladyblossom had described. He was anxious to pin the little squirmer down.

  “This is the sort of dance the spirits come to?” he insisted. “Queen Bridget and Good Saint Paul and the Sunday Dwarf?”

  Mr Trotter’s smile lessened at each name and blanked out on the last. For a moment the wary watcher stared at Foxe, undisguised.

  “Who has been telling you these things?” he whispered.

  “All that is over. All that is finish with the slave days. You are breaking our laws to talk about such stuff. Next time you hear this talk, you must tell at once the police. Was this actor, this herbalist, telling you all this?”

  “No. It was just something I heard.”

  “Where? Where?”

  Ah well, thought Foxe, two can lie as cheaply as one.

  “Outside my bedroom window, as a matter of fact,” he said. “I’ve got a flat in Freedom Street, and I was woken up one night by two men arguing about it. They were drunk, but I thought it sounded interesting. I didn’t know it was illegal, so thanks for telling me. What are you going to put instead of the Igloo?”

  Mr Trotter’s eager innocence magicked back to life.

  “My idea for rich Arabs—you know Arabs are not allowed to drink, but … oh, I could tell you stories. We will have a great tent, with a stuffed camel, and drinks which do not seem to be drinks. Will you try a whisky sherbert? On the house, of course.”

  “No thanks. I suppose that poor girl will have to wear a veil now, instead of her parka.”

  “New girl,” said Mr Trotter. “But you will have a Bloody Mary, yes? And tell me if there is a stuffed camel in your laboratories, perhaps.”

  “No thanks, really. I doubt if there’s a camel, but I’ll keep my eyes open. Do you really think I ought to go to the police about that other thing?”

  “What is the use?” said Mr Trotter, half turning away. “Two voices in the dark? You waste a little police time, perhaps they waste a lot of yours.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Foxe to his back. “Thanks.”

  Foxe had his tourist lunch at a shack which had sprung up from nowhere in the last three weeks, a little further down the beach. He drank two cans of the fizzy, thin, quinine-flavoured Island beer, which he rather liked, and ate fresh-caught mullet with hot green-pepper sauce. A fat American at a nearby table leaned across and remarked that at least the Islanders knew how to cook fish, and Foxe agreed with him—it was one of those mysterious pockets of competence which the Islanders managed to maintain, like jungle clearings, amid their general chaos.

  Another such pocket, Dreiser said, was spying. Curiously, Foxe’s anger had been a little appeased by his success in lying to lying Mr Trotter, and he could now consider the incident almost objectively. Talking about the spirits was illegal, and Mr herbalising Trotter had talked about Asimbulu. He had told the girl not to listen, but she’d listened—and, presumably reported to the police. Mr herbalising Trotter was in jail now, most likely; it must have been the girl who reported that Foxe drank Bloody Marys and worked at the lab, though it was a little curious that Mr Gibson Trotter had bothered to brief himself on these facts—unless he was the sort of born hotelier who automatically registers people’s likes and habits. At any rate, it didn’t seem to add up to a spy network on the Dreiser scale. Foxe decided to forget about it—though at least Lisa-Anna would have been delighted that he’d managed to get angry over something outside his work.

  Lisa-Anna. That was over. He decided to forget about her too. In ten days, he thought, I shall have some spare time again. I’ll get a new girl.

  5

  “In a few years they will have a hotel here,” said Dreiser, pitching his voice above the rattle of tumbling water.

  “No beach,” said Foxe.

  “They’ll build one. With forty-five miles of perfect natural beaches round the Cay, they’ll still decide to build an artificial one.”

  “Why on earth?”

  “Because they’ve only got one waterfall. That makes it necessary to spoil it with a hotel, and people won’t come to the hotel without its having a beach.”

  “It might be cheaper to build an artificial waterfall where one of the beaches is.”

  “Excellent thinking, David. Send in a report to the Minister of Tourism.”

  Dreiser finished paying out the anchor cable, made it fast and came aft to sort through the fishing tackle. His sea personality was markedly different from his shore personality. In the hour’s journey up the coast Foxe had noticed none of what Galdi called “typical Dreiserisms,” those almost deliberately self-induced accidents of phrasing or behaviour, a sort of creative clumsiness, which invariably on shore destroyed Dreiser’s image of the brisk but reliable administrator. The time when he’d squirted dye all over himself from his safe had been a fair example. But at sea he seemed to relax. Here there was no need to put on a show of competence, because he was already competent. Even the jerky, inhuman movements of his limbs became somehow functional and controlled. Foxe found it difficult to get used to. It was like a trick with perspective, where the object drawn on the paper seems at moments to recede and at others to protrude towards one; in the same way, though it was natural for Foxe to think that he was now seeing the real Dreiser, and the other one—the Dreiser of the Dreiserisms—was a sort of mask or carapace, he kept going through moments when things seemed the other way round; this Dreiser, this efficient seaman, was the mask and the spy-bedevilled gawk was the real thing.

  The same uncertainty affected the bay where they had come to fish. Here Nature was at her most artificial, carelessly achieving a series of symmetries and contrasts which a human landscape architect would have rejected as excessive. The boat hobbled gently at the edge of the marbled turbulence below the fall, an area of ceaselessly repatterned eddies which set off the stillness and clarity of the rest of the bay’s surface. The cliffs were blackish, and the volcanic upthrust which had created them had flowed into columns of smooth rock, sombre and massive pillars supporting a frivolous frieze of palm-fronds and garlands of blue flowered creeper among which small parakeets flashed like fishes among seaweed. These cliffs ran through three quarters of a circle, enclosing a space which would have been unspeakably hot under the vertical noon sun but for the mitigating spray from the fall; the fall itself was on
ly about thirty feet high and three or four feet wide, and poured its lacy ribbon down with strange apparent slowness, as though the laws of gravity had been relaxed to conform to by-laws more in keeping with local inertia.

  The final artificiality was negative. There were no hoardings, no neon signs, no tin shacks selling varnished cowries, not even another tourist. An artificial beach, with basting bodies and gaudy umbrellas, would have been more natural than this solitude.

  Dreiser handed Foxe a stubby rod.

  “You’ll have to show me what to do,” said Foxe.

  “You’ll soon learn. I’ll start you off. If we fish over the stern I can cast for you and give you a hand if you’re in trouble, but we’re unlikely to get into anything very big in here. The best ones are round the fall.”

  “Not what I’d choose if I were a fish,” said Foxe.

  “No? In that case you’d stay a little fish, David. Fish go where the food is, and never mind the racket—they are like commuters in a city. The stream that feeds the fall is the sewer for three villages. It is strange, David, that you can think like a monkey or a rat, but not like a fish.”

  Foxe shrugged. His skill, such as it was, lay in thinking like a laboratory animal, not like a rat in a burrow under somebody’s warehouse. But at the moment he was more concerned to think like a tourist. His rats were on holiday too. No more needles prodding into their bellies, no more gates and levers—just a few days of lounging around in their cages, while Foxe reorganised the computer data, then a quick painless death and a deep-freeze shipment back to Europe for dissection. So Foxe deliberately studied the scenery, or thought about the new girl—a tourist she’d better be, not too pretty or amusing so she’d be easy to say goodbye to when her plane was due. Or his.

  “Yes,” said Dreiser, fiddling with bait. “If you look at it you’ll see that the bay is really the bowl of a gigantic lavatory pan.”

  “Let’s hope nobody comes and sits on it while we’re here—you might keep that sort of fantasy to yourself, Fred. Wasn’t there anywhere else where we could have gone to catch fish?”

  “The fish here eat pretty good. Now I’ll cast for you …”

  Dreiser reached across with an arm almost as hairy and angular as a spider’s leg. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt patterned in swirls of orange and cerise. His dark and corvine face was shadowed beneath a floppy linen hat, and his sunglasses were very black. The rod became an extension of his arm, whipping the line to and fro above the boat and then letting it curl forward, lazy as the falls, to mate with the tumbling foam.

  “Easier than it looks,” he said, handing Foxe the rod.

  “Wind it in very slowly. If you feel a bite, snatch the tip up to make the hook bite.”

  Foxe obeyed, his mind elsewhere. The odds were about fifty-fifty, he thought—a German girl, perhaps, but an American for preference, easy-going and insensitive … empty starlit beaches and the silky warm sea … half the world away from the fug of the cluttered room on the sixth floor in the Kemperer Strasse …

  “But it’s not only the fish,” said Dreiser. “I don’t see how they can get a microphone on us here. The fall makes too much noise.”

  “Now, look, Fred …”

  “I got a telex yesterday with your next posting. You’re on two-month loan to the State laboratories on Main Island. Got something?”

  “No. Of course not. I just jerked the thing because you startled me. What on earth …”

  “When you get a bite, try and do that again … uh, David, it’s the first I’ve heard of any State laboratories on Main Island.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me yesterday when you got the telex? Bringing me out here to break the news! Honestly, Fred, I’ve got to say this—I go along with your spy neurosis because it keeps you happy, but mucking about with my life … !”

  “Look at the mouth of the bay. Try to do it naturally.”

  Foxe shrugged and swung round. A little beyond the reefs an orange cruiser had anchored, and a man in a wet suit was preparing to go overboard, while another man was adjusting what looked like a fancy camera on a tripod.

  “Couple of amateur Cousteaus,” he said.

  “That’s a directional mike, David. But I doubt if they’ll be able to tune the falls out.”

  “Oh, come off it. OK, you’ve lived here for years, you know the form, I can’t argue with any of that. But I also know that if the Company’s being mucked about the way you say it is, we’d have pulled out of Hog’s Cay ages ago.”

  “A very good point, David. That’s the key to the whole problem—it even explains why you are here, working on an experiment you know to be valueless. Have you ever asked yourself why the Company is on Hog’s Cay in the first place?”

  “I imagine there are tax advantages. And it makes sense to have the plant here, processing raw materials with cheap labour, rather than shipping them out in bulk. And the labs were set up to look at substances in some of the local flora, I was told.”

  “Yes, that’s all true—but laboratories on our scale, David? We’re a cover, but like any good cover we have to function in our own right.”

  “What are we covering?”

  “Nothing. We were bust three years ago.”

  “You’ll have to explain.”

  “The Company came in here, as you say, to exploit a few raw materials. But … have you ever thought about the nature of a big multinational organisation, David? It can be very interesting. Among other things it has so many secrets, secret formulae, secret activities, secret bargains. Where can it hide them all?”

  “Switzerland, I thought.”

  “Yes, that is one solution. Centralise into a secure country. But if that country isn’t as secure as you thought … Even Roche has been called to account by client governments, you know. Our solution was to spread the danger, to give as few hostages as possible to any one government, to take advantage of a tangle of different legal systems, and so on. A few years back the Southward Islands looked an ideal refuge—that was under President Afenziah—a little country, poor and backward so that a small investment from the Company had a major effect on the economy, and apparently stable. The plant was already in existence, the laboratory only planned. It was enlarged to undertake work of considerable complexity, well away from the rest of the world scientific community. Large scale computer storage facilities were installed, and complex safes. A Director was chosen who had experience of security matters …”

  “You?”

  “Correct, but don’t tell Galdi. You see it suits me to have this thought of as a neurosis—my colleagues are then security conscious to keep me happy, without believing that there are really any secrets to guard.”

  “Ingenious,” said Foxe. He thought so, too. He hadn’t realised that Dreiser’s neurosis had reached that stage of tortuousness where it became one of its own defences against reality.

  “I’ve wound right in now,” he added. “Shall I try and cast?”

  “Better let me do it once more. Put your hands on mine and see if you can get the feel of it.”

  Dreiser laid his own rod down and took Foxe’s while Foxe leaned and twisted across his body. Along the inside of his right forearm he could feel the hard sinews that controlled Dreiser’s wrist sliding with silky precision under the hairy skin. The trick clearly lay in timing the movement of the wrist in relation to the swinging arm, and at the same time feeding the right amount of loose line into the rod. No real problem he thought as he took the rod back—after a bit of practice arm and wrist would learn to move almost by reflex.

  “And then President Afenziah died?” he said, thinking at least to get the story back to verifiable facts. “Assassinated, wasn’t he?”

  “Correct,” said Dreiser calmly. “A good man—in my opinion a great man. Forty-three when he died. He was working in a clove plantation, helping to dig a drainage ditch, on Main Islan
d. That was his style. He had all the cabinet working alongside him. A man came up the road with a mattock, looking like he wanted to help—when the President was working that way you got this crowd of volunteers showing up always. But this man when he came near enough swung his mattock and smashed in Afenziah’s skull. Doctor Trotter—he was Minister of Tourism then—was working nearest to the President. The story is he saw what the man was at a second too late, and then he cut him in two with one swing of his shovel.”

  “Was that true?”

  “Hold it. I’m into something.”

  Dreiser jerked the tip of his rod back, bending it to a straining curve. He flexed it to and fro consideringly, then went on talking while his arms played his catch automatically.

  “True, David? I think so. There was a security blackout at once, a very thorough one. Under Afenziah the secret police were not a big organisation, and certainly not an efficient one, but straight off after he died there was this solid clamp-down, and next thing anyone knew the Trotters had the Islands in their pocket.”

  “You mean they knew it was going to happen before. Who was the man with the mattock?”

  “Officially a Khandhar. You’ve heard of them?”

  Foxe nodded.

  “Well, don’t talk about them on the Island unless you’re covered by a waterfall. They’ve got spokesmen in New York, who’ve always denied the assassination. Their line is that Afenziah had been trying to come to terms with them, and that part of the bargain was he should break the power of the Trotters, and in particular that the money from Hog’s Cay—it was just starting to be opened up for tourism then—should be re-invested in the Islands … which is not how Doctor Trotter played it.”

  He paused to grope for the net in the bottom of the boat. Foxe, who had been paying no attention to his own rod, discovered that the feel of it had changed in his hands and looked down to see that he had wound the weight clean out of the water. He pulled a length of slack line off the reel and started to twitch the tip to and fro, feeding in line as the weight pulled it out. Yes, it was easier than it looked, but not that easy—at one moment the wicked little hooks came whistling past a couple of inches above his head. The final cast snaked out and plopped into the water a bit to the right of the fall.