by Jim Crace
The shout of “Maximum” has not just alerted Maxie. In less time than it takes to say Kapow, you’re dead, Maxie has been thrown to the ground. His cheek and naked chest are on the wet tarmac, a knee is pressed against his shoulder, his hair is bunched and gripped tightly at the back. Automatic guns and tasers are swiveling, fingers on their triggers. Three red laser lights dance on Leonard’s jacket. Fireflies again. They’re shouting at him now, a hubbub of instructions: “Stay where you are,” “Get down, arms out,” and “On your knees.” Three men in combat uniforms are running at him, their nightsticks drawn, their hot breath smoking in the morning chill.
Leonard does not doubt what he should do. Don’t hesitate. Retreat. He turns his back on them and starts toward the waste ground and the safety of the Buzz. It’s Budapest again: his terror is too deep to spot, but he is mute and powerless with fear, hardly able to breathe, let alone walk. He does walk, though, and tries his best to move as nonchalantly as a man who does not understand what hurry means. He aims to be so slow and insubstantial that the red laser lights he knows are trained on him will pass straight through his back and head and pale into the night. Half a second and he’s dead.
Their lasered target succeeds in taking another dozen steps. Before he has reached the corner by the press marquee and the posses of journalists and camera crews just released to inspect and film the hostage house, the three night runners catch the herbivore. The first blow that he takes—a kick, in fact, clinically delivered—is to the back of his calf. It topples him. He’s down before he feels the pain. The second is a knee, rammed into his frozen shoulder. He feels that pain at once, and yells. The third blow is a silencing and stunning punch to the jaw. It clicks his head back sharply, knocks off his beach cap. All he hears is someone shouting, “Make him safe, make him safe.” The men are frisking him, simply pulling out his pockets and pushing their hard fingers into his niches and his angles. “He’s clean and he’s made safe,” one shouts eventually. Another advises, “Keep it easy, lads.” A third, his mouth a centimeter from Leonard’s ear, is whispering, “You hear me, pal? You so much as twitch and you are getting tasered. That’s fifty thousand volts, understand, you fuck? You’ll never want to twitch again. Be a hero or be sensible. Your call.” Leonard cannot know, but it will seem that he is being both.
FRANCINE IS AWAKE BY NOW. Awake and tired. It’s not nearly dawn, but she slips out of bed and looks into the street to see if Leonard has come back with her car. She’s not sure how much time has passed since he went out. It can’t be long. He will have walked to where they parked in less than fifteen minutes. He’ll be back quite soon. She checks her phone: no messages. She speed-dials Leonard’s cell. It’s off. She’d better dress. It will be good to have an early start, get home and make the most of Sunday. She waits at the window, like a trawler man’s wife. The street outside the Woodsman is quiet. The parked cars have it to themselves. Again it’s raining, and the wind has lifted from the east, bringing in a Russian chill that rattles the windows of the room in hostile gusts. It is a Sunday morning wind, the sort that says that it will be okay to stay all day in bed. But this is not a bed for staying in, and so the weather must be faced. She pulls the sash window up and leans out into the cold as far as she can, so that she has views across the rooftops toward Alderbeech. She sees a helicopter and what looks like the hard white glow of floodlights. At once she knows what they must signify—the siege is finally over. Lights, camera, action—that’s how it always goes. So that’s where Leonard is, standing at the barrier and watching. She knows better than to wait for him. When her husband is spectating—at anything from a tennis match in the park to a fight outside a pub—he seems to lose all sense of time. He has to stay and watch from his safe distance until there is no drama left. So Francine settles the hotel bill by posting cash in the early-bird payment safe and sets off toward the car by the route that Leonard is bound to use himself on his return. She expects to spot her Buzz and husband at any moment. She will wave, and he will pull across to let her in and take her home. A pleasing prospect. Everything is pleasing, even the rain. The walk itself is deeply satisfying, and not only because she has escaped that room. She feels unexpectedly young and sensuous. She has not washed or changed her clothes. She has not cleaned her teeth. What makeup she had on last night has smudged across the pillows on the bed. Her lips are bruised from kissing. Her cheeks are wet and flushed. She’s warm and satisfied. In ways she does not even try to understand, the helicopter and the distant blush of lights suggest a rescue she has feared would never come. Everyone is rescued, actually, not only the hostages and not just Lucy Emmerson, rescued from herself, but Leonard and Francine too, and—dare she think it?—Celandine.
It is almost two hours since Leonard left her sleeping. The approach streets to Alderbeech are calm and unpopulated. A typical predawn Sunday. The waste ground has already almost cleared. There are a few detachments of uniformed men there, clearing up, and the mobile lavatories and canteen are still in place, though locked and shuttered. Francine goes directly to the Buzz. There is no sign of Leonard, but that is no surprise. She cuts across the waste ground, past two marquees not noticed on her first visit, and enters the hostage street under the bluish flooding of police lights. She sees at once there is no barrier for Leonard to be spectating behind. It has been dismantled and its parts are piled up on the pavement awaiting collection. For the first time in more than four days the street is open to traffic and pedestrians, but there are none yet. If she were Leonard she would want to see inside the hostage house and investigate the full length of the street. That is where she expects to meet her husband now, on the pavement. She thinks she sees him standing a hundred meters farther down, beyond the lights. She waves and starts in his direction, walking along the far-side path, not even pausing to stare into the house, past the single policeman who is at the gate, keeping guard and getting very wet. He watches her, glad to inspect this attractive older woman, walking with a swing, and relieve the monotony of guard duty by wondering what has made her seem so spirited so early in the day. Apart from this one officer, there’s no activity at the hostage scene. No doubt the policeman’s many colleagues are tired and catching up on sleep. Forensic teams will come in when it’s light, she thinks. Film crews will return to finalize reports. She hurries on, but the figure she has taken for Leonard turns out to be a dog walker, a dog that barks and warns her off. She’ll wait for Leonard in the car. She’s sure she has a spare key in her bag.
On her return—on the nearer pavement—she does stop to stare into the house. It seems untouched, determinedly undramatic, dull. Most of the curtains have been drawn. The only light is in the porch. The only movement is a cloud of moths. It’s hard to even dream up a figure standing in the shadows, holding a gun at shoulder height and pointing it at Leonard in the street, as he’s imagined it: Kapow. You’re scathed. Kapow. You’re dead!
“All over?” she asks the policeman.
“Done and dusted,” he replies.
“Anybody hurt?”
“One of our guys took a tumble. Family wasn’t touched. Three individuals in custody, and hardly a scratch on them. All foreigners. That’s about the size of it. Nice work all round. Top job.”
Francine offers him her widest smile and keeps on smiling as she crosses the street, heading for the entrance to the waste ground by the two marquees. It is there that she spots, with immediate alarm, what looks like Leonard’s yellow beach cap swept up among the litter, the recent pile of paper coffee cups, pop cans, and takeaway wrappers. She doesn’t pick it up at once but turns it with her foot, expecting to discover some other logo on its peak—but no, its slogan is QUEUE HERE, just like Leonard’s. Now she bends for it. The cap is damp and heavy in her hands, caked with mud. She shakes and stretches it, then turns it inside out, hoping not to find her husband’s stage name, Lennie Less, inked along the rim.
15
THE WONKY, UNEDITED VIDEO of Leonard’s detention in Alderbeech during the ea
rly hours of the morning is greeted by clapping and whoops when it is first aired on the wall screens of NSF’s debooting and debriefing rooms. There’s little else of dramatic interest for the news networks to broadcast and nothing else for the armed incident squads, now going off-duty, to applaud; the hostage rescue itself was disappointingly routine, with at best a bit of shouting but not a shot fired or a punch thrown. So Leonard’s late, unheralded appearance on the street was a godsend in a way. The weirdo in the yellow cap provided their only opportunity, after more than four days of dreary vigilance, to let off a bit of steam. “That’s copybook, that is,” one of the officers calls out, as the intruder is brought to the ground in three easy movements. “Step up, those men. Rosettes all round.”
Elsewhere in the building, in the rooms above the custody suite where the four detainees are being held in separate cells, the responses among members of the NSF command team are not so celebratory. It’s not only that the first broadcasters of the video, already syndicated round the world, have failed to pixilate the faces of the arresting officers. That is an easy fix. A phone call, or a text reminder of the National Security Standards in Broadcasting, and it’s dealt with. There are greater problems, less easy to massage or to solve. What is now clear is that what they flagged up as “a delicate and risky” security operation has proved to be an embarrassing anticlimax. According to the brisk report just delivered to them by the duty CO, the siege could have been ended much earlier “by a couple of coppers on a tandem.” When the armed squads stormed in, according to the first reports, everyone inside the hostage house—the family, the gang—was asleep. It was Operation Wakey-Wakey, not so much Shock and Awe as Rouse and Arrest. All but one of the hostage-takers’ guns were soon discovered to be replicas, and the single working revolver was unloaded, with no trace so far of any spare ammunition. There were no barricades, no booby traps, no ropes, just evidence of takeaway food, the stink of cigarettes, and unusual tidiness. A jigsaw puzzle of London’s Tower Bridge lay almost completed on the living room table. Add to that yesterday’s tip-off from NADA that the Emmerson kidnapping and SOFA’s grim threats of “an eye for an eye” were nothing but a stunt, and the whole standoff begins to look absurd. “No need to make any of that public. Yet,” one of the team says. “Embargo it.” Unfavorable details such as these can be buried in the minutiae of the official incident report, he suggests. And the report itself can be delayed for a week or so, at least until the public and the press have lost interest, as they will.
It is less easy, though, to know how to handle the embarrassment of the wonky video, especially with the summit leaders scheduled to discuss freedom and security in two days’ time and all the world’s press already in town and hungry for a British story to tide them over. What is needed, just to offer balance, is a strip of film showing a heroic and risky intervention by the NSF. A few injured officers paraded for the cameras would help. But there is nothing. They can’t even hope anymore for some drama associated with a rescue or release of Lucy Emmerson. Some shots of a pretty teenager, hurt possibly but certainly tearful, would have played well on the newscasts. Instead, the nation is getting up to watch three of the security force’s celebrated “burly bastards” knocking to the ground, with what commentators are already describing as excessive force, a shabby, middle-aged member of the British public who is guilty of little more than straying.
The command team plays and replays the video footage, looking for a PR spin but finding none. The liberty lobbies are going to have a field day. No question about it, the first kick is rule-breaking; this civilian is clearly offering no threat. He’s walking off, in fact. The man’s back is turned. His arms are down. He is not attempting to run. That kick cannot be justified. Nor can any of the subsequent blows: a knee in the back and a fist to the chin are not appropriate, especially given that the target is offering no resistance and is, to use the parlance of the force, already tarmacadamized. The video’s sound track—enhanced by NSF techs—is little help. It worsens matters, actually. It can’t be long before the news networks enhance the audio for themselves and hear exactly what was whispered full to camera into the arrested and incapacitated man’s ear as he lay stunned on the ground: “You so much as twitch and you are getting tasered. That’s fifty thousand volts, understand, you fuck?”
“Yes, understood—and all too bloody well.” The officer turns off the telescreen. “That’s bloody tasered us, that’s what that’s done.” The other commanders shake their heads in glum agreement. This is a mess. A classic case of excessive and unwarranted, which at best will earn the NSF another roasting in the liberal press—especially when it transpires, as it must, that their captive was not a danger at all but just a nosy parker—and at worst will have its payoff on the streets. Riots, possibly. The mood is jittery already. And it could escalate. The “demo mob” has a hero and a martyr now.
“What was he doing there, anyway?”
The duty CO checks his report sheet. “Picking up his car, it says.”
Leonard has not yet seen the news reports or video. He has been sleeping for an hour or so, despite his bruises and the narrowness of the banquette in the custody cell. The night’s events are tumbling. He makes no sense of them. He mostly dreams of Maxie crashing through the windscreen of the Buzz. But when the command team sends for him, he’s dreaming that he and Maxie have escaped from Alderbeech. Together. Bullets wing the car at first. Then they find themselves in empty neighborhoods with no one in pursuit. “I came for you,” he says to Maxie, the streetlights turning into stars, a sudden blast of light. “Comrade Leon saves your sorry arse.”
The sudden blast of light comes from a set of interrogation lamps, pointing toward the ceiling. The duty CO stands at the end of the banquette, grinning stiffly and holding Leonard’s coat, belt, and shoes and an envelope containing his cell, ID fob, and keys. His instructions are to bring Mr. Lessing up to the visitors’ lounge without his seeing a television screen and to sit him in the soft-backed chair facing the window, out of harm’s way. It is here that he is served a canteen breakfast on a tray while the service paramedic dresses and photographs his wounds and makes light of “the rugby damage” he’s received. A middle-ranking female officer has been instructed to placate and scold the prisoner before releasing him. He should leave the building persuaded that it’s best to make no fuss. Certainly any complaint for wrongful arrest or a claim for damages would be “mischievous and unwarranted.” She shakes Leonard’s hand and offers her regrets for the “necessarily firm” treatment he received. The three men responsible have already been suspended from all duties, she explains, glad to see that he looks surprised and guilty when he hears the news. But the truth is that Mr. Lessing has been foolhardy, in her view and in the view of anyone who saw him on the street this morning. Straying into the middle of a security operation is never wise. But—she’s checked—he has not broken any laws. “We can congratulate ourselves,” she adds, pleased with her bantering tone and the phrasing she practiced before walking into the lounge, “that this is still a nation where straying is not a crime but merely inadvisable. And inconsiderate. And best not repeated.” There will be more questions to be answered, possibly, but not in custody. He can expect a home visit, perhaps. But in the meantime, it might be better, judicious even, if “discretion is allowed to rule the day, on both our sides. We will not be releasing your details to the press, out of consideration for your privacy.”
She does not say that her next task is to preempt any problem he might cause by ghost-briefing some of the NSF’s pet dependents in the press, telling them what she’s learned from a NADA leak just a few minutes ago: that this Leonard Lessing might not be as squeaky as he seems. Somehow he’s linked to Maxim Lermontov and to the not-so-missing girl. He has history as a militant, some Texan connection. He is known to be someone who has provided information to the police. He’s been spotted in a cafeteria with Mrs. Emmerson. Foolhardy, indeed. She shakes his hand again. “Now, let us reunite you with yo
ur vehicle, Mr. Lessing. You look as if you’d benefit from …” She pauses, judges that she’d better not be personal. “From forty winks.”
Francine is sleeping in the car, her mouth hanging open like a child’s, when Leonard is finally returned to the now almost vacated waste ground a little before 10 a.m. She must have checked out of the room as soon as it was light and waited at the Buzz for his return, not panicking, even though his cell was off, but finding comfort in logical and reassuring explanations for his absence, as he’d expect of her. She’s always level-headed when she has to be. His yellow cap is clutched in her hand, he sees. That’s puzzling, although he can’t say why. He has to reel back through the events of the morning before he recalls losing it and where. It’s all a haze at first. He can clearly remember the early walk through Alderbeech, the conversations that he had—“What are you? Press?”—the two marquees, the engulfing shadows of the garden wall. Each step of it is still crisp in his memory. It’s crisp until the fireflies start to glow. But when the mayhem begins, the snatch squads and the stun grenades, the heavy boots, the heavy fists, the hoisting of his body in the air, the impact of the metal wagon into which he’s thrown, the shouting and the threats, he cannot concentrate or be certain of the details. Is that concussion or champagne? Is it himself or Maxie Lermon whom he can half remember crashing to the ground? The scene itself has lost its definition. Victim and witness are the same. All he remembers now is haste and pain. Everything is physical.
Leonard rubs his chin. It’s dislocated, possibly. It’s tender, for sure, from the tip into the jawline. It is as though the stubble hurts. Now he more clearly remembers being punched—rubbing the injury has helped—and how the sudden, expert blow clicked his head back sharply. That’s the moment his cap came off. He has it now. The pain shot through his face and shook his forehead with such force that his cap detached and dropped into the street … where Francine picked it up. Finding her husband’s cap but without her husband under it must have unnerved her, surely. It would have been a shock. He’s touched that she has bothered to retrieve it, even though she hates the cap—“That filthy thing”—dislikes all hats on men, and has threatened many times to chuck it in the bin. He needs to believe that she was worried for him just a bit. He looks for signs of anxiety on her sleeping face. But there are none. She looks serene and comfortable for once. Perhaps she fell asleep as soon as she sat in the Buzz and hasn’t realized that he’s been missing for—what? Almost six hours now.
