In World City (13 page)

Faced with the possibility of having to lay off two-thirds of the staff, William Burger went to the Ageing Initiative and asked for additional funding. They were reluctant. Some of the pension funds were going through a bad patch and, like the pharmaceutical companies, they wanted to keep the animal work at a distance. The Ageing Initiative dragged its feet and skilled staff began to leave. Miranda Whitlam went to her father and put a plan to him. Accordingly, he arranged to divert further income from some of his assets into an obscure charity foundation he had long cultivated. The foundation provided a package to sustain the work of the institute and Miranda Whitlam was appointed director. She was twenty-nine.

Dion brought Leo electronics, so Leo told him to specialise in electronics. “You're still a kid so you work with kids' stuff. You can move on to something more serious when you're good and ready. You will be.”

At first, Leo had him working mark-down shops on the outer edges of World City. Music centres, hand computers, organisers, even food processors all came across the dereliction via Dion. They were sold back to other mark-down shops, which paid a percentage for the privilege of being able to buy from Leo and, in return, were left unmolested. Dion was found a corner on top of a stained, overcrowded apartment block close up to the border between the Waste and World City. The corner might have been set aside to contain machinery – an air-conditioning unit perhaps that had long been sold to scrap. There was only a dribble of water came down the walls when it rained hard, and in winter the heat from the lower floors kept the little space tolerably warm. Dion taped up his picture of the jungle-clad island on the driest of the walls. Otherwise, there was just a bedroll and a pile of old electronics magazines that he could call his own. Dion was starting at the bottom but he knew Leo's executives could live well enough. He was attracted to the position of executive and to the good-living executive status merited.

Dion was looked after, to some extent and for a small consideration, by an old Asian lady who lived down the stairs that led up to his little cubicle. From her, he learned something of the sociology of the Waste. She said, “I will not ask you where your money comes from, young man. Nobody asks questions like that around here. But I get mine properly, in the same way that my parents got theirs, and their parents before them. It is enough, and enough is all that I need. Ten percent I save, twenty percent I give to the building cooperative, sixty percent buys me my food and the last ten percent I give to Our Lady of Luck. You did not know that, young man? Well, you have much to learn. That is how respectable people live in these parts and most of us are respectable. There are some who are not, however,” she added, looking accusingly at Dion.

She took his money, nevertheless, and he would sit watching her cook their meal when he had nothing else to do. He became aware, as she arranged her cooking pots, her chopping board, her knives and spices, that the way she moved was familiar. It was some time before he began to make the connection.

“Why do you do it that way?” he asked, as his suspicions gathered. She gave an impatient click of her tongue, which he took as a demand for silence. After she had completed her cutting, she turned and looked at him. He repeated, “Why do you do it that way? You always cut the onions and things with seven cuts. You always place the pot on the left and the cutting board on the right, so you have to move from right to left even though you're right-handed. There's a whole lot else you do that I can't make out, but it's not like you're just getting the job done. There's other stuff you're doing as well.”

She regarded him, secure in a superior knowledge. “You, young man, are ignorant. And you will stay ignorant in the company you keep. Those men – they feed off the people with money. They feed like fleas off a dog. Dog's blood is all they bring back here. Dog dies, fleas die. But the respectable people here are different. We know the luck that rules the world.”

Dion learned that the poor spent their money on offerings to Our Lady of Luck, which took the form of lottery-ticket purchases and comprised the Waste's principal activity. Not bread, but attempts to manipulate probability were the staff of life. On his first expedition into the Waste, Dion had noticed the peculiar organic energy this imparted to the groups of people who, he now knew, were interminably discussing new ways of influencing the Waste's patron saint.

Apart from Leo's company men and the few others like them, all inhabitants of the Waste lived to explore new invocatory protocols. It had been one such exploration Dion had seen in the old lady's cooking, and she had reminded him of his grandmother. But, for all his distance from his grandmother, he could still recognise the protocols of the Waste as no more than simulations. His grandmother's passes and incantations had been the expression of something alive and unseen and there had been a power in them he had been able to feel. By contrast, the rituals the dwellers in the Waste contrived for themselves felt empty.

The old Asian lady spoke often about how she got her money properly, but she never told Dion how this was. It was only by talking to a sour-faced man who lived three floors down and never seemed to go out that Dion learned the Waste was supported by the federal government. The man growled at Dion, “It's cheap. Ghettoise the poor, withdraw basic services, law and order, all that – and pay some of the credit you save directly back to the people to give them a subsistence living they can spend on government lotteries. This is the Waste – like in ‘waste bin' – only most of the fools around here don't see it like that. They think they're special. Pray to Our Lady of Luck – Our Lady of Fuck. No, I don't have the stomach for crime. Wish I had. The authorities don't mind it carrying on at a reasonable level. It gives them an excuse for tying up World City even tighter – more electric fences and closed-circuit televisions. One hundred video eyes on every corner – always one of them awake.”

*

Dion progressed in the company. He was able to take the casual brutality because, rightly, he guessed that if he kept on the job, the brutality would give way to tolerance. It might even progress to respect, but he could wait for that.

What he couldn't take though was the calculated, deliberate, unremitting brutality that continued to be handed out to him by one man, long after all the others had taken to tolerating him. The man was called Maskel and he talked to Dion like Miranda Whitlam's man had talked to him. When the other company men told Maskel to go more easy on the boy, Maskel simply went at him the harder, only he hid it more. He talked about Dion as black filth when others couldn't hear instead of when they could. He hit Dion when others weren't looking instead of when they were. Dion used all his skill to try and avoid Maskel. Maskel was one of Leo's top executives, so Dion wasn't going to hit back in a hurry, but he felt the strain begin to tell.

One time, when he was safely immersed in the group of men around the fire, Dion heard Maskel say to Leo, “Leo, this is chicken shit we're working with here. We need to get an operation going in World City, something with a bit more return on it.”

Maskel went on for some time like that, but all Leo would say in reply was that the time wasn't right. Dion heard the edge in Leo's voice and thought that maybe Leo might not like Maskel so much after all. Dion got Leo out of hearing of the others and said, “I can't stand that Maskel. He's making my life hell. Can't you get him to lay off me, Leo?”

Leo looked at him and smiled with all the warmth of a winter sun shining through ice. He said, “You work with Maskel from now on.”

When they first went out on a job together, Maskel said, “What I like about Leo is his sense of humour.”

Maskel hit Dion less but abused him more. “You lickshit little nigger boy, you love it don't you. Makes you feel like the slave you are. That's why you don't open your mouth at me. You just love it.”

Dion looked meek and thought about ways of killing Maskel. He studied the man, examined the way he had to push every encounter with anyone just to see what gave, and he took in the way Maskel went unchallenged and took in his overconfidence. It was this overconfidence that had Maskel looking the other way when Dion, under the guise of needing a piss after a particularly tight job, reached into the hole where he had hidden the gun and, holding it in both hands with the muzzle a foot from the base of Maskel's skull, pulled the trigger. The sound was enormous and Dion had a vague memory of bits of head flying around. He ran without looking back. After he had dropped the gun down a hole where no one would ever find it, he was convulsively sick.

Dion had just wanted Maskel non-existent, so he did what was necessary to achieve that. There was no drama, no confrontation, no change of heart, not even a twist of fate that disposed of Maskel without Dion having to get blood on his hands, like so often happened to heroes in the videos. Dion told Leo they had been tracked by some would-be competition and Maskel had been shot. Leo's only reaction was a raised eyebrow so Dion assumed such things must happen from time to time.

*

Soon Dion had his own band of boys doing the kids' stuff, while he learned about corporate operations. The key to it was that every World City enterprise had somebody sufficiently disaffected to open the doors for Leo's men. All the traitor would need was enough credit to get clean away as soon as the police got too close. And every corporation was more than happy to buy whatever their principal competitor's traitor succeeded in ‘liberating'.

Remembering what Maskel had once said, Dion said to Leo, after he had removed the business suit that had just got him unnoticed into a smart hotel lobby and through to the latest corporate traitor, “This is working at a high level. Why don't we move into World City?”

“Too many eyes in there,” Leo said, gazing into the fire from out of the glacial-blue wastes of his interior. “You have to start killing if you want to make headway in World City. We're left alone out here. Some even see our operation as necessary. I'm not into killing anyway. It generates too much feeling.”

“Have you ever killed anyone, Leo?”

“I don't know.” Leo allowed a dark, humourless smile to pass across his face.

“What do you mean – you don't know?”

“Most people I want dead get themselves killed anyway.”

Dion saw the slightest twinkle in Leo's eyes – light on ice crystals – and he thought of Maskel.

“So you've not really killed anyone yourself,” Dion challenged.

He wanted to push Leo in some way. How could the man be so fucking cold?

“I put a bullet through my father's head.”

Leo paused to take in Dion's shock, before he laughed his most mirthless laugh.

“The doctor had pronounced him dead. My father's last wish was that I shoot him through the head before they took him away. He was terrified of being burned or buried alive. Maybe he was alive when I shot him.”

“When was that?”

“When I was thirteen. It was the old bastard's parting gift to me. Maybe he knew I'd enjoy doing it.”

“What was he like?”

“A bastard. He had this little family of weak people he could do what he liked with. And he could lie his way out of it if he went over the top and damaged one of us too much. He was a good liar, my father. He knew the kind of things the rest of the world wanted to hear. And he knew what he wanted to do behind the lies – which was beat the shit out of frightened people. That's what he enjoyed. That's what he lived for. It meant he didn't walk out on us, though, like most men do. He just died instead.”

“You ever think about dying?”

“Never. It's enough for me to get by from one moment to the next.”

Sometime later, a contract team came out of World City, triangulated the patch of waste ground where Leo's fire burned and blew his head apart while he stood gazing into the flames. Someone had refused to recognise the necessity of his operation. Leo's company reorganised into a working affiliation of specialities. Dion took on the electronics' workers and the patch of waste ground. He was twenty-nine.

Dion's eyes narrow: perhaps there is a change in the light or the way the wind is blowing. Then from a doorway in the crumbling facade of the building opposite a figure scuttles out. The head and face are hooded against the rain. All that can be seen is a shapeless huddle of blanket which, judging by the height, is wrapped around a child. Dion shudders. Why is she, of all people, sending him a child?

The figure crosses the road and comes to the perimeter fence. Its head turns up and the face of a young boy, black, not yet ten years old stares straight at him. Then the hood comes down and the bundle makes off towards the hotel entranceway. Dion pauses before turning from the window. The face had seemed eerily familiar. But he is haunted by such faces – faces of a group of kids, gathered around him looking for a lead, waiting for Miranda Whitlam to arrive and turn them into something different.

Dion remembers those kids – deprived on every level but fighting for life with a tenacity that now seems beyond him. He even finds himself wishing he had been born as one of them. He can remember perfectly the childhood of these other children, can remember them racing around the derelict land where the fire still burned after he had inherited it from Leo. But his own childhood is beyond recall. It might have been comfortable and secure, some good times, nothing remarkable. But there is a veil comes down whenever he tries to remember, a discontinuity between his past and present, as if he no longer has the faculties to recover his formative experiences. He can remember nothing of them. Perhaps they were appalling. He turns back and looks into the room. His eye catches the painting of a jungle-clad atoll. For a moment he sees it differently, more like a poster hanging on a stained wall. Then the impression is gone and he is merely looking at another hotel room.