Ruin Nation (22 page)

“... and
you
claim to be the Chief of Police,” Calamari continues. “Well, let’s examine that statement a little closer.”

“Yes, lets!” says
Malmot, making yet another unexpected entrance. The door slams behind him, the air turns grey around him. He steps forward, we take two paces back. He has
that effect
. “What
exactly
are you chief of? A thriving black-market economy, perhaps? How nice. My
official
economy barely exists.”

“Sounding bitter,” Durham jeers.

“You’ve also got your dirty mitts on drugs, firearms, prostitution and people trafficking. Lucky you. I’ve got the ability to raise taxes that nobody pays.”

“You got the Army,” Durham spits bitterly. “You got
our
Army!”

“I
rebuilt
the Army,” Malmot corrects, “from damn-near nothing. And now the hard work’s done, you want to take it all away from me.” And he pauses. “You know, it’s the sense of betrayal that hurts the most.” And he sighs. And he smacks his former comrade in the mouth with a glass ashtray.

“What the hell is this about?” I whisper to a dark shadow standing next to me. But they don’t know either. I figure all will become clear eventually. But how long does ‘eventually’ take.

“You don’t deserve an army,” Durham taunts through split lips and crimson gushings. Malmot considers his response.

“I hope you like hanging by your ankles, because we’re going to lunch. So do try not to breathe in too much blood. Can’t have you drowning on us, can we?” He’s halfway out the door when he adds, “Oh, and just one more thing before we leave, something to mull over: We found your little subterranean bunker. Bit of a health risk. Full of vermin. So we
fumigated
it for you. No, don’t thank me. Do be a dear though, and sign this.”

“What is it?”

“It’s the bill. Gas doesn’t come cheap, you know. Still, you can always redirect the money from your wages bill. After all, it’s much smaller now.”

And so we adjourn to the canteen. I’ve no notion what we’ll return to. I don’t recall what I eat. I just remember fighting to keep it down.

“Ah! Still alive, I see. Excellent!” says
Malmot clasping his hands together. “Well, I feel we got a little sidetracked earlier. So let’s start again, shall we, and explain why such a loyal servant of His Majesty should find himself snatched in the middle of the night.”

“Yes, do please,” snarls a sarcastic Durham.

“Well, it seems a number of your more senior Brownshirts were involved in a little incident at Battencross Manor the other day.”

“The crowd control officers you requested?”

“The men
I
made you lend me
. Yes.”

“And you know how much I hate the fact you can make me do that, don’t you?”

“Yes, it’s half the reason I do it. There has to be some perks to running the country. Anyway, it seems your boys went a little bit mental, assassinated Lord Battencross and would have moved on to the guests if Jupiter here hadn’t interrupted them.”

Durham shoots me a seething look.

“My men
don’t
go mental. You set them up!” he spits.

“Yes, I did rather,”
Malmot sneers. “But that’s what I do to young gentlemen with orders to kill me.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” says Durham.

“Audio!” Malmot orders and a disembodied voice fills the room. It’s Spencer, the Brownshirt thug I supposedly executed:

“He’ll be there, skulking in the background somewhere. When we’ve fulfilled all our contractual obligations, so to speak, we grab the old bastard by the shoulders and ram him, head first, through the windscreen. Make it look like a traffic smash. Simple as...”

“And you’re sure about this?” asks an unknown voice.

“Sure as sure. Chief D’s orders, straight from the beetle’s backside, as they say.”

“You can see,” Malmot teases, “the esteem in which your men hold you.” And when Durham makes a disrespectful noise, he subjects him to an unpleasant procedure. What happens next? Well, once again, I have the transcript. It’ll be quicker if you read it out:

MALMOT: Now, if you’ll just stop burbling blood and let me finish…

DURHAM: Yes. [Sarcastic] Sorry.

M: Okay. Now, what would you say if I said I had evidence that you were behind the murder?

D: I know what you want me to say. You want me to confess. I won’t, though.

M: You won’t? Well, what if I was to show you… In fact, I
will
show you! Look at this! It’s a flowchart! See this heading: ‘Bloodbath at Battencross Manor’ – it feeds into a box marked ‘Class Warfare’ before splitting off into two possible directions: ‘Death and Glory’ and ‘Complete Proletariat Revolution’.

D: All of which has nothing to do with me.

M: Well, you can
say
that, but if you look here, next to the caption, ‘Our Wise and Benevolent Ruler’, someone’s drawn a picture of you wearing a big crown.

D: No one will believe I did that.

M: You dress as an insect for sex. People will believe anything about you.

D: But… But…

M: No buts. Someone stab him with something.

D:
Aaaaah!

M: That’s for planning to kill me. Now, about this Revolution.

D: There is no Revolution! You know that as well as I do!

M: But, if there’s no Revolution, how can there be a Counter Revolution?

D: I… Aaaaagggggh!

M: Exactly. Now, listen to me. I said,
listen
to me, Durham! If you stop wailing then you might find this interesting. You see, in a few weeks time – not sure of the date, but it’ll probably be a Friday – a group of men dressed suspiciously like your bullyboys will start a vicious protest against democracy.

D: Why?

M: Haven’t worked that out either. Some kind of scandal or something. Anyway… There’ll be all kinds of violent mischief, culminating in the armed occupation of New Downing Street. They’ll have about two hours to declare a new government with a stupid name, issue some weird decrees, make themselves thoroughly unpopular, before I invoke the Emergency Powers Act. You remember what that is, don’t you?

D: Yes. We used it before. It’s a license for you to declare martial law.

M: It is. And the first thing I’ll do is flatten Number Ten with the ‘Brownshirts’ inside it.

D: But you’ll be killing your own agents.

M: No, there’s an escape tunnel. I’ll be killing members of your extended family I bus in specifically to provide bodies. But that’s by the by. Martial Law means no more fannying around with Parliament and crappy old democracy – just the rule of my iron fist!

Oh, remember the old days, when we reclaimed London and toasted our success from the top of a Chieftain tank?! It’ll be like that. Only, this time, I’ll be up on the turret and you’ll be smeared all over the tracks!
Hurrah!

All Present:
Hurrah!

M:
And then it’s onwards and upwards toward
official
dictatorship! Not sure which way we’re headed yet. Could be socialist – you’d like that, wouldn’t you? – or perhaps we’ll go goose-stepping off in the fascist direction? I haven’t decided. Perhaps we’ll do
both
, like the Castro boys’ Cuba: set off to the left and end up marching back on ourselves from the right!

I hate it when conversation gets too political. Throw in a smattering of Finance talk and you’ll find me staring out the window thinking about sun-dappled woodland and fast-flowing streams full of trout.

Meanwhile, back in the real world,
Malmot’s talking about establishing a Corporate State. Every country needs to stand on its own economic feet, he says. But Durham believes our economy is based upon the production of cheap alcohol, counterfeit clothing and reliant on poseurs drinking themselves to death. With that in mind, why not play to our strengths and open England as a massive tourist resort?

He mentions Cuba again and someone else mentions that tourists bring in fresh DNA.

“And you’ll need DNA if you’re going down the fascist route,” says Durham, “because too much of this Far-Right-Racial-Purity malarkey and you’ll end up as a nation of window-lickers.”

“It’s a fair point,” says
Malmot. “But there’s one other business option we haven’t considered yet.”

“And what’s that?”

“Warmongering. We’ve nothing better to do.”

We stand in hushed silence. We’re a hundred years behind the rest of the world in weapons technology and starting a war would be suicide. But that’s for the future to decide. We’re here to interrogate the prisoner,
Malmot reminds us, and soon we’re back into his alternate reality of Revolution and Counter-revolution.

“I didn’t put King William back on the throne to have you haul him off and guillotine him!” he snarls.

Well, we won’t be leaving until Durham ‘confesses’ his involvement in something or other. So I decide to get out of here. In mind, if not in body. I picture myself on the banks of a crystal-clear Estonian lake, eating beef sandwiches with a new wife and the children I don’t have yet. We’re all smiling and no one’s drunk. But Durham can scream louder than I can think and soon the kids are screaming, too. And I consider that God must have been in an exceptionally malicious mood when he gave misery a broadcast frequency.

Well there’s nothing for me to do until Durham signs his confession, and he can’t sign it till Malmot’s finished making it up. But instead of sitting down and applying himself to the damn document, the evil wraith’s left his beetle friend to stew in a blindfold and earmuffs and decided to drive me home in his great big, horrible car. Is he going to kill me? There’s no chauffeur, no bodyguards and, when I do tune into the damned weird noise he calls his voice, I get the distinct impression he’s attempting to be friendly. I don’t like being in enclosed spaces with him. I find the whole experience distinctly unnerving. Why’s everyone rushing to confide in me all of sudden? Do I look like a sympathetic listener? More likely, it’s because I’m unknown and expendable. There’s no way I can use their secrets against them.

“You know what
bugs
me about Durham? Get it?
Bugs
me?!” he jokes. I get the feeling I should laugh. I manage some kind of chuckle, but my thoughts are back in the interrogation room.

“But seriously,” he continues. “I’ve sent some good tarts that man’s way and he always turns them down. It’s a small thing in the scheme of things, but it registers on a subconscious level. It’s suspicious. We know he likes women; you caught him with one. But I wonder if knows what to do with them? I mean, in a conventional sense? Has he ever had penetrative sex? Or does he just rub buttocks in a nest of wood shavings?

“An army may march on his stomach but it thinks with its balls. There’s only so much space in a testicle, Jupiter, and if it’s full of semen then there’s no room for ideas. Full bollocks, empty head. You can’t trust a man who doesn’t ejaculate regularly because his brains are being squashed. It makes him prone to all kinds of peculiar notions. Dressing up as an insect being one of them.”

“I understand,” I lie.

“He was a good soldier, you know; brutal, completely amoral, not much of a personality so to speak, but a brilliant organiser. Very efficient.”

We turn a corner into some rough-looking part of town I don’t recognise.

“This car’s armoured. The tyres are reinforced,” he tells me and sets about mowing down pedestrians to demonstrate. Some go over the top, some go underneath. Again, I suspect I’m becoming desensitised.

“Have you read Machiavelli?” he asks.

“I’ve read ‘The Prince’ and it was…”

“It’s pretty dull, isn’t it? Not half as juicy as you’re led to expect.”

“To be honest, Sir, it bored the tits off me.”

“But you remember the part about Borgia and Ramiro De
Orco?”

“Not entirely, Sir.”

We turn another corner. More dull thuds, more flying bodies.

“See! Windscreen’s not even chipped! Anyway… Borgia makes De
Orco governor of Romagna. 1501 A.D I believe. De Orco’s a vicious psychopath and Borgia tasks him to reduce crime by any means necessary. And he does it, but makes both Borgia and himself pretty unpopular in the process. So Borgia has the clever idea of hacking his governor in half and leaving the bits on the piazza at Cesena with a block of wood and a sticky knife. It’s an open secret who did it.

“Well, the masses think this is marvellous because cruel De
Orco’s dead. And Borgia thinks this is marvellous because he has both law and order and immense popularity.”

“And was Durham to be your De
Orco?”

“Once he’d cleaned up the streets, yes.”