Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales (5 page)

‘How did you do it? The assassination?’ she asked.

‘Oh, he’s not dead yet, but he will be.’

‘How? Did you poison the statuettes?’

Niccolò shook his head.

‘No, I gave him a gift—an imperfect gift. Perfection is an obsession with him. Now he is caught in a cycle of madness. He will not destroy the gift, for the angels have his face and it would be like destroying himself. Yet one of the figures mocks him—resembles him in a crude way, but actually has the face of a monkey. Without this figure the ring of angels is incomplete, an obscenity—three hundred and thirty-two statuettes. The pattern on the marble is broken, the circle unfinished, yet with it, the art is marred, twisted into a joke of which he is the brunt.

‘He will go mad, it will destroy him.’

Her eyes were round.

‘You’re sure of that?’

‘I’m certain of it. He loved my mother very much—my friend the sage Cicaro was there at the time—but he had her executed after my birth, because... because her beauty was marred.’

‘In what way?’

‘Stretch marks,’ said Niccolò. ‘In giving birth to me, she was left with stretch marks on her abdomen. He destroyed her because she was imperfect, blemished by a natural act of which he himself was the author. He killed someone he loved because of his madness for perfection. Now he will destroy himself—he’s caught in the web of his own vanity. He
has
to have the circle of angels, for they immortalise his youth and beauty, yet he cannot have them, because one of them is a mockery. He will rage, he will consume himself with frustration and fury. He will destroy himself...’

‘You are a genius,’ she said.

‘I am... subtle.’

They stood, watching the water sliding beneath the craft, as darkness fell. When it became cooler, once the sun had finally gone, she put her arm around him.

 
Written during my years in Hong Kong, where I used to watch the black drongos fighting amongst themselves. Hong Kong was seething with ideas for short stories one just had to reach up and pluck them from the air.

So what you want to do is take Marcia’s personality and put it in the body of a bird?’ said Steve. ‘What are you trying to create, some monster freak? Some creature that’ll think, like...like

Marcia?’ We were at dinner, just the three of us, in a small restaurant off Mody Road in Tsim Sha Tsui. My brother Steve and his girlfriend Marcia were flying out of Hong Kong the next day. They were going on a business holiday, to some remote place in the Philippines, which was incidentally Marcia’s homeland.

I explained patiently, ‘I’m not transferring her psyche,
Steve,
there are laws against that. All I want to do is copy Marcia’s persona, and superimpose it upon that of the drongo.’

‘Okay Einstein, what’s the difference?’ he said.

‘Her persona is simply her personality. A
psyche
is someone’s conscious and unconscious, someone’s
mind
or
self,
if you like. I’m not allowed to screw around with psyches, although it is possible to make a transfer under controlled conditions. Only the GRL, the Government Research Labs, are permitted to dabble in that. This won’t hurt her in the least, and she’ll have the satisfaction of knowing she’s furthering my studies of behaviour patterns in wild birds.’

‘What if I don’t want you to mess around with my girl’s persona?’

‘Stevie...’ said Marcia, in that soft voice she has, but he cut her off, with, ‘No, wait,
I
want to hear what Einstein here has to say about it. You just keep quiet for a minute. No, I’m sorry Marcia, this is for me to decide whether it’s right for you to do this or not. You don’t understand these things like we do.’

Steve can be a real pain in the ass, when he wants to be, which is most of the time, but he is my brother and I put up with him because I love him. He is unbelievably insecure, and this manifests itself in hostility and aggression. Tonight, he was being nice: any other time he would have blown his stack and started throwing things around the room. He always mellowed a little prior to travel, gradually becoming as pliant as he would ever be with Marcia, or any woman.

Men could take him better than women: they recognised the apprehensive hunter-gatherer in him as something they had within themselves, though often not to the same extreme. Steve was one of those people who believed you had to prove yourself all the time, against the competition. If you didn’t, you would be taken advantage of, and eaten alive. They would fall on you like jackals while you were exposed to them. You had to keep your defences up, show them you were a man to be reckoned with, never let them see your vulnerability.

He played squash as if to lose would mean the guillotine. He was merciless against business rivals. My older brother was still living in a world where you clubbed a man senseless and took his meat and his woman and made sure you felt damn good about it. Any weakness in you would be exploited, and you would become carrion for the vultures.

I did not consider Steve a
bad
man, and most other men liked his company, many women too if they were the kind who preferred being told what to do, but there were others who considered him an aggressive thick-skinned bull.

I hadn’t told Steve that the reason I wanted Marcia’s persona, as opposed to any other, was because of my observations of their
relationship
. Steve had always been a bully, and the person who took the brunt of his obnoxious behaviour, was Marcia. She, on the other hand, had soaked up his abuse with not a flicker of annoyance or retaliation. I used to sit and watch her being verbally attacked, Steve imposing his will on her with unbelievable insensitivity, and yet she took it all calmly, letting it all wash over her, leaving her unmoved. She wasn’t submissive, not in a way that was visible, she just allowed it to happen while seemingly unimpressed.

‘I think it’s for Marcia to decide, not you Steve. I’m not asking you for your persona, and Marcia is a grown woman. She doesn’t need your permission.’

‘Yeah, but she’s my girl, Pete. I’ve got to look after her interests.’

‘You don’t need to do anything of the sort. She’s a capable person.’

Steve was typical of many expatriates living in a far eastern enclave consisting mostly of other expats. He was conservative, thoroughly conventional, and about a hundred years behind the times. His passport said he was an Amer-European, but in truth we had long since left our original nationalities behind, and had become something else. I’m not sure what.
Gweilos
I suppose, which is the Cantonese term for all Caucasians living in their society. Literally it means
foreign devil
, but language is dynamic and it has become a quick description of a western businessman living on the China coast, out of touch with reality, holding on to out-of-date values, talking in clichés like: ‘Your average British workman is lazy, but take the Chinese, they’ll flog their guts out for you for a few dollars a day, and they can live on it you see, because they know which markets to go to get cheap vegetables, they don’t pay the same prices as me and you...’

There are Chinese businessmen like Steve, who exploit the local labour, but they don’t make excuses for the poor pay they offer, they simply do it. Steve
thought the Thatcher-Reagan years of the last century were
wonderful, but of course he only went to Britain and America for business conferences, a few days, nothing more.

‘Is that what you think?’ said Steve, his tone belligerent. ‘Well, okay, I’ll leave the decision to her, but I’m going to come along. I only have her best interests at heart.’

Steve, being a man’s man, a hard drinker, naturally believed eastern women were toys to be played with, but Marcia was the immovable object, who took all he had to throw at her, and remained intact, without reprisal, without going under. She was a small woman, even for a Filipino, with a gentle smile. She withstood the storms and remained undaunted. I had great admiration for her in one way, though I felt she lacked the spirit to kick Steve in the balls, like many
gweilo
women I knew would have done ages ago. The Filipino maids, fifty thousand of them in Hong Kong, were an accommodating group. Most of them considered a little abuse worth pursuing the romantic dream of marrying out of the terrible
poverty which
was their cultural heritage. Even if the man
be
a boorish old fart like Steve, twice her age and with a body ravaged by too many gins.

‘That’s what I think, Steve...’

In the end, I had my way, and Steve even drove us to the lab in his new Mercedes, chatting quite amiably on the journey under the forest canopy of neon branches that grew from buildings either side of the street. The night watchman was a little surprised to see us, at eleven in the evening, but he let us in, and stood by the lab door in that guarded manner of the Cantonese security worker dealing with the unusual, wondering whether he is going to get into trouble for allowing someone to enter the building after hours, even if that
someone
was perfectly entitled to be there. The Cantonese like to live lives of complete order, within a vast sea of chaos.

Marcia went into the scanner cubicle a little nervously, though it is one of the newer devices produced by Walker and Quntan, in which the subject stands upright, rather than one of the more common horizontal coffin affairs of Stebling Inc. Steve chatted to the night watchman, while I took the reading, then when everything checked out, proceeded to take a facsimile of Marcia’s persona on disk.

When I had finished with Marcia, I asked Steve to step into the cubicle.

He stuck out his jaw.

‘Why? What do you want my personality for? I thought you considered it pretty shitty?’

‘Don’t make a fuss, Steve, I’m not going to hurt you.’

This struck at the core of his manhood, as I knew it would. He went straight into the cubicle to prove he was not afraid of anything, even if his brother was a mad scientist.

‘Okay,’ he growled, from within, ‘but if I start growing hairs on the palms of my hands Pete, I’m coming looking for my little brother to eat.’

It was all over by twelve, and we went for a final coffee at the Peninsula Hotel on Nathan Road, where the string quartet plays on a balcony above patrons surrounded by the ornate glitz and opulence of yesteryear.

I saw them off at the airport the next morning, Steve grumbling at the taxi driver most of the way, because he wasn’t driving fast enough for him, and Marcia talking to me in that soft tone quite unlike the voice she used when talking in Tagalog to her fellow Filipinos. Steve was
definitely
more mellow
now. In the old days he would have taken time out to snap at her, and ask me what I found so interesting in her ‘drivel’, but that day he simply gave her one or two side glances, not without a trace of fondness in them. They were to be gone for the whole of July and August, the terrible months in Hong Kong, when the temperature is over 33 Celsius most days, and the humidity in the high nineties.

A week after they had left I began my experiment.

The Chinese government had employed me as a lecturer on Animal Behaviour at the University of Hong Kong, but of course I was permitted, even expected, to carry out my own research. Any findings would of course be credited to the University as well as myself, thus gaining face for my Chinese employers.

My specific interest at this time was
animal aggression
. What I wanted to do was to superimpose a placid persona on an aggressive wild creature, in order to study the reactions of the creature’s own kind, and to see whether there was any change in their behaviour towards the subject, and indeed whether the subject showed any signs of reverting to type.

The creature I had chosen was a black drongo
(Dicrurus macrocercus
), a bird about the size of a jackdaw. It is a quarrelsome creature, known in India as King Crow, because of its habit of mobbing the much larger members of the
Corvidae
family. It fights amongst its own kind, for scraps of food, though there are no recorded combats ending in fatalities. The black drongo has an unusual cat-like hissing call, which is quite disturbing to other birds.