Raucous (21 page)

CHAPTER FIFTY FOUR

She had never been to the Turk’s office, never needed nor wanted, and while nothing had been moved or changed, it now belonged to Raucous.

The curtains were open, light spilled in, and the dust and dirt accumulated in edges where cleaners couldn’t reach, showed the age of tired furniture.  Raucous walked around the desk and sat in the leather chair.  Everything creaked and cracked, floorboards, wood and leather.  Charlotte sat opposite.

“You made it to where you wanted to be.  How does that feel?” Charlotte asked.

Raucous smiled and leaned forward, crossing his arms and placing them on the desk surface.  “How would you know this was my goal,” he said.

Charlotte leaned in too.  She fixed Raucous with a stare she hoped conveyed all her anger. “A young man growing up here, what other dreams would you have?”

Raucous nodded, he paused and thought, he wanted to speak truthfully.  He had nothing to hide from this woman, not any more.

“Dreams change,” he said.  "As you grow up, you start to question and see things differently.”  He smiled as a thought came to him from an angle he had never considered.  “I'd pass my knowledge to the kids of these parts but if they are anything like me, they wouldn't listen."

Charlotte shook her head, like a teacher seeing one of her students act badly at a distance.

“Your destiny didn’t change,” Charlotte said.

Raucous lost his passive exterior for a brief moment, he looked surprised and confused.

“You think all this was written in the stars?" Raucous said.  He looked around the office, "I wouldn’t say I am where I want to be.  Not yet.”

Charlotte waited; she looked around the office too.  It was a small dingy place for a big fat empty man who was gone and would not be remembered as anything other than the man who used to run things.  The Turk provided nothing for history.  He was a figure-head, an accountant.  Nothing of nothing to anyone.

“I thought you would want to kill him,” Charlotte said.

Raucous turned and gazed through the window, he saw grey clouds and a polluted city sky.  He shrugged and turned his face back to Charlotte.

“Someone beat me to it,” he said.

“Who was that?”  Charlotte asked.

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

Charlotte turned her palms up to the ceiling and moved her hands apart so she looked like she was halfway through a catholic mass.

“Mine is Parker,” she said.

“And I cannot think of a better person to have done it.  It would have been slow, better than anything I could have done."

Charlotte looked at the office again.  She turned and fixed Raucous with an inquisitive stare.

"Raise your eyebrow any further and you'll look like Roger Moore," Raucous said.

“Are you taking over everything?” Charlotte asked.

Raucous leaned back.  He looked around the office and smiled.  “I’m more of a destroyer than constructor.  My history tells me that.  I can't see myself changing now."

Charlotte bit her lower lip.  She thought and fixed Raucous with a stare.  She waited and neither blinked.  Raucous knew what was coming.

"You are going to go through with everything?"

Raucous had his answer and didn’t need to pause or cause suspense.

"I spent too long wanting it,” he said. "To be swayed by a leather chair kept warm all these years by a man I would not wish to be.  I don't want to be the man they look to."

"But you are," Charlotte said.

Raucous shook his head four times slowly.  He refused to accept her words as truth.

"Only for now,” he said. "My reign, for want of a better word, will be brief.  Who the hell wants the brains of the organization to be a man named Raucous?"

CHAPTER FIFTY FIVE

Charlotte laughed at the name.  “Belfour?  Isn’t that a ghost hunter?  Why do you think he can help us?”

She was reading the name and address from a piece of paper Roach had given her.

Roach didn’t answer.  He was driving.  He liked to concentrate on the road.  Charlotte knew and found his concern amusing.  He drove a ten year old Toyota Corolla, a bland, clean, car, grey in color and jarringly obvious in a crowd. It ran smoothly and had a mileage of 43,000.  Roach was no traveller.  And he was no driver.  He checked the rear view mirror.

“Still there?”  Charlotte asked.

Roach nodded.  “Red fiesta.  Strange car to use to follow someone.”

“Coincidence?”

“I don't see how.”

Charlotte looked through the rear window.  The red Fiesta was two cars back.

“How long before we get there?”

“Ten minutes.”

Charlotte touched the dashboard with her right index finger.  “So really, who is he?”

“Someone I should hate.  He took something from me.  Knew Chamberlain, worked with him.”

“And he wants to meet us?”

“He doesn’t know it’s me.”

Roach drove slowly.  They didn’t speak.  Roach checked his rear-view mirror, until they were two minutes from their destination and the red car vanished.

They pulled up to the gate of a long drive to a house in Dulwich.  Greenery and countryside beauty in the heart of London.  The large college standing proud within its open grounds.  A cricket pitch lay dormant but cared for.  They were stopped at a barrier.  A toll booth.  A large man, probably retired stepped from the small white cabin. 

“This is a private road, you can turn back and go all the way round, or pay the fifty pence,” he said.

He didn’t wait for an answer, he turned and shuffled back to his seat and paper and sat down.

Roach straightened his legs so he could dig into his pocket.  He found fifty pence, leaned out of his window and slotted the coin into the machine.  The small flimsy barrier lifted and he drove through.  He turned left when the road hit the main street; he followed the edge of the college sports field, went under the railway crossover and turned right into a street over hung on either side by tall oak trees.  He slowed down and indicated right even though there were no other cars on the street.  He pulled up to the gate and stopped.  They looked for the buzzer, or keypad but saw none.  A camera on top of the right gatepost blinked at them.  They sat, the engine idling for two minutes.  A flashing yellow light started on the left hand gate post and the gates started to slowly open inward.

They drove the hundred meters from the gate to the front door, pulled up on the gravel and stepped out of the car.  A man was waiting for them on the large top step to the open front door. 

The man was six feet tall and in shape.  Not power lifting muscles bulging through polyester suit, but lean and strong, a middleweight boxer's body after six weeks of camp.  He was young, not yet thirty-five, Charlotte guessed.  She wondered why Belfour needed a bodyguard.  He moved with a grace.  He indicated that Roach and Charlotte should follow.

The hallway was a large open space.  But the bodyguard led them through quickly to a large study room at the rear of the house.  Charlotte had read a lot of Chandler many years ago but she couldn’t remember the title of the book with an old crippled Colonel in a wheelchair worried about his daughters.  She was sure Belfour could.  It was a conservatory of high humidity and greenery of the exotic kind covering every space.  Belfour was in his Victorian dressing gown, sat at a basic wooden table.  He had his silk pajamas underneath.  He was sitting in front of a very old typewriter with spools of paper spread everywhere.  He looked up on their entrance and lowered his glasses.  He invited them to sit.

Charlotte exchanged a glance with Roach.  She didn’t know if he had the same idea as her, but Belfour was putting on a show. 

“You told me you were journalists over the phone, Mr. Roach?”

Roach started to speak.  “No, no,” Belfour said, “No need for the formal, I work for so and so routine.  What would you like to ask me?  A color piece is it?  I don’t see a photographer or a camera.  Is the article to be published without my image?  Shame, after I had gone to all this effort.”

Silence filled the room.  Charlotte watched the man in the suit.  Belfour saw.  “How rude of me,” he said.  “This is Michael, my, well, I don’t know what I would call him.  My safety net?  Yes.  Safety net.”

Belfour sniggered to himself and looked at Roach, his focus zooming in and out like a drunk.  “Well, if I am not going to be photographed, I am off to get changed into something more normal.”

Belfour stood and quickly paced from the room.  Michael stayed, his right hand holding his left with his arms straight down.  He stared ahead like a Roman centurion.  

Roach leaned across to Charlotte and whispered, “He’s changed since I knew him.  He has lost it.  Completely crazy.  He writes bullshit.  I think I wasted our time.”

They sat for several minutes without speaking.  Michael stood still, not even rolling on the balls of his feet, a statue on guard.  Charlotte thought about the reasons for Belfour’s exit, the reason he was taking so long.  She was ready to lean over to Roach and tell him something was wrong but she had no time, Belfour swept into the room wearing a white suit like he was a journalist in Thailand in the 1950s.  His right hand held a panama hat.  He returned to his seat at the table and leaned forward looking at Roach.  There was a hint of anger in his yes.

“In answer to your little conversation in my absence, “Belfour said.  “Yes, I am a fruit loop.  And yes, the majority of what I produce is sensationalized claptrap I base on nuggets of truth.  I ran out of anything even remotely original to write over a decade ago, and many of my educational published works should be considered for the fiction chart.  So, yes, Mr. Roach, your time has been wasted.  I’m a ridiculous theorist of the highest order.”

Roach looked at Belfour and nodded.  “Bugged room?”

“Of course, why wouldn’t I?  I thought you two would say more but you are hardly conversationalists.  And sadly I was unable to contact an important person to find out who you really are, and that’s something I would very much like to know.”

Michael turned his face to Belfour and asked a question by raising his eyebrows and tilting his head. 

“No, Michael, I don’t think that is necessary,” Belfour said.

“You seem to be doing well from it,” Charlotte said.

Belfour stood and swept his arm around the room theatrically. 

“And I am happy about that.  I earn on sales, and my works have, in the current climate of famous people being shown to be sexual predators and lying shitebags of the highest order come back into fashion.  But as I say, it’s sensationalized fluff I have managed to spin out over a great many years.  I have a skill.  I write bullshit so well people believe it to be true.”

Charlotte stood, and Roach followed.  Belfour laughed with a guttural bellow.

“I am not David Icke," he said.  "I have not taken copious amounts of acid and watched the entire series of V on Christmas day with the Queen’s speech. I have not invented a lizard people theory involving Royalty and the Bush family.  Probably because I don’t have that much imagination.  But I can assure you, and I am sure you can confirm to your people, whoever they may be, that what the world believes, or at least those that know of my existence and writing, are on the whole correct.  I write bollocks for cash.”

Charlotte raised an eyebrow and the smile from Belfour’s mouth slipped away.

“Now, Michael, if you would like to show our guests to their car, we can all go back to how it was this morning.  Thank you for your visit, utter waste of everyone’s time.  Goodbye.”

CHAPTER FIFTY SIX

I’ll be punished too, Raucous thought.

The only outcome, the final hit to end their game meant he would suffer.  But he wouldn’t fight this time; he wouldn’t kill to defend his own life.  Next time would be different.  He would choose to be the victim, embrace it, and smile at the end because he will have taken them down.  And if it meant his life would end, as he knew it would, then he could make peace with that.  But the others, he couldn’t find a way to reconcile his promise with what he needed to do, with who would be hurt.

He thought back to the lesson.  Mr. Hutton, a teacher who actually cared but cut no slack.  If you didn’t want it, he called you dumb and treated you as if you were.  He tricked you every now and again into showing your smarts and he smiled at you and told you, See, something works in that head of yours. 

Hutton was stood at the front of the class trying to elicit debate from 30 kids, only problem was twenty five didn’t want to be involved.  Animal rights or animal welfare.  No one knew the difference. 

Do you treat each individual animal as our equal and give them rights to live and be protected, or do you consider them as a whole and decide their collective fate with management techniques where some suffer and even die so that the group continues living?  The elephant example.  Do you kill a few and sell the ivory to finance the well-being of the others, or do you decide that none should be touched or killed and no finance comes at all, because let’s face it, how many of us humans are going to fork out cash to protect and feed some big fat grey thing that lives in another continent?

Kids arms springing up, those hippy do-gooders from families with enough money to be able to contemplate such things.  How much would you give he asked?  A small amount by thousands is a big amount.  And then he ran through a list of endangered animals, how much for that one, the same?  They all said yes.  You’ll be giving away your salary if you give to them all.

Fifty pounds a day.  What’s fifty times thirty?  1500.  What's the average salary?  Probably the same.  So don’t buy food or pay rent or spend any money ever again to put someone through university.  Most can’t do that.

“Then they should work harder,” a snob said.

“And you should know you are a right-wing arsehole,” Hutton replied.

Raucous remembered Hutton smiling when the kid broke his collarbone during the rugby hour.  He patted Raucous on the back and told him it was a fair tackle.

Raucous packed up his brand new electronic gadget.  He knew what he had to do.  Protect the whole with sacrifices of the individual.  He didn’t have enough to offer to protect each one.