The Wilt Alternative (23 page)

Chinanda evaded the question. 'But what did you do about this misery?' he yelled, poking his
face close to hers. 'You washed your conscience in the hospital and then went back and lived in
luxury.'

'I had three square meals a day if that's what you mean by luxury. I certainly couldn't have
afforded the sort of expensive car you drive around in,' riposted the old lady. 'And while we're
on the subject of washing, I think it might help to quieten the children if you allowed me to
bath them.'

The terrorists looked at the quads and tended to agree. The quads were not a pleasant
sight.

'OK, we bring you water down and you can wash them here,' said Chinanda, who went up to the
darkened kitchen and finally found a plastic bucket under the sink. He filled it with water and
brought it down with a bar of soap. Mrs de Frackas looked into the bucket doubtfully.

'I said "Wash them". Not dye them.'

'Die them? What do you mean die them?'

'Take a look for yourself,' said Mrs de Frackas. The two terrorists did, and were appalled.
The bucket was filled with dark blue water.

'Now they're trying to poison us,' yelled Baggish and headed up the stairs to register this
fresh complaint against the Anti-Terrorist Squad.

Inspector Flint took the call. 'Poison you? By putting something in the water supply? I can
assure you I know nothing about it.'

'Then how come it's blue?'

'I've no idea. Are you sure the water's blue?'

'I know fucking well it's blue,' shouted Baggish. 'We turn the tap and the water comes out
blue. You think we're idiots or something.'

Flint hesitated but suppressed his true opinion in the interest of the hostages. 'Never mind
what I think,' he said, 'all I'm saying is that we have done absolutely nothing to the water
supply and '

'Lying pig,' shouted Baggish. 'First you try trapping us by raping Gudrun and now you poison
the Water. We don't wait any longer. The water is clean in one hour and you let Gudrun go or we
execute the old woman.'

He slammed the phone down, leaving Flint more mystified than ever. 'Raping Gudrun? The man's
off his head. I wouldn't touch the bitch with a bargepole and how I can be in two places at the
same time defeats me. And now he's saying the water's gone blue.'

'Could be they're on drugs,' said the sergeant 'Gets them hallucinating sometimes, especially
when they're under stress.'

'Stress? Don't talk to me about stress,' said Flint and turned his anger on a PLD operator.
'And what the hell are you smirking about?'

'They're trying it out in the bath now, sir. Wilt's idea. Randy little sod.'

'If you're seriously suggesting that a couple copulating in a bath can turn the rest of the
water in the house blue, think again,' snapped Flint.

He leant his head back against an antimacassar and shut his eyes. His mind was churning with
opinions. Wilt was mad. Wilt was a terrorist. Wilt was a mad terrorist. Wilt was possessed. Wilt
was a bloody enigma. Only the last was certain, that and the Inspector's fervent wish that Wilt
was a thousand miles away and that he had never heard of the bastard. Finally he roused
himself.

'All right, I want that helicopter back and this time no balls-ups. The house is floodlit and
it's going to stay that way. All they have to do is land that telephone through the balcony
window and considering what they've done here that should be child's play. Tell the pilot he can
rip the roof off if he wants to but I want a line through to that flat and fast. That's the only
way we're going to find out exactly what Wilt's playing at.'

'Will do,' said the Major, and began issuing fresh instructions.

'He's playing politics now, sir,' said the operator. 'Makes Marx sound like a right-winger.
Want to hear?'

'I suppose I'd better,' said Flint miserably, and the loudspeaker was switched on. Through the
crackle Wilt could be heard expounding violently.

'We must annihilate the capitalist system lock stock and barrel. There must be no hesitation
in exterminating the last vestiges of the ruling class and instilling a proletarian consciousness
into the minds of the workers. This can best be achieved by exposing the fascistic nature of
pseudo-democracy through the praxis of terror against the police and the lumpen executives of
international finance. Only by demonstrating the fundamental antithesis between...'

'Christ, he sounds like a bloody textbook,' said Flint with unintentional accuracy. 'We've got
a pocket Mao in the attic. Right, get these tapes through to the Idiot Brigade. Perhaps they can
tell us what a lumpen executive is.'

'Helicopter's on its way,' said the Major. 'The telephone's fitted with a micro-television
camera. If all goes well we'll soon see what's going on up there.'

'As if I wanted to,' said Flint and retreated to the safety of the downstairs toilet.

Five minutes later the helicopter swirled across the orchard at the bottom of the garden,
poised for a moment over Number 9, and a field telephone swung through the balcony window into
the flat. As the pilot lifted the machine away a trail of wire spun out behind it like the thread
of a mechanical spider.

Flint emerged from the toilet to find that Chinanda was back on the phone.

'Wants to know why we haven't cleared the water, sir,' said the operator.

Inspector Flint sat down with a sigh and took the call. 'Now listen, Miguel,' he began,
imitating the friendly approach of the Superintendent, 'you may not believe this '

A stream of abuse indicated all too clearly that the terrorist didn't.

'All right, I accept all that,' said Flint when the epithets dried up. 'But what I'm saying is
that we aren't in the attic. We haven't put anything in the water.'

'Then why are you supplying them with weapons by helicopter?'

'That wasn't a weapon. It happened to be a telephone so we can talk to them...Yes, I daresay
it doesn't sound likely. I'm the first to agree...No, we haven't. If anyone has it's the...'

'People's Alternative Army,' prompted the sergeant,

'The People's Alternative Army,' repeated Flint. 'They must have put something in the water,
Miguel...What?...You don't like being called Miguel...Well as a matter of fact I don't
particularly like being called fuzzpig...Yes, I heard you. I heard you the first time. And if
you'll get off the line I'll talk to the bastards up there.'

And Flint slammed down the phone. 'All right, now get me through to the attic. And make it
snappy. Time's running out.'

It was to run out for a further quarter of an hour. The sudden reappearance of the helicopter
just when the Wilt alternative had switched from sex to politics had thrown Wilt's tactics out of
joint. Having softened his victim up on the physical level he had begun confusing her still more
by quoting the egregious Bilger at his most Marcusian. It hadn't been too difficult, and in any
case Wilt had speculated on the injustice of human existence over many years. His dealings with
Plasterers Four had taught him that he belonged to a relatively privileged society. Plasterers
earned more than he did, and Printers were positively rich, but allowing for these discrepancies
it was still true that he had been born into an affluent country with a favoured climate and
sophisticated political institutions developed over the centuries. Above all an industrial
society. The vast majority of mankind lived in abject poverty, were riddled with curable disease
which went uncured, were subject to despotic governments and lived in terror and in danger of
dying by starvation. To the extent that anyone tried to change this inequity, Wilt sympathized.
Eva's Personal Assistance for Primitive People might be ineffectual but it had at least the merit
of being personal and moving in the right direction. Terrorizing the innocent and murdering men,
women and children was both ineffectual and barbaric. What difference was there between the
terrorists and their victims? Only one of opinion. Chinanda and Gudrun Schautz came from wealthy
families and Baggish, whose father had been a shopkeeper in Beirut, could hardly be called poor.
None of these self-appointed executioners had been driven to murder by the desperation of
poverty, and as far as Wilt could tell their fanaticism had its roots in no specific cause. They
weren't trying to drive the British from Ulster, the Israelis from the Golan Heights or even the
Turks from Cyprus. They were political poseurs whose enemy was life. In short they were murderers
by personal choice, psychopaths who camouflaged their motives behind a screen of Utopian theory.
Power was their kick, the power to inflict pain and to terrify. Even their own readiness to die
was a sort of power, some sick and infantile form of masochism and expiation of guilt, not for
their filthy crimes, but for being alive at all. Beyond that there were doubtless other motives
concerned with parents or toilet training. Wilt didn't care. It was enough that they were
carriers of the same political rabies that had driven Hitler to construct Auschwitz and kill
himself in the bunker, or the Cambodians to murder one another by the million. As such they were
beyond the pale of sympathy. Wilt had his children to protect and only his wits to help
him.

And so in a desperate attempt to keep Gudrun Schautz isolated and uncertain, he mouthed
Marcusian dogma until the helicopter interrupted his recital. As the telephone encased in a
wooden box swung through the window Wilt hurled himself to the floor in the kitchen.

'Back into the bathroom,' he yelled convinced that the thing was some sort of tear-gas bomb.
But Gudrun Schautz was already there. Wilt crawled through to her.

'They know we're here,' she whispered.

'They know I'm here,' said Wilt, grateful to the police for seeming to provide proof that he
was a wanted man. 'What would they want with you?'

'They locked me in the bathroom. Why would they do that if they didn't want me?'

'Why would they do it if they did?' asked Wilt. 'They'd have dragged you out straightaway.' He
paused and looked hard at her in the light reflected from the ceiling. 'But how did they get on
to me? I ask myself that question. Who told them?'

Gudrun Schautz looked back and asked herself a great many questions. 'Why do you look at me? I
don't know what you are talking about.'

'No?' said Wilt, deciding the time was ripe to switch to full-scale mania. 'That's what you
say now. You come to my house when everything is going so good with the plan and now suddenly the
Israelis arrive and everything is kaput. No assassination of the Queen, no use for the nerve-gas,
no annihilation of the entire pseudo-democratic parliamentary cadres in the House of Commons at
one fell swoop, no...'

In the living-room the telephone interrupted this insane catalogue. Wilt listened to it with
relief. So did Gudrun Schautz. The paranoia which was part of her make-up was beginning to assume
new proportions in her mind with every shift in Wilt's position.

'I'll answer it,' she said but Wilt glared at her ferociously.

'Informer,' he snarled, 'you've done enough harm already. You will stay where you are. That's
your only hope.'

And leaving her to work out this strange logic, Wilt crawled through the kitchen and opened
the box.

'Listen you fascist pig swine,' he yelled before Flint could get a word in edgeways, 'don't
think you're going to sweet-talk the People's Alternative Army into one of your lying dialogues.
We demand '

'Shut up, Wilt.' snapped the Inspector. Wilt shut up. So the sods knew. In particular, Flint
knew. Which would have been good news if he hadn't had a bloody murderess breathing down his
neck. 'So there's no use trying to bluff us. For your information, if you want to see your
daughters alive again you had better stop trying to poison your little comrades on the ground
floor.'

'Trying to what?' asked Wilt, stunned by this new accusation into using his normal voice.

'You heard me. You've been doctoring the water supply and they want it undoctored as of
now.'

'Doctoring the...' Wilt began before remembering he couldn't talk openly in present
company.

'The water supply,' said Flint. 'They've set a deadline for it to be cleared and it runs out
in half an hour. And I do mean deadline.'

There was a moment's silence while Wilt tried to think. There must have been something in that
bloody hold-all that was poisonous Perhaps the terrorists carried their own supply of cyanide.
He'd have to get the bag out but in the meantime he had to maintain his lunatic stand. He fell
back on his earlier approach.

'We make no deals,' he shouted 'If our demands aren't met by eight in the morning the hostage
dies.'

There was the sound of laughter at the other end of the line. 'Pull the other one, Wilt,' said
Flint. 'How are you going to kill her? Screw her to death perhaps?'

He paused to let this information sink in before continuing, 'We've got every little antic
you've been up to on tape. It's going to sound great when we play it back in court.'

'Shit,' said Wilt, this time impersonally.

'Mrs Wilt particularly enjoyed it. Yes, you heard me right. Now then, are you going to clear
that water or do you want your daughters to have to drink it?

'All right, I agree. You have the aircraft waiting on the runway and I don't move from here
until the car arrives. One driver and no tricks or the woman dies with me. You understand?'

'No,' said Flint beginning to feel confused himself but Wilt had ended the conversation. He
was sitting on the floor trying to think himself out of this new dilemma. He couldn't do anything
about the water tank with the Schautz woman watching. He would have to continue his bluff. He
went back into the kitchen and found her standing uncertainly by the bathroom door.

'So now you know,' he said.

Gudrun Schautz didn't. 'Why did you say you would kill me?' she asked.

'Why do you think?' said Wilt, plucking up sufficient courage to move towards her with
something approximating to menace. 'Because you are an informer? Without you the plan...'