Spark: A Novel (6 page)

“Who are you talking about?”

“Sheila Cassidy told her mother who told Mr. Singh who told Miss Batenor—the lady downstairs—who—who told me. But now they all
deny
saying it—refuse to talk to the police—because they don’t want trouble.”

“Trouble with whom?”

“There—there are these young men—on the corner—up and down our street—I’m sure you’ve seen them. And I was a fool, Mr. Morgan. I was blind—
blind
to the danger. Because I told them to go away and even called the police twice. And they knew me—knew Joey was my pet—and they mocked me and whistled—so I stopped going out in the evening and—”

“
Who
mocked you?”

“This one man in particular. They—They call him ‘Micky Sicky.’ So he was there on the pavement and Sheila said that Joey was running around, barking. He wanted to play, of course. He loved to
play.
”

“And what happened?”

“Micky kicked my darling very, very hard. And then he must have beaten him or kicked him many times, because Joey’s body was broken and one of his eyes was nothing but blood. And then Micky threw my love away.”

Mrs. Driscoll started weeping again while I stood there like another piece of furniture. I didn’t feel any of the emotions listed on my phone’s database. My strongest desire was for more information.

“What did the police do?”

“They talked to Micky Sicky, but he denied everything. And he’s still there, out on the street, watching me. Not more than an hour ago, when I looked out the window, he saw me and made a barking sound.” Mrs. Driscoll got up from the sofa. She forgot all the rules and touched me, pulling me over to the window. “Look! There! Can’t you see?”

I peered out the window and saw four young men smoking cigarettes and talking to each other. “The one with the very long hair and the—”

“Yes. I see him.” Micky Sicky was a stocky white man in his twenties with matted dreadlocks that touched his shoulders.

Mrs. Driscoll staggered back to the sofa and blew her nose with the lace handkerchief. “It’s just a
dog.
That’s what my sister said when I spoke to her on the phone. And yes—yes, that’s true, but …” She shook her head. “But it gives you its love and you give it
your
love and then it’s more than a dog. So much more.”

Once again, she curled up on the sofa, and pulled the pillow to her chest. There was nothing I could do for her, so I maneuvered around the furniture and slipped out the door. Riding back to Kensington on the tube, my Spark began to bounce around inside my Shell. I remembered Mrs. Driscoll weeping and the framed photograph of Joey with his feet on a striped ball. And those thoughts continued when I got back to my apartment and drank two bottles of ComPlete.

When I first met Miss Holquist and began working for the Special Services Section, she emphasized one fact and one rule.

The fact was:
I was now working for Miss Holquist.

The rule was:
I must not work for anyone else.

If I was given a weapon for a particular target, then I shouldn’t use that weapon to neutralize someone else. Trying to resolve the problem, I told Edward to activate the Power-I program on my computer. I used the program to make two lists:

Eventually, my Spark was absorbed by darkness, but when I woke up the next morning the thoughts remained. After the shops opened, I found a hardware store and bought a hacksaw and nylon cord. Then I returned to my apartment and cut four inches off the barrels of my shotgun and two inches off the walnut stock. I tied one end of the cord to the barrel and attached the other end to an eye screw twisted into the stock. With some minor adjustments, I could conceal the weapon beneath a navy blue waterproof smock with a fake corporate logo sewn onto the breast. While I was examining my silhouette in the bedroom mirror, the Sentinel camera photographed Mallory’s mistress arriving for her weekend visit. In the past, the bodyguard had always driven her back to the train station on Sunday afternoon.

It was time to start the plan. I took the tube to South London and rented a white delivery van for the weekend. It was raining as I crossed back over the river. Yellow headlights came toward me like blurry eyes. Cold drops of water exploded on the windshield and trickled down the glass. When I got back to my apartment I sat on the one chair in the middle of the living room with the sawed-off shotgun on my lap.

I was safe. No one was touching me. But then my Spark began to vibrate rapidly and visions appeared that I could not control. I saw Micky Sicky grab Joey and throw him against a wall. Then he began kicking the dog with his heavy black boots. Smiling. Laughing.

I do not believe in justice and fairness and decency. These words have no form or shape for me. There is more reality in things: a rusty nail on the sidewalk or a smooth brown pebble pulled from a stream. But thoughts about Mrs. Driscoll, Joey, and Micky Sicky were a
distraction
that would prevent me from completing my assignment. I needed to do something that would push those thoughts out of my mind.

Around ten o’clock in the evening, I wrapped the sawed-off shotgun in a throw rug and placed it on the floor of the van. Great Britain had an EYE monitoring system like the United States’, but it was called ARGUS. Although my phone wasn’t connected to my identity, it could still be tracked by scanners. I turned it off as I drove the van north to Stoke Newington.

I cruised up and down the streets looking for Micky Sicky, but only a few people were out. After an unsuccessful search I parked the car near a hospital and played a computer game on my phone. Then I returned to Watkins Street and found my target leaning against a parked car.

I stopped the van, rolled down the window, and spoke with an American accent. “Good evening. Maybe you can help me. I just arrived in London this afternoon.”

“What’s the problem, bruv? You lost?”

“I work for somebody in the music business and he needs some drugs to get through the night. A girl at a party told me to come to this street.”

Micky Sicky grinned. Bad teeth. “What’s your man’s name, bruv? He famous? Can I meet ’im?”

“That depends on what you can supply.”

“Got everything. Top gear. Whatever you need.”

“Can we get off the street? Being out here like this makes me nervous.”

“Go down to the corner, turn left, then right, and park.”

I had not planned what was going to happen. At that moment, I felt like a line in a cathode tube, jabbing at the boundaries of the screen with sharp movements and sudden bursts of energy. Following
his directions, I turned into a dirt alleyway behind some fenced-in vegetable gardens. Light came from a few windows and a security light attached to a tool shed.

I got out of the van but left the door open. The shotgun was on the driver’s seat, the stock poking a few inches out of the rolled-up throw rug.

“Hey …”

Micky appeared at the end of the alleyway and began walking toward the van. Picking up the throw rug, I cradled it in my arms as if it was a wounded dog and approached him slowly.

As the target drew closer my right hand thrust itself into the center of the rug, grabbed the stock of the shotgun, and let its concealment fall away.

My legs took two quick steps and then—

My finger squeezed the trigger and then—

The shotgun fired and buckshot cut through the air.

When I was in the clinic, Dr. Noland told me about a logical problem created by a Greek philosopher named Zeno that suggested that the buckshot would never hit its target. The buckshot would take half the time to get halfway there, but then it had to go halfway to the next interval, and halfway to the interval after that, and so on. Since there appeared to be an infinite number of these smaller and smaller distances, the buckshot would never arrive.

I thought about Zeno’s paradox for several days until Dr. Noland gave me a solution. A distance composed of an infinite number of finite moments is not infinite. If the distance between the shotgun barrel and Micky Sicky’s flesh was fifteen feet, it doesn’t make a difference how many times you divide it into fractions; it’s still fifteen feet. This was helpful to me at the clinic because I realized that no matter how many times my thoughts divided into a multitude of more thoughts, I could still make a single choice and function in the world.

And this is what happened in the alleyway. The buckshot burst through the paradox and hit my target in his left leg.

Micky Sicky fell backward, then screamed with pain and started rolling around on the dirt. I took a few steps forward and pointed
the shotgun at his head. He had lost control of his bladder and I found the smell unpleasant.

“Be quiet,” I said.

Micky’s mouth opened and closed like a Chinatown carp just pulled from the water tank. But he stopped making noises.

“You killed a little white dog,” I said.

“Fuckin’ bastard! You just shot me!”

I cocked the second barrel. “You have three seconds to say one truthful statement. Did you kill a little white dog?”

“It was nothing,” Micky whimpered. “Just a joke, bruv. I swear. I’m sorry.”

“Repeat after me: Joey was loved by the angels in heaven.”

“Fuckin’ hell!”

“Say it. If you want to live.”

“Joey … love … by angels.”

“Good. Remember that. If I see you in this neighborhood again, I’ll take a blowtorch and burn off your ears.”

I extended the shotgun like a walking stick and shot Micky in the right leg. He was still screaming as I got in the van and drove away. Although I had disobeyed Miss Holquist, my actions had established two facts:

I left London early the next morning. A few hours later, I parked a half mile from Victor Mallory’s estate. Outside the van, the sky was a gray, smudged color. The oak and beech trees had lost all their leaves, and the ditch weeds were dry yellow stalks.

Using my computer, I connected to the Sentinel hidden in the blackberry thicket across the road from the entrance. At 10:57 a.m., a BMW sedan left the estate. The younger bodyguard had the shift that weekend and he was taking Mallory’s girlfriend back to the train station. I waited a few minutes and then drove up to the CCTV camera at the main gate.

I pressed the red button below the camera and, a moment later, heard Mallory’s voice. “Who are you?”

“Dave Pinnock,” I said, speaking with a South Wales accent. “I’m from Jolly Good Fellow.”

“Jolly Good … what?”

“Jolly Good Fellow, sir. I have a delivery here for Victor Mallory.”

“I didn’t order anything.”

“It’s a gift, sir.” I was wearing a fake ID card attached to a cord hanging from my neck. Holding the card with two fingers, I waved it at the CCTV camera. “Jolly Good Fellow is a specialty gift service. Or motto is:
‘When Flowers Aren’t Enough.’
 ”

“I don’t give a damn about your motto. What are you doing here?”

“I’ve got a holiday gift for you, Mr. Mallory, sir.”

“Leave it at the gate.”

“Sorry, sir. But I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“I do hate to spoil the surprise, Mr. Mallory. But the gift is a case of French champagne. It’s against our procedure to leave alcohol or jewelry at an address without someone signing for it.”