The Red Men (13 page)

I took Florence to the staff canteen and offered to buy her lunch.

‘I’ve already had my rations,’ she said. Florence was wearing a head scarf, and a powder-blue silk and wool crêpe mix suit decorated with a pink fabric rose. The hemline
of her skirt fell just below the knee and she was careful to keep it that way. I wondered if she ever took the whole rationing chic so far as to rub a used tea bag over her calves to simulate
stockings. I asked her about Raymond.

‘He’s very angry,’ she replied. ‘Sometimes his face drifts and you don’t know where he is. Then he is urgently there, you know. He has been giving out a lot of
silence. That’s unlike him.’

Her teeth were translucent from calcium deficiency. She corrected her head scarf.

‘We should have gone somewhere I could smoke.’

‘Have you seen much of Raymond lately?’

‘Less than usual.’

‘Is Bravado still giving you trouble?’

She laughed, chewing on a fingernail. ‘Like you wouldn’t believe.’

Then Florence leaned forward, and whispered to me, ‘Is it still on?’

I didn’t understand what she meant. I let it pass and continued with my questions.

‘Do you know where Raymond is now?’

She flashed me a look that I could not quite read.

‘No.’

‘I’m worried that he might be thinking about violence,’ I said.

‘Yeah right.’ Florence’s replies were encoded by her facial expressions. I would have to crack them if the true meaning of the conversation was to be apparent.

‘We have to persuade him to come in. We need his account of what has been going on. Then management can take action.’

‘But you don’t want him to come in alone, do you?’

‘Alone is fine.’ I shook my head, showing her that I felt I was missing something in the conversation. Discreetly she took my smartphone from the table and gently removed its
battery, laying it beside the handset.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ Florence hissed at me.

‘I just want to speak to Raymond,’ I hissed back. ‘I haven’t heard from him in a month.’

Florence looked at me like I was an idiot.

‘You spoke to him yesterday. I was there.’

I reared back.

‘What?’

‘You called him when he got back from Leytonstone. You were talking about the old days. About
Drug Porn
, about some article Raymond had written. He was very pleased you remembered
it.’

This was how I learnt that Harry Bravado had been imitating me, taking on my role as Raymond’s confidant, doctor to his patient, patron to his poet, all that.

The colour drained from her face. I realized something terrible had just occurred to her.

‘I’ve got to warn him.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘You and Raymond have been planning this for weeks. Wait! Shit!’

Florence let out a little scream, stifled it and set about trying to reassemble my mobile phone. She broke a nail on the casing; it pinged off and lay on the table between us.

‘He told you where he was going and everything. You’ve set him up. He wouldn’t have taken it this far if it hadn’t have been you.’

Florence called Raymond. There was no answer. Raymond had already gone back into the dark.

Raymond drifted along with the commuters. He kept his eyes on the ranks of shoes and boots clomping up the stairs and concentrated upon keeping in step. Stratford station was
airy and clean, a futuristic terminal. No time to daydream. Head down, pass in hand, Raymond walked quickly into the dark zone with a paper under his arm and a gun in his inside pocket.

The traffic burred around the Broadway. The Wave building loomed in the background, its crest and trough of steel an example of the simple order power can impose. Raymond walked through a
hotchpotch of market stalls and unsteady shops. His sensation was of being was quite different from usual: sedated, disembodied, separate from the acts he was compelled to perform. He walked up the
Grove, toward Leytonstone High Road, through the street economy. Two Somalian men presided over a rug of flotsam and jetsam, their distinctive physiognomies tall and sinuous, beguiling punctuation
marks drifting over the usual prose of the street. Huddled low, a Vietnamese woman showed him her bagful of pirate content. The weak daylight played out like grainy film stock, the shop fronts were
all washed-out colours and soft contrast. Only the advertising hoardings were vibrant. The thirty-foot tall photograph of a bottle of Moët & Chandon stuck to the side of a burnt-out house
was a grand faux pas.

He arrived at the courier’s house before he was ready. Unaccustomed to sharpening himself in anticipation of a crucial act, he dawdled outside the house feeling cloudy and diffuse. There
was a hard centre to him, the gun. It dragged at the shape of his jacket as he idly circled the house. In the yard, the courier supervised the hoisting and lowering of large porcelain conical
acoustic horns, guiding them over pipes that jutted from the shadows below. Raymond considered calling out to him, but lacked even the will for that minor act. Instead he strolled around to the
front of the house. The small white van he had seen the previous day was still there, except now there was a man sitting in the driving seat. The heaps of personal effects had been moved. The
driver beckoned to Raymond. He walked over to the van; the driver leaned across and popped open the passenger door. It creaked on its hinge and dragged against the road.

‘You wanted to speak with me?’ asked the driver.

Raymond climbed into the van and shut the door. The suspension was shot and the vehicle listed to one side, tipping him toward the driver. He got a good look at Harold Blasebalk. His face was a
‘before’ to Bravado’s ‘after’. Where Bravado had tight black curls, Blasebalk had grey tufts sparse as dune grass. Bravado had a fat-pored, freshly shaven surface,
Blasebalk had a Formica pallor enlivened by livid capillaries. Harold wore a torn and rumpled work suit over the kind of jumper small children pick for their father for Christmas. Harry Bravado
wore a starched white shirt and gold cuff links, if he felt like wearing clothes at all.

The van smelt strongly of a man and his toxins.

‘I recognize you,’ said Raymond.

‘Because I look like him?’ Blasebalk slumped back in his seat. The courier was perched on the fence, checking how everything was going down. Blasebalk gave him a nod.

‘The Elk told me you were looking for me.’

‘He never told me his name.’

‘I don’t know yours.’

Raymond introduced himself.

‘I want you to meet someone,’ said Raymond, ‘and then we’ll go into Monad together.’

Blasebalk shook his head.

‘I’ve tried that. I called Monad. Bravado shunted me into voicemail. I went down to the Wave. Bravado called security and they took me away.’

Raymond offered a shrug instead of sympathy. Blasebalk started the engine.

‘I want to keep moving while we talk,’ he said.

Raymond glanced at the rear view mirror as the van pulled out into the street. Good. It was all going to plan. Blasebalk would drive him to the meeting with Nelson and if he resisted he could
persuade him with the gun.

Blasebalk drove the van alongside Wanstead Flats, level hectares of grassland with thickets of gorse and broom. Were its fishing ponds deep enough to stow a body? Would you even need to hide the
corpse around here?

‘Is it true my other self has been tormenting you?’ asked Blasebalk.

‘He has,’ said Raymond. ‘You have.’

Blasebalk nodded, accepting the accusation. He concentrated on the road ahead.

‘I went to your house,’ continued Raymond. ‘I met your wife.’

‘How is she?’

‘She’s resigned. She thinks you’ve caved in and gone on a bender.’

‘She should have come with me. Women are so pragmatic. So pointlessly pragmatic.’

Raymond looked out of the window. A pack of mongrels in luminous visibility jackets ran across the scrub. When he didn’t look at Blasebalk, and just sat in the presence of his familiar
voice, then he could feel angry again. He needed to be angry.

‘You are responsible for all this. You created this thing, you took advantage of it, and then you abandoned it.’

Blasebalk felt this was unfair.

‘I am not responsible for this.’

They drove up Centre Road, flanked by the unremarkable scrub. Four crows unfurled and suspended upon the wind. Raymond was equally adrift, his temple resting against the cold glass of the
window.

‘Please,’ he whispered.

The car inched around the burnt-out congress of two cars, their skeletons interlocked to comfort one another.

‘I asked them to delete him,’ said Blasebalk, ‘after he showed me videos of my own death. He thought that by confronting me with my own mortality I could be shocked into
following his project, which was complete self-interest, self-actualization, self-gratification. I got the impression that there was intense status competition between the red men. The social
standing of the subscriber determined their place in their hierarchy. That was why he was so keen to see me succeed.

‘I was stupid. I asked Monad to get rid of him and obviously he found out. His self-interest and mine diverged. I became my own worst enemy. That has always been my problem.’

After pottering around a roundabout, Blasebalk turned the car back toward the city. To their left, the tall railings girdling the City of London cemetery. Through their shuttering motion,
Raymond glimpsed the heads of mournful stone angels and ranks of headstones. So soon and they were here already.

‘Take the turning into the graveyard,’ said Raymond. ‘My friend is waiting for us there.’

The car did not slow.

‘I’m not sure I want to meet any friend of yours.’

‘He works for Monad too. He’s a consultant and can speak directly to the board. You should hear what he has to say.’

Blasebalk turned the car into the cemetery gates. Armed security guards idled at the entrance. This place had not been allowed to go dark. The fires of the crematorium were still burning.

They parked by a florist’s cart. Raymond took a hand-drawn map from his jacket while Harold Blasebalk took out an anorak from his bedroom in the boot.

‘You can’t hold me responsible for Bravado,’ Harold said, scrambling around in search of a hat and gloves. ‘He is nothing like me. He is immortal, invulnerable, almost
omnipotent. He’s not human. Monad are responsible. Cantor is responsible. He was the artist, I was merely his subject.’

Raymond turned the map clockwise on its axis to establish his bearings.

‘Why then, is it only your red man that is tormenting people?’ he said, not looking up.

The cemetery was a valley of the dead set low in the lee of the North Circular road and a busy train line. Many graves were marked with yellow stickers, indicating they were soon to be
reclaimed. Business was good. A patch of the freshly dead was decorated with endearments spelled out in flowers: ‘Dad’, ‘Son’, ‘Bruv’. Recent headstones were
inset with screens showing film clips of the deceased. After watching a couple of these recordings, one made by a woman in full knowledge of her terminal condition, the other a man prancing
unawares at a Christmas party with his daughter in her arms, they took the long way around. Only graveside wind chimes and distant sirens interrupted the peace. Blasebalk stopped Raymond with a
firm hand on his bicep, and pointed out the lumbering form of a Dr Easy comforting a widow. She was in one of those grief-rages where you try to turn back time with kicks and punches, and the
benign suede robot accepted each blow, inclining its oval head at a sympathetic angle and turning up the mournful blue in its eyes.

‘This is not a dark place,’ said Harold Blasebalk.

Raymond pressed on.

‘It’s a graveyard, Harry.’

He took a few paces before he realized his mistake. Harold, not Harry.

Blasebalk stood by a plot decorated with soft toys. The grave of a child. It struck Raymond that this location was ideal for murder in so many respects. Few witnesses, plenty of space. Every
headstone insisted on the insignificance of death. These people did not die, they fell asleep. Childish sentiments, a universe where all wounds will be healed, and every loss meets its consolation.
The crematorium let out another meagre exhalation. Here was death in all its municipal banality. It would mean nothing to add another entry into its daily itinerary.

‘Look at this poor fellow.’ Blasebalk squatted down next to the child’s grave and righted a teddy bear that had fallen over.

‘You don’t have any children, do you, Raymond? You don’t have those feelings. You are still emotionally naive.’

Raymond laughed.

‘While you’re a saint! I’ve lived with your shit. Your concentrated shit!’

Blasebalk stood up, dusted the soil from his knees.

‘I should have fought back. I was so used to behaving. Look where it got me.’

Raymond took the gun out and pointed it hip-height at Blasebalk, who was not surprised to see it.

Harold sighed. ‘I’ll come with you then, but it is hopeless.’

Raymond motioned to Blasebalk to walk ahead across the graves and then followed him, both men steadying themselves upon the headstones.

‘Now I know why Harry Bravado hates you so much,’ Blasebalk called back. Many of the graves had collapsed into the ground. The footing was treacherous and Raymond had to muster all
his being-in-the-moment to cope with the situation. They came upon the brook, the golf course beyond and the long sentences of graffiti-marked trains barrelling by overhead. Here a gunshot would go
unheard. The two men stood at the exact position of the X on Raymond’s map.

‘Can I ask you a favour? If this doesn’t work out for me, can you speak to my wife. To my boys.’ The older man considered sobbing, then turned his attention to Raymond’s
grip upon the gun.

Raymond was having doubts. ‘It’s just occurred to me. Your name. Blasebalk. I had no idea Bravado was Jewish. My father was Jewish.’

Blasebalk shouted back over the noise of the trains. ‘The algorithms smooth out ethnicity over time. It’s the opposite of real life. Your friend is late.’ Blasebalk was
definitely considering rushing him.