Days (37 page)

1.30 p.m.

A
CROSS THE TABLE
from Frank, Mr Bloom is savouring a portion of tiramisu which, if his frequent sighs of pleasure are anything to go by, tastes ambrosial. A Days logo has been stencilled in icing sugar and chocolate powder on top of the portion, and this Mr Bloom has, with childlike precision, eaten around, so that all that remains on his plate is a sagging cylinder of layered pudding topped by twin semicircles, one white, the other light brown. Frank, meanwhile, is midway through a cup of espresso.

The two of them have been sharing a long silence which has been interrupted only by the arrival of the waiter to remove their main-course plates and take their orders for dessert. During that long silence Frank has considered, and rejected, dozens of potential topics of conversation. With the awkward business of his resignation out of the way, he has not wanted to waste this opportunity to sit and converse casually with Mr Bloom – an opportunity snatched from his dream of an ordinary life – but it seems that that faculty, which others take for granted, has atrophied in him. He envies the diners around him the ease with which they fill the air with talk

He has thought about dredging up some incident from the recent past to twist into an anecdote for Mr Bloom’s entertainment, but it is hard to single out an individual event from his life that might remotely be considered amusing. His life seem to have telescoped into one long procession of indistinguishably dull nights and days, sleeping giving way to working, working to sleeping, so that reminiscing is like looking back at an empty road which traverses a succession of low rolling hills of uniform size, a narrowing grey ribbon whose peaks and troughs diminish endlessly into the distance.

He can at least remember the events of this morning clearly enough, and has contemplated giving Mr Bloom a description of his encounters with the ponytailed shoplifter, with Moyle in Matchbooks, and with Clothilda Westheimer at the lightning sale in Dolls. But where is the novelty there? Especially for Mr Bloom, who has been walking these floors for longer than he has.

It has even occurred to him to tell Mr Bloom about Mrs Shukhov’s impromptu two-night stay at the Hotel Days, but he has decided that that would be unwise. He has a duty to let his superior know about the breach in security, but frankly his feelings about the woman and about his inexplicable, spontaneous gesture in the booth in Processing – what
was
he thinking? – have confused him, and Mr Bloom would detect that confusion in his voice the moment he mentioned her name, and would read more into it than is there. Would jump to conclusions. Ridiculous conclusions. Would say that Frank is exhibiting all the symptoms of infatuation. Which is of course absurd. Frank doesn’t even know the meaning of the word infatuation. An infatuated Ghost? Ghosts are men and women with hermetically-sealed hearts. Ghosts keep a lid on their feelings as tight as the drum-skin monofilament net strung over the Menagerie. You may catch a glimpse of an emotion every once in a while, something as frivolous as a blue butterfly or as nobly graceful as a white tigress, but nothing gets in and nothing gets out. The area is cordoned off, secure.

Besides, Processing will file a report. Mr Bloom doesn’t have to learn about it from
his
lips.

In the end, saying nothing at all has seemed the course least likely to bore or embarrass either of them. The silence, because it is mutual, is acceptable. But of all the things Frank expected to come away with after this meeting with Mr Bloom, a feeling of chagrin was not one of them. Some kind of catharsis, yes; the lightening of the soul that traditionally comes with confession. Instead, all he has been left with is the lingering, frustrating impression that, although Mr Bloom may have successfully clambered his way up out of Ghosthood, he is still walled in by his work, trapped in a trench too deep to see out of. For Mr Bloom there is still only, and ever shall be, the job. His world is Days.

Which disappoints Frank because he expected more from Mr Bloom, and, perhaps more importantly, because it doesn’t bode well for his own future.

Mr Hubble?

Frank sets down his coffee cup.
Hubble here.

Mr Hubble, we have an improper usage of a lost or stolen card. Green Floor, Electrical Supplies.

Well, I happen to be on Green, but I’m off-duty. Why did you contact me?

The card was flagged. Special attention you.

Who is the rightful owner of the card?

C A... Some kind of Russian name. Shuckoff?

Shukhov.
Frank’s throat mic transmits to the screen-jockey a grunt that was not intentionally subvocalised.
All right. Have you alerted a guard?

Not yet.

Don’t until I tell you to.

Okey-doo.

Eye?

Yes?

I’m speaking to you as an individual operative. Have you and I been in contact already today?

Yep, we have.

Matchbooks?

Yes.

I feared as much. Hubble out.

That grunt – a cross between a ruminative hum and an expulsion of breath, Frank’s way of saying to himself that he should have known that his moment of recklessness down in Processing would not be without its consequences – alerts Mr Bloom to the bobbing of his Adam’s apple. He waits until Frank has finished talking to the Eye, then says, “Duty calls again?”

“Something like that.” Frank stands up, laying his napkin on the table. “Do you mind?”

“Not at all. Always the job, eh? Always the job.”

“Let me pay.” Frank reaches for his wallet.

Mr Bloom flaps a hand. “Won’t hear of it. What’s the point in having a Palladium if I can’t use it to buy someone a meal every once in a while?”

“If you’re sure.”

“Go, Frank. Go and do what you do so well. And don’t forget to think over what I’ve said.”

“Donald...” Suddenly Frank wants to say a dozen things. Now, at last, when there is no time, he realises how much he has to communicate to Mr Bloom. In the end all he says is, “Thanks.”

Then he is hurrying out of the restaurant.

1.32 p.m.

O
NLY WHEN
E
DGAR
has passed through Horticultural Hardware and is halfway across the Gardening Department does he risk a glance over his shoulder. He is surprised to find that the sales assistant from Electrical Supplies is not hard on his heels. Still he does not slacken his pace. On he goes, the trolley’s hard rubber wheels trundling over Gardening’s synthetic lawn, which carpets a smoothly-contoured fibreglass framework of hillocks, berms and dells. Dwarf cypresses in urns dot the billowing, bright-green landscape, and
trompe l’oeil
murals on the walls and ceiling continue the pastoral idyll, adding details that cannot be reproduced indoors by practical means, such as hedgerow mazes, lily ponds, gambolling nymphs and satyrs, and an electric-blue sky wisped with strands of white cloud and flecked with the tiny black }-shapes of high-flying birds. The illusion has been well crafted. If you squint, the department’s physical boundaries seem to disappear, and the parklike vista stretches limitlessly into infinity, the painted perfection betrayed only by the connecting passageways hollowing through to neighbouring departments.

Grecian-style follies – plaster Doric columns supporting plywood porticos – serve as sales counters, and the sales assistants are costumed like characters from a Miltonian masque, the men in shepherds’ smocks and broad-brimmed felt hats, the women wearing simple gowns with wreaths of silk flowers garlanded in their hair. Littered about in large, incongruous piles are the items actually for sale: sacks of compost and packets of seeds and net-bags of bulbs and stacks of clay pots; tools and trugs and stakes and canes and gloves and strap-on knee-pads; secateurs and grass-clippers and branch-loppers and apple-pickers. It is in the adjoining Horticultural Hardware Department that automated gardening implements such as lawnmowers, as well as less nature-friendly items such as pesticides and weed-killer, can be found. The Gardening Department is for the hands-on enthusiast who lives for the feel of earth beneath his fingernails and for the Arcadian dream of Nature shaped and tamed by the sweat of Man’s brow.

The trolley, having not been designed to perform well at anything more than a gentle walking pace, is difficult to control, exhibiting a definite leftward bias. It requires all the strength in Edgar’s forearms to keep it running straight and true. His breath is starting to come in hard, short gasps, and his face is bathed in a gloss of perspiration. He runs on through the bucolic tranquillity of Gardening, oblivious to the eyebrows and remonstrations raised by his noisy progress.

For the first time since setting out on this mission, he thinks he is in with a chance of pulling it off successfully.

1.35 p.m.

E
NTERING
E
LECTRICAL
S
UPPLIES,
Frank makes for the main sales counter where Mrs Shukhov’s Platinum was used. He introduces himself to the sales assistant and, looking significantly around, asks where the perpetrator is.

The sales assistant shakes his head contritely. “Ah, well, you see...”

“Don’t tell me you let him get away.”

“It was just a spool of wire.” The sales assistant is aware that retirement credits are at stake here. “Hardly the sort of thing to arouse suspicion, you know what I’m saying? And I tried to stop him, but” – he pats the solid swell of his belly resoundingly – “I’m not exactly built like a cheetah, am I?”

“So he was male, and yet the fact that the card had ‘MRS’ printed on it didn’t make you just the slightest bit suspicious?”

The sales assistant gives a hapless shrug. “He was an employee. He had an ID badge.”

“ID badges can be faked.”

“Like I said, as soon as I realised something wasn’t kosher, I tried to stop him. And it was just a spool of wire, remember.”

“Theft is theft,” says Frank. “Can you at least describe him?”

“Young. Twenty-two, twenty-three – thereabouts. Had a trolley. And a huge forehead. You know, as though his skull has sort of expanded forwards, pushing back his hair.”

“All right.” Turning away from the counter, Frank coughs discreetly into his throat mic.
Eye? Hubble. We’re looking at a male perpetrator, early twenties, with a trolley. Distinguishing feature: big forehead. Possibly an employee, more likely a pro with a bogus ID.

Gotcha. Any idea where he is?

Somewhere west of Electrical Supplies. Begin a sweep of the area now.

On it. Could he be making for the exits?

I don’t think so. It’s unlikely anyone would go to the trouble of obtaining a forged ID and a Days card just to get hold of some wire.
Frank frowns.
There’s something odd going on here, but I’m damned if I know what it is.

32

Heptane
: a paraffin containing seven atoms of carbon.

1.41 p.m.

C
ROUCHING BEHIND THE
crescent of hardbacks that screens her desk from the prying Eye, Miss Dalloway locates a section marked by such apt titles as
The Winds of War
,
The War of the Worlds
,
War and Peace
,
The Stand
and
Mein Kampf
. Book by book she clears away this literary seal, like an archaeologist excavating a tomb, stacking the hardbacks behind her, until she has exposed the cavity within. Oscar stands by, ready to offer whatever assistance he can.

Reaching both arms into the cavity, Miss Dalloway carefully – oh so carefully – eases out a ten-litre steel beer keg. The keg is full and heavy, and she moves it a centimetre at a time, wincing grimly at every slop and lap of its contents. When the keg is clear of the cavity, she squats down, embraces it, and lifts. Carrying it to the desk, she sets it gently down beside the open copy of
Kitchen-Sink Arsenal
, then steps back, letting out a long-held breath. Oscar is curious to know what a beer keg might contain that merits such respectful caution, but decides not to enquire. He has a feeling he may not like the answer.

Miss Dalloway returns to the cavity and extracts a sealed sandwich bag, which she also places on the desk. Inside the bag are a Roman candle, a box of matches, a camera flashbulb, a nine-volt battery and a roll of parcel tape. Oscar recognises items his fellow Bookworms were instructed to buy for their head of department the day before yesterday. But where is the can of paraffin he himself purchased for her? And the fertiliser Colin obtained from Gardening?

He watches Miss Dalloway unscrew the cap of the keg, her movements precise and delicate. As she uncovers the circular aperture in the top of the keg, a sharp, ammoniac smell steals out, stinging his nostrils. Through the aperture he glimpses the surface of some kind of thick brown liquid that reminds him of a chocolate-cake mix.

He can contain his curiosity no longer.

“Miss Dalloway...?”

“Not now, Oscar. No distractions.”

The formidable Head of Books scans the desktop. Her gaze alights on a perspex thirty-centimetre ruler, which she picks up and inserts into the keg. She stirs the thick brown liquid with the ruler slowly, peering into the aperture every so often. When she is satisfied that the liquid has achieved the desired consistency, she withdraws the ruler and hands it, dripping, to Oscar for disposal. Holding it gingerly by its dry end, he drops it into the waste-paper basket.

Now Miss Dalloway unseals the sandwich bag and lays its contents out in a row on the desk. She tears off a few strips of parcel tape with her teeth and tamps them loosely to the edge of the desk, then uses one of them to attach half a dozen of the matches to the Roman candle so that the matches’ heads are in contact with the firework’s blue touchpaper. She picks up the camera flashbulb and whacks it against the desk repeatedly until its glass shatters, then tapes the broken flashbulb to the firework and adds more matches to bridge the gap between the touchpaper and the exposed bulb filaments. Finally she tapes the battery securely to the side of the keg. She compares her finished handiwork with the illustration on the open page of
Kitchen-Sink Arsenal
and seems satisfied.