Game Control (38 page)

  'In 1938,' said Wallace, 'two German diplomats went to Chamberlain and warned of the imminent invasion of Poland. They were accused of being treasonous to their own country and sent packing. All during the war, stragglers from camps tottered into Britain with stories so outlandish the government thought they were mad.'

  'So no one would believe you now.'

  'I do prefer to blow the whistle when I've got the goods. But if you force my hand, I will expose you now. You might not hang, but you'd have a poor time paying your phone bill.'

  'Threadgill—' Piper leaned forward, and cast the rest of the pack in the fire. 'Why didn't you have me shot?'

  'Because,' said Wallace, 'I think that's what you want.'

vation campaign during a drought, 'Buy an elephant a drink' taped around one side. In the little comic touches Eleanor immediately recognized: Norman. Calvin took a gingerly step back.

  'What's that?' asked Eleanor.

  'Pachyderm.'

  It took her a minute, but gradually the hairs on her neck rose. 'No.'

  Calvin made a sound of noncommittal confirmation in the back of his throat and sat down. He contemplated the object with his head cocked. 'It's not exactly a virus. A "prion"? A protein of some kind. It's tiny. Suspended in a solution hundreds of times more potent than botulism. Can be airborne or dissolved in water. Norman got word through his epidemiologist cronies of an AIDS vaccine that went wrong: some it immunized; others it destroyed overnight.'

  'What about the parameters?'

  'It strikes mostly children under five,' Calvin continued, moderately interested, 'about 60 per cent, and a progressively smaller percentage of older children and adults. The aged are susceptible—an economic plus.'

  'How does he know?'

  'Well, he was a bit apologetic—' Calvin fished eight-by-tens from his briefcase. '—Since I didn't give him the go-ahead. But he wanted to surprise me, and you know his position on a test.'

  The photos were of an African village, with dozens of children sprawled on the ground, by women weeping. The
totos
looked strangely reposed.

  'They used a low-flying crop dusting plane. Pachyderm works fast. Twelve hours or less. Norman claims there wasn't much evidence of agony, more the discomfiture of a tummy cramp. Some high fevers and delirium. And he was right, dying is never a bowl of cherries.'

  'How many people did he kill?'

  'The sample was about 400; of those, 137 were cropped. He's watching the village for longer-term attrition, but this organism can't live exposed to air for more than twenty-four hours, so secondary mortality shouldn't be significant.'

  Eleanor let go of the photos; they stuck to her fingers. 'This is horrible.'

  'The pathogen is cheap to manufacture. Norman claims we could organize within months.'

  'What about 1999?'

  'The Nostradamus angle always was a bit hokey.'

  'So what are you going to do?'

  'Basengi's work was nearly complete. Your research, you admitted last week, suggested HIV is no more than a modest assist, and Pachyderm functions doubly as a vaccine. The labour force calculations are in; the parameters are met. Except,' he noted sadly, 'the Jews.'

  'What about wildlife?'

  'Norman's tested an array of species and so far the only animals sensitive are roaches and rats, but not to an extent that will disturb the food chain. Norman thought a few less pests was swell.'

  'Norman says. Norman thought. What do you think?'

  'He wants to do more trials. But with Threadgill on our tail, haste is warranted; and the sooner we crop, the fewer we need to cull.' Calvin spoke with detached curiosity. Only a slight lilt, an upward tilt of his sentences, gave his monotone any topography at all.

  'Why don't you kill Wallace?' asked Eleanor.

  Calvin didn't look enthusiastic. 'I suppose we could. What a bother.' Calvin noticed the way she was looking at him and explained, 'Norman opened a bottle of champagne. I'm afraid it went rather to my head.'

  'Champagne's not all that's gone to your head. Is this the only vial?'

  'I don't know. He thought it would give me a kick to take it home with me. After seven years' research.'

  'Calvin, bury it. Find a toxic waste barrel. Throw it in the sea.'

  'That would be profligate. This is an expensive aperitif.' His tone was whimsical. 'Besides, Norman could make more.'

  Eleanor threw up her hands. 'Shoot Norman!'

  'Now,' he chided. 'You sound like Threadgill.'

  'Or like you. What's the difference?'

  Calvin asserted mechanically, 'I'm right.'

  It was an old circle: so you say; so everyone says; wasn't the alternative to have no conviction. Eleanor skipped it.

  'Can we go to bed?' he proposed. 'I know it's early, but I'm tired. Perhaps it was the flight.'

  He stood, stretched and yawned, then nodded to Pachyderm. 'Take care of that. It's not coffee creamer.'

Calvin had worried that he'd roped himself with a single slip (under duress; hadn't she forced him?) into performing as a dutiful lover on a regular basis and had meant, if the future of the planet had not inconveniently intervened, to have a chat. (He hated chats. He hated
relationships
.) However, once next to her, his body had other ideas.

  So he wanted her, but he did not want to want her, and consequently the act was savage because he was fighting himself. This time his visions were not oceanic, but thick and opaque. He saw pig's knuckles. When it was over he was hyperventilating. Eleanor held him lightly away from her, telling him to slow down, which he did only gradually, out of exhaustion.

  Sleep, when it came, was more of the same. He dreamt of Lake Magadi. He had decided to go for a swim. Below the scabby pink crust, the water was crimson, like freshly cut meat, and though he knew that the soda would peel his skin he waded in. The lake stung his legs and clung to the hairs as he slogged on. Up to his neck, the red water filled his horizon. Insects swept the stagnant surface in black waves. The flamingos were ratty, their feathers matted, and they could not fly. His body was on fire and he could feel his skin moulting. If he kept walking he would sink, and he kept walking.

When Eleanor woke, Calvin was not in bed. She found him seated in the living room, and talked to the back of his chair. 'Don't you ever have sex like that with me again.'

  'I won't.'

  'It's better just to hold you, if the alternative is violence. I'm sore.'

  Calvin sighed. 'I've always reviled animal lovers.'

  'You revile anyone who loves anything.'

  'Except demography.'

'Except demography.'

'You cannot always choose your passions.'

'You can choose to have more than one.'

'I am grateful for even one.' He let his head tip back over the chair.

'You're crying!'

'More,' he said, '
sentimentality
.'

  She stepped into the room to discover he had Malthus on his lap. The monkey was limp.

  'Clever bugger, wasn't he?' said Calvin.

  The canister on the table was open. It exposed a thermosful of something like black bean soup. Calvin stayed her with a hand out. 'Don't go near it. Don't touch it or breathe it. You should leave the house.'

  'Malthus got into that?'

  'He was dextrous, if you'll remember.'

  'You didn't even cry when Basengi died.'

  'Please, Eleanor, go.'

  'Then you should leave, too.'

  'I will lock the creature back in its closet, but I don't want to upset it with you here.'

  Eleanor dressed quickly and returned. 'Come with me. Call the WHO. Get someone in a suit to dispose of it.'

  'No,' he said simply. 'Get out.'

  There was no arguing. 'You won't—'

  'What?'

  'Take any yourself?'

  He laughed drily. 'My dear, I wouldn't go to this much effort to concoct my own personal hemlock, I'm not that eccentric. Now please go.'

Calvin had always idealized prisons. To think in small, concrete terms, he had to be shackled in a small, concrete place. He required a world he could not escape. Behind bars there was no danger of intergalactic travel. He pictured days of horrid food you still looked forward to and work of uncreative drudgery at number plates as a kind of bliss. He revered a life where you were sufficiently uncomfortable that you thought of nothing but slop-outs and an extra blanket. He eagerly anticipated press-ups in exercise yards, crude male camaraderie, pin-ups over the bunk, wild fantasies about bustouts that he would never attempt. So many people wished to burst their bonds; Calvin wanted to be locked up. He craved an orderly, mindless life run by someone else, where the universe never went funny on you and you could have discussions of the merits of this or that but never on whether there was such a thing as good and bad in the first place. He would love to feel passionately about Wednesday's cauliflower cheese. He had lived in a world without limits and it was frightful. Surely the answer was to get a strongarm to build a wall around you and then you no longer had to worry about what you should and should not do because you could not.

  Besides, what was the difference between prison and the world? You get up, eat breakfast, clean the wing, exercise, read, have problems with the neighbours, get raped, look for love…Sound familiar? Weren't you
sentenced to life
on both sides of the bars?

Of course, these fancies were all more abstracted waffle.

  The holding cells in Nyayo House were themselves a study in over-population—there was no getting away. Detainees slept on the floor, and when all sixty were sandwiched side by side at night the whole row had to turn from their left to right sides at the same time. There were no toilets or even bedpans, and the place reeked of human effluence, the kind of smell so rank and constant you were supposed to get used to it; Calvin was waiting. Their only ration was
posho
, cooked into a stiff, lumpy
ugali
unseasoned with so much as salt, cold, and served in dog bowls. Calvin wouldn't touch it, though after two days passed into three he submitted to the diet of bathtub caulking.

  Nyayo House was one of those edifying experiences only in the humblest sense, for it did not teach him fortitude, endurance, courage, his astonishing capacities of forbearance: Papillon. Instead Calvin realized within ten minutes of his stay that he was a pantywaist; that he'd led a pampered life and pampered was precisely the way he would like it to stay. Only the comfortable revere discomfort; only whisky-sippers in overstuffed armchairs can exalt suffering; only the free can construct elaborate and patently silly metaphors about prison life and its endearing capacity to keep your feet on the ground with chains. In short, like any normal person, as soon as he got in he wanted out, and though perhaps feeling like a normal person was this misadventure's only compensation, it wasn't sufficient by a long shot.

  Calvin was the one
mzungu
in the cell, and hence something of a novelty. In keeping with this country's ambivalent relation to his colour, he drew both admiration and disdain; certainly dismay, since a European could bribe his way from jail. The white man's presence polarized the prisoners, since one lot were inclined to defecate on his feet and filch his watch, the other eager to shift him an extra handful of that terrifying
ugali
or lend him their wind-cheaters to cushion his head. In all, he was more mascot than kicked cat. He gave their cell distinction, especially once they asked, as all prisoners do, why he'd been lifted.

  'Genocidal conspiracy,' he tried unsuccessfully with a bloodied boy who'd been set upon by vigilante
wananchi
for stealing a pineapple.

  'I was going to kill
mingi watu
,' he attempted next. 'As many as in China and India together.'

  No one knew where, or what, China was, and Calvin was determined to communicate. 'I am a
mzungu
witchdoctor. I made a
dawa,
very strong. I was going to destroy my enemies by sprinkling them with dark dust.'

  This version went down well. It was the best story in the cell by a yard. They laughed and retold it in their own fashion—better, Calvin thought. Some of these chaps would prove useful for a poetic touch in his posthumous biography.

  He had prepared himself for standing achingly in waisthigh cold water, but whether from superstition over his complexion or the 'Doctor' before his name, he was not tortured. Originally, Calvin might have been disappointed, but now he knew enough to be grateful.

  It was five days before Calvin was dragged into a bleak room, whose guard sloped an automatic over one shoulder and wielded an electrified cattle prod. The warder's face was heavy and stupid, always petrifying in a man with a gun, and his helmet was too big, mushrooming to below his eyebrows; the guard kept his chin in the air to see. After ten minutes of his brutish silence, Eleanor Merritt was led to the opposite chair. It must have cost her pots of
chai
to arrange the meeting.

  She looked terrible—thin, pale and haggard, and she'd gone back to her earlier schoolteacher clothes, with a high neck, sloped shoulders and a bow.