The Gift (13 page)

Davy raised the camera to his eye and swung it to and fro over the gaudy scene, telling himself that this was the perfect way of spying on the criminals without being seen staring at them. But in fact he was using the black, hard chunk of gadgetry as a screen between himself and the world; the prisms and lenses of the viewing aperture made the whole site tiny and distant, with the figures of the workmen unrecognizably small. One of them was climbing into the big digger—that must be Monkey. Davy steadied the camera and clicked the shutter to make sure he knew how; as he wound on the film, he saw Sonia frowning at him for having wasted a frame on something that didn't include Mr. Venn.

He looked away from her in time to see the usual two dark police cars and the black security van slide past along the road and around the corner out of sight. His heart began to thud. Sonia was writing. He stared at Monkey's digger, thinking whatever it is, it's got to be soon or the wages will be in that van. Minutes dribbled away.

Suddenly a black puff rose from the digger's exhaust, and his heart bounced again at the sight. At first he thought it was that inner shock that had caused the windows to rattle; but then, for no reason, he remembered Granny saying how the blasting at the slate quarry used to shake the windows of the farm. And the lights in the office had gone out and Mr. Venn had picked up one of his telephones and was saying, “What the hell?” but not saying it into the mouthpiece.

Mr. Venn slammed that telephone down, picked up another, and jiggled the cradle.

Mr. Wribley—the pale, bothered man from the office next door—poked his head into the room.

“My phones are dead, Mr. Venn,” he said.

“So are mine,” said Mr. Venn. “And the power's gone. We've blown a bloody big fuse somewhere—didn't you hear the thud?”

“Mr. Venn …” began Davy.

“Not now, lad.”

“That big digger's doing something funny,” said Davy.

Mr. Venn strolled irritably over, not believing it mattered. But his whole stance changed the moment he had wiped himself a mist-free patch with his hand and could see how Monkey's digger was, so to speak, elbowing its way toward the far entrance. The machine lurched and swayed. Its earth scoop gesticulated like a clenched fist at the end of its arm. Its caterpillar tracks churned past a pile of reinforcing rods, catching the far ends so that the wicked iron whipped to and fro over the concrete.

“He's going across the air lines!” yelled Mr. Venn. “Get Reynolds on the intercom!”

But at that instant from Mr. Wribley's office rose a steady, horrible electronic whoop.

“Radio's all jammed!” shouted Mr. Wribley.

“Hell! Hell! Hell!” bellowed Mr. Venn. He snatched up his white hard hat with a single red band across the top and rushed out of the office.

“Now!” shrieked Sonia above the hideous radio wail. “You can get him coming back!”

Mr. Venn raced into sight down below, darting through the cluttered maze of building materials. Another man in a blue hat with two white bands was running from the far right. They were both going to be too late: Monkey's digger was already at the site entrance, its dangling arm poised. One of the crawler cranes, which Davy hadn't even noticed start, was chugging up behind it. A few workmen had gathered but were doing nothing except shout and gesticulate.

Out in the street a big truck that seemed to have been waiting its turn to be filled with a load of spoil swung suddenly across the road just as the first police car came swirling around the corner. Davy had the camera already poised for Mr. Venn's return, so he steadied on the scene at the gateway, snapped the shutter, and wound the film on.

“Oh, oh, oh,” shrieked Sonia, jumping up and down. The implacable whooping from the radio drowned all other noise.

The truck had caught the police car full in the flank, and it was lying on its side, a wreck, blocking the rest of the road. The security van braked violently and just managed not to collide with the wreckage. The second police car halted smartly, but all the occupants must have been staring at the chaos ahead; none of them noticed Monkey's digger trundle out of the gateway with a lurching rush. Its arm swung forward and caught the police car low in the flank just as the doors were opening; for an instant of juddering effort all stayed poised and then that police car was also on its side. Davy took another picture just as Monkey scrambled nimbly down from his still moving monster. He seemed to have left it running in low gear, for it was now trying to climb the wreckage of the police car with the trapped men inside.

The gateway was now clear for the crawler crane to barge out. Three men who had been hidden under sacks in the back of the spoil truck jumped down and surrounded the security van. A policeman, obviously dazed, worked himself free from the wreck of the first car and staggered toward these men, shouting. He had blood all over his face. Davy took another picture just as one of the men turned and hit the policeman with a short club. The policeman dropped and lay still in the road. The man turned back as though he had simply swatted a fly and helped his comrades pass the big double chain that had been dangling from the hook of the crane under the chassis of the security van. They all four stood back. Monkey waved a hand. The crane jerked and staggered slightly as it took the weight of the van, swayed it into the air, and dumped it bodily in the back of the spoil truck.

The workmen at the gate were still shouting and gesticulating, but doing nothing about the theft of their wages. Suddenly Davy realized that the masked man who had been poised by the cab of the truck, apparently doing nothing, in fact had a machine gun in his hands.

Sonia screamed on and on, the intercom whooped, the office staff yelled and swore. Davy cut himself off from all this by taking pictures.

The van was in the truck and the bandits were scrambling aboard when, up from the main road, flashed three more police cars. From somewhere out of sight on the other side a dozen policemen came running. Monkey, still in the road, yelled and pointed. The man with the gun swung around and pointed it toward the policemen, who threw themselves flat on their faces. There was too much noise in the office for Davy to tell whether the man actually fired any shots, but he remembered the camera in time to take another picture as the man swung around and started to fire at the police cars, shattering the windshield of the nearest. The other bandits were jumping from the truck and running in different directions. Two of them tried to dash through the group of policemen who were cautiously getting to their feet; both were collared. Monkey and another man disappeared between the Christmas-freckled shanty shops beyond. The man with the gun had his back to the truck, so he never noticed the door of the security van sliding forward or the black-helmeted security guard towering above him. The long truncheon swung, and the gunman lay sprawling by the big wheels. Davy by now was not conscious of clicking the shutter and winding the film on.

Another man who seemed to have been sitting in the far side of the cab came running through the site gates, straight at the crowd of workmen who still stood dithering there. They scattered, leaving a single man in his path. This man, instantly recognizable by the white hard hat with the broad red band, crouched for a rugby tackle, but the bandit jinked in his stride and swung a slamming fist that caught Mr. Venn below the ear and dropped him like a log.

“Oh, oh, oh,” shrieked Sonia, and rushed from the office.

The last bandit came straight on toward Davy, running as lightly and as neatly as a footballer. Like an onrushing wave, his thoughts came before him: desperate, terrified images, hardly recognizable as the site because of the way all the things seen through those mad eyes seemed to crowd in, to lean, to reel, to steeple, to stand poised as masses of crushing weights about to fall out of the bitter sky. An elderly small workman ran across waving protesting arms, but in the picture he was hideous, squat, and hungry, with teeth like a dog's. The blow that cut him down was an instant of savage joy; but then the office itself glowered, ready to fall like a trap, with white-faced monsters grinning at the windows. The gate was an iron ambush, the passage beneath the office a tunnel of terrors, and out beyond waited the furious houses.

Long after the last of Wolf's thoughts had faded into the distance Davy stood by the window, shaking his head, trying to free his mind of the memory of them. When he looked out again, he saw that Sonia had reached Mr. Venn and was kneeling by his body, cradling his head in her arms, watched by happy, excited, bewildered workmen. He took a picture of that scene, too. It was the end of the reel.

The whole raid, according to the newspapers, had taken four and a half minutes from start to finish.

There were three reasons why the newspapers, both on Saturday and Sunday, made so much of the story. First, nothing much else was happening by way of news: no fresh wars, no arrested pop stars, no falling governments, no footballers having tantrums, no air disasters, no quints. Secondly Mr. Black Hat's Napoleonic planning excited the reporters, with its bomb to put the site telephones out of order and its jamming device to interrupt both the site and the police car radios. Besides that there were seven badly injured policemen and one old workman still in a coma; and the security guard who clobbered Mr. Black Hat from above turned out to have been the local golf champion, so the headline writers had enjoyed themselves with horrible sporting puns.

And thirdly there were Davy's photographs. Luck, and the bright morning and the good lens had, even at that range, produced a dozen beautiful pictures of the whole action, about seven of them taken at the instant when something thrilling was happening. Mr. Wribley, of all people, had first realized what Davy had done, and had got in touch with his brother-in-law who was a reporter on the local paper. This brother-in-law, a dour and distrustful-sounding man called Mr. Boland, had firmly taken charge of the film; Davy, when he was telling Penny and Mum about the adventure, forgot to mention that he'd taken any photographs at all. (Dad was down at the police station.)

It was a surprise, then, when Penny pushed the paper across to him at breakfast and there was the whole story again, frozen into separate instants: Monkey leaping from the cab of the digger, the policeman yelling with the blood on his face, Mr. Black Hat in his gangster's pose with the gun, Sonia crouched in the frozen truck tracks with Mr. Venn's head in her lap. This last picture was for some reason especially dramatic; when Davy bicycled down the road and boughtall the other papers, he found that they'd almost all printed it, variously describing Sonia as a teenage local beauty and an Italian tourist.

One Sunday paper carried an interview with Sonia, who seemed to have been unable to say anything except, “I love him. I love him. I love him,” over and over again. Mr. Palozzi was furious and began shouting about the honor of the family and sharpening an old bayonet he happened to have. (Mrs. Venn was probably not specially pleased, either.) Luckily Mrs. Palozzi, who was a plump Scot, thought the whole adventure extremely funny. Davy at once realized where Sonia had inherited her giggles from when Mrs. Palozzi came up in her car on Sunday morning to ask Davy to come and explain to Mr. Palozzi exactly what had been happening in the site office. Mr. Palozzi had locked Sonia, weeping, in her bedroom, and was sitting by the kitchen table fingering the fine edge and point of his bayonet.

“It's all right, sir,” said Davy, standing stiffly on the other side of the table. “Sonia's rather like that. She keeps falling in love and telling everyone about it except the person she's in love with. He never knows. Anyway it's usually a pop star or someone whose picture she's seen in a magazine, or someone on the telly.”

He didn't say anything about the occasional schoolmaster in case Mr. Palozzi started hanging about at the school gates with his bayonet.

“When I am young,” muttered Mr. Palozzi, “I have eight sisters. Eight. They sleep in one room, and in that room they have only one picture on the wall. One picture of the Holy Virgin. Right? Now I have one daughter, and she has on her wall not eight pictures—no—eighty. Eighty different men! I am disgusted!”

He threw his bayonet angrily into the bread bin. Mrs. Palozzi rumpled his close-cropped hair and laughed.

“There's safety in numbers, Tony,” she said. “Come off it. Sonny's a good girl. You'll only put ideas into her head, playing the heavy Eyerie father like that.”

“Playing!” snarled Mr. Palozzi.

The doorbell rang. Mrs. Palozzi bounced out into the hallway. Mr. Palozzi looked at Davy and winked, but his frown returned at the sound of a man's voice interrupted by Mrs. Palozzi's eager trills.

“Well, that's a weird thing,” they heard her saying. “I've got the boy here, too.”

She led Mr. Wribley's brother-in-law back into the kitchen.

“Palozzi,” said Mr. Palozzi, rising to shake hands.

“My name's Boland,” said the brother-in-law. “I work for the
Examiner.
”

“Pleased to meet you,” lied Mr. Palozzi.

“Hello, my lad,” said Mr. Boland. “You did all right with those pictures, didn't you? Beginner's luck!”

He sounded disgusted about it.

“It was Mr. Palozzi's camera,” explained Davy. “It's a smasher.”

Mr. Boland grunted.

“That's the trouble,” he said. “Your mother told me you were down here, which is just as well.
I
don't know the legal position if X takes a lot of pics with Y's camera, and Z then sells them to half the world's press. So what I suggest is I take fifteen percent commission and you split the rest. Okay?”

“How much?” said Mr. Palozzi sharply.

“Two hundred and twenty-three pounds eighty-two pence,” said Mr. Boland.

“Mama mia!” said Mr. Palozzi.

“That leaves you ninety-five quid each,” said Mr. Boland. “Okay?”