Paid and Loving Eyes

torch in a tomb—”

“Mr Veriker, would you excuse us, please?” Lysette said to Gobbie. I stared at him. His name was Gobbie, for heaven’s sake. Everybody knew that. Well, well. Who’d think Gobbie’d go and grow a surname? Him, of all people. “It seems that Lovejoy’s even stupider than we both could possibly imagine.”

“Watch your frigging gob, Lysette.” I was getting narked. Nowt but birds with hobnailed tongues since I’d left home.

“Come, Lovejoy. Perhaps, Mr Veriker, you’d like to meet us here in an hour?”

We left. I trailed after, sheepish but madder. It would be obvious now to anybody that we knew each other. She went down into a shopping precinct underneath the railway station. It was posh, with splendid boutiques, auto-bank windows, luscious grub, imported knitwear, a veritable Bond Street of superb design. Really Swiss, I thought.

“Your arm, Lovejoy.”

“You sure?” I was still furious. Fair’s fair, right? I hadn’t asked to come just to help her and her frigging pansified brother…

“Change?” An apparition said it in three languages, holding out his hand. Maybe four, five. I wouldn’t know.

“Er, aye.” I gave him some. He looked derelict, almost in rags, and filthy.

“Change?” Two more drifted at me from nowhere, hands out. Lysette yanked me aside and we moved on among the people.

They seemed mostly youngsters, huddled in mounds. One or two sprawled. Most sat at a crouch.

“You encourage them to mug you, Lovejoy,” Lysette said, keeping us walking. “It’s a real danger. They sleep here or in doorways up above. I know it happens in all cities—and in lovely neat Zurich.” She sounded bitter.

“Only here, though?” I asked. I knew that in India the railway stations are great social concourses.

She did not laugh, gave me a look of scorn. “You think you have drug problems, Lovejoy? Nothing like ours. The diseases that accompany it offer the proof.”

“In Switzerland?” I didn’t realize I’d spoken aloud.

“Yes, here. The capital.” She drew me to the escalator and we made the open air.

“A few homeless in a whole nation…” I faltered.

“How much evidence do you want, Lovejoy? The report from the parliamentary commission which investigated our Ministry of Justice? It found that secret police gangs had records of thirteen per cent of the entire Swiss population on file.” She gave a wintry smile. “So many Swiss subversives!”

“Your Swiss police?” My plans took another tumble.

“Of course,” she said sweetly, “the files vanished when the commission report became, shall we say, famous!” She guided me along the pavement. “Possibly because the secret army we call P26 might have to be unmasked further.”

Either she was off her nut or my plans were even wronger. She hailed a taxi, still talking.

“Economy? All Europe’s ills we Swiss have in abundance. Rising unemployment, inflation, poverty, falling home ownership…”

I won’t tell you the rest, if that’s all right. I’m not scared of such talk, but there’s too much going wrong everywhere, and it shouldn’t. A bird I once knew used to say mine was the typical ostrich mentality, but it’s not. I just don’t want to hear bad things, that’s all. What’s wrong with that? I didn’t look at what she pointed out on that taxi ride, struggled to deafen myself, shut her horrible words out. Lysette went for reprimand.

“It’s no good trying not to listen, Lovejoy,” she was telling me as we finally came back. “Those people in the Platzspitz were mainliners, druggies, pushers, narcos. Needle Park, that place I showed you. It’s an open drugs mart, free needles on the State in hopes of lowering the AIDS rate. The suppliers make a billion francs a year…”

“Alma-Tad,” my mind sang, “oh, what a cad…”

“We have Zahfraulein, tooth ladies,” she was waxing. I tried putting my hands over my ears. She leaned closer, spoke more directly. The taxi driver must have thought us insane. “Spot checks on children’s teeth—so they can start out really healthy derelicts…”

Do women never shut up? “Oh, I wandered today to the hill, Maggie,” my cortex warbled. Thank God, we were back near the Limmatplatz and its massive Migros supermarket with the orange M.

“The Migros?” She’d glimpsed my relieved recognition, rotten cow. “Our famous store, all things to all men!” She scathed on. “We Swiss are so docile! It is 1984. Twenty- five per cent of us shop there daily…” We stopped at a traffic light, and I got out for air and freedom, leaving her to it.

She caught me up, no getting rid of her. I’d dithered, lost for direction. She took my arm. “Switzerland has more drug OD deaths in six months than—”

“Love.” I stopped, broken. “Please. I can’t… I just, well can’t. Don’t you see? For Christ’s sake.”

“You have social and political responsibility, Lovejoy —” She sounded like Colonel Marimee, in her own mad way.

“Lysette. Let’s part, eh? You your way, me mine. Bugger everybody.”

“Community obligations—”

“Aren’t, love. They drive me insane. I can’t take it. I can only escape. It’s all I ever do.”