Looking for Jake and Other Stories

what would happen, what the penalty was for renegacy. I don’t regret it, he thought fiercely. I’d do it again. I won’t courier for them no more, no matter what they do to me.

When the policeman phoned him, some days later, it took Morley several seconds to understand what he was saying, the message was so unexpected.

“We’ve got him.”

Morley could not understand how the operatives could have been so careless. A botched job, a rush, the incompetence of some new agent; he could not understand it. “They were caught selling the stuff?” he kept saying.

“Yeah,” the officer said. They sat in the police-station canteen. “Junkies, they know they should use a fence and all that, but, you know . . .” He waggled his eyebrows to indicate that it was difficult to care when you were high.

Morley wanted to see him, the so-called junkie they had caught, but he was not allowed even to peer through the grille of the cell. His heart was hard in his throat. He thought of the man in that little room.

Impassive, in nondescript, forgettable clothes. Waiting for the police to receive a message from some astonishing lawyer, or government minister, and to let him go; or for a midnight visitor to free him in some effortlessly daring raid. Morley imagined him a big man but not so big he was slow, with a face that showed no emotion at all, nor his purpose. Morley did not know if he could bear to see the face of his designated punisher.

Why did you get caught?

It did not take much to find out the supposed name of the man the police were holding. A word to a few of the officers he had dealt with, and he learnt when the suspect would be released—soon to be rearrested, he was assured, immediately they could find a fingerprint or DNA (they’d be coming to dust again). Morley wasn’t to worry, they assured him.

Morley could still not well believe what he was going to do. But he could not live this way anymore. He waited as the day went, and grew more and more frightened. He did not give the thought words, but he knew that this might be when he died.

How will I recognise him? he thought, and remembered the photograph the desk clerk had shown him.

Those things aren’t accurate. That made him look, I don’t know...

He considered the way the man would walk: ignorable, invisible, forgettable, and all full of power. Have to be very careful... Morley thought again.

I’m going to see one of them, he thought. Any minute. He could have retched.

When the man left the police station, Morley felt as if he could not breathe.

It was late. He tracked the man quietly toward estates that sprawled and seemed empty. The man’s disguise was consummate: his furtive movements, his anxious little tics perfect. Morley hung back, but as he saw his target stop by a stairwell, in the shadows of some industrial bins, lighting a cigarette, he was overcome. He had thought he was only there to track, but now he ran forward in fear and anger and wondered as he came if this had always been going to happen. Morley was sobbing as he attacked. He knew he could not give his target a moment.

“Who are you?” he whispered through the scarf around his face. “You leave me alone.” He gasped, he sucked in breath, gripped the man’s throat and barrelled him down. His hands were shaking very hard.

“Who the fuck are you?”

The man he held was whining like a child. Morley pushed his face into concrete. “Shut up, shut up, you’re fooling no one, you understand?” He jabbed. “Tell me, tell me, what do you want from me?” He stretched out his arms hard, trying to keep distance.

The burglar was crying. Desperately, Morley kicked him. “Tell me,” he said.

“Is it you I done?” the man whimpered. “It didn’t mean nothing, it didn’t mean nothing, don’t cut me . .

.” Urgently Morley watched his arms, his legs, ready for an attack. His quarry was thin, and his face was scabbed. It was hard to make sense of his expression. For one moment, Morley saw a calculation on the man’s face, and he opened his own eyes aghast, but the expression was gone, and he was unsure.

“Who are you?” Morley said again, and the man, the young man, flapped his hand at the blood on him.

“I ain’t nothing,” he gasped, and Morley watched him and suddenly understood and came in close.

“What did they tell you?” he said urgently. “I’ll make sure you’re safe. Whatever they threatened you with, I can, we, the police can protect you. Who were they, the ones told you to break in? What did they want? ”

But though he shook him and hurt him again, badly, Morley could not make the man talk. He would only cry, holding his arms limp, and Morley had at last to throw him down and run, leaving the young burglar howling and tearing himself from tension and frustration. The man was a flawless actor; or was well-chosen by the hidden agency, for ignorance and expendability; or was too terrified to tell the truth; or the police had the wrong man.

Morley cleaned his flat, took the plant off the disc. He heard no more from the police. When he heard about the poison gas attack, he sat staring at the heavy circle, the evidence of his mutiny.

On the screen, rescuers in chemical suits dragged young men and women out of the subway. Most were dead; some were still dying, noisily drowning on their own deliquescent lungs. Morley watched. Their families mobbed the site, broke through the cordons, were held back by the police and by gusts of gas, braved them, reached their dead lovers and family with their eyes streaming from more than grief. Some succumbed.

Simultaneous attacks in other parts of the city, and Morley heard what the journalists heard, the screams and foreign entreaties. In places of worship, in the offices of giant companies, and in that modern subway, gas made hells. Several devices were found and defused before they were triggered: even more had been supposed to die than the hundreds who did.

A coalition of armies was amassed. There was an onslaught on the poisoners’ refuge. Morley watched the conflict.

When his prime minister appeared, came onto his screen to ask for Morley’s and his compatriots’

support, Morley could focus only on the bookshelves behind the leader. Amid the spines were tasteful statuettes, a couple of plaques, and there at the prime minister’s right hand an empty space, what looked like a deliberate gap, what looked like a stand for something, something circular, something the size of the pallet that had propped up Morley’s flowers.

Morley felt as if he were choking. It’s a message, he thought. They’re saying, ‘See what we’re missing?’

If I’d sent it on, they would have had it, and they might have stopped this.

It was too late to send it now. Morley was stricken.

He saw photographs of the hideouts from which the masterminds of the attack had fled, and in an alcove in the wall were two saucer-shaped things, covered with writing, and a space for a third, that was not there. It could have been even worse, Morley thought then, and his heart surged and misery lifted. Oh thank God, that was it, it would have been even worse, if I’d not held this back from them. He stared again at his container, but did not remain convinced. He could not.

Is it too late?

I’ll send it. I’ll send it. But he did not want to make things worse.

 It was murderous, it was going on, people were dying, and he had started it, or possibly perhaps had softened it and made it better. Morley felt that the guilt would destroy him. If it weren’t for the great pride he felt at other times, he was sure he could not have survived.

The battles did not stop, and he stared and stared at the address on the container. Once he took a knife to it, to open it, but he stopped, in time, when all he had done was score scratches on the surface. He could not risk making things worse.

“I might make it better,” he whispered, and nearly prised it apart again, but did not.

Your work is done, it said to him, every time he looked at it. Your work is done, but it was not, and it never would be.