On his eighteenth day in the tiger cage, Robert Stoney began to lose hope of emerging unscathed.
He’d woken a dozen times throughout the night with an overwhelming need to stretch his back and limbs, and none of the useful compromise positions he’d discovered in his first few days-the least-worst solutions to the geometrical problem of his confinement-had been able to dull his sense of panic. He’d been in far more pain in the second week, suffering cramps that felt as if the muscles of his legs were dying on the bone, but these new spasms had come from somewhere deeper, powered by a sense of urgency that revolved entirely around his own awareness of his situation.
That was what frightened him. Sometimes he could find ways to minimize his discomfort, sometimes he couldn’t, but he’d been clinging to the thought that, in the end, all these fuckers could ever do was hurt him. That wasn’t true, though. They could make him ache for freedom in the middle of the night, the way he might have ached with grief, or love. He’d always cherished the understanding that his self was a whole, his mind and body indivisible. But he’d failed to appreciate the corollary: through his body, they could touch every part of him. Change every part of him.
Morning brought a fresh torment: hay fever. The house was somewhere deep in the countryside, with nothing to be heard in the middle of the day but bird song. June had always been his worst month for hay fever, but in Manchester it had been tolerable. As he ate breakfast, mucus dripped from his face into the bowl of lukewarm oats they’d given him. He stanched the flow with the back of his hand, but suffered a moment of shuddering revulsion when he couldn’t find a way to reposition himself to wipe his hand clean on his trousers. Soon he’d need to empty his bowels. They supplied him with a chamber pot whenever he asked, but they always waited two or three hours before removing it. The smell was bad enough, but the fact that it took up space in the cage was worse.
Toward the middle of the morning, Peter Quint came to see him. “How are we today, Prof?” Robert didn’t reply. Since the day Quint had responded with a puzzled frown to the suggestion that he had an appropriate name for a spook, Robert had tried to make at least one fresh joke at the man’s expense every time they met, a petty but satisfying indulgence. But now his mind was blank, and, in retrospect the whole exercise seemed like an insane distraction, as bizarre and futile as scoring philosophical points against some predatory animal while it gnawed on his leg.
“Many happy returns,” Quint said cheerfully.
Robert took care to betray no surprise. He’d never lost track of the days, but he’d stopped thinking in terms of the calendar date; it simply wasn’t relevant. Back in the real world, to have forgotten his own birthday would have been considered a benign eccentricity. Here it would be taken as proof of his deterioration, and imminent surrender.
If he was cracking, he could at least choose the point of fissure. He spoke as calmly as he could, without looking up. “You know I almost qualified for the Olympic marathon, back in forty-eight? If I hadn’t done my hip in just before the trials, I might have competed.” He tried a self-deprecating laugh. “I suppose I was never really much of an athlete. But I’m only forty-six. I’m not ready for a wheelchair yet.” The words did help: he could beg this way without breaking down completely, expressing an honest fear without revealing how much deeper the threat of damage went.
He continued, with a measured note of plaintiveness that he hoped sounded like an appeal to fairness. “I just can’t bear the thought of being crippled. All I’m asking is that you let me stand upright. Let me keep my health.”
Quint was silent for a moment, then he replied with a tone of thoughtful sympathy. “It’s unnatural, isn’t it?
Living like this: bent over, twisted, day after day. Living in an unnatural way is always going to harm you.
I’m glad you can finally see that.”
Robert was tired; it took several seconds for the meaning to sink in.It was that crude, that obvious?
They’d locked him in this cage, for all this time…as a kind of ham-fistedmetaphor for his crimes?
He almost burst out laughing, but he contained himself. “I don’t suppose you know Franz Kafka?”
“Kafka?” Quint could never hide his voracity for names. “One of your Commie chums, is he?”
“I very much doubt that he was ever a Marxist.”
Quint was disappointed, but prepared to make do with second best. “One of the other kind, then?”
Robert pretended to be pondering the question. “On balance, I suspect that’s not too likely either.”
“So why bring his name up?”
“I have a feeling he would have admired your methods, that’s all. He was quite the connoisseur.”
“Hmm.” Quint sounded suspicious, but not entirely unflattered.
Robert had first set eyes on Quint in February of 1952. His house had been burgled the week before, and Arthur, a young man he’d been seeing since Christmas, had confessed to Robert that he’d given an acquaintance the address. Perhaps the two of them had planned to rob him, and Arthur had backed out at the last moment. In any case, Robert had gone to the police with an unlikely story about spotting the culprit in a pub, trying to sell an electric razor of the same make and model as the one taken from his house. No one could be charged on such flimsy evidence, so Robert had had no qualms about the consequences if Arthur had turned out to be lying. He’d simply hoped to prompt an investigation that might turn up something more tangible.
The following day, the CID had paid Robert a visit. The man he’d accused was known to the police, and fingerprints taken on the day of the burglary matched the prints they had on file. However, at the time Robert claimed to have seen him in the pub, he’d been in custody already on an entirely different charge.
The detectives had wanted to know why he’d lied. To spare himself the embarrassment, Robert had explained, of spelling out the true source of his information. Why was that embarrassing? “I’m involved with the informant.”
One detective, Mr. Wills, had asked matter-of-factly, “What exactly does that entail, sir?” And Robert-in a burst of frankness, as if honesty itself was sure to be rewarded-had told him every detail.
He’d known it was still technically illegal, of course. But then, so was playing football on Easter Sunday.
It could hardly be treated as a serious crime, like burglary.
The police had strung him along for hours, gathering as much information as they could before disabusing him of this misconception. They hadn’t charged him immediately; they’d needed a statement from Arthur first. But then Quint had materialized the next morning, and spelled out the choices very starkly. Three years in prison, with hard labor. Or Robert could resume his wartime work-for just one day a week, as a handsomely paid consultant to Quint’s branch of the secret service-and the charges would quietly vanish.
At first, he’d told Quint to let the courts do their worst. He’d been angry enough to want to take a stand against the preposterous law, and whatever his feelings for Arthur, Quint had suggested-gloatingly, as if it strengthened his case-that the younger, working-class man would be treated far more leniently than Robert, having been led astray by someone whose duty was to set an example for the lower orders.
Three years in prison was an unsettling prospect, but it would not have been the end of the world; the Mark I had changed the way he worked, but he could still function with nothing but a pencil and paper, if necessary. Even if they’d had him breaking rocks from dawn to dusk, he probably would have been able to daydream productively, and for all Quint’s scaremongering he’d doubted it would come to that.
At some point, though, in the twenty-four hours Quint had given him to reach a decision, he’d lost his nerve. By granting the spooks their one day a week, he could avoid all the fuss and disruption of a trial.
And though his work at the time-modeling embryological development-had been as challenging as anything he’d done in his life, he hadn’t been immune to pangs of nostalgia for the old days, when the fate of whole fleets of battleships had rested on finding the most efficient way to extract logical contradictions from a bank of rotating wheels.
