Safe Enough, page 9
Socrates said, “Not your fault. In the West Indies, the owners were British.”
The room the two men were in was the ground-floor living room of a suburban house, unoccupied as of an hour ago. The residents had been told to take a long walk, and Socrates had overseen the iron bolt being screwed into the floor, and then his men had taken a long walk, too, but not before bringing in five gallons of gasoline in a can. The guy in the shackles was soaked in it. The liquid that had plastered his hair to his skull was gasoline, and the pool he was sitting in was gasoline. Less than a gallon so far, but a little goes a long way.
Socrates said, “The plantation owners had one fieldworker for every two acres, plus skilled labor for after the harvest, plus domestic staff. As a result, they were heavily outnumbered, twenty to one at times, and they were mistreating their people very badly, working them too hard in the sun, and abusing them in their houses. Especially the females. They had their way with the pretty ones and worked the ugly ones relentlessly.”
The man in the shackles said, “Uprisings.”
“Yes,” Socrates said. “They lived in a permanent state of fear. Quite rightly, I might add. They deserved to. They were always listening out for plots against them. Which were few and far between actually, but they happened.”
The man in the shackles didn’t speak. Socrates was walking slow circles around the gasoline pool, clockwise, declaiming, enjoying himself, like he imagined his ancient namesake had in the marketplaces of old Athens. He said, “What do you suppose they did when they discovered a planned move against them?”
The man in the shackles said, “Examples.”
“Exactly,” Socrates said. “They made examples of the ringleaders. They had two favorite methods. Do you know what they were?”
“No.”
“The first was breaking on the wheel. Do you know what that was?”
The man in the shackles did know, but he wanted to keep the conversation going, obviously, so he said, “No.”
Socrates said, “A man would be stood upright and tied by his wrists and his ankles to a large wagon wheel. Then a fellow slave would be made to break all his bones with a heavy iron bar. All of them, but slowly and in sequence. Possibly an arm first, and then the opposite leg, and so on. The victim would be reduced to a bag of jelly, just hanging there with no effective skeletal support. The agony must have been terrible.”
The man in the shackles said, “Yes.”
Socrates said, “The second method was to burn them alive. They would be tied to a stake, and a bonfire would be built around them.”
The man in the shackles said nothing.
“The power of example,” Socrates said. “Very effective. There was trouble, but surprisingly little of it, given that for a long time an overwhelming majority was suffering hideous torment.”
The man in the shackles said, “Bad.”
Socrates smiled. “But there were enormous profits to safeguard. Then as now. White powder and insatiable demand. Incalculable wealth, something that had never been seen before. Should I burn you alive?”
The man in the shackles said, “No.”
“But you stole from me.”
“No.”
“Half a million dollars is missing.”
“Mistake.”
“Sloppy bookkeeping?”
“Yes.”
“Crystallizing the sugar was an art. The cane was crushed in the mills, and the juice was drained and boiled, and the molasses was skimmed off, and the resulting pure liquid was dried in the sun, and lime was added, and the powder just appeared. That is, if everything was done right. If it wasn’t, then money was lost, and the skilled man was beaten severely, often flogged, even though he was a skilled worker and even though the process was difficult and his mistake might have been entirely innocent. Sometimes the victim had a limb cut off, usually a leg. Sometimes he was castrated.”
The man in the shackles said nothing.
Socrates said, “It was about the power of example.”
The man in the shackles shifted his weight and said, “Pocket change.”
“Whose?” Socrates asked, interested. “The plantation owners’ or mine?”
“Either one.”
“True,” Socrates said. “One hogshead of sugar didn’t amount to much. A tiny percentage really. Almost invisible, just like a bag of cash is to me.”
“Well, then.”
“But the big owners had hundreds of slaves. Suppose they all slacked off, just a tiny percentage each? A hogshead here, a hogshead there, weeds in the fields, crops planted too late to get the rain? Then what?”
The man in the shackles didn’t answer.
Socrates said, “I have more than hundreds of associates. I have thousands ultimately. Suppose they all made small mistakes?”
“Can’t help it. I try hard.”
“I’m sure you do. But what if all of you were as sloppy?”
“It was a small amount.”
“As was a single hogshead of sugar.”
“That’s my point. And it was a genuine mistake.”
“So you want me to show mercy?”
“Please.”
“But then what about the power of example?”
“It was a mistake. That’s all.”
Socrates stepped over to the corner of the room and picked up the gas can. It was made of red metal, and it had an angled spout. The liquid inside sloshed and moved and exhaled vapor and made thin keening sounds as tiny waves broke against the inside walls. Socrates hefted it high and stepped back to the shackled man and tipped it like a teapot and drizzled a thin stream over the man’s head. The man moved, and the stream bathed the hollows above his collarbones and his neck and his back. The man gasped, like the gas was very cold or like he was very afraid or both. Socrates kept it going a full thirty seconds, the best part of another gallon. Then he returned the can to the corner of the room and started walking circles again.
He said, “It was my money, not yours.”
The man in the shackles said, “I apologize.”
“For what?”
“For the mistake.”
“Do you think an apology is enough?”
“Yes.”
“Convince me.”
The man in the shackles took a deep breath, fully aware that what came next would be crucial. He said, “Any process has inefficiencies at the edges. With the sugar, you know, some of it must have gotten spilled. Some of the liquid must have leaked. It’s inevitable. You can’t drive yourself crazy, looking for perfection.”
“Now you’re worried about my spiritual welfare?”
“I’m just saying. There are going to be losses. And mistakes. You can’t worry about all of them.”
“I don’t,” Socrates said. “Not all of them. Because you’re right. One hundred percent perfection is impossible. Therefore, I set realistic targets.”
“Then we’re okay.”
“No,” Socrates said. “We’re not okay. Because you exceeded the target. Three hundred grand, maybe four, that’s within the margin. But you took five. That’s outside the margin.”
“But you’ve got billions. You’re a very rich man.”
“Actually, I’m an unbelievably rich man.”
“So a mistake about half a million is like losing a dime under the sofa cushion.”
Socrates took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, took a cigarette from the pack, and put it between his lips. He held his lighter in his hand. It was a plastic Bic, shaped like a cylinder, disposable, nothing fancy. He didn’t spark it up. He just played with it, rotating it fast between his fingers, like a tiny twirling baton. He said, “One assumes that physiologically sugar is important to the human organism in small quantities, but that those small quantities were extremely hard to find in nature so that the craving had to be correspondingly huge and permanent. That’s what those old British plantation owners found, anyway. They sold all the sugar they could produce. Demand didn’t fall away, even after people were getting enough. They became addicted to sweetness.”
The man in the shackles smiled, trying to be a pal. He said, “People are addicted to what we sell, too.”
Socrates said, “No, they’re addicted to what I sell. There is no ‘we’ anymore. An hour from now, you won’t even be a memory.”
The man in the shackles didn’t reply. Socrates said, “My point is that those old primeval nutritional urges seem to have hardwired us for addiction. For a million years, we were compelled to seek things out, and we can’t stop now. We can’t just flip a switch after all of evolutionary history.”
“But that’s good for us. For our business, I mean.”
“Generally,” Socrates said. “But specifically it’s bad for you. Because people get addicted to being rich, too. I mean, look at me. I had to work very hard in the past. That’s like my own evolutionary history. I can’t just flip a switch now.”
“But you are rich. You’ll always be rich.”
“So I should stop now? Is that what you’re saying? Does a person stop eating cookies because he’s had enough sugar for the day? No, he keeps on reaching for that packet until they’re all gone.”
“It was a small amount.”
“My small amount.”
“You’ve got enough.”
“I need more. Because you’re forgetting something else. Being rich doesn’t mean anything unless other people are poor.”
“You need me to be poor?”
“I like the comparison. It makes me feel better.”
“I thought this was about the power of example.”
“Well, that, too.”
And at that point, the man in the shackles just gave up and waited. Socrates sensed the surrender. Entertainment was over. He stepped back to the corner of the room and picked up the can of gas. He poured more over the guy’s head while the guy bucked and struggled and cried. Then he trailed a wet line all the way to the door. He held the can upside down to chase out the last drops. He put the can on the floor and crossed the hallway and opened the front door. His guys were back from their walk. They were waiting in the cars.
There was a breeze outside, enough to make a draft inside, enough to stir the gasoline vapors and spread the smell. The wind was blowing parallel with the front of the building, creating a slight Venturi effect, sucking air out of the house the same way a spray gun sucks paint out of a reservoir. Socrates figured the whole house would burn, but he didn’t care. It wasn’t his.
He clicked his lighter.
It didn’t work.
The serrated wheel spun free and then jammed. The flint had broken, and the fragment had seized up the mechanism. He dropped the lighter and pulled his gun. He aimed at the floor from a foot away, right at the wet line. He figured the muzzle flash would do the trick or, failing that, the heat of the bullet itself.
The breeze gusted, the vapors stirred; he pulled the trigger, and the air itself seemed to catch fire all around him, blue flames dancing and curling and twisting, connected to nothing, then connected to his clothes, to his hair, to his skin. He stood up slowly, moving, turning, ablaze, stamping a meaningless circle inside an envelope of fire. The breeze fed the flames and pulled more vapor out of the house, which fed the fire even more. Socrates made it out the door and two steps toward his car, and then he went down heavily on his front, and the wind caught the door and slammed it shut behind him.
The guy in the shackles heard the screaming, and then he heard cars driving away, and after that he heard nothing, until an hour later the occupants of the house got back. They didn’t call the cops. No one thought that was a good idea. They called the shackled man’s friends instead, and four of them arrived another hour later with bolt cutters. Then all five men left, stepping over the blackened lump on the driveway.
THE BONE-HEADED LEAGUE
For once the FBI did the right thing: it sent the Anglophile to England. To London, more specifically, for a three-year posting at the embassy in Grosvenor Square. Pleasures there were extensive, and duties there were light. Most agents ran background checks on visa applicants and would-be immigrants and kept their ears to the ground on international matters, but I liaised with London’s Metropolitan Police when American nationals were involved in local crimes, either as victims or witnesses or perpetrators.
I loved every minute of it, as I knew I would. I love that kind of work, I love London, I love the British way of life, I love the theater, the culture, the pubs, the pastimes, the people, the buildings, the Thames, the fog, the rain. Even the soccer. I was expecting it to be all good, and it was all good.
Until.
I had spent a damp Wednesday morning in February helping out, as I often did, by rubber-stamping immigration paperwork, and then I was saved by a call from a sergeant at Scotland Yard, asking on behalf of his inspector that I attend a crime scene north of Wigmore Street and south of Regent’s Park. On the 200 block of Baker Street, more specifically, which was enough to send a little jolt through my Anglophile heart, because every Anglophile knows that Sherlock Holmes’s fictional address was 221B Baker Street. It was quite possible I would be working right underneath the great detective’s fictional window.
And I was, as well as underneath many other windows, because the Met’s crime scenes are always fantastically elaborate. We have CSI on television, where they solve everything in forty-three minutes with DNA, and the Met has scene-of-crime officers, who spend forty-three minutes closing roads and diverting pedestrians, before spending forty-three minutes shrugging themselves into Tyvek bodysuits and Tyvek booties and Tyvek hoods, before spending forty-three minutes stringing KEEP OUT tape between lampposts and fence railings, before spending forty-three minutes erecting white tents and shrouds over anything of any interest whatsoever. The result was that I found a passable imitation of a traveling circus already in situ when I got there.
There was a cordon, of course, several layers deep, and I got through them all by showing my Department of Justice credentials and by mentioning the inspector’s name, which was Bradley Rose. I found the man himself stumping around on the damp sidewalk some yards south of the largest white tent. He was a short man, but substantial, with no tie and snappy eyeglasses and a shaved head. He was an old-fashioned London thief-taker, softly spoken but at the same time impatient with bullshit, which his own department provided in exasperating quantity.
He jerked his thumb at the tent and said, “Dead man.”
I nodded. Obviously I wasn’t surprised. Not even the Met uses tents and Tyvek for purse snatching.
He jerked his thumb again and said, “American.”
I nodded again. I knew Rose was quite capable of working that out from dentistry or clothing or shoes or hairstyle or body shape, but equally I knew he would not have involved me officially without some more definitive indicator. And as if answering the unasked question he pulled two plastic evidence bags from his pocket. One contained an opened-out blue US passport, and the other contained a white business card. He handed both bags to me and jerked his thumb again and said, “From his pockets.”
I knew better than to touch the evidence itself. I turned the bags this way and that and examined both items through the plastic. The passport photograph showed a sullen man, pale of skin, with hooded eyes that looked both evasive and challenging. I glanced up and Rose said, “It’s probably him. The boat matches the photo, near enough.”
Boat was a contraction of boat race, which was Cockney rhyming slang for face. Apples and pears, stairs; trouble and strife, wife; plates of meat, feet; and so on. I asked, “What killed him?”
“Knife under the ribs,” Rose said.
The name on the passport was Ezekiah Hopkins.
Rose said, “Did you ever hear of a name like that before?”
“Hopkins?” I said.
“No, Ezekiah.”
I looked up at the windows above me and said, “Yes, I did.”
The place of birth was recorded as Pennsylvania, USA.
I gave the bagged passport back to Rose and looked at the business card. It was impossible to be certain without handling it, but it seemed to be a cheap item. Thin stock, no texture, plain print, no embossing. It was the kind of thing anyone can order online for a few pounds a thousand. The legend said HOPKINS, ROSS, & SPAULDING, as if there were some kind of partnership of that name. There was no indication of what business they were supposed to be in. There was a phone number on the card, with a 610 area code. Eastern Pennsylvania, but not Philly. The address on the card said simply LEBANON, PA. East of Harrisburg, as I recalled. Correct for the 610 code. I had never been there.
“Did you call the number?” I asked.
“That’s your job,” Rose said.
“No one will answer,” I said. “A buck gets ten it’s phony.”
Rose gave me a long look and took out his phone. He said, “It better be phony. I don’t have an international calling plan. If someone answers in America it’ll cost me an arm and a leg.” He pressed 001, then 610, then the next seven digits. From six feet away I heard the triumphant little phone company triplet that announced a number that didn’t work. Rose clicked off and gave me the look again.
“How did you know?” he asked.
I said, “Omne ignotum pro magnifico est.”
“What’s that?”
“Latin.”
“For what?”
“Every unexplained thing seems magnificent. In other words, a good magician doesn’t reveal his tricks.”
“You’re a magician now?”
“I’m an FBI special agent,” I said. I looked up at the windows again.
Rose followed my gaze and said, “Yes, I know. Sherlock Holmes lived here.”
“No, he didn’t,” I said. “He didn’t exist. He was made up. So were these buildings. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s day Baker Street only went up to about number eighty. Or one hundred, perhaps. The rest of it was a country road. Marylebone was a separate little village a mile away.”
“I was born in Brixton,” Rose said. “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
“Conan Doyle made up the number two twenty-one,” I said. “Like movies and TV make up the phone numbers you see on the screen. And the license plates on the cars. So they don’t cause trouble for real people.”
