Looking for Jake and Other Stories

GO BETWEEN

Something was in the bread. Morley was cutting, and on the fourth strike of the knife, the metal braked.

Behind him his friends talked over their food. Morley prised the dough apart and touched something smooth. He had marked it with a scratch. Morley could see the thing’s colour, a drab charcoal. He frowned. It had been a long time since this had happened.

“What’s up?” someone said to him, and when he turned his face was relaxed.

“It’s gone mouldy.”

He put the bread in the rubbish, where he could reach it again.

When the others were gone Morley took the bread out and pulled it apart. From its crumbs he drew a tube, a grey baton that fit thickly in his hand. The line of a seal was just visible at one end. Morley did not open it. He turned it over. There were instructions on it, in small type, embossed as if punched out from within.

CONCEAL BY RUBBISH BIN AT EASTERNMOST EXIT ST. JAMES PARK,it said.ASAP.

YWBC.

Morley turned it over. He felt the crack of its opening and the larger more ragged mark he had made.

The mar made him anxious.

He packaged it tightly in a hard cardboard tube. Walking to the park, he clutched the cylinder, until he realised how he must look, and he turned slowly and he hoped seemingly idly to see who if anyone was watching him, and he relaxed his grip on the tube until he thought perhaps it was too much and that someone might now be able to snatch it. He reached the gate with relief and paused, fussed ostentatiously with his newspaper, put down the tube and tucked it up to the bin with his foot before walking away.

The next day he completed the evaluations he was working on. Morley ate lunch out, and when he headed for home he stopped and bought two new hardbacks, started to read one on the train. (He opened it with a moment’s frisson, but it was all there.) He had ice cream in a cinema café until the next showing of a film that he sat through until the end of the final credits. He ate at a pizzeria, sitting outside, reading his book, but nothing did any good.

Through it all he never stopped waiting. He imagined the park wardens, the dustmen and -women becoming intrigued by the cardboard tube, looking to see that they were not watched and taking it from the piles they collected. He imagined them opening his package, unscrewing that grey rod and drawing out whatever it was he had been charged to deliver. He should be calmer, he knew, but it had been so many months since he had last had to do this. Finally, two days later, when he thought it must have arrived wherever it was going, he felt relief.

He pushed his life back into its usual shape, quickly. Though he could not think that this was the last of it, he was pleased that he had not obsessed as he sometimes did, that he had lost only two days to his duty.

Early on it had been more. He was so successful that when he at last received another instruction it came as a shock.

October, and Morley was enjoying London’s autumn smell. In a newsagent’s he picked up a copy of the Standard, and hesitated by the chocolate, looking at the low-fat version he had trained himself to pretend he liked but suddenly hungry for a real bar, which with guilty devil-may-care he took and paid for. He unwrapped it as he walked. The first bite he swallowed: it was on the second that his teeth touched something hard and he gasped and came halting, and stared into the wet and melting sweet at something much darker and more cold inside.

He stared at the chocolate and thought but I was about to take the other one. It was a long time since he had dwelled on that phenomenon. He had thought himself inured to his instructors’ unerring knowledge of what he would pick.

In the first months he had been constantly aghast at the fact, had imagined unseen cadres watching him, gauging what he was about to buy, somehow pushing their messages into things just before he touched them, but that was impossible. The inserts were there already, waiting for him.

Morley, always knowing that it was useless, had attempted to trick those who contacted him. In shops he would hover for many seconds, his hand over a specific item; he would pick it up, walk on, then suddenly return and grab a replacement.

It made no difference. For weeks and months at a time his shopping was untouched, but when they wanted to pass on a command, he could not evade them. Twice, obscurely shaped, opaque containers were delivered in products he knew he had taken quickly and at random: in a jar of mayonnaise; threaded through a pack of dustbin liners.

Once Morley had spent days living only off translucent products, holding each glass or plastic container up to the light to see it was uncontaminated by commands before buying it, but he had been too hungry to continue like that for long.

The chocolate contained something like a fat pen-lid. Thankfully Morley had not bitten it.

LEAVE ON YOUR SEAT ON THE LAST SOUTHBOUND VICTORIA LINE TRAIN BETWEEN

PIMLICO AND VAUXHALL,it said.ASAP. YWBC.

Morley stared at the order, and hated it.

This time, when he obeyed it, he did not try to distract himself. With something between resentment and self-indulgence he let himself think only of his task, of what might go wrong. From the station at Vauxhall he went straight home and drew a chart of all the places the little package might be intercepted. He ranked them, in order of potential danger.

The next day and the day after that he called in sick and spent the day watching news. Police intercepted a bomb in Syria; Greek doctors saved the lives of twins; a strike by baggage handlers in Paris was averted; a serial sex offender caught in Berlin. It might be any of these, Morley thought, and he stared at the screen at these and other stories, and tried to read some secret nod to him in the reporters’ words, in the facts of each case.

Of course his actions might have their effects in the work of hidden agencies, which measured their successes precisely in stories that no one would ever hear. Morley knew that. He knew he could not know, that he might be wasting his time.

He knew also that what he forwarded might have no effect at all, on anything: he did not believe it, but he knew it might be.

This must be important work. He had long ago decided that was the only thing that made sense. It was what had first changed his opinion of his tasks, had turned his paranoia, his fear, into something like pride.

The truth was that it was not just the tedium of clear soups and water or white wine that had aborted his experiment with see-through goods: it was also a growing sense of anxiety, a fear that he was succeeding, that he was missing messages, and that he must not, that important things depended on him doing the duty given him.

He had never believed that the insertions were everywhere, that everyone received them randomly but that no one said a word. He had been chosen, for opaque reasons, to be the middleman. Whoever was contacting him must need anonymity, certainty that they were not traced. Hence this subterfuge, entrusting their deliveries to a stranger.

Morley had been watched for years, since he was a boy. It was the only thing that made sense. They must have had to make sure he was suitable, that he would not fail, that his curiosity would not goad him to open the little containers and let their contents get into the wrong hands, into his hands.

A few days on there was another grey baton in his bread.CONCEAL BY RUBBISH BIN AT

EASTERNMOST EXIT ST. JAMES PARK, it said again.ASAP. YWBC. Morley was horrified. He had never had an instruction repeated before. He winced at its corrective tone. Thankfully this time he had not cut the insert.

There was the bread-knife mark, twice my teeth dented the thing, there was that one I dropped and chipped. They must know it’s a risk, he thought, reiterating arguments he had had with himself many times. They wouldn’t put it where it could be scratched like that if it mattered. Probably this is nothing to do with that. Still he imagined whoever had received it examining the first tubular casing, touching the blemish, throwing it away unopened, unsure that they could trust it. The thing, the key it contained, might not be used, and that might be what lost the battle.

He obeyed quickly, but out of that reawakened anxiety came others. Watching the news stories, wondering in which braveries or tragedies he had played a tiny part, Morley felt a resurgence of another fear, for the first time in years, that those messages he had missed, if he had missed any, in the years he had tried to escape the instructions, had been crucial to a long-term plan. That everything he did now was too late, and that deserted in a landfill, discarded years ago by some confused consumer in his place, was the small dark box embossed with instructions which he Morley had been supposed to obey, a box that had been key to all these other, later packages, which were now pointless.

Throughout his life as an occasional courier of messages in his milk, his vegetables, his CDs, in hollows cut in the pages of his books, squeezed from toothpaste tubes, though he had wondered often about his unseen superiors, Morley had not speculated much on the hidden items themselves. For much of the time he had just assumed, vaguely, that they must be instructions, messages that could not be trusted to phone lines or email, rolled in protective carapaces. He could not fail to notice, though, that the small hard thing in his chocolate had resembled nothing so much as a bullet.

He thought of that as he watched footage of an assassination, the death of a strongman president in an ex-Soviet republic, shot once by a sniper. The murdered man was huge and did not look quite human. It may have taken a special weapon to end him. Morley tried to make sense of the politics of the place: he could not tell if the dead man had been a good or a bad thing, which at first made him think that the bullet he had passed on (if it had been a bullet) could not have been used for this job, because there was no obvious heroism here. But of course he was in no position to say: perhaps even if this had been an evil, the good that it also did necessitated it.

Morley knew where these thoughts were going. He had been on this route many times, back when he had rebelled against his unseen commanders. He knew what he would think next, and though he did not want to, though he had had this out with himself many times and thought the argument done, he could not stop.

He wondered again if perhaps his actions were on behalf of some body whose agenda he would not share, something malignant.

There was an explosion on an oil rig; an attack on Kurdish villages; rapes in Mexico City. A jockey tested positive for drugs, there was a bloodless coup, a bloody intervention. Morley saw the little bullet or bullet-shaped thing or tightly folded instructions in a bulletlike case held in the hand of the horse rider or the doctor whose test discredited him, in the pocket of the African general who took power promising peace, in the gun belt of the mercenary whose forces invaded the capital.

He knew also that these items and the others that preceded them might be nowhere he would ever see.

They could be hidden, with the orders they must have contained for those higher up than he.

Did I do that? Morley thought as he watched the successful docking of a shuttle with Mir. Did I do that? A child-smuggling ring broken. That? The torture and murder of a Russian antiracist. A company excelled. The end of a conflict came, and a new conflict.

Morley went to sleep an unsung hero but woke in the night, horrified at the knowledge that he was a dupe of criminal stupidity. He became a champion again and then a pawn and then an irrelevance.

At work, Morley thought of the men and women who issued him his real orders, in their white room, or their cave. Their satellite.

“You know all this stuff in Chechnya?” someone said to him in the pub, and he started. Yes, he knew about it, he watched the news, and now he thought about the death squads, the resistance fighters.

The person who had spoken was saying something like “they’re all as bad as each other,” and distractedly Morley was glad to hear that others were intervening and disagreeing, but he was not paying close attention. He hoped that when next he was issued commands, they concerned the Chechnyans. Or the South Sudanese.

“If you could do something about it,” someone was saying, but Morley was ahead of her. I can, he thought.

Every time he bought anything he felt his stomach sink in case there was an instruction, but he was almost eager. He was afraid that enthusiasm or anxiety would count against him. He was careful to display no expectation. He picked products from shop shelves firmly, without hesitation.

Of course nothing came. For many days nothing came and he thought often of his duty and how he would like to do it. A tanker was lost in the North Sea. Livestock was bled dry in Mexico by some goatsucker, nothing came, crop circles returned, diseases took thousands, corruption brought down banks, nothing came.

When it did, in the end, the instruction was larger than any he had received before. He suspected, before he had unwrapped his carton. He hefted it. “Deep Pan Vegetable Feast,” he read, and eyed its thickness.

Inside it was a disk, almost an inch thick, the diameter of a small frisbee, that had been only just covered in dough and cheese. It was the same dark grey that most of the others had been, perhaps a little lighter or darker. Morley shook it but it made no sound. There was a line just visible bisecting it, where it could be prised apart.

FORWARD TO, he read on it, and then a post-office-box number.ASAP, it said. They want me to send it? Morley thought, bewildered, as he kept reading. They’ve never— He stopped hard as he reached the next, last, line:THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION. YOUR WORK IS DONE.

You will be contacted.

Yesterday was bad comparison, yellow wears bad conscience, yule wary basket-case: of course not, of course not. You will be complicit; connected; collected; conniving; coopted; collated; concerned. Of course not. You will be contacted. Morley had understood very early whatYWBC meant, letters he had read on every insert with which he had ever been entrusted, until now.

He put the discus-thing on the table, stared at it. For minutes, Morley stared at it, until he knew what it was that he felt: horrified, and bereft.

He should be happy. There was no hint of displeasure in the message. It seemed they were choosing a major task with which to finish his service. The job was done. That was the implication, it wasn’t that his work was done, but that his work was done, that things were irrevocable now. He supposed he had helped bring in a better world.

As he wrapped the canister and put it in a box, though, he thought suddenly, I’ve been replaced, and became so enraged that he slammed the thing down. Why’ve they replaced me? What did I do wrong?

In the post office, in the long, long queue, he could not stop staring at a woman three people in front of him.

She held a large padded envelope close to her. Abruptly she let it drop and held it loosely, while she looked round, taking in everyone. She drew her hands up again, slowly, the package creeping back towards her chest, and she tried to put it down again and walked briskly and with relief to the service window when it opened.

Morley was still. The queue became restive but he did not move. Behind him an elderly Rastafarian gripped a poster tube in two hands. A young mother fussed with the cardboard box she had put beside her baby in its pushchair. A teenager was picking with what looked like great nervousness at the large wrapped case he held.

“Excuse me, mate, are you going to—” someone was saying, but Morley ignored him, stared at the parcels in the line.

I’m surrounded by colleagues, he thought, and then almost instantly, I’m surrounded by enemies.

Men and women from his own organisation, or from splinters from that organisation, renegades, or opponents dedicated to destroying him, those who would make things far worse for Chechnya, for the economy, those whom he must stop. None of them know, he thought. He was the only one who knew that there, in that post office, ignoring each other and filtering out the tiny mutter of a Walkman, glancing at the clock, fidgeting, they were all at war. There must be civilians among them, and they were in danger too. Innocent people could get hurt.

Careful now.

Be careful. Morley swallowed. He closed his eyes. I’m losing it. “Mate, excuse me, but the queue’s moving—”

“Go on mate—”

What am I doing?

It was sudden, a landslide of certainty. Seeing all his hidden enemies or comrades or random strangers, Morley could not believe he had been taken in, that he had been suckered by the implied do-gooding of his overseers, these skulking contaminators. He was aghast. He thought of the years he had done their work and of each message or item or weapon or computer code he had passed on. As rage grew in him and disgust for his foolishness, a fervour came too, to fix the bad he had done. He could hardly imagine what he must have been party to, but he made himself, he was unflinching. The flies on corpses, the slumps that wiped economies away and left people raging in the streets.

“Mate—”

But Morley was out and running, pushing through the lines, holding his terrible package close, as if he would shield everyone else from it.

No, he thought. No.

He held the disc over the waters of the canal, he held it by a skip full of rubbish, by a bonfire on the allotments, but at last he took it back to his house and placed it on his table, a baleful centrepiece.

I won’t be part of it anymore, Morley thought. Fuck you, he thought, staring at the container. He put a potted plant on it. He tried to make it banal.

That night when his phone rang, Morley was horrified but not so surprised to hear the curt message, the voice so clipped he could not even tell the sex or age of the speaker.

“Is this . . .” it said, and then a gasp, a contained sound, and then, “You’re just bloody asking for trouble,” and there was laughing and the line cut.

Morley did not leave his house for days. He picked up a knife whenever the phone or the doorbell rang, but that one call seemed to be the end of it. I knew it, he thought and most or much of the time believed. I was right about them, they wouldn’t threaten me if they were...on my, on our side.

Nothing came for him. He watched the disc. It sat below the china pot through the weeks of winter, into spring.

Morley carefully watered the plant. For a time he flinched when he shopped, and then he stopped, and he found nothing in his products. He watched what happened in the world, and was as sure as he could be that he was not to blame. He was more and more certain that he had done the right thing.

By March he had almost stopped worrying. When he came back to his flat one day to find his window broken and his home trashed, his video and stereo taken, his books thrown to the floor, he even fleetingly thought that it was just a burglary. But it did not take him long to trace the footsteps of the intruder, see how they had hurried from room to room, how they had been looking for something.

They had been interrupted, it seemed, had not spent long in the kitchen. The disc was untouched, fringed by the leaves that now half hid it. They would not have expected it to be there. Morley felt the raised instructions again and sat on the floor.

The police were sympathetic. They made it clear that he should not expect too much.

I expect nothing, he thought. You can’t track the likes of these. You’re no good to me at all. They want me.

“Is there . . . is it . . . Is it like most other breakins?” he could not restrain himself from asking, and the liaison officer nodded and watched him carefully.

“Yes. It’s . . .” He moved his lips. “Sometimes people find this sort of thing very upsetting. Would you like me to . . . I can put you in touch with someone to chat to about it. A counsellor . . .” Morley almost laughed at the man’s misdirected kindness.

You can’t help me, he thought. No one can. He wondered 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.

You never had any work, he heard, but ignored, inside himself. Your work meant nothing.

He could send it and the fighting would end and the right side triumph. He would send it, he would end the killing, he decided, except that he could not risk the catastrophe he would or might let loose if he did.

Perhaps it was too late, anyway. It might make no difference. If I send it and it makes no difference, that’s why, it’ll be because I left it too late, like a fool. His burden bent him.

There is no burden, he heard and ignored. You have no work to do. Your work was always done.

Outside moved many people carrying parcels. Morley held the disc and watched the war that he had started or contained or had no effect on at all.