The Curve of The Earth

4

Petrovitch put his shoulder to an anonymous door on Brixton High Street, and led the way up a set of bare wooden stairs. Cooking smells grew stronger the further he climbed — signature smells he recognised from earlier days when he was new in town.

“Hungry yet, Newcomen?”

“No, not really,” said the agent. He looked like he was already eating some particularly sour lemons. Particularly he wasn’t enjoying trying to squeeze his suitcase up the narrow staircase.

“I’ve ordered for both of us. It’s probably safer that way.” He got to the top of the stairs, where a massive slab of a man blocked entry to the dining room. Infoshades hid his oriental eyes, but the wireless earpiece was clearly visible: no hair at all on the man’s shaved, scarred head. “Wong’s expecting us,” said Petrovitch.

The bouncer sneered down at him, and on seeing Newcomen half-hidden behind his luggage, spat on the floor.

“Yeah, I get to choose the company I keep, not some neckless svinya.” Petrovitch flexed his fingers. “I could throw you down the stairs and the nerve impulses won’t have travelled to your walnut-sized brain by the time you hit the bottom. You can choose that, or get the huy out of the way.”

The man started chuckling to himself, and his great belly shuddered in waves. “You’re him.” He had a grin of black and silver teeth. “You’re Petrovitch all right. Go right in.”

“Thanks.” The door opened with a burst of noise and steam. “Mudak.”

A dozen tables were already full of diners, talking, laughing, shouting and singing. C-pop cranked tinnily through inadequate speakers in the ceiling, and the air was almost opaquely blue with burnt cooking oil.

Moving through the fug towards Petrovitch was a thin figure wearing a stained white apron. “Hey! Bad man!”

“Hey, Wong. Your sign outside still isn’t working.”

Wong folded his scrawny arms. “You fix it for me?”

“Kind of busy at the moment. Maybe when I get back.”

Wong nodded slowly. “Pay me back for all those free cups of coffee, yes?”

“Free? From you? How is the coffee, anyway?”

Then they were hugging, slapping each other’s backs and cackling like loons. “Coffee hot and strong today!” they chorused.

“Where that wife of yours?” asked Wong after they’d separated.

“Taking care of business. She sends her apologies.”

“Okay. Next time, bring her, not this thing. She much prettier.” Wong peered at Newcomen. “Case out back. No room in here. No room!.”

“He treats it like it’s got the yebani crown jewels inside. Let him stick it in a corner somewhere.”

“Who this? Makes place look untidy.”

Petrovitch peered through the chemical fog. Tidiness had never been a hallmark of Wong’s establishments. Or cleanliness, for that matter.

“This is Agent Joseph Newcomen, FBI. He’s going to help me find Lucy. Isn’t that right, Newcomen?”

“Yessir… yes,” he corrected himself.

“American, huh?’ Wong stalked around him like he was viewing a grotesque artwork. “This one end up dead too?”

“Yeah, maybe. I seem to have a bit of a record for that.”

“What? What do you mean?” Newcomen looked startled.

“First American?” Wong snorted. “Bang. Bullet in head.”

“And the next?”

“Bang. Bullet in head.”

“Pretty much tells you everything you need to know, Newcomen.” Petrovitch scratched at his nose. “You got a table for us, or are we going to have to eat standing up?”

“This one, here?” Wong pointed to a table in the middle of the floor.

“Yeah, how about that one over there, behind the pillar, where no one will be able to overhear everything we say to each other?”

Wong’s eyes narrowed. “You organising crime again?”

“No, not with Joe Friday here, anyway. I just want to sit somewhere we’re not going be disturbed. We can do drunken revelry later.”

“Okay.” Wong persuaded the two Rastafari out of their seats and carried their half-eaten egg fu yongs to the table he’d tried to foist on Petrovitch. They grumbled about Babylon, but then saw who it was they were making space for. The men both slid their palms across Petrovitch’s white hand and seemed content.

The table was cleaned with a damp rag smelling strongly of bleach. Petrovitch shrugged off his coat and threw it across the back of his chair before falling into the seat.

Newcomen hovered nervously, looking around him in wonder and fear. His shoulders finally slumped, as if he’d accepted his fate, and he dragged his suitcase into the space next to the red-hot radiator.

“You don’t honestly think I’m going to eat anything here, do you?” he sat down opposite Petrovitch and leaned across to hiss at him. “What are you trying to do to me?”

“I’m trying,” said Petrovitch, “to talk to you. Find out what you’re like. Find out whether I can trust you to do your job or not. I know all the facts about your life: what I don’t know is you: how you react, your own particular strengths and weaknesses. The files I’ve read don’t tell me that sort of stuff. Now, do you want coffee?”

“We could talk at my hotel. Have dinner in the restaurant. With food that isn’t going to poison me.”

“Hmm.” Petrovitch flipped open an imaginary notebook and started to write. “Freaks out when removed from comfort zone.”

“I do not do that.”

“Unable to cope with novelty.”

“Shut up.”

“Scared of absolutely everything.” Petrovitch flipped the note-book shut and tossed it away over his shoulder. “That’s about right, isn’t it?”

“Don’t make fun of me, Petrovitch.”

“Or what, vat-boy?”

“That’s not an insult.”

“Is where I come from. Hell, at least my upgrades took.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Okay. This isn’t going well. Some of that is my fault.” Petrovitch placed his palms on the table. “Let me ask you a question: do you actually care that my daughter’s missing?”

Newcomen worked his jaw. “It’s my job to help find her.”

“That’s not what I asked.” Petrovitch stared across at the American. “Let’s try another. When they tweaked your genes, did they throw out the code for your soul?”

“Are you trying to get a reaction from me? Provoke me? Get me into a fight that’ll land me in front of the Assistant Director’s desk on a disciplinary matter? You won’t be able to do that. You want to know what was in your file? You don’t need to warn me about your behaviour. I know about it already.”

“Okay, okay.” Petrovitch held his hands up. “I know what you care about now. Your position within the Bureau. That’s what’s important to you, I understand that now. Let’s get a coffee each and calm down.”

Right on cue, two mugs appeared. It was almost as if Wong was waiting for a gap in the conversation.

“He takes it white,” said Petrovitch, dragging his own drink towards him.

Wong sniffed, and came back a moment later with a jug half-filled with something resembling milk. “Ready for food?”

“Yeah.”

“We haven’t even seen a menu yet,” objected Newcomen.

Petrovitch pointedly ignored the interruption. “What I said earlier will be fine.” After Wong had left, he said: “You know when you go round someone’s house for dinner? You don’t ask for a menu then, do you? No. So don’t be an idiot.”

“This is a public diner….”

“You don’t know anything about Wong, and you don’t get to say what this is or isn’t. Especially when your government killed most of his old customers with a cruise missile.”

Newcomen chewed cud for a while, and ignored his coffee. Petrovitch didn’t, and welcomed it like an old friend. Hot and strong, just how he liked it.

“Look,” said Newcomen suddenly, putting his forearms on the table and crowding close. “Can we agree on a truce?”

“And why would I want something like that?” Petrovitch centred his mug down in the brown ring of liquid already on the wooden surface. “But go on, I’m listening.”

“We’ve been thrown together by circumstances beyond our control. I don’t have a choice about being sent, and you don’t get to choose who escorts you around.”

“Someone chose. Don’t you want to know who? And why?”

“I know why they sent me. It’s because they thought I was the right man for this job.”

“That begs so many questions.” Petrovitch held up two fingers. “Mainly, what’s the job and why are you right? You see, I was expecting some high-level State Department official, not some junior G-man. What did Buchannan tell you the job was?”

“Stick with you. Show you around. Keep you up to date with the investigation. Wait until you were satisfied we’d done everything we could, and then,” Newcomen sat back, “get you out of the country.”

Petrovitch’s eyes narrowed. “You have remembered my daughter’s missing, haven’t you?”

“Petrovitch. Dr Petrovitch, you have to realise that the chances of find-” His words finished in a choking sound, because Petrovitch had lunged across the table and had him by the throat.

“Finish that sentence and I’ll break your neck.” He squeezed a little more. “Vrubatsa?”

Newcomen’s fingers managed to prise Petrovitch’s hand away, but only because he’d let him. The American rubbed at his throat and glared across the table. “I thought we were discussing a truce.”

“We will find her. This is not an article of faith, this is a statement of fact. The moment you stop looking for her is the moment I kill you.” Petrovitch looked around the pillar to see if Wong was coming with their food. “That’s not just hyperbole, Newcomen: I do mean it.”

“Then you’ll be arrested and charged with first-degree murder. You’ll be executed for sure.”

“And when I said the thing about diplomatic immunity, it wasn’t a joke. Uncle Sam can kick me out, but not arrest me. For anything.” Dinner arrived sizzling, and Petrovitch moved his mug out of the drop zone. “Even that.”

“You’re not going to kill me.” Newcomen looked through the steam and smoke rising from his plate. “It’s a steak.”

“Yes. Yes it is. Well spotted. And you’re right, of course. I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to rely on your fear that I will kill you to make you do pretty much everything I want. Only at the very end will you find you had a choice all along.”

Wong returned with a big bowl of glistening chips and a leafy green salad that didn’t look like it had been hanging around in the back of the fridge for a week.

“This actually looks edible. I owe your Mr Wong an apology.”

“No you don’t. Just dig in.” Petrovitch twirled his knife between his fingers and started to slice into his meat.

The steak was just how Newcomen liked it: seared on the outside, still pink in the middle. He ate some fries, and moved salad to the edge of his plate. “Things will be different,” he said between mouthfuls, “when we get to America.”

“I know they will,” said Petrovitch. “That’s why it’s important we do this now.”

“Do what?”

“Eat, drink and be merry. We’re free to fall out into the street, worse for wear from baijiu. We’re free to say fuck and shit and call each other bastards. We’re free to wear what we want, no matter how immodest. Now, I know you think that these aren’t freedoms at all, that all we’re doing is enslaving ourselves to our passions, but you’d be wrong.”

“And why would my whole country be wrong?”

“Because you’re lying to yourselves. You can think we’re all foul-mouthed drunks and our women dress like whores, but you’re missing the point. Underneath the veneer of Reconstruction, you’re all monsters. In the Freezone, no one ever goes hungry. If they fall sick, we cure them if we can and look after them if we can’t. No one’s lonely, because there’s always someone listening. We take care of each other, and we all have a say in the big decisions. Which is pretty much how we got to this point.”

Newcomen realised he couldn’t feel his fingertips any more. Nor his toes. He tried to stand, and fell hard against the bare boards of Wong’s empty dining room. Everyone else had left while they were hidden behind the pillar. Even the kitchen space, all flame and spice beforehand, was silent.

“What…” he managed before his tongue grew thick and unworkable in his mouth.

Petrovitch scraped his chair back and went to the door. No slab-bodied bouncer, but Madeleine, Valentina and Tabletop. “Give it another minute. He’s almost there.”

He came back and sat cross-legged in front of Newcomen’s paralysed form.

“You see, the whole point of this evening was genuinely to find out what you were like. If you weren’t such a craven, self-absorbed careerist, you might have saved yourself from what happens next. But we’d already made the decision based on what we knew of you, and we’ve decided that the only way we can ensure your single-minded dedication to the task of finding Lucy is by planting a bomb in your chest. The irony is that we just want you to do the job you’re paid to do. Do it, and you’ll be fine.”

Petrovitch reached out and rolled the unresisting Newcomen flat.

“The drug’s very specific and quickly metabolised. No ill-effects afterwards.” He knelt up and started to unbutton the agent’s shirt and unknot his tie. “You won’t feel a thing.”

Tabletop placed a slim case on the floor next to Newcomen’s head and opened it. Inside was a scalpel, and she was already wearing surgical gloves. She held the blade up to the light, then without doubt or hesitation, brought it down.