Death Comes for the Fat Man

4

Hector too was preoccupied with Troy.

Of course his tutelary spirit who dwelt a little lower than Olympus hadn’t managed to whirl him away from danger and deposit him in a scented bedroom with the loveliest woman on earth. On the other hand Hector was very willing to settle for a hospital bed and a bunch of sympathetic nurses.

On first arrival in hospital they’d placed him in intensive care and he’d awakened to find himself sprouting a variety of wires and tubes. His first words being a request for his breakfast, the doctors had feared there might be serious head trauma as well as the various bruises and breakages already diagnosed, but when X-rays showed no brain damage and his visiting colleagues confirmed normalcy, they had removed him from IC, transferred him to a small side ward, and given him a tranquilizing shot.

Here he had slept the sleep of the drugged for some hours.

Opening his eyes and seeing Dalziel floating under the ceiling might have put another man into shock, but for Hector it was simply a mild surprise.

This acceptance of whatever happened without any inclination to analyze either an event or his own reactions to it was an essential element of the talent for survival that was the sole gift of his tutelary spirit. It meant that as the growing Hector made his pinball progress from one disaster to another, he never absorbed the damage into himself by dwelling on it.

If Hector had analyzed his vision (which of course he didn’t), he might have said that it wasn’t so much that he actually saw the Fat Man floating above him, it was more that he felt as he would have felt had he in fact seen this phenomenon. But though not a shock, the surprise itself was enough to wake him to full consciousness, and after a few moments he sought for and found a bell push that summoned a nurse to whom he reiterated his earlier demands for solid food.

A doctor was consulted. On the diagnostic basis that if Hector had suffered any significant internal injury, his reaction to the insertion of a hospital meat pie would be as good a diagnostic tool as anything, he gave the go-ahead. When Hector survived and asked for another, he was downgraded even further off the critical list.

Replete, he lay back in bed, and this was where Troy came in. His mind, usually a comfortable blank in moments of repose, turned into a screen on which strange images were being played.

He saw a figure he recognized as himself emerge from a small copse to stand on the edge of a white plain stretching to infinity. He glanced to his right. About twenty yards away stood a chariot just like the chariots they used in Troy, one of his favorite videos, which he’d watched only a couple of nights ago. The only difference was that it was pulled not by a horse but by some sort of cat the size of a horse.

The charioteer raised the visor on his helmet and Hector was a bit disappointed to see it wasn’t Brad Pitt. But whoever it was smiled at him and with a gauntleted hand motioned him to continue to advance.

Hector managed a nod of acknowledgment and took a step forward.

And that was that. No sense of impact, flying through the air, hitting the ground. He opened his eyes and found himself in bed and the picture was simply cut off.

But it was easy to replay it. All he had to do was close his eyes again. He did this two or three times in the hope that it would move on, then he found himself distracted by a sudden burst of activity in the room.

A nurse explained that because he was so much improved and they were really short of space, they were moving another patient into the room. This turned out to be a man in late middle age with no outward sign of his condition. He showed little interest in his roommate but brusquely supervised the positioning of a small TV set at his bedside. Hector could see the screen at an angle but there was no disturbing noise, as the man was listening through a headset.

Normally a devotee of TV so long as the programs contained a maximum of action and a minimum of talk, Hector felt too tired to be envious. He fancied a little sleep, but irritatingly, every time he closed his eyes, the sequence with the cat-drawn chariot still kept running.

It did occur to him to wonder if there might not be something of memory in it. If so, he knew he ought to pass it on to his colleagues. But he couldn’t see a way to share his vision without its oddities leaving him open to professional mockery. Just because he was used to mockery did not mean he was inured to it. Hector was proud of being a policeman. In a low-orbiting life, getting through the training course and surviving his probation period marked points of apogee. Much of his hesitancy in reporting and giving evidence derived from a desire to be sure he got it right, and if in the end he’d adopted the maxim When in doubt, leave it out, the fault lay as much in the attitude of colleagues as in himself.

His assertion, which Pascoe had found so amazing, that Dalziel had been good to him, derived principally from a sense that the Fat Man didn’t single him out. Yes, he made him the butt of his jokes, but then he made everyone the butt of his jokes, even the perfect Pascoe. Yes, he laid on the tongue-lashings with great vigor, but when did he ever hold back? Yes, he treated everything Hector said with great caution fading into outright skepticism, but at least he always insisted on hearing that everything. Don’t tire thy brain out trying to separate wheat from chaff, he’d once said. Tell me the lot, son, and I’ll do the sorting. And on another never-to-be-forgotten occasion Hector had overheard him bellow at a DI who’d fallen short of the Fat Man’s high standards, Thinking for tha self, were you? By God, I’d sooner have someone like Hector who knows his limitations than buggers like you who fancy they’re twice as clever as they really are!

So there it was. If Dalziel were around it would be easy. He’d let him know about the chariot sequence running through his mind and rest happy that the Fat Man would do the sorting.

But he wasn’t around, except in the sense that his body was lying unresponsively in a nearby ward and his spirit might be floating equally unresponsively beneath the ceiling. So the sorting was down to Hector.

He opened his eyes and tried to let his sideways glimpse of the TV screen blot out the chariot. To his surprise there was a face on it he thought he recognized. Could be wrong-he was used to being wrong-and the angle made things look sort of squashed and long at the same time. But the face definitely had a look of DCI Pascoe’s missus.

He shifted his position to try to get a better view and the other patient glanced angrily toward him like one of those guys on a bus who don’t like you reading their newspaper over their shoulder.

He turned away and closed his eyes and tried to sink into an imageless sleep.

He was almost there when suddenly he was jerked back to the surface by an exclamation from the other bed.

“Bloody hell!” cried the grumpy man. “Did you see that? Did you see that?”

Someone with a greater mastery of repartee might have responded, “No, because when I tried to see it, you gave me a piss-off look!”

But for Hector even esprit d’escalier required a staircase like Mount Niesen’s.

He sat up in bed and looked toward the other patient.

He too was sitting bolt upright, staring aghast at his now blank TV screen.

“What?” said Hector.

“Did you not see it? You should have seen it! Is this what they call reality TV then-shooting buggers dead afore your eyes? Nurse! Nurse! Bloody hell!”