The Best of Science Fiction 12

Beyond the Weeds Peter Tate

This time, Anton Hejar came by chance upon the event. He heard the shrill gathering of locked tires and was running before any sick-soft sound of impact. The car could be skidding, no more; but one could not afford to stand and wait. One had a reputation.

He shouldered a passage through the lazy-liners on the rotor walk even as a bundle with flapping limbs and thrown-back head turned spit-wise in the air. He was at curbside when the body landed close to his feet.

Hejar placed his overcoat gently to retain a little of the man's draining warmth.

"Somebody get an ambulance," he shouted, taking command of the situation while women grew pale and lazies changed to the brisker track and were borne smartly away.

The man's eyes flickered. A weak tongue licked vainly at lips grown dry as old parchment. Breath came like a flutter of moth's wings.

"How are you feeling?" asked Hejar.

The eyes searched for the speaker, blinked and blinked again to bring him into focus. The man tried to speak, but there was only a rattle like too many unsaid words fighting for an outlet.

Hejar sniffed the air. His nostrils, finely attuned to the necessities of his calling, could pick out death like hollyhock or new-made bread. Yes, it was there, dank and acrid as stale perspiration.

"No need to worry," he told the man. "You'll be all right."

He took off his jacket to make a pillow for the man's head.

"My ... wife ... she ... "

"Don't concern yourself," said Hejar. "Let's get you settled first."

He's kind, thought the man in his mind full of moist pain. Perhaps he just isn't trying to fool me with sentimentality. I feel so cold ...

The siren of the approaching ambulance rose and fell on a scale of panic. Hejar moved the man's head gently, looking for marks or a tell-tale run of blood from the ear. He found nothing. Good. The brain, then, the control centre was undamaged. Great.

He went through the pockets of the overcoat covering the man. From one he produced a small tin and opened it, exposing an inked pad. He manoeuvred digits on a rubber stamp.. The man moved feverishly beside him. "You'll be fine, old son," he said gently. "Help's just arriving."

Then he brought the rubber stamp down right between the man's eyes.

Doberman Berke, a morgue attendant of intermediate stature, humbled through life in constant awe of the ubiquitous Anton Hejar. Where death stalked, there, too, walked Anton Hejar, hat pulled low, hand on stamp.

Berke paused in his work to examine the insignia between the corpse's eyes. It was not elaborate, a mere functional circle with script around the outer edging and the characters 'A.H.' tangled in some written state of intercourse at centre.

'Item and contents property of ... ' read the circumferential legend if one cared to crane one's neck and bend kiss-close to the poor dead face to see.

Berke did no such thing, nor had he ever done so. He knew Hejar's function, knew the language of the snatchers from careful study. Instead, with a curiosity he compared the time on Hejar's stamp — 14:34 — with the report that accompanied the cadaver. The ambulance men had put the time of extinction at 14:34.5. Hejar's professionalism was uncanny.

He detached the item and placed it in a refrigerated container. Then he pushed it to one-side to await collection.

Invariably, Hejar came himself. If he had any juniors, Berke had never seen them. Certainly, they never came to claim their master's bloody bounties. Hejar knew Berke's routine. He had already checked the attendant's volume of work. He would be here very shortly.

And even as Berke acknowledged the fact, the door swung wide and Hejar was walking towards him, smiling and beneficent, unfolding a spotless receipt.

Berke took the receipt and examined it closely, though he knew full well it would contain adequate authority from Coroner Gurgin. Dealing with Hejar, an expert in his own field, Berke endeavored to appear as painstaking and conscientious as Hejar's patience would allow. And Hejar had a fund of patience. Hejar had so much patience he should have had a long face and a penchant for squatting on desert cactus plants to go with it. Instead, he just smiled ... and in that smile lay a chill warning that if you didn't move fast enough to prove you were alive, then Anton Hejar would take you for dead.

Berke handed back the receipt. "Any trouble this time? Sometimes sector centre gets a little old-fashioned about dispatchment at speed. Like sympathy for the dependents."

"Sympathy is out of date," said Hejar blandly. "Absurd sentimentality about a piece of stiffening flesh." He showed his teeth again, setting up laughter wrinkles around his blue, blue eyes. "Burgin knows where his steroids come from. He gives me no complications. A little blind-eye money for his favourite dream pill and he is always prepared to write me a rapid registration marker. Now, is this mine?"

He moved towards the container and identified his designation, humming busily to himself. He caught up the container by its handle and started for the door.

"Wait."

"Why?" Hejar spat out the word with a venom that made Berke writhe, but his face, all the while, was mild, his manner charitable. "Why," he said, more reasonably.

Hejar was no stranger. They met elsewhere and often and dialogue came far more easily where surroundings were no more indicative of the one's vocation than the other's.

Berke felt foolish. There were always questions that occurred to him moments before Hejar's arrival at the morgue and each time, he lined them up and rehearsed a conversation which, he hoped, would impress Hejar with its depth and insight.

But when Hejar came, it was as though he dragged the careful script out of Berke's head and bundled it into a corner. Berke was tongue-tied. Hejar, as ever, was sunny. Today was no exception.

"Why?" Hejar asked again, patiently.

Berke stumbled. "Isn't ... isn't there anything else you want? The trunk isn't spoken for."

"No wonder."

"I'm not with you."

"The man has been struck by a car," said Hejar with exaggerated diction. He might have talked thus to a retarded child — if he had ever spared a little of his surface warmth for a creature who could do him no good. "Digestive chemistry, kidney system, circulation ... they're all finished. At most, there may be a dozen organs worth salvaging, and we don't have time for that. Besides, our clients pay more money for bits and pieces."

"Uh-huh." Berke slotted away the piece of business acumen. Sooner or later, he would have to take his chance on the outside — he was fast running out of apprenticeships. And he was determined to sample the lush pastures of the thoroughfare section, with its easy pickings and its first-come-first-served credo. There was small reward, by comparison, in industrial accidents or domestic mishaps.

"Now," said Hejar, "is there anything else?" He made it sound like a polite inquiry, but Berke knew that he delayed the man further at his peril. He didn't want to leave his room one morning and find Hejar waiting to follow him. He shifted from one foot to another.

"Oh, yes. Forgive me." Hejar reached in his pocket and tossed a handful of notes across to Berke. They fluttered on to the separation table. In the time it took Berke to wipe them clean of tell-tale stains, Hejar was gone.

Jolo Trevnik locked the weathered door of his downtown Adonis League and wondered, as he wondered every night, why he tried to carry on. Once, his culture clinic had been definitely uptown and well filled with rounded young men who slung medicine balls at each other and tested their biceps in crucifix poses on the wall-bars.

Ironic how, when you had survived everything else from social stigma to national laziness, finally location turned against you. The people had moved away into apartment blocks on the town periphery, leaving the centre purely for business and only that which was conducted in skyscraper settings.

These days, Trevnik exercised alone, moving slowly from one piece of apparatus to another, not because he had himself slowed up, but because now only time hung heavily on the wall-bars.

His suit grew progressively shabbier and his fortune, body-built in the days of blind, rootless activity that followed the tobacco ban, grew correspondingly smaller. As did his steaks and his health food orders. He was still in fine shape ... and frustrated as only a man can be whose sole talent has become redundant.

He turned away from the door and walked towards the main rotor quay. A shadow in a doorway down the street moved to follow him.

Hejar had made only a token attempt at concealment and Trevnik knew of his presence. It was part of the new fatal system that had emptied Trevnik's clinic and all others around the town, and all football grounds and all places where excitement or over-exertion might bring unexpected eclipse. The body that had once been so envied in life was now attractive only in terms of death.

I guess I ought to be honoured, Trevnik thought. But I feel like a cat in heat. I'll make the pink punk work for his money.

At the rotor quay, he selected the slow track, and moved quickly along it. He wanted to put the idlers in his pursuer's way and they made no protest, silent, turned inward with the sea-shells in their ears filling their minds with hypnotic rhythms and whispered words.

Above the whine of the rotor and the passing traffic, he heard the man stumbling after him, heard him cursing, and laughed.

At the next junction, he transferred to a faster track, still walking rapidly, weaving neatly between the younger mutes, with their frondular arms and snapping fingers.

Hejar was less adept and less gentle. Once, he jostled a young man so violently that his earpiece slipped to the moving pavement.

The youth recovered it and pursued the pursuer long enough to tap his heels and send him headlong before returning to his reverie.

Trevnik heard the resultant tumble and allowed the pavement to bear him along until the dishevelled Hejar regained his feet. Then he back-pedalled until the man drew level, still dusting himself down. He raised the pitch of his voice a deceptive shade.

"I hope you didn't hurt yourself," he said, fussily ... too fussily. "Perhaps we should walk a little more slowly."

Hejar eyed him warily. "I'm quite recovered now," he said. "Thanks for your concern."

If the guy knows why I trail him, he wondered, why doesn't he show it? Why this spectacular concern?

"Perhaps I should walk with you in case you feel suddenly faint," said Trevnik. "If you're shaky, you ought to get to bed. Are you sure I can't help you?"

The attitude jarred on Hejar's sensitivity. He began to notice other things about the man. How he moved — almost mincingly. The breeze that played on their faces as they were drawn along the track brought a musky aroma to the nostrils grown acute with death. Hejar swallowed and looked at the man again.

"Really," he said, almost defensively. "It's all right. The next quay is as far as I go."

"As you please," said Trevnik. His lips tightened with a hint of petulance. "But if there's the smallest thing ... "

"Nothing," said Hejar, savagely.

Trevnik rode beside him, barely glancing at him but carrying the smug conviction of a man who has done a good turn only to meet an ungracious response.

Smug? Hejar, sneaking glances at Trevnik from the shelter of his hat-brim, became even more apprehensive.

Trevnik's finely developed limbs and torso were bound to fetch a good price. Or were they? Trying to sell internal organs marred by chromosomatic complications or a brain whose motivations were neither particularly masculine nor blatantly feminine but in some twilight in-between ... that had definite set-backs.

At the quay closest to his office, he disembarked. "Thanks for everything," he said.

"I hope we meet again," said Trevnik. He waved until the rotor bore him out of sight.

There was no doubt Trevnik had a physique rarely seen among the squat inhabitants of 1983; a body which, if properly marketed, could still prove profitable despite ...

Hejar chewed his sensual lower lip. Despite nothing. He had kept observation for weeks now, at first unnoticed and lately unheeded. In the beginning there had been no such doubts proffered. It was just today? Hejar could not be sure that the disturbing traits had not been there for some time. Certainly, they had not been apparent when he began his vigils. And that was it — a device, dated from the time Trevnik first noticed that the snatchers were on to him, or at least some time subsequent to that ... when he thought of it.

Hejar felt better. The fall had shaken him, had made his heart pound alarmingly. But now he had rumbled the man, his good spirits returned.

Any fresh measures to protect the remains after death intrigued him. There was, after all, no pain, no occupancy and postmortem activities were unlikely to disturb the main participant. But the sanctimonious sproutings of the sixties and early seventies still persisted though even the government had officially classed them out of date. There remained in certain circles a horror of disturbing the corpse. Hejar had long ago shouldered and forgotten the inferences of obscenity and laughed all the way to the credit pile when somebody called him a ghoul, a cannibal, a necrophile.

"I do mankind a service," he would tell people who questioned his motives. "The burial grounds have been used up, built over, defiled in asphalt. The crematorium has a use, but it is a great leveller. How do you identify ashes? Items that could be vital to the living are wasted in the flames. Far better, is it not, to have a scroll stating that even in death, your dearest are unselfishly helping those who continue to suffer. I aid medical science. I am trained to the task and my spirit is right."

"If I can help somebody," he crooned raggedly as he entered the block where his office was situated, "as I pass along ... "

He boarded the elevator and pressed the button for the 11th floor.

"Then my living shall not be in vain ... "

The elevator wound upwards. Head bowed, Hejar was engrossed in the half-remembered song.

"Then my living shall not be in vain ... Oh ... "

The elevator shunted him into the nth floor berth. He opened the door of his office.

"My living shall not be in va-a-i-i-n-n-n ... "

The woman in the guest chair had red-rimmed eyes but she watched him intensely.

"Good evening," he said calmly. He was used to finding such women in his office. One pair of red eyes looked much like another.

"I've been here for hours," she said.

"I didn't know you were waiting," he said, obviously. He did not concede the necessity for an apology. Instead, he smiled.

"You are ... Mr Hejar, the ... reclamation ... man?" Hejar's smile had disconcerted her, as it had been meant to do. The smile therefore broadened.

"I've been sitting here, looking at your ... pictures," she said, gesturing vaguely at the Ben Maile skyline and the Constable pastoral. "They're not ... what I ... would have expected."

Hejar hung his hat and coat carefully on the old-fashioned stand. He took his seat behind the desk and built a cathedral nave with his fingers while the smile lay dozing on his face.

It was always best to let them talk — as much as they wanted to, about whatever they wanted to. Gradually they would work their way round to the inevitable plea.

"What had you expected, Mrs ... " He deliberately left the sentence hanging in the air.

"An office without a single rounded edge. No softness anywhere ... everything sharp and cold and soulless."

She would tell him her name and the reason for her presence in her own time. He would not prompt the revelation because it was important to maintain a singular lack of interest.

"I think pictures add another dimension to an office," he said "Constable had a way with water, an eye for minute detail. I often think he sketched every leaf. Maile, now ... "

"You're probably wondering why I am here," said the woman. She was fortyish, plump, not unbecoming. She was in pain, with her loss, with the alien circumstances in which she now found herself.

"Take your time. I know how it is ... "

"I'm Elsie Stogumber."

Stogumber. Hejar switched on the audiostat which unscrambled the data from the long-winded secretary computer.

"Stogumber," he said into the feeder piece.

"There would hardly be anything recorded yet," said the woman.

"Today?"

The woman twisted her gloves in her lap.

"He asked for you," said Hejar.

"Small comfort to me now." The woman seemed mesmerised by the anguished play of finger and nylon. Hejar waited.

"They say you — you had his head."

"That's right."

The woman watched his face for perhaps five seconds. Then she went back to her glove play.

"You wouldn't still have it?"

Hejar's stomach churned. His vocation was bloody enough, even viewed with the detachment he brought to it, but ...

"Why?" he asked. The smile had gone.

"I suddenly couldn't remember my husband's face. It terrified me. If I could just ... "

"I no longer have it. My clients demand prompt delivery."

"Your — clients?"

"Come now, Mrs. Stogumber. I'm sure you realise the complete situation. You already know exactly what came to me. You also know why and that I am only an agent in this ... "

She screamed once, sharply. But her face was unfrenzied. It seemed impossible that such a sound had uttered from her.

"Who has it now, then?" she asked. Her voice was controlled, but only just. "Who has it?"

"My dear Mrs. Stogumber ... " Hejar found another smile and slipped it on. "Will you not be satisfied if I say that your husband is beyond any inconvenience or pain and that his last thoughts, to my certain knowledge, were of you?"

"No. It is not enough."

"What would you want, Mrs. Stogumber?"

"Ideally, my husband. Or at least, some part of him."

"But he's dead, Mrs. Stogumber. He's gone. He is nothing without the spark of life. Why prolong the parting? Why mess up your pretty dress, Mrs. Stogumber?"

The woman crumpled visibly in the chair. Her shoulders shook and she took in great gulps of air.

"Don't you have any movies of him? No threedees, maybe?"

"He went out after breakfast and I'll never see him again. You — you buzzards chop him up before I can even ... identify him."

The fight for breath became less laboured as tears began to flow. Hejar let her cry, thankful for an escape valve. He wondered what he could say when she came out of it. Evening edged a little closer to night. Her sobs softened to an occasional sniff. She blew her nose and then looked up.

"It usually helps if I explain," began Hejar. "You see, when in 1973, the Central Committee rescinded the Anatomy Act of 1823 and the Burial Act of 1926 ... "

"I've seen you," she said. "All of you. Waiting at busy road junctions, chasing ambulances, trailing feeble old men ... "

Her voice was close to hysteria. He rose, walked round the desk and slapped her hard. She fell silent.

"You might feel different if you understood our mission," he said. "We are not buzzards. We play a vital role. To benefit the living, we make certain adjustments to the dead. Nobody suffers by it. The Salvage of Organs Act of January, 1974, gave us the full power of the legislature. This was tantamount to a declaration that the racket in kidneys and heart valves and limbs that had thrived up to that time was accepted as inevitable and made conventional. We have new thinkers now. Wasting precious sentiment on a pile of gone-off meat was not progressive. Surely you can see that."

The woman took a deep breath. For a moment she teetered on the verge of more weeping. Then she struggled on.

"I accept it in theory," she said. "It seemed to make good sense at the time. Things like that always do when you are not involved ... But I've seen the way you work. You salvage men don't just wait for death — you prompt it. Surely, if you are the public servants you say you are, you shouldn't have to compete with each other."

Hejar swung his feet up on to the desk. Now the situation had resumed a calmer plane, he could pick and choose his words. He clasped his fingers behind his head.

"Now there, admirable Mrs. Stogumber, you have hit upon our problem. This is a living as much as a vocation. I must play as others shape the game. If there is a certain — over-enthusiasm, it is not of my choosing. But I have to absorb it if I am to continue in the practice. As long as there are people who deplore this trend, there is a chance that it will be thrown out. You see, there are so many new people trying to make out. As yet, we have no control over membership. The dignity that once went with this calling ... the pathological training ... Well, you know how it is. You open a door and all manner of undesirables flock through it."

"I'm sorry," she said. "For acting like that, I mean. It was childish of me." She pried a wintry smile.

"I am sorry, too, Mrs. Stogumber, for having to resort to such extreme measures. Your present composure impresses me considerably. Perhaps you find the situation a little easier to accept now."

She smiled again, a little more like autumn now.

"When somebody takes the trouble to explain, it helps," she said.

"The 1974 amendments to the Human Tissues Act of 1961 ... " said Hejar. She stopped him with a raised hand. "Now Mr. Hejar. I fear you are trying to blind me with science."

High summer shaped her lips. Hejar swung his feet off the desk, stood up and came round towards her. "Not at all, my dear lady ... "

But Elsie Stogumber was clear of her chair and through the office door before he could reach her. Her summer was not for Anton Hejar.

Hejar stood on the permanent walkway opposite the gymnasium and made no attempt at concealment. Such intrigue became ludicrous with repetition, particularly when all parties were aware of the charade that was being played out. Now, he did not veil his intentions even out of courtesy.

He was too little of the hypocrite, he told himself, but even in that, he lied. He stood so because he liked to watch Trevnik's dark face as the man noticed him, to see the nostrils flare and the eyes go suddenly wild as if in fear of an old superstition, and then just as suddenly narrow and normal and carefully-averted.

He heard a descending thunder on the stairs. Trevnik must have seen him, given the advantage of darkness looking out on light, because he simply showed his back as he locked the door and started down the street.

In no apparent hurry, Hejar crossed the road and fell into step about twenty yards behind the giant. Today, he saw nothing suspect in the man's gait. Trevnik, presumably, had given up any pretense and walked now only in a way that exhibited the disciplined thrust of hip and leg.

Elsie Stogumber, cramped from her unaccustomed sojourn in the narrow doorway once occupied by Hejar, emerged into the mid-day brilliance and watched the two men down the street.

Berke took a final wheat-germ sandwich and pushed the remaining pile along the bench to Hejar.

Though he had long since ceased to be troubled by his occupation, his appetite had never returned. Each day he prepared more sandwiches than he would eat.

And each day, still feigning surprise at the meeting and hungry from his hunt, plump Hejar joined him on his bench at the leisure zone and waited politely until Berke had shown himself fed to sufficiency and offered him the surplus.

Berke washed his mouth out at the nearby drinking fountain, spat and sat down again.

Hejar chewed, his attention riveted to the children's fun-run, watching for a collision with the spinning chairs or a fall from the helter-skelter.

"We could, perhaps, fill in the loop-holes," said Berke. Hejar grunted.

"The way into this game is too easy," said Berke. "If we study, it is to be eventually better at our job. There is no ruling. It is a labour of love. Amateurs, opportunists can always make inroads. Perhaps we should form a union, or get some recognition from the Central Committee."

Hejar shrugged. He was uninterested in Berke's theorising, his verbal attempts — in his incompetence — to make the living more secure for himself.

"The amount of money the amateurs make, the volume of business we professionals lose is negligible," he said. "What do they get? A relation dies at home. Natural causes. Who pays for natural causes? The bodies are worn out, anyhow. A murder victim is discovered on a rubbish dump in an advanced state of decay. Where's the money in that? No, myself I don't mind who gets the stamp. I can always keep myself well."

In his sudden silence, he indicated his doubt of the other's ability.

"Me, too," said Berke hurriedly. "I was thinking of the less fortunate members of our calling."

Atop the fifty foot slide, a jostled child screamed and clutched with vain fingers at the air. Berke and Hejar moved at speed towards the gathering crowd.

The Minerva no longer pretended that the health foods it served were any more than politely-fashioned simulants or, at best, salvaged from some overgrown delicatessen. But at least the café still retained certain of the musty odours that had once given herb stores an impression of geography contained within three walls and a display window.

Jolo Trevnik avoided the glassed-up, crowded planktonia. His stomach, accustomed to a balanced carbohydrate intake, turned on the lead oxide that came with every boxed cereal these days, a legacy of the brightly-painted free gift needed to sell any competitive product.

His system revolted against battery lamb and the beef and chicken, he knew, contained sterilising agents. Not that he was bothered particularly about potency. The unborn were the lucky ones, he reasoned.

A shape above his table cut out the light. Momentarily, he started, his mind still fixed on the snatcher with the Santa Claus face.

Then the woman sat down opposite him and he noted the carefully-highlighted features and the overbright eyes with a measure of relief.

He took a sip at his acorn coffee to steady his nerves. When he put his cup down, she said, "Mr. Trevnik?"

He nodded.

"I saw the name on the door of your gymnasium."

"But that's a long way away. What ... ?"

"I followed you," she said quickly. "I couldn't help noticing I wasn't the only one."

Trevnik dropped his eyes and considered the gray coffee. He felt — unclean; a curiosity, a freak. All the more for having someone else notice his humiliation.

"I'm sorry for you," she said, and that made it worse.

"You don't need to be sorry, lady," he said, almost angrily. "It doesn't bother me. I look after myself. I avoid accidents."

"My husband was the same."

"Should I know your husband?"

"I think he came to your clinic a few times — Harry Stogumber."

"Stogumber."

His echo of the word chilled her with a memory.

"Tall man," he said. "Not too fat. Not much meat on him at all, really ... "

"Please." The woman laid her gloved hand across his fingers.

"I'm sorry," said Trevnik. "Did I say something ... ?"

"A phrase. It has associations ... "

Trevnik went over it in his mind. " 'Not much ... ' " He bit his lip. "I am beginning to understand," he said. "I didn't realise. Forgive me, ma'am. Maybe I should ... "

Trevnik freed his great legs from the meager table and turned his seat at an angle to allow them access to the gangway.

"I hope you're not going," the woman said. "Please don't go."

Elsie Stogumber was running her eyes over the breadth of his shoulders, the width and density of his hands. The frankness of her inspection began to embarrass him. "I was going to ask you a favour," she said finally. "That man who keeps following you. He was there when the car hit my husband. He ... " She swallowed hard.

"Don't trouble yourself," said Trevnik. "I can work out what happened."

"I want to hurt him," she said. "Really physically hurt him. But what can I do?"

Trevnik looked down at his hands, saw how the tendons moved under the skin.

"So you want me to hurt him for you ... Do you know that I have never in my life used my strength to hurt anyone?"

"I could offer you money," she said. He looked up angrily. "But I won't. I can see that you would do it only if you wanted to do it."

"Lady, that man is only waiting for me to die so he can tear me apart. I want to do it now."

"Then what is stopping you?"

Trevnik clasped his hands to stop them from moving of their own accord. He rested his chin on them.

"It is against the law," he said.

"What law? What human law could possibly deny that I have a right to hurt that man?"

"You, maybe. Not me."

"You could plead self-defence ... if you said he tried to push you into the road or trip you into the rotor plant, you would have provocation."

"Lady ... Mrs. Stogumber, ma'am. How could I plead self-defence. I mean ... I mean ... look at me. I look like an attacker. I want to help you, Mrs. Stogumber, but ... "

"It's all right," said Elsie Stogumber. "I'll find somebody else."

Trevnik found himself on his feet. The woman said no more. All she wanted was for him to stand still while his thoughts progressed. She allowed perhaps 15 seconds to pass while Trevnik hesitated, towering above her. "Of course, they wouldn't have to kill him," she said quietly.

"Maybe if I ... " Trevnik sat down again. "Maybe if I told them how he'd been following me and all and ... and ... taunting me, they'd understand."

Elsie Stogumber let him talk on, convincing himself, committing himself.

"I am sure nobody on earth would blame you," she said eventually. "He is trying to — well, interfere — with you. That's almost an offence in itself."

Trevnik smiled happily for the first time in a long while. "You're right, Mrs. Stogumber," he said. "You're sure as hell right."

Again the plump man waiting on the far pavement; again the thunder down the rotting wooden stairs. Jolo Trevnik emerged and turned to lock the door. Hejar shifted his weight from one foot to another, anxious to be away.

Trevnik turned from the door and looked straight at Hejar. Then he started across the road. Hejar was suddenly afraid. He sought desperately for another purpose to give to his presence.

"That building," he said before Trevnik could reach him. "Doesn't look too safe. It could fall down any time."

"Is that why you keep following me?" Trevnik mounted the curb. "Because you're afraid I'll go down with it? I'm not much use to you crushed, am I?"

"No ... no. We — my department — we wanted to find out where you live, where you eat, your transportive habits, so we can site your replacement office accordingly ... "

"Rubbish," said Trevnik.

"No, I assure you ... "

Trevnik hit him first on the nose, drawing blood. "See a little of your own," he said pleasantly.

Then he sank his right fist deep into Hejar's solar plexus and followed it with his left. He began to enjoy the way the stout man yielded and swayed before him; the way the flesh gave beneath his knuckles.

He began a methodical destruction, aware that he was going beyond his brief, but somehow no longer able to call back his massive fists.

He chopped down on the nerve centres inside Hejar's collarbones.

"Grave-robber," he said without expression. "My, how you little pink people love to get blood on your hands."

He hit Hejar twice more in the stomach, and the man was there, jack-knifed in front of him.

His knees spoke to him. Use us. Smash him. But he controlled them. If he used anything but his fists in this, it would no longer be fair, would no longer carry a justification.

Hejar folded slowly to the ground. Trevnik's feet spoke. Let us finish him. Please.

"No," Trevnik shouted. He turned Hejar face upwards then, and with tears streaming down his face, he walked away.

Hejar, his senses reeling, his mouth salty and crowded, saw roofs tipping at him and tried to twist out of their downward path. But he could not move.

A shadow lingered above him. His flooded nostrils barely caught a woman's scent before a smell he knew only too well, a smell of ancient perspiration.

The woman pushed back his damp hair and then seemed to be going through his pockets.

Hejar closed his eyes. Get on with it, he thought through a blood-red mist. Take my wallet and go.

The woman spoke. "Mr. Hejar." The voice had a familiarity but it defied identification as the torrents of imbalance raged against his ear-drums.

He opened his eyes. The woman bent towards him. Something glinted in her hand.

He tried to scream but choked on his own blood, his own overpowering smell.

"A widow has to make a living somehow," said Elsie Stogumber. Then she brought the stamp down right between his eyes.