The Wilt Alternative

Chapter 17

Downstairs in the kitchen Chinanda and Baggish were having a hard time thinking at all. All the complexities of life from which they had tried to escape into the idiotic and murderous fanaticism of terror seemed suddenly to have combined against them. They fired frantically into the darkness, and for one proud moment imagined they had hit the helicopter. Instead, the thing had apparently bombed the house next door. When they finally stopped shooting they were assailed by the yells of quads in the cellar. To make matters worse, the kitchen had become a health hazard. Eva's highly polished tiles were a slick of vomit and after Baggish had twice landed on his backside they had retreated to the hall to consider their next move. It was then that they heard the extraordinary noises emanating from the attic.

'They're raping Gudrun,' said Baggish and would have gone to her rescue if Chinanda hadn't stopped him.

'It's a trap the police pigs are setting. They want to get us upstairs and then they rush the house and rescue the hostages. We stay down here.'

'With that noise? How long do you think we can go on with all that yelling? We each need to sleep by turns and with them crying is impossible.'

'So we stop them,' said Chinanda and led the way down to the cellar where Mrs de Frackas was sitting on a wooden chair while the quads demanded mummy.

'Shut up, you hear me! You want to see your mummy you stop that noise,' Baggish shouted. But the quads only yelled the louder.

'I should have thought coping with small children would have been an essential part of your training,' said Mrs de Frackas unsympathetically Baggish rounded on her. He still hadn't got over her suggestion that his proper métier was selling dirty Postcards in Port Said.

'You make them quiet yourself,' he told her, waving his automatic in her face, 'or else we '

'My dear boy, there are some things you have yet to learn,' said the old lady 'By the time you reach my age dying is so imminent that I can't be bothered to worry about it. In any case I have always been an advocate of euthanasia. So much more sensible, don't you think, than putting one on a drip or one of those life-support machines or whatever they call them. I mean, who wants to keep a senile old person alive when she's no use to anyone?'

'I don't,' said Baggish fervently. Mrs de Frackas looked at him with interest.

'Besides, being a Moslem, you'd be doing me a favour. I've always understood that death in battle was a guarantee of salvation according to the Prophet, and while I can't say I'm actually battling I should have thought being shot by a murderer amounts to the same thing.'

'We are not murderers,' shouted Baggish, 'we are freedom fighters against international imperialism!'

'Which serves to prove my point,' continued Mrs de Frackas imperturbably. 'You're fighting and I am self-evidently a product of the Empire. If you kill me I should, according to your philosophy, go straight to heaven.'

'We are not here to discuss philosophy,' said Chinanda. 'You stupid old woman, what do you know about the suffering of the workers?'

Mrs de Frackas turned her attention to his clothes. 'Rather more than you do by the cut of your coat, young man. It may not be obvious but I spent several years working in a children's hospital in the slums of Calcutta and I think I know what misery means. Have you ever done a hard day's work in your life?'

Chinanda evaded the question. 'But what did you do about this misery?' he yelled, poking his face close to hers. 'You washed your conscience in the hospital and then went back and lived in luxury.'

'I had three square meals a day if that's what you mean by luxury. I certainly couldn't have afforded the sort of expensive car you drive around in,' riposted the old lady. 'And while we're on the subject of washing, I think it might help to quieten the children if you allowed me to bath them.'

The terrorists looked at the quads and tended to agree. The quads were not a pleasant sight.

'OK, we bring you water down and you can wash them here,' said Chinanda, who went up to the darkened kitchen and finally found a plastic bucket under the sink. He filled it with water and brought it down with a bar of soap. Mrs de Frackas looked into the bucket doubtfully.

'I said "Wash them". Not dye them.'

'Die them? What do you mean die them?'

'Take a look for yourself,' said Mrs de Frackas. The two terrorists did, and were appalled. The bucket was filled with dark blue water.

'Now they're trying to poison us,' yelled Baggish and headed up the stairs to register this fresh complaint against the Anti-Terrorist Squad.

Inspector Flint took the call. 'Poison you? By putting something in the water supply? I can assure you I know nothing about it.'

'Then how come it's blue?'

'I've no idea. Are you sure the water's blue?'

'I know fucking well it's blue,' shouted Baggish. 'We turn the tap and the water comes out blue. You think we're idiots or something.'

Flint hesitated but suppressed his true opinion in the interest of the hostages. 'Never mind what I think,' he said, 'all I'm saying is that we have done absolutely nothing to the water supply and '

'Lying pig,' shouted Baggish. 'First you try trapping us by raping Gudrun and now you poison the Water. We don't wait any longer. The water is clean in one hour and you let Gudrun go or we execute the old woman.'

He slammed the phone down, leaving Flint more mystified than ever. 'Raping Gudrun? The man's off his head. I wouldn't touch the bitch with a bargepole and how I can be in two places at the same time defeats me. And now he's saying the water's gone blue.'

'Could be they're on drugs,' said the sergeant 'Gets them hallucinating sometimes, especially when they're under stress.'

'Stress? Don't talk to me about stress,' said Flint and turned his anger on a PLD operator. 'And what the hell are you smirking about?'

'They're trying it out in the bath now, sir. Wilt's idea. Randy little sod.'

'If you're seriously suggesting that a couple copulating in a bath can turn the rest of the water in the house blue, think again,' snapped Flint.

He leant his head back against an antimacassar and shut his eyes. His mind was churning with opinions. Wilt was mad. Wilt was a terrorist. Wilt was a mad terrorist. Wilt was possessed. Wilt was a bloody enigma. Only the last was certain, that and the Inspector's fervent wish that Wilt was a thousand miles away and that he had never heard of the bastard. Finally he roused himself.

'All right, I want that helicopter back and this time no balls-ups. The house is floodlit and it's going to stay that way. All they have to do is land that telephone through the balcony window and considering what they've done here that should be child's play. Tell the pilot he can rip the roof off if he wants to but I want a line through to that flat and fast. That's the only way we're going to find out exactly what Wilt's playing at.'

'Will do,' said the Major, and began issuing fresh instructions.

'He's playing politics now, sir,' said the operator. 'Makes Marx sound like a right-winger. Want to hear?'

'I suppose I'd better,' said Flint miserably, and the loudspeaker was switched on. Through the crackle Wilt could be heard expounding violently.

'We must annihilate the capitalist system lock stock and barrel. There must be no hesitation in exterminating the last vestiges of the ruling class and instilling a proletarian consciousness into the minds of the workers. This can best be achieved by exposing the fascistic nature of pseudo-democracy through the praxis of terror against the police and the lumpen executives of international finance. Only by demonstrating the fundamental antithesis between...'

'Christ, he sounds like a bloody textbook,' said Flint with unintentional accuracy. 'We've got a pocket Mao in the attic. Right, get these tapes through to the Idiot Brigade. Perhaps they can tell us what a lumpen executive is.'

'Helicopter's on its way,' said the Major. 'The telephone's fitted with a micro-television camera. If all goes well we'll soon see what's going on up there.'

'As if I wanted to,' said Flint and retreated to the safety of the downstairs toilet.

Five minutes later the helicopter swirled across the orchard at the bottom of the garden, poised for a moment over Number 9, and a field telephone swung through the balcony window into the flat. As the pilot lifted the machine away a trail of wire spun out behind it like the thread of a mechanical spider.

Flint emerged from the toilet to find that Chinanda was back on the phone.

'Wants to know why we haven't cleared the water, sir,' said the operator.

Inspector Flint sat down with a sigh and took the call. 'Now listen, Miguel,' he began, imitating the friendly approach of the Superintendent, 'you may not believe this '

A stream of abuse indicated all too clearly that the terrorist didn't.

'All right, I accept all that,' said Flint when the epithets dried up. 'But what I'm saying is that we aren't in the attic. We haven't put anything in the water.'

'Then why are you supplying them with weapons by helicopter?'

'That wasn't a weapon. It happened to be a telephone so we can talk to them...Yes, I daresay it doesn't sound likely. I'm the first to agree...No, we haven't. If anyone has it's the...'

'People's Alternative Army,' prompted the sergeant,

'The People's Alternative Army,' repeated Flint. 'They must have put something in the water, Miguel...What?...You don't like being called Miguel...Well as a matter of fact I don't particularly like being called fuzzpig...Yes, I heard you. I heard you the first time. And if you'll get off the line I'll talk to the bastards up there.'

And Flint slammed down the phone. 'All right, now get me through to the attic. And make it snappy. Time's running out.'

It was to run out for a further quarter of an hour. The sudden reappearance of the helicopter just when the Wilt alternative had switched from sex to politics had thrown Wilt's tactics out of joint. Having softened his victim up on the physical level he had begun confusing her still more by quoting the egregious Bilger at his most Marcusian. It hadn't been too difficult, and in any case Wilt had speculated on the injustice of human existence over many years. His dealings with Plasterers Four had taught him that he belonged to a relatively privileged society. Plasterers earned more than he did, and Printers were positively rich, but allowing for these discrepancies it was still true that he had been born into an affluent country with a favoured climate and sophisticated political institutions developed over the centuries. Above all an industrial society. The vast majority of mankind lived in abject poverty, were riddled with curable disease which went uncured, were subject to despotic governments and lived in terror and in danger of dying by starvation. To the extent that anyone tried to change this inequity, Wilt sympathized. Eva's Personal Assistance for Primitive People might be ineffectual but it had at least the merit of being personal and moving in the right direction. Terrorizing the innocent and murdering men, women and children was both ineffectual and barbaric. What difference was there between the terrorists and their victims? Only one of opinion. Chinanda and Gudrun Schautz came from wealthy families and Baggish, whose father had been a shopkeeper in Beirut, could hardly be called poor. None of these self-appointed executioners had been driven to murder by the desperation of poverty, and as far as Wilt could tell their fanaticism had its roots in no specific cause. They weren't trying to drive the British from Ulster, the Israelis from the Golan Heights or even the Turks from Cyprus. They were political poseurs whose enemy was life. In short they were murderers by personal choice, psychopaths who camouflaged their motives behind a screen of Utopian theory. Power was their kick, the power to inflict pain and to terrify. Even their own readiness to die was a sort of power, some sick and infantile form of masochism and expiation of guilt, not for their filthy crimes, but for being alive at all. Beyond that there were doubtless other motives concerned with parents or toilet training. Wilt didn't care. It was enough that they were carriers of the same political rabies that had driven Hitler to construct Auschwitz and kill himself in the bunker, or the Cambodians to murder one another by the million. As such they were beyond the pale of sympathy. Wilt had his children to protect and only his wits to help him.

And so in a desperate attempt to keep Gudrun Schautz isolated and uncertain, he mouthed Marcusian dogma until the helicopter interrupted his recital. As the telephone encased in a wooden box swung through the window Wilt hurled himself to the floor in the kitchen.

'Back into the bathroom,' he yelled convinced that the thing was some sort of tear-gas bomb. But Gudrun Schautz was already there. Wilt crawled through to her.

'They know we're here,' she whispered.

'They know I'm here,' said Wilt, grateful to the police for seeming to provide proof that he was a wanted man. 'What would they want with you?'

'They locked me in the bathroom. Why would they do that if they didn't want me?'

'Why would they do it if they did?' asked Wilt. 'They'd have dragged you out straightaway.' He paused and looked hard at her in the light reflected from the ceiling. 'But how did they get on to me? I ask myself that question. Who told them?'

Gudrun Schautz looked back and asked herself a great many questions. 'Why do you look at me? I don't know what you are talking about.'

'No?' said Wilt, deciding the time was ripe to switch to full-scale mania. 'That's what you say now. You come to my house when everything is going so good with the plan and now suddenly the Israelis arrive and everything is kaput. No assassination of the Queen, no use for the nerve-gas, no annihilation of the entire pseudo-democratic parliamentary cadres in the House of Commons at one fell swoop, no...'

In the living-room the telephone interrupted this insane catalogue. Wilt listened to it with relief. So did Gudrun Schautz. The paranoia which was part of her make-up was beginning to assume new proportions in her mind with every shift in Wilt's position.

'I'll answer it,' she said but Wilt glared at her ferociously.

'Informer,' he snarled, 'you've done enough harm already. You will stay where you are. That's your only hope.'

And leaving her to work out this strange logic, Wilt crawled through the kitchen and opened the box.

'Listen you fascist pig swine,' he yelled before Flint could get a word in edgeways, 'don't think you're going to sweet-talk the People's Alternative Army into one of your lying dialogues. We demand '

'Shut up, Wilt.' snapped the Inspector. Wilt shut up. So the sods knew. In particular, Flint knew. Which would have been good news if he hadn't had a bloody murderess breathing down his neck. 'So there's no use trying to bluff us. For your information, if you want to see your daughters alive again you had better stop trying to poison your little comrades on the ground floor.'

'Trying to what?' asked Wilt, stunned by this new accusation into using his normal voice.

'You heard me. You've been doctoring the water supply and they want it undoctored as of now.'

'Doctoring the...' Wilt began before remembering he couldn't talk openly in present company.

'The water supply,' said Flint. 'They've set a deadline for it to be cleared and it runs out in half an hour. And I do mean deadline.'

There was a moment's silence while Wilt tried to think. There must have been something in that bloody hold-all that was poisonous Perhaps the terrorists carried their own supply of cyanide. He'd have to get the bag out but in the meantime he had to maintain his lunatic stand. He fell back on his earlier approach.

'We make no deals,' he shouted 'If our demands aren't met by eight in the morning the hostage dies.'

There was the sound of laughter at the other end of the line. 'Pull the other one, Wilt,' said Flint. 'How are you going to kill her? Screw her to death perhaps?'

He paused to let this information sink in before continuing, 'We've got every little antic you've been up to on tape. It's going to sound great when we play it back in court.'

'Shit,' said Wilt, this time impersonally.

'Mrs Wilt particularly enjoyed it. Yes, you heard me right. Now then, are you going to clear that water or do you want your daughters to have to drink it?

'All right, I agree. You have the aircraft waiting on the runway and I don't move from here until the car arrives. One driver and no tricks or the woman dies with me. You understand?'

'No,' said Flint beginning to feel confused himself but Wilt had ended the conversation. He was sitting on the floor trying to think himself out of this new dilemma. He couldn't do anything about the water tank with the Schautz woman watching. He would have to continue his bluff. He went back into the kitchen and found her standing uncertainly by the bathroom door.

'So now you know,' he said.

Gudrun Schautz didn't. 'Why did you say you would kill me?' she asked.

'Why do you think?' said Wilt, plucking up sufficient courage to move towards her with something approximating to menace. 'Because you are an informer? Without you the plan...'

But Gudrun Schautz had heard enough. She retreated into the bathroom, slammed the door and bolted it. This little man was insane. The whole situation was insane. Nothing made any sort of sense, and contradiction piled on contradiction so that the outcome was an incomprehensible flux of impressions. She sat on the toilet and tried to think her way through the chaos. If this weird man with his talk of assassinating the Queen was wanted by the police, and everything seemed to point in that direction, however illogically, there was something to be said for seeming to be his hostage. The British police weren't supposed to be fools but they might free her without asking too many awkward questions. It was the only chance she had. And through the door she could hear Wilt muttering to himself alarmingly. He had started to wire the doorhandle again.

When he had finished Wilt climbed back into the attic space and was presently elbow-deep in the water tank. It was certainly a very murky colour and when he finally managed to drag the hold-all out his arm was blue. Wilt laid the bag on the floor and began to rummage through its contents. At the bottom he found a portable typewriter and a large ink pad with a rubber stamp. There was nothing to suggest poison, but the typewriter ribbon and the ink pad had certainly polluted the water. Wilt went back to the kitchen and turned on the tap. 'No wonder the buggers thought they were being doctored,' he muttered and, leaving the tap running, climbed back into the roof space. By the time he had crawled round the back of the tank with the hold-all and hidden it under the fibreglass insulation the dawn was beginning to compete with the floodlights. He emerged, went through to the living-room, lay down on the sofa and wondered what to do next