In Ning Dang Po, the capital city of K’Barth, later on that same drizzly night, a group of shadowy figures huddled on a quay by the river Dang. If you’d noticed them, you might have thought trouble was afoot and on this particular evening, you wouldn’t have been wrong.
The Pan of Hamgee stood shivering in the rain, trying not to contemplate his future. He looked up at the sky. The moon was obscured by low clouds from which a thin miasma of pathetic rain fell. It plopped steadily into the Dang and pattered on the umbrellas held by Big Merv, Frank the Knife and Smasher Harry. The Pan waited miserably in their midst trying not to think about the pins and needles in his feet and heaviness of his dripping clothes. He raised his bound hands and slicked his soaking hair from his face, wishing he’d remembered his hat when he’d fled from the Parrot and Screwdriver.
The silent warehouses of the docks towered into the night sky, refining the darkness and hemming him in. In a couple of hours this area would be bustling with people: dockers, office workers, forklift truck drivers, accountants, shipbuilders and sailors, all safe in their allotted roles within society.
They had jobs, families and at the end of each day, homes to go to. He could see them in his mind’s eye, acting out their daily routine in the bright sunlight while he, an invisible outsider, rotted in the harbour below them. He tried to think positively but the mental image of his drowned corpse kept returning to haunt him.
“Shall I cut ’im?” asked Frank.
Arnold The Prophet – wasn’t the concrete enough?
“Nah. Not yet,” said Big Merv glaring at his prisoner with menacing intent.
The Pan of Hamgee tried to meet his eyes in a devil-may-care sort of fashion but he was shivering too much. He told himself that this was because he was soaked to the skin, not because he was absolutely petrified and definitely not because he was standing on the edge of a harbour, up to his knees in a box of quickly drying, quick-drying cement with the prospect of a short, vertical swim in the River Dang.
“You’re a GBI,” lectured Big Merv, “without me you’d survive a couple of weeks at the outside. You’re nothing, d’you hear me? NOTHING. I take you off the streets, give you a job and a roof over your ’ead and how do you repay me?”
That was the trouble with upsetting underworld legends such as Big Merv, they got so wound up. The Pan stood silently in the concrete and watched his life flash across the backs of his closed eyelids. It took a depressingly short time. He had achieved so little. Now he was going to disappear swiftly, anonymously and without trace. No-one would mourn his passing. It was no good panicking, he told himself; death was a universal truth which could not be avoided. He failed to convince himself, and carried on with the trembling.
“Merv, please, can we talk about this?” he whimpered.
“’S nothing to talk about you insignificant little tart. And don’t call him ‘Merv’ call him ‘Sir’,” shouted Smasher Harry, as he whacked The Pan across the backs of his knees with a pickaxe handle. His legs buckled and he sank backwards but Frank the Knife caught him by the scruff of the neck and yanked him upright. Big Merv held up one hand and Smasher Harry, pickaxe handle raised for a second swipe, waited.
“’Arry’s right, what’s to talk about, you little squirt?” he demanded. But, The Pan reasoned to himself, Big Merv must be prepared to talk or he wouldn’t have stopped Smasher Harry from hitting him a second time.
There must have been a reason why Ning Dang Po’s biggest underworld boss would take him under his wing. Big Merv had collared him trying to steal his wallet and instead of thumping the living daylights out of him, he’d offered him a job. Since he caught The Pan in the act, it was doubtful he appreciated his pickpocketing skills. It dawned on him that if he could only work out what Big Merv had seen in him, preferably within the next thirty seconds, he might be able to talk his way out of this. Otherwise he’d be too dead to care.
“Do you understand what you’ve done?” Big Merv asked him. “I owned five blocks of flats in this city and now, thanks to you, you snivelling little twonk, it’s four.”
“It was an accident—” began The Pan.
“Yeh?”
“YES. Please, you have to believe me. It was a mistake. The candle fell on the carpet. I tried to put it out but I couldn’t see ... the smoke ... I threw the chips on it instead of the peas. I’ll pay for the damage.”
“How much?” The Pan cleared his throat. “Yeh. Thought so,” said Big Merv without giving him time to answer. His eyes flickered sideways at Smasher Harry and the pickaxe handle made contact with a dull thud.
“Please—ooof! I can’t pay you yet Mer—yowch!—Sir. I don’t have any cash. I’m not solvent, but I promise I will pay you, soon,” The Pan gibbered. “I mean it—I swear I will pay you the instant I get a job.”
Big Merv raised his hand again and once more, Smasher Harry stopped. There was a short silence during which, The Pan assumed, he was appraising the chances of a Government Blacklisted Individual finding gainful employment. Not likely to happen. He would have to wait a long time for his money.
“Don’t listen to him,” sneered Frank the Knife who, doubtless didn’t want all the efforts he had expended constructing a nice wooden box – dovetail joints those corners were – and mixing the concrete, to come to nothing.
“No, please do listen to me,” begged The Pan, “try to see me as an investment. You let me go and when I’m a high-flying multi-million-earning businessman, I’ll pay you back a hundredfold. There’s no point in killing me now. You won’t even get the price of this box.”
He glanced downwards at Frank’s handiwork. You could make a tidy profit if you made it a lid, painted it and sold it on in the market but Frank was a henchman, not a craftsman, and putting his talents to legal use wouldn’t occur to him.
“I have nothing worth selling,” The Pan added with a shrug, “except my wheels.” And the only reason he still had those was because he had been living in them for several months now. “They’re all I have left.” He put his hand in his pocket, which was difficult when it was so tightly tied to the other one, and pulled out a keyring with a bunch of keys on it. “Here ... take them,” he said, miserably holding it aloft.
“You can keep ’em.” That figured. Merv already owned a dark blue MK II snurd. It was the best of the best, the stuff of folklore when The Pan was a kid. Big Merv wasn’t going to want a new set of wheels, especially not The Pan’s. Dumb to offer. The silence lengthened and no-one said anything. Beside him, Frank and Harry waited, mutely, for orders. Big Merv stood looking at him, his antennae waving to and fro. Did that mean ...? Yep.
Thinking. Definitely. But was that good news? Maybe. He seemed to be weighing the situation carefully.