“We are lucky gods,” Richard Cody was telling some Six executives with whom he was drinking inside the Chairman’s Lounge. He was working hard at changing his own rather bleak mood. “Why, just look at our world! A more wondrous variety of food and wine in one suburban supermarket than Nero could have found in his whole empire—and all that just for another evening meal!”
As wonderful a week as Richard Cody was having, he was still troubled by something that he reasoned should not have troubled him at all. The day before, he had overheard one of his producers, a young woman who Richard Cody felt had a lot to learn, talking about him with a research assistant, another not unattractive young woman.
“Not an idea in his head,” she had said.
And yet it had been a remarkable week, and today had been particularly glorious. Why, only that evening, after watching the special at the studio, he had just been about to come to the club when Mr Frith himself had called.
Mr Frith said he personally wanted to pass on to Richard Cody the news that “those who matter at the highest level” had already rung to congratulate him on the special. Six, Mr Frith had been told, was helping not only the government but the nation and freedom itself. It was something, Mr Frith felt, that would not go unnoticed when the contracts for the next government advertising campaign on a welfare clampdown or a new tax regime was apportioned among the media conglomerates; nor when the laws concerning media ownership were reviewed. And nor, Mr Frith added, would he personally forget Richard Cody’s part in it all.
But it was hard to take pleasure in that memory when all he could hear in his mind were the two women talking.
“Know why they call him Shitcart?” said the research assistant—“Screw him into a septic tank one end and watch the shit stream out the other!”
And they had both laughed and laughed.
“We live far longer than anyone before us,” Richard Cody continued, quoting almost verbatim from an article he had read online only the night before: “We have wondrous machines doing our bidding, we look better and we can look at better things”—here he raised his eyebrows, and the other men laughed as they surveyed the high breasts and wide smiles of the women who wandered the room semi-naked.
But all Richard Cody could hear in his mind was the sound of the two women’s tittering and their voices saying:
“Shitcart! Oh my God! That’s hilarious! Shitcart!”
And while Richard Cody continued in the lounge with his philosophy of a wondrous west, outside the Chairman’s Lounge Billy the Tongan’s dark eyes came to life. Even with her shaved head he had no trouble recognising her.
“People been round, Krystal,” Billy the Tongan said, his snub nose spreading even wider as he spoke. “Asking questions.”
The hail was easing, but it was still hard to hear anything over its cacophony.
“People always asking, Billy,” the Doll said loudly, still catching her breath, knowing she needed to humour him, to have him onside and not suspicious. “Only they don’t stop till you give them the answer they want.”
Billy the Tongan smiled. He raised a great white arm, gesturing with his open hand to the door. As the Doll walked past, he didn’t look at her but away, up and down the street. It was something he had learnt when he had been a bodyguard.
Keeping the Beretta hidden behind her handbag, the Doll marvelled at how it felt little more than a toy, something Max might play with. Only its compact weight in her hand reminded her otherwise.