Ministry of Emissions, file 2.

Alular knew the streets well but knew the time of day better. The angles of sunlight coruscated across the cluster of buildings, outhouses and warehouses known as Silar’s Wharf, signalling midday. Seven days ago the Ministry of Emissions had handed the relevant documents to the cabinet, and the Prime Minister had promptly issued the repossession papers that Alular was about to serve to the squatters on the Wharf.

Mia Ziman’s personal army were, to Alular, little more than pirates. Where Ziman had been an industry insider, completing contracts with private corporations and even, in its infancy, with the Ministry, the lowlifes who populated the Wharf were motivated only by the financial morsels which Ziman allowed to fall from her lap after she had gone underground.

Little had changed, thought Alular. A few pennies here and there and anyone will follow you into the fire.

He made his way between a low stone outhouse and a series of rusted metal automobiles towards a large cement building. Its tin roof curved over two long, wide segments in a deflated M-shape—like a child’s sketch of a seagull—and Alular could hear movement within. He regretted having handed off his gun license when he left the Ministry of Emissions.

A wooden door leading in to the left-hand silo was offset in its jamb. He pushed until the door popped inwards. Inside the vast and seemingly vacant silo shafts of light streamed through cracks and illuminated dust hanging in the air. But behind him and to his right a figure had crept unnoticed into the space between Alular and the door.

“Get your fucking hands up in the air, minister,” the Cutter said.  Alular complied. If the Cutters saw fit to put a bullet in his head and dump him into the muddy Thames basin, he had no means to object.

“I’m not a minister,” said Alular. “My name is Samuel Alular. I used to work for the Ministry, but I’m retired now.” There was a moment’s pause. “Lung condition,” he sputtered.

The Cutter’s movements described a circle around Alular until the pistol was aimed waveringly at the captive’s head. He seemed to be reducing the situation to its fundament—numbers, letters, probabilities—before addressing the intruder.

“Well, whoever the fuck you are, we know that Ziman’s dead and that the Ministry of Emissions is behind it.  And now they’re out to throw us on the fucking pyre and let us burn, let our ashes light up Downing Street for a few days…”

“The papers were signed by the Prime Minist—”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean? I didn’t elect Luger. Neither did Mia. You, on the other hand, probably served on the committee that put him in office.”

Alular kept still.

“So tell me, Samuel Alular: why should I listen to a retired Emissions Agent delivering messages from an unelected official?”

The fire behind the Cutter’s eyes seemed for a moment to be quelled. Alular tensed until he could feel his ageing tendons crunch downwards, ready to snap at and wrestle the barrel from his opponent’s hand.

But the Cutter drew away, turned and jogged towards the end of the silo, shouting: “this way, Minister Alular.” He followed and, after several seconds, pushed into the sunlight at the end of the building.

*         *         *

The light bleached the tarmac. His eyes dilated and adjusted, and Alular saw the Cutter gesturing to an outhouse further ahead. He stumbled past another scorched and rusted car chassis and the husk reminded him of Ziman’s death mask beneath vacuum-sealed glass.

Alular jogged on. The Cutter reached the outhouse and stumbled inside, raking the handgun against the interior wall before swinging it absently back towards Alular. A red-brick glow was reflected in the Cutter’s eyes.

He flicked the barrel, indicating a wooden trapdoor in the centre of the room and said: “you go first, Minister.” Alular lifted the hatch to discover a ladder, punctuated with rusted holes and descending into low-lit chambers beneath the silo. The Cutter pointed with his chin and Alular clambered on to the top step and lowered himself downward.

In the chamber it could have been twilight. Tongues of light flickered against the walls, illuminating Alular’s captor as he reached the base of the creaking ladder. He knew as the Cutter brushed past him that this had not been in Augustus’ plan.

“Down here… down here is what you and yours are so afraid of.”

Alular was tiring fast. At the end of the tunnel, he slowed and stopped. The Cutter was haloed in an orange light, flame glowing and crackling around him in spite of the transparent plexiglass screen keeping the fire sealed in the passageway.

The Cutter’s pistol was dangling, pointing at the ground beneath their feet. Alular knew that, in that moment, he could have snatched the weapon and twisted the barrel to his captor’s temple.

But he did not. Instead he stepped close to the screen, an inch of plastic separating him from the flames. Placing a hand against the plexiglass he could feel the heat, could almost smell the ashes beneath the towering peaks of yellow and white and orange. Looking up he could see embers disappearing into a flue.

Alular had not seen so much carbon burning, so freely ablaze, since he had been a young Emissions Agent at the Department of Energy. The blaze put his teeth on edge, but the contained power of the fire entranced him.

“How did you get your hands on so much C?” he asked. The Cutter did not answer. “I haven’t seen this much flame in… twenty years.”

The Cutter drew up next to him. “Mia didn’t leave us without our bargaining chips.”

Alular moved back into the tunnel and was digging inside his jacket pocket when his captor said: “You can send those repo papers back to our dear Mr Luger. And now that you’re here, Minister Alular—sorry, former Minister Alular—I have a little proposition for you.”

Behind the screen the fire burned, wisps of light formed and reformed, and Alular saw the zigzag hairline of Mia Ziman disappear in a lick of flame. [continues]

Faber: A Photograph and a Clue

It is 2007. Faber, a student of post-modern detective author Charles Thornton, is in Berlin investigating an unpublished Thornton novel and events leading up to Thornton’s death in 1996. ‘The Poet’, a supposed friend of Thornton’s, pays an unexpected visit to Faber’s apartment.

Another photograph was uncovered, courtesy of the Poet. When the straggle-haired bohemian had appeared at Faber’s apartment door, his crumpled corduroy jacket tasting ripe in the humidity, he seemed curiously out of place. His conformist individuality was perfectly suited to Prenzlauer Berg and to the neo-Communist café where they had met, but on the quiet streets of Neukoelln he was visibly uncomfortable.

The Poet’s photo revealed a room, sparsely furnished and poorly arranged. The gloom was broken only by a crescent of light which shone from a desklamp at the centre of the frame. Surrounding the hunched figure of Charles Thornton was a halo of sixty watts, an author outlined in twilight.

On the third floor, the Poet stood at the kitchen window and looked across the courtyard to the graffitied building opposite. “Weiss ich gar nicht,” he said. Faber had switched into rudimentary German. He hoped that this courtesy might loosen the man’s lips.

“The last decade of his life,” Faber said, “inside that concrete cube, all alone.”

“All alone except for his photographer,” replied the Poet. It was unclear just what had prompted the anonymous face behind the camera to snap this frame: Thornton’s expression was neutral, his typewriter—though uncovered—was not loaded with paper, and the darkness literally obscured the possibility of a nighttime reading session.

“I didn’t want to tell you this.” The Poet moved away from the window , scraped past Faber and turned right into the living room. “But this photo was taken by his secretary Helga. It landed in a box in my basement when she left Berlin six years ago. Charles Thornton,” he concluded, “did not have many friends.”

Faber had reached the middle of the room. The Poet sat and gazed at the picture on the coffee table in front of him. “Are you saying that Thornton and Helga, they—?” Faber stepped between the table and the sofa and sunk into the neigbouring seat, as far as the second-hand cushions would allow.

The Poet said: “I don’t know whether they were lovers, but then whether they fucked or not is not really the point… if there is a point to any of your digging, Mr. Faber.” The indignation was this time unfeigned, but any vitriol he felt had long since been replaced with melancholy. “They were partners—as long as I had known Charles, he had been hers, and she his.”

Slowly manoeuvring the photograph across the table, Faber examined its borders as though there might be a perfume or a voice described imperceptibly at the edges of the frame. Helga had, behind the lens, captured a moment of serenity at the apex of Thornton’s breakdown. At that time Thornton had been working on the last Delaney novel, and though Faber had only managed to wrangle from his publishers an outline of Delaney & the Devil’s Interval, those years had evidently been close to unbearable for both Charles and Helga.

“I leave this with you,” said the Poet. “Any time you want to come up to Prenzlberg and bury yourself in a dead man’s world, let me know. My basement is your basement.” As he rose a smirk grew from the corner of his mouth to his left cheek. Faber thanked him, rose too, and waited for the echoing footsteps to decay in the hallway.

*       *       *

Across Faber’s desk were strewn Delaney novels and literary companions, his own notes, newspaper cuttings and cassette tapes, derivative fiction started but never finished and—finally—the photograph of Charles Thornton. The ex-pat author, the post-modern dean of detective noir, the mysterious émigré: Faber had used each of these descriptions numerous times in his academic papers, but none was sufficient to describe the man in this dog-eared picture, wrapped in a figurative and literal gloom. Somewhere out of shot, the indistinct Helga had turned Thornton’s voyeuristic tendency back on himself. Helga, he thought. Until today you were just a secretary.

He grasped for a cassette perched at the top of a small stack, but his wrecking ball hand toppled them and they clattered onto the desk. A neon pink post-it note protruded from one of the cases. Faber picked it out of the rubble and inserted the tape into the Dictaphone. He clicked PLAY and Thorton’s voice made the room instantly smoky.

“I suppose it comes to every generation, or at least to those who have lived through such a turbulent time and lived on — or should I say survived? — to tell the tale. It is only so far along a certain path that we can go before we reach thorns and stingers crowding over, under, and around us, impeding our progress so that we are compelled to stop. To stand still, only able to glance through the twists of green at that which lies ahead.

“We live in a post-satire world, someone once said. I forget who. Research is not my strong suit. But whoever passed on to us that particularly uninformative nugget of information was, to all intents and purposes, correct. Everything is post something, and we’ve come so far along this particular timeline — which cannot be altered, erased, reordered or accurately described — that we can only define ourselves by that which we succeed. Time pushes on against us, anticipating both physical and cultural decay to such an extent, that the modern has been twisted into an absurd, caricature-like, defiantly meaningless post-modern, no matter that defining one’s cultural existence as ‘meaningless’ is a paradox as big as they come.

“Post-modern. It is a prefix which signals the arrival of those thorns and stingers and the end of progress. Fin-de-siecle, one used to call it. But at the turn of the 20^th century, when we were still kind enough to lock away famous homosexual men for their private indiscretions, at least a few of us were smart enough to know that we weren’t smart enough to know very much. I never thought much of his dramas or poems but it’s clear that old Oscar knew this: all is forgiven if you spread yourself — like a shameless veneer of credibility — just thinly enough around a room of half-baked writers.”

A click followed by a change in the pitch of the static signalled the end of the entry. As he replaced the cassette tape, the neon note told Faber that the recording was from “ca. Aug. 1993.” Lichttrager Verlag, Thornton’s publishers, had confirmed that a full draft of Devil’s Interval had been submitted by January 1994.

This picture had surfaced, had made its way organically from Helga via Thornton to the Poet and—at last—to Faber, and it was a clue, something of substance bearing the burden of something with none. Digging in a desk drawer, Faber pulled out a business card, corners frayed but text still legible, and he wrote down the Hamburg address printed on the front of it. It was time to pay a visit to Helga Schnatterer. [continues]

A clue, something of substance bearing the burden of something with none.

Ministry of Emissions, file 1.

The Selibant building was large, grey and cumbersome, high above the scaly miniature villages of corrugated tin and tarpaulin. Its edifice was concrete, glass and steel, shining in the evening light as the helicopter descended to the roof.

After several minutes of shutting down engines and flicking switches from green to red, Alular exited. Two men, each incongruously dressed in a dark suit and tie during the most humid month of the year, nodded in greeting and turned to escort him to the drop platform. As they descended, Alular’s mind performed its usual synaesthesia and he saw in the elevator’s mechanical whoosh a stream of grey water.

The interior was spartan. On both sides doors led off the main corridor, some illuminated in a yellowish lamplight while others suffered under the sputtering of halogen overheads. The suit to the left gave him a room number and pointed. Alular headed down the hallway and his companions whooshed behind him back to the source of the stream.

*      *      *

The desk in room 1105 was as cluttered as the corridor was bare. A stack of taupe-coloured files danced in front of a monitor surrounded by stationery and electronic pads. Spread across the surface of the desk they nearly obscured the silvered nameplate which read Augustus Johnson, Director of Emissions. Alular crumpled into the hard plastic chair. The room was small and stuffy, and Johnson smelled like a week’s worth of work.

“Sam, thanks for coming.”

Alular made affirmative sounds. He knew Augustus was not one for small talk.

“You recognise her?” He pushed a large-format negative through the pads and loose-leaf files then pressed a switch. The desk beneath the negative lit up and an inverted luminance shone through.

“No,” said Alular. The image was a three-quarter close up of a woman. Her hair was cut close to the skin, the edges zigzagging unevenly onto her forehead. Toward the right of the frame the focus became lost, as though she were caught during a sudden movement. “Who is she?”

Augustus leaned over and twisted the negative so that it faced him. “This is Mia Ziman,” he said. “But I think you used to call her the Holy Grail.”

Alular raised an eyebrow and heard the desk lamp buzz out. The whites of Augustus’ eyes blazed in the low light as he waited for Alular to lower his brow.

“So why am I here?” asked Alular, feigning uninterest. “Now that you have a picture of Ziman, surely you can run her through the Ministry’s face recog and have her in a cell by dinnertime?”

“Ziman is already in the building, Sam.”

*      *      *

The glints and flickers, hard edges of brushed aluminium and plexiglass screens were lit lowly but consistently, and Alular barely noticed the sheen of coppery red reflected in the surfaces. One end of the room dipped into a circular trough several feet wide. A hole in the centre was backed up with watered-down blood commixed with clumps of grey bone and gristle.

Augustus had already stepped over to one of the cold chambers and punched in a number. The tube opened to an analogue creak and behind a transparent window at the head of the tube Alular saw the zigzag hair and the intelligent upturned mouth of Mia Ziman.

For the last two and a half years of his life at the Ministry, Alular’s only concern had been uncovering the identity of the woman in the photograph. Twelve hours spun into fifteen or twenty as he had searched for even the faintest scratch of DNA at crime scenes, any trace of the elusive figurehead of The Cutters in filing cabinets or the Ministry’s records . Within the last hour he had gone from the dynamic anxiety of being shown the negative in Augustus’ office to a despondence at seeing the husk of a woman, feminine features as yet undiminished in death.

“This isn’t just for kicks, though, Sam.” Augustus exerted pressure on the chamber and it slid back into place. “Ziman’s death—it was a car accident on the south bank; a former officer of ours just happened to be on the scene at the time—”

“Circumstance,” interrupted Alular, shaking his head. He saw the ligaments of luck stretching, connecting points A and B only when they saw fit.

“Her death threw up a whole load of legal issues, including the deeds to Silar’s Wharf. Which means—”

“That the Ministry can repossess the land.”

Augustus nodded. “And with your experience,” he said, “the PM wants you to deliver the message.” [continues]