wondered? The reproachful, admonitory second person singular, or the more straightforwardly confessional first? He moved between ‘you’ and T as his mood took him, but today, he considered, he had done nothing untoward or recriminatory, there was no need for harsher objectivity – T it would be. ‘379’, he wrote, in his tiny, neat hand. ‘The Case of Mr Dupree’.
37g. The Case of Mr Dupree. I had spoken to Mr Dupree only once, when I called to make the appointment. ‘Why isn’t Hogg coming?’ he had said immediately, neurotically, like a lover, disappointed. ‘Had enough fun, has he?’ I told him Mr Hogg was a busy man. ‘Tell Hogg to come himself or the whole thing’s off,’ he said and then hung up.
I relayed all this to Hogg, who made a sick-looking face, full of contempt and disgust. 7 don’t know why I bothered, why I took the trouble,’ Hogg said. ‘He’s squatting in the palm of my hand,’ he said, holding out his broad palm, callused like a harpist’s, ‘with his trousers around his ankles. You finish it off, Lorimer, my lad. I’ve got bigger fish to fillet.’
I did not know Mr Dupree, which is why my shock was so short-lived, I suppose – still disturbing to think about, but not profoundly so. Mr Dupree had existed for me only as a voice on the telephone, he was Hogg’s case, one of Hogg’s rare sorties into the market, as he liked to put it, to sample the wares and the weather, just to keep his hand in, and then passed him on to me, routinely. That’s why I felt nothing, or, rather, what genuine shock I felt was so brief The Mr Dupree I encountered had already become a thing, an unpleasant thing, true, but had a flayed cow carcase been hanging there, or, say, I had been confronted by a pile of dead dogs, I would have been equally upset. Or would I? Perhaps not. But Mr Dupree, the human being, had never impinged on me, all I had to go on was the importunate voice on the phone; he was merely a name on a file, merely another appointment as far as I was concerned.
No, I don’t think I am a cold person, on the contrary I am too warm and this, in fact, may be my problem. But why am I not more shattered and distressed by what I found today? I do not lack empathy but my inability to feel anything lasting for Mr Dupree disturbs me rather. Has my job, the life Head, given me the emotional responses of an overworked stretcher-bearer on a crowded battlefield blankly noting and enumerating the dead only as potential burdens. No, I’m sure of it. But the case of Mr Dupree was something that should never have happened to me, should never have become part of my life. Hogg sent me there on his business. But did he know something like this might occur? Was it his insurance to send me there instead?
The Book of Transfiguration
He cabbed to the Fort. He would drink too much, he knew, they all would, they always did at these rare gatherings of the entire team. Sometimes if he drank a lot he slept at night but it didn’t always work, though, otherwise he would have embraced alcoholism with a convert’s zeal. Sometimes it kept him up, jangled and alert, mind going like a train.
Getting out of the cab, he saw that the Fort was agleam, all aglow tonight, spotlights picking out its full twenty-four floors. Three swagged, gilded commissionaires stood at the porte cochère below the aquamarine neon sign. Solid, emphatic, classical roman font – FORTRESS SURE. Something grand must be going on in the boardroom, he thought, all this is not for the likes of us. He was checked, saluted and directed across the lobby to the escalators. Second floor, Portcullis Suite. There was a full-sized catering kitchen on the twenty-fourth, he had been told, and a chef. Someone had said it could have doubled as a three-star restaurant: it probably did, for all he knew – he had never risen to those heights. He smelt cigarette smoke first, then heard the ebb and flow of too-loud conversation and chorused male laughter, feeling the transient electricity of excitement that free drink always provoked. He hoped some canapés had made their way down here to the proles. Mr Dupree had made him miss lunch, he realized, and he was hungry.