Page 30 of Safe Enough

The man in the shackles smiled, trying to be a pal. He said, “People are addicted to what we sell, too.”

Socrates said, “No, they’re addicted to what I sell. There is no ‘we’ anymore. An hour from now, you won’t even be a memory.”

The man in the shackles didn’t reply. Socrates said, “My point is that those old primeval nutritional urges seem to have hardwired us for addiction. For a million years, we were compelled to seek things out, and we can’t stop now. We can’t just flip a switch after all of evolutionary history.”

“But that’s good for us. For our business, I mean.”

“Generally,” Socrates said. “But specifically it’s bad for you. Because people get addicted to being rich, too. I mean, look at me. I had to work very hard in the past. That’s like my own evolutionary history. I can’t just flip a switch now.”

“But you are rich. You’ll always be rich.”

“So I should stop now? Is that what you’re saying? Does a person stop eating cookies because he’s had enough sugar for the day? No, he keeps on reaching for that packet until they’re all gone.”

“It was a small amount.”

“My small amount.”

“You’ve got enough.”

“I need more. Because you’re forgetting something else. Being rich doesn’t mean anything unless other people are poor.”

“You need me to be poor?”

“I like the comparison. It makes me feel better.”

“I thought this was about the power of example.”

“Well, that, too.”

And at that point, the man in the shackles just gave up and waited. Socrates sensed the surrender. Entertainment was over. He stepped back to the corner of the room and picked up the can of gas. He poured more over the guy’s head while the guy bucked and struggled and cried. Then he trailed a wet line all the way to the door. He held the can upside down to chase out the last drops. He put the can on the floor and crossed the hallway and opened the front door. His guys were back from their walk. They were waiting in the cars.

There was a breeze outside, enough to make a draft inside, enough to stir the gasoline vapors and spread the smell. The wind was blowing parallel with the front of the building, creating a slight Venturi effect, sucking air out of the house the same way a spray gun sucks paint out of a reservoir. Socrates figured the whole house would burn, but he didn’t care. It wasn’t his.

He clicked his lighter.

It didn’t work.

The serrated wheel spun free and then jammed. The flint had broken, and the fragment had seized up the mechanism. He dropped the lighter and pulled his gun. He aimed at the floor from a foot away, right at the wet line. He figured the muzzle flash would do the trick or, failing that, the heat of the bullet itself.

The breeze gusted, the vapors stirred; he pulled the trigger, and the air itself seemed to catch fire all around him, blue flames dancing and curling and twisting, connected to nothing, then connected to his clothes, to his hair, to his skin. He stood up slowly, moving, turning, ablaze, stamping a meaningless circle inside an envelope of fire. The breeze fed the flames and pulled more vapor out of the house, which fed the fire even more. Socrates made it out the door and two steps toward his car, and then he went down heavily on his front, and the wind caught the door and slammed it shut behind him.

The guy in the shackles heard the screaming, and then he heard cars driving away, and after that he heard nothing, until an hour later the occupants of the house got back. They didn’t call the cops. No one thought that was a good idea. They called the shackled man’s friends instead, and four of them arrived another hour later with bolt cutters. Then all five men left, stepping over the blackened lump on the driveway.

THE BONE-HEADED LEAGUE

For once the FBI did the right thing: it sent the Anglophile to England. To London, more specifically, for a three-year posting at the embassy in Grosvenor Square. Pleasures there were extensive, and duties there were light. Most agents ran background checks on visa applicants and would-be immigrants and kept their ears to the ground on international matters, but I liaised with London’s Metropolitan Police when American nationals were involved in local crimes, either as victims or witnesses or perpetrators.

I loved every minute of it, as I knew I would. I love that kind of work, I love London, I love the British way of life, I love the theater, the culture, the pubs, the pastimes, the people, the buildings, the Thames, the fog, the rain. Even the soccer. I was expecting it to be all good, and it was all good.

Until.

I had spent a damp Wednesday morning in February helping out, as I often did, by rubber-stamping immigration paperwork, and then I was saved by a call from a sergeant at Scotland Yard, asking on behalf of his inspector that I attend a crime scene north of Wigmore Street and south of Regent’s Park. On the 200 block of Baker Street, more specifically, which was enough to send a little jolt through my Anglophile heart, because every Anglophile knows that Sherlock Holmes’s fictional address was 221B Baker Street. It was quite possible I would be working right underneath the great detective’s fictional window.

And I was, as well as underneath many other windows, because the Met’s crime scenes are always fantastically elaborate. We have CSI on television, where they solve everything in forty-three minutes with DNA, and the Met has scene-of-crime officers, who spend forty-three minutes closing roads and diverting pedestrians, before spending forty-three minutes shrugging themselves into Tyvek bodysuits and Tyvek booties and Tyvek hoods, before spending forty-three minutes stringing KEEP OUT tape between lampposts and fence railings, before spending forty-three minutes erecting white tents and shrouds over anything of any interest whatsoever. The result was that I found a passable imitation of a traveling circus already in situ when I got there.

There was a cordon, of course, several layers deep, and I got through them all by showing my Department of Justice credentials and by mentioning the inspector’s name, which was Bradley Rose. I found the man himself stumping around on the damp sidewalk some yards south of the largest white tent. He was a short man, but substantial, with no tie and snappy eyeglasses and a shaved head. He was an old-fashioned London thief-taker, softly spoken but at the same time impatient with bullshit, which his own department provided in exasperating quantity.

He jerked his thumb at the tent and said, “Dead man.”

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