The Dead Republic by Roddy Doyle Page B

things breaking, angry people grunting quietly. Bill looked at me. He was hunting for reassurance, something solid to tell Ford. He shrugged and walked away. I watched him till he turned the corner to the elevator. I heard it start; the cables groaned as they pulled it to him.
    I shut the door.
     
     
     
    I was wide awake, alert. Trained killer - I never slept. Before, in the old days, I’d woken straight into every escape or confrontation. Nothing had been unexpected.
    I was ready. I didn’t move.
    I couldn’t hear anything beyond or beneath the usual. Early, pre-dawn morning - all the expected sounds. The corridor outside was empty. The hotel’s clients were fast asleep or dead.
    The crack on the head came before the grunt. Hands were on me, heavy on my head and shoulder. The hands had weight but the knocks to my head weren’t meant to kill or even hurt me. One hand pressed my face hard into the pillow. Things seemed to squirm and shift inside it, right against my skin and eye. I tried to push against the weight. I got my head up, but I knew it: I was being let move, an inch or two. There was enough power there to push me down, to smother me or even break my neck.
    —The leg on, Mister Smart?
    My face went back down into the pillow. Harder this time, longer - I was losing.
    The leg was beside the bed. The sheet was off me; he’d have seen I wasn’t wearing it.
    That was what drained everything out of me. The sight of myself, what he must have been looking at. The old man, naked, the meatless arse; the old insect, one of the legs pulled off.
    —Ready to get up?
    I nodded - I tried to.
    —Okay?
    I nodded again. I could turn now.
    —Sorry, Mister Smart, he said.
    I covered myself with the sheet, for his sake and my own.
    —Just following orders, Bill, yeah?
    —No, he said.—Nobody told me to do this.
    —Then what the fuck are you up to?
    This time he really hurt me. He swung his open hand from right across the room; the crack filled the place. I hit the floor, between the bed and wall. I’d landed on the wooden leg.
    —Put it on, he said.
    He watched me carefully; he stayed close. I stopped holding the leg like a club, and I saw his feet shift slightly. But he wasn’t giving me room. I wasn’t going to get him now.
    He watched me strap it on. He watched me get the clothes on. He moved, just enough. He stayed right with me.
    —Why? I asked him.
    I put my notebook into one of my jacket pockets. I remembered the fedora and I put it on.
    —There’s just so much a man should have to take, he said. I was ready to go.
    —I don’t mind taking the orders, he said.—It suits me fine. Mister Ford is a good man.
    I looked at him. Not for the first time, I’d underestimated a man. I’d never fuckin’ learn.
    —But you, he said.—Calling you Mister Smart don’t come natural. Let’s go.
    He didn’t touch me. He didn’t have to. I moved; I did what he wanted me to. But he stood in my way.
    —You’re shit, he said.—Like me.
    There was no aggression in what he said, and he wasn’t trying to provoke me. That was what made it frightening. He believed what he’d said.
    —I’m sorry, I said.
    —Yeah.
     
     
     
    —You have a passport? said Ford.
    —No.
    —You had one when you came here.
    —It wasn’t mine, I told him.—And I threw it in the Hudson.
    —We’ll get you a passport, said Ford.—You American now? I didn’t know.
    —I don’t want a passport.
    It wasn’t the same desert. It was the whole world, a vast land all around me, but still, it looked smaller than Monument Valley. The fort looked like the same one, a flimsy thing, picked up and dropped there. The walls were too low to stop anything. In fact, there was only one wall.There was a long line of army tents, brighter versions of the ones I’d seen in the migrant camps during the Depression years. There were trees here, a few of them, that made long vein-like shadows across the dust. We were in Utah, somewhere - the Moab. Somewhere