HOW TO WEAR A NAME-BADGE (AND OTHER ORIENTATION TIPS)
By
Robert Frazer
"Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success."
-Henry Ford-
Avise still couldn't get his head around power steering.
For the past six months, he'd always been at the wheel of a Dardo IFV – the shape of a trowel-chipped brick, and half as manoeuvrable – with four tons of lumbering inertia that brought to mind the slow-motion curve of a prizefighter's knockout hook, sweat-sheened in crystal under the rolling cameras... the only problem being that it never snapped back up to full speed again like it did in the movies. Still, you got plenty of claret when being rattled around by a RPG impact made you gash your lip against the cupola edge.
If Avise hadn't been grinding up the roads in a Dardo, he was trying to corral a herd of Land Rovers across Nasiriyah's gravel fields. The regiment had been short of vehicles – just as it had been short of cleaning kits, boots, body armour, webbing-straps and magazines that didn't deform in the desert heat and jam up their rifles – and its motor pool had been slopped back up to full with a fleet loaned from the Alpini. Desert camo had been smacked on the Land Rovers so hastily they were pimpled with thick congealed slumping beads of paint and scabby scales peeling the old blue underneath... and several of the vehicles routinely overheated as the yellow sludge that they had been drenched in glued their bonnets shut. The Land Rovers had canted drive shafts which made them literally impossible to drive in a straight line – ideal when you're high in the Alps and need help hugging their precipitous contours, but in southern Iraq's billiard-table landscape it aggravated an inspection tour of vehicle checkpoints across town into six hours of wrestling a hippo.
When Avise had walked back to his own private car, sitting quietly in the car park of regimental garrison and washed to a springtime clean by the season's showers, he'd had to think about how to work the remote locking. The engine purred into life with one feather-nudge of the key and the radio immediately began playing the Premiata Forneria Marconi compilation CD that he'd left in there before flying out. It was a weird, perturbed, dislocating sensation – the soundwaves forming the ripples of a departing dream sinking down into forgetfulness, as though the past six months had been an aberration that the universe pinched shut over, a hermetic capsule that people's attention slid off, something that they wouldn't even fail to understand but fail to even recognise, like sound at too high a pitch.
Did that make him more perceptive and sophisticated, or did it make him a dog?
Certainly, Avise felt as though he had been driving without opposable thumbs. After months of stodgy, unresponsive steering the light, computer-assisted flightiness of his car veered too far the other way. He may as well have been scrabbling at the wheel with flat paws as just turning out of his parking space rocked the bumper of the adjacent car (nothing that needed a form filled, thank Heaven for small mercies), and every T-junction had lurched into a U-turn (in his stomach as much as the car, as traffic wailed around him). After skidding into a moderation of small, scratching jinks at the wheel and a twitching head wincing at every passing kerb and wing-mirror, he'd trembled the car through the streets of Isernia and jerked onto the Autostrada of the Two Seas. On the long motorway he could stretch and exhale and begin to feel a little more relaxed and familiar with his driving again. Running along the garter of the Italian boot brought some more military smartness back to mind; also, it's often said that military life is one part terror to nine(ty-nine) parts boredom... and for the past hour he'd been stuck in a jam.
Avise hadn't realised it before he'd nearly shunted the car in front and had to clumsily stall his own, with the lurching belch of a protesting engine, to avoid cracking bumpers. He was a good Italian, and it was an article of citizenship that traffic jams in Italy had to be punctuated by blaring horns and revving growls and burning, smiling cheeks and shaking fists conducting a music of invective – not sullen, slumped shoulders in their seats, vacant and enervated staring at the cars in front, and the hollow, queerly negative silence of dead engines. The motorway had become a car park and as Avise leaned back against the side of his car and tipped some cigarette ash onto the tarmac, taking it all in, it was his first inkling that things had changed since he'd been away.
"Hey, could you spare your lighter?" A man with teak Mediterranean skin and thickset from too much of the syrup of healthy fruit waggled a thin brown cigarillo out of his car window, becoming the first voice Avise had heard since he'd stopped.
Avise nodded and went over, feeling oddly transgressive for walking on the motorway, and fished into his trouser pocket with his free hand. "I use matches, but yeah."
"Ah, how sophisticated." The other man gave an assured smile of one who was knowledgeable in such things.
The real reason was that rat-packs came with matchbooks and not with gas refills, but as Avise watched the other man puff his cigarillo to life he saw no benefit to be had from souring his new associate's relish.
After a moment savouring his cigarillo's flavour, the man evidently felt some sort of fraternity amongst embattled smokers oppressed by the healthniks, and sought to make conversation. "You think that they'd have changed tactics by now."
"I don't know," Avise shrugged, "if they kept one lane open it'd only cause aggravation with people jockeying for places. This way at least people feel that it's out of their hands and there's no sense worrying."
"I mean Padania", the man frowned, flicking his glance towards the cars obstructing him. "They've been doing this for an age, now. Of course, the police are useless and can't even find a pattern with something this obvious."
"I don't follow." Avise was genuinely perplexed. The radio had warned of delays due to a traffic collision.
"Haven't they caught you up in this before?" The man eyed Avise with a hint of suspicion of the abnormal.
"I've... been abroad." Avise grimaced privately, hating himself for the reticence conditioned into him by civilians' unreliable reactions.
At this the man smiled, evidently enjoying being able to expound from a position of authority. "Padania will rescue some beat-up banger from the scrapyard, stop on the hard shoulder early in the morning, then off they go over the roadside barrier and into the undergrowth with a quick bomb alert to the local paper. There's nothing there, of course – there never is – but the police have to check and clear it anyway, so the motorway grinds to a halt right in time for rush hour. It's been going on for months. There's probably some employment law which means that the cops have to get their precious beauty sleep and can't just post a guard by the roadside to catch them in the act." He gave a hard pull on his cigarillo to soot his words with harsh contempt.
It was well past eleven, so Avise could tell that something was off with the man's confidently-expounded model.
The man looked ready to elaborate on the parlous state of modern policing and the methods for the remedying thereof, but he was interrupted by a young, harried-looking municipal policeman who came jogging down the road, one of several threading their way between the lanes and ducking their heads into car windows. "Uh, excuse me, sir, could you please return to your vehicle? The, uh, traffic collision had just been cleared and we are reopening the road shortly."
While the cigarillo-smoker gave a snort of "about time", the policeman's hesitant manner and shifty eyes put Avise into an inquisitive mood – maybe something to do with a career of sniffing out soldiers wretchedly trying to wriggle out of some petty iniquity. Some traffic collision that completely shut off a four-lane motorway. Avise was of a mind to question why, if it was a mere traffic collision, he had seen passing by on the hard shoulder two Carabineri paddy-wagons and one of those unmarked Ford Transits – the type that were supposed to be as innocuous and ubiquitous as the labouring White Van Man but which rolled a little too heavily on their suspension and immediately gave away to anyone who'd spent more than five minutes on Wikipedia that they were SISDE evidence collectors. The rookie was clearly out of his depth, but as much as it would have amused Avise to have sternly upbraided an inadequate private, responsibility tugged him back towards his car.
After all, he thought with a final drag before flicking the butt down onto the asphalt, it was important to keep to an appointment.
The remainder of the journey passed uneventfully, and with skipping the lunch that he'd planned at that nice service station he'd passed last time he cycled this way, a little liberation of the accelerator and a precise understanding of the leeway permitted by the tools of the fascist oppressor (speed cameras), Avise still reached his destination - a compound in the leafy countryside a little inland of Rome, just before it creased up into the foothills of the Apennines – before his scheduled arrival.
It was impossible to reconnoitre the location before he announced his arrival (at least not without tabbing over a mile of farmland and ruining his suit) – the road up to the compound drifted a wavy rural curve through a broad band of open meadow, on the one side freshly mowed in long ranks of yellowing hay, and on the other side still tall with a rippling sheen of golden clover. At this distance the compound was a thin brown line of a wall, over which were pale blocks of pink and white. For an instant, Avise blinked with an eyelash-twitch of long, blank mud walls enclosing squares of desert and oblong lumps of housing.
As Avise's car came closer to the compound the road straightened out into a long avenue, but then peculiarly jerked into a sharp chicane before reaching the gatehouse. As Avise checked his rear-view mirror before making the turn, he caught the sign past it, mounted on top of the wall:
SOCIAL WELFARE AGENCY
Understanding the importance of continued care
Something writhed in Avise's breast, a vile worm curling and twitching as a lamp was shone on it, snagging at his face and pulling his mouth into a savage scowl. This year, he had undergone a second ordeal of squinting at an imprecise heat-haze horizon and wondering which dry ditch or breeze-block wall would find some jihadi scrabbling around like a spindly-legged spider scuttling out from underneath a stone; and now, it pricked Avise acutely that someone was watching him, and smirking.
As Avise made the final turn towards the compound, a security guard in a tan uniform – and no weapon that Avise could see, not even a truncheon – waved him down before he reached the gate. "Good afternoon, sir. Do you have an appointment?"
All smiles again, Avise held up his Army identity card. "Hello, I'm Major Avise Mancini, O.C. 'J' Coy, 18th Bersaglieri. I have a meeting at fifteen-hundred hours?"
The security guard took the card from Avise, studied both sides and scratched the name-tape on the back, before handing it back and mumbling some cant into a small walkie-talkie pinned to his lapel. Receiving a response that satisfied him, the security guard nodded. "That's fine, Major Mancini – please go through. Head straight on and go directly to the main building – there is visitors' parking available in the quad and you will find Reception there as well. Welcome to the Social Welfare Agency."
Avise nodded in acknowledgement and puttered forward over the speed bumps set just before the entryway. There was only a simple striped barrier laid across the road that the security guard raised by pushing down on a concrete counterweight – all studiedly low-tech and simply innocuous – but there was also a heavy gate on rollers slid aside behind the wall, and the guardhouse bore an uncanny resemblance to the architecture of guardhouses on three different Army bases that he'd been posted to over the course of his career.
Past the gatehouse was another broad stretch of open ground, although the tall black poplars lining the road prevented Avise from getting an encompassing view of the compound ahead of him. After a couple of hundred yards Avise reached a crossroads, and what was undoubtedly the main building surged up suddenly before him as the trees stepped back – no doubt a deliberate effect to make the building seem grander and more impressive in scale than if he'd seen it slowly inflate from a distance. It was a wide building, with long extensive wings sweeping out and shoving aside the clutches of smaller units that the left and right turns of the crossroads stumbled after. The lower level was weighted in banded rustication to give a sense of the firmness of the foundation; regular ranks of upright rectangular windows given small shade by decorative lintels stamped to attention like black-jacketed soldiers sweating under shakoes, two companies flanking the narrow, tall round-arched portal into the quadrangle; some form of greeting. The building looked more like a stately home than a government office, although given the tendency of senior civil servants (and, Avise conceded with Christian honesty, command-level officers) to start feathering their nests, there was some overlap. With an eye used to trying to distinguish which smudge was a tumbledown stone and which was the pot-shotting raghead, Avise noticed that each of the lintels had the exact same arrangement of stone fruit and fossil ivy, as if they had been bought wholesale from the mason... it was almost childishly charming, suggesting a minor noble waddling along with puffy-red breathlessness, struggling to catch up with the Palace of Caserta.
Avise was about to shift his car back into gear and drive on through the facade when colours purred across his vision and curled around to the driver's window. It was a bright, gleaming yellow Vespa scooter, at the hand of a young woman who seemed just as bright. She was wearing a sleeveless top with her pale arms complementing the deep burnt orange of the fabric, and the black zip running down her front, open at the throat, snaked a slinky course down her narrow waist and pert bust. Olive gloves on the handlebars suggested an energetic physicality, and short but tousled brown hair formed a bower over a welcoming smile. "Hi there!" She rapped on the window.
Avise lowered the window, curious about the unexpected but not unpleasant interruption. "Hello," he returned the smile, "can I help you?"
"Just to say that the main quad is full," the woman bent her head down to the window and gestured down one of the arms of the junction, "but there's more parking round to the right. Pull up there, it's no problem."
"Well, thank you," Avise nodded, "that saves me some bother."
"No problems," the woman flashed a grin, "see you later!" The Vespa whirred off in the other direction.
Avise remained still for a moment, and then turned to the right, tipping his head with an appreciative hum. See you later. Heh. Confident.
Can I help you. Heh. Confident. Priscilla mused as she flicked down the Vespa's support strut around the other side of the building.
"Parking attendant? You're not showing much ambition in your career." Priscilla looked up to see Olga leaning against a side-door.
"It's good sense," Priscilla protested, "you know the quad wasn't designed for cars, it can get tight to manoeuvre in there when there are a lot in."
"I know that I've got spare spaces on either side of my car," Olga shook her head, "If you wanted to get a good look at the New Guy, there's more dignified ways. We have had these inventions recently, we call them windows. Fascinating technology. Bit radical, really."
"I'm showing initiative," Priscilla puffed with importance, "it's in the handbook that all Prospects are to undergo continuous assessment from the point of their first outside approach to the compound gate."
"Just like a fish hitting ice!" Olga laughed. When Priscilla looked confused at the Russian idiom, Olga shrugged. "Okay, then, so what's your 'assessment' result?"
At that, Priscilla twisted her mouth into a brief frown. "Well... I kind of hoped that he'd have a more impressive motor than a Fiat Punto."
The initial encouragement of a friendly face was dampened when Avise found himself nuzzling his little turquoise hatchback between a silver Porsche on one hand and a cobalt Maserati on the other... and when he walked back around to the front of the building and entered the quad, he noticed at least half a dozen free spaces – he now wasn't sure whether the woman had given her advice in all helpfulness or if it was the first nudge of a subtle hazing ritual. It left Avise feeling slightly agitated, and his feeling of dislocation on seeing the Social Welfare Agency's sign began to surface again – he was a medalled officer, not a cadet who hadn't learned to bull his boots.
The reception was a high-ceilinged, light-coloured and airy room, well-lit by a rank of tall windows set above the entryway and looking out into the quad. Avise found that he was the only current visitor. He gave his name to the receptionist, who spoke into a black plastic IP phone and invited Avise to wait for another attendant, who would be ready in a few minutes. Avise turned back from the desk and paced idly around the room The room was a queer mix of the opulent and humdrum, but it was not the dignified shabby gentility of a natural occupant restraining his means, but the discordant diminution of parasitic squatters dwarfed by what they camped under. Waiting-room chairs that reminded Avise of his dentist were pushed against the walls, and old magazines with curling creased covers were laid on side-tables. Against the light colouring of the room, with white walls and a marble-grey floor, the receptionist's desk was out of place – a broad, heavy oblong of plain dark oak which looked as if it had been dragged down from a dusty study rather than buy a new one. A few pictures in simple frames broke up the walls, and a wooden door with glass panels behind the receptionist led to what Avise could see as a conventional office, while other corridors leading away from the reception were all blocked with electronic turnstiles. A large, obvious, Seventies-beige CCTV camera was mounted in one corner – and Avise could espy a smaller, more discreet black modern camera dome disguised behind a light fitting.
It was as though someone had handed him a photograph of the reception, and then a layer of acetate with all of the furniture and details printed on – but everything was offset, and no matter how Avise jiggled the sheet, he couldn't make the lines match. It wasn't just the mere fact of noticing unusual discrepancies – the sense of displacement was actively preying on him, raised corners digging into his back. It wasn't just different, it was wrong.
The receptionist saw Avise's vague wanderings around the room as impatience and pushed an ashtray across her desk, and also pointed to another on one of the side-tables. "Feel free to smoke, sir."
Avise almost tripped over his feet. Smoking? Inside a building? A government building? Now he wasn't so much dislocated as ripped completely out of his socket. Still, there was one rock of security that he could cling to amidst the storm. He slipped out a Marlboro and lit up. Avise breathed in deeply, focusing his attention inward, steadying his bearings and letting the flame concentrate on and warm his core. The smoke flooded in, its rough, biting edge awaking his alertness and sensation, and catching on and scooping up all of the burrs of suspicion that crawled through him, to be blown out in one satisfying, cleansing, fuming exhalation. He felt better after just one breath.
As Avise watched his bad feeling wisp away to inconsequence in the air in front of him, he noticed one of the pictures emerge out through the thinning cloud. He was focused on the play of smoke, but as it dispersed the picture's details caught on the departing swirls and retained his interest, so he walked across the reception to examine it more closely. As it happened he recognised the print, mainly for its pious subject matter. It was Francesca's Resurrection, with Christ emerging from the tomb in stern authority while the sleeping soldiers beneath Him were witnesses to the miracle, even in their repose. Avise was no great art lover – he had visited galleries and endeavoured to elucidate meaning beyond nice and pretty platitudes, but more for the manful struggle for Achievement and Worthiness. This guilty sensation pricked at him again, needling that he would be cheapened if he did not exert himself to derive Significance from the Masterpiece, and with dutiful obligation he rolled the feeling of his next breath of smoke into a thoughtful – no, Contemplative – mood.
"Do you know what I find most interesting about that picture?"
"Hmm?" Avise turned around from the picture, seeing another man emerge from the office door and move past the receptionist to walk over to him. He was a couple of inches shorter than Avise but with a similar build improved by a well-tailored suit that confidently gave no flabby looseness, although his cropped black hair was a little untidy, as if uncombed. His shoes clacked loudly on the floor as he approached Avise.
"One of the soldiers has no legs. Did you notice?" The new arrival pointed past Avise to the painting.
Avise hadn't noticed. Curious, he turned his head back and true enough, one didn't. A soldier leaning back against Jesus's sarcophagus and holding a spear should have had his legs entwined with the man lying beside him, but he rose over the other soldier's thighs as a disembodied torso. "Heh." Avise gave a light chuckle. "So it is. I suppose even Renaissance Masters can make mistakes."
"I don't think so." The other man stood beside Avise, shaking his head. "You never even knew, and it had to be pointed out to you. The man's incomplete, and yet it does not disturb the composition." The man put a hand on his hip and considered the painting with a smile. "I like that. I like to think that it reflects what we do here."
"It's a nice thought." Avise nodded in fair agreement.
The man turned to face Avise. "I'm Jose Croce, a carer here at the Social Welfare Agency. I'm your guide for today." He extended his hand.
Avise extinguished his cigarette, crushing it into an old lozenge tin from a jacket pocket, and then extended his own hand naturally, with no unseemly speed and without any tripping pause or hesitation. He clasped Jose's hand in a firm grip, one of confidence but with no petty adolescent attempt at applying crushing pressure. He looked Jose directly in the eye, while his own showed the focusing of recognition but not the moronic width of surprise or inquiry. Avise said, "Good afternoon, Mr. Croce."
Jose nodded, his own eyes softening with the appreciation of the newcomer's restraint and comportment. First hurdle crossed. "Just Jose will be fine, we'll be spending some time here so there's no need to be stuffy." Now, at that Avise did look surprised, an instinctual raising of the eyebrows which squirted out from underneath his grip of self-control and which he hurriedly tried to sweep back in by masking it as an inhalation. Jose noted it, and not wanting the new arrival to stumble so soon, brushed it off as inconsequential by continuing on uninterrupted. "Do you have your itinerary for the day?"
"I didn't receive specifics." Avise explained. "I was just advised to bring mufti and an overnight bag. It's in my car."
"That's fine." Jose nodded. "No need for it now, you can collect it after dinner – for now, I would like to begin by showing you the place."
The receptionist stood Avise against a blank part of the wall and flashed a photograph with a small webcam plucked off of the top of her desk monitor, before printing off an identity card which was hung from his neck. It had his name and portrait, the legend "VISITOR" in bold, heavy type, a barcode and a bright red square.
"Try to keep that right-side out if you can," Jose explained as Avise examined the badge, "and don't take it off."
"Is it that important?" Avise looked puzzled. He liked to wear his webbing tight to his body with nothing clattering and jangling, and these sorts of loose dangling badges were usually shoved into a pocket as soon as he was through a check.
"Security have... standing orders about responding to these things." Jose half-explained.
Avise looked at the badge again, frowning at the barcode. The irritation that he'd felt when first approaching the outer gate of the Social Welfare Agency now became... perturbed as he followed Jose to one of the corridor turnstiles.
"So, Major, what have you read about the Social Welfare Agency?"
Jose and Avise were walking along a long corridor on the ground floor of the main building, moving deeper into the compound. As Jose was leading a couple of pace in front, Avise could turn his head to take in the new territory around him. Windows on Avise's left looked out across a wide lawn with a collection of smaller buildings on the far side, their modern concrete and redbrick while on the right they provided air and light for a series of busy offices. Avise was well aware himself that government institutions could be ponderously top heavy (not least the Army, he conceded with honesty, which had more brigadiers than it did battalions), but even so he wondered if even the most obnoxiously brazen timeservers could excuse this much administration in a medical unit.
"The Social Welfare Agency is a medical research organisation that specialises in bodily trauma," Avise began, making sure that he ticked all the boxes and didn't say 'quango', "particularly in active prosthetics but also plastic, cosmetic and aesthetic surgery" – they were different things, apparently – "and physiotherapy and psychiatric care so that subjects can fully adapt to them, and overcome the psychological problems stemming from what made those augments necessary."
"Okay then – so what have you heard about the Social Welfare Agency?" Jose half-turned and tipped his head back towards Avise as he walked. The gesture seemed all the more interrogative, with one eye becoming the sidelong stare of a bird of prey.
Avise blinked, and then shrugged his shoulders, lifting his frame up off of the rack and unclipping himself into a casual stance. "Well, there was a lot of carping on internet forums that wounded soldiers apparently get first preference for new limbs and that money to prop up Imperialism would be better spent on nurses and immigrants and Gay Pride pamphlets." He laughed with gentle derision.
Jose's didn't laugh along. He stopped and turned around, and his look was... expectant. "Anything else?"
Avise drew in a breath, his humour suddenly dissipated. Well, if he wanted it... "There's some... well, some Frankenstein stuff. Scuttlebutt that your operations don't go as well as the World Health Organisation raves." He looked at Jose with an apologetic grimace, not welcoming bringing embarrassment. "Talk that the government bankrolls your out-of-court settlements to keep a policy failure hush-hush."
Jose's mouth flickered with a brief hum of a laugh. "Well, that's a new one. I'll have to remember it." He turned back around and continued walking.
Avise twitched his head, glancing outside the window towards the big lawn, before following on. He wondered if he had passed the test.
Just as they were about to turn the corner one of the office doors swung open and a young woman – no, a girl – emerged. She initially was facing away from Avise as she backed out, waving a farewell to whoever was inside, but as she turned around with a swift, smart spin, her long blonde pigtails spiralling around like the mesmeric whorls of a gymnastic ribbon, Avise was taken aback. The girl had a lithe, slender figure, and the sharp edges of her crisp white blouse and plain black knee-length schoolgirl's skirt emphasised a lean, whipcord athleticism. She was half-caste, but not a plain mongrel but the sort that married enhancing complementary features, for set in her rich coffee-coloured skin were a pair of brilliant sapphire eyes and a crown of harvest gold. "Oh, hello, Mr. Croce."
"Afternoon, Triela." Jose nodded, before gesturing towards Avise. "This is Major Mancini, our visitor today."
"Good afternoon, sir, it is a pleasure for you to be here." Triela bowed her head deferentially and extended her hand.
"Thank you for the welcome, young Miss." Avise gave an indulgent, paternal smile at the grown-up attitude and reciprocated the gesture. As they shook, Jose wondered, "What's bringing you down to Section One, Triela?"
"Hilshire has been cooped up in his room all day writing his commentary on Phong Linh's Bologna file. I was just delivering it for him so he could spend some time in the sun before he gets too pale." She laughed lightly.
"I see." Jose nodded. "Do you have any other tasks for today?"
"Gym, then Amadeo and Mr. D'Arme are taking the first-gens to the training area to inspect the new course." As she spoke, she glaced back at Avise – it was only a brief flicker, not long enough for any sort of penetrating gaze, but nonetheless something in Avise's subconscious instinctively recoiled, like a magnet being pushed away by an intangible but irresistible field. He took a short step back, abruptly feeling guilty as though he had been caught eavesdropping, and then feeling absurd and angry with himself for letting guilt command him like that in what was a perfectly innocent open conversation – there was an unreal ferment within him.
"Well, work hard." Jose continued blandly, apparently unaware of the effect Triela had on his companion. "I'll see you at dinner tonight."
"Of course, Mr. Croce." Triela nodded again. "Have a good day, Major Mancini, I hope you like it here." She said sweetly, before walking away around another corner of the junction.
"A little young for staff? She can't be more than fifteen."
"That's Triela, one of our patients here at the Social Welfare Agency. One of our successes, too." Jose gave a sardonic grin.
That Triela... when she had first appeared, She had turned a little too quickly, and her greeting had not been so much said as declared. He felt the scaffolding of a staged encounter, and felt mildly resentful, chafing against it. He wasn't a sales rep looking for a pitch. "One of their successes", indeed!
Avise looked down at his hand and flexed in into a fist a couple of times, then wriggled his fingers.
She had had a really strong handshake, too.
"...yeah, it's a real shame that they closed down ATB Baggoceri. Anywhere else and you'd need a five-star hotel to get access to a beach like that!"
"Probably signed off on by just some time-serving brigadier who was self-conscious about showing his gut!"
After their halt in the office corridor and the encounter with the girl, Jose seemed to be become a lot looser, moving back to be alongside Avise, and they had fallen to chatting amiably about their shared experience of the military. After a couple more turns down more corridors – other routes signposted as though they were hospital departments – they emerged out of the rear of the building, at the top of a patio and a wide series of steps. Judging by the decorated barriers beside them they would originally have looked out over a garden, but the wide grounds and expansive building had stressed even the government's coffers – now the garden had been covered with low-maintenance tarmac and turned into what looked to be a parade square, doubling-up as another car park. Jose began walking down the steps and Avise was about to follow, but he almost stumbled on the first step as a streak skidded across his vision. Another girl – a younger adolescent with boyish looks emphasised by her cropped blonde hair – skidded across the parade ground with an audible squeal from the soles of her sneakers. As she braked, her body leaned with unspent momentum, and she flashed the adults a bright, sunny smile that seemed charming as she tipped her head to one side. "Hi, Mister Croce! Sorry, but I've got to dash!" A blur sent Avise's name badge flapping behind his neck as the girl vanished into the building behind him.
Avise had scarcely turned his head back before another young girl appeared, already hopping up the steps as he caught sight of her. This one had a shock of deep red hair with braided pigtails that swung and spasmed behind her as she moved. She jogged past Avise without acknowledging him, but just as she was about to yank open the door back into the building she turned back around. "Which way did Rico go?"
"The other one went off round the side." Avise said automatically, thrusting an arm out.
The girl gritted her teeth and looked as though she was about to curse, but bit it back when she remembered her company. Without a thank you she sprinted off to the far end of the patio, tucked her legs underneath her and neatly vaulted over the banister, and tore off out of sight.
Avise got to the bottom of the steps, and Jose raised his eyebrows.
"Keeps the little nippers busy and out of mischief" Avise laughed the question off with a casual shrug, but it was only as he said it he realised precisely why he had done so himself. He had wanted to check something.
The first girl had cleared ten steps in a single bound.
Jose led Avise to a light-framed Kawasaki Mule utility vehicle parked on the edge of the square. They both hopped on, and Jose drove them around a couple of buildings – a dormitory and a... shooting range? The sign had already flashed past before Avise could get a proper look at it, and he didn't mention it to Jose because it sounded stupid and he was feeling isolated enough already, but the suspected glimpse didn't settle his stomach anymore than the lurching, juddering runabout did. They then emerged onto a road that crossed over some more open ground and led towards a wide-fronted, obviously modern building – its glass bays, silvery plastic wall-panels, and clean new light-brown brick a stark contrast to the dressed stone of the main building that he had just passed through. Alongside the road was a long rank of climbing frames, although they looked less like a children's playground and more the practical-challenge examination area that he had clambered over back when he was a cadet at Selection. He saw another three adolescent girls – one with a fountain of long blonde tresses, another with a coy close bob of black hair, and the last with long black hair tied back with a mauve headband – trying to cross a long red monkey-frame with green logs hanging down from it, set in a wood-chip square of lava and toxic waste. The two black-haired girls were trying to snag and pull one of the logs back to them with the lip of a long plank, while the blonde girl, stranded in the middle, had become bored with the others' floundering and was using the log as a swing. An adult man stood off to the side, patiently scratching notes on a clipboard.
The girls were handling planks more than twice their own height.
"Are all of your patients children?" Avise asked suddenly, turning his head back to Jose.
"Not all of them, no" Jose shook his head. "In the last few months we've expanded our operations to incorporate teenage girls as well. Our technology is becoming sufficiently advanced for our synthetic components to be accepted by more developed bodies."
"Females? Not males as well?" That surprised Avise.
"No, just girls." Jose confirmed. Avise grunted distastefully. That all sounded a little too 'affirmative' for his liking.
"I'll be able to tell you more about it in the next stage of the tour." Jose continued, apparently taking Avise's noise for confusion. "We're just at the Medical Centre now." The Mule pulled up outside the front door of the modern building.
"This is all a pretty substantial place." Avise wondered as he ranged his gaze across the building's frontage. "How much can it all cost?" He wasn't quite able to sheathe the accusatory edge to his voice, and felt guilty about it – he himself had had enough of being treated as a faceless drone because of his uniform, and it was wrong to take the government's prolifigacy out on Jose.
"Enough." Jose grunted absently. Both men dismounted, but Jose raised a hand to stop Avise before he entered the building. "Before we go in, we need to sort out your badge."
"What about it?" Avise asked, patting his chest and then surprised to find it no longer hanging there. He spun his head around in frustrated bewilderment – how could it have fallen off? Did everything have to be so damned inconvenient? – before Jose reached out and flipped the badge round from Avise's back, where the speed of the girl's jumping and sprinting back at the main building had spun it round his neck.
Jose couldn't resist cracking a smile. Avise harrumphed, restoring his array of dignity by marching straight and smartly into the medical centre.
The tour of the medical centre lasted another good half an hour. Avise was led into offices, into laboratories, into wards, and he shook hands and exchanged pleasantries with men in white coats and women in green scrubs. All the while Jose nattered amiably about polymer musculature and filtration gauzes, about stem-cell cultures and retinal receptors, but by this point Avise was only half-listening. For a start, he wanted to tell Jose that his personnel file said that his degree was a 2:2 in Physics and not a Double First in Biology, but that was only a symptom of the problem.
Everyone knew the story about the Croce bombing. Everyone also knew the story about how it had been a criminal act of murder. Everyone knew that local mafias had sought to disrupt law enforcement in a desperate attempt to prevent the police from exposing and defeating their rackets and theft from hard-working, law-abiding citizens. This was all widely distributed knowledge and available to all whom wanted to learn more from any national newspaper or bookseller in Italy. Avise wondered why a subaltern in the Carabinieri would engage in such a dramatic career change. Was it a quiet grace appointment by a sympathetic friend in government, some string-pulling that was meant with all sincere helpfulness but nonetheless a sequestration of a political embarrassment? What a dreary place. No, a pit.
It was preying on him. Again, Avise's ear quaked with the snickering, contemptuous laugh of someone wittier, nimbler, and smarter than him. There was that weird, actinic buzz in the air, the choked, stolen breath of that preternatural moment before the AK banged, that moment of vertigo when devils leapt up from underneath and muscles clenched with violence. His heartbeat pounded off of the walls and drowned out Jose's narration.
There was an air force base, in South Tyrol, in a high valley near the Austrian border. It was there for border patrol – but the runway was too short for modern aeroplanes, and in any case that role was utterly redundant with the introduction of the Schengen Area. The nearest town – if that could dignify a collection of half-timbered dwellings, most of which were empty half the year – was three hours away on a vile tapeworm of a mountain road. No snow-bunnies there. In truth, it was a place where soldiers who had killed a comrade in an accident – or who had been found with an officer's wife – could be privily put away until the end of their contracts or they submitted a letter of resignation, Form Number 9x19mm. Avise felt as though he was skirting a perilous precipice. You could fall into soft, comfortable cushions, but you sank deep into them and had nothing to push against to bring yourself back upright.
In a wide corridor they passed a set of double-doors marked "Applied Testing". Jose hopped up a short flight of stairs and then reached a smaller door marked "Applied Testing – Control & Observation". Some joker had also Blu-Takked up a piece of paper underneath it declaring "Welcome to the Danger Zone!"
"Well, here's the nerve centre of the work here—"
" Why am I here, Mr. Croce?"
Jose stopped and turned back, looking down to Avise who was still mounting the lower step.
"This has been a fascinating afternoon." Avise continued, a bubble of resentment stirring his words with a haughtily indignant froth. "I suppose that I should feel privileged with a close look at a project that is the pride of the government – but if you want to promote your agency then you're better with a journalist. I'm not sure what exactly you expect me to even do here, what role I could possibly fulfil. The fact is, I'm a soldier. I'm not a scientist, and I'm not a social worker." He thrust out his arms to encompass it all, and looked at Jose with theatrical helplessness.
"I don't work with children."
"Well, that's good!" Jose nodded, and pushed open the door. "Neither do we."
The Danger Zone was a narrow room with a few chairs and computer consoles, at which a lab-coated medic sat who Jose introduced as "Doctor Donato". The room dominated by large glass panels overlooking the lower chamber, which was evidently a sports hall of some kind, broadly scattered with mats, frames, bars, horses, and a table with a FN P90 submachine gun.
"The kids are into Airsoft?" Avise pointed at the table. "That surprises me. I'd have thought that a government hospital would be all teddy-bears and talking about your feelings."
"Not exactly." For the first time in the whole afternoon, Jose responded with a pained grimace.
"The cyborgs prefer a bit more rough-and-tumble in their play." Doctor Donato looked up at Avise with a grin.
Cyborgs? Avise returned the smile. Heh, made sense with all of this talk of prosthetics. It was good to see that people had a sense of humour about these things. He could imagine that children would like the superhero comic-book allusion, it would add confidence. Probably part of the treatment.
"Okay Belgonzi, our guest is here. Show them in." Donato spoke into a microphone set into his console. The doors to the sports hall swung open and three figures walked in – another lab-coated doctor with a satchel over his shoulder, and two more young girls. One was bespectacled with long black hair that she was tying into a ponytail as she walked; the other had a bob of brown hair, and turned and waved at the control room. Jose smiled thinly and raised his hand in response, and the girl skipped into the room with an enthusiasm that was obvious to Avise even across the distance of the hall. The long-haired girl was dressed in a loose white vest and a pair of sporty hot-pants – "porn shorts", was the jokey term issued as standard to every single PTI that Avise had met – while the other didn't look like anything suitable for exertion, wearing a grey cardigan and pleated skirt that belonged more in a classroom.
"These are Claes and Henrietta, two more of our cyborgs." Jose used the word plainly and matter-of-factly as he introduced them. "Say hello to our guest, please." He leant down to the microphone.
"Good afternoon, Mister Mancini." Henrietta said with formal politeness. "Sir!" She suddenly squeaked hastily, trying to cover a mistake. Avise twitched an indulgent smile.
"Good afternoon, Major Mancini." Claes added, a certain acerbic dryness in her tone apparent even over the crackle of the speakers. "Enjoy the show."
Avise, not sure of quite how to react, leaned down to the microphone after a moment of hesitation. "Hello girls—" He paused as he noticed Donato press "TRANSMIT" for him. "Erm, afternoon, young misses. Work hard!" With all the sports equipment in the hall, he guessed that he was going to be shown a demonstration of the effectiveness of Social Welfare Agency's prosthetic technology in restoring human mobility.
The medic Belgonzi led the girls to a space on one of the walls, which was filled with a large square of thick, scuffed chipboard with a plastic sheet at its base. The Henrietta stood aside while the medic took a series of wires and pads out of his satchel, rubbed gel over the connectors and discreetly fitted them underneath Claes's vest. He then led the wires to a power-point underneath a floor panel and slotted them in, squatting down with a strained motion of someone not too used to much physical exertion himself. Belgonzi then stood back up and gently pushed Claes back against the chipboard.
It was this point that Avise realised something. He hadn't noticed it at first because the colour of brown leather was disguised against the chipboard, but there were several restraints attached to the wall – and Claes was being strapped into them. He leaned forward over the glass
"Test Code ACP00468. Beginning test of Subcutaneous Ballistic Gel Mk. 34" Donato spoke into a microphone. Ballistic? "Clear the chamber for testing." The other medic gave the girl Claes a tight squeeze on her shoulder and then left the room, leaving the two girls alone.
"Testing data feeds." Donato tapped a few keys and then examined a variety of graphs and bars on the monitor beside him. He nodded with satisfaction. "Feedback confirmed.
"Testing subject, are you ready to start?" Donato continued.
"Ready." Claes replied.
"Tester, are you ready to start?"
"Ready!" Henrietta called out through the speakers.
"Tester, make ready."
Henrietta walked to the table and took up the P90, snapped in a magazine lying beside it and efficiently charged the cocking handle. She walked across to a space marked with a line on the floor in front of Claes, and put the weapon to her shoulder.
She was aiming at Claes.
Avise heard Jose shift his feet behind him.
"Tester, left side, single shot. Fire."
Even though the plate glass, the report was deafening. Avise flinched back from the glass as if it had jumped at his face, and it was only the inuring effect of years at shooting ranges which stopped him from slipping down further into ducking for cover.
"Tester, right side, single shot. Fire."
A glint of brass fell from the weapon like a round crystal droplet.
"Tester, chest area. Burst shot. Fire."
The glass rattled. Threads of fabric drifted through the air as curling, languid smoke, highlighted under the chamber's bright lighting.
"Tester, abdomen, sustained shot. Fire."
Claes's eyes were open. Her fists were clenched. Her breath was even.
"Cease fire. Make safe."
Henrietta removed her magazine, cleared the breech, caught the ejected round as it fell with a swift snatched fist, and then stood up straight, holding her weapon at a parade-ground high port.
Several soft pink rose-petals were embroidered on Claes's vest, needled through with copper thread in a delicate decoration.
"Alright!" Donato cried cheerily, applauding with the loud clacks of his keyboard. "We have some good data today, girls. Very well done. Belgonzi, escort Claes to the repair shop. Henrietta, clean up here and store your weapon, Jose will be waiting for you at the training area this afternoon."
Nothing happened for a few seconds, until with a tired sigh Jose leaned over Donato's shoulder and twisted the microphone up to him. "Test complete, chamber safe for activity." The door opened again and Belgonzi walked in, a slightly embarrassed shuffle to his step.
"Jose, did I do well?" Henrietta suddenly interjected, an urgent insistence making the speaker almost squeal with static.
Jose frowned, and bowed his head with a heavy slump. After a second he perked back up again. "Splendidly, Henrietta, all of your marks were dead on."
"Thank you!" The obvious glee had the same effect on the speakers.
Voices continued to emit from the speakers. "Oh, I hope it didn't hurt too much, Claes. I tried to aim at the softer parts."
"What do you mean, 'softer parts'? I hope you're not implying that—" Jose clicked the microphone off.
It was only at this point that Avise realised he was still leaning forward with his face almost pressed against the glass. With some effort, he flattened his creases down back to full height, and stepped back. As he bumped against the far wall of the room, he glanced aside – Donato and Jose were both watching him.
Jose folded his arms. "You asked me earlier, Major Avise Mancini, O.C. 'J' Coy 18th Bersaglieri, how much something like this costs." Jose's voice shot out tersely, almost like a bark. "The truth is, the cost is small. Cheap, even. That might surprise you with government pork-barrel spending but that, Major, is Gospel. This whole edifice only requires a tiny, inconsequential thing, often ignored and easily missed. Some might even argue that it's the phantom-paper of some banker and of no real substance at all."
Donato looked away, out of the window. Avise glanced at the movement, before realising that Jose was waiting for him to meet his eyes.
"Their souls."
Avise looked at Jose – properly, for the first time. He was struck by a look that had previously been disguised by easy acting and the innocuous setting – a look that he had seen on preciously few occasions – even despite his profession. A flinty set to the chin and jaw, a tight edge of its corner. Eyes were small with a piercing narrowness, glassy with a parched dryness.
Hard.
Avise puffed out a breath, and thought about what to say.
"Jesus. Christ. Almighty."
It seemed expected.
THE END