Anansi Boys

Then he went out and locked the door, with Fat Charlie on the inside and himself on the outside.

THE ODDEST THING, THOUGH GRAHAME COATS, WHO WAS not given to self-inspection, was how normal and chipper and generally good he felt.

The captain told them to fasten their safety belts, and mentioned that they would be landing soon on Saint Andrews. Saint Andrews was a small Caribbean island which, on declaring independence in 1962, had elected to demonstrate its freedom from colonial rule in a number of ways, including the creation of its own judiciary and a singular lack of extradition treaties with the rest of the world.

The plane landed. Grahame Coats got off and walked across the sunny tarmac dragging his wheeled bag behind him. He produced the appropriate passport—Basil Finnegan’s—and had it stamped, collected the rest of his luggage from the carousel, and walked out through an unattended customs hall into the tiny airport and from there into the glorious sunshine. He wore a T-shirt and shorts and sandals and looked like a British Holidaymaker Abroad.

His groundskeeper was waiting for him outside the airport, and Grahame Coats sat himself in the back of the black Mercedes and said “Home, please.” On the road out of Williamstown, the road to his clifftop estate, he stared out at the island with a satisfied and proprietorial smile on his face.

It occurred to him that before he left England he had left a woman for dead. He wondered if she was still alive; he rather doubted it. It did not bother him to have killed. It felt instead immensely satisfying, like something he had needed to do to feel complete. He wondered if he would ever get to do it again.

He wondered if it would be soon.

CHAPTER TEN

IN WHICH FAT CHARLIE SEES THE WORLD AND MAEVE LIVINGSTONE IS DISSATISFIED

FAT CHARLIE SAT ON THE BLANKET ON THE METAL BED AND waited for something to happen, but it didn’t. What felt like several months passed, extremely slowly. He tried to go to sleep but he couldn’t remember how.

He banged on the door.

Someone shouted, “Shut up!” but he couldn’t tell whether it was an officer or a fellow inmate.

He walked around the cell for what, at a conservative estimate, he felt must have been two or three years. Then he sat down and let eternity wash over him. Daylight was visible through the thick glass block at the top of the wall that did duty as a window, by all appearances the same daylight that had been visible when the door was locked behind him that morning.

Fat Charlie tried to remember what people did in prison to pass the time, but all he could come up with was keeping secret diaries and hiding things in their bottoms. He had nothing to write on, and felt that a definite measure of how well one was getting on in life was not having to hide things in one’s bottom.

Nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen. More Nothing. The Return of Nothing. Son of Nothing. Nothing Rides Again. Nothing and Abbott and Costello meet the Wolfman…

When the door was unlocked, Fat Charlie nearly cheered.

“Right. Exercise yard. You can have a cigarette if you need one.”

“I don’t smoke.”

“Filthy habit anyway.”

The exercise yard was an open space in the middle of the police station surrounded by walls on all sides and topped by wire mesh, which Fat Charlie walked around while deciding that, if there was one thing he didn’t like being in, it was police custody. Fat Charlie had had no real liking for the police, but until now, he had still managed to cling to a fundamental trust in the natural order of things, a conviction that there was some kind of power—a Victorian might have thought of it as Providence—that ensured that the guilty would be punished while the innocent would be set free. This faith had collapsed in the face of recent events and had been replaced by the suspicion that he would spend the rest of his life pleading his innocence to a variety of implacable judges and tormenters, many of whom would look like Daisy, and that he would in all probability wake up in cell six the following morning to find that he had been transformed into an enormous cockroach. He had definitely been transported to the kind of maleficent universe that transformed people into cockroaches…

Something dropped out of the sky above him onto the wire mesh. Fat Charlie looked up. A blackbird stared down at him with lofty disinterest. There was more fluttering, and the blackbird was joined by several sparrows and by something that Fat Charlie thought was probably a thrush.

They stared at him; he stared back at them.

More birds came.

It would have been hard for Fat Charlie to say exactly when the accumulation of birds on the wire mesh moved from interesting to terrifying. It was somewhere in the first hundred or so, anyway. And it was in the way they didn’t coo, or caw, or trill, or sing. They simply landed on the wire, and they watched him.

“Go away,” said Fat Charlie.

As one bird, they didn’t. Instead, they spoke. They said his name.

Fat Charlie went over to the door in the corner. He banged on it. He said, “Excuse me,” a few times, and then he started shouting, “Help!”

A clunk. The door was opened, and a heavy-lidded member of Her Majesty’s constabulary said, “This had better be good.”

Fat Charlie pointed upward. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. The constabular mouth dropped open peculiarly wide, and it hung there slackly. Fat Charlie’s mother would have told the man to shut his mouth or something would fly into it.

The mesh sagged under the weight of thousands of birds. Tiny avian eyes stared down, unblinkingly.