Incompetence

by Rob Grant

Genres: Fantasy; Humor & Satire; Science Fiction; Humorous sci-fi

Synopsis

Bad is the new good. In the not too distant future the European Union enacts its most far reaching human rights legislation ever. The incompetent have been persecuted for too long. After all it''s not their fault they can''t do it right, is it? So it is made illegal to sack or otherwise discriminate against anyone for being incompetent. And now a murder has been committed and our possibly incompetent detective must find out who the murderer is. As long as he can find directions to get him through the mean streets.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 336

Sample

The flight was uneventful enough, except the pilot accidentally touched down at a slightly wrong airport and forgot to lower the landing gear, so we left the plane by way of the emergency chute, and I lost my shoes.

I was fairly pooped by the time I’d hobbled through Customs, filled in the usual lost luggage forms with the assistance of a stone-deaf baggage complaints officer and taken a three-hour taxi ride to the country where I’d intended to land. The ride would have cost about a month’s salary, if the cabby had remembered to charge me. All I wanted to do, once the hotel receptionist had finished denying all knowledge of my reservation, was to flop down on the bed and sleep for a millennium or two.

Only there was no bed.

I punched a small hole in the bathroom wall and dialled Reception.

A woman picked up the phone and said: ‘Restaurant. How may I help you?’

‘I dialled Reception.’

‘Well, this is the restaurant.’

‘Right. Could you possibly patch me through to Reception?’

‘That won’t be a problem, sir. One moment.’

There was a silent pause, then the ringing tone again, and the click of the receiver being lifted. The same chirpy voice said: ‘Restaurant. How may I help you?’

I dragged on an imaginary cigarette and exhaled slowly. ‘It’s me again.’

‘I’m sorry. Who did you want to speak to?’

‘I wanted to speak to Reception.’

‘Well, this is the restaurant.’

‘I know. You accidentally patched me from the restaurant back to the restaurant again.’

‘It sounds to me like there’s a problem with the internal phones.’

‘Yes, indeedy.’

‘I’ll put you through to House Services.’

‘I’d be very grateful.’

Again, the silence, the ringing, the click and the voice. ‘Restaurant. How may I help you?’

I told her how she might help me, and she threatened to report me to Security for verbal violence. I wished her good luck getting through and slammed down the phone. I reckoned she’d probably spend the rest of the afternoon phoning herself.

There was no message from Klingferm, though, let’s be realistic, the chances of the hotel staff receiving the message and actually delivering it to me in the correct room on the right day were less than promising.

I spent twenty minutes trying to assume a vaguely comfortable position on a sofa perfectly designed to deny humans rest or comfort, then decided I’d be better off sorting out some clothes and other essentials. My luggage was probably having a good time scooting round a baggage carousel in Rio de Janeiro, and my shoes no doubt graced the feet of some scavenging bastard ground staff at Verona airport.

I didn’t expect to find a local Yellow Pages, so when I did, I kissed it passionately. Sadly it was the local Yellow Pages for the Los Angeles area, and I was in Rome. I enlarged the hole in the bathroom wall and steeled myself to scour the streets of the Eternal City for shoe shops in my stockinged feet.

I opened the hotel room door. A security guard was standing just outside, looking puzzledly at a clipboard. He looked up, grinned, and said, ‘English?’

I tried to look German and shook my head.

‘This is room 407, yes?’

I looked at the room number on the door. 407. I tried shaking my head again, Germanically.

‘Mr Vascular?’

That was indeed the name I was travelling under. I tried to make an expression like it was the first time I’d ever heard it. Pulled it off, too, I think.

‘I have a complaint against you. Very serious. A proposition of a sexual nature to the restaurant manager.’

Again, I tried to shake my head in a foreign language.

‘You requested her to masturbate over the phone for you.’

Not exactly. I suppose I had, in a way, suggested that the woman should have sex with herself, though not for my titillation. I put on my best Teutonically perplexed expression.

‘I don’t need to tell you that this sort of thing cannot be tolerated. I must ask you to accompany me to the holding cells, where we will await the arrival of the vice squad.’

I tried not to notice the polished black leather gun holster strapped to his belt, but failed, I think. It’s astonishing how naked you can feel in stockinged feet. Especially in the presence of a uniformed man bearing firearms. Verbal sexual violence invoked a mandatory jail term, even in Italy, where it used to be a valid career choice. Even if the charge didn’t stick, I’d spend a sorry few days in a damp cell, with only some bored, sadistic guards carrying sturdy lengths of rubber hose for occasional company.

‘I think you’ve got the wrong party,’ I said, wisely abandoning the dismal German tourist ploy.

‘Are you suggesting a bribe?’

Nonplussed at the non sequitur, I hesitated, then reached into my jacket pocket. ‘Certainly not, officer. Though I was thinking it would be a nice gesture to make a small contribution to the Security Guards’ Widows and Orphans Fund.’ I tugged out a deck of notes – a big denomination on the top, singles underneath. That’s how I keep them. Believe me, it comes in handy. Tips, beggars, muggers, MEPs. You name it.

He pulled a neat disappearing trick with the money and consulted his clipboard again. ‘I am now thinking perhaps Mr Vascular is in room 507.’

‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised.’

He snapped a polite salute and turned right down the corridor. I gave him a couple of minutes, then stepped out of the room, turned left and headed for the elevator. It arrived almost immediately, which I should have seen as a warning.

Two hours and a small suffocation scare later, the elevator car finally decided it’d had enough of me and spewed me out into the lobby. I padded over to the Reception desk and tried to complain about the bedlessness of my room, the uselessness of the internal telephone system and the sheer cussedness of the lift, but the shifts had changed and the new receptionist was a ninety-year-old man who could only communicate in what appeared to be Polish with a Cuban accent. I took up a pen and a notepad, and tried drawing a bed, but he seemed to think it was some kind of amorous initiative. Frighteningly, he appeared to be excited by the prospect. I gave up.

I was about to squeeze into the street through the tiny gap offered by the hotel’s jammed doors when I spotted a piece of paper in 407’s cubbyhole. Briefly, I contemplated engendering another fruitless exchange with the superannuated clerk, then leapt over the counter and scrambled for the message. It was addressed to a Mr Faro in room 333. While the ancient receptionist clubbed me about the back of the neck with a rolled-up city centre map, I checked the other boxes and found a fax with my name on it in 207’s cubbyhole.

It was from Klingferm all right.

He’d set up a meet less than a mile away, in just under an hour. Which meant I was facing an uncomfortably long walk in my flimsy socks or a terrifying cab journey with a Roman taxi driver. I had to pick up my Italian ID. I wondered if I could also afford the time to stop off and buy a pair of shoes.

As it turned out, I could afford that time. If I hadn’t stopped to buy those shoes, I’d probably have been as dead as Klingferm turned out to be.

Rome was buzzing. Quite literally. Absolutely everyone had a mobile phone, and absolutely everybody was calling absolutely everybody else absolutely all the time. I wondered if there were some law making them compulsory. Frighteningly, it’s possible, these days. I swear I saw a street beggar stop and take a call on his cellular. I even heard a trill from a baby carriage, but it turned out to be a toy mobile phone. They start dickhead training early in Italy.

All the Romans were grumpy, it struck me. This was only a couple of months after the cigarette riots, so everyone was probably in tobacco cold turkey. Italians are genetically programmed to smoke in your face almost as incessantly as they use mobile phones, so the legislation banning public smoking didn’t sit too well with the good citizens of the capital. As ever, the carbonari enforced the law with their usual insane rigour, and lighting up a sly one would like as not draw you a severe truncheoning. Several people were actually beaten to death for endangering their health. That’s how things work in the United States of Europe.

I picked up my ID and found a shoe shop easily enough. Finding a shoe shop assistant who wasn’t on a cellphone or out in the back risking a pistol-whipping for a quick draw of nicotine proved harder. My feet had swollen from walking around shoeless, but I squeezed them into my regular size, so at least they’d fit in the morning. Nice shoes, too. Genuine vegetable leather and reclaimed materials. Carrot hide and cardboard. With any kind of luck, they’d probably last right through to the afternoon.

I was supposed to meet Klingferm on the thirty-third floor of an office block in the Via Torino, but I smelled trouble before I even reached the Piazza della Republica. Police cars kept whizzing by, sirens and lights flashing. You ever get that feeling they’re heading in the same direction you are?

A big crowd was gathered at the intersection of Torino and the Via Nazionale.

Something big had happened, and everyone was on their cellphone, waving their arms and telling everyone else about it. I was probably the last person in Italy to find out.

I shoved my way through the mobile mayhem and ducked under the yellow and black striped tape that was cordoning off the street. A police officer who’d rather have been doing more interesting things tried to shoo me away like I was some kind of cheeky puppy. I flashed my gold Europol detective badge at him, and he suddenly found some manners.

I nodded down the street where the blue lights were flashing and a milling mob of Rome’s finest were busily obliterating anything that might be forensically useful at the crime scene. ‘Quite a circus,’ I said.

‘Seven dead.’ He nodded.

‘Elevator accident.’ Elevator accident? I waved an offhanded salute, and the cop snapped a neat one back. I wandered towards the circus.

I suppose I knew Klingferm would be one of the bodies. The closer I got to the mêlée, the more certain I became. Whatever had happened, had happened at the Casa Martini, the building where we were supposed to meet.

The elevator, or what was left of it, was actually in the street. It had been smashed up plenty. I had to do some serious visio-spatial mental juggling to rearrange the pieces in my head and work out what it must have looked like intact. One of those neo-Nouveau external elevators, I guessed. Mostly glass. The kind that glide up and down outside the building, and you either go gaga at the view or goo-goo with vertigo. I checked the exterior of the Casa Martini. It had three identical elevators, all frozen now, ranked high along its façade. Beside them, there was an empty track which the crashed elevator had probably once thought of as home.

The bodies had been banged up pretty good. There were seven gurneys with stuffed body bags on them, but the body bags weren’t body shaped. There were still some extraneous portions of human detritus that hadn’t yet been allocated a bag. There were bizarre chalk outlines everywhere: blobs of indefinable God knows what. Even while I watched, I saw some idiot chalking around what looked like an eyeball that had flung itself clear of the impact. Good plan. That was going to help the investigation no end.

In the thick of the activity, I spotted an officer who looked like he might be in charge of things. He looked the hysterical type, yelling instructions and chewing people off. I wasn’t in the mood for that, so I checked around and found an officer who looked like he knew what he was doing, and how to do it without making a fuss. He was sifting through what I guessed would be the personal artefacts of the victims.

I flashed my shield again. The officer looked up from what he was doing and scrutinised it a little too closely for my comfort. I don’t like being too well remembered. I started wondering if the badge was still current. I hadn’t checked in a few years. That could have been embarrassing. ‘Europol?’ he said, surprised. ‘You boys got here pretty fast.’

Good. I was ‘you boys’. I shrugged. ‘Coincidence.’ I put the badge away.

‘You believe in coincidence.’ He smiled. ‘That’s nice.’

I don’t, of course. I shrugged again. ‘I had a meeting at the Martini building.’

‘You’re not here officially, then?’

As a federal officer, I could technically pull rank on a local flatfoot. I decided to play nice. ‘I’m not here at all, if you don’t want me to be.’

He smiled and offered me his hand. ‘Salieri,’ he said. ‘Detective Sergeant Salieri.’

I took the hand. ‘So, what happened here, Sergeant?’

‘The elevator took leave of the building, is what happened here. Eyewitnesses say it shot to the top and just kept on going. Straight up in the air, like a rocket.’

‘And then it came down.’

‘And then it came down. Big time.’

‘Got any ID on the victims?’

He clicked his fingers and grabbed a clipboard from a passing sergeant. ‘We’ve got their names, we’ve got their effects. We just haven’t got all the bits of them together yet.’

He showed me the list. I already knew Dick Klingferm’s name would be on it. It still knocked the wind out of me to see it in black and white.

Salieri was watching my face. ‘Somebody you know?’

‘No,’ I lied. ‘Seven people, though.’ I handed the clipboard back. ‘Such a stupid way to go.’

He turned back to the list. ‘I’m having a problem with the personal effects.’

I had an idea what that might be. ‘Really?’

‘Yeah, I’ve got seven stiffs with eight IDs.’

Naturally. Klingferm would be carrying a spare. ‘Maybe you nabbed a pickpocket.’

‘Maybe,’ he said. But I don’t think he bought it. Not a problem. They’d run a trace and it would lead back to nowhere.

‘So, you’re looking at an accident here, or what?’

‘Accident, negligence, take your pick. There’s going to be some engineers and some building planners who won’t be sleeping too good tonight.’

I nodded towards the wreckage. ‘You mind?’

‘How could I mind? You’re not even here.’

I nodded to thank him.

He leaned in and spoke softly. ‘I wouldn’t attract the attention of Captain Zuccho, though, if I could help it.’ He flicked his head back towards the officer in charge, who appeared to be beating an underling with a rolled-up newspaper.

‘Trouble?’

‘Let’s just say he has anger containment problems.’

Anger containment problems, heh? I let out a long whistle. It’s nice to meet a smart cop once in a while. I don’t know how Salieri managed to slip his way through the system, but it was a pretty sure thing he’d never rise above the rank of sergeant. He had talent.

I circled around the elevator debris. Not to avoid disturbing the evidence, but there was a whole lot of gore over everything and I doubted that my carrot and cardboard shoes were guaranteed blood proof. I didn’t want to be walking the streets with my footwear haemorrhaging.

I didn’t really know what I was looking for until I found it. The brass housing that contained the lift buttons. Very interesting. I bent down to pick it up, and all hell broke loose.

I felt the force of a human storm sweeping in from behind me. Captain Zuccho was on the rampage.

‘Who the hell do you think you are, you syphilitic son of a bitch?’

Well, hell-oo to you, and top o’ the morning. I turned, still in my crouch. The purple-faced captain was flanked by a pack of scared subordinates. I got the feeling that if he ordered them to leap on me and tear me to pieces with their teeth, they’d probably do it just to keep out of his bad books.

I stood and held up my shield. Zuccho didn’t look like he was in the mood for reading, so I reinforced it with: ‘Europol.’

‘I don’t give a rolling, flying fuck if you’re the living incarnation of the holy arsehole of Jesus, Son of God. You’re tampering with my evidence!’

I smiled. ‘Can we calm down, here?’ Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Salieri wince. Wrong tack to take. Whoops.

‘Calm down? Did you tell me to calm down!?’

I held up my hand. ‘I didn’t mean to imply any –’

‘Don’t tell me to calm down! Don’t you tell me to calm down, you whore peddling spastic. Here! I’ll fucking calm down!’ He unholstered his gun. ‘I’ll calm down! I’ll calm the fuck down!’ He pointed the weapon at the pavement to his left and fired. ‘There!’ He shot again. ‘And there!’ He emptied the clip into the ground. Five more shots. ‘And there! And there! And there! And there! And there! Is that calm enough for you? Am I calm now? Is that calmed down sufficiently?’

The entire crime scene fell silent. Zuccho just stood there, breathing heavily, his weapon smoking, everybody watching him. Slowly, his rage subsided. He looked around. ‘What is this? Fucking happy hour? Get to work, people!’

The circus started up again. Zuccho holstered his weapon and lowered his voice. ‘I’m going to make an apology to you about that. You have to understand: things get a little … fraught for me sometimes. I have anger management issues, and sometimes … well, sometimes I get just a little too frisky.’

Just a little too frisky? I felt he was being too hard on himself. All he’d done was empty an entire clip of live ammunition into the ground less than a metre away from what he thought was a federal officer at a hot crime scene.

‘I’m OK now,’ he said.

‘You’re sure?’

‘Sure. That’s how it is. It passes. You say you’re a fed?’

‘I’m not here to take over your investigation, Captain. I just happened by, is all.’

‘OK, that’s good. I’m still in charge?’

‘I’m not even here, really. Just passing by, thought I might help.’

‘And that little contretemps – that won’t be appearing on any reports, or anything?’

‘I didn’t see any contretemps, Captain.’

‘OK. Good. No harm done, then. What have you got there, Detective?’

‘This is the contraption that housed the lift buttons. Notice anything odd?’

I handed him the housing. He turned it over a couple of times. ‘It’s bent,’ he deduced cleverly. Sherlock Holmes, or what? ‘But then, it would be, wouldn’t it?’ He flung it back among the debris. I winced.

I turned and looked at the Martini building. ‘Mind if I take a look at one of the other elevators?’

Zuccho didn’t answer me. I glanced back. He was biting his lip, hard, and the knuckles on his tensed fists were bone white. Clearly, for some reason, he did mind my taking a look at one of the other elevators, and he was struggling to choke back the fury.

‘No,’ he said, finally, but the concession didn’t come easily to him. ‘No, you go take a look at one of the other elevators, Detective.’ And he added, very quietly, like he didn’t want to say it, but he couldn’t help himself: ‘I’m only the officer in charge of the scene, after all. I’ll just stand here with my thumb up my arse and wait for you to tell me what to do next.’ His voice started rising. ‘Or maybe I should go away on vacation and leave the entire investigation up to you.’ Now he was back at full volume again. ‘Or wait, wait – better still: maybe I should retire from the whole God-damned police force and you can have my fucking job. Be my guest. You can go home and nail my wife while you’re at it.’

‘I meant we should take a look together, naturally. If you thought it was a good idea.’

This seemed to appease him, marginally. He took some deep breaths and managed to lower his blood pressure down to just plain bursting point. ‘Great,’ he choked. ‘Thank you. Let’s do that.’ I didn’t really want him with me, but then I didn’t particularly want a gun-happy idiot with a hair-trigger temper lurking around where I couldn’t see him, bearing murderous grudges against me, either.

I allowed him to lead the way. He took time out en route to chew out and piss off any subordinate who hadn’t the good sense to be somewhere else. Zuccho made Captain Bligh look like a man-management genius.

The elevators travelled up the face of the building, but they were accessed from inside. Zuccho blustered up the entrance steps and stood at the top, arms folded, foot tapping, building up a head of ire while I looked up the building’s façade again, just to confirm my calculations.

I’d only hesitated for about ninety seconds, but he reacted like I’d left him standing at the altar for the third time running without phoning ahead to let him know I was calling off the wedding.

‘So nice of you to join us, Detective. I was thinking of renting out one of the offices here so I could catch a few nights’ sleep while you finished your sightseeing tour of the whole of Italy, and deigned to favour us with your sainted presence. But, no, you’re here already. Doesn’t time fly when you’re waiting for someone special? Would you like to see the elevators now, or shall we stand here atop these steps another few months or so, drinking in the glory that is Rome?’ There was actually spittle beginning to foam in the corner of his mouth. I wondered how he could exist at this level of consistent fury without his brain literally exploding.

‘Now would be dandy.’

‘Thank you so very, very much, only I do have an entire police department to run, and I’d like to think I might actually get back to my office at some point during my lifetime, if that doesn’t inconvenience you overly.’

‘Like I said, right now would be a very good time to inspect the elevators.’

‘Excellent.’ He swept into the building. I followed, fast enough not to piss him off any more than I had to.

Incidentally, here’s a little-known fact about Captain Bligh: the Bounty wasn’t the first or the last vessel that the magnificent seafarer lost through mutiny. In his glittering naval career, his crews mutinied on him seven times. Seven times. Not two or three times. Not four or five. Seven. Why the hell did they keep giving him a boat? I wonder how the masterminds who put him in charge of that seventh voyage felt when the salty old dog turned up yet again in a rowing boat at Portsmouth harbour with three midshipmen in filthy long johns and an empty canteen smelling of urine?

Zuccho strode right across the marble hall towards the emergency stairs.

‘Whoa, whoa!’ I called. ‘Captain Zuccho? Where are you going?’

He stopped and turned. ‘Where am I going? Well, I thought I might try a quick camel trek across the Andes, Detective. Where do you think I’m going? I’m going up these stairs to inspect the elevators. I thought that was the plan. Only if the plan’s changed, it would be nice if you could let me know.’

‘Wouldn’t it be quicker to bring one of the elevators down?’

His eyes widened and he took a staggering step forward, waving his arms in front of him, as if suddenly stricken blind. ‘Oh, merciful Father!’ He fell to his knees. ‘I cannot bear to look upon thy countenance. For thine is the true blinding face of pure genius! Don’t go up to the elevator, bring the elevator down to us.’ He started crawling towards me. ‘The scales have fallen from mine eyes. I seeth it now, so clearly.’ He reached my feet and started kissing them. ‘Oh what misery it must be for thee, to be compelled to worketh with mere mortals.’

I looked down at him. ‘Is there something wrong with bringing one of the elevators down?’

He looked up at me, his tongue hanging out of his mouth. ‘Are your shoes made of vegetable matter?’

‘Carrot leather and cardboard.’

‘They taste disgusting.’

‘I hadn’t planned on serving them up.’

‘Is there something wrong with bringing one of the elevators down?’ he repeated, clambering to his feet. ‘Oh, yes, there may possibly be something wrong with bringing one of the elevators down, don’t you think? Given that the last time someone tried to operate one of the elevators, it launched into fricking deep space. That might be a problem. To send another elevator to the fricking moon. Do you think we should risk it? We may have to clear it with the European Space Agency first.’

‘Captain Zuccho, I don’t want to piss you off here, any more than I do by just being alive and breathing, but have you been given any strategies to deal with your anger containment problem?’

‘Yes, I have. And I’m fucking using them. You should have seen me before therapy. I was a fucking nightmare to live with, believe me.’

‘Personally, I think we can risk summoning an elevator. I’m guessing the elevator was going up when the accident happened.’

‘OK, you fricking carrot-shoed moron. Let’s say we go with your genius plan. Let’s say we go ahead and call the elevator, it blasts off into the stratosphere and comes crashing down on the crowds outside like an intercontinental ballistic missile, crushing everyone within fifty kilometres? How’m I going to explain that little faux pas? I say, “Whoops, sorry: the federal agent wearing vegetables on his feet thought it would be a good idea”?’

‘What floor is the nearest elevator on?’

‘Fourteen.’

‘You’d rather climb fourteen flights of stairs?’

‘Good point. I’ll press the button.’

Zuccho leaned over and made a big pantomime point of pressing the lift button with his extended forefinger, and, of course, nothing happened. ‘Oh wait, it’s not working. Duh, let me see: why could that be? Could that be because the power to the elevators has been cut? Could it be that I, myself, ordered the power to the elevators to be cut? Why would I do such a crazily random thing? What possible motive could I have? Could some tiny part of my minuscule little mind have been worried that some innocent party might come along and try to use the elevator, thereby inadvertently becoming an unwitting volunteer astronaut on an unofficial and ill-fated mission to Mars?’

I’d known the power would have been cut. I’d intended Zuccho to get the building engineers to isolate one of the elevator cars on the central computer, and lower it remotely, which they must have been able to do. I was thinking about trying to explain that to him, but, suddenly, it seemed like considerably less effort to climb fourteen storeys’ worth of staircase.

I made for the emergency stairs. Victory did not dim Zuccho’s appetite for sarcasm. ‘Oh, now the stairs are a good idea, Mr Cabbage Boots! Let me see, who thought of that one…’

I let the door slam shut behind me and started up to the fourteenth floor. Hopefully, a couple of hundred stairs might knock the wind out of Zuccho’s sails.

It certainly left m. . .