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13: Spam: Man got to live what he know.
[Open spam]
[Omar is a roamer. As long as he's not forced to stay in his cabin -- in his cell, comfortable as it may be -- he spends very little time there. He's just as likely to sleep in an empty cabin, or even once or twice in the Enclosure. He keeps bizarre hours, and he keeps them largely to himself.
None of this is new. This is how he's been since he got here the first time. Since his last death toll, though, he's become even more erratic in his efforts to stay unpredictable, and the recent spate of unwarranted brutality has him feeling especially restless. He can be chanced upon at all kinds of odd times and places: at the library early in the morning, in the showers and the laundry room around noon, eating in the dining hall in the late afternoon. In the evening, smoking up on the deck with so many of his fellow passengers, because it's not actually that he's antisocial -- just very, very careful.
Careful enough that he takes data, and so some of the newer passengers may or may not be surprised to glimpse him out of the corner of their eyes every now and again. Maybe even writing something down.]
[Spam for Cold and Dark]
[But there's a predictability even in unpredictability, and he does from time to time spend the night in his cabin, if only to keep up the illusion that he does so much more often. It might take a more careful observer a while to figure out when he's likely to return, but the time comes around eventually.
It's late in the evening, but he's been up for the last 36 hours, and he's tired -- and therefore both baffled and a little annoyed to hear a knock on the door right when he's about to lay his head down.]
Man, who is it?
[Edit: Voice to Ricki, post-Tiffany spam]
You know what? I remember a time this place didn't feel like a cross between a day care and a circus.
[Edit: Spam for Luna, post-pairings announcement]
[Omar's been playing the warden shuffle for a while now. At best, it's been ineffective -- the closest thing he's gotten to a decent temporary warden, in Horatio, got ripped away from him halfway through the month. At worst, it's been disastrous. So he's not inclined to pay much mind to the announcement, not anymore. He goes about his day. Let Luna Lovegood come to him, if she likes.]
[Omar is a roamer. As long as he's not forced to stay in his cabin -- in his cell, comfortable as it may be -- he spends very little time there. He's just as likely to sleep in an empty cabin, or even once or twice in the Enclosure. He keeps bizarre hours, and he keeps them largely to himself.
None of this is new. This is how he's been since he got here the first time. Since his last death toll, though, he's become even more erratic in his efforts to stay unpredictable, and the recent spate of unwarranted brutality has him feeling especially restless. He can be chanced upon at all kinds of odd times and places: at the library early in the morning, in the showers and the laundry room around noon, eating in the dining hall in the late afternoon. In the evening, smoking up on the deck with so many of his fellow passengers, because it's not actually that he's antisocial -- just very, very careful.
Careful enough that he takes data, and so some of the newer passengers may or may not be surprised to glimpse him out of the corner of their eyes every now and again. Maybe even writing something down.]
[Spam for Cold and Dark]
[But there's a predictability even in unpredictability, and he does from time to time spend the night in his cabin, if only to keep up the illusion that he does so much more often. It might take a more careful observer a while to figure out when he's likely to return, but the time comes around eventually.
It's late in the evening, but he's been up for the last 36 hours, and he's tired -- and therefore both baffled and a little annoyed to hear a knock on the door right when he's about to lay his head down.]
Man, who is it?
[Edit: Voice to Ricki, post-Tiffany spam]
You know what? I remember a time this place didn't feel like a cross between a day care and a circus.
[Edit: Spam for Luna, post-pairings announcement]
[Omar's been playing the warden shuffle for a while now. At best, it's been ineffective -- the closest thing he's gotten to a decent temporary warden, in Horatio, got ripped away from him halfway through the month. At worst, it's been disastrous. So he's not inclined to pay much mind to the announcement, not anymore. He goes about his day. Let Luna Lovegood come to him, if she likes.]
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Well, then, we ain't really talking about the same thing, are we?
[Not that he necessarily condones what Ricki is talking about, either, but--]
Ain't no good men standing between a gangster and his dollar. Not truthfully.
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[Because it's not entirely truthful to pretend he guns down civilians left right and centre.]
That was one of the worst things I've ever done. But it isn't necessarily so clear cut.
Say there's an undersecretary to a Polish minister. Young kid, thirties maybe. Loses his heart to a dancer. You go in for a little bit of a burn- bring me information on what you're doing with Germany. He does fine for you the first time, but panics and threatens to go to the police the second time, and if he does he's going to get you and a few good Polish agents killed. You don't have time to be sure there's going to be a safe extract, and it's your mistake to begin with but they don't deserve to be killed for it- neither does the kid, mind, but really, it's in everyone's best interest that we know what Germany is getting up to, given the hell of a war that's just been going on. At this point historically we're all learning the truth for the first time so the sense of urgency there is pretty bloody high.
[It gets complicated.]
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What do y'all do if he won't say nothing the first time around? Come to that -- what else you got to incentivize him along the way?
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Everything is words. If he holds up the first time, we leave him be. Maybe we don't even let the secret out, though now and again we have to, to let them all know we can. Resisting is the smart thing to do. It would be very, very easy to pretend that the good men stay out of our clutches, that there's something you can just do right enough to avoid someone like me.
[He leans forward, and just shows him. When Ricki starts a burn, he is warm, and sweet, and understanding. He is as reasonable and irresistible as anyone has ever been, with just a hint of the urgent about him, like he's truly afraid that Omar won't see that Ricki is the one who can solve all of his problems.]
We don't need state secrets. We'd just like access to the Berlin trade import files, see what food supplies are coming into the city. Surely this isn't worth all that? You're standing to lose your job, your marriage, never mind the reputation of the poor girl, over what's really just the price of sugar behind the wall? Let me help.
[Subsiding, and Ricki is himself again;]
Except it lasts a few hours, before you get to that line. You've got a glass of scotch or three in him, or if he's a teetotaler you've kept him talking until three am, which works nearly the same. You've confused him, though, is the main thing, and you're the life line. Let me help. The best part is, if you're any good, you believe it while you say it. I think it's true, every single time.
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Then again, he's not sure he quite likes the reality of this, either. He sits back, drawing on his cigarette, going quiet for what might be a little too long as he mulls this over. It's not, of course, that he never lies, or that he's never dealt in trickery; that's always been an important weapon in his arsenal. Hell, he's lied under oath. But there's still that line in him... there's trickery against the Barksdales and the Bells of the world, and against the Maury Levy Esquires, and then there's trickery against some naive little gofer that happened to dip his pen in the wrong ink.
Finally--]
Story for you.
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[Ricki says, surprised and warmed, and eager to hear how this goes.
He could use a heartbeat, to sit back and smoke and remember which him he currently is.]
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I was around... I'd venture to say maybe eleven or twelve years old the first time my brother had me come out robbing with him. I'd been a scrapper before that, mind -- already had this on me. [He gestures along the scar that runs down his face.] But I ain't had a job, you know? I wanted to get in the game. So Anthony took me out with a friend of his and we go down the way a bit, and then they point out this man on this bus stop bench and they say, a'ight -- that's the man we gonna rob.
And I ask, who the man be, and why we be robbing him? And they tell me, because he be there all alone. So we go and we put our guns on him, and I'm thinking, you know -- okay, now here I am. Playing for real. Only he turn out to be this dude just trying to get home from work in the middle of the night. Sixteen dollars on him, and him asking if he can just keep his license so he don't have to go out to the DMV and miss his shift the next day.
Only sticking up I did the rest of that night was holding my brother's boy up until he gave me that sixteen dollars to give back. I'd looked down the barrel of my gun, down at this working man's face, and I'd thought-- what did this man think his day was gonna be when he woke up this morning?
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He pictures Omar, living across the world and decades away, already familiar with guns and grappling in a pretty serious way with power and opportunity, and all the things that twist kids into being fighters. How the story ends instead, with the bright indignity of an unlikely, twelve year old Robin Hood.
Ricki has a tell, if you watch him close. He always touches his mouth when he's trying not to be caught smiling at something.]
How'd you get away from your brother's boy, after an improvisation like that? [No, that's not what he wants to know.] Did you catch back up to him? Get to see the look on his face when you handed the money back?
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[It's funny, but he doesn't really remember that part as well. It hadn't been about the man's feelings; it had been about the injustice of it. The idea that a man could get up, kiss his family goodbye, and spend all day and into the night at some crummy minimum-wage job, just to have a group of punk kids that were too scared to go up against anyone with teeth come and take all his hard work away.]
...he looked grateful, I suppose. Maybe confused, mostly.
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[He guesses, distilling all of this down, and everything else he's heard so far. What Jimmy told him, about his work and Omar bothering him.
That's right, Jimmy. The thing with the gun, he feels a little guilty about, but no need to go into that, now. Not when he's getting the long and short of it.]
Organized crime is fair game, for a rip-running stick up boy, with a moderate crew. [Well.] I have a unique talent for getting mugged everywhere I go, you know. I really should go to Baltimore.
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Depends on what they thievin' and robbin'.
[Because he has no illusions about what he is. He just knows that no one that's been on the other end of his gun since that night has ever been trying to keep hold of an honest day's pay.
Then Ricki continues with that and Omar finds himself poorly containing a grin, a twitch of pleased surprise tugging at the corner of his mouth.]
I don't do so much of that anymore. Thieves don't get nearly as much as drug dealers, and they get torn down by the police a whole lot easier. Sorry to disappoint.
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[Agreeing, because he can see how it'd be a quicker way to clean up, and a more insidious kind of damage, drugs do, as well.]
So has anyone ever tried to tell you your inmate sticking point? General rakishness, or theft in the abstract? Because I'll be honest, Omar, you sound considerably more principled than I feel.
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If I had to guess, I'd say it might have something to do with all the murder and mayhem along the way. I told y'all I had bodies on me.
[A lot. There are a lot of those.]
Ain't like I'm turning them G-packs and that cash in to the police, neither.
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[A little wrinkle of his nose. Peculiar local custom, isn't it?]
Mind you, some wardens- but then again... Maybe that's the key to your graduating, though. Promise with all your heart to turn a cut over at tax season. Could be, we conduct a survey, we find out that the one thing that connects us all is that we're all terribly delinquent on our taxes.
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Could be. My old warden kept trying to think on other occupations I could be going into, instead of wasting my potential like I am.
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[Ricki pegs him, right away.]
That's my back up plan. I, personally, an expert on gently tossing ambitious young muggers into canals.
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[He leans over suddenly as if to tap out his ash into the wastepaper basket, but seems to think better of it just in time and veers away again. He glances around for a different substitute ashtray.]
Let me ask you this, Good Boy -- what you think your sticking point might be? I mean, whatever it is I be thinking about your methods, you saying it was all for your people, right? Stopping wars and all.
spam
Two foibles, me. First one's obvious. Ends justifying means. Boring, easy, not worth getting into. Mea culpa, and all that.
Second one, I've been putting a little more thought into lately, and it actually is there. Right on the face of it. Being a good boy in a game like this.
[He sits up again, something laconic melting off him. This will be the first time he's said this out loud, and it's complicated, and he wants badly to get it right.]
I've told you a lot of stories, Omar, but this one is different enough that I'm going to explicitly tell you this time that you need to keep your mouth shut about it in any room that I haven't cleared for ears.
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--circle around back to later, he thinks, as Ricki sits forward. He cocks his head slightly, curiosity duly piqued.]
...a'ight, man.
[He hasn't exactly been going around sharing Ricki's stories anyway, but he can respect when a secret really needs to be a secret.]
Think you gotta know by now I'm a man that keep his word.
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[A gesture, not important, and he leans over out of the bed to drag out the ashtray that lives underneath it.]
-but I'm not supposed to know this, so if by any chance any of the parties involved showed up...
[This one's different.]
It starts with a man named Leamas. A good man, a loyal man, a man with no reputation in particular except with those high enough up to know that he is very, very good. An old rhino who skulks around the edge of the Berlin Wall for years, doing the kind of work that destroys a man's soul. It's West Berlin, so all his men keep going down, and no one can tell why. No one can blame him, precisely, but you can't get a commendation for something like that, either, and I'm given to understand it eats away at a handler, watching the men who trust them go down in pools of blood, over and over.
Now, as I understand it, Leamas is transferred back and to a desk, which is never a promotion for a man like this. His flaming out is slow and predictable, and involves a fair amount of cheap whiskey and someone getting his pension cut on a technicality- a real nasty business, the kind that gets through the rumour mill, even in circles like ours where we all know better. After this little performance, he is now reasonably well known as an 'ex' spy. A humiliated, penniless alcoholic ex spy, at that, and one with a hell of a lot of possible gold to give any German smart enough to pick up on the fact.
[Watching him closely, wondering how quickly Omar will see the pieces come together. How long in advance these games can run. The kind of voluntary and personal mortification it takes for a man like Leamas to pretend to all his colleagues to go out like that. The kind of system that would ask such a sacrifice from one of their oldest, most dedicated, and best.]
Somewhere in all this, there's a girl. Either he loves her, or he doesn't, no one can really remember, but she's a member of some silly UK Socialist-Leninist organization in the little strip of nowhere where he's living, and she's pretty enough and half his age. We can figure, maybe she's the one who flagged someone back home to send legs after our man Leamas, or maybe her youth and her revolutionary zeal are a cover for him, something to let him make a call, make an offer to go over- doesn't matter. There's a girl, is all we know, and maybe he loves her.
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So there's just a broken man at the end of his rope and a girl and the bottom of a bottle. In Omar's world, he'd become an angry security guard or something equally demeaning. In this one, he'll become a turncoat. Omar nods -- go on.]
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So he builds himself up into this craven thing. No money, no dignity, no loyalty left, and by hook and crook, he gets himself picked up by the Abteilung.
[Ricki says, with a glint of admiration in his eyes that may not quite make sense.]
East German secret police. There are exactly three things you need to know about them, for the purposes of the adventure of our man Leamas. The first, is that they have this sadist in their ranks; a bastard named Mundt, who had a hand in putting a few of the bullets in the heads of the members of that leaky network. Second, that Mundt has a second in command, a bright young thing named Fiedler, who is sharp as a tack, but in a sort of pleasant 'enemy worthy of respect' sort of way. Third, partially because of the efforts of Mundt, they make the KGB interrogators look like a cakewalk.
No way in hell would I ever defect to them, and certainly not with an agenda, but Leamas does it. Walks right in and works it so he ends up in Fiedler's office, with that young man trying to get everything he knows out of him.
This is all- you're with me?
[Convoluted as hell, and about to get worse.]
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I'm with you.
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[He says, stopping for a breath from the cigarette.]
They'll see the lie. So if you're sitting down across from a man like Fielder, and he asks you about a man like Mundt, you talk about what a prick he is, and how he came to London that one time-
Well, before you get to any of that, there are four days of other names to go through. Everything from West Berlin, we can imagine, not that it made much of a difference by now. Some pre-screened ongoing ops that can be safely rattled by the Germans without anyone getting seriously hurt. Maybe, just maybe, Leamas gives over one or two bits of chump change- a Polish undersecretary who handed over the sugar distribution plans, who Fiedler doesn't know has been dragging his feet on us since, but is a pretty enticing traitor to nab, because think of how much worse that could have been, if we'd kept working him.
In the end, it's easy. Men are very simple. Fiedler is Jewish, Mundt is an ex-Nazi, they loathe one another already. Fiedler doesn't trust Leamas, but as long as Leamas doesn't lie to him, never says this man is a double agent, Fiedler will hunt for it. The Circus has given Leamas enough to make the shape of it almost clear- not perfectly incriminating evidence, because that wouldn't be any good either, but by the end of their days together, this bright young man is convinced that he has twisted this old warhorse of ours into giving up secrets that even Leamas didn't know that he knew. Because he's fought to win this truth, Fiedler will believe it down to his very marrow, and when he proves it, the Nazi bastard will be-
[A throat slitting gesture.]
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