It had been an awkward dinner. I’d been seated at the table of honour, next to the Mayor’s wife. Dressed entirely in black, she had furtive eyes and though she wore expensive rings the skin around her nails was ragged. Between courses her clenched hands rested in her lap like two plucked quails. Trying to be diplomatic, I asked her about herself, but the answers I received were curt and dismissive. The only time she came alive at all was when she mentioned her sixth child, a son, who had been born the year before, and even then she sent a glance in the direction of her husband, seeking his approval, perhaps, or fearing his reaction. Halfway through dessert, she reached under the table, her head turned sideways, one ear only inches from her plate. I assumed she had dropped her napkin, and I shifted in my chair, ready to help her retrieve it. Then I saw that she had drawn her dress up, almost to her hips. Her unexpectedly voluptuous thighs, white as meringue, were darkened in two places by large bruises, both of which bore the imprint of somebody’s knuckles. Look what he does to me, she said in a harsh whisper. She gave me a look of such fury that I thought for one surreal moment that I might be the culprit.
After the banquet, the Mayor himself walked up to me. We shook hands. He was a thick-set, fleshy man with a shaved head. Knowing what I knew, I found it hard to meet his gaze, but I suspected that he might be used to having people look away from him, that he might even see it as proof of his natural authority, his manhood. Thank you, he said, for taking such good care of my wife. His lips parted on a set of strong, widely spaced white teeth. I had never heard gratitude so heavily laden with menace and innuendo. Just then, I thought of something I hadn’t thought of in years. I remembered Pat Dunne in the border hotel the night before she crossed into the Yellow Quarter with Chloe Allen. I saw the heel of her hand slamming into the drinks machine. You have to act like them, she’d told me, or you don’t survive.
I slowly levered myself away from the door and unfastened my bow tie. I was genuinely tired now, my fatigue given a sombre, despairing edge by the knowledge that I could have been in Aquaville, in a water-taxi heading west. I took off my tuxedo and threw it over the back of a chair, then squatted down and unlocked the mini-bar. Inside, I found two miniature bottles of brandy. I emptied one of them into a glass, then closed my eyes and brought it up to my nose. The smell instantly transported me to Charlie Boorman’s room in the Sheraton – the unmade bed, the half-eaten meals, the green crêpe-paper rabbit revolving in the air. My eyes still closed, I drank. The first mouthful sent a thin blade of warmth through me. Brandy. It was the taste of the Blue Quarter to me now. It was the taste of the club with its velvet curtain and its blonde ticket girl. The taste of a gold door opening … To speak to my mother, but not to be allowed to see her. To be so close to her, and then – and then nothing… A low murmur came out of me, and I opened my eyes. Everything was edged in bright pale light. The Yellow Quarter. I finished my first brandy and poured the second.
Taking my drink with me, I walked into the bathroom and switched on the light. I put the glass on the shelf above the sink, next to my travel clock, then I examined myself in the mirror. The areas below my eyes seemed to have been shaded in, and the hollows in my cheeks had deepened. It made me think that the distance between myself and my shadow was narrowing, that I had begun to change places with my darker half. I was about to turn on the tap and drink a few handfuls of cold water when a sudden dull reverberation shook the room. Several things occurred at once. My clock tipped off the shelf and landed in the sink. The shower-curtain rattled on its rail. The mirror leapt in its chrome brackets, and then, almost as an afterthought, cracked down the middle, from top to bottom. My head divided into two sections that no longer quite fitted together. I thought fleetingly of stroke victims, and how one side of the face will often freeze or slip. My right hand lifted to my cheek, as if to check for damage. I picked up my clock and put it back on the shelf. 11:14, it said. And then, more than a minute later, 11:14. I still couldn’t imagine what had happened.
A hush had fallen, and I had the sense that the reverberation had silenced everything that came after it, that it had robbed the world of all its sound. I stepped into the short passageway outside the bathroom. A pale smoke or powder had forced its way beneath my door. I stood quite still and watched as the particles settled on the carpet, a sprinkling of greyish-white, discreet but enigmatic, like a messenger who has been trusted with only part of the news. I moved to the door and pulled it open.
The air outside my room swirled with dust. To my left, about fifty yards away, my corridor met another. At the junction of the two I could see people rushing this way and that, their outlines hazy, their features smudged, as if they were in the process of being erased. Some had towels or handkerchiefs pressed to their faces. Others were doubled over, coughing. I heard the word ‘bomb’, and though I had never experienced anything like this before I replayed every detail of the last ninety seconds, and then I thought, Of course. A bomb.
I withdrew, closing the door behind me, and stood looking at my feet for a moment, then I moved on into the middle of the room. Again I stood still, my face lowered. I was seeing images, each of them deliberate, carefully chosen, pressed to my mind’s eye like a licked stamp to an envelope. The hand splayed on the window of the limousine, Frank Bland crammed into his tuxedo. The bruises staining the thighs of the Mayor’s wife, as if wild berries had been piled on to her lap. Look what he does to me. I couldn’t marshal even one coherent thought.
A piece of paper whirred out of the fax machine and spilled languidly on to the carpet. It was blank. I put on my coat and picked up my overnight case, then opened the door again. By now, the vacuum that had followed the explosion had been filled with the constant shrill ringing and almost festive whoops of various alarms and sirens. I turned to the right, making for the emergency stairs.
Beyond the fire doors I came across the spindly, bewildered figure of Marco Rinaldi. He was wearing a red-and-white-striped nightshirt, and his eyelids were swollen with sleep. His black hair lifted above one ear in a single eccentric wing.
‘I think I’m still drunk,’ he said. ‘What’s going on?’
‘There’s been a bomb,’ I said.
‘A bomb?’ He looked around, then back at me again, as though he expected me to offer him some proof.
We started down the stairs, Rinaldi leading the way. Our rooms were on the fourteenth floor. It would take a while, I thought, to reach ground-level. Every so often Rinaldi glanced at me over his shoulder, a nervous, enquiring look, and I would smile and nod. We passed the twelfth floor, the eleventh. By the tenth I noticed that my pace had slowed and that a gap had opened up between us. Other guests kept pushing past me. Part of my mind seemed to be examining the current situation from an entirely different viewpoint; it had begun to question my behaviour and was about to suggest alternatives. As we approached the eighth floor, two middle-aged men burst through the fire doors and out on to the stairs. I can’t find Angela, one of them was babbling. I can’t find her anywhere. I’ve looked in her room, I’ve looked – The other man took him by the shoulders. John, he said, calm down. She’s probably downstairs. She’s probably waiting for us down there. I stood stock still. My ambivalence had gone. Resolved itself. You have to use all this confusion and hysteria, I told myself. Use the dust, the hours of darkness, the uncertainty. Use it. No one will know what’s become of you. They might think you’re trapped under the rubble. They might think you’re dead. They won’t know, though. They won’t be sure of anything. This is your chance, I said to myself. This is a gift.
Half a flight below me, Rinaldi had stopped as well. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I have to go back,’ I said. ‘I’ve forgotten something.’
‘Go back? Are you mad?’
‘I’ve got to. Look, you keep going. I’ll see you outside.’
He hesitated, one hand on the banister, but I could tell from his snatched glances down the stairwell that he didn’t relish the idea of waiting.
/> ‘You go on,’ I insisted. ‘I won’t be long.’
‘Be careful,’ I heard him call out as I turned away.
Everyone apart from me was coming down, some of them bleeding, others white with shock. I met no other delegates, at least none that I recognised. It felt right to be going up again. Easier. As if, for me, the world had been upended.
The fourteenth floor was utterly deserted. Walking along the corridor, I thought the lights seemed dimmer. Dust in the atmosphere – or a partial power failure. I stopped outside my room and felt in my pocket for my keys. A draught edged past, and I could smell night air, the scent of fallen leaves. I entered my room, locking the door behind me. Good… Good… Good, the room said, and then fell silent.
I had lied to Rinaldi, of course. I had forgotten nothing.
I laid my coat on the bed, then reached for the remote. Surprisingly, perhaps, the TV still worked. A reporter was standing in front of the hotel. His voice had a thrilled, brittle quality about it – the voice of someone who was already an authority on something that had only just happened – and the wind ruffled the hair on his forehead in a way that made him seem dashing but vulnerable. He would probably be a celebrity by morning. The bomb had been left in a sports bag on the first floor, he was telling us. Thirty people had been admitted to hospital, some critically injured. As yet there were no fatalities. In a statement released a short time ago, the Black Square had claimed responsibility for the explosion. The notorious terrorist organisation had condemned the Rearrangement Day celebrations – twenty-seven years of shame, it had called them – and reiterated its determination to fight on, to bring about reunification. Carl Triggs had denounced the attack as ‘a despicable and cowardly abomination’. The police suspected the existence of a second device – or, at least, they hadn’t been able to rule it out. The entire area had been cordoned off.
I fetched my toilet bag from the bathroom, then went over to the wardrobe and lifted out the suit I had worn on the flight that afternoon. Laying the suit across the bed, I opened my wallet and took out the largest banknotes I had on me. I folded each note in half, lengthways, and then again, then I slipped my jacket off its hanger and, using a pair of nail-scissors, carefully unpicked two or three stitches from one end of the collar and slid the folded notes inside. I turned the collar down again and smoothed it out. It might have looked a little thicker than before, but I doubted anyone would notice. I put on the suit and reached for my overcoat. The clock next to the bed said ten-past twelve. I glanced at the TV. The reporter was standing sideways-on to the hotel. Half the front wall had dropped away, exposing the internal structure of the building. Rooms gaped out into the night. Wires dangled. How peculiar, I thought, that I was still inside.
Buttoning my coat, I crossed the room and unlocked the door. Out in the corridor nothing had changed. What I was contemplating was unthinkable – it went against all my principles, everything I had ever learned or held dear – but the disappointment I had been dealing with all evening had not diminished, as I had hoped it might. If anything, in fact, it had intensified, gradually distilling into a kind of anguish. I had to return to that club in the Blue Quarter. I had to. Had I been finding out about myself, or just imagining things? I didn’t know. Whatever the truth was, it had felt more real than anything had felt for ages. I had felt more real. Or more alive, perhaps. Yes, I would return, but under my own auspices. If I was caught, I would be charged under Article 58 of the Internal Security Act, an all-purpose clause that covered any action that could be seen to be ‘undermining the state’. I would be throwing away my career, my position – all those years. None of that appeared to bother me. I had always been renowned for my ‘integrity’ and my ‘conscientiousness’. My ‘sense of civic responsibility’. A strange, reckless delight swept through me at the thought that I would now be trampling on that reputation. For the second time that night, I set off towards the fire stairs, my heart like a bomb exploding endlessly inside my body.
As I reached ground-level, the power failed completely. In darkness now, I pushed through a sprung fire door, carpet replacing lino underfoot. A weak silvery light inhabited the corridor in which I stood, a kind of phosphorescence, as if sparks from the detonation had somehow been dispersed into the atmosphere. Though I could just about see, I had no idea which way to go. It was a vast hotel – five hundred rooms, someone had told me – and I had only arrived that afternoon. I hadn’t had the opportunity to orient myself. Sounds came to me – the stammer of a helicopter, a man talking through a megaphone – but they seemed both distant and redundant. I chose a direction, began to walk. Once, I passed through an area of armchairs and plants, rain falling lightly on the plush upholstery, the leaves, and I looked up, expecting a glimpse of the night sky, clouds hovering, but the ceiling was still intact. The sprinkler system had come on, triggered by all the dust and smoke.
A few minutes later, and wholly by chance, I found myself outside the banqueting hall, the padded double-doors opening on air that felt dense, trapped, a fug of filter coffee and stubbed-out cigars. Standing just inside, I heard a peculiar rumbling noise. I moved cautiously out across the room, light catching on the rims of wine-glasses, the blades of knives, the mirror-panelled walls. A man had fallen asleep with his head resting against the back of a chair, his hands folded across his belly, his mouth ajar. When I shook him by the shoulder, his snoring seemed to concertina, one sound colliding with another in a sudden clutter of snorts and grunts. I shook him again. He murmured something, then slumped forwards on to the table. I couldn’t just leave him. What if a second bomb went off? Also, I thought, more calculating now, my delayed departure from the hotel would look far less suspicious if I was seen to be bringing someone out. Putting an arm around the man’s waist, I hauled him to his feet. He didn’t struggle or protest. As we moved towards the FIRE EXIT sign, bumping between tables, he nuzzled affectionately into my neck, his breath warm and meaty as an animal’s. We went up a short flight of steps, along a service corridor, then I pressed down, one-handed, on a horizontal metal bar and we were outside – cold air, voices, blue lights whirling.
Halfway down the alley, two firemen stopped me and I steered the dead weight of the drunk into their arms.
‘I found him in the banqueting hall,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t wake him.’
‘We need to look at timings and schedules,’ the drunk man murmured. ‘Let me give you my card.’ Eyes still closed, he chuckled to himself.
Showing the firemen my room key, I told them I was a guest of the hotel. I spoke calmly. In my suit and overcoat I must have looked affluent, respectable. They asked if I was hurt, and when I shook my head they waved me on.
At the end of the alley I ducked beneath a strip of yellow tape. The people on the other side of the police cordon were gazing past me, their faces brightly lit and utterly transfixed, as if a spaceship had just landed behind my back. I resisted the temptation to look round. I already knew what was there – I’d seen it on TV – and besides, I didn’t want to run the risk of catching anybody’s eye. I had to sink without a sound into the blue-black of the night.
As I moved deeper into the crowd, I wondered whether Rinaldi would be questioned by the authorities and, if so, what he would tell them. Parry? He went back upstairs. He said he’d forgotten something. I don’t know what… Would he embellish his role at all? I tried to stop him, but he wouldn’t listen. He pushed me away. What could I do? He might even become dramatic. I didn’t see him after that. I never saw him again – In retrospect, I was glad Rinaldi was the last person I’d had contact with. Half-asleep, still drunk, dressed in a lurid nightshirt, Marco Rinaldi would make the most unreliable of witnesses. There would be layer on layer of ambiguity, plenty of room for doubt and speculation. I couldn’t have planned it better if I’d tried.
Once I had put a certain distance between myself and the Plaza, I was able to slow down, feeling confident that I would no longer be recognised. The streets were full – I didn’t think I�
��d ever seen such crowds – but none of the people who surrounded me had any idea who I was. There would be no chance meetings with old acquaintances or colleagues from the office, no voices calling out my name in disbelief. Though midnight had come and gone, the celebrations showed no sign of letting up, people shouting and dancing and fighting everywhere I looked, and the news of the bomb had just begun to filter through, which gave the atmosphere a feverish, chaotic edge.
I pushed my way into a bar, hoping for some respite, but here too I was buffeted, and it took me another quarter of an hour to get a drink. The TV in the top corner of the room had been tuned to a news channel, the volume turned up high. There, once again, was the hotel. I watched the injured being brought out on stretchers and loaded into ambulances. A section of the road that ran past the entrance had been buried under an avalanche of masonry and plaster, and we were shown endless close-ups of the rubble, among which lay an assortment of unlikely objects – an armchair, a vacuum-cleaner, three oranges, a doll (the camera lingered on the doll, of course). My brandy arrived at last. When I reached for the glass I noticed that my hand was trembling. Was it the fact that I had been in great danger, that I was, in some very real sense, lucky to be alive, or was it a response to the action I had subsequently taken? There was no way of telling. I drank half the brandy, which seemed to steady me a little.
Until the bomb went off, the notion of escape had not occurred to me – I hadn’t even entertained it as a possibility – and yet, somehow, I found that I was already in possession of a strategy. Obviously I wouldn’t be able to walk through a gap in the wall, as Victor and Marie had done. This was the Yellow Quarter, and the borders would be fiercely defended. No, I would make for one of the big northern cities – Burnham, Sigri, Ustion – and go to ground. I would become a student of choleric behaviour, learning rashness and belligerence, but all the while I would be working out how to return to the Blue Quarter. Only a moment ago my hand had been shaking, but now a thrill went through me at the sheer unimaginable magnitude of what I was doing. My thoughts had begun to startle me. Or perhaps I was just discovering new aspects of myself, qualities I hadn’t realised I had. Sitting in that bar, not knowing where it was or even what it was called, I felt like a spy – glamorous, resolute, only dimly perceived.
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