by Neil Cross
Earlier, Holloway had bought a leatherette suitcase from a dusty-windowed, discount luggage store outside Finsbury Park tube station. Into this he transferred the bulk of the cash, clean and otherwise. He caught a minicab to Waterloo. The driver stank like a wet dog. At Waterloo, Holloway bought a better suitcase, the upright kind with wheels. In the lavatory, he transferred the cash into it. There was a utility cupboard close to the wash basins. He hid the cheap suitcase in there.
From W. H. Smith he bought a novel, a newspaper and a bag of Werther’s Originals. Then he joined the fluid crowd fusing with the body of the train. He was travelling first-class. As he boarded, he noted with satisfaction that many of his fellow passengers were Japanese and American tourists, few of whom would be on the alert for a wanted English policeman. The remainder were English and French businesspeople. They could be expected to take less notice of their fellows than their laptop computers and mobile telephones.
The train appeared to progress with teeth-grinding deliberation. Holloway imagined that a police car was shadowing it: if he only turned his head, he would see its flickering white form through the midsummer hedgerows. He imagined plain-clothed and uniformed policemen walking the length of the train, checking passports and tickets. But no policeman came and when the train entered the Channel Tunnel and picked up speed, he swelled with gratitude and relief. He made his precarious way to the lavatory, where he suffered a short, fierce burst of diarrhoea. He checked his forehead. He was clammy and feverish. He sat on the lavatory until the train erupted into the brittle French daylight.
On arrival at the Gare du Nord, he purchased American Express traveller’s cheques to the value of £2,000. The desk clerk expressed no surprise or concern at the number of high-denomination notes Holloway handed over. Emboldened, he spent much of the morning exchanging ever-larger amounts of cash for traveller’s cheques at various banks and American Express offices. Some of these cheques he cashed immediately at other nearby banks. With this cash he bought yet more traveller’s cheques.
That afternoon he sat in a café on the Left Bank and ordered a series of large espressos, into each of which he dropped three or four cubes of sugar. He allowed his mind to clear. He watched Parisians and tourists come and go, because that’s what you did in Paris. When some of the exhaustion had lifted, he ordered a toasted ham and cheese sandwich. Concerned that he might be dehydrating, he followed the coffees with a large bottle of mineral water.
He made his way to the crowded Champs-Elysées, where he found a white and chrome boutique that was air-conditioned to a fridgelike chill. He paid cash for two summer suits, four shirts, underwear and socks. He left the goods for collection later. A few doors down, he bought a pair of shoes. From a pharmacist he bought a toothbrush, deodorant, shaving equipment and some plasters to prevent the new shoes blistering his heels. From a tourist information booth, he bought a city map cum guidebook. He picked up his clothes and hailed a taxi. He showed the driver a mid-range hotel listed in the guidebook.
The room was clean but shabby round the edges, in brown and cream. It had the faint odours of damp and antiquation.
He sat on the spongy bed and closed his eyes and slept. When he woke it was dark and he was sure the lobby was full of English policemen. He went to the bathroom and stroked his throat ruminatively in the black-spotted mirror. It rasped beneath his fingers. He made the shower short: a ten-second, high-pressure burst of cold water, followed by a ten-second burst of hot. Another ten cold, ten hot. Then he quickly soaped himself, shaved and towelled himself dry. He dressed in a new suit.
A scruffy, unshaven young man in a baseball cap had rented the room. A smart, red-headed middle-aged man in a light grey summerweight suit and black shoes left it.
The clerk with whom he settled the bill was not the clerk from whom he’d taken the room. Despite his early departure, he paid in full. Another cab took him through the white and gold centre of Paris and on to the airport.
He caught a late business flight to Berlin. Disembarking, he was beyond tired. He took a room at a generic airport hotel. Everyone spoke English with no discernible accent. He ran the shower, but had to lie down before the exertion of undressing. He fell asleep to the sound of CNN. He woke at 6 a.m. and lay awake in the darkness, staring at the ceiling and listening to the white noise coming from the bathroom.
If he spent enough nights in such rooms, he might simply fade away. The maids would find his bed rucked and empty and untainted by human odour.
He sat up. Acid sputtered in his gut.
It came to him that he had been murdered. He had been taken forever from the world, stolen from his daughter. This understanding brought him closer to Joanne. He understood now how their lives had tessellated. The convergence reached back through time. He had been there during her childhood, a dark orb behind the childish light in her eyes. He had been the shadow of a face cast on the wall during her first kiss. And in her turn, she had always been with him. She was the discarnate sigh at his shoulder when he married, the knowledge in the black, new-born eyes of his daughter. She was the objectless sadness in hotel rooms.
He spent the day in Berlin, buying and changing more traveller’s cheques. Soon the dirty money would be dilute, like a carcinogenic trace element in purified water.
That evening, he left for Hamburg.
He completed the ad hoc money laundering in Frankfurt. To his knowledge, the money was not marked and the used notes were non-sequential. But he thought it possible the cash could be marked in a way he didn’t know about and couldn’t identify. He’d paid out a good proportion of it in commission, but at least he was now confident that he would not be discovered by carelessly spending the wrong note on the wrong day, at the wrong establishment.
There was plenty left. He wasn’t sure exactly how much, but enough to last for quite some time; especially if he began to exercise some frugality.
The time had come to slow down.
Tired of Germany, he flew to Prague. He spent a week there and flew on to Rome. From Rome he travelled to Greece. Piraeus was ozone and diesel smells, the calling of gulls. He bought a four-week ferry pass. In Paroikia on the island of Samos, he took a room in a whitewashed pension. He stayed there for some weeks.
The cranked-up torque of his musculature loosened. He spent long, shaded days under a beach umbrella. Behind the sunglasses, his eyes were blank. A dust sheet had been thrown over his thoughts. Under it there lurked unspecified contours. He dined alone in the evening, and set his head early on the pillow. His skin smelled of sun and salt and Ambre Solaire.
He didn’t remember deciding to move on: he seemed to snap into consciousness as the plane descended upon Barcelona. Another taxi. He took a room in the Hotel Habbanna. He set his luggage down. In the granite, deco room there was an enormous bed. He sprawled on it like a starfish.
In the morning, he happened upon a crumbling, secluded square just off the tourist bustle and pickpocket press of the Ramblas. The square was bordered by cafeterias and restaurants. He spent a slow morning breakfasting on tapas, English tea and mineral water. He consulted a city guidebook and in the afternoon paid a visit to the Sagrada Familia, Gaudí’s twisting, hallucinatory anemone of a cathedral. He paid the fee and ascended its high spires. He peered vertiginously over the city. Barcelona winked beneath the diaphanous haze of pollution. The moment fluoresced in him.
As an adolescent, he had secretly cut himself on the arms and ribs and chest with razorblades or shards of broken glass. Slow, deliberate bisections. Between the carving of flesh and the ebony weal of blood, he ceased to exist.
He watched the sun set from the tower of the Sagrada Familia. Then he went to a bar and thought about it.
Back in his room, he flicked through the erotic pay-per-view cable television channels. He saw a thirty-second clip of this and a ten-second burst of that. The outcome was a shifting, nullifying collage of satyriasis. With the volu
me muted, the images were ridiculous. The postures were silly, the facial expressions burlesque. The European films were underlit and heroin-blank. The bodies on which they centred were pale and veined and mottled and hairy-moled, so that Holloway felt a tug of affection for their owners, even the scrawny man wielding a raw club of penis that shone like a healing burn. Other scenes he recognized at once as American: inhumanly solid breasts that swelled fungally above pinched waists. Neurotically shaved and depilated adult pudenda. All sanitary and barren. Lust without passion. American pornography was overlit and without shadow. Intersecting planes of pink and white and brown. Abrupt badger stripes of hair: gleam of mucus. Hot stink of shit and spermicide.
It seemed a joyless and comical prank that this act, rendered here in its various but essentially unchanging inanity, could so blight the brief passage of human life on earth.
He wondered if pornography might function as a cure for sex. Perhaps young men consumed it so eagerly because it disengaged them from the profundity of their own fear: their most primal dread was rendered farcical. Not even bestial. Lobotomized.
Watch enough and you might never want to have sex again.
The idea made him sad, like old photographs did, and he smiled to himself, watching an American-Asian girl pretend to enjoy being anally skewered on a three-foot dildo.
The next morning he bought a ticket to Wellington, New Zealand.
II
Despite spending two nights in Hong Kong en route, he arrived at Auckland bleary and crumpled. His consciousness felt negligently tethered to his body. It bobbed in his zombie wake like a party balloon. His feet were swollen.
Once it had been established that he did not intend to bring any dangerous fruit into the country, Auckland proved to be the most accommodating of airports. The corridors and walkways were ornamented with potted, indigenous plant species. Native birdsong had been piped in. Smoked glass windows overlooked gigantic docked 747s.
He went to the Air New Zealand desk and confirmed his connecting flight to Wellington. It left in two hours, so he found a luggage trolley and walked to the domestic terminal. In a moulded plastic seat, he punched and bundled his hand luggage into a pillow. He fell asleep at once. When he jerked awake and looked at his watch, he couldn’t work out where the time had gone. He went to the lavatory and passed a thick, odorous stream of dark urine. He examined his tongue in the mirror. The sight was alarming. He went to Whitcoulls and bought a litre of Evian and five Cherry Ripes, bars of cherry coconut in plain chocolate. The mixed strangeness and familiarity of the horizontally ranked confectionery reminded him how far he was from home. By the time he had washed down this meal (he could not work out which meal it had been), the time had come to board his flight.
It was a small plane and he was a nervous flier, but nevertheless he fell asleep before take-off.
He awoke as the aircraft tipped into a vertical dive. He bloomed with hysteria. It was a long minute before he convinced himself they were not about to slam into the heavy earth.
The air crew remained nonchalant (Holloway was well-practised at assessing when they were not) and continued to go about their business. The plane swept low over the water. Too rigid with dread to enquire otherwise, he took it on faith that the pilot was not about to ditch in the Pacific. In fact, Wellington’s approach runway jutted into the bay like an uncompleted motorway bridge. When the aircraft’s landing gear first brushed the tarmac and squealed, so nearly did Holloway.
Outside the airport terminal, he rested his weight on a low wall that bordered the short-stay car park. He squinted in the oblique white slant of Wellington light. Everything was altered. The sunlight came from strange angles. Distant lettering on road signs and advertisements was abnormally distinct. He could see tiny bumps and depressions in the tarmac. The details of his own rumpled clothing and soiled skin. Sweat and sebum were a sheen on his forearms. Crystals of salt at the root of tiny hairs.
The sky rang crystal blue above him. White concrete shone like a temple. Parked and passing cars were bursting nodes of primary colour. The white and silver of skyborne aircraft.
He moved to the taxi rank in dreamlike weightlessness. He tried to calculate what time of day it was, then what day. He reached the front of the queue. The taxi driver left his seat and came round the car to collect Holloway’s bags. It felt like being rescued.
The driver was broad, with a low centre of gravity. He’d greased his thin grey hair into a DA and his blue shirtsleeves were rolled to the elbow, revealing heavily tattooed forearms. He sat behind the wheel and swivelled to face Holloway. He rested a forearm along the back of the seat.
‘Where can I take you, mate?’
Holloway tried to think. After a while, he thought of the word he was looking for.
‘A hotel.’
‘Do you know which hotel?’
‘Oh. Anything half-decent. Whatever.’
‘This your first time in Wellington?’
He lacked the strength to lie.
‘Yes.’
‘That’ll be right.’ The driver nodded and pursed his lips. Then he said: ‘Listen, I’ll tell you the truth. This is my second day behind the wheel.’
‘Right,’ said Holloway.
‘It’s not that I don’t know Wellington,’ the driver said. ‘I know Wellington like the back of my hand. But I’ve been away.’
Holloway trundled along the conversational rut.
‘Really? How long?’
The driver was pulling from the airport now, on to the main road.
‘Twenty years. Give or take.’
‘Long time,’ said Holloway.
‘Bloody long time.’
‘Right.’
‘Right.’
They drove for a while, in the easy silence of two men who fully understood one another.
‘So the thing is,’ said the driver, ‘I can tell you what hotels were good twenty years ago—’
‘Oh. Right,’ said Holloway.
‘You get me? Wellington’s changed a lot in twenty years. A lot. Now, I don’t want to tell you somewhere’s great, just because it was great in 1982. Do you get what I’m saying?’
‘Look,’ Holloway said. ‘Anywhere. Anywhere will do.’
‘Sure?’
‘Sure.’
‘Right you are. You got any preferences about the route?’
‘No.’
‘You ever seen the bay?’
‘No.’
‘Oh, mate. You have to see the bay. You can’t come to Wellington and not see the bay.’
‘Great,’ said Holloway. ‘OK.’
‘Right you are,’ said the driver. He threw the cab into a screaming U-turn. A giant hand buried Holloway in the vinyl seat.
‘Don’t worry, mate,’ the driver said. ‘She’ll be right.’
Holloway was too tired not to take his word for it.
They raced along the coastal road, which ascended into steep green hills. The landscape was exotic and familiar. Gorse clung to the upper hillsides, undulating tree ferns to the lower. The roadside was lined with toetoe. It bowed like pampas grass; from its centre emerged feathery, head-hung pom-poms.
They passed an erratic strip of weather-beaten dwellings. Each was completed to a different design. Some were ramshackle and uncertain; their wooden frames worn smooth by salt wind hitting the Cook Straight off the Tasman Sea. Others were smart family homes in jaunty pastels. New 4 x 4s squatted in their driveways.
To their immediate right, the ocean surged and eddied at the rocky, beachless seashore. The driver stopped to show Holloway a blue penguin. The bird sprang happily from the boiling foam of a breaking wave and planted itself on a wet rock. It hunched its shoulders like a gumshoe in a raincoat. Holloway watched the penguin through the window. The penguin looked back at him through little black eyes. Then it waddled in a
half-turn and dumped itself back in the tidal surge. He watched its head bob like a ping-pong ball until it was lost from sight.
They drove on.
Round the camber of headland, Wellington unveiled itself. It was a pearly crescent, set tight to the windy bay; the lunette of a God’s nail. Standing on reclaimed land, the city climbed on its outer curve into steep hills. White houses collected in their deep green slopes and gullies.
He had not expected the city to be so abundantly green, nor its once-colonial downtown to be so contemporary and metropolitan. He tipped the taxi-driver and decided to get himself a coffee before looking for a hotel.
He found a café on the edge of Civic Square, which was a pristine fusion of Victorian architecture and late twentieth-century postmodernity. He planted himself on a metal alfresco table and ordered banana cake and cappuccino. He felt misplaced and disconsolate. This was a bright new place. He was old-world, and worn and filthy: a spectral reminder of colonial antiquity.
It had been a long way to come, and to a stranger place than he had imagined, to commit a murder.
18
He was in no rush. For nearly three weeks, while he assimilated and got over the jet lag, he familiarized himself with Wellington. He spent hours strolling downtown. He window-shopped and bought a wardrobe of appropriate clothing. The months spent in Europe and the weeks on a Greek beach had left him tanned and his hair bleached nearly blond. He wore loose khaki trousers and bright short-sleeved shirts. He took day trips to local places of interest. He ate in cafés and browsed the Te Papa museum and the bookshops. He committed to memory the secrets of Wellington’s orientation: the linking alleys and the unexpected culs de sac. The dream-city began to solidify. It sent taproots into his mind. The eagerly courteous young waiting staff in the cafés and diners learned to recognize him.
Hiya, Will. Cake and a Coke?
At the end of the second week, he went to an internet café and found the official website of Victoria University, Wellington. He made notes in a spiral-bound reporters’ pad, then read and reread some pages of secondary interest.