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.
By the time I left, it was after one o’clock in the morning, and slack columns of drizzle were slanting across the road like gauze curtains blown sideways by a breeze. There was almost nobody about. The weather must have driven everyone indoors. Moans and wails came from somewhere, and I paused, unable to decide whether the sounds were human or animal. It would be the tail-end of the revelries, I told myself. Things winding down, people who had gone too far. Turning my collar up against the rain and wrapping myself tightly in the folds of my coat, I set off in what I hoped was a northerly direction.
I passed along the damp dead streets of the business district, some of whose buildings I recognised from the drive in from the airport, then the road sloped upwards and I found myself on an elevated dual carriageway. Huge yards lay below me, filled with lumber and scrap metal.
Looking over my shoulder, all the brashness and glitter of the city centre behind me now, I saw a car come speeding up the fast lane. As I watched, it began to veer towards me. There didn’t seem to be anybody driving. At the last minute, a woman’s face rose into the windscreen, and I heard the tyres shriek as she applied the brakes. The car swerved out into the middle lane again, spun round twice, and then stalled, facing in the wrong direction, one of its elaborately spoked wheels resting on the central reservation. Its headlights angled sideways and upwards, almost quizzically, into the night. Fine rain fell through the beams, silent, sharp-looking, as if a tin of pins and needles had been emptied somewhere high up in the sky.
The door on the driver’s side opened and an elderly woman climbed out. She wore a fur coat, and her pale hair had been pinned up in a tidy and yet complex bun. She appeared calm, if slightly indignant.
‘What are you doing there?’ she said. ‘What do you want?’ As though I had distracted her in some way. As though the accident were all my fault.
‘Nothing,’ I said stupidly. ‘I was just walking.’
A car flashed between us, horn blaring.
She watched it vanish round a curve in the dual carriageway, then turned back to me. She seemed to have no sense that either she or her car might be in danger, or that they might present a threat to others. ‘Yes. I see.’ She passed one hand across her forehead, then lightly touched her hair. Her movements had the slow-motion dreaminess of someone underwater. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Good. That’s good.’ She let out an unexpected husky laugh. ‘Can I give you a lift?’
I asked her where she was going. Home, she told me. She lived in the suburbs. That would be perfect, I said, then glanced towards her car.
She read the look. ‘I’m not drunk,’ she said. ‘I’ve just had a few champagne cocktails, that’s all.’ She saw that I wasn’t entirely reassured. ‘I was looking for my cigarette lighter. I dropped it on the floor.’
Perhaps I should hold the lighter, I suggested. When she wanted a cigarette, I would light it for her. She thoroughly approved of this idea.
Once she had turned the car around and we were under way, she asked me how I came to be walking along that stretch of road. She’d never seen anyone out there before. I felt an almost overpowering need to tell her that I’d been staying in the hotel that was bombed, but I knew it would be unwise. I had to try and keep my mouth shut, not give anything away.
‘Cars,’ she said. ‘They always go wrong at the most inconvenient times.’