It was all very odd. Struck by the lack of instructions to keep his head down, Rudi decided to push the envelope one day, informing Mrs Gabriel at breakfast that he intended to do some sightseeing.
“I’ll see if we can find you some maps somewhere,” she replied, standing by the table with a tray of cleared-away breakfast things in her hands. “Mr Bauer collects maps like other people collect stamps or train numbers.”
Sitting there, looking at his half-eaten breakfast, Rudi almost weakened and told her not to bother, but instead he said, “Thank you, Mrs Gabriel, that would be very kind of you.” The very act of speaking English in London seemed to bring out an exaggerated politeness.
For tourists, Londoners still produced paper maps, and Mrs Gabriel brought a sheaf of them to Rudi a minute or so later – surely not long enough for her to consult her superiors and get their consent, certainly not long enough for them to organise a tail. Although London was by some distance the most surveilled city on the face of the Earth, and anyone who knew what they were doing would have had a tail waiting outside, twenty-four hours a day, for just this eventuality.
The maps were tattered and frayed from constant refolding, and useless in any operational sense. The street maps showed tiny cartoon representations of notable buildings and big advertisements from corporate sponsors. The Underground map simply looked unlikely, a multicoloured circuit diagram inviting travellers to have a go if they felt lucky.
Outside, on King’s Bench Walk, he fought down an urge to stand and look at every passing clerk and barrister and tourist. Movement was the important thing.
Up through the archway and onto Fleet Street, and he stood for a few moments trying to get a sense of the place.
This was not, he felt right away, a European city. You could visit Paris or Brussels or Madrid, even St Petersburg, and know you were in Europe. London was different. London was… he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Even standing there watching the everyday workers and tourists go by, he heard snatches of conversation in half a dozen languages. London was certainly cosmopolitan. More than that, it was an immigrant city. First, waves of conquerors. The Romans. The Normans. Then waves of migrants from… well, from everywhere. Jews, Huguenots, Somalis, Bangladeshis, West Indians… the list went on and on. Rudi had even found, in one of Mr Bauer’s books, a mad story about a group of exiles from fallen Troy who were supposed to have sailed up the Thames at some point in the far and misty past to found the city.
His phone, of course, had never been returned to him, and a replacement had not been provided. And Jan’s watch had vanished somewhere along the way, which bothered him obscurely. But he judged that he had been standing there long enough for a tail to be organised by any half-competent security service, so he turned right and set off down the slope of Fleet Street towards St Paul’s.
Within the first fifteen or twenty minutes he decided that, if anyone was following him, they were fantastically good at their job. He prided himself on being fairly sharp at spotting a tail, and he couldn’t see anyone even vaguely suspicious. He tried four or five fairly lazy evasion routines, on the grounds that it might lead the people behind Smithson’s Chambers to underestimate him, which was never a bad thing, and when he’d completed the routines there was no sign of anyone picking him up again. Fine. Fuck it.
So he just forgot about surveillance and walked, map in hand, for hours. He did a long, leisurely tour of the City, the square mile that enclosed the oldest part of London and housed some of the city’s financial institutions. He walked out of the City and into the West End and theatre-spotted. Did a tour of the awesomely primal kitsch being sold on stalls in Covent Garden. Stood in Trafalgar Square and stared at Nelson’s Column.
The map he was using was about six years old, pre-dating the massive terrorist truck bomb which had blown a six-metre-deep crater in Whitehall and led to the gating off of the entire street. He stood at the gates for a little while, looking down towards Westminster, then he turned away and walked down to the Embankment, crossed the road, and sat for almost an hour on a bench watching the Thames and the various working and tourist boats passing by up and down the river. London, he had decided, was a mad place, very much of itself, entirely unique. He thought he liked it. He wondered if he would be able to make a run for the Estonian Embassy, and whether they would take him in if he got there.
Finally, hunger got the better of him and he walked back along the Embankment to Temple Station, through the side gate into the Temple, and back to Smithson’s Chambers, where Mrs Gabriel had prepared some doorstep sandwiches – what was it with these people and colossal hunks of white bread? – of boiled chicken and a big pot of Yorkshire Tea.
AND SO IT went on, day after day, week after week. He dutifully ate Mrs Gabriel’s meals, worked his way steadily through Mr Bauer’s library, went for walks. He had no money with which to access public communications; he walked in and out of internet cafés hoping to catch an unattended terminal with some credit still on it, but without success. He thought he detected a boundary when he asked for some money to buy a pass and explore the Underground network and it was refused, but nobody made a big thing about it. It wasn’t even a refusal, properly speaking. He raised the subject with Mr Self one morning, just in passing, and Mr Self said he’d see about it, and it was never mentioned again. He considered repeating the request, but he’d got the point.
Anyway, Central London turned out to be surprisingly small, once you got to know it. All the important stuff was within walking distance, so long as you enjoyed walking. From the eastern edge of the City to the western end of Oxford Street was an hour and a half’s easy walk, and you could make it from Euston all the way over Waterloo Bridge to the great glass and steel blocks of the South Bank in less than that. It was hardly a stretch. And as everyone fell into a routine, Mrs Gabriel even made up sandwiches and gave him a small cardboard carton of fruit juice to take with him on his wanderings. This routine, this boredom, was of course exactly what he wanted. And equally, the inhabitants of Smithson’s Chambers knew this and indulged him. And he exploited them. And they let him. And so on. He was honestly curious about how long they could keep playing this peculiar little game. He suspected it could be quite a long time. The strongest impression he had formed so far about whoever was holding him was that, as well as having an unusual way of doing things, they were people of quite considerable patience.
On the other hand, he couldn’t stay here for ever. Apart from anything else, despite all the exercise he was getting, Mrs Gabriel’s food was putting weight on him.
As if sensing this new strain of restlessness, Mr Self began to make more frequent appearances at the Chambers. Rudi noticed him more and more about the place, talking Mr Bauer through interminable legal documents in his office, chatting lasciviously – he was a man of some lasciviousness – to Mrs Gabriel – who giggled like a teenager and thumped him on the shoulder – and all the time making sure he knew where Rudi was. Rudi found this new behaviour quite interesting, but kept up with his daily walks all the same. For the first time in weeks, he started keeping an eye out for a tail again.
One day in the first week of March, Mr Self happened to pass through the living room, where Rudi was sitting on the window seat reading a tattered biography of Brad Pitt.
“Oh,” Mr Self said as if the thought had just occurred to him, “ought to have told you. Having a party day after tomorrow.”
“Oh?” said Rudi.
“Big legal wigs,” said Mr Self. “Judges. High Court bods. Couple of MPs too, I think.”