At the same time, nothing fired the imagination of the whole of humanity as much as this island.
It might have been a rough pile of bird-shit, but at the same time it was considered the most extraordinary, perhaps the most hopeful place in the world. In fact the actual magic emanated from an object about two nautical miles off the coast, a gigantic platform resting on five house-sized pontoons. If you approached it on misty days, at first you couldn’t see what was so special about it. You saw flat structures, generating plants and tanks, a helicopter landing pad, a terminal with a tower, aerials and radio telescopes. The whole thing looked like an airport, except that there was no runway to be seen. Instead, a massive cylindrical construction grew from the centre, a gleaming colossus with bundles of pipes meandering up its sides. Only by narrowing your eyes could you make out the black line that emerged from the cylinder and soared steeply upwards. If the clouds were low, they engulfed it after a few hundred metres, and you found yourself wondering what you would see if the sky cleared. Even people who knew better – in principle, then, anyone who had managed to get through the high-security area – expected to see something where the line ended, a fixed point on which the overstretched imagination could settle.
But there was nothing.
Even in bright sunshine, when the sky was deep blue, you couldn’t see the end of the line. It became thinner and thinner until it seemed to dematerialise in the atmosphere. Through field-glasses it just disappeared a little higher up. You stared until your neck ached, with Julian Orley’s now legendary observation in your ears, that the Isla de las Estrellas was the ground floor of eternity – and you started to sense what he had meant by it.
Carl Hanna strained his neck too, craning from the seat of the helicopter to look up stupidly into the blue, while below him two finback whales ploughed the azure of the Pacific. Hanna didn’t waste a glance on them. When the pilot pointed out the rare animals yet again, he heard himself murmuring that there was nothing less interesting than the sea.
The helicopter curved round and roared towards the platform. The line blurred briefly in front of Hanna’s eyes, seemed to dissolve, and then it was clearly visible in the sky again, as straight as if drawn by a ruler.
A moment later it had doubled.
‘There are two of them,’ observed Mukesh Nair.
The Indian brushed the thick black hair off his forehead. His dark face glowed with delight, the nostrils of his cucumber-shaped nose flared as if to inhale the moment.
‘Of course there are two.’ Sushma, his wife, held up her index and middle fingers as if explaining something to a child in reception class. ‘Two cabins, two cables.’
‘I know that, I know!’ Nair waved her impatiently away. His mouth twisted into a smile. He looked at Hanna. ‘How amazing! Do you know how wide those cables are?’
‘Just over a metre, I think.’ Hanna smiled back.
‘For a moment they were gone.’ Nair looked out, shaking his head. ‘They simply disappeared.’
‘That’s true.’
‘You saw that too? And you, Sushma? They flickered like a mirage. Did you see—’
‘Yes, Mukesh, I saw it too.’
‘I thought I was imagining it.’
‘No, you weren’t,’ Sushma said benignly and rested a small, paddle-shaped hand on his knee. Hanna thought the two of them looked as if they’d been created by the painter Fernando Botero. The same rounded physiques, the same short, inflated-looking extremities.
He looked out of the window again.
The helicopter stayed an appropriate distance from the cables as it drifted past the platform. Only authorised pilots from NASA or Orley Enterprises were allowed to fly this route when they brought guests to the Isla de las Estrellas. Hanna tried to catch a glimpse of the inside of the cylinder, where the cables disappeared, but they were too far away. A moment later they had left the platform behind, and were swinging in towards the Isla. Below them, the shadow of the helicopter darted across deep blue waves.
‘That cable must be really thin if you can’t see it from the side,’ Nair reflected. ‘Which means it must actually be flat. Are they cables at all?’ He laughed and wrung his hands. ‘They’re more like tapes, really, aren’t they? I’ve probably got it all wrong. My God, what can I say? I grew up in a field. In a field!’
Hanna nodded. They had fallen into conversation on the flight here from Quito, but even so he knew that Mukesh Nair had a very close relationship with fields. A modest farmer’s son from Hoshiarpur in Punjab, who liked eating well but preferred a street stall to any three-star restaurant, who thought more highly of the concerns and opinions of simple people than of small-talk at receptions and gallery openings, who preferred to fly Economy Class and who craved expensive clothes as much as a Tibetan bear craves a tie. At the same time Mukesh Nair, with an estimated private fortune of 46 billion dollars, was one of the wealthiest people in the world, and his way of thinking was anything but rustic. He had studied agriculture in Ludhiana and economics at Bombay University, he was a holder of the Padma Vibhushan, the second-highest Indian order for civilian merits, and an unchallenged market leader when it came to supplying the world with Indian fruit and vegetables. Hanna was intimately acquainted with the CV of Mr Tomato, as Nair was generally known, having studied the careers of all the guests who were travelling in for the meeting.
‘Now look, just look at that!’ shouted Nair. ‘That’s not bad, is it?’
Hanna craned his neck. The helicopter hovered along the eastern slope of the island so that they could enjoy a perfect view of the Stellar Island Hotel. Like a stranded ocean steamer it lay on the slopes, seven receding storeys piled up on top of one another, overlooking a prow with a huge swimming-pool. Each room had its own sun terrace. The highest point of the building formed a circular terrace, half covered by a huge glass dome. Hanna could make out tables and chairs, loungers, a buffet, a bar. Amidships lay a part that had been left level, plainly the lobby, bounded to the north by the stern-shaped construction of a helicopter landing pad. Architecture alternated with sections of rough stone, as if the architects had been trying to beam up a cruise-ship right in front of the island, and had miscalculated by a few hundred metres towards the centre. It seemed to Hanna that parts of the hotel grounds must have been blown into the mountain with explosives. A footpath, interrupted by flights of steps, wound its way down, crossed a green plateau whose design looked too harmonious to be of natural origin, then led further down and opened up into a path running along the coast.
‘A golf course,’ Nair murmured in delight. ‘How wonderful.’
‘I’m sorry, but I thought you liked things simple.’ And when the Indian looked at him in amazement, Hanna added, ‘According to yourself. Plain restaurants. Simple people. Third-class travel.’
‘You’re getting things muddled.’
‘If the media are to be trusted, you’re surprisingly modest for a public figure.’
‘Such nonsense! I try to keep out of public life. You can count the number of interviews that I’ve given over the past few years on one hand. If Tomato gets a good press, I’m happy. The main thing is that no one tries to get me in front of a camera or a microphone.’ Nair frowned. ‘By the way, you’re right. Luxury isn’t something I need to live. I come from a tiny village. The amount of money you have is irrelevant. Deep down, I’m still living in that village, it’s just got a bit bigger.’
‘By a few continents on either side of the Indian Ocean,’ Hanna teased. ‘Got you.’
‘So?’ Nair grinned. ‘As I said, you’re getting things muddled.’
‘What?’