You drag the suitcase behind you like a guilty conscience. Slouch along Princes Street, keeping to the garden side, oblivious to the rumble and skirr of the trams. Trudge past the Waverley Steps, past the shopping mall and the stony classical frontage of the art gallery, across the road, past the sunken gardens and the big Christian temple with the mossy graveyard below street level. Up Lothian Road towards the bus-stop. A police car whines past, and for a moment you are dizzy with terror. But it doesn’t stop, and your heartbeat slows in time with your steps. The clammy cold sweat in the small of your back slowly dries as you repeat to yourself, It’s only a fucking suitcase.
You should have let the Gnome pick it up for you; he is entirely to blame for your being in this invidious position, after all. The injustice claws at your stomach. “The angle, dear boy, is money—and how you, and I, and a couple of friends, are going to make a great steaming pile of it.” May Allah, the compassionate, the merciful, have a special inferno set aside for the scheming bald arse-bandit and his great glistening pile of dosh. It’s not him who has to—
The bus kneels and the glass doors slide apart like a mouth to swallow you down into hell.
You’ve tried to avoid this ever happening, and for the most part you’ve been successful. You have rubbed shoulders with hard men, violent men, thugs: But you’ve always got a place to go where you can be free of them. You have indulged your base urges in public toilets and other men’s bedrooms, but never where you might be recognized and shamed by people who know you. You have done your absolute best to obey this single iron rule: Men’s laws mean less to you than those of Allah, but this solitary unwritten one you cleave to like a drowning sailor to his life-belt. Until now.
You ride in a haze of misery, barely noticing your surroundings until it’s time to get off. The suitcase is a drag on your wrist, as intolerable as a screw’s handcuff, growing heavier with every step. You turn the corner, take the slope with ever-sinking heart, fumble in your pocket for the key, and carry the nightmare across the threshold and up the stairs to your den in the attic.
For the first time ever, you have broken the one unbreakable rule: Never let work follow you home.
Colonel Datka’s man didn’t give you a choice in the matter.
“You have an envelope waiting for me. I believe you live at”—the bastard has your home address on the tip of his tongue—“is that correct? You will take my suitcase home with you and store it. I may need to stay in your spare room, from tomorrow, for a few days. I trust you will have a spare key waiting for me here.”
His smile was insectile, twitching mouth parts flexing around immobile mandibles, coldly inhuman eyes watching you through the wraparound display screens of his eyeware.
“If anybody enquires, you will tell them I am Peter Manuel, and I am a business representative.”
“What kind… of… ?”
The mandibles clattered and chomped like those of an angry hornet: “I am here to sell toys.”
“But my wife and children—”
“They will not be inconvenienced.” His gaze was as unseeing as a corpse. “It is a fall-back position. Hopefully it will not be needed.”
“But I—”
“Do you want more money?” He cocked his head to one side, scanning, sensing, focussing but not feeling. “Are we not paying you enough?”
You hastened to reassure him that indeed you were being paid an adequate sufficiency.
“Then what’s the problem?” His stare went through you, bulletblunt and tearing as it tumbled. “Remember the key. Tomorrow.”
And he was gone like that: vanished, oblivious, leaving behind him the shattered and splintered wreckage of the invisible plate-glass window you had placed between your home life and your hustling.
You’re going to have to tell Bibi something.
But what?
“You’ll tell her what you always tell her, lad.” The Gnome’s familiar tones, the rolling R’s and cut-glass sibilants of his currently adopted accent (upper-crust Morningside, posher than the King of England’s) pronounce his diagnosis with utter certainty. You hate him for it, briefly: for his self-assured confidence, his smugly dispassionate claim on your future. He’s like a spider, observing the world through the tiny tugs on the periphery of his web. “She expects the worst of you already; inviting some dodgy toy salesman to stay is nothing.”
Actually it’s everything, but you can’t tell the Gnome this; there is no rupture in his world, no gap between the sacred and the profane. He lives his life entirely in the foreground, sly as a fox and just as shameful, and he wouldn’t understand what’s wrong even if you had the words and the will to tell him. Which you don’t. So you burrow your arse deeper into the decaying armchair and squint at the pint of beer before you on the table. “He’s a nut-case, though. Why me?”
“Because you’re in the right place at the right time. Drink your beer, there’s a good chap.”
“It’s not the right place. It’s a fucking dangerous place.” You obey his injunction and swallow another mouthful of sour fizz. “What’s the angle? Come on. Tell me.”
“The angle is, we make lots of money—”
You cross your arms. “Not fucking good enough, Adam.” Not lad, you notice absently. You don’t get to call him by any other kind of diminutive or belittling nickname. Professor, maybe. Come to think of it, that sort of sums up your relationship, doesn’t it? “What’s my angle? Why am I hanging my ass out here while foreigners use me as a distribution hub for bread mix and psychos invite themselves to stay with my wife and kids? What do I get from this?”
You stop and stare at the Gnome, giving him your best crack at Cousin Tariq’s hard-sell hairy eye-ball.
“Diplomatic immunity—”
“That’s nonsense, and you know it. Honorary consuls don’t get immunity from parking tickets, let alone anything else. Especially not consuls working for a sock-puppet state that wouldn’t even exist if its parent government wasn’t so anxious to get rid of it that they rigged the independence referendum.”
“Ah, that.”
“Yes, that—I can read wikipedia, too! Seventy-two per cent voted against independence according to the UN exit polls, did you know that? Unemployment is running at 40 per cent. And Issyk-Kulistan, with about 20 per cent of Kyrgyzstan’s population, inherited 80 per cent of its national debt. What the fuck is that about?”
The Gnome sits there listening to you rant, staring into the turbid depths of his half-drunk pint of 80/- and all the while swirling it gently, so that the suds form a slimy slick up the sides of the conic. He glances up at you with eyes as old as the hills. “So?”
“I’ve been doing some thinking,” you tell him, and wait.
“A dangerous habit to get into, Master Hussein.” His tone is light. “What precisely have you been thinking?”
“I’ve been thinking that… this is a set-up, right? Some kind of scam to do with their national debt? And while they’ve got their hands off IRIK for a few years, organized crime moves in.”
“Not exactly, but close.” The Gnome takes a long suck on his bevvy. “What it’s about is, a country like Kyrgyzstan can’t afford to fuck with its credit rating, can it? They ran up some big debts over the last twenty years, building gigantic presidential palaces and new airports and so on. The usual prestige shit, presided over by a series of authoritarian ass-hats, would-be dictators-for-life who only averaged eight years in the saddle between revolutions. The gas-fields are played-out, now, so they’re trying to restructure their debts, and finding it hard.