‘Luckily for you, I’m called to the local bar as a solicitor-advocate, so there’ll be no need to take on a trial lawyer. I’m going to see the DA this afternoon, and I’m hoping to persuade him to set an early date for the combined hearing, right?’
‘Combined hearing?’ Tom queried weakly.
‘That’s right. Bail has to be confirmed by a senior judge; at the same time traditional makkatas will rule on the combo. The judge is no prob’, but the makkatas have to come in from over there.’ Swai-Phillips jerked a thumb over his shoulder; then, seeing his client’s incomprehension, qualified this: ‘Y’know, from the desert. Anyways, so long as you’ve been deemed astande, you can immediately begin restitution to the Intwennyfortee mob—’
Tom waved the lawyer down; none of this arcane legal stuff was getting through to him. What had registered, however, was Swai-Phillips’s earlier assumption. ‘What makes you so certain’ — Tom chose his words carefully — ‘that I’ll be moving out of the Mimosa in the morning? My wife and kids aren’t set to fly until—’
‘Please, Mr Brodzinski, look behind you.’
Tom whipped round: the twins, Jeremy and Lucas, were playing in the flower bed at the front of the apartment block. As he watched, Jerry picked up a handful of bark chips and slung them at his brother. Tommy Junior was preoccupied, lost in a solipsistic frolic, leadenly cavorting at the kerbside, his partner a wheeled flight bag that he jerked back and forth by its handle.
At that moment, the double glass doors swung open, and Martha and Dixie emerged, between them manhandling the enormous suitcase that conveyed the bulk of the family’s effects.
Tom swivelled back to face Swai-Phillips’s bug eyes. It was a disconcerting reprise of the scene that had been played in the same location, by the same cast, that morning. Only this time, Tom voiced his unease: ‘How did’ya know they were leaving? How! Are, are you. .’ he said, floundering, ‘. . psychic or something?’
Swai-Phillips began to utter his maddening, stagy laugh. However, he was forestalled by Martha, who let go of the suitcase and came barrelling across to the SUV. She wrenched the passenger door open and, leaning across her husband, began shouting at the lawyer: ‘What the fuck’s your game, mister? Have you got your hooks into my husband? Whaddya want from us, money? Slimy, fucking money!’
Even the imperturbable Swai-Phillips seemed taken aback by this turn of events. Involuntarily, he reached up and swept off his glasses. It was as if — it occurred to Tom later — he was refusing a blindfold, the better to impress his insouciance on this one-woman firing squad by staring her down.
Except that the lawyer couldn’t really stare anyone down once his mask was removed. For, while one of his eyes was keenly green and steady, the other was rolled back in its socket, and half obscured by a pink gelatinous membrane that cut obliquely across the white. The three of them froze, shocked in different ways by the revelation of this deformity. Certainly, neither Tom nor Martha Brodzinski had ever seen anything like it before.
4
Later on, as the Brodzinskis waited at the check-in for an elderly Anglo couple to redistribute their hoard of native knick-knacks, Tom asked his wife why she’d reacted with such vehemence.
It was a mistake. Up until that moment they’d been getting on. Tom had accepted there was little to be gained by Martha and the kids staying, while, if they left immediately, they’d be able to fly home direct, with only one brief stop for refuel-ling in Agania.
For her part, Martha had refrained from berating her husband in front of the children. She had even, as they sat jammed beside each other in the back of the cab, taken Tom’s sweaty hand in her own cool one and given it a series of rhythmic squeezes, as if seeking to pump into him a little of her steely resolve.
However, when Tom raised the issue of Swai-Phillips, Martha’s expression hardened. She turned away from him, completed the check-in procedure, then sent the kids over to the gift shop with a couple of bills. Motioning to Tom, she led him in the opposite direction, towards a towering shrubbery: entire trees, strung with creepers, were planted in an enormous container, together with a basalt boulder.
Once they were concealed behind this, Martha let him have it. ‘I understand you made a mistake, Tom,’ she began reasonably enough, ‘but the way you insist on compounding it is beyond me. It’s like you’ve got some kinda urge to drag yourself down — and the rest of us with you. Jesus Christ!’ she spat, then gnawed with perfect teeth at the heel of her hand, a pathetic signal of distress that Tom couldn’t remember her making since the dark days, shortly after they’d adopted Tommy Junior, and he was — albeit tentatively — being diagnosed.
‘I–I. . I’m not sure I know. .’ He groped for the right formula to appease her. ‘I mean, I thought you — you were angry when I was rude to him, to Swai-Phillips.’
‘Jesus-fucking-Christ!’ she spat again. ‘I wanted you to be polite to the man, not sign away our entire fucking livelihood to him. Don’t you get anything? Don’t you realize where you are? These people are laughing at you — laughing all the way to the fucking bank.’
Tom ran a hand over his brush-cut hair; its thickness reassured him, and his headache had succumbed to two hefty painkillers. He felt gutsy enough to come back at her: ‘Look, Martha, maybe you’re right, in part, but I do know where I am — right here, and Swai-Phillips is a local attorney, he knows all about this local stuff, the way native and codified laws work together. Shit, even Adams, the Consul, he says Swai-Phillips is the man in Vance — or one of them.’
‘The man, the man,’ Martha mocked him. ‘And what does that make you, a man’s man? No, lissen to me, Tom. I told you before we came here to read those books, really read them, not just drift off over them ’cause you’d had your evening toke and your Seven and fucking Seven. This is a big, dangerous, confused country, and these people are not your friends — none of them.
‘While you were getting in with them, I was making my own inquiries. Seems Adams hasn’t been with the State Department for over ten years — he’s just the Honorary Consul, he hasn’t got any more leverage than you.’
Tom was unmanned. He stood face down to the polished floor of the terminal. The scissoring brushes wielded by a downtrodden-looking Tugganarong pushed a sausage of lint past where they stood.
Eventually, he said what he thought she wanted to hear: ‘What should I do, then?’
Martha pursed her lips; her long neck kinked in irritation. It had been the wrong thing to say.
‘Do? I dunno, Tom, but if I was you, I’d at least check with the embassy down south. If they can’t advise you by phone, I’d get on a goddamn flight and go see them. You’ve got bail, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, but I’m not sure if—’ He was going to explain about state and federal jurisdictions in this part of the world, thereby demonstrating that he wasn’t completely ignorant.
After twenty years of marriage Martha could anticipate this from tone alone. ‘One thing I need you to realize, Tom, is this: this is all your own doing, one hundred per cent. You’ve screwed this one up, just like you screwed up that real estate business in Munnings, and my goddamn brother’s health insurance.’
‘That—’
‘I don’t want to hear it. You’ve screwed this up like you’ve screwed up your relationship with Dixie, with Tommy Junior, and the way you’re on target to do the same with the twins. .’
Now she was under way, Martha could have kept going indefinitely, had not Tommy Junior discovered them in their toxic bower. He stared at his quarelling parents, his brown eyes shiny and indifferent, then he forcibly turned his mother by her shoulders to face the departures board.