The cloud cover was very low this morning. So low that the top half of the Metro-Center disappeared in its draggled fringes. There were dashes of rain on the pitted, oily surface of the lot, although the day’s serious downpours were still some way off.
Tom prodded Adams: ‘C’mon, what is a goddamn tontine?’
But the Consul wouldn’t be drawn. ‘I daresay you’ll discover, ah, en route, Brodzinski. Think of it as adding a little excitement to the journey. Frankly, I envy you. Driving for day after day across that amazing landscape, towering mountains like mere ripples on the horizon. .
‘Y’know, Tom’ — the romantic image tilted Adams into intimacy — ‘the desert folks believe the land is always becoming — never, ah, finished. That every time a traveller visits a region it, ah, springs into being for him, taking on the characteristics of his own mind. .’
As he trailed off, Tom thought back to their first encounter in the breakfast room at the Mimosa Apartments. Then, Adams had seemed the very epitome of buttoned-down, diplomatic rectitude: the kind of Ivy League second-rater who reaches his peak when he makes the right fraternity, and who then finds a niche in the State Department where he can slowly decline. Now, Tom wasn’t so sure. Was Adams perhaps a little unhinged?
Perhaps to confirm this — as well as to display his mind-reading abilities — the Honorary Consul lifted his left hand high in the air, then brought it down to truffle in the hair at the back of his head. It was an action Tom had seen him perform before, yet it was too studied to be gestural.
The car-rental clerk rustled up. Drawing Tom’s attention to the unusual position of the spare wheel — which was housed beneath the front fender — she said, ‘It’s only an emergency tyre, yeah, so don’t do over forty on it, or go off the hardtop.’
‘Isn’t that a little dumb?’ Tom objected. ‘I mean, it’s an off-roader, and as I understand it mostly we’ll be driving on dirt, with big distances between road stops — hundreds of miles.’
She slapped this down with a hard fact: ‘Lissen, this here is the only rental car you’ll get for over there — I mean, blokes like you.’
Her eyes slid across to where Mulgrene was unloading plastic-wrapped bales of diapers from the back of his Land-cruiser. Prentice loitered near by, smoking as usual.
‘It’s not a bad car,’ she continued emolliently, as she slid into the front seat. ‘You can drive a stick-shift, yeah? Five front, one rear, then this switch here takes you into 4WD, right.’
The SUV looked too short in the wheelbase for rough terrain, and the roof was as high as Tom’s head. The front seats were cramped — the back one only a narrow bench, and the trunk was clearly inadequate. Tom began to fret.
‘Where am I gonna put my bag? Let alone all the stuff I’ve gotta take on to Ralladayo?’
Nor did he like the fact that the SUV was a bright white. He’d assumed they would be given one with desert colours — or even a camouflage job.
‘Don’t get your knickers in a twist,’ Prentice said jocularly. ‘There’s a roof-rack, y’know.’
Ever since Prentice had turned up at the Entreati Experience that morning, he had been the dead soul of bumptiousness. He seemed to think it a fine jaunt to be travelling thousands of miles to make reparation for the sick crimes he had committed. Either that — or his crimes had been so vile that the desert trip was judicial leniency.
Tom thrust his flight bag into the cavity behind the driver’s seat. There was hardly anything in it anyway: just toiletries, a few T-shirts and pairs of short pants, some underwear, and his copy of the Von Sassers’ Songs of the Tayswengo. The rest of the pathetic flotsam left behind after the wreck of his family holiday, he had dumped in a cardboard box that the manager of the Experience said he would keep safe.
Then there was the parcel that Gloria Swai-Phillips had left at the hostel for Tom to take to the Tontines. Football-sized and shaped, it was wrapped in layers of newspaper and tied up with string; ready, apparently, for children’s hands to tear it apart when the music stopped.
Prentice pointed at his own bag — which was of the squashed, retro-Gladstone type — with the tip of his cigarette. ‘I say, Brodzinski, d’you mind?’
‘Mind?’ Tom snapped. ‘Mind what?’
‘Mind slinging it in the boot for me. My elbow’s playing up.’ He flexed it pathetically. ‘Beastly gyp — can’t seem to shake it.’
Adams came over. ‘Commander Squolloppoloppou’s men will meet you at the Goods Shed Store; it’s at Webley and Frangipani—’
‘I know,’ Prentice put in.
The Consul ignored him and continued: ‘You can get the rifles and such there. Prentice, I believe, needs to obtain his, ah, medications. You’ll have to give the police this copy of the Court Mandate, and this one of your original visa-rights waiver; in return they’ll give you your laissez-passer. I’m afraid I’ll have to take your passport now; you won’t, ah, be needing it.’
They exchanged the relevant documentation, Adams neatly tucking Tom’s passport away in his floppy briefcase. To Tom, it felt as if they had come full circle, back to the breakfast room of the Mimosa. Adams had retreated from him since the night they had eaten binturang together. The Consul had sealed himself inside the ziplock bag of his professional detachment.
Tom got into the car. Adams leaned down to the window and fixed him with his chilly blue eyes. ‘As I’ve had cause to remark before, the law here works in a roundabout way. Trust me, Brodzinski, deliver the goods to the Intwenny-fortee, come back here, and the situation will have changed — maybe not today or tomorrow, but some day soon, and then it will have changed for the rest of your life.’
By way of an answer, Tom turned the key in the ignition. The SUV spluttered into life. He glanced sideways to check out if Prentice had finished his deliberations with his own diplomat, then said: ‘Understood.’
‘OK?’ Adams probed.
‘OK,’ Tom reluctantly conceded.
The clerk shouldered Adams aside. ‘The law of the car is that it takes diesel, not petrol. Remember that,’ she laughed. ‘Or you’ll be in big shit.’
Tom revved the engine, and it clattered like that of an old prop plane.
‘It’s possible,’ Adams resumed, obviously reluctant to let Tom go, ‘that I may, ah, run into you in the Tontine Townships. I have consular business that takes me—’
But Adams’s valedictory words were blown away as Tom, tiring of the situation, banged his foot on the gas. The SUV shot across the lot and skidded into the roadway.
‘Whoa!’ Prentice cried. ‘Sir Colm had his hand on the window — you could’ve hurt him.’
Tom pulled up at a cross street and glared across at him. ‘I want one goddamn thing straight with you, Prentice, from the start.’
‘W-What’s that?’
‘No smoking in the fucking car. Got it? No smoking in the fucking car. Do that, and we just might make it through this without me wringing your goddamn neck.’
Tom drove on. The anger felt good — a deep-heat embro-cation rubbed into his irritation, which was — he thought — the psychic equivalent of Prentice’s increasingly disgusting fungal infection.
‘No need to play the giddy ox, old chap.’ Prentice said. ‘You had only to ask.’
He flipped his butt out the window, then inserted his flat fish hands between his denim thighs, muttering, ‘I have the feeling this isn’t the start of a wonderful relationship.’
An unmarked car was parked up in the lot at the Goods Shed Store. Even Tom, who knew little of such things, could see that it was armour plated, and that the whiplash aerial was too long for a civilian vehicle. In it, three cops were gollydollying to each other. Their coppery beach-ball faces were impassive, their complicated caps were jammed down on their heads. Beneath their see-through rain capes their side arms were obscenely lethal.