‘I don’t know what to say,’ Tom said at last, superfluously.
‘Really’ — Adams, having delivered his body-blow, was almost emollient — ‘the situation is nothing to worry about. So far as I’m aware Mr Lincoln is making a full recovery, no?’
‘When I left him early this morning, in the hospital, he was already sitting up in bed. To be honest, Mr Adams’ — Tom winced, he could hear the note of childish self-exculpation re-entering his voice even as he spoke — ‘I’m not even sure that his collapse has anything to do with the — the butt. I mean, he is very old.’
Adams exhaled through pursed lips, and Tom was reminded of the first, satiated exhalation of the smoking day.
‘Well,’ the Consul said, ‘that’s good. Very good. If he makes a speedy recovery, it will simply be a matter of basic compensation for the Intwennyfortee, and the charges will quietly be dropped.’
‘Meaning?’ Tom thought of his credit cards, the plastic pacemakers on his avaricious heart.
‘I would expect her clan to ask for some new cooking pots, a couple of hunting rifles, maybe ten thousand dollars. These can be very practical people, Mr Brodzinski.’
‘What about Mr Lincoln himself?’ There it was again, the querulous note. ‘Don’t his wishes come into this? Couldn’t I, like, reason with him?’
Again, the smokeless blow: ‘Er, no — not exactly.’ Adams leaned forward, steepling long, aristocratic fingers. ‘Certainly, Mr Lincoln’s goodwill is a desirable thing, but once he’s been harmed by another, he becomes inquivoo — which is to say, inert, passive in the matter. For the desert tribes, all important aspects of their existence are governed by this principle: when to act, and when to remain still. Astande and inquivoo. If—’
Adams was warming to his little anthropology seminar. Tom cut him short: ‘What if Mr Lincoln gets worse — sicker, I mean?’
‘Let’s consider that eventuality if it happens, shall we?’ Adams hadn’t taken kindly to the interruption. He tapped the papers. ‘Sign and date, here, here and here. I need to lodge these papers right away at the Interior Ministry.’
Tom picked up the fountain pen and did as he was told. Then he handed the pen and papers back to the Consul, who took a final slug of his coffee, then unfolded himself from beneath the table. Tom accompanied the long drip-dry streak of neatness out into the parking lot, feeling slobbish and juvenile in his short pants and sandals.
Outside the sun was jackhammering down on whitish concrete, viridian grass, bluish blacktop. A mile or so to the south, the pale blocks of Vance’s civic centre — the big hotels, municipal and corporate offices, the hypodermic spire of the Provincial State Assembly — flapped in the convection, as if they were the sails of an urban clipper, about to cast off from this protracted and alien shore. Beyond them, the green hills of the Great Dividing Range mounted, in a seemingly endless procession of lush dips and heavily forested spurs, to the horizon.
Tom was surprised to discover that, far from driving one of the ubiquitous SUVs which anyone of consequence in Vance — Anglo, Tugganarong or native — owned, Adams had a distinctly battered old Japanese hatchback. He slung his briefcase on to the back seat of this, then took off his seersucker jacket and folded it with precise movements. Before getting into the car, he turned to Tom. ‘Where, may I ask, are your wife and children?’
‘I think they went downtown. We’re scheduled to fly home tomorrow, and the kids wanted to see the terrarium, and. .’ he said, tripping into despondency, ‘. . a whole lot of other stuff.’
Adams ignored this remark. ‘Do you have a local cellphone, Mr Brodzinski?’
‘No, and my own can’t use the local networks.’
‘Then I suggest you, ah, rent one; you may be needing it. Also, you need to consider the possibility of a lawyer.’
Clearly, this was Adams’s way of saying that Tom would have to stay behind, while Martha and the kids flew home. As if to emphasize this, the Consul reached into his shirt pocket and came out with a card. ‘You can reach me on my cell at any time,’ he said, ‘or leave a message on the ansaphone. I pick them up regularly.’
Tom took the card with one hand and stretched out the other. Once again, the Consul patted it. Adams got down into the little car. It was going to be an awkward parting. Adams wound down the window, but his gaze was fixed straight ahead, to where sprinkler jets played on the hurting, emerald green of the sports field, with its three anomalous goal posts like keep-fit gibbets. He started the car.
Hating himself for doing it, Tom leaned down and, to prevent Adams from driving away, placed his hands on the car door.
Where has my cool gone? I’m blabbing like a fucking wimp. . Tom railed at himself, but to the Consul he said: ‘I–I didn’t realize any of this stuff, you know. About, um, customary law. I though this was, like, a developed country — it certainly sells itself that way so it can rake in the tourist bucks.’
The Consul withered up at Tom. It would have been a relief if he’d given another of his bite-sized lectures, pointing out that ignorance of the law was no defence, or perhaps detailing a few more ethnographic facts. Instead, Adams only withered at him for a while longer, then resolutely put the car into shift.
‘Call me later,’ he snapped, ‘or I’ll call you.’ Then he pulled away. The tin-pot Toyota halted at the cross street for a moment, then turned right along Dundas Boulevard, towards the ridiculous white marble pyramid of the casino on the seafront.
Tom stood for a while looking after him, then peered down at the card in his hand. It had the usual heavy weave of government service stationery. Underneath the flag, and the mysteriously armed bird of prey — what could it possibly do with those spears and lightning bolts? — was embossed WINTHROP ADAMS, HONORARY CONSUL; then an address, which Tom, despite his ignorance of Vance, recognized as being residential.
‘Honorary Consul’? Tom mused. Presumably, this meant that Adams wasn’t a full-time government employee, or even that he came under the auspices of the embassy in the capital down south?
Tom was pondering this when a large red SUV swerved into the parking lot and bounced to a halt beside him. He recoiled, then stepped forward, intent on giving the reckless driver a piece of his disordered mind. But before he could, the driver’s window was reeled down to disclose a truly striking visage, while the back door of the SUV burst open, and Tom’s younger children came galumphing out.
The eight-year-old twins, Jeremy and Lucas, leaped at Tom, pummelling his chest, and both piping at once.
‘We saw crocodiles, Dad!’
‘And snakes! Big snakes!’
‘One had eaten, like, a goat!’
‘And you could see hoofs sticking out of its tummy!’
Tom’s daughter, Dixie, put one long leg down from the vehicle, and her father noted, with annoyance, that she had had her blonde hair done up in the discoid coif of a desert tribeswoman. Tom had seen other female Anglo tourists affecting this look, and he’d remarked to Dixie and Martha how unbecoming it was: their hair scraped up and oiled, so that their pink scalps were exposed. He would have forcefully expressed his displeasure right away, were it not for the imposing oddity of the SUV’s driver.
He must have been ten years or so younger than Tom — a man in the full rude vigour of his mid thirties. Certainly, the copper-skinned torso framed by the SUV’s window was highly toned: every pectoral and abdominal muscle clearly defined. That the man was naked from the waist up was not that remarkable, but his Afro of tight, almost white-grey curls was striking, as was the goatee-and-moustache combination he sported, which was beautifully trimmed.