The man also wore wrap-around reflective sunglasses, the cord of which lay on his broad shoulders. Yet, far from annulling his features, this near-clownish mask of plastic and hair only enhanced them.
Tom couldn’t tell what ethnic group — or mixture of ethnicities — the man’s face betokened. The sharp, flat triangle of a nose and the high cheekbones suggested he was Asiatic, but his skin was too red for this. His sheer bulk might mean he was Tugganarong — or had Tugganarong blood — for the Feltham Islanders often tipped the scales at over 300 pounds. However, the island people, unlike the mainland natives, had only sparse and wispy body hair.
Could the hair be the result of a generous measure of Anglo genes? Tom considered. Or was the man a member of some grouping previously unknown to him?
The driver forestalled all of this by flicking a finger to his brow in casual salute, and saying a single word: ‘Hi.’
This ‘Hi’ — lazy, apparently unconcerned — brought with it an astonishingly physical sensation of psychic intrusion. Tom felt the hairs rise on his neck — and even his arms. He began to sweat. It was as if the clown-masked man had walked in through one of his eyes, and was now crouching down in the bony cave of Tom’s skull. It was altogether uncanny, and Tom couldn’t recall ever having had such a vivid first impression of anyone before.
Certainly not of Martha. Martha, who now emerged from the SUV herself. The way she sidled from one haunch to the other, the way she extended a slim foot to the ground, the way her long neck arched — all of it recalled to her husband the first time he had seen her, across a crowded room, at a dull party in their home town. It was this air of languorous self-containment that had attracted him twenty years before, and which now impinged upon him once again. For, just as the clown-masked man had marched into his head, so Martha, quietly and deliberately, seemed to be quitting it.
‘Tom,’ she said, coming across to him, ‘this is Mister—’
‘Jethro, Jethro Swai-Phillips,’ the man cut in, and reached out his hand. Tom noted that the fingers were of equal length, so that the whole appendage seemed squared off and artificial. Tom took hold of it reluctantly, thinking: how many goddamn times am I gonna have to shake hands today? It’s like these people really do have to check that a man’s not packing a gun.
‘Jethro saw us waiting at the taxi stand in town,’ Martha explained. ‘There were no cabs; apparently there’s some kind of a race meet on today, so he, very kindly, offered us a ride.’
‘It’s the least I could do for visitors to my country, yeah,’ Swai-Phillips boomed. He had the deep yet ebullient tones of a voiceover for a radio advertisement. ‘We have a saying here,’ he continued. ‘ “The wayside inn should have as many beds as there are folk under the setting sun.” ’
‘Is that what you do?’ Tom asked, keen to put the conversation on the ground of masculine competitiveness. ‘Are you a hotelier?’
‘Lord, no!’ Swai-Phillips laughed — a big rich laugh with overtones of helpless hilarity. ‘No, no, I’m a lawyer. And I hope you’ll forgive me, but your good lady here took the liberty of filling me in on your current difficulties, right?’
Christ! How that meaningless interrogative the locals involuntarily added to the end of their sentences annoyed Tom.
‘It’s nothing,’ he snapped at the lawyer. ‘Everything’s fine.’
Realizing he was overreacting, yet powerless to stop himself, Tom took a twin in each hand, gripping their shoulders as if they were suitcase handles, and started back towards the front door of the Mimosa. Martha sucked her breath in through gritted teeth. However, Swai-Phillips refused to be snubbed. ‘No,’ he boomed after Tom, ‘I don’t believe it is nothing. You’re not in your own country now, Mr Brodzinski. Personal-injury cases here can be more than just financially costly, yeah?’
Tom let go of the eight-year-olds — who were already protesting at their frogmarch — and whirled about. ‘What is this?’ he cried. ‘Are you some fucking ambulance-chaser? Is that your thing, man?’
Martha made as if to admonish her husband, but Swai-Phillips seemed not in the least put out. ‘I mean it,’ he said coolly. ‘Not just financially costly, although good representation can be expensive.’ He extended the strange hand again, a white oblong aligned with its blocky digits. Martha took the card. ‘I don’t do no win-no fee personal-injury cases,’ he remarked perfunctorily. ‘In fact, few lawyers here in Vance will, and certainly not if the plaintiff has any connection to traditional people. But then, the Consul probably told you that already, right?’
Swai-Phillips inclined his neat globe of a head towards Martha, as if he were tipping his hat to her. Then he repositioned his sunglasses.
‘Good day, madam,’ he said. ‘It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance, and, of course, that of your children.’ Then the mirror-tinted window of the SUV whined upwards, replacing Swai-Phillips’s clownish mask with a reflection of the Brodzinskis’ own stunned faces, and the big car pulled away.
They stared after its tail lights as it bounced up on to the roadway. Martha was almost exploding with rage, but Tom felt utterly disconnected.
How could he have known? he uselessly interrogated himself. How the hell did he know that I’d seen the Consul?
3
After a full — obscenely costly — hour on the phone in the apartment, Tom managed to secure three days’ postponement on their flights home. First he blustered, then he wheedled, and finally he begged the airline clerk. In the end, he was charged only $500 extra, but the changed bookings meant they would have to depart Vance at 4 a.m., then make two stopovers: the first at Faikwong, and the second at Tippurliah, which Tom had never heard of before, but which turned out to be a tiny atoll in the middle of the Pacific.
‘How can, like, international flights stop there?’ Dixie asked him when he’d come off the call, and was consulting his pocket atlas. ‘I mean, it’s like the size of a, like, fingernail or something.’
‘I dunno,’ her father groaned. ‘It must be ’cause there’s a military installation in that neck of the woods. At the end of World War II, they laid out strips for Superfortresses on some of these flyspecks. Anyway, we’re gonna be there for seventeen hours, so we’ll have plenty of time to find out.’
‘I’ve gotta, like, jones for Faikwong,’ Dixie said, changing tack; ‘everyone says the malls there are, like, totally out of this world. I wanna get some cool stuff.’
‘Me too.’
Tommy Junior had lumbered into the main room of the apartment and stood gurning up at his games console, which he held in an outstretched hand. ‘This thing is way obsolete — they’ll have the latest VX90 in Faikwong. It’ll be way cheap too.’
‘I don’t know where you guys think the money for all this is going to come from. .’ Tom began reasonably enough, but as he spoke his voice began to rise and rise, with little aggrieved yelps. ‘Neither of you seems to’ve sicked on to the fact that your father — that’s me, guys — is in some serious trouble, here.
‘Changing the flights has already cost five hundred bucks; there isn’t any money left over for your toys. I may need a lot more money than we’ve got to deal with this situation at all. I don’t even expect Tommy to understand any of this, but you, Dixie, are you as goddamn stupid as him, or are you just INCREDIBLY FUCKING SELFISH!’
The blood drained from the teenage girl’s tanned face, leaving bone-white patches underneath her eyes. Her long neck jerked back, and the absurd disc of greased blonde hair, which sat on her head like an ugly halo, knocked against a hotel-chain abstract in an aluminium frame.