He found the taxi rank on the edge of the station, next to a vast market. The driver was unwilling to leave until he had a full load of passengers and Walker sat wearily in the back of a dilapidated Mercedes, shoving himself a little further into the corner every time someone else climbed in. A woman was squeezed up next to him, clutching bags of bulging shopping. As the car turned a corner one of her bags spilled over and fruit and vegetables went rolling across the floor. Walker bent down to help retrieve things and saw that an egg box had come open and one egg had smashed over his shoe. As soon as he saw it he was overwhelmed by a feeling of giddiness. The woman apologized and began dabbing clumsily at his shoe with a clump of tissues. Walker forced himself to smile, insisted it didn’t matter. He breathed deeply, opened and closed his eyes, waiting for this sudden surge of giddiness, of vertigo, to pass.
Once he had booked into a hotel Walker sent a letter to Malory. In fact he sent ten of them, putting blank sheets of paper in envelopes and sending them to him care of American Express in towns he may have passed through. On each of the envelopes he wrote ‘Please forward if necessary’. If he had nothing else to go on — no idea of where Malory had gone next — he could stop at each of the towns and ask if there was any mail for him, Alex Malory. Nine times out of ten the letters would be waiting but occasionally, he hoped, they would have arrived at a place Malory had actually passed through. If the mail had been picked up, then Malory had been there between the letter’s arrival and Walker’s own. If they were sent to a place Malory had already left, it was possible that he would have arranged to have letters forwarded. In this way the letter served as a kind of tracking device, an advance scout.
Beyond that he had little idea what to do in Usfret, a dirty, crowded, sour-smelling town. He walked the streets looking for — for what? For a sign that Malory may have passed through, an indication of where he had gone. He felt pointless, absurd — and then, on his second day in the city, he saw Malory.
Walker was heading towards Americas Square in the middle of the city. As he got nearer to the square the streets became more and more crowded. In the Spanish quarter, where some kind of fiesta was in progress, it became difficult to move. That was as nothing, however, compared with the crush that Walker found himself in twenty minutes later in the area around the square itself. The streets here felt like the packed terraces of a soccer stadium. By the time Walker saw it was hopeless — that he would never get to the square — it was impossible to extricate himself from the crush; he could go only in the general direction of the crowd. In places — by the entrance to subway stations especially — the crowd had congealed completely. People trying to get out of the subway found the exit plugged by crowds attempting to come in. A woman lost her footing and disappeared from sight. It seemed certain she would be trampled underfoot but she emerged, ashen, weeping, a few seconds later.
The crowd was not uniformly dense and as long as you abandoned all volition and went where the crowd willed, a degree of movement was possible. After the crush around the food stalls Walker found himself in a less compacted part of the crowd. Stumbling through the undergrowth of feet which trod and tripped over his own, he took brief faltering steps. Up ahead a man was trying to manoeuvre his bicycle through the crowd — and there, right next to him, was Malory. The realization passed through Walker like a shock. It couldn’t be but it was, he was sure. The very randomness of the sighting, the almost instinctive recognition, was virtual proof of that. Walker yelled out above the hubbub of the crowd, ‘Malory!’ A dozen faces turned round, Malory’s among them. There was a brief surge and the faces turned immediately away. He yelled again and this time more people turned back — but not Malory, who seemed to be making an effort to move through the crowd. Walker shoved his way past the bodies in front of him. Malory was moving with the general flow of the crowd, not straining to get ahead but maintaining a steady ten yards between himself and Walker. Elbowing his way more aggressively, incurring curses and retaliatory shoves, Walker closed the gap to three yards. Malory continued moving forward, so calmly that the surrounding people would not have guessed he was trying to get clear of the figure barging and squirming behind him. The calm was deceptive, for Walker saw now that every time a slight gap opened in the crowd Malory used that opportunity to gain a few yards’ advantage. There was a ripple of shoving and stumbling ahead of Walker and he saw Malory abruptly stranded in a pack of bodies. The crowd formed contour lines which had bunched themselves tightly around Malory, but Walker was still able to move relatively easily. He barged through the scrum of bodies, his arms coming clear of the surface of shoulders like a swimmer’s. A wave of shoves passed through the crowd. Malory tottered but people were packed so tight around him that it was impossible to fall. Using his arms like a wedge and then slipping into the gap, Walker moved within two yards of Malory but here the crowd was so dense that no movement was possible. Panic was spreading. There was another shove from behind. Three people disappeared from sight, initiating a counter-surge which sent everyone lurching in the other direction. Walker lost his footing but was immediately wedged upright by the press of bodies from the other side. He glared round and joined in the shouts of recrimination, aware that by elbowing his way through the crowd he had helped set up the ripples and currents of panic which were threatening to engulf him. Malory was only a yard away. Walker’s arms were pinned by his side; if he could have raised them above the pack of people he could have reached out and touched his shoulder. For five minutes they remained like this, the crowd like a vast millipede, swaying on tiny legs which were always about to collapse beneath it. Surges and counter-surges rocked through the crowd until the crush began to ease. Malory moved a few steps and then another yard. Walker stumbled forward and then found himself penned in again. Moments later he was able to move, but all the time the distance between himself and Malory was increasing. It was like being in an ocean: currents and eddies, powerful rip-tides, sucked you in the opposite direction to that in which you wanted to go. This worked well for Malory, who moved whichever way the current took him, but for Walker it made the task of following him impossible. Where the crowd urged Malory in one direction, a few moments later it tugged Walker away in the other. Malory was ten yards clear now and it was impossible to beat a path through to him. There was another surge and Walker was swept further from Malory, forced to the other side of a row of parked cars. He felt a hard shove in the back. Stumbled and grabbed the shoulder of the woman in front, almost dragging her to her knees. He regained his balance and looked round but there was no sign of Malory in the spot where he had last seen him.
Monitoring footage of the scene, police gradually dispersed the crowd but Walker remained trapped for several hours more. By any normal standards it was still fantastically crowded but eventually he stumbled into his hotel, shocked by the empty expanse of the lobby.
He was exhausted, his muscles ached and his back and arms were bruised. Soaking in a bath he went over and over the day’s events until he began doubting whether it was actually Malory he had seen. And even if it had been, Walker was now as far away from him as ever. The fact that he had been within a yard of Malory meant nothing.