by Hugh Laurie
Yes, of course, credit is not the point of the exercise. But then again, it's easy to say that when you've got some. Credit, I mean. And men just don't get any these days. In the sexual arena, men are judged by female standards. You may hiss and tut and draw in your breath as sharply as you like, but it's true. (Yes, obviously, men judge women in other spheres -patronise them, tyrannise them, exclude them, oppress them, make them utterly miserable - but in matters of a writhing nature, the mark on the bench was put down by women. It is for the Fiat Panda to try and be like the Volvo, not the other way round.) You just don't hear men criticising women for taking fifteen minutes to reach a climax; and if you do, it's not with any implied accusation of weakness, or arrogance, or self-centredness. Men, generally, just hang their heads and say yes, that's the way her body is, that's what she needed from me, and I couldn't deliver it. I'm crap and I'll leave at once, as soon as I can find my other sock.
Which, to be honest, is unfair, bordering on the ridiculous. In the same way that it would be ridiculous to call a Fiat Panda a crap car, just because you can't fit a wardrobe in the back. It might be crap for all sorts of other reasons - it breaks down, or it uses a lot of oil, or it's lime-green with the word 'turbo' written pathetically across the back window - but it's not crap because of the one characteristic that it was specifically designed to have: smallness. Neither is a Volvo a crap car, simply because it won't squeeze past the barrier in the Safeways car-park and allow you to get out without paying.
Burn me on a mound of faggots if you like, but the two machines are just plain different, and that's that. Designed to do different things, at different speeds, on different types of roads. They're different. Not the same. Unalike.
There, I've said it. And I don't feel any better.
Latifa and I made love twice before breakfast, and once afterwards, and by mid-morning I'd managed to remember Burnt Umber, which made thirty-one, something of a personal record.
'Cisco,' I said, 'tell me something.'
'Sure, Rick. Go ahead.'
He glanced across at me, then reached down to the dashboard and popped the cigarette lighter.
I thought, for a long, slow, Minnesotan moment.
'Where does the money come from?'
We travelled about two kilometres before he answered.
We were in Francisco's Alfa Romeo, just the two of us, gradually reeling in the Autoroute de Soleil from Marseille to Paris, and if he let 'Born In The USA' go round just once more on the tape-deck, I was probably going to have a nosebleed.
Three days had passed since the shooting of Dirk Van Der Hoewe, and The Sword Of Justice was feeling pretty invincible by now, because the newspapers had started to discuss other matters and the police were scratching their computerised, intelligence-gathering heads at the lack of any firm leads.
'Where does the money come from,' Francisco repeated eventually, drumming the steering-wheel with his fingers.
'Yeah,' I said.
The motorway hummed by. Wide, straight, French.
'Why do you want to know?'
I shrugged.
'Just... you know ... just thinking.'
He laughed like a crazy rock 'n' roll thing.
'Don't you think, Ricky, my friend. You just do. You good at doing. Stick with that.'
I laughed too, because this was Francisco's way of making me feel good. If he'd been six inches taller, he'd have ruffled my hair like a big-hearted older brother.
'Yeah. I was just thinking, though ...'
I stopped. For thirty seconds we both sat a little straighter in our seats as a dark-blue Gendarme Peugeot cruised past. Francisco eased fractionally off the accelerator and let it go.
'I was thinking,' I said, 'like when I paid the check at the hotel, you know ... and I thought, like, that's a lot of money ... you know ... like six of us ... hotels and stuff... plane tickets . . . lots of money. And I thought. . . like, where's it coming from? You know, somebody's paying, right?'
Francisco nodded wisely, as if he was trying to help me with a complicated problem involving girlfriends.
'Sure, Ricky. Somebody's paying. Somebody's got to pay, all the time.'
'Right,' I said. 'That's what I thought. Somebody's got to pay. So, like, I thought... you know ...who?'
He kept his eyes to the front for a while, then slowly turned and looked at me. For a long time. So long, that I had to keep flicking my eyes to the road in front to make sure there wasn't a fleet of jack-knifing lorries ahead of us.
In between these glances, I shone back at him with as much innocent stupidity as I could manage. Ricky's not dangerous, I was trying to say. Ricky's an honest infantryman. Ricky's a simple soul who just wants to know who's paying his wages. Ricky is not - never has been, and never will be - a threat.
I chuckled, nervously.
'You going to watch the road?' I said. 'I mean, like... you know.'
Francisco chewed his lip for a moment, then suddenly laughed with me and turned back to face the front.
'You remember Greg?' he said, in a happy, sing-song way.
I frowned, heavily, because unless a thing happened in the last few hours, Ricky's not sure he can remember it too well.
'Greg,' he said again. 'With the Porsche. With the cigars. Took your picture for the passport.'
I waited a while, and then nodded vigorously.
'Greg, sure, I remember him,' I said. 'Drove a Porsche.'
Francisco smiled. Maybe he was thinking that it didn't matter what he told me, because I'd have forgotten it all by the time we got to Paris.
'That's him. Well now, Greg, he is a clever guy.'
'Yeah?' I said, as if this was a new concept to me.
'Oh sure,' said Francisco. 'Real clever. Clever guy with money. Clever guy with a lot of things.'
I thought about this for a while.
'Seemed like an asshole to me,' I said.
Francisco looked at me in surprise, then let out a yell of delighted laughter, and hammered the steering-wheel with his fist.
'Sure he's an asshole,' he shouted. 'A fucking asshole, yeah.'
I laughed along with him, glowing with pride at having said something to please the master. Eventually, gradually, we both calmed down, and then he reached out a hand and turned off the Bruce Springsteen. I could have kissed him.
'Greg works with another guy,' said Francisco, his face becoming suddenly serious. 'Zurich. They are like finance people. They move money around, do deals, handle a lot of big stuff. Varied stuff. You know?' He looked across at me, and I frowned dutifully back, showing some hard concentration. That seemed to be what he wanted. 'Anyhow, Greg gets a call. Money coming in. Do this with it, do that with it. Sit on it. Lose it. Whatever.'
'You mean, like, we got a bank account?' I said, grinning. Francisco grinned too.
'Sure, we got a bank account, Ricky. We got a lot of bank accounts.'
I shook my head in wonder at the ingenuity of this, and then frowned again.
'So Greg pays money for us, right? But not his money?'
'No, not his money. He deals with it, takes his cut. Big cut, I think, seeing as how he drives a Porsche, and all I got is this fucking Alfa. But it ain't his money.'
'So who?' I said. Probably too quickly. 'I mean, like one guy? Or a lot of guys, or what?'
'One guy,' said Francisco, then took a last, long, deciding look at me - auditing me, weighing me up - trying to remember all the times I'd annoyed him, all the times I'd pleased him; figuring out whether I'd done enough to earn this one piece of information that I had no right or reason to know. Then he sniffed, which is a thing Francisco always did when he was getting ready to say something important.
'I don't know his name,' he said. 'His real name, I mean. But he uses a name for the money. For the banks.'
'Yeah?' I said.
I was trying to make it look as if I wasn't holding my breath. Cisco was teasing me now, drawing the whole thing out for fun.
'Yeah?' I said again.<
br />
'The name is Lucas,' he said at last. 'Michael Lucas.'
I nodded.
'Cool,' I said.
After a while I settled my head back against the window, and pretended to sleep.
There's a thing, I thought, as we thrummed along towards Paris, and Christ knew what. There's a strange piece of philosophy in action. I just hadn't realised that before.
Thou Shalt Not Kill, I'd always assumed, was top of the list. The Big One. Coveting neighbour's asses, obviously, was a thing to avoid; likewise, committing adultery, not honouring thy father and thy mother, and bowing down before graven images.
But Thou Shalt Not Kill. Now that is a Commandment. That's the one everyone can remember, because it seems the rightest, the truest, the most absolute.
The one that everyone forgets is the one about not bearing false witness against thy neighbour. It seems paltry by comparison to Thou Shalt Not Kill. Nit-picking. A parking offence.
But when it's thrust in your face, and when your gut reacts to it seconds before you brain has had a chance even to digest what it's heard, you realise that life, morality, values - they just don't seem to work the way you thought they did.
Murdah shot Mike Lucas through the throat, and that was one of the wickedest things I'd ever seen, in a life not unmarked by the seeing of wicked things. But when Murdah decided, for reasons of convenience, or amusement, or administrative neatness, to bear false witness against the man he'd killed - to take away not just his physical life, but his moral life too; his existence, his memory, his reputation; using his name, blackening it, just to cover his own tracks - so that he could hang the blame for what was to come on a twenty-eight-year-old CIA man who went a little funny in the head, well, that was the point when things started to change for me.
That was the point when I started to get really angry.
Twenty-one
I think I bust a button on my trousers.
MICK JAGGER
Francisco gave us ten days' leave for rest and recreation.
Bernhard said he was going to spend it in Hamburg, and he had a look on his face that seemed to indicate some kind of sexual thing might be involved; Cyrus went to Evian Les Bains, because his mother was dying - although it later turned out that she was dying in Lisbon, and Cyrus simply wanted to be as far away from her as possible when she finally went; Benjamin and Hugo flew to Haifa, for a little scuba diving; and Francisco hung around at the Paris house, acting up the loneliness-of-command role.
I said I was going to London, and Latifa said she'd come with me.
'We have a fucking good time in London. I'll show you things. London is a great town.' She grinned at me, and threw her eyelashes about the place.
'Fuck you,' I said. 'I don't want you hanging off my fucking elbow.'
These were harsh words, obviously, and I really wished I hadn't had to put it like that. But the risk of being in London with Latifa at my side, and some twerp yelling at me in the street, 'Thomas, long time no see, who's the bird?' was just too awful to contemplate. I needed to be able to move freely, and ditching Latifa was the only way I could manage it.
Of course, I could have made up some story about having to visit my grandparents, or my seven children, or my venereal disease counsellor, but in the end I decided that fuck off was less complicated.
I flew from Paris to Amsterdam on the Balfour passport, and then spent an hour trying to shed any Americans who might have been keen enough to follow me. Not that they had any particular reason to. The shooting in Miirren had satisfied most of them that I was a solid team player, and anyway, Solomon had recommended a long leash until the next contact.
Even so, I wanted every pair of eyebrows to be straight and level for the next few days, with nobody, on any side, saying 'hello, what's this?' over something I did or somewhere I went. So at Schiphol airport, I bought a ticket to Oslo and threw it away, then bought a change of clothes and a new pair of sunglasses, and dithered around in the lavatory for a while, before emerging as Thomas Lang, the well-known non-entity.
I arrived at Heathrow at six o'clock in the evening and checked into the Post House hotel; which is a handy place, because it's so close to the airport; and a horrible place, because it's so close to the airport.
I had a long bath, then flopped on to the bed with a packet of cigarettes and an ashtray, and dialled Ronnie's number. I had to ask her for a favour, you see - the kind of favour that you need to take a while to get round to - so I was settling in for a big session.
We talked for a long time, which was nice; nice anyway, but particularly nice because Murdah was, in the very long run, going to have to pay for the call. Just like he was going to have to pay for the champagne and steak I ordered from room service, and the lamp I broke when I tripped on the edge of the bed. I knew, of course, that it would probably take him something like a hundredth of a second to earn enough money to cover it all - but then, when you go to war, you have to be ready to live off small triumphs like this.
While you wait for the big one.
'Mr Collins. Do take a seat.'
The receptionist flicked a switch and spoke into thin air.
'Mr Collins to see Mr Barraclough.'
Of course it wasn't thin air. It was, instead, a wire-thin microphone attached to a headset, buried somewhere inside a big hair-do. But it took me a good five minutes to realise this, during which time I wanted to call somebody and tell them that the receptionist was hallucinating quite seriously.
'Won't be a minute,' she said. To me or the microphone, I'm not sure.
She and I were in the offices of Smeets Velde Kerkplein, which, if nothing else, would presumably score you something pretty decent in a game of Scrabble; and I was Arthur Collins, a painter from Taunton.
I wasn't sure if Philip would remember Arthur Collins, and it didn't really matter if he didn't; but I'd needed some tiny purchase to get me up here to the twelfth floor, and Collins had seemed like the best bet. An improvement, anyway, on Some Bloke Who Once Slept With Your Fiancee.
I got up and paced slowly around the room, cocking my head to one side in a painterly fashion at the various chunks of corporate art that covered the walls. They were, for the most part, huge daubs of grey and turquoise, with the odd -the very odd - streak of scarlet. They looked as if they'd been designed in a laboratory, and probably had, specifically to maximise feelings of confidence and optimism in the breast of the first-time SVK investor. They didn't work for me, but then I was here for other reasons.
A yellow oak door swung open down the corridor and Philip stuck his head out. He squinted at me for a moment, then stepped out and held the door wide.
'Arthur,' he said, a little hesitantly. 'How's it going?'
He was wearing bright yellow braces.
Philip had his back to me, and was half-way through pouring me a cup of coffee.
'My name isn't Arthur,' I said, as I slumped back into a chair.
His head shot round, then shot back again.
'Shit,' he said, and started to suck the cuff of his shirt. Then he turned and shouted towards the open door. 'Jane, darling, get us a cloth, will you?' He looked down at the mess of coffee, milk, and sodden biscuits, and decided that he couldn't be bothered.
'Sorry,' he said, still licking his shirt, 'you were saying?' He sauntered round behind me, making for the sanctuary of his desk. When he got there, he sat down very slowly. Either because he was haemorrhoidal, or because there was a chance that I might do something dangerous. I smiled, to show him that he was haemorrhoidal.
'My name isn't Arthur,' I said again.
There was a pause, and a thousand possible responses clattered through Philip's brain, spinning across his eyes like a fruit-machine.
'Oh?' he said, at last.
Two lemons and a bunch of cherries. Press restart.
'I'm afraid Ronnie lied to you that day,' I said, apologetically.
He tipped himself back in his chair, his face fixed into a cool, pleasant, nothing
-you-can-say-will-ruffle-me smile.
'Did she now?' A pause. 'That was very naughty of her.'
'It wasn't out of guilt. I mean, you must understand, nothing had happened between us.' I left a pause - about the length of time it would take to say 'I left a pause' - and then delivered the punch line. 'At that stage.'
He flinched. Visibly.
"Well of course it was visibly. Because I wouldn't have known about it otherwise. What I mean is, it was a big flinch, almost a jump. Big enough, certainly, to satisfy the square leg umpire.
He looked down at his braces and scraped at one of the brass adjusters with his fingernail.
'At that stage. I see.' Then he looked up at me. 'I'm sorry,' said Philip, 'but I feel as if I should ask you for your real name, before we go any further. I mean, if you're not Arthur Collins, you know...' He trailed off, desperate and panicky, but not wanting to show it. Not in front of me, anyway.
'My name is Lang,' I said. 'Thomas Lang. And let me say first of all that I absolutely realise how much of a shock this will be to you.'
He waved away my attempt at an apology, and sat there for a moment, chewing his knuckle while he thought about what he was going to do next.
He was still sitting like that five minutes later, when the door opened, and a girl in a stripy shirt, presumably Jane, stood there with a tea-towel and Ronnie.
The two women paused in the doorway, eyes flitting here and there, while Philip and I got to our feet and did our own lot of flitting. If you'd been a film director, you'd have had a heck of a job deciding where to put the camera. The tableau stayed as it was, with all of us writhing in the same social hell, until Ronnie broke the silence.
'Darling,' she said.
Philip, the poor dope, took a step forward at this.
But Ronnie was now heading for my side of the desk, and so Philip had to turn his step into a vague gesture towards Jane, and what happened with the coffee was this, and the biscuits got all like that, and would you mind awfully much being a love?
By the time he'd finished, and turned back to us, Ronnie was in my arms, hugging me like an express train. I hugged her back, because the occasion seemed to demand it, and also because I wanted to. She smelled very nice.
