by Iain Banks
'I see.' This had, of course, been mentioned in the CD-ROM Tommy Cholongai had given me: Mr Levitsen wasn't actually an employee of ours, but we did pay him quite a lot of money and he had a vague idea that we were interested in the place for more than the odd diplomatic passport.
'You let me know if I can be of any help.' He spread his arms wide. 'I am at your disposal, Kate. I have a lot of contacts. Smoke?' He pulled a little painted tin from one pocket of the grubby parka and took out a slim hand-rolled cigarette.
'No, thank you.'
'Mind if I do?'
I glanced round at the counter. 'I take it you're not expecting the quickest of service.'
'Ten, fifteen minutes on a good day.' He lit the roll-up with a Zippo. Some smoke rolled across the table. Not a cigarette, then, a joint. He must have seen me sniff. 'You sure?' he asked, through a smoke-wreathed grin.
'A little early in the day for me,' I told him.
He nodded. 'Heard you saw the old lady yesterday.'
'The Queen Mother? Yes.'
'Is that a weird fucking set-up, or what?'
'Weird just about covers it.'
'She say anything about the Prince?'
'She wanted my opinion on his marriageability.'
'Yeah, she's been talking about that a lot recently.'
'Do you visit her often?'
'Na. Just been the once, when I first got posted here, three years ago. But, like I say, I got contacts everywhere.' Above the oil-on-water glasses, his sun-bleached eyebrows arched. 'So, what's happening with the Business here? I keep getting hints there's some sort of major shit coming down, or maybe not shit, maybe more like major manna coming down, you know?' He pulled the mountaineering glasses down again and gave me what could almost have been a leer. 'You part of that? Bet you can't tell me even if you are, right? But you're here, and you're, what, a Level Three, yeah? Best looking L-Three I've ever seen, by the way — uh, hope you don't mind me saying so.'
'No, I'm flattered.'
'So, what's happening?' He leaned closer again. 'What was all that stuff out on Juppala last year? And down on the valley floor here and upstream. All that laser range-finding and drilling and surveying shit. What's all that about?'
'Infrastructure improvements,' I said.
'On Mount Juppala? You kidding me?'
I sipped my tea. 'Yes.'
He laughed. 'You aren't going to tell me a damn thing, are you, Kate?'
'No.'
'So why did they send you?'
'Why do you think anybody sent me? I'm on sabbatical. I can go where I like.'
'Weird time of year for a holiday.'
'A sabbatical isn't a holiday.'
'So why did you come?'
'To see what the place is like at this time of year.'
'But why?'
'Why not?'
He sat back, shaking his head. He attached a roach clip to the remains of the joint and sucked hard, brows knotted with either concentration or the sharpness of the hot smoke. 'Whatever,' he said, on an in-drawn breath on top of what he'd already smoked. He pinched the roach out and left it folded in the teacup's saucer. 'So, where do you want to go?'
'When?'
'Whenever. I got a Jeep. Get places Langtuhn's limo won't. Anywhere you want to go, let me know.'
'That's very kind. I may take you up on that. Are you free this afternoon?'
'Sure. Where to?'
'You're the local knowledge. Suggest somewhere.'
'Well, there's — ah-hah! Hey, that was quick. Here's breakfast.'
'Uncle Freddy?'
'Kate, dear girl. You made it to Thulahn then, yes?'
'Yes. Managed to avoid the prayer flags. Been having a look round. Done the palace and bits of the city, seen the old Queen and had a guided tour of the lower valley and the nearest town just this afternoon. The weather's atrocious now. Nearly didn't make it back.'
'Prince returned yet, is he?'
'No. He's not due back from Paris for another few days.'
'Oh, he wasn't going to Paris, dear girl. He was in Switzerland,' Uncle Freddy said. 'At CDO.' CDO is what we usually shorten Château d'Oex to.
'Oh. Well, no, he's still not due back until next week.'
'Jolly good. Did you give the Queen Mum my regards?'
'No. I didn't know you knew her.'
'Audrey? Oh, golly, yes. From way back. Meant to say. Thought I had. Senility, probably. Still. She didn't mention me, then?'
'I'm afraid not.'
'Not to worry. Heard she'd gone a bit batty actually, if not totally ga-ga. How did she seem to you?'
'Eccentric in that sort of feral way that old English ladies go sometimes.'
'Probably the altitude.'
'Probably.'
'Who was your guide if the Prince isn't back?'
'The honorary US consul. Youngish chap, second-generation hippie. Secured me a breakfast that was surprisingly edible and then took me down to Joitem in his Jeep. It's a bit like Thuhn except lower down and flatter and surrounded by rhododendron bushes. Visited an abandoned monastery, saw a few farms and prayer windmills, nearly skidded off the road into ravines a few times, that sort of thing.'
'Sounds terribly exciting.'
'And you? I've tried you a few times and you never seem to be in.'
'Oh, just faffing about as usual. Driving.'
'You should get a mobile.'
'What? One of those things you hang above cots?'
'No, Freddy, a phone.'
'Pah! And disturb a good drive by having a phone go off in my ear? I should cocoa.'
The skies were clear the next day, though confusingly (for me and probably no one else in Thuhn) snow swirled everywhere for a few hours beneath that cloudlessness; a stiff, freezing wind blasted down from the mountains and across the city and the palace and seemed to scour most of the snow away, brushing it off down the valley in tall, white, dragging shrouds and gathering it into huge drifts beneath the river's steeper banks.
Josh Levitsen had warned me about wind chill the day before and, anyway, this wasn't the first time I'd been in a cold place. I made sure I had a scarf over my mouth and nose when I went out, dressed in Western gear again, but even so the ferocity of the chill was stunning.
The children were nowhere to be seen. The city seemed deserted. My eyes watered in the icy blast and the tears froze almost instantly on my skin; I had to keep turning and bending and brushing drops of salty ice away and rubbing feeling back into my cheeks. I pulled the scarf up higher and eventually found my way down to the Wildness Emporium, where the Sikh brothers fussed over me and poured me warm paurke — tea with roasted barley flour and sugar in it; it tasted much better than it should have. There also I bought a polarised ski mask for my eyes and a blue neoprene thing that fitted over the rest of my lower face and made me look a little like Hannibal Lecter but which was much more effective than the scarf.
Suitably kitted up, with not a square centimetre of bare skin left exposed to the elements, I left the brothers happily counting even more of my dollars and set off into the wind again.
People were keeping indoors. It was the best time to see the city just as a set of buildings and the spaces in between them. I walked all over it until hunger and chance brought me within sniffing distance of the Heavenly Luck Tea House around lunch time, and then sat, extremities tingling, tucking into dhal bhut (sticky rice with lentil soup poured over it) and jakpak kampa (spicy stew with mystery meat). A watery yoghurt called dhai — pretty similar to a plain lassi — washed it all down.
The other diners — all seriously quilted, mostly male, some still wearing pointy hats — laughed and grinned and talked at me in machine-gun Thulahnese and I just grinned like an idiot and laughed when they laughed and made dumb faces and fanned my mouth in what was apparently a quite hilarious manner when I bit on a chilli in the stew and nodded and shrugged and mugged and whistled and just generally behaved like a complete cretin for about forty minutes, and then fina
lly left the place with a huge smile on my face under the blue neoprene Hannibal Lecter mask, feeling full, content and warm as well as perfectly, blissfully happy and with the sense that I'd just spent one of the most pleasantly communicative and life-affirming lunches I'd ever experienced.
'Kathryn?'
'Mr Hazleton.'
'You are well, I hope?'
'I'm fine.'
'And your stay in Thulahn, is that going well?'
'Very well.'
'I've never been. Would you recommend a visit?'
'That depends on your tastes, Mr Hazleton. It's fine if you like lots of mountains and snow.'
'You don't sound very enamoured of the place, Kathryn.'
'I like lots of mountains and snow.'
'I see. I was wondering. I was trying to decide whether you'd decided. Trying to make up my mind whether you had made up your mind, or not.'
'Uh-huh.'
'You're being very reticent, Kathryn.'
'Am I?'
'Is there somebody else there in the room with you?'
'No.'
'You're upset with me, aren't you?'
'Upset, Mr Hazleton?'
'Kathryn, I do hope you believe me when I say I had nothing to do with the contents of that disc. It came into my possession and I confess I thought to turn it to my advantage, but what else was I supposed to do? …Kathryn, if I'm wasting my time with this call, tell me and I'll hang up. Perhaps we can talk again later.'
'What was the purpose of your call, Mr Hazleton?'
'I wanted to know if you'd come to a decision regarding the contents of the disc I had delivered to you. Have you decided to do nothing, or are you still mulling it over?'
'Oh, I'm mulling. Mulling away furiously here.'
'Are you, Kathryn?'
'Would I lie to you, Mr Hazleton?'
'I imagine you would if you thought it was the right thing to do, Kathryn.'
'Well, I'm still thinking.'
'The problem hasn't gone away, I'm afraid. Right now, even as we speak, Mrs Buzetski is —'
'Boston. She's in Boston, and she's not really visiting an old school chum at all.'
'Ah. You know. You must have spoken to Stephen. How is he? Do you think he suspects anything yet?'
'I'm sure I couldn't say, Mr Hazleton.'
'I'd better go, Kathryn. Give my regards to the Prince when he gets there, will you?'
In the late afternoon Langtuhn Hemblu appeared and announced he was to take me to the Foreign Ministry for the formalities to be completed. I was to bring my passport. I asked him to wait and changed into my ethnic clothes, then we took the Roller a short distance down into the crowded city to a squat building with plain-painted walls.
I was shown into a large room where a bulbously tiled cylindrical stove in one corner radiated heat and four young, yellow-robed clerks perched on high stools behind tall desks. All four stared at me and then put their heads down and scribbled furiously when a tall, bald, orange-robed man appeared from a door to one side of the big stove, announced he was called Shlahm Thivelu, Senior Immigration Officer, and invited me into his office.
We sat on either side of an impressive desk topped by a curved gallery holding lots of compartments containing rolled-up documents. Mr Thivelu put on a dainty pair of glasses and inspected both my passports as though he'd only ever seen one or two such odd documents before.
The last time I'd been here I'd gone through immigration control and customs in the arrivals hall at the airfield. This had consisted of ducking through the cargo door of the crashed Dakota, giving my name to an adolescent sitting behind a tiny rickety desk and shaking his hand. Obviously things had become a lot more formal since then.
Mr Thivelu nodded, searched about the desk for a while, muttered something about a damned stamp, then shrugged and wrote something into my UK passport before handing both back and wishing me a pleasant stay.
As I stepped out of the ministry I looked at what he had written. He'd printed the date and Welcome To Thulahn. Langtuhn held the Roller's door open for me. He was smiling widely. 'You look happy,' I said, as we set off back up the hill.
'Oh, yes, Ms Telman!' Langtuhn said, his face positively radiating happiness from the rear-view mirror. 'His Holiness the Prince will now be returning tomorrow!'
'Yes, unfortunately I'm not sure — what?' I jerked forward in my seat. 'Tomorrow?' I'd thought I'd have at least three more days here before having to worry about Suvinder showing up.
'Yes! Isn't that wonderful news? Now you will get to see him after all! He too will be happy to see you, I'm sure.'
'Yes. Yes, I expect he will.' I watched the Wildness Emporium slide past. One of the Sikh brothers saw me; he smiled and waved enthusiastically. I waved back feebly.
I couldn't even get the plane out; it had been and gone again since I'd arrived and tomorrow's inbound flight bringing the Prince was the next one. The alternative to flying was finding some motorised transport and taking the long road north and west and eventually south and back to India. Days of hair-raising travel and nights in dubious rest-houses, from what I'd heard. Or I could hike straight out, if the passes were open, which was unlikely at this time of year. I'd done some trekking in Nepal in my early twenties so I wasn't totally inexperienced, but I wasn't hill fit either, or that young any more. Anyway, I supposed it would look terribly rude.
'What brings the Prince back so early?' I asked.
'We do not know,' Langtuhn admitted, hauling the ancient car straight as we passed a butcher's and skidded on a patch of what looked like chicken entrails. He laughed. 'Perhaps he has run out of money in the Paris casino.'
'Ha ha,' I said. I sat back. Suvinder. Oh, well.
Maybe having the Prince here wouldn't be so terrible. He wasn't that difficult a guy to deal with and he would, I assumed, make it even easier for me to travel round the country and gain access to, well, whatever I needed to gain access to. So, not such a bad thing after all.
Look on the bright side, I told myself.
* * *
The Prince arrived back the following morning. What seemed like most of Thuhn turned out to watch the plane land. It was another clear but bitingly cold day, though the wind was barely more than a breeze. Langtuhn Hemblu, wearing a slightly threadbare chauffeur's outfit, which was a size or two too big for him and which included tall boots, jodhpurs and a peaked grey cap, drove me down to the airfield in the Rolls-Royce but explained apologetically that I would have to make my own way back to the palace, as the car would be required by the Prince and his entourage. I told him this was fine by me and joined the crowd on the banking above the football pitch/airfield like everybody else. They'd removed the far set of goalposts, I noticed.
Some of my little pillow friends appeared — Dulsung, Graumo and Pokuhm, if I'd got their names right — and we stood together, though they couldn't see very well over all the adults in front. Dulsung was the smallest, so I lifted her on to my shoulders. She giggled and slapped a pair of sticky hands on to my forehead, below my black fur hat. The two boys looked up enviously at her, put their pointy-hatted heads together and conferred for a moment, then each tugged at the nearest pair of quilted trousers, pointed meaningfully up at Dulsung, and after some teasing were duly hoisted on to neighbouring sets of shoulders.
Everybody else seemed to see the plane before me. People started pointing and a few cheers rang out. Then I saw the tiny scrap of metal against the grey-black rocks of the mountains high above and away to one side, its dark shadow flickering over ridges and gullies as it tipped and fell towards us. It looked about the size of a small bird of prey. The sound of its engines was still lost in the spaces between the mountains.
I looked up towards Dulsung, pointed at the aircraft and said, 'Aeroplane.'
''Roplane.'
The plane raced down, wheeling and stooping through the winds, no longer making straight for us but heading diagonally across the sky above the ice-choked gorge. It curved out to one side of
the city, turned sharply over the gravel beds in the valley downstream and came flying back straight towards us. The wind, I realised, must be in the opposite direction from when I'd landed. The square-sectioned, hunched-looking craft seemed almost static in the air, the drone of its engines audible now.
The plane jiggled, riding waves of wind and shaking its wings as though it was shrugging. It seemed to be about to overshoot and go round again, then it dipped suddenly and flared, wheels smacking the far end of the field in a cloud of dust and gravel with a thud, just about where the goalposts would have been. Everybody seemed to take this as a cue to start clapping; even Dulsung removed her hands from my forehead to slap them together a few times. Over this racket, the plane's engine note had changed and swelled and the machine seemed to bow, compressing the nose wheel's landing gear as it rushed towards us with a swirling grey-brown cloud rising behind it.
I could see the two pilots in their seats. I got ready to run. The engines screamed, the whole plane shuddered and slowed, and then it turned, tipping slightly and skidding to a halt, still not quite into the nearer penalty box and a good fifty metres away from where I stood.
I joined enthusiastically in the applause while the cockpit window slid open and a Thulahnese flag on a stick was jammed into its hole. A small line of welcoming officials formed up on the gravel and Langtuhn Hemblu manoeuvred the Roller on to the touchline near a couple of four-wheel-drives and then got out and stood, cap under arm, by the rear door.
The Prince was first out of the plane, waving from the doorway, dressed in what looked like a niftily tailored dark blue version of the traditional quilted trousers and jacket. People waved back. Some were drifting away already; presumably those who came only to watch the plane, or hard-line republicans disappointed to have witnessed another safe royal landing. More people spilled out of the aircraft behind the Prince.
I glanced up at Dulsung. Her muddy boots were leaving marks on my quilted red jacket. I pointed. 'The Prince,' I said.
'Thirp Rinse.'
Suvinder looked around, seemingly distracted, as he progressed down the line of bowing officials. He motioned Langtuhn Hemblu over while everybody else was getting themselves and their luggage organised. Langtuhn and the Prince talked briefly then Langtuhn pointed at our bit of the crowd and they both shielded their eyes and stared in our direction. They weren't looking for me, were they?
