The Butt: A Novel Page 4

  Whereas, throughout his vacation, he’d been blithely blind to the racial differences of the country’s inhabitants – for, was it not, he asked of his flabby liberal conscience, exactly like home? – he now found the woman behind the counter disconcertingly alien. Even though she riffled her computer keyboard, exhibiting all the vapid efficiency of a First World employee, Tom couldn’t help fixating on her café-au-lait complexion. Her wrists were encircled with the same raised bands of whitened flesh as the limbs of the maid at the Mimosa. Cicratization, wasn’t that what it was called? And how did they do it? By inflicting a regular pattern of burns, then rubbing ash into them? But what kind of ash? Surely not cigarette?

  Cicratization. It wasn’t the kind of body-modification that Dixie and her friends snuck off to get at that stoners’ piercing joint behind the Milford Mall, now was it? Those alien wrists . . . this reeked of wood-smoked firelight, the jumble and thrash of naked limbs, the jabber of alien tongues . . .

  His homely fugue dispelled, Tom couldn’t wait to sign the papers and get back outside.

  As soon as he’d texted Adams with his new cellphone number, the silvery shell in his palm rattled into life. A loud percussive ring tone issued from its little speaker; the noise entirely drowned out the lazy ‘pop-pop-pop’ of the automated pedestrian crossing. One of the ubiquitous Vance meter maids was passing by: a faded Anglo in a militaristic orange uniform, toting a handheld computer and a digital camera. She looked over at Tom and grimaced.

  He answered the incoming call – it was Adams. ‘I’m glad you fixed yourself up with a cellphone,’ he said, without any preamble. ‘There have been, ah, developments. I need you to come right out to my place; the address is on the card I gave you.’

  ‘Developments?’ Tom was bemused.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it on the phone,’ Adams came back at him. ‘Just get a cab and give the driver the address. He’ll know how to find it. Come right out. Right out.’

  The cabbie was languid to the point of inanition, and Tom could have sworn he drove half the way there steering with his knees. He dropped Tom on a suburban street that curled up into the foothills. Single-storey clapboard houses were set back from the road behind grassy verges. They stood upon stilts, surrounded by stands of palms and bamboo.

  At first glance, the lazy S of bluey-blacktop and the neat gardens could have belonged to any suburb in the subtropical developed world. But then Tom noticed the basement areas beneath the houses: there were heaps of old washing machines, discarded TVs and crazy hanks of chicken wire lying on the dirty concrete pans between the stilts. The odour of the place was more decayed than floral, and, sniffing this, Tom made his way between two thorny hedges, then over a rickety wooden walkway that linked the front yard of Adams’s house to its single upper storey.

  He opened the screen door and, finding the front door ajar with no sign of buzzer or knocker, called out: ‘Anyone about?’ In what he hoped was a strong assertive voice.

  There was no reply. Tom pushed the door open. The room that confronted him was unremarkable: there were woven rush mats on the highly polished floorboards; rattan easy-chairs with padded cushions; a couple of small bookcases, stacked vertically with books and piled horizontally with periodicals. There were native paintings on the plain white walls: jaggy swirls of bright pigments and finger daubs, applied to curved bark shields. With its slight air of bachelor’s asperity, and its fussy co-option of native artefacts, the interior was exactly what Tom had expected of the Consul.

  Then, above the steady pulse of the cicadas, which had swelled to occupy the sonic vacuum left by the departing cab, Tom became aware of the cooing and tongue slapping of native speech coming from below.

  Retracing his steps across the walkway, Tom made his way awkwardly down the steep bank to the underside of the house. Here, in the stripy cacophony of sunbeams, an arresting spectacle met his eyes: five heavy-set hillwomen were seated inside a long black town car. Tom immediately recognized them as being Handrey. This much he did know, for the tourist lodge the Brodzinskis had stayed at in the cloud forest was run by the Handrey Tribal Council.

  The women were chattering away to one another, the two in the front seats twisted round, so that they could address the three others sandwiched in the back. Initially, Tom found it incredible that they could have driven down here in the big black car, a vehicle he associated with the downtown of cities back home. But then, on looking more closely, he realized that the car was only a shell: the tinted windows punched out, the bodywork peppered with rusty holes. Two of the doors were missing altogether, and instead of sitting on Firestones, the automobile carcass was jacked up on bricks.

  The fat, jolly women were wrapped up in their chatter, just as their fingers were twined in each other’s wiry hair. They picked and pulled as they yattered, teasing out the cooties, which they then deftly crushed between their fingernails, before flicking them away.

  The women ignored him; Tom stared at them.

  He thought of the ads he’d seen at home: big billboards that had encouraged him to fly his family halfway around the world to this island-continent. On these, smiling Anglo servitors, clad in spotless white, were laying out tableware on immaculate linen, while behind them a towering rock formation burned orange in the low-angled sun. ‘We’ve set the table and checked under it for flippers,’ the slogan read. ‘So where the hell are you?’

  What was missing from these huge photographs, with their groups of grinning models, was the myriad of bit players: the insects. Tom thought of the leaf-cutter ants he’d seen from the balcony that morning, the black ants porting the Rice Krispies in the breakfast room, the crickets filling Adam’s backyard with their monotonous fricative noise. Up in the hills, he’d seen the gothic mounds of termites, which were five and even six yards high.

  And, of course, the billboards – which also featured laughing surfers on the beaches down south, and bubbling snorkellers on the Angry Reef up north – were devoid of black or brown faces. The natives, like the insects, were not a tourist attraction. It occurred to Tom that if the government had had its way, all visitors to the country would have seen of its indigenous people were their bright, naive patterns: black and white stripes, red dots and blue spirals, on T-shirts, sarongs and the tailfins of aircraft.

  The kids had all got cooties – Martha too. The foul-smelling chemicals Tom got at the drugstore had no effect, so, in the end, Martha had spent a good part of her vacation combing her children’s hair and her own. Martha’s patience frayed, as she pulled at the infested locks.

  These Handrey women were different. As he watched them, Tom began to appreciate that their delousing was part of an unforced intimacy, one in which their happy conversation was complemented by the reassurance of touch. They reminded him of the hefty Polynesian maidens painted by Gauguin, but what were they doing here?

  At last he ventured to speak: ‘Is this . . . Mr Adams’s place . . . the Consul?’

  The women went on ignoring him, and Tom felt himself succumbing to irritation, when Adams himself emerged from the dense shrubbery of the backyard.

  The Consul was sporting a broad smile, and a small, leather apron. He held a pair of garden shears in one hand, while the other parted the lush, ridged fronds.

  ‘Ah, Mr Brodzinski!’ he cried, ‘Glad you’re here. Let me put my gardening things away and we’ll go upstairs to, ah, talk.’

  Tom thought he might come to loathe Adams’s ‘ah’, a tic that suggested everything the Consul said was judicious, considered and yet never the less utterly provisional. Adams’s arrival didn’t stop the women’s chattering, and he’d had to raise his voice to be heard above it.

  Tom thought it odd that the Consul’s tone was so lighthearted – joyful, even. Taking him in more fully, he noted further transformations: Adams’s eyes were bright, and there was a happy slackness to his stride.

  Tom waited while the older man took off his apron and placed it, together with the shears, in a battered cup
board behind the town car. He then followed Adams’s narrow rump up an open flight of stairs, which emerged into the room he’d already seen from the front door.

  ‘Drink?’ Adams asked, with what Tom felt was unseemly levity, given the urgency with which the Consul had impelled him to come.

  ‘Round this time I normally have a long cool one, a Daquiri mixed with the local palm spirit. Some Anglos say this climate doesn’t, ah, allow for early drinking, but I say, they can’t handle it.’

  ‘Um . . . I dunno, yeah, OK, then,’ Tom mumbled; and then, finding his tongue, continued: ‘Those women downstairs in the town car – are they, kind of, clients of yours, or what?’

  Adams, who had opened the front of a drinks cabinet, and was mixing the cocktails with near-professional bravura, snorted at this. He paused and looked over at Tom. For a moment, it seemed as if he was going to launch into an explanation of their presence, but he only snapped: ‘No, friends.’

  Tom, although understanding full well that Adams wished to avoid discussing his private life, couldn’t forbear: ‘What about the town car?’ he pressed. ‘Strange place to see one.’

  The Consul took a long slug on his Daquiri before answering, and Tom, who had grasped the chilly pole of the highball glass, followed suit, unthinkingly. The drink was a physical wrench, jerking him right into the present, slamming his face against hard reality.

  Was the palm spirit like mescal, or something? Tom wondered, because at once the pulsing of the cicadas was that much louder, the heat more insistent; the swirls of Adam’s native daubs threatened to rotate like pinwheels.

  Adams tugged at his long U of a chin, in lieu of a goatee. ‘I was working in the south, at our embassy in the capital. When I had to take early retirement . . .’ Adams paused and, deliberately and unselfconsciously, lifted one hand high above his head, then brought it down to gently pat the back of his head. He resumed: ‘The town car was offered to me as part of my, ah, termination package. Only just made it here. Not the best set of wheels for, ah, off-roading.’

  He took another pull on his drink and sat down in the rattan easy-chair opposite the one Tom had collapsed into. He set his glass down on a matching side table and leaned forward, caging the fluttery moment with his wiry hands. ‘Two points, Mr Brodzinski.’ Adams drew one long finger far back with another. It looked painful. ‘One: Mr Lincoln has, very unfortunately, developed an infection.’

  ‘Infection?’

  ‘Two: the Assistant DA has already visited the Mimosa, together with police ballistics experts–’

  ‘Ballistics?’

  ‘Mr Brodzinski, I’d be grateful if you didn’t interrupt. The ballistics people have established – to the satisfaction of the Public Prosecutor at least – that the trajectory of your, ah, cigarette end would’ve taken it inside the exclusion zone that forbids smoking within sixteen metres of all public buildings.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Tom was more than incredulous: he was oscillating in and out of hysteria. ‘Smoking is permitted in our apartment; I made sure of that when we checked in.’

  ‘It’s simple, Brodzinski.’ All laughter was now gone from the Consul’s eyes; they bored into Tom. ‘While the immediate confines of the apartment are a private space – so long as you’re paying for it – the complex, as a whole, is a public space. As the, ah, butt, left your apartment – and before it entered that of Mr and Mrs Lincoln – its parabola took it, albeit briefly, into the exclusion zone that surrounds the Mimosa.

  ‘As I’m sure you can appreciate, this fact, in conjunction with the, ah, victim’s deteriorating condition, has distinctly severe consequences for your own, ah, situation.’

  Tom, knowing it was a mistake, took another pull on his own Daquiri. Surely, at any second, the great wave of need-for-nicotine would engulf him? And, perhaps, despite all his resolutions, Tom should let it drag him away? Only the absurd irony that discarding a cigarette was to blame for his awful predicament prevented Tom from running from the house and down the road in search of a pack.

  Luckily, this time the liquor worked, and Tom felt himself detaching and floating a little way off. He was able to ask, fairly calmly: ‘What consequences?’

  ‘Well’ – Adams, Tom now suspected, was actually enjoying himself – ‘It’s complex, and the case may even set a new precedent; but, suffice to say, it’s no longer possible to resolve the matter through direct negotiations with Mr Lincoln, or even his wife’s, ah, family. The DA has made it clear that he intends to take on the case, and he will almost certainly institute a prosecution for . . .’

  Without warning, Adams, who had seemed in full flood, trailed right off. The horsy face tipped forward, and the Consul fretted with the lace of one of his suede shoes.

  ‘What! What? Prosecution for what?’ Tom was gabbling.

  Adams sighed. ‘For attempted murder, Mr Brodzinski, and, should the worst happen, naturally for murder itself.’

  Tom stood up abruptly and walked to the back window of the room. The fly screening transformed the view without into a sepia image: an old photograph of a verdant, tropical hillside. Beyond it were the inapposite buildings of the colonial power, which were doubtless teeming with thin, feverish men wearing outsized solar topees.

  The hillwomen beneath the house had begun to quietly chant ‘Bahn-bahn-bahn-boosh. Bahn-bahn-bahn-boosh . . .’ over and over again.

  Tom turned back to Adams. ‘I guess this means I won’t be going back home this Thursday.’

  ‘This Thursday, or any time soon, Mr Brodzinski. Lissen.’ Having dropped his latest bunker-buster, Adams was, once more, conciliatory. ‘I don’t for a second believe these charges will stand for long. There’ll be a plea bargain. There’s also the delicate matter of making restitution – the form of justice, ah, favoured by the Tayswengo – within any, ah, retributive parameters. The DA is part-Tugganarong, the Mayor two fifths Inssessitti. Both are facing re-election campaigns within the next six months; all of these factors must be taken into consideration.’

  Suddenly, Tom crossed to Adams’s chair and, heedless of any dignity, fell to his knees. He even grasped the Consul’s bare forearm in both of his hands. ‘For Christ’s sake, Adams,’ he blurted out. ‘I know you’re a kind of a diplomat and you can’t screw with the locals, but you could at least advise me. Wouldn’t it be better for everyone if I just slipped away? No one’s taken my passport; surely they can’t be posting a watch at Immigration. I mean, I’m no murderer, ferchrissakes, I flipped a goddamn lousy butt!’

  Tom stopped. Adams disengaged his arm in a feminine way, as if he were rejecting the importuning of a lusty suitor. He stood. ‘Mr Brodzinski, they most certainly will have your details on the computer system at the airport. Even if you could effect, ah, departure from this country in some other way – and may I remind you, while the coastline is vast, the ocean distances to any other landfall are correspondingly so – you’re forgetting the papers you signed this morning.

  ‘We have no extradition treaty, but there is something called an Asset Transfer Convention, which both nations are signatories to.’

  ‘W-What does that mean?’

  Tom was squatting on his scrawny legs, back at summer camp, querying the Mohawk tribe’s field game task.

  ‘It’s . . . well, it’s unusual – perplexing even.’ Once again, the Consul was enthralled by the fathomless complexities of his adoptive country. ‘I can only imagine that it was an oversight on the part of the State Department, or that they didn’t understand exactly what the Convention would mean when applied to customary law, but, candidly, should you, ah, abscond, your chattels to the value of your presumptive bond would be liable to destruction – not confiscation, mind, destruction – by the plaintiffs’ agents.’

  ‘I – I don’t understand.’

  ‘The Lincolns could, should they so wish, destroy any of your assets up to the value of the bond, which is $2 million. And’, Adams snorted, ‘unbelievably, this has been known to happen.

  ‘A ren
egade Aval clan insisted that the Westphalian authorities blow up the house of a German tourist who had run into a herd of their auraca in the interior, then absconded. And they – fearing a diplomatic incident – obliged. I’m told the German ended up in the bauxite mines at Kellippi. He’s not very well.’

  Adams stood and began to walk up and down. He stopped and looked over at Tom. ‘But this is all academic, Mr Brodzinski. Pull yourself together. You aren’t going to do anything to imperil either yourself or your wife and kids. You wife is, by all accounts a very lovely woman . . .’

  Was it Tom’s fevered imagination, or did Adams actually lick his thin lips at this point?

  ‘This morning, I suggested that you get yourself a good lawyer. Have you taken any steps in that direction? If necessary the consulate can recommend some practitioners here in Vance . . .’ Adams’s voice sank, then disappeared.

  Tom turned from the window. The Consul had picked up a wooden flipper lizard from the floor and was running a finger round the whorls incised on the back of the carving. Tom had a moment of compassion for this man, who, he suspected, might be trying to do the decent thing by him.

  ‘And once I’ve engaged a lawyer, what do I do then? Please advise me.’

  ‘You’ll need to present yourself at police headquarters. There, you’ll be arrested, formally charged and – if there’s a judge available – almost certainly immediately bailed. Have you any means of getting funds transferred to the state’s account? There are no bail bondsmen here, Mr Brodzinski.’

  ‘I think – I presume my bank manager will, um, oblige.’

  The ‘presume’ and the ‘oblige’ sounded good, the kind of measured terminology that the Consul himself might use. Tom felt he was regaining his composure.

  ‘And the lawyer?’

  At the exact moment Adams said the word ‘lawyer’, Tom, who hadn’t even been aware of his hand being in his pocket, felt the edge of the card Jethro Swai-Phillips had given him. A card that, out of contempt, he hadn’t bothered to put in his billfold, but merely shoved down into this sweaty, lint-filled darkness.