It's our annual school treasure hunt on Foundation Day, she thought; the next clue takes you to the next clue; the last clue takes you to the prize.
It was pitch dark and the first stars were appearing. A biting country wind was blowing off the hills. Away down the road she saw the lights of a petrol station, but no houses anywhere. She waited five minutes, a bus pulled up with a sigh. It was three-quarters empty. She bought her ticket and sat down near the door, knees together, eyes nowhere. For the next two stops no one boarded; at the third, a boy in a leather jacket leapt in and sat himself cheerfully beside her. He was her American chauffeur of last night.
"Two stops from now is a new church," he said conversationally. "You get out, you walk past the church, down the road, keeping on the right sidewalk. You come to a parked red vehicle with a little devil hanging from the driver's mirror. Open the passenger door, sit down, wait. That's all you do."
The bus drew up, she got out and started walking. The boy remained on the bus. The road was straight and the night extremely dark. Ahead of her, perhaps five hundred yards, she saw a crooked splash of red under a street lamp. No sidelights. The snow squeaked under her new boots, and the noise added to her feeling of being detached from her body. Hullo, feet, what are you doing down there? March, girl, march. The van came nearer and she saw it was a little Coca-Cola van driven high on the kerb. Fifty yards beyond it under the next lamp was a tiny café,and beyond the café again nothing but the bare snow plateau and the straight, pointless road to nowhere. What had possessed anybody to put a café in such a godless spot was a riddle for another life.
She opened the van door and got in. The interior was strangely bright from the street lamp overhead. She smelt onions and saw a cardboard box full of them among the crates of empty bottles that filled the back. A plastic devil with a trident dangled from the driver's mirror. She remembered a similar mascot in the van in London, when Mario had hijacked her. A heap of grimy cassettes lay at her feet. It was the quietest place in the world. A single light approached her slowly down the road. It came level and she saw a young priest on a bicycle. His face turned to her as he ticked past, and he looked offended, as if she had challenged his chastity. She waited again. A tall man in a peaked cap stepped out of the café,sniffed the air, then peered up and down the street, uncertain what time of day it was. He returned to the café,came out again, walked slowly towards her until he came alongside. He tapped on Charlie's window with the fingertips of one gloved hand. A leather glove, hard and shiny. A bright torch shone on her, blacking him off from her completely. Its beam held her, travelled slowly round the van, returned to her, dazzling her in one eye. She lifted a hand to shield herself, and as she lowered it, the beam followed it to her lap. The torch went out, her door opened, one hand closed on her wrist and hauled her out of the car. She was standing face to face with him, and he was taller than she was by a foot, broad and square to her. But his face was in black shadow under the peak of his cap, and he had turned his collar up against the cold.
"Stand very still," he said.
Unslinging her shoulder bag, he first felt the weight of it, then opened it and looked inside. For the third time in its recent life, her little clock radio received careful attention. He switched it on. It played. He switched it off, fiddled with it, and slipped something into his pocket. For a second, she thought he had decided to keep the radio for himself. But he hadn't after all, for she saw him drop it back into the bag, and the bag into the van. Then, like a deportment instructor correcting her posture, he put the tips of a gloved hand on each of her shoulders, straightening her up. His dark gaze was on her face all the time. Letting his right arm dangle, he began lightly touching her body with the flat of his left hand, first her neck and shoulders, now her collarbone and shoulder blades, testing the spots where the straps of her bra would have been if she had worn one. Now her armpits and down her sides to her hips; her breasts and belly.
"This morning in the hotel you wear your bracelet on your right wrist. Tonight you wear it on your left wrist. Why?"
His English was foreign and educated and courteous; his accent, so far as she could judge, Arab. A soft voice but powerful; a speaker's voice.
"I like to change it around," she said.
"Why?" he repeated.
"To make it feel new."
Dropping into a crouch, he explored her hips and legs and the inside of her thighs with the same minute attention as the rest of her; then, still only with his left hand, carefully prodded her new fur boots.
"You know how much it is worth, that bracelet?" he asked as he stood up again.
"No."
"Stay still."
He was standing behind her, tracing her back, her buttocks, her legs again, down to the boots.
"You didn't insure it?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Michel gave it to me for love. Not money."
"Get in the car."
She did so; he walked round the front and climbed in beside her.
"Okay, I take you to Khalil." He started the engine. "Door-to-door delivery. Okay?"
The van had an automatic gearbox, but she noticed he steered mainly with his left hand while the right rested on his lap. The jangle of the empties took her by surprise. He reached a crossroads and turned left into a road as straight as the first, but without lamps. His face, as much as she could see of it, reminded her of Joseph's, not in its features but in its intentness, in the drawn-back corners of his fighter's eyes, which kept a constant watch on the van's three mirrors, as well as on herself.
"You like onions?" he called above the clatter of the bottles.
"Quite."
"You like to cook? What you cook? Spaghetti?Wienerschnitzel?"
"Things like that."
"What did you cook for Michel?"
"Steak."
"When?"
"In London. The night he stayed in my flat."
"No onions?" he shouted.
"In the salad," she said.
They were heading back towards the city. Its glow made a pink wall under the heavy evening cloud. They descended a hill and arrived in a flat, sprawling valley suddenly without form. She saw half-built factories and huge lorry parks, unoccupied. She saw a rubbish tip that was being shaped into a mountain. She saw no shops, no pub, no lights in any window. They entered a concrete forecourt. He stopped the van but did not switch off the engine."hotel garni eden," she read, in red neon letters, and above the garish doorway:"Willkommen!Bienvenu!Well-come!"
As he handed her the shoulder bag, an idea struck him. "Here--give him these. He likes them too," he said, fishing for the box of onions from among the crates. As he dumped it in her lap, she noticed again the stillness of his gloved right hand. "Room five, fourth floor. The stairs. Not the elevator. Go well."
With the van's engine still running, he watched her across the forecourt to the lighted entrance. The box was heavier than she had expected and claimed both her arms. The lobby was empty, the lift stood waiting, but she didn't take it. The staircase was narrow and twisting, the carpet worn to the thread. The canned music had a panting insinuation, the fuggy air reeked of cheap scent and stale tobacco smoke. At the first landing, an old woman called "Gross Gott" to her from inside her glass cubicle but did not raise her head. It seemed to be a place where unexplained ladies came and went a good deal.