*
It’s close to midnight when the taxi drops us off at the Hilton Olympia. Hiltons are reliable and terminally un-hip, so the bar is blessedly free of the hipster crowd who swarm the lobbies of boutique hotels from Hoxton to Hampstead these days. In fact it’s empty except for us, and a couple of international men of mystery busy downloading internet porn on their phones as they try to medicate their jet lag with vodka martinis.
(Welcome to my life these days.)
Boris grabs us a booth at one end of the bar. A waitress materializes as Mhari slithers onto the bench seat opposite us. We order: a whisky soda for Boris, a Bud (the Czech kind) for me, and a Bloody Mary for Mhari, because she’s not totally humorless about her condition. My beer evaporates slowly as Mhari and Boris dissect my interview in painstaking detail. I wave for another just as Mhari gets around to asking the question I’ve been avoiding for the past hour. “Do you suppose it’s on iPlayer yet, Bob? Do you want to watch it? Your very own fifteen minutes of fame?”
“How about we don’t go there?” I raise my new beer. Glug. “I’d like to sleep tonight, thanks. Watching me make an arse of myself on TV will not help. Beer will help.”
“You didn’t make an arse of yourself—” Mhari cocks her head to one side and looks pitying, which irritates the hell out of me. “That’s not a good place to go, Bob.”
“Yes, well, I don’t normally go places where I get laughed at by four million people, do I?” I shrug, then put my bottle down, loosen my strangulation device, and unbutton my collar. This time she doesn’t try to stop me: okay, so apparently I’m off duty at last. “It was a total clusterfuck, he was wearing a class six ward. Who ordered that?”
Mhari looks at me sharply. “You’re sure? Class six?”
“Yeah. Someone got to him, in addition to briefing against us. Can you—”
She jerks her chin sideways. “Boris?”
“Am on it,” he says without looking up as he thumb-types away. “Am emailing the SA nows.”
“Any other surprises?” she asks me, and I shake my head.
“No, but that one was bad enough as it is. It threw me badly.” I scan our surroundings again. You can never be too sure, but nobody seems to be paying any attention to us. “What was the sticky about, anyway?” The gizmo they wanted me to plant on the underside of the interviewee’s chair.
Boris is inspecting his glass in obsessive detail.
“Nobody briefed me on why, just on what,” Mhari says calmly. “You did your job, I did mine, that’s all.”
“But it’s a really bad idea to play that kind of game,” I complain. “What if it was—”
She looks at me impatiently. “You did just fine. What you don’t know they can’t get out of you if they put you under oath and start asking questions. Anyway, they had three victims in that chair yesterday and another scheduled to go on fifteen minutes after you left. If you did it right it’s sterile.”
“Who do I raise it with? Through proper channels?” I add sarcastic emphasis. I’m not a goddamn errand boy these days and if they want someone to do a plumbing job we’ve got an entire department for that. Burning your shiny new PR guy’s cover by handing him a gray task on his first time out is really not how we’re supposed to operate, unless you’re planning on firing him the very next day. Although on second thought, we’re so shorthanded right now—
“Send a memo upstream; am will forward it,” Boris offers. I stare at him. Okay, so that’s why they sent you along, is it? I nod.
“Beer,” I say grumpily, and take a long pull from my bottle. “If I’m going to make a fool of myself in public, at least I deserve a beer afterwards.”
“You didn’t make a fool of yourself; I think you did quite well,” Mhari says. “Now can we please change the subject?”
“Make that two beers, and I’ll just stand in the corner in my jester’s cap.” I really hope she’s trying to keep my morale up; the last thing I want is a permanent public relations assignment.
“You should talk to Mo,” Mhari suggests unexpectedly.
Stung, my mouth runs ahead of my brain: “I don’t need your that’s a good idea actually…” I get as far as pulling out my phone before a glance at the screen tells me it’s a bad idea: it’s six minutes past midnight already. I might be living in Beer Standard Time, but Mo has just spent last week off-grid in a cottage down at the Village, getting away from it all. She’s back at work this week, and I’m certain she’ll be burning the candle at both ends catching up with the backlog. She won’t thank me for waking her up in the middle of the night for a drunken chat. “Tomorrow, maybe.”
“Definitely tomorrow.” To my surprise Mhari reaches across the table and grabs onto my fingertips. “This isn’t good for either of you. You should talk to her.”
I pull back, but her grip tightens. After a moment I stop. “Why the sudden concern?”
She hesitates momentarily. “I like Mo and I have to work with you. She’s been in a bad place recently and you weren’t there for her, and now you’re heading for a bad place too, and”—she lets go of my hand and shrugs again, her shoulder pads miming a vampire princess’s bat wings—“I’m just concerned.”
I can’t hold back a slightly bitter smile. “So, no hidden agenda.”
“No, Bob, no hidden agenda.” Her answering smile is full of history. Hers, and mine (we were an item for a while, back before I met my wife). “As I get older I find friendship gets ever more precious.” She’s my age, but she could pass for late twenties. She used to be pretty but when she got PHANG syndrome she turned supermodel glamorous: it’s as if she’s aging backwards, living along some sort of femme fatale eigenvector that’s iteratively converging on Big Sleep–era Lauren Bacall. “I can see where we’re going more clearly these days. I don’t want to hit eighty on my own.”
“To friends.” I raise my drink to cover my confusion. The beer’s running low so I wave my hand for a third (and final) bottle. Mhari has always been better than me at people skills. It’s taken me this long to appreciate her for what she is, now that we’re not going at each other like a pair of cats with their tails tied together.
“Absent friends,” grunts Boris, surfacing from his whisky. He waves for another.
“Friends dead, alive, and undead.” Her eyes glance sidelong around the bar, scanning. When she’s sure it’s safe, she continues: “You realize this isn’t over, don’t you?”