Semple sticks his bottom lip out. ‘It won’t get any worse than this.’
At the table next to them, Tunde is listening. He also has a large whisky, though he’s not drinking it. The men are getting drunk and shouting. The women are quiet, watching the men. There is something vulnerable and desperate in the men’s display – he thinks the women are looking with compassion.
One says, loud enough for Tunde to be able to hear, ‘We’ll take you anywhere you want to go. Listen, we don’t believe in this nonsense. You can tell us where you want to go. It’ll be just the same as it’s always been.’
Hooper clasps Semple by the sleeve, saying, ‘You have to leave. First plane out of here and screw it all.’
One of the women says, ‘He’s right. What’s the point of getting killed over this piss-pot of a place?’
Tunde walks slowly to the front desk. He waits for an elderly Norwegian couple to pay their bill – there’s a taxi outside loading up their bags. Like most people from wealthy nations, they’re getting out of the city while they can. At last, after querying each item on the mini-bar receipt and the level of the local taxes, they leave.
There is only one member of staff behind the desk. Grey is colonizing his hair in clumps – a chunk here and there, the rest dark and thick and tightly curled. He’s perhaps in his sixties, surely a trusted staff member with years of experience.
Tunde smiles. An easy, we’re-in-this-together smile.
‘Strange days,’ he says.
The man nods. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘You’ve planned what you’re going to do?’
The man shrugs.
‘You have family who’ll take you in?’
‘My daughter has a farm three hours west of here. I will go to her.’
‘They going to let you travel?’
The man looks up. The whites of his eyes are jaundiced and streaked with red, the thin, bloody lines reaching towards the pupil. He looks for a long time at Tunde, perhaps five or six seconds.
‘If God wills it.’
Tunde puts one hand into his pocket, easy and slow. ‘I have been thinking of travel myself,’ he says. And pauses. And waits.
The man does not ask him more. Promising.
‘Of course, there are one or two things I’d need for travel that I … don’t have any more. Things that I wouldn’t want to leave without. Whenever I were to set off.’
The man still says nothing, but nods his head slowly.
Tunde brings his hands together casually, then slides the notes under the blotter on the desk so that just the corners of them are showing. Fanned out, ten fifty-dollar bills. US currency, that’s the key thing.
The man’s slow, regular breathing halts, for just a second.
Tunde continues, jovial. ‘Freedom,’ he says, ‘is all anyone wants.’ He pauses. ‘I think I will go up to bed. Could you tell them to send me up a Scotch? Room 614. As soon as you can.’
The man says, ‘I will bring it myself, sir. In just a few moments.’
In the room, Tunde flicks on the TV. Kristen is saying, The fourth-quarter forecast isn’t looking good. Matt is laughing attractively and saying, Now, I don’t understand that kind of thing at all, but I’ll tell you what I do know about: apple-bobbing.
There’s a brief roundup on C-Span about a ‘military crackdown’ in this ‘tumultuous region’, but much more about another domestic terrorism action in Idaho. UrbanDox and his idiots have successfully changed the story. If you’re talking about men’s rights now, you’re talking about them, and their conspiracy theories and the violence of them and the need for curbs and limits. No one wants to hear about what’s happening here. The truth has always been a more complex commodity than the market can easily package and sell. And now the weather on the ones.
Tunde stocks his backpack. Two changes of clothes, his notes, his laptop and phone, water bottle, his old-fashioned camera with forty rolls of film, because he knows there could be days when he won’t find electricity or batteries, and a non-digital camera will be useful. He pauses, then crams in a couple more pairs of socks. He feels a kind of excitement welling up, unexpectedly, as well as the terror and the outrage and the madness. He tells himself it is stupid to feel excited; this is serious. When the knock on the door comes, he jumps.
For a moment, when he opens the door, he thinks the old man has misunderstood him. On the tray, there’s a tumbler of whisky sitting on a rectangular coaster, and nothing else. It’s only when he looks more closely that he sees that the coaster is, in fact, his passport.
‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘This is just what I wanted.’
The man nods. Tunde pays him for the whisky and zips the passport into the side pocket of his trousers.
He waits to leave until around 4.30 a.m. The corridors are quiet, the lights low. No alarm sounds as he opens the door and steps out into the cold. No one tries to stop him. It is as if the whole afternoon had been a dream.
Tunde crosses the empty night-streets, the dogs barking far away, breaks into a jog for a few moments then settles back to a long-legged, loping pace. Putting his hand into his pocket, he finds he still has the key to his hotel room. He considers throwing it away or putting it into a postbox but, fingering the shiny brass fob, he thrusts it back into his pocket. As long as he has it, he can imagine that room 614 will always be there waiting for him, still just as he left it. The bed still unmade, the morning’s papers by the desk in ungainly peaks, his smart shoes side by side under the bedside table, his used pants and socks thrown in the corner by his open, half-empty suitcase.
Rock art discovered in northern France, around four thousand years old. Depicts the ‘curbing’ procedure – also known as male genital mutilation – in which key nerve endings in the penis are burned out as the boy approaches puberty. After the procedure – which is still practised in several European countries – it is impossible for a man to achieve an erection without skein stimulation by a woman. Many men who have been subjected to curbing will never be able to ejaculate without pain.
CAN’T BE MORE THAN SEVEN MONTHS LEFT
* * *
Allie
Roxy Monke has disappeared. Allie saw her at the party, the staff say they saw her leaving, there’s security camera footage of her car driving out of the city, and then nothing. She was heading north, that’s all they know. It’s been eight weeks. There’s been nothing.