The Butt

3

After a full — obscenely costly — hour on the phone in the apartment, Tom managed to secure three days’ postponement on their flights home. First he blustered, then he wheedled, and finally he begged the airline clerk. In the end, he was charged only $500 extra, but the changed bookings meant they would have to depart Vance at 4 a.m., then make two stopovers: the first at Faikwong, and the second at Tippurliah, which Tom had never heard of before, but which turned out to be a tiny atoll in the middle of the Pacific.

‘How can, like, international flights stop there?’ Dixie asked him when he’d come off the call, and was consulting his pocket atlas. ‘I mean, it’s like the size of a, like, fingernail or something.’

‘I dunno,’ her father groaned. ‘It must be ’cause there’s a military installation in that neck of the woods. At the end of World War II, they laid out strips for Superfortresses on some of these flyspecks. Anyway, we’re gonna be there for seventeen hours, so we’ll have plenty of time to find out.’

‘I’ve gotta, like, jones for Faikwong,’ Dixie said, changing tack; ‘everyone says the malls there are, like, totally out of this world. I wanna get some cool stuff.’

‘Me too.’

Tommy Junior had lumbered into the main room of the apartment and stood gurning up at his games console, which he held in an outstretched hand. ‘This thing is way obsolete — they’ll have the latest VX90 in Faikwong. It’ll be way cheap too.’

‘I don’t know where you guys think the money for all this is going to come from. .’ Tom began reasonably enough, but as he spoke his voice began to rise and rise, with little aggrieved yelps. ‘Neither of you seems to’ve sicked on to the fact that your father — that’s me, guys — is in some serious trouble, here.

‘Changing the flights has already cost five hundred bucks; there isn’t any money left over for your toys. I may need a lot more money than we’ve got to deal with this situation at all. I don’t even expect Tommy to understand any of this, but you, Dixie, are you as goddamn stupid as him, or are you just INCREDIBLY FUCKING SELFISH!’

The blood drained from the teenage girl’s tanned face, leaving bone-white patches underneath her eyes. Her long neck jerked back, and the absurd disc of greased blonde hair, which sat on her head like an ugly halo, knocked against a hotel-chain abstract in an aluminium frame.

The frame rattled on the brick wall. Dixie’s hairstyle was now all mashed up, like a bird’s nest found lying by the roots of a tree. She bit her lip. Tears lay in her eye sockets — misery bifocals. She bit her knuckles and spluttered, ‘You. . you!’ Then she turned abruptly, mashing the halo still further, and bolted into the back bedroom, where, after a few more seconds, Tom heard her begin to wail, with all the mundane anguish of an ambulance siren.

Tommy Junior remained standing exactly where he was, gurning at his games console.

Later on, when the kids had cooled off in the Mimosa’s pool, the Brodzinskis walked across the stretch of park to the ’nade.

When they’d first arrived in Vance, three weeks before, the prospect had both charmed and reassured Tom: the neatly mown grass and the oval beds of tropical shrubbery, which spread smoothly down to the ’nade, the long boardwalk that ran clear around Vance Bay, its supporting piles sunk deep in the muddy foreshore.

Now, however, he was conscious only of what an alien imposition this all was: the flowers were too lurid and fleshy, the heavily irrigated grass too green. As for the ’nade, while the weathered wood used to build it was meant to make the serpentine structure harmonize with its surroundings, this effect was ruined by the regularly spaced ‘information points’ — each with its perspex rain hood, each blazoned with a stentorian NO SMOKING sign, complete with obligatory list of grave penalties.

Alongside the ’nade, there was a beautifully equipped playground. Bright, primary-coloured climbing frames, see-saws and swings stood in safety pits of fine white sand. There was even a water play area, where concealed jets created an artificial stream. Yet, the high-flown municipal pride in inclusiveness, which had even produced a swing for wheelchair-bound children, now seemed strange to Tom, set beside the brackish ooze of the bay, in which wallowed the occasional salt-water crocodile or prehistoric-looking bird.

As they ate their burgers and fries on one of the trestle tables by the café, Martha pointed out what Tom had known only too well — even as he’d wheedled the airline clerk — yet hadn’t dared to acknowledge to himself. ‘There are only two alternatives, Tom,’ she began.

And he, forlornly, tried to stop her, with a ‘Perhaps we should discuss this in private. .?’

Which she waved away with ‘The kids may as well hear it right now. It’s a valuable lesson for them’ — she turned to include all the children in the homily — ‘about how all our actions have consequences. Your daddy has signed a bond, see, and that bond is his word, because he’s an honest man; and because he’s given his word, he’ll have to stay here for a few more days, so he can sort out this business with Mr Lincoln, the man he injured.

‘OK. But if we want to get home in time for you guys to start school, and me to start work’ — here, Martha darted a particularly sharp look at Tom, who, she maintained, never accorded her career the same importance that he attached to his own — ‘then we’ll have to go without him. See’ — she turned to Tom again — ‘wasn’t that easy?’

Jeremy squeezed a French fry between his grubby fingers, until it ejaculated white pulp on to his ketchup-smeared paper plate.

‘What’s a bond?’ he said.

On leaving his family, Tom went straight to the CellPoint store that he’d spotted the day before. It was half a mile along Dundas Boulevard, the wide straight avenue that ran from the terracotta block of the Mimosa into the downtown area of Vance.

The CellPoint store, with its plate-glass window plastered with blue and orange decals, and its modular plastic stands that held the gleaming clam shells of the cellphones, was deeply comforting to Tom. There was an outlet exactly like it in the mall near their home town of Milford.

The CellPoint store spoke to him of efficient global communications and, more importantly, of what was being communicated: namely, certain standards of human decency and best business practice.

As Tom stepped inside, the air con’ separated his damp shirt from his back. The workaday formalities of renting a phone were also comforting, yet Tom couldn’t stop himself from examining the sales clerks with new and warier eyes.

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 cupboard 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 renegade 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.

He pulled it out and, without any thought, handed it to the Consul, saying: ‘What about this guy, is he any good?’

Adams took the card, and glanced at it. ‘Swai-Phillips?’ he laughed shortly. ‘He’s one of the best, and, in point of, ah, fact, for your particular case he’s the very best. He has Gandaro and Aval blood; hill and desert. There’s a dash of Tugganarong in there as well, and, of course, his mother’s mother was Belgian. So, he covers the, ah, waterfront. If anyone can get you bail, he can.’

‘Bail. .’ Tom muttered, wonderingly. For the first time he took in the fact that he might actually be seeing the inside of a police cell, before the setting sun splurged, molten red, on to the mudflats of Vance Bay.

‘Call him on my phone,’ Adams continued, ‘and if he’s able to meet you down there, I’ll give you a ride. Then we must call the DA’s office, get the relevant account details and arrange for the transfer of these funds.’

‘H-How much d’you think they’ll want?’

Tom could already hear his bank manager’s incredulous voice echoing from the other side of the world: ‘You want what?’

‘I should think it’ll be a minimum of, ah, $100,000 — maybe even twice that.’

Having sounded this financial death knell, Adams set down the lizard on the polished floorboards. He beckoned to Tom: ‘Come back in here to my office, we’ll make the calls.’

An hour or so later, Tom levered himself up out of the passenger seat of the Consul’s Toyota, to find the lawyer already waiting for them on the brilliant white concrete steps of police HQ.

Tom was relieved that Swai-Phillips had put on a shirt, but surprised that it was such a loud one: the Manhattan skyline encircled his powerful chest. The skyscrapers were black and studded with hundreds of tiny yellow oblong windows, like a negative image of gnashing teeth.

Swai-Phillips waved away Tom’s proffered hand, at the same time politely dismissing a reiteration of the apology his new client had already made to him on the phone. He put one huge and corded arm about Tom’s shoulders, while vigorously shaking Adams’s hand with the other. The two men exchanged bursts of pidgin, the consonants flying like buckshot, then laughed together.

‘OK from here in, Jethro?’ Adams said, switching to English.

‘Yeah — yeah, no worries, mate,’ the lawyer replied, and, still embracing Tom, he wheeled him round and marched him up the steps and under the massive marble portico — a feature that Tom, even in his shocked and sozzled state, could recognize as being absurdly grandiose for a provincial station.

In the lobby, which was equally imposing — shiny marble floor, inset with gold brilliants forming the outline of the southern constellations — Swai-Phillips embraced Tom still more closely. ‘You,’ he breathed, his sandalwood-scented Afro tickling Tom’s cheek, ‘say nothing. Keep it zipped.’

Then the lawyer advanced on the reception desk, which had been roughly, but artistically, hewn from a block of rusty-red native rock. Behind it sat an Anglo cop in camouflage uniform. She also wore a bulletproof vest that was cut low, like a décolletage. An assault rifle was propped beside her computer terminal, while leaning against the wall behind her was a bundle of hunting spears, some at least twelve feet long.

Once Swai-Phillips had explained their business, another officer ushered them into an interview room. Here, there were a couple of plastic chairs and a steel table that had built into it some kind of apparatus; this, judging by the buttons and LED displays, Tom assumed to be recording equipment. Surveillance cameras were mounted in all four corners of the room; they were the same compact models that he’d seen all over town, loitering in alleyways, squatting on top of poles like remote-control stylites.

Feeling the effects of Adams’s Daquiri, Tom sat down heavily on one of the chairs. Swai-Phillips went to the window and, parting the slats of the Venetian blinds, pointed out to him a powerboat moored in the marina. The high white superstructure was trimmed with silvery aluminium, and a thicket of whiplash radio antennae sprouted from the wheelhouse roof, while a stand of thick sea-fishing rods was planted by the stern.

‘Mine,’ Swai-Phillips said casually. ‘I’ll take you out one day.’

The door whooshed open behind them, and Tom turned to see a very stocky brown-skinned man enter. He was clearly a high-ranking officer, for, while he wore the same military-style uniform as the state police, and his massive head was surmounted with the same shiny origami cap — all sharp angles, with a peak like a stork’s bill — his was festooned with ornate enamelled medallions.

The officer — who Tom assumed, rightly, to be a Tugga-narong — marched up to him, smelled his breath through pump-action nostrils and spat out: ‘Drinking, eh? Anglo’s ruin over here.’ Then he laughed and turned to the lawyer. ‘Gettinoff on your pot an’ stuff, are you, Jethro?’ He jerked a thumb towards the marina. ‘I ken tellya ’ow that tub ainfor the thing. You gotta veep-creep up on ’em fishy-fellers. Veep-creep awlways. I bin out lass Satenday for tuckerbully, an’ gotta 500-pounder juss offa me skiff.’

Swai-Phillips guffawed. ‘Me? I took two 700-pound tunny off Piccaboy’s ’fore lunch the same day. Gaffed ’em, filleted ’em, an’ served ’em up to the old folk at me veranda. I tellya, Squolly, that pot ’o mine don’ juss find de fish — it lures dem in!’

The two men — one, two heads taller than the other — continued their hobbyists’ boasting for another five minutes or so, their claims becoming more and more fantastical.

At some point Swai-Phillips must have passed the officer, whom he called Squolly, the Milford Chemical Bank’s faxed notification of Tom’s asset transfer, because he no longer had it in his hand when he broke off and said to Tom, ‘We’re off now’; then to Squolly, ‘Gotta get this diddy one back ’fore ’e karks wiv de stress of itall.’

The two friends — for, clearly, that’s what they were — then touched palms, and, grasping his client’s shoulder as if it were the tiller of a sluggish sailboat, Swai-Phillips guided Tom out of the building.

Once they were in the lawyer’s SUV, and a fair way off from police headquarters, cruising along the wide boulevards through the commercial district, Tom recovered his thick tongue and asked Swai-Phillips: ‘What happened there? I mean, Adams said I’d be arrested.’

‘You were.’

‘Then what about Miranda? He, S-Squolly, he never read me my rights.’

‘Rights!’ Swai-Phillips laughed. ‘The only rights hereabouts are the ones we make!’

And to illustrate this witticism, he signalled and took the next right into a cross street.

Tom absorbed this for a while, then said: ‘When will the judge decide if I get bail?’

This time the lawyer laughed long and hard; a series of independent bellows of such force that even the oversized car rocked.

‘Oh.’ He recovered himself and patted Tom’s bare knee. ‘You got bail alrighty, no worries there, my friend, yeah. With a hundred K down flat, Squolly would’ve given bail to a kiddie-fiddler!’

And Swai-Phillips erupted all over again, his preposterous silvery Afro shaking like the foliage of a birch tree.

Put out, Tom almost inquired whether, since there had been no sign of a judge, a bribe had been involved. But then he thought better of it: he was beginning to understand how far out of his depth he was. To ask his own lawyer such a thing would only be to flounder still more in this treacherous quicksand.

The shock, the heat and the leaden charge of Adams’s palm spirit Daquiri were all puddling together into a bad headache, when the SUV pulled into the Mimosa’s parking lot. Swai-Phillips hit a button on the dash, and the native music that had been unobtrusively playing — and which, Tom now realized, had the same, insistent bing-bong beat as the ring tone on his hired cellphone — cut out.

The lawyer stopped the car and turned in his seat. Tom looked into the wrap-around shades and saw in their bulbous lenses his own pale face, leeched of any colour or composure.

‘OK, Brodzinski.’ The lawyer was all business now. ‘Come by my office tomorrow morning, as soon as you’ve moved your stuff over to a longer-let apartment. Budget will be a consideration for you now, yeah? I can recommend the Entreati Experience on Trangaden Boulevard.

‘I’ll be needing a deposit from you. Another wire transfer would be fine, although I’d prefer cash. Either way, say $5,000. My secretary will make sure you get an itemization at the end of every week.

‘Luckily for you, I’m called to the local bar as a solicitor-advocate, so there’ll be no need to take on a trial lawyer. I’m going to see the DA this afternoon, and I’m hoping to persuade him to set an early date for the combined hearing, right?’

‘Combined hearing?’ Tom queried weakly.

‘That’s right. Bail has to be confirmed by a senior judge; at the same time traditional makkatas will rule on the combo. The judge is no prob’, but the makkatas have to come in from over there.’ Swai-Phillips jerked a thumb over his shoulder; then, seeing his client’s incomprehension, qualified this: ‘Y’know, from the desert. Anyways, so long as you’ve been deemed astande, you can immediately begin restitution to the Intwennyfortee mob—’

Tom waved the lawyer down; none of this arcane legal stuff was getting through to him. What had registered, however, was Swai-Phillips’s earlier assumption. ‘What makes you so certain’ — Tom chose his words carefully — ‘that I’ll be moving out of the Mimosa in the morning? My wife and kids aren’t set to fly until—’

‘Please, Mr Brodzinski, look behind you.’

Tom whipped round: the twins, Jeremy and Lucas, were playing in the flower bed at the front of the apartment block. As he watched, Jerry picked up a handful of bark chips and slung them at his brother. Tommy Junior was preoccupied, lost in a solipsistic frolic, leadenly cavorting at the kerbside, his partner a wheeled flight bag that he jerked back and forth by its handle.

At that moment, the double glass doors swung open, and Martha and Dixie emerged, between them manhandling the enormous suitcase that conveyed the bulk of the family’s effects.

Tom swivelled back to face Swai-Phillips’s bug eyes. It was a disconcerting reprise of the scene that had been played in the same location, by the same cast, that morning. Only this time, Tom voiced his unease: ‘How did’ya know they were leaving? How! Are, are you. .’ he said, floundering, ‘. . psychic or something?’

Swai-Phillips began to utter his maddening, stagy laugh. However, he was forestalled by Martha, who let go of the suitcase and came barrelling across to the SUV. She wrenched the passenger door open and, leaning across her husband, began shouting at the lawyer: ‘What the fuck’s your game, mister? Have you got your hooks into my husband? Whaddya want from us, money? Slimy, fucking money!’

Even the imperturbable Swai-Phillips seemed taken aback by this turn of events. Involuntarily, he reached up and swept off his glasses. It was as if — it occurred to Tom later — he was refusing a blindfold, the better to impress his insouciance on this one-woman firing squad by staring her down.

Except that the lawyer couldn’t really stare anyone down once his mask was removed. For, while one of his eyes was keenly green and steady, the other was rolled back in its socket, and half obscured by a pink gelatinous membrane that cut obliquely across the white. The three of them froze, shocked in different ways by the revelation of this deformity. Certainly, neither Tom nor Martha Brodzinski had ever seen anything like it before.