The Butt

5

Tom holed up at the Experience and waited for the wound in his thigh to heal. Bored, he ventured out to a book store he’d noticed in the nearby mall. When he let slip to the clerk that he might be going ‘over there’, she pressed upon him a fat volume called Songs of the Tayswengo by O. M. and E. F. von Sasser.

‘It’s the bizzo,’ the girl said. ‘The Von Sassers have been over there for decades — first the father, then the son. They know all there is to know. They’ve collected all the stories — they write beautifully as well.’

Her eyes were a little crazy; her words came in enthusiastic spurts.

Tom didn’t find Songs of the Tayswengo to be beautifully written at all. It was turgid, loaded with anthropological jargon, and the songs themselves seemed at once silly and incomprehensible: ‘Jabber up to me, flipper lizard / Let me rub sand on your sad gizzard’ was a representative couplet.

Every time he started reading the heavy hardback, Tom fell asleep — only to wake with a start, having dreamed that a malevolent child was sitting on his chest.

Fed up with the Von Sassers, Tom bought more books and scanned them on his sweat-damp bed at the Experience, a mosquito coil smouldering by his elbow. But these writers were just as bewildering. One would propose an outlandish psychological model of the hill tribes, while the next would say this was nonsense: the Handrey were as similar to the Anglos as any one individual is to the next.

There was dispute even about the fundamentals: some experts categorically stated that the desert people had been there for as long as 100,000 years; while others insisted that when the first Anglo explorers crossed the interior, they encountered Inssessitti makkatas, who told them that their people had only been in the region for the past decade, having themselves arrived by sea from the Felthams.

The very shifting sands of the deserts and the sliding rivers of mud in the tropical uplands served to obscure whatever material evidence there might be to support or deny these competing contentions. And so it was that the land itself was amnesiac, forgetful of its own history; and ignorant, even, of its own terrifying extent.

After a couple of days Swai-Phillips called.

‘I’ve no date yet for the prelim’ hearing, right,’ he said without any preamble.

‘Well, when will you?’

‘Hard to say.’

Tom pictured the lawyer in his offices at the top of the Metro-Center, puffing on a stinky engwegge cheroot and bullshitting from behind his mask of a face.

‘But so long as the court accepts the makkata’s evidence you can make the first reparation trip over there, right away, right.’

‘First?’

‘There may have to be several, but the good thing is you can head off while the criminal prosecution continues — which may take many weeks.’

Seeking to deploy his new knowledge, Tom asked, ‘Am I, like, initiated now?’

Swai-Phillips was dismissive. ‘Don’t be under any illusions, Brodzinski,’ he said. ‘If you’d been foolish enough — and some Anglos are — to have gone through initiation to one of the desert mobs, you wouldn’t be idling your days away reading, while waiting for a fair trial. That makkata would’ve broken every bone in your body with a punishment stick — then Atalaya’s women would’ve pissed on you — by way of humiliation.

‘Anyway, when’re you gonna come up to the house again? Gloria’s been asking after you. Squolly’s coming up Sunday with his mob, gonna do a big barbie. There’ll be heaps of fish, heaps of beer, shitloads of kids in and out of the pool. Do you good, mate, have a slice of the old family life.’

Tom didn’t want to see Gloria again; he wasn’t certain he’d be able to cope with her travesty of his wife’s features in broad daylight. Nor was the idea of sinking a few beers with the policeman appealing.

Tom had to report to police HQ every other day. Squolly — or Commander Squoddoloppolollou, as he was properly called — was always laid-back and friendly. Even when the grandiose marble hallways filled with the clatter of steel-shod boots, and open-topped trucks full of paramilitaries screeched in and out of the parking lot, the barrel-shaped officer still found time to get Tom a soda, then sit with him while he sipped it in the pleasantly cool confines of the interview room.

Squolly disdained the Intwennyfortee mob’s ritual business. ‘See, Tom,’ he told him, ‘our belief is that it’s a man’s intentions that count, yeah. We don’t judge an offender for what he’s done, yeah, only for what he thought he was going to do.’

‘But I thought that’s what the native people believed too?’

Squolly laughed and exhaled a patch of condensation into being on the shiny peak of his cap, which he was holding. ‘No, no, the desert mobs — the Tayswengo, who you’re mixed up with; the Aval, Jethro’s dad’s people; the Inssessetti and the renegades, the Entreati — well, they’re harsh, man. Very fierce, yeah. Their line is that every single act a fellow makes is willed, right enough: a hiccup, or a murder.’

‘I knew that much. I’ve been reading the Von Sassers’ Songs of the Tayswengo.’

‘OK, sure, very. . authentic.’ The policeman grinned, revealing teeth as strong and squared off as his own torso. ‘The hill tribes, yeah, they’re different again. They believe in spirits big time. A spirit gets between a man and his wife, a man and his kiddies, a man’s hand and a can of bloody peaches! They’re praying all the time, making offerings — trying to get these bloody spirits to stop ’em spilling their grog.

‘If a Handrey or an Ibbolit does a big bad one — a rape, a murder — we have to get ’im down here, yeah, get his bloody makkata and get him to summon the right spirit, so he can tell the makkata why he made the fellow do it!’

Squolly shook his head at the very idea of such foolishness. He drew a handkerchief covered with brownish engwegge stains from his pocket and began polishing the peak of his cap. ‘Now, with us coastal peoples — Anglos, Tugganarong — we’re more rational, right. Man’s accused of doing something bad — like you, yeah — we don’t pull him in and ’terro-gate ’im. We don’t duff him up, right. No, we ob-serve him. We send our blokes out after him — quiet, yeah, no fuss — and check out how he conducts himself in the world. How he orders his morning coffee, buys his paper, deals with all the little irritations of his day. Then we compile a report on what kind of intentions the fellow has. There’s nothing high tech’, we don’t use no fancy psychologists or profilers, it’s just good old-fashioned police leg work.’

Oddly, the surveillance didn’t bother Tom — even though Squolly’s men were trying to read his mind in a way not usually attempted by anyone save for a mother or a lover.

On the contrary, as he splashed through the first storms of the monsoon to buy his newspaper, or sat beneath bulging awnings drinking his coffee, the sight of a cop, loitering by the doors to the mall, dumpy in his rain cape, was almost reassuring. Often his tails would come over to chat with him, mulling over the strength of the previous night’s wind, musing as to whether this year’s monsoon was heavier than the last.

In the afternoons, in the brief interval between one swishing curtain of rain and the next, Tom would put on his old sweat-pants and go for a run. Leaving the dock area, he jogged through the shopping district. At this time of the year the chilled malls were empty but for a few Anglos. The tourists were all gone, and the miners wouldn’t come in from the interior until shortly before Christmas. Nor was the business district buzzing; the occasional clerk or manager, dressed in their tropical version of a suit — jacket and pants both cut short to reveal pale arms and paler legs — would scamper along the sidewalk, leaping over puddles, their faces set, as if to say, ‘This business of leaping over puddles is bloody serious, right.’

Tom slopped by them. He glanced up at the Metro-Center to see if his lawyer was in his office; then, head down, took the wide Trangaden Boulevard, which ran through the outskirts of town, where glass barns sold agricultural equipment, then on between billboards that grew tattier, until it declined into a single strip of concrete, before eventually terminating in the long sable strand of the town beach.

Usually, there would be a couple of other afternoon exercisers out there with Tom, while sea fishermen whipped the slack waves with their lines. The gnarled shapes of the offshore atolls, which in fine weather were lovely ornaments cast down on the azure baize, now resembled crumpled refuse adrift on this oceanic puddle. The clouds shrouded the foothills, obscuring the more elevated suburbs of Vance. So Tom took his constitutional along a sable corridor, between vaporous walls.

To swim in the sea was, of course, out of the question. In the dry season there were sharks and box jellyfish, while the monsoon brought with it the Sangat, or bladder, clams. When the wind rose and the waves pounded, they drummed up these avid crustaceans from the sea bed. Anyone unlucky enough to have one fasten on his skin would soon become the host for a thriving population of necrotic bivalves. Tom had seen bladder-clam victims in Vance, clunking along the sidewalks with their bared arms or legs warty with nacre. They looked like medieval knights, unhorsed and stripped of their armour save for brassards or greaves.

Each afternoon Tom jogged the length of the beach, then back to the Experience. Overall he was covering six or seven miles. But while the first few runs left him heaving for breath, after a week he was managing it easily.

With every breath the humid air was discovering new tissue to invigorate. Tom had read somewhere that, if fully unfurled, the human lung would cover two football fields, and now he felt as if he were reoccupying this living turf, which for so many years had been ploughed over with tar.

Before the rains swished back in there was a small window of opportunity, and gratefully Tom thrust his head into it, breathing deeply with each pace. At these times he was almost glad of his protracted sojourn. He felt a stupefying pride at his own achievement: would I, he wondered, ever have cracked the smoking habit if all this shit hadn’t gone down?

When he’d got back to the apartment, showered off and drunk a couple of bottles of mineral water, Tom ventured out once more. This was the most onerous part of his daily routine: the call home.

There were several call stores in downtown Vance. In these strip-lit caves, the Tugganarong who did the city’s menial jobs paid over their wages for a few minutes’ chitchat with their families in the Feltham Islands.

The call stores doubled in function, also offering money-transfer services. Tom often saw some downtrodden Tugga-narong pay over half his wages to Western Union, then half of the remainder to Bell Telephone. Squolly had told him that the Tugganarong were paid minimal wages, the justification being that their employers — whether domestic, municipal or business — provided accommodation and food. So, once they’d visited the call store, they had only a handful of change left; enough for a brown-bagged bottle to be drunk in the street, then they’d lurch back to their dormitories, festering sheds on the far side of town.

The Tugganarong smelled of the lanolin they used to mould their thick hair into Anglo hairstyles. They were also loud, conducting their calls home with a mixture of frustration and anger. As they shouted in the flimsy booths, their language was impenetrable to Tom, and seemed to consist of sharp consonants, interspersed with syllables that all sounded like ‘olly’. Making his collect calls, which involved negotiating with up to three operators, all on the line simultaneously, Tom had to contend with this background roar: ‘Gollyrollyfollytollybolly!’

When he heard the familiar tone of the wall-mounted phone in his own bright, open-plan kitchen, Tom’s frustration fell away, and he simply felt miserable. On answering, his children dutifully passed the handset, one to the next. He pictured them in a row of descending height on the red-tiled floor: Von Trapped.

The twins prattled on about school and friends — the shiftless, shifting alliances of eight-year-olds — then passed Tom on to Tommy Junior, so the lumpen fourteen-year-old could drone on about his computer games and his trading card collection. ‘Gollyvollytolly. .’ Tommy Junior seemed to be saying, while all around Tom the Tugganarong kept up the same incomprehensible jabber. Tom pictured Tommy Junior as a Tugganarong, his white skin darkened, his mousy crest greased. And wasn’t it true — Tom mused while the boy babbled — that Tommy Junior was his own guest worker? Foisted on Tom to perform the menial job of stabbing his conscience.

The hardest exchanges were with Dixie. When she came on the line, Tom pressed the handset so hard against his ear that he could hear the cartilage crack. Dixie, who was charged with explaining to her father, half a world away, why it was that at this early hour — 8 a.m. by his reckoning — her mother was not in the kitchen cooking breakfast, cutting sandwiches or combing hair. Not, in short, doing any of the things that a now sole parent might be expected to.

The first few times Tom called and got his daughter in lieu of his wife he was understanding. How could he be anything but? Yes, Martha was already at work, yes, he understood. Of course she had to leave early — he saw that. She was still asleep. .? Dixie would wake her if he insisted. . But no, he didn’t insist, because he entirely understood, you see. Her mother must be tired after getting in so late.

So it went on, for day after day; until Tom at last cracked and shouted at his wife’s proxy: ‘Dixie! Dixie! Where is your goddamn mother? I haven’t spoken to her since you guys got home, and that was more than two weeks ago! Get her for me now. Now! D’you hear me?’

Dixie chose not to hear this outburst.

‘Dad? Dad? What is it, Dad?’ Came echoing under the sea, or through the stratosphere. ‘Dad? Dad?’

Then the line went dead, and the ‘Gollybollyfolly’ swelled up, engulfing Tom Brodzinski with the Tugganarong’s own exile on this fatal shore.

That night, lying in the sweat box of his apartment, the monsoon pouring through the night outside, Tom began thinking about the butt again. He was back on the balcony, looking down on Atalaya Intwennyfortee. Had he examined her breasts too intently? To glance — surely that was only natural; but had he perhaps ogled her lasciviously? He couldn’t recall her seeing him, yet that wasn’t the point — it was his intentions that mattered.

Then there was the butt itself. Lying in bed, the heavy volume of the Von Sassers tented over his belly, Tom pressed the nail of his index finger against the pad of his thumb. How much tension had there been? How much pressure had he exerted? This much — or this? Gloria’s cool fingers had moved expertly, swabbing at the crescent-shaped incision the makkata’s blade had made in Tom’s thigh. Tom had felt no arousal — only relief.

Now he was aroused. The natives who drank in the bar opposite were being herded away by the low squawk of a squad car’s siren. The rains drummed. The first roaches to check into the motel were fretting in their chambers, already regretting their choice of accommodation. Tom sought to yank the handle that delivered repose. Under the sheet it was not his hand but Gloria’s. It went lower, seeking out the raised scar tissue on his thigh. . Gloria’s fingers probed it — or were they. . Martha’s?

He shot upright and squeezed on the light that tore into sharp being the nasty walls, the nylon curtains and the late check-ins to the roach motel, skittering and whirring for cover.

‘I was in shock.’ Tom said aloud. ‘I was in shock and she was wearing make-up — perhaps even a prosthesis.’

His wife of nearly twenty years was conniving with that lawyer. Her performance at the Mimosa Apartments had been just that, put on to throw Tom off the scent. He’d never seen her go through security, because she never had; and there Martha was, up at Swai-Phillips’s creepy tin mansion, pretending to be someone else altogether.

‘And for why?’ he implored the night and the roaches.

Too shaky for sleep now, Tom got up and pulled on his clothes. Outside in the street, he gathered the folds of his rain poncho around him and splashed towards the ’nade. He welcomed the company of his tail, although he was surprised to see the cop putting in such late hours. When they reached the boardwalk, they sheltered in the adjacent perspex hoods of two information points. The audio recording in Tom’s was a history of the first colonists, but he didn’t want to hear it again. Instead he waited for the grey dawn, and for the green tide to ebb across the mudflats, exposing the ugly crocodiles.

Once or twice he considered taxing the policeman with the hypocrisy — and possibly even illegality — of his smoking while on assignment; but then he thought better of it, and went back to cursing his own folly and stupidity, his wife’s perfidy and treachery.

The following evening Tom had dinner with Adams, at the Honorary Consul’s house. He took with him a decent bottle of Côte du Rhone that he’d managed to search out from the dusty shelves of a liquor store. Tom presented it to Adams, when his host came bounding along the walkway from his front door and opened the passenger door of Tom’s cab.

‘Excellent, excellent,’ the Consul muttered to himself, while Tom paid off the driver. Then, when Adams turned to face him, he said: ‘This will go very well with the main course. My, ah, friends have scared up some binturang for us.’

He leaned into Tom, as if seeing him for the first time. ‘You’re not a, ah, vegetarian, are you, Brodzinski?’

By night Adams’s house achieved a certain elegance. The dark floors reflected the fan blades, and the splashes of colour which were the Consul’s native daubs glowed in the lamplight. Seated in a rattan chair, Tom accepted a Daquiri and resolved to make it last. As if by unspoken agreement, the two men didn’t discuss the business of the butt at all. Instead, Tom told Adams how struck he’d been by the bladder-clam victims who clonked through downtown.

‘Yes, distressing, isn’t it?’ Adams took a sip of his drink, his tone suggesting that he found it anything but.

‘The research centre here is doing some first-rate work on the problem. They already have an effective palliative; however, it’s expensive, well beyond the means of any but the, ah, elites — and they don’t tend to be the ones foolish, or desperate, enough to swim in the sea.’ He smiled insidiously. ‘They have pools.’

Tom was content to sit like this, getting gently soused on the Consul’s Daquiris and talking of this and that. As long as he didn’t require anything from Adams, the man was a decent companion. Besides, he had something he wanted to give his host: a revelation he kept to himself, as a child does a guilty yet treasured secret.

The rains started up outside, as sudden as a twisted faucet, and the Consul raised his voice to combat the pounding on the wooden roof. He was telling Tom, at considerable length — and with certain embellishments suggesting either that he was extrapolating from something that he had written down or that this wasn’t the first time he had recounted the tale — about his trip up to Vance in the town car.

From time to time one of the Handrey women came into the room, her bare feet sucking on the floorboards, and bent over Adams to whisper in his ear. On each occasion this happened, he’d report to Tom: ‘Nearly there, binturang’s damn tricky to cook — it’s the timing that’s crucial.’

Once, Tom thought he saw Adams cup the heavy breast of one of the women and give it a squeeze, but he couldn’t be sure. He took it as read that Adams’s involvement with these native women was exploitative — probably on both sides.

Adams was describing how the car broke down and he became trapped in the Tontine Townships of the bauxite belt. ‘Parts were impossible to get hold of locally, and it took several weeks for them to be freighted in. The situation at that time was. . well, to be frank I was frightened. But there was no question of my abandoning the car. It had become’ — he smiled in a self-deprecating way — ‘well, become part of my, ah, quest to discover this country. To truly be part of it.’

Tom couldn’t have cared less about Adams’s quest, nor was he eagerly awaiting the binturang. He’d seen the animals in the wild, when the Brodzinskis toured a nature reserve in the Highlands. Binturang was the native name for these large arboreal mammals, which were anthropoid in their form and bulk, yet feline in their movements and manner of reclining, usually full-length on the horizontal limbs of the high jungle canopy.

While Tom had been keen to sample the local cuisine when his family had been with him — the thick creamy stews of the hill tribes, the fruity curries of the Tugganarong — now that he was alone he yearned for down-home junk food. He went into fast-food joints and sat there uptaking hydrolysed fat and corn syrup, his hands wrenching at the bolted-down tables. Sipping on his waxed-paper bucket of soda, Tom hearkened to the familiar gravelly sounds of the ice chips inside and, narrowing his eyes, attempted to screen out anything in his visual field — a spike of alien greenery against the plate-glass window, the oiled pompadour of a dining Tugganarong — that jibed with this homeyness.

A spindly gateleg table had been set for the two men in the Honorary Consul’s bedroom. In the corner of the austere room, with its white walls and polished wooden floor, stood a narrow army cot, made up with a brown blanket and a neatly folded sheet. On top of a chest of drawers, in front of an oval mirror, were arranged silver hairbrushes and crystal scent atomizers.

Tom would have commented on the oddness of all this, were it not for the presence of the cooked binturang. The long pink glistening skinned corpse lay on an enormous chopping board that had been placed on the table, which hardly seemed strong enough to support it.

The Handrey women had removed the binturang’s head before they spit-roasted it. It rested to one side in a heap of arugula, its eye sockets black and crispy, its needle-sharp teeth bared. Tom thought the animal looked like a faked photograph of an alien’s corpse lying in a secret military installation. He steeled himself with a slug of Daquiri before sitting, then set his glass down with a clonk, hoping one of the women would get him a refill.

Adams registered this and said irritatedly, ‘I think I’ll ask for that excellent vino you brought to be poured, Brodzinski. Liquor doesn’t sit well with binturang.’

He began to sharpen a long carving knife with slow, deliberate strokes on a cylindrical whetstone. Then Tom watched, repulsed, as Adams began sawing through one of the fully extended back legs. The table moved back and forth under the impetus, the claws of the leg Adams was severing flicking droplets of grease across the front of his tan cotton pants. He stopped for a moment to wipe the sweat from his forehead, then bent back to his task.

‘Wayne?’ said a Handrey woman, passing Tom a brimming goblet. He took it gratefully.

The Binturang turned out to be very tasty. The flesh was so tender it could be forked apart into long filaments as twirlable as spaghetti. The flavour was between that of partridge and of pork. With the assistance of half a bottle of Côte du Rhone, and the Handrey women who ladled taro paste and vegetable curry on to his plate, Tom ate most of a leg, together with a little of the belly meat, which Adams told him was the most prized part of the beast.

The woman who served them stayed in the bedroom, squatting against the baseboard. She slowly exposed the knuckle bones of the paw Adams had carved for her. Occasionally, Tom glanced across and observed the way she gently held the paw, as if it were the hand of a small child.

They were silent while they ate. Adams bent low over his plate, his jaw knotting with steady effort. The fan thrummed, the rain drummed. After a few false starts the Handrey women’s chanting got going underneath the house. The volume rose until the beat of their ‘bahn-bahn-bahn-bahn-boosh’ competed with the overhead percussion.

Tom was half-cut when the chopping board, bearing most of the binturang still intact, was borne off below to feed the chanters. Because of this, he considered his conversational gambit fairly astute. Wiping his mouth with a starched napkin, he asked his host: ‘D’you know this guy, Brian Prentice, that Swai-Phillips is representing?’

Adams seemed not to have heard. ‘I think we may as well have our coffee next door,’ he said, fastidiously wiping his own downturned mouth. ‘I didn’t ask them to trouble with dessert; I hope you don’t mind?’

Tom grunted that he didn’t and stumbled back into the other room, where he collapsed into one of the creaking rattan chairs. After fiddling with a music deck on one of the shelving units, the Consul slumped down opposite him. A trickle of New Age music — wind chimes, flutes and a theramin — percolated through the heavy rhythmic soundscape of the house. Tom thought the choice a modest revelation, not what he expected from the tightly buttoned Adams. His host absent-mindedly fluttered his fingers as if conducting the puny tune, then said: ‘Prentice? Well, he’s not one of ours, so he’s no direct concern of mine. Obviously, I take a closer interest than I would with other foreign nationals, and, as it happens, I have spoken to their attaché here in Vance, Sir Colm, ah, Mulgrene. Without in any way being loose-mouthed, we were able to ascertain that your situations had certain, ah, similarities.’

‘They have an attaché right here in Vance?’ Tom was surprised; this hardly tallied with the respective global reaches of the two nations.

‘It’s a hangover, of course,’ Adams said. ‘Not that they were the colonial power here, but they had extensive interests over many years. Incidentally’ — his horse lips puckered — ‘I’m aware you harbour doubts concerning my own, ah, capabilities—’

Tom tried to issue a denial, but Adams wouldn’t permit it. ‘I may no longer be a salaried official of the State Department, but, believe me, this is a fully functioning consulate, and I am empowered to do anything that’s necessary to assist you. Anything.’

He regarded Tom icily, before adding, ‘The same does not apply to, ah, Prentice.’

‘What’s he accused of?’ Tom asked bluntly.

‘I can’t tell you,’ Adams snapped back.

‘Can’t or won’t?’ Tom needled him.

‘Can’t. Won’t. Mustn’t. There are strict laws here, criminal cases can’t be, ah, bruited about — especially when the charges involve the traditional peoples. You’ll be grateful for such a, ah, close-mouthed approach when it comes to your own preliminary hearing. It means that the judges can’t be influenced by knowledge of what the defendant has been accused of, right up until he steps into the dock.’

Tom swam up through the watery music towards the light. ‘Swai-Phillips said Squolly would give a child abuser bail if he could come up with the right cash. Is that true? Is that what Prentice has done, screwed a native kid? He certainly looks the type.’

Tom would have gone on if a Handrey woman hadn’t come in carrying a tray with coffee things and a small dish of truffles on it. When the coffee had been poured and she had withdrawn, Adams slowly inclined his teaspoon so that some large granules of the Turkish sugar tumbled into his tiny cup. Then he sighed. ‘Look, let’s not fence, Brodzinski; we both know it’s not Prentice who’s bothering you, it’s Swai-Phillips.’

Tom regretted having taken a truffle. His thumb and forefinger now had pads of melted chocolate on them as shiny as paint. He sucked these in what he hoped was a sage and meditative fashion, before replying: ‘Martha — my wife. I saw her up at Swai-Phillips’s place. She’s still here. I think — I think. .’ A pause, then the words came in a rush: ‘I think she’s mixed up with him in something. I’ve tried calling her again and again — she’s sure as hell not back in Milford.’

Tom stopped. Adams had stood up abruptly and now loomed over him, a queer half-smile on his diffident lips. ‘First off,’ he said firmly, calming a fractious child, ‘I know who you mean — at Swai-Phillips’s place, that is — his cousin Gloria Swai-Phillips. Remarkable lady, runs several orphanages in the Tontine Townships. And yes, there is a striking resemblance between her and your wife.’ He paused, sighed. ‘If you want the truth, the reason why you and your family were, ah, noticed in the first place, was because of that resemblance.’

‘Noticed?’ Tom said wonderingly.

‘Well,’ Adams laughed shortly, ‘we get a lot of Anglo tourists through here in the season, and one bunch looks pretty much the same as the next. Your wife made your family stand out — Gloria Swai-Phillips is a very popular, very influential person.’

Adams crossed to his drinks cabinet. ‘I believe a Seven and Seven is your poison,’ he said, holding up the whisky bottle. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have any 7 Up; will you take a little branch water with your Seagram’s?’

Adams saved his clincher until the drinks were poured and he’d sat down once more. ‘The thing is, Brodzinski, your wife can’t possibly still be here in Vance.’

‘Oh, really?’ Tom sipped the drink; it didn’t taste right without the sugary gloss of the soda. ‘Why’s that?’

‘Because I’ve spoken to her myself. She called me — and I called her back in, ah, Milford.’

‘She called you? Why? Was she worried about me?’ The rains stilled, a fissure opened up in the lowering sky, and through it shone the reinvigorated sun of Martha’s regard.

Adams put a stop to it: ‘Look, I appreciate that this must be painful for you, Brodzinski; that I, a comparative stranger, should be, ah, privy to your wife’s estrangement; but facts are, ah. .’ He pulled on a long bony finger. ‘. . facts. She wishes to reassure you of her, ah, concern — but not to speak to you. She called on another matter, in some, ah, distress because of something — or, rather, somebody — she had seen in your local mall.’

‘In the mall? Who?’ Tom had definitely had too much to drink. His words lurched from his mouth and found themselves suddenly on the glossy floor.

‘It would’, Adams said, shifting to academic mode, ‘have been almost exactly at the time the makkata was doing the astande ceremony at Swai-Phillips’s place — perhaps twenty minutes later. Your wife saw — or thought she saw — a Tayswengo man in L. L. Bean.’

‘In L. L. Bean?’

‘In L. L. Bean, trying on a pair of, ah, pants. Which was just as well!’ Perversely, Adams seemed to be enjoying himself. ‘Because, apart from his breechclout, he was completely naked.’

‘Let me get this straight,’ Tom staggered on, following the Consul’s crazy logic. ‘You’re saying my wife called you because she saw. . the makkata in Milford Mall, in L. L. Bean?’

Despite the ludicrousness of this, Tom realized that he too had no difficulty in picturing the wizard right there: beside an aluminium rail, hung with jeans and slacks, while on the other side of the plate glass zitty teenagers in their lumpy puffa jackets watched the guy riding the resurfacing machine describe bold figures on the ice rink.

‘Magic’, Adams said, ‘is a much misunderstood, ah, concept. Besides, Brodzinski, I’m not even necessarily saying that’s what this was. But no one can live here for long without becoming aware of the traditional people’s ability to, ah, shall we say, influence certain coincidences.’

Tom didn’t know how to reply to this — so he said nothing. This, in terms of Adam’s recondite etiquette, must have been the right thing to do. Because, after looking at Tom from under his wire-wool eyebrows for a while, the Consul said: ‘Good, I’m glad you understand. Now, to more mundane business. Jethro dropped off some of the prosecution’s depositions earlier on.’

Adams rose, went back to the shelving, picked up a plastic wallet and lobbed it into Tom’s lap. ‘They’re ballistics reports, witness statements — that kind of thing. Jethro’s over there’ — a thumb jerk over one shoulder — ‘right now. He’ll be back in time for the prelim’ hearing, which is now set for this Friday. In the meantime, he asked me if I’d go through these with you.’

Adams hooked a bamboo stool between them with his foot, then began dealing forms and diagrams out of the wallet.

‘See here,’ he began. ‘This is a computer-generated diagram of the, ah, butt’s parabola; these figures are the force estimated to have been exerted on it by your fingers, and these the velocity the butt reached before impacting with Mr Lincoln’s head. Should the DA decide to push an evidential-intentional line, it will be necessary for the defence to take issue with them.’

Tom took a judicious sip of his whisky, then said: ‘Why?’

‘Why?’ Adams echoed him witheringly. ‘Why? Because, Brodzinski, if these, ah, calculations are allowed to stand unopposed, they would suggest that you employed more force in, ah, flipping the butt than a negligent act would imply. The prosecution then has you lining up the butt like a — like a grenade launcher, or any other offensive weapon.’

Tom allowed this absurdity to wash over him for a while, together with the New Age tinkling, the Handrey women’s chanting and the drumming of the rain. It was up to him, he grasped, to think outside of the box. Adams wasn’t capable of it — he’d gone native. Swai-Phillips wasn’t either — he was a goddamn native. There was a crucial piece missing from this crazy jigsaw.

Tom hunched forward and, taking the diagram from the stool, flapped it in Adam’s horsy face. ‘What’, Tom demanded, ‘could possibly be my motive for attacking Mr Lincoln?’

‘Motive? Motive?’ Strange wheezing sounds issued from Adams, his eyelids flickered, his pale-blue eyes watered. He was laughing. ‘There’s motivation in abundance, Brodzinski,’ he managed to choke out at last. ‘Jealousy, for one. Atalaya has already told Commander Squoddolop-polollou that you were looking at her, ah, breasts, before you flipped the butt—’

‘Oh, ferchrissakes!’ Tom cried.

But Adams continued: ‘Or, should the police choose to paint you up, ah, blacker still, they could say this was a race-hate crime.’

‘Lincoln’s not black!’ Tom expostulated.

‘Mr Lincoln is an initiate of the Tayswengo, Brodzinski.’ His lips twisted with the irony. ‘And, so far as they’re concerned, they only come in one, ah, colour.’

An hour or so later Adams escorted Tom along the slippery walkway to where a cab was idling at the kerb. The Consul had only a small umbrella, and it was awkward manoeuvring it so as to protect them both. Adams kept on bumping against Tom’s behind. Drunkenly, he wondered if Adams might be a little drunk.

Tom opened the car door and turned to face his host. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry I kinda lost my cool back then. You’ve — you’ve been decent to me, Adams — I know you’re trying your best to help, and thanks for the dinner — the binturang was great.’

The rain was now falling so heavily that it was as if the two of them were standing under a waterfall. Adam’s hand, clenched round the umbrella’s handle, was within an inch of Tom’s cheek.

‘Well, ah, thank you, Brod — I mean, hell, let me call you Tom, d’you mind?’

‘N-No.’ Tom was taken aback.

‘And you’ll call me Winnie, yes?’ There was a pathetic eagerness in Adam’s eyes.

‘S-Sure, Winnie,’ Tom said.

Then, as if to seal this contract, the Consul inclined his head and kissed Tom on the forehead, his lips remaining there for several seconds. Tom was struck by how wet and plump Adam’s lips felt, considering how dry and diffident his mouth appeared. When he removed them, it was with an audible ‘plop’ of un-suction.

Tom stood, staring at the Consul’s face, grey and washed out in the sodden night. He felt a bead of consular saliva trickle down the bridge of his nose.

‘W-Winnie,’ Tom said to break the spell. ‘Is there anything else I can do, anything at all?’

Adams inclined his head once more, coercing Tom’s eyes to his own. ‘You know, don’t you, who Astande is?’ he said.

‘No.’

‘He is “the Swift One” in Tayswengo cosmology, the “Righter of Wrongs”; so there’s always more you can do. You’ve been to visit Mr Lincoln; well, go again. However off-putting he may be, keep talking to him. If anything can mitigate the charges levelled against you, it’s the, ah, willingness to be astande despite his inquivoo. So, go. Go now.’

With this, Adams placed a hand on Tom’s shoulder and pressed him down into the ear.

Tom rolled down the window so he could say goodbye, but Adams was already slipping back along the walkway to his front door. By the time the cab drove off, the lights on the small veranda had been extinguished. Adams and his five fat Handrey women were bedding down for the night.

Tom pictured the Consul stretched out full length on his army cot, the rough blanket pulled up under his long chin.

‘But how?’ he asked out loud. ‘How did he know that I drink Seven and Sevens?’

‘Whozzat?’ the cabbie interjected; however, his passenger didn’t explain, only asked him to drive to the hospital.