Divided Kingdom (21 page)

Half a flight below me, Rinaldi had stopped as well. ‘What are you doing?'

‘I have to go back,' I said. ‘I've forgotten something.'

‘Go back? Are you mad?'

‘I've got to. Look, you keep going. I'll see you outside.'

He hesitated, one hand on the banister, but I could tell from his snatched glances down the stairwell that he didn't relish the idea of waiting.

‘You go on,' I insisted. ‘I won't be long.'

‘Be careful,' I heard him call out as I turned away.

Everyone apart from me was coming down, some of them bleeding, others white with shock. I met no other delegates, at least none that I recognised. It felt right to be going up again. Easier. As if, for me, the world had been upended.

The fourteenth floor was utterly deserted. Walking along the corridor, I thought the lights seemed dimmer. Dust in the atmosphere – or a partial power failure. I stopped outside my room and felt in my pocket for my keys. A draught edged past, and I could smell night air, the scent of fallen leaves. I entered my room, locking the door behind me.
Good… Good… Good
, the room said, and then fell silent.

I had lied to Rinaldi, of course. I had forgotten nothing.

I laid my coat on the bed, then reached for the remote. Surprisingly, perhaps, the TV still worked. A reporter was standing in front of the hotel. His voice had a thrilled, brittle quality about it – the voice of someone who was already an authority on something that had only just happened – and the wind ruffled the hair on his forehead in a way that made him seem dashing but vulnerable. He would probably be a celebrity by morning. The bomb had been left in a sports bag on the first floor, he was telling us. Thirty people had been admitted to hospital, some critically injured. As yet there were no fatalities. In a statement released a short time ago, the Black Square had claimed responsibility for the explosion. The notorious terrorist organisation had condemned the Rearrangement Day celebrations – twenty-seven years of shame, it had called them – and reiterated its determination to fight on, to bring about
reunification. Carl Triggs had denounced the attack as ‘a despicable and cowardly abomination'. The police suspected the existence of a second device – or, at least, they hadn't been able to rule it out. The entire area had been cordoned off.

I fetched my toilet bag from the bathroom, then went over to the wardrobe and lifted out the suit I had worn on the flight that afternoon. Laying the suit across the bed, I opened my wallet and took out the largest banknotes I had on me. I folded each note in half, lengthways, and then again, then I slipped my jacket off its hanger and, using a pair of nail-scissors, carefully unpicked two or three stitches from one end of the collar and slid the folded notes inside. I turned the collar down again and smoothed it out. It might have looked a little thicker than before, but I doubted anyone would notice. I put on the suit and reached for my overcoat. The clock next to the bed said ten-past twelve. I glanced at the TV. The reporter was standing sideways-on to the hotel. Half the front wall had dropped away, exposing the internal structure of the building. Rooms gaped out into the night. Wires dangled. How peculiar, I thought, that I was still inside.

Buttoning my coat, I crossed the room and unlocked the door. Out in the corridor nothing had changed. What I was contemplating was unthinkable – it went against all my principles, everything I had ever learned or held dear – but the disappointment I had been dealing with all evening had not diminished, as I had hoped it might. If anything, in fact, it had intensified, gradually distilling into a kind of anguish. I had to return to that club in the Blue Quarter. I
had
to. Had I been finding out about myself, or just imagining things? I didn't know. Whatever the truth was, it had felt more real than anything had felt for ages.
I
had felt more real. Or more alive, perhaps. Yes, I would return, but under my own auspices. If I was caught, I would be charged under Article 58 of the Internal Security Act, an all-purpose clause that covered any action that could be seen to be ‘undermining the state'. I would be throwing away my career, my position – all those years. None of that appeared to bother me. I had always been renowned for my ‘integrity' and my
‘conscientiousness'. My ‘sense of civic responsibility'. A strange, reckless delight swept through me at the thought that I would now be trampling on that reputation. For the second time that night, I set off towards the fire stairs, my heart like a bomb exploding endlessly inside my body.

As I reached ground-level, the power failed completely. In darkness now, I pushed through a sprung fire door, carpet replacing lino underfoot. A weak silvery light inhabited the corridor in which I stood, a kind of phosphorescence, as if sparks from the detonation had somehow been dispersed into the atmosphere. Though I could just about see, I had no idea which way to go. It was a vast hotel – five hundred rooms, someone had told me – and I had only arrived that afternoon. I hadn't had the opportunity to orient myself. Sounds came to me – the stammer of a helicopter, a man talking through a megaphone – but they seemed both distant and redundant. I chose a direction, began to walk. Once, I passed through an area of armchairs and plants, rain falling lightly on the plush upholstery, the leaves, and I looked up, expecting a glimpse of the night sky, clouds hovering, but the ceiling was still intact. The sprinkler system had come on, triggered by all the dust and smoke.

A few minutes later, and wholly by chance, I found myself outside the banqueting hall, the padded double-doors opening on air that felt dense, trapped, a fug of filter coffee and stubbed-out cigars. Standing just inside, I heard a peculiar rumbling noise. I moved cautiously out across the room, light catching on the rims of wine-glasses, the blades of knives, the mirror-panelled walls. A man had fallen asleep with his head resting against the back of a chair, his hands folded across his belly, his mouth ajar. When I shook him by the shoulder, his snoring seemed to concertina, one sound colliding with another in a sudden clutter of snorts and grunts. I shook him again. He murmured something, then slumped forwards on to the table. I couldn't just leave him. What if a second bomb went off? Also, I thought, more calculating now, my delayed departure from the hotel would look far less suspicious if I was seen to be bringing
someone out. Putting an arm around the man's waist, I hauled him to his feet. He didn't struggle or protest. As we moved towards the FIRE EXIT sign, bumping between tables, he nuzzled affectionately into my neck, his breath warm and meaty as an animal's. We went up a short flight of steps, along a service corridor, then I pressed down, one-handed, on a horizontal metal bar and we were outside – cold air, voices, blue lights whirling.

Halfway down the alley, two firemen stopped me and I steered the dead weight of the drunk into their arms.

‘I found him in the banqueting hall,' I said. ‘I couldn't wake him.'

‘We need to look at timings and schedules,' the drunk man murmured. ‘Let me give you my card.' Eyes still closed, he chuckled to himself.

Showing the firemen my room key, I told them I was a guest of the hotel. I spoke calmly. In my suit and overcoat I must have looked affluent, respectable. They asked if I was hurt, and when I shook my head they waved me on.

At the end of the alley I ducked beneath a strip of yellow tape. The people on the other side of the police cordon were gazing past me, their faces brightly lit and utterly transfixed, as if a spaceship had just landed behind my back. I resisted the temptation to look round. I already knew what was there – I'd seen it on TV – and besides, I didn't want to run the risk of catching anybody's eye. I had to sink without a sound into the blue-black of the night.

As I moved deeper into the crowd, I wondered whether Rinaldi would be questioned by the authorities and, if so, what he would tell them.
Parry? He went back upstairs. He said he'd forgotten something. I don't know what…
Would he embellish his role at all?
I tried to stop him, but he wouldn't listen. He pushed me away. What could I do?
He might even become dramatic.
I didn't see him after that. I never saw him again –
In retrospect, I was glad Rinaldi was the last person I'd had contact with. Half-asleep, still drunk, dressed in a lurid nightshirt, Marco Rinaldi would make the most unreliable of witnesses. There would be layer on layer of
ambiguity, plenty of room for doubt and speculation. I couldn't have planned it better if I'd tried.

Once I had put a certain distance between myself and the Plaza, I was able to slow down, feeling confident that I would no longer be recognised. The streets were full – I didn't think I'd ever seen such crowds – but none of the people who surrounded me had any idea who I was. There would be no chance meetings with old acquaintances or colleagues from the office, no voices calling out my name in disbelief. Though midnight had come and gone, the celebrations showed no sign of letting up, people shouting and dancing and fighting everywhere I looked, and the news of the bomb had just begun to filter through, which gave the atmosphere a feverish, chaotic edge.

I pushed my way into a bar, hoping for some respite, but here too I was buffeted, and it took me another quarter of an hour to get a drink. The TV in the top corner of the room had been tuned to a news channel, the volume turned up high. There, once again, was the hotel. I watched the injured being brought out on stretchers and loaded into ambulances. A section of the road that ran past the entrance had been buried under an avalanche of masonry and plaster, and we were shown endless close-ups of the rubble, among which lay an assortment of unlikely objects – an armchair, a vacuum-cleaner, three oranges, a doll (the camera lingered on the doll, of course). My brandy arrived at last. When I reached for the glass I noticed that my hand was trembling. Was it the fact that I had been in great danger, that I was, in some very real sense, lucky to be alive, or was it a response to the action I had subsequently taken? There was no way of telling. I drank half the brandy, which seemed to steady me a little.

Until the bomb went off, the notion of escape had not occurred to me – I hadn't even entertained it as a possibility – and yet, somehow, I found that I was already in possession of a strategy. Obviously I wouldn't be able to walk through a gap in the wall, as Victor and Marie had done. This was the Yellow Quarter, and the borders would be fiercely defended. No, I
would make for one of the big northern cities – Burnham, Sigri, Ustion – and go to ground. I would become a student of choleric behaviour, learning rashness and belligerence, but all the while I would be working out how to return to the Blue Quarter. Only a moment ago my hand had been shaking, but now a thrill went through me at the sheer unimaginable magnitude of what I was doing. My thoughts had begun to startle me. Or perhaps I was just discovering new aspects of myself, qualities I hadn't realised I had. Sitting in that bar, not knowing where it was or even what it was called, I felt like a spy – glamorous, resolute, only dimly perceived.

By the time I left, it was after one o'clock in the morning, and slack columns of drizzle were slanting across the road like gauze curtains blown sideways by a breeze. There was almost nobody about. The weather must have driven everyone indoors. Moans and wails came from somewhere, and I paused, unable to decide whether the sounds were human or animal. It would be the tail-end of the revelries, I told myself. Things winding down, people who had gone too far. Turning my collar up against the rain and wrapping myself tightly in the folds of my coat, I set off in what I hoped was a northerly direction.

I passed along the damp dead streets of the business district, some of whose buildings I recognised from the drive in from the airport, then the road sloped upwards and I found myself on an elevated dual carriageway. Huge yards lay below me, filled with lumber and scrap metal.

Looking over my shoulder, all the brashness and glitter of the city centre behind me now, I saw a car come speeding up the fast lane. As I watched, it began to veer towards me. There didn't seem to be anybody driving. At the last minute, a woman's face rose into the windscreen, and I heard the tyres shriek as she applied the brakes. The car swerved out into the middle lane again, spun round twice, and then stalled, facing in the wrong direction, one of its elaborately spoked wheels resting on the central reservation. Its headlights angled sideways and upwards, almost quizzically, into the night. Fine rain fell through the
beams, silent, sharp-looking, as if a tin of pins and needles had been emptied somewhere high up in the sky.

The door on the driver's side opened and an elderly woman climbed out. She wore a fur coat, and her pale hair had been pinned up in a tidy and yet complex bun. She appeared calm, if slightly indignant.

‘What are you doing there?' she said. ‘What do you want?' As though I had distracted her in some way. As though the accident were all my fault.

‘Nothing,' I said stupidly. ‘I was just walking.'

A car flashed between us, horn blaring.

She watched it vanish round a curve in the dual carriageway, then turned back to me. She seemed to have no sense that either she or her car might be in danger, or that they might present a threat to others. ‘Yes. I see.' She passed one hand across her forehead, then lightly touched her hair. Her movements had the slow-motion dreaminess of someone underwater. ‘Are you all right?'

‘I'm fine.'

‘Good. That's good.' She let out an unexpected husky laugh. ‘Can I give you a lift?'

I asked her where she was going. Home, she told me. She lived in the suburbs. That would be perfect, I said, then glanced towards her car.

She read the look. ‘I'm not drunk,' she said. ‘I've just had a few champagne cocktails, that's all.' She saw that I wasn't entirely reassured. ‘I was looking for my cigarette lighter. I dropped it on the floor.'