I’d never seen so many three-piece suits in all my life. Almost every man around the government building we entered was wearing one. I had on a leather jacket over an open-necked shirt. The jacket was missing a button but in one respect I was right in style-like quite a few of the other men, I had a bulge under my left armpit where my gun was hanging. I comforted myself with the thought that my bulge looked more natural, blended in with my casual style. I’ll swear some of them had two bulges.
Trudi looked suspiciously at January and me as we waited at a desk which looked like a jumbo jet’s control panel. Lights flashed as buttons were pressed.
‘What’s up?’ she said.
I glanced around the steely eyes and blank faces. I would’ve told her but Bolton was within earshot. ‘Trouble,’ I said. ‘I’m glad I had that 30 minute sleep. Now I’m ready for anything.’
‘Ready for what?’ she hissed.
‘Go up to the fifth stage, please,’ the desk attendant said. He was pale as if he never went out in the sun. The way his fingers flashed over the panel suggested he never left the desk. He handed each of us a different coloured plastic tag. ‘You’ll have to check your weapon if you’re going into the conference room, sir.’
‘He isn’t,’ Trudi said. We marched across to the elevators. I flattened myself against the wall like a man on a window ledge 10 storeys up, reached out slowly and pressed the call button.
‘I told you not to clown, Hardy,’ January snapped.
Trudi laughed. She opened her handbag, pulled out two envelopes, and gave them to Bolton and me. ‘Greenbacks,’ she said.
I bowed. ‘Thank you, ma’am.’
We went up to the fifth stage along with a selection of the non-security people. These wore trench coats or carried them and they were mostly pale, as if they worked inside all day, seven days a week. Maybe they did. Discreetly lit, heavily carpeted, the fifth stage featured a lot of polished wood veneer. Trudi checked her plastic tag and pointed to the far door which had a red light burning over it.
‘Be here in an hour, Cliff,’ January said.
‘Yessir.’
He strode, as well as a five foot seven and a half man can stride, towards the door with Trudi and Bolton following. She shot me a sympathetic look over her shoulder and I got a flash of what it had been like standing by the window with her. I wondered if we were going to make any progress from there.
An hour wasn’t long enough to do any business with Billy Spinoza. I went out of the building, told the driver he had an hour to wait and went for a walk. It was late afternoon and the clouds and rain had cleared completely. It would have been warm in the bright sunshine except for a breeze that seemed to be there as a reminder that winter would be along as usual.
I was hoping to find a bar to spend a greenback in but there was nothing of the kind around. It was all government buildings and carparks. A large shopping mall suddenly appeared at the end of a concrete path but it specialised in fast food, photocopying, instant printing and dry cleaning. Looked like this was an area where people came to work, and anything else they had to do got done on the run. Not literally on the run; I was almost the only person I saw who walked more than 50 yards. The cars moved along at a steady pace and pulled in and out of the parking bays, and people made short, stabbing rushes to where they were going. Not very aerobic.
From long habit I ran my eyes over the cars parked outside the building where January was having his meeting. Nothing unusual-a red Buick Skylark, several big Japanese jobs, a white Volvo with a red stripe, taxis and limos. Nothing familiar in grey; no freak trucks; no obvious mobile bombs. Our driver was deep in the sports section of a newspaper when I went into the building. He wasn’t worried, why should I be?
I was five minutes early on the fifth stage but January and party were already out and waiting for me. January looked accusingly at me but he didn’t say anything as we went back to the desk and handed in our tags. We all took the one car this time, me in the front. Trudi gave the driver his instructions and nothing more was said. I arranged my face in a broad smile and turned around.
‘How’d it go?’
‘He’s a cretin,’ Peter said.
‘I got a message before we left,’ Trudi said. ‘The dinner’s cancelled. We’ve got two hours between this meeting and the later one.’
‘Thank Christ,’ January said. ‘Trude, see if you can find out a decent place to eat tonight. Martin, you can…’
‘Bolton,’ Bolton said.
‘Yes. You can go back and talk to…’
‘Martin,’ I said.
‘Yes. At the hotel. Get something together for the speech tomorrow, okay?’
‘Sure. After the naval bloke?’
‘Mm. What d’we know about him?’
Trudi flicked some papers. ‘I think he was born on a nuclear warship. Probably got married on one, too.’
‘God.’ January sounded tired and dispirited. ‘Well, this is all just crap anyway. It’s the speech tomorrow and the Senate hearing that count.’
‘When can we leave?’ I said.
Trudi raised one of her plucked eyebrows. ‘You don’t like it?’
‘I’ll tell you after we go to the decent place to eat.’
The procedure at the next place was much the same except that there were a lot of uniforms about and they wanted to confiscate my weapon if I was to take a step past the desk.
‘It’s not worth the grief,’ January said. ‘Meet us down here in an hour.’ He flashed a grin that had some of the old charm in it. ‘From what I hear of him we might be back before you have time to take a piss.’
They went up and I sat down on a long padded bench beside a low table piled with magazines. I turned the pages of a few copies of Time and the National Geographic but it seemed like I’d read it all before-peace talks, famines, lost stone age tribe in Indonesia. I was in a waiting room adjacent to the reception desk; I sat so I could see out at the people who passed the desk but I soon got bored with that. I changed my seat so I could see out into the carpark. The light was fading; most of the traffic looked to have that going-home feeling to it, but there were still a few cars arriving.
I was practically asleep when two thoughts hit me-I hadn’t sent my postcard to Helen and I was facing the prospect of going out to dinner with a man whose life was threatened. Not only that, but I was a threatened man myself. I couldn’t do anything about the postcard where I was but I could do something about the threat. I took out Billy Spinoza’s card and approached the desk.
‘Could I use your telephone, please?’
The young man at the controls looked at me suspiciously. He wore a crisp white shirt with blue and gold epaulettes and a dark blue tie. His cheeks were pink and his teeth were very white. ‘It’s for government business only, sir, I’m sorry.’
‘This is government business. I’m on Mr January’s security staff and I want to call a number I’m pretty sure is government too.’
I showed him the number on the card. He examined it very carefully, holding it in his scrubbed hands. ‘I guess it’s okay. I can’t give you privacy, though. I can’t leave the desk.’
‘Just give me the phone, that’ll be enough. How do you get a line?’
‘Here, I’ll get it.’ He stabbed the buttons and handed the phone across. ‘Sure hope we don’t impose those sanctions.’
‘What?’ I could hear the dial tone.
‘Against South Africa. I’m against it.’
‘Do you have Mr January down as a South African?’
He consulted the sheet in front of him. ‘What it says here.’
‘Christ!’ I said.
‘Watch your language, sir!’
I stared at him and felt his discomfort. He moved his hand on the desk and I could see the edge of the National Enquirer slip inside the pages of the Washington Post. I turned as far away from him as I could and called the number. Billy Spinoza came on the line immediately.
‘Spinoza.’
‘This is Cliff Hardy. A hole has opened up in my man’s schedule. We’re going to be running loose for a couple of hours. I thought I should talk to you about it. Also there’s been a…development.’
‘Can you tell me now?’
‘Nope.’
‘Okay, where are you?’
I glanced around the reception lobby. ‘It says Navy 10, G6, by the door. That mean anything to you?’
‘Yeah. I can be there in 30 minutes.’
‘That’s about when he’s due out.’
‘Okay. Anything else troubling you? I mean as of right now?’
There was but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Something vague – something I’ d seen or something less definite, like a smell. I told him no and he hung up.
I handed the phone back. ‘Thank you.’
He nodded and went back to sitting still. He was faintly flushed; he knew he’d said something wrong but he was too polite to ask. I went back to the waiting room and waited.
January stormed out of the lift; Bolton was gabbling at him and being ignored; Trudi’s face was set in a grimace of anger. If he thought he could use his bodyguard as a punching bag he changed his mind when he saw my face. He stopped a few feet from me and jammed his fists into his jacket pocket which ruined the cut.
‘Well, are we ready?’
‘We’re waiting.’
‘For what?’
‘Spinoza. I’m not waltzing you around in a city I don’t know with bull’s eyes painted on our backs.’
‘What bull’s eyes?’ Trudi said.
‘Tell you in a minute. I think you should let Bolton take the car back to the hotel. Spinoza’ll have a car.’
January fought for calm. He was flushed, his hair was ruffled and a nerve was jumping in his cheek under his right eye. But he was an experienced man and no fool. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You’re in charge.’ He turned to Bolton and managed a few polite words. Bolton looked relieved to be pulled out of the action; he nodded, smiled tightly at Trudi and me and went out of the building.
We stood outside the waiting room watching the light traffic in the lobby. The servicemen predominated over the civilians and men predominated over women. They all looked busy; they all looked important and most looked worried. Billy Spinoza came through the doorway. I suddenly realised that his was the first dark face I’d seen in the place. He was wearing a rollneck sweater and a checked jacket-tough guys don’t wear ties.
‘Ms Bell, Mr January, Cliff, shall we go?’
‘Have you got a car, Mr Spinoza?’ January said.
‘No, sir, not right now. Have to be careful with cars in my line of work.’ He steered us towards the door.
‘Why’s that?’ Trudi said.
‘It’s just another thing they can wire. Fact is, there hasn’t been a single bombing or bugging in a taxi cab yet. We appreciate that.’
It was dark outside but the afternoon warmth was lasting. Spinoza collared a cab that was dropping a much be-ribboned officer at the building and he ushered us into the back.
‘Where to, brother?’ the driver said. He was darker than Spinoza with a shiny bald head. The photograph of him above the sun visor must have been taken years before when he still had a fringe of grizzled grey hair.
‘The Strip, I guess. What would you folks like to eat?’
The driver flicked the meter on. ‘Creole?’
‘Yuk,’ Trudi said.
The driver smiled. ‘Chinese?’
‘How about Australian?’ I said.
‘Say what?’
Spinoza pulled at his tuft of beard. ‘We’ll eat Italian. The food’s okay but more to the point we’ll get good visibility.’
‘That again,’ Trudi said. ‘Tell me.’
We told her as we drove to Georgetown. She listened in silence, asked for my descriptions of the men in the car again and then sank back in the seat. ‘Prohibition’s over, isn’t it? Let’s get a drink.’
After the grey wasteland of the administrative buildings, putting foot on the Strip was like arriving on another planet. The neon and the traffic noise and the music seemed to blend into a roar of sound and light. We three Australians were edgy and tired and Spinoza was tense, but something about the place revived us. It wasn’t quite a good feeling; it was almost as though the world’s problems were too big and this was a place to come to forget them for a while, until they reached out and snuffed you.
Spinoza directed us through the streams of people on the pavement who were milling around briefly, forming groups and breaking up and staying compulsively on the move. Cars crawled along the street, parked, honked and were honked at, moved on. There was flow between the road and the pavement. I saw a man park almost in the middle of the road, walk to the kerb; hand his keys to another man and take up the conversation as his car was driven away. The road and pavement people were all of the same tribe.
The restaurant, which was named Dino’s or Mario’s or Luigi’s, had red and white tablecloths but they were striped not checked and the bottles in which the candles stood didn’t have wickerwork around them. Spinoza had a quiet word with the supervisor and a couple was moved away from a table in the corner. They were smiling and I watched as the cloth was changed on the table and they were re-settled. A bottle of wine arrived for them and was uncorked with a smile and a flourish. Then we sat down.
‘Okay?’ Spinoza said.
We were in a corner; no doors behind us or to the side, a clear view of the entrance, the serving door and the door that led to the conveniences. I could even see through a window into the small carpark at the side. ‘Fine,’ I said.
‘Double vodka,’ Trudi said to the drink waiter. ‘Scotch and ice to my right and beer for the gentlemen opposite.’
‘Mineral water,’ Spinoza said.
The waiter looked enquiringly at me. ‘Light beer,’ I said. ‘I love a compromise.’
January was rubbing his eyes and massaging the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger.
‘They say you shouldn’t eat when you’ve got jet lag, Peter,’ I said. ‘You should have a salad.’
‘I’ve never had jet lag in my life,’ January snarled. ‘I want osso bucco and a litre of red wine. God, I’m going to make them sorry for this.’
‘You’ll be sorry if you drink a litre of red wine here, sir,’ Spinoza said softly. ‘But what d’you mean, if I may ask. The threats…?’
‘No, I’m talking about that prick who thought I was a South African.’
The drinks arrived and Spinoza sipped his mineral water. ‘That is a considerable insult,’ he said. ‘Cliff, do you…?’
But I wasn’t listening; I wasn’t even drinking. I was looking out into the carpark and I knew what had disturbed me before but wouldn’t quite rise to the surface. The white Volvo with the red stripe I’d seen at our first stop had been in the carpark at the second stop and here it was again, pulling into a parking bay right outside.