“How?” he asked.
“He’s a cunning little bastard,” she said.
Claude read the letters with wonder and fear, wonder at the adventure he was watching, and (to his own surprise) fear that the band would arrive at his house and take Julie from his dull world to their exciting one.
As he detailed the plumbing of the six-storey office block and watched the melancholy streets of the town with their predictable goings and comings, he thought only of the rock’n’roll band and the million dollars’ (half a million dollars’?) worth of amphetamines.
Ho-Chin, the legendary drummer, was coming down from the north and sneaking through borders for an unstated rendezvous with Eric, the lead guitarist. Evelyn, having laid low in Hong Kong, had slipped out to a cattle boat and was heading this way laden with cocaine and a plan to slip in through Daru in New Guinea and Thursday Island.
And each of them, it seemed to Claude, drawing his dreadful plumbing and considering the placement of mirrors for successful typists to lipstick in front of, was a king amongst kings and their coming together would be more thrilling and threatening than the meeting of rivers from the mountains.
And then there were setbacks, delays.
Paul had been arrested in Bangkok for busking. (Claude sent money.) Evelyn was having an affair with a Muslim in Surabaya and walked amongst pilgrims for Mecca with her infidel’s secrets, blue Muslim cocks on pale mornings, white sheets and slowly turning fans above the vagueness of mosquito nets. She who had once worked the London tube with her twelve-string guitar (click-click-cocaine-click), with her beautiful Eurasian face and blue-black straight hair, as thin and nervous as a million dollars’ worth of amphetamines.
Eric wrote letters about music, drugs and police that Claude didn’t understand.
He came to hate the letters. He also became obsessed by them. And as he concentrated on the method of attaching fire-escape banisters to walls, his mind wandered through impossible concerts in the municipal auditorium. Eric, in fur boots, eyes closed, singing electrical magic with his guitar until audiences were transformed into rivers and white water dispersed down streets where it flooded the houses and left them full of fish.
And as he worked on the relationship between the lift doors and the placement of the call buttons, he saw the second concert where the people would come and be transformed into large white birds who would circle in slow loops before going to live beside rocky seas, catching fish and making eggs which they would guard against predators.
Stoned on hope and anxiety he saw a concert where the applause became locusts and the audience became fields of grass and were devoured by the locusts and left barren and desolate. Wind came through the municipal auditorium blowing gritty sand into the faces of the rock’n’roll band as they travelled out into the desert, cruel bandits looking for new audiences, coming at last to a city in the north surrounded by orange groves and date palms where they would be taken in and adopted by the people and taught crafts such as cabinet making and net weaving and some would learn how to pick an orange, at what time, by what method, for the people in that place had no music in their lives and didn’t understand the purpose of the band, seeing them simply as vagabonds to be befriended and taught a purpose in life.
Such were Claude’s dreams of the rock’n’roll band, against whom he was already building defences.
6.
She made up her eyes with charcoal in the manner of Indian men, so they suggested secrets and sorcery.
She pored over newspapers, reading between the lines of local news.
The mayor, she suggested, was a Cocairo.
How was she so sure?
“Look at his cheekbones. Cocairos are like that. That’s how you tell them. The skin stretches tight over their cheekbones. They got a crazy look in their eyes.”
A local murder was obviously centred around heroin.
“How? Why?”
“It’s very weird, you know, the guy wasn’t from here at all and the girl was. I think she lured him into the bush where the other guy killed the first guy. He probably double-crossed him. It was a heroin deal, I bet.”
“How?”
“It’s just very weird, that’s all.” And she couldn’t say any more, retreating simply into her own certainty, unable or unwilling to explain why it was a heroin killing or possibly not believing it anyway, but simply wanting to transmit the incredible life she had lived with Carlos.
“This town is a fucking bore.”
“You don’t have to stay here.”
“I can’t afford to go anywhere else … unless …” she flashed wide sparkling Indian eyes and snapped her fingers, click, click, click, “unless you want to come and get some amphetamines with me, honey.”
He thought of Bonnie and Clyde Barrow taking photographs of themselves in hotel rooms, posing as gangsters in a movie, cigarettes dangling from their mouths, guns pointed on camera.
“You’re a French gangster movie,” he told her.
“You don’t make any sense,” she said. “There’s half a million dollars’ worth of amphetamines. We can get them.”
She was chubby. She cried in her sleep. Her palms sweated continually. He saw her cowering in a corner while Carlos beat her up.
“Where are they?”
“I’ll tell you when we’re on our way.”
“I can’t leave anyway,” he said. “I’ve got a building to finish.”
“You’re a boring old man, Claude, come and get drunk.”
“We got drunk last night.”
“We could try and score some coke.”
“You said you didn’t want any more coke.”
And there she was again, in her underwear, the grey hat tipped forward on her curly blonde head, the revolver dangling in her small damp hand. “Just a sniff, honey. Cocaine is a really amazing drug. It’s a really nice drug.”
“We could always go and see the mayor,” he said.
“Oh, that mayor. Claude, you don’t know anything about what goes on in this town.”
7.
“Are you really serious about these amphetamines?” he asked her.
“It’s a very heavy scene.”
“Do you really know where they are?”
“Do you think everything I tell you is a lie?”
“No, but you do exaggerate.”
She smiled.
“Are they really worth a million dollars?”
“That’s retail,” she grinned.
“How would you sell them?”
“You’d never come with me, would you? We could go to South America together. It’s a really amazing place.”
“No,” he said. “I’m an architect with responsibilities to my clients. And I won’t come with you because I’m a coward.” They were curled up on the couch in front of the fire listening to Mozart. “Why don’t you go and get them yourself? I’ll wait for you here.”
“People there know me. I was there with Carlos. They know the stuff is hidden somewhere but they don’t know where. It’s very heavy. They kill people for money like that.”
“But not respectable middle-class architects,” he said thoughtfully.
For one fleeting, terrible moment she thought his interest might be serious. The thought chilled her. “Oh baby, don’t you ever get mixed up with these people. They don’t care about anyone.” She cradled his head in her lap. “Let’s get stoned and watch TV.”
8.
One day he returned home and found that she had swept the house. A stew was cooking on the stove. There was a bottle of wine open on the table.
“Why did you do that?” he asked her. He was astonished. It seemed out of character.
“I cut the grass, too, some of it.”
“What with?”