‘We’ll just need a scan of your passport,’ says Belasco. ‘Sorry for the hassle but as you can imagine we take a lot of precautions at a facility like this.’
‘I’m afraid my passport’s in the safe at my hotel. But I’ve got my driver’s licence.’ Raf takes it out of his wallet. Fourpetal had warned him this might happen so last night he went over to Jonk’s flat with Isaac and the three of them spent the evening forging this card. Because Jonk once tried to start a side business selling fake IDs, he already had a pirate copy of Photoshop, a second-hand inkjet printer, and a box of those butterfly laminate pouches that you can seal with a clothes iron. The only problem was, Jonk had ordered the pouches from a website that specialised in supplying the ‘novelty’ ID market, so they were all printed in advance with generic foil holograms, but South African driver’s licences don’t actually have holograms on them, just pink watermarks, with the result that Raf’s fake licence has more ‘security features’ than a real one. In most circumstances this wouldn’t matter, but Fourpetal also warned him that quite a lot of Lacebark’s goons are hired from South Africa.
So Raf’s as nervous now watching the guard run his card through the scanner as he was earlier when a security camera first swivelled its head towards him like a carrion bird as he waited outside the gate of the depot. Then he realises that if he just stares across the desk in silence it’s going to make him look even more unnatural, so he turns back to Belasco and tries to think of something to say, but his mind is suddenly an empty trough. To his enormous relief, it’s Belasco who asks, ‘And you work with Mr Jacobs in Tanzania?’
‘That’s right.’ (‘Thitt’s hroitte.’)
‘He told me he was in the Nostrand office in Fehedou at the time of the truck bombing. That must have been a really nasty thing to experience.’
‘Yes, it really was.’
On the heavy steel door that presumably leads through into the main section of the depot, there is a sign that says authorised personnel only, which to Raf seems hilariously mundane and redundant in this context. (He’s relieved that the security measures here don’t extend to a fingerprint or iris scanner, and he remembers Isaac’s proposal for a biometric identification system which required the user to perform thirty seconds of oral sex on an androgynous piezo-electric tubercle, on the basis that any given individual’s precise oral sex technique is both unique and impossible to teach or imitate.) The guard at the desk hands back Raf’s driver’s licence without meeting his eye. Since he seems to be safe for the moment, he scrapes together his courage to take a small risk. ‘I must say, Ms Belasco—’
‘Denise.’
‘I must say, Denise, until recently I only really thought of Lacebark as a mining company.’ This remark will make sense as long as Raf is about to get a tour of something that is not a mine, and that seems like a good bet, unless Isaac is correct in his speculation that Lacebark’s big secret is the diamond mine they have dug under the streets of London with its entrance hidden in this depot. (Isaac has never believed that the true explanation for why south London doesn’t have a proper Tube network is that its subsurface geology makes tunnelling impossible — he has a selection of mutually contradictory conspiracy theories to propose instead — and in a sense an urban mine would prove him correct.)
‘Oh, sure,’ says Belasco. ‘You’re by no means alone there. The vast majority of Lacebark’s business is and always has been resource extraction. That’s what we’re known for. But over the last twenty years we’ve faced a lot of the same problems in Myanmar that you and your colleagues at Nostrand are now facing in Tanzania. One of Lacebark’s basic corporate values is that we never outsource when we can insource. So we’ve pumped major resources into developing skills that lie quite a long way outside our core competencies. And the best way to begin to defray an investment like that is to offer some of those skills on the open market. It’s much the same approach that San Miguel took with Sentinel back in the 1960s, for instance, if you’re familiar with Sentinel. If we build you a facility like this in Tanzania, you can be confident it will do the job, because we rely on facilities of exactly the same kind. We are our own most demanding customers.’
Raf tries to translate all this in his head. He knows from the Pankhead email that Lacebark are in financial trouble. By now they must be aching for cash so badly that they’ll accept contracts from other companies for services that have nothing to do with mining. Nostrand Discovery is a potential client. In that case ‘Mr Rose’ can probably afford to play it a bit more aloof.
‘Shall we head on through?’ says Belasco.
After the security guard presses a button on a panel, the steel door in front of them emits a buzz and then a clunk. Belasco holds it open for Raf. And Raf steps out, somehow, into the open air.
Many times in his life, Raf has carelessly said, ‘I thought I was dreaming’ or ‘I had to pinch myself’ or ‘It was a total nightmare’. But he won’t say those things again after this. Because never, ever before has he had any experience which made him feel so much like a drowsy and gullible consciousness floating through its own depthless improvisation.
He stands in a London street. Above his head, there is a sun, but the sun is both weak and very close, as if the world is ending. On his left there is a post office, followed by a laundrette, a mobile phone shop, a fried chicken shop, a pound shop, a pawnbroker, and a pub, and on his right there is a Chinese takeaway, followed by a greengrocer, a charity shop, a butcher, a hairdresser, a kebab shop, a bookie, and a chemist; and all these are easy to identify even at a distance because their signs just say post office, laundrette, mobile phones, and so on, in an invariant sans-serif typeface. Most of the road has white zigzag lines on either side, but farther on, past a bus stop, a few cars and vans are parked. And about two hundred metres away, blocking the end of the street in a way that you would never see in real life, is an orthogonal pair of two-storey council blocks overlooking a small park with swings and a tree. Everything is a bit too bright and concentrated, sickening, like undiluted orange squash. Raf can hear radios and car horns and the rumble of an overground train, and he can smell chip fat and bus exhaust and fishmonger’s ice melting in the gutter, but there isn’t enough bustle here to generate any of those harmonies, just a few men and women walking up and down the street, nearly all of them Burmese, dressed in cheap sportswear, pretending to have somewhere to go. And there’s no chewing gum on the pavement, no stickers on the lamp-posts, no paint flaking from the windowsills of the flats above the shops — none of the scurf and sebum that distinguishes a body from a mannequin. He’s rendered architectural models on his computer with more texture than this.
Of course, if you put everything together rationally, it becomes apparent that Lacebark have built some sort of film set or theme park here inside the freight depot, but at first sight, before he understood what he was looking at, it seemed more like a dip in the bandwidth of reality itself. When at last the trance breaks, he walks over to the greengrocer and picks up a delicious-looking plastic mango from a cardboard box at the front. Underneath the top layer of mangoes there are chunks of styrofoam to bulk up the pile. If that climbing gym was a mountain, this is the village at the foot of the slopes. Perhaps in some way the tacky fake hologram on his driver’s licence was the visa that got him across the border.
‘Our team can build one of these for you in less than three weeks,’ says Belasco behind him.