'But the real culprit – '
'The real culprit is far away. I can't catch him. I'm not clever, all I can do is take the pain. From my father, from the crowd outside, I can absorb their darkness. It's what I do, how I survive. Feeding on the violence of others.' He held her with a look she would never forget to her dying day. 'Someone once told me about the army.'
'What army?'
'Everyone has an army in their heart, an army that rallies when its host is most in danger, an army that fights back with all its might until every last one of its soldiers is dead. But I don't. I have no army. There's nothing inside me fighting back, there's just a black hole.' He smiled at her. 'Don't look so worried. I know how to make the most of it.' As he had been talking to her, he had raised the entry-door's floor-bolt with his boot, and now he shrugged himself away to release the top bolt in one swift, simple movement. The door suddenly opened inwards and he slipped through it before anyone could realise what was happening.
Woody screamed after him but the others had crashed forward to slam the door shut once more. She begged them to open it, screamed and pleaded until her throat was raw, but they carried her away to the side of the room, where Bax gave her water and sat her down. She regained her breath, stopped crying and waited.
They all waited.
Outside, Simon stood before the seething crowd with the placidity of a medieval child-saint, a sickly hermaphrodite that raised its arms in preparation for final absolution. His moon-blanched face was tense with sexual anticipation, his body illuminated by dozens of flashlights as the figures around him surged and erupted forward. In the distance the riot vehicles could be heard arriving. The mob took the sound of their sirens as a call to action and fell upon the boy, slashing and punching at him with everything they were holding, machetes and carpet-cutters, butchers' hooks, bread knives, daggers and carving-forks. Obviously those inside the club were unwilling to take the rap for the murderer and had forced him to step out in the open. They had no loyalty to one another and probably all deserved to die but this one, this one had to suffer properly for what he had done.
But then the swinging boots and arcing knives slowed their rhythm. Gradually the shouts died down and stopped. For a few moments total silence descended on the neighbourhood. Then a few of the women started to scream. The crowd slunk back from the grotesque remains of their victim, slipping in crimson mire. A sense of shame and horror descended over them as they listened to those inside the building putting the remaining fires out. Weapons were released from bloody hands as men began to cover their faces and weep. Some fell to their knees. Others stumbled into the arms of their women like lost children. As the police disembarked from their grid-covered vehicles, one of the wives came forward and laid her coat across the shattered skull of the boy who had drained their rage away.
Inside the club, the sudden silence was eerier than anything they had heard so far. Woody put her eye to one of the bulletholes and watched as nearly three hundred men, women and children were herded back to the far side of the street. At the corner of her vision she could see the edge of the pavement, and a pale leg lying in a pool of blood, its foot severed at the ankle.
Bax had been standing up at the window. He had seen the boy hacked apart, and was crying uncontrollably. Jack and the bouncer were opening the club's main entrance doors, trying to clear away the suffocating smoke. Woody stepped numbly down and walked off through the guttering fires of the club, toward the chill clean air outside. She pulled her vest over her head and let it drop, then tore away the strips of tape and released her breasts from their confinement. She looked back at Jack, who returned her rueful smile. They both knew that she wasn't one of the boys any more.
She didn't need to be.
She had her own army.
FIVE STAR
Celia wiped her forehead and checked her watch again. Sweat was dripping in her eyes. 'If the worst comes to the worst,' she said, 'we could go down to the crossroads and wait for the local bus. They're apparently quite reliable.'
'Don't be ridiculous,' said Trevor, 'the whole point of booking a cab is to avoid having to mix with the locals. I've seen enough locals to last a lifetime. All those deformities.'
Celia shuddered. A drip of sweat fell from the tip of her nose. 'That blind man with the flying snakes. Ugh.'
'Exactly. That's the whole point of staying in a five star hotel. They make their ice cubes with Evian. They have French chefs. Showercaps. Fruit baskets. Slippers under your bed. If it wasn't for the outside temperature you'd think you were at home. The beach and the bar are for the use of residents only. Safety is not in numbers, safety is in five stars. Ah.' Trevor looked up at the sound of the vehicle and tilted back the brim of his straw hat. 'Better late than never.'
The filthy taxicab that hoved into view was Russian in origin. It looked like a child's drawing of a car, a grey tin box with squared-off corners and bashed-up fenders. The dashboard was filled with every kind of gaudy religious icon imaginable, the centrepiece being a barebreasted madonna with a pale green wobbly head that looked suspiciously as if it might glow in the dark. The vehicle slewed to a stop in a spray of brown dust and its driver alighted. He batted his sweat-stained shirt with his cap and opened the trunk so that their Louis Vuitton luggage could be stowed beside the greasy pumps and jacks, then stepped back to watch while the couple struggled to fit their cases. He spoke good English but had no intention of revealing this talent, for if he did so he would inevitably be drawn into arguments about lateness, overcharging and the unavailability of change. Instead he picked his teeth with a match while the skinny pale English lady fussed and tutted around her useless-looking husband.
He knew at once that they were upper class. They had that pinched look the posh English so often had, a look created by a lifetime of making false economies. The upper-class English always found new corners to cut while clinging to the lavish lifestyles they felt were their birthright, as if a reduction in the porter's tip would somehow pay for their next trip to Gstaad or Glyndebourne. The woman was bitching at her husband now, something about getting grease on her dress, and he was just nodding apologetically. Poor bastard. If he was any kind of a man he'd shut her mouth with a slap. Wearily the driver reached in and adjusted his wooden-beaded seat cover before heaving himself back into the car. They trundled off and around the corner, surprising a goat who was searching the road for a cool spot to give birth.
'Well, check-in time is two hours before departure, which already makes us over half an hour late,' said Celia, checking her compact mirror for facial anomalies.
'That's for passengers in Economy,' said Trevor, staring from the window as they passed a herd of perilously undernourished cows. 'We can turn up mere minutes before the flight if we wish. They have to wait for us. We're the ones who keep the airline running by paying full fare, not those lager-swilling chimps you see on the bargain package tours. Christ, it's hot.' The sea was a wall of blue at their backs, the air stagnant and still beneath the sun. The taxi wound its way inland, past derelict mills and bleached fields of dead brown crops. 'If only we could have gone to the house in St Raphael,' said Celia, fanning herself, 'instead of having to come here.'
'You know very well we couldn't do that. The press would have been expecting it. We'd have had no privacy.'
'Do you honestly think things will be better back in England?' she snapped. 'I've had people come up to me in the street and make accusations to my face!'