And was still sobbing — albeit muffled by the cigarettes he held to his lips — as they trundled on towards the Tontines.
Tom was only relieved that he, personally, hadn’t killed anyone. After the dust had settled, Daphne Hufferman pointed out that the Green Bay Packers kid had her bullets in his chest. ‘I dunno where your shot went, Tom,’ she told him. ‘But you were game for a rookie — I’ll give you that.’
Then she went from corpse to corpse and, taking them by the ankles with workwomanly efficiency, dragged them off Route 1. As for the insurgent Prentice had shot in the shoulder, she gave him a hefty shot of morphine from the medical emergency pack she carried with her. Then she and Tom got the man on his feet and led him into the shade of a rocky overhang.
At first the Aval tribesman had been shocked — latterly he was stoned. Tom had sat with him, while Daphne walked away into the desert, found the insurgents’ pick-up and used their short-wave radio to call the grid reference into the police.
‘What will the cops do to him?’ Tom asked as he drove.
‘Shit knows, yeah,’ Daphne replied. ‘Might drag him into choky in the Tontines, yeah. Might just do him there and dig a pit.’ She chuckled. ‘That might seem a little harsh to you, right, but that one ain’t gonna abandon killing for a career in industry. You should’ve seen the bumper sticker on his ute: WE SHALL KNOCK ON THE GATES OF HEAVEN WITH ANGLO SKULLS. Makes yer think, right.’
Tom wasn’t thinking much at all. His tongue curled back and probed the dry gulches of his mouth, then extended into his psyche and explored its numbness. So, he thought, this is what real shock feels like: nothing at all. Self-defence was moral dentistry, accompanied by a whole-conscience shot of Novocaine.
He tried to thank Prentice for what he had done — but the gratitude fizzled out on his parched tongue. Besides, Prentice was engaged in some peculiar introspection of his own: as the sobs died down, the tempo of his smoking increased. He began, once more, to toy with his automatic, taking out the magazine, ramming it back home, then aiming at the lengthening shadows out in the desert.
Daphne instructed Tom to stop at the buckled steel skeleton of the eighty-mile bore. While the two men covered her, she bolted over and deposited the bag full of beer empties in the recycling bin. When Prentice, at long last, tucked the Browning away in its shoulder holster, he wasn’t himself again — he was more than himself: an anthropoid mosquito full of sucked-up blood. Tom could make out the words in his ultrasonic whine: ‘I am the Swift One, I am the Righter of Wrongs. .’ While from time to time, Prentice muttered aloud, ‘It’s just not cricket.’
Twenty kilometres before the Tontines the ghostly cavalcade of burned-out vehicles began. Ten kilometres later they saw a perfectly ordinary grader working on the road and were waved through by gangers in fluorescent safety jackets. Then they reached the city limits.
The sign was as stark as a gibbet in the desert twilight: WELCOME TO THE TONTINE TOWNSHIPS, it read. TWINNED WITH OENDERMONDE, BELGIUM. The three vertical stripes of the Belgian flag — black, yellow, red — were set beside the shield of the Republic. Next to the sign’s rusty posts lay a bloated body with greyish patches on the dark skin of its outstretched arms. They were travelling at too great a speed for Tom to be able to tell if it was a corpse or a drunk.
He pushed the SUV on down a long, dusty boulevard with outsized concrete flowerpots on its dividing strip. To either side there were street after street of identically shaped bungalows, each one a steel shoebox with a veranda tacked on one side and an aircon’ unit on the other. On top of the bungalows were sloping aluminium roofs, painted tile-red.
‘They’re modified freight containers,’ Daphne explained. ‘Guvvie ships ’em in and plonks ’em down. If one of ’em gets whacked by the insurgents, or the bing-bongs that live in it have a party and burn it out, they ship in another one.’
There wasn’t anyone much on the streets, only the occasional skulking figure that recoiled from the vehicle’s approach, and disappeared into one of the identical bungalows. A police checkpoint hove into view: a series of blast walls and a chain-link fence twenty-five feet high, topped by angle-irons strung with razor wire. The Tugganarong police stamped the trio’s papers while exchanging desultory chit-chat with Daphne about the ambush. Then they waved them on.
They turned into another wide boulevard. This one had fat-trunked baobab trees with whitewashed trunks planted along its dividing strip. Here, the containers had been installed side-on, and there were paved sidewalks. The containers lacked roofs, but windows had been cut in their sides. These were covered with security grilles. Each of these commercial premises had a large electric sign on top of it, and, with darkness fast falling, a robotic finger pressed a button. Slogans cascaded along the blank façades, racing the little SUV: APEX ASSURANCE, COVENTRY REAL ASSURANCE, PERSONAL FIDELITY, AMHERST LIFE, TIP-TOP TONTINES. . Tom wondered who these were aimed at, for there was still hardly anyone on the streets.
They reached another checkpoint with more bored cops, more blast walls, more razor wire. The cops checked under the car with their mirrors-on-poles. Then there was a third checkpoint, a fourth and even a fifth. Each necessitated the same laborious procedures, the same routine interrogations.
Prentice had come down from his maiming high, and in the short transits between the checkpoints he nodded out. His forehead, pressed against the window, looked in the sodium glare of the spotlights as brittle as glass.
Rousing himself, at what it transpired was the final checkpoint, Prentice reached for his cigarettes, only to have a flat-faced Tugganarong non-com’ snap at him, ‘You better not spark that one, yeah,’ and gesture to a sign that was bolted to the blast wall. The sign shouted: NO IFS, NO BUTTS, STUB IT OUT!
‘If I were you, yeah, I’d take your stay in the TGS as an opportunity to kick the habit. Perhaps it’s the Lord’s way of persuading you to stop.’ Then he slung the sheaf of their papers back into Prentice’s lap and waved them through the raised barrier with a negligent flick of his rifle barrel.
It was the first time Tom had heard the Lord referred to since the courtroom had lustily sung the National Anthem, back in Vance.
There was no time to dwell on this. Daphne Hufferman’s hand was on Tom’s shoulder, tending him this way and that, along driveways as smooth and dark as chocolate cake. Miniature office blocks with mirrored-glass walls were set in pocket-sized lawns upon which sprinklers played. Apart from the swishing caress of these, and the tired grumble of the SUV’s engine, the Sector was unnaturally silent: a man-made oasis, where interloping blossoms skulked in the moist beds at the foot of the buildings.
A perfect little Hilton emerged from the orangey gloom. It was exact in every way, from its pseudo-Hellenic portico to its ornamental ponds dappled with water lilies, but maybe one fifth the size of any other Hilton Tom had ever seen.
And there, standing by the main doors, apparently forewarned of their arrival, a swirl of black-winged moths fluttering round his fastidious form, stood Adams, the Honorary Consul. While beside him was the morphed version of Tom’s own wife: Gloria Swai-Phillips, wearing a floral-print cotton dress.
12
The following morning, Tom had just returned from the concession stand and was at the sink in the bathroom, applying arnica ointment to his cheek — which had been badly bruised by the rifle’s recoil — when there was a knock on the door.
He admitted Adams, who walked past him and crossed at once to the far side of the room. Tom moved his discarded clothes from the easy-chair to the floor and invited the Consul to sit.