He left her after a few minutes, scribbling his phone number, as an act of gallantry, with a blunt stub of pencil on a bit of cardboard torn from a packet of cigarette papers. She folded this once and tucked it into the coin pocket of her jeans. They had made friends, though as she watched him cycle away she noticed that the bicycle was wagging less than previously and his head was wagging more.
She went back into the boulangerie and endured a foul look. The baguette, which she ate sitting on a low wall in the sunshine, was delicious. She spent the night in a field outside Freychenet, more excited than she was prepared to acknowledge to herself.
Now Isla is walking up, leaving the last outbuildings of the farm she passed behind her. The cart track is dry, and the sun has baked worm-curls of mud on it. Her new walking boots bash satisfyingly and painlessly off them. As a contour slopes round she glimpses the roof of a wooden cabin. The quarter-acre of land in front of it has been raked out flat and hoed, and there are lines of bamboo poles with brilliant green-yellow bean shoots curling around them. Chickens scratch in the dirt.
She doesn’t think that Banacharski knows she is coming to look for him. She underestimates how small these towns are, and how close together. Banacharski knows she’s coming.
He didn’t know, at first, whether he wanted to be found. But now he sees her starting up the path towards him, smiling, and he thinks that he has been too lonely for too long.
‘So, Jones,’ said Bree. ‘This thing. This thing you have.’
It had been bugging Bree all afternoon, and she had been bugging Jones with it. It wasn’t something Bree could quite make sense of. And – she being a naturally sceptical person – it wasn’t something she completely believed, either. It was far from impossible that this was something Red Queen was doing just to mess her about. That Jones was a spy, or an actor, or some other damn thing. Indeed, that this whole thing might be some sort of fieldwork assessment exercise.
Jones didn’t say anything.
They were in the car, and Jones was looking out of the windshield at the road. They were on the road west out of Atlanta heading for Birmingham. The sun was low in the sky ahead of them. They reckoned the kid was on the move, and that he was heading west.
Bree had asked how they knew that and Red Queen had said something about triangulation. They had tried the idea of using fluctuations in the ambient spread of probabilities to track the device. They conjectured that its effect on the world might leak out from it – little subtle ripples of unlikelihood, little freaks, unexpected variations from the mean could be discerned if you looked at large enough bodies of data. Their conjecture – unless what they were seeing was no more than the effects of chance itself – seemed to have been borne out.
They were monitoring regular big spreads: sports events, the patterns of roulette wheels and hands dealt in the major gambling centres of the North American mainland. Of course – and Bree would never have doubted it – they had access to those data in real time. Over the last several hours there had been spikes, outliers, runs of aces, improbable snake eyes, statistically significant fluctuations.
Red Queen didn’t go into detail – just hints. Bree imagined low-level employees sitting in safe houses in all fifty states flipping quarters every ten seconds and noting down the results: ‘Heads, tails, heads, heads, tails, heads, heads, heads, heads, coin landed on edge, heads, heads, heads…’ Whatever was measurable was measured.
Wispy though it was, all these variations, plotted together, seemed to signal some sort of gradient, something geographical, arranged around a moving focus. And the data was consistent with that focus heading westwards at approximately the speed of an automobile travelling down a highway. Crudely, as Red Queen explained it, the closer to this thing you got, the less likely it was that you’d roll a four one time in six. Dice were behaving themselves on the eastern seaboard, Red Queen said. Dice were becoming more unruly to the west.
That, then, was the weather report: that was the state of chance. Things were getting more unlikely in the south-western United States of America, with a front of downright implausible moving in from the east. Conditions in Atlanta and points east were calming, with nobody expected to beat the house for the foreseeable future.
‘This thing,’ Bree repeated. ‘Does it make life fun?’
‘I don’t understand.’ Jones said that to a lot of enquiries. Bree had learned to persevere. She stopped talking, and looked at the side of his face like he was a Sudoku.
‘Knock knock,’ said Bree.
Jones didn’t say anything.
‘I said: knock knock. You know about that, Jones. Don’t pretend you don’t. You grew up in some laboratory somewhere you never got told knock knock jokes?’
‘I know knock knock jokes. I just don’t know why they make you laugh.’
‘So you know what you say?’
‘I know.’
‘So say it.’
‘Who’s there,’ said Jones, but he said it without a question mark.
‘Boo,’ said Bree.
‘I’ve heard that one,’ said Jones.
‘Say it for me, Jones,’ said Bree with a wheedling intonation. If you’d been watching carefully you could have identified her coaxing manner as flirtatious, almost.
‘Boo who.’
‘Don’t cry,’ said Bree. ‘It’s only a joke.’
Jones continued to stare out of the windshield. Bree reached into the glove compartment and took out a Slim Jim and unwrapped it and began to chew. That hadn’t been a success.
‘Slim Jim, Jones?’ she said.
‘No thanks,’ said Jones.
‘OK,’ said Bree, a mile or so later on. ‘Not big on sense of humour. No GSOH, like they don’t say in the lonely hearts listing. Jokes don’t make you laugh.’
Jones didn’t say anything.
‘Jeezus, Jones. I’m trying to needle you here. Throw me a bone.’
Jones continued to look out of the windshield with bland attention to the road.
‘OK. Needle means like… Bone means like… Means say something.’
‘What would you like me to say?’ said Jones.
‘Make conversation.’
Jones left it a while. He seemed to be involved in some sort of mental effort. Bree could have sworn the hand with which he ordinarily smoked – the main hand with which he ordinarily smoked, given he seemed to be ambidextrous in this regard – twitched towards his pants pocket.
‘Knock knock,’ said Jones eventually.
‘Who’s there?’ said Bree.
Jones didn’t say anything for a bit.
‘Who’s there?’ said Bree. ‘Jones, you have to -’
‘Mister,’ said Jones.
‘Mister who?’ said Bree.
‘Mister Jones,’ said Jones. Bree laughed. Jones didn’t.
‘Hah, Jones,’ said Bree. ‘I like it. You were joking… Nice work…’
She cracked open another Slim Jim – they were minis – by way of celebration. Jones continued to stare benignly at the road, but she saw something around his eyes, in his frown, that looked a little haunted.
She waited a bit.
‘You weren’t joking,’ she said. ‘Were you?’
‘No,’ said Jones. ‘I was trying.’
‘You were funny. Sort of… inadvertently.’ After the highway had gone by for a bit more, uneventfully, Bree continued. ‘Knock knock jokes aren’t really funny, anyway,’ she said. ‘They’re more like corny. So it’s funny when they’re not funny?’
‘I know that,’ said Jones. ‘I know other people find things funny. It’s one of the concepts I find difficult to understand. Funny is what?’
‘Do you not laugh, Jones?’
Jones thought quite hard about this; as did Bree, who was trying to remember if she’d heard him laugh since they’d met.
‘No,’ he said eventually, in a tone of voice that suggested that the question was an odd one.
‘Not even if I tickle you?’