'Paul,' he shouted, 'Derek,' as their heads bobbed downhill, borne by the sluggish crowd. They'd looked preoccupied, perhaps with finding him. He would have used the alley if the bulk of a van hadn't been parked mere inches short of both walls. 'I'm here,' he yelled, digging the heels of his hands into his chin and his fingertips into the bridge of his nose. 'Over here,' he pleaded at the top of his voice, and Paul turned towards him.
He would have seen Barry if he'd raised his eyes. Having surveyed the crowd between himself and the alley, he said something to Derek that caused him to glance about before vanishing downhill. The next moment, as Barry sucked in a breath that almost blinded him with the whiteness of the houses, Paul had gone too.
Barry bellowed their names and waved until his finger sprinkled the wall with a Morse phrase in blood. None of this was any use. Members of the crowd scowled along the alley at him while the vendors around him glared at him as if he was somehow giving them away. As he fell silent, the personal stereos renewed their bid for audibility. Wasn't the one at the front of the stall playing his favourite album? He could have taken it for the stereo he'd left in the apartment. He reached for the headphones, but the stall-holder, whose leathery face seemed to have been shrivelled in the course of producing an unkempt greyish beard, tapped his arm with a jagged fingernail. 'Buy, you listen,' he said.
Barry had no idea what he was being told, and suddenly no wish to linger. He might have enough of a problem at the apartments, since he hadn't brought a key with him. Best to save his energy in case he needed to persuade the owner to admit him to his room, he thought as he toiled past the final stall. It was heaped with suitcases, three of which reminded him of his and Paul's and Derek's. Of course there must be many like them, which was why he'd wrapped the handle of his case in bright green tape. Indeed, a greenish fragment adhered to the handle of the case that resembled his so much.
As he leaned forward to confirm what he could hardly believe, the stall-holder stepped in front of him. He wore a sack-like garment that hid none of the muscles and veins of his arms. His small dark thoroughly hairy face appeared to have been sun-dried almost to the bone, revealing a few haphazard blackened teeth. His eyes weren't much less pale and cracked and blank than the wall behind him. 'You want?' he said.
'Where'd you get these?'
'Very cheap. Not much use.'
The man was staring so hard at him he could have intended to deny Barry had spoken. Barry was about to repeat himself louder when he heard a faint sound above the awning, and raised his unsteady head to see the owner of the Summit Apartments watching him with a loose lopsided smile from an upper window. 'What do you know about it?' Barry shouted.
If the man responded, it wasn't to him. He addressed at least a sentence to the stall-holder, whose gaze remained fixed on Barry while growing even blanker. Barry was about to retreat downhill in search of his friends when he noticed that the vendors he'd encountered in the lesser market had been drawn by the argument or, to judge by their purposeful lack of expression, by whatever the man at the window had said. 'All right. Forget it. I will,' Barry lied and moved away from them.
At first he only walked. He'd reached the first alley that led to the topmost section of the main market when the owner of the Summit Apartments blocked the far end. Sandalled footsteps clattered after Barry, who almost lost the remains of his balance as he twisted to see the vendors filling the width of the street. An understated trail of blood led through the dust to him. He sprinted then, but so did his pursuers with a clacking of their sandals, and the owner of the apartments managed to arrive at the next alley as he did. Above it there were only houses that scarcely looked entitled to the name, with rubbish piled against their closed doors, their windows either shuttered or boarded up. A few dizzy panting hundred yards took him beyond them to the top of the hill.
Two policemen were smoking on it. Though he saw nothing to hold their attention, they had their backs to him. Beyond the hill there was very little to the landscape, as if it had put all its effort into the tourist area. It was the colour of sun-bleached bone, and scattered with rubble and the occasional building, more like a chunk of rock with holes in. A few trees seemed hardly to have found the energy to raise themselves, let alone grow green. Closer to the hill, several goats waited to be fed or slaughtered. Barry was vaguely aware of all this as he hurried to the policemen. 'Can you help?' he gasped.
They turned to bristle their moustaches at him. It didn't matter that they were the policemen he'd encountered earlier, he told himself, nor did their sharing a fat amateur cigarette. 'All my stuff is in the market,' he said. 'I know who took it, and not just mine either.'
The officer who'd previously spoken to him held up one large weathered palm. Barry kept going, since the gesture was directed at his pursuers. 'You come,' the man urged him.
Barry had almost reached him when the policemen moved apart, revealing a stout post, a larger version of those to which the goats were tethered. He saw the other officer nod at the small crowd - more than Barry had noticed were behind him. As the realization swung him around, his hands were captured, handcuffed against his spine and hauled up so that the chain could be attached to a rusty hook on the post. 'What are you doing?' Barry felt incredulous enough to waste time asking before he began to shout, partly in the hope that there were tourists close enough to hear him. 'Not me. I haven't done anything. It was him from the Summit. It was them. Don't let them get away.'
The stall-holders from the cheapest region of the market were wandering downhill, leaving the owner of the apartments together with three other people as huge and glistening. The only woman looked pained by Barry's protests or at least the noise of them. The policemen deftly emptied his pockets, and while the man who'd spoken to him in the market pocketed his cash, the other folded the traveller's cheques in half and stuffed them in Barry's mouth. Barry could emit no more than a choked gurgle past the taste of cardboard as the Summit man waddled up to squeeze his chest in both hands and tweak his nipples. 'You nice,' he told Barry as he made way for the others to palpate Barry's shrinking genitals and in the woman's case to emit a motherly sound at his injured finger before sucking it so hard he felt the nail pull away from the quick. All this done, the four began to wave obese wads of money at the policemen and at one another. Barry was struggling both to spit out the gag and to disbelieve what was taking place when he saw three girls appear where the houses gave way to rubble.
The girl in the middle was Janet. Presumably she hadn't been to bed, since she was wearing the same clothes and supporting or being supported by her friends, or both. They looked as if they couldn't quite make out the events on top of the hill. Barry threw himself from side to side and did his utmost to produce a noise that would sound like an appeal for help, but succeeded only in further gagging himself. He saw Janet blink and let go of one of her friends in order to shade her eyes. For an instant she seemed to recognize him. Then she stumbled backwards and grabbed at her companions. The three of them staggered around as one and swayed giggling downhill.
If he could believe anything now, he wanted to think she hadn't really seen him or had failed to understand. He watched the bidding come to an end, and felt as though it concerned someone other than himself or who had ceased to be. The woman plodded to scrutinize him afresh, pinching his face between a fat clammy finger and thumb that drove the gag deeper into his mouth. 'Will do,' she said, separating her wad into halves that the policemen stuffed into their pockets.