Niko's jacket had the word death stitched gothically at the back of its collar. He took it off, and threw it on to the back seat — so revealing a T-shirt which said Godless Motherfucker.
This was the company Haffner now kept. He decided that he rather liked it.
— You saw my girl, yes? said Niko chirpily, bending to slurp at the keyhole of a newly opened can of Coke.
— Yes, said Haffner, deciding that it would be best if he stopped the sentence there.
— Uhhuh, uhhuh, said Niko.
To this, Haffner maintained his politic silence.
— You like potato chips? said Niko: trying to begin a conversation as they drove off.
Niko, the athlete, was always snacking. He offered Haffner an angled tube.
— No, said Haffner: feeling drunk, and sick.
Their destination was a billiards and pool hall — on the opposite edge of the town to Benjamin's utopian Chinese restaurant, in an industrial complex — on the second floor of what appeared to have been intended as an office block. On the ground floor were a hair-dresser supply shop — whose windows were hung with posters displaying the moustaches and side-partings of another era — and a shop selling carpet to the outfitters of mid-range business premises. Each window of the billiards hall was blacked out.
Their contact was already there. To Haffner's disturbed surprise, he discovered that he recognised this contact.
— I'm sorry, he said to Niko. I don't think I got his name.
— Viko, said Niko, pointing to his misprinted double.
— Ah yes, of course, said Haffner.
And Haffner gazed over at his masseur.
Haffner wondered if this would be awkward. All that was needed, he concluded, if the man could indeed do what he said he could do, was a brisk, businesslike demeanour.
He looked around: at the wall lamps, visored by green eyeshades; at a bar of chocolate on a table, its foil wrapper partially unwrapped, exposing its ridged segments — like a terrapin, or grenade.
He had hoped for something more; he had hoped for a man in a suit, with a briefcase and moustache. He had certainly hoped for a stranger. A powerful, authoritative stranger. If Haffner had ever had to imagine how this kind of business might be done, difficult as it may have been, he would have been able to be precise about the clothes. It most certainly would not have featured this man's obvious pleasure in contemporary sportswear.
As if, conceded Haffner, Haffner could talk: this man without a wardrobe.
Viko was a drifter; a man of travels. His career had taken him along the fabled European coasts: from Juan-les-Pins to San Remo, from Dubrovnik to Biarritz. His trade was that of the hotelier. Wherever he went, he found work in the spas of luxury retreats, the reception desks of grand hotels. In this trade, he had grown sleek. He had also become expert in the wiles of the world. Not for Viko, the moral life. He preferred corruption, blackmaiclass="underline" the free flow of information.
He kept himself to himself, this was how Viko put it. It was not quite how his colleagues put it. They knew him as rather more sinister: a fixer; a man who was protected, and who could, in his turn, offer protection to others. His ethics were those of the favour. He dispensed largesse. In return, he received the loyalty of chambermaids, office assistants, waiters, car-wash attendants. Often no one knew where Viko was: his movements were uncertain. His apartment was always blandly comfortable: on the walls, posters of Renaissance gods, and cubist still lifes.
Yes, out of his uniform — out of the shorts and cotton sports shirt, the tennis shoes — Viko was transformed. No longer the man who pampered the pampered rich. Now, he was in power.
Viko walked up to Haffner and Niko, nodded, then walked past them to the bar. But the barman was not there. He was taking the garbage out. Viko waited. He turned from the bar and reapproached them.
— How are you, my friend? said Viko to Niko. You are like Elton John, no?
Viko was wearing a T-shirt which did not conceal the fact that his forearms and upper arms were plaited with muscle, like challah bread. He put imaginary binoculars to his face. He grinned, behind his binoculars, scanning the limited horizon.
— In those glasses.
Niko smiled. He looked at Haffner. Haffner smiled at Viko, nervously.
The label of Viko's shirt, which lolled over the collar, was still pierced by its plastic hammerhead tag.
The billiards and pool hall in which they found themselves was reminiscent of an idealised gentlemen's club, from the nineteenth-century colonies. It was a vision of the past, where the players — dressed in waistcoats and bow ties — were meant to tend, like waiters, to the table. Portraits of forgotten stars, like imaginary aristocrats, were hung beneath lamps which bequeathed luminous rectangles to the aristocrats' foreheads, as if they were sweating. Each photograph was scribbled with an illegible imitation of a signature: as if the sign for a signature was its very illegibility.
Niko said that he would just go into the bathroom. Viko said he would be with them in one minute. First he had this little matter — they understood? He gestured over to a table, where an argument was taking place. They understood. So Viko wandered back over to the tables and took up his position, a little way off, on a bar stool; while Haffner waited on a banquette for Niko to return.
Haffner listened to the argument: like every argument, its intonations were universal.
He did not know the precise details: he did not know that a man was telling his teenage son that he was not showing any respect to Viko.
— When you were my age, he said. When you. When I was. There was a pause.
— You're me, right, said the man.
On his bar stool, Viko lit a cigarette: aloof from the argument, in his ivory tower.
He was forty-two, said the anonymous father, and he had never said fuck in front of his mother. Never. Look, he loved him more than his bird loved him. He respected him. And he didn't need to go round saying things which weren't respectful. If he didn't show any respect.
— Him, if he wants to, said the man, pointing at Viko, he can have anyone killed.
And how was Haffner also to know, as he listened to this incomprehensible argument, that Niko was, at that moment, bending as if in solicitude over the tank of a toilet, inhaling a gram of cocaine which he had first neatly heaped in a thin straggling line? It wasn't Haffner's normal world. As he looked around, sipping the first of the vodkas which the barman brought him, he was simply trying to understand why there seemed to be such a lack of urgency; such a lack of businesslike flair. He wanted to be done with this. The urgent need to do what he had to do and secure this villa for Livia still possessed him, even in his drunken state. He wanted to be true to a domestic idyll. He wanted to be successful and in bed. But Haffner, in his finale, was fated so rarely to be in bed when he wanted, with whom he wanted.
He felt for the phone, bulging in his tracksuit top.
Niko propped himself on the patch of yellow foam under the ripped velour of the banquette, on which Haffner's hand had been resting.
— You want to play? said Niko. You like billiards? Why not? If we played a little game, for a bet?
— Really? said Haffner.
— Why not? said Niko. Why not?
Haffner was drunk. And he was good at billiards. After all, he had been Joe Davis's banker. Haffner, as the legend had often said, was a natural.
Along the walls of the billiards and snooker hall, a range of cues was propped — like an armoury. Haffner prised one out from its tight little omega, and rolled it on the empty and unlit surface of a dark unoccupied table. It drifted in an unprofessional curve. Haffner prised out another. The black butt of this cue was slightly sticky. He rolled this one also — noting its warp, its bias and slide.