"Are we going indoors? Maybe they've got one there," said Jonathan. "It's getting urgent again," he added, for Tabby's benefit.
* * *
Tension now, as they stand in the unlit side street. A fast tropical dusk is gathering. The sky is aglow with coloured neon, but in this canyon of walls and dingy alleys, the dark is already here. Everyone's eyes are on the hatted man. Frisky and Tabby stand either side of Jonathan, and Frisky's hand is on Jonathan's upper arm: not grasping it exactly, Tommy, just making sure nobody gets lost. The Arab student has gone ahead to join the forward group. Jonathan sees the man in the hat enter the blackness of a doorway. Langbourne, Roper and the student follow him.
"Mush," Frisky murmurs. They walk forward.
"If you could just find me a loo," Jonathan says. Frisky's hand tightens on his arm.
Inside the doorway, reflected light glows at the end of a brick corridor lined with posters too dark to read. They reach a T junction, turn left. The light brightens, leading them to a glazed door with plywood tacked over the upper panes of glass to hide the writing underneath. A smell of chandlery pervades the still air: rope and flour and tar and coffee and linseed oil. The door stands open. They enter a luxurious anteroom: leather chairs, silk flowers, ashtrays like glass bricks. On a coffee table, glossy trade magazines about Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil. And in a corner, a discreet green door with a bucolic lady and gentleman going for a walk on a ceramic tile.
"Quick, then," says Frisky, shoving Jonathan forward, and Jonathan keeps his jailers waiting for two and a half infuriating minutes by his watch while he sits on the lavatory and scribbles on a piece of writing paper spread on his knee.
They pass to the main office and it is large and white and windowless, with recessed lighting and a ceiling made of perforated tiles, and a conference table with empty chairs drawn up to it, and pens and blotters and drinking glasses laid like places for dinner. Roper and Langbourne and their guide stand at one end. The guide, now that he can be seen, turns out to be Moranti. But something has happened to his body, some quickening of urgency or hate, and his face has the slashed grimness of a Halloween lantern. At the other end of the room, by a second door, stands the farmer whom Jonathan remembers from this morning's military display, and at his arm the bullfighter, with one of the richly dressed boys in a leather bomber jacket beside him. The boy is scowling. And round the walls, still more boys, all wearing jeans and sneakers, all honed and fit after their extended stay at Faberge, all pressing the smaller variety of Uzi submachine gun discreetly to their sides.
The door behind them closes, the other opens and it is a door to a real warehouse: not a steel-lined abyss like the hold of the Lombardy but a place with some pretension to taste with stone-slab floors, and iron pillars that fan into palm tree as they reach the ceiling, and dusty art deco lampshades hanging from the girders. On the side of the warehouse that borders the street, closed garage doors. Jonathan counts ten of them each with its own lock and number and its own bay for a container and a crane. And at the centre, cardboard boxes by the thousand, piled in brown cubist mountains, with forklift trucks standing at their feet to trundle them the sixty meters to the containers on the street side. Only occasionally is a commodity displayed: a cluster of outsized pottery urns, for instance, waiting to be specially packed; a pyramid of video recorders; bottles of Scotch whisky, which in a previous existence might have worn a less distinguished label.
But the forklift trucks, like everything else about the place, are idle: no watchman, no dogs, no night shift toiling at the packing bays or scrubbing down the floor; just the friendly smell of chandlery and the clip and squeak of their own feet on the flagstones.
* * *
As on the Lombardy, protocol now dictated the order of progression. The farmer led with Moranti. The bullfighter and his son walked after him. Then came Roper and Langbourne and the Arab, and finally Frisky and Tabby, with Jonathan pressed between them.
And there it stood.
Their prize, their rainbow's end. The biggest cubist mountain of them all, stacked roof-high in its own fenced enclosure and guarded by a ring of fighters with submachine guns. Each box numbered, each box bearing the same pretty-coloured label of a laughing Colombian boy juggling coffee beans above his big straw hat, a Third World model of a happy child, with perfect teeth and a cheerful shining face, drug-free, loving life, juggling his way into the future. Jonathan took a quick reckoning, left to right, up and down. Two thousand boxes. Three thousand. His arithmetic deserted him. Langbourne and Roper stepped forward together. As they did so, Roper's features came into the stiff arc of the overhead light, and Jonathan saw him as he had seen him the very first time, stepping into the glow of the chandelier at Meister's, tall and at first glance noble, brushing the snow off his shoulders, waving at Fräulein Eberhardt and looking every inch the buccaneering dealmaker of the eighties, even if it was the nineties: I'm Dicky Roper. My chaps booked some rooms here. Rather a lot of 'em...
What had changed? All this time and all these miles later, what had changed? The hair a mite more grey? The dolphin smile a fraction stiffer at the corners? Jonathan saw no change in him at all. At every point where he had learned to read the Roper signals ― the occasional flicking of a hand, the smoothing of the horns of hair above the ears, the ruminative tilting of the head while the great man affected to consider ― Jonathan saw no hint of transformation.
"Feisal, table over there. Sandy, pick a box, pick twenty, different places. You chaps all right back there, Frisky?"
"Sir."
"Hell's Moranti gone? There he is. Señor Moranti, let's get this thing on the road."
The hosts had formed a group apart. The Arab student was with his back to the audience, and while he waited he unloaded things from the recesses of his jacket and set them out on the table. Four of the fighting boys had taken the doors. One held a cellular telephone to his ear. The rest moved quickly toward the cubist mountain, passing between the ring of guards who remained facing outward like a shooting party, clutching their submachine guns across their chests.
Langbourne pointed at a box in the middle of the heap. Two boys tugged it out for him, dumped it on the ground beside the student, and pulled up the lid, which was not sealed. The student delved in the box and drew out a rectangular package bound in sackcloth and plastic and adorned with the same happy Colombian child. Placing it on the table before him, masking it with his body, he bowed low over it. Time stopped.
Jonathan was reminded of a priest at Holy Communion, helping himself to the host and the wine with his back turned, before bringing them to his communicants. The student bowed more deeply, entering a phase of particular devotion. He sat back and gave Roper a nod of approval. Langbourne selected another box, from another part of the mountain. The boys tore it from its place. The mountain slipped and recovered. The ritual was repeated. And repeated. Perhaps thirty boxes were tested in this way. Nobody fidgeted his gun or spoke. The boys at the door were motionless. The only sound was the shuffle of the boxes. The student glanced at Roper and nodded.
"Señor Moranti," said Roper.
Moranti took a small step forward but didn't speak. The hatred in his eyes was like a curse. Yet what did he hate? The white colonialists who for so long had raped his continent? Or himself for stooping to this transaction?
"Reckon we're getting there. Quality's no problem. Let's do quantity, shall we?"
Under Langbourne's supervision, the fighters loaded twenty random boxes onto a forklift and drove them to a weighbridge. Langbourne read the weight from the illuminated dial, made a reckoning on his pocket calculator and showed it to Roper who appeared to agree with it, for he again called something affirmative to Moranti, who turned on his heel and with the farmer at his side led the procession back to the conference room. But not before Jonathan had seen the forklift truck take its load to the first of two containers standing open-topped in the bays numbered eight and nine.