He had come to a network of steam-drift streets, crowded with cafés, bars and clubs. He walked past a club where a new kind of music was playing loudly. A bottle smashed a few yards in front of him. Whoops of laughter and a voice calling out: ‘Sorry, man, just an accident.’ Walker looked up to a second-floor balcony: a guy with his arms around a giggling woman, the pair of them so huge it seemed likely that the next thing to come down would be the balcony itself. ‘Take a full one with my apologies,’ he said, letting a beer bottle drop from his hand. Walker caught it, twisted off the top and took a gulp, held it up appreciatively. He smiled and walked on, pleased with himself for catching the bottle, ears ringing with the laughter of the pair on the balcony.
Pounding from the entrances to clubs, different kinds of music thumped together in a disjointed beat. The streets were littered with vomit, glass, even, Walker realized with revulsion, a bloody clump of teeth. A drunk lurched towards him, his face reeling yellow and blue in the flash of lights. His hands were on Walker’s lapels. Walker began pushing him away but already his battered mouth was spraying words: ‘He’s in Despond. That’s where you’ll find him. He’s waiting for you.’
From across the street a guy came crashing through the window of a bar. The shower of glass held a thousand scattered glimpses of the scene before falling like hail over the figure sprawled on the sidewalk, blood laking around him. The drunk had let go of Walker, had vanished in the boozesodden crowd. Walker looked round, could see no sign of him. There was a cheer from the bar and then silence, passers-by standing clear as the guy on the sidewalk dragged himself to his knees, shambled to his feet. He swayed uncertainly, gazing into the bar until a stool came spinning through the window and knocked him back into the angled grit of glass. Another cheer from the bar. This time he didn’t have the strength to get to his feet and he crawled away from the window on his hands and knees. Another stool came sailing out, followed by a chair, glasses and more stools, the remains of the window. The man sagged under the bombardment and lay motionless, one arm curled protectively around his head, surrounded by a broken mass of furniture. A dapper man from the bar stepped through the window frame and stood over him, counting him out — one-ah, two-ah — all the way to ten until he waved his arms to declare the bout oyer and stepped back through the window. All around from the street and bar were whoops, cheers and applause until people drifted away.
Walker moved on, replaying the drunk’s few words over and over. The crowds thinned out. He came to the river and gazed across at an area of derelict buildings. The girders and pillars of burnt-out tower blocks showed stark against the sunset. Something in the nature of skyscrapers suggested that these bare skeletons of metal represented the final flourishing of their vertiginous aspiration: this is how they had been intended to look.
The river was dappled red by the sun as Walker made his way along the tow-path. Further along the path was barricaded off and he entered the fringes of the Latin Quarter. Lines of washing hung between cramped balconies, the late silhouettes of birds were hemmed in by the redness of the sky. Preoccupied with the drunk’s startling appearance Walker had been paying little attention to exactly where he was. He had been told to be careful in certain parts of the Quarter at night and became abruptly anxious. A pair of youths in ripped jeans and biker jackets appeared from around a corner, nodded as they passed by.
Top-floor windows glowed furnace-red but it was growing dark in the narrow streets. Walker glanced round and in the shadows behind him thought he detected a figure moving. When he looked again there was nothing. Dogs barked nearby. From behind, car headlights illuminated the street and flung his shadow up the wall of a building to his right. He turned down a one-way street and stepped into shadows. The car slowed by the NO ENTRY sign then continued on its way, perpendicular to the street Walker was now on.
He walked for a few blocks, past a grocery store — closed now — whose name he recognized from earlier on. If he was right, then Canal Street, at the edge of the Quarter, was only five minutes away — though in which direction he was not sure. A car slowed to let him cross the road. He gestured ‘thanks’ and stepped out from the sidewalk, trying to see the driver behind the dark windows. The car turned the corner after him. He trotted across the road, walked briskly to the next right. The instant he was out of sight of the car he sprinted thirty yards, hoping that by the time it turned the corner he would have disappeared around another. When headlights swept the walls and filled the street he resumed walking. Up ahead was another one-way street. He trotted as soon as he was round the corner and was relieved to see that the car did not follow him. In evading the car, though, he had lost all sense of direction. He didn’t even know the name of the street he was in, the area was totally deserted: no cars, no shops, no passers-by. He wondered if the driver had been deliberately nudging him in this direction so as to intercept him a few blocks later. He looked up and down the street and began running back to the crossroads.
He was almost there when the street was again filled with the white lights of a car behind him. He heard the car accelerate. No longer attempting to disguise his urgency, he sprinted to the crossroads. He ran to another one-way street where a sign said closed — roadwork and this time the car trailed him into it. The street was so narrow that there was no sidewalk, just enough room for a car. After running thirty yards he could see no side streets between himself and the roadworks.
He was trapped. He stopped running, breathing hard. The car stopped. High up in the gap between buildings was a glinting catwalk of sky. He heard the car revving behind him. Up ahead, flashing yellow lights and black-and-yellow tape indicated where the road had been dug up. He began running again, knowing he would never make it that far. The car revved harder. There was a screech of rubber and the street was filled with the roar of the car accelerating, bearing down on him. The roadworks were a hundred yards away. He stopped, turned. Began running straight at the approaching car, into the white glare of the headlights.
The car was a wall of white lights and noise. He had to wait till the last possible moment, a split second before he was splashed all over the windshield, until –
‘— NOW!’
The word exploded from his throat. He leapt as high as he could, forcing himself higher, tucking his feet under his body, the bonnet rushing beneath him, the windshield — at the height of his leap now and the roof slipping by beneath him and then just clipping his foot, destroying his balance and sending him tumbling down the sloping back of the car.
He hit the floor hard, jarring his wrists, gouging lumps out of his palms and knees — but he’d made it, he’d made it. Not even winded. He looked up at the brake lights straining red as the car ricocheted from one wall to the next, trailing sparks and ploughing into the barriers and lights of the roadworks. With flashing hazard lights sprawled all around and one wheel still spinning in mid-air it looked as if both car and street had been ripped apart by a land-mine.
Walker was trembling uncontrollably, his knee was throbbing and cut, his palms bleeding. He had an impulse to sit down in the street and let someone bandage his cuts. Hauling himself to his feet took more effort than the jump. His strength had left him. He forced himself to trot to the end of the street and turn left, back the way he had come. It was only after he had put several streets between himself and the crashed car that he slowed to a walk. He was shaking so much he had to stop and rest for several minutes but, now that his panic had subsided, it proved surprisingly easy to find his way back to Canal Street. On Canal he hailed a taxi and gave the name of his hotel, clenching himself tight to control his shaking for the duration of the journey.