It wasn’t always clear where one message ended and the other began. Either that or he was very drunk.
He was very drunk.
Bryant’s idea, as numbers in the hotel bar began thinning; carry the party over into the cordoned zones.
‘They may be shit-poor over there,’ voice blurred as he leaned across the table. ‘But they know how to have a good time. There’s a couple of places I know you can buy all sorts of interesting substances over the counter, and they’ve got floor shows you wouldn’t believe.’
Liz Linshaw wrinkled her sculpted features. ‘Sounds strictly for the boys,’ she said. ‘If you gentlemen will excuse me, I’m for a cab.’
She kissed Bryant on the lips, causing a small storm of whoops and yells, and left with a sideways grin at Chris. A couple of other women excused themselves from the group in her wake and Mike’s expedition began to look in danger of fizzling out.
‘Oh, come on, you bunch of pussies,’ he slurred. ‘What are you afraid of? We’ve got guns.’ He yanked out his Nemex and brandished it. ‘We’ve got money, we’ve got this city by the balls. What the fuck kind of life is it when we own the fucking streets they walk on and the blocks they live in and we’re still fucking scared to go there? We’re supposed to be in charge of this society, not in hiding from it.’
It wasn’t speech-making of Louise Hewitt’s calibre, but Mike managed to rope in a half dozen of the younger men round the table and a couple of the harder-drinking women. Ten minutes later, Chris was in the passenger seat of Bryant’s BMW, watching the emptied streets of the financial district roll by. In the back seat sat a nameless young male executive and an older woman called Julie Pinion – macho sales talk snarled back and forth between them. In the wing mirror, the following lights of two other cars. Shorn was descending on the cordoned zones in force.
‘Okay, you two keep it down,’ said Mike over his shoulder as they turned a corner. Up ahead the lights of a zone checkpoint frosted the night sky. ‘They won’t let us through here if they think there’s going to be trouble.’
He brought the BMW to a remarkably smooth halt at the barrier and leaned out as the guard approached. He was, Chris noticed, chewing gum to mask the alcohol on his breath.
‘Just going down to the Falkland,’ Bryant called cheerfully, waving his Shorn Associates plastic. ‘Take in the late show.’
The guard was in his fifties, with a spreading paunch beneath his grey uniform and broken veins across his nose and cheeks. Chris saw the cloud of vapour he made when he sighed.
‘Have to scan that, sir.’
‘ ’course.’ Bryant handed over the card and waited while the guard ran it through his hipswipe remote and handed it back. The unit chimed melodically, and the guard nodded. He seemed tired.
‘You armed?’
Bryant turned back into the car. ‘Show the man your peacemakers, guys.’
Chris slid the Nemex out of its shoulder holster and displayed it. Behind him he heard the two backseat disputants doing the same. The guard flashed his torch in the windows and nodded slowly.
‘Want to be careful, sir,’ he told Bryant. ‘There’s been layoffs at Pattons and Greengauge this week. Lot of angry people out getting drunk tonight.’
‘Well, we’ll stay out of their way,’ said Bryant easily. ‘Don’t want any trouble. Just want to see the show.’
‘Yeah, okay.’ The guard turned back to the checkpoint cabin and gestured to whoever was inside. The barrier began to rise. ‘I’ve got to check your friends as well. You want to park just past the gate till we clear them?’
‘Be glad to.’ Mike beamed and drove the BMW through.
The second car passed muster but with the third there was some trouble. They peered back and saw the guard shaking his head while suited forms craned from the windows front and back, gesturing.
‘The fuck is going on back there?’ muttered Julie Pinion. ‘Couldn’t they even act sober for a couple of minutes.’
‘Stay here,’ Bryant said, and climbed out into the night air. They watched him walk back to the third car, lean down and say something to those leaning out. The heads disappeared back into the vehicle, as if on wires. Bryant put his hand on the guard’s shoulder and dug in his pocket. Something passed between them. The guard said something to the driver of the third car. A clearly audible whoop of delight bounced out of the windows. Bryant came back, grinning.
‘Gratuities,’ he said as he got into the car again. ‘Ought to be compulsory, the shit they pay those guys.’
‘How much did you give him?’ asked Pinion.
‘Hundred.’
‘A hundred! Jesus.’
‘Ah, come on Julie. I’ve tipped waiters better than that. And he’s going to take a lot more heat than a waiter if this dinner party goes awry.’
The little convoy pressed on into the cordoned zone.
It was an abrupt transition. In the financial district, street lighting was a flood of halogen, chasing out shadows from every corner. Here, the street lamps were isolated sentinels, spilling a scant pool of radiance at their feet every twenty metres of darkened street. In some places, they were out, lamps either fused or smashed. Elsewhere they had been destroyed more unambiguously, rendered down to jagged concrete stumps still attached to their trunks by a riot of cables and metal bands.
‘Look at that,’ said Pinion disgustedly. ‘What a bunch of fucking animals. It’s no wonder nobody wants to spend money fixing these places up. They’d just tear it all down again.’
Even the street beneath their wheels changed. Within a hundred metres of the checkpoint the ride turned bumpy and Bryant had to slow down and negotiate rain-filled potholes the size of small garden ponds. On either side, the houses huddled. Here and there, for no visible reason, one had been taken down, sprawling smashed brick and spilled interior in the space in which it had stood. There were no other vehicles on the streets, moving or parked. A few figures moved on the pavements on foot, but they grew immobile as the twilight-blue armoured saloons with their Shorn Associates logos rolled by. Most turned up their collars or simply sank back into the shadows.
‘Fucking creepy,’ said the young executive behind Chris. ‘I mean, I knew it was bad out here but—’
‘Bad,’ Julie Pinion coughed laughter at him. ‘You think this is bad? Mike, you remember the suburbs in that shithole we got seconded to for Christmas last year.’
‘Muong Khong, yeah.’ Bryant looked in the rearview. ‘Gives you a whole new perspective on what real poverty is, man. Chris, you ever been on secondment? With Emerging Markets, I mean?’
‘Couple of times, yeah.’
‘Pretty awful, huh?’
Chris remembered the call of a muezzin in the warm evening air, smells of cooking and a small child prodding three goats home-wards. Later, he’d been walking past a stone-and-thatch dwelling when a young girl of about fourteen came out and offered him fruit from their dinner table because he was a guest in the village. The unlooked-for kindness, with its hints of an antique and alien culture, had pricked tears out on the underside of his eyes.