One bite and I’m flailing for the salep jug.
Ralf laughs. ‘You see?’
The salep, warm and creamy, gums round the fire in my throat like a retardant foam. My whole mouth sings. ‘What is this stuff?’
Ralf shrugs, pleased with himself for so surprising me. ‘It’s real çig köfte. There’s this spice in it called isot. A kind of black paprika.’
A minute later I’m recovered enough to dare another mouthful. And another. And another. I wish to God I hadn’t eaten earlier, this stuff is delicious. ‘How did you find this place?’
‘It’s one of Vaux’s haunts,’ Ralf says. ‘His local.’
‘Yes?’
‘He has a house near here.’
The menus come around again. I say, ‘They have a milk dessert on here called Chicken Breast. How does that work?’ It occurs to me that I have become Ralf.
Ralf pulls out his phone and checks the time. ‘We’d better settle up.’
The sun is low in the sky and, in the park, the young spring foliage shines like foil. The party is set up in the ornamental garden. Brick steps climb the hillside. Paths send out branches at precise, perpendicular angles. The effect is softened by all the planting wound round the trellises and gazebos: lilac and clematis, grapevine and rose. Come summer, there will be welcome shade here. This early in the year, it’s easy enough to find gaps in the screening foliage to enjoy the view. This evening the city, softened into butter by the sun, puddles around the blue paste jewel of the Middle.
Guests stand chatting in small, nervous groups among the stone seats, ornamental nooks, fountains and artful screens. Waiters in whites move among us with champagne and canapés.
‘Glasses on, people!’
And here he comes. Laughing. Glad-handing. Ralf turns and nudges me. I wince against the flashlight spraying and rippling through the leaves and through the crowd that gathers around us as people surge forward to grab their five-second shake-and-grin with our legendary host.
Sunlight catches in his shocked-white hair.
‘What’s the matter, Connie?’
His hair.
‘Bryon!’
Vaux knows Ralf’s voice. He turns.
There is something here I am missing. Something obvious and terrible.
‘Conrad’s here! You haven’t met. My business partner. Bryon!’
His face lights up, seeing Ralf among all these anonymous, uplifted faces. Photographers surround him, lighting him up like a poster. No army drab this time. A tux, and wrapround shades so shiny, featureless and deadly black, they might be a single piece of enamel.
Camera flash streaks across the big black lenses of his shades as he reaches out to shake my hand. A beat. ‘Conrad?’ He hesitates. Bryon Vaux. Producer of Michel’s Shaman franchise. Majority shareholder in Loophole.
‘Connie?’
The crowd carries him on. My hands hang limp and lifeless at my sides.
‘Conrad?’
I turn away to face the city, and pulling my wraprounds from my pocket, I let myself slip back into the game.
The city has been rendered down to a jumble of charcoal-grey plinths – stone footprints where building after building has been magicked away. At this distance only the biggest, most rectilinear footprints stand out. Most of the city is reduced to rubble. This is my home with its inner chaos exposed, no more now than a ghastly iteration of the same salt crystal. City as tumour. A spreading circle of dead tissue. City as leprosy. ‘Ralf. I’ve met him.’
‘What?’
‘Vaux. I’ve met him.’
‘Really? Where?’
I shake my head. I don’t want to talk about this, after all. Not here. ‘Doesn’t matter.’ Vaux is older now, of course. Much older. Nonetheless, wealth and the years have been kind to him. There can be no mistake.
Across the horizon, fires leap. Ash drifts in waves. The air shimmers with imagineered heat as bit by bit the city disappears under the pall of its annihilation.
This is the man who accosted me. This is the man who exposed himself to me. This is the man I left Mum standing near, the last day I saw her alive.
A lot of water has passed under the bridge since those days when Gabby used to turn up at our hotel on ‘delousing leave’. Whenever she returned from the protest camp for a few days’ R&R, you could spot her a mile off from her shag of rat-tailed hair. You could smell her. Nowadays she dresses conservatively, in linen suits and tailored white shirts. She lives abroad, pursuing an academic career. Behind her, fuzzy and foreshortened in the lens of her laptop’s camera, her office wall is a mass of sticky notes and dry-marker scribble. ‘Is this about your dad?’
When I lost touch with my father finally, in the weeks after the car accident, Gabby did what she could to trace his electronic signature for me. Her academic studies and radical politics have given her some insight into where and how information is actually structured, beneath the reassuring blandishments of clouds and commercial search engines. ‘Pretty much nothing is ever lost,’ she told me, confidently. But silence is silence, whichever way you cut it, and we never did find my dad.
‘Not exactly.’ I tell her, wishing I had my story straight. ‘It’s more to do with the hotel.’
‘I knew there’d be something you wanted.’
‘Poor Gabby. It’s the price you pay for actually knowing how to do stuff.’
‘“How are you, Gabriela?” “I’m fine, Conrad. How are you?”’
‘I’m crap at keeping in touch, I know.’
‘The price of this call is that you come and visit me here. I mean it.’
‘Okay.’
‘I mean it. Give me a date.’
Eventually she stops twisting my arm, and I can ask her, ‘Could our old hotel records still be any place?’
This turns out to be more likely than I expected. There’s a regulation says that guesthouses have to maintain their customer records for a couple of years. ‘No-one ever gets around to deleting the expired data. Why would they bother?’
This is the kind of digital silt Gabby’s undergraduates sieve through in their second semester, hunting for interesting mash-ups. ‘I might get one of my students to do the donkey work, so is there anything here we’re likely to turn up that should stay confidential?’
‘Possibly.’
‘Yes?’
I take a deep breath and tell her about Bryon Vaux. Some of it. The barest outline.
‘You’re kidding.’ She is impressed.
‘Dad knew him. Treated him. Taught him how to use a visual vest.’
‘Bryon Vaux stayed at your hotel? Would I have met him?’
‘Almost certainly.’
A pause while she thinks about this. Like most people who navigate data for a living – or who, as in her case, train the navigators – Gabby values her mental privacy, and wears neither wraprounds nor contact lenses. Her eyes are clear. Even over this not especially hi-def video link I can see her scepticism she tries to work out what my real motivation is here. ‘You think Vaux can help you find your dad?’
A smart guess, though wrong. ‘Possibly,’ I say, not wanting to discuss my real suspicions. For a start, they are far too incoherent to share. I can’t even convince myself that I’m on to anything important. All I know is – the sight of Bryon Vaux has put the fear in me.
‘Your dad never said anything about him?’
‘Why would he? To him, back then, Vaux would just have been another serviceman with burnt eyes—’
‘But you’re sure it’s him?’
‘I’m sure it’s him. I’m positive. Though I can’t see how it could be him, logically.’
‘Tell me what you need to know.’
‘If we can confirm Vaux was billeted at the hotel, I want to find out when and why he discharged himself. What?’
‘I thought you told me you were working for Vaux now?’