The Search Page 6

  ‘What?’

  ‘Wait over there.’

  Over there was a bench. Walker waited ten minutes. A door opened and another guy, squinting at the papers in his hand, called out ‘Mr . . . Walker?’ as if the name were unpronounceably, suspiciously alien. Walker followed him into a room: desk, chair, banks of files. The guy smoked, was unshaven, wore an open-necked shirt. Walker recognized the uniform instantly – bribe – and this knowledge gave the subsequent interrogation a relaxed, veiled purpose. All questions about his circumstances and intentions were really intended to establish only one thing: how much he was good for. Walker indicated he might be good for plenty, especially if he could be furnished with a little extra assistance. The port official hesitated. That depended . . .

  ‘A friend of mine arrived here,’ said Walker, coming straight to the point. ‘A couple of days ago, I think. I’d like to look him up. I need the address he gave on his disembarkation card.’

  ‘Impossible.’

  ‘How much?’ Walker could see greed flickering in the other man’s eyes and knew that in an hour he would be out of here with everything he needed. Only the price had to be finalized now.

  It took even less time than he expected. He checked in at the Grand Central and dialled the number Rachel had given him. No answer. He tried later, again without success, and set off for the address given to him by his friend – as he now thought of him – at the port.

  The house was in the middle of an old terrace of high town-houses in the east of the city. He stood in the lobby, waiting for the elevator, obscurely convinced that something was wrong. In the elevator he stared at his face in the mirror and wondered what he looked like. His reflection posed the question it was supposed to answer.

  The apartment was on the seventh floor; by the fifth Walker felt certain he was making a mistake. The elevator stopped on the sixth floor. A cigarette-faced woman stepped aside to let Walker off. He padded along a corridor and up the emergency stairs. Easing the fire door open a fraction he had a good view of room 7D. He allowed the fire door to close until there was only a knife-edge of light. Waited.

  After ten minutes a squat man emerged from the lift and knocked on the door. The door opened and he spoke quietly. Seconds later a figure Walker recognized as Carver emerged. Walker moved back down the stairs but heard footsteps coming from below. As quietly as possible he trotted back up to the top floor. A folding-ladder led to a frosted skylight. The ladder squeaked as Walker pulled it down, creaked as he climbed up. He cracked open the skylight and clambered out on to the roof.

  The noise of traffic was all around. Shadows hazed and disappeared. He crossed the roof and made his way along a ledge to the next house. There was a skylight here, locked from the inside. The next house along was higher than the rest and he had to haul himself up. As soon as he had done so he heard footsteps from behind. Keeping low he moved across the roof and ducked behind a crumbling chimney stack. Seeing his pursuers fanning out from the skylight, he scuttled away and lowered himself down on to the roof of the next house. He continued moving like this until the terrace was split abruptly by a service alley running between two houses. In the darkness below, dustbins and trash, the glint of broken glass. The gap was only four yards but a low ornamental wall at the edge meant that it was impossible to get the kind of run-up he needed. He glanced back and tried the entrance to the lift housing. It was locked, but lying nearby were two rusty scaffolding poles.

  He picked up one of them, carrying it in his arms like a tightrope-walker, making his way to the edge of the building. Resting it on the low wall he began feeding the pole out over the alley. With a yard still to go it became too heavy to handle. He dragged it noisily back over the wall towards him and tried again, this time standing it on end and lowering it by degrees towards the opposite roof. When he could hold it no longer he let it drop like a metronome across the alley. It smashed down on to the low wall opposite, bounced, shivered. As he scrambled to steady it, the pole slipped off the far wall, flicked up from beneath his hands and went twirling out of sight. By the time he heard the crash and tangle from the alley below he was already dragging the other pole into position, this time to a place where a gap in the wall would support it like an oarlock. He upended the pole, released it and watched it swing down. Again it clattered and bounced but this time, anchored by the wall, it remained lodged on the far roof. He pushed it out until there was an overhang of a foot on each side and then climbed over the edge of the building, began moving out over the alley. A yard out he brought his legs up and curled them around the pole so that he could move more quickly.

  There was a shout from the roof. Raising his head and looking back between his arms he saw his pursuers rush to the edge. They tried to prise the pole free of the gap in the wall but Walker’s weight had jammed it in further. He continued moving, hand over hand, pulling with his shoulders, pushing with his legs, hauling himself away. He felt the pole quiver as they began heaving it free of the gap, followed by a jarring crash as they let it fall back on to the top of the wall. The impact shook his legs free and left him hanging by his hands. For a second he dangled uncontrollably and then, setting up a rhythm, began moving again, hand over hand. Glancing back he saw them standing on the wall, trying to tug the pole sideways, towards the edge. With a final heave they wrenched it the remaining inch and out over the alley. Walker made a grab for the building. The scaffolding pole whipped past his shoulder, sheered away beneath him. His fingers curled over the wall. Another crash from the alley below. He scrambled on to the roof and looked back. For a moment the four of them stood there, Walker and his three pursuers, not moving.

  ‘Listen,’ Carver called, pausing for breath. ‘We should talk. We can help each other.’

  Walker gulped in mouthfuls of air. Carver was talking again, silhouetted against a sudden burst of sunlight.

  ‘We want the same thing. We know where Malory is.’ Walker had got his breath back, was on the brink of listening. He turned and walked along the row of roofs. Carver was calling, ‘Wait. Walker, wait.’

  Walker kept moving, heard Carver shouting, ‘This is your last chance, Lancelot. You’re a dead man.’

  Walker tried an entrance to the emergency stairs. It was locked but the frame and door were so rotten that one kick smashed a hole. He reached through and unlatched the door, lowered himself on to the steps. He charged down the stairs and out into the swarm and din of the street. A taxi pulled up nearby. Walker barged past a waiting executive and wrenched the door open, lunged in.

  Back at the Grand Central he piled his stuff into a bag. His only concern was to get away from Ascension. Where he went next didn’t matter. But even as he thought this he wondered also if flight might not be the best form of pursuit, the best way of finding Malory. Malory’s movements were so random that perhaps he too should abandon any plan. He hurried to the station and bought a ticket to Alemain, the closest town to which he had sent his speculative mail.

  He arrived at the station with time to spare: the train did not leave for fifteen minutes and passengers were not yet being allowed on board. He drifted round the concourse, half expecting to catch a glimpse of Carver. At least half the people here, it seemed, were either following or being followed. Perhaps it was so many people wearing hats that contributed to this impression. Anywhere else a hat looked like an affectation but here, in a railway station, it was part of the standard luggage of travel, a kind of ancillary ticket. The chance to wear a hat with impunity was probably one of the things that preserved the romance of train journeys.

  As he made his way towards the platform he passed a Photo-Me booth and ducked beneath the curtain. It was as good a place as any to hide from view but, without intending to, he found himself spinning the stool down as far as it would go and paying in coins, posing for four sudden snaps of the flash. Clambering out of the booth he saw a woman reading a tabloid stroll towards him. An Asian girl went into the booth. He looked at the clock and at the sign that said ‘Phot
os Delivered in Four Minutes’. All around this sign were sample photos of smiling couples, smiling and serious individuals. One strip showed a black and white couple kissing and pulling faces – you could do what you wanted in the relative privacy of the booth; the machine didn’t care, it recorded but didn’t notice. Ugly or beautiful, tall or short, everyone came out the same way.

  After only a couple of minutes the pictures arrived. He moved towards the machine but saw they were of a woman, the woman reading the paper, who reached down and took them.

  The developing times were cumulative, so he had another four minutes to wait – more like five probably – and it was now exactly four minutes to. The train’s departure was being announced. Two minutes clicked by. He looked up at the clock, glanced down at the little metallic cage where the photos arrived and set off for the train. He had gone two steps when he thought he heard a faint rustle from the booth. He hurried back, checked the empty tray and ran for his train.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Buildings, people, streets and shops: beyond that Alemain had little to recommend it – especially since Walker had such trouble finding his way around.

  He had picked up a street plan at the station and set off for the Am Ex office. For an hour now he had been pacing the streets, scrutinizing the map at almost every corner, but was still nowhere near his destination. The smaller streets were not shown on the map but it was detailed enough to reveal that he was lost. This was the true purpose of maps: without one it was impossible to say with certainty that you were lost, with one you knew you were lost.

  Walker persisted for a long while, becoming steadily more frustrated as streets changed name, distances expanded or contracted and expected turnings and landmarks failed to appear. Gradually he became convinced that the map bore no relation to his surroundings. The fact that here and there reality and representation corresponded was entirely coincidental. It took Walker a long time to accept this: so entrenched was his faith in the integrity of maps that his first reaction was to assume that the map was right and the city somehow wrong. The whole point about a map was that it was a more or less accurate representation of reality. He had heard of towns where streets and buildings were being demolished and built so fast that maps, lagging behind reality, were obsolete by the time they were printed, but this map either deliberately distorted reality or ignored it.

  He threw the map away and walked on. Once he had got used to the idea that the town was not as the map had led him to expect, it was surprisingly easy to find his way around.

  At the Am Ex office a pretty Chinese woman trotted off to look for his mail. A minute later she came back with the letter he had sent from Usfret. He thanked her and headed back to the station, caught the next train to Avlona.

  He had noticed bicycles being wheeled on to the train at stations en route, but when it pulled into Avlona he was surprised at how many people had bicycles. As he walked towards the centre of town, cyclists were coming and going in all directions. All around was the angular flash and blur of spokes and frames.

  It was a warm spring afternoon and Walker dawdled on his way to the Am Ex office. Relieved to be somewhere pleasant after Usfret and Ascension, he decided to spend the rest of the day there, even though the letter from Usfret was waiting for him. He walked back out into the last sunshine of the day. Leaves fluttered like bunting.

  Outside a bric-a-brac store he spun a squeaking rack of postcards. An old photograph of London caught his attention. It was taken in the nineteenth century when London was a teeming and bustling centre of commerce and trade – but the city was deserted. Walker puzzled over the image for several minutes before realizing that the long exposure time had emptied the scene of all moving objects: people, trams, horses.

  He walked and considered what to do next, where to go. Again, when he looked back, this moment would represent another important shift in the nature of his search for Malory. For the first time he had formulated the question in terms of where he should go rather than where Malory had gone. It was not that the question of Malory’s whereabouts no longer mattered – but that question had been absorbed so totally into his own decision-making process that he no longer needed to ask it. It was as if the only way of duplicating Malory’s movements was to anticipate them. Inevitably he would make mistakes but these mistakes might lead him to the right track eventually. The right path might be, precisely, a culmination of mistakes, of detours. As soon as you recreated it on a map or set it down in a book, even the most idiosyncratic random movements acquired an internal logic; their purpose remained elusive but they formed a path, a route, led somewhere. With such a map he could find his way back.

  In the morning he walked past a shop with a row of used bicycles chained up outside. The shop was run by an old man who claimed to have ridden in the Tour. Walker indicated a bike he liked and the old man unlocked the chain and extricated it from the row: ten-speed, dropped handlebars, light enough to be picked up easily with one hand. Walker rode it around the block and asked the old man what he wanted for it.

  ‘You’ve read those stories about a knight on his charger?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You seen Westerns? The cowboy on his horse?’

  Walker nodded.

  ‘Now it’s you on that bike. A clear line of descent. Seventy-five buys you the bike and the ancestors.’

  ‘What about just the bike?’ said Walker, but as far as the old man was concerned the deal was clinched already.

  Walker paid up, lashed his bag to the rack and pedalled off.

  ‘So long, cowboy,’ called the man who had once ridden in the Tour, stuffing Walker’s money into his pocket.

  The morning’s chill still clung to the air but after riding for fifteen minutes he felt fine. He headed out of town, the volume of cyclists diminishing steadily as he went. The road was flat and ran alongside a river with fields stretching away on the other side.

  For lunch he bought bread, fruit and water and sat down to eat behind the goalpost of a deserted football pitch. A breeze rustled the bushes beyond the touchlines. The goal was smudged with dried mud where the ball had ricocheted off crossbar and posts. The goalmouth and centre circle were dry and bare, pock-marked by studs. Chewing and swallowing, he imagined some archaeologist of the future re-creating sequences of play and estimating the scores of games played here from the patterns of stud-marks on the pitch.

  In the middle of the afternoon he came to a bridge, rising high and golden in the blue sky. As he drew closer he saw that what he had taken to be the ripple of hot air was actually the bridge itself rippling in the air. It undulated gently as if a wave were passing through it, as if its burnished girders were made not of steel but of some highly elastic material.

  He stopped at the edge of the bridge, watching it rise and fall rhythmically, breathing. There was no traffic. A sign said BRIDGE CLOSED and a barrier blocked the carriageway. He manoeuvred his bike round the barrier and walked out on to the bridge. At first, although he could see the bridge undulating ahead of him, the cables growing taut and slack with strain, he hardly felt any movement. Then, as he moved out over the river, he felt the road shifting beneath his feet like a ship on calm seas. There was no sense of danger. He looked at the bridge’s flowing reflection in the river below. He dropped a stone over the edge and watched it fall and splash, vanish. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a bird swoop down and glide low over the river. After a few minutes he got on his bike and cycled over the shifting hills and dips. The sun strobed through the stanchions and cables rearing above him.

  When he had crossed to the far side he looked back at the bridge rising and falling in the blue air.

  That night he slept by the roadside and cycled on as soon as the sun shuddered clear of the horizon. Late in the afternoon, his legs wobbly after so long on the bike, he rode into a city where there were no people, only streets – narrow, cobbled, crossed by even narrower streets that led to rain-damp alleys and dead-ends. Torn posters advertised polit
ical meetings and sporting events. There were parked cars but no sign of the people who drove them. A few shops had their shutters pulled down but most were open for business as usual. As he opened the door of a pâtisserie a little bell rang like a wind-chime. The shelves were half-empty with bread and cakes. He took a croissant that tasted as if it had been fresh-baked that morning. Took two more and walked out of the shop, still chewing, flakes of pastry falling to the floor. The street was divided sharply into sunlight and a tide of shadow inching towards the opposite wall. Riding along the cobbled streets was so awkward that he left the bike where it was, propped against the shop window.

  He came to a large square. In the middle was a water fountain, a statue of a dragoon or fusilier wading through it, sword raised above his head. He wore a cloak, armour breastplate and knee-length leather boots – under one of which was trapped a flapping fish: not a dragon or serpent but a playful and, apparently, undistressed fish. Despite the raised sword there was no suggestion that this aggressive posture indicated any ill-will towards the fish. He just happened to be brandishing a sword and treading on a fish which squirmed good-humouredly beneath his feet, as if it were being tickled rather than squashed.

  Walker dunked his head in the bubbling water, his face level with the bemused eye of the fish. Fingered back his wet hair, feeling the cold drips on his neck and shoulders. The shadows cast by the buildings on one side of the street climbed the walls of those on the other. He hoped to come across some indication of what had happened here but apart from the absence of people everything was completely normal.

  Halfway down a street of expensive shops he went into a place called Hombre. He flicked through rows of jackets and trousers and then stripped off and unwrapped a pair of underpants. Next he extricated a shirt from the pins, cardboard and cellophane and put that on, then a pair of cotton socks hanging on a rail. He tried on a suit jacket which fitted perfectly. The trousers were too big round the waist so he took a pair from the suit that was the next size down. He took his time choosing a tie, finally deciding on one that was a sober grey with light spots. In the basement he found a pair of suede shoes with thick soles – comfortable, easy to run in. Back upstairs he picked out another shirt, extra pairs of underpants and socks, a sweat-shirt and a pair of cotton trousers which he crammed into a bag. His old clothes seemed like sour-smelling rags now and he dumped them in a bin.