The Bone Clocks (25 page)

Either Bernard Kriebel’s shopped me or someone’s shopped Kriebel. “A fascinating job, I guess. But why phone you?”

“Well, actually, Hugo, she wanted a word with you.”

“What about?
I
certainly haven’t nicked a Monet.”

A worried little laugh. “She wouldn’t actually say. I explained you’re in Switzerland, and she said she’d appreciate your calling her when you get back. ‘To assist in an ongoing inquiry.’ ”

“And you’re sure this wasn’t some idiot’s idea of a practical joke?”

“She sounded real. There was a busy office in the background.”

“Then I’ll call Detective Sheila Young the moment I’m home. Some manuscript got nicked from Humber Library, I wonder? They
have a few. Or … nope, I’m
clue
less, but I’m
itch
ing with curiosity.”

“Super. I—I must admit, I didn’t tell your mother.”

“Tactful, but feel free to tell her. Hey, if I end up in Wormwood Scrubs, she can do the ‘Free Hugo’ campaign.”

Dad’s laugh is brighter. “I’ll be there, with my placard.”

“Splendiferous. So, apart from Interpol hounding you about your criminal-mastermind son, is everything else okay?”

“Pretty much. I’m back to work on the third, and Mum’s rushed off her feet at the theater, but that’s panto season for you. You’re quite sure you don’t need a lift from the airport when you get home?”

“Thanks, Dad, but the Fitzsimmonses’ driver is dropping me off. See you in eight days or so, when our mystery will be resolved.”

I
GO UPSTAIRS
with scenarios flashing by at twenty-four frames a second: The brigadier’s died and a legal executor is asking, “
What
valuable stamps?”; Nurse Purvis is asked about the brigadier’s visitors; Kriebel points the finger at Marcus Anyder; CCTV footage gets reviewed; I’m identified; I conduct a taped interview with Sheila Young; I deny her accusations, but Kriebel appears from behind a one-way mirror—“It’s him.” Formal charges; bail denied, expulsion from Cambridge, four years for theft and fraud, two suspended; if it’s a quiet news day I’ll make the national papers—
OLD RICHMONDIAN STEALS STROKE VICTIM
’
S FORTUNE
; out in eighteen months for good behavior, with a criminal record. The only profession open to me will be wheel clamping.

In my garret, I wipe a clear bit on the misted-up window. Snowy roofs, Hôtel Le Sud, sheer peaks. No snow’s falling yet, but the granite sky is full of oaths. January 1.

A compass needle is turning. I feel it.

Pointing to prison? Or somewhere else?

Madam Constantin doesn’t choose people at random.

I hope. Hard rabbitty thumps from below: Quinn.

He comes soon, like a disappointed brontosaurus.

Detective Sheila Young isn’t a trap; she’s a catalyst.

Pack a bag
, my instinct says.
Be ready. Wait
.

I obey, then find my place in
The Magic Mountain
.

T
HE
C
HALET OF
Sin is astir. I hear Fitzsimmons on the first landing below: “I’ll have a quick shower …” The boiler wakes, the pipes growl, and the shower spatters; women are speaking an African language; earthy laughter; Chetwynd-Pitt booms, “Good morning, Oliver Quinn! Tell me that wasn’t what the doctor ordered!” One of the women—Shandy?—asks, “Rufus, honey, I call our agent, so he know we are okay?” Footsteps go down to the sunken lounge; in the kitchen, the radio leaks that song “One Night in Bangkok”; Fitzsimmons comes out of the shower; male muttering on the landing: “The scholarship boy’s still up in his holding pen … On the phone earlier … If he wants to sulk, let him sulk …” I’m half tempted to yell down, “I’m not bloody sulking, I’m
really
happy that you all got your rocks off!” but why should I spend my energy on rectifying their assumption? Someone whistles; the kettle’s boiling; then I hear a half-falsetto half-croak half-shout: “You are
shitting
me!”

I give my full attention. A quiet few seconds … For the second time on this oddest of mornings I experience an inexplicable certitude that something’s about to happen. As if it’s scripted. For the second time, I obey my instinct, close
The Magic Mountain
, and stow it in my backpack. One of the singers is talking fast and low so I can’t make out what she’s saying, but it prompts a
thud-thud-thud
up the stairs to the landing, where Chetwynd-Pitt blurts out, “A thousand dollars! They want a thousand fucking dollars!
Each!
”

Drop, drop, drop, go the pennies. Or dollars. Like the best songs, you can’t see the next line coming, but once it’s sung, how else could it have gone? Fitzsimmons: “They’ve got to be fucking joking.”

Chetwynd-Pitt: “They’re very very not fucking joking.”

Quinn: “But they … they didn’t
say
they were hookers!”

Chetwynd-Pitt: “They don’t even look like hookers.”

Fitzsimmons: “I don’t
have
a thousand dollars. Not here!”

Quinn: “Me neither, and if I did, why should I just hand it over?”

Tempting as it is to emerge from my room, stroll on down with a cheery “Would you Romeos like your eggs scrambled or fried?,” Shandy’s call to her “agent” is a klaxon with flashing lights blaring out the word
pimp, pimp, pimp
. Some would say it’s merely a fluke that I have a new pair of Timberland boots in my room, still in their box, but “fluke” is a lazy word.

Chetwynd-Pitt: “This is extortion. I say, fuck ’em.”

Fitzsimmons: “I agree. They’ve seen we have money, and they’re thinking,
How do we get a slice of this
?”

Quinn: “But, I mean, if we say no, I mean, won’t they—”

Chetwynd-Pitt: “Club us to death with tampons and lipsticks? No, we establish that piss off means piss off, that this is Europe, not Mombasa or whereverthefuck, and they’ll get the idea. Who’ll the Swiss cops side with? Us, or a trio of sub-Saharan rent-a-gashes?”

I wince. From the Bank of Floorboards I withdraw my assets and redeposit the wedge of banknotes in my passport bag. This I secure inside my ski jacket, contemplating that, while the wealthy are no more likely to be born stupid than the poor, a wealthy upbringing compounds stupidity while a hardscrabble childhood dilutes it, if only for Darwinian reasons. This is why the elite
need
a prophylactic barrier of shitty state schools, to prevent clever kids from working-class post codes ousting them from the Enclave of Privilege. Angry voices, British and African, are jostling down below. From the street outside I hear a
beep
. I look through my window and see a gray Hyundai with a skullcap of snow, crawling thisaway with ill intent. It stops, of course, at the mouth of Château Chetwynd-Pitt, blocking the drive. Out step two burly guys in sheepskin jackets. Then Candy, Shandy, or Mandy appears, beckoning them in …

T
HE FRACAS IN
the lounge falls silent. “
You
, whoever you are,” shouts Rufus Chetwynd-Pitt, “get off my property
now
or I call the police!”

Camp-Psycho-German with a nasal voice: “You ate in a fancy restaurant, boys. Now it is the time to pay the bill.”

Chetwynd-Pitt: “They never
said
they were hookers!”

Camp-Psycho-German: “
You
did not say you are crafted of penis yogurt, yet you are. You are Rufus, I believe.”

“None of your
fucking
business
what
my—”

“Disrespectful language is unbusinesslike, Rufus.”

“Get—out—now!”

“Unfortunately, you owe three thousand dollars.”

Chetwynd-Pitt: “Really? Let’s see what the police—”

That must be the TV expiring in a tinkly boom. The bookcase slams on the stone wall? Smash, clang, wallop: glassware, crockery, pictures, mirrors; surely Henry Kissinger won’t escape unscathed. And there’s Chetwynd-Pitt shrieking, “My hand, my f’ck’n’
hand!
”

An inaudible answer to an inaudible question.

Camp-Psycho-German: “I CANNOT HEAR YOU, RUFUS!”

“We’ll pay,” whinnies Chetwynd-Pitt, “we’ll pay …”

“Certainly. However, you obliged Shandy to call us, so the price is higher. This is a ‘call-out fee’ in English, I think. In business, we must cover costs. You. Yes, you. What is your name?”

“O-O-Olly,” says Olly Quinn.

“My second wife owned a Chihuahua named Olly. It bit me. I threw it down a … 
Scheiss
, what is it, for an elevator to go up, to go down? The big hole. Olly—I am asking you the English word.”

“A … an elevator shaft?”

“Precisely. I threw Olly into the elevator shaft. So, Olly, you will not bite me. Correct? So. You will now gather your monies.”

Quinn says, “My—my—my what?”

“Monies. Funds. Assets. Yours, Rufus’s, your friend’s. If there is enough to pay our call-out fee, we leave you to your Happy New Year. If not, we do some lateral thinking about how you pay your debts.”

One of the women speaks, and more mumbling. A few seconds later Camp-Psycho-German calls up the stairway. “Beatle Number Four! Join us. You will not be hurt, if you do no heroic actions.”

Soundlessly, I open the window—it’s cold!—and swing my legs over the window ledge. A Hitchcock
Vertigo
moment: Alpine roofs you’re planning to slide down look suddenly much steeper than Alpine roofs admired from below. Although the angle of Chetwynd-Pitt’s chalet becomes shallower over the kitchen, there’s a real risk that in fifteen seconds I’ll be the screaming owner of two broken legs.

“Lamb?” It’s Fitzsimmons, up on the stairway. “That money you won off Rufus … He needs it. They have knives, Hugo. Hugo?”

I lower myself onto the tiles, gripping the windowsill.

Five, four, three, two, one …

L
E
C
ROC IS
locked, dark, and there’s no sign of Holly Sykes. Perhaps the bar’s closed tonight, so Holly won’t be in to clean it until tomorrow morning. Why didn’t I ask for her number? I hobble to the town square but even the hub of La Fontaine Sainte-Agnès is in an end-of-the-world mood: few tourists, fewer vehicles, the gorilla-
crêpie
’s nowhere to be seen, most shops have
Fermé
signs up. How come? Last year January 1 had quite a buzz. The sky presses lower, the gray of sodden mattresses. I go into La Pâtisserie Palanche de la Cretta, order a coffee and a
carac
, and slump in the corner by the window, ignoring my throbbing ankle. Detective Sheila Young won’t be thinking about me today, at least. What now? What next? Activate Marcus Anyder? I have his passport in a safety-deposit box at Euston station. A bus to Geneva, a train to Amsterdam or Paris; across on the hovercraft; flight to Panama; the Caribbean … Job on a yacht.

Really? Do I pack in my old life, just like that?

Never see my family again? It’s so abrupt.

Somehow this isn’t what the script says.

Olly Quinn passes the window, just three feet and a pane of glass away, accompanied by a cheerful-looking man in a sheepskin jacket. Camp-Psycho-German’s right hand, I presume. Quinn looks pale and sick. The duo march past the phone box where our Olly had his
Ness-based meltdown only yesterday and into Swissbank’s automated lobby where the cashpoints live. Here Quinn makes three withdrawals with three different cards, before being frog-marched back. I hide behind a conveniently to-hand newspaper. A Normal would feel guilt or vindication; I feel as if I just watched a middle-of-the-road episode of
Inspector Morse
.

“Morning, Poshboy,” says Holly, holding a hot chocolate. She’s beautiful. She’s utterly herself. She’s got a red beret. She’s perceptive. “So, what sort of trouble are you in?”

I don’t know why I deny it. “Everything’s fine.”

“Can I sit down, or are you expecting company?”

“Yes. No. Please. Sit down. No company.”

She removes her ski jacket, the mint-green one, sits opposite me, places her red beret on the table, unwinds her cream scarf from her neck, rolls it up into a ball, and places it on her beret.

“I just went to the bar,” I admit, “but figured you were skiing.”

“The slopes are shut. Because of the blizzard.”

I glance outside again. “What blizzard?”

“You really should listen to the local radio.”

“There’s only so much ‘One Night in Bangkok’ a man can take.”

She stirs her hot chocolate. “You ought to be getting back—the forecast’s for whiteout conditions, within the hour. You can’t see three yards in a whiteout. It’s like being blinded.” She eats a spoonful of froth and waits for me to confess what sort of trouble I’m in.

“I just checked out of the Hotel Chetwynd-Pitt.”

“I’d check in again, if I were you. Really.”

I do a downed-plane hum. “Problematic.”

“Unhappy families in the House of Rufus Sexist-Git?”

I lean forward. “Their hot totties from Club Walpurgis turned out to be prostitutes. Their pimps are extracting every last centime they can scare out of them as we speak. I exited via an escape hatch.”

Holly shows no surprise at this common ski-resort tale. “So what’s your plan?”

I look into her serious eyes. A dum-dum bullet of happiness tears through my innards. “I don’t know.”

She sips her hot chocolate and I wish I was it. “You don’t look as worried as I would be, if I was in your shoes.”

I sip my own coffee. A pan hisses in the bakery kitchen. “I can’t explain it. It’s … impending metamorphosis.” I can see she doesn’t understand, and I don’t blame her. “Do you ever … know stuff, Holly? Stuff that you cannot possibly know, yet … Or—or lose hours. Not as in, ‘Wow, time flies,’ but as in,” I click my fingers, “there, an hour’s gone. Literally, between one heartbeat and the next. Well, maybe the time thing’s a red herring, but I
know
my life’s changing. Metamorphosis. That’s the best word I’ve got. You’re doing a good job of not looking freaked, but I must sound utterly, utterly, utterly bonkers.”

“Three too many utterlies. I work in a bar, remember.”

I fight a strong urge to lean over and kiss her. She’d slap me away. I feed my coffee a sugar lump. Then she asks, “Where do you plan to stay during your ‘metamorphosis’?”