to rise, but Hoffmann held up his hand to ward him off. He took another step away from the table and his feet became entangled in the legs of the upended chair. He stumbled and almost fell, but that seemed to those watching to break whatever spell he was under, for suddenly he kicked the chair sideways out of his path and turned and ran towards the door.
Hoffmann was barely conscious of the astonished exclamations swelling behind him, or of Quarry calling his name. He ran out into the mirrored corridor and down the sweep of staircase, grabbing the handrail to pivot around the landings. At the bottom he jumped the last few steps, sprinted past his bodyguard – who was talking to the concierge – and out on to the promenade.
11
… the struggle [for existence] almost invariably will be most severe between the individuals of the same species, for they frequent the same districts, require the same food, and are exposed to the same dangers.
Across the wide highway the pavement beneath the lime was empty. Hoffmann halted amid the rows of guests’ luggage, looked left and right, and swore. The doorman asked if he wanted a taxi. Hoffmann ignored him and walked straight past the front of the hotel to the street corner. Ahead was a sign, HSBC Private Bank; to his left, running parallel with the side of the Beau-Rivage, a narrow one-way thoroughfare, the Rue Docteur-Alfred- Vincent. For want of a better idea he set off down it, jogging about fifty metres, past scaffolding, a line of parked motorbikes and a small church. At the end was a crossroads. He stopped again.
A block further along, a figure in a brown coat was crossing the road. The man paused when he got to the other side and glanced back at Hoffmann. It was him, no question of it. A white van passed between them and he was gone, limping off down a side street.
And now Hoffmann ran. A great righteous energy flooded his body, propelling his legs in long, fast strides. He sprinted to the spot where he had last seen the man. It was another one-way street; once again he had vanished. He ran down it to the next junction. The roads were narrow, quiet, not much traffic, a lot of parked cars. Wherever he looked there were small businesses – a hairdresser’s, a pharmacy, a bar – people going about their lunchtime shopping. He spun around hopelessly, turned right, ran, turned right again, working his way through the narrow maze of one-way streets, reluctant to give up but increasingly sure that he had lost him. The area around him changed. He registered it only vaguely at first. The buildings turned shabbier; more were derelict, sprayed with graffiti; and then he was in a different city. A teenaged black woman in a tight sweater and white plastic micro-skirt shouted at him from across the road. She was standing outside a shop with a purple neon sign, VIDEO CLUB XXX. Ahead, three more very obvious hookers, all black, patrolled the kerbside while their pimps smoked in doorways or observed the women from the street corner: young, small, thin men with olive skin and cropped black hair – north Africans, maybe, or Albanians.
Hoffmann slowed his pace, trying to get his bearings. He must have run almost to the Cornavin railway station, he realised, and into the red-light district. Finally he stopped outside a boarded-up nightclub covered in a flaking skin of peeling fly-posters: Le Black Kat (XXX, FILMS, GIRLS, SEX). Wincing, his hands on his hips, a sharp pain in his side, he leaned over the gutter trying to recover his breath. An Asian prostitute watched him from a shop parlour window no more than three metres away. She wore a black corset and stockings and sat cross-legged on a red damask chair. She recrossed her legs, smiled and beckoned to him until abruptly some unseen mechanism drew a blind across the scene.
He straightened, conscious of being observed by the girls and their pimps. One rat-faced man, a bit older than the others, with pockmarked skin, was looking at him and talking into a mobile. Hoffmann set off back the way he had come, scanning the alleys and courtyards on either side in case the man had slipped into one of them to hide. He passed a sex shop, Je Vous Aime, and retraced his steps. The window contained a halfhearted display of merchandise: vibrators, wigs, erotic underwear. A pair of crotchless black panties was stretched out and pinned up on a board like a dead bat. The door was open, but the view of the interior was obscured by a curtain of multicoloured plastic strips. He thought of the handcuffs and ball gag the intruder had left behind. Leclerc had said they might have come from such a place.
Suddenly his mobile chimed with an incoming text: ‘Rue de berne 91 chambre 68’.
He stared at it for several seconds. He had just passed the Rue de Berne, had he not? He turned around and there it was, right behind him, close enough to read the blue street sign. He checked the message again. The sender was not identified; the originating number was unavailable. He glanced around to see if anyone was watching him. The fronds of plastic fluttered and parted. A fat, bald man wearing braces over a dirty vest emerged.
‘ Que voulez-vous, monsieur? ’
‘ Rien.’
Hoffmann walked back up the street to the Rue de Berne. It was long and shabby but at least it was busier – two lanes, with tram cables strung above – which made him feel safer. At the junction was a fruit and vegetable shop offering an outdoor display, next to it a forlorn little cafe with a few empty aluminium chairs and tables set out on the pavement, and a tabac advertising ‘ Cartes telephoniques, Videos X, DVDs X, Revues X USA ’. He checked the street numbers. They ascended to his left. He walked, counting them off, and within thirty seconds had migrated from northern Europe and entered the southern Mediterranean: Lebanese and Moroccan restaurants, swirls of Arabic script on the shop fronts, Arabic music blaring from tinny speakers, a smell of greasy hot kebabs, which turned his stomach; only the freakish absence of litter betrayed that this was Switzerland.
He found number 91 on the northern side of the Rue de Berne, opposite a shop selling African clothes – a dilapidated seven-storey building of peeling yellow stucco, perhaps a hundred years old, with metal-shuttered windows painted green. The building was four windows wide, its name spelt out down the side, almost from top to bottom, by individual letters protruding over the street: HOTEL DIODATI. Most of the shutters were closed, but a few were half-raised, like drooping eyelids, the interiors hidden by a greyish-white cataract of thick net curtains with a floral design. At street level there was an ancient and heavy wooden door that reminded Hoffmann incongruously of Venice; it was certainly older than the building, and elaborately carved with what looked like masonic symbols. As he watched, it swung inwards and from the dim interior a man emerged wearing jeans and trainers, with a hood pulled over his head. It was impossible to see his face. He put his hands in his pockets, hunched his shoulders and set off down the street. A minute or so later the door opened again. This time it was a woman, young and thin, with fluffy dyed orange hair and a short black-and-white-checked skirt. She was carrying a shoulder bag. She paused on the doorstep and opened the bag, searched it, retrieved a pair of sunglasses, put them on and then moved off in the opposite direction to the man.
There was never a moment when Hoffmann made a definite decision to go in. He watched for a while, and then he crossed the road and lingered outside the door. Eventually he pushed it open and peered inside. The place had a stale smell, emphasised rather than disguised by a joss stick burning somewhere. There was a small lobby with a counter, deserted, and a seating area with a black and red sofa with wooden legs and matching armchairs. In the gloom a small aquarium glowed brightly but it seemed devoid of fish.
Hoffmann took a few steps over the threshold. He reasoned that if he was challenged, he could say he was looking for a room: he had money in his pocket, he could pay for it. They probably rented by the hour. The thick door closed behind him, cutting off the sounds of the street. Upstairs someone was moving around, music was playing; the thump of the bass line shook the thin partitions. He moved through the empty reception, across a floor of curling linoleum, and followed a narrow passage to a small elevator. He pressed the call button and the doors opened immediately as though it had been waiting for him.
The elevator was tiny, lined with scratched grey metal like an old filing cabinet, with just about enough room for two people, and when the doors closed Hoffmann was almost overwhelmed by claustrophobia. The buttons offered him a choice of seven floors. He pressed number six. A distant motor whined, the elevator rattled and he began to rise very slowly. It was not so much a sense of danger he felt now as of unreality, as if he were back in a