of the wall light but the fixing was too flimsy. The shower curtain rail came away in his hand in a spurt of pink plaster. In the end he settled on the handle of the bathroom door. He dragged the German’s body over and propped him up against it. He made a noose out of the end of the laces, slipped the ligature around Karp’s neck, looped the line over the handle and yanked. It took some effort, hauling on the cord with one hand and hoisting the corpse under its armpit with the other, but finally he managed to raise it sufficiently to make the scene look at least half- plausible. He looped the line around the handle again and knotted it.
Once he had stuffed the German’s possessions back into the rucksack and straightened the bed, the bedroom looked oddly untouched by what had happened. He slipped Karp’s mobile into his pocket, closed the laptop and carried it over to the window. He parted the net curtain. The window opened easily, obviously often used. On the fire escape, amid the encrusted swirls of pigeon shit, were a hundred sodden cigarette butts, a score of beer cans. He clambered out on to the ironwork, reached around the window frame and pressed the switch. The shutter descended behind him.
It was a long way down, six floors, and with every clanging step of his descent Hoffmann was acutely aware of how conspicuous he must be – directly visible to anyone looking out from the buildings opposite or who happened to be standing in one of the hotel bedrooms. But to his relief most of the windows he passed were shuttered, and at the others no ghostly faces materialised behind their shrouds of muslin. The Hotel Diodati was at rest for the afternoon. He clattered on down, his only thought to put as much distance between himself and the corpse as possible.
From his high vantage point he could see that the fire escape led to a small concrete patio. A feeble attempt had been made to turn this into an outdoor seating area. There was some wooden garden furniture and a couple of faded green umbrellas advertising lager. He calculated that the best way to get out to the street would be through the hotel, but when he reached the ground and saw the sliding glass door that led to the reception area, the fear- animal decided against it: he couldn’t risk running into the man from the next-door room. He dragged one of the wooden garden chairs over to the back wall and climbed up on to it.
He found himself peering at a two-metre drop to the neighbouring yard – a wilderness of sickly urban weeds choking half-hidden pieces of rusting catering equipment and an old bike frame; on the far side were big receptacles for trash. The yard clearly belonged to a restaurant of some kind. He could see the chefs in their white hats moving about in the kitchen, could hear them shouting and the crash of their pans. He balanced the laptop on the wall and hauled himself up to sit astride the brickwork. In the distance a police siren began to wail. He grabbed the computer, swung his leg over and dropped down to the other side, landing heavily in a bed of stinging nettles. He swore. From between the waste bins a youth stepped out to see what was going on. He was carrying an empty slop bucket, smoking a cigarette – Arab-looking, clean-shaven, late teens. He stared at Hoffmann in surprise.
Hoffmann said diffidently, ‘ Ou est la rue? ’ He tapped the computer significantly, as if it somehow explained his presence.
The youth looked at him and frowned, then slowly withdrew his cigarette from his mouth and gestured over his shoulder.
‘ Merci.’ Hoffmann hurried down the narrow alley, through the wooden gate and out into the street.
Gabrielle Hoffmann had spent more than an hour furiously prowling round the public gardens of the Parc des Bastions declaiming in her head all the things she wished she had said on the pavement to Alex, until she realised, on her third or fourth circuit, that she was muttering to herself like a mad old lady and that passers-by were staring at her; at which point she hailed a taxi and went home. There was a patrol car containing two gendarmes parked in the street outside. Beyond the gate, in front of the mansion, the wretched bodyguard-cum-driver whom Alex had sent to watch over her was talking on his telephone. He hung up and stared at her reproachfully. With his closely shaved domed head and massive squat frame he resembled a malevolent Buddha.
She said to him, ‘Do you still have that car, Camille?’
‘Yes, madame.’
‘And you’re supposed to drive me wherever I want to go?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Bring it round, will you? We’re going to the airport.’
In the bedroom she started flinging clothes into a suitcase, her mind obsessively replaying the scene of her humiliation at the gallery. How could he have done such a thing to her? That it was Alex who had sabotaged her exhibition she had no doubt, although she was prepared to concede he would not have meant it maliciously. No, what was absolutely bloody enraging was that it would have been his clumsy, hopeless conception of a romantic gesture. Once, a year or two ago, when they were on holiday in the south of France and dining in some ludicrously expensive seafood restaurant in St-Tropez, she had made an idle remark about how cruel it was to keep all those dozens of lobsters in a tank, awaiting their turn to be boiled alive; the next thing she knew he had bought the lot at double the menu price and was having them carried outside to be tipped into the harbour. The uproar that ensued as they hit the water and scuttled away – now that had been quite funny, and needless to say he had been utterly oblivious to it. She opened another suitcase and threw in a pair of shoes. But she couldn’t forgive him for today’s scene, not yet. It would take at least a few days for her to calm down.
She went into the bathroom and stopped, staring in sudden bafflement at the cosmetics and perfume arrayed on the glass shelves. It was hard to know how much to pack if you didn’t know how long you would be gone, or even where you were going. She looked at herself in the mirror, in the wretched outfit she had spent hours choosing for the launch of her career as an artist, and started crying – less out of self-pity, which she despised, than out of fear. Don’t let him be ill, she thought. Dear God, please don’t take him away from me in that way. Throughout she kept on studying her face dispassionately. It was amazing how ugly you could make yourself by crying, like scrawling over a drawing. After a while she put her hand into her jacket pocket to try to find a tissue, and felt instead the sharp edges of a business card.
Professor Robert WALTON
Computing Centre Department Head
CERN – European Organisation for Nuclear Research
1211 Geneva 23 – Switzerland
12
… varieties are species in the process of formation, or are, as I have called them, incipient species.
It was well after three o’clock by the time Hugo Quarry got back to the office. He had left several messages on Hoffmann’s mobile phone, which had not been answered, and he felt a slight prickle of unease about where his partner might be: Hoffmann’s so-called bodyguard he had found chatting up a girl in reception, unaware that his charge had even left the hotel. Quarry had fired him on the spot.
Still, for all that, the Englishman’s mood was good. He now believed they were likely to mop up double his initial estimate of new investment – $2 billion – which meant an extra $40 million a year simply in management fees. He had drunk several truly excellent glasses of wine. On the drive back from the restaurant he celebrated by putting a call through to Benetti’s and commissioning a helicopter pad for the back of his yacht.
He was smiling so much the facial-recognition scanner failed to match his geometry to its database and he had to try a second time when he had composed himself. He passed under the bland but watchful eyes of the security cameras in the lobby, cheerfully called out, ‘Five,’ to the elevator and hummed to himself all the way up the glass tube. It was the old school song, or as much of it as he could remember – sonent voces omnium, tum-tee tum-tee tum-tee-tum – and when the doors opened he tipped an imaginary hat to his frowning fellow passengers, the dull drones from DigiSyst or EcoTec or whatever the hell they were called. He even managed to maintain his smile when the glass partition to Hoffmann Investment Technologies slid back to reveal Inspector Jean-Philippe Leclerc of the Geneva Police Department waiting for him in reception. He examined his visitor’s ID and then compared it to the rumpled figure in front of him. The American markets would be opening in ten minutes. This he
