‘I apologize, monsieur. But if you look at the documents I have sent you will understand our urgency.’

‘Who are you speaking for? The students? Or someone else?’

‘May I believe that you will meet with me?’

‘You know where my rooms are at the university. I have no objection to seeing you there.’

‘Thank you, monsieur, but not at the university. You will be contacted again in a few days with the name of a safe place. Goodnight, monsieur. I am sorry. Goodnight, monsieur.’

The line went dead. László replaced the receiver and stood in the green light thinking of the room somewhere in the city where Emil Bexheti and the others were gathered to make their plans, their late night calls on behalf of the ‘We’. He decided to have absolutely nothing to do with them. They were quite capable of making trouble, precisely the kind of trouble the Garbargs probably already suspected him of. He yawned, stretched and was about to turn off the lamp when something on the floor between the two desks caught his eye, and he reached down to pick it up. It was the napkin in which he had carried the gun from the dining room. He looked about for a few moments but there was no sign of the weapon and he knew it had gone. For a night at the end of May, the study seemed unseasonably cold.

14

Cutting coke on Jo-babe’s belly, Ranch used a credit card rather than a razor. She lay very still on the bed, her T-shirt bunched up under her little breasts, the lines organized around her belly button like long white scars. On the other side of room Rosinne was putting a new CD into the jaw of the music machine.

‘No more Bjork,’ called Ranch. ‘She’ll make us crazy as she is.’

‘I like crazy,’ said Rosinne, but it wasn’t Bjork, it was the King in full sail singing America’s Favorite Yuletide Melodies.

‘Inspired choice,’ said Larry, who stood by the window working with his tongue to loosen a piece of meatloaf trapped between his front teeth. Lunch had been an hour in the sunlit dining room of the main house, where there were more pictures of Harold and John, the lost boys, and several piles of shiny unlabelled videocassettes. Betty, her charm bracelets jangling, had brought in the meatloaf, the peas and potatoes, and after that some odd approximation of an English steamed pudding with scoops of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, mocha flavour. As a courtesy to her the men had not talked business at the table, but when she cleared away the bowls and put the coffee on – the swing-door to the kitchen bringing gusts of another soap opera – ‘...I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you kids ...’ – TB had produced a folded single-sheet photocopied contract from the breast pocket of his shirt, and slid it over the table to Larry.