Richard House - The Kills

Tired, Ford asked to be taken directly to his hotel.

‘But you’re staying with me? Nathalie arranged this.’

‘I have a hotel booked. I’m afraid I’ve paid.’ Ford looked as apologetic as he could manage. He wanted to keep this brief, in and out, everything done quickly.

* * *

Nathalie’s brother wouldn’t leave after he’d dropped him at the hotel. The man was too attentive, and while Ford made excuses for his tiredness, Stéphane paid no attention to his yawning, his reminder of the time.

Happy to be finally alone, Ford lay on his bed. The blue floral wallpaper extended up the wall and onto the ceiling. The fidgety pattern matched perfectly so he could not find the seam. The bed was too soft and the room too warm, and it reeked of perfume, old-fashioned, rose geranium. He recalled other hotel rooms, times when he didn’t have to mind the expense.

He checked the street, and half-expected to find Stéphane outside, still dithering, but the street was empty, silenced by the snow, the bulk of the view taken up by an office building.

As he undressed, Ford settled his mind over the small changes to the following day: Nathalie’s delay was no inconvenience, he didn’t know what he would say to her in any case. After he had seen the notebooks he would leave as quickly as he could. Most of what needed to be done would be managed ad hoc, on the spot. The circumstances themselves were so foreign — in every sense — that it disturbed him, although he could not explain why. Closer now to success than failure he decided he needed a drink, more than that, tonight he would rather drink than sleep.

* * *

Ford sat at the bar in his hotel on a smooth leatherette stool. The bar was nothing more than a padded banquette and a small shuttered counter, a row of optics bolted to the wall, not a bar so much as a rec-room, the same room used for breakfast. He drank the only malt they had, drank half the bottle, taking it in steady measures, using the whisky to work through the expectations for the following day, a certain anti-climax to find himself close to what he wanted. While he liked the idea that no one would join him, he regretted not going out to a bar. Although he didn’t want company, he wouldn’t have minded the presence of others, a distraction from his own thoughts. He reconsidered the idea when a young man in a business suit came into the room. The man also appeared unhappy at the coincidence, took the seat beside him with a small apology and waited for the desk clerk to come through from the lobby to serve him.

Ford bought the man a whisky, which they talked about, both admired, stated their preferences. An American with a name of two first names, Mark Mathews or Mathew Marks, said that he was in town for business, and after an appreciable silence Mark Mathews / Mathew Marks asked Ford if he was also in town for business.

‘That’s right.’ Ford straightened his back and sipped his whisky.

The man looked hard at Ford, a weakness to his posture, he shook his head as if to shift an idea.

Ford raised the glass to his lips, and spoke softly over the rim. ‘I know what you’re thinking. You spend all day driving, or flying, or flying and driving, or sitting on some train, and you find yourself in a town you don’t know and you want a quiet drink with company, but not small talk.’

The man shrugged and ducked his head. ‘I won’t disturb you, but small talk is fine with me.’

Ford set his glass at the bar, and pushed it back with two fingers. ‘There’s a parasite, a very common parasite — I don’t know how I know this — in every situation it becomes something different. First, it starts as something that resembles an egg, and it gets eaten by a snail, but there’s something about this parasite that makes the snail sick, so it regurgitates the parasite along with this fluid which, as it happens, is highly attractive to ants. So these ants eat whatever it is that the snail has left, and with it the parasite. The parasite then changes into something different inside the ant, only instead of making the host sick, this time, it does something to the ant’s brain, and remember, this is a simple single-cell organism which can’t survive on its own. But what it does is it makes the ant behave differently, and when it becomes night instead of returning to the nest as it would ordinarily want to, instead of going down, looking for safety, instead of looking for its nest, underground, it has this urge to go up. Up. As high as it can go. In most cases this is only going to be a blade of grass, because most of these ants, in this instance, live in fields. So these ants, in the evening, have this urge to climb instead of hide. This is where the ant gets eaten by a sheep, because sheep prefer to graze in the evening, and the ant is right on top of that blade of grass. And this is where the parasite comes into its own because the sheep is the parasite’s preferred host, sheep are the target, and once it’s inside the sheep it begins to thrive, and it changes again. It becomes something new and it begins to divide and for a while there is a kind of equilibrium: the parasite helps with the sheep’s digestion, and the sheep provides a happy home, until, inevitably, the parasite over-populates the intestine, which prevents digestion, stops everything from working, and is just a bad, bad, situation. When there are too many of them the sheep gets sick, and the parasite, sensing this, changes again, but this time, it becomes exactly what it was at the beginning, so that when the host dies or otherwise evacuates the parasite, and snails come to feast on the sheep, or on the sheep’s waste, the whole process can start over.’ Ford paused, and looked directly at the businessman. ‘I know. You have to ask yourself if this is true. You have to ask, how is it that something without a brain can be so cunning, so in control, that’s what you have to ask. Because most things with a brain just, somehow, don’t have that wherewithal. Unless you understand that intelligence isn’t what matters here, that behaviour, not intellect, is what commands this little parasite, and behaviour, in this instance, is entirely reactive. So all that this parasite is doing is reacting to a situation. That’s all.’

He stood up, feeling the whisky in his legs and stomach, and the room to be a little too warm. ‘The man who told me this story works for a man who is fat. He’s just fat. He’s big. And he works for this company, which is successful beyond belief, and it was built out of a whole bunch of smaller businesses which were brought together, over many years, to become the top of their field. But. Rather than settle with being in the middle of something big, what he did was he, the man who worked for this fat man, broke this company into pieces, or, maybe he just knocked off one piece — but he hid some money, a lot of money — to do this, and then, once everything had blown over, once that company was in pieces, or once he got the piece he wanted, he found that money, and everyone liked him so much that instead of being one man lost among other men, rather than settling in the middle, he became the only man at the top. You see this? You see how this works? That’s proactive, that’s being proactive.’

As he walked to the door he heard the businessman ask his name, and for one moment, before dismissing the idea, he thought to answer Stephen Lawrence Sutler, just for the hell of it. After so much caution, what harm could it do?

‘What are you doing in Grenoble?’

Ford shrugged. ‘Someone is missing. They think I have information about where he is, they think I know what has happened to him but I don’t. I honestly wish I did. I’m here to collect some information for myself and then I’m leaving.’ He ran his hand through the air, sawing up, free.