Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

— I don't get this, said Benji.

— You don't get what? asked Haffner.

— I don't see why it's more cosmopolitan to be anti-Zionist, said Benji. It just means you feel more nationalist about Britain.

— Don't be clever, said Haffner.

Gluttonous, still perplexed by Haffner's ideas of loyalty, Benji continued to reach for the black bean chicken with his chopsticks: trembling in the air, like dowsers. Haffner continued too. On one thing were Haffner and Benjamin agreed: the absolute superiority of MSG — that glorious chemical. They adored its sweet and savoury slather — and there it was, unctuous, before them.

Through the prism of his newly sexual nature, Benjamin considered the problem of fidelity. Perhaps, he thought, there was something in what Haffner said. Maybe it was true that it was better to refuse one's own nation. And I think that I should repeat that Benji had inherited from Haffner the love of romance. So he liked the grander, political structure which Haffner's theory offered him when he considered his current predicament, more than the crudely sexual structure in which it was housed at the moment. It was nothing to do with the girl! Nothing to do with the smell of her, which Benji had caressed with his nostrils all the next day, and night, refusing to wash. Nothing to do with the wet warmth of her mouth on his penis. All of Benji's urges, he thought, were simply desires to be free. They were all about his new refusal to be faithful to irrelevant ideals.

It did seem possible.

— So then, said Haffner. Time to go.

— You can't, said Benjamin.

— I am, said Haffner. I'm meeting this man, and I'm meeting him now.

Had Benjamin, wondered Haffner, any better ideas? No, thought Benjamin. He didn't. He only knew that he had barely begun the conversation he wanted to have. He had barely begun at all.

If he wanted, said Haffner, if he was really worried, then Benjamin could call him. Haffner promised to keep his phone on. And then Haffner, replete with a final spring roll, having laid down his chopsticks on their concertina of wrapper, and given Benjamin a selection of banknotes to pay for the meal — a meal in which Benjamin settled to the last dishes, as if to the last supper — ventured back out into the fading day.

And as he walked, he hummed. In the tropical night, the beguine washed over him.

Raphael Haffner was drunk.

In the driveway of the hotel, Niko was in his car — now wearing a pair of outlandish tinted glasses — waiting for Haffner.

The sky was fading, elaborating its golden cloths. And all its other traditional effects.

— Yes we have it, he said. I have found your man.

Haffner peered into the car. There was a plastic bag full of Coke cans in the footwell behind the driver's seat. A packet of cigarettes was protruding from the open glove compartment. The radio, to Haffner's antiquarian delight, was only a radio — without even the empty slit for a cassette.

Niko's jacket had the word death stitched gothically at the back of its collar. He took it off, and threw it on to the back seat — so revealing a T-shirt which said Godless Motherfucker.

This was the company Haffner now kept. He decided that he rather liked it.

— You saw my girl, yes? said Niko chirpily, bending to slurp at the keyhole of a newly opened can of Coke.

— Yes, said Haffner, deciding that it would be best if he stopped the sentence there.

— Uhhuh, uhhuh, said Niko.

To this, Haffner maintained his politic silence.

— You like potato chips? said Niko: trying to begin a conversation as they drove off.

Niko, the athlete, was always snacking. He offered Haffner an angled tube.

— No, said Haffner: feeling drunk, and sick.

Their destination was a billiards and pool hall — on the opposite edge of the town to Benjamin's utopian Chinese restaurant, in an industrial complex — on the second floor of what appeared to have been intended as an office block. On the ground floor were a hair-dresser supply shop — whose windows were hung with posters displaying the moustaches and side-partings of another era — and a shop selling carpet to the outfitters of mid-range business premises. Each window of the billiards hall was blacked out.

Their contact was already there. To Haffner's disturbed surprise, he discovered that he recognised this contact.

— I'm sorry, he said to Niko. I don't think I got his name.

— Viko, said Niko, pointing to his misprinted double.

— Ah yes, of course, said Haffner.

And Haffner gazed over at his masseur.

Haffner wondered if this would be awkward. All that was needed, he concluded, if the man could indeed do what he said he could do, was a brisk, businesslike demeanour.

He looked around: at the wall lamps, visored by green eyeshades; at a bar of chocolate on a table, its foil wrapper partially unwrapped, exposing its ridged segments — like a terrapin, or grenade.

He had hoped for something more; he had hoped for a man in a suit, with a briefcase and moustache. He had certainly hoped for a stranger. A powerful, authoritative stranger. If Haffner had ever had to imagine how this kind of business might be done, difficult as it may have been, he would have been able to be precise about the clothes. It most certainly would not have featured this man's obvious pleasure in contemporary sportswear.

As if, conceded Haffner, Haffner could talk: this man without a wardrobe.

Viko was a drifter; a man of travels. His career had taken him along the fabled European coasts: from Juan-les-Pins to San Remo, from Dubrovnik to Biarritz. His trade was that of the hotelier. Wherever he went, he found work in the spas of luxury retreats, the reception desks of grand hotels. In this trade, he had grown sleek. He had also become expert in the wiles of the world. Not for Viko, the moral life. He preferred corruption, blackmail: the free flow of information.

He kept himself to himself, this was how Viko put it. It was not quite how his colleagues put it. They knew him as rather more sinister: a fixer; a man who was protected, and who could, in his turn, offer protection to others. His ethics were those of the favour. He dispensed largesse. In return, he received the loyalty of chambermaids, office assistants, waiters, car-wash attendants. Often no one knew where Viko was: his movements were uncertain. His apartment was always blandly comfortable: on the walls, posters of Renaissance gods, and cubist still lifes.

Yes, out of his uniform — out of the shorts and cotton sports shirt, the tennis shoes — Viko was transformed. No longer the man who pampered the pampered rich. Now, he was in power.

Viko walked up to Haffner and Niko, nodded, then walked past them to the bar. But the barman was not there. He was taking the garbage out. Viko waited. He turned from the bar and reapproached them.

— How are you, my friend? said Viko to Niko. You are like Elton John, no?

Viko was wearing a T-shirt which did not conceal the fact that his forearms and upper arms were plaited with muscle, like challah bread. He put imaginary binoculars to his face. He grinned, behind his binoculars, scanning the limited horizon.

— In those glasses.

Niko smiled. He looked at Haffner. Haffner smiled at Viko, nervously.

The label of Viko's shirt, which lolled over the collar, was still pierced by its plastic hammerhead tag.

The billiards and pool hall in which they found themselves was reminiscent of an idealised gentlemen's club, from the nineteenth-century colonies. It was a vision of the past, where the players — dressed in waistcoats and bow ties — were meant to tend, like waiters, to the table. Portraits of forgotten stars, like imaginary aristocrats, were hung beneath lamps which bequeathed luminous rectangles to the aristocrats' foreheads, as if they were sweating. Each photograph was scribbled with an illegible imitation of a signature: as if the sign for a signature was its very illegibility.