Will Self - The Butt

‘Bail. .’ Tom muttered, wonderingly. For the first time he took in the fact that he might actually be seeing the inside of a police cell, before the setting sun splurged, molten red, on to the mudflats of Vance Bay.

‘Call him on my phone,’ Adams continued, ‘and if he’s able to meet you down there, I’ll give you a ride. Then we must call the DA’s office, get the relevant account details and arrange for the transfer of these funds.’

‘H-How much d’you think they’ll want?’

Tom could already hear his bank manager’s incredulous voice echoing from the other side of the world: ‘You want what?’

‘I should think it’ll be a minimum of, ah, $100,000 — maybe even twice that.’

Having sounded this financial death knell, Adams set down the lizard on the polished floorboards. He beckoned to Tom: ‘Come back in here to my office, we’ll make the calls.’

An hour or so later, Tom levered himself up out of the passenger seat of the Consul’s Toyota, to find the lawyer already waiting for them on the brilliant white concrete steps of police HQ.

Tom was relieved that Swai-Phillips had put on a shirt, but surprised that it was such a loud one: the Manhattan skyline encircled his powerful chest. The skyscrapers were black and studded with hundreds of tiny yellow oblong windows, like a negative image of gnashing teeth.

Swai-Phillips waved away Tom’s proffered hand, at the same time politely dismissing a reiteration of the apology his new client had already made to him on the phone. He put one huge and corded arm about Tom’s shoulders, while vigorously shaking Adams’s hand with the other. The two men exchanged bursts of pidgin, the consonants flying like buckshot, then laughed together.

‘OK from here in, Jethro?’ Adams said, switching to English.

‘Yeah — yeah, no worries, mate,’ the lawyer replied, and, still embracing Tom, he wheeled him round and marched him up the steps and under the massive marble portico — a feature that Tom, even in his shocked and sozzled state, could recognize as being absurdly grandiose for a provincial station.

In the lobby, which was equally imposing — shiny marble floor, inset with gold brilliants forming the outline of the southern constellations — Swai-Phillips embraced Tom still more closely. ‘You,’ he breathed, his sandalwood-scented Afro tickling Tom’s cheek, ‘say nothing. Keep it zipped.’

Then the lawyer advanced on the reception desk, which had been roughly, but artistically, hewn from a block of rusty-red native rock. Behind it sat an Anglo cop in camouflage uniform. She also wore a bulletproof vest that was cut low, like a décolletage. An assault rifle was propped beside her computer terminal, while leaning against the wall behind her was a bundle of hunting spears, some at least twelve feet long.

Once Swai-Phillips had explained their business, another officer ushered them into an interview room. Here, there were a couple of plastic chairs and a steel table that had built into it some kind of apparatus; this, judging by the buttons and LED displays, Tom assumed to be recording equipment. Surveillance cameras were mounted in all four corners of the room; they were the same compact models that he’d seen all over town, loitering in alleyways, squatting on top of poles like remote-control stylites.

Feeling the effects of Adams’s Daquiri, Tom sat down heavily on one of the chairs. Swai-Phillips went to the window and, parting the slats of the Venetian blinds, pointed out to him a powerboat moored in the marina. The high white superstructure was trimmed with silvery aluminium, and a thicket of whiplash radio antennae sprouted from the wheelhouse roof, while a stand of thick sea-fishing rods was planted by the stern.

‘Mine,’ Swai-Phillips said casually. ‘I’ll take you out one day.’

The door whooshed open behind them, and Tom turned to see a very stocky brown-skinned man enter. He was clearly a high-ranking officer, for, while he wore the same military-style uniform as the state police, and his massive head was surmounted with the same shiny origami cap — all sharp angles, with a peak like a stork’s bill — his was festooned with ornate enamelled medallions.

The officer — who Tom assumed, rightly, to be a Tugga-narong — marched up to him, smelled his breath through pump-action nostrils and spat out: ‘Drinking, eh? Anglo’s ruin over here.’ Then he laughed and turned to the lawyer. ‘Gettinoff on your pot an’ stuff, are you, Jethro?’ He jerked a thumb towards the marina. ‘I ken tellya ’ow that tub ainfor the thing. You gotta veep-creep up on ’em fishy-fellers. Veep-creep awlways. I bin out lass Satenday for tuckerbully, an’ gotta 500-pounder juss offa me skiff.’

Swai-Phillips guffawed. ‘Me? I took two 700-pound tunny off Piccaboy’s ’fore lunch the same day. Gaffed ’em, filleted ’em, an’ served ’em up to the old folk at me veranda. I tellya, Squolly, that pot ’o mine don’ juss find de fish — it lures dem in!’

The two men — one, two heads taller than the other — continued their hobbyists’ boasting for another five minutes or so, their claims becoming more and more fantastical.

At some point Swai-Phillips must have passed the officer, whom he called Squolly, the Milford Chemical Bank’s faxed notification of Tom’s asset transfer, because he no longer had it in his hand when he broke off and said to Tom, ‘We’re off now’; then to Squolly, ‘Gotta get this diddy one back ’fore ’e karks wiv de stress of itall.’

The two friends — for, clearly, that’s what they were — then touched palms, and, grasping his client’s shoulder as if it were the tiller of a sluggish sailboat, Swai-Phillips guided Tom out of the building.

Once they were in the lawyer’s SUV, and a fair way off from police headquarters, cruising along the wide boulevards through the commercial district, Tom recovered his thick tongue and asked Swai-Phillips: ‘What happened there? I mean, Adams said I’d be arrested.’

‘You were.’

‘Then what about Miranda? He, S-Squolly, he never read me my rights.’

‘Rights!’ Swai-Phillips laughed. ‘The only rights hereabouts are the ones we make!’

And to illustrate this witticism, he signalled and took the next right into a cross street.

Tom absorbed this for a while, then said: ‘When will the judge decide if I get bail?’

This time the lawyer laughed long and hard; a series of independent bellows of such force that even the oversized car rocked.

‘Oh.’ He recovered himself and patted Tom’s bare knee. ‘You got bail alrighty, no worries there, my friend, yeah. With a hundred K down flat, Squolly would’ve given bail to a kiddie-fiddler!’

And Swai-Phillips erupted all over again, his preposterous silvery Afro shaking like the foliage of a birch tree.

Put out, Tom almost inquired whether, since there had been no sign of a judge, a bribe had been involved. But then he thought better of it: he was beginning to understand how far out of his depth he was. To ask his own lawyer such a thing would only be to flounder still more in this treacherous quicksand.

The shock, the heat and the leaden charge of Adams’s palm spirit Daquiri were all puddling together into a bad headache, when the SUV pulled into the Mimosa’s parking lot. Swai-Phillips hit a button on the dash, and the native music that had been unobtrusively playing — and which, Tom now realized, had the same, insistent bing-bong beat as the ring tone on his hired cellphone — cut out.

The lawyer stopped the car and turned in his seat. Tom looked into the wrap-around shades and saw in their bulbous lenses his own pale face, leeched of any colour or composure.

‘OK, Brodzinski.’ The lawyer was all business now. ‘Come by my office tomorrow morning, as soon as you’ve moved your stuff over to a longer-let apartment. Budget will be a consideration for you now, yeah? I can recommend the Entreati Experience on Trangaden Boulevard.