Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

“Yes. But hold it!” she said from the top.

Everyone looked so different up there: Jaime at the bar and the serpentine queue for service; the deejay was going bald; a clownish drunkard slow-danced with a poster of King Bhumibol. The Thais watched this scene, smoking faster. They revered their monarch, a man known for humility and for playing the jazz saxophone. He was considered the sole blameless public figure in a country of corruption and coups. When the drunkard tongue-kissed his poster, it was too much: a katoey rushed him and a brawl exploded, spreading fast. Bystanders shrieked. Tooly looked down at Humphrey.

From his vantage point, he saw nothing, only heard cries, clothes tearing, the smack of knuckles on flesh. “Come down!” he said. The crowd surged like rough seas. “Down, please!” He raised his arms to catch her, but the crush of people pushed him off balance and toppled the ladder.

The ceiling flew away from Tooly, bodies spinning closer, the floor rushing at her. Her shoulder struck concrete, her head whipped back. As legs trampled around her, she curled up, teeth chattering, thinking how much trouble she was in. A high heel trod on her hand; a shin clipped her in the mouth.

Then someone grabbed her, pulled her upward. She clung to his arm, as the man pushed away the crowd and called out orders, which cut through the frenzied din. Gradually, the panic eased — just a few late shouts and shoves. Even after the man had released her, Tooly clasped his sleeve.

“All right?” he asked, cupping his palm under her chin, thumb across her cheek to her earlobe. His voice and eyes had an odd effect on her, seeming to silence the music that thumped in the background.

She hesitated, unsure how to respond to this stranger, with wild brown hair and mountain-man beard, whiskers parting above his lips as he grinned at her. She looked away, then at him again, realizing only after two glances what was odd about his eyes: one was green, the other black. (That pupil was permanently dilated, she later learned, due to a fistfight in his teens.) “I’m Venn,” he told her. Others sought his attention, called to him. The room still twitched from the spasm of violence. He paid no mind, dealing only with her. “You got a bit of a knock there.”

The back of her head throbbed where it had struck the floor. “It’s okay,” she pretended.

“Good girl,” he said. “Good girl. You smack your head and not a word. That’s what I like to see.”

Disheveled and fraught, Humphrey reached them. “You are hurt, little gurul?”

“I’m fine,” she said, emboldened, glancing up at Venn.

“I am relief,” Humphrey said. “Very relief to hear this.”

“Do you know Sarah?” she asked Venn. “She invited me to this party, but I can’t find her now.”

“I know Sarah. And I know who you are, Matilda.”

He summoned the two bouncers and ordered them to guard the little girl — what the hell had they been doing, letting her walk around on her own? They were far larger than Venn, yet both listened, heads down. They led her by the hand to the front door, sat her on the floor, and amused her with silly jokes, letting her light their cigarettes. After an hour, she fell asleep, the toasty smell of smoke mingling with a dream about calculators.

Upstairs, Venn found a group of backpacking former Israeli soldiers who were sharing a joint, and he deputized them to clear everyone off that floor so it could be used by the girl to sleep. As he carried Tooly up there, she stirred but kept her eyes closed. The delicious sensation of being placed on a soft bed — he slipped the book bag under her head as a pillow.

“I’m a bit worried,” she said, sleepy eyes flickering. “I’m supposed to go home.”

“Nothing to worry about,” he assured her, kicking the last stragglers downstairs and leaving her there to rest. “Nothing to worry about.”

And she wasn’t worried anymore. She woke just once more that night, the house nearly silent by then, traffic distantly audible, dawn light rising pinkly through the holes in the wall.

THE DINER WAS at the corner of Atlantic and Smith, in the shadow of the Brooklyn House of Detention, a high-rise jail whose grated windows concealed any sign of the torments within. In there, cuffs and toughs; out here, milkshakes and pancakes.

Tooly took a booth by the window and opened the plastic menu, watching the street, delivery trucks trundling past. Since New Year’s Eve, the snow had melted away, as had the millennial panic. They’d said a computer glitch would humble the industrialized world come midnight December 31, 1999. But the Y2K problem proved no problem, notwithstanding the billions spent to avert it. Nor did terrorists blow up New Year’s celebrations in Times Square. The only notable events of December 31, 1999, were the conclusion of an airline hijacking in India, its passengers exchanged for imprisoned militants, who took refuge with the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan; and the resignation of the Russian leader, President Boris Yeltsin, who’d overseen the replacement of Soviet Communism and now left his little-known prime minister, Vladimir Putin, in charge of the largest country in the world.

But more immediate to Tooly’s concerns was Sarah. This was a goodbye lunch, after which Sarah was to depart for Italy, following weeks of unwelcome inhabitation. In typical fashion, Sarah had nagged about having a “girls meal out” before leaving, yet now appeared unlikely to turn up for it.

After an hour, the remains of a fried-egg sandwich sat on Tooly’s plate. She raised her hand for the check. At which point Sarah walked in, yawning from one table to another as if to trumpet her entrance. She dropped her handbag on the banquette, shoved her suitcase under the booth table — she was heading to the airport straight from here. Rather than address Tooly, she turned to a group of hipsters in the next booth. “Don’t have a cigarette for me, do you?”

One did, a short guy in a porkpie hat, who fumbled in his overalls pocket for a compressed pack of Parliaments, which he shook out before her, two smokes jutting. She took both, placing one in her lips, the other between his. “You have to keep me company now,” she told him. Out on the sidewalk, she twirled away as smoke ribbons rose, pranced on the balls of her feet down the length of the diner window and back, chatting with the young man. Amazing how Sarah — still furious that Tooly had been avoiding her — now reversed the burden of impatience.

“What are we having?” she asked, sliding back into the booth. She took Tooly’s hand, rubbed it.

“Are you doing that because you’re freezing?”

“Hello!” Sarah said, waving to each member of the waitstaff, concluding with the head waiter. “We’ll have two large, hot coffees.” She behaved as if time began only once she entered a room, mindless of the dirty plate and half-drunk egg cream on the table. Tooly didn’t want coffee. Nor did she want to disagree this early on. So she sipped hers, which was tepid, sour, too long in the carafe.

Sarah peppered her monologue with references to her rich boyfriend in Italy, Valter, as well as others involved in his leather shop. She had to keep an eye on certain characters, though it was never specified why. As with many of her tales, this one contained puddles of truth, but these accounted for little of her rainfall.

“Sarah?”

“Yes?”

But Tooly had only wanted to interrupt the flow. She had nothing to say, so sounded like a child who states an adult’s name just to see if it works. She played with the metal milk jug, replaced it, invented a question. “Do I seem like the same person from when I was little?”