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18

THE POSTER. Here it was again. The rat-man's skull staring down with hatred on a burning city he had cut in half with his great Crusader's sword. With a shock, Neill realized it could be Beirut.

Spend a Night in Hell

Friday 13 March

Moldova 21

Couples Kr 1,500

Be there by 21:00

Again it was in English. This angered him, as if the poster had been aimed solely at him. Anyway it was too late now, nearly ten.

Down the street a yellow-lit sign, JaegerToefel, swung in the wind. Maybe they spoke German there, German chicks. A tall cool stein of Pilsner.

Inside the JaegerToefel was smoky and hot. Two thin old men were playing checkers at the bar; six or seven more were playing cards at a long table down one side. The barman was skinny and small with a large fluffy black moustache. Faintly the Beatles were singing “She loves you ya ya ya” on a radio high up behind the bar.

He ordered the Pilsner and leaned against his stool, against the bar. The beer was a lovely yellow color like early morning sun on fields of wheat. Why would it be in English, he wondered, that poster? It made no sense. If it was Beirut, who was the rat-man?

He emptied his glass and ordered another. Tomás was probably right. He was taking a wicked chance just trying to get into Beirut. Like Michael Szay said, he'd probably end up dead on some pavement, or in a Hezbollah hellhole. Anyway Mohammed would never talk to him.

The waiter set a new Pilsner down on the sticky wet table. Fifteen thousand pounds for one conversation. Maybe he should offer Mohammed five thousand to get him to talk. That way he'd still have Freeman's other ten thousand.

Layla. Did you know, Mohammed, I used to screw your devout Muslim wife?

Did he dare speak to that snake Hamid, the one who made it all go bad, and ask him to contact her, so he could reach Mohammed? Hamid would say no, unless he got a little cash, too. Spreading Freeman's shekels around for the betterment of man.

One of the checkers players next to him was telling a funny story and kept backing up, gesturing and bumping him, till Neill stepped on his foot. He halted, hands in mid-air, glanced round at Neill, moved away. Feeling guilty and alone, Neill watched the golden bubbles rise up inside his beer, thinking about Layla, Mohammed, Hamid, Freeman's fifteen thousand, an article about new hopes for peace in Lebanon, Bev and the kids at the dinner table passing round the paper, opened to his article. Even Commors, the deputy news editor, wouldn't dare touch it. Not this time.

After that, why not sign on with Freeman, an analyst or something, keep the paper, or switch back to The Times if the paper wouldn't raise him. And Freeman'd use him more, send him back to Ankara maybe, Amman. It was so easy to be a listening post and Freeman was too dumb to know it. He thought it was hard.

The poster wasn't a rat-man, really, but a horrifying man-rodent's skull.

He tried to imagine the fields of barley under the August sun where this beer had come from. On his hands it cast a gentle sunset light. The pores were large and shadowed, the hairs along his wrist a golden gray.

Soon he'd be dead, and this strong, limber wrist would rot and congeal at the bottom of a coffin. These strong legs and gut and eyes and this brain thinking all this and the lungs breathing in, the backbone, neck and skull. All dead. This heart pumping blood, rotting, drying, sinking into the wood.

It was too heartbreaking to lose, this lovely life. This joy, this love, this sun.

One of the men, laughing, slapped checkers on the board. The door squealed and two women entered, muffled in their hoods, talking together, then two men. Out on the street a trolley clanged by; cars were spinning tires in the lightly falling snow; people's boots squeaked on the pavement. Such busy creatures we are, he thought, we humans. So busy in the face of death.

With a strange urge to escape he paid for his Pilsners and ducked out into the fresh snow. A prostitute strolled past and he eyed her without slowing. On the pavement the snow was building into slush that came through the sides of his shoes.

A taxi eased by and he waved it down. “How far to Moldova?” he asked in German. The driver answered in Slovak; Neill tore a piece of paper from his notebook, wrote “Moldova 21” and handed it to him. Get in, the driver beckoned, did a U-turn, and drove through town upriver. Ten-forty, a clock said. Late again, Neill thought.

The tires whammed as the taxi dropped from macadam to cobbles. There were buildings with empty windows now, no pavements, here and there a truck trailer alongside an unlit opened door, men moving without lights, black warehouses three stories high, potholes and ruts laced with ice, once a dead horse at the side of the street, legs frozen in the air.

No cobbles now, just dirt. In and around skeletons of old trucks and piles of scrap timber, wire, and steel, red flash of rat eyes. The taxi stopped. “One thousand korunas,” the driver said in German.

“Moldova 21?”

The driver pointed down a wide empty street, toward the river. “One thousand.”

“Take me there.” Neill pointed at himself, down the street.

The driver moved one hand over the other to signify a car over the street, crashing in potholes, crumpling to a halt. The driver had narrow, sunken cheeks, emaciated skin over bone. He walked two fingers down one of his hands, showed a crossroads. “One.” The fingers loped to the next, the next, all the way to five.

Neill could see nothing down the street. “Das is gefährlich?” he said – is it dangerous? – made the motion of cutting his own throat.

The driver chuckled. “Im Bratislava, alle ist gefährlich.”

Neill paid the thousand korunas and got out. The taxi spun round and its taillights vanished the way they'd come. Neill drew his coat close, tripped over a piece of cable, stood rubbing his knee through the torn cloth. No streetlights, barely enough reflection off the smog to show rooftops high on either side, here and there a grim glimmer of window, dark gape of a door. Car lights were coming down the road, stopped a block away, went out.

He stumbled on something hard, moved round it – broken bricks. At the second crossroads several trucks clustered like great dark buffaloes feeding, between them a fire with two men crouched before it.

Ice on the puddles crunched under his feet.

At the fifth crossroads he turned left into the cold sewery wind off the river. This street was wider, cobbled in places, a skein of transmission cables over tilting dark buildings.

In London you never worry about dark places, he realized, because the crooks are too cowardly to go in them. But here...

He kept to the middle of the street. The whole thing was crazy but if there was this Moldova 21, he might as well get there instead of trying to go back. They wouldn't have put it on the poster if it didn't exist.

Unless the taxi driver had made a mistake. Or he'd brought him to the wrong place on purpose, radioed some friends and told them where to find him.

The darkness deepened on his left – an alley, at its far end a red glimmer. He hesitated, trying to watch all directions, fearing someone behind. If he went down the alley they'd grab him. But the red light was probably 21 – this must be Moldova. If he went back he'd have to pass the men at the fire, by the trucks. He moved a foot into the alley, hit his knee against hard metal, cold. A car. There seemed to be cars down both sides, a narrow pavement between them.

Silly to be fearful in such a silly situation. Down there, that red light had to be Moldova 21. Or a place with a phone, maybe.

The red glimmer was a light over a red door. Under its aura a Mercedes coupé, an Audi, a Harley with a Portugal license, a Lancia with Stuttgart plates. Reassured, he pushed the lit doorbell.

The red door opened, blocked by a big man in a black jacket, a wild black beard, thick red-rimmed glasses. “You're late,” he said in English.

Neill glanced at his watch. “The cab left me. I had to walk.”

“Where's the woman?” At the man's back a whitewashed stone stairway dropped toward the sound of heavy metal.

“Woman?”

“You're supposed to bring at least one. This is a couples place.”

“It didn't say that.”

“You don't read Slovak?”

To Neill his own words seemed ludicrous, a servile postulant's. “I saw it in English.”

“Welcome to Hell,” the man snorted. “But you pay the couples price.”

Another song was playing now, though the first hadn't had time to stop. Neill went down the narrow deep stairs to a wooden door with black metal studs. Now the music seemed overhead. The door wouldn't open.

He went back up but the man with the wild beard and red glasses was gone and the front door was locked. Or was this a different door? Had he come up the wrong stairs? The music was loud, from everywhere at once; it made it hard to think. The man must have locked up – too late, no more people allowed in. Neill shoved the door but it was solid as stone. He went back downstairs, the music fading, but the door was open now on a squat smoky room with couples dancing to Poison between gauze banners hung like cloth walls. This isn't Hell, Neill thought. Not Poison but Scorpions, the couples sliding through smoke and gauze banners. A woman dropped a cigarette, snuffed it with a high-heeled shoe, smiled at Neill and swung back to her partner. At the end of the room was a bar and behind it a movie showing a room of haze and smoke and slowly writhing couples. It wasn't a film but a silk curtain, and beyond it a room of sheepskin, leather, and low couches, men and women making love.

“You didn't come with anybody?” the bar girl said.

“Why does everyone speak English?”

“It's the only other language I know. You take a drink? It's in the price.”

He nodded at the two women and the man naked on the floor behind her. “This happen every night?”

She shrugged, unwrapped the cork of a bottle of champagne, pulled the cork, filled his glass and set the bottle beside it.

There were no stools at the bar. He hung his coat over one arm, his back to the bar. The champagne tasted of roses. Dancers shifted in and out of darkness, the melody changed, occasionally people moved from one side of the silk screen to the other. You think you're wildly passionate lovers, Neill thought, but you're just two flabby people twitching on the floor.

He had such a wearying sense of so many things always going wrong, no let-up. Job and family and fate, remembering when things were different. No wonder. The music ebbed and returned, over the nearer voices, the air thick with cigarette smoke. A woman came naked through the silk screen and took a bottle back into the room. The music broke and couples jostled beside him at the bar, glued to each other or nonchalantly distant, a woman's hot haunch against his thigh as she embraced her lover. Another man raised his partner's dress to her waist while she rubbed up and down against him and they took turns drinking from a champagne bottle. A couple came in the door, leaned to each other briefly, then moved apart. The woman pushed past Neill to the bar, took a long drink from his bottle. She was breathing hard and her black hair stuck to the back of her neck. “Couldn't wait!” she said. “I'll give you some of mine.”

“It's all right. I'm not staying.”

“Not staying? It's just beginning.”

“Why does everybody speak English?”

“I'm from Kosice.” She lit a cigarette, waved away smoke. “Lots of textiles. But good schools. So I learned English and Russian, and a little German.”

Her lipstick was half gone and her complexion very flushed. She had a round young face with full lips and a rapacious slender body moving with the music.

Neill glanced along the bar. “Where's your guy?”

“Saw someone else he wanted to go in there with.”

He looked across the silk screen, couldn't see the man. “You don't care?”

She smiled. “You are too English.”