Rates of Exchange (24 page)

From a hazed memory, Petworth now remembers something. ‘When you were at the airport, with Professor Rum,’ he says. ‘Oh, the airport, where you saw me wave to you,’ says
Princip, ‘I had come back from Provd, there was meeting of the Writers’ Union.’ ‘Who was the man, the other man, who waved after the taxi?’ ‘Oh, this man with
the umbrella?’ asks Princip, ‘We did not know him. He was foreign, from somewhere else. He did not speak Slakan so well. You see, Mr Petwit, here there is so much following. You are a
nice man, in a nice place we would like each other. But I don’t think so in Slaka. Look, we are almost at Wang’luku. Get up, comrade, push, push.’ Above the tram, Marx and Engels,
Wanko and Grigoric, bob in the narrow street. Then they are in the square, busy tonight with people, crowded round the newspaper seller, buying from the man with the balloons. ‘So, I have
brought you home,’ says Katya Princip, in her sheepskin waistcoat and batik dress, looking at him with grey-green sad eyes, ‘I have really liked to meet you. But I cannot be your good
witch, I cannot be your bad witch, it would be so nice and very silly. Did you like to meet me?’ ‘Very much,’ says Petworth. ‘Well, if you don’t have me, you have my
book,’ says Princip, ‘And if you open it very carefully, and learn the words very slowly, and look for the hidden places, the corners that are secret, then in a certain way you can have
me. Perhaps, now you know me you will have me much more like that than if we decided to be silly and go and make some love. Do you know the title, what it means? It means not to be afraid.’
‘Then perhaps we shouldn’t be,’ says Petworth. ‘Yes, you like to like me, I like to like you,’ says Princip, ‘And in a nice world it would all be very nice. But
it is not a nice world and everyone must take care for themselves. Now I think you go in your hotel.’

‘Then come in for a minute,’ says Petworth. ‘You don’t understand, they will take notice there, they watch everyone,’ says Princip, touching his lips with her
finger, ‘Oh, Mr Petwit, I have told you. You are really not a character in the world historical sense. You come from a little island with water all round. When we were oppressed and occupied
and when we fought and died, and there were mad mullahs and pogroms against the Jews, what did you have? Queen Victoria and industrial revolution and Alfred the Lord Tennyson. We sent Karl Marx to
explain you everything, but you didn’t notice. What did you do with him, put him in Highgate cemetery, some would say the best place, I know. You never had history, just some customs. Now, go
in there. Think of your nice Mrs Petwit, all the little Petwits if you have some. Perhaps in your room you make a little toast for me. To the beautiful lady, this time really meaning it. So, enjoy
our country, please, and make a good lecture. I like to be there, but I will not, because I like you, I really like you.’ She stands looking at him, in her white dress and sheepskin coat;
then she kisses his cheek, turns, and is gone into the crowd. Petworth turns too, stepping in through the glass doors, past the limping doormen. In the lobby, a crowd of oriental gentlemen stands
round the desk; there is noise and emptiness, people and personlessness. He goes to the desk to change his identay’ii for his key; ‘Pervert, don’t you know what time is, six and a
half,’ says the lacquered-haired girl, tapping her watch crossly, ‘Do you know you have missed your telephone? Well, is too late now.’ He goes up in the great lift, past the white
floormaid, and into his dark room, that empty place for his filled spirit. Brandy tastes like nausea in his throat; an unfamiliar pulse beats at the back of his head; there is post-surgical pain in
his feelings. He takes off his official suit, knowing that he has missed something, or that something is missing. Ten minutes later, naked in the vast bathroom, under the groaning, creaking shower,
hard water hitting a head filled with the sediment of his governmental lunch, hand twisting taps that will not quite come to balance, so that now the water turns his white body scalding hot, now
freezing cold, his face staring upward into the painful flood, while the split peach of his buttocks and the limp profitless dangle of his thighs flicker at him from the opposite, misting mirrored
wall, a gloomy nude, his long day by no means over, he tries to call himself back to duty, sociability, affability, to find a face that will meet the face of Mr Steadiman.

5 – CD/GB.

I

The clocks on the nearby government buildings, the chimes in the belfries round about, are all ringing seven as Petworth descends the rough stairs to the cellar bar of the
Hotel Slaka, looking for Mr Steadiman. His hair is wet from his hasty shower, his head heavy from the day’s hospitality; he knows himself for a man of sorrows, who, in one day, has met and
found, loved and lost. Raising the curtain to the Barr’uu Tzigane, he expects the gloomy cavern to match his mood. But something has changed in the underground place; yesterday’s
drabness has turned into something almost resembling joy. Behind the caravan bar is a laughing gipsy barman, while the whores who sit, teasing and giggling, in a line along the bar in front of him,
drinking specialist drinks, are brighter, more glittering, and far more numerous. They all turn to look through silver eye make-up at Petworth as he comes in; in the lap of one, a new one, with
hennaed red hair and a golden dress, a small beribboned lapdog barks brightly at his entrance. At the red-checked tables there is much busyness and noise; laughter and jollity sound as Zaïrean
timber talks to Ukrainian grain, Indian cloth to Polish leather. Bright-sad music is in the smoky air; among the tables, with their gleaming table lamps, two small gipsies in frilly sleeves pass,
fiddling furiously. It is a frivolous place, almost too frivolous for a man not hunting frivolity. But diplomatic matters attend him, the duties of his visit; he steps inside and walks slowly among
the tables, staring from side to side, looking for the Second Secretary from the British Embassy.

Evidently the task will not be easy. Mr Steadiman, to identify himself, has promised to wear a suit; but a suit is precisely what all the many single men who sit at the tables – staring,
waiting, looking at the girls, gazing dubiously down into small drinks – have elected, on this evening, to wear. Steadiman, no doubt, has no desire to draw special attention to himself; and
yet, as Petworth looks carefully around, going from table to table, it seems to him that none of the men who sit there quite looks like a British Second Secretary. This suited man wears a black
plastic hat; that one smokes a plastic-ended cigar. This one works steadfastly on notes, a pocket calculator clicking away in his hand; that one has his big bullet head thrust deep down into the
pages of
P’rtyuu Populatuuu
. That one is Chinese; these two are black Africans. Steadiman, presumably, has not arrived, or obscured himself so well that he will make himself known. A
table comes vacant in one of the dark alcoves; Petworth sits down at it, facing the curtained doorway. After a moment, looking rather surly, a red-checked waitress halts beside him; Petworth orders
a Sch’veppuu. He sits, and looks carefully round the room; only the pretty whores at the bar look back at him, and one, the new one with the henna hair and the lapdog, mouths a kiss at him;
Petworth ignores it. The gipsies play, the men at their tables sit and work, from time to time the door curtain rises and a man comes in – a turbanned man, a black man, a bespectacled man, a
man in a see-through fold-up raincoat – but none of them look like a Steadiman. Meanwhile, his drink, like Steadiman himself, fails to come. Staring at the whores, jogging their pretty legs,
in silver boots and high-heeled shoes, up and down, Petworth broods on blonde hair, a batik dress, a brief happy tram-ride, a bleak separation, on the sadness and solitude behind the public spaces
of society and exchange.

The clocks on the nearby government buildings, on the belfries around, chime seven-thirty, and still Steadiman has not come. Petworth is just thinking of returning to his room, or of attempting
a taxi, when the door curtain lifts once more. A man stands there, looking expectantly round the noisy room: a tall man, fresh-faced, forty-ish, thin, wearing a suit, carrying a rolled umbrella. He
steps into the room, looking – carefully at the whores along the bar, evidently seeking someone; and Petworth knows that this man has been somewhere in his story before. The man steps onward,
between the tables, and Petworth suddenly recalls where he has seen this face, this suit, this umbrella, this look; this is the man who jostled him in the entrance to the arrivals hall at Slaka
airport, as Lubijova led him toward his taxi; this is the umbrella that waved after the taxi, when, looking back, Petworth saw Professor Rum, Katya Princip, and a third figure, a man with a sack,
this man, chasing his arrival. The man is now moving from table to table, a crisp, confident expression on his face, speaking to the people sitting there: the man with the black plastic hat, the
man with the plastic-ended cigar. His quest is clearly unsuccessful; he turns now to the man with the pocket calculator, then the man behind
P’rtyuu Populatuuu
. Petworth now realizes
suddenly that it is he who is being looked for; at the same time he understands at once who his follower is. He rises from his seat and goes toward the man, who, an expression of waning confidence
on his features, is now approaching the solitary Chinese. ‘Excuse me,’ Petworth says, coming up to the man, who, rejected by the Chinese, has now turned to the two black Africans,
‘Would you happen to be Mr Steadiman?’

‘Aaaarrggghhh,’ says the man, turning; the two gipsies now come on either side of him, and begin bowing their fiddles at him in musical frenzy. ‘Not today, thank you,’
says the man to the gipsies, ‘Who are you?’ ‘My name’s Petworth,’ says Petworth, ‘I thought you might be looking for me.’ ‘Pet Pet Petworth?’
says the man, his fresh features taking on an expression of cunning, ‘And you’re looking for a chap called Ster Ster Steadiman?’ ‘Yes,’ says Petworth.
‘You’re alone?’ asks the man. ‘Yes,’ says Petworth. ‘And no one followed you here?’ asks the man. ‘Only you,’ says Petworth. ‘And you
think I might be this chap whatsisname you’re looking for?’ says the man, who has a public-school English accent. ‘Yes,’ says Petworth. ‘Look, do let’s sit
down,’ says the man. ‘I’ve already got a table,’ says Petworth. ‘Where is it?’ asks the man. ‘Over there in the alcove,’ says Petworth. ‘Show
me,’ says the man, ‘Is this it?’ ‘Yes,’ says Petworth. ‘Very good, old chap,’ says the man, after a moment, sitting down, ‘Do take a pew.’
‘Thank you,’ says Petworth. The man looks around, and then lifts up the table-lamp and looks curiously underneath it. ‘We should be alright here,’ he says, ‘Do you
have a pass pass passport?’ ‘Yes,’ says Petworth. ‘May I see it?’ says the man lifting up the table cloth and looking underneath it. ‘Yes,’ says Petworth.
‘Aaarrggghh,’ says the man, taking the passport, and looking at it, ‘Very good. And what was the name of the contact you were looking for?’ ‘Steadiman,’ says
Petworth. ‘Well, believe it or not,’ says the man, ‘That’s me, actually. Yes, I’m St St Steadiman. Well well welcome to Slaka.’ ‘Thank you,’ says
Petworth. ‘Clever of you to spot me,’ says Steadiman, ‘I like to keep a low pro pro profile. I suppose it was the suit.’ ‘Yes,’ says Petworth.

And indeed, close to, it is clear that this suit is not like other suits; the other male garments here and there about the room are only pale approximations to the suit Steadiman wears, which is
suit itself. It is pin-striped, its lapels handstitched and exact; the jacket falls open to reveal a neat waistcoat, the bottom button left statutorily undone; the finely creased trousers drape
carefully over clocked silk socks and finely cleaned shoes. The shirt underneath is wide-striped, and bespeaks an address in Jermyn Street; on the collar is a scatter of blood spots, that necessary
testament to fine wet shaving. The tie is an English tie, indicating its character as a badge of membership, of some club or regiment or school, without uttering the vulgarity of being actually
recognizable. And the face above, staring frankly at Petworth, and then with suspicious cunning round the rest of the room, well, that is clearly made from British genes; fine, long-chinned, it has
that hopeful, boyish expression, touched with a small adult pain, that makes all Englishmen feel they have once sobbed collectively together in the dorm of some universal prep school after lights
out, even if, like Petworth, they never went to one. Yes, Steadiman is, quite certainly and unmistakably, Steadiman, the Second Secretary at the Embassy. ‘Awfully sorry,’ he says
‘Multos apologiosas about being late. I had to go out to the air and pick up the dip, out to the airport and pick up the diplomatic pouch. Of course the Heathrow flight was three hours late
again. I wonder if those chaps who are always on strike ever think they might be putting our international relations in utter jep jep jeopardy. I think it’s time for drinkies.’

Steadiman suddenly raises his right arm high in the air, and leaves it there. ‘Were you out at the airport yesterday?’ asks Petworth. ‘Ah,’ says Steadiman,
‘Aaarrgghh. Why do you ask? Think you spotted me there, do you?’ ‘I did actually, yes,’ says Petworth, ‘I saw you waving after my taxi.’ ‘Oh, did
you?’ says Steadiman, looking a little crestfallen, ‘Yes, I had to go to the air and pick up the dip, so I thought I’d do a little careful checking to make sure you’d made a
safe land land landfall. We like to keep an eye on our high-level visitors, you know; but their Min Min Ministraty doesn’t like us po po poaching on their pa pa patch. Naturally one’s a
little discreet.’ ‘Naturally,’ says Petworth. ‘But they are looking after you nicely?’ asks Steadiman, ‘Giving you a goo goo good time?’ ‘Very
good,’ says Petworth. ‘And did they give you an official lunch today?’ asks Steadiman. ‘They did,’ says Petworth. ‘Tell me,’ says Steadiman, looking
carefully round the room, ‘Who was the host? Was it the min the min the Min . . .’ ‘No, it wasn’t the Minister,’ says Petworth, ‘It was a man called
Tankic.’ ‘Ah, yes, Tankic,’ says Steadiman, ‘My wife’s met him. Bald, humorous sort of chap.’ ‘That’s it,’ says Petworth. ‘Yes, well,
they gave you their number three,’ says Steadiman, ‘Not bad. Very clever operator, Tankic. Big in the party, they say, and undoubtedly destined for high high higher things. Ruthless as
hell, of course. As they put it here, he’d sell his mother to the butcher to improve the food production target. Where did he take you?’ ‘The Restaurant Propp,’ says
Petworth. ‘Really?’ says Steadiman, ‘Very good. They’re treating you well. I wonder what they’re up to. What happened to our drink?’ ‘I ordered one
three-quarters of an hour ago,’ says Petworth, ‘It never came.’ ‘Oh, they’ll come for me,’ says Steadiman, confidently, clicking the fingers on his raised right
arm, ‘Over here, my dear. Two thirsty gentlemen waiting.’ Evidently the confidence is justified; the red-checked waitress, smiling pleasantly, comes over to the table. ‘See what I
mean?’ says Steadiman, beaming up at her cherubically, a faint babyfuzz on his cheekbones, ‘They always come, I don’t know why. Hello, my dear. Now then, what would you say to a
nice cock a nice cock . . .?’ ‘Not a cocktail for me, thanks,’ says Petworth. ‘Something a bit softer, then?’ asks Steadiman, continuing to beam up at the waitress.
‘I’d just like the Sch’veppuu I ordered earlier,’ says Petworth.