I shrugged my shoulders. ‘You can’t get decent help these days.’

He furrowed his brow at this, slightly puzzled, and I knew straightaway that he wasn’t on MDT – not right now at any rate.

‘Where the money?’

After he said this I noticed him glancing over at the shelf above the computer. When he didn’t see what he was looking for, he stepped a little closer to the desk and

continued his discreet search.

‘I want to pay off the whole thing now,’ I said.

This caught his attention, and he turned to look at me. I’d left a bag with all the cash in it on top of one of the bookshelves. I reached up now and got it down.

Gennady shook his head when he saw the bag.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Twenty-two five.’

‘But I want to pay it all off.’

‘You can’t.’

‘But—’

‘Twenty-two five.’

I was going to say something else, but there was no point. I sighed and took the bag over to the table, made a space and started counting out the twenty-two five.

When I’d finished, I handed the wad of cash to Gennady and he put it into his inside jacket pocket.

‘Did you get a chance to read that treatment?’ I said.

He sighed and shook his head.

‘No time. Too busy.’

He glanced over once more at the desk.

‘Maybe next time,’ he said, and then left.

*

I made an effort to clean the place up after Gennady had gone, but quickly lost interest. Then I sat on the couch and tried to read an article in the latest issue of Fortune

magazine, a survey of ‘hot’ developments in e-commerce, but when I’d made it a paragraph or two in, I started dozing and let the magazine drop from my hand and fall

to the floor. In the late afternoon, I had a shower and shaved. I got dressed, took a handful of cash from the bag I’d left on the table in the dining area and headed out –

not having been out, except to get food, for nearly a week. I wandered over to the West Village and stopped off at a couple of bars I occasionally went to and started

drinking vodka Martinis.

Towards the end of the evening I found myself, fairly trashed, in a quiet place on Second Avenue and Tenth. I was sitting at the bar, and a bit further down there was

a television set above where the cash register was, on wall-brackets. A movie had been playing – something, judging by the hair and clothes, from 1983 or 1984. The

volume had been turned right down, but now a news bulletin came on and the barman turned it up.

The sudden intrusion of sound from the TV killed off any conversation in the bar, and everyone – dutifully, drunkenly – gazed up at the screen to listen to the

headlines.

‘Middle East peace-talks at Camp David break down after two weeks of intensive negotiations. Hurricane Julius arrives off the south coast of Florida, leaving a trail

of devastation in its wake. And Donatella Alvarez, who has been in a coma for two weeks after a brutal attack in a Manhattan hotel room, dies this afternoon – police

say they are now conducting a full-scale murder investigation.’

I stared in shock at the screen as the newscaster went back to the details of the peace-talks story. I grabbed on to the side of the bar, and held it tightly. After a

couple of seconds, I mumbled something – maybe audibly, maybe not – and swung around to get off my stool.

I stood there for a moment, swaying from side to side, very unsteadily. The room then began to spin, and I moved, staggering the few yards over to the door. I just

about made it out into the street before splatting an evening’s worth of vodka, vermouth and olives up on to the sidewalk.

[ 20 ]

I CONTINUED DRINKING OVER the weekend, mostly vodka, and mostly at home. After all, what else was there to do? I’d just become the subject of a full-scale murder

investigation – albeit, and very con veniently, under an assumed name – so surely, in the circumstances, a little drinkie or two could hardly be seen as anything other than

appropriate. I wasn’t making any further pretense at reading ‘the material’ either, so I gave in for a while and went back to watching the news on TV. This quickly

became all I wanted to watch and again I found myself wading through hours of mindless crap, shouting drunken abuse at the screen as I waited for the next bulletin to

come on.

There wasn’t much for the media to say about Donatella Alvarez herself – the woman had died and that’s all there was to it. What most of the reports were focusing

on now was the political fall-out from her death. This came in the form of renewed calls for the Defense Secretary to resign. The brouhaha over Caleb Hale’s original

comments about Mexico had received a shot in the arm when the Alvarez story first broke, and another one now with her death. I hadn’t followed the story too closely,

but I’d been aware of it in the background – aware of it as one of those bizarre developments that takes on a life of its own and enters the news-chain like some kind of

virus.

Six weeks or so earlier, Caleb Hale was reported to have said at a private gathering that Mexico had become a liability for the US and that ‘we should just consider

invading the damned place’. The source that leaked the story to the Los Angeles Times claimed that Hale had name-checked corruption, insurgency, the breakdown of

law and order, the debt crisis and drug-trafficking as the five points on ‘the pentangle of Mexico’s instability’. The source went on to claim that Hale had even cited John

O’Sullivan on our ‘manifest destiny to overspread the continent’ and had mentioned an op-ed piece he’d once read called ‘Mexico: The Iran Next Door’. Caleb Hale

immediately issued a classic non-denial denial, but then proceeded, in an interview, to more or less justify precisely what he was claiming not to have said. The President

was perceived to be weighing in behind Hale when he not only refused to demand the Secretary’s resignation but also refused to condemn his alleged remarks – which

of course opened the floodgates of comment and speculation. Everyone was initially shocked and incredulous, but as the days passed certain influential quarters

appeared to warm to the idea, and early conclusions about the Defense Secretary being seriously out of touch softened a little, with some even transforming into a broad

endorsement for, at the very least, a tougher line on foreign policy.

Now, with what was perceived as a racially motivated killing tossed into the mix, the debate had gone into overdrive. There were interviews, panel discussions,

sound bites, one-liners, earnest reports from dusty border towns, aerial shots of the Rio Grande. I watched from my couch, glass in hand, and got caught up in it all as

though I were watching a prime-time soap – continually forgetting in my alcoholic euphoria that I was perhaps just a fingerprint or DNA test away from full involvement