1

It was ten o’clock in the morning and the kitchen was full of standing smoke and the smell of the stuffed cabbages. ‘So you’re off to London?’ Emma’s mother said. Though she was not an old woman, probably not even fifty, she had the sour demeanour of someone disappointedly older. She looked much older too as she moved ponderously around the kitchen in an old blue tracksuit, or leaned heavily on the grim, antiquated gas cooker.

Gábor said, ‘We’ll bring you something back. What do you want?’

‘You don’t need to bring me anything,’ she said. Her hair was dyed a maximal black. White roots showed. Outside the window, its sill crammed with dusty cacti, an arterial road growled. She lit a cigarette. ‘I don’t need anything,’ she said.

‘It’s not about needing,’ Gábor told her. ‘What do you want?’

She shrugged and lifted the cigarette to her seamed mouth, to rudimentary dentures. ‘What have they got in London?’

Gábor guffawed. ‘What haven’t they got?’

She put a plate with a single pickle on it, halved lengthways, on the small, square table next to Balázs’s Michelangeloesque elbow.

(His mouth working, he acknowledged the plate with a nod of his head.)

Gábor said, ‘We’ll find you something. Whatever.’

‘You’ve got business there, have you?’ the woman said.

‘That’s right.’

‘And your friend?’ (Balázs went on eating.) ‘Has he got business there too?’

‘He’s helping me.’

‘Is he?’ She was staring straight at him, at ‘Gábor’s friend’ – a sun-toughened lump of muscle in a tight T-shirt, skin tattooed, face lightly pockmarked.

‘Security,’ Gábor specified.

‘How’s the cabbage?’ she asked, still staring at Balázs. ‘OK?’

He looked up. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’

She turned back to Gábor. ‘And what’s Emma going to do while you two take care of your business?’

‘What do you think?’ Gábor said. ‘Shopping.’

They weren’t actually friends. They knew each other from the gym. Balázs was Gábor’s personal trainer, though Gábor’s attendance was sporadic – he might turn up four or five times one week, then not for a whole month, thus undoing all the work they had put in together on the machines and treadmills. He also ate and drank too much of too many of the wrong things. When he did show up, Emma was sometimes with him, and sometimes she was there on her own. These days she was there more often than he was – Monday, Wednesday, Friday, every week. All the guys who worked at the gym wanted to fuck her, Balázs wasn’t alone in that. He wanted it more than the others though. It was getting to be an unhealthy, obsessive thing.

She didn’t even acknowledge him when she came into the kitchen. Without seeming to (he was lighting a Park Lane) he noticed that she was wearing the cork-soled platform shoes that made him think of pornography. In fact, he had an idea that Gábor – like not a few of the members of the gym, with their BMWs parked outside – was somehow involved in the production of pornography. One of the BMW drivers had even offered him a part in a film, had offered him a month’s wages for one day’s ‘work’ – Balázs had the well-muscled, tattoo-festooned look the producer favoured. His lightly pockmarked face was apparently not a problem, though the man had intimated that his size might be. Balázs had turned him down; partly to leave no hint that he was worried he might be too small, he had told him, or implied, that his girlfriend wouldn’t let him do it. That wasn’t true. He had no girlfriend.

Nor was it that he didn’t need the money. He did. He needed whatever bits and pieces of extra work he could find. He had been employed by Gábor as a minder several times already – usually when he visited people at their offices, often in smart villas in the leafier parts of the city – though what Gábor did exactly, and what his business was in London, Balázs did not know.

The easyJet flight to Luton was four hours delayed due to the late arrival of the aircraft. Gábor took this quite hard. He seemed especially concerned about Zoli, whom he was unable to reach on the phone. Zoli was evidently some contact or associate of his in London, who would be meeting them at the airport, and Gábor was frantic at the idea that this Zoli was already on his way to Luton and would have to wait there for hours.

When Gábor finally got through to him, Zoli already knew about the delay. They were by then installed at a table in the sun-dappled interior of the small terminal. Gábor finished apologizing to Zoli and put down his phone. ‘It’s all right,’ he said.

Balázs nodded and took a mouthful of lager. The two men each had a half-litre of Heineken. He wondered how it would be in London. He imagined meetings in soporific offices, himself standing near the door, or waiting outside. For Emma, though, this was a sort of holiday so she and Gábor would probably want to have some time to themselves. Well, that was fine. He just had to know when to leave them alone, when not to hang around.

It was extremely stressful, he found, to be in her presence outside the safely purposeful space of the gym. It was the same in the car, in Gábor’s Audi Q3, when she was there. Sometimes Gábor would go in somewhere and leave them in the car together – she in the front, Balázs in the back – and he would be so intensely aware of her presence, of the minuscule squeaks when she moved on the leather seat, or flipped down the sun visor to tweak an eyebrow in the vanity mirror, that, just to hold himself together, he had to fix his eyes on some object outside the darkened window and keep them there, unable to think about anything except how he had masturbated to her, twice, the previous night, which did not seem a promising starting point for conversation. They never spoke. Sometimes they would be alone in the car for twenty minutes – Gábor was always away for at least twice as long as he said he would be – and they never spoke.

What she was like ‘as a person’ he had no idea. There was something princessy about her. She seemed to look down on the staff in the gym – she wasn’t friendly with them anyway. The women who worked there hated her, and it was assumed that she was with Gábor, who was slightly shorter than her, for his money. She always listened to music while she worked out, possibly to stop people trying to talk to her. Sometimes she would have a tea – usually organic peppermint or something – in the little cafe. Balázs had never seen her smile.

He had been surprised to see what her mother was like, where she lived. He had expected something smarter, something in Buda maybe, a house with roses in front and a well-preserved fifty-year-old offering them coffee, not that wreck of a woman living in that hole of a flat. The time-browned tower block, the odours and voices on the stairwell, the neglected pot plants by the yellow window where the stairs turned – these things were all familiar to him. Most of the people he knew emanated from places like that, himself included. That she did, however, was a surprise.

He finished the Heineken and said something about stepping outside for a cigarette. Gábor, waggling his fingers at the screen of his phone, said, ‘Yeah. We’ll just be here.’ She did not even look up from her magazine.

He smoked on the observation terrace, from where, through a barrier of hardened glass, you could watch the planes taxiing to the end of the runway and taking off at intervals of a few minutes. Standing there and watching them through the feeble heat haze, the sound of the engines coming to him across several hundred metres of warm air made him think of the days he had spent at Balad Air Base, with the rest of the Hungarian unit, waiting for the flight home. He now looked back on that year with something like nostalgia. He should have stayed in the army – it was safe there, and there were things to do. Now he was just treading water, softening, waiting for something to happen . . . What was going to happen, though?

Gábor was standing there.

He lit a cigarette, a more expensive one than the Park Lanes Balázs smoked. ‘Sorry about the delay,’ he said.

Gábor seemed nervous. It was as if he had something to say but wasn’t sure how to say it.

Balázs had started to think that maybe Gábor didn’t have anything to say after all, so long had he just stood there smoking furtively, when he said, ‘I should tell you what we’ll be doing in London.’

There followed a few seconds during which they stared together at the scene in front of them – the smooth-skinned planes waiting in the sunshine near the terminal, and the other, smaller vehicles zipping around with a sense of urgent purpose on the quilted tarmac.

‘Emma,’ Gábor said, as if she was there and he was addressing her.

Balázs half turned his sun-reddened head.

She wasn’t there.

Gábor said, ‘Emma’s going to be doing some work in London.’

They watched as a narrow-bodied Lufthansa turboprop started its take-off. After a few hundred metres it leapt into the air with a steepness of ascent that was quite startling, as if it were being jerked into the sky on a string. They watched it dwindle to a point in the sky’s hazy dazzle, and then, at some indefinite moment, disappear. Then Gábor said, ‘And your job . . .’ He found a more satisfactory pronoun. ‘Our job is to look after her. OK?’

Balázs simply nodded.

‘OK,’ Gábor said, with finality, having performed what was obviously an embarrassing task. ‘Just thought I’d tell you.’ He dropped his cigarette and extinguished it under the toe of his trainer. ‘See you inside.’

Mimicking his employer, Balázs toed out his own cigarette. (His shoe was a hard, square-ended, faux-leather thing, manufactured somewhere in South-East Asia.) Then he lit another, and squinted out at the shimmer standing on the tarmac.

2

Zoli met them at Luton Airport in a silver Mercedes.

The flight had been uneventful. The plane was full, but Gábor had paid for priority boarding and they had seats together – Balázs squashed into the window seat, Gábor stretching his legs in the aisle, and Emma between them, listening to her iPod and staring at the rigid plastic seat back a few inches from the tip of her nose. When the plane’s ascent flattened out and the drinks trolley approached, Gábor bought himself and Balázs little cans of beer – two each – and Emma a Diet Coke.

With barely enough space to lift the beer to his lips, Balázs concentrated on the window. There was nothing to see, except a section of wing and fierce light on the endless expanse of white fluffiness far below. You would fall straight through it, he thought, solid as it looks. He wasn’t sure, now, that he had understood what Gábor had meant when he said that Emma would be ‘doing some work’ in London. Had he even heard him properly? The light hurt his eyes and he half lowered the plastic shutter. He folded his swollen hands in his lap and sat there, his mind snagged on those questions and on the serrated whisper of her headphones, only just perceptible over the massive white noise of the labouring engines.

Zoli was tall and not unhandsome, and managed a moustache without looking silly. He also had an air of slightly savage intelligence about him – he was in fact a fully qualified doctor, though not currently practising. It was true that there was an unhealthy puffiness to his face, a swollenness, his eyes protruding more than was ideal, but Balázs did not notice these things until he saw them, intermittently, in the rear-view mirror – he was sitting in the back of the Mercedes with Emma, the lowered leather armrest emphatically separating them – as they made their way towards London.

They did so with single-minded speed, Zoli pushing the powerful car through holes in the traffic on the motorway. Holding on to the spring-hinged handle over the window, Balázs saw fleeting past a landscape somehow more thoroughly filled than any in his own country. It seemed more orderly. It was very obviously more moneyed. Even now, in the middle of summer, everything looked fairly plump and fresh.

Gábor lit a cigarette. He was sitting in the front with Zoli, who immediately told him to put it out.

Gábor apologized and pressed it into the ashtray.

Still forcing the car forward, Zoli pulled the ashtray out of its hole, lowered his window and shook it out into the loud wind. When the window was up again, he explained that he had borrowed the car from a friend of his who had a luxury limousine hire service. He had promised he wouldn’t smoke in it.

‘Sorry,’ Gábor said again. Then he said, ‘This is the new S-Class, yeah? Nice car. Very nice car.’

Zoli agreed vaguely. He looked in the rear-view mirror and for a moment Balázs saw his swollen eyes.

Zoli was in his mid-thirties probably, only a few years older than the others. Even so, Gábor was having trouble relating to him as an equal, something he normally managed quite easily with older and more important-seeming men, a quality that was probably the source of much of whatever professional success he had enjoyed. They had made some small talk as they drove out of the airport – though even that was abruptly ended (Gábor was in the middle of saying something) when Zoli had to pay for the parking – and, as they headed into London, Gábor’s usual effortless friendliness seemed to have faltered. Whether that was because he was simply intimidated by Zoli or for some other reason, Balázs did not know. Seeing them shake hands with some formality in the arrivals lounge the situation had seemed to him to be this: they had met before but did not know each other well. Zoli and Emma, on the other hand, seemed never to have met. Gábor introduced them, again with a strange sort of formality, and Zoli was very friendly to her – a wide smile, a pair of kisses. To Balázs – obviously the minder, with his shit clothes and his muscles – he had offered only a peremptory handshake. Then he had hurried them to the short-term parking lot. They were in a hurry because, as Zoli said, ‘there’s one tonight’ – whatever that meant – and what with the delay they were pressed for time, as they had first to go to the flat. Zoli, it seemed, had sorted out a flat for them to stay in while they were in London.

They spent some time stuck in traffic, the flow of the motorway silting up as it entered the metropolis. They were slowed by traffic lights. (The air conditioning was on – outside the tinted windows London, what they were able to see of it, sweltered.) Then there were smaller thoroughfares, a more local look to things. There were neighbourhoods, parks, high streets, overflowing pubs. Smudged impressions of urban life on an electric summer evening. It went on for over an hour. Then they arrived at the flat.

It was on a quiet street with a few trees on it. Small two-storey houses, all exactly the same. They waited with their luggage and duty-free while Zoli opened the front door, swearing to himself as he struggled with the unfamiliar keys. The flat was on the upper floor of a house, up some narrow stairs, at the top of which there was another struggle with the keys, and then they went in. One bedroom, white and sparsely furnished. Balázs would take the sofa in the living room, which overlooked the quiet road. On the other side of the landing, lurking mustily, was a windowless bathroom, into which Emma disappeared with her washbag as soon as they arrived.

The men waited in the living room, Gábor on the sofa, Zoli pacing slowly and taking in the view from the uncurtained window and then pacing again, and Balázs just standing there staring at the old lion-coloured carpet and its mass of cigarette burns and other blemishes. From his sprawl on the sofa, Gábor wondered out loud whether there was somewhere to get something to eat. Zoli offered only an uninterested shrug. He said he didn’t know the area well – like the Mercedes, he said, he had borrowed the flat from a friend. He himself lived in another part of London. Turning back to the window, he said the high street was nearby – there would be something there.

‘D’you mind popping out,’ Gábor said to Balázs, ‘and getting some kebabs or something?’

Balázs looked up from the carpet. ‘OK.’

‘Do you want something?’ Gábor said.

The question was addressed to Zoli, but he was still staring out the window and didn’t answer.

‘Zoli?’ Gábor said, slightly tentatively. ‘D’you want something?’

‘No,’ he said, without turning.

‘OK. So, yeah, just get some kebabs,’ Gábor said.

Balázs nodded. Then he said, ‘How many should I get?’

‘I don’t know. I’ll have one. Do you want one?’

‘Uh . . . Yeah.’

‘And Emma might want one. Four?’ Gábor suggested.

The stairs were almost too narrow for his shoulders, he almost had to make his way down sideways. The downstairs hall was dark, despite the frosted square pane in the front door, which opened as he neared the foot of the stairs and admitted a youngish woman in a charcoal trouser suit.

It was very warm and light out in the street, a nice soft evening light that flattered the parked Merc. He lit a Park Lane, and then set off through the little mazy streets of pinched, identikit houses in the direction Zoli had indicated. It took him twenty minutes to find the high street, and when he did there seemed to be nowhere selling specifically kebabs. He walked up and down, sweating now in the summer evening, his orange T-shirt stuck to his skin. He noticed a Polish supermarket, and the number of non-white people in the street. Then he phoned Gábor. ‘Is chicken OK?’ he said.

Gábor didn’t seem to understand the question. ‘What?’

‘Chicken,’ Balázs said emphatically. ‘Is it OK?’

‘Chicken?’

‘Yeah.’ He was standing outside a fried chicken place. The street lights had just flickered on, greenish. There was a faint smell of putrefaction. ‘There’s this fried chicken place . . .’ he said.

‘Yeah, that’s fine,’ Gábor told him. Then, ‘I mean – does it look OK?’

Balázs looked at the place. ‘Yeah, it looks OK.’

‘Yeah, fine,’ Gábor said. ‘And don’t be too long. We’ve got to leave at half eight.’

Balázs slipped his phone into the hip pocket of his jeans and stepped into the pitiless light. There was a small queue. While he waited he studied the menu – some backlit plastic panels – and when it was his turn, ordered without mishap. (His English was quite fluent; he had learned it in Iraq – it was the only way they could communicate with the Polish soldiers they were stationed with, and of course with whatever Americans they happened to meet.) He had trouble finding his way back to the flat and had to phone Gábor again for help. Then they sat in the living room, he and Gábor, on the low sofa, eating with their hands from the flimsy grease-stained boxes. The overhead light was on in its torn paper shade and the stagnant air was full of loitering smoke and the smell of their meal, and in the hurried eating of which Balázs was so involved he did not notice Emma’s presence until Zoli spoke.

Then he lifted his head. His mouth was full and his fingers were shiny with the grease of the chicken pieces. She was standing in the doorway.

‘Wow,’ Zoli said, as if speaking Balázs’s thoughts. ‘Wow.’

Sitting in the pearly Merc, Balázs found an after-image of how she had looked, standing in the doorway, still singed into his vision as he stared out the window at other things. The London night was as glossy as the page of a magazine. Nobody spoke now as the smoothly moving Merc took them into the heart of the city, where the money was.

3

It was awkward, especially that first night. In the driver’s seat, Gábor seemed morose – he spent a lot of time with his head lolling on the leather headrest, staring out through the windscreen at the plutocratic side street in which they were parked. Unusually for him, he hardly said a word for hours at a time. The hotel was a few minutes’ walk away, on the avenue known as Park Lane – after which Balázs’s inexpensive cigarettes, he now learned, were named.

When they had arrived, Zoli made a phone call and they had been joined shortly afterwards by a young woman, also Hungarian, whose name was Juli and who, it seemed, worked at the hotel in question. Zoli introduced her to Gábor and Emma, and then she, Zoli and Emma – lofty and precarious on inordinate heels – had set off, and Gábor had told Balázs that the two of them would be waiting there, in the car, until Emma came back.

It was a pretty miserable night they spent there, mostly in silence exacerbated by the tepid stillness of the weather. There were instances of listless conversation, such as when Gábor asked Balázs whether this was his first time in London. Balázs said it was, and Gábor suggested that he might like to do some sightseeing. When Balázs, showing polite interest, asked what he should see, Gábor seemed at a loss for a few moments, then mentioned Madame Tussauds. ‘They have waxworks of famous people,’ he said. ‘You know. David Beckham. Whatever. Emma wants to see it. Anyway, it’s something for you to do, if you want.’

They lapsed then into a long silence, except for Gábor’s index finger tapping the upholstered steering wheel, a sound like slow dripping – drip drip drip – slowly filling a dark sink of preoccupation from which Balázs’s question, asked some time later, seemed mysteriously to flow.

He asked Gábor how he knew Zoli.

‘Zoli?’ Gábor seemed surprised that it was something Balázs would have any interest in. ‘Uh,’ he said, as if he had actually forgotten. ‘Friend of a friend. You know.’ There was another longish pause and then, perhaps finding that it was something he wanted to talk about after all, Gábor went on. ‘I met him last time I was here, in London. He suggested we set something up.’ In the shape of light that fell into his lap from a street lamp, Gábor studied the Tibetan inscription tattooed on the inside of his left forearm.

She tapped on the misted window just after five in the morning. It was light and quite cold. Not much was said as Gábor, waking, unlocked the door and she got in. Nor while he fiddled with the satnav. Then he switched on the engine, set the demister noisily to work on the windows, and they pulled out into the empty street.

She looked tired, more than anything, still in her skimpy dress and heels – though now she had shed the shoes and drawn her legs up under her on the seat. The two men had managed a few hours’ sleep while they waited; it was hard to say whether she had. Her brown-ringed eyes suggested not. Her residual alertness seemed chemically assisted.

‘Everything was OK?’ Gábor said eventually, while they waited at a traffic light.

‘Mhm.’

‘Are you hungry?’ was his next question, a minute or so later.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe.’

‘You should eat something,’ he advised.

‘OK.’

They stopped at a McDonald’s and Balázs was sent in, sensible, in her presence, of his own obvious stink – he had been wearing the same T-shirt for twenty-four hours. She wanted a Big Mac and large fries, and a Diet Coke.

‘Thanks,’ she said when he got back to the car and, turning in the passenger seat, passed her the brown bag.

Was it the first word she had ever spoken to him?

He said, ‘No problem,’ though she might not have heard, as at that moment Gábor started the engine.

She pushed the plastic straw into the cup’s lid and started to drink.

Zoli showed up in the middle of the afternoon, while they were all still asleep. From his position on the odorous sofa, Balázs was woken by his music, or perhaps by its sudden stop, as he parked in the street outside.

His main purpose was to pick up his share of the money and Gábor emerged vague and tousled in a singlet and boxer shorts to hand it over, which he did in the recessed corner of the living room that had been turned into a derisory pine kitchenette. Zoli then handed out strongly chilled lagers and, as they opened them, asked after Emma. She had not been seen – not by Balázs anyway – since the morning, when she had disappeared into the bedroom as soon as they got back to the flat. Gábor had joined her soon after, leaving Balázs to press his face into the strange-smelling sofa back in an attempt to escape the light that flooded the room as he tried to ignore the sounds from the street, intermittent but easily audible from the first floor. At about ten o’clock, still unable to sleep, he had masturbated under a weak shower to a torrent of fragmentary pornographic set-ups, involving Emma in a vaguely delineated hotel room, of the sort that had filled his head all night. A shocking quantity of seed turned down the plughole. Some time after that, with a T-shirt tied over his eyes, he fell asleep.

A few hours later Zoli turned up.

‘So everything went OK?’ he said, and swigged.

‘Yeah, I think so,’ Gábor said, with a sort of sleepy snuffle. They were standing at the pine breakfast bar.

‘I know him, that guy,’ Zoli said. ‘He’s OK. He’s a nice guy. I put him in first because I knew he wouldn’t cause any hassle.’

Gábor just nodded. He was wearing his glasses, not his contacts, which gave him a look of bookish vulnerability.

‘Some of the others I don’t know,’ Zoli went on. ‘I’m not expecting any hassle.’

‘No,’ Gábor said.

‘These aren’t people who want to talk to the police, to journalists, you know what I mean. They’ve got too much to lose. Some of them are famous, I think.’

‘Yeah?’ Gábor said. He didn’t seem interested.

‘I think so,’ Zoli said, with a nod and a swig. ‘She still asleep?’ he asked.

‘Yeah,’ Gábor said.

Zoli didn’t stay long, and after he left Gábor went back to bed. If he had had a bed, Balázs might have done the same. Instead he went out into the blinding day and got another box of chicken pieces from the same place as the night before. Then he lay on the sofa with the window open, smoking and trying to read a book, Harry Potter és a Titkok Kamrája; he was working his way slowly through the series. He found it difficult to focus on the story. Then he found it difficult to focus on the words.

When he woke up she was standing in the doorway, in a dressing gown. He had no idea what time it was. It was still daylight.

‘Hi,’ she said in a neutral voice.

‘Hi.’ He sat up quickly. ‘What, what time is it?’

‘I don’t know. Gábor wants to go shopping.’ She tilted her head as if looking at something upside down. ‘Is that any good?’ she asked.

‘Uh.’ He picked up the book and looked at the front, as if the answer might be there. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. He tried to think of something else to say about it.

She stayed there a few moments more, in the mote-filled afternoon light, as if she was waiting for something. Then she yawned, and left.

Later, when they were sitting in the parked Merc, Gábor told him about the shopping trip – two and a half hours in the scrum of Oxford Street, followed by a meal in the red velvet interior of an Angus Steakhouse. They had been talking more than they had the first night, the two men. It was drizzling. Maybe that helped, the way the surrounding hubbub softened the silence. The fact was, they did not know each other well. Even in the context of the gym they were not particularly friendly. Gábor’s friendliness shone without favouritism on everyone, but he spent more time talking and joking with other members of the staff – with András, with Attila – than with Balázs, in spite of the fact that Balázs was his personal trainer.

At about midnight, Balázs left the Merc and went through the drizzle to the nearby KFC, which was open till two, to get their ‘lunch’ – two ‘Fully Loaded’ meals.

Taking his seat again, he found Gábor in a pensive mood. ‘Sometimes I worry about my attitude to women,’ Gábor said. Water trickled down the window against which his head was silhouetted. ‘D’you worry about that?’

Balázs had just bitten into his chicken fillet burger and could not immediately answer. When he could, he said, ‘What d’you mean?’

‘Just my attitude to women,’ Gábor said miserably. ‘Maybe it isn’t healthy.’ He turned to Balázs, ‘What would you do in my position?’

‘What would I do?’

‘Yeah, if you were in my position.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘If you and Emma were . . . whatever,’ Gábor said. ‘Would you let her do this?’ he asked.

Balázs said, ‘Would I let her?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Uh,’ he said. He was having trouble imagining, with any emotional specificity, the situation Gábor wanted him to. ‘Don’ know,’ he said. ‘Maybe.’

‘You would?’ Gábor sounded pleased.

‘Well . . . I don’ know.’ Balázs tried to think about it honestly. ‘Maybe not,’ he said. ‘It depends.’

‘On what?’ Gábor asked.

‘On what . . . You know . . . I don’ know . . . What sort of relationship . . .’

‘That’s it,’ Gábor said, finally turning his attention to the food in his lap. ‘What sort of relationship you want. That’s my point. That’s what I’m talking about.’

‘You’re worried it won’t be, uh . . . positive for your relationship?’ Balázs said, encouraged by having seemingly hit the nail on the head and wanting, as well, to talk about Emma some more.

‘Yeah,’ Gábor said simply, and pushed a sheaf of French fries into his mouth.

‘Well . . . D’you talk to her about it?’

Gábor shook his head, and spoke with his mouth full. ‘Not really, to be honest. I mean, I try sometimes. She doesn’t want to.’

They ate.

‘It’s her birthday next week.’ Gábor sounded slightly wistful now.

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. The nineteenth. I’m taking her to a kind of wellness spa place.’

‘Yeah?’ Balázs said again.

‘In Slovakia. They’ve got this luxury hotel up in the mountains there. We’ve been there before. Kempinsky Hotel. You know those hotels?’

Balázs frowned slightly, as if trying to remember, then shook his head.

‘Fucking nice,’ Gábor told him. ‘There’s this kind of lake, surrounded by mountain peaks – she loves that shit. They’ve got every kind of treatment,’ he said. ‘Literally. You know. Mudbaths, whatever.’

4

The days passed, and every day was the same, from Zoli’s visit in the mid-afternoon, through the long night, to the stop at McDonald’s in the smeary sun and the spasm in the mildewed shower, which smoothed the way to sleep.

Still, his sleep was poor. He felt stretched thin with fatigue, felt as insubstantial sometimes as the sails of smoke that sagged in the windless air of the warm living room. Sometimes he felt transparent, at other times insufferably solid, but all the time there was the small furtive thrill of inhabiting the same space as she did. Of using, for instance, the same bathroom. The small, water-stained bathroom was full of her stuff. He examined it with intense interest. If her proximity thrilled him, however, it tortured him also in the long pallid hours of each afternoon, as he lay on the sofa knowing that she was there, on the other side of the flimsy wall, at which he stared as if trying to see through it, while the fantasies unspooled in his smooth, pitted head.

As for her, he marvelled at how fresh she seemed. If on Monday, which was the fourth day, she looked a little haggard and hungover when she appeared at four o’clock in the afternoon in her towelling dressing gown, it was nothing she was not able to magic away, more or less, with twenty minutes in front of the bathroom mirror.

Monday was the night they had the problem, the night of the incident. It was still early, not even eleven, when Gábor got the text message.

‘Shit,’ he said.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s from Emma.’

‘What’s it say?’ Balázs asked.

‘Nothing.’

‘Isn’t that the signal?’

‘Maybe it’s a mistake,’ Gábor said.

‘Isn’t it the signal?’ Balázs asked again.

‘Yeah,’ Gábor sighed. ‘OK,’ he said heavily, ‘let’s go.’

He was scared, Balázs thought. That’s why he was taking the hammer – he had a hammer with him, he kept it under the driver’s seat. Now it was up his sleeve.

They started to walk towards the hotel. Shaking his head, his face full of sorrowful intensity, Gábor said, ‘I was really hoping this wouldn’t happen.’ Once he had lit a cigarette, he phoned Juli, who was working nights all week. She said she would meet them at the staff entrance – a little low door in the side of the building, set in a deep doorway, up a sticky step.

She was waiting there, smoking nervously, when they arrived. ‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Is everything OK?’

‘Don’t know,’ Gábor said.

‘What happened?’

‘Don’t know,’ Gábor said again.

They followed her to the service stairs. ‘It’s the fourth floor,’ she told them, handing Gábor the key card. ‘404.’ Gábor nodded, and he and Balázs started solemnly up the stairs.

Scuffed walls, a neon tube over each landing.

‘You ready?’ Gábor said.

Balázs shrugged.

Gábor said, ‘This is where you earn your money.’

‘OK.’

‘I’ll make sure she’s OK, you deal with him. I mean, if there’s any trouble.’

‘OK.’

‘And the minimum of necessary force, yeah? I know I don’t need to tell you that. We don’t want . . . You know what I mean.’

He was worrying about the police, obviously. It was something that was on Balázs’s mind too. ‘Why don’t you leave the hammer here?’ he said, stopping.

‘What?’

‘Leave the hammer here. You can get it later.’

‘Why?’

Balázs wondered how to put it. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘if . . .’ He started again. ‘Let’s say the police get involved, and you’ve got a hammer . . . A weapon. D’you see what I’m saying? We won’t need it anyway.’

‘Well . . .’ Gábor was doubtful. ‘We won’t need it?’

‘No.’

‘OK.’ He shrugged. He put it down quietly and they passed through a fire door into the moneyed hush of the hallway on the other side, where they searched in the smart light for 404. When they found it, they listened at the door, heard nothing. Then Gábor swiped the sensor, the lock whirred and disengaged, and they went in.

‘What’s this?’ Gábor said. He sounded surprised, almost disappointed.

There were three people in the room, which was large and well lit – Emma and two Indians, all sitting down, and all seemingly waiting patiently in polite silence.

‘OK, listen,’ one of the Indians said immediately, standing. ‘We want to talk to you.’ He was much the older of the two of them and had been sitting on an upholstered chair between the tall, draped windows.

Gábor ignored him and said to Emma, in Hungarian, ‘What’s going on?’

She shrugged. ‘There are two of them.’

‘I can see that. What’s been happening?’

‘Nothing.’

Gábor turned to the older man – who was wearing a tweed jacket and seemed to be waiting for him to finish speaking to Emma – and said, in his faintly American-accented English, ‘Only one of you can be here.’

‘Yes, this is what we want to talk to you about,’ the man said.

‘Only one of you can be here,’ Gábor told him again.

‘I understand, I understand . . .’

‘OK, you understand. So one of you go. Please.’

The Indians – the older with his nice jacket and manners, his elegant cologne, the younger scrawny in a Lacoste polo shirt, and still in his seat – were profoundly unintimidating. There was a fairly obvious sense that Balázs, standing with his massive arms folded near the door in a turquoise short-sleeved shirt with meaningless numbers inexplicably printed on the fabric, would be able to deal with them simultaneously if necessary. The older man’s exaggerated politeness, with its subtle edge of suppressed hysteria, may just have been down to that.

‘I understand,’ he was saying yet again. ‘The young lady told us that only one of us could, uh . . . you know,’ he said. ‘I understand. That’s OK. That’s OK. My, uh, my young friend . . . will be . . . doing that.’

Moving only his eyes, Balázs looked at the younger man. He was about twenty perhaps, or even younger, and, slumped slightly in his seat, staring at his loafers, seemed not even to be following what was happening.

Gábor said to Emma, again in Hungarian, ‘Do you have the money?’

She nodded.

‘Who paid you?’

She pointed to the older Indian, who said, ‘I just want to watch.’

Gábor turned to him. ‘What?’

The man said again, ‘I just want to watch.’

‘You want to watch?’

‘Yes.’

Gábor said, succinctly, ‘Fuck off.’

‘Is it a problem?’

‘Yes, a problem,’ Gábor said in a louder voice.

‘Why?’ The man seemed sincerely puzzled.

‘Why? Why?’ In what seemed to be a sudden loss of temper, Gábor seized the Indian by the scruff of his jacket and first swung and then started shoving him towards the door, until Balázs, packed into his lurid turquoise shirt, intervened and separated them. There was a moment of tense quiet while Gábor, evidently struggling to maintain a professional demeanour, focused on his shoes. Then he looked up and said tautly, ‘It’s a problem, OK. A problem. Please?’ With stiff politeness, an extended hand, he showed the man the door.

The Indian was starting to sweat. Nevertheless, he seemed determined to negotiate. Panting slightly, he said, ‘No, just a minute. Please. I also say please. Just a minute.’

‘Let’s go,’ Gábor said.

‘Please,’ the man went on. ‘Let’s just talk for a minute. Let’s just talk. Your friend said the money was for a whole night with the, the young lady. Your friend said that.’

‘Yes,’ Gábor said, with strained patience.

‘Now, listen,’ the Indian said, his pate starting to shine, ‘what I want to suggest is, uh, that we only take, uh, an hour or two of her time – but that I’m allowed to watch. Just watch! Is that fair? Doesn’t that seem fair?’

‘Look, this is a nice Hungarian girl,’ Gábor said. ‘She don’t do stuff like that, OK?’

‘Oh, she’s a nice girl – of course she’s a nice girl.’

‘Yes, she’s a nice girl. Let’s go.’

‘OK, you want more money,’ the Indian said, as if surrendering, as Gábor took hold of his arm. ‘How much? How much? A thousand pounds,’ he offered.

Gábor, transparently surprised by the size of the offer, did not say anything. He swallowed cautiously and looked at Emma.

‘OK? A thousand pounds?’

‘Uh,’ Gábor said, frowning as if trying to work something out. He seemed unable to do so, however, and finally said, ‘It’s up to her.’

‘Of course!’ The man turned smartly to Emma. She was sitting, with some dignity, in a tub chair, wrapped in a towel, her long thighs, which the towel did not hide, scrupulously parallel. The man said, ‘A thousand pounds, madam, simply to sit in the corner. I’ll be as quiet as a mouse. What say you?’

Even the young Indian lifted his overlarge head, with its cockatoo-ish plume of blow-dried hair, and looked at her now as they all waited to hear what she would answer.

‘Just say no,’ Gábor said to her, in their own language. ‘Just say no, and we’ll get rid of him.’

‘Why?’ she said finally. ‘What difference does it make?’

Gábor’s face underwent a very slight distortion.

‘What difference does it make?’ she said again.

‘You’ll do it then?’

She shrugged, and Gábor turned to the waiting Indian, who had not understood the exchange, and said, ‘OK. Where’s the money?’

‘I, uh, I have it here.’ He took from the inside pocket of his jacket a tan leather wallet.

As he counted out the money, Gábor said, ‘You just watch.’

‘Of course, of course,’ the man said distractedly.

‘You don’t touch.’

A shake of the shining head. ‘No.’

‘Any trouble, we’ll be here.’

The man held out the money. ‘I promise you, there won’t be any trouble.’

‘Give the money to her,’ Gábor said.

‘Oh, excuse me. Madam?’

Emma stood up – even without her shoes she was taller than the dapper man – and took the money and put it in the small handbag that was on one of the tables next to the brocaded expanse of the bed.

‘OK,’ Gábor said to Balázs. ‘Let’s go.’

Gábor hardly spoke for the rest of the night, his face swallowed by shadow in the parked Merc. He had speculated bitterly, as they walked back, on the nature of the Indian’s perversion, but once they had taken their seats on the anthracite leather, he seemed to have nothing more to say.

The previous night had also challenged his composure, though not nearly to the same extent. Zoli had told them, when he came as usual to collect his money, that the client for that night did not want to go to the hotel, so they should go instead to his house. It turned out to be in a grand square of stucco terraces. The two men had watched through the windscreen as Emma, in the familiar little flesh-coloured sheath of a dress, went up the steps to the porticoed entrance, with its big hanging lantern, and pushed the doorbell. A minute later the house swallowed her.

‘Whatever,’ Gábor said.

The house spat her out at four in the morning, just as the birds started to sing in the railinged gardens.

She was drunk. As they drove through the empty streets, she apologized for hiccuping, and then, when she couldn’t stop, seemed to get the giggles.

‘You’re in a good mood,’ Gábor said, fixing her momentarily in the rear-view mirror. ‘D’you have fun then?’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said softly.

‘You’re drunk.’

‘Yes, I’m drunk. I’ve had about two bottles of champagne.’

‘Champagne?’ Gábor said. ‘Nice.’

She ignored the sarcasm. ‘Not really.’

‘No? Did he make you drink it?’

She turned to the window, to the blue streets, dawn seeping into them. Monday morning. ‘It helps,’ she said.

Later they had to stop so she could be sick on the steps of a shuttered shop.

 

Photograph © Nadav Kander