Authors: Jonathan Coe
Wilkins
With a considerable effort of will, Thomas raised his aching body onto one elbow and looked blearily around the room.
The slightly moth-eaten velvet curtains were still drawn, and it took a few seconds for his eyes to become accustomed to the dark. Soon, enough shapes were visible to make him sure that he had no idea where he was. A wave of panic rushed through him and he sat up sharply. His head pounded with the sudden movement. Fumbling in the half-dark, he found the switch of a bedside light and turned it on.
The room was plainly furnished and far from luxurious. From the bathroom Thomas could hear the sound of a dripping tap. He was fully clothed. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood up, moving more carefully than before, aware that any sudden movements of his head would trigger more pain. He walked over to the window – a matter of only two or three steps – and drew back the curtains. But the view from the window did not tell him very much. He saw only a grey, rainswept back alley, separating him from a brick wall by just a few feet. Even now it was difficult, from the quality of the light, to judge what hour of the day it might be. He glanced at his watch. It was a quarter to three.
After running his head under the cold tap for a minute or two, checking in the pocket of his jacket (which was hanging in the wardrobe) to see if his wallet was still there, and taking a final glance around the room to make sure that none of his possessions had been left on any of the surfaces, Thomas quietly opened the door and stepped out into a narrow, thinly carpeted corridor. He pocketed the key and eased the door shut behind him. Everything was quite silent. There was no maid in the corridor, vacuuming the carpet or carrying clean sheets from one room to another while breezing past him with a cheerful ‘Bonjour’. He had rarely experienced a silence so profound.
Not being able to find any lift, he descended three flights of stairs and finally came upon a mean, narrow little vestibule. The lighting was poor and there was nobody sitting behind the reception desk. Thomas rang the bell. Before long a lank, gangly-looking fellow with a sallow complexion emerged from a doorway at the rear. He was eating a sandwich.
‘
Oui?
’
‘
Bonjour, monsieur
,’ said Thomas; then chided himself for sounding so deferential. He was about to adopt a far more authoritative tone when he realized that he had no idea what he wanted to ask. ‘Erm,
je voudrais . . . le check-out
?’ he concluded, with a feeble rising note of interrogation.
‘Room number?’ said the receptionist.
Thomas had to look at his key. ‘Three-one-two.’
The man took the key and thumbed through a card index on his desk. Then he glanced up at Thomas and said: ‘Nothing to pay.’ He was about to disappear again into his rear doorway when Thomas – himself about to make for the front door and the street outside – turned, hesitated and said: ‘You mean – my bill has been paid?’
‘Yes.’
‘By . . . by whom? – If you don’t mind my asking.’
The man sighed, and looked again through his card index.
‘Monsieur Wilkins.’
‘Wilkins?’
‘Wilkins.’
Thomas and the receptionist stared at each other for a few seconds in silence. There were many questions Thomas wanted to ask now, but he suspected that he would be wasting his time.
‘Did you enjoy your stay?’ the receptionist asked.
‘Yes. Yes, it was . . . very comfortable.’
‘
Bien
.’
The man took another bite of his sandwich, and withdrew. Thomas turned and walked out onto the street.
In the course of the last few weeks, he had paid very few visits to the centre of Brussels, which was where he now appeared to be. He didn’t recognize his surroundings at all. A walk of a hundred yards or less brought him out on a wide boulevard, lined with shops and cafés, where two busy lanes of traffic were moving in both directions. The sun was by no means bright – in fact it was having trouble breaking through a wall of ashen clouds – but it was enough to make Thomas wince and close his eyes. Looking into the distance, he saw what seemed to be a taxi rank, and hurried towards it. He told the taxi driver to take him to the Motel Expo at Wemmel.
The taxi ride seemed to make his headache and nausea worse than ever. It was as much as he could do to raise himself out of the car and count out the notes for his fare. Once the car had gone, he slunk past the bored, inattentive figure of Joseph Stalin in the reception hut and began to trace the familiar path back to his temporary home. Threading his way between the breeze-block cabins, twice he had to stop, in order to lean against a wall, regather his strength and wait for a feeling of dizziness to pass. It took him several fumbling attempts to get the key to turn in his own lock.
Thomas had hoped to regain some sense of normality by returning to his cabin that afternoon. But soon after he stepped inside, he discovered something more disconcerting than anything he had experienced on this already disconcerting day.
The first sign that anything was amiss came when he went into the bathroom to run water over his head again. He noticed that Tony’s toothbrush was gone. So was his toothpaste (the new, special stripey sort), his razor and shaving cream – in fact his entire sponge bag. Rushing back into the bedroom, Thomas flung open the wardrobe door and found that Tony’s half of the wardrobe was entirely empty. Shirts, ties, jackets, underwear – all missing. He looked under the bed, where Tony kept his suitcases. They had been removed as well.
Thomas sat down on his own bed and ran a hand nervously through his hair. He realized that he was shaking, and breathing much too heavily. Something strange was going on here, and he didn’t like the look or the feel of it. Not at all.
There was a knock on the door, and then it was pushed open (Thomas had left it ajar). And there stood the latest in today’s series of surprises.
‘Anneke!’ he said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘The man at the gate told me your cabin number,’ she said. ‘I thought I should come by before I started work.’
‘But why?’
‘I wanted to see that you were all right. I was worried about you.’
She came a few steps further inside. Thomas realized that there was nowhere for her to sit. Embarrassed, he cleared away the pile of dirty laundry that covered the only chair in the room: a plain, uncomfortable, wooden affair, not at all suitable for lounging in, or indeed receiving visitors.
‘Here, please,’ he said, gesturing towards the bed. Anneke sat down there, smiling secretly to herself, while he perched awkwardly on the chair.
‘So,’ she said, looking around with the same smile on her face, evidently enjoying the novelty of the situation, ‘Now I see why you and Tony have been getting to know each other so well and so quickly. It’s very . . . intimate. What happens when either of you wants to bring one of your romantic conquests back here?’
‘But that’s just the point,’ said Thomas. ‘I mean, that isn’t the point . . . The point is that Tony seems to have gone. None of his things are here any more.’
‘Gone?’
‘Vanished.
Disparu
.’
Anneke reflected. ‘Perhaps he has just gone to work?’
‘With his toothbrush? And all his clothes? And two suitcases?’
‘That is very strange,’ she admitted, frowning.
‘Look – exactly what happened last night?’
‘To you? Or to Tony?’
‘Both. Me, first of all, I suppose.’
‘Well . . .’ She leaned forward, and looked into his eyes. It was a look full of concern, and full of affection, which touched him deeply: although he did not realize this, or reflect upon it, until some time afterwards. ‘I think . . . I had the impression . . . that you were very drunk.’
‘Obviously. Did I do anything terrible, like stand on the table and start dancing to the strains of the balalaika, or anything like that?’
‘Not at all. You fell asleep. On my lap. It was rather sweet, I have to say. Everybody thought so – not just me.’
‘Everybody?’
‘Yes. Tony, and Miss Parker, and Mr Chersky, and Mr Carter.’
‘Carter? Was he there?’
‘Yes, he was. Don’t you remember him joining us? In fact he was the one who started to get concerned, when we couldn’t wake you up.’
Anneke explained how Mr Chersky and Mr Carter had finally managed to half-carry, half-drag Thomas out onto the street. Mr Carter had then called a taxi and taken Thomas away – presumably to the hotel – while Mr Chersky had shortly afterwards returned and rejoined them in the bar.
‘After that,’ she said, ‘I began to feel very tired. And now that you were gone, I did not really want to be there. I was going to stay the night in the hostel that some of the hostesses use in Laeken. So Tony and Miss Parker and Mr Chersky escorted me there. They were very loud and very happy. They were singing songs all the time. Children’s songs, Mr Chersky said, from the Young Pioneers camp at Artek. And then when they had seen me to my door they all said goodnight and then Tony said to Mr Chersky, “Come on, we have to show you those designs.” And off they went, into the night. The three of them.’
Thomas looked at her in horror.
‘Designs? What designs?’
‘I’ve no idea. I thought you might know.’
Thomas ran a hand through his hair again. Could this be as bad as it looked?
‘Wait a minute!’ he said. ‘They
were
talking about designs earlier. Emily’s friend is a dress designer. They were trying to get Andrey to feature some of her fashions in his paper.’
‘Really?’ said Anneke. ‘When I was there, all they seemed to be talking about was that machine. The one that Tony’s been working on.’
Thomas thought about this. It was true. He tried to recall again the details of last night’s conversation, but everything was too blurred.
Why
had he allowed Andrey to ply him with drink like that? He should have known when to stop. His head was still aching, and his thoughts would not come into focus. He needed coffee, strong coffee.
Anneke was watching him still, her eyes brimming with sympathy. They looked at each other for a moment. The sun must have been struggling through the clouds, because her hair and her face were illuminated, briefly, by a passing, brighter glow admitted through the skylight in the roof of the cabin. She looked so beautiful. Thomas wanted to reach across and kiss her.
‘We should go,’ he said.
‘Yes. I’m expected at work.’
‘I’m going to stop by the British pavilion and make a few enquiries. There’s bound to be some perfectly rational explanation for all this.’
But Thomas’s confidence was misplaced. When he reached the British pavilion he found something even more alarming. One of the exhibits was missing.
‘Excuse me,’ he said to one of the assistant curators, in a voice which he could hardly stop from shaking, ‘but . . . where’s it gone? The ZETA machine?’
‘It was removed this morning,’ said the assistant.
‘Removed? On whose orders?’
‘Mr Buttress, sir. He came in and supervised the work himself. He and a couple of the lads took it all apart and loaded it into a van.’
‘And then what? Where did they take it?’
‘Couldn’t tell you that, sir. Leaves a bit of a gap, though, doesn’t it? We’re going to have to fill it up with something else. Apparently there’s some sort of big new computer thing arriving in a day or two.’
His mind reeling with the implications of all this, Thomas thanked the assistant and hurried off around the ornamental lake and towards the Britannia. Nodding the curtest of greetings at Mr Rossiter, he pushed his way through the crowd of patrons and squeezed behind the bar. He asked Shirley to make him a double-strength coffee as soon as she had a moment, and made straight for the telephone.
‘Can I speak to Mr Carter, please?’ he said, after dialling through to the British Council offices in Brussels. ‘My name is Foley. Tell him that it’s very urgent.’
Before long Mr Carter’s reassuring cheerful drone came down the line.
‘Afternoon, Foley. So you’re still in the land of the living, then?’
‘Yes, I am, just about. Largely thanks to you, by the sound of it.’
‘Think nothing of it, old man. All in a day’s work. Best go easy on the old potato juice next time, though. That stuff is deadly. How was the hotel, anyway? Sorry, we didn’t exactly leave you in the lap of luxury. Was everything all right with the bill?’
‘Yes, it was all paid for. Settled in the name of Wilkins – whoever that might be.’ Mr Carter did not comment. It was unclear, from his silence, whether the name Wilkins meant anything to him or not. ‘Well, anyway, you have my eternal thanks, however the thing was managed. But that’s not really why I’m phoning. Listen, Carter, there’ve been some rum things going on today.’ (He glanced around, but no one seemed to be listening, apart from Shirley, who was hovering at his elbow with the coffee.) ‘Tony – Tony Buttress – has disappeared. Vanished. Packed up all his belongings and
scarpered, without even leaving a note. And even worse than that . . .’
(Thomas’s voice dropped to an even lower register) ‘. . .
the machine has gone as well
.’
There was another longish silence at the other end of the line.
‘I’m not quite sure I’m with you, old man.’
‘The machine. The ZETA machine.’
‘Well, how can that have gone?’
‘Apparently Tony himself came in first thing this morning and had it packed up. About eight hours after you and I
both
heard him telling Mr Chersky what a great thing it would be for international relations if the Russians knew all about it.’
Again, there was silence at Mr Carter’s end. Thomas could tell that these revelations had shocked him.
‘All right,’ came the voice, finally. ‘Situation understood. I think we might be getting into pretty deep waters here, Foley. I’m going to need to take some advice at my end. I’m just going to . . . ask around a little bit, and then I’ll call you back. Or somebody will. Where are you? At the pub?’