The Bell-Boy (11 page)

‘You may imagine the rest for yourselves, madams. By word of mouth the notoriety of this establishment quickly spread, inevitably attracting what one is forced to call “the hippy element” as distinct from the spiritual seekers to which Malomba has long been accustomed and which it still welcomes with open arms. Woe to this city!’ cried Mr Bundash mournfully, as might any official guide on seeing his home town degenerate. At the same time he kept a covert eye on Zoe; since he was paid a commission by The Punk Panther’s management for any custom he might steer their way. She struck him as evincing a curiosity whose offhandedness was surely the result of her mother’s standing right beside her. ‘All-night dancing,’ he added gloomily. ‘Loud music. Cheap hamburgers.’ He shook his head.

When mother and daughter finally reached the hotel they retired at once to darkened rooms.

Laki was crossing the Nirvana's back-yard in the remains of twilight. His tuneless whistle told of a pleasant sundownish feeling of having spent the day well. It was largely drowned by the clarions, drums, gongs and wails with which the city's religious greeted the night. As he walked he bounced an empty plastic gallon container on alternate knees. Being off duty, he had changed out of his white cotton uniform and was wearing dark shorts and T-shirt better suited to stealth and minor villainy. Over one shoulder was slung a small bag.
He bonged the container off the goat's rump as he passed it and faded among the tattered banana plants. These leaned their juicy boles drunkenly on the fringes of the tiny patch of land which Mr Muffy had not yet sold to the Bank of the Divine Lotus. Beyond them lay a fence of vertical stakes marking the beginning of the Redemptorist Fathers' garden.

Reaching this Laki pulled out a loose stake, stood it aside and squeezed through the gap. The territory on the other side felt immediately different, not merely because it was forbidden but because it was so lush. At once he was in near-jungle, a forty-yard belt of which separated him from the nearest tongue of deer-cropped grass. He and Raju had once taken pains to approach the toddy palms by varied routes, but their daily undetected journeys had made them careless and between them they had worn a distinct trail. Arriving at the right tree, Laki took from the bag his curved knife which he stuck through his belt, as well as a short length of stout rope. He tied the container to his belt by its handle, stepped out of his rubber slippers, flung the rope around the trunk and began to climb with a hopping motion, knees sticking out at froglike angles on either side.

This method of climbing a palm was hard work and the rope wound about his hands hurt. Had this been a legitimate enterprise he would long ago have hacked hand-and footholds into the fibrous wood, but even Raju – whose age was against him for climbing trees after a night's sitting behind the hotel desk – had vetoed this in favour of discretion. As a matter of fact it was a source of pride and pleasure to them both that they should be able to practise their country-boy skills inside the city boundaries.

He reached the top of the palm with early moonlight glinting dully on the knifeblade and swung himself up into thick fronds, panting slightly and squatting down to rest. Between his feet jutted the decapitated stalk of the tree's flower, its bleeding end enclosed by a bamboo cylinder. He
unhitched this and, finding a fragment of mosquito netting stashed in a cleft, strained the contents of the bamboo into his plastic container. There seemed to be about a quart of the liquid, an excellent haul. He cut a sliver off the end of the stalk as precisely as a chef slicing cucumber, for the stump tended to heal itself during the day. Having replaced the bamboo, he pushed the knife back in his belt and returned to earth. The entire operation had taken four minutes and in that time true night had fallen. He shouldered his bag and retraced his steps for ten yards but then struck off at a tangent, emerging beneath the cloud-tree.

Nearly opposite, across a strip of grass and amid a whirl of fireflies, stood the Fathers' ornamental pagoda. In front lay the hump of the miniature stone bridge and a black meander of streamlet. The pagoda glimmered white against the vegetation like a chess piece. Laki had little doubt he was unobserved. At this time, he knew, the Fathers would be sitting down to dinner in their bungalow, sparks of whose lights could occasionally be glimpsed seventy yards off through the leaves. Nonetheless, it was not unknown for one of them to go for a stroll, so rather than walk boldly across the lawn he chose to sidle along the edge of the trees to the bridge and flit across it. Now if he stood with his back to the pagoda, his view was of the upper stories of the Hotel Nirvana as they rose above the foliage. Since so few of its rooms were presently occupied it was mainly a dark bulk with here or there a yellow light. One of these might have marked Mrs Hemony's room but the beautiful Zoe's, overlooking the roof of the BDL next door, remained invisible. He sighed but took heart from his own rooftop domain, clearly outlined against an opalescent drift of the Milky Way.

Dropping his bag, Laki carefully approached the pagoda's doorway. Occasionally Father McGoohan would spend a reflective hour sitting inside, for a stone bench lined
each of the little room's six walls. Tonight there was no one, merely some dark clots on the floor which he knew to be monkey-dirt. Returning to his bundle, he took out a coil of washing-line appropriated from the Nirvana and tied one end to the bag, the other to his belt. Then he shinned up the wall to the pagoda's first storey, using the easy handholds offered by its scrolls of exuberant decoration, and squeezed in through a narrow window slit. Inside was a smaller version of the room downstairs but without the benches.

His discovery of this chamber, which was just wide enough to lie down in but in which he had to crouch, had actually been made from his own eyrie. With a pair of binoculars borrowed from a tourist's room, he had deduced that the pagoda must consist of a series of ever-smaller chambers rather than being hollow throughout. He knew this because the monkeys had made the same discovery and could sometimes be seen gallivanting in its cells and grimacing from its windows. They even swarmed the flanged pinnacle on top and from there swung into the trees whose branches dipped conveniently close.

Laki had long since investigated the structure from top to bottom, but had found only the first floor habitable. The diminishing size of the upper chambers made them suitable only for monkeys. They were full of mud-brick chips from his own rooftop target practice, as well as any amount of twigs and excrement. He had decided to keep this first storey monkey-free by setting traps. He caught several quite painfully and they had been variously boiled, roast, curried and stewed. After a while the monkeys became more prudent and although they could still now and then be seen using the pagoda as a climbing frame and cavorting in its ground-floor room, they rarely went into his chamber. Every so often a new generation was born and he had to set his traps again, but it was comparatively easy to discourage them.

On the other hand they still stole any small object he left
in the room, so it was bare but for the motheaten carpet he had installed (until lately the one article of luxury in Room 41) and a wooden box too heavy for the monkeys to lift. This had originally been made to hold the hotel's fuses and wiring, but before it could be put up Laki had spotted that it would just fit through one of the pagoda's narrow embrasures. It was wide and flat and weighted with catapult ammunition. Besides these pebbles it contained a box of matches and a stump of candle, as well as various snares and nooses made of stainless steel wire.

Now he hauled up his bag after him and added to the box several purloined mosquito coils with their flimsy metal stands. Then he sat in the darkness with the crown of his head touching the cement ceiling. He was excited by this room in some way – excited by
concealment,
by knowing of secret niches where he could sit or lie unsuspected. He took delight in coming and going between mysterious haunts known to himself all over Malomba. The creek in the river where he and Jason had swum that morning was merely one of several places he visited regularly, setting traps and picking fruit or simply lying in a shady nook away from the dust and traffic.

Here in the pagoda was a den where he could be the tiger in the garden with his glossy eyes and pelt, full of power. It was a certainty of his that one day when he was a man and married with a family he would still have such places to pass private hours – not doing anything particularly, but just being able to rejoice in a necessary latency. He liked this chamber's smallness. He liked the fact that it reminded him of his room on the roof – even that here, too, a vine had twined itself about the pagoda and hung a spray of flowers and gourds in through two of the six window slits. Periodically the Fathers' gardener hacked it back, but the ubiquitous vine was never daunted for long.

He sat for a while in the dark taking swigs of warm toddy. The vespertine ceremonials were over; even the procathedral's
mournful Lenten tolling had ceased. Instead, the comparative silence of natural sounds filled the night. Frogs roared from the edge of the stream down below, a mosquito whined about his eyelids. Putting an ear to the plastic container, he listened to the soft fizz of toddy fermenting. He mustn't drink too much, he thought, otherwise he would wind up like Raju; the porter would anyway complain that there wasn't enough to see him through his night's vigil. What was more, he had not yet had supper and at this very instant Raju might be polishing off his portion as well. He climbed down to the ground, put the rope back in his bag and set off for the fence. Toddy made his step light and he was whistling again as he reached the gap and wormed through.

A hand fastened on his T-shirt and pulled.

‘Little pus-bubble. Oh yes, now we have you,' said Mr Muffy's voice in accents of real satisfaction, and Laki found himself dragged through the hole even before he had time to jettison the toddy. ‘And what have
you
been doing, swine-face? What evil adventure is it this time?' He jerked the container from his bell-boy's grasp and shook it at eye-level. ‘Kerosene, is it? A bit of fire-raising, maybe, to chase away boredom? But no,' he said, affecting to avert his face fastidiously, ‘our breath gives us away. Pure essence of carrion, boy. You've a stench on you like a toddy-shop harlot.'

It was most unfortunate that Mr Muffy had been in the yard, for normally he went home a good two hours earlier. Today, however, the proprietor had become absorbed by the new adding machine whose buttons he had now mastered. He was about to embark on a great Plan to take the Nirvana up-market in a single dazzling move, to engage the Chinese on their own ground. The idea had come to him all at once, as such things did to men of vision. The monopoly the Chinese enjoyed enabled them to fix their prices scandalously high. If he couldn't provide the same
standards for a third of the price and still turn a decent profit, then he didn't deserve to be a porter in the Wednesday Market. The prospect inflamed and exhilarated him. In sober moments, however, he knew he was going to need allies. Apart from the Chinese themselves, there were powerful cabals in town who would have to be sweetened.

Part of the solution, he knew, lay with the plain-clothes police. They demanded regular payment and occasional tidbits, but it was worth it in return for being thought a good citizen. If he was hoping to compete with hotels such as the Golden Fortune and the Seven Blessings, he would need at the very least to provide a massage service. He had once heard Mr Botiphar, the Mayor's brother, say that foreigners also liked video films of dwarves giving each other colonic irrigations, and suddenly he had felt completely out of his depth. If that was what it took to stay on top in the hotel business, then so be it; but it was evident that the advice and cooperation of the police would be essential. He had hitherto kept his dealings with them to a nervous minimum but could sense that this would no longer suffice. They liked active compliance, they liked to be kept informed. He sighed. The world of big business was indeed hard. One needed enterprise, sure enough; but one also had to become involved in all sorts of distasteful politicking and grovelling … Still, he thought, he was equal to the challenge.

Mr Muffy had fed some projected figures into his machine and the little scroll of paper it spat out caused him much satisfaction. Locking up his office, he was just setting off to tell his wife that if she behaved herself he might soon buy her the gold lamé Hindu pantaloons she coveted when he remembered she had asked him to take a look at the goat and see if it was fat enough to be eaten. He was prodding it when Laki's familiar whistle from beyond the bananas had caught his ear. Now the sight of his bell-boy standing there in shorts and reeking of drink made all too clear the Nirvana's need for radical change.

‘Knife,' he said contentedly, having seized the bag and shaken out its contents. ‘Rope. Looks to me like a clear case of breaking and entering premises at present unknown. But we'll find out, won't we? Or – no, I've got it. We were bringing our dying mother a life-saving draught of her favourite drink, weren't we? We had to penetrate the isolation ward of Malomba General Hospital. The knife was in case you met with opposition from the nursing staff. Of course. Well, I'm deeply touched, boy; deeply touched …' And more in the same ironic vein, during which his grip shifted from the bell-boy's T-shirt to his ear.

Laki, waiting with apparent submission, debated whether to punch his employer in the kidneys and have done with it. In addition to being wonderfully satisfying, it would bring to an end all vacillation and ensure his having to move on. But it would also throw away unfinished all the work he had been putting into the Hemonys. Besides losing his room, he would be banished for ever from the sight of Zoe. Despite the pain in his ear (for Mr Muffy was all the while leading him off through the yard, the kitchens, and along the passage to his office behind the front desk) Laki decided to endure. An end to his troubles was in sight and it would be a pity to spoil it all … He would not have been able to say quite how his troubles were going to end, only that he had a definite feeling about the foreign family with which he was building up such cordial relations. Kindness did not go unrewarded, he knew, especially when one was dealing with spiritual visitors. And anyway, foreigners of all kinds were notorious for their impulsive acts of generosity to evade embarrassment, as well as for their miraculous power to change people's lives.

‘… and then I think we'll telephone the Beetles and give their canes some practice. Warm up that juicy little rump of yours, turdlet, h'm? Oh turdlet, turdlet. It's a criminal child I've been feeding and housing all these years. Dear, dear …'