The Business

The plane wheeled abruptly, engines roaring and then cutting out.  That left only the roaring in my ears, then.  The co-pilot appeared, looking pleased with himself.  Through the plane's windscreen, not far in front, I could see a set of soccer goalposts.  He kicked open the door, which whammed down and jerked on its chain like a hanged man. 'Here we are,' he said.

I unbuckled, rose unsteadily and stepped out on to the dusty brown ground.  I was suddenly surrounded by a sea of knee- and thigh-high children kitted out to resemble small cushions, while a crowd of adults dressed in what looked like colourful quilts appeared and started congratulating the flight crew on another safe landing.  The terminal building was still the fuselage of a USAAF DC3 that had crash-landed here during the Second World War.  It was closed.  A wind as cold and thin and sharp as a knife cut across the landing strip, raising dust and goose pimples.  I patted a selection of worryingly sticky little heads and looked up past the jumbled buildings of the town to the steep slope of chaotically fractured rocks over which we had made our final approach.  Prayer flags everywhere, like bunting round a used boulder lot.  Beneath my feet were the markings for one of the football ground's penalty boxes.  One of the male quilt-people came up to me, put his hands together as though in prayer and bowed and said, 'Ms Telman, welcome to Thuhn International Airport.'

I successfully resisted the urge to laugh hysterically in his face.

'I say, did you know that you can count up to over one thousand just using your fingers?'

'Really?'

'Yes.  Can you guess how?  I bet you can't.'

'You'd…use a different base, I suppose, not ten.  Ah, of course; binary.  Yes.  It'd be…one thousand and twenty-four.'

'One thousand and twenty-three, actually.  Zero to one thousand and twenty-three.  Gosh, though, well done.  That was very quick.  I must have bored you with this before.  Have I?'

'No, Mr Hazleton.'

'Then I'm impressed.  And you know my name, and here I am and I've very rudely forgotten yours, though I'm sure we were introduced earlier.  I do hope you'll forgive me.'

'Kathryn Telman, Mr Hazleton.'

'Kathryn, how do you do.  I do believe I've heard of you.'

We shook hands.  It was November 1989, in Berlin, the week the Wall came down.  I'd squeezed myself into a Lufthansa flight from London (jump seat, snooty stewardesses) just that day, determined to be there for a bit of history that had seemed unthinkable just a few years earlier.  A whole bunch of the more adventurous Business high-ups had had exactly the same idea — Tempelhof and Tegel must have been double-parked with executive jets for those few days — and as a result almost by default there was a sort of impromptu meeting of various Level Twos and Ones set up for that evening.  I'd decided to try and gatecrash that as well, and succeeded.

We were sitting down to di

I had indeed been introduced to Hazleton at the reception before di

He'd just nodded at me as he'd sat down and then ignored me throughout the first course, as though he'd really chosen this seat at random or had taken it reluctantly, then suddenly he'd come up with this unlikely chat-up line about digital digits.  I had become used to this sort of thing from upper-class Englishmen.  At least he had used the second person, rather than 'one'.

'And if one used one's toes,' he said, 'one could go up to over a million.' (Oh, so we were using 'one', were we?)

'Impractical, though,' I said.

'Yes, you'd have to take your socks or stockings off.' (Back to 'you', then.)

'I was thinking,' I said, 'of the difficulty of articulating your toes.'

'Oh.  Yes.  How do you mean?'

'Well, you can use your fingers to count because you can alter their state, bend each one to show whether it's a zero or a one, but very few people can do anything similar with their toes.  They just sort of sit there, don't they?'

He thought about this. 'I can put my little toes over the ones next to them.'

'Really?  On both sides?'

'Yes.  Good, eh?'

'Then assuming you can put each of your big toes over the one next to them, you could count to, what, just over sixteen thousand.'

'I suppose so.' He contemplated his entrée for a moment. 'I can wiggle my ears, you know.'

'Never!'

'Yes.  Watch.'

'Good heavens!'

We amused each other with a selection of childish antics like this for a while, then got on to puzzles.

'I've got one,' I said. 'What are the next two letters in this sequence? S, T, N, D, R, D?'

He sat back.  I had to repeat the letters for him.  He looked thoughtful. 'S, D,' he said.

'No.'

'Yes, it is.  It's "standardised" with all the vowels taken out.'

'No, it isn't.'

'Why not?' he asked indignantly. 'That's a perfectly good answer.'

'The correct one's much better.'

He made a noise which sounded suspiciously close to a 'harrumph', and sat back with his arms crossed. 'Well, so you tell me, young lady.'

'Want a clue?'

'Oh, if you insist.'

'First clue.  I'll write it down.' I took my napkin and lipstick and wrote: S T  N D  R D   _ _.

He bent over the napkin, then looked up at me sceptically. 'That's a clue?'

'The gaps, the spacing.  That's the clue.'

He looked unconvinced.  He carefully extracted a pair of half-moon glasses from his breast pocket and put them on.  He peered at the napkin over the top of them.

'Want another clue?'

'Wait, wait,' he said, holding up one hand.  'All right,' he said eventually.

'Second clue: it's a very simple sequence.'

'Really?  Hmm.'

'The simplest.  That's your third clue.  Actually it's your fourth clue, too, and I've already given you the answer.'

'Uh-huh.'

He gave in at last. 'Well, I think the answer is S, D, and you're just being a tease,' he told me, folding the glasses and putting them away.

'The answer is T, H.'

He looked at the napkin.  I wrote the last two letters into the space. 'No,' he said. 'I still don't see.'

'Watch.' I wrote a large 1 in front of the letters ST.  I didn't need to add the 2, the 3 or the 4.

'Ah,' he said, nodding. 'Very clever.  Haven't heard of that one before.'

'You wouldn't have.  I made it up myself.'

'Really?' He looked at me. 'You are a clever little thing, aren't you?'

I used my wintry smile.

I woke up in darkness, breathless.  I was gasping for air, drowning in what felt like a semi-vacuum beneath a huge and terrible weight.  Darkness.  Not just ordinary darkness but total darkness; profound and utter and somehow intensifying the breathlessness.  Where was I?  Berlin?  No, that had been a dream, or something remembered.  Blysecrag?  Chilly enough for one of the turret rooms.  I looked for my watch.  The bed felt small and cold and odd.  Nebraska?  The air outside the bed, as well as feeling absurdly cold, didn't smell right.  The bedclothes were far too heavy.  My breath hurt my throat.  There was a very strange smell in the air.  Where the hell was I?