The Business

Teams of yaks moved through constantly branching tu

A masked man I knew not to trust was doing a complicated trick with cups and hats and my little netsuke monkey, shifting them around the table while people placed bets and laughed.  The masked man's mouth was visible and he was missing lots of teeth, but they weren't really missing at all: some had been blacked out as though he was an actor.

I woke up, wondering where I was again.  Thulahn?  Not cold enough.  But, then, I'd been moved to a more hotel-like room.  But still not Thulahn.  I remembered the smell of the Heavenly Luck Tea House.  Yorkshire?  No.  London?  No, Château d'Oex.  Ah yes.  Nice room.  Valley view.  Alone.  Nobody here.  I felt groggily across the bed.  No, no one here.  Monkey gone.  This monkey's gone to heaven — wasn't that a Pixies' song?  Dulsung.  Why hadn't she been in my dream?  And who's this 'we' anyway, white man?  Na, nothing.  Sleep again.

There was time to kill at the Grimsel Pass.  I sat in the 7-series waiting for Poudenhaut, reading the Herald Tribune.  The phone rang and it was, at last, Stephen.

'Kathryn?  Hi.  Sorry for the delay.  Daniella was ru

'That's all right.  It's good to hear you.'

'What was it you wanted to talk about?  Nothing too urgent, I hope.'

'Hold on.' I got out of the car, only just beating Happy Hans, my white-haired chauffeur, to the draw: he had his cap on, he was out of his door and reaching for the outside handle of my door while I was still pushing.  He drew the door fully open as I got out into the chill air of the early afternoon.  The car park was gravel, uneven.  I nodded to Hans and let him put my coat over my shoulders before I walked off, heading away from the quaintly painted old wooden i

'Kathryn?'

I stopped at the low wall, looking down the valley at the road winding into Italy.

'Still here, Stephen,' I said. 'Listen, what I have to tell you is pretty bad news.'

'Oh, yeah?' He sounded only a little wary at first. 'What?  How bad?'

I took a deep breath.  The air was cold; I could feel its raw, numbing touch in my nostrils and at the back of my throat and could sense it filling my lungs. 'It's about Emma.'

I told him.  He was silent, mostly.  I told him all of it: about the DVD, Hazleton's involvement, the dates and places and the obligation that Hazleton expected of me.  He was so quiet.  I wondered if perhaps none of this was coming as a great shock at all.  Maybe, I thought, they had an open relationship that he'd never wanted to tell me about in case it encouraged me.  Maybe Hazleton had been upset that I'd told him I'd made my mind up but that I wasn't going to tell him what my decision was yet, and he had told Stephen.

But no.  Stephen was just stu

He said, 'Yes,' once or twice, and, 'I see,' and, 'Right.'

'Stephen, I'm sorry.' Silence. 'That's hopelessly inadequate, I know.' More silence. 'I just hope you…Stephen, I've thought about this for a long time.  Two weeks.  I didn't know what to do.  I still don't know that I'm doing the right thing.  I think it's all pretty horrible, including Hazleton's part in it, and making me have anything to do with it, too.  I want you to know I'm not enjoying this.  I'm trying to be straight with you, trying to be honest.  I could have got Hazleton to let you know without me being —'

'All right! ' he said loudly, almost shouting.  Then, 'Sorry.  All right, Kathryn.  I take the point.  I guess you did the right thing.'

I looked up at the blue, blue sky. 'You're going to hate me for this, aren't you?'

'I don't know what I'm going to feel, Kathryn.  I feel…I don't know.  Winded.  Yeah, sort of winded, like when you fall on your back and can't breathe, but…hey, a lot worse, you know?'

'Yeah, I know.  Stephen, I'm so sorry.'

'Oh.  Well.  I guess it had to be done.  Jeez.' He sounded like he might be about to laugh or cry.  Breath whistled out of him. 'Some start to the day.'

'Is Emma there?'

'No, still away…Well, just coming back today.  God, the bitch.'

'You take it easy, okay?'

'Huh?  Yeah, sure.  Sure.  Ah, and thanks.  I guess.'

'Look, call me whenever, all right?  Get your breath back.  But keep in touch.  Call me later.  Will you?'

'Ah, yeah.  Yeah, right.  I'll… Goodbye, Kathryn.  Goodbye.'

'Good — ' The phone clicked off. ' — bye,' I said.

I closed my eyes.  Somewhere down the road, in Italy, I could hear the muted rasp of a high-performance engine, coming closer.

Lunch was a disappointment.  Poudenhaut couldn't stop talking about his car, a shiny red 355 soft-top with a black hood.  He'd driven me here in it, keeping the revs below five thousand because even though the engine was meant to have been run-in on the bench he just wanted to be sure.  Hans and the BMW would appear here later to take me back to the château.  We were in a modern glass and steel restaurant in the trees above an archetypically twee village that looked like it was composed of scaled-up cuckoo clocks: on the hour you expected a door under the eaves to flap open and Heidi to bounce out at the end of a giant spring.

We both drank spring water.  The food was Swiss-German, not my favourite cuisine, so it was easy to save plenty of space for a pudding, which was satisfyingly rich and chocolaty.

Poudenhaut tore his gaze away from the Ferrari again (he'd insisted on a table with a view of the car park). 'Yes, why did you want to see me?'

Nettle-grasping time again. 'I wanted to ask you what you were doing at the Silex plant the other day.'

His big, puffy face stared at me over our gently steaming coffee.  He blinked a few times.  I wondered which way he'd jump. 'Silex?' he said.  He frowned and concentrated on stirring some sugar into his espresso.

'You know, the chip plant in Scotland.  What took you up there, Adrian?'

I watched him decide.  He wasn't going for total denial.  Something closer to the truth. 'I was looking into something.'

'What was that?'

'Well, I can't say.'

'Was this for Mr Hazleton?'

He stirred his coffee slowly, then brought the little cup to his lips. 'Mm-hmm,' he said, and sipped.

'I see,' I said. 'I take it he had his suspicions too, then.'

'Suspicions?'

'About what was going on in there.'

He put on a serious face. 'Hmm.' His gaze flickered all over me.

'Come to any conclusions?'

He shrugged. 'How about you?'

I sat closer, leaning into the fragrant vapours rising from my coffee. 'There was something hidden in there.'

'In the plant?'

'Yes.  Ideal place, when you think about it.  Chip factories have brilliant security anyway.  You know how much chips are worth: more than their weight in gold.  So the places are really well guarded.  Then there's the whole prophylactic rigmarole you have to go through to get into the production facilities; all that changing and delay.  Impossible to just charge in.  Giving people inside time to hide stuff, if you know somebody who might ask awkward questions is coming in.  Plus there are all those deeply noxious chemicals they use, the etching fluids, the solvents and washes; really nasty chemical-warfare stuff any rational person would keep well away from.  So as well as all the usual security paraphernalia, the guards and walls and cameras and so on, and the sheer difficulty of accessing the place quickly, you've got a serious health disincentive to go there in the first place.  It's perfect, the ideal place to hide whatever.  I took a look round three or four weeks ago, but I couldn't find anything.'