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Armin is elbow deep in soapsuds and fuming. Didn’t his brother realise, when he organised him the job to get him close to the target, that it would confine Armin to the bowels of the hotel, the backwater, the scrap heap, the garbage end of business? Here with the plumped-up plates of the rich, the soufflés and the foie gras and the jellied eel with caviar – how did they manage jellied eel in a warzone, he wonders. (The caviar, he saw, came from a can.) All of these so-called delicacies, by the time they reach Armin, are no more than smears on plates. The sad wilted salads, the gravies clumped with half-chewed gristle. Only the expensive stuff – the sturgeon roe, the shell-less shrimps – get eaten clean off plates. Even the rich are greedy for the fine stuff. Especially the rich. That’s how they got that way.
But how did he get here? And how the hell is he going to get out?
A fucking dog! André, the sous-chef, his voice tremulous with indignation, throws a side plate into the sink where Armin labours. As if he can’t get the china to leave his hand fast enough.
She feeds her dog on my tartare!
The hair at Armin’s nape lifts up. She’s here, right now. Upstairs in the dining room, at her customary table in the corner, with her Lulu dog, a fluffy white thing that reminds Armin of a handbag, the way she keeps it tucked under her arm when she goes out into the street. He’s watched her from out there before. They all have. His brother, him, the others in the unit. But they can’t get to her from there. It has to be inside.
So here he is, inside, but on the fringes and so far from the guests and their day-to-day comings and goings (unless you count the stale leavings on their plates) that he might as well be working in the falafel stall down the road. Not that it’s there anymore. Bombed out last Tuesday. It was a mistake, of course. Doesn’t matter which side set the bombs – and either one of them had reason to target the nearby embassy. Sophia’s falafels were loved by all, rebel or partisan or government stooge. Even the tourists, when they left the gilt-edged velvet-draped dining room and ventured onto the street, would stop there for a falafel, to taste some of the local colour. Now Sophia’s, and Sophia herself, were gone. But the ambassador – he had survived. And his wife was sitting upstairs with a poodle with the need to relieve itself of some steak tartare.
Armin pulls the plug on the sink, pulls his apron over his head, and informs André that he’s taking a smoke break. But once through the swinging doors he doesn’t turn right towards the staff exit, but left, along the corridor and up the stairs to the back of reception. He can linger there a while, his eye on the revolving doors that lead out onto the street, without anybody taking offence. He’ll talk to Bea, the receptionist, about her mother, who was from his village, about the people left behind there, being persecuted for their faith and their ethnicity and the land they had, stony and inhospitable as it was, that the other side wanted.
The old lady comes through into the reception area just as he is starting to get stiff from his angle against the counter, leaning, over-casual, so that he can watch the lobby but escape the eye of the floor manager.
That woman – he nods to the old lady and Bea’s gaze follows his – her husband could stop it all. Then more softly – If we could just get to him.
She seems still to be taking this in as he detaches himself from the counter and says, with a nonchalance he doesn’t feel, I’m going for a walk.
But at the door he is confounded. If it was the kind that opened out he could have held it for her, gained her trust with his gallantry. As it is he will either have to force himself into the same revolving compartment as her, or be confined in a separate pie-shaped glass booth, following her around a pivot; she would be spun out into the street and he would be left revolving helplessly without her.
He lets momentum decide, shoving himself into the circling cubicle with her, ignoring the dog’s indignant growl, and feeling the weight of the gun pressed sharply into his side as they shuffle sideways together in an awkward dance.
Please, he says to her, I need to talk to you.
