Anansi Boys

“This afternoon.”

“You are, I take it, joshing with me.”

“Not at all.”

A computer screen was gazed at, lugubriously. A keyboard was tapped. “It doesn’t look like there’s anything out there for less than twelve hundred dollars.”

“Oh.” Fat Charlie slumped.

More keyboard clicking. The man sniffed. “That can’t be right.” Then he said, “Hold on.” A phone call. “Is this rate still valid?” He jotted down some figures on a scratch pad. He looked up at Fat Charlie. “If you could go out for a week and stay at the Dolphin Hotel, I could get you a week’s vacation for five hundred dollars, with your meals at the hotel thrown in. The flight will only cost you airport tax.”

Fat Charlie blinked. “Is there a catch?”

“It’s an island tourism promotion. Something to do with the music festival. I didn’t think it was still going on. But then, you know what they say. You get what you pay for. And if you want to eat anywhere else it will cost you.”

Fat Charlie gave the man five crumpled hundred-dollar bills.

DAISY WAS STARTING TO FEEL LIKE THE KIND OF COP YOU only ever see in movies: tough, hard-bitten, and perfectly ready to buck the system; the kind of cop who wants to know whether or not you feel lucky or if you’re interested in making his day, and particularly the kind of cop who says “I’m getting too old for this shit.” She was twenty-six years old, and she wanted to tell people she was too old for this shit. She was quite aware of how ridiculous this was, thank you very much.

At this moment, she was standing in Detective Superintendent Camberwell’s office and saying, “Yes, sir. Saint Andrews.”

“Went there on my holidays some years back, with the former Mrs. Camberwell. Very pleasant place. Rum cake.”

“That sounds like the place, sir. The closed-circuit footage from Gatwick is definitely him. Traveling under the name of Bronstein. Roger Bronstein flies to Miami, changes planes, and takes a connection to Saint Andrews.”

“You’re sure it’s him?”

“Sure.”

“Well,” said Camberwell. “That buggers us good and proper, doesn’t it? No extradition treaty.”

“There must be something we can do.”

“Mm. We can freeze his remaining accounts and grab his assets, and we will, and that’ll be as much use to us as a water-soluble umbrella, because he’ll have lots of cash sitting in places we can’t find it or touch it.”

Daisy said, “But that’s cheating.”

He looked up at her as if he wasn’t certain exactly what he was looking at. “It’s not a playground game of tag. If they kept the rules, they’d be on our side. If he comes back, then we arrest him.” He squashed a little Plasticine man into a Plasticine ball and began to mash it out into a flat sheet, pinching it between finger and thumb. “In the old days,” he said, “they could claim sanctuary in a church. If you stayed in the church the law couldn’t touch you. Even if you killed a man. Of course, it limited your social life. Right.”

He looked at her as if he expected her to leave now. She said, “He killed Maeve Livingstone. He’s been cheating his clients blind for years.”

“And?”

“We should be bringing him to justice.”

“Don’t let it get to you,” he said.

Daisy thought, I’m getting too old for this shit. She kept her mouth shut, and the words simply went round and round inside her head.

“Don’t let it get to you,” he repeated. He folded the Plasticine sheet into a rough cube, then squeezed it viciously between finger and thumb. “I don’t let any of it get to me. Think of it as if you were a traffic warden. Grahame Coats is just a car that parked on the double yellow lines but drove off before you were able to give him a ticket. Yes?”

“Sure,” said Daisy. “Of course. Sorry.”

“Right,” he said.

She went back to her desk, went to the Police internal Web site, and examined her options for several hours. Finally, she went home. Carol was sitting in front of Coronation Street, eating a microwavable chicken korma.

“I’m taking a break,” said Daisy. “I’m going on holiday.”