Prologue

The bus smelled of hot vinyl and somebody’s chips.

It was going east along Camelback Road at the speed of a bus, which was not fast, in the last of the light. The sun had gone down behind the mountains at a quarter past seven and taken nothing with it. The sky was the colour of the inside of a peach, and the road was the colour of a griddle, and the air that came in when the doors opened at each stop came in like something out of an oven that somebody had opened to check on.

The sign over the driver’s head said it was 103 degrees.

There were five of them on the back seats, the long one across the back and the two that faced each other in front of it, and they were the only people on the bus under fifty except the driver, who was perhaps forty, and who had looked at the five of them getting on, one after another, in suits, at a stop outside a hotel on a Tuesday evening, and had decided, visibly, in about a second and a half, that he was not going to find out.

Theo was beside the window, on the left of the back seat, with the fare card still in his hand. It was a plastic card with a picture of a cactus on it, a saguaro with its arms up, and he had bought it at the airport the day before because, he had said, you always buy the card. Nobody had asked him why. Nobody had known what the card was for. Theo was holding it now the way some people hold a passport at a border, flat in his palm, ready.

Lukas was on the seat facing them, with the route map. He had taken it out of the rack by the doors when they got on and unfolded it, the whole thing, which was a very large map of the whole of the Valley, with coloured lines on it running in every direction, and he was holding it up in front of his face at arm’s length and turning it slowly, a few degrees at a time, the way he turned a chart of the sky until the stars on the paper lay the same way as the ones above him.

“We are here,” said Lukas, to the map.

“We’re on a bus,” said Theo.

“The bus is here.” Lukas put his finger on a line. “Going this way.” He turned the map a few more degrees. “Or this way.”

“It’s going east.”

“Then this way,” said Lukas, satisfied, and went on looking at it.

Jack was asleep.

He had been asleep since the second stop. He was beside Theo, with his head back against the window and his mouth slightly open and his face, which had been the colour of skimmed milk when he came out of the arrivals hall at Sky Harbor on Monday, now the colour of a tomato, apart from two pale rings round his eyes where his sunglasses had been all morning at the water works. He had said, getting on, I’m just going to rest my eyes, Hanover, and had rested them, and was now breathing very deeply through his nose in the way people do on buses after a day in 108 degrees in a suit that was not theirs.

Alexander sat opposite Frederick, beside Lukas, very upright, with his hands on his knees.

He had not moved since he sat down. He sat on a bus the way he sat in the front row of a cathedral, as though somebody might at any moment come down the aisle with something on a cushion and he would have to receive it correctly. Every time the bus stopped he looked at the doors. Every time they opened he looked at whoever got on, briefly, with total attention, and then looked away again, satisfied that they were not a threat to anything, and returned his gaze to a point about two feet in front of his own face.

“You can lean back,” said Frederick.

“I know,” said the German Emperor, and did not.

Frederick leaned back himself, to show him.

The seat was hot through his shirt. He had taken his tie off on the service road and put it in his jacket pocket, and taken his jacket off at the bus stop and put it over his arm, and he could feel the shirt sticking to the seat already, all the way down. He did not mind. He found that he did not mind anything. He was on a bus. Nobody had made him a programme for the bus. Nobody had sent him a note about the bus, or a briefing, or a list of the people he would meet on the bus with their names spelled phonetically. Nobody on the bus, except the four people with him, knew who he was, and the driver had decided not to find out, and the old man across the aisle in a cowboy hat had looked at him once, and at his shoes, and said, “Hot one,” and Frederick had said, “Yes,” and that had been the whole of it.

He thought it was possibly the best moment of his life.

He thought that, and then, because it was the kind of thought that made you want to check that everything was where it should be, he put his hand in his trouser pocket.

There were coins in it. Twenty of them, a weight against his leg. Pound coins, warm. He had taken them on Monday morning from the dish by the north-wing kitchen door, because twenty had seemed like a great deal, and he had still not worked out what else you did with them.

He put his hand in the other pocket.

There was nothing in the other pocket.

He felt the jacket over his arm. The inside pocket: the tie. The outside pockets: a programme for the opening of the North Gateway Water Treatment Works, folded in four, and a small paper packet of salt that a woman at the water works had pressed on him at about eleven in the morning in case he felt faint.

He sat very still.

He knew exactly where it was. He could see it. It was on the bed in his room on the third floor of the hotel, on the white cover, where he had thrown it at a quarter past five when he went in to change his shirt, because it had buzzed again with something from the press office about the plaque, and he had thrown it on the bed with a small, private violence, and changed his shirt, and gone out, and not picked it up.

He could see the rest of it too.

He could see the room, with the curtains drawn against the evening and the air conditioning humming and his good shoes on the floor by the wardrobe where he had kicked them off. He could see the bed. He could see the phone on the bed, face up, lighting up. He could hear it. It had a ring he had never changed, the one it had come with, a sort of bright plinking, and he could hear it now, quite clearly, on a bus going east on Camelback Road, three miles away, ringing in an empty room.

And he could see who was standing over it.

He could see her quite clearly. She would be standing at the foot of the bed with her own phone to her ear, listening to his ring in the room and in her ear at the same time, and her face would be doing nothing at all. That was the worst of it. Castellanos’s face had done things, small ones, a look at the ceiling, a breath through the nose. Sergeant Kimura’s face, when she was angry, did nothing at all, which was much worse, and which he had seen exactly once, in June, at a lunch in the Palace with a bishop who had tried to take his photograph.

“Freddie,” said Theo.

“Mm.”

“You’ve gone a funny colour.”

“I’m fine.”

Theo looked at him for a long moment with the expression he had in maths when he had got to the answer before the teacher and was deciding whether to say.

“You left your phone,” said Theo.

“No.”

“You did. You keep feeling your pockets. You’ve felt them four times.” Theo looked out of the window. “It’s fine. I’ve got mine. Jack’s got his. Lukas has got about three.”

“Two,” said Lukas, behind the map.

“It’s not fine,” said Frederick. “She’ll have rung it.”

“Course she’ll have rung it.” Theo watched the road go by, the low pale buildings, a petrol station lit up like a stage, a man on a corner holding a sign about mattresses in 103 degrees with tremendous dignity. “She’ll have rung it, and it’ll have rung on the bed, and she’ll be standing there listening to it.” He thought about it. “She’ll be pretty mad.”

“Thank you, Theo.”

“I’m just saying.”

The bus stopped. The doors opened. The oven came in. A woman got on with a bag of shopping and a small boy in a baseball cap, and paid, and the small boy looked down the length of the bus at the five of them on the back seats, in their good trousers and their shirts stuck to their backs, the sleeping one and the one with the map and the one sitting as though he were in church, and his mouth opened, slowly, and his mother said, “Sit down, Mateo,” without looking, and he sat down, and looked at them over the back of his seat all the way to the next stop.

Alexander looked at Mateo with complete seriousness, and inclined his head, very slightly, an inch.

Mateo ducked.

“Don’t do that,” said Frederick.

“He was looking at me.”

“Everybody’s looking at you. You’re sitting like a statue of yourself.”

Alexander considered this. Then, very slowly, as though it were a manoeuvre that would require all his concentration, he unfolded his hands from his knees and leaned back against the seat, until his shoulders touched it, and stayed there, rigid, at an angle of about eighty degrees.

“Better,” said Lukas, from behind the map, without looking.

Theo had turned back to the window. He was holding the cactus card in both hands now, on his knees, and he was looking out at the road, and the light, and the mountains to the north going from purple to grey, and the lights coming on along the street one after another in a line, and his face was doing something that Frederick had not seen it do all day, since half past six in the morning, when they had both been standing in a car park in their suits in the desert with the sun coming up and nobody had said the word.

“Happy birthday to me,” said Theo, to the window.

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Then Jack, who was asleep, said, without opening his eyes, “Happy birthday, mate,” and went on being asleep, and Lukas lowered the map six inches and looked at Theo over the top of it, and Alexander inclined his head, an inch, to the back of Theo’s head, which was the most anybody had ever seen him do on public transport.

Frederick did not say it. He was going to say it properly, later, somewhere better than the back of a bus, and he had a plan, and the plan had not included leaving his phone on a bed.

He looked back down the length of the bus, through the rear window, at the road behind them, going west, into the last of the peach-coloured light, towards the hotel, and the room on the third floor, and the white bed, and the bright little plinking ring that he could hear, quite clearly, if he let himself, going on and on and on, and the woman standing at the foot of the bed with her phone to her ear, saying nothing.

It was a quarter to eight.

It had been, he thought, a very long day. It had started with a plaque.