fired a single shot, and Konstantine’s head exploded in a splatter of blood and brains, which sprayed over George’s trousers, drenching them red.
‘Scheisse!’ George shouted involuntarily, pulling his legs away, and he heard Valentin laugh.
He reached the door just in time to splash a gout of vomit over the landing. Down below in the yard he could see the bodies of the other Georgians, both of them surrounded by pools of welling blood. The man who had opened the street door for them had almost reached the cover of the vaulted passageway before he was hit and he lay with arms outstretched as if trying to drag himself away from the bullets.
‘Come on, George,’ Valentin said behind him. ‘Help us clean up this shit.’
September 1999
The first time Joseph Coker saw George he had the peculiar feeling that he was looking at a jumbled up version of himself, and, as it happened, this wasn’t far from the truth. A careful observer might have noted that their skins were both the same shade of light burnt ochre, that they were roughly the same height and weight, that they had the same straight, broad nose, and the same long upper lip, with a little peak in the middle, the sort of feature that Joseph’s wife had pronounced cute in the days when they first got together. Joseph must have noticed, but, oddly enough, when he looked back at his memories of that first time none of these characteristics came to mind, and, during the months which followed that first meeting, he was never quite able to admit that they looked very much alike. On the contrary what he remembered later about his first sight of George was his hair.
Perhaps he would have paid more attention if he’d been prepared for the encounter, but his only warning had been a phone call from the reception desk which came just after he had walked into the hotel room and tossed his jacket on the bed.
‘Mr,’ the receptionist hesitated over the pronunciation, ‘Mr Cocker,’ she said eventually. ‘Your visitor is here.’
She put the phone down before he could ask who it was, and after a moment of indecision he shrugged the jacket back on and set out for the lobby.
The organisers had put him in a hotel ‘on the outskirts’ of the city, perhaps because his had been a late invitation. Most of the other film makers seemed to have been accommodated in the hotels clustered around Wenceslas Square, and at first Joseph had been irritated by the prospect of being out of touch with the action. During the odd moments when his colleagues would be dropping into the cafés to rap with the local movers and shakers, he thought, he’d be struggling out to the suburbs. On the other hand, even though he already knew it would be very different, the mental image he’d had of the city was of somewhere the size of London, where a trip to the outskirts would have taken at least an hour; but to his astonishment the drive from his hotel to the centre of Prague had been a matter of less than fifteen minutes. It had seemed shorter because he was busy looking around, trying to fix in his mind the qualities of the scene through which he was moving. He had also been nervous, anxious about how the film would be received, and what he would say afterwards.
He needn’t have worried. He had imagined his film up on the screen of a cinema, with rows of upturned faces following every move, but the showing actually took place in a large room on the first floor of a building sandwiched between a hotel and a shopping mall. The audience consisted of hardly more than a dozen people, and all the way through their attention was distracted by the sound of music from somewhere outside. The problem was, as one of the organisers explained to him later on, that his film had been scheduled at the same time as The Exorcist. The director was in the city that day, and everyone wanted to be at the session where he would speak. Hearing this, Joseph had to admit that he would have preferred to meet the famous director rather than watch his own film once again, and he had the depressing feeling that his audience were mainly people who had not been able to secure tickets for the main event, or festival staff whose duty it was to be there.
In the circumstances, after that day’s session at the festival he felt more or less relieved to be at a distance from the crowd of students, cinéastes and journalists swarming like wasps around the group of writers and directors whose films were on show. Even so, he guessed that, for some reason, one of them had managed to track him and was now lying in wait for him downstairs. The idea was curiously annoying.
In the lift he wondered about the way the receptionist had pronounced Coker. He had told them his name at the desk when he checked in, emphasising the long vowel, and he was surprised that she had found it difficult. After all it sounded not unlike Coca Cola, and that had to be one of the more familiar brand names in Prague. But Jarvis Cocker might have toured the area, or maybe his near namesake, old Joe Cocker. That would account for it. He’d recognised the voice of the receptionist, a stocky blonde whose broad features had a battered look, and he remembered that, out of all the women who worked on the desk, she was the one who spoke the most fluent English. Perhaps he’d ask her why she had said his name that way.
Stepping out of the lift he’d begun framing the words in which he would put the question, but when she saw him she merely smiled and pointed towards the far end of the lobby. Looking in that direction he saw a group of middle-aged Germans sitting together, but he’d already seen them all in the morning, or perhaps it was an exactly similar group, plump, pink and noisy, moving with a ponderous speed towards the buffet tables. He looked back at the receptionist and she pointed again. This time he followed the line of the gesture and saw an armchair next to the windows, facing away from the room. Poking over the top of it was a tuft of blond curls.
Immediately Joseph began riffling through his memory of the day, searching for a woman whose hair was cut in this dramatic style, then the head moved, turning to face him, and he saw that the curls belonged to a man. The hairstyle was actually a fairly conventional fade, with the two sides of the head cut short and the middle part fluffed up and dyed blond with an auburn undertone which he suspected was natural, since his own hair was patched with the same light streaks. In the same instant he saw that the man’s skin was light brown, like his own, and it struck him that this was a black man with a white parent, like himself. Another visitor from England, he guessed. Perhaps a tourist who had seen him enter the hotel and stopped in to say hello. He must be on some kind of business, Joseph thought, because his clothes had none of the casual flavour that most of the tourists affected. Unusually, he was dressed in a neat dark suit and a white shirt with an open collar; and even with the punky hairdo, he looked stylish, almost elegant.
‘Hiya man,’ Joseph called out, ‘what are you doing here?’
In reply the man stood up and stuck his hand out in greeting.
‘Hello mister,’ he said.
Joseph couldn’t place the accent, and for a moment he thought it was a joke. Then, looking at the expression of polite diffidence on the man’s face, it struck him that this must be a black man who belonged to the region. He felt a surge of excitement at the idea. He knew that there would be mixed-race people dotted around various parts of Europe, but meeting one made him feel a bit like an explorer encountering another one of his own kind in the middle of an uncharted wilderness.
‘Hello,’ Joseph said. He took the man’s hand and shook it. ‘How are you?’ He couldn’t think of anything else to say. His mind went back to the reason for the man’s presence. Perhaps he’d been at the festival and was eager to meet privately with the black director from England. Joseph smiled, trying to communicate the sense of comradeship the man must have been seeking. ‘Were you at the festival today? I’m Joseph Coker.’
The man smiled back at him.
‘I know. I read of you in the newspaper,’ he said. ‘I am George Coker.’
His English seemed almost perfect, but he spoke slowly,