The Call

At a quarter to six in the morning Sergeant Ruth Kimura was standing in the forecourt of the Arizona Biltmore beside a car with a crack across its windscreen, and she had not eaten anything since a sandwich at half past five the night before.

She had been offered food. Castellanos had offered her half of a filling-station sandwich four times, the last time at about half past four, outside a closed diner on Scottsdale Road, and she had said no four times, and he had stopped offering, because he had worked beside her two years and knew what the fourth no meant. The night manager of the Biltmore had offered her breakfast at a quarter past four, when she had come back through the lobby to look at the King’s suite again, as if it might have changed. She had not taken that either. She would eat when she had found him. Nobody had taught her that. It was just true.

The forecourt was grey. The lamps along the drive were still on, but they were losing to the sky, which had gone the colour of a pigeon over the palms to the east. It was eighty-six degrees. A man in a hotel shirt was hosing down the paving by the door, slowly, the way men hose things down at dawn everywhere, and he had looked at her once when he came out and then not again, which was the right amount.

In the inside pocket of her jacket she had the King’s phone.

She had picked it up off the bed at a quarter to eight, after it had rung out under her own name. She had carried it all night. It had fourteen missed calls on it now, every one of them hers, because for the first two hours she had kept ringing it from her own phone without thinking, out of pure habit, the way you go on pressing the button for a lift, and it had gone on buzzing against her ribs each time like a second heart.

She had not told anybody.

That was the thing. That was the whole of the night, when she looked at it, which she had been doing for ten hours. At twenty to eight she had stood in an empty corridor outside an empty suite, and she had had, by her own count, about nine seconds in which to decide whether this was a night that would be written down, and she had decided that it was not. No call to the Phoenix police. No call to the March. No call to the Household in New Westminster, where it was a quarter to eleven at night and Dame Margaret Roper would have been in her dressing gown with a book. Five officers of the King’s own detail, and a man off duty from Tucson with a cracked windscreen, and nobody else in the world.

She had been right. She had known she was right at twenty to eight and she knew it now. She had also been wrong, in the way you are always wrong about a decision like that until it comes out right, and it had not come out yet.

Beside the car, Castellanos was drinking coffee out of a paper cup from a filling station on Indian School Road. It was his third. He had driven up from his mother’s in Tucson in a little under two hours with a crack across his windscreen that the March’s traffic police would have had views on, and he had not once since he arrived said I told you so, or when I was on the detail, or anything at all about the night except, when she asked him, where to look next; and they had still been one bar behind, every time since he came, from Coach House to the plaza.

At five past three on Winfield Scott Plaza they had been three minutes behind.

Three minutes. They had waited at Boondocks for a rematch that never came, until a quarter to two. At twenty to two the man on the door had come over to the car and bent down to her window and asked her again, very politely, as one professional to another, and she had said no again, and he had nodded and gone back to his wristbands. They had gone back through Old Town at two, when the bars that shut at two turned out into the street all at once and there were ten thousand people on the pavements and none of them were five. They had gone back to Boondocks, because a word had been underlined twice, and sat outside it in the car. And at ten to three, in the car, she had taken the receipt out of her breast pocket again, and turned it over, and read the other line.

GILIGIN’S (TILL 3)

“It’s open till three,” she had said.

“Yes, Sergeant,” Castellanos had said, and nothing else, then or since.

They had left the car on Scottsdale Road, because the streets were full of people going home, and run. She had come up the plaza to the bar’s open door with its lights up white, and a woman with a pencil in her hair standing in it had told her, kindly, five of them, just left, three minutes ago, nice kids, birthday, the tall one paid in coins, and pointed, and asked her nothing, and Kimura had turned round in time to see the tail-lights of a large dark car turn out of the far end of the plaza, and she had known whose car it was, because she had known since ten o’clock whose car was behind them all night, and she had stood on the plaza and said a word in Japanese that her grandmother had used about the weather in Fresno.

“Sun’s up in eight minutes,” said Castellanos.

“I know.”

“Then they’ll want breakfast.” He drank some coffee. “Kids always want breakfast. Doesn’t matter what they’ve done. They’ll be in a diner by half past six. We sit on Scottsdale Road and watch the diners.”

“He doesn’t know what a diner is.”

“Theo Hartigan knows what a diner is.”

That was true. That had been the problem all night. On his own the King would have been back at the Biltmore by nine, because on his own he would not have known how to do any of it. Theo Hartigan knew how to do all of it. Theo Hartigan knew how to ride a bus, and which bus, and how to pay for it with a card with a cactus on it, and how to get five people into a bar, and how to get them out of Ahwatukee, and she had sat in this car outside Boondocks at a quarter past two reading the King’s file on her phone and found, under associates, the line Hartigan, T., Page of Honour, closest friend, son of a bus driver, and had laughed out loud, once, in a way that had made Castellanos look round.

Her phone rang.

It was in her hand. It had been in her hand for ten hours. She looked at the screen and did not know the number. It was long, and it began with a plus and a four and another four, and it was not any number she had, and it was ringing at a quarter to six in the morning, and she knew before she answered it who it was, the way you know a footstep.

“Kimura,” she said.

There was a noise on the line like wind. Not wind. Breathing, hard, the breathing of somebody who has been climbing, and behind it a great empty space, and somewhere in the space a voice that was not his saying oh God in an English accent.

Then his voice.

“I’m on Camelback,” said the King. “On the top. We’re all fine. I’m sorry.”

She did not say anything.

She stood in the forecourt of the Arizona Biltmore with the phone against her ear and the sky going pink over the palms and the man with the hose looking carefully at the paving, and she found that for a moment she could not say anything at all, and that her free hand had gone to the inside pocket of her jacket, flat, over the other phone, the way you put your hand over your heart.

“Sergeant?”

“All of you,” she said.

“All five.”

“The Germans?”

“Both. Lemonade all night. Carded everywhere. It’s been very hard on Lukas.”

“Kessler.”

“At the bottom. In the car. He hasn’t said a word since he picked us up.” A pause, and the breathing. “He brought water. Twenty-four bottles. He’s had it in the boot since six.”

She shut her eyes.

“Which trail?”

“Echo Canyon. The gate opened at five. There was a ranger. She told us not to be stupid.” Another pause. “There are some very old people up here who got to the top before us. One of them called us students.”

“Stay there,” said Kimura.

“We’re not going anywhere. It’s about to come up.” She heard him turn, on the rock, the phone moving with him, and the wind that was not wind. “Sergeant, it’s about to come up. You should see it.”

“I’m coming up.”

“I know.”

“Drink some water. All of you. Now. Before I get there.” She was already moving. She did not remember deciding to move. “Sir.”

“Yes?”

“Don’t hang up.”

“I won’t.”

She was running. She was running across the forecourt of the Biltmore with the phone at her ear and the King of the United Kingdom of America breathing on the other end of it on the top of a mountain, and the man with the hose stepped back out of her way without being asked, and Castellanos had already thrown his coffee into a flowerbed and was already behind the wheel, already turning the key, as if he had heard her say which trail and had known from the word which what had happened, and had moved before she had.

She got in. The door was still closing when the car moved.

“Echo Canyon,” she said.

Castellanos took the car down the long drive between the palms.

“Of course it is,” he said.

---

She did not call the others until they were on Camelback Road.

She did it with the King’s call still open on her own phone, holding it against her shoulder, and calling the detail on the radio with her other hand, and she said exactly what she had been going to say since twenty to eight, in exactly the words she had chosen for it at twenty to eight, in case.

“Found. Camelback summit, Echo Canyon. All five. All well. I’m going up. Nobody else.”

There was a pause on the radio. Then the officer who had been sitting in the Biltmore’s lobby since three, who had a wife in New Westminster and two children and had not complained once, said: “Nobody else, Sergeant,” in a voice that was very nearly a laugh.

She put the radio down.

On her shoulder, on the phone, the King had stopped talking. She could hear the space, and the wind that was not wind, and somebody, Theo Hartigan by the sound of it, saying there, very quietly, and then nothing at all, a long nothing, the nothing of five people all looking the same way at the same time.

Castellanos drove. He did not speed, quite. He went along Camelback Road towards the mountain with the sky going gold in front of them and the crack across his windscreen catching the light, and he did not say anything for a while. Then he said, without looking at her:

“You know what this is.”

“Don’t.”

“It’s the second one.”

“I know what it is.”

“The first one’s where to stand,” said Castellanos. “The second one’s letting him. I told him that in June, on the step. I told eighteen recruits it last week. I didn’t think,” he said, and turned off Camelback Road onto the road of very large houses, “it would be a mountain.”

“Neither did I,” said Kimura.

Ahead of them, at the end of the road, there was a car park, and a gate standing open, and beside the gate a large dark car with its engine running and a man in a grey suit standing beside it, very straight, with his hands behind his back, looking at nothing, in the way that Castellanos had always looked at ceilings.

Behind him, up the slope, the whole of the mountain had turned red.

Kimura got out of the car before it had stopped, with the phone still against her shoulder, and walked past Kessler without looking at him, and Kessler did not look at her, and that was the conversation, and it was enough for both of them; and she went through the gate, and started to climb.