Last Call

The sun came up at eight minutes to six over the McDowells, and nobody said anything.

It came up the way Theo had never seen anything come up. First the edge of the sky above the far mountains went from white to a colour there was no name for, and then there was a line of fire on the top of the range, very thin, very bright, as if somebody had drawn it with a pen, and then the line was a curve, and the curve was the top of something enormous, and it came up out of the mountains so fast that he could see it moving.

And the light came across the Valley.

It came across it like water. It came over the McDowells and down into the desert on the far side of the city, and the desert went from grey to red to gold in a long wave, and the wave came on, west, over the first of the streets, and the streets lit up one after another in their straight lines, every one of them at once and then the next, the whole grid of them going gold block by block as far as he could see in every direction, the canals flashing in it like somebody signalling with mirrors, the palms throwing shadows a mile long, the glass of every building turning to fire one after another, towards them, faster than a bus, faster than anything, until it came up the side of Camelback Mountain under their feet, over the boulders and the rail section and the red rock, and reached the top, and reached them.

It was warm at once. It was a hundred degrees in a second, on his face, on his arms, on the back of his neck. He did not care.

Nobody said anything.

The fit old people on the summit had stopped taking photographs. They were standing with their phones down at their sides, looking. One of them, a man with a white beard and a hat with a cord under the chin, took his hat off. Theo did not know why. He nearly took off a hat he was not wearing.

Beside him, Freddie was standing very still with his hands behind his back and Jack’s phone in one of them, still open, still on a call, the screen gone dark against his palm. On Freddie’s other side Alexander was standing exactly the same way, hands behind his back, chin up, the light on his face, and Theo saw them both and thought that there were not many people in the world who could tell you where that way of standing came from, and he was one of them, and he would not tell anybody, ever, not even Oma.

Jack was sitting on a rock well back from the edge, a very long way back, nearly in the middle of the summit, with both hands flat on the rock and his mouth open, looking at the sunrise over the tops of everybody else’s heads.

Lukas was looking east, where the sun was, and then a little to the right of it, at a place in the sky that had nothing in it now but light.

“Sirius has gone,” said Lukas.

“Is it coming back?”

“Every morning,” said Lukas, “until the spring.” He considered the sky. “A little earlier each time.”

Theo looked at the place in the sky where there was nothing.

“Is that a fact?” he said.

“Yes,” said Lukas, and did not say facts don’t count, and Theo understood that it was the first fact all night that Lukas had let count.

---

They stood there a long time.

It got hotter. The light stopped being gold and started being white, and the shadows of the palms down in the city pulled in, and the city stopped being something that was happening and became something that was there, a very large city in a desert on an ordinary Wednesday morning, with traffic on it now, a lot of traffic, moving along the straight lines like beads on wires, people going to work. Somewhere down there a bus driver was starting the six o’clock along Indian School Road. Theo hoped he was having a good morning.

The fit old people began to go down, one by one, nodding to the five of them as they went, the way people nod to strangers on the top of a mountain. The man with the white beard put his hat back on and looked at Freddie for a second longer than at the others, the way people had been looking at Freddie for a second longer all night, and then he looked at the view instead, which was the right thing to do, and went down.

“Freddie.”

“Mm.”

“Best eighteenth in history?”

Freddie did not look round.

“You tell me,” he said. “You’ve only had one.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I’ve got.”

Theo thought about it. He thought about it properly, on the top of a mountain, at a quarter past six in the morning, with no sleep, eighteen years and one day old. He thought about a plaque with a curtain that would not open, and a bus with a King on its back seat who had never been on one, and a quiz, and the wrong bus, and a strip of shops in Ahwatukee in the dark, and a dance floor, and a pub on Stetson Drive, and a present, and a mystery beer from Milwaukee, and the Christmas bar with no Christmas in it, and the Wheel, and a doorman with a marker pen, and pickle juice, and a woman wiping an X off the back of a King’s hand without saying a word, and a kerb, and a star coming back.

“Yes,” said Theo.

“Yes what?”

“Best eighteenth in history.”

Freddie nodded, once, at the city, as if it had been settled by vote.

“Good,” he said.

---

Kimura came up the last of the trail at twenty-five to seven.

Theo saw her first, because he was the only one facing that way. He saw the top of her head come up over the last of the red rocks, the short black fringe, wet through, and then the rest of her, in the dark trousers and the white shirt she had been wearing at the reception at six the night before, with the jacket gone and the sleeves rolled up and a phone held against her shoulder, climbing the last scramble with one hand, not fast, not slow, the way she did everything, and she came up onto the top of Camelback Mountain and stopped and stood and looked at them.

Behind her, a long way behind her, a broad grey head came up over the rocks, and then a broad grey man in a dark shirt, in brown shoes, breathing very hard, who stopped at the top of the scramble and put both hands on his knees and stayed like that.

Nobody said anything.

Kimura took the phone away from her shoulder and looked at it and pressed the screen, once, and in Freddie’s hand, behind his back, Jack’s phone gave a small sound and went quiet.

Then she walked across the top of the mountain to where Freddie was standing, and sat down on the rock beside him, and looked at the Valley.

She did not say anything. She sat with her forearms on her knees and her hands loose and looked at the city going about its Wednesday, and her face did nothing at all, and her shirt was stuck to her back, and her breathing slowed, and slowed, and Theo stood a little way off and did not move, and neither did anybody else.

Castellanos came the rest of the way up, slowly, and sat down on a rock a little below hers, facing the same way, and did not say anything either.

It went on for a long time. It was the longest anybody had not said anything all night.

Then Kimura reached into the inside pocket of the jacket that was not there, found it was not there, reached into the back pocket of her trousers instead, and took out a phone, and held it out to Freddie without looking at him.

It was his.

He took it. He looked at the screen.

“Fourteen missed calls,” he said.

“All mine,” said Kimura.

He put it in his pocket.

---

“This didn’t happen,” said Kimura.

She said it to the Valley. She said it the way she said things at the edge of a room, quietly, and to nobody in particular, so that everybody heard.

“So I’m going to tell you what didn’t happen, once, and then it won’t have.” She looked at the city. “At no time yesterday evening did the King of the United Kingdom of America leave a reception at the Arizona Biltmore by the service road. At no time did he get on a bus.”

“Three buses,” said Theo.

“At no time did he get on three buses,” said Kimura, without turning her head, “one of them to Ahwatukee. At no time did he enter licensed premises on McDowell Road on quiz night. At no time did a Page of Honour kiss a hitching rail in Old Town Scottsdale at twenty past one in the morning.”

“It was the Travellers’ Act,” said Theo.

“At no time,” said Kimura, “did the staff of four licensed premises watch a door shut behind five young men and then ask me whether that was who they thought it was.”

“What did you tell them?” said Jack.

“No.”

“Every time?”

“Five times. Boondocks asked twice.”

Theo counted, with his lips. “That’s four bars,” he said. “We went to five.”

“Giligin’s didn’t ask,” said Kimura.

“She knew,” said Freddie. “She just didn’t ask.”

“At no time,” said Kimura, “did anybody’s protection officer sit in a car outside five bars with his lights off and twenty-four bottles of water in the boot, and say nothing to anybody, because there was nobody to say it to, because none of it happened.” She paused. “At no time did the King of the United Kingdom of America pay for anything in Old Town Scottsdale with his own face.”

“There was pickle juice,” said Jack.

Kimura turned her head, at last, and looked at Jack.

“What pickle juice?”

“Nothing,” said Freddie. “It didn’t happen.”

Kimura looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked back at the Valley.

“And at no time,” she said, “did a sergeant of the King’s protection detail climb Camelback Mountain at half past six in the morning in yesterday’s shirt and sit on the top of it and look at that.” She looked at it. The whole of it, the light on the city, the long shadows of the mountains drawing in, the sky going hard and blue and enormous over the desert. “Because she never would.”

Nobody said anything.

“It’s very good, though,” said Kimura.

---

Then she took a small notebook out of her back pocket, and a pencil, and opened the notebook on her knee, and wrote something in it, and held the pencil over the page.

“Escape,” said Kimura. “Ten.”

Freddie turned his head.

“Ten?”

“The bus was ten. Kessler was ten. Leaving the phone was ten, and I want it noted that I know you didn’t mean to, and I don’t care.” She wrote. “I’m marking the escape, sir, not the destination.”

“In London you gave the destination one.”

“In London,” said Kimura, “you walked into the only bar in the city where the two of us were sitting.” She looked out at the Valley, at the light, at the whole of the March of Arizona lying open under them like a map somebody had unrolled on a table. She held the pencil over the page a while longer.

“Destination,” she said, and wrote it down. “Ten.”

Below her, on his rock, Castellanos made a sound.

It was a short sound. It came from somewhere a long way inside him, and it came out once, like a door opening and closing in a wind, and stopped, and he sat on his rock in his brown shoes with his face doing nothing at all, looking at Phoenix.

Kimura turned and stared down at him.

“Inspector,” she said.

“I didn’t,” said Castellanos.

“You did.”

“I didn’t,” said Castellanos, “and you will not mention it.”

Jack fell off his rock.

---

They went down at seven.

Before they went, Kimura stood up, and put the notebook back in her pocket, and looked at the five of them, one at a time, the way she looked at a room. She looked last at Theo.

“Happy birthday, Mr Hartigan,” she said.

“It was yesterday,” said Theo.

“Not until I say so,” said Kimura.

Theo opened his mouth, and shut it, and found he did not have anything to say to that, and that he did not want anything, and he nodded.

“There’s a bus,” he said, when they were at the top of the scramble, getting ready to go down, Jack holding on to Alexander’s shoulder and Lukas already three boulders below, “along Camelback Road. At six fifty-one, and then every twenty minutes. It goes right past the Biltmore.”

“We are taking the car,” said Kimura.

“It’s a really good bus.”

“We are taking,” said Kimura, “the car.”

They went down the mountain in the hot white light, slowly, the seven of them, over the boulders and down the rail section, slowly, because everybody goes fast on the rail section and Kimura said that this morning nobody was going to, and past the fit old people coming up for the second time, who stood aside and said good morning, and down the steps of rock and dust between the boulders to the gate, which was standing open, with the ranger’s truck gone.

On the far side of the gate, in the car park, beside a large dark blue car with its engine running and its side door slid open, Kessler was standing in his grey suit with his hands behind his back.

He had a paper bag in each hand now. They were brown paper bags with grease coming through the bottoms of them, and a smell was coming out of them across the car park that Theo had known all his life, from his grandmother’s kitchen on a Sunday morning in Milwaukee, before church, before anything, before he had ever heard the word Hanover used about a boy in a school chair.

Kessler looked at the five of them coming through the gate, and at the sergeant and the Inspector behind them, and at the sun, and for the first time since he had collected them from the plaza, he spoke.

“Frühstück?” said Kessler.

And Theo Hartigan, who was eighteen, and had been awake for every minute of his birthday, and knew that word from before he knew most words, said yes before anybody else could.