The Bone Clocks

A file of latecomers shuffles along the row in front of me. So perfect an opportunity, it might have been scripted. Behind this human shield, I slip out of the room and clip-clop down the whitewashed stairs. Across the open-air courtyard of the Claustro de Santo Domingo, Kenny Bloke is reading to a hemisphere of children. The kids are entranced. Dad had a story about a party where Roald Dahl arrived by helicopter and told everyone he met, “Write books for children, you know—the little shits’ll believe anything.” I exit the ducal gates onto the plaza where Damon MacNish performed last night. Five blocks along the not-quite-straight Calle 36, I light a cigarette, but drop it down a drain before taking a single puff. Cheeseman’s given up smoking, and the tang of tobacco could be a lethal clue. This is serious shit. I’ve never done anything quite like it. On the other hand, no review ever killed a book as wantonly as Richard Cheeseman’s killed Echo Must Die. Plantains sizzle at a stall. A toddler surveys the street from a second-floor veranda, clutching the ironwork, like a prisoner. Soldiers guard a bank with machine guns slung round their necks, but I’m glad my money isn’t dependent on their vigilance; one’s text-messaging while another flirts with a girl Juno’s age. Is Carmen Salvat married? She made no mention.

Focus, Hershey. Serious shit. Focus.

STEP UP FROM the bright hot street into the cool marble-and-teak lobby of the Santa Clara Hotel. Pass the two doormen, who, one suspects, have been trained to kill. They assess clothes, gringocity quotient, credit rating. Remove sunglasses and blink a bit gormlessly— See, boys, I’m a hotel guest—but replace them as you skirt the courtyard, passing preprandial guests sipping cappuccinos and banging out emails where Benedictine nuns once imbibed deep drafts of Holy Spirit. Avoid the eye of the mynah bird and, beyond the sleepless fountain, take the stairs up to the fourth floor. Retrace last night’s midnight steps to the inevitable forking path. A sunny corridor leads around the echoey well of the upper courtyard to my room, where Crispin Hershey bottles out, while the crookeder way twists off to Richard Cheeseman’s Room 405, where Crispin Hershey extracts his due. A minnow of dйjа vu darts by and its name is Geoffrey Chaucer:

“Now, Sirs,” quoth he, “if it be you so lief

To finde Death, turn up this crooked way,

For in that grove I left him, by my fay,

Under a tree, and there he will abide …”

But it’s justice, not death, that Ibe so lief to finde. Any eyewitnesses? None. The crooked way, then. A maid’s trolley is parked outside Room 403, but there’s no sign of the maid. Room 405 is around the corner, the last-but-one down a dead end. Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love” sashays through my head, and via an arch in the hotel’s outer wall, four floors above street level, Hershey sees roofs, a blue stripe of Caribbean, and dirty cauliflower clouds … Far-off coastal skyscrapers, finished and unfinished. Room 405. Knock-knock. Who’s there? Your come-sodding-uppance, Dickie Cheeseman. Down in the street, a motorbike revs up the octaves. Here’s Cheeseman’s spare swipe-card, retained after my act of Good Samaritanship last night, and here is Fate’s chance to nix my best-laid plan: If Cheeseman noticed he was missing a swipe-card this morning and obtained a replacement with a new code, the little LED on the door will blink red, the door will stay shut, and Hershey must abort mission. But should Fate want me to press ahead, the LED will turn green. There’s a lizard on the door frame. Its tongue flickers.

Swipe the card, then. Go on.

Green. Go go go go go!