Without warning

Admiral Ritchie was wrong. Jedediah Armstrong Culver, of the Louisiana Bar, did not take three or four business suits along with him on vacation. He only ever took one, just in case. As soon as he’d learned of the Disappearance, however, he’d gone straight downtown and bought four new outfits, off-the-rack, but quickly tailored to fit his ample frame. As always, they were either blue pin-striped and single-breasted, or charcoal grey, ditto. Two Brooks Brothers, one Zegna and a rather subdued Armani. He put the charge on one of his European cards, a Visa issued by Barclays Bank in London, where he had worked for three years as an equity partner with Baker amp; McKenzie before moving home to set up his own firm. The Barclays Visa he normally saved for annual trips to Europe with Marilyn, but none of his US-issued plastic was working. Diners, Amex and Mastercard, none of them were any good. The local merchants had stopped taking them in payment or their billing systems simply locked up when presented with the account details.

For now, at least, there was no such problem with his English credit card. Even so, aware that some might think his use of credit an imposition on the goodwill and touching naпvetй of Mr Rajiv Singh, the owner of the swish gentlemen’s outfitter on Beretania Street where he bought all four suits, Culver had explained exactly how quickly Singh needed to lodge his accounts this month. Which was to say, immediately.

‘And don’t take no guff from those sons a bitches neither,’ he’d advised. ‘Get your money fast, and if you’re in the market for some further and better advice – get the hell out of the suit business, too. Ain’t gonna be much call for all these fancy duds soon.’

Mr Singh had not needed telling twice. Eighty per cent of his business came from mainland tourists dropping disgraceful amounts of money on exclusive leisurewear. Business attire was a sideline. The next time Jed Culver drove past the shop it was closed. He never saw Singh again.

‘Best damn investment I ever made,’ he said to himself while climbing into the jacket of his new favourite, the Armani.

‘What’s that, Jedi Master?’ his wife called out, distracted, from the lounge room where she was glued to the television.

Culver tugged at his shirt cuffs as he walked through into the main living area of the Embassy Suites serviced apartment. Marilyn, his third wife, and definitely his favourite, sat curled up at the end of the lounge nearest the TV, ignoring the glorious vista of Waikiki Beach and Mamala Bay in the floor-to-ceiling picture windows. The pollution storm had not yet reached this far around the world, and the advice they had was that the worst of it probably wouldn’t drift so far south anyway. Intensifying low-pressure systems were likely to draw the poisoned banks of cloud back up to the northern latitudes. Even so, Marilyn, a forty-year-old who looked thirty and sometimes acted twenty, remained at the end of the sofa, a black three-seater covered in a strikingly dense pineapple motif.

She was, he thought fondly, a bear of little brain, but such a beautiful bear, and so cuddly and loving that he couldn’t help but love her all the more. She was just so much easier to live with than the harsh, angular carnivorous bitches he’d married by mistake the first two times. (And if there was one upside to the otherwise unmitigated horror of the last week, it was realising that those two life-sucking trolls had winked out of existence.)

In comparison to Vanda and Louise, Marilyn’s needs were simple, if expensive, and she gave him so much in return that he could only worry at the change that had come over her since the Disappearance. What she lacked in book smarts, his wife more than made up for in a vast store of emotional, physical and spiritual resources. She was a woman who rushed at the edge of life, gleefully, like a child chasing soap bubbles on the breeze.

Jed had never known her to vague out in front of the tube for such a long stretch of time – unless it was in front of Fashion TV in the weeks before they decamped to London and Paris each year. This last week, however, she’d camped in front of the box, channel surfing between BBC World, CNN Hong Kong, Sky News and whatever crisis-of-the-moment bulletins the local network affiliates were putting to air. Right now, she was seemingly mesmerised by an interview with some retired British admiral who wanted to blow up the Channel Tunnel and deploy the Royal Navy ‘to secure the approaches’. Distracted by his murmuring in the bedroom for only a moment, she had now sunk back into video torpor. Jed shook his head and let her be.