The Fear Index

with lime trees, benches, small trimmed lawns, elaborate belle époque street lamps and dark green topiary. A semicircular embankment with a stone balustrade radiates out into the water, leading down to a jetty and a ferry station. On this particular afternoon a dozen people were queuing at the white metal kiosk for ferry tickets. A young woman with a red baseball cap skated by on rollerblades. Two men in jeans were walking a large black poodle. Finally Hoffmann’s eyes came to rest upon a skeletal apparition draped in a brown leather coat standing under one of the pale green limes. His skull was gaunt and very white, as if he had just vomited or fainted, and his eye sockets were deeply shadowed by his bulging forehead, from which all his hair had been scraped back into a tight grey ponytail. He was gazing directly up at the window from which Hoffmann was looking down.
    Hoffmann’s limbs locked. For several long seconds he was unable to move. Then he took an involuntary step backwards, knocking over his chair. Quarry, staring at him in alarm, said, ‘Oh God, you’re going to faint,’ and began to rise, but Hoffmann held up his hand to ward him off. He took another step away from the table and his feet became entangled in the legs of the upended chair. He stumbled and almost fell, but that seemed to those watching to break whatever spell he was under, for suddenly he kicked the chair sideways out of his path and turned and ran towards the door.
    Hoffmann was barely conscious of the astonished exclamations swelling behind him, or of Quarry calling his name. He ran out into the mirrored corridor and down the sweep of staircase, grabbing the handrail to pivot around the landings. At the bottom he jumped the last few steps, sprinted past his bodyguard – who was talking to the concierge – and out on to the promenade.

11

    … the struggle [for existence] almost invariably will be most severe between the individuals of the same species, for they frequent the same districts, require the same food, and are exposed to the same dangers .

    CHARLES DARWIN, On the Origin of Species (1859)

    ACROSS THE WIDE highway the pavement beneath the lime was empty. Hoffmann halted amid the rows of guests’ luggage, looked left and right, and swore. The doorman asked if he wanted a taxi. Hoffmann ignored him and walked straight past the front of the hotel to the street corner. Ahead was a sign, HSBC Private Bank; to his left, running parallel with the side of the Beau-Rivage, a narrow one-way thoroughfare, the Rue Docteur-Alfred-Vincent. For want of a better idea he set off down it, jogging about fifty metres, past scaffolding, a line of parked motorbikes and a small church. At the end was a crossroads. He stopped again.
    A block further along, a figure in a brown coat was crossing the road. The man paused when he got to the other side and glanced back at Hoffmann. It was him, no question of it. A white van passed between them and he was gone, limping off down a side street.
    And now Hoffmann ran. A great righteous energy flooded his body, propelling his legs in long, fast strides. He sprinted to the spot where he had last seen the man. It was another one-way street; once again he had vanished. He ran down it to the next junction. The roads were narrow, quiet, not much traffic, a lot of parked cars. Wherever he looked there were small businesses – a hairdresser’s, a pharmacy, a bar – people going about their lunchtime shopping. He spun around hopelessly, turned right, ran, turned right again, working his way through the narrow maze of one-way streets, reluctant to give up but increasingly sure that he had lost him. The area around him changed. He registered it only vaguely at first. The buildings turned shabbier; more were derelict, sprayed with graffiti; and then he was in a different city. A teenaged black woman in a tight sweater and white plastic micro-skirt shouted at him from across the road. She was standing outside a shop with a purple neon sign, VIDEO CLUB XXX. Ahead, three more very obvious hookers, all black, patrolled the kerbside while their pimps smoked in doorways or observed the women from the street corner: young, small, thin men with olive skin and cropped black hair – north Africans, maybe, or Albanians.
    Hoffmann slowed his pace, trying to get his bearings. He must have run almost to the Cornavin railway station, he realised, and into the red-light district. Finally he stopped outside a boarded-up