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said George, and sighed. He sighed loudly, and lifted his glass. ‘Security people say not,’ said George, fitting his snout into the wine glass, and tipping it until the wine overran his lower lip.
    ‘Not?’ boomed Ergaste.
    ‘But if not ransom ,’ asked Peter, ‘then for what?’
    ‘They didn’t say,’ said George. ‘They didn’t tell me. They didn’t say.’
    ‘It must be money, it boils down to money, always, with these people,’ said Ergaste. ‘I’m not a racist, indeed not. I don’t mean these people racially, you comprehend.’
    ‘Of course not,’ said George, vaguely.
    ‘Hhh!’ sniffed Peter, in perfect agreement, or perhaps in pointed disagreement.
    ‘I’m as free from race-hate as the snow itself,’ insisted Ergaste.
    ‘Of course you are, I believe in you,’ said George, uncertain as to what he might be committing himself.
    ‘By these people I don’t mean Iranians, or Turks, or Armenians, or Kurds, or Arabs, or Parsee, or fucking Russians, or moon-men, or, or,’ he lifted the glass balloon of his cognac slowly before him, as if acting a dumb-show lift-off to orbit. ‘Or any racial category. I mean poor. I mean the poor.’
    ‘The poor,’ repeated George, tentatively, as if the concept were being introduced into his consciousness for the first time in his life.
    ‘It’s the poor,’ said Ergaste, banging his glass back down on the table between them. ‘We’re an island of Enough in an ocean of Poverty. I mean, here, on this mountain, this Ararat. But I mean – you know. In life, generally. And the poor, you mark my words, young George, the poor only ever want one thing. Money.’ The cognac had made him unusually talkative.
    ‘Assuming it is poverty, behind this?’ put in Peter. He patted George’s arm, companionably. ‘Maybe it’s political? Maybe it’s a news-grab? Either way it ought to be possible to get the little lady back. Which is to say, it will be possible. Of course it will. And it goes without saying,’ he added (whilst Ergaste nodded his massy nose, and grunted ‘goes without saying’), ‘that anything we can do to help, we will do. Anything at all.’
    George stared with, in the first instance, frank noncomprehension at this offer of assistance. He ought to have been able to process the conventional companionship on offer. It should have been a supportive and readily graspable thing: manly society at a time of crisis, friendship. But for some reason, looking into Peter’s moist eye, George felt a blurting urge to burst into tears. It was on the end of his tongue to say: I fucked your wife this afternoon . Naturally he didn’t say this. But there was something painfully absurd in the man’s ignorance – about George, and about his own wife – that gave an oppressively poignant quality to his ingenuousness.
    It was out of the question to cry.
    George turned away to hide the new reflecting brightness of his eyeballs, and looked through the bar’s main window at the floodlit snow field outside. Some brave souls were larking about in the night-time. At the wall, a few feet behind their table, the screen was on. What was on? Some show about dancing, a twinkling blur of colours. Most of the wall was taken up with a huge mirror, crusted about its rim with a light-brown crimped and scalloped frame, like a pizza’s edge. The mirror itself, lit from within, reflected the narrow bar, its oval tables, its almost exclusively male clientele.
    A moth, very hostile when faced with the sight of moth-ish rivalry, repeatedly and vehemently headbutted its own reflection in the bright glass. The moth made a noise like a rag pennant fluttering in the wind.
    ‘I’m in hell,’ said George, not loudly; but as the thought occurred to him – as a sudden realization, a novel insight into his new condition of existence.
    The others either did not hear or chose to ignore him.
    ‘Wine,’ boomed Ergaste. ‘Did I ever tell you I’m a Roman Catholic? Oldest religion in the