A Spy by Nature - Charles Cumming [80]
Fortner comes up behind me as the girl moves off.
‘I never bought that round,’ I tell him.
‘What?’
‘Of drinks.’
‘Oh sure, yeah,’ he says, looking down at the table. ‘Get me a Bloody Mary this time, will ya, Milius? I can feel my insides turnin’ black with all this Guinness.’
I stand up to go back to the bar as one of the members of staff comes past me with a tall column of pint glasses stacked high in his arms. He collects the empties from our table and goes on his way, leaving the ashtray full of butts and gum.
‘Pint of lager and a Bloody Mary,’ I tell the Kiwi barman. The boy to girl ratio around me is Alaskan: for every reasonably attractive woman, there are now six or seven men crowding up the pub.
‘Tabasco, Worcester sauce in the Bloody Mary?’
‘Yeah.’
The Kiwi pours the pint and sets it down on a cloth mat in front of me, turning to fill a tumbler with ice. He places that alongside the lager and lifts a half-empty bottle of Smirnoff from a rack below his waist. Rather than simply pour the vodka into the glass, he gives the bottle a 360-degree spin in the flat of his hand and upends it so that a good splash of liquid bounces out of the glass on to the mat. Then, when he has finished pouring a contemptible measure of spirits, he whips the neck of the bottle out of the glass in a fast twist, and the same thing happens again: large drops of vodka land on the mat outside the tumbler, leaving no more than an inch in the glass itself.
‘I would have preferred that in the drink,’ I tell him.
‘Sorry, mate,’ he says, a fake smile frozen on to his face like a gameshow host’s. He drop-slides the bottle back into its rack, fills the glass with Bloody Mary mix and says, ‘Four-twenny.’
I don’t make a scene. How can you argue with a guy who, ten years after Cocktail, still thinks it’s cool to act like Tom Cruise? He gives me my change and I head back to the table.
‘So I’ve been thinking about what you were sayin’ earlier,’ Fortner announces, as if I hadn’t been away. I am still squeezing into my seat when he says: ‘About the difference between here and back home. You may have a point.’
‘I definitely have a point. And I haven’t even started yet. You know the thing that frustrates me?’ The music is turned up on a speaker above our heads so I lean in a little closer. ‘It goes back to what we were saying about CNN. How come the world is crawling with mediocre American hamburger and ice cream outlets? Why does no one here get a piece of that?’
‘Same reason you were sayin’. You guys just don’t have the vision. You don’t think globally. You tellin’ me the ice cream in Penzance isn’t better than Ben ‘n’ fuckin’ Jerry’s? No way. But those guys were smart for two hippies. They saw the opportunity and they weren’t afraid to hang their balls out a little bit. But your man in Cornwall with his two scoops and a chocolate flake, he doesn’t think like that. That’s why he doesn’t have any outlets in Wisconsin and Ben and Jerry have a store on every street corner in western Europe. And Haagen-Dazs for that matter.’
Fortner leans back in his chair. His eyes sweep briefly, suspiciously, around the room, and his mouth stretches out.
‘You know Haagen-Dazs is a made-up name?’
‘No kidding?’ he says.
‘I’m telling you. The guy wanted something that sounded aristocratic, something classy, so he played around with a few Scandinavian-sounding words and came up with that. Then he had his family change their surname by deed poll to Haagen-Dazs and now they have their picture taken for Hello! magazine.’
‘Shit,’ says Fortner. ‘I always thought they were descended from the Hapsburgs.’
‘No. They’re descended from a thesaurus.’
Fortner is an intriguing drunk. In the early stages, say after two or three beers or a half-bottle of wine, all the better elements of his personality - the quick, sly humour, the anecdotes, the cynicism - fuse together and he operates with a sharpness which I have seen captivate Katharine. But this doesn’t last. If he keeps knocking back the drink, his questions become more blunt, his answers long-winded and tinged with