Fitzsimons-Ross told me.I made him his cup of tea, which he drank silently. Then I proffered the seven hundred deutsche marks. He reached into his pocket and fished out a metal object that he placed on the table, then slid toward me.“Here’s a key,” he said. “Move in whenever.”“I thought I’d come by tomorrow with my stuff, then move in on Friday.”“Whatever works. Don’t worry about any of this. I’ve got it all very regulated. Very under control.”I said nothing. But I did notice how he was working very hard at being lucid right now, despite having mainlined what I presumed to be a significant amount of smack. This, I came to discover, was the strange, infernal duality of Alaistair Fitzsimons-Ross. It didn’t matter that I had walked in on his shooting up. It didn’t matter if he called me a cunt or made some less-than-vaguely anti-Semitic comment (as he was prone to do). It didn’t matter if he had woken up next to some Kurdish rough trade he’d picked up in the toilets near the Hauptbahnhof.
