Eating Crow (25 page)

It was obvious what I had to do. I lifted the telephone and dialed Max’s number.

A
bkhazia in the Democratic Republic of Georgia has impressive mountains, fine beaches, but no good restaurants. If you are going there it won’t be for dinner. It was not always so. Abkhazia sits hard against the Russian border, and in the old days, the fattened pashas of the Communist Party used to come here from Moscow to vacation on the Black Sea coast, where they could eat charcoal-grilled bass, drink hefty Georgian wine, and make eyes at the famously pretty waitresses who were always willing to serve the Party. Then the Soviet Union collapsed like so many sandcastles before the tide, and the killing started. The Abkhazians demanded their independence from the Georgians, to whom they had been forcefully wed so many years before, and the tourism business suffered terribly. The charcoal grills were extinguished, the restaurants closed.

Today the only people who go to Abkhazia are peacekeepers or oil executives surrounded by their thick-necked bodyguards, for in the late 1990s, Abkhazia suffered further misfortune: oil was discovered on the coastal plain. Before the find Abkhazia was a scrappy place of beaches, mountains, and ethnic tension. Afterward it was a scrappy place of beaches, mountains, ethnic tension, and money. When the Georgian government awarded exploitation rights to Caucasia Oil and Gas, a Moscow-based corporation part owned by Russian billionaires with high-level connections to the Kremlin, Abkhazian separatist militias responded by taking small groups of aid workers hostage. It was, they said, the only way to bring international attention to a gross injustice. An entire people was being robbed of its birthright, they said. Later they alleged that Caucasia’s poor management of the oil find was poisoning the lakes and the land, and that brutal private security companies were being used to stifle dissent. They wrote mournful folk songs about their plight and in London small theater companies performed evenings of poetry and song, all proceeds going to the Free Abkhazia Campaign. These theatrical events were, by all accounts, long and dull.

Eventually, of course, Caucasia Oil and Gas recognized that something had to give. The cost of securing their oil pipeline to the coast was proving prohibitive. The company kept being mentioned on the evening news, and not in a good way. The evenings of poetry and song were spreading to New York and Los Angeles and Paris. Soon they would be in Berlin. Later Caucasia’s chief executive officer declared that they were forced to act by the adverse publicity. I can see now that this was my undoing. Without the media interest none of it would have happened.

We called ourselves Olson, Rashenko, and Basset. I warned them that the acronym, ORB, made us sound like a bunch of club DJs, but it didn’t matter, because the press dubbed us The Sorry Business and it stuck. We had three offices. Max worked from Washington, Rashenko went to Moscow, and I returned to a serviced suite in London’s Belgravia.

It was an awkward homecoming. When I was about ten years old my mother had let me travel freely about the city. For a tiny sum, even to me, even then, I could buy a day ticket that allowed unlimited use of the red buses and I would ride whole routes just to see what was at the end of them. I wanted to say I had been to London Bridge or the Woolwich Arsenal, even though it was more interesting getting there than arriving. After Dad died she withdrew the privilege as if afraid that out of sight, I would also vanish and never come back. Life had become unreliable and she didn’t trust it to take care of me.

Now, so many years later, the thought of disappearing from view suddenly seemed very attractive. I wanted to slip back into London unseen and unannounced. I wanted to communicate with my mother by phone from undeclared locations, a free spirit who existed only as a voice on the line. It was never to be, of course. It is mothers who haunt their sons, not the other way round, and I knew that if I were to exorcise her from my guilty thoughts, I would have to visit her. Sons always go home to their mothers in the end, if only for tea.

I went every few days, for the train journey to the suburbs and the familiar smell in her house of lavender, which had quickly replaced the hot tang of stock after Dad went. I brought her news of what I was doing and she always managed to appear intrigued, although she knew most of it because she had read about it in the newspapers. This, she said, was one of the curiosities of my new life. In the past she knew what I was doing by reading my restaurant reviews. Now she could measure out my progress in headlines. I asked her if I had disappointed her, in the needy way of sons who hunger for reassurance, and she laughed and said she only wanted what all mothers want, which was for me to be happy, “though I’m not sure you are terribly happy at the moment, dear.” I told her I was working on it.

I phoned Luke and asked him to have dinner with me. He agreed to come as long as I was paying. He also made me promise to order an offensively expensive bottle of wine. This seemed a reasonable deal, so I crashed the plastic on something big and French and tannic and then another bottle, until I was drunk enough to confess my sins.

“I’m afraid I was a bit of an arse in New York.”

“You weren’t a bit of an arse. You were both buttocks.”

“Eh?”

“A complete arse, boy. A complete arse.” I was too drunk to compete but I appreciated the sentiment. It felt good to be here in a London restaurant, being abused by my younger brother.

He told me that Lynne had met someone else so I didn’t call her, though I was hungry to hear her voice. I wanted to talk to Jennie too and sometimes, when it was late and I knew the office was closed, I would dial her number in Vienna just to hear the outgoing message on her voice mail, which was calm and businesslike. For years I had always known there was a woman I could talk to. My relationship with Lynne had been one long conversation. It had been the same with Jennie, and I always felt that I was a better person than I might otherwise have been when I was talking to them. Now those dialogues had come to an end and I liked myself less as a result.

I rented an expensive apartment down by the river at Battersea, a place of glass walls and high ceilings, and I spent my evenings watching TV for the small pleasures of the English accent. If I was bored I would walk along the river or read the case files that Max sent my way. It was not gripping stuff and promised little substantial work. In time we held some seminars with pharmaceutical companies who had ill-informed their patients about drug side-effects, and we worked up apology strategies for a couple of personal investment companies which had mis-sold pension products. We even landed the contract to apologize on behalf of Dick’s Dogs, which had recently expanded into Europe, but they had cleaned up their act and, much to my macabre disappointment, there were no burn victims requiring expressions of regret.

Until the Caucasia job came along the only apology we executed was delivered in-house. It was inevitable, really. I had heard the cough getting worse and worse. I had noticed, when we met, a sallowness to the cheeks and a thinness to his already thin hands. Nevertheless when Max told me, during one of our regular trans-Atlantic telephone conversations, that he had been diagnosed with a terminal cancer, I was shocked.

“Reward for a lifetime’s committed smoking,” he said, and he began one of those deep-lung laughs that soon slapped the breath out of him.

A few days later he flew to London. On diagnosis he had joined a class action against the American tobacco companies for failing to reveal what they knew about the links between smoking and cancers. The moment his name appeared in the suit, lawyers for Big Tobacco crumbled and agreed to apologize. They gave us the business and, to keep affairs tidy, agreed that Max could accept the apology. “I want you to do it,” he said. “It’s only right.”

It was a moving ceremony. First came the formal signing of the share certificates. In his new book Schenke had argued that plausible apologibility in the private sector would come from the symbolic ownership of one, but only one, share in each corporation involved. The apologist was entitled, he said, to benefit from the apology process, but not from stock movements in the company itself. Mass share ownership was, he said, “antiempathetic.” This made sense to me.

I lit and extinguished sixty-seven cigarettes, one for each year of Max’s life, and told him the story of my ancestors’ involvement in the tobacco business, in Jamaica and the Southern United States. “The irony is that you helped change my life,” I said at the end. “And in return my family stole yours away from you. I am so terribly sorry.” When I was done and we had chased any lurking smoke from the room, he said, “An apology like that is almost worth dying for,” which was kind, if not true.

That was the day he told me about Caucasia. Some of it I already knew. I had watched news reports about the hostages. I recalled footage of the relatives being interviewed on the steps of the Foreign Office because that was when I first clocked Jennie, striding up behind them. I was shocked that they were still being held, and more shocked that I hadn’t noticed, but I didn’t immediately regard myself as the best candidate for the job. Caucasia, a Russian-owned company, wanted to offer an apology to the Abkhazian rebels for the damage done to their land and for acts of brutality committed by their security men. Afterward, compensation, in the form of a cut of the profits, would be negotiated. It seemed to me that, being Russian and having been a KGB heavy, Rashenko was better suited to the task than I.

Max placed one hand flat against his chest, as if soothing indigestion, and said, “He’s been doing all the backchannel work, talking to both sides, settling terms.”

“And you didn’t think to mention this to me?”

“We were keeping your powder dry.”

I should have become suspicious at that point. I should have smelled the deception. But that’s the thing about the sorry business: it ruins your judgment. I had just come out of a ceremony marking the approaching death of my mentor. I was high on emotion, low on cunning, living in the moment. I was dead meat.

Two weeks later, on a bright, early spring morning, I flew to Istanbul, and from there in a private jet to the former Soviet airbase at Zugdidi, just south of the Abkhazian border. Max was waiting for me on the airfield, in the back of a heavy old Soviet jeep that smelled of oil and damp earth. At his side was a small oxygen tank from which he took gulps through a face mask. There was a young Irish nurse called Cathy with him, red hair cropped short, white nursing smock worn carelessly over jeans and sneakers. She was monitoring the dials on the gas canister as if waiting for a cake to cook, and occasionally she looked upward at the gray, cloud-quilted sky as though searching for something she recognized in this uncommon landscape. Max appeared even less substantial than the last time we had met, and his suit hung loosely from him in ugly folds which were too familiar to me to even deserve comment.

“You shouldn’t have come, Max.”

“Don’t talk crazy. I wouldn’t send you off on this one alone.”

“He’s a fool to himself, sir,” Cathy said with an encouraging County Cork lilt. “A fool to himself.”

“You should have listened to her.”

“Cath takes good care of me,” he said, patting her hand as if she were the girl who packed his bag at the supermarket. “She’s on top of things.”

I looked around. The broad airfield was restless with activity. On one side, personnel carriers were lined up in rows three deep, low slung and glowering, a dark smudge on the landscape. I could see a number of larger tanks on the other side with soldiers crawling all over them, and overhead double-rotored helicopters sucked up the air.

I leaned into Max’s ear so he could hear me over the noise. “Is this all for me?”

Max gave me a conspiratorial wink. “Part of Vladimir’s deal. Georgian military gets to conduct exercises down here while you go in there. The moment the apology is made and accepted”—he took a deep, uncomfortable breath—“they’ll withdraw back to Tbilisi.”

“And the other side are cool with that?”

“Sure,” he said, and he took another gulp of air. “In this part of the world saber rattling is a spectator sport. They expect it.”

“It still looks like they mean business.”

“That’s ninety-five percent of the military’s job,” Max said, “to
look
like they mean business.”

He turned and gestured to Cathy, who pulled a sheaf of papers from her bag. The first was my single share in Caucasia, which I signed for. Next was a map showing the route into Abkhazia, a clear X marking each military checkpoint on this side of the border. The nurse then handed me a hefty mobile phone.

“A Thuraya satellite phone,” Max said, nodding toward the kit in my hand. “Anytime, anywhere. Get the aerial up, point it south, and use the hands-free to speak. Turn it over.” I did so. Taped to the back was a slip of paper bearing a phone number.
“My
sat phone. Dial it whenever you need to.” He coughed. “Either me or Cath will pick it up. And I mean anytime, Marc. We’re here for you. You understand?” I said that I did. “It’s also equipped with a Global Positioning System so we can locate you if need be.”

“That’s reassuring.”

“Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worrying. It should be … fun.”

“Good. That’s the spirit. You’ve worked on the apology?”

“It’s a done deal.”

“See you back here in a few hours?”

“Take care, Max.” It seemed the right thing to say. I might be going off on a risky adventure, but he was the one in mortal danger.