In the Evil Day (16 page)
Sonny, you die when I fucken tell you to and not a fucken second before.
They were the words mad Sergeant Toll shouted at him when he lay in an erosion gully, bruised all over, arm broken, at the School of Infantry obstacle course. Niemand used the same words to the curly-haired boy, Jacobs, whose blood was lying like red mercury on the ancient dust of Angola. But Jacobs hadn’t obeyed. He’d coughed blood and he’d died.
Floors, he’d lost track of floors, surely this was the ground floor. No, one to go, shit no, more than one. He wasn’t feeling well. Not a good idea this, he should have left Mr Fucking Shawn’s cassette where he found it.
More stairs. Another floor? No, he remembered this section, the smell, perfume, somehow not women’s perfume, too much lemon and bay, this was the ground floor, carry on down, he’d be in the basement.
An exit, right there, to his right, he hadn’t noticed it. He walked towards the doors. Upright, don’t hunch, the tendency was to hunch when hurt, why was that? It didn’t help, didn’t take away any pain.
He looked around, not feeling alert. Where were they? They hadn’t sent one man to kill him. One man in a dress and a wig. They’d sent two men to the hotel, that hadn’t worked. Second try, this place would be crawling with killers, a full fucking platoon of them.
He went past the doorman, who stared at him, then onto the pavement, lots of people, they were hard to avoid, all carrying bags. He bumped into a woman, said sorry. Daylight fading. Cold day, cold on his face, he felt warm inside, that was a good sign, they always talked about feeling cold when you were hit badly. The old hands. He was an old hand now. But he’d never taken a bad hit. Just the piece out of his side, the flesh wound in the bum and the grenade slivers in his arm and his chest.
He knew where he was. The underground was just around the corner. Catch the tube as planned.
The pain was in his jaw now, why was that?
He crossed the side street, walked to the corner, turned into the busy street. No, he shouldn’t catch the tube, he’d be trapped down there. He walked past the station entrance, halfway down the block. Cross, better to cross, he thought. Crossing the street, traffic stalled, walking between the cars. This was a silly thing to have done, you didn’t want to die for this kind of shit.
Too late to think about that. Anyway you didn’t want to die protecting parasites in Joburg, that would be a really seriously stupid way to go.
‘You all right?’
Someone was speaking to him. Someone on a motorbike, sitting in the traffic, a yellow helmet, waiting for the lights ‘Need a lift,’ said Niemand. ‘I’m hurt.’
‘Get on,’ said yellow helmet.
Niemand got on, bag on his lap, held the sides of the rider’s leather jacket. He looked back. Two men in dark suits were on the corner outside the store, looking around.
Then, through the cars, he saw another man in a dark suit coming, running around cars.
Coming to get him. Make sure this time.
He couldn’t move, couldn’t get off the bike.
What was the point? He couldn’t run.
The man was fifteen metres away, a pale face, dark hair, coming quickly.
Fuck, he thought. Stupid.
With a roar, the bike pulled away, went between a car and delivery vehicle. Niemand’s head went back and when it came forward he couldn’t stop it, it came to rest between the rider’s shoulder blades, wanted to stay there.
This wasn’t good. How much blood had he lost? He took a hand off the rider’s jacket and felt his shirt. It was wet, soaked.
Too much blood.
‘YOU TELL me what’s going on,’ said Caroline Wishart. ‘Two bastards sandwich me, take the package. Stolen goods, the one says. Then someone attacks Mackie.’
‘Close the door, will you?’
Colley was holding a plain cigarette in long ochre fingers, tapping it on his desktop, tapping one end, turning it over, tapping the other. ‘I’m buggered,’ he said. ‘Who knows how many people he’s swindled.’
‘Where’d you get the money?’
‘The money?’
‘Yes, the money.’
He lit the cigarette with an old gas lighter, many clicks before the flame and the deep draw, belched smoke, did some coughing. ‘Chalk this one up to character building,’ he said. ‘Some you win, some are fuck-ups. That’s life.’
‘Who’d you tell?’
‘Tell? Who’d you tell?’ He put on a high-pitched and squeaky voice, his idea of an upper-class girl’s voice.
Caroline wanted to strangle Colley, go over to him and slap his face and put her hands around his mottled neck.
‘Leaving aside the pathetic quality of your imitations,’ she said, ‘where’d the money come from?’
He smiled, a pleased expression. ‘It wasn’t actually real money.’
‘What?’
‘The top and the bottom ones, yes. The middle ones…shall we say Middle Eastern?’
It was dawning on Caroline that she was missing something. ‘Well, shall “we” tell me what the fuck’s going on here?’
Colley formed his lips into an anus and blew tiny, perfect smoke rings. She saw the pale, vile tip of his tongue. The grey circles met the thermal from the ground-level heating duct, rose, dissolved.
‘You came to me for help, remember,’ Colley said. ‘You could’ve gone to Halligan, but no, you thought he’d pinch your story, make you sorry you screwed him with your non-negotiable demands.’
She could not contain herself. ‘Well, not doing that, that was probably a big mistake.’
Carefully, Colley rested his cigarette in a saucer, finger-shaped nicotine stains around the edges, looked up at her. ‘Listen, sweetheart,’ he said, ‘your big scoop, it happened to you, you didn’t happen to it. Now you’ve got to produce another one. And you gels, you can’t actually do that, you can’t actually do anything, and once you stop giving the working-class old farts cockstands, once the next little upper-class tart comes along, well then you’re back to writing your lifestyle crap.’
He was telling her something but she couldn’t quite grasp what it was.
‘Still,’ said Colley, ‘you can always get daddy to set you up as an interior decorator, can’t you?’
‘So what do I do?’ she said.
‘Nothing. Move on, this never got off the ground, no harm done, we just forget it. We don’t put it in the CV and we don’t entertain the pub with the story.’
‘That’s it?’
Colley took off his glasses, looked for something to clean them with, found a crumpled tissue and breathed on the filthy lenses. ‘Well,’ he said, not looking at her, rubbing glass, ‘some good can come out of a cockup. You never know.’
She waited. He didn’t look up, started on the other smeared lens. He wasn’t going to say any more, she was dismissed.
She left, feeling the tightness in her chest, the sick feeling.
One day she would kill Colley. Tie him to a tree in a forest, torture him and kill him. No, torture him and bury him alive, shovel damp soil alive with worms onto his head, into his mouth, watch his eyes.
But she knew that what she hated most was not Colley.
No, she hated herself for being so stupid as to go to him, to trust him.
HE FOUND her on the university website.
Dr Alexandra Koenig, Dr. med., Dr. phil., Dipl.-Psych. Clinical psychologist.
Research: Empirical validation of psychoanalytical concepts; psychophysiology;
post-traumatic stress disorder.
A homepage carried a photograph, properly severe. He went to her curriculum vitae. It listed at least two dozen articles. She had been a visiting fellow at the Harvard Medical School. She was on the editorial board of
The Journal for Trauma Studies.
There was an email address. Anselm stared at the screen for a while, then he opened the mailer, typed in her address. Under Subject, he put: Rudeness, contrition.
In the message box, he typed: We could meet, for a walk perhaps. John Anselm.
He felt relieved after sending the message and went back to the logbooks. The phone rang.
‘It’s done,’ said Tilders. ‘Some luck too. Two for the price of one.’
‘Not a concept known to this firm,’ said Anselm. He didn’t know what Tilders was talking about. They must have got the bug on Serrano earlier than expected.
His email warning was blinking. He clicked. Alex Koenig.
The message was: A walk would be nice. Does today suit you? I am free from 3 p.m.
Anselm felt flushed. He couldn’t think of anywhere to meet her, and then he thought of his childhood walks with Fräulein Einspenner in Stadtpark. He hadn’t been there in thirty years.
She was waiting in front of the planetarium, formally dressed again, wearing her rimless glasses. There weren’t many people around, a few mothers with prams or pushers, lovers, older people walking briskly.
She saw him from a distance, didn’t look away, watched him approach.
‘Herr Anselm,’ she said, long and serious face. She held out her right hand. ‘Perhaps we start again?’
‘John,’ said Anselm.
‘Alex.’
They shook hands.
‘Shall we walk?’ she said.
They walked on the grass, away from the building. There wasn’t much left in the day. A wind had come up, serrated edge of winter, hunting brown and grey and russet leaves across a lawn worn shabby by the summer crowds.
‘Well,’ she said, not at ease. ‘You know what I do for my living. You are not still a journalist.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m in the information business.’
‘Yes?’
‘We gather it and sell it.’ That was true, that was what they did. He didn’t want to tell this woman the sordid truth but he didn’t want to lie to her, he’d told a lot of lies, most of them to women.
They were at the road. She stopped and turned. He turned too and they looked back at the planetarium: it was big, solid, domed, towering over the parkland, a faintly sinister presence, alien in its setting.
‘That’s an Albert Speer kind of building,’ Alex said. ‘Hitler must have liked it. It says, look at me, I’m huge.’
‘Well, I don’t want to stand up for Adolf ’s taste in architecture but if you have to have water towers, it’s not too bad.’
‘Water tower? I thought it was a planetarium.’
‘Now it is. It think it was built as a water tower. We could have coffee, something.’
He needed a drink, he hadn’t had anything to drink all day, nothing at lunch time, he usually drank beer from the machine in the basement.
‘Yes, good. Do you know where?’
‘I think so. It’s been thirty years, almost that.’
They set off again, crossed the road. She took big strides, he’d always had to shorten his stride with women, the women he remembered walking with. That was not many. He remembered one. He remembered walking in Maine with Helen Duval, she complained constantly about being bitten by midges, then she tripped over a root and claimed to have sprained her ankle. They were within sight of the cabin he’d hired. That was as far as they ventured.
‘You’re a medical doctor,’ he said. ‘As well.’
‘In theory,’ she said. ‘In practice, I can’t even diagnose myself. I get flu and I think I’m dying. You came to the park when you were young?’
‘I was brought to see the birds. They used to have wonderful exotic birds and all kinds of fowls, these huge fluffy things, golden pheasants, I remember. May still be here somewhere. Do you enjoy what you do?’
She had taken off her glasses. He hadn’t noticed her do that.
‘I suppose so.’ She looked at him, looked away. ‘Yes. Well, I do what I do and I don’t give much thought to whether I enjoy it. It’s not that…it’s not a question that arises. It’s my work.’
She was not used to being asked questions.
She
asked the questions. They walked in silence for a time, gravel hissing underfoot, the wind tugging at them, lifting their hair. Then they saw a sign and went down a path and found the café. There were more people in it than in the park, people rewarding themselves for taking exercise.
‘Hot chocolate with rum,’ said Anselm. ‘That’s what we should have.’
‘Right.’
‘The woman who brought me here always had one. She used to give me a teaspoonful. That’s where it all began. My decline.’
A waitress in black with a white apron came and he ordered two, stopped himself ordering a drink as well, asking her whether she wanted a drink.
‘What brought you to hostages?’ said Anselm.
He wasn’t looking at her, he was looking at the people. He had been doing that since they entered, doing an inventory of the people in the big room. Then he realised she would notice that and he looked at her. She’s pretending she hasn’t noticed, he thought, she’s wary. She thinks I’m capable of repeating last time’s performance.
I am.
‘Well, most of the post-trauma research in this area has been on large groups,’ said Alex. ‘I’m interested in the dynamics of survival in small groups.’