Notorious (10 page)
‘And elsewhere,’ says Sister Antony.
At the base of the hill with the Asylum directly above us, she faces what looks like solid rock; I think she is going to walk straight into it. But at the last moment she turns sideways and disappears through a narrow opening.
I squeeze in behind her. Almost immediately the gap widens into a shallow cave. The roof presses down on me. The temperature drops ten degrees.
Ahead is a doorway: reinforced wood with metal brackets and hinges hammered into the rock. The Sister takes out a large iron key and heaves the door open, revealing stairs cut into the same dark rock that I had seen in the underground bedrooms.
We climb through the dusky light to the next level. The wall is cool, even slightly damp when I touch it. I smell salt.
Sister Antony takes a torch from her pocket and points to a passage running off to our left. ‘The well,’ she says. She opens a door on our right. Meat on hooks is hanging in rows; chests filled with ice line the whitewashed rock walls. There are lanterns by the door and stacked candles. In Casablanca, the hanging meat is coated in flies, turning a dull green. But there are no flies here.
Sister Antony points to the wet sheen on the flagstones. ‘The well is drawn off a channel which runs under the Massif to the Kabir mountains. Somewhere deep below the rock, they think there is an underground lake which feeds the channel.’ She draws a breath. ‘To find that . . . ’
‘You could irrigate the desert.’
‘Then the people would come.’
‘Businessmen,’ I say. ‘Non-believers. Americans.’
She refuses to be drawn. ‘Abu N’af will always be a refuge for solitaries, hermits, people who cannot survive in the noisy world.’
We climb the stairs. Light comes down to meet us and I see the numbers on my watch. The old sickness is back in my stomach. It is as though it has never left me. It has only vanished briefly, during that time in Sicily. With her.
I sway against the rock. Sister Antony grips my elbow, hard.
‘Everyone plays their own games in the desert,’ she says. ‘For amusement, for money, for revenge. Laforche knows exactly when the Saudis come hawking; they radio ahead.’ She lets me go, steps back. ‘The desert will send you crazy with suspicions, with mirages.’
‘Crazier,’ I say.
‘Remember,’ says Sister Antony, ‘you can always make a fresh start with your next breath.’
W
e are at the door of the infirmary. Laforche stares at me. ‘You understand this is your last chance to speak to her. After this, she says – ’
I snort. ‘She doesn’t have a choice.’
‘But I do, Monsieur. Remember that.’
We go in.
Through the half-closed shutters, the fierce light is already fading. Grey is soaking up the sky. The wind whines against the hill.
‘It will storm tonight,’ says Laforche as we walk across the floor, our feet hitting the tiles like castanets.
‘Rain?’ I am trying to breathe slowly, clear my mind.
‘Dry lightning.’
We reach the bed. Again, Sister Antony is sitting, her head bowed. Laforche stands at the foot of the bed, arms behind his back.
‘You look different,’ says the woman.
I put my hand to my open collar, to where my tie should be.
‘Not the office boy.’
‘No.’
‘Not the patsy.’
‘That’s your interpretation. Not mine.’
I pull a wooden chair out from the wall, sit next to the bed, my briefcase on my knee.
‘Still got your beloved case,’ she says. ‘Your identity.’
‘Always.’
‘You can’t keep files on everyone.’ She presses her lips together, her back arched. I half rise from my seat. She continues, in gasps, ‘Ashes to ash.’
‘Don’t.’ I stop myself from cursing her. ‘Do you want names here?
Should I call you Ophelia? Yeah . . . Ophelia and her brother, of the tragic house of – ’
She forces herself up. She shouts, ‘Don’t you dare include my brother.’ Her face drains white. The welts are as dark as scars. Sister Antony lowers her onto the pillows. The sound of the woman’s breathing fills the room.
‘I’m sorry.’ My fists clench. I feel the tendons standing out in my neck. ‘Your brother wasn’t – ’
She sits up again, clutching at Sister Antony. ‘You bastard!’ she says. ‘You told me my brother was alive. Getting me to help your demon friends.’
‘Enough,’ says Sister Antony. The woman falls back, staring at the ceiling.
Laforche clears his throat. ‘I think – ’
‘Not yet,’ says Sister Antony, and to me, ‘Ask your questions.’
I look at the crumpled figure in the bed.
‘Now,’ says Sister Antony. ‘Or never.’
I sit by the bed. The only way I can look at her is to think of her as a map, not a person. She is a map to recovery with all the answers. She is a country of red and white, of smooth planes and festering welts. I think of the smudged Sicilian afternoon light falling on the gleam of a wrist bone, the curve of her right ear. The lower lobe. Lobe. I almost thought “love”.
‘We need to know.’ I raise my voice so Laforche and the Sister will remember when Mitch asks. ‘What did Pietr tell you before he died? Where did he hide the Baghdad statuettes?’
‘Isn’t it odd,’ she says dreamily, ‘that at any moment of tragedy in the world, a horse is rubbing itself against a fence or sailors are looking the other way when Icarus falls from the sky?’
‘Don’t play the fool,’ I say. ‘You’ll only hurt yourself.’
She is silent.
‘If you don’t tell us your movements on the last night,’ I say, ‘they will charge you. Someone disabled all the surveillance in the house.’
‘You,’ she says. ‘We both know why.’
‘Pietr must have told you something.’
She closes her eyes.
I say to Sister Antony, ‘You think all she’s facing is a slap on the wrist, some jail time. But if you don’t take my help now, Mitch will be here soon, tonight even. I’ll have no power then, do you understand? She’ll be gone, charged as a terrorist and gone to a CIA prison. Off the books: Poland, Afghanistan. It’ll be like she never existed.’
‘That’s like saying Saint Antony never existed,’ says the Sister, ‘because he tried and failed to build a community in the desert. Yet here I am.’
I stare at them. ‘Don’t you see? She’s the woman at the centre of a web of survivals.’
I say to her, ‘What have you been doing all these months?’
She won’t open her eyes.
‘Who have you been seeing?’ The moment the words are out of my mouth I know they are wrong. They give too much away. Words destroy. I always knew it. They had ruined the two of us.
The woman opens her eyes but she doesn’t look at me. She looks at Sister Antony. I feel some communication pass between them. The woman says, ‘I’ll never tell you.’
The afternoon sun struggles through the clouds. The dunes fan out in wrinkles under the sullen sky. The ground is moving as though horsemen are rising out of the sand. The riders have been hidden in pits underneath, sand laid on cloth laid over branches. They will ride up the slope of the pit and attack the attackers. Victory by hiding yourself away; the way she has done for the last eight months. She has hidden but I am the one who is stuck in the pit.
I say, ‘How did you come through the desert?’
‘I had Rimbaud’s diary,’ she says. ‘I followed the landmarks in it like a map.’
I look at Laforche. He frowns.
‘That’s impossible,’ I say to her. ‘The only diary is here.’
‘I had a copy, made thirty years ago.’
‘Where is it?’
‘It’s been given back to the last surviving relative of its last owner.
It’s not part of your big conspiracy. You and Mitch will never get it.’
The wind swells. Sand sprays onto the floor. Laforche and the Sister go to close the shutters. I glimpse the clouds wrenched apart, the moon rising like a half-developed photograph, an apparition sitting low over the horizon. A lightning flash tears through the image, more sand lifts, veiling the plain. Goats cry in the courtyard and dogs howl in the distance.
‘How much do you remember about your career as a spy?’ I ask the woman, leaning towards her.
‘My short and disastrous career as a spy.’ She is tracing the welts on her left hand with her right. I see the lighter line where the skin hasn’t been tanned, where her wedding ring had been. So she has been wearing it all these months. Despite her husband dying the day they got married.
She says, ‘Your spy.’
‘But not my assassin.’
She stares at me. ‘You think I killed Pietr?’
I have to get my story right. I am exhausted by all these double acts. I say, for the witnesses, for Mitch, ‘Mitch says they found two bodies in the fire, both shot.’ I say, as though I don’t know better, ‘Maybe you killed Pietr in defence. Maybe Rosza was attacking you.’ Ambushing you, in the house I sent you to.
She says, ‘I didn’t kill them.’
‘Evidence – ’
She laughs, almost without sound. ‘I know what evidence Mitch can come up with. And if you lied about my brother, why couldn’t you be lying now?’
I grasp the briefcase. ‘I’ve got photos, of Pietr.’
‘No.’ Her eyes fill with tears. ‘I don’t want to see.’
‘You don’t want to see what happened to your husband? Unless you already know what happened to him. To your husband.’
‘Yes, husband,’ she shouts. ‘Husband. That just kills you doesn’t it? I can hear it in your voice.’ She puts her hands over her face, says, low, ‘You’ve only yourself to blame. That I married him.’
She lies back in the bed. Her face is tinged grey, as though swept by sand mist. ‘I have been dreaming about hearts,’ she says. ‘The worst thing about being medicated is that you feel as though you have no heart. The empty space fills up, first with water, then with clay, then glass.
‘I have been reading about poets and thinking about hearts. After Shelley drowned, and his body was washed up on shore, he was identified by a volume of Keats’ poetry in his pocket. They tried to cremate him but his heart refused to burn. Byron insisted it be taken out of the fire, out of his poor burnt body, and given to Shelley’s wife Mary. When she died, years later, they say she still had the heart, in a gold casket next to her.’
‘Drowning,’ I say. ‘You’ve been thinking about drowning again.’
She looks at me steadily. ‘If you scar even the smallest part of the heart, you have a scar forever.’
‘You knew it was me the instant you saw me,’ she says. ‘Why are you even interrogating me? You’ll get your promotion.’
I think of all the times I had told her she was just the job. I can’t speak.
‘He was frightened of what you had told us,’ says Laforche. ‘But it is too late now. His friends will be here in a few hours.’
She turns dark eyes to me. ‘Mitch?’
I nod.
‘Then you’re ruined,’ she says. ‘He’ll show no mercy. I told you that in Sicily.’
I force myself forward. ‘Where are the two statuettes? Say it for the tape. Appear to co-operate.’
‘You want me to trust you?’
‘I – yes.’
She blinks. ‘You’ll help me, even though you think I’m a murderer?’
I hesitate. ‘You were the only one in the house.’
‘I went back to get Rimbaud’s diary,’ she says. ‘But I didn’t go into the house, I went up the tower steps. What about you?’
‘I know I didn’t do it.’
Laforche stirs. ‘That’s hardly evidence, Monsieur.’
‘I needed Pietr alive.’ I hear myself: hesitant, resentful. Lacking conviction.
‘What about Mitch?’ says the woman.
‘Mitch wouldn’t – ’ I stop.
‘Of course he would,’ she says.
‘How do we even know this is the woman you’re looking for?’ says Laforche. ‘It’s only your word against hers. If we refuse to release her . . . ’
‘They’ll take her anyway,’ I say.
‘Not if we negotiate with them.’
‘To negotiate you must have something to trade,’ I say. ‘If she won’t swap information, what do you have?’
‘Her diary,’ says Laforche. ‘It has all the details does it not?’
‘Not what they are looking for,’ I say. ‘Not about the art.’
‘But it has other things,’ says Laforche. ‘Things we could trade.’
‘We?’ I look at them. Sister Antony folds her hands.
‘The diary is of more use than you think,’ says Laforche. ‘Why don’t you see?’
‘Stop it,’ says the woman. She looks at my open collar, my tie-less throat. She says, ‘Stop taunting him.’
The clasps on the briefcase crack as I unlock it. I stare at my worldly possessions. Twenty-five years working and this is all I have. I feel nauseous.
I lift up my files, the camera, the tape recorder. I see the inevitable absences. The diary is gone, and the gun.
‘
He has a streak of cruelty in him, I see that now
.’ Laforche’s voice rolls through the room. He is standing, bent over the book in his hands, reading from it. I see a flash of red. ‘
Sometimes he will pin my
wrist to the table in Café Flora, watch me with those black eyes, to see
whether I will pull away. He is constantly furious, constantly talks about
death and killing. Killing Pietr.
’
Laforche holds up the diary. The red ribbon is a flame between his hands, like Shelley’s heart in the hands of his wife.
Laforche reads from the diary, ‘
He sat opposite me in the café, this
man with the closed face. He has the blackest eyes of any blue-eyed man I
ever met. When I first saw him I thought he was ill. He is intensely angry
at times; he radiates anger. I work from rage, he said to me. I work and
work. I keep waiting for my life to start
.
‘
I know that I should say that his life has started, with me. I want to
heal him, it would make up for everything. We are bound together by our
individual guilt, I saw that the moment I met him. If he were whole . . .
If I can make him whole . . . But I am angry myself, about his lies. I let
him mark me, I want him to be guilty. He pins my wrist to the table, he
leaves bruises on my inner arm, my inner thigh. Bruises hard to explain
away, bruises he wants Pietr to find. He is a traveller in a strange country.
He has never been in this place before and he is testing to see how far he
should go
.’