Notorious (2 page)
I kicked. Snow sprayed out. The squirrel snarled, turned and bounded away. I lay on my back, the cold eating into me, an ache in my eyes. Scalding chips of cold fell on my upturned face as the bone-marrow sky looked down on me.
The grey dusk doused the dying sun. I had to decide: go through the house or around it. I trudged up the front steps, past statues so encrusted with snow that it was hard to tell what they were. I saw frozen people inside the crucifix-shaped meringues: glistening like chandeliers, crystal knots of tears on their cheeks, struggling to escape their marble deaths.
The front door rocked on its hinge; snow patched the polished wooden floor. I was surprised: I had thought the new tenants – the Americans – would have taken care of the house, as though this was conventional wartime and it was a matter of billeting, of courtesies observed.
But ever since 2003, this had been a different kind of war. If the investigator’s file was right, the Americans weren’t interested in protocols.
Odd shapes were mounted along the hallway, nailed to wallpaper which in this light looked blood red. The first shapes were tinselled with ice. I took a half step. Was that – ? Yes, preserved animal heads, hundreds of them, pierced from ceiling to floor down the long red corridor.
Midway, the shapes changed. Apes’ heads? No, too small. I edged forward, saw the deep lines around the open eyes, the grimaces of the tongueless mouths. The fading afternoon light slipped in mustard-coloured tears down the metallic cheeks. Death masks.
The banging started again, closer. I didn’t want to see any more. I backed out, went down the steps, slipping on dark grey mirrors of ice. I grabbed at a statue. With a whiplash crack, my hand went through the glittering crust and I felt the strangely warm stone beneath.
I pulled out the investigator’s report. The map seemed accurate so far. If those were the fields and the house was here . . .
The snow had been roughly cleared from the side path. I went past stone buildings huddled around a cobbled yard – the old stables – to the south field. The low-slung aluminium building in the centre looked like one of the chicken sheds near my childhood home: those apparently innocuous, windowless huts whose lights shone all day and all night through the prefabricated joints, through the dreadful, muffled quiet.
I picked the lock surprisingly easily and, visualising the door slamming shut, wedged it back in the snow. I wanted all the light I could get.
The floor was covered with rotting hay; a dilapidated tractor lay down its rusted neck in one corner; in the other: a pile of gumboots clotted with grass slime and grey mud.
From here on in, the investigator had said, he couldn’t vouch for accuracy. Bribes only get you so far, he said, even with Nazis.
‘They’re Poles,’ I said.
‘They’re grabbing people in the middle of the night, throwing black hoods over them and flying them around the world.’
‘That’s the CIA.’
‘Is this political for you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s personal.’
‘It’s personal for the people getting snatched,’ he said. ‘I bet it was personal for your brother.’
The hatch was twelve feet exactly from the door. I cleared the dead hay and pulled the heavy rubber matting aside. Beneath was thin steel painted a pale brown; hay-brown. I heaved it up and back and looked down into the dark square. I tried not to think of the poet Shelley drawing his grave, precisely shading the steps which descended into the earth.
I descended into the earth.
At the bottom, the investigator had said, was a switch about shoulder height. He looked at me. ‘About head height.’
‘It won’t set off an alarm?’
‘Nobody’ll be there.’ He half raised a hand. ‘Nobody should be there.’
Light came on in the bulbs strung on wire along the narrow passage before me. I had expected something engineered into the earth, not this hastily hacked crevice, its moist walls held back by buckling wooden planks. A temporary place; no-one would have been kept here for long. Not the young bearded men picked up in airports, snatched as they were getting off trains, into cars, as they turned the key in the lock of their cheap hotel room. No-one stayed for long. Not even my brother.
There were things in this under-earth which were not temporary. Tiny creatures rustled and scuttled away from the light: worms curled frenziedly into the black wall, slaters slid between the wet, dangling roots. Small clots of dirt constantly hit the ground as though the earth was trying to get comfortable, shifting away from the grip of the wooden planks.
Don’t go down the left passage, the investigator had said. It’s not relevant. And you can’t see anything.
But the bulbs projected enough light to at least look; to make sure. I inched sideways, the wall spongy against me, the low, knotted roof catching my beret, wet grit scratching my neck. I thought, There must be another, easier entrance.
I went on. The damp earth mushroomed at my back; the sooty air coated my throat. I smelled mould and the deeper odour of decay. The bones of long-dead things, asleep and hunched in the dirt, dug into me. I imagined vertebrae folded over like pale plates in the gloom.
Warmer air brushed my cheek. I stepped forward and out into a rock cavern. In the wedge of light expiring at my feet, I saw that large hollows had been scooped out of the glazed wet walls. As my hand stretched into the nearest dark oval, I felt a husky, splintered bone. Another lay parallel, and another. A human ribcage. I touched the ridged neck, the eyeless skull. A skeleton, buried upright in the earth. Why? To save on coffin wood in war time? I let my hand drift down, felt flaking metal, heard the clink of a chain. Manacles. So, a local punishment for traitors? A private prison?
I measured myself against the corrugated human before me. Too short to be the one I was looking for, I told myself, trying not to think of chainsaws and quick lime.
Catacombs, the investigator should have said. But maybe he knew that would be irresistible to me. To be deep down where the earth truly became bone. Became truth.
Be careful what you wish for, my mother used to say, pinching me. Now, this close to answers, I found it hard to breathe. I backed away. My heel caught the jut of a paving stone: the first in a path which seemed to me – although I could hardly see – to glow in the dusk. I followed it, more by feel, away from the fissure, away from the light, into a wider passage. Hot air riffled around me. The paving stones became broader and neater as they led to two rows of tall iron boxes.
The boxes were haloed by a sullen orange light rising from fluorescent tubes lying on floor brackets. The glow coated the heavy bolts and the barred windows set in the metal walls. Not boxes. Cages.
I heard no human breath but I had to be sure. I pulled open the first door and went in. I saw the nicotine-coloured sheen on the floor and a child’s yellowing, disposable nappy curling beneath the scratches in the wall. I smelled the fear and the blood. I imagined the human shapes crushed together, merging with the damp. Flinching in the darkness. And when my foot crunched on something that was not glass and I looked down and saw the tooth clotted in red at the base, I knew it was much worse than I had thought.
A click. The light vanished. In the absolute blackness, a breath slowly exhaled next to me. As I backed away, I heard the beat of boots on stone. One–two–three–four. Louder. Closer. Light burst in arcing stars. Torch lights surrounded me, dark shapes behind them. My bag was ripped off my shoulder. An American voice funnelled out from the star-burst in front of me.
‘You’re trespassing. What are you doing here?’
‘Trespassing,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Arresting,’ he said. A torch on my right dipped down to point at my bag, and in the backlight I glimpsed the pale set face of a young man in uniform. Hands came out of the darkness to search me, roughly. Another star dipped; a halo illuminated the file. A hand – wrist-less, arm-less – turned the pages.
‘You,’ said the American. ‘You’re a bigger fool than your brother.’
A silhouette loomed up. My hands were grabbed, twisted in front of me. Plastic cuffs snapped around my wrists.
‘You’re lucky you’re too rich to be disappeared,’ said the American. ‘And too unstable to be believed.’ As the stars swung away, a small white square fell from the file. The photo. I put my foot over where I guessed it had landed.
‘You, book-boy,’ said the American. ‘Put her in the truck. Direct to base. No stopping for friends, get it? And don’t talk to her.’ His torch retreated.
Another moment of blackness. The orange glow surged up the walls.
There was only me and the young soldier left in the cage. We looked down to the photo lying by my boot. The low light made the man in the black and white image shudder, as though he was coming out of the dungeon floor.
The young soldier bent. On his nape, I saw black moles below his sandy hair. He picked up the photo. ‘Lover?’ He had a Polish accent.
‘Hunter,’ I said. The shadows slid across the face of the man in the photo. A man who lived in shadows, a shadow who wanted to be a man.
The hot air swelled in my throat; the wall vibrated against my shoulder. I looked at the photo of the man who called himself John Devlin. ‘The man who wants to ruin me.’
‘So, you will run?’ said the Polish soldier, standing. He held out the photo, face up; offering me John Devlin’s head in a vice. Exactly what I should want.
The soldier took a book from his hip pocket, a book with a pierced red heart on its cover. It was the Rimbaud. He put the photo inside and held out the book. ‘From my brother.’
I looked at the book. Poetry, I couldn’t escape it.
A shout coiled down the corridor. The soldier stiffened.
I held out my cuffed hands. ‘Can you make these tighter?’
He stared at me.
I said, ‘Make them hurt.’
R
ené Laforche, the Administrator of the Asylum at Abu N’af, is a small man with gleaming black hair, toffee-coloured teeth and a row of shiny medals pinned to his grey suit. His Anjou Rose medallion for public service has white polish clumped like beetle rot to the silver. He keeps running his thumbnail around the grooves, trying to shift the polish, frowning at me. I sense a breakdown in communication which Mitch’s solution for problems like this – the fat envelope filled with dirham notes sitting in my briefcase – will no doubt exacerbate.
Laforche flicks out what he thinks is the last bit of polish – it isn’t, and he will dislike me even more when he realises – and sits up straight.
‘I’m sure you are aware, Monsieur, that the Asylum is where they brought Rimbaud in from the desert.’
So this is the game: humiliate the hick foreigner.
I assume my blandest expression and say to the irate puffball opposite, ‘Rambo? The American action man with the red headband?’
The puffball swells further. ‘The famous French poet, Monsieur!
Le symboliste
, follower of Baudelaire,
un ami du Verlaine
. He came to the desert to die.’
I nod as though I am pretending to know what he is talking about, even though I do know what he is talking about and am just pretending to pretend to know.
I eat a date – and another two – and drink the mint tea. Dust irritates my ear drum.
‘So Monsieur Deviling – ’
‘Devlin.’ I extract my business card. ‘John Devlin.’
Laforche holds the card by one corner, away from him. ‘Our doctors – ’
‘ – are very, very qualified.’ I reach for my briefcase. ‘But – ’
He raises his voice. ‘Monsieur, how can you talk to this poor disturbed woman? A woman who runs into walls because she says she wants to climb inside a pebble? She is in the hospital now.’ He shakes his head.
I look at Laforche’s gleaming hair. Is it dyed? Maybe not. He is in his middle fifties – the same age as the husband of the woman – but older than me by a decade. I wonder if he is in love with her.
‘What she did to her face . . . ’ His voice is actually fading.
I bite my lip as if shocked. It is not completely an act. I did see the photos.
‘How you can talk to her if you do not even know who Rimbaud is?’
Baffling. I am ground between two intractable ways of thinking: the hard, cutting lines of the stars and bars of the great US of A, with its aisles of pills in neon-lit mega-stores, and this land of endlessly shifting curves and veiled ambiguities, of ancient herbs in tiny cut-glass bottles. I imagine living in a world of sand where footprints are constantly erased. I suppose our symbol would be the moon’s crescent too. Something that reshapes itself. Disappears.
I pat the briefcase. ‘Monsieur.’ It sounds like “mon sewer”. I say, ‘Her family authorises – ’
‘How do they know who she is?’ he says. ‘She does not know. We do not know.’
‘Well, the people who are interested believe they know.’
He looks through the window, past the helicopter parked in the shadow of the high stone walls, to the Kabir Massif. Sheets of sullen orange hang over the stubby peaks and tremble there. The pilot is rubbing furiously at the smears of marmalade dust dulling the chopper’s shiny panels. He is having to go over the same spot every few moments.
‘Abu N’af is famous for its storms,’ says the Administrator maliciously. ‘A grain of sand will bring down your fine machine.’
‘Not a grain, surely.’ I hunch lower in the chair, try to look like a dutiful messenger, a low-rung grunt. ‘Monsieur, you must see what is at stake here. The smuggling of priceless artefacts. Heinous traffickings. Lootings of culture by the father of the Australian woman you are sheltering.’
Laforche smiles. ‘Usually it is the French who are considered the looters. The books taken from Danang and Hanoi. Napoleon’s foragings in Egypt and Spain.’ He examines his thumbnail and frowns. ‘You are here to arrest the woman.’
‘No.’ My voice is over-emphatic; above my supposed pay grade. ‘But she has information that is very important to certain people.’
‘And you?’
For the first time, I am not sure what to say. ‘I won’t judge the poor woman.’