Notorious (5 page)
‘ – the opportunity not to go to jail for letting her get away. So you’d better nail her good this time.’
‘Yes, Mitch.’
‘You’re on probation until then, you know.’
‘Yes.’
I stare at the gravel grimace, hear the endless silence. Always we try to make our little marks on this vast page, digging out roads, reshaping mountains. It is a compulsion, this constant remaking. Like reaching out in the middle of the night to cup a hand around a woman’s calf and, very softly and gently, move her leg a fraction.
I catch my breath.
‘What’s that sound?’ says Mitch.
‘The wind’s coming up. People go mad in the dust storms here, apparently.’
‘Madder,’ says Mitch. ‘Well, you’ve got one day – ’
‘Two,’ I say.
‘Dude, if you can’t get her talking by tomorrow night, dump her in the desert. We could pick her off from the air. Problem solved.’
Static eats the humour in his laughter.
‘Joke, Devlin,’ says Mitch. ‘Like your Hollywood name.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Joke.’
He says, ‘You field guys. You all think too much.’
Laforche had refused to wake the woman. Instead, he told me a long pointless story. An old tale of the desert, he said. Two friends are parted for years by various malign fates, the weather, new loves. Then, after many more contrived circumstances, one finally sends the other a letter which contains only the words,
This morning I pruned
my rose tree
. After many more malign circumstances (bandits, failing carrier pigeons and so on), his friend replies,
This morning I too
pruned my rose tree
.
Whole minutes went by while I stared in despair at the photo of the kiss in the café. The wooden fan overhead creaked into my silence.
‘You see?’ said Laforche.
Now I am being given a guided tour of the property by Sister Antony. The condemned property. I wonder if Laforche knows. Maybe he thinks it will help, if he co-operates with us. Maybe he doesn’t care; it is another game to him. A game putting me behind schedule.
I am standing in the room where the woman slept when she first arrived. It is a windowless cell, one of the summer sleeping rooms burrowed into the earth, taking advantage of small caves and natural pockets in the rock. But even here, some indecisive murk of sunlight falls down the curve of the rubbed-shiny stone steps and sidles exhausted, the colour of grey felt, around Sister Antony, who waits for me in the cool corridor.
Dust is still itching my ear. I am annoyed enough to want to take off my tie and jacket but I refuse to lower my standards. I sit on the cot in the corner which, surprisingly, takes my weight without protest. A white sheet covers a lumpy pallet made from tough calico.
I scratch a thumbnail against stubby stalks. The pallet is filled with straw. I feel the weight of the satellite phone on my belt, the solidity of my briefcase, the fine weave of my suit. Straw.
The nun is stationary, her face shadowed above her impossibly white pinafore. She is wiry and tough; a desert plant. But there is light below her heart. She traps light in her slender gold cross.
I contemplate her. I have already tried my panting-puppy routine, complaining about the heat, admiring her fortitude. I have grumbled about the Casablanca traffic on Haussmann Avenue, the endless parking notices – ‘To be paid in cash! Always worse on a Monday! Lottery night, it’s a scandal!’ – to show that I am on her side, an oppressed worker. But all she gives me is a tightening of those thin lips. The only time her jaw relaxes is when I slap the thick stone walls and, in a blurt about medieval architecture, praise the Church for maintaining buildings like these. For a moment I think she is about to speak but then she bows her head again.
I play my torch over the walls. The back wall is pitted rock, shifting like deep sea under moonlight. There are glints of grey; tin maybe. Last week’s satellite photos showed new mining to the south, in the blood-stained sands of the Western Sahara.
The rock is cool to the touch, a relief from the gritty heat upstairs. Down here, you could fool yourself you could beat the desert. That you would win. The torch light ripples over the rubbed floor stones, catching odd marks; writings in French and English. I stare at the hopeful postcards. Brave little sign-posts:
Pierre was here
;
Silvana was
here
. I have no sympathy for them.
I kneel on the cool floor and lift the cot away from the wall. There is something scratched in French in the corner:
Je suis Rimbaud, l’ange déchu de Paris.
Je suis allé dans le desért sacré.
Maintenant, je suis un autre.
She’s likely to do the opposite of what her father wants, I told Mitch right from the start. Of what we want. Out of spite. Out of revenge.
The mother, of course, was committed years ago.
I stare at the rock. My watch beeps again. By now I should have finished the first interrogation. Should know where I stand.
I think of the man who said to her, ‘The light from the moon spills into your shoulder.’ A less haggard man. A man proud of his strength, his ability to catch her in his arms and raise her above his head, up to the moon. A man who could make her laugh. A happy man.
It was probably on the surveillance tapes. Somewhere, waiting to be found.
Stupid man.
The cell is airless, the only sound a rustle: a small black beetle picks its way painstakingly along the side of the wall, lifting its long thin legs as though there was an art to walking. An art to walking.
Ridiculous. I lift my foot. The beetle stops under the sudden increase in gloom. I lower my heel, wanting to grind, to smash.
‘No!’ says the nun by my side. The beetle lurches forward, turns as though it wants to run into the wall –
she wants to climb inside a
pebble
– and disappears.
‘Tunnels,’ says Sister Antony. ‘They make tunnels between the stones.’ She bows her head. Her lips move. I tug at my tie. I am surprised to find that I am breathing heavily. I can see how emotions become muted in the desert. Nearly nothing is worth the physical toll.
The nun kisses her crucifix. Her hands are like the stone floor: a smooth, deep brown, crisscrossed with lines, a blue vein travelling like a river through this country with no boundaries.
I tighten my tie. A country with no boundaries. Ridiculous.
I ask for a translation of the French scratched into the corner.
She says, ‘I am Rimbaud, the fallen angel of Paris. I went into the sacred desert. Now, I am another.’
‘The Administrator said that he came to the desert to die.’
She smiles, her mouth turns downwards. ‘Monsieur Laforche was born in Paris, the metropolis of red roses. The desert frightens him.’
I make an encouraging noise, nod thoughtfully.
‘He sustained him in a desert land,’ she says, ‘in a howling wilderness waste. He shielded him, cared for him, guarded him as the apple of His eye. Deuteronomy.’ Her voice is no longer like dried twigs. ‘Rimbaud did not come here to destroy his body but to transform it.’ Her words ring out like bells. I swear I hear an echo. ‘Like Jesus, he wandered in the desert, and when he came out of the desert, he built a community.’
I stare at her. ‘Did Rimbaud begin a church here?’
She withdraws her hands into her wide sleeves. ‘He saved Abu N’af.’ Her hands move beneath the material. ‘When the Church would have closed us.’
I recall the report. Once Abu N’af was crowded, with waiting lists of two years. It was a retreat which imitated those of the Italians who, in the 1970s, opened their convents and monasteries to the newly distressed as well as the faithful, as long as they paid. But in these days of terrorism, the Moroccan desert and Rimbaud weren’t the drawcards they used to be.
‘You need another poet,’ I say to her.
I
open my eyes on darkness as smothering as a cowl, with black wind in my mouth and sand under my cheek on the pillow. I think I hear a helicopter, Mitch arriving. But it must be the upper shutters clicking like bones against the wall. My watch says 3 am.
I feel woolly-minded; the familiar pain grinds below my ribs. It is like the shame I used to feel about my addiction to alcohol. When I was drinking, all I thought about was drinking. It is hunger but it is not.
I see freckles. There is only one person who ever took the pain away . . .
I am in the room she slept in: Rimbaud’s room. I turn on my torch, pull on my trousers. I am halfway to the door when I remember my briefcase and my shirt. I put on my shirt, take the briefcase.
The steps are smooth and cool under my feet. My bare feet, I realise as I step into the courtyard. The air is swollen with pine nuts and diesel oil and warm musk. A breeze slaps my face. It reminds me of Sicily. But seeing her, I say to myself, would remind me of Sicily.
The lion stares at me black-eyed under the swollen and bruised moon. I need my shoes. Only the thought that I will be quieter without sends me on.
I switch off the torch. There is enough light to see by. I am still not accustomed to how low the moon rides here. A yearning for home shakes me: wattle on the breeze, jacaranda trees dripping purple on the stone, the southerly buster at dusk chasing the heat away. The high moon.
The door to the sick bay is ajar. I slip into the darkness and feel my way along the wall, past the sideboard, walking my fingers over the gravelled metal surfaces of the hurricane lamps to the first window. I ease the shutters apart, latch them back.
Slowly dissolving verticals of moonlight fall over the black desert, trailing breaths of cloud, tendrils which reach down to the dark ground. Then I see that it is the ground reaching to the sky. The sand is rising: the moonlight catches the glitter of a thousand fragments in the slowly turning dust spirals; the echoes of a thousand sounds are held in the heart of every spiral. A thousand faces are out there, breathing.
The room takes on a hushed, waiting quality. I feel as though I have walked into an absence of sound, where I won’t be able to speak, no-one will be able to speak. I sway. I am falling through all known points of contact, falling through a void. With sheer force of will, I make myself walk towards the bed. At the back of my mind, a voice says,
Stupid man
.
The woman lies under the mosquito net. She is an effigy; the welts blue in this light. I unlock the briefcase, the sound as loud as rifle fire. I take out the gun and put it beside the briefcase, on the floor.
The net comes up like foaming sea. I know it is made of some rough thread, camel hair or hemp. But it shimmers around the woman. She moves like the tide as the net comes up. She is diaphanous.
I throw the net back, reach out and run my fingers through her hair. I feel grit, tiny pieces of coral, metal flecks. A small triangular object, flint maybe, the tip of an arrowhead or a hook. Old weapons, old seas.
Her breathing is steady.
I bend over her, put my cheek on the pillow, feel my eyelashes an eyelash away from hers, smell the lotion on her skin: a flat antiseptic smell and some scent known only to this part of the world.
Her breath catches, her eyelashes lift.
I straighten. Her eyes are deep water.
I say her name.
She raises her right hand and traces in the air. The light streams between her parted fingers.
‘Is that a sign?’ I say. ‘A map?’
She ignores me, keeps tracing. ‘We must talk,’ I say loudly. ‘Before Mitch gets here.’
Her hand is trembling, slowing. Her lips are moving; I catch the murmur of a strangely familiar song. It reminds me of the moon behind black branches. I can’t place it. I dismiss it. It is not relevant.
I say, ‘If you don’t help me, you’re against me.’ There is a shifting of shadow behind me. But I ignore it, bend down, grope for the briefcase, the gun.
‘Fuck you then,’ I say.
The Sister comes up beside me in a pool of yellow light, catches my arm.
‘She’s dying,’ says the Sister.
‘She knows who I am.’ I say to the woman in the bed, ‘You know me.’
Her hand stops.
‘No,’ she says in that swollen voice. ‘I don’t know you.’
‘You can’t lie about this. It’s recorded. You worked for us.’
Her hand resumes its slow tracings.
‘Stop that.’ I grab her hand. Her fingers are still, quiescent, like water, slipping away from me as I release her. I feel burned.
The Sister says, ‘Go now.’
‘She’s lying. Don’t you understand? The whole family is rotten.’
The Sister shakes her head.
I say, ‘You know I’m right. Otherwise you would have called for help.’
I see the three of us, caught in the pool of light.
The woman in the bed says, ‘My mother has someone else’s body.’
The Sister looks down at her.
‘The chauffeur took me back to the Manse,’ says the woman. ‘The Mausoleum, my brother called it.’
‘Wait,’ I say. ‘I know that.’ The Sister tenses as I open the briefcase and take out the diary. I move closer to the hurricane lamp and undo the red silk ribbon, turn the pages.
The woman watches me, unblinking. I hold a handful of pages in front of her. ‘You recognise this, don’t you?’
‘No,’ she says and turns her face away.
‘Yes.’ I select a page and read it out, skimming. ‘
August 19. The
chauffeur takes me home to the Manse . . . My mother said the black
wrought-iron draped around the house was black lace but my brother
called it iron spider webs
.’
The woman closes her eyes.
‘This is your family,’ I say, turning pages. ‘
Usually I make allowances
for my mother . . . for duty’s sake, for the sake that I really don’t care. But
today . . . I overhear the nurse . . . We found the blood in Anna’s room.’
The woman doesn’t move. I skip down, raise my voice, ‘This is what you wrote about your mother:
Misery is making her sag, despite
all the plastic surgery. I’m sick of you kids, she says. Kid, I say. There’s
only one of us left now.
’