Notorious (58 page)

I walk forward, put down the case, retreat carefully.

I say, ‘You can see how alike the women are. Almost like sisters. But we’ve been following the wrong one.’

He frowns at the case but he doesn’t pick it up. He says, ‘Anna’s dead.’

I should have known he would remember my reports. I try to clamp the desperation in my voice. ‘What if the precious files are wrong? It’s only words, easy to change. How did the woman get out of Sicily? I had her passport.’

‘That fuck Stefano,’ say Mitch. ‘Tunisia is only a boat ride away.’

If I look at my watch, it will be a sign to him. It doesn’t matter of what; he’s trained to read everything into nothing. Devlin was anxiously checking his watch, he would say. Devlin was jittery, drunk, unstable, insane. Ask the pilot – he’ll confirm it.

Soon the sun would break free of the milky horizon and surge up, shrivelling everything in its path.

My hands are shaking. I shove them into the robe’s deep pockets.

‘That bitch has made fools of us – of you,’ says Mitch. ‘If you can’t finish it off there are plenty of Agency men who would love to take a crack at her.’

Maybe now is the time to bargain, to remind him about Hafid Street.

‘She’s an accessory,’ says Mitch.

‘She doesn’t know it all.’

‘She knows enough.’

That note in his voice again – something about this job makes him furious.

That mightn’t be such a bad thing.

I nod at the briefcase. ‘I’ve got Pietr’s confession in there. When I went back into the house, he confirmed his daughter Anna had been staying there too.’

Mitch stares at me. ‘But we never saw her.’

‘She’d had a nervous breakdown. More than one. She was engaged to the woman’s brother.’

He remembered that from the files.

‘She was in seclusion,’ I say. ‘I listed her in my notes.’

We look at each other. We both know he’s had people regularly hacking my laptop – in Venice, in Trepani. But he can’t admit that here. He can’t call me a liar.

He swallows down his protest. ‘So the woman . . . ?’

‘Could be anywhere. Maybe still in Sicily.’

He contemplates the helicopter, the puffs of red dust swirling over the black metal runners. Now I sneak a glimpse at my watch. One hour gone since I woke, maybe two since she went into the desert. I stare down the pitted road. Twenty minutes to the plain; an hour, maybe more, to circle the plateau and reach the desert proper. But the scorpion’s poison in her system would have slowed her. She might have fallen. She might be crawling.

‘I think this is all bullshit,’ says Mitch. ‘But forget that. What else did Pietr say?’

I am back in Sicily, smoke and steam rising through cracks in the floor. I heard hissing: the earth disgusted. Apocalyptio.

Red lace over the blue-veined marble. Reflections trapped in the shiny wetness: my face, the raised hand of the man lying on his back on the floor. In his red tributaries.

I kneeled beside Pietr. He was still alive. The gun was in his hand. His lips were blackened. He had put the gun in his mouth.

I looked across to the small crumpled heap in the black dress next to the fireplace.

It had been hard to make out what Pietr had been saying. I had done most of the talking.

But at the end he had turned his face very slightly so he could see from the corner of his eye. Looking at the shape next to the fireplace, he said, I never forgave my mother. I never could. It was in the blood.

I held his hand. After a while, he said the woman’s name. He said,
My wife
.

We both felt my fingers tighten.

He said, I couldn’t change for her.

I know.

You can change for her.

No, I said. I don’t know if I can.

He coughed. His chin was shiny. He said – or was it me? – I was brought up to believe you had to be a bastard to get ahead. But ahead to what? All I had in the end was waking up in the middle of the night marooned on a white plain, a plain on which there were no footsteps other than my own.

I survey the desert. The sky is blown glass. Thunderheads distort the horizon, the sun flares in the red-grey mist. The land is rising to meet the sky.

‘I told Pietr I wasn’t a kind man,’ I say. ‘I don’t do anything for free.’

‘That’s my boy,’ says Mitch. He takes out a slim silver flask from his pocket, raises it to his lips, watching me over the rim.

I say, ‘I presume the Americans aren’t interested in Saddam’s revolting collection of velour sparkle paintings and porn?’

Mitch lowers the flask, caps it. ‘We’re all on the same side here, Dev,’ he says, quietly, pleasantly. ‘You must have known we’d find the figurine in Hafid Street.’

‘The minor figurine.’

He isn’t surprised. I wonder if he has a briefcase of cash in the helicopter.

He says, still friendly, ‘What else have you got?’ We might have been old pals swapping golf scores.

I say, ‘Two pieces. The gold falcon from the Royal Palace of Ur and a miniature of the goat guardian at Tel Halif.’ I can almost feel the goat in my hands. It had been cut from the largest ruby I had ever seen, with beaten silver for a face plate and a rug of silver chain mail flung over the spine. The original was seven feet tall, created in the place where recorded history began. A place now sacked in less than ten years. Looted, vandalised, its excavation sites attacked with front-end loaders. Clay tablets taken from the museum of Baghdad: the first writings, many of them not even read yet. Civilisation unrecorded. History lost.

I say, ‘You can have them back.’

‘If we give up on the woman.’ He sees my face and laughs. ‘You’re so easy to read, Dev. We all know you couldn’t just fuck for your country.’

‘Maybe I don’t care about the woman,’ I say. ‘Maybe I just want to humiliate you.’

His face changes. This he can understand. This is what he suspected.

He says, ‘We’re trying to build goodwill here.’

‘You’re trying to reclaim moral ground after carnage,’ I say. ‘After looting by people who knew in advance. Who were tipped off.’

Mitch studies me. ‘Our job is intervention or non-intervention. There’s no middle ground.’

‘There should be,’ I say. ‘The results are bad either way.’

‘It’s all adults here. Everyone over the age of twenty-one deserves what they get.’

‘Not an entire people.’

He shrugs. ‘Don’t take it personally, Dev. Have some water.’ He throws me the flask. ‘You look parched.’

I am thirsty, I don’t stop to think. I raise the flask, tip my head. Fire roars in my throat.

He says, ‘Everything we do is for your own good, Dev.’

I cough and almost fall to my knees. The sky seems to darken, the sand is moving, shapes are rising on the horizon. A bird hovers overhead: not an eagle, a vulture. I squat and spit out the last of the Scotch.

‘What’s the matter?’ says Mitch. ‘Seeing monsters? Got the DTs?’ He picks up the briefcase. ‘You run away from everything.’ He comes closer. ‘Your father, Borneo.’ He stands over me. ‘You even went AWOL on the woman.’

I straighten and look down at him. ‘You’re Iago, Mitch. Filling your empty days with malice.’

He smiles. ‘Who’s this Iago, Dev? An informant? An imaginary character to justify being such a loser? You think she is on your side. But she left you, didn’t she? And now you can’t find her.’

The flask is cool in my hands. I pour a little into my palm and rub the liquid on my gums. I bare my teeth at him. ‘I can’t find her. And neither will you.’

He laughs. ‘You know it will go on. Even without Pietr. It’s too lucrative.’

‘History catches up with all of us, Mitch. The world is too small a place now.’

He isn’t listening. He has tucked the briefcase under his arm and is punching in a code on the locking panel. I watch him. It is the over-ride code. I know it well.

Nothing happens. He punches it in again. The locks don’t open. He thumps the briefcase. ‘Open it.’

I shake my head. ‘You’ll have to take it back. Get Grant on it. He’s good.’

‘How do I know you won’t screw us?’

‘Because I want you to leave me alone.’

His hands relax on the case. I know I have him. I look at my watch.

I say, ‘Both pieces are in a house on Rue Sidi Hmad. You’ll have to go in during work-hours, there are tenants. The falcon is under the floor in the bedroom, the goat is in a cavity in the fountain statue.’ I nod at the briefcase. ‘The address is in the laptop. And details of the rest.’

‘If we forget about the woman.’

‘If you keep after her, well, she knows about the rendition site at Koloshnovar. The black box cells. The water-boarding. Just let her disappear quietly, Mitch. You got what you wanted.’

He is thinking. He is tempted. I have to make sure. I raise the flask, I take another drink. I let the liquid run down either side of my mouth. I see my face in the mirror in Borneo as the phone began to ring. I see Mitch’s reflection in the mirror and I think, I hate you.

I say, ‘Maybe I should be the hero here. Maybe I should use the insurance Pietr gave me.’

‘Insurance?’ His hands tighten on the briefcase.

‘Pietr made his own tapes of what the CIA did in the holding cells at Koloshnovar. He was paranoid, apparently, after what happened to his father.’

Mitch says, ‘You’ll be crucified in a military court. Closed.’

I raise the flask in a salute. ‘As you always say, you can’t expect a drunk to behave rationally.’ I tilt the flask over my mouth.

‘Wait,’ he says. He shakes the briefcase. ‘It’s all in here?’

‘Plus a copy in safe hands. They know what to do if anything happens to me.’

‘They?’ He doesn’t like the sound of that.

I want to say, Even you can’t wipe out an entire village. But I don’t. Just in case.

He thinks for a moment. ‘You be where we can find you.’

‘Sure, Mitch.’ I drop the flask in the dust. I think of one last thing. ‘Be careful of the old turtle in the fountain. It bites.’

I walk down the rutted road, his shouts folding into the dust behind me. I walk on and on, down and down. The last thing I hear as I pull the hood over my head is his voice. ‘You’ll kill her the way you killed your father.’

Or maybe it was, ‘Everything we do is for your own good. You fuck.’

Sister Antony is waiting at the base of the plateau. She comes out of the entrance shadows, holding a backpack. When she sees me, she sets it down and says, ‘Did he believe you?’

I have to rest against the rock. The trembling in my legs seems worse. Sister Antony gives me a bottle of water. I pour it over my face. I can still smell the Scotch.

I think of Pietr gasping out the co-ordinates of the safe in the basement office. ‘Mitch wants to believe,’ I say. ‘But it doesn’t mean he won’t hunt for scapegoats. You, Laforche.’

‘Laforche told me he can pay off his gambling debts now.’ She doesn’t sound surprised.

‘You should leave with him.’

‘Maybe.’

‘You know they are closing this place down.’

‘Yes.’ The rock’s shadow doesn’t dim the hard grey polish of her eyes. She says, ‘There is a place I always wanted to visit. The ghostly ruins of Smara.’

‘At least you have the book. The magic book in your jewelled casket.’

‘The book is the jewelled casket.’ She raises her hand, flexing her fingers.

‘Is it real?’ I say. ‘Is it by Rimbaud? Or by someone else?’

She turns her wrist, easily. ‘There is always a book behind the book. Until eventually behind all the books in the world, we come to one man or one woman writing the book.’

‘That’s not enough,’ I say loudly. My voice echoes against the black rock.

‘Why not?’ she says. ‘We are the story being written. We don’t know how it ends. That is why we keep looking. That is why we go out into the desert. We go into the white pages and look for traces beneath the black marks left by the noon-day sun.’

There is pain behind my eyes, the old anger. The old disbelief. I say, ‘But the reality is the retired jeweller in Casablanca who says he sold you a box of nineteenth century parchment. Maybe your book is a fake.’ I point out to the horizon. ‘All of this is a fake.’

‘Does it matter?’ she says.

I drink some water and peer through the sandy mist to the shimmering folds of red earth. I see the tough pale plants, the lacework of low flowers, the cactuses burrowing under each other for protection, the broken question mark of a scuttling scorpion. It is familiar to me now.

‘She preferred to go out into this,’ I say. ‘Instead of staying with me.’

‘She was driven,’ says Sister Antony. ‘By lies and betrayals.’

‘My lies.’

Sister Antony shakes her head. ‘She was grieving. That is why she placed the scorpion on her face.’

‘My betrayals.’

‘She thought she had lost her life twice over.’

‘I’ve failed at it all. It’s been a nightmare, living this half-life.’

‘Remember,’ she says, ‘Adam found Eve after a dream. Shared dreaming is the essence of humanity.’

‘Shared.’ I can’t breathe. ‘We have nothing to share.’

The Sister steps closer. ‘Stop looking in the book of limits, the book of margins.’ She takes my hand. It is so unexpected I can only stare at her.

She says, ‘You need to look in the unwritten book.’

She gives me the backpack. ‘Water. And a compass. You probably don’t need it with all your fancy equipment.’

‘I need it,’ I say. ‘I’ve left all my fancy equipment behind.’

I grip the backpack. ‘I’m worried.’ There is a tremor in my voice. I swallow. ‘I’ve failed before. Everywhere I go there are – calamities.’

She touches the scar on her cheek. ‘You will grow into speech through loneliness and suffering. Jesus began his work from solitariness.’

I can hardly process what I am hearing. ‘But you can’t think – I’m not Jesus, the woman is not Jesus.’

The muddy light coats her eyes now. Mitch could be right – her neighbour in Casablanca, the teetotaller poet, had said she had a taste for self-punishment.

She says, ‘In the loneliness of the desert, we are visited by angels. I gaze out and see an immense flowering in the desert.’

‘Do you really see it?’

‘I see a silver lake and roses reaching up to the blue sky.’