Solomon's Keepers (16 page)

‘Hold it there. Unhook them at whitey there and hold the rest. Face this way!’

Rough hands grapple the chain behind, tightening then loosening and letting go. The hatch slams shut behind you.

‘Thought these days were over eh?’ The fat man says to no one in particular. You’re watching the line of men turn towards the figure in the faded yellow Hawaiian shirt, watching him strut, watching his hands worry the coiled whip. You check behind. Beyond the ship’s rail the shore is a distant brown seam between worlds of grey. This is not a landing.

‘You’ve been below too long. You stink and we need to clean you up before we land. You swim together. You go over the side, there, down the net. You swim around the stern, that way; you come back that side, there. Okay, start with him.’

Your neighbour turns a knowing eye to you and holds your gaze. ‘Yeah, and when we’re done they’re gonna hand out towels, right?’

It’s too much for a man down the line. He starts to plead. At the first shot he screams. The second is muffled in the wind and he is silent. The fat man moves down the chain to where it sags.

You count three above deck: The fat man with a pistol, the one with the whip and a nervous looking oriental with a headband and a shotgun.

One by one the collars are opened and segments of chain crash to the deck. The line moves hesitantly towards the side. The ship lists in a trough of water and a rush of wind is white noise in your ears. Next but one has a stiff collar and the fat man yanks it and swears as it comes away. A knot of figures is waiting by the net; the first men are over the side. The body lies where it fell. No one is speaking. The oriental is creeping towards the rail in the shadow of the tower. Your neighbour stands silently with his head lowered and his hands clasped in front of him like a mourner. When his collar comes off the length of chain drops to your side. The fat man reaches at your throat.

He turns the key in the lock and tosses it free. The collar is stiff. He jams his fingers under the metal to get a grip. His knuckles are in your throat. The gun hand is a shadow at your side. You seize the collar and twist your whole body sharply. His trapped fingers wrench to his shoulder and his locked arm spins him. A moment is all you need to stamp into his knee, tear the chain free and wrap it around his neck. A single savage twist and he snaps limp. The pistol fires two wild shots before you have his hand.

The oriental runs towards you. He fires first at the group and then takes aim at you. But the fat man is a shield and he hesitates. You have the pistol in your grip and are shooting before he can work it out. The oriental drops but you keep firing till the gun clicks empty.

A splash of pain in your back and a shot. Not a shot. The snap of a whip and an electric stripe all the way round to your chest. You gasp and turn. The lash flips back behind the Hawaiian shirt. He’s backing away; no gun. You run.

The lash meets your raised arms, snakes and burns. You can’t catch it. It comes again, singing to a snap as the distance closes. This time it overlaps itself and holds your arm. You bowl into the target of palm fronded yellow in a world gone red. He lands heavily against metal and splays and you land on top and plunge with a knee. He is still. You pull away and stand and turn to the group now clambering back over the rail. You walk, still fizzing with adrenaline, towards the body on the deck. They shout. You turn and meet the Hawaiian’s wild-eyed charge. Rage drives your fists. You don’t stop. You back him against the davit and smash a blow into his face. It squashes bloodily and he reels. No thought now. Just all your energy like a torrent; fists swinging, finding flesh, pounding bone on bone until they pull you off him.

Eva is back in the living room again. She checks herself around the middle and feels for the injuries. She feels horrified and strangely elated. The relief stays but all the pain has gone. She looks at her small pink fists. Jake is smiling. ‘You dropped him over the side yet?’

It takes a moment before she can speak. ‘Jake, I can’t believe this isn’t real. This is all an act, right? The shooting, the…brutality, that guy they…that I…that whoever it is beat up. It is all an act, isn’t it?’

Jake shrugs. ‘I wasn’t there. You tell me. Sure hurts when the bastard hits though, doesn’t it?’

Eva is silent again. Jake gets to his feet. ‘I need another drink,’ he says. ‘You know, there’s a trick if you want to resume where you left off. You just hold the Start button down for a count of two. Go on, chuck the bastard over.’

‘What do I do to skip that bit? I don’t think I want to go back there…ever.’

‘Four and Start will take you to the next. That’s it on that routine.’

Eva thinks about holding the baby again but presses Four.

Welcome back. You know, whatever else we experience in life, whatever takes us up or brings us down, we always come back to love. As long as we are flesh and blood we can’t get along without it. With KomViva you can experience more highs and lows in an hour than some do in their whole lives. So naturally we bring you the most sensational lovemaking too. After all we’re only human. So get ready for a little lovemaking…KomViva style. Here’s a taste of what we mean. You’re reminded that this experience is for adults only…

Firelight lapping painted cave walls and gleaming in the nap of fur spread wide and flat. A girl with long dark hair moves deep shadows as she comes towards you across the bed on her knees. She sweeps her arms around your neck and kisses you greedily. Her hands find your naked back, dig nails in your skin and then reach hungrily between your thighs. She whispers: ‘Please now let’s do it,’ turns, arching her back down and her buttocks high, spreading her thighs with little steps of her knees. Then you’re standing against her, reaching around hips, fingers delving. You plant your hands on her hips and push home. The firelight skims across your skin. The spread fingers plumping perfect flesh. The scar stands out in profile on your right wrist; the raised line along the inner forearm, unmistakably, the lizard scar.

She lets the helmet drop to the floor. She doesn’t speak. Jake thinks he understands, watches the upturned helmet rocking but lets her be. Judging by the time, she hadn’t got to the worst of it, the best of it, rather. Must be funny for a woman too. Maybe better. Sooya certainly didn’t complain.

After a bit he asks if she wants anything. A drink? Another beer? She says yes please distractedly. He thinks something is wrong but gets the drink anyway. She hasn’t moved when he comes back. ‘Fucking hell! You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

Only then does she look up at him. ‘I think I have,’ she says.

He says something else but she is lost in thought and doesn’t catch it. She feels the universe collapsing, the stars rushing in like birds coming home. A myriad tiny familiarities suddenly cohere as one. It can’t be true. But it is.

Thirteen

Eva drives fast, as though to outrun the bewilderment and anger and shake loose the seed of elation that sticks in her heart. What’s the explanation? Was it a trick? Some kind of overlay from her memory? Was that possible? But many of the sensations which confirmed who he was were not memories; they were a calculated recognition of something familiar from another perspective, from his perspective. The anger is an authentication all of its own. She’s pissed off because she’s been duped. She’s not sure by whom, but duped in a big way. There’s a betrayal in there alongside the sense of intrigue and a renewed, audacious thrill. The world is not the same place, she is not the same person and the future is not the same as it was.

Nothing makes sense. Everything has been manipulated to make a fool of her. How do you make sense of losing your man in a war and finding him again in the embrace of a woman? She manages a wry smile at the thought that she could not conceive of a worse scenario. Except that she can of course. The one she has lived with.

She parks the car on the street outside the rented apartment and takes her bee swarm thoughts inside. In matters of the heart there is a contract of intensity and nothing said or not said can overrule that. He would never have abandoned her deliberately whilst alive. Once inside, she lets the tears come unquestioned and slumps on to a settee. None of this makes sense. It is mad and unfair and…ridiculous. Ridiculous to make such a discovery whilst so engrossed in that act. Even now the delicious anarchic novelty of it all is contriving to make the real world seem the less real, to mock the serious decisions she needs to make. If it is an infidelity then is she not complicit? Is it mitigated or made worse by the passive participation of so many others?

The fundamental fact is that she knows he’s still alive. Even though her rational mind won’t stop offering explanations, in the end thinking is only thinking but knowing is knowing. She reached so deeply, so willingly and invested so much in this. There’s some payback due. She has given an advance on all this. It owes her. She’s going to collect.

All that advice about letting time be a healer was precisely wrong and a waste of life. Those phoney words: celebration, hero. They’d used them at the memorial service. Celebrate his life. Verbal looking away. She doesn’t want to look away any more, she needs to look into the mess and divine what she really feels and what to do. Now it doesn’t feel like there’s been any healing of the heart; immersing herself in family and work has been worthy, necessary, but it isn’t enough. It feels like watching the decorators bustling into the empty apartment above hers with their dust sheets and radios and their vans in the street outside. The activity only underlines the emptiness, the fact that the life that belongs there is elsewhere.

She resolves to act swiftly to catch up. Is she about to compound one folly with another? Who cares? She fixes herself a sandwich and pours a glass of cold white wine. She’s ready to think about what to do. She has to do something. She plays with the fantasy: Young scientist researches mysterious reappearance of dead lover. This isn’t a story; this is her life. She pictures herself wandering into a police station to report a found person to a burly sergeant leaning over the counter. Right then Madam, better take some details. The name of the undeceased gentleman? Age? Occupation? And, if you don’t mind, what were the circumstances of his um…? I see Madam. Is it possible that…? Oh fuck off.

But research is her profession and getting to the purpose and the essence of things is something she understands. She finds out why things are as they are, how they should be. If it feels different when it’s her own story, her own man, nevertheless there is a certain comfort in the resolution to act. She has allowed him to escape once and had thought him dead. But this return is for a reason. It must be destiny. A part of her might even call it divine. If her career and his had been incompatible before then that incompatibility no longer counts. There have to be new rules now. Now he’s a legitimate target. She is going to find and confront him. The feeling is too strong to ignore. For all the grieving and the time that’s passed it is only now that she knows. She has a second chance and she’s not going to miss it.

René never made the Solomon programme. After the final selection he had moved on. But he still had the same mobile number that Eva had once texted him on. She still had the number. She tries the Black Lamb, quizzes the landlord about the names of the characters she’d heard about and never met, including a ranger called Tyler. She calls one of the soldiers, Piers, whom she had met for the first time and spoken to at length at the memorial service and whose number she had taken but never expected to use. The service came back; a parish church and a small knot of family and local residents, elderly farmers mostly with workaday stoops in their best clothes, two young soldiers towering above the throng, taut and bright like planed wood. His mother had apologized, inexplicably, for not knowing more about Eva, for never having met her, for knowing only that her son had put her name in the ‘other contacts’ section on an official form. She had heard lovely things about her in ‘email letters’ and had been looking forward to meeting her. She doesn’t want to risk an emotional scene and so speaks in tidy phrases which have been prepared for delivery over many hours of worrying. At one point she says ‘I can see why he thought so much of you.’ Eva can see how the emotions have already been harvested and carefully preserved for another season. There are tears in her eyes, a lingering look to gather something from this brief opportunity, to capture something from a future that is already a ghost.

His father is dignified and distant. He acknowledges Eva but seems uncomfortable and is soon at a loss for words. After the service when they return to the bungalow he spends most of the time talking to the young soldiers, his tall spare frame drawn to their kindred postures, listening and nodding at their stories, matching something of their present with memories of his own past, drawing a new warmth from those memories as though from a rekindled fire. For Eva, there isn’t much to be said beyond small talk. She doesn’t know any of them but wears the knowing looks when introduced by his mother as a ‘friend’ and later works around the room with natural charm. It’s a muted affair and there’s a sense that too little said could so easily become far too much. The priest leans in to say how sad it is for the family to lose both sons. Eva leaves as promptly as seems polite.

She wants to talk over events and would like to ask some questions of someone who knew the team. She says it is something she needs to do. She asks if there are any grounds for believing that her man is still alive. She knows as she does this that it will come across as strange but she needs to hear someone on the inside tell her that there is no way Rees is still alive. She needs to measure her conviction against it. She asks them how she would know if that were the case. Piers tells her she wouldn’t know, but he would and she’s mistaken. Everyone tells her they can’t say more, not because there is more but because the terms of their contracts forbid it. They know and she begins to understand that Solomon is secret and friendship only allows a tiny stretch of the rules of silence. She’s only there because he broke them with her. But time has gone by and eroded the emotional leverage she might have had. She knows nobody will tell her any more details. Maybe one or two would confide that there were special circumstances. But they don’t know themselves. They tell her there is nothing to be gained. He’s gone, they say, let it rest.

When friends won’t listen any more she calls the liaison officer at the base who had called her with the terrible news he was tasked with passing on to the named ‘close contacts’ on the forms Rees had left. They’ve already heard something. At first they fend her off. No more we can add. It is a very sad loss…always a place on the roll of honour. But she won’t be deterred. She asks directly if there is any chance that Rees could be alive and on a secret mission. What assurances can be given? What law governs this issue? Who is the most senior officer who is prepared to put it in writing? They’ve seen something similar before. People react in different ways. It isn’t uncommon for a reaction to spring up long after a serviceman has been lost. Sometimes it takes years. There is counselling available. There is considerable discretion as to how to allocate funds. Families are supported by charities that also act as conduits for government money. The aim is to minimise publicity and to obviate any stories that would smack of neglect. There have been abuses and so Eva meets with caution at every step. She is not a spouse and so there is no entitlement. But she is a named person on the records and she has to be taken seriously. They don’t know what she knows. When she makes clear she isn’t interested in money they check her out and find she’s published investigative scientific research and blogged about unethical interventions in nature. The shutters come down. She gets her letter from a regimental commander. Deeply regrets. She quotes the Speicher case, the only serviceman classified as killed in action ever reassigned as a missing in action. Could it happen again? They say no. The body was recovered and has been cremated, they tell her. Parents have scattered the ashes. They question who can benefit from this sustained enquiry. Still she is not deterred. She begins to change her mind and to believe that the military doesn’t know. A Brit assigned because of a special project into an American action is uncommon enough to be a story in itself. Maybe there are unfamiliar rules. She is good at research, and when the trail leads to America she calls all the way up to the Chairman of the Senate Democratic Oversight Committee. He is the first one not to assume she is informed only by grief and to ask her why she is convinced Rees is alive. It is a measure of her frustration that she tells him. She has concluded she has to. I have seen him she says. And you can too. Unaware of the chain of events it will unloose, she tells him how.