We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (20 page)

Kellas glanced at Lloyd, but there was no reaction.

‘We underspent our budget one year,’ he said. ‘Somebody thought it might be useful to have a piece of underground real estate nobody else knew about. Not even our friends across the Atlantic. It’s pretty much snoop-proof. You heard the Pentagon moved another satellite to watch western Europe.’

‘Just a minute,’ said Lloyd. ‘Who are the good guys here?’

‘You have to read on to find out.’

‘But the Pentagon is the
bad
guys.’

‘In this book, definitely.’

‘Everybody in the Pentagon?’

‘The whole institution.’

‘What, like America got taken over by some kind of evil dictator?’

‘No, they just had a normal election.’

Lloyd exhaled. ‘This is such bullshit. OK, go on.’

De Peyer nodded. ‘I take it this meeting isn’t happening.’

‘We’re absolutely not here, my friend. No records, no minutes. You must rely on your excellent memory.’

‘Who turned up?’

‘Everybody. Except the Canadians. They sent the most encrypted good luck message in history. The French are trying to take charge, of course. The Germans were terrified that one of the Americans at Ramstein might be Jewish. But they have a convicted hacker working out of his prison cell who managed to get into the Pentagon’s personnel files. No Jews in that unit. The Spanish are surprisingly gung-ho.’

‘Wait, the Germans are Nazis again?’

‘No, they don’t want to be Nazis, that’s why the thing about the Jews.’

‘This is very confusing. Go on.’

‘What about your people?’

‘Us? We’re ready to draw a line. I was at Srebrenica.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Srebrenica. A town in Bosnia where a bunch of Muslims got massacred after a Dutch UN battalion let the Serbs in.’

‘OK. That actually happened? OK.’

‘I know. You also picked up that American accent when you studied in California.’

‘The thing is, Tom—’ Haverkort leaned forward and lowered his voice ‘—nobody trusts anybody. Most of all, they don’t trust you.’

‘Do you trust me, Casp?’

Haverkort hesitated. ‘We’re all in unknown territory here. We’re defying habits we learned in the cradle. It’s huge. But we know that however big it is for us, it’s bigger for your country, Tom. Britain and America, you’re family.’

‘I don’t know that the Americans think so.’

‘They sent us a cop. Downing Street doesn’t trust the military on this.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Give it to me straight, Tom. What did he tell you, the prime minister?’

‘He said that the law is the law, and America is not above it. We are not attacking America, but we cannot allow these soldiers to avoid international justice.’

‘And if America attacks us? Will you fight?’

De Peyer grinned. ‘If standing in the way is fighting,’ he said, ‘I’ll stand in the way.’

‘You’ve got some nerve, peddling that stuff over here,’ said Lloyd.

‘You peddle your stuff over there.’

‘I ain’t peddling no stuff.’

‘Not you personally.’

‘Your book stinks.’

‘That’s what they told me in New York.’

The bus driver announced that they were arriving at T’s Corner grocery store, Oak Hall.

‘My stop,’ said Kellas.

‘Listen, I got something to say to you,’ said Lloyd. ‘America is the greatest country in the world, that’s ever been, and we don’t need some British guy coming here with his bullshit novels, trying to teach us about justice. I mean, sweet Jesus, it’s like the whole world is on our case right now, attacking us, and dissing us, and making us out like we’re baby-killers. Well, I’ve got a message for the world: butt out, and watch out, ’cause we’re coming back. We done Afghanistan, and now we’re going to do Iraq, and we’ll do whatever else it takes to stop all the terrorists and the motherfucking outlaws, alone if necessary. We’re coming back.’

A cheer, a whoop and an ‘Amen’ came from other seats in the bus.

‘It’s only a novel,’ said Kellas. ‘A made-up story.’

‘Why would you make up a story like that unless you thought it was true?’

The bus stopped and the doors opened. Kellas stood and Lloyd got up to let him out. ‘To make money,’ said Kellas.

‘That’s weak, brother. You got no right. You don’t know us. You don’t know this country and you ought to leave what you don’t know and you don’t understand well alone.’

‘Isn’t it the American way?’

‘Bullshit! You can’t be anti-American in the American way.’

Kellas nodded slowly and said goodbye.

‘Yeah, take care, man. Take it easy. Someone picking you up?’

Kellas walked down the aisle of the bus, thanked the driver and walked down the steps into the storm. He reached the partial shelter of the roof over a set of petrol pumps when he heard a shout behind
him. He looked round. Lloyd was standing in the doorway of the bus, waving the envelope containing his manuscript. He lifted it at Kellas and shook it, then threw it towards him. It fell short and landed on the wet asphalt. A sheaf of pages slipped out. Wind and water fought for control. After a few flips airward, the rain brought the paper down and the envelope and pages lay there, soaking. The bus doors closed and the bus drove off. Kellas picked up the envelope and the stray pages and pushed them into the slot of a trash can by the pumps. For a moment, anger hammered against the bounds of his body, and he struck the lid of the trash can with both fists. Then he walked into the grocery store, bright and deserted, apart from a single server on duty. It was five-thirty a.m. His wrist ached. He went up to the counter.

‘Hi,’ said the server. ‘How are you today?’ She was a young girl, small and slight, with large eyes and her hair in widely spaced cornrows. She looked barely sixteen.

‘Regular coffee,’ said Kellas.

‘Small, medium or—’

‘Small.’

The girl fetched him a paper cup and a lid. Her movements were precise and slow. ‘You just come in on the bus from Salisbury? Was it snowing up there?’

‘Further north it was.’ Kellas’s hand closed over the top of the cup.

‘You must’ve outrun the cold front, then, ’cause they say it’s heading on down our way, going to be here any time. They said on Weather Channel first the wind’d get up, then the rain’d come in, and once the storm was all wild and busy, the rain’d turn to snow, and we’d have a good inch by time the sun comes up. Only I’m not so sure, ’cause—’

‘Jesus, can you stop prattling on about the fucking weather?’ said Kellas. He opened his mouth to continue, then stopped. The girl’s eyes had widened. Kellas looked down. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘You don’t have no cause to be shouting at me like that.’

‘You’re right, I’m sorry. Really.’

‘I was only making conversation.’

‘I know. I don’t know what came over me. That is, I do know what came over me, but anyway, I apologise.’

‘I’ve got a panic button right under the counter, and I can have the cops on your ass in sixty seconds. You want me to do that?’

‘No. I’m – how much for the coffee?’

‘Dollar ten.’

Kellas found two dollars in his pocket and gave it to her and told her to keep the change. She thanked him.

‘What’s your name?’ said Kellas.

‘Renee.’

‘My name’s Adam. I want you to believe that when I say I’m sorry, I mean it, it’s not just…’

‘It’s OK.’

‘How old are you, if you don’t mind me asking?’

‘Eighteen.’ She was wary now.

‘Am I keeping you from your work?’

‘You’re the only customer.’

‘I should be getting on,’ said Kellas, half-turning round. Instead he moved closer to Renee. ‘Last time I lost my temper with someone your age was about a year ago. I yelled at him and I shoved him, with my hand, like that, pretty hard.’

‘Maybe you should think about getting some of that anger management therapy.’

‘Maybe. He did something that pissed me off but we didn’t speak each other’s language, not a single word.’

Renee had stretched her arms out on the counter in front of her and was leaning on them, arching her back. ‘How come he didn’t speak English?’ she said.

‘He spoke another language, probably two.’

Renee yawned and kicked one of her heels back. Kellas knew he should stop. ‘I would never have shoved him if he hadn’t had a gun. That made it OK. I could tell myself I was doing something dangerous.’

‘What kind of a gun did he have?’

‘An AK.’

‘Pretty heavy.’

‘You know what that is?’

‘Oh, sure I know.’

Kellas went to fill the cup with coffee from the filter jug, emptied four sachets of sugar into it and went back to the counter. He stood with his back to it, leaning against it, drinking the coffee and watching the windows, which trembled in the wind. Every few moments a sound came from the glass as if someone had thrown a handful of gravel on it. Renee was working over some surfaces with a cloth.

‘Where was that place you were at?’ said Renee.

‘Afghanistan.’

Renee stuck out her lower lip and nodded, moving her cloth from side to side over a clean shelf. ‘That’s a long way from here.’

‘You could get there in a day.’

‘D’you see any of those Taliban?’

‘Only dead ones.’

‘You a soldier?’

‘No.’

‘Some kind of bounty hunter?’

‘No!’ Kellas laughed.

Renee smiled. ‘Why not? There’s guys over there worth millions just for their heads. Dead or alive, it says on the poster. My boyfriend was like “I ain’t joining the army” but somebody was to pay his fare out there and give him an Uzi and a pick-up, he’d go after them by himself.’

‘I was a reporter.’

‘OK. So no killing for you. You’re a peaceful individual. A noncombatant.’

Kellas frowned. The counter was crowded with motoring atlases, cigarette lighters, drums labelled
Sea Salt Peanuts
, five-cent candies and stickers reading ‘Virginia is for lovers’. The strong light in the
store was taken up by thousands of yellow and red labels printed on plastic packaging.

‘I used to think that. Now I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘If you stand by while somebody else kills some strangers in the distance, are you in on the killing yourself? What’s the charge, aiding and abetting? I don’t know where the law of Virginia or Afghanistan stands on that. I thought we were only
talking
about killing, and then one of us went and did it.’ Kellas paused and looked at Renee. She was standing with her hands behind her back, leaning against a wall behind the counter, staring at nothing with her head slightly bowed.

‘So maybe I helped out,’ he said. ‘Killing a couple of Taliban.’

‘You should get in touch with the FBI,’ said Renee. ‘You might be in for a bounty for that.’

‘Do you think?’

‘I guess they’d need to see some sort of proof. Like an ear, maybe, or one each of their fingers.’

They stopped talking. Kellas became aware that if it wasn’t for the faint sound of Bing Crosby singing
Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer
on the PA, the store would be in complete silence.

He put the half-finished cup of coffee down and asked the way to Chincoteague. ‘That’s Chincoteague Road right there outside, between us and Pizza Hut,’ said Renee. She nodded. ‘Just follow it all the way, across the causeway, and that’s Main Street, Chincoteague.’

Kellas thanked her and walked out of the store into the storm. After a few paces he stopped and considered going back to tell Renee that it had started to snow, but even the short distance he had travelled was hard-won ground, and he went on.

T
he wind was as strong as before, but the temperature had gone down steeply, and lush, sticky flakes of snow were hurtling darkly across the lamplight. Pale half-moons of a feathery texture at the edge of the road suggested it would settle. Looking further ahead, Kellas could see a strip of snow consolidating down the centre of the highway.

His left hand gripped the two halves of his jacket together at his throat. The bandage provided a little extra warmth but this was cancelled out by the chilling effect of snow melting on the skin of the hand and his face. The pain in his wrist was fading, numbed by the cold, perhaps. That was a good thing. Of most concern was the speed with which his jacket and trousers were absorbing moisture. Once all his clothes were saturated, which would be soon, he would begin to lose body heat rapidly. It could not be a good sign that the snow was falling thickly enough for the lower layer to melt and continue soaking his jacket, while a middle layer formed a transition, and an outer layer began to stick and accumulate on the jacket breast.

Ahead the snow was unbalding the asphalt swiftly. There were houses. Shelter to seek if it got rough, which, most likely now, it would. A phrase appeared in his head: once you experience unambiguous symptoms of hypothermia, it is already too late. Yet had he heard it, or read it, or made it up in that moment? It wouldn’t do to ramble. No meandering, mental or pedestrian. Concentrate.

‘Concentrate,’ he said into the wind.

Lengthen your stride. Rapid march. Forward. On. Imagine you
are carrying someone sicker than you, someone you care for. Someone you care for more than you care for yourself. On with the loved one, on to safety. Think thoughts with ends and destinations. Think of making a case to the woman you’ve crossed the ocean to see. Don’t think of the case itself, only of making it. Bombard her with words. One will get through. On now. Although certainly ten miles was a hell of a way to walk in a snowstorm. Two and a half hours at a fair pace on the flat. He was not dressed for this weather. It was not so much the thought of dying as the thought of embarrassing his father which might force him to knock on strange doors and seek help. Scot Found Dead On American Road. Father Critiques Footwear, Lack Of Coat. But he did not want to knock on those strange doors. The whole countryside was armed to the teeth, jaundiced at the very rumour of bums and footpads. He needed to keep moving. It would warm him up.

It would be sunrise in an hour, he supposed, already the middle of the morning in Dumfries. The post would have been delivered. It was Tuesday. It was due. One of the children would have found the letter, perhaps, the strange small communication sealed with a second stamp, fluttering through the slot onto the rug in the hall, along with the weight and bright colours of the junk mail, carried further by the tiny extra puff of air as the heavier letters struck the floor. Kellas couldn’t unsend it, however much he longed to. Perhaps Fergus would have found it. The boy would have been intrigued and taken it to his mother. Five of them around the breakfast table, snatching, pouring, drinking and squabbling. Sophie would have opened it, curious, but with foreboding. M’Gurgan would have noticed the hand-scrawled address on an Ikea receipt, looked at Sophie’s face, and wondered whether his wife was being stalked; whether she was having an affair. What she knew about him that he didn’t know she knew. Sophie would have dropped the letter, put her hands to her mouth and rushed out of the room, weeping. No, that was a film. What would she really have done? Read it carefully, trying not to show what she was thinking, although
M’Gurgan would have seen. She would have folded the piece of paper very small, running her nails along the folds, and closed her fist around it, and she would have looked at M’Gurgan without saying anything, and he would have known that she had received information prejudicial to his good character in that home. Perhaps there would have been a moistness in her eyes, and certainly by this time Angela and Carrie would have realised that something was wrong. At the same moment, Angela would have said: ‘What’s wrong, Mum?’ and Carrie would have said ‘What does it say, Mum?’ And Sophie would have said ‘Nothing’, and chased them out to school. M’Gurgan, sitting at the table, would have heard the front door close and Sophie striding back down the hall with her shoes hitting the floor hard and he would have got to his feet, ready for the fight. A possibility: they’d been worried about their friend Kellas. M’Gurgan might have recognised the handwriting and thought that it was a suicide note. What a good man, to care so much! And how much harder then to find out that Kellas had not killed himself, but had betrayed him, and betrayed Sophie, the ordinary woman who got things done. They would be fighting now, in the day of the east. By the evening Kellas would have blown his friends’ family to fragments.

Kellas slipped and tumbled into a patch of snow. He jumped up and brushed the snow off his jacket and trousers in a frenzy, as if it was a mass of poisonous insects. Light dazzled him and he put his right hand over his eyes. A vehicle had stopped a few yards away. It was pointed in the direction of Chincoteague. After a few moments, it rolled forward till the open driver’s window was level with Kellas. It was a pick-up truck with lines of ten year’s antiquity. A man in his fifties or sixties, white-haired, in an old ski jacket, looked at Kellas over his elbow.

‘Where are you going?’ asked the man.

‘Chincoteague.’

‘You drunk?’

‘No.’

‘Are you high?’

‘No.’

‘Is there some medication you should be high on, and you skipped your dose?’

‘No.’

‘Get in. Quietly. The baby’s sleeping.’ Kellas walked round to the passenger side, climbed in and closed the door. A single seat ran the width of the cab, in the American style, and in the middle, between Kellas and the driver, was a sturdy white carry cot, with a baby’s puckered face poking out of folds of wool.

‘Thank you,’ said Kellas quietly. ‘I’m soaking. It’s good to be out of the snow.’ He tilted the vents with his finger and felt hot air blow onto him. ‘Do you mind?’

‘Where are you heading?’

Kellas named the street.

The man watched the road ahead for a while. In the cone of the lights the snow seemed to part and show the way at the same time, like the crowd around a body when the police arrive.

‘Are they expecting you there?’ asked the man.

‘Expecting me?’ repeated Kellas. He looked down at the baby. It was more tightly asleep than anything he had ever seen. Two small fists a-curl. It was unreprieved darkness outside, and the truck hammered forward, towards the island, with an old man at the wheel and a baby asleep beside him.

‘She’s six months old,’ said the driver. He glanced at Kellas and turned back to the road. ‘She’s not yours.’

Kellas didn’t reply, unsure whether he’d misheard, or whether the driver had said something so strange that it would signify Kellas’s departure from one life and his entry into another, more real and secret. He looked at the old man. He was tall, as far as Kellas could tell; he would be well over six foot standing. He didn’t appear to be carrying much fat under the ski jacket, which was unzipped. Underneath he wore a checked shirt and a white vest. He had a long, narrow face with a mark under his left eye, hidden from Kellas while he watched the road. His hair was cropped closely at the sides.
Had it not been thicker and looser on top, he would have looked military. Two long, sharp lines, like cuts, ran down the sides of his face, from cheekbone to jaw. There was a generic quality to his handsomeness, as if, when younger, he had begun to will himself into having a particular set of features at sixty, drawing for models on the likes of police chiefs, presidents and generals as portrayed on American TV specials, and it was difficult for Kellas to identify what it was about him that took him beyond performance and gave him gravity. It was, Kellas realised, that he seemed to have no tension in him, neither the fake forms of bad actorsiness of purpose, nor the wound-up tautness of anxious western men and women of affairs who fretted, who exercised too much without having anything real to do with the strength they gained, ending up in the course of a day unconsciously tightening their muscles, ready to leap at and strangle the monster of their disaffection, which never appeared. This man was brooding over something, something that in a way Kellas dared not guess involved him, but he wasn’t brooding with his body.

The man turned his face to look at Kellas. He had grey eyes. Under the left eye the mark, Kellas saw now, was a tattooed tear. ‘My name is Bastian,’ he said. ‘Do you recognise it?’

Kellas shook his head, and began to introduce himself, but Bastian interrupted. ‘I know your name,’ he said. ‘You’re Adam Kellas.’

The tear was so out of place, seemed such a ridiculous mistake, that at first Kellas found it impossible to focus on what Bastian was saying. He wanted to ask about the tear, and couldn’t. Gradually the strangenesss of Bastian recognising him and asking whether he was expected asserted themselves over the oddness of the tattoo. The real and secret life was, after all, beginning, now, when Kellas was filthy and exhausted; the information that the baby was not his was an act of joining of things so dizzying that Kellas involuntarily pushed his hands through his hair. The baby gurgled.

‘My side of things is not as strange as it might appear, I should
tell you,’ said Bastian. ‘What’s strange isn’t that I should happen to pick you up. I dropped Astrid off at the hunt site a few minutes ago. She makes an early start on hunt days. And I couldn’t leave Naomi alone in the house. Went to the store for milk, and Renee was chewing her braids and swivelling from side to side, and I asked her what she’d done, and she said she’d directed a funny-looking guy in nothing but a light jacket down the road to Chincoteague, ten miles with the snow coming down, and only after he’d gone did she realise he’d come in on the bus and he didn’t have a car. She was trying to work out whether to call police or ambulance and I said since I was going that way I’d see what was up. I thought there was something familiar about your face but it was only when you got in the car that I recognised you.’

‘Have we met?’

‘“Someone should have tipped Paris McIntyre off that he was about to be arrested, for he had many friends in the police who owed him favours, yet when the time came, each of them found their own way to forget that he had ever existed.” Your picture was on the jacket. When Astrid came back from Afghanistan, she told me about you. She said that you’d written books. I tracked
The Maintenance of Fury
down on the Internet. Took a long time. I liked it. I have a good memory for first lines, and I liked that one. Echoes of Kafka and Tolstoy.’

‘I don’t need the fact I’ve been travelling for more than twenty-four hours as an excuse,’ said Kellas slowly. ‘I feel very awake now. But I could write hundreds of first lines to books and still not know how to begin asking all the things I want to ask.’

‘Try picking the first question that comes into your head.’

‘Why did you have a tear tattooed on your face?’

The snow had slackened and a watery blue was lightening the eastern horizon.

‘Up ahead’s the causeway that takes me and Naomi to Chincoteague,’ said Bastian. ‘I can take you across to the island, to our home. I will do that, gladly, and you’ll be very welcome, and
you’ll see Astrid, which I guess is why you’re here. Or, if you ask me to, I’ll just as gladly drive you to Baltimore or DC, right now. Think about it. Of the two ways, my advice to you would be: go back. Don’t come to the island. Think about that while I answer your question.’

‘OK,’ said Kellas.

‘It was after I dropped out of college. I used to have a smallholding in the hills near San Francisco. I raised marijuana there, supplied the local musicians. It brought in a little cash and I read and wrote and collected books. I spent a lot of time in the woods, smoking and listening to the trees and the water. One year, I guess it would have been ’68, this guy turned up and stayed. He was a little younger than me. He might have been dodging the draft, I don’t remember.’

The car went over a bump. Some roadkill, presumably, a rabbit or large bird.

‘He wore a fringed buckskin jacket and jeans and had a beard he thought made him look like Anton Chekhov, although to me he looked more like General Custer. He didn’t bother me at first but after a while I noticed that wherever I was, and whatever I was doing, he was there, doing it too. I’d go into the library to read and he’d come along, take out a book and start reading. He’d go to bed when I went. If I went for a walk, he’d tag along. He wouldn’t help out with the plants unless I took the lead. His name was Edwin. For a while I thought he was a narc. Then I thought he was a puppy. But it was something else. He wouldn’t do, and he wouldn’t learn; each time he followed me he did it so that he could watch himself. He was his own spectator. He was amazed at the quaintness of his own life. It was as if the actual him was in some other space, sitting on some soft chair, shovelling popcorn into his mouth, watching and commentating while the material Edwin experimented with living. I’d light a joint, and he’d come up and wait till I handed it to him, and he’d say: “I am going to get so stoned today.” It would have made more sense to me if I’d
heard him say “
They
are going to get so stoned today.” He’d be twitchy in the woods. It wasn’t in his nature just to
be
there. He had to be telling himself, and me, that we were there, and that it was a good thing, a great thing.’

Between the men, Naomi slept. She threw a couple of punches in the air, moved her head and blew a bubble. Kellas tried to listen to what Bastian was saying. He had a yearning to see Astrid and a cowardly yearning for delay. He felt as he had felt when the deafening motors of the lizard-coloured transport plane had changed their note on the descent to Faizabad, and he had longed to land and step out into Afghanistan, and at the same time feared the end of the clarity of journeying.

‘One day in winter I got up early, had some coffee alone in the kitchen, and went out to see the sun come up,’ said Bastian. ‘Right then, Edwin was next to me, coffee in hand. And he started his commentating about how beautiful it was, and how he felt at one with the world, how he pitied the office workers and their bourgeois routines. It had a power on me, his incantation, I began to feel that the sun had been designed, made and marketed, and that I was buying it just by standing there and watching it and listening to Edwin. And Edwin said wasn’t it a great life we had, and I said I supposed it was, even though him saying it made me doubt it. Edwin asked what I was going to do in the future and I said I didn’t know, maybe the same as whatever I was doing now. And Edwin nodded and said he felt exactly the same way. He said: “If I ever come down off this hill and get a straight job in the land of white bread and adding machines, Bastian, will you please come and find me and shoot me?” I looked at him, and I thought about it. I thought about it seriously. I was sure he’d get that job and I believed in that moment that it was a real possible future for me to kill him as he’d asked. I saw myself walking into his office in some small-town real estate firm and him rising to greet me, with his tie tight in the folds of his neck, and saying “Hey Bastian! Long time, no see!” And me drilling him with twelve-gauge. But then I thought about myself and
my own weakness. I could kill the future Edwin, but I didn’t want to, I wasn’t a killer, and what about me? I’d been afflicted by his shadow so easily. I needed to get back into the world, but I needed to change myself. I needed something to stop the world from swallowing me up.